Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

"Ah yes… well, you know my feelings about Strauss," said Nick.

Sam looked at him disappointedly. "Oh, Strauss is good," he said. "He's very good on women."

"That wouldn't in itself put me off!" said Nick.

Sam chuckled at the point, but went on, "The orchestral music's all about men and the operas are all about women. The only interesting male parts he wrote are both trouser-roles, Octavian, of course, and the Composer in Ariadne."

"Yes, quite," said Nick, slightly pressured. "He's not universal. He's not like Wagner, who understood everything."

"He's not like Wagner at all," said Sam. "But he's still rather a genius." They didn't get round to Nick's money till the end of lunch. "It's just a little inheritance," said Nick. "I thought it might be fun to see what could be made of it."

"Mm," said Sam. "Well, property's the thing now."

"I wouldn't get much for five thousand," said Nick.

Sam gave a single laugh. "I'd buy shares in Eastaugh. They're developing half the City. Share price like the north wall of the Eiger."

"Going up fast, you mean."

"Or there's Fedray, of course."

"What, Gerald's company?"

"Amazing performance last quarter, actually."

Nick felt stirred but on balance uneasy at this idea. "How does one go about it?" he said, with a gasp at his own silliness, but a certain recklessness too, after four glasses of Chablis. "I wondered if you'd look after it for me."

Sam put his napkin on the table and gestured to the waiter. "OK!" he said brightly, to show it was a game, a bit of silliness of his own. "We'll go for maximum profits. We'll see how far we can go."

Nick fumbled earnestly for his wallet but Sam put the lunch on expenses. "Important investor from out of town," he said. He had Kesslers' own platinum MasterCard. Nick watched the procedure with a bead of anticipation in his eye. Outside on the pavement, Sam said, "All right, my dear, send me a cheque. I'm going this way," as if Nick had made it clear he was going the other. Then they shook hands, and as they did so Sam said, "Shall we say three per cent commission," so that they seemed to have solemnized the arrangement. Nick flushed and grinned because he'd never thought of that: he minded terribly. It was only later that it came to seem a good, optimistic thing, with the proper stamp of business to it.

Wani was still "building up his team" at Ogee, and Nick was silently amazed by both his confidence and his lack of urgency. A woman called Melanie, dressed for a Dallas cocktail party, came in to do the typing, and artfully protracted her few bits of filing and phoning through the afternoon. Whenever her mother rang her she said things were "hectic." Wani had a wonderful Talkman, which was a portable phone he could take with him in the car or even into a restaurant, and Melanie was encouraged to call him on it if he was in a meeting and give him some figures. Then there were the boys, Howard and Simon, not actually a couple, but always referred to together, and acting together in the comfortable way of schoolboy best chums. Howard was very tall and square-jawed and Simon was short and owlish and pretended not to mind being fat. If anyone took them for lovers Simon shrieked with laughter and Howard explained tactfully that they were merely good friends. Nick liked nattering with them when he dropped into the office, and enjoyed their glancing hints that they both rather fancied him. "Well, I swim and I work out a couple of times a week," Nick would say, leaning back in his chair with the glow of shame that for him was still the cost of bragging; and Simon would say, "Oh, I suppose I ought to try that." They all carried on as if they'd never noticed Wani's beauty, and as if they took him entirely seriously. If his picture appeared in the social pages of Tatler or Harper's and Queen Melanie passed the magazine round like a validation of their whole enterprise.

Nick was confident that none of them knew he was sleeping with the boss, and with ten or more years of practice he could head off almost any train of talk that might end in a thought-provoking blush. Part of him longed for the scandalous acclaim, but Wani exacted total secrecy, and Nick enjoyed keeping secrets. He worked up his earlier adventures as a cover, and told Howard and Simon a different version of the Ricky incident, replacing Wani with a Frenchman he'd met at the Pond the previous summer.

"So was he handsome, this Ricky?" said Simon.

Handsomeness was neither here nor there with Ricky, it was his look of stupid certainty, the steady heat of him, the way you started in deep, as though the first kiss was an old kiss interrupted and picked up again at full intensity-Nick said, "Oh, magnificent. Dark eyes, round face, nice big nose-"

"Mmm," said Simon.

"Perhaps a trifle too punctually, though not yet quite lamentably, bald."

There was a moment's thought before Simon said, "That's one of your things, isn't it?"

"What…?" said Nick, with a vaguely wounded look.

"A trifle too… how did it go?"

"I can't remember what I said… 'a trifle too punctually, though not yet quite lamentably, bald'?"

Howard sat back, with the nod of someone submitting to an easy old trick, and said, "So did he have a beard?"

"Far from it," said Nick. "No, no-he spoke, as to cheek and chin, of the joy of the matutinal steel."

They all laughed contentedly. It was one of Nick's routines to slip these plums of periphrasis from Henry James's late works into unsuitable parts of his conversation, and the boys marvelled at them and tried feebly to remember them-really they just wanted Nick to say them, in his brisk but weighty way.

"So what's that from, then?"

"The baldness? It's from The Outcry, it's a novel by Henry James that no one's ever heard of." This was taken philosophically by the boys, who hadn't really heard of any novels by Henry James. Nick felt he was prostituting the Master, but then there was an element of self-mockery in these turns of phrase-it was something he was looking at in his thesis. He was at the height of a youthful affair with his writer, in love with his rhythms, his ironies, and his idiosyncrasies, and loving his most idiosyncratic moments best of all.

"It sounds like Henry James called everyone beautiful and marvellous," said Sam, a little sourly, "from what you say."

"Oh, beautiful, magnificent… wonderful. I suppose it's really more what the characters call each other, especially when they're being wicked. In the later books, you know, they do it more and more, when actually they're more and more ugly-in a moral sense."

"Right… " said Simon.

"The worse they are the more they see beauty in each other."

"Interesting," said Howard drily.

Nick cast a fond glance at his little audience. "There's a marvellous bit in his play The High Bid, when a man says to the butler in a country house, T mean, to whom do you beautifully belong?' "

Simon grunted, and looked round to see if Melanie could hear. He said, "So what was his knob like, then?… You know, Ricky?"

Well, it was certainly worth describing, and embellishing. Nick wondered for a moment how Henry would have got round it. If he had fingered so archly at beards and baldness, the fine paired saliences of his own appearance, what flirtings and flutterings might he not have performed to conjure up Ricky's solid eight inches? Nick said, "Oh, it was … of a dimension," and watched Simon work what excitement he could out of that.

So he prattled on, mixing up sex and scholarship, and enjoying his wanderings away from the strict truth. In fact that was really the fun of it. And it seemed to fit in with the air of fantasy in the Ogee office, the distant sense of an avoided issue.

Nick couldn't quite have defined his own role there, and he only learned what it was when he was suddenly invited to Lowndes Square for Sunday lunch. He'd been dancing at Heaven till three the night before, and was still struggling with the rubber mask, the wobbly legs, the trill and glare of a beer and brandy hangover when Bertrand Ouradi grasped his hand very hard and said, "Ah, so you're Antoine's aesthete."