Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

Downstairs, a little later, in the drawing room, the coda of the party was unwinding, and Gerald opening new bottles of champagne as though he made no distinction between the boring drunks who "sat," and the knowing few of the inner circle, gathered round the empty marble fireplace. The Timmses were there, and Barry Groom, with their different fanatical ways of talking, their shades of zeal and exasperation-all alien to Nick more than ever in the lull after drugs and sex. He saw that Polly Tompkins was sitting with them, as if among equals, and already impatient for something superior. Gerald, it was clear, hadn't yet got round to the new paper on Third World debt. "Have a look at it," said Polly, and nodded at him like a genial don. The strange thing was that it was also Gerald's nod, just as his white collar was Gerald's collar. The mimicry was artful, slightly amorous, and since the love was hopeless, slightly mocking too. Really everything nice about Polly was a calculation.

Morgan, the woman Polly had brought, came to join Gerald's group, where they were going back over the scandal of Oxford refusing the PM an honorary degree. John Timms, with his intense belief in form, regarded the incident as an outrage, but Barry Groom, who hadn't bothered with Oxford, said, "Fuck 'em's what I say," in a sharp frank tone that made Morgan blush and then weigh in like a man herself. The only touching thing about her was her evident uncertainty as to when or why anything was funny. "They seem to think the lady's not for learning," Gerald said. She looked bewilderedfy at their laughing faces.

From the balcony, in the late July evening, the gardens receded in depth beyond depth of green, like some mysterious Hodgkin, to a point where a faintly luminous couple reclined on the grass. The astonishing greenness of London in summer. The great pale height of the after-dusk sky, birds cheeping and falling silent, an invincible solitude stretching out from the past like the slowly darkening east. The darkness climbed the sky, and the colours surrendered, the green became a dozen greys and blacks, the distant couple faded and disappeared.

"Hallo there…!"

"Oh hi, Jasper."

"How are you, then, darling?"-almost tweaking him in the ribs.

"Very well. How are you?"

"Ooh, not bad. A bit tired…"

"Hmm. What have you been up to?"

Young Jasper, no younger probably than Nick, but with his chancy just-out-of-school look, quick and lazy at the same time, his flirtiness, his assumption he knew you, as if by bedding, or flooring, Catherine he gained equal rights, an instant history, with her intimate old friend… Jasper couldn't have known they'd been overheard upstairs, but his little smirk coming and going invited you to guess he'd been up to something. He had the pink of sex about him still. He leant by Nick on the balustrade, and he was clearly fairly drunk.

"Is Catherine OK?"

"Yeah… She's a bit knackered, she's turned in. This isn't really her sort of scene."

Nick stared at the compound presumption of this remark and said, "Things going OK between you two?"

"Ooh yes," said Jasper, with a momentary pout, a wincing frown, to say how very hot it was. "No, she's a lovely lady."

Nick couldn't rise to this. After a moment he said, as nicely as he could, "You are looking after her, aren't you, Jasper?"

"Hark at Uncle Nick," said Jasper, piqued and somehow furtive.

"I mean, she seems quite steady at the moment, but it would just be disastrous if she came off this medication again."

"I think she's got it all sorted out," said Jasper, after a pause, adjusting his tone, his whole accent. He stood back and pushed his right hand through his glossy chestnut forelock, which immediately fell forward again; then the hand went into his jacket pocket, with just the thumb hooked out: subtly annoying gestures meant perhaps to convey commitment and dash to the doubtful house-buyer. "She thinks the world of you, Nick," he said.

Polly Tompkins had come out onto the balcony, perhaps jealous at seeing Nick with the boy he had squashed unavailingly earlier. Nick introduced them in a thinly amused tone which made no great claims for either of them. "I thought you were avoiding me," he said.

Jasper was waiting casually to see what the terms were, and if this big fat double-breasted man, who could have been anything between twenty-five and fifty, was part of the gay conspiracy or the straight one. Polly said, "You're such a social butterfly, I haven't been able to reach you with my net," and looked at Jasper as if to say he could find a use for him, if Nick couldn't.

Nick said, "Well, I was a social caterpillar for years."

Polly smiled and took out a packet of fags. "You seem to be very close with our friend Mr Ouradi. What were you talking to him about, I wonder?"

"Oh, you know… cinema… Beethoven… Henry James."

"Mmm… " Polly looked at the Silk Cut-a quitter's ten-but didn't open them. "Or Lord Ouradi, as I suppose we shall soon be saying."

Nick struggled to look unsurprised as he ran through all the reasons that Polly might be pulling his leg. He said, "I wouldn't be surprised-there's a sort of reverse social gravity these days, isn't there. People just plummet upstairs."

"I think Bertrand's rather more deserving than that," said Polly, successfully resisting and pocketing the cigarettes.

"Anyway, he's not British, is he?" Nick said airily, and rather proud of this objection. It was Polly, after all, who'd once called him a Levantine grocer.

"That's hardly an insuperable problem," said Polly with a quick pitying smile. "Well, we must be going. I just wanted to say goodbye. Morgan has an early start tomorrow. She has to fly up to Edinburgh."

"Well, my dear," said Nick, "one never sees you these days. I've given up keeping your place warm for you at the Shaftesbury"-a kindness, a bit of a sentimental gesture at the sort of friendship they had never actually had.

And Polly did a small but extraordinary thing: he looked at Nick and said, "Not that I remotely concur with what you've just said-about the peerage." He didn't flush or frown or grimace, but his long fat face seemed to harden in a fixative of threat and denial.

He went in, and Jasper followed him, turning to give Nick a curt little nod, in his own unconscious impression of Polly, so that the mannerism seemed to spread, a note of contempt that was a sign of allegiance.

THE SERVICE STAIRS were next to the main stairs, separated only by a wall, but what a difference there was between them: the narrow back stairs, dangerously unrailed, under the bleak gleam of a skylight, each step worn down to a steep hollow, turned tightly in a deep grey shaft; whereas the great main sweep, a miracle of cantilevers, dividing and joining again, was hung with the portraits of prince-bishops, and had ears of corn in its wrought-iron banisters that trembled to the tread. It was glory at last, an escalation of delight, from which small doors, flush with the panelling, moved by levers below the prince-bishops' high-heeled and rosetted shoes, gave access, at every turn, to the back stairs, and their treacherous gloom. How quickly, without noticing, one ran from one to the other, after the proud White Rabbit, a well-known Old Harrovian porn star with a sphincter that winked as bells rang, crowds murmured and pigeons flopped about the dormer window while Nick woke and turned in his own little room again, in the comfortable anticlimax of home.

On his back, in the curtained light, the inveterate habits of home took hold of him without a word… Wani, of course… yes, Wani… in the car… and that time with Ricky, the outrage of it… though home, historically, was a shrine of Toby-longing, almost extinct now, worked up only in moods of vicious nostalgia… still, it seemed possible… Toby of three years ago… at Hawkeswood… morning after the great party… calling him into the King's Room, sweaty with hangover under one roiled sheet… "Fuck, what a night…!" and then he darted to the bathroom… only time he saw him naked… great innocent rower's arse… did that happen… did what happened next happen… and Wani that night…