The Line of Beauty
Read The Line of Beauty Online
Authors: Alan Hollinghurst
A
New York Times
Bestseller
A
Los Angeles Times
Bestseller
A Book Sense National Bestseller
A Northern California Bestseller
A
Sunday Times
Bestseller
A
New York Times
Notable Book of the Year
And chosen as one of the best books of 2004 by:
Entertainment Weekly
•
Washington Post
•
San Francisco Chronicle
•
Newsday
•
Seattle Times
•
Salon.com
•
Boston Globe
•
New York Sun • Miami Herald
•
Dallas Morning News
•
San Jose Mercury News
•
Publishers Weekly
"In this saga about the Thatcher years Alan Hollinghurst writes harsh but deeply informed social satire from within, just
as Proust did. Hollinghurst is never mocking or caricatural but subtly observant and completely participant. He writes the
best prose we have today. He brings the eloquence of a George Eliot together with the sexiness and visual acuity of a Nabokov."—
Edmund White
"An affecting work of art."—
Michiko Kakutani,
New York Times
"Hollinghurst's prose is a genuine achievement—lavish, poised, sinuously alert...
The Line of Beauty
is an ample and sophisticated delight, charged with hundreds of delicate impressions and insights, and scores of vital and
lovely sentences. It is at once domestic and political, psychological and historical. It is funny, moving, and finally despairing."—
New Republic
"His finest novel to date."—
Geoff Dyer
"Line for line, Hollinghurst's novel about London during the 1980s is the most exquisitely written book I've read in years.
Witty observations about politics, society, and family open like little revelations on every page."—
Christian Science Monitor
"A rueful, snapshot-accurate portrait of this era."—
Seattle Times
"An intoxicating read...each sentence in this book rings as perfect and true as a Schubert sonata."—
Hartford Courant
"[A] masterpiece with a skillfully rendered social panorama, a Proustian alertness to social nuance and a stylistic precision
that recalls [James]."—
Newsday
"The Line of Beauty
is itself a thing of beauty—an elegant and seductive novel...readers will hang on every bracing word.
The Line of Beauty
may perhaps be the author's most mature and accomplished work to date. It might also be his
best."—
Philadelphia City Paper
"A deliciously snarky portrait of Thatcherite Britain, but Hollinghurst also makes you believe in his characters, and nobody
produced better prose this year."
—
San Jose Mercury News
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
The Swimming-Pool Library
The Folding Star
The Spell
T
HE
L
INE OF
B
EAUTY
A NOVEL
A
LAN
H
OLLINGHURST
BLOOMSBURY
Copyright © 2005 by Alan Hollinghurst
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from
the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury
Publishing, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, New York and London
Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers
All papers used by Bloomsbury Publishing are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in well-managed forests. The
manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Hollinghurst, Alan.
The line of beauty / Alan Hollinghurst.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
1. University of Oxford—Alumni and alumnae—Fiction. 2. Notting Hill (London, England)—Fiction. 3. Male friendship—Fiction.
4. Social classes—Fiction. 5. Married people—Fiction. 6. Legislators—Fiction. 7. Rich people—Fiction. 8. Young men—Fiction.
9. Gay men—Fiction. I. Title.
PR 6058.O4467L56 2004
823'.914—dc22
2004047660
First published in the United States by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2004
This paperback edition published in 2005
eISBN: 978-1-59691-808-5
5 7 9 10 8 6
Typeset by Hewer Text Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed in the United States of America by Quebecor World Fairfield
F
OR
F
RANCIS
W
YNDHAM
I am very grateful for the hospitality of Yaddo, where part of this novel was written.
A. H.
"What do you know about this business?" the King said to Alice.
"Nothing," said Alice.
"Nothing
whatever?"
persisted the King.
"Nothing whatever," said Alice.
"That's very important," the King said, turning to the jury. They were just beginning to write this down on their slates,
when the White Rabbit interrupted: "
Un
important, your Majesty means, of course," he said in a very respectful tone, but frowning and making faces at him as he spoke.
