Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

The tannoy crackled and whined. Nick was at the far end of the field, dawdling behind a group of local lads, and pretending to admire a stall of primitive local pottery. The mayoress made a very dull speech, but it rode on the goodwill of the audience, and on the expectation that it would be over much sooner than it was. Families rambled with a half-attentive air across the grass. Her chain could be seen, the glint of glasses, and her bright-blue, white-bowed prime-ministerial dress, on the low platform; and Gerald, standing behind, with beaming impatience. She said something unfortunate about not being able to get a celebrity to open the proceedings this summer, but at least the person they had got was on time-"unlike a certain star of the airwaves last year!" After this Gerald leapt up to the mike as if seizing the controls of a bus from a drunk.

There was applause, not easy to measure, lost in the open air; as well as one or two shouts and klaxon-squawks to remind Gerald that though he had a large majority there were still constituents unsedated by council-house sales and tax cuts. "I liked it when they had Derek Nimmo," a woman said to Nick. Nick knew what she meant, he absorbed people's gibes about Gerald without protest, but still felt the old secret pride at knowing him. He gazed around, followed the Carter boy's amazing arse with his eyes, smiled loyally at Gerald's jokes, and sensed in them a mixture of piety and condescension rather like his own. He felt so decadent here. And how could you honestly expect Gerald, at the door of the Cabinet, in the Lady's favour, an amusing speaker from the floor of the House, to bother very much for an audience of squalling kids and deaf pensioners? Catherine said Gerald despised his constituents. "If only you didn't have to be MP for somewhere," she said, "Gerald would be completely happy. You know he loathes Barwick, don't you." Nick had laughed at this, but wondered if his "dear ma and pa" were in fact exempt from the loathing. "This is a classic English day," Gerald was saying now, "and a classic English scene." And Nick appealed against Catherine's judgement. Surely something else is happening, beneath the cheerful imposture: it can't help mattering to him-as he speaks these platitudes he comes to think they're fine words after all, he's caught up on a wave of rhetoric and self-esteem. He told a joke about a Frenchman on a cycling holiday that went down well; and as he wound up, at just the right time, he managed to suggest that far from being a rich businessman who came down from London to loathe them he was in fact the spirit of Barwick, the Pickwick of Barwick, opening the fete to them as if it were his own house. He cut the tape, which demarcated nothing, in a decisive lunge: the sliding snap of the shears could be heard over the microphone.

After this Gerald was led off on a quasi-royal tour of the fete, his style hampered by the mayoress, who fell naturally into the role of consort. Nick wanted to keep an eye on who was going into the Gents, but felt the pull of the London party too, and strolled over to join Penny. "That went well," he said.

"Gerald was excellent, of course," said Penny. "We're not very pleased with the mayoress." They watched the mayoress now, at the jam stall, looking at the prices as if they were trying to cheat her, and might need beating down; at which Gerald, who didn't know the shop price of anything except champagne and haircuts, impulsively bought two jars of marmalade for a fiver and posed with them for the local press. "Hold them up a bit, sir!"-and Gerald, always reassured by the attendance of photographers, cupped' them in front of him, almost lewdly, until Penny came forward, silent agent of a wish, and took them from him; he held on to them for a moment as he passed them over and murmured, "Je dois me separer de cette femme commune."

At the tombola he bought ten tickets, and stood around waiting for the draw. The prizes were bottles, of all kinds, from HP Sauce to Johnnie Walker. He hadn't dressed for the country at all, and his keynote blue shirt with white collar and red tie, and his double-breasted pinstripe suit, stood out as a dash of Westminster among the shirtsleeves and jeans and cheap cotton frocks. He nodded and smiled at a woman beside him and said, "Are you having a good day?"

"Mustn't grumble," said the woman. "I'm after that bottle of cherry brandy."

"Jolly good-well, good luck. I don't suppose I'll win anything."

"I don't suppose you need to, do you?"

"All right, Mr Fedden, sir!" said the tombola man.

"Hello! Nice to see you… " said Gerald, which was his politician's way of covering the possibility that they'd met before.

"Here we go, then! HP Sauce, I expect, for you, isn't it, sir?"

"You never know your luck," said Gerald-and then, as the hexagonal drum was cranked round, "Something for everybody! All shall have prizes!"

"Ah, we've heard that before," said a man in gold-rimmed glasses who evidently fell into the category of "smart-alec socialist," the sort who asked questions full of uncheckable statistics.

"Nice to see you too," Gerald said, turning his attention to the numbers.

"Hah!" said the man.

The cherry-brandy lady won a half-bottle of Mira Mart gin, and laughed, and blushed violently, as if she'd already drunk it and disgraced herself. Lemonade, then Guinness, went next. Then Gerald won a bottle of Lambrusco. "Ah, splendid…" he said, and laughed facetiously.

"I understand you like a drop of wine, sir," said the tombola man, handing it over.

"Absolutely!" said Gerald.

"Don't keep it," whispered Penny, just beside him.

"Mmm…?"

"One doesn't keep the prize. Doesn't look good…"

"Looks bloody awful," Gerald muttered; then boomed considerately, "I don't feel I should snatch victory from my own constituents." Shy cheers were sounded. "Barbara-can I persuade you…?"

The lady mayor seemed to register at least three insults in this proposal: to her status, to her taste, and to her well-advertised abstinence. Nick had a hunch too that she wasn't called Barbara. Wasn't she Brenda Nelson? The bottle lay for a moment in Gerald's hands, as if tendered by a mocking sommelier. Then he passed it hastily back to the trestle table. "Give someone else a treat," he said, with a nod.

Still, the feeling that he ought to be allowed to win something had clearly taken hold of him. Seeing his chance, craning round as if he'd lost someone, he struck out by himself through the crowds. Penny trotted patiently after him, clutching the marmalade, and then Nick, some way behind the wake of laughter and agitation that followed Gerald's passage.

The sport of welly-whanging was unknown in the Surrey of Gerald's youth, as it was of course in contemporary Notting Hill; the only wellies he ever touched in middle life were the green ones unhoused from the basement passage for winter weekends with country friends. But at Barwick, which still had a regular livestock market and loose straw blowing in the street, the welly, black, leaden-soled, loose on the heel, was an unembarrassed fact, and whanging it a popular pastime. Gerald approached the flimsy archway made of two poles and a banner, beneath which a white chalk crease had been drawn. "Put me in for a go!" he said. He had the expression of a good sport, since he was new to the game, but a glint of steel showed through.

"That's 25p a whang, sir, or five for a pound."

"Ooh, give us a quid's worth," said Gerald, in a special plummy voice he used for slang. He groped busily in his pockets, but he'd spent all his change already. He got out his wallet and was hesitantly offering a £20 note when Penny stepped forward and put a pound coin on the table. "Ah, splendid… " said Gerald, observing a couple of teenage boys who weren't making an effort-the boot plonked to earth a few feet in front of them. "OK…!"