The Line of Beauty

  Nick glanced out into the room to find Wani, who was sitting at a table with his mother and a middle-aged woman who looked quite prickly and confused under his long-lashed gaze. It was almost a decoy of Wani's to let his gaze rest emptily but seductively on a woman. He still hadn't spoken to Nick since his arrival; there had been a turn and a nod, a sigh, as if to say, "These crowds, these duties," when they were taking their seats. If it made him uneasy to see his lover and his father tete-a-tete he was too clever to show it. Bertrand said, "That son of mine, who's he flirting with now?"

  Nick laughed easily and said, "Oh, I don't know. Some MP's wife, I expect."

  "Flirting, flirting, that's all he bloody does!" said Bertrand, with a mocking flutter of his own eyelashes. Dapper and primped as he was, he became almost camp. Nick pictured the daily task of shaving above and below that line of moustache, the joy of the matutinal steel, and then the joy of the dressing room that was like a department of a shop. He said, "He may flirt, but you know he never really looks at another woman," and was thrilled by his own wickedness.

  "I know, I know," said Bertrand, as though cross at being taken seriously, but also perhaps reassured. "So how's it going—at the office?"

  "Oh fine, I think."

  "You still got all those pretty boys there?"

  "Um . . ."

  "I don't know why he has to have all these bloody pretty poofy boys." "Well, I think they're very good at their jobs," Nick said, so horrified he sounded almost apologetic. "Simon Jones is an excellent graphic designer, and Howard Wasserstein is a brilliant script editor."

  "So when does the bloody shooting start on the film?"

  "Ah—you'd have to ask Wani that."

  Bertrand popped a new potato into his mouth and said, "I already did—he never tells me nothing." He flapped his napkin. "What is the bloody film anyway?"

  "Well, we're thinking about adapting The Spoils of Poynton, um . . ."

  "Plenty of smooching, plenty of action," Bertrand said.

  Nick smiled thinly and thought rapidly and discovered that these were two-elements entirely lacking from the novel. He said, "Wani's hoping to get James Stallard to be in it."

  Bertrand gave him a wary look. "Another pretty boy?"

  "Well, he's generally agreed to be very good-looking. He's one of the rising young stars."

  "I read something about him . . ."

  "Well, he recently got married to Sophie Tipper," Nick said. "Sir Maurice Tipper's daughter. It was in all the papers. Of course she used to go out with Toby—Gerald and Rachel's son." He produced all this hetero stuff like a distracting proof; he hoped he wouldn't normally be so cravenly reassuring.

  Bertrand smiled as if nothing would surprise him. "I heard he let a big fish go-"

  Nick blushed for some reason, and started talking about the magazine, with the brightness of a novice salesman, not yet committed and not yet cynical; he told him that he and Wani were going on a trip to research subjects for it—and that was the nearest he could get to stating the unspeakable fact of their affair. For a second he imagined telling Bertrand the truth, in all its mischievous beauty, imagined describing, like some praiseworthy business initiative, the skinhead rent boy they'd had in last week for a threesome. Just then he felt a kind of sadness—well, the shine went off things, as he'd known it would, his mood was petering into greyness, a grey restlessness. He felt condemned to this with Bertrand. It was just what had happened at Lowndes Square: the secret certainty faded after half an hour and gave way to a somehow enhanced state of doubt. The manageable joke of Bertrand became a penance. Nick was powerless, fidgety, sulkily appeasing, in the grip of a man who seemed to him in every way the opposite of himself, a tight little bundle of ego in a shiny suit.

  Something awful happened with a waitress, who was taking round a wine bottle. She was black, and Nick had noticed already the flickers of discomfort and mimes of broadmindedness as she moved through the room and gave everyone what they wanted. Bertrand held out his glass and she filled it with Chablis for him—he watched her as she did it, and as she smiled and turned interrogatively to Nick, Bertrand said, "No, you bloody idiot, do you think I drink this? I want mineral water." The girl recoiled for just a second at the smart of his tone, at the slap-down of service, and then apologized with steely insincerity. Nick said, "Oh, I'm sure we can get you some water, we've got masses of water!" in a sweetly anxious way, as if to soften Bertrand's tone, to apologize for him himself, to give a breath of laughter to a rough moment; while Bertrand held the glass out stiffly towards her, expressionless save for a steady contemptuous blink. She held her dignity for a moment longer, while Nick's smile pleaded with her not to mind and with him to relent. But Bertrand said, "Don't you know bloody nothing?—Take this away," and glared at Nick as if to enlist or excite a similar outrage in him. Then when the girl had marched off, without saying a word, he looked down, sighed, and smiled ruefully, almost tenderly at Nick, as though to say that he would have liked to spare him such a scene, but that he himself was afraid of no one.

