Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

"Well…" said Wani, "yes…!"

"I love her!" exclaimed Sally Tipper, hoping perhaps they would take love to include friendship, as well as surpassing it.

"I know," said Gerald. "It's those blue eyes. Don't you just want to swim in them-what?"

Sir Maurice didn't seem ready to go quite that far, and Rachel said, "Not everyone's as infatuated as my husband," lightly but meaningly.

Nick looked out over their heads at the vast night landscape, where the lights of farms and roads invisible by day shone in mysterious prominence. He said very little, holding on to the ignored romance of the place and the hour, the soft gusts in the trees, the stars that peeped in the grey above the silhouetted woods. It turned out to be Wani who saved the evening. He clearly admired Maurice Tipper, and tried to amuse him as well as impress him, neither an easy task. He had a significant lavatory break after the main course, and for the next half-hour supplied a sense of purpose and fun that the others had been groping for. Even Catherine was laughing at his farfetched imitation of Michael Foot, and Lady Partridge, who kept waking from brief sleeps with a cough and a furtive stare, laughed too.

In the morning, before it was too hot, the Tippers went down to the pool, she with a clutch of sunscreens and a huge hat, he with the new Dick Francis in one hand as a decoy for the briefcase in the other. It was the time when Nick liked to do his fifty lengths-at least he invented this tradition to focus his resentment of the newcomers. When he went down a bit later, Lady Partridge, a keen but almost unmoving swimmer, was halfway across the shallow end, apparently unaware that Sally Tipper, beside her in the water, was asking her about her hip replacement: she glanced at her from time to time with mild apprehension. Maurice Tipper had got a table and chair fixed up under an umbrella and sat in tight biscuit-coloured shorts reading and annotating a sheaf of faxes. His lips quivered and pinched with the sarcastic alertness that was his own brand of happiness. Nick, dispossessed, went off to his favourite corner on a lower terrace and read A Small Boy and Others in the company of a lizard.

At noon there were calls and voices up above as a party was assembled for lunch. Nick went to see them off. Toby had pulled up the spare seats in the back of the Range Rover and was checking they were safely bolted; he was taking the extra trouble that delays a departure and disguises the relief of the person left behind. "We don't want you flying through the windscreen," he said to Lady Tipper.

"I think you'll find this restaurant acceptable," Gerald burbled facetiously, gesturing Maurice Tipper to the front seat beside him.

"He just can't have anything too rich," said Sally. "His wretched ulcers…" She twitched while she pulled a long face. "I'm afraid last night's dinner rather did for him."

"Oh, they'll look after you, they'll do anything for you," said Rachel, with unflinching sweetness. Gerald, ruefully baffled by his new guests' failure to notice the beauties of the manoir, was taking them to Chez Claude in Perigueux, normally the last-night treat of the holidays, in the hope of cracking a word of praise out of them.

"See if you agree with us that it merits a third Michelin star," he said.

"We're not big lunchers," said Sally Tipper.

Catherine and Jasper came out last, and Wani squashed in with them excitedly in the third row. Toby closed the doors like a guard and off they went, with a soft superior roar, perched and crammed, for what Nick pictured as a little outing in hell-not the starry Chez Claude or the turret-crowned countryside, but the atmosphere they carried with them. Toby put his arm round Nick's shoulder and they went into the silent house-both of them lightly excited and self-conscious.

Toby made them sandwiches for lunch, in a deliberately enthusiastic way, heaping in cold chicken and lettuce and olives and tomato rings which the first bite would send squirting and dropping from the edges. It was a bit of a mess, a mishmash, lots of dressing was sploshed in-it was almost as though he was saying to Nick, who had once had a job in a sandwich shop, "I'm not a poof, I haven't got style, I can't help it." They took them down to the poolside and sat under an umbrella to eat them, with the dressing and tomatoes squirting out and the lettuce dropping into their laps.

"Mm, lovely and quiet, isn't it," said Toby after a bit.

"I know," said Nick, and grinned. They were both wearing dark glasses, and had to search for each other's gaze.

"Fancy a beer?" said Toby.

"Why not," said Nick. Toby went into the pool-house, and came back with a couple of Stellas from the fridge. It seemed to signal a desire to talk, but he didn't know how to start. Nick said, "So when are Maurice and Sally going?" though he knew the answer.

"Funny you should say that," said Toby. "I was just thinking the same thing."

"I can cope with her, somehow."

Toby looked at him almost reproachfully: "You're being a hero with her. Of course, she's a great opera queen, isn't she."

Nick tried to work out, through their two pairs of sunglasses, if this was a joke-but it seemed to have been said in equal innocence of queens and opera.

"He's a total philistine," he said.

"Oh, he's a bastard," said Toby, who, unlike his father, hardly ever swore.

Nick did it for him. "He's a cunt."

"No, he really is."

"I mean, why are they here actually?"

"Oh, business, of course… " Toby looked uneasy at hearing himself criticize his father: "You know, I think Dad thought we were going to be one big happy family; but then there was … the Sophie thing, but-anyway, he's carrying on as if nothing had gone wrong."

"Business as usual," said Nick, reluctant to get into the Sophie thing all over again. "I suppose Tipper's very powerful, isn't he?"

"Obviously he's one of the biggest."

"What is it, exactly?"

"Nick, really…! You've heard of TipperCo, for Heaven's sake, it's a huge conglomerate."

"No, of course…"

"It was a huge asset-stripping story in the 70s, he was very unpopular but he made millions."

"Right…"

"Yeah, you were probably doing Chaucer that week."

Nick got as always a tiny amorous frisson from being teased by Toby; he coloured and giggled acceptingly. Of course, Toby knew about all this stuff, but you forgot that he did. It was as wonderful in its way that he'd written articles in newspapers as that his father should have something to do with immigration policy, or who went to prison. "I had a look at a few of his faxes, but they were in some foreign language."

"Oh, I wonder what that was."

"You know, numbers and things."

"Ha! Yeah, I had a look too, actually. There's a lot of property stuff going on now, which I guess is what Dad's interested in."

"Sam Zeman says Gerald's doing awfully well."

"Yah, he's plotting something."

"I suppose he's a plotter…?"

"Oh, yes. Well, you know how bored he gets."

"That's true, actually…"

"I mean, he's bored to death down here."

"He always says how much he loves it."

"He loves the idea of it. You know…" This was an interesting idea itself, and came somehow formulated, like the sage things Toby used to say at Oxford, as if he'd got it off a family friend.

"He's probably missing London," said Nick, just wondering if Toby had an inkling of what he meant.

"I think he misses work," said Toby.

Nick gave a hesitant laugh, but said nothing else. He stood up, and pulled off his T-shirt.

"Good idea," said Toby, and did the same, and stood stretching needlessly. There was a little rise, for Nick, in the sexual charge of the afternoon. Toby was still beautiful, even though he was letting himself go. His beauty was held in an eerie balance with its own neglect. He tucked his chin in, the corners of his mouth twitched down as he looked down his body. It was a shame, but it was also oddly comforting, even lightly arousing, how he grew plumper, while Wani, whose smooth sleekness had been part of his charm, seemed to Nick to grow leaner and ever more aquiline. Toby sat back down, looked at Nick, and took a couple of quick swigs from his bottle, shy about what he wanted to say. "Yeah, you're in pretty good shape these days, Nick," he said. "I was noticing."