Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

After a longish silence Leo said, "So how's it going at college?" as if they hardly knew each other.

"Oh, it's all right," said Nick, disconcerted but then touched by Leo's stiffness. Whenever Leo was cold or rough to him he felt it like a child-then he turned it round and found some thwarted love in it. He was in awe of Leo, but he saw through him too, and each time he followed this little process of indulgence he felt more in love. "It hasn't been very exciting so far. I suppose it's just different from what I've been used to." He always came away from the sunless back court where the English department was with two or three newly shaped anecdotes, which gave his days there a retrospective sparkle; but he found it hard to interest Leo in them and they often went to waste. Or they were stored up, with a shadowy sense of resentment.

"He was at Oxford University before," said Leo.

"And now where is he?" Mrs Charles wondered.

"I'm at University College," Nick said. "I'm doing a doctorate now."

Leo chewed and frowned. "Yeah, what is it again?"

"Oh… " said Nick, with a disparaging wobble of the head, as if he couldn't quite get the words out. "I'm just doing something on style in the-oh, in the English novel!"

"Aaaah yes," said Mrs Charles, with a serene nod, as if to say that this was something infinitely superior but also of course fairly foolish.

Nick said, "Umm…"-but then she broke out,

"He's crazy for studying! I'm wondering just how old he is."

Nick chuckled awkwardly. "I'm twenty-one."

"And he doesn't look like no more than a little boy, does he, Rosemary?"

Rosemary didn't answer exactly, but she raised one eyebrow and seemed to cut her food up in a very ironical way. Nick was blushing red and it took him a moment to notice Leo's embarrassment, the mysterious black blush, frowningly denied. His secret was heavy in his face, and Nick suddenly understood that the difference in their ages mattered to Leo, and that even an innocent reference to it seemed to lay his fantasy bare. Old Pete was licensed by being old, an obscurely benign institution; it was much harder to account for his friendship with a studious little boy of twenty-one.

Nick had to go on, though he could hear that he was out of tune, "Of course one misses one's friends-it takes a while to settle down-I expect it will all be marvellous in the end!" There was another rather critical pause, so he went on, "The English department used to be a mattress factory. At least half the tutors seem to be alcoholics!"

Both these remarks had gone down rather well at Kensington Park Gardens, and had left Nick suppressing a smile at his own silliness. But all families are silly in their own way, and now he was left with a puzzled and possibly offended silence. Leo chewed slowly and gave him a completely neutral look. "Mattresses, yeah?" he said.

Rosemary stared firmly at her plate and said, "I should think they ought to get help."

Nick gave an apologetic laugh. "Oh… of course, they should. You're quite right. I wish they would!"

After a while Mrs Charles said, "You know, all the men like that, that's got that sort of problems, each and every one of them got a great big hole right in the middle of their lives."

"Ah… " Nick murmured, flinching with courteous apprehension.

"And they can fill that hole, if only they know how, with the Lord Jesus. That's what we pray, that's what we always pray. Isn't that so, Rosemary?"

"That's what we do," said Rosemary, with a shake of the head to show there was no denying it.

"So what's your success rate?" said Leo, in a surprisingly sarcastic tone; which explained itself when Mrs Charles leant confidentially towards Nick. You couldn't stop a mother when she was on the track of her "idea."

"I pray for all those in darkness to find Jesus, and I pray for the two children I've brought into this world to get themselves hitched up. At the altar, that's to say." And she laughed fondly, so that Nick couldn't tell what she really thought or knew.

Leo scratched his head and shivered with frustration, though there was a kind of fondness in him too, since he was going to disappoint her. Rosemary, who was clearly her mother's right hand, found herself linked with Leo, and protested flatly that she was ready, just as soon as the perfect man turned up. With her eyes half closed she had her mother's devout look. "There's nothing keeping me from the altar except that one thing," she said, and as the look fell on Leo she seemed to play with betrayal, and then once again to let it go.

When the fruit and ice cream had been brought in, Mrs Charles said to Nick, "I see you been looking at my picture there, of the Lord Jesus in the carpenter's shop."

"Oh… yes," said Nick, who'd really been trying to avoid looking at it, but had none the less found himself gingerly dwelling on it, since it hung just above Leo's shoulder, straight in front of him.

"You know, that's a very famous old picture."

"Yes, it is. You know, I saw the original of it quite recently-it's in Manchester."

"Yeah, I knew that's not the original when I saw one just the same in the Church House."

Nick smiled and blinked, not sure if he was being teased. "The original's huge, it's life-size," he said. "It's by Holman Hunt, of course…"

"Aha," Mrs Charles murmured and nodded, as if a vaguely unlikely attribution had been shown to her in a newly plausible light. It was just the sort of painting, doggedly literal and morbidly symbolic, that Nick liked least, and it was even worse life-size, when the literalism so cried out to be admired. "I heard tell he's the same fellow as painted The Light of the World, with the Lord Jesus knocking on the door."

"Oh yes, that's right," said Nick, like a schoolteacher pleased by the mere fact of a child's interest, and leaving questions of taste for much later. "Well, for that you only have to go to St Paul's Cathedral."

Mrs Charles took this in. "You hear that now, Rosemary? You and me's going out to St Paul's Cathedral any day now to look at that with our own naked eyes." And Nick saw her, in shiny shoes and the small black hat like an air hostess's that was nesting on a chair in the corner, making her way there, with waits at a number of bus stops, and the nervous patience of a pilgrim-he saw her, as if from the air, climbing the steps and going into the stupendous church, which he felt he owned, all ironically and art-historically, more than her, a mere credulous Christian. "Or else, of course, you and me can go… eh?" she said to Nick, somehow shyly not using his name.

"I'd love to do that," Nick said quickly, taking the chance to be kind and likeable that had been denied him earlier on.

"We'll go together and have a good look at it," said Mrs Charles.

"Excellent!" said Nick, and caught the hint of mockery in Leo's eyes.

Mrs Charles said, cocking her head on one side, "You know, they always got something clever about them, these old pictures, don't they?"

"Often they do," Nick agreed.

"And you know the clever thing about this one now… " She gave him the tolerant but crafty look of someone who holds the answer to a trick question. To Nick the clever thing was perhaps the way that the Virgin, kneeling by the chest that holds the hoarded gifts of the Magi, and seeing the portent of the Crucifixion in her son's shadow cast on the rear wall of the room, has her face completely hidden from us, so that the painting's centre of consciousness, as Henry James might have thought of her, is effectively a blank; and that this was surely an anti-Catholic gesture. He said, "Well, the detail is amazing-those wood shavings look almost real, everything about it's so accurate…"

"No, no…" said Mrs Charles, with amiable scorn. "You see, the way the Lord Jesus is standing there, he's making a shadow on the wall that's just the exact same image of himself on the Cross!"