Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

Toby was still chatting in Wani's doorway, his hands in his shorts pockets, the undeniable bulge above the waistband these days, something comfy about him, as well as something passive and perplexed. Nick loved him with that fondness of an old friendship that accepts a degree of boredom, and is soothed and even sustained by it. What he felt was distilled affection, undemanding but principled. "Ah, he can tell us," Toby said.

"Yah, what was the name of the brothel we went to in Venice?" said Wani. He was unpacking too, though as coyly and delayingly as he had undressed that day at the Highgate Ponds.

"Oh, the ridotto?" said Nick. "Yes, it's this really exquisite little casino, I suppose it was a brothel, really. Tl ridotto della Procuratoressa Venier.' It's just behind San Marco."

"There you are," said Wani.

"It's been done up by the American branch of Venice in Peril. You ring the bell and the lady shows it to you."

"OK…" said Toby. "So it's not a functioning brothel…"

Wani said, "Anyone less like a madam than the lady from Venice in Peril it would be hard to imagine. I'm having a feature on the top brothels of the world in my first issue."

"Your advertisers will love that," said Toby.

"Don't you think?" said Wani. "Well, beautiful brothels." He looked at Nick, whose idea the feature had entirely been. "You know-risottos."

Toby said, "You should have taken me with you. You can't expect poor old Guest to go sniffing round tarts' parlours."

"No, you'd have been much more use," Wani said, and gave him a level grin, so that Nick was jealous for a second and went on to wonder-it had never been clear-if Wani fancied Toby. Well, it was possible, but unlikely, for some large social reason, which perhaps boiled down to the fact that Toby couldn't be bought.

"Drinks at six," Toby said. "But come and have a swim first. Everyone's outside"-and he slapped off down the echoing hallway.

Then Nick strode across Wani's room, pushed open the loosely coupled shutters, and had his first look at the view: of wooded spurs, dropping from either side like interlaced fingers, and beyond them one bright curve of the Dronne with a rocky bluff above it, bright too in the late afternoon sun. There was the glare of France in high summer, the colours simplified, dry and drab, but twitching with light, and the shadows baffling, like deep grey gauze. Down below, three or four stony terraces dropped away from the house, linked by stairways-it was hard from here to work them out. "Yeah, I'm going to change," said Wani.

"Good idea," said Nick, turning and smiling.

"Hmm. OK…"-with the frowning reluctance of a boy.

"Darling, I spent half last night with my tongue up your arse, I'm not going to be too shocked if you take your shirt off."

Wani gave a dry little laugh and arranged his various pairs of slippers and moccasins on the floor of the wardrobe. "It's what people might say," he muttered.

"What, because I'm gay, you mean?" Nick said, with a flash of the eyebrows. "Well, there's no one else in the house. And I'll just carry on looking out of the window… I'll crane out of the window": which he did, to see that directly below there was a white awning, covering, presumably, the table, the famous table evoked by Gerald-with apologies to Napoleon-as the first dining room of Europe. It was the table and the awning that made it their view-the one often referred to by Gerald as his own landscape, one of the few things, like the music of Strauss, on which he was all unembarrassed sensibility. Of course it wasn't quite what Nick had expected; again it took a minute for the reality to blot and erase the long-imagined, subtly finer view.

Beyond the awning, steps led down on the left through the shade of a sprawling fig tree towards a low-roofed further structure, which Nick thought must be the pool-house. And just then Catherine came up them, noiselessly barefoot, on tiptoe at the heat of the stones, a blue towel round her shoulders and her hair still wet. She looked very young, childlike, nipping across the terrace, peering about; and with a vague air of crisis to her, Nick felt, as if she'd been dressed like this in a London street. Toby came out from the house and she said, "Are they here?"-in her way of not quite noticing him even though she was asking him a question. "They'll be down in a minute," Toby said, going on himself towards the steps to the pool. Catherine sat on her towel on the low terrace wall, pushed back her hair, and her eyes drifted slowly upwards across the front of the house until she saw Nick leaning out of the end window and grinning at her. "Hello, darling!"

"Hello, darling!" Nick opened his arms to the view and then, with the sort of dumb camp she liked, pretended to throw flowers down at an adoring crowd. She beamed and raised her hands in noiseless applause.

