The Line of Beauty

Claire looked round in pursuit of her new idea. 'You're Jewish, aren't you, Nat?'

'I am, darling,' said Nat, 'or half Jewish, anyway.'

'And the other half's a bloody Welshman,' said Roddy. He turned his head on her knee and squinted up at her. 'God, you're drunk,' he said.

This was the kind of insult that passed for wit at the Martyrs' Club, and was in fact one of the things most often said there. Toby had once taken Nick to the club's poky panelled dining room, where Christ Church toffs and Union hacks conformed deafeningly to type and boozed and plotted and howled unacceptable remarks at each other and at the harried staff. It was another world, defiantly impervious, in which it was a shock to find that Toby had a place.

'You are so fucking drunk, Shepton,' Toby said. He had pulled off his socks and rolled them into a ball and he threw them very hard and accurately at the fat peer's head.

'Fucking Christ, Fedden,' Roddy muttered, but left it at that.

Nick was explaining about the sea in Conrad's novels being a metaphor for both escape from the self and discovery of the self-a point which took on more and more revelatory force as he repeated it. He laughed at the beauty of it. He wasn't a strong smoker, and a second frowning toke, taken in the belief that the first one had had no effect, could leave him swimming and gabbling for hours. Nat Hanmer was sitting on the floor beside him, and his warm thigh was pressed against his own. There was something charmingly faggy about Nat tonight. He nodded and smiled into Nick's eyes as he was talking. Nick thought the pressure of the dope on his temples was as if his skull was being gently squeezed by Nat's big hands. Sam Zeman was nodding and smiling too and corrected, as if it really didn't matter, a plot detail in Victory that Nick had got wrong. Nick loved Sam because he was an economist but he'd read everything and played the viola and took a flattering interest in people less sublimely omniscient than himself.

He wanted to lie back and listen and perhaps have a long deep snog with Nat Hanmer, whose lips were not so full and soft as Leo's, but who was (Nick hadn't seen it before) almost beautiful, as well of course as being a marquess. The two of them in their shirtsleeves. Nat said he was having a go at writing a novel himself. He'd bought a computer, which he said was 'a really sexy machine.' In the warm explanatory light of the pot Nick saw what he meant. 'I'd love to read it,' he said. Across the room Gareth had switched wars and was describing the Battle of Jutland to a paralysed circle of young women. His big velvet bow tie was all donnish conceit. He was going to go on like this for forty-five years.

Nick heard himself saying how he missed his boyfriend, and then his heart speeded up. Sam smiled-he was purely and maturely straight, but he was cool with everything. Nat said broad-mindedly, 'Oh, you've got a… you've got a bloke?' and Nick said, 'Yeah… ' and already he'd told them all about answering the advertisement, and their meeting and having sex in the garden and the funny episode with Geoffrey from two doors down. And how they were now going out together on a regular basis. Pot was a kind of truth drug for him-with a twist. He had an urge to tell, and show himself to them as a functioning sexual being, but as he did so he seemed to hear how odd and unseen his life was, and added easy touches to it, that made it more shapely and normal.

'I didn't know about all this,' said Toby, who was going round in his bare feet with a bottle of brandy. He was grinning, slightly scandalized, even hurt perhaps that Nick hadn't told him he was having an affair.

'Oh, yes…' said Nick, 'sorry… He's this really attractive black guy, called Leo.'

'You should have brought him tonight,' Toby said. 'Why didn't you say?

'I know,' said Nick; but he could only imagine Leo here in his falling-down jeans and his sister's shirt, and the jarring of his irony against the loaded assumptions of the Oxford lot.

'May one ask why?' said Lord Shepton, who had lately been snoring but had now been tickled awake and had a blearily vengeful look. Nobody knew what he was talking about. 'We've already got bloody… Woggoo here,' and he struggled upright, with a grimace of pretended guilt, to see if Charlie Mwegu, the Worcester loose-head prop and the only black person at the party, was in the room. 'I mean, fucking hell,' he said. Shepton was a licensed buffoon, an indulged self-parody, and Nick merely raised his eyebrows and sighed; for a moment the old dreariness and wariness surfaced again through the newer romance of the pot.

