Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

"Hello!" said Sally Tipper. "Well, that was very enjoyable."

"I know, heartbreaking," said Lady Kimbolton. "I imagine you saw the Telegraph this morning?"

"I did indeed," said Sir Maurice. "Congratulations!"

"I do like to hear music in the home," Lady Tipper said, "as in the times of Beethoven and Schubert themselves."

"I know… " said Lady Kimbolton, her square practical face tilting this way and that to see what was on the table.

"Nigel must be chuffed," Sir Maurice said.

"Maurice and I have been to a number of concerts at friends' houses lately, it's an excellent move," said Lady Tipper, who was known to be artistic.

"I know, there seems to be an absolute mania for concerts," Lady Kimbolton said. "This is the second one I've been to this year."

"I hear Lionel Kessler, you know…? had the Medici Quartet at Hawkeswood for a marvellous evening with Giscard d'Estaing."

"I think that's really what gave Gerald the idea," said Nick, joshing in between them as they got to the table.

"Oh, hello…"

"Hello, Dolly," said Nick. He knew he could do quite a funny sketch about Gerald's growing preoccupation with the concert idea, which had come to a peak of competitive angst when Denis Beckwith, a handsome old saurian of the right enjoying fresh acclaim these days, had hired Kiri te Kanawa to sing Mozart and Strauss at his eighty-fifth birthday party. But something made him tread carefully. "You know how competitive he is," he said.

"We're all for competition!" said Dolly Kimbolton, claiming her plate of salmon from the waiter.

"Jolly good, jolly good… " said Gerald, weaving through behind them. "Clever you to introduce us to a new artiste," said Sally Tipper.

"I liked that last thing she played," said Sir Maurice.

Gerald looked round to see where Nina was. "We thought rather than going for a big name…"

The "Badminton" lady was darting in for a bread roll. "You're so right," she said. "I hear Michael's hiring the Royal Philharmonic for their summer party."

"Michael…?" said Gerald.

"Oh?… Heseltine? Yup… yup… " She hunched in fake apology as she backed away. "Yup, the whole blinking RPO. What it must be costing.

But they've had a good year," she added, in a tenderly defiant tone.

"I thought we'd had a pretty good year," Gerald muttered.

Nick had been avoiding Bertrand Ouradi, but as he turned from the table with his plate there Bertrand was. "Aha, my friend the aesthete!" he said, and Nick was reminded of an annoying foreign waiter, perhaps, or taxi driver, for whom he was identified by a single joke. But he was able to say excitedly,

"How are you?"

Bertrand didn't answer-he seemed to suggest the question was both trivial and impertinent. He looked around the room, where people were grouping on the sofas and at little tables brought in by the staff and swiftly covered with white cloths. He didn't know where to settle, among these braying English snobs; his expression was proud and wary. "Bloody hot, isn't it," he said to Nick. "Come and talk to me"; and he led him, again like a waiter, with half-impatient glances over his shoulder, among the dotted supper tables-not to the cool of the great rear balcony but to a window seat at the front, looking onto the street. Perching there, knee to knee, partly screened by the roped-back curtains, they had a worrying degree of privacy. "Bloody hot," said Bertrand again. "Thank god that beast has got bloody air conditioning": he nodded at the maroon Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow parked at the kerb below.

"Ah," said Nick, unable to rise to such a wretched brag. In the back window of the car shiny white cushions were neatly aligned; he couldn't see the number plate but the thought that it must be BO something made him smirk-he pressed the smirk a little harder into a ghastly smile of admiration. One of Catherine's neuroses was a horror of maroon; it outdid her phobia of the au sound, or augmented it perhaps, with some worse intimation. Nick saw what she meant.