"Come down at once!" she called.

"We're coming…"

Wani had put on his swimming trunks under his white linen trousers, and they showed as a provocative black shadow. Nick was a little exercised about the types of swimwear, and the different registers of poolside life. The knob-flaunting Speedos appropriate for an unsocial fifty lengths or a scientific hour of sunbathing might seem ill-judged for cocktails or ping-pong, when sexless bags might be preferred. But perhaps not; sun-worship was half the point of a home in France, and the Feddens might not feel, as Nick somehow did, that if the contours of his penis were visible, then the question of what he liked to do with it was at the forefront of everyone's mind.

Catherine kissed the two boys in very different ways: she butted her face against Wani's and brayed, "Hello!" and showed that she didn't really know him or expect much of him. She pulled Nick into the embrace of her towel, so that her thin body in its damp swimsuit pressed against him, and he wriggled away laughing as he hugged her. "Thank god you're here at last," she said.

"How are you, darling?"

"I'm fine. Gerald's having an affair, did you know?"

Nick blinked and recoiled offendedly, but then tried to keep smiling. "Gerald?" His whole image of the coming ten days was changing; he would have to find out who knew, and how much Catherine knew, of course. He felt horribly guilty himself for knowing, and doing nothing, and his main wish, in this first instant, was to clear himself. "You can't be serious," he said, postponing for a further second or two the really irreversible question, with whom?

"No, it's true. He's having an affair with Jasper."

Nick gasped. "Darling! How outrageous!"

"I know, it's a scandal."

"Has it been going on long?"

"The whole week. There's this hideous room called the fumoir and they go in there together and play chess and smoke cigars. Well, you'll see. No one else can bear to go in, so we don't know exactly what they get up to."

"Let's hope the press don't get to hear about it," Nick said, with a giddy feeling of reprieve mixed up with the real and re-awoken sense of risk.

"It's like being kissed by a lav."

"Oh… the cigars…?"

"Incidentally," she said to Wani, "we're on septic here, so nothing funny down the bog."

"No… right… " said Wani, and chuckled and frowned. It was just comic brusqueness, an urge to ruffle this exquisite new arrival, and also clairvoyant, Nick felt, as though she knew that a closeted cokehead would always be in the WC. She led them down the stairs, under the wide leaves of the fig tree, and out onto the flagged surround of the swimming pool.

The pool occupied another long terrace, open to the south, so that the glitter of the water seemed to reach and hang against the distance. At the near end was the pool-house, a little cottage in itself, with shuttered windows and wet footprints going in and out at the door. Thick-cushioned loungers, turned towards the sun at different times, lay abandoned around the pool, but close by, under a huge red umbrella, Rachel was stretched out with her eyes closed, and the straps of her black swimsuit looped down over her upper arms. Her mouth was slightly open, she might have been asleep, or in the border-zone of voices where the sunned mind dallies with sleep for seconds at a time. She was more beautiful and vulnerable than Nick was prepared for; he had never seen her undressed-he thought it was a private view she might not want Wani to share. A few feet away, at an angle, Gerald was lying, propped up, with the meltwater of a long drink in a beaker beside him, dark glasses on, head bent over a book in his lap, but unambiguously asleep, since the pages of the book stood up in a quivering comb. Beyond them, Jasper sprawled on his tummy on the blue-tiled ledge just below the surface of the pool, looking away at the view, and giving an impression of adolescent boredom. He was wearing huge multi-coloured swimming-bags, and as he lazily kicked the water they glistened and ballooned, deflated and clung, one buttock pink, the other lime-green. Nick saw Wani looking at him. Then Toby came marching out of the pool-house, and Catherine, wanting to take the credit, shouted, "Here they are!" and woke them all up. "You look such old wrecks lying there," she said, and cackled in the "mad" style that she now allowed herself. Gerald started speaking at once, Rachel wriggled as she stretched and sat up, and the two boys bent down rivalrously to kiss her. Jasper came sploshing across the pool. Nick hadn't seen them for a while, of course, and finding them here, in the nearly naked torpor of their private world, he saw everything that was wonderful about them, and something else, like one of Catherine's glittering intuitions, their unsuspecting readiness for pain.