Read The Line of Beauty Online
Authors: Alan Hollinghurst
"No, they've got some nice pieces," Leo said, flatly, and a little ponderously, and so perhaps shyly. He turned round, nodding.
"You've done well."
"Darling, none of it's mine . . ."
"I know, I know." Leo sat down at the piano, and after a moment's thought stood his glass on a book on the lid. "What's this,
then. . . Mozart, all right, that's not too bad," checking the cover of the music on the stand, but letting it fall back to
the eternally open Andante. "So what key's this in?"—as if the key required some special tactics, like a golf-shot. "F major
. . ."
"It's a funny old piano," said Nick. He felt that if Leo played the piano, especially if he played it badly, it would waken
the unconscious demons of the house and bring them in yawning and protesting.
"Ah, that's all right," Leo murmured courteously; and he started to play, with a distracted frown at the page. It was the
great second movement of K533, spare, probing, Bach-like, that Nick had discovered, and tried to play, on the night when he'd
lost his chance of meeting Leo—till Catherine had complained, and he'd apologized and doodled off into Waldorf music. To apologize
for what you most wanted to do, to concede that it was obnoxious, boring, "vulgar and unsafe"—that was the worst thing. And
the music seemed to know this, to know the irresistible curve of hope, and its hollow inversion. Leo played it pretty steadily,
and Nick stood behind him, willing it along, nudging it through those quickly corrected wrong notes and tense hesitations
that are a torture of sight-reading and yet heighten the rewards when everything runs clear and good. When Leo suddenly went
steeply wrong he gave a disparaging shout, struck a few random chords, then reached for his glass. "Must be too pissed to
play," he said, not necessarily joking.
Nick sniggered. "You're good. I can't play that. I didn't know you could play." He felt very touched, and chastened, as if
by a glimpse of his own unquestioned assumptions. It opened a new perspective, the sight of Leo in his jeans and sweatshirt
and baseball boots raising Mozart out of the sonorous old Bosendorfer. And it seemed to have loosened him up, he was like
a shy guest who makes a brilliant joke, its lustre heightened by delay and distillation, and who suddenly finds he's enjoying
himself. Nick grabbed him from behind and squashed a kiss onto his cheek.
Leo chuckled and said, "All right, babe . . ."
Nick said, "I love you," shaking him in a tight hug, and grunting at the hard muscular heat of him. Leo reached up with his
free right hand and gripped his arm. After a while he said,
"That's a terrible picture."
It was Norman Kent's portrait of Toby, aged sixteen, and it was the image—beyond the intimidating bronze bust of Liszt—on
which the eyes of the doodling pianist tended to dwell. While Leo had been playing, it had lent its sickly colour to Nick's
thoughts.
"I know . . . Poor Toby."
"Cos he's quite tasty, in my opinion."
"Oh yes."
"You never told me if you had him, when you were all up at Oxford University."
Nick had still not quite let on to Leo that before their tangle in the bushes he had never exactly "had" anyone. He said,
"No, no, he's completely straight."
"Yeah?" said Leo, sceptically. "You must have had a go."
"Not really," Nick said. He stood back, with his hands still on Leo's shoulders, and smiled wanly at the pink-faced blazered
boy. The old regret could always come alive again, and for a moment even Leo, warm under his hands, seemed cheap and provisional
compared to the unattainable bloom of Toby.
"I just thought the way he kissed you and looked at you was a bit poofy."
"Don't!" Nick murmured, and then laughed, pulling Leo to get him up, and get the real kisses from him, the ones that Toby
would never give him.
But Leo held out a moment longer. "So they're easy about having a bender in the house, are they, their lordships?"
"Of course," said Nick. "They're absolutely fine with it." And in his mind he heard Catherine saying, "As long as it's never
mentioned." He went on, with a degree of exaggeration, "They've got lots of gay friends. In fact they asked me to bring you
here, darling."
"Oh," said Leo, with a subtlety of register worthy of Rachel herself.
Nick lay naked on top of the duvet, in quick-pulsed amazement. Leo had rung his mother, told her he was staying over: it was
a risk, a yielding, and therefore a commitment. Nick listened to the hiss of the shower in the bathroom across the landing.