  Nick knew he should move away, but he hadn't finished his main course; he took shameful refuge in it as a reason not to make a scene of his own. Other people must have heard. Tucked away in the window seat they must look like conspirators. Bertrand was talking about property now, and weighing the merits of wn against those of sw3; it seemed he too was thinking of moving to the neighbourhood. He looked at the room as if trying it on. "Well, it's lovely here," Nick said sadly, and gazed out of the window at the familiar street, at Bertrand's horrible maroon car, at the half-recognized evening life in the houses opposite, and at the big blond man who came up from the area of one of them, unlocked the big black motorbike that stood on the pavement outside, straddled it, pulled on and buckled his helmet, kicked the bike into eager life and three seconds later was gone. Only a buzz, a drone that faded as it rose, could be heard amid the high noise of talk in the room. It was as if the summons of the Chopin had been answered and the freedom seized by a lucky third person.

  "Aah . . . " Gerald was saying, hovering like a waiter himself, the best of all waiters, "I hope everything's all right." He held a bottle of water in one hand and a freshly opened bottle of Taittinger in the other, as if hedging his bets.

  "Marvellous!" said Bertrand, pretending not to notice these things, and then making a Gallic gesture of flattered surprise. "You're very kind, to wait on me yourself."

  "These young girls don't always know what they're doing," said Gerald.

  Nick said, "Gerald, obviously you've met . . . Mr Ouradi."

  "We haven't really met," said Gerald, bowing and smiling secretively, "but I'm absolutely delighted you're here."

  "Well, what a marvellous concert," Bertrand said. "The pianist had amazing technique. For one so young . . ."

  "Amazing," Gerald agreed. "Well, you saw her here first!"

  With an effect of creaking diplomatic machinery Dolly Kimbolton rolled into view, and Bertrand stood up, passing his plate with its toppling knife and fork to Nick. "Hello!" she said.

  "Have you met Lady Kimbolton? Mr Bertram Ouradi, one of our great supporters."

  They shook hands, Dolly leaning forward with the air of a busy headmistress rounding up stragglers for some huge collective effort. Bertrand said, in his tone of clear, childish self-importance, "Yes, I'm making quite a contribution. Quite a big contribution to the party."

  "Splendid!" said Dolly, and gave him a smile in which political zeal managed almost entirely to disguise some older instinct about Middle Eastern shopkeepers.

  "I don't know if we might all have a little chat. . . ?" said Gerald, raising the champagne bottle. "And I think we might be needing this." The suggestion obviously didn't include Nick, who as so often wasn't visible and certainly wasn't relevant, and who was left, when the other three went off, holding Bertrand's unfinished supper as well as his own.

  He closed the door, locked the door, and reached out for Wani, who patted him and kissed him on the nose as
he turned away.

  "Where's the stuff?" said Wani.

  Nick went over to the desk, unhappy but caught up too in the business of the coke, which if he was patient enough might make them both happy again. He got out the tin from the bottom drawer. Wani said, "A tin is such an obvious place to hide it."

  "Darling, no one even knows I've got anything to hide." He passed Wani the packet and smiled reproachfully. "It's just like our wonderful secret love affair."

  Wani pulled out the chair and sat down at the desk, little clouds and gleams of possible rejoinders passing across his features. He peered at the stack of library books and selected Henry James and the Question of Romance by Mildred R. Pullman, which had a sleek Mylar sleeve protecting its dark jacket. "This should do," he said. He had never been in Nick's room before, and it was clear that it held no magic for him of the kind Nick had felt in Wani's room at Lowndes Square. Well, he wasn't one who noticed such things. He didn't thank Nick for meeting Ronnie or show any intuition of the scary drama it had been for him. Nick said, to remind him,

  "I had such a sweet little chat with Ronnie. It seems he's hoping to move to this area." Wani said nothing, tipping out a bit of the rough powder onto the book. "He is very nice, isn't he?" Nick went on. "It was quite a business—ringing him and waiting and ringing again . . . And of course he was late . . . !"

