Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

Across the road, half-dazzled by the evening sun, couples were arriving at the Crown for the dinner, the women in long skirts, their hair done, the men in suits, greeting each other with little pats and after-yous, confusing attempts at social kissing (not between the men, of course), all of them excited to be hearing their MP later on, but calm too with the sense of accumulated lightness in being Conservatives. And fuck, there was Gary Carter, setting out on the scent of his own Saturday night, in a short denim jacket and stiffly tight new jeans and that terrible sexy haircut; he called across to a mate under the market hall, he showed himself off to him somehow, with the funny unchallengeable poofiness of a handsome straight boy in a country town. Though girls apparently loved boys' bums too-good judgement, though Nick wasn't sure what they wanted with them. Gary passed under the market hall and out the other side, and started to amble back along the pavement behind. It was time to go; Nick sensed the atmosphere of Linnells waiting, in all its stolid innocence of what it was taking him away from. Then he shook himself, shocked to be dragged under and back by these small-town dreams. One way or another the place had to be left; he felt his long adolescence, its boredom and lust and its aesthetic ecstasies, laid up in amber in the sun-thickened light of the evening square; how he always loved the place, and how he used to yearn for London across the imagined miles of wheat fields, piggeries, and industrial sidings. He thought he would just cruise out past Gary and stir his interest and fix a picture of him in his mind for later. He started the car, and craning round to reverse into the road he saw the folder with Gerald's speech in it lying on the back seat.

Penny was sure to have another copy for him, in the hotel, though probably one without these inked-in jokes, underlinings and reminders: the text was revealingly marked up for so confident a speaker. The names "Archie" and "Veronica" were ringed in red at the top of the first sheet. The thing to do was to find Penny and insinuate the speech back into Gerald's hands. Drinks would be under way now, and Nick pictured already one of the grimly decorous "suites," used for low-grade business conferences and Rotary dinnen, where the function would be taking place. He was only wearing crumpled linen trousers and a short-sleeved shirt, but he could dart in like a stagehand with a forgotten prop, he could be functionally invisible, and for the Barwick Conservatives disbelief could remain suspended.

In the crowded front hall he was still the driver, the messenger, and if any of the guests recognized him, members of the Operatic, men who had filled his teeth and fitted him for school blazers, they didn't show it. If it was a snub it was also a relief. He asked at reception, and the girl thought Gerald had gone out to the car park at the rear-she thought he wanted some air. Nick sidled out and went into the long corridor which turned and stepped up and stepped down through various awkward annexes towards the back of the building. Here hunting prints and old Speed maps of the county were hung against red-flock wallpaper; and the carpet was red, with an oppressive black swirl, like monstrous paisley. Couples came towards him, half-smiling, crisply reassuring each other about the locked car, the tidied hair, the tablets patted in a pocket. They seemed satisfied by this passageway, the sketchy historical sham of it, the beer smells and cooked lamb smells in the spaces between fire doors. And there was Gerald, at the next corner, glancing to left and right as if planning an escape, a last quick minute of his real life before the show started-Nick didn't shout out because of the people in between, but he saw him push open a door at the side and pop in.

The sign said "Staff Only," so that Nick looked round too-it was probably a back way through to the Fairfax Suite. Inside there was a service passage, less glaringly lit, and he saw Gerald's head through the small wired window in another swing door-and Penny's too, giggling: that was good, it meant things were under control. The door was still settling back in lazy wafts which was why perhaps the noise of Nick pushing it open didn't alert them-it was just a further rhythmic displacement of the stale air. He managed to make a kerfuffle, half turning back, trapping his leg and dropping the folder so that neither of them would know he had seen Penny's hand, like an amorous teenager's, tucked in the back pocket of Gerald's trousers.

However, he had seen it, and the shock of it, trite but enormous, made him distracted at dinner, when the anticipated crabwise conversation about Gerald took place. He agreed rather sourly with their jokey criticisms and spoke of him as if he'd never much cared for him. This made them even more uneasy. There was a summer repeat of Sedley on ITV, and they watched it after dinner in their excited ceremonious way, Dot saying (quite tipsy by now), "My son knows him, you know! He's a great friend of Patrick Grayson!" and Nick thinking, why can't you see what a frightful old poof he is.

When they turned in, unbelievably early, the high summer twilight still beautiful outside, Nick called out, "Sleep well!" and closed his door with a bewildering sense of loss, as though Gerald and Rachel were really his parents, and not the undeviating old pair in their twin beds in the next room. Later he heard his father snoring through the wall, and the creak of his mother's bed-he pictured her pulling the blankets over her ears. Rachel had once admitted to Nick that Gerald snored too, though she'd done it in the way she sometimes pretended to a disadvantage, from polite awareness of her own good fortune ("I know, we can never get into Tante Claire"): "He can make a bit of a rumpus," she'd said. Nick drew and resisted various conclusions from what he had seen; he was greedy and then reluctant for unpleasant sensations. He thought perhaps he was being a bit of a prig. He thought of Gerald's regular visits to Barwick with Penny, almost always without Rachel. It was a system, a secret so routine it must have come to seem secure. And the steady disguise, of course, of the "loathing" for Barwick, the chore of the surgery, the boredom of meetings with Archie Manning… And what about in London? Presumably they couldn't do it there, the risk of detection would be too great. Or didn't much actually go on? Could Penny possibly be the sort of girl for all that? There might be some other excuse for the glimpse he had had in the hotel. Impossible to think of one. He wondered if Gerald was snoring now, and the image of what he probably was doing rose alarmingly in Nick's sex-picturing mind. Or if he was snoring, then it seemed to his partner like a bearable penalty of an illicit affair… Nick stopped and drew back with distaste for his own imagining of the thing. A little later he woke and the house was silent again, and the shock of what was happening came over him, his grown-up scorn of its utter banality and his child's ache of despair. He saw it had already become a secret of his own, a thing to carry unwillingly, a sour confusion of duties. He lay awake listening to the silence, which was illusory, a cover to a register of other sounds… the sigh of a grey poplar, the late half-conscious toppings-up of the cistern overhead, and within his ears remote soft percussions, like doors closing in non-existent wings of the house.

Toby said, "You get a glimpse of the chateau on your left," and he slowed down as a gap in the trees appeared. They saw steep slate roofs, purple-black brick, plate glass, the special nineteenth-century hardness.

"Right…" said Wani. "But you don't have that any longer?"

"My grandfather sold it after the war," said Toby.