Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

"Hello, darling!" said Nick, and went down on one knee to help him heave himself up. Wani didn't answer and didn't smile.

A few minutes later it was almost calm again. They were sitting there beside a man of fifty with thick grey chest hair and a restlessly sociable manner. His much younger friend, a Malaysian perhaps, was swimming some way from the raft, cruising other men outrageously, and doing clever duck-dives which made his trunks come off. "Oh, he gives me some trouble, that one," the man said. "Look at him." Wani smiled politely and turned to Nick; he wasn't used to meeting people like this, in the near-naked free-for-all of a public place. "Don't get me wrong, though-it's all good fun." The man waved cheerfully as if the boy was paying him even the faintest attention, and said, "He's devoted to me, you know. I don't know why, but he is."

"What's his name, then?" said a rough-voiced man, who was squatting behind them.

"He's called Andy."

"Andy, yeah?" said the man. "Here, Andy," he shouted, getting to his feet, "show us your arse!"

"He will!" said his old protector. "He will!"

The raft shook and on the other side of them a sleekly muscly man twisted up out of the water and landed with a promising thump on the boards. Nick saw Wani glance across at him from under his long lashes, as if assessing a new kind of problem or possibility; Nick himself had seen him here last year. He was balding and dark eyed, round faced, with a nice long nose and the lazy but focused expression of a man who thinks of nothing but sex. Nick remembered his idling gaze, the huge dark pupils that seemed to fill his eyes, and the curving weight of him in his black trunks. His stomach was a smooth curve outwards as he sat, and it seemed his destiny to be fat, but for now the fat was held in easy balance with the muscle.

Wani was sitting with his knees drawn up, his hair swept back in shiny waves but bunching and tightening again as it dried. He had got back some of his social poise, and with it an oblique deprecating manner, as though afraid he might be recognized or fancied. The older man talked across him to Nick. "He's getting so particular," he said.

"Aha…" said Nick.

"KY not good enough any more, apparently. We have to have some other substance called Melisma. Then Melisma's not good enough, apparently, either. We're moving on to Crest. But you have to be careful, don't you, with these awful rubber johnnies. I never thought the day would come… What do you use?"

"Should keep him nice and clean, anyway," said the rough-voiced man, who was clearly taking quite an interest in Andy. "Crest's a kind of toothpaste, mate," and shortly afterwards he dived in and swam powerfully in his direction.

"I'm Leslie, by the way," said the older man.

Wani turned his head and nodded. "Hi. Antoine."

"Now where would you be from, I wonder?"

"I'm Lebanese," said Wani, with a quick dry smile, in his driest English accent. Nick watched his aquiline profile and smiled mischievously. He liked to see another man acknowledge Wani's glamour, it gave him a quick jealous shot of the passion he had felt for him since Oxford, which was lust enlarged and diffused by mystery. Now he was looking down again, his extraordinary eyelashes lowered. Nick remembered him sometimes, after a class, or after dinner on a rarer night when he was unclaimed by his other worlds, coming back to the room of some poor student, with its shelf of paperbacks and a Dylan poster, and talking a bit more about Culture and Anarchy or North and South, swapping notes over Nescafe, and making a sweetly respectful attempt to show that he shared the concerns of these other boys, and like visiting royalty was quite unconscious of their clumsiness and deference. Wani, who could really only bear fresh coffee, with a little jug of hot milk on the side. Some of the snobbier people in college, like Polly Tompkins, mocked his fanciness and said he was only the son of a grocer, an immigrant orange-and-lemon seller, "a Levantine cockney tart" was Polly's phrase-he was a cute little Lebanese boy who'd been sent to Harrow and turned into a drawling English gentleman. Some of them thought he must have been turned into a poof as well, on no stronger grounds than his tight trousers and his bewildering good looks.

"So what do you do?" said Leslie.

"I've got my own film-production company," Wani said.

"Oh…" said Leslie, crushed and intrigued at once. And then, in a rather roundabout response, "Did you see A Room with a View? I wonder what you thought of that, if you're in the film world."

"I didn't, I'm afraid," said Wani, with another tiny but chilling smile.

"Didn't I see you in the Volunteer last week?" Leslie said after a bit-at which Wani looked quite blank, but the question was aimed at the dark-eyed man, who all this time had been lying back on his elbow, with one knee raised and his tackle slumped unignorably towards them. It was difficult to tell if his vague smile was a reaction to their conversation, or even if he was looking at them. His eyes seemed to work on some scene of imminent gratification, unfolding on a screen that hung between himself and the afternoon. There was something confidently patient about him, no lecherous effort or rush. But when he was spoken to it was as if they'd already been talking, and there was an understanding between them. Nick gazed at him, feeling he allowed and absorbed gazes, and at the glinting water beyond, with a twinge of sadness that when they stopped talking they would have to leave the little sun-struck oblong of the raft and swim back to the solid world. Wani was looking at the man again too, but also at the waiting ladder of the jetty, with the flicker of someone calculating his escape.

When they were getting dried and dressed in the compound Wani nodded and said, "There's our friend Ricky again." Nick looked over his shoulder and saw the sexy man emerging round the fence of the nudist yard and pulling carelessly at the draw-string of his trunks.

"Oh, yes. I didn't know he was called Pdcky," Nick said.

"Well, he looks like a Ricky," said Wani, while getting out of his trunks sitting down and wrapped in a towel.

"Have you got an erection or something?" said Nick.

"Don't be puerile," Wani said. He gave Nick a look that was part challenge and part broody supplication. "Why don't you ask him if he'd like to come home with us?"

"What, 'Ricky'?"

"Isn't that what goes on at this sort of place? I didn't imagine we'd come here for the exercise."

Nick sniggered. "You don't have to go mad," he said, "the first time I take you out."

Wani coloured a little but he held his gaze. "It could be a lot of fun," he said. "I should have thought. He's very common."

Nick glanced round again at Ricky, who was loitering amiably by the path to the toilets, and loitered too of course in his memory, as unexplored potential. At the same time he felt a little clutch of warning. Wani didn't know what he might be getting them into, and nor did Nick. When he looked back Wani was standing up in his underpants and tugging on his jeans. "I'm sure it could be," Nick said drily. At which Wani, with a twitch of his eyebrows and a sour compression of his lips, seemed to shrug the thing off. He took his watch from his pocket and put it on.

"If you don't ask him soon," he said, "we won't have time. I'm sorry, I thought you liked him."

"Yes, he's hot," said Nick, and found he was describing himself, in his unexpected anxiety. He hated to see Wani's beautiful mouth curl like that, and to feel his disdain, so amusing and exciting when applied to others, fall on him. He wanted only love, and today perhaps a kind of obedience, from Wani, who knew that the local tactics of argument and persuasion confused and upset him. "All right, I'll go and get him," he said, pretending that for him as well to ask was naturally to get, and knowing that he could never allow Wani to ask him himself.