  Wani said, "You only like him because he's a wog. You probably fancy him."

  "Not particularly," said Nick, whose wave of sexual feeling for him had been just a part of the criminal excitement, tension and relief at the same time, the feeling that Ronnie accepted not only his money but him; and then, to get it done, "I wish you wouldn't use that word. I keep trying to believe you're not as irredeemable as your father."

  Wani weighed this up for a moment. "So what was Papa talking to you about?" he said.

  Nick sighed and paced across the room—where they both were again, in the subtly glamorized light and depth of the wardrobe mirror. He had imagined Wani's being here so often, for secret sleepovers and also, in some other dispensation, freely and openly, as his lover and partner. He said, "Oh, he wants to move to this area too, apparently." He gave a snuffly laugh. "I ought to put him in touch with Jasper."

  "That Jasper's a sexy little slut," said Wani, and it wasn't quite his usual tone.

  "Yeah . . . ? All white boys look the same to me," said Nick.

  "Ha ha." Wani studied his work. "So—what else did he say?"

  "Your old man? Oh, he was just pumping me again about you, and about the film. He has no idea what's going on, of course, but I think he's decided that I hold the key to the mystery. I did what I could to persuade him there wasn't a mystery."

  "Maybe you're the mystery," said Wani. "He doesn't know what to make of you."

  This was probably true, but also terribly unfair. Nick was longing to make a declaration, and now he felt violent towards Wani as well: his pulse was thumping in his neck as he stood behind him, then put his hands on his shoulders. All evening he'd needed to touch him, and the contact was convulsive when it came. Wani was working painstakingly and a little defensively with his gold card, making rapid hatching movements to and fro across the partially visible features of Henry James—not the great bald Master but the quick-eyed, tender, brilliant twenty-year-old, with an irrepressible kink in his dark hair. Nick squeezed Wani's neck with each clause: "I wish we didn't have to carry on like this, I feel I've got to tell someone, I wish we could tell people."

  "If you tell one person you've told everybody," Wani said. "You might as well take a full-page ad in the Telegraph."

  "Well, I know you're very important, of course . . ."

  "You don't think we'd be at a party like this if people knew what we did, do you?"

  "Mm. I don't see why not."

  "You think you'd be hobnobbing with Dolly Kimbolton if she knew you were a pretty boy."

  "She does know I'm a—that's such an absurd phrase!"

  "You think so?"

  "And anyway hobnobbing, as you call it, with Dolly Kimbolton is hardly an indispensable part of my life. I've never pretended not to be gay, it's you that's doing that, my dear. This is 1986. Things have changed."

  "Yes. All the poofs are dropping like flies. Don't you think the mother and father of Antoine might worry a bit about that?"

  "That's not really the point, is it?"

  Wani made a little moue. "It's part of the point," he said. "You know I have to be incredibly careful. You know the situation . . . There!" He raised his hands as if he'd balanced something. "Now there's a line of beauty for you!" And he looked aside into the mirror, first at Nick and then at himself. "I think we have a pretty good time," he said, in a sudden weak appeal, but it was short of what Nick wanted.

  Something happened when you looked in the mirror together. You asked it, as always, a question, and you asked each other something too; and the space, shadowy but glossy, the further room in which you found yourself, as if on a stage, vibrated with ironies and sentimental admissions. Or so it seemed to Nick. Now it was like a doorway into the past, into the moment he had thought "Oh good" when Ouradi first appeared, having missed the start of term, in the Anglo-Saxon class, and was called on to translate a bit of King Alfred, which he did very decently—Nick had fixed on him already and expected him, as a latecomer and a foreigner, to look for a friend in this group of raw eighteen-year-olds. But he had vanished again at once, into some other world not quite discernible through the evening mist on Worcester College lake. And the "Oh good," the "Yes!" of his arrival, the sight of his beautiful head and provoking little penis, were all Nick got, really, from Wani, in those Oxford years, when he himself was in disguise, behind books and beer glasses, "out" as an aesthete, a bit of a poet, "the man who likes Bruckner!" but fearful of himself. And now here he was with Wani, posing for this transient portrait, almost challenging him in the glass—and it was like the first week again: he was tensed for him to disappear.

