The Line of Beauty

Nick shrugged and snuffled. 'Heavens,' he said. He had just spent five pounds on a taxi, he was doing all sorts of incautious things, and would have loved not to pay.

'Well, thank you!' Rachel took the money, and stood folding it appreciatively, not sure where to put it. Then Gerald and Badger Brogan came in from tennis-there was the flat chime of their feet on the iron stair from the garden, and then they were in the kitchen like two big hot boys. Just for a second Gerald noted the transaction that was taking place. The next second he said, 'Thrashed him!' and threw down his racquet on the bench.

'God, Fedden, you're a liar,' said Badger. 'It was 6-4, Rache, in the third set.'

Gerald shook his head in the savour of triumph. 'I let him have it hot.'

'I'm sure you were very well matched,' said Rachel prudently.

This wasn't quite acceptable to either player. 'I chose not to question some frankly fantastic line calls,' said Badger. He roamed round by the table, picking up a spoon and putting it down, and then a garlic press, without noticing. Nick smiled as if amused by the drama of their game, though in fact he felt challenged by Badger's free and easy way here, by the mood of competition he stirred up in Gerald, and perhaps by its counterpart, his longer and deeper claim on Gerald's affection. 'Hello, Nick!' said Badger, in his probing, sarcastic tone.

'Hello, Badger,' said Nick, still self-conscious at teasing a virtual stranger about the yellow-grey stripe in his dark hair, at having to enrol in the family cult of Badger as a character, but finding it easier after all than the sober, the critical, the almost hostile-sounding 'Derek.'

Badger in turn was clearly puzzled by Nick's presence in his old friend's house and made facetious attempts at understanding him. It was a part of his general mischief-he lurched about all day, asked leading questions, rubbed up old scandals and scratched beadily for new ones. He said, 'So what have you been up to today, Nick?'

'Oh, just the usual,' said Nick. 'You know, morning in the library, waiting for books to come up from the stacks; bibliography class in the afternoon, 'How to describe textual variants.' ' He made himself as dull as he could for Badger, like a brown old binding, though to his own eye 'textual variants' glinted with hints at what he'd actually done, which was to cut the class and have two hours of sex with Leo on Hampstead Heath. That would have been more scandal than Badger could manage. On the first night of his stay he had described an Oxford friend of theirs as the most ghastly shirtlifter.

'LBW, Badge?' said Gerald.

'Thanks, Banger,' said Badger, using an interesting old nickname that Nick couldn't see himself making free with, and which Gerald was wise enough not to object to. The two men stood there, in their tennis whites, drinking their tall glasses of lemon barley water, gasping and grinning between swigs. Gerald's legs were still brown, and his confusingly firm buttocks were set off by his tight Fred Perry shorts. Badger was leaner and seedier, and his Aertex shirt was sweatier and pulled askew by being used to mop his face. He was wearing scruffy old plimsolls, whereas Gerald seemed to bounce or levitate slightly in the new thick-soled 'trainers.'

Elena hurried in from the pantry with the joint, or limb, of venison, plastered up in a blood-stained paste of flour and water. The whole business of the deer, culled at Hawkeswood each September and sent to hang for a fortnight in the Feddens' utility room, was an ordeal for Elena, and an easy triumph for Gerald, who always fixed a series of dinner parties to advertise it and eat it. Elena set the heavy dish on the table just as Catherine came down from her room, with her hands held up like blinkers to avoid the sight. 'Mm-look at that, Cat!' said Badger.

'Fortunately I won't even have to look at you eating it,' said Catherine; though she did quickly peer at it with a kind of relish of revulsion.

'Are you going out, then, old Puss?' said Gerald, his eagerness damped at once by a wounded frown.

'You'll have a drink with us, darling?' said Rachel.

'I might do if there's time,' said Catherine. 'Is it all MPs?'

'No,' said Gerald. 'Your grandmother's not an MP.'

'Thank Christ, actually,' said Catherine.

'And nor is Morden Lipscomb an MP.'

'There are two MPs coming,' said Rachel, and it wasn't clear if she thought this rather few or quite enough.