Bertrand asked him a few questions about the recital, and paid attention to the answers as though at a useful professional briefing. "Amazing technique," he repeated. "Still very young," he said, and shook his head and dissected his salmon. High and capable though he was, Nick hesitated to play the aesthete very thoroughly, hesitated to be himself, in case his tone was too intimate and revealing. The influence of Bertrand was as strong in its way as the coke, and he found himself speaking gruffly to him. He wondered actually, despite the keenness of his feelings, if Nina had been much good. Reactions were skewed by her being so young. He pretended he was Dolly Kimbolton and said, "The Beethoven was heartbreaking," but it wasn't a phrase that Bertrand saw a use for. He looked at him narrowly and said, "That last thing she played was bloody good."

Nick glanced out into the room to find Wani, who was sitting at a table with his mother and a middle-aged woman who looked quite prickly and confused under his long-lashed gaze. It was almost a decoy of Wani's to let his gaze rest emptily but seductively on a woman. He still hadn't spoken to Nick since his arrival; there had been a turn and a nod, a sigh, as if to say, "These crowds, these duties," when they were taking their seats. If it made him uneasy to see his lover and his father tete-a-tete he was too clever to show it. Bertrand said, "That son of mine, who's he flirting with now?"

Nick laughed easily and said, "Oh, I don't know. Some MP's wife, I expect."

"Flirting, flirting, that's all he bloody does!" said Bertrand, with a mocking flutter of his own eyelashes. Dapper and primped as he was, he became almost camp. Nick pictured the daily task of shaving above and below that line of moustache, the joy of the matutinal steel, and then the joy of the dressing room that was like a department of a shop. He said, "He may flirt, but you know he never really looks at another woman," and was thrilled by his own wickedness.

"I know, I know," said Bertrand, as though cross at being taken seriously, but also perhaps reassured. "So how's it going-at the office?"

"Oh fine, I think."

"You still got all those pretty boys there?"

"Um…"

"I don't know why he has to have all these bloody pretty poofy boys." "Well, I think they're very good at their jobs," Nick said, so horrified he sounded almost apologetic. "Simon Jones is an excellent graphic designer, and Howard Wasserstein is a brilliant script editor."

"So when does the bloody shooting start on the film?"

"Ah-you'd have to ask Wani that."

Bertrand popped a new potato into his mouth and said, "I already did-he never tells me nothing." He flapped his napkin. "What is the bloody film anyway?"

"Well, we're thinking about adapting The Spoils of Poynton, um…"

"Plenty of smooching, plenty of action," Bertrand said.

Nick smiled thinly and thought rapidly and discovered that these were two-elements entirely lacking from the novel. He said, "Wani's hoping to get James Stallard to be in it."

Bertrand gave him a wary look. "Another pretty boy?"

"Well, he's generally agreed to be very good-looking. He's one of the rising young stars."

"I read something about him…"

"Well, he recently got married to Sophie Tipper," Nick said. "Sir Maurice Tipper's daughter. It was in all the papers. Of course she used to go out with Toby-Gerald and Rachel's son." He produced all this hetero stuff like a distracting proof; he hoped he wouldn't normally be so cravenly reassuring.

Bertrand smiled as if nothing would surprise him. "I heard he let a big fish go-"

Nick blushed for some reason, and started talking about the magazine, with the brightness of a novice salesman, not yet committed and not yet cynical; he told him that he and Wani were going on a trip to research subjects for it-and that was the nearest he could get to stating the unspeakable fact of their affair. For a second he imagined telling Bertrand the truth, in all its mischievous beauty, imagined describing, like some praiseworthy business initiative, the skinhead rent boy they'd had in last week for a threesome. Just then he felt a kind of sadness-well, the shine went off things, as he'd known it would, his mood was petering into greyness, a grey restlessness. He felt condemned to this with Bertrand. It was just what had happened at Lowndes Square: the secret certainty faded after half an hour and gave way to a somehow enhanced state of doubt. The manageable joke of Bertrand became a penance. Nick was powerless, fidgety, sulkily appeasing, in the grip of a man who seemed to him in every way the opposite of himself, a tight little bundle of ego in a shiny suit.