Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

"In the house…? Oh, in the arse, I see." Nick smiled with a funny mixture of coldness and hilarity, a certain respect for mischief, however painful. He watched him pushing his hands through his lover's black curls: which he did in a carefree, patient, familiar way, almost as if Wani wasn't sucking him off, as if he was some beautiful pampered child who'd run in among the adults, hungry for praise and confident of it. Tristao stroked his hair, and grinned and praised him. "He always pay the best."

"I'm sure!" said Nick, and took a condom out of his pocket.

"Here we go," said Tristao.

Downstairs the Prime Minister was leaving. Gerald had danced with her for almost ten minutes. He had the glow of intimacy and lightness of success about him as he saw her to her car, careless of the rain. Late fireworks were still going off, like bombs and rifles, and they glanced upwards. Rachel stood in the doorway, with Penny behind her, whilst Gerald, usurping the secret policeman, leant forward and slammed the car door in a happy involuntary bow. The rain gleamed and needled in the street lamps as the Daimler pulled away with a noise like a brusque sigh.

NICK WENT OUT to vote early, and took Catherine with him in the car. She had been up since six to catch Gerald on Good Morning Britain. In the long month of the election campaign she had refused to watch TV, but now that Gerald and Rachel had both gone up to Barwick she seemed able to do little else.

"How was he?" Nick said.

"He was only on for a minute. He said the Tories had brought down unemployment.''

"That is a bit rich."

"It's like Lady Tipper saying the 80s are a marvellous decade for staff."

"Well, it'll soon be over."

"What? Oh, the election, yes." Catherine stared out into the drizzle. "The 80s are going on for ever."

In the long tree-tunnel of Holland Park Avenue it was as if the dawn had been deferred, though it was high summer, and hours after sunrise. It was just the discouraging sort of weather that campaigners dreaded.

"Gerald's bound to get back in, isn't he?" said Nick. At Kensington Park Gardens no one had been able to put this simple question…

Catherine seemed to look up from the depths of her gloom at an impossible consolation. "It would be just so wonderful if he didn't."

At the polling station they gave in their cards and the woman smiled and blushed when she saw the name Fedden and the address. Nick felt she was being unduly confident. In '83 Catherine had fouled her paper, and this time she promised to vote for the Anti-Yuppie Visionary Vegetarian candidate. Nick stood in the plywood booth and turned the thick hexagonal stub of pencil in his fingers. Voting always gave him a heightened sense of irresponsibility. They were in the big classroom of a primary school, with children's drawings and a large and unusual alphabet (N was for Nanny, K for Kiwi-fruit) running round the walls. Today was an unearned holiday. Nick had a moment's glimpse of the hundred little rules and routines of the place, and a mood of truancy came over him. Besides, what happened in the booth was an eternal secret. His pencil twitched above the Labour and Alliance candidates, and then he made his cross very frowningly for the Green man. He knew the Conservative was bound to get back in.

There were doubts, though, in some quarters, and Labour was thought to have had a very good campaign. Nick himself found their press advertisements much wittier than the Tories'. "In Britain the poor have got poorer and the rich have got… well, they've got the Conservatives" was one that even Gerald had laughed at. In general, Gerald's view was that campaigning was over-rated at the national level, and irksome, even counterproductive, in the constituencies. "You know, the best thing I could have done on May 11, when the election was called, would have been to push off for a month's holiday somewhere," he said to Catherine. "Quite possibly on safari." He got fed up with Catherine saying it was a "TV election." "I don't know why you go on about it, Puss," he said, looking in the hall mirror before a "photo-opportunity" for the local news. "All elections are TV elections. And a bloody good thing too. It means you don't have to go and talk to the voters yourself. In fact if you do try and talk to them they're bored to death because they've heard it all already on TV." ("Mm, that may be why," said Catherine.)

He was surprised that he hadn't been asked to appear in more of the major broadcasts and televised press conferences, where the Lady herself had retained a tireless dominance. His personal highlight had been a Question Time on BBC1, where he stood in for the indisposed Home Secretary at the last moment but very much took his own line. He did a lot of smarmy joshing with Robin Day, whom he knew socially, and this irritated the Labour defence spokesman, who was fighting an uphill battle on nuclear disarmament. Nick and Rachel watched it at home. Caught on the TV screen in his own drawing room Gerald looked distinctly alien, fattened and sharpened by the studio lights. He played sulkily with his fountain pen while the other panellists were speaking. His breast-pocket handkerchief billowed upwards like the flame of a torch. He came out in favour of Europe, having as he said a house in France where he spent the summer. He said he believed there were tens of thousands of jobs available if only people would get out and look for them (cries, which he relished, of "Shame"). Lively rudeness and childish antagonism were the point of the programme, and also its limitation. Rachel laughed in fond disparagement once or twice. Gerald's special mixture of laziness and ambition seemed to crystallize under the camera into brutal bumptiousness. A questioner from the floor, who looked like Cecil, the Barwick welly-whanger, accused him of being too rich to care about ordinary people; and while Gerald boomingly deplored the statement you could see it sinking and settling in his flushed features as a kind of acclaim.

When it came to canvassing in Barwick, Gerald felt there was less need than ever to put oneself out. He pooh-poohed the polls. All the Northamptonshire seats were Tory strongholds, even Corby, with its closed-down steelworks. "Even the unemployed know they're better off with us," Gerald said. "Anyway, they've got a computer in the office up there now, and if they can find out how to work it they'll be able to pinpoint any dodgy waverers and bombard them with stuff." "What?" Catherine wanted to know. "Well, pictures of me!" said Gerald. Nick wondered if his cavalier tone was a way of preparing for possible defeat. In the final week there was something called Wobbly Thursday, when everyone at Central Office panicked. The polls showed Labour barging ahead. Toby remarked that his father seemed very unconcerned. "One has merely to cultivate," replied Gerald, "the quality that M. Mitterrand has attributed to the Prime Minister, and which he sees as the supreme political virtue."

"Oh yes, what's that?" said Toby.

"Indifference," said Gerald, almost inaudibly.

" Right… " said Toby; and then, with a certain canny persistence, "But I thought she was climbing up the wall."

"Climbing up the wall, nonsense."

"It's like the adverb game," said Catherine. "Task: Climb up the wall. Manner: Indifferently." At which Gerald went off with a pitying smile to correct his diary.

At the office Nick looked through the mail and dictated a couple of letters to Melanie. In Wani's absence he'd grown fond of dictating, and found himself able to improvise long supple sentences rich in suggestion and syntactic shock, rather as the older Henry James, pacing and declaiming to a typist, had produced his most difficult novels. Melanie, who was used to Wani's costive memos, and even to dressing up the gist of a letter in her own words, stuck out her tongue with concentration as she took down Nick's old-fashioned periods and perplexing semicolons. Today he was answering a couple of rich American queens who had a film-production company perhaps as fanciful, as nominal, as Ogee was, and who were showing interest in the Spoils of Poynton project-though with certain strong reservations about the plot. They felt that it needed an injection of sex-smooching and action as Lord Ouradi had put it. The queens themselves sounded rather like porn actors, being called Treat Rush and Brad Craft. "Dear Treat and Brad," Nick began: "It was with no small interest that we read your newest proposals comma with their comma to us comma so very open brackets indeed comma so startlingly close brackets novel vision of the open quotes sex-life close quotes of italics capital S Spoils semicolon -"