Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

"Silly old Hector," said Gerald.

"I don't think we were terribly surprised," Rachel said, with her characteristic tremor of irony.

"You must have known him?" Toby asked, in a ponderous new "interview" style he had.

"A bit," said Rachel.

"Not really," said Gerald.

Catherine was still gazing out of the window, indulging her dream of not being connected to her family. "I really don't see why he has to go to jail," she said.

"He's not going to jail, you daft old puss," Gerald said. "Unless you know something I don't. He was only caught with his trousers down." By some half-conscious association he looked to Nick for confirmation of this.

"As far as I know," said Nick, trying to make the five little words sound both casual and judicious. It was horrible to imagine Hector Maltby with his trousers down; and the disgraced MP didn't seem after all to merit much in the way of solidarity. Nick's taste was for aesthetically radiant images of gay activity, gathering in a golden future for him, like swimmers on a sunlit bank.

"Well, I don't see why he had to resign," Catherine said. "Who cares if he likes a blow-job now and then?"

Gerald smoothed this over but he was clearly shocked. "No, no, he had to go. There was really no alternative." His tone was ruffled but responsible, and the sense of his own voice submitting to the common line and formula of politics was vaguely disturbing, though Catherine laughed at it.

"It may all do him good," she said. "Help him to find out who he really is.

Gerald frowned, and pulled a bottle from the cardboard crate. "You have the oddest idea of what might do people good," he said, musingly but indignantly. "Now I thought we might have the Podier St-Eustache with dinner."

"Mm, lovely," Rachel murmured. "The thing is, darling, quite simply, that it's vulgar and unsafe," she said, in one of her sudden hard formulations.

Gerald said, "You'll dine with us tonight, Nick?"

Nick smiled and looked away because the generous question raised a new uncertainty about his status on subsequent nights. How much and how often would he be sharing with them? They had mentioned he might sometimes be called on to make up numbers. "I'm terribly sorry, but I can't tonight," he said.

"Oh… what a shame, our first night back…"

He wasn't sure how to put it. Catherine watched his hesitation with a fascinated smile. "No, Nick can't because he's got a date," she said. It was annoying to have her frankness applied to his tender plans, and a treacherous reward for his silence about her affairs. He coloured, and felt a further crackle of social static pass through the room. Everyone seemed to be humming, doubtful, encouraging, embarrassed, he couldn't tell.

Nick had never been on a date with a man before, and was much less experienced than Catherine imagined. In the course of their long conversations about men he had let one or two of his fantasies assume the status of fact, had lied a little, and had left some of Catherine's assumptions about him unchallenged. His confessed but entirely imaginary seductions took on-partly through the special effort required to invent them and repeat them consistently-the quality of real memories. He sometimes had the sense, from a hint of reserve in people he was talking to, that while they didn't believe him they saw he was beginning to believe himself. He had only come out fully in his last year at Oxford, and had used his new licence mainly to flirt with straight boys. His heart was given to Toby, with whom flirting would have been inappropriate, almost sacrilegious. He wasn't quite ready to accept the fact that if he was going to have a lover it wouldn't be Toby, or any other drunk straight boy hopping the fence, it would be a gay lover-that compromised thing that he himself would then become. Proper queens, whom he applauded and feared and hesitantly imitated, seemed often to find something wrong with him, pretty and clever though he was. At any rate they didn't want to go to bed with him, and he was free to wander back, in inseparable relief and discouragement, to his inner theatre of sexual make-believe. There the show never ended and the actors never tired and a certain staleness of repetition was the only hazard. So the meeting with Leo, pursued through all the obstacles of the system which alone made it possible, was momentous for Nick. Pausing for a last hopeful gaze into the gilt arch of the hall mirror, which monitored all comings and goings, he found it reluctant to give its approval; when he pulled the door shut and set off along the street he felt giddily alone, and had to remind himself he was doing all this for pleasure. It had taken on the mood of a pointless dare.

As he hurried down the hill he started focusing again on his Interests and Ambitions, the rather surprising topic for the meeting. He saw that interests weren't always a sexy thing. A shared passion for a subject, large or small, could quickly put two strangers into a special state of subdued rapture and rivalry, distantly resembling love; but you had to hit on the subject. As for ambitions, he felt it was hard to announce them without sounding either self-deluding or feeble, and in fact unambitious. Gerald could say, "I want to be Home Secretary," and have people smiling but conceding the possibility. Whereas Nick's ambition was to be loved by a handsome black man in his late twenties with a racing bike and a job in local government. This was the one thing he wasn't going to be able to admit to Leo himself.

He fixed his thoughts for the hundredth time on the little back bar of the Chepstow Castle, which he had chosen for its shadowy semi-privacy-a space incuriously glanced into by people being served in the public bar, but barely used on summer evenings when everyone stood outside on the pavement. There was an amber light in there, among the old whisky mirrors and photographs of horse-drawn drays. He saw himself sitting shoulder to shoulder with Leo, their hands joined in secret on the dusty moquette.

As he approached the pub he registered a black man at the edge of the crowd of drinkers, then knew it was Leo, then pretended he hadn't seen him. So he was quite small; and he'd grown a kind of beard. Why was he waiting in the street? Nick was already beside him and looked again, very nervously, and saw his questioning smile.

"If you don't want to know me…" Leo said.

Nick staggered and laughed and stuck out his hand. "I thought you'd be inside."

Leo nodded, and looked down the street. "This way I can see you coming."

"Ah… " Nick laughed again.

"Besides, I wasn't sure about the bike, in this area." And there the bike was, refined, weightless, priceless, the bike of the future, shackled to the nearest lamp-post.

"Oh, I'm sure it will be fine." Nick frowned and gazed. He was surprised that Leo thought this a bad area. Of course he thought it was rather dangerous himself; and three or four corners away there were pubs he knew he could never enter, so bad were their names, and so intense the mana of their glimpsed interiors. But here… A tall Rastafarian strolled by, and his roll of the head was a greeting to Leo, who nodded and then looked away with what seemed to Nick a guarded admission of kinship.

"We'll have a little chat outside, eh?"

Nick went in to get the drinks. He stood at the counter looking through to the back bar-where in fact there were several people talking, perhaps one of those groups that meet in a pub, and the room was brighter than he remembered it or would have wanted it. Everything seemed to be a bit different. Leo was only having a Coke, but Nick needed courage for the evening and his own identical-looking drink had a double rum in it. He had never drunk rum before, and was always astonished that anyone liked Coke. His mind held the floating image of the man he had longed to meet, whom he had touched for a moment and left outside in all his disconcerting reality. He was too sexy, he was too much what he wanted, in his falling-down jeans and his tight blue shirt. Nick was worried by his obvious intention to seduce, or at least to show his capacity for seduction. He took the drinks out with a light tremble.