Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

Nick tittered. "You know-sort of Lebanese guy, has a white Mercedes… sometimes calls himself Wani…"

"All right, yeah-enough said! Yeah, Ronnie.. ." said Ronnie, and chuckled affectionately, or with a hint of ridicule, so that Nick didn't know for a moment what he thought of Wani himself, any view of him seemed plausible. "The man with the portable telephone. He's Lebanese, is he? I didn't know he was Lebanese."

"Wani? Well actually he was born in Beirut, but he went to school here, and in fact he's lived in London since he was ten," said Nick, getting snagged as usual in a sub-clause to a more important sentence.

"… right…" said Ronnie after a bit. "Well I expect you'll be wanting to see me then. About something."

The great thing about Ronnie, as Wani said, was that he always came through. The stuff was tip-top, he dealt to some big names, and if the price, at one-twenty a gram, was a little steep, the mark-down at three-fifty for a quarter-ounce was a deal indeed. (A quarter-ounce, seven grams, was the only metric equivalent Nick had yet been able to memorize.) The downside of Ronnie was a strange delaying manner that would have seemed sleepy if it hadn't been also a kind of vigilance. He never rushed, he was never on time, and he had a puzzled porous memory. Nick had only met him once, when they'd driven round the block in his red Toyota and he'd watched the simple way the exchange was made. Ronnie was a cockneyfied Jamaican, with a tall shaved head and doleful eyes. He talked a lot about girlfriend troubles, perhaps just to make things clear. His voice was an intimate murmur, and since he was giving them something they wanted he had seemed to Nick both seductive and forgivable.

Today, it all felt much less happy. Ronnie asked him to ring back ten minutes later, when the routine of the first call was repeated almost verbatim, and again ten minutes after that, to check he was on his way. After each call Nick hung around the streets and felt glaringly criminal as well as vulnerable, with £350 rolled up tight in rubber bands in his pocket. The area seemed suddenly to be infested with police cars. For several minutes a helicopter hammered overhead. Nick wondered how he would explain the money to the police, then thought it was more likely they would wait until he got into the car before they made their move. He wondered if Gerald would be able to keep it out of the papers, if they'd be able to get Gerald into the papers, it was more than vulgar and unsafe, he could lose his seat if it came out that drugs were being taken in his house. How long would the sentence be? Ten years? For a first offence… And then, god, how would a pretty little poof with an Oxford accent survive in prison? They'd all be after his arse. He saw himself sobbing in a doorless lavatory. But perhaps a character reference from Professor Ettrick would help, or even someone at the Home Office-Gerald might not abandon him entirely! He was already at the place, the corner by the Chepstow Castle-a minute or two early. He perched at one of the picnic tables outside. The pub itself was shut, bleared light came out through plastic sheeting as work went on after hours, a new brewery had bought it, they were knocking the little old bars into one big room to make it more spacious and unwelcoming. Twelve minutes went past. It was very suspicious the way that man at the bus stop kept glancing at him and never got on a bus. Ronnie was getting careless, his phone was obviously tapped, it would be what they called a knock, when everyone in the street, the blind man, the pizza boy, the lady with the dog, were revealed in a second as plain-clothes officers. The car pulled up, Nick strolled over and got in and they cruised off round the block.

"How's it going, Rick?" Ronnie said, his mournful head not moving but his glance going from side to side and back to the rear-view mirror. Nick laughed and cleared his throat. "Very well, thanks," he said. They sat low in the Celica, Ronnie long-legged, arms on his knees, like a boy in a go-kart, long fingers turning the wheel by its crossbar rather than the rim. "Yeah?" said Ronnie. "Well, that's good. How's that Ronnie, then?"

Nick laughed nervously again. "Oh, he's fine, he's very busy." It was a wonderfully approximate world the real Ronnie lived in, and perhaps he liked it that way, his customers all nicknames and mishearings, it was tactful and safe. He looked in the mirror again, and at the same time his left hand went to his waistcoat pocket and then across to Nick, with the neat little thing held invisible under it. Nick was ready for that but he had to grope for the roll of notes in his pocket. Ronnie accelerated through an amber light, and it struck Nick he was breaking the law by not wearing a seatbelt. Ronnie wasn't wearing his either, that was the sort of world he was moving in, and he thought it might hurt his feelings if he belatedly buckled up. The journey must be nearly over, and the chances were they wouldn't have a prang. Awful, though, to get pulled over for a seatbelt violation, and then be questioned, and then searched … He nudged Ronnie's arm and he took the money and lost it, again without looking.

They pulled in behind the church at the crown of Ladbroke Grove, in the shadowy crescent of plane trees. "Thanks very much," said Nick. He really had to rush but he didn't want to seem unfriendly. Ronnie was looking out thoughtfully through the windscreen.

"This is an old church, Rick," he said. "This must be old."

"Yeah-well, it's Victorian, I suppose, isn't it," said Nick, who in fact knew all about it.

"Yeah?" said Ronnie, and nodded. "God, there's some old stuff round here."

Nick couldn't tell quite what he was getting at. He said, "It's not that old-sort of 1840s?" He knew not everybody had a sense of history, a useful image, as he had, of the centuries like rooms in enfilade. For half a second he glimpsed what he knew about the church, that the reredos was designed by Aston Webb, that it was built on the site of the grandstand of a long-vanished racetrack. It was a knobbly Gothic oddity in a street of stucco.

"I'm telling you, I'm moving up here, too fucking right I am," said Ronnie, in his protesting murmur.

"Mm, you should," said Nick, unsure if he was humouring him or sharing a wry joke, but excited anyway at the thought of having him as a neighbour. He was sexy, Ronnie, in his haggard spectral way…

"Get away from that woman, I'm telling you"-he shook his head and laughed illusionlessly. "I hope you're not having woman trouble, do you, Rick?"

"Oh… no… I don't," said Nick. "Still bad, is it?"

"I'm telling you," said Ronnie.

Nick could see that Ronnie might be a bit of a handful, and that his line of work might make a certain kind of girl uneasy. He wanted to lean over and get out his probably long and beautiful penis and give him the consolation that a man so perfectly understands-right here, in the car, in the dappled shade across the windscreen. But Ronnie had to get on-he offered his hand, coming down at an angle from a high raised elbow.

Nick got out of the car and turned to walk the two hundred yards to the house. In the street the sense of danger squeezed about him again, and the people who passed him as they came home from work frowned and sneered as they saw that he held a tiny parcel, a crass mistake, a heavy sentence, gripped tight in his hand in his pocket, ready, at the dreaded moment, to be flung down a drain. But when he turned up the steps and looked to left and right he had a gathering rapturous feeling he had got away with it. Of course nobody knew, it was totally safe, nobody had seen, it was nothing but an unknown car that slipped past the end of the street in a second. And now a flood of pleasure was waiting to be released. He rushed through the hall, up the stone stairs, there were voices already in the drawing room, the moan and yap of the first guests' opening platitudes, up and up, up the familiar creaking attic stairs, and into his hot still room that was waiting for him with birdsong through the window and the bed reflected in the wardrobe mirror. He closed the door, locked the door, and over a smiling five minutes changed his shirt, put in cufflinks, tied a tie and pulled on his suit trousers, all intercut with tipping out, chopping and snorting a trial line of the new stuff, hiding the rest in his desk, unrolling the banknote and rolling it up backwards, wiping the desk with his finger and his finger on his gums. Then he shrugged on the jacket, tied his shoes, leapt downstairs and talked brilliantly to Sir Maurice Tipper about the test match.