'Yup, Timms and Groom!' said Gerald, as if they were the joiliest company imaginable.

'The man who never says 'hello'!'

'You're too absurd,' said Gerald. 'I'm sure I have heard him say it…'

'If Morden Lipscomb's coming I'm going to keep my coat on, he makes my blood run cold.'

'Morden's an important man,' said Gerald. 'He has the ear of the President.'

'Will Nick be making up numbers, I suppose,' said Catherine.

Nick fluttered his eyelashes and Gerald said, 'Nick doesn't make up numbers, child, he's part of the… part of the household.'

Catherine looked at Nick, slightly mockingly, across the space that separates good and bad children. She said, 'He's the perfect little courtier, isn't he?'

'Oh, Elena,' said Rachel, 'Catherine's not dining, we'll be one fewer for dinner-yes, one less.' Elena went into the dining room to adjust the placings, and came back a moment later with an objection.

'Miz Fed, you know is thirteen.'

'Ah… ' said Rachel, and then gave an apologetic shrug.

'Yes, well I don't think any of us are triskaidekaphobes here, are we?' said Gerald. They were all very up on the names of phobias, since at various times Catherine had suffered from aichmo, dromo, keno, and nyctophobia, among a number of more commonplace ones-it was a bit of a game with them, but it cut no ice with Elena, who stood there biting her lip.

'You see, you'll have to stay,' said Badger, reaching out clumsily to hold Catherine. 'How can you resist that beautiful venison?'

'Hmm,' said Catherine. 'It looks like something out of a field hospital.' And she shot a tiny forbidding glance at Nick, who saw that it was probably the aichmophobia, the horror of sharp objects, that made the serving and carving of a haunch of venison impossible for her. The family knew about her trouble in the past, but had happily forgotten it when it seemed not to recur. It was only Nick who knew about the recent challenge of the carving knives. He said,

'I don't mind dropping out too if I'm going to spoil the seating.' He enjoyed the well-oiled pomp of the dinners here, but he knew he was too much in love to do more than smile in the candlelight and dream of Leo. He would be quiet and inattentive. And already he felt a tingle in the air, the more-than-reality of the memory of being with his boyfriend.

'No, no,' murmured Rachel, with an impatient twitch of the head.

'Elena, we'll risk it!' Gerald pronounced. 'Si… va bene… Nick, you'll just have to be the odd man… um…' Elena went back into the dining room with that look of unhappy subjection that no one but Nick ever noticed or worried about. 'We're not living in twelfth-century Calabria,' said Gerald, as the phone started ringing and he plucked it from the wall and grunted, 'Fedden,' in his new no-nonsense style. 'Yes… Hello… What?… Yes, yes he is… Yes, all right… Mm, and to you,' then holding the receiver out towards Nick: 'It's Leo.' Nick coloured as though his thoughts of a few moments before had been audible to all of them; the kitchen had accidentally fallen silent and Gerald gave him a look which Nick felt was stern and disappointed, but perhaps was merely abstracted, the frown of a broken train of thought.

Catherine said, 'If it's Leo, they'll be hours.' And Rachel nodded sympathetically and said, 'Yes, why don't you take it in the study.' Gerald looked at him again as if to say that the brute reality of gay life, of actual phone calls between shirtlifters, was rather more than he had ever imagined being asked to deal with; but then nodded and said genially, 'By all means, it's the red phone.'

'Ah, hotline,' said Badger, whose scandal-sensors were warming to something awkward in the air. Though as Nick went down the hall what struck him was that Rachel knew what was going on, and was protecting him. Gerald never really noticed anything about other people, they were moving parts in a social process, they agreed with him or they thwarted him, his famous hospitality disguised an odd lack of particular, personal skills-all this came clear to Nick in a liberating rush as he pushed open the study door. After which it was beautifully surreal to stand and talk in sexy murmurs beside his desk, to hear Leo's voice in the one room in the house which expressed Gerald's own taste, which was a vacuum of taste, green leather armchairs, upholstered fender, brass lamps, the stage set for his own kind of male conspiracy.