  He said, "Do you ever sleep with Martine?" It hurt him to ask, and his face stiffened jealously for the answer.

  Wani looked round for his wallet. "What an extraordinary question."

  "Well, you're quite an extraordinary person, darling," said Nick, thinking, with his horror of discord, that he'd been too abrupt, and pulling a hand through Wani's springy black curls.

  "Here, have some of this and shut up," said Wani, and grabbed him between the legs as he came round the chair, like boys in a playground, and perhaps with the same eagerness and confusion. Nick didn't resist. He snorted up his line, and stepped away. Then Wani too, re-rolling the note, bent his head and was about to swoop when they both heard the dim cracks of footsteps, very close, already on the turn of the top stairs; and a voice, under the breath, indistinguishable. Wani twitched round and glared at the lock of the door, and Nick with his heart racing ran through the memory of turning the key. Wani snorted his line, up one nostril, pocketed the note and the wrapper and turned over the book, all in a second or two. "What are we doing?" he muttered.

  Nick shook his head. "What are we doing . . . ? Just talking about the script . . ."

  Wani gave an absurd sigh, as if it might just do. Nick had never seen him so anxious; and somehow he knew, as he held his gaze, that Wani would punish him for having observed this moment of panic. It wasn't the drugs so much as the hint of a guilty intimacy. And now that it was done it was surely the locking of the door that was suspicious. "No, just ten minutes, baby," the same voice said, Nick smiled and closed his eyes, it was Jasper's phoney drawl, the familiar floorboard outside the bathroom creaked, a dress brushed the wall, and they heard the door of Catherine's room close, and almost at once the rattle of the key. Nick and Wani nodded slowly and smiles of relief and amusement and anticipation moved in sequence across their faces.

  For Wani the first hit of coke was always an erotic rush, and for Nick too. They had kissed the first time they did coke together, their first kiss, Wani's mouth sour with wine, his tongue darti
ng, his eyes timidly closed. Each time after that was a re-enactment of a thrilling beginning. Anything seemed possible—the world was not only doable, conquerable, but lovable: it showed its weaknesses and you knew it would submit to you. You saw your own charm reflected in its eyes. Nick stood and kissed Wani in the middle of the room—two or three heavenly minutes that had been waiting to happen, a glowing collision, a secret rift in the end of the day. They stood there, in their suits, Wani's lightweight Italian "grey," black really, like one of his father's suits but made to hint and flow, Nick, in the needle-fine pinstripe Wani had bought him, like one of the keen young professionals of the age, the banker, the dealer, the estate agent even . . .

  Funny how sound travelled in an old house—through blocked-off chimney spaces, along joists. A rhythm almost inaudible to the cautious couple or unsuspecting soloist who made it was relayed as a workmanlike thump through the ceiling below or, as in this case, a busy squeak in the room next door. Stroking Wani's penis through his open fly, kissing his neck so that his skin stood up in shivers, Nick laughed but he was embarrassed too, almost shocked to hear them at it (which he never had before) and at it so promptly and so fast. No wasteful foreplay there—it made him wonder if Catherine was liking it, if Jasper wasn't being a brute with her, when surely she needed such careful handling. He felt Wani's grip tighten on his shoulder, pressing him down, and he went down on one knee, looking up at him sternly, and then on both knees and pulled his cock into his mouth. Wani wasn't big but he was very pretty, and his hard-ons, at least until the coke piled on too deep, were boyishly steep and rigid.

  Nick worked on him easily and steadily, his own dick still buttoned away in a hard diagonal, something else waiting to happen, and the squeak of the telltale floorboard coming in rapid runs, like a manic mouse, and then with impressive intermittence; Nick almost went with it, but it was a distraction too, like the voices on the stair, a kind of brake or warning. They must have moved the bed, or they were fucking on the floor perhaps. He pictured them, Catherine vaguely and anxiously, Jasper much more vividly.