The Line of Beauty (30 page)

"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 darting, 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.

Wani's hands stroked and clutched at Nick's hair, tugged on it unpleasantly hard. "They're really going at it," he murmured.
"The little sluts . . . " Nick glanced up and saw him smiling, in his erotic trance, not at him directly but at the two of
them in the mirror; and also (Nick knew) staring through the mirror, and the wardrobe itself, into the room beyond, which
he had never seen and which was just as readily the motel bedroom of some seedy flick. "They're really going at it—the little
sluts"—Nick heard how he loved saying it again, whispering it, and grunted as Wani's little thrusts against his face fell
into the accelerating rhythm of the kids next door. He felt awkward, pulled in to service a fantasy he couldn't quite share—he
tried again, he'd jerked off a few times about Jasper already, but Catherine was his sister, and on lithium, and, well . .
. a girl. He heard her voice now, quick staccato wails . . . and Wani's breathing, slipping away from him just at the moment
he had him. And then another idea came to him, a second resort, a silent, comical revenge on Wani while he brought him off—it
was Ronnie he'd invited in, to solace him for his woman trouble, to give him ten minutes of real care, man to man. It took
a little adjustment, of course, a little further twist on make-believe, since the Ronnie he'd imagined was twice the size
of Wani—at least. But as Wani pulled out and Nick squeezed his eyes tight shut, it could almost have been Ronnie in front
of him, instead of the man he loved.

Downstairs, a little later, in the drawing room, the coda of the party was unwinding, and Gerald opening new bottles of champagne
as though he made no distinction between the boring drunks who "sat," and the knowing few of the inner circle, gathered round
the empty marble fireplace. The Timmses were there, and Barry Groom, with their different fanatical ways of talking, their
shades of zeal and exasperation—all alien to Nick more than ever in the lull after drugs and sex. He saw that Polly Tompkins
was sitting with them, as if among equals, and already impatient for something superior. Gerald, it was clear, hadn't yet
got round to the new paper on Third World debt. "Have a look at it," said Polly, and nodded at him like a genial don. The
strange thing was that it was also Gerald's nod, just as his white collar was Gerald's collar. The mimicry was artful, slightly
amorous, and since the love was hopeless, slightly mocking too. Really everything nice about Polly was a calculation.

Morgan, the woman Polly had brought, came to join Gerald's group, where they were going back over the scandal of Oxford refusing
the PM an honorary degree. John Timms, with his intense belief in form, regarded the incident as an outrage, but Barry Groom,
who hadn't bothered with Oxford, said, "Fuck 'em's what I say," in a sharp frank tone that made Morgan blush and then weigh
in like a man herself. The only touching thing about her was her evident uncertainty as to when or why anything was funny.
"They seem to think the lady's not for learning," Gerald said. She looked bewilderedfy at their laughing faces.

From the balcony, in the late July evening, the gardens receded in depth beyond depth of green, like some mysterious Hodgkin,
to a point where a faintly luminous couple reclined on the grass. The astonishing greenness of London in summer. The great
pale height of the after-dusk sky, birds cheeping and falling silent, an invincible solitude stretching out from the past
like the slowly darkening east. The darkness climbed the sky, and the colours surrendered, the green became a dozen greys
and blacks, the distant couple faded and disappeared.

"Hallo there . . . !"

"Oh hi, Jasper."

"How are you, then, darling?"—almost tweaking him in the ribs.

"Very well. How are you?"

"Ooh, not bad. A bit tired . . ."