Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

"Ah yes," said Nick.

"Mainly it took place in Italy, which we love so much, it was delightful."

Martine slightly surprised him by saying, "I think it's so boring now, everything takes place in the past."

"Oh… I see. You mean, all these costume dramas…"

"Costume dramas. All of this period stuff. Don't the English actors get fed up with it-they are all the time in evening dress."

"It's true," said Nick. "Though actually everyone is in evening dress all the time these days, aren't they." He was thinking really of Wani, who owned three dinner jackets and had gone to the Duchess's charity ball in white tie and tails. He saw he was under attack, since the Poynton project would naturally involve a lot of dressing up.

Monique Ouradi said, "I'm sure my son will make a beautiful film, with your help"-so that Nick felt she was encouraging him in some larger sense, in the inscrutable way that mothers sometimes do.

"Yes, perhaps you don't know him all that well," Martine agreed. "You will need to push and shove him."

"I'll remember that," said Nick with a laugh, and amazing arousing images of Wani in bed glowed in front of him, so that Martine was like a person in the beam of a slide projector, half exposed, half coloured over, and a little ridiculous.

The Ferrari smacked into Bertrand's slipper once again, and little Antoine made it rev and whine as it tried to climb over it, until Bertrand bent down and picked the toy up and held it like a furious insect in the air. Antoine came round from behind the sofa, dawdling as he caught the moment of pure fury on his uncle's face and then gasping with laughter as the glare curled into a pantomime snarl. "Enough Ferrari for today," Bertrand said, and gave it back to the child with no fear of being disobeyed. Nick felt abruptly nervous at the thought of crossing Bertrand, and those same naked images of his son melted queasily away.

Wani said, "You must be longing to see round the house."

"Oh, yes," said Nick, getting up with a flattered smile. He felt that Wani had almost overdone the coolness and dissimulation, he'd barely spoken to him, and even now, as he lifted Nick on a wave of secret intentions, his expression gave nothing away, not even the warmth that the family might have expected between two old college friends.

"Yes, take him round," said Bertrand. "Show him all the bloody pictures and bloody things we've got."

"I'd love that," said Nick, seeing the hidden advantage of the aesthete persona, even in a house where the good things had the glare of reproductions. "Will I go too?" said little Antoine, who was clearly as fond of his cousin's touch and smile as Nick was; but Emile crossly made him stay.

"We'll begin at the top," Wani announced as they left the room and started upstairs two at a time. On the second flight he said quietly, "You didn't say where you were last night."

"Oh, I went to Heaven," said Nick, with mild apprehension at telling an innocent truth.

"I wondered," said Wani, without looking round. "Did you fuck anyone?"

"Of course I didn't fuck anyone. I was with Howard and Simon."

"I suppose that follows," said Wani, and then allowed Nick a tiny smile. "What did you do, then?"

"Well, you have been to a nightclub, darling," said Nick in a voice where sarcasm almost wished itself away. "You've been photographed in several with your fiancee. We danced and danced and drank and drank."

"Mm. Did you take your shirt off?"

"I think I'll leave that to your jealous imagination," Nick said.

They went along the landing and into Wani's bedroom. Wani bustled through, with a just perceptible air of granting a concession, of counting on Nick not to look too closely at what the room contained, and went into a white bathroom beyond. Nick followed slowly. Everything in the bedroom interested him, it was dead and alive at once, group photographs, from Harrow, from Oxford, the Martyrs' Club in their pink coats, Toby and Roddy Shepton and the rest; and the books, the Arnold and the Arden Shakespeare and the cracked orange spines of the Penguin Middlemarch and Tom Jones, the familiar colours and lettering, the series and ideas of all that phase of their life, stranded and fading here as in a thousand outgrown bedrooms, never to be looked at again; and the young man's princely bed, almost a double; and the mirror, where Nick now timidly checked his own progress-he looked perfectly all right. The puzzlement of a hangover… the creeping hilarity of the new drink… He strolled on into the bathroom.

Wani had got his wallet out, and was crushing and chopping a generous spill of coke on the wide rim of the washbasin. "A lot of funny old stuff in there," he said.

"I know," said Nick. "It's a little early for that, isn't it?" It was a lovely slide they were on with the coke, but sometimes Wani was a bit serious, a bit premature with it.

"You looked as if you needed it."

"Well, just a small line," said Nick. He looked around this room as well, with tense insouciance. He didn't really want to go down to lunch in reckless unaccountable high spirits and make a different kind of fool of himself. But a line wasn't feasibly resisted. He loved the etiquette of the thing, the chopping with a credit card, the passing of the tightly rolled note, the procedure courteous and dry, "all done with money," as Wani said-it was part of the larger beguilement, and once it had begun it squeezed him with its charm and promise. Being careful not to nudge him as he worked, he hugged Wani lightly from behind and slid a hand into his left trouser pocket.

"Oh fuck," said Wani distantly. In about three seconds he was hard, and Nick too, pressing against him. Everything they did was clandestine, and therefore daring and therefore childlike, since it wasn't really daring at all. Nick didn't know how long it could go on-he didn't dream of it stopping, but it was silly and degrading at twenty-three to be sneaking sex like this, like a pickpocket as Wani said. But then again, on a hungover morning, moronic with lust, he saw a beauty in the slyness of it. There were several pound coins in the flannel depths of the pocket, and they tumbled round Nick's hand as he stroked Wani's dick.

Wani drew the powder into two long lines. "You'd better close the door," he said.

Nick lingeringly disengaged himself: "Yeah, we've only got a minute." He pushed the door to and came forward to take the rolled £20 note.

"Turn the key," said Wani. "That little boy follows me everywhere."

"Ah, who can blame him," said Nick graciously.

Wani gave him a narrow took-he was often dissatisfied by praise. They stooped in turn and zipped up the powder, and then stood for a minute, sniffing and nodding, reading each other's faces for comparison and confirmation of the effect. Wani's features seemed to soften, there was a subtle but involuntary smile that Nick loved to see at the moment of achievement and surrender. He grinned back at him, and reached out to stroke his neck, and with his other hand rubbed playfully at Wani's oblique erection. They were on to such a good thing. He said, "This is fucking good stuff."

"God yes," said Wani. "Ronnie always comes through."

"I hope you haven't given me too much," Nick said; though over the next thirty seconds, holding Wani to him and kissing him lusciously, he knew that everything had become possible, and that the long demanding lunch would be a waltz and that he would play with Bertrand the tycoon and charm them all. He sighed and pulled Wani's left arm up to look at his famous watch. "We'd better go down," he said.

"OK." Wani stepped back, and quickly undid his trousers.

"Darling, they're waiting for us…" But Wani's look was so fathomlessly interesting to him, command and surrender on another deeper level, the raw needs of so aloof a man, the silly sense of privilege in their romantic secret-Nick knelt anyway, and turned him round in his hands, and pulled his pants, the loose old-fashioned drawers that Wani wore, down between his thighs.