The Line of Beauty

drawing room. They seemed to bring along their own complacent atmosphere, the mood of their life together in the Chelsea flat, and of some larger future when they might curl up a leg on the sofa or stand with an elbow on the mantelpiece in a room as enormous as this. Toby played the lightly chivvied 'husband' very sweetly, and Sophie claimed him in the childish ways of someone experimenting with her power, with little exasperations and innuendos. She did a performance about how Toby ground his teeth in his sleep. Nick tittered warily at this glimpse of the bedroom, but found her lack of subtlety oddly reassuring. She'd got Toby, snoring and twitching, but the romantic reach of Nick's feelings for him, the web of sacrifice and nonsense and scented Oxford nights, survived untouched. Toby was very sweet to Nick too. He left his position by the fireplace and came and sprawled on the rug by his chair, so that Nick could have reached out and stroked the back of his neck. For a moment Sophie looked disconcerted, but then she took possession of that situation as well. 'Ah-you two should see more of each other,' she said. 'It's good to see you together.' A minute later, looking vaguely self-conscious, Toby got up and pretended to search for a book.

'And what about your lovely friend…?' Sophie wanted to know.

'Oh… Leo, do you mean?'

'Leo,' said Sophie.

'Oh, he's-lovely!' Here was the subject again-Nick just hadn't got used to it yet, to the idea of anything so secret, so steeped in his own fears and fantasies, being cheerfully enquired after by other people. Toby too looked round from the bookcase with his encouraging grin.

'Such a… lovely man,' said Sophie, whose conversation tended not to develop, but to settle, snugly or naggingly, in one place.

Nick was glad of the praise, and mistrusted it at the same time. 'Well, he loved meeting you,' he said.

'Aah…' Sophie purred, as if to say that people usually did enjoy that. 'He's a great fan of your work, Pips,' said Toby.

'I know,' said Sophie, and sat looking down modestly. Her dark-blonde hair, worn long at Oxford, had been cut and backcombed, Diana-style, and quivered when she shook her head. She was wearing a red strapless number that didn't really suit her.

'You know she's got a part in a play,' said Toby.

'Oh, shoosh… ' said Sophie.

'No, we've all got to go and see her. Nick-come to the first night, we'll go together.'

'Absolutely,' said Nick. 'What are you doing?'

Sophie quivered and said, 'Well, you might as well know,' as if being hurried into announcing a different kind of engagement. 'I'm doing Lady Windermere… '

'Fantastic. I think you'll be very good at that.' It was a surprisingly big part, but Nick could see her as the self- righteous young wife clipping rose stems in her Westminster drawing room; and delivering those awful soliloquies she has-

'I don't know what it will be like. It's one of these very way-out directors. He's… he's gay, actually, too. He says it's going to be a deconstructionist reading of the play. That doesn't worry me, of course, because I've done deconstruction; but Mummy and Daddy may not like it.'

'You can't go worrying about what your parents will think,' said Nick.

'That's right,' said Toby. 'Anyway, your ma's very with-it. She's always going to way-out concerts and things.'

'No, she'll be fine.'

Toby chuckled. 'Of course your father's most famous remark is that he wished Shakespeare had never been born.'

'I don't know that that's his most famous remark,' said Sophie, with a hint of pique. In fact if Maurice Tipper had made a famous remark at all it would probably have been something about profit margins and good returns for shareholders. 'He only said it after getting bitten to death by mosquitoes watching Pericles in Worcester College gardens.'

'Ah… ' murmured Nick, whose own memory was of Toby's bashful swagger as a Lord of Tyre, when Sophie had been the Marina.

'You're too horrid about my poor papa,' said Sophie in a highly affected way, as if in her mind she was already on stage.

Catherine came in, dressed for her night out in a tiny spangled frock, over which she was wearing an unbuttoned light-grey raincoat. She wore high-heeled black shoes and stockings with a whitish sheen to them.

'Goodness!' said Toby.

'Hello, darling,' said Catherine confidentially to Sophie, stooping to give her a kiss. Sophie clearly found Catherine the most challenging aspect of an affair with Toby, and Catherine knew this, and treated