Then, since he could see himself in the wardrobe mirror, he got under the bedclothes. He lay there, with one hand behind his
head, in an almost painful state of happiness and worry. Far down below, the front door was triple-locked, the lights were
all out in the drawing room and kitchen, the one lantern cast its cold glare into the hall. Catherine's bedroom door was closed,
but he was certain she was out. They had the house to themselves. The window was open a notch, and he could hear the throat-tearing
runs and trills of a robin that had taken to singing in the garden at night, and which he had eagerly decided was a nightingale;
an old lady standing listening on the gravel path had put him right. He had still, therefore, never heard a nightingale, but
he couldn't imagine it bettering his robin. The question was what time would Gerald and Rachel get back. But actually, probably,
not till late, it was Gerald's "surgery" in the morning, then a two-hour drive. Nick smiled at their unconscious generosity.
The shower-noise had stopped, and the robin skirled on, with sulky pauses and implacable resumptions. Nick would have liked
it even better if Leo had come to bed without showering, he loved the faint sourness of his skin, the sharpness of his armpits,
the sweet staleness deep between his legs. Leo's smells were little lessons constantly re-learnt, little shocks of authenticity.
But to Leo himself they were a source of annoyance and almost of shame. He had a terribly keen sense of smell, revealed in
a queue or a crowded room by a snubbed upper lip and an aristocratic flinching of the nostrils. He insisted he liked Nick's
smells, and Nick, who had never really thought of himself as having smells, was nervously unsure if this was truth or chivalry.
Perhaps it was a loving mixture of the two.
There was a kind of magic in this—to be lying in bed, a single bed, with all that it implied, and playing gently with himself,
and waiting for his lover to appear. It was the posture of a lifelong singleness, incessant imagining, the boy's supremacy
in a world of dreams, where men kept turning up to do his bidding; and now, that rattle of the bathroom door, snap of the
light cord, squeak of the landing floor, were the signals of an actual arrival, and within three seconds the door would open
and Leo would come in—
How black he looked, in the white skirt of a bath towel pulled tight round his buttocks and over the curbed jut of his dick.
He held his folded clothes in his hands, like a recruit, stripped and scrubbed and given his slops—he looked around, then
put them down on the desk, by the blue library books. He was a trifle formal, he winked at Nick but he was clearly moved by
the ordinariness and novelty of the moment. To Nick it darkened, it had the feeling of an elopement, of elated action haunted
by the fears it had defied, of two lovers suddenly strangers to each other on their first night in a foreign hotel. But after
all they had only eloped upstairs, it was absurd. He felt breathless pride at having Leo here. He threw back the duvet, and
said, "I'm sorry about the bed"—shifting a bit to make room.
"Eh . . . ?" said Leo.
"I don't think you'll get much sleep."
Leo let his towel drop to the floor and stared at Nick without smiling. "I'm not planning on getting any," he said.
Nick accepted the challenge with a little moan. It was the first time he had seen Leo naked, and the first time he had seen
the masking shadow of his face, lazily watchful, easily cynical, clever and obtuse by turns, melt into naked feeling. Leo
breathed through his mouth, and his look was a wince of lust and also, it seemed to Nick, of self-accusation—that he had been
so slow, so vain, so blind.
N
ICK WENT AHEAD
on the path and held the gate open for Wani, so that for several seconds the outside world had a view of naked
flesh before the gate, with its "Men Only" sign, swung shut behind them. It was a small compound, a concrete yard, with benches
round the walls under a narrow strip of roof. It was like a courtyard of the classical world reduced to pipes and corrugated
iron. There was something distantly classical, too, in the protracted nakedness, and something English, school-like and comfortless
in the concrete and tin and the pond-water smell. Nick crossed the open space, past the books and towels of one or two sunbathers,
and he saw it take account of them, someone greeted him, conversations stretched and lulled, and he felt the gaze of the little
crowd, like idle fingertips, run over him and come to rest, more tenderly and curiously, on Wani. Wani, in ice-blue mirror
shades, was a figure of novel beauty, and only Nick perhaps, sitting down and beckoning to him, saw the wariness in his half-smile.
