Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

Something awful happened with a waitress, who was taking round a wine bottle. She was black, and Nick had noticed already the flickers of discomfort and mimes of broadmindedness as she moved through the room and gave everyone what they wanted. Bertrand held out his glass and she filled it with Chablis for him-he watched her as she did it, and as she smiled and turned interrogatively to Nick, Bertrand said, "No, you bloody idiot, do you think I drink this? I want mineral water." The girl recoiled for just a second at the smart of his tone, at the slap-down of service, and then apologized with steely insincerity. Nick said, "Oh, I'm sure we can get you some water, we've got masses of water!" in a sweetly anxious way, as if to soften Bertrand's tone, to apologize for him himself, to give a breath of laughter to a rough moment; while Bertrand held the glass out stiffly towards her, expressionless save for a steady contemptuous blink. She held her dignity for a moment longer, while Nick's smile pleaded with her not to mind and with him to relent. But Bertrand said, "Don't you know bloody nothing?-Take this away," and glared at Nick as if to enlist or excite a similar outrage in him. Then when the girl had marched off, without saying a word, he looked down, sighed, and smiled ruefully, almost tenderly at Nick, as though to say that he would have liked to spare him such a scene, but that he himself was afraid of no one.

Nick knew he should move away, but he hadn't finished his main course; he took shameful refuge in it as a reason not to make a scene of his own. Other people must have heard. Tucked away in the window seat they must look like conspirators. Bertrand was talking about property now, and weighing the merits of wn against those of sw3; it seemed he too was thinking of moving to the neighbourhood. He looked at the room as if trying it on. "Well, it's lovely here," Nick said sadly, and gazed out of the window at the familiar street, at Bertrand's horrible maroon car, at the half-recognized evening life in the houses opposite, and at the big blond man who came up from the area of one of them, unlocked the big black motorbike that stood on the pavement outside, straddled it, pulled on and buckled his helmet, kicked the bike into eager life and three seconds later was gone. Only a buzz, a drone that faded as it rose, could be heard amid the high noise of talk in the room. It was as if the summons of the Chopin had been answered and the freedom seized by a lucky third person.

"Aah… " Gerald was saying, hovering like a waiter himself, the best of all waiters, "I hope everything's all right." He held a bottle of water in one hand and a freshly opened bottle of Taittinger in the other, as if hedging his bets.

"Marvellous!" said Bertrand, pretending not to notice these things, and then making a Gallic gesture of flattered surprise. "You're very kind, to wait on me yourself."

"These young girls don't always know what they're doing," said Gerald.

Nick said, "Gerald, obviously you've met… Mr Ouradi."

"We haven't really met," said Gerald, bowing and smiling secretively, "but I'm absolutely delighted you're here."

"Well, what a marvellous concert," Bertrand said. "The pianist had amazing technique. For one so young…"

"Amazing," Gerald agreed. "Well, you saw her here first!"

With an effect of creaking diplomatic machinery Dolly Kimbolton rolled into view, and Bertrand stood up, passing his plate with its toppling knife and fork to Nick. "Hello!" she said.

"Have you met Lady Kimbolton? Mr Bertram Ouradi, one of our great supporters."

They shook hands, Dolly leaning forward with the air of a busy headmistress rounding up stragglers for some huge collective effort. Bertrand said, in his tone of clear, childish self-importance, "Yes, I'm making quite a contribution. Quite a big contribution to the party."

"Splendid!" said Dolly, and gave him a smile in which political zeal managed almost entirely to disguise some older instinct about Middle Eastern shopkeepers.

"I don't know if we might all have a little chat…?" said Gerald, raising the champagne bottle. "And I think we might be needing this." The suggestion obviously didn't include Nick, who as so often wasn't visible and certainly wasn't relevant, and who was left, when the other three went off, holding Bertrand's unfinished supper as well as his own.

He closed the door, locked the door, and reached out for Wani, who patted him and kissed him on the nose as he turned away.

"Where's the stuff?" said Wani.

Nick went over to the desk, unhappy but caught up too in the business of the coke, which if he was patient enough might make them both happy again. He got out the tin from the bottom drawer. Wani said, "A tin is such an obvious place to hide it."

"Darling, no one even knows I've got anything to hide." He passed Wani the packet and smiled reproachfully. "It's just like our wonderful secret love affair."

Wani pulled out the chair and sat down at the desk, little clouds and gleams of possible rejoinders passing across his features. He peered at the stack of library books and selected Henry James and the Question of Romance by Mildred R. Pullman, which had a sleek Mylar sleeve protecting its dark jacket. "This should do," he said. He had never been in Nick's room before, and it was clear that it held no magic for him of the kind Nick had felt in Wani's room at Lowndes Square. Well, he wasn't one who noticed such things. He didn't thank Nick for meeting Ronnie or show any intuition of the scary drama it had been for him. Nick said, to remind him,

"I had such a sweet little chat with Ronnie. It seems he's hoping to move to this area." Wani said nothing, tipping out a bit of the rough powder onto the book. "He is very nice, isn't he?" Nick went on. "It was quite a business-ringing him and waiting and ringing again… And of course he was late…!"

Wani said, "You only like him because he's a wog. You probably fancy him."

"Not particularly," said Nick, whose wave of sexual feeling for him had been just a part of the criminal excitement, tension and relief at the same time, the feeling that Ronnie accepted not only his money but him; and then, to get it done, "I wish you wouldn't use that word. I keep trying to believe you're not as irredeemable as your father."

Wani weighed this up for a moment. "So what was Papa talking to you about?" he said.

Nick sighed and paced across the room-where they both were again, in the subtly glamorized light and depth of the wardrobe mirror. He had imagined Wani's being here so often, for secret sleepovers and also, in some other dispensation, freely and openly, as his lover and partner. He said, "Oh, he wants to move to this area too, apparently." He gave a snuffly laugh. "I ought to put him in touch with Jasper."

"That Jasper's a sexy little slut," said Wani, and it wasn't quite his usual tone.

"Yeah…? All white boys look the same to me," said Nick.

"Ha ha." Wani studied his work. "So-what else did he say?"

"Your old man? Oh, he was just pumping me again about you, and about the film. He has no idea what's going on, of course, but I think he's decided that I hold the key to the mystery. I did what I could to persuade him there wasn't a mystery."

"Maybe you're the mystery," said Wani. "He doesn't know what to make of you."

This was probably true, but also terribly unfair. Nick was longing to make a declaration, and now he felt violent towards Wani as well: his pulse was thumping in his neck as he stood behind him, then put his hands on his shoulders. All evening he'd needed to touch him, and the contact was convulsive when it came. Wani was working painstakingly and a little defensively with his gold card, making rapid hatching movements to and fro across the partially visible features of Henry James-not the great bald Master but the quick-eyed, tender, brilliant twenty-year-old, with an irrepressible kink in his dark hair. Nick squeezed Wani's neck with each clause: "I wish we didn't have to carry on like this, I feel I've got to tell someone, I wish we could tell people."