Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

"OK, babe," Leo said quietly. "Well, I'll see you soon. We'll get it together at the weekend, yeah? I've got to go-my mum wants the phone."

"I'll ring you tomorrow…"

"Yeah, well, lovely to chat."

And in the silence of the room afterwards, shaken, tight-lipped, Nick clutched at that cosy but cynical cockney lovely. Of course Leo was inhibited by being at home, he wanted to say more. Just think of this afternoon. It was terribly sweet that he'd rung at all. The chat was a romantic bonus, but nothing was certain when it came to words, there were nettles among the poppies. For a minute or two Nick felt their separation like a tragedy, a drama of the thickening dusk-he saw Leo at large on his bike while he stood in this awful office with its filing cabinets, its decanters, and the enlarged photograph, just back from the framers, of the hundred and one new Tory MPs.

In the kitchen he found that people had dispersed to bathe and change, and these further unstoppable rhythms made him feel like a ghost. Rachel was sitting at the table writing place cards with her italic fountain pen. She glanced up at him, and there was a slight tension in her manner as well as obvious solicitude, a desire not to offend in a moment of kindness. She said, "All well?"

"Yes, thank you-fine…" said Nick, shaking himself into seeing that of course life was pretty wonderful, it was just that there was more to it than he expected-and less as well.

"Now should I put Badger or Derek, do you think? I think I'll put Derek, just to put him in his place."

"Well, they are place cards," said Nick.

"Exactly!" said Rachel, and blew on the ink. She looked up at him again briefly. "You know, my dear, you can always bring friends here if you want to."

"Oh, yes… thank you…"

"I mean we would absolutely hate it if you were to feel you couldn't do that. This is your home for however long you are with us." And it was the "we," the general benevolence, that struck him and upset him; and then the practical acknowledgement that he wouldn't be there for ever.

"I know, you're very kind. I will, of course."

"I don't know… Catherine says you have a… a special new friend," and she was stern for a second, magnanimous but at a disadvantage: what should she call such a person? "I just want you to know he'd be very welcome here."

"Thank you," said Nick again, and smiled through a blush at the thing being out. It was confusingly straightforward. He felt relieved and cheated. He wasn't sure he could rise to the freedom being offered-he saw himself bringing home some nice white graduate from the college instead, for a pointless tea, or convivial evening bleak with his own cowardice.

"We're such broody old things," Rachel said, "now that Toby's moved out. So do it just for our sake!" This was a charming exaggeration, in a woman of forty-seven, with thirteen for dinner, but it acknowledged a truth too: it didn't quite say she thought of him as a son-it didn't elevate or condescend-but it admitted a habit, a need for a young man and his friends about the house. She tapped the cards together and came across the room and Nick gave her a kiss, which she seemed to find quite right.

In fact Toby and Sophie were there that night. They came early and Nick had a gin-and-tonic with them in the drawing room. They seemed to bring along their own complacent atmosphere, the mood of their life together in the Chelsea flat, and of some larger future when they might curl up a leg on the sofa or stand with an elbow on the mantelpiece in a room as enormous as this. Toby played the lightly chivvied "husband" very sweetly, and Sophie claimed him in the childish ways of someone experimenting with her power, with little exasperations and innuendos. She did a performance about how Toby ground his teeth in his sleep. Nick tittered warily at this glimpse of the bedroom, but found her lack of subtlety oddly reassuring. She'd got Toby, snoring and twitching, but the romantic reach of Nick's feelings for him, the web of sacrifice and nonsense and scented Oxford nights, survived untouched. Toby was very sweet to Nick too. He left his position by the fireplace and came and sprawled on the rug by his chair, so that Nick could have reached out and stroked the back of his neck. For a moment Sophie looked disconcerted, but then she took possession of that situation as well. "Ah-you two should see more of each other," she said. "It's good to see you together." A minute later, looking vaguely self-conscious, Toby got up and pretended to search for a book.

"And what about your lovely friend…?" Sophie wanted to know.

"Oh… Leo, do you mean?"

"Leo," said Sophie.

"Oh, he's-lovely!" Here was the subject again-Nick just hadn't got used to it yet, to the idea of anything so secret, so steeped in his own fears and fantasies, being cheerfully enquired after by other people. Toby too looked round from the bookcase with his encouraging grin.

"Such a… lovely man," said Sophie, whose conversation tended not to develop, but to settle, snugly or naggingly, in one place.

Nick was glad of the praise, and mistrusted it at the same time. "Well, he loved meeting you," he said.

"Aah…" Sophie purred, as if to say that people usually did enjoy that. "He's a great fan of your work, Pips," said Toby.

"I know," said Sophie, and sat looking down modestly. Her dark-blonde hair, worn long at Oxford, had been cut and backcombed, Diana-style, and quivered when she shook her head. She was wearing a red strapless number that didn't really suit her.

"You know she's got a part in a play," said Toby.

"Oh, shoosh… " said Sophie.

"No, we've all got to go and see her. Nick-come to the first night, we'll go together."

"Absolutely," said Nick. "What are you doing?"

Sophie quivered and said, "Well, you might as well know," as if being hurried into announcing a different kind of engagement. "I'm doing Lady Windermere … "

"Fantastic. I think you'll be very good at that." It was a surprisingly big part, but Nick could see her as the self-righteous young wife clipping rose stems in her Westminster drawing room; and delivering those awful soliloquies she has-

"I don't know what it will be like. It's one of these very way-out directors. He's… he's gay, actually, too. He says it's going to be a deconstructionist reading of the play. That doesn't worry me, of course, because I've done deconstruction; but Mummy and Daddy may not like it."

"You can't go worrying about what your parents will think," said Nick.

"That's right," said Toby. "Anyway, your ma's very with-it. She's always going to way-out concerts and things."

"No, she'll be fine."

Toby chuckled. "Of course your father's most famous remark is that he wished Shakespeare had never been born."

"I don't know that that's his most famous remark," said Sophie, with a hint of pique. In fact if Maurice Tipper had made a famous remark at all it would probably have been something about profit margins and good returns for shareholders. "He only said it after getting bitten to death by mosquitoes watching Pericles in Worcester College gardens."

"Ah… " murmured Nick, whose own memory was of Toby's bashful swagger as a Lord of Tyre, when Sophie had been the Marina.

"You're too horrid about my poor papa," said Sophie in a highly affected way, as if in her mind she was already on stage.

Catherine came in, dressed for her night out in a tiny spangled frock, over which she was wearing an unbuttoned light-grey raincoat. She wore high-heeled black shoes and stockings with a whitish sheen to them.

"Goodness!" said Toby.

"Hello, darling," said Catherine confidentially to Sophie, stooping to give her a kiss. Sophie clearly found Catherine the most challenging aspect of an affair with Toby, and Catherine knew this, and treated her with the kind of clucking condescension that Sophie would otherwise have lavished on her. "Love your clever frock," she said.