Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

And then there was Rosemary, coming in from work, home early, it seemed, to help her mother out with this underexplained guest they had. She was a doctor's receptionist, and wore a blouse and skirt under her belted mac. They had an awkward introduction, edging round Leo's bike in the hall. Perhaps it was shyness, but she seemed disdainful of Nick. He looked for her prettiness, and thought she was like a silky fluffy version of Leo, without the devastating detail of an ingrowing beard. Then brother and sister both went off to change. Nick couldn't work out the plan of the house, but there were subdivided rooms at the back, and a sense of carrying closeness that made the bike entirely necessary; it waited there, shuddered and jangled faintly as Nick bumped against it, as if conscious of its own trapped velocity.

"Ah, that bicycle," said Mrs Charles, as if it was some profane innovation. "I told him…"

They went into the front room, in which a heavy oak dining table and chain, with bulbous Jacobean-style legs, were jammed in beside a three-piece suite that was covered in shiny ginger leather, or something like it. There was a gas fire with a beaten copper surround under a ledge crowded with religious souvenirs. Mrs Charles's church life clearly involved a good deal of paperwork, and half the table was stacked with box-files and a substantial print-run of the tract "Welcoming Jesus In Today." Nick sat down at the end of the sofa and peered politely at the pictures, a large framed "mural" of a palm-fronded beach and a reproduction of Holman Hunt's The Shadow of Death. There were also studio photos of Leo and Rosemary as children, in which Nick felt himself taking an almost paedophiliac interest.

"Now, young sir," said Mrs Charles, with a clarity of enunciation that sounded both anxious and arch, "he tells me next to nothing, Leo, you know, at all. But I think you're the fellow who lives in the big white house, belongs to the MP?"

"Yes, I am," Nick said, with a self-deprecating laugh which seemed to puzzle her. Leo must have been talking up these facts to impress her, though on other occasions they were the object of vague derision.

"And how do you like it?" Mrs Charles asked.

"Well, I'm very lucky," Nick said. "I'm only there because I was at university with one of their children."

"So, you met her?"

Nick smiled back with a little pant of uncertainty. "What, Mrs Fedden, you mean…"

"No…! Mrs Fedden… I assume you met Mrs Fedden, if I'm saying her name correctly." Nick blushed, and then smiled as he saw the way, simple but nimble, religious even, that she'd gone for the big question. "No- her. The lady herself. Mrs T!"

"Oh… No. No, I haven't. Not yet…" He felt obliged to go on, rather indiscreetly, "I know they'd love to have her round, he, um, Gerald Fedden, has tried to get her at least once. He's very ambitious."

"Ah, you want to make sure and meet Mrs T."

"Well, I'll certainly tell you if I do," said Nick, looking round gratefully as Leo came into the room. He was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and Nick had a vivid image of him ejaculating. Then he saw the heavy spit as it loitered and drooled down the taut ginger back of the sofa. He felt deliciously brainwashed by sex, when he closed his eyes phallus chased phallus like a wallpaper pattern across the dark, and at any moment the imagery of anal intercourse, his new triumph and skill, could gallop in surreal montage across the street or classroom or dining table.

"And can I be allowed to hope you are a regular church-attender?"

Nick crossed his legs to hide his excitement and said, "I'm not really, I'm afraid. At the moment, anyway."

Mrs Charles looked used to such disappointments, and almost cheerful, as if taking a very long view. "And what about your father and mother?"

"Oh, they're very religious. My father's a churchwarden, and my mother often does the church flowers… for instance." He hoped this compensated, rather than merely highlighting, his own delinquency.

"I'm very happy to hear it. And what is your father's occupation?" she demanded, pressing on in interview mode, which made Nick wonder if she did somehow know, however subconsciously, that he was trying to tie his life to her son's. He was a puzzle, Nick, in many contexts-he was often being interviewed obliquely, to see how he fitted in.

He said, "He's an antiques dealer-old furniture and clocks, mostly, and china."

Mrs Charles looked up at Leo. "Well, isn't that the exact same thing as old Pete!"

"Yeah," said Leo, whose whole manner was withdrawn and unhelpful. He dragged out one of the dining chairs and sat down at the table behind them. "There's a lot of antique dealers about."

"The exact same thing," said Mrs Charles. "You go on, look around. We got some good old antiques here. You don't know old Pete?"

"Yes, I do," Nick said, glancing round the room and wondering what Pete had said about it all before him, and how Pete had been explained to her.

"It's a small little world," she marvelled.

"Well, Leo introduced me to him…"

"Ah, he's a good man, old Pete. You know we always called him 'old' Pete, though he can't be not more than fifty."

"He's forty-four," said Leo.

"He was a great help to my son. He helped him with getting through college, and with the job on the council. And he didn't stand to get nothing from it-leastways not in this world. I always say to Leo he's his fairy godfather."

"Something like that," said Leo, with the sourness of a child subjected to the astounding iterations of a parent's treasured phrases-treasured often because they put a bright gloss on some anxious denial. The clumsy unconscious joke in this one must have made it specially wearing.

"A proper decent father Leo didn't have," said Mrs Charles candidly, and again with an almost cunning air of satisfaction that they had been so tested. "But the Lord looks after his own. And now, don't you reckon he's a good boy?"

"Yes, he's… splendid!" said Nick.

"What's for tea?" said Leo.

"I'm hoping your sister is bringing it off now," said Mrs Charles. "We're giving our guest our special spicy chops and rice. In this country," she observed to Nick, "you don't fry the chops so much, you're always grilling them, isn't that right?"

"Um… I don't know. I think we do both." He thought of his own mother, as an embodiment of any such supposed tradition; but went on charmingly, "But if you fry them rather than grilling them, then that's also what we do in this country!"

"Ha… " said Mrs Charles, "well that's certainly one way of looking at the matter."

At table the movement of Nick's left arm was limited by the leaning tower of "Welcoming Jesus In Today." He came down on his food in a hesitant but predatory fashion. The meal was a bold combination of bland and garishly spicy, and he wondered if Rosemary had mockingly overdone the chillies to make fun of his good manners. He was full of round-eyed appreciation, which was also a cover for the surprise of having his evening meal at five forty-five; some absurd social reflex, the useful shock of class difference, a childish worry perhaps at a changed routine, all combined in a mood of interesting alienation. At Kensington Park Gardens they ate three hours later, and dinner was sauntered towards through a sequence of other diversions, chats and decantings, gardening and tennis, gramophone records, whisky and gin. In the Charles household there was no room for diversions, no garden to speak of, and no alcohol. The meal came on straight after work, a wide-ranging grace was declaimed, and then it was eaten and done with, and the whole long evening lay ahead. There were things Nick guessed about them, from the habits of his own family, which lay somewhere between the two; but there were others he would have to wait for and learn. He had never been in a black household before. He saw that first love had come with a bundle of other firsts, which he took hold of like a wonderful but worrying bouquet.