"Mm, very primitive," Wani said, as if the place confirmed a suspicion he had about Nick.
Nick said, "I know," and grinned—it was just what he loved about it.
"Where do we put our things?"
"Just leave them here, they'll be fine."
But Wani flinched at this. He had the keys to the Mercedes in his jeans pocket, and his watch, as he had told Nick more than
once, cost a thousand pounds. "Yah, maybe I won't go in." And maybe Nick, who had never owned anything, was guilty of failing
to imagine the worries of a millionaire.
"Really, it'll be fine. Put your stuff in here," he said, offering him the Tesco carrier bag which had held his towel and
trunks.
"This watch cost a thousand pounds," said Wani.
"Perhaps don't tell everyone about it," Nick said.
There was an old man drying near them, squat and bandy and brown all over, and Nick remembered him from last year, an occupant
of the place, of the compound and the jetty and the pond, and more especially of the screened inner yard where on a hot day
men sunbathed naked, hip to hip. He was lined but handsome, and Nick felt that smoothed and uniformed, in vigilant half-profile,
his picture could well have accompanied the obituary of a general or air vice-marshal. He nodded amiably at him, as a leathery
embodiment of the spirit of the place, and the old man said, "George has gone, then. Steve's just told me, went last night."
"Oh," said Nick, "I'm sorry. No, I didn't know George," but assuming that by "gone" the old boy didn't mean gone on holiday.
It was George who needed the obituary.
"You knew George." He looked at Wani as well, who was undressing in a slow, abstracted way, with pauses for thought before
each sock, each button. "He was always here. He was only thirty-one."
"I've never been here before," Wani said, courteous but cold. The old man frowned back and nodded, accepting his mistake,
but perhaps thinking less of them for not knowing George.
After a pause Nick said, "How's the water?" and held his stomach in as he took his shirt off because he wanted the man to
admire him. But he didn't reply, and perhaps he hadn't heard the question.
Out on the jetty Nick strode ahead again, in his blue Speedos, and opened his arms to meet the embrace of the view, the green
and silver expanse of the pond, young willows and hawthorns all round it, and the Heath behind, glimpsed only as patches of
sunlit hillside. Nick was pleased with his own body, and he preened in pardonable ways, stretching and flicking his feet up
against his buttocks as he ran on the spot. Across the surface of the water moved the dotted heads of swimmers. There was
something sociable and inquisitive about them. Out in the middle of the pond was the old wooden raft, the site of endless
easy contacts, and the floating platform of some of Nick's steadiest fantasies. Half a dozen men were on it now, and soon
he would be with them. He turned round and grinned to encourage Wani, who was dawdling by the curved downward rail of the
ladder, and gazing at the distant heads of the swimmers as if wondering how they'd ever got there. It seemed swimming was
a rare omission from the list of things he did beautifully. There was a mild and interesting cruelty in bringing him here,
so far out of his element. "You've got to jump in," he said. "You'll find it torture going in slowly." He smiled at Wani's
tight black trunks, the smoothness and delicacy of his pale brown body, and the usual provocation of his penis, now held upright
over his balls like a bold exclamation mark. Then he jumped in himself, to show how easy it was, and felt the shock of the
cold water just below the thin warmth of the surface. He hung there, kicking back and nodding at Wani, who stood stooped like
a skier, but with one hand pinching his nose; and then flung himself into the pond. When he came up he was gasping and sploshing
about and for a second he had a look of undisguised fear. His black curls were half unwound by the water, and hung over his
eyes and ears. Nick bobbed beside him and felt his grip on his upper arm; he let his legs wander and slide consolingly between
Wani's, and with his free hand he swept his hair back, and that seemed to steady Wani, who swam off in a hasty, upright breaststroke,
as if nothing had happened.
For a few minutes they pushed along in a rough circle, following the white cords strung between floating rings which marked
the boundary of the swimming area. Beyond it, Nick supposed, the water must lie too shallowly over the deep soft mud. Wani
swam well enough, in fact, with head up and the facetious expression of someone forced to be a good sport; he stopped at one
of the rings and clung to it for a rest, with a heavy-breathing grin, and a shake of the head that seemed to say "I can do
this" as well as "I'll get you back for it." Nick pulled up the goggles that were bobbing loosely round his throat, and duck-dived.
