Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

Leo chuckled and said, "All right, babe…"

Nick said, "I love you," shaking him in a tight hug, and grunting at the hard muscular heat of him. Leo reached up with his free right hand and gripped his arm. After a while he said,

"That's a terrible picture."

It was Norman Kent's portrait of Toby, aged sixteen, and it was the image-beyond the intimidating bronze bust of Liszt-on which the eyes of the doodling pianist tended to dwell. While Leo had been playing, it had lent its sickly colour to Nick's thoughts.

"I know… Poor Toby."

"Cos he's quite tasty, in my opinion."

"Oh yes."

"You never told me if you had him, when you were all up at Oxford University."

Nick had still not quite let on to Leo that before their tangle in the bushes he had never exactly "had" anyone. He said, "No, no, he's completely straight."

"Yeah?" said Leo, sceptically. "You must have had a go."

"Not really," Nick said. He stood back, with his hands still on Leo's shoulders, and smiled wanly at the pink-faced blazered boy. The old regret could always come alive again, and for a moment even Leo, warm under his hands, seemed cheap and provisional compared to the unattainable bloom of Toby.

"I just thought the way he kissed you and looked at you was a bit poofy."

"Don't!" Nick murmured, and then laughed, pulling Leo to get him up, and get the real kisses from him, the ones that Toby would never give him.

But Leo held out a moment longer. "So they're easy about having a bender in the house, are they, their lordships?"

"Of course," said Nick. "They're absolutely fine with it." And in his mind he heard Catherine saying, "As long as it's never mentioned." He went on, with a degree of exaggeration, "They've got lots of gay friends. In fact they asked me to bring you here, darling."

"Oh," said Leo, with a subtlety of register worthy of Rachel herself.

Nick lay naked on top of the duvet, in quick-pulsed amazement. Leo had rung his mother, told her he was staying over: it was a risk, a yielding, and therefore a commitment. Nick listened to the hiss of the shower in the bathroom across the landing. Then, since he could see himself in the wardrobe mirror, he got under the bedclothes. He lay there, with one hand behind his head, in an almost painful state of happiness and worry. Far down below, the front door was triple-locked, the lights were all out in the drawing room and kitchen, the one lantern cast its cold glare into the hall. Catherine's bedroom door was closed, but he was certain she was out. They had the house to themselves. The window was open a notch, and he could hear the throat-tearing runs and trills of a robin that had taken to singing in the garden at night, and which he had eagerly decided was a nightingale; an old lady standing listening on the gravel path had put him right. He had still, therefore, never heard a nightingale, but he couldn't imagine it bettering his robin. The question was what time would Gerald and Rachel get back. But actually, probably, not till late, it was Gerald's "surgery" in the morning, then a two-hour drive. Nick smiled at their unconscious generosity.

The shower-noise had stopped, and the robin skirled on, with sulky pauses and implacable resumptions. Nick would have liked it even better if Leo had come to bed without showering, he loved the faint sourness of his skin, the sharpness of his armpits, the sweet staleness deep between his legs. Leo's smells were little lessons constantly re-learnt, little shocks of authenticity. But to Leo himself they were a source of annoyance and almost of shame. He had a terribly keen sense of smell, revealed in a queue or a crowded room by a snubbed upper lip and an aristocratic flinching of the nostrils. He insisted he liked Nick's smells, and Nick, who had never really thought of himself as having smells, was nervously unsure if this was truth or chivalry. Perhaps it was a loving mixture of the two.

There was a kind of magic in this-to be lying in bed, a single bed, with all that it implied, and playing gently with himself, and waiting for his lover to appear. It was the posture of a lifelong singleness, incessant imagining, the boy's supremacy in a world of dreams, where men kept turning up to do his bidding; and now, that rattle of the bathroom door, snap of the light cord, squeak of the landing floor, were the signals of an actual arrival, and within three seconds the door would open and Leo would come in-

How black he looked, in the white skirt of a bath towel pulled tight round his buttocks and over the curbed jut of his dick. He held his folded clothes in his hands, like a recruit, stripped and scrubbed and given his slops-he looked around, then put them down on the desk, by the blue library books. He was a trifle formal, he winked at Nick but he was clearly moved by the ordinariness and novelty of the moment. To Nick it darkened, it had the feeling of an elopement, of elated action haunted by the fears it had defied, of two lovers suddenly strangers to each other on their first night in a foreign hotel. But after all they had only eloped upstairs, it was absurd. He felt breathless pride at having Leo here. He threw back the duvet, and said, "I'm sorry about the bed"-shifting a bit to make room.

"Eh…?" said Leo.

"I don't think you'll get much sleep."

Leo let his towel drop to the floor and stared at Nick without smiling. "I'm not planning on getting any," he said.

Nick accepted the challenge with a little moan. It was the first time he had seen Leo naked, and the first time he had seen the masking shadow of his face, lazily watchful, easily cynical, clever and obtuse by turns, melt into naked feeling. Leo breathed through his mouth, and his look was a wince of lust and also, it seemed to Nick, of self-accusation-that he had been so slow, so vain, so blind.

NICK WENT AHEAD on the path and held the gate open for Wani, so that for several seconds the outside world had a view of naked flesh before the gate, with its "Men Only" sign, swung shut behind them. It was a small compound, a concrete yard, with benches round the walls under a narrow strip of roof. It was like a courtyard of the classical world reduced to pipes and corrugated iron. There was something distantly classical, too, in the protracted nakedness, and something English, school-like and comfortless in the concrete and tin and the pond-water smell. Nick crossed the open space, past the books and towels of one or two sunbathers, and he saw it take account of them, someone greeted him, conversations stretched and lulled, and he felt the gaze of the little crowd, like idle fingertips, run over him and come to rest, more tenderly and curiously, on Wani. Wani, in ice-blue mirror shades, was a figure of novel beauty, and only Nick perhaps, sitting down and beckoning to him, saw the wariness in his half-smile.

"Mm, very primitive," Wani said, as if the place confirmed a suspicion he had about Nick.

Nick said, "I know," and grinned-it was just what he loved about it.

"Where do we put our things?"

"Just leave them here, they'll be fine."

But Wani flinched at this. He had the keys to the Mercedes in his jeans pocket, and his watch, as he had told Nick more than once, cost a thousand pounds. "Yah, maybe I won't go in." And maybe Nick, who had never owned anything, was guilty of failing to imagine the worries of a millionaire.

"Really, it'll be fine. Put your stuff in here," he said, offering him the Tesco carrier bag which had held his towel and trunks.

"This watch cost a thousand pounds," said Wani.

"Perhaps don't tell everyone about it," Nick said.

There was an old man drying near them, squat and bandy and brown all over, and Nick remembered him from last year, an occupant of the place, of the compound and the jetty and the pond, and more especially of the screened inner yard where on a hot day men sunbathed naked, hip to hip. He was lined but handsome, and Nick felt that smoothed and uniformed, in vigilant half-profile, his picture could well have accompanied the obituary of a general or air vice-marshal. He nodded amiably at him, as a leathery embodiment of the spirit of the place, and the old man said, "George has gone, then. Steve's just told me, went last night."