Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

"Yes, do. And you might find my husband," said Rachel.

He looked into the dining room, crowded like a restaurant with separate tables, where Toby was standing with a card in his hand. He was silently rehearsing his speech. "Keep it short, darling," Nick said.

"Nick… Fuck…!" said Toby, with a worried grin. "You know it's one thing making a speech to your aunts and uncles and, you know, your mates, but it's quite another making a speech to the fucking Prime Minister."

"Don't panic," said Nick. "We'll all shout, 'Hear, hear!'"

Toby laughed gloomily. "You don't suppose she might have to go to a summit or something at the last moment?"

"This is the summit, I'm afraid. It certainly is for your papa." Nick edged between the tables, each place with its mitred napkin and black-inked card. No titles, of course. He leant on the chair-to-be of Sharon Flintshire. "I love these pictures of the happy couple."

"I know," said Toby. "The Cat's done a bit of art."

Catherine had propped up on the sideboard a thing like a school project, where blown-up photographs of Gerald and Rachel before they were married flanked a formal wedding photo, with later family pics below. It looked rather like the placards of the cast outside a long-running West End farce.

"Your mother was so beautiful," Nick said.

"I know. And Dad."

"They're so young."

"Yeah, Dad's not that keen on it actually. He doesn't want the Lady seeing him in his hippy phase." To judge from the photos Gerald's hippy phase had reached its counter-cultural extreme in a pair of mutton-chop whiskers and a floral tie.

"I can't work out how old they were."

"Well, Dad'll be fifty next year, so he was… twenty-four; and Ma's a couple of years older, of course."

"They're our age," said Nick.

"They didn't waste any time," said Toby with a sad little smile.

"They certainly didn't waste any time having you, dear," Nick said, making the amusing calculation. "You must have been conceived on the honeymoon."

"I think I was," said Toby, both proud and embarrassed. "Somewhere in South Africa. Ma was a virgin when she was married, I know that, and three weeks later she was pregnant. No playing around there."

"No, indeed," said Nick, thinking of the years his parents had taken to have him, and with an inward smile at his own freedoms.

Toby looked at his speech again, and bit his lip. Nick watched him affectionately: unbuttoned jacket over crimson cummerbund, heavy black shoes, hair cut short so that he looked fatter-faced, like an embarrassed approximation of his father, but his father as he was now, not when he was twenty-four. On a slow impulse Nick said, "I may have just what you need. If you'd like a little, er, chemical help."

"Have you…?" said Toby, startled but interested.

And Nick murmured to him that he'd managed to get hold of a bit of charlie.

"God, amazing, thanks a lot!" said Toby, and then smiled round guiltily.

They sent a waiter to the drawing room with champagne, and went on up, with a little flutter about "rehearsing." For Nick the flutter was that of sharing the secret. They went into Toby's old bedroom, and locked the door. "The place is crawling with fuzz," Toby said.

"So what are you going to say in your speech?" said Nick, tipping out some powder on the bedside table. The room had a special mood of desertion, not the mute patience of a spare bedroom but the stillness of a place a boy has grown up in and abandoned, with everything settling into silence just as it was. There was a chest of drawers in mahogany and a gilt-framed mirror, very nice pieces, and Toby's school and team photos, a young unguarded class sense to everything; and the wardrobe of clothes Nick had once daringly dressed up in, which had lost their meaning, even to him.

"I thought I might make a joke about the Conference," said Toby. "You know, the Next Move Forward, and Mum and Dad going on for ever, like the Lady."

"Mm." Nick frowned over the busy credit card. "I think the thing is, darling, you should make the speech just as if the Lady wasn't there. And everything you say should be about… your father and your mother. It's their day, not hers, and not just Gerald's."

"Oh," said Toby.

"You might even make it more about Rachel."

"Right… God, I wish you'd write it." Toby slouched anxiously about the room. From downstairs the doorbell was heard and the first guests arriving. "I mean, what can you say about the old girl?"

