Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

"I know what you mean," said Nick, with a wary laugh at her mimicry. "You get used to that."

Catherine leaned back on her arms and swung her legs. "I'm quite glad I'm not his fiancee, I must say."

"I think she's probably used to that too."

"She's certainly had time to get used to it…"

Nick looked down, realigned the books on his table, his notebooks, Henry James's memoirs covering the Spartacus gay guide to the world. He assumed Catherine had come here with a purpose. She glanced round, and then got up and closed the door, in the abstracted way of someone already working on the next thing.

"I must say I'm beginning to wonder about old Wani," she said.

"How do you mean…?"

"He's rather brilliant, actually."

"Oh…?"

"He's completely pulled the wool over your blue eyes."

Nick smiled dimly, with anxiety and a vague sense of a compliment. "Quite probably," he said.

Catherine sat down and said, "My little Jaz has got a theory."

"Oh, yes?" said Nick. "I wouldn't automatically credit a theory of little Jaz's."

Catherine carried on as if she didn't mind him sounding like her father. "Perhaps not, but…Jasper's very observant, you know, well, you probably don't believe me… anyway, he thinks he's a fag."

"Oh!" Nick tutted disappointedly. "Yeah, people are always saying that. It's just because he bathes so often and wears see-through trousers." The odd thing, Nick thought, was that people said it so rarely.

"Jasper says he follows him round all the time trying to get a look at his knob."

"Mm… It sounds to me a bit like vanity, darling. Jasper's always following me round trying to show me his knob." Perhaps this was too frank. "You must admit, he can be a bit of a flirt." Nick was surprised by his own presence of mind, but still he sniggered, and crossed his legs in complex discomfort.

"Wani hasn't said anything at all, then? About Jaz? I suppose he would be extra careful to keep it from you, wouldn't he-in case you got the wrong idea! Wouldn't do at all!" said Catherine, perhaps not convinced by her own theory.

Nick was blushing, but he looked at her levelly. "I don't know, darling," he said, and bit his lower lip. "Aren't they alone together down at the pool right now? Who knows what might be happening?"

"At least he's not wearing his thong today," said Catherine.

"No, quite…" Nick pushed on defensively with his rough joke. "Though once they get into the pool-house together…"

Catherine gave him a bothered stare, and coloured a little herself. She knew of course that Nick knew that Jasper fucked her in the pool-house, it was a silent brag; but of course she didn't know that Nick had fucked Wani there last night, after the awful dinner, in a storm of pent-up anger. She said, "Oh, god, don't mention the pool-house."

"What…?"

"Gerald was on to me about it this morning, and behaving broadly like an ape, I must say."

"Oh, darling… I saw something was going on": and the image of Gerald standing by the pool, head down, shoulders rounded in accusing disappointment, was somehow ape-like, it was true.

"Apparently her ladyship found a rubber johnny floating in the lav. She was frightfully upset, as you can imagine. It quite ruined her early-morning bathe."

"Hoorah!" said Nick, and grinned at her, while his mind raced round a series of right-angled bends.

"I thought he'd flushed it, but Gerald came snooping round, and we only escaped by a hare's breath."

"I'm surprised she knew what it was."

"It's too pathetic," said Catherine, who of course had missed last night's sex-education class. "We're all adults, for god's sake."

"I know…"

"You can't do it in the house, because the noise carries."

"That can be a problem."

"Actually, god, fuck, that's really weird…!" Catherine stared at him in excited self-doubt, whilst Nick felt his disguise grow eerily thinner. He smiled, not knowing if he'd been recognized, or if, by sitting still, he could avoid detection. "Because I'm sure we didn't use one yesterday."

"You must always use a rubber," said Nick. "There's no point in sometimes using one and sometimes not. You don't know where he's been."

"Oh, Nick, he's a total innocent. He's never been with anyone else."

"No, well…"

Catherine gaped. "So if it wasn't us."

"It might have been there from the day before, I suppose," said Nick, with doomed insouciance, watching Catherine as she went on an Agatha Christie-like tour of the possible and frankly impossible suspects. He thought that perhaps like Poirot she had known the answer before she came into the room; but when she stood up, walked to the window, and turned he saw the shock, the disgust even, of discovery in her face.

"God, I've been stupid," she said.

Nick looked at her, and she looked at him. He felt the painful stupidity of detection himself, and also a kind of pride, lurking still, waiting for permission to smile. She couldn't deny the scale and class of the deception. He thought he saw her quick recovery, her feel for anything salacious. He said, "Perhaps he is rather brilliant, yes."

Catherine came and sat down again, as dignified as she could be. "I don't think he's brilliant any more," she said.

Nick said carefully, "You mean he was brilliant when you thought he was tricking me, but not when it turns out he's tricking you." He felt, without time to work it out, that there could be a brilliance of concealment, over something simple and even sordid; and there could be a simple, dumb concealment of something glitteringly unexpected. Caught up in it, inured to it, he didn't know which was more nearly the case with himself and Wani. "Of course, it's all for him," he said.

"I mean how can he bear it?"

"The secrecy, you mean? Or me?"

"Ha, ha."

"Well, the secrecy… " Often in life Nick felt he hadn't mastered the arguments, and could hardly present his own case, let alone someone else's; but on this particular matter he was watertight, if only from the regular need to convince himself. He checked off the points on his fingers: "He's a millionaire, he's Lebanese, he's the only child, he's engaged to be married, his father's a psychopath."

"I mean how did it start?" said Catherine, finding these points either too obvious or too involved to take up. "How long's it been going on? I mean-god, really, Nick!"

"Ooh, about six months."

"Six months!"-and again Nick couldn't tell if this was too long or not long enough. She stared at him. "I'm going to write that poor long-suffering French girl a letter!"

"You're to do nothing of the kind. A year from now that poor French girl will be blissfully married."

"To a Lebanese poofter with a psychopath for a father…"

"No, darling, to a very beautiful and very rich young man, who will make her very happy and give her lots of beautiful rich children." It was a tiringly ample prospect.

"And what about you?"

"Oh, I'll be all right."

"You're not going to carry on bumshoving him when he's married to the poor little French girl, I hope?"

"Of course not," said Nick, with a glassy smile at the one thing he didn't want to think about. "No-I shall move on!"

Catherine shook her head at him, she had the moral she wanted: "God, men!" she said. Nick laughed uneasily, as an object of both sympathy and attack.

"But really, swear not to say a word to anybody."

She weighed this up, teasingly, and teasing meant more to her than to Nick. She was on the side of dissidence and sex, but she was still huffy with her discovery, with having been tricked and not trusted. In the pause that followed they heard the faint scratch of footsteps on the stairs and then the clip of hard-soled slippers, which Nick knew at once, along the tiled hallway. He bit his lip, winced, and curled his head forward as if he was praying, to enjoin silence. Wani was coming up to his room, to change probably, which he did more often than anyone else, as if strictly observing an etiquette the others had let slide. And for another reason too, so that his reappearance in pressed white linen trousers or bright silk shirt was a cover and almost an explanation for his new liveliness; as if he sprang back to noiseless applause. He went into his room, and they could see him hesitate, the shadow on the gleam of the tiles under Nick's door, which wasn't normally closed. Then he closed his own door, and seconds later the catch jumped and settled. The door catches here had a life of their own, and kicked and rattled with stored energy, in accusing jumps.