Under the yellowish sparkle of the surface the water was muddy green, deepening into murky brown, a world of bottle-glass
colours. He twisted round, deciding what trick to play on Wani. Bubbles, dazzles from the rippling surface, stirred-up specks
of black leaves swung and fled around Wani's legs, which hung there, lazily chasseing, in a princely pretence that no underwater
attack was expected. And perhaps it was too childish, with Wani all at his mercy—instead of a grab or a tickle he shot up
bursting for breath and laughing in his face. He would have kissed him if a watchful old gent hadn't been cruising so very
close by them.
When they set off again, Nick raced ahead and came back, triumphing over Wani, decorating his steady course with curlicues,
and all the while looking out for who else was there. It was hard to tell from their sleeked heads in the water; but through
the smear of the goggles each figure waiting on the jetty or clambering onto the raft had the gleam of a new possibility.
Nick swam close to the raft once, and kicked round it on his back, while he and a couple who were standing on it wondered
if they knew each other.
After an almost complete turn of the pond Wani had done enough, and they trod water for a minute and talked while Nick glanced
to left and right with his naked eyes. He loved it here but he was disappointed, it was too early in the season perhaps, he
matched the calm of today and the chill of the water against the swarming heat wave Sundays of last year, the raft mad with
clutching and jumping, the toilets crowded and intent, the queens on the grass outside packed like a city in a dozen rivalrous
districts.
There were shouts and splashes from the raft, where a new group had converged. Nick felt the tug of curiosity and saw the
chance to show Wani off and to show off to him, which was a lovely double vanity. Wani shivered and Nick said, "You need to
keep moving," and kicked away towards the middle of the pond. A couple of dark men in black trunks were standing up, clumsily
repelling a big blond muscle-queen who was trying to climb onto the stiffly lurching deck. Two other men who were crouching
on the edge fell in, they half threw themselves in, like kids, and then scrambled back to join the assault. Thirty seconds
of struggle followed, which some took more seriously than others, or with more thought for how they looked. Nick followed
it all with smiling intensity, looking for his place in it.
Now there was a kind of truce, and everyone got back on board, so that when Nick cruised past he had a view of dangling legs,
pinched dicks at funny angles, streaked hair and glistening skin, a floating tableau of men against the sky. Sex made them
half conscious, half forgetful of the picture they made; they were sportsmen resting in stunned camaraderie, but some of them
wriggled and held hands and breathed lustfully in each other's faces. They kicked their feet in the water, indolent but purposeful.
One of them who was standing behind leant forward, out of the sky and the trees, and Nick reached him a hand and shot up and
hopped out streaming as two queens plumped apart to make room for him. He stood breathing and grinning in a loose but curious
embrace with the men in the middle. He had a sense of something fleeting and harmonic, longed for and repeated—it was the
circling trees, perhaps, and the silver water, the embrace of a solitary childhood, and the need to be pulled up into a waiting
circle of men.
"Don't I see you at Bang last week?" the man beside him said, who had put a steadying hand on Nick's shoulder and left it
there.
"I think not," said Nick, who in fact had never been there. But he carried some memory-print of this man, some unplaced excitement.
It took him a moment to realize that he used to see him at the Y, last year perhaps, in the showers there; and a moment more
to confirm that as Nick had grown slowly and unseriously heavier, the Spaniard, if that's what he was, black-haired and lean,
with large rosy nipples, had grown perceptibly thinner, into an eerily beautiful, etched-out version of himself. He leant
lighdy on Nick now, and seemed almost to shrug off this undeniable fact, or perhaps to challenge him to see it, but not himself
to allude to it in any way, unless by a lingering, fearful glance. Nick twisted casually away from him, and what came back
gleaming out of the blur of memory was his round bottom and the tiny black curls just showing when he bent over: an image
which also reminded him of Wani. He scanned the water blandly, and thought that perhaps he had gone in—just then the fun began
again, the Spaniard abruptly dive-bombed, everyone shouted, and the raft itself groaned and creaked. Nick hopped around, laughing
and shouting something himself into the unavoidable drench after drench as people jumped in. And there, in the wallow, was
Wani's face, almost tearful with concentration as he tried to avoid the reckless arms and legs of the other men and find a
moment to clamber out.