"You could say what a lot she's had to put up with in Gerald," said Nick, with a dark sense of her not knowing the half of it. "Actually, don't say that," he added prudently; "just keep it short." He pictured Toby standing and speaking, his anxiety grinning through to a crowd that would be warmed with drink into roughness as well as affection. "Remember, everyone loves you," he said, to help him overlook the various monsters who were coming.

Toby stooped and sniffed up his line and stood back; Nick waited and watched for the amorous dissolve, not knowing quite what colour it would take in him. "Haven't done this for yonks," Toby said, half protest, half apology. Then, "Mm, that's very nice…" And a minute later, in beaming surrender, "This is great stuff, Nick, I must say. Where the hell did you get it?"

Nick snorted briskly and wiped the table with the flat of his finger. "Oh, I got it off Ouradi, actually."

"Right," said Toby. "Yah, Ouradi always gets great stuff."

"You used to do it with him in the old days."

"I know, we did once or twice. I didn't know you ever did it, though." Toby pranced towards him, and it was all Nick could do not to kiss him and feel for his dick, as he would have done with Wani himself. Instead he said, "Here, why don't you take the rest of this." It was about a third of a gram.

"God, no, I couldn't," said Toby, with the gleam of possession at once in his face.

"Yeah, go on," said Nick. "I've had enough, but you might need some more." He held out the tiny billet-doux, which as always with Ronnie was made from a page of a girlie mag; a magnified nipple covered it like a seal. Toby took it and put it, after a moment's thought, deep in his breast pocket. "God, that's fantastic!" he said. "Yah, I think tonight'll be all right, you know, I'm just going to keep it short," and he went prattling on in the simple high spirits of a first hit of cocaine. On the way downstairs he said, "Of course, darling, tell me if you want some more-I won't use all this."

"I'll be fine," said Nick.

They sashayed into the drawing room, where Lady Partridge was asking a man from the Treasury about muggers, and Badger Brogan was flirting gingerly with Greta Timms, pregnant with her seventh child. Nick circled through the room, smiling and almost immune to the anxiety he noticed in others, the booming joviality, the glancing inattentiveness, the sense of a lack that was waiting to be filled by the famous arrival. He looked round for a drink. The coke trickle in his throat made him doubly thirsty. Two waiters came in with laden trays, which made him laugh: they were just the answer to a double thirst. He chose, on grounds of beauty, the dark, full-lipped one, "Thanks-oh, hello," Nick said, over his raised glass, knowing the waiter before he knew who he was-just for a second, while everything was shining and suspended, their eyes engaged, the bubbles sailing upwards in a dozen tall glasses. "I remember you," he said then, rather drily, as if he were a waiter who had memorably dropped something.

"Oh… good evenin," the waiter said, pleasantly, so that Nick felt forgiven; and then, "Where do I see you before?"-so that he guessed he was in fact forgotten.

There was a commotion at the window, and Geoffrey Titchfield said, "Ah, the Prime Minister's car has arrived," like an old flunkey, steeped in the grandeur of his masters. He moved towards the door, too exalted by his own words to share in the fuss that they had triggered. Guests glanced into each other's faces for reassurance, one or two seemed already to give up, and withdrew into corners, and among the men there was some thinly amiable jostling. Nick followed through onto the landing, with the sense that the PM was beyond discretion, she'd be piqued if there wasn't a throng, a popular demonstration. He was pressed against the banister at the first turn of the stair, smiling down like an eye-catching unnamed attendant in a history painting. The door was standing open and the damp chill from outside gave an edge to the excitement. The women shivered with happy discomfort. The night was the fractious element they had triumphed against. The Mordant Analyst scurried in, almost tripped, amid laughs and tuts. Gerald was already in the street, in humble alignment with the Special Branch boys. Rachel stood just inside, haloed by the drizzly light and the diaphanous silver sheath of her dress. The well-known voice was heard, there was a funny intent silence of a second or two, and then there she was.