Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

Nick said quietly, "I just thought, if we can't sit together…" since the only reason for sitting through a super-violent three-hour gangster movie was to have Leo's weight and warmth against him and his hand in his open fly. They had touched each other like that, with cautious delirious slowness, in Rumblefish, under the dreamy aegis of Matt Dillon, and in Fellini's And the Ship Sails On, which had been Nick's hopeless choice of picture and a peculiar backdrop to an orgasm. Otherwise, they had only made love in parks, or public lavatories, or once in the back of Pete's shop, which Leo had kept a key to, and which felt even more furtive than these cinema handjobs. The thing about the cinema was that they seemed to share in the long common history of happy snoggers and gropers, and Nick liked that.

But now he was alone again, he felt it very keenly, accepting the "better" ticket, in the middle of the back row. The ads were already showing as he clambered along and in their patchy glare he loomed and ducked and apologized, and was a clumsy intruder in a world of snuggling coupledom. He squeezed in and even the space of his seat seemed half absorbed by the lovers' coats and bags and angled limbs. The 170 minutes stretched out ahead like a long-ago detention, some monstrous test. They stretched out, in fact, like a film he had no wish to see, and for a moment he was gripped by a tearful bolshiness that he himself thought astonishing in a grown man. He saw that he could get up and go home and come back at the end. But then he was frightened of what Leo would say. There was so much at stake. There was a Bacardi advertisement, and the brilliance of tropical sea and white sand lit up the auditorium. He stared at the left side, near the front, to try to spot Leo, but he couldn't find him. Then he did see the squared-off silhouette of his head, and for a moment his oddly distant and attentive profile, played over by the reflected light. Of course the scene of palm trees and surf was much the same as Mrs Charles's mural. Now superbly handsome heterosexuals romped across it.

Critics had already described Scarf ace as "operatic," which perhaps was only their way of saying it was Latin, noisy and bombastic. It was set in a Miami so violent and so opulent, so glittering and soulless, that Nick found himself worrying about how people survived in it, and then about how he would survive in it. In his disaffected mood he kept wandering off from the film itself into paranoid doubts and objections. He saw that he was reacting like his mother, for whom any film on the telly with a sex scene or the word shit in it took on a nearly hostile presence, and was watched thereafter with warm mistrust. Scarface was all about cocaine, which alarmed him. He remembered tensely how Toby had taken it at Hawkeswood with Wani Ouradi. The film confirmed his worst suspicions. Nowhere in it was there a hint of the delicious pleasure that Toby had spoken of. The drug was money and power and addiction-a young blonde actress in the film snorted joyless volumes of it.

The couple on Nick's left were slumped in a slowly evolving embrace. He was aware of a hand on a thigh left bare by a very short skirt-and when it moved, his glance twitched guiltily away. He had an unusual sense of the cinema as a room-a long narrow space with the dusty plaster mouldings of an old theatre. Instead of the proper oblivion of the filmgoer he felt a kind of foreboding. When the picture brightened his eyes yearned down across the shadowy ranks of heads, but Leo was little and so was he, and he never had that one clear view of him again. Because the film was Leo's choice, he imagined him enjoying it, taking it on, adjusting himself, as it went along, to its new standards of hardness. A film that was shocking quickly lowered the threshold, it made people unshockable. Nick felt that if he'd been sitting with Leo he might have tittered and groaned at the shootings and blood like everyone else. But now they were apart, as they might have been on occasion in this very cinema before they even knew of each other's existence, sitting separately in the near dark. It was irrational, perhaps, but the glaring unreality of the film seemed to throw a suspicion of unreality over everything else, and his affair with Leo, which was so odd, so new, so unrecognized, felt open to crude but penetrating doubt. He wondered if he would have noticed Leo a year ago, in the shuffling semi-patience of the exit line, or carried his image home to lie awake with. Well, probably not, since one of Leo's affectations was to sit through to the very last credits, the lenses, the insurers, the thanks to the mayor and police department of… oh, somewhere obscurely a solution and a puzzle at the same time.

And it wasn't in fact until all that was over that Leo came into the foyer, blinking and nodding and then genially puzzled at the troubled look on Nick's face. "All right, babe," he said quietly, and gripped his upper arm to steer him out. "That's what I call snorting coke," he went on, referring to a scene in the film's final hour where Pacino had torn open a huge plastic bag of cocaine on his desk and plunged his nose into it, the slave at last to his own instrument of power. It had struck Nick as completely ridiculous. "Did you like that, then?"

Nick hummed and cleared his throat like an anxious bringer of bad news. "Not much," he said, and gave Leo a thin smile.

"It was quite a laugh," said Leo. "The ending was outrageous."

"Yes… yes it was," Nick agreed, hesitantly but firmly, recalling the comprehensive final bloodbath. As so often he had the feeling that an artistic disagreement, almost immaterial to the other person, was going to be the vehicle of something that mattered to him more than he could say.

But Leo said, "Nah, sorry about that, babe, it was pretty crappy. And we never got our kiss and cuddle."

"I know," said Nick with an archness that covered and somehow dissolved three hours of regrets-in his relief he couldn't see where he was going and grabbed and rattled one of the cinema's already locked glass doors.

Leo went out and into the blocked-offside street where he'd left his bike, and when Nick followed he found him putting his arms round his neck and kissing him, chastely but tenderly, on the forehead; then he kept looking at him, lightly frowning and smiling at the same time, with humorous reproach.

"Nicholas Guest."

"Mm…"-Nick colouring but holding Leo's gaze submissively.

"You worry too much. You know that?"

"I know…"

"Yeah? You do trust your Uncle Leo, don't you?"

"Of course I trust you," Nick burst out quietly, as if he'd been asked a simpler question.

"Well, don't worry so much, then. Will you do that for me?" And again he was all cockney softness.

"Yes," said Nick, glancing a little worriedly none the less to left and right, since Leo was holding him against the wall like a mugger as much as a lover-he worried what people would think. In the wake of his relief this short exchange raised a vague dissatisfaction.

"Don't ever forget it."

"I won't," Nick murmured, and Leo stood back. He wasn't sure what it was that he mustn't forget, he had a restless ear for syntax, but he smiled at the general drift of the little catechism of reassurance. It was lovely that Leo saw at once what was wrong, even if his avuncular tone didn't put it completely right. Nick found he was confident enough, despite his racing heartbeat, to mention his plan.

"You're sure they're not here, yeah?"

"Yes, I'm positive. Well, Catherine might be in."

"Catherine, right, that's your sister, yeah?" And then Leo winked.

The heavy, sharp-edged key to the mortise locks had already cut a gash in Nick's trouser pocket, and the whole bunch was tangled in the torn threads and hanging against the top of his thigh. As he tugged at it a few of the new pound coins dropped ticklingly down his leg and rolled across the tiled floor of the porch. Leo jumped on them. "That's right, throw it away," he said.