Claire was looking tenderly at Nick, and said, 'I think black men can be so attractive… they have sweet little ears, don't they… sometimes… I don't know… It must be nice -'

'Calm down, Claire!' barked Roddy Shepton, as if his very worst fears had been confirmed. He struggled towards his glass on the floor.

'No, I'm quite jealous actually,' said Claire, and gave Lord Shepton a playful poke in the stomach.

'Oh, you cow!' said Lord Shepton; his attention refocusing, slowly but greedily, on Wani Ouradi, who had just come into the room. 'Ah, Ouradi, there you are. I hope you're going to give me some of that white powder, you bloody Arab.'

'Oh, really!' said Claire, appealing hopelessly to the others.

But Wani ignored Shepton and stepped through the group towards the bed and Toby. He had changed into a green velvet smoking jacket. Nick had a moment of selfless but intensely curious immersion in his beauty. The forceful chin with its slight saving roundness, the deep-set eyes with their confounding softness, the cheekbones and the long nose, the little ears and springy curls, the cruel charming curve of his lips, made everything else in the house seem stale, over-artful, or beside the point. Nick longed to abandon handsome Nat and climb back on to the King's bed. He rolled his eyes in apology for Shepton, but Wani gave no answering sign of special recognition. And the group soon started talking about something else. Wani lay back on his elbow beside Toby for a minute, and took in the room through the filters of his lashes. Toby had picked up one of the girls' pink chiffon scarves, and was winding it into a turban with drunk perseverance. Wani said nothing about the turban, as if they were almost too familiar with each other to comment, as if they were figures of some other time and culture. Nick heard him say, 'Si tu veux… ' before getting up and going into the bathroom. Toby sat a while longer, laughing artificially at the conversation, and then went off with a yawn and a stumble after him. Nick sat sunk in himself, jealous of both of them, shocked almost to the point of panic by what they were doing. When they came back, he watched them like a child curious for evidence of its parents' vices. He could see their tiny effort to muffle their excitement, the little mock solemnity that made them seem oddly less happy and smashed than the rest of the party. They had a gleam of secret knowledge about them.

A joint came round again, and Nick took a serious pull on it. Then he got up and went to the open window, to look out at the damp still night. The great beeches beyond the lawn showed in grey silhouette against the first vague paling of the sky. It was a beautiful effect, so much bigger than the party: the world turning, the bright practical phrases of the first birds. Though there were hours still, surely, before sunrise… He stiffened, grabbed at his wrist, and held his watch steady in front of him. It was 4.07. He turned and looked at the others in the room, in their stupor and animation, and his main heavy thought was just how little any of them cared-they could never begin to imagine a date with a waiter, or the disaster of missing one. He made the first steps towards the door, and slowed and stopped as the pot took his sense of direction away. Where, after all, was he going? Everything seemed to have petered into a silence, as if by agreement. Nick felt conspicuous standing there, smiling cautiously, like someone not on to a joke; but when he looked at the others they seemed equally stilled and bemused. It must be some amazingly strong stuff Nick thought his way towards moving his left leg forward, he could coax his thought down through the knee to the foot, but it died there with no chance of becoming an action. It was slightly trying if he had to stand here for a long time. He looked more boldly round at the others, not easy to name at the moment, some of them. Slow blinks, little twitches of smiles. 'Yah… ' said Nat Hanmer, very measuredly, nodding his head, agreeing with some statement that only he had heard. 'I suppose… ' said Nick, but stopped and looked around, because that was part of a conversation about Gerald and the BBC. No one had noticed, though. 'But you're thinking, wasn't that Bismarck's whole point?' Gareth said.

Nick wasn't sure how it started. Sam Zeman was laughing so much he lay back on the floor, but then choked and had to sit up. One of the girls pointed at him mockingly, but it wasn't mockery, she was laughing uncontrollably herself. Nat was red in the face, pinching the tears out of his eyes and pulling down the corners of his mouth to try to stop it. Nick could only stop giggling by glaring at the floor, and as soon as he looked up he was giggling again convulsively, it was like hiccups, it was hiccups, all mixed up together with the whooping, inexplicable funniness of the brandy bottle, the Renoir lady, the gilded plaster crown above the bed, all of them with their ideas and bow ties and plans and objections.