"
Un
important, of course, I meant," the King hastily said, and went on to himself in an undertone, "important—unimportant—unimportant—important—"
as if he were trying which word sounded best.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,
chapter 12
P
ETER CROWTHER'S BOOK
on the election was already in the shops. It was called
Landslide!,
and the witty assistant at Dillon's had arranged the window in a scaled-down version of that natural disaster. The pale-gilt
image of the triumphant Prime Minister rushed towards the customer in a gleaming slippage. Nick stopped in the street, and
then went in to look at a copy. He had met Peter Crowther once, and heard him described as a hack and also as a "mordant analyst":
his faint smile, as he flicked through the pages, concealed his uncertainty as to which account was nearer the truth. There
was clearly something hacklike in the speed of publication, only two months after the event; and in the actual writing, of
course. The book's mordancy seemed to be reserved for the efforts of the Opposition. Nick looked carefully at the photographs,
but only one of them had Gerald in it: a group picture of "The 101 New Tory MPs," in which he'd been clever enough, or quick
enough, to get into the front row. He sat there smiling and staring as if in his own mind it was already the front bench.
The smile, the white collar worn with a dark shirt, the floppy breast-pocket handkerchief would surely be famous when, the
chaps in the rows behind were mere forgotten grins and frowns. Even so, he was mentioned only twice in the text—as a "bon
viveur," and as one of the "dwindling minority" of Conservative MPs who had passed, "as Gerald Fedden, the new Member for
Barwick, so obviously has," through public school and Oxbridge. Nick left the shop with a shrug; but out in the street he
felt delayed pride at this sighting of a person he knew in a published book.
He had a blind date at eight that evening, and the hot August day was a shimmer of nerves, with little breezy interludes of
lustful dreaming. The date wasn't totally blind—"just very short-sighted," Catherine Fedden said, when Nick showed her the
photograph and the letter. She seemed to like the look of the man, who was called Leo, and who she said was so much her type;
but his handwriting made her jumpy. It was both elaborate and impetuous. Catherine had a paperback called
Graphology: The Mind in the
Hand,
which gave her all sorts of warnings about people's tendencies and repressions ("Artist or Madman?" "Pet or Brute?"). "It's
those enormous ascenders, darling," she said: "I see a lot of ego." They had pursed their lips again over the little square
of cheap blue writing paper. "You're sure that doesn't just mean a very strong sex drive?" Nick asked. But she seemed to think
not. He had been excited, and even rather moved, to get this letter from a stranger; but it was true the text itself raised
few expectations. "Nick—OK! Ref your letter, am in Personnel (London Borough of Brent). We can meet up, discuss Interests
and Ambitions. Say When. Say Where"— and then the enormous rampant L of Leo going halfway down the page.
Nick had moved into the Feddens' big white Notting Hill house a few weeks before. His room was up in the roof, still clearly
the children's zone, with its lingering mood of teenage secrets and rebellions. Toby's orderly den was at the top of the stairs,
Nick's room just along the skylit landing, and Catherine's at the far end; Nick had no brothers or sisters but he was able
to think of himself here as a lost middle child. It was Toby who had brought him here, in earlier vacations, for his London
"seasons," long thrilling escapes from his own far less glamorous family; and Toby whose half-dressed presence still haunted
the attic passage. Toby himself had never perhaps known why he and Nick were friends, but had amiably accepted, the evidence
that they were. In these months after Oxford he was rarely there, and Nick had been passed on as a friend to his little sister
and to their hospitable parents. He was a friend of the family; and there was something about him they trusted, a gravity,
a certain shy polish, something not quite apparent to Nick himself, which had helped the family agree that he should become
their lodger. When Gerald had won Barwick, which was Nick's home constituency, the arrangement was jovially hailed as having
the logic of poetry, or fate.
