Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

"Oh… thank you," said Sophie, smiling and blinking.

"Are you going out, then, sis?" said Toby.

Catherine headed towards the drinks table. "I'm going out tonight," she said. "Russell's taking me to an opening in Stoke Newington."

"And where might that be?" said Toby.

"It's a well-known area of London," Catherine said. "It's very fashionable, isn't it, Soph?"

"Yes, of course-darling, you've heard of it," said Sophie.

"I was joking," said Toby; and Nick thought it was true, you never expected him to; and when he did you couldn't always be sure that he had. And then the idea of a party, not this one, but a noisy party with cans of beer and trails of pot smoke, through which he moved with his lover, as his lover, came over him like a pang and he envied Catherine. It was an image of an Oxford party, but blended with something known only from television, a house full of black people.

Toby said, "I'm just going upstairs to see if I can find those trousers. Are you going to Nat's bash, Nick?"

"What is it?" said Nick, with another dimmer pang at the thought of another kind of party, a posh white hetero one, at which his presence was not thought necessary.

"Oh, he's having this Seventies party…" said Toby hopelessly.

"No, I'm not invited," said Nick, with a superior smile, thinking of the loving closeness he had felt with Nat at Hawkeswood, when they were both stoned and sitting on the floor. "Is it in London?"

"That's the thing. It's up at the blasted castle," said Toby.

"Yes… It's absurdly soon, isn't it, for a Seventies party?" said Nick. "I mean, the Seventies were so ghastly, why would anyone want to go back to them?" He'd been longing for a chance to see the castle-a marcher fortress with Wyatt interiors.

"Well, public schoolboys love reliving their puberty, don't they Soph," said Catherine, coming back with a very tall drink.

"I know," said Sophie crossly.

"Some of them spend their whole lives doing it," Catherine said. She stood in front of the fireplace, with a hand on her hip, and seemed already to be moving to the music of a future very remote from any such nonsense.

Toby shrugged apologetically and said, "I just hope I've still got those disco pants!"

Nick almost said, "Oh… the purple ones…?"-since he knew just where they were, having been through everything in Toby's room, read his schoolboy diary, sniffed the gauzy lining of his outgrown swimming trunks, and even tried on the flared purple trousers (standing foolishly on the long legs). But he merely nodded, and knocked back the rest of his g-and-t.

Gerald came down in a dark suit with characteristic pink shirt, white collar, and blue tie. He seemed to recognize, with a forgiving smile, that he had set a sartorial standard the others were unlikely to match. He kept on smiling as he crossed the room, as a sign of his decision that he would not react to Catherine's appearance. The mac worn over the micro-frock made her look almost naked. When Badger came in he was less circumspect. "My god, girl!" he said.

"No, your god-daughter actually, Uncle Badger," said Catherine, with the forced pertness of a much younger child.

Badger frowned and hummed. "Well, exactly," he said. "Didn't I promise to safeguard your morals, or something?" He rubbed his hands together and had a good look at her.

"I'm not sure anyone thinks you'd be the best person for that," Catherine said, sipping her gin and sitting down sideways on a low armchair.

"You're going easy on that stuff, aren't you, Puss?" said Gerald.

"It's my first one, Daddy," Catherine said; but Nick could see why Gerald was anxious, she was high on her own defiance tonight. He watched Badger watching her, his grey-striped peak slicked back after his shower, something disreputable and unattached about him; in parts of Africa, according to Toby, he was known not as Badger but by one of a number of words for hyena. Certainly he circled, and was hungry for something. His lecherous teasing of his god-daughter was allowed because it was of course impossible, a clownish joke.

Catherine stayed long enough to meet everyone and to test her claim that Barry Groom never said hello. Gerald played along and said, "Hello, Barry," and not only seized his hand but covered it confirmingly with his other hand, as if he was canvassing: at which Barry, looking round the room with a suspicious smile, said, "Gerald, I'm surprised at you"-holding him there long enough to make him uneasy-"a green front door, that's hardly sending the right signal." He got a laugh, which was warmer and more complex than he expected-there was a second or two while he grew into it, squared his shoulders. He followed Gerald across the room, nodding in a vain, critical way as he was introduced, but not saying hello. When Catherine shook his hand, he said, "Aha! Beautiful creature!" with a vaguely menacing presumption of charm. Catherine asked him where his wife was and he said she was still parking the car.

It was good that Catherine should want to be present, to be presented, to help entertain the guests, but to the family it was also a little sinister. She put everyone on edge by having her coat on indoors, and seemed to be playing with her father's hopes that at any moment she might leave. He glanced at her distractedly from time to time, as if he would have liked to say something but had made the calculation that the oddity of the coat was preferable to the naked flesh beneath it. He introduced her to Morden Lipscomb with visible reluctance. The grey old American, with his tiny granite-like sparkle of charm, shook her hand and smiled mockingly, as if being confronted with an ancient indiscretion he meant entirely to deny. Toby and Nick were both watching her and Toby said, "God, my sis looks like, you know, one of those girls who try and lure you into striptease parlours."

"She looks like a strippergram," Sophie said.

Lady Partridge came in with that air of social vexation Nick had seen in her before: she wanted to appear totally at home here and she also wanted her arrival to be an event; her deafness added a querulous uncertainty as to which effect she was having. Badger got her a drink and flirted with her, and she allowed herself to be flirted with. She liked Badger, having known him since he was a boy, and nursed him through mumps once, when he was staying in the holidays-an episode that was still referred to as a touchstone of their friendship, and in a vaguely risque way, since apparently Badger's balls had been the size of grapefruit. Nick had heard them joke about it earlier in the week, and it had sounded like jokes he had with his own parents, that were ribald little reference points in a past before everything changed and became indescribable.

All the time Nick was thinking about Leo, so that Leo seemed to be the element, the invisible context, in which these daunting disparate people were meeting and sparring and congratulating each other. They didn't know it, which made it all the funnier and more beautiful. He mixed himself a fresh gin-and-tonic, Gerald-style, quinine lost in juniper, and drifted round not minding if he wasn't spoken to. He looked at the pictures with a new keenness, as though explaining them to Leo, his grateful pupil. The other MP and his wife, John and Greta Timms, were standing in front of the Guardi with the look of people who had come to the wrong party, who wanted more of a challenge, he in a grey suit, she in the helpless boldness of a blue maternity dress with a white bow at the neck: it was as if the PM herself were pregnant. John Timms was a junior minister in the Home Office; he must have been several years younger than Gerald, but he had precocious gravitas and unflappable self-importance. If Barry Groom never said hello, John Timms seemed at first not to blink. His gaze was fixed and almost sensual, and his speech had a hypnotic steadiness of pace and tone, irrespective of meaning: he was inspired, he seemed constantly to admit, but he wasn't in any dubious way excitable. They were talking about the Falklands War and the need to commemorate it with a monument and to celebrate it with an annual public holiday. "A Trafalgar Day for our times," said Timms, and his wife, in whom his certainty produced a more vibrant kind of urgency, said, "Why not revive Trafalgar Day itself? Trafalgar Day itself must be revived! Our children are forgetting the War Against the French…"John Timms gazed out into the room as though flattered by his wife's zeal and loving her for it, but not himself being ready to go so far. He hadn't been introduced to Nick (indeed the Timmses were really speaking to each other), and his gaze played on him for a moment, seemed to feel him and test him and doubt him. "You'd like to see a permanent Falklands memorial, wouldn't you," he said.