Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

"SOMETHING FOR EVERYBODY!" Gerald Fedden said, striding into the kitchen with a rattling brown-paper carrier bag. "All must have prizes!" He was tanned and tireless, and a lost energy came back into the house with him, the flash of his vanity and confidence-it was almost as though the words of the returning officer were fresh in his ears and he were responding to applause with these high-spirited promises. On the side of the bag was the emblem of a famous Perigueux delicatessen, a blue goose with its head through what looked like a life-saving ring, its beak curling Disney-wise in a complacent smile.

"Yuk, not foie gras," Catherine said.

"In fact this quince jelly is for the Purring One," said Gerald, taking out a jar in a gingham cap and bow and sliding it across the kitchen table.

Catherine said, "Thanks," but left it there and wandered away to the window.

"And what was it for Tobias?"

"The… um… " Rachel gestured. "The carnet."

"Of course." Gerald rummaged discreetly before passing his son a small notebook, bound in odorous green suede.

"Thanks, Pa," said Toby, who was sprawling in shorts on the long banquette and obliquely reading the paper while he listened to his mother's news. Behind him, the wall was a great hilarious page of family history, with numerous framed photographs of holidays and handshakes with the famous, as well as two wicked caricatures of Gerald, which he had made a point of buying from the cartoonists. When Gerald was in the kitchen, guests always found themselves contrasting him with his grinning, hawk-nosed cartoon image; the comparison was obviously to his advantage, though it couldn't help stirring the suspicion that under his handsome everyday mask this predatory goon might indeed be lurking.

Now, in linen shorts and espadrilles, busying back and forth from the car, he was full of anecdotes about life at the manoir, and mentioned particular local characters to stir up amusement and regret in his children. "It's such a shame we couldn't all be there together. And you know, you really should come down one year, Nick."

"Well, I'd love to," said Nick, who had been hovering with an encouraging but modest expression. Of course it would have been grand to summer with the Feddens at the manoir, but less marvellous, he couldn't help feeling, than staying in London without them. How different the room looked now, with all of them noisily and unnoticingly back in it. Their return marked the end of his custodianship, and his real pleasure in seeing them again was stained with a kind of sadness he associated with adolescence, sadness of time flying and missed opportunities. He was keen for a word of gratitude to ease the mysterious ache. Of course his main achievement, in the crisis with Catherine, went unmentioned. It seemed an omission which could still be redeemed, by a quick firm gesture of good conscience, and Catherine herself looked nervously aware of the unstated subject; but Nick saw, in the unsuspecting presence of her parents, that he had somehow sided with her, and that it was never going to be declared. "

However," said Gerald, "it was simply great for us that you could be here to look after the Cat that Walks by Herself. I hope she wasn't any trouble?"

"Well… " Nick grinned and looked down.

As an outsider, he had no pet name, and was exempt from the heavy drollery of the family lingo. His own gift was a small knobbly bottle of cologne called "Je Promets." He took an appreciative sniff, and read into it various nice discriminations on the part of the donors; certainly his own parents would never have given him anything so fragrant or ambiguous. "I trust it's all right," said Gerald, as if to say he'd made a generous stab at something outside his competence.

"It's wonderful-thank you so much," said Nick. As an outsider he found himself floating again in a pleasant medium of social charm and good humour. Toby and Catherine could frown and sulk, and exercise their prerogative not to be impressed or amused by their parents. Nick, though, conversed with his hosts in an idiom of tremendous agreement. "Did you have glorious weather?" "I must say we had glorious weather." "I hope the traffic wasn't too frightful…" "Frightful!" "I'd love to see the little church at Podier." "I think you'd love the little church at Podier." So they knitted their talk together. Even disagreements, for instance over Gerald's taste for Richard Strauss, had a glow of social harmony to them, of relished licence, and counted almost as agreements transposed into a more exciting key.

There was a lot of wine in the back of the Range Rover and Nick offered to help Gerald carry it in. He couldn't help noticing the almost annoying firmness of the MP's backside, pumped up no doubt by daily tennis and swimming in France. The suntanned legs were a further hint of sexual potential that Nick would normally have thought impossible in a man of forty-five-he thought perhaps he was so excited by the prospect of Leo that he was reacting to other men with indiscriminate alertness. When the last case was in, Gerald said, "We were stung for a hell of a lot of duty on this stuff."

Toby said, "Of course if trade barriers were lifted in the EC you wouldn't have to worry about that sort of thing."

Gerald smiled thinly to show he wasn't rising to the bait. There were a couple of bottles for Elena, who was involved in an anxious transfer of household powers to Rachel, and put them aside in her black shopping bag, to take home. Elena, a widow in her sixties, was treated with affection and a careful pretence of equality by the family, so it was revealing to see her nervousness as she accounted for what she had done in their absence. Nick couldn't quite rid himself of a sense of embarrassment with her, the ghost of an elaborate but misdirected courtesy. On his first visit to Kensington Park Gardens, he'd been welcomed by Toby and then left briefly alone in the house, with the warning that his mother would soon be home. Hearing the front door open and close, Nick went downstairs and introduced himself to the good-looking woman with jet-black hair who was sorting out the mail on the hall stand. He spoke excitedly about the painting he'd been looking at in the drawing room, and it was only slowly, in face of the woman's smiling deference and heavily accented murmurings, that he realized he wasn't talking to the Honourable Rachel but to the Italian housekeeper. Of course there was nothing wrong in being charming to the housekeeper, and Elena's views on Guardi were probably just as interesting as Rachel's and more so than Gerald's, but still the moment which she seemed to remember for its charm Nick recalled as a tiny faux pas.

Even so, sliding on to the seat beside Toby, taking in the soap and coffee smell of him, pressing briefly against his bare knee as he reached for the sugar, he felt what a success he had had. That was a year ago, and now everything was rich with association. He picked up the notebook, which had barely been looked at, and stroked the soft pile of its cover, to make up for Toby's lack of appreciation and remotely, too, as if he were thumbing some warm and hairy part of Toby himself. Toby was talking of becoming a journalist, so the gift was vaguely insulting, a lazy attempt at aptness, the sense of mere duty in the givers disguised by the stinking costliness of the production. The notebook wouldn't open flat, and a few addresses or "ideas" would have filled it. It was certainly hard to imagine Toby using it as he visited a picket line or jostled for an answer from a camera-mobbed minister.

"You heard about Maltby, of course," said Toby.

Immediately Nick felt the air in the room begin to tingle, as if at the onset of an allergic reaction. Hector Maltby, a junior minister in the Foreign Office, had been caught with a rent boy in his Jaguar at Jack Straw's Castle, and had rapidly resigned from his post and, it seemed, from his marriage. The story had been all over the papers last week, and it was silly of Nick to feel as self-conscious as he suddenly did, blushing as if he'd been caught in a Jaguar himself. It was often like this when the homosexual subject came up, and even in the Feddens' tolerant kitchen he stiffened in apprehension about what might carelessly be said-some indirect insult to swallow, a joke to be weakly smiled at. Even the case of the absurd fat Maltby, a real-life cartoon of the greedy "new" Tory, seemed to Nick to allude to his own quiet case and, in a brief twinge of paranoia, to raise a question about his closeness to Toby's beautiful brown leg.