Gerald and Rachel were still in France, and Nick found himself almost resenting their return at the end of the month. The
housekeeper came in early each morning, to prepare the day's meals, and Gerald's secretary, with sunglasses on top of her
head, looked in to deal with the imposing volume of post. The gardener announced himself by the roar of the mower outside
an open window. Mr Duke, the handyman (His Grace, as the family called him), was at work on various bits of maintenance. And
Nick was in residence, and almost, he felt, in possession. He loved coming home to Kensington Park Gardens in the early evening,
when the wide treeless street was raked by the sun, and the two white terraces stared at each other with the glazed tolerance
of rich neighbours. He loved letting himself in at the three-locked green front door, and locking it again behind him, and
feeling the still security of the house as he looked into the red-walled dining room, or climbed the stairs to the double
drawing room, and up again past the half-open doors of the white bedrooms. The first flight of stairs, fanning out into the
hall, was made of stone; the upper flights had the confidential creak of oak. He saw himself leading someone up them, showing
the house to a new friend, to Leo perhaps, as if it was really his own, or would be one day: the pictures, the porcelain,
the curvy French furniture so different from what he'd been brought up with. In the dark polished wood he was partnered by
reflections as dim as shadows. He'd taken the chance to explore the whole house, from the wedge-shaped attic cupboards to
the basement junk room, a dim museum in itself, referred to by Gerald as the
trou de gloire.
Above the drawing-room fireplace there was a painting by Guardi, a capriccio of Venice in a gilt rococo frame; on the facing
wall were two large gilt-framed mirrors. Like his hero Henry James, Nick felt that he could "stand a great deal of gilt."
Sometimes Toby would have come back, and there would be loud music in the drawing room; or he was in his father's study at
the back of the house making international phone calls and having a gin-and-tonic—all this done not in defiance of his parents
but in rightful imitation of their own freedoms in the place. He would go into the garden and pull his shirt off impatiently
and sprawl in a deckchair reading the sport in the
Telegraph.
Nick would see him from the balcony and go down to join him, slightly breathless, knowing Toby quite liked his rower's body
to be looked at. It was the easy charity of beauty. They would have a beer and Toby would say, "My sis all right? Not too
mad, I hope," and Nick would say, "She's fine, she's fine," shielding his eyes from the dropping August sun, and smiling back
at him with reassurance, among other unguessed emotions.
Catherine's ups and downs were part of Nick's mythology of the house. Toby had told him about them, as a mark of trust, one
evening in college, sitting on a bench by the lake. "She's pretty volatile, you know," he said, quietly impressed by his own
choice of word. "Yah, she has these moods." To Nick the whole house, as yet only imagined, took on the light and shade of
moods, the life that was lived there as steeped in emotion as the Oxford air was with the smell of the lake water. "She used
to, you know, cut her arms, with a razor blade." Toby winced and nodded. "Thank god she's grown out of all that now." This
sounded more challenging than mere moods, and when Nick first met her he found himself glancing tensely at her arms. On one
forearm there were neat parallel lines, a couple of inches long, and on the other a pattern of right-angled scars that you
couldn't help trying to read as letters; it might have been an attempt at the word ELLE. But they were long healed over, evidence
of something that would otherwise be forgotten; sometimes she traced them abstractedly with a finger.
"Looking after the Cat" was how Gerald had put it before they went away, with the suggestion that the task was as simple as
that, and as responsible. It was Catherine's house but it was Nick who was in charge. She camped nervously in the place, as
though she and not Nick was the lodger. She was puzzled by his love of its pompous spaces, and mocked his knowledgeable attachment
to the paintings and furniture. "You're such a snob," she said, with a provoking laugh; coming from the family he was thought
to be snobbish about, this was a bit of a facer. "I'm not really," said Nick, as if a small admission was the best kind of
denial, "I just love beautiful things." Catherine peered around comically, as though at so much junk. In her parents' absence
her instincts were humbly transgressive, and mainly involved smoking and asking strangers home. Nick came back one evening
to find her drinking in the kitchen with an old black minicab driver and telling him what the contents of the house were insured
for.
At nineteen she already had a catalogue of failed boyfriends, each with a damning epithet, which was sometimes all Nick knew
them by: "Crabs" or "Drip-Dry" or "Quantity Surveyor." A lot of them seemed almost consciously chosen for their unacceptability
at Kensington Park Gardens: a tramplike Welshman in his forties whom she'd met in the Notting Hill Record Exchange; a beautiful
punk with FUCK tattooed on his neck; a Rastafarian from round the corner who moaned prophetically about Babylon and the downfall
of Thatcher. Others were public schoolboys and sleek young professionals on the make in the Thatcher slump. Catherine was
slight but physically reckless; what drew boys to her often frightened them away. Nick, in his secret innocence, felt a certain
respect for her experience with men: to have so many failures required a high rate of preliminary success. He could never
judge how attractive she was. In her case the genetic mixture of two good-looking parents had produced something different
from Toby's sleepy beauty: Gerald's large confidence-winning mouth had been awkwardly squashed into the slender ellipse of
Rachel's face. Catherine's emotions always rushed to her mouth.