"Hello, darling!" said Nick, and went down on one knee to help him heave himself up. Wani didn't answer and didn't smile.
A few minutes later it was almost calm again. They were sitting there beside a man of fifty with thick grey chest hair and
a restlessly sociable manner. His much younger friend, a Malaysian perhaps, was swimming some way from the raft, cruising
other men outrageously, and doing clever duck-dives which made his trunks come off. "Oh, he gives me some trouble, that one,"
the man said. "Look at him." Wani smiled politely and turned to Nick; he wasn't used to meeting people like this, in the near-naked
free-for-all of a public place. "Don't get me wrong, though—it's all good fun." The man waved cheerfully as if the boy was
paying him even the faintest attention, and said, "He's devoted to me, you know. I don't know why, but he is."
"What's his name, then?" said a rough-voiced man, who was squatting behind them.
"He's called Andy."
"Andy, yeah?" said the man. "Here, Andy," he shouted, getting to his feet, "show us your arse!"
"He will!" said his old protector. "He will!"
The raft shook and on the other side of them a sleekly muscly man twisted up out of the water and landed with a promising
thump on the boards. Nick saw Wani glance across at him from under his long lashes, as if assessing a new kind of problem
or possibility; Nick himself had seen him here last year. He was balding and dark eyed, round faced, with a nice long nose
and the lazy but focused expression of a man who thinks of nothing but sex. Nick remembered his idling gaze, the huge dark
pupils that seemed to fill his eyes, and the curving weight of him in his black trunks. His stomach was a smooth curve outwards
as he sat, and it seemed his destiny to be fat, but for now the fat was held in easy balance with the muscle.
Wani was sitting with his knees drawn up, his hair swept back in shiny waves but bunching and tightening again as it dried.
He had got back some of his social poise, and with it an oblique deprecating manner, as though afraid he might be recognized
or fancied. The older man talked across him to Nick. "He's getting so particular," he said.
"Aha . . ." said Nick.
"KY not good enough any more, apparently. We have to have some other substance called Melisma. Then Melisma's not good enough,
apparently, either. We're moving on to Crest. But you have to be careful, don't you, with these awful rubber johnnies. I never
thought the day would come . . . What do you use?"
"Should keep him nice and clean, anyway," said the rough-voiced man, who was clearly taking quite an interest in Andy. "Crest's
a kind of toothpaste, mate," and shortly afterwards he dived in and swam powerfully in his direction.
"I'm Leslie, by the way," said the older man.
Wani turned his head and nodded. "Hi. Antoine."
"Now where would you be from, I wonder?"
"I'm Lebanese," said Wani, with a quick dry smile, in his driest English accent. Nick watched his aquiline profile and smiled
mischievously. He liked to see another man acknowledge Wani's glamour, it gave him a quick jealous shot of the passion he
had felt for him since Oxford, which was lust enlarged and diffused by mystery. Now he was looking down again, his extraordinary
eyelashes lowered. Nick remembered him sometimes, after a class, or after dinner on a rarer night when he was unclaimed by
his other worlds, coming back to the room of some poor student, with its shelf of paperbacks and a Dylan poster, and talking
a bit more about
Culture and
Anarchy
or
North and South,
swapping notes over Nescafe, and making a sweetly respectful attempt to show that he shared the concerns of these other boys,
and like visiting royalty was quite unconscious of their clumsiness and deference. Wani, who could really only bear fresh
coffee, with a little jug of hot milk on the side. Some of the snobbier people in college, like Polly Tompkins, mocked his
fanciness and said he was only the son of a grocer, an immigrant orange-and-lemon seller, "a Levantine cockney tart" was Polly's
phrase—he was a cute little Lebanese boy who'd been sent to Harrow and turned into a drawling English gentleman. Some of them
thought he must have been turned into a poof as well, on no stronger grounds than his tight trousers and his bewildering good
looks.