Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

On the floor below was the "library," a homage to Lutyens neo-Georgian, with one black wall and pilastered bookcases. A glass bowl, some framed photos, and a model car took up space between the sparse clumps of books. There were big books on gardens and film stars, and some popular biographies, and books valued for being by people Wani knew, such as Ted Heath's Sailing and Nat Hanmer's "really rather good" first novel Pig Sty. The room had a proper Georgian desk, and sofas, a huge staring television and a VCR with high-speed rewind. It was here, a few days after the Ricky episode, with its large tacit adjustment to Nick's understanding of things, that Wani had sat down, plucked the top off his Mont Blanc and made out a cheque to Nicholas Guest for £5,000.

Nick had looked at the cheque, drawn on Coutts & Co. in the Strand, with a mixture of suspicion and glee. He handled it lightly, noncommittally, but he knew in a second or two that he was fiercely attached to it, and dreaded its being taken away from him. He said, "What on earth's this?"

"What…?" said Wani, as if he'd already forgotten it, but with a tremor of drama that he couldn't fully suppress. "I'm just fed up with paying for you the whole fucking time."

This was quite a witty remark, Nick could see, and he took the roughness of it as a covert tenderness. Still, there was a sense that he might have agreed to something, when he was drunk and high-that he'd forgotten his side of a bargain. "It doesn't seem right," he said, already seeing himself doing the paying, taking out Toby, or Nat perhaps, to Betty's or La Stupenda; having a credit card, therefore…

"Yah, just don't tell anyone," said Wani, pressing a video into the slot of the player, and picking up the remote control, with which he poked and chivvied the machine from a frowning distance. "And don't just blue it all in a week on charlie."

"Of course not," said Nick-though the idea, and the hidden calculation he made, brought him up against the limits of £5,000 fairly quickly. If he was going to have to pay for himself, it wasn't nearly enough. Seen in that light, it was rather mean of Wani, it was a bit of a tease. "I'll invest it," he said.

"Do that," said Wani. "You can pay me back when you've made your first five grand profit." At which Nick sniggered, out of sheer ignorance. It was all a bit tougher than he thought, if he was going to have to pay it back. But he didn't want to whinge.

"Well, thank you, my dear," he said, folding the cheque reflectively, and going towards him to give him a kiss. Wani reached up his cheek, like a thanked but busy parent, and as Nick went out of the room Wani's favourite scene from Oversize Load was already on the screen, and the man in black was performing his painful experiment on the excited little blond.

"Oh, baby…!" Wani chuckled, but Nick knew he wasn't being called back.

A couple of nights a week Wani spent uncomplainingly at his parents' house in Lowndes Square. Nick had been ironical about this at first, and piqued that he seemed to feel no regret at passing up a night they could have spent together. The family instinct was weak in him-or if it flared it involved some family other than his own. But he soon learned that to Wani it was as natural as sex and as irrefutable in its demands. On other nights of the week he might be in and out of the lavatories of smart restaurants with his wrap of coke, and roar home in WHO 6 for a punishing session of sexual make-believe; but on the family nights he went off to Knightsbridge in a mood of unquestioning compliance, almost of relief, to have dinner with his mother and father, any number of travelling relations, and, as a rule, his fiancee. Then Nick would go back jealously to Kensington Park Gardens and the hospitable Feddens, who all seemed to believe his story that on other nights he worked at his thesis on Wani's computer and used a "put-me-up" at his flat. He had never been invited to Lowndes Square, and in his mind the house, the ruthless figure of Bertrand Ouradi, the exotic family protocols, the enormous monosyllable of the very word Lowndes, all combined in an impression of forbidding substance.

On one of his nights alone, Nick went to Tannhauser and met Sam Zeman in the interval. They gossiped competitively about the edition being used, an awkward hybrid of the Paris and Dresden versions; Sam had the edge in relevant and precisely remembered fact. Nick said there was something he wanted to ask him, and they agreed to have lunch the following week. "Come in early," said Sam, "and try out the new gym." Kesslers had just rebuilt their City premises, with a steel and glass atrium and high-tech dealing-floors fitted in behind the old palazzo facade.

When the day came Nick turned up early at the bank and waited under a palm tree in the atrium. People hurried in, nodding to the commissionaire, who still wore a tailcoat and a top hat. On the exposed escalators the employees were carried up and down, looking both slavish and intensely important. Nick watched the motorbike messengers in their sweaty waterproofs and leathers, and heavy boots. He felt abashed and agitated by closeness to so many people at work, in costume, in character, in the know. The building itself had the glitter of confidence, and made and retained an unending and authentic noise out of air vents, the hubbub of voices and the impersonal trundling of the escalators. Nick craned upwards for a glimpse of the regions where Lord Kessler himself might be conducting business, at that level surely a matter of mere blinks and ironies, a matter of telepathy. He knew that the old panelled boardroom had been retained, and that Lionel had hung some remarkable pictures there. In fact he had said that Nick should call in one day and see the Kandinsky…

Sam took him through and down into a chlorine-smelling basement where the gym and lap-pool were. "It's such a godsend, this place," he said. Nick thought it was very small, and hardly compared with the Y; he saw that he came to a gym as a gay place, but that this one wasn't gay. An old man in a white jacket handed out towels and looked seasoned to the obscenities of the bankers. Nick did a perfunctory circuit, really just to oblige Sam, who was pedalling on a bike and filling in the Times crossword. He felt he didn't know Sam very well, and had a vague sensation of being patronized. Sam's friendly Oxford cleverness had hardened, he had a glint to him like the building itself, a watchful half-smile of secret knowledge. All around them other men were slamming weights up and down. Nick wasn't sure if they were working up their aggression or working it off. In the showers they shouted esoteric boasts from stall to stall.

Nick had seen their lunch taking place in a murmurous old City dining room with oak partitions and tailcoated waiters. The restaurant Sam took him to was so bright, noisy and enormous that he had to shout out the details of his £5,000. When Sam understood he flinched backwards for a second to show he'd thought it was going to be something important. "Well, what fun," he said.

It was nearly all men in the restaurant. Nick was glad he'd worn his best suit and almost wished he'd worn a tie. There were sharp-eyed older men, looking faintly harassed by the speed and noise, their dignity threatened by the ferocious youngsters who already had their hands on a new kind of success. Some of the young men were beautiful and exciting; a sort of ruthless sex-drive was the way Nick imagined their sense of their own power. Others were the uglies and misfits from the school playground who'd made money their best friend. It wasn't so much a public-school thing. As everyone had to shout there seemed to be one great rough syllable in the air, a sort of "wow" or "yow." Sam was somewhat aloof from them but he didn't disown them. He said, "I saw a marvellous Frau ohne Schatten in Frankfurt."