She loved anything satirical, and was a clever vocal mimic. When she and Nick got drunk she did funny imitations of her family,
so that oddly they seemed not to have gone away. There was Gerald, with his facetious boom, his taste for the splendid, his
favourite tags from the
Alice
books. "Really, Catherine," protested Catherine, "you would try the patience of an oyster." Or, "You recall the branches
of arithmetic, Nick? Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision . . . ?" Nick joined in, with a sense of treacherously
bad manners. It was Rachel's style that attracted him more, as a code both aristocratic and distantly foreign. Her
group
sounded nearly Germanic, and the sort of thing she would never belong to; her
philistine,
pronounced as a French word, seemed to cover, by implication, anyone who said it differently. Nick tried this out on Catherine,
who laughed but perhaps wasn't much impressed. Toby she couldn't be bothered to mimic; and it was true that he was hard to
"get." She did a funny turn as her godmother, the Duchess of Flintshire, who as plain Sharon Feingold had been Rachel's best
friend at Cranborne Chase school, and whose presence in their lives gave a special archness to their joke about Mr Duke the
odd-job man. The Duke that Sharon had married had a twisted spine and a crumbling castle, and the Feingold vinegar fortune
had come in very handy. Nick hadn't met the Duchess yet, but after Catherine's impression of a thoughtless social dynamo he
felt he'd had the pleasure without the concomitant anxiety.
Nick never talked to Catherine about his crush on her brother. He was afraid she would find it funny. But they talked a good
deal about Leo, in the week of waiting, a week that crawled and jumped and crawled. There wasn't much to go on, but enough
for two lively imaginations to build a character from: the pale-blue letter, with its dubious ascenders; his voice, which
only Nick had heard, in the stilted cheerful chat which finalized the plans, and which was neutrally London, not recognizably
black, though he sensed a special irony and lack of expectation in it; and his colour photograph, which showed that if Leo
wasn't as handsome as he claimed he still demanded to be looked at. He was sitting on a park bench, seen from the waist up
and leaning back—it was hard to tell how tall he was. He was wearing a dark bomber jacket and gazed away with a frown, which
seemed to cast a shadow over his features, or to be a shadow rising within them. Behind him you could see the silver-grey
crossbar of a racing bike, propped against the bench.
The substance of the original ad ("Black guy, late 20s, v. good-looking, interests cinema, music, politics, seeks intelligent
like-minded guy 18—40") was half-obliterated by Nick's later dreamings and Catherine's premonitions, which dragged Leo further
and further off into her own territory of uncomfortable sex and bad faith. At times Nick had to reassure himself that he and
not Catherine was the one who had a date with him. Hurrying home that evening he glanced through the requirements again. He
couldn't help feeling he was going to fall short of his new lover's standards. He was intelligent, he had just got a first-class
degree from Oxford University, but people meant such different things by music and politics. Well, knowing the Feddens would
give him an angle. He found the tolerant age range comforting. He was only twenty, but he could have been twice that age and
Leo would still have wanted him. In fact he might be going to stay with Leo for twenty years: that seemed to be the advertisement's
coded promise.
The second post was still scattered across the hall, and there was no sound from upstairs; but he felt, from a charge in the
air, that he wasn't alone. He gathered up the letters and found that Gerald had sent him a postcard. It was a black-and-white
picture of a Romanesque doorway, with flanking saints and a lively Last Judgement in the tympanum: "Eglise de Podier, XII
siecle." Gerald had large, impatient handwriting, in which most of the letters were missed out, and perhaps unnegotiable with
his very thick nib. The author of
Graphology
might have diagnosed an ego as big as Leo's, but the main impression was of almost evasive haste. He had a sign-off that
could have been "Love" but could have been "Yours" or even, absurdly, "Hello"—so you didn't quite know where you stood with
him. As far as Nick could make out they were enjoying themselves. He was pleased to have the card, but it cast a slight shadow,
by reminding him that the August idyll would soon be over.