Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

"We see so little TV," said Sally Tipper. "We don't have the time! What with Maurice's work, and all our travelling… And really I don't think I miss it. What was he in, your friend?"

Toby, clearly moved, said, "He starred in Sedley. He was bloody funny, actually."

"Oh, sitcoms," said Sally Tipper, with a twitch.

"Would you say, Nick?" said Gerald. "Not a sitcom exactly…"

"It was sort of a comedy thriller," said Nick, who wanted them to like Pat before they found out the truth. "Sedley was the charming rogue who always got away with it."

"Mm, quite a lady-killer," said Gerald.

Wani said, "I thought he was so charming when I met him… at Lionel's house, it must have been… frightfully funny!"

"I know… " said Rachel distractedly, stroking Catherine's hand across the table, enabling and containing the little episode of grief. She had probably been crying herself in her room, and now drew a certain resolve from having her daughter to look after.

Gerald, with his frowning moping manner of comprehending the feelings of others while being quite untouched and even lightly repelled by them, made little sighs and rumbles from the head of the table. "Poor old Puss," he said. "Uncle Pat was her godfather. Not her real uncle, obviously…!"

"Madly left-wing," said Lady Partridge, but with a chuckle of posthumous indulgence, as though that had been something else rather roguish about him. "She had two-a true-blue one and a red-hot socialist. Godfathers."

"Well, he might have been a red-hot socialist when Mum first met him," said Toby. "But you should have heard him on the Lady."

"What…?" said Gerald.

"Loved the Lady!"

"Of course he did," said Gerald warmly, not wanting to risk the old jokes about Rachel's left-wing pals in front of the Tippers. "Her godmother, of course, is Sharon, um, Flintshire… you know, yup, the Duchess."

"You and Pat were old friends," said Wani, with his instinct for social connections. "You were at Oxford together."

"He was Benedick to my Beatrice," said Rachel, with a beautiful smile which seemed conscious of the spotlight of sympathy, "and indeed Hector Hushabye to my Hesione!"

"Mm, jolly good!" said Gerald, outshone and subtly embarrassed.

This was enough to rouse Maurice Tipper, who said, in the airy unsurprisable way of a suspicious person, "So how did he die?"

Gerald made a sort of panting noise, and Rachel said quietly, "It was pneumonia, I'm afraid. But he hadn't been well, poor old Pat."

"Oh," said Maurice Tipper.

Rachel peered into the distance beneath the glazed earthenware salad bowl. "He picked up some extraordinary bug in the Far East last year. No one knew what it was. It's thought to be some incredibly rare thing. It's just frightfully bad luck."

Nick felt a kind of relief that this sinister fiction was being maintained, and looked at ignorant little Jasper, who was nodding at it and not quite meeting his girlfriend's eye. Then he saw him wince in anticipation.

"Mum, for Christ's sake!" said Catherine. "He had AIDS!"-with a phlegmy catch in her voice, which her anger fought with. "He was gay… he liked anonymous sex… he liked…"

"Darling, you don't know that… " said Rachel. It wasn't clear how much of the story she hoped to throw doubt over.

"Of course he did," said Catherine, whose view of gay sex was both tragic and cartoonlike. She grinned incredulously down the table. Nick felt himself included in her scorn.

"Anyway…!" said Gerald, with a smile and a deep breath, as if the nasty moment had passed, lifting and tilting the bottle enquiringly towards his mother.

"Oh, it's pathetic!" shouted Catherine, with the rush and stare of someone hurtled along by a strong new mix of emotions. "I mean surely the least we can do is tell the truth about him?"-and she smacked the table hard, but still somehow childishly and comically; there were one or two nervous smiles. She jumped her chair back over the flags and hurried indoors.

"Um… should I…?" said Jasper, and sniggered.

"No, no, I'll go," said Rachel. "In a minute or two."

"Experience suggests to wait a bit," said Gerald, as if explaining some other local custom to his guests.

"An emotional young lady," said Maurice Tipper with a grin of displeasure.

"She's a very emotional young lady," said Jasper, in a cowardly mixture of boasting and mockery.

"She's quite unbalanced," Lady Partridge agreed confidentially.

Gerald hesitated, peering over his raised wine glass, but took his daughter's part. "I think I'd say she's just very softhearted," he said; which it seemed to Nick was just what she wasn't.

Rachel said, with a hint of frost, "Does Sophie ever get upset?"

Sir Maurice seemed to think the question impertinent. His wife said, "If she does, she doesn't let it show. Unless she's on stage, of course. Then she's all passion." Nick thought of her performance in Lady Windermere's Fan, where all she had had to say was "Yes, mamma."

After dinner the four boys were in the drawing room, though Jasper fidgeted and soon went upstairs to skulk around Catherine's door. Wani was reading Sir Maurice's Financial Times, and Toby was sitting in the puzzlement of bereavement, tilting a glass of cognac from side to side, and trying occasional rephrasings of the same idea to Nick: "God it's awful, poor old Pat, I can't believe it."

Nick lowered the book he had just started, smiled to suggest the book itself was a bore. "I know," he said. "Isn't it awful. I'm so sorry." He thought of the two of them down by the pool after lunch, and the lustful tenderness he felt for Toby seemed to glow and fill the room. He was excited by Toby's grief, and the boyish need he seemed to feel for Nick's comfort, and for something wise Nick might say. Nick himself was impressed by Pat's death, and had a distantly acknowledged feeling of guilt, that he'd done nothing for Pat-though Pat, in another sense, had done nothing for him; Nick hadn't liked his brand of cagey camp, and had been snotty and even priggish with him: so that, more shamefully still, he felt subtly disembarrassed by the death, since it erased the memory of his own bad grace. "I wonder how Terry's coping," he said, to focus Toby's thoughts.

"Yah, poor guy. God it's awful, this bloody plague."

"I know."

"You'd bloody well better not get the fucking thing," said Toby.

"I'll be all right," said Nick. "I've been taking very good care since-well, since we knew about it." He glanced across at Wani, who was screened above the knees by the raised pink broadsheet with its headlines about record share prices, record house prices. From time to time he smacked the page flat. "You don't have to worry about me," Nick said.

Toby looked a bit shame-faced. "I didn't know Pat, you know, slept around."

"Well… " said Nick. He knew very well, because Catherine was indiscreet, that Pat had liked very rough sex. "Don't believe everything Catherine says. She lives in a world of her own hyperbole."

"Yah, but she was pretty close to Pat, Nick-he took her out to dinner quite often. She stayed at Haslemere three or four times. If she says he liked anonymous sex-"

Nick saw that the Tippers had come in. They'd been up to their room and now they'd come down, tight-lipped and close together, as though they felt obliged to put in another half-hour. Maurice had clearly been very displeased by the scene at dinner, and a suspicion of deviancy seemed to hang for him now over the whole party. The boys all stood up, and Nick set his book, face down, on the arm of his chair. Sally Tipper peered at it, to deflect her discomfort on to a neutral object, and said, "Ah, that's Maurice's book, I see."

"Um… oh," said Nick, sure of himself but confused as to her reasoning; it was a study of the poetry of John Berryman. "I don't think…"