Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

As they sat there, compromised, staring attentively, but not at each other, waiting for Wani to be done, Nick pictured him having a line, his air of cleverness and superiority, and almost hoped that they would hear him, and that that secret would come out too. To hear it, like a lovers' rendezvous, a rhythm, a ritual: evidence of the other great affair in Wani's life. But he was probably in his bathroom. A light aircraft droned and throbbed in the heights, a summer sound, that came and went on the mind.

When he'd gone downstairs again, Catherine said, "Of course switchers are a nightmare. Everyone knows that."

"I don't suppose everyone knows it," said Nick.

"God, you remember Roger?"

"He was Drip-Dry, wasn't he?" Nick felt annoyed, slighted, but undeniably relieved that Catherine had decided to show him up with talk about her own boyfriends. "Always something just a little bit funny about the sex-as if he wished you had a hairy chest… you know. And the feeling that you never had his absolutely undivided attention."

"I'm not sure one wants that, does one," said Nick, not quite meaning it, but seeing as he said it that it could be a helpful kind of wisdom, if you shared your lover with a woman as well as a drug.

"They say they love you, but there's more reason than usual to disbelieve them." In fact Wani had never said that, and Nick had stopped saying it, because of the discomforting silence that followed when he did. "I'm surprised, actually, I wouldn't have thought he was your type."

"Oh!" said Nick, and gasped at the thought of him.

"I mean, he's not black, really, he's been to university."

Nick smiled disparagingly at this sketch of his tastes. He felt embarrassed-not at sex talk, which was always an enjoyable surrender, a game of risked and relished blushes, but at the exposure of something more private than sex and weirdly chivalrous. He said, "I just think he's the most beautiful man I've ever met."

"Darling," said Catherine, in a protesting murmur, as if he'd said something very childish and untenable. "You can't really?" Nick looked at his desk and flinched irritably. "I can sort of see what you mean," Catherine said. "He's like a parody of a good-looking person, isn't he." She smiled. "Give me your pen": and on the top of Nick's notepad she made a quick drawing, a few curves, cheekbones, lips, lashes, heavily inked squiggles of hair. "There! No, I must sign it"-and she scrawled "Wonnie by Cath" underneath. Nick saw how accurate it was, and said, "He doesn't look like that at all."

"Hmm?" said Catherine teasingly, feeling she'd made a point but not knowing where it had got her.

"All I can say is, when he comes into the room-like when he got back late for lunch the other day, when we'd been gossiping about him, and I was playing along with you, sort of agreeing, actually-when he came in, I just thought, yes, I'm in the right place, this is enough."

Catherine said, "I think that's awfully dangerous, Nick. Actually I think it's mad."

"Well, you're an artist," said Nick, "surely?" Whenever he'd imagined telling someone this, the story, the idea, had met with a thrilled concurrence and a sense of revelation. He had never expected to be contested on every point of his own beliefs. He said, "Well, I'm sorry, that's how I am, you should know that by now."

"You'd fall in love with someone just because they were beautiful, as you call it."

"Not anyone, obviously. That would be mad." He resented her way, now she'd gained access to his fantasy, of belittling the view. It was like her attitude to the room they were sitting in. "It's not something we can argue about, it's a fact of life."

Catherine cast her mind back helpfully. "I mean, no one could have called Denton beautiful, could they?"

"Denny had a beautiful bottom," Nick said primly. "That was what mattered at the time. I wasn't in love with him."

"And what about little thing? Leo? He wasn't beautiful exactly, I wouldn't have thought. You were crazy about him." She looked at him interestedly to see if she'd gone too far.

Nick said solemnly but feebly, "Well, he was beautiful to me."

"Exactly!" said Catherine. "People are lovely because we love them, not the other way round."

"Hmm."

"Did you hear anything more from him, by the way?"

"No, not since spring of last year," said Nick, and got up to go to the lavatory.

The bathroom window looked out across the forecourt and the lane at the other, unmentioned view, northwards: over rising pastures towards a white horizon-and beyond that, in the mind's distance, northern France, the Channel, England, London, lying in the same sunlight, the gate opening from the garden to the gravel walk, and the plane trees, and the groundsmen's compound with the barrow and the compost heap. It came to Nick in a flash of acute nostalgia, as though he could never visit that scene of happiness again. He waited a minute longer, in the heightened singleness of someone who has slipped out for a minute from a class, a meeting, ears still ringing, face still solemn, into another world of quiet corridors, the neutral gleam of the day. He couldn't unwind the line of beauty for Catherine, because it explained almost everything, and to her it would seem a trivial delusion, it would seem mad, as she said. He wouldn't be here in this room, in this country, if he hadn't seen Toby that morning in the college lodge, if Toby hadn't burnt in five seconds onto the eager blank of his mind. How he chased Toby, the covert pursuit, the unguessed courage, the laughable timidity (it seemed to him now), the inch or two gained by pressure on Toby's unsuspecting good nature, the sudden furlongs of dreamlike advance when Toby asked him up to town-he could never tell her that. Her own view was that Toby was a "vacuous lump."

When he went back into the room she had found the Spartacus guide, and was looking at it, and then over it at him, with a mocking gape, as if this was the silliest thing of all. "It's too hysterical," she said.

"Marvellous, isn't it," said Nick, slightly prickly, but glad of the distraction.

"Hang on… Paris… I'm just looking up Paraquat. I don't believe this book." She studied the page, in her illiterate excitable way.

"I shouldn't think there's much there," said Nick, who had already looked it up and imagined with mingled longing and satire the one disco and the designated park.

"Well, there's a disco, darling. Wed to Sat, 11 to 3. L'An des Roys," she said, in her plonking French accent. "We must go! How hilarious."

"I'm glad you find it so amusing."

"We'll suggest it to Ouradi, and see what he says… God, there's everything in here."

"Yes, it's very useful," said Nick.

"Cruising areas, my god! Look at this, rue St Front-we went there with the Tippers yesterday. If only they'd known… What does AYOR mean?"

"AYOR? At Your Own Risk."

"Oh… right… Right… And it's the whole world!"

"Look up Afghanistan," said Nick, because there was a famous warning about the roughness of Afghan sex. But she carried on flicking through. Nick disguised his interest, the vague comical rakishness he seemed to admit by having the book, and went and sat on the bed.

"I'm just looking up Lebanon," she said, after a minute.

"Oh yes…" said Nick.

"It sounds marvellous. Mediterranean climate, well we knew that, and it says homosexuality is a delight."

"Really," said Nick.

"It does. 'L'homosexualite est un delit,' " she read, sounding like General de Gaulle.

"Yes, delit is a crime, unfortunately."

"Oh, is it?"

"Delight is delice, delit is a misdemeanour."

"Well, it's bloody close…"

"Well, they often are," said Nick, and felt rather pleased with himself. Catherine was bored with the book. She held Nick's eye, and said, "So what's he into, old Ouradi?"