Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

"He's the minicab driver," said Nick.

"Does he need paying?" said Gerald.

"I don't charge her," said Brentford. "She call me when he dump her."

"Is this true?" said Gerald.

"It's really kind of you," said Nick.

Catherine made a little scream of disbelief, and came and took Brentford's arm, but he kept a wary dignity with her too and didn't hold her: he pushed her gently towards Nick, and she leaned against him, wailing but not holding on to him. She was in her own distress, she wasn't seeking solace from Nick, just somewhere to stand; still he put a cautious arm round her. "Is it Russell?" he said. But she couldn't begin to answer.

"What is it, darling?" said Rachel, hurrying downstairs.

Gerald explained, "That bloody little shit's dumped her," clearly saying, through pretended indignation, what he most hoped had happened. "Poor old Puss."

Rachel looked at the three men, and there was a hint of fear in her face, as if Brentford had brought some threat much larger than Catherine's tantrum into the house. "Come upstairs, darling," she said.

Barry Groom had come out into the hall, staring and twitching his head, and so drunk suddenly that there were unconscious delays to his aggression. "Look here, you!" he shouted at Brentford. "I don't know who you are. You fucker!"

Gerald put a hand on his wrist. "It's all right, Barry."

"You keep your hands off her, you…"

"Oh, shut up… you arsehole!" said Nick, without planning to, and shaken by the sound of his own raised voice.

"Yes, shut up, you wanker!" said Catherine, through her tears.

"Now, now!" said Barry, and then something awful, a sly smile, slid on to his face.

"God, I'm really sorry… " said Nick to Brentford.

"Why are we all standing here?" said Gerald.

"Darling, come up," said Rachel.

"Let's finish our port and cigars," said Gerald, turning his back on Brentford. He had to show, for the sake of the party, that he took scenes like this with habitual good humour. "Will you take her up, darling?" he said, as if there were really a chance he might do it himself.

Catherine moved away and started up the stairs, and Rachel tried to put an arm round her, but she shook it off. Nick took Brentford to the door. "Are you sure we can't pay you?" he said, though he doubted he had the price of a fare from Stoke Newington himself. He wanted Brentford to know he wasn't guilty of the thing the whole house stood accused of.

"He's a bad man," said Brentford, on the doorstep.

"Oh… " said Nick, "yes… " He wasn't certain which man was being referred to, and Brentford's shake of the head and flap of the arm seemed to write them all off.

Nick stood on the pavement for a while after the Sierra had gone, and heard the laughter of the women from an open window above. It was good to be out of the house, in the night air. He was trembling a little from having shouted at someone he hated. He thought of Leo, and smiled, and hugged his hands under his armpits. He wondered what Leo was doing, the afternoon flared up again and warmed him with amazement; then the thought of Pete came over it like the chill of a cloud. He went in and slowed as he passed by the half-open door of the dining room: "… the beggar stank of pot!" Gerald was saying, to odd humourless laughter. Now perhaps he could really go upstairs, and taste the freedom of being the odd man. He didn't have a place in either of the two parties. It was bad form to go away, it admitted a prior desire to do so; but he couldn't go back and sit with Barry Groom. He thought Gerald might be angry with him too, but he would surely be glad of his taking an interest in Catherine. It couldn't be called a shirking of responsibility. Nick started to climb the stone stairs, and had hummed several bright anticipatory bars from Schumann's Fourth Symphony before he stopped himself.

"GOD YOU'RE A twit," said Leo. He looked fretfully at different parts of Nick, unable to place his dissatisfaction exactly. In the end he licked his thumb and rubbed his cheek, as if Nick was a child. This word twit, a tiny sting, had come up before, and signalled some complex of minor reproaches, class envy, or pity, the obvious frustrations of having a boy like Nick to teach. As always Nick searched for something else in it too, which was Leo's tutting indulgence of his pupil; he still longed for flawless tenderness, but he forgave Leo, who for once was nervous himself. They were on the Willesden pavement, ten yards from his front gate. "You're so fucking preppy," said Leo.

"I don't know what that means."

Leo shook his head. "What am I going to do with you?"

They had met after work, across the road from the Council offices, and Leo was wearing a dark grey suit with square shoulders and a white shirt and a wide but sober tie. It was the first time Nick had seen this beautiful everyday metamorphosis, and he couldn't help smiling. He was in love to the point of idolatry, but the smiles, the appreciative glances, seemed to strike Leo like a kind of sarcasm. "You look so handsome," Nick said.

"Yeah, and so do you," said Leo. "Right, we're going in. Now what did I tell you, don't take the name of the Lord in vain. Don't say, 'Oh my god!' Don't even say, 'Good Lord!' " (Leo fluted these phrases in the way that was his puzzling imitation of Nick.) "Don't say, 'Jesus fucking bollocks.' "

"I'll try not."

Nick was always a favourite with mothers, he was known to be a nice young man, and he liked the unthreatening company of older people. He liked to be charming, and hardly noticed when he drifted excitedly into insincerity. But he also knew the state of suspense, the faked insouciance, of bringing friends home, the playful vigilance with which certain subjects had to be headed off even before they had arisen; you took only a distracted, irrelevant part in the conversation because you were thirty seconds, a minute, ten minutes ahead of it, detecting those magnetic embarrassments towards which it would always twitch and bend.

"My sister sort of knows," said Leo. "You wrant to watch her."

"Rosemary."

"She's pretty."

Nick followed him up the short concrete path and said in his ear, "Not as pretty as you, I bet," one of his light flirty jokes that he watched swoop to earth under its own weight of adoration.

Mrs Charles and her son and daughter lived on the ground floor of a small red-brick terrace house; there were two front doors side by side in the shallow recess of the porch. Leo applied himself to the right-hand one, and it was one of those locks that require tender probings and tuggings, infinitesimal withdrawals, to get the key to turn. Nick reflected briefly on the coloured glass in the inset window and the old Palm Sunday cross pinned above the doorbell. He pictured Leo going through this routine every day; and he noted his own small effort of adjustment, his disguised shock at the sight of the street and the house-perhaps he was a twit after all. When he stepped inside he had a memory, as sharp as the cooking smell in the hall, of school afternoons of community service, going into the homes of the old and disabled, each charitable visit a lesson in life and also-to Nick at least-in the subtle snobbery of aesthetics.

He took in the tiny kitchen in a photographic glance, the wall units with sliding frosted-glass doors, the orange curtains, the church calendar with its floating Jesus, the evidence of little necessary systems, heaped papers, scary wiring, bowls stacked within bowls, and the stove with plates misted and beaded on the rack above a bubbling pan; and at the centre Leo's mother, fiftyish, petite, with hooded eyes and straightened hair and a charitable smile of her own. "You're very welcome," she said, and her voice had the warm West Indian colour that Leo kept only as a special effect or a temporary camouflage. "Thank you," said Nick. "It's very good to meet you." He was so used to living by hints and approximations that there had always been something erotic in meeting the family of a man he was in love with, as if he could get a further vicarious fix on him by checking genetic oddities, the shared curve of the nose or echoing laziness of step. In the rich air of Kensington Park Gardens he seemed to live in the constant diffused presence of Toby, among people who were living allusions to him and thus a torment as well as a kind of consolation. But of course he had never done more than hug Toby and kiss him on the cheek; he had twice had a peep at his penis at a college urinal. Here, in a tiny flat in unknown Willesden, he was talking to the mother of the man who called him not only a "damn good fuck" but also a "hot little cocksucker" with "a first-class degree in arse-licking." Which clearly was way beyond hugging and peeping. Nick gazed at her in a trance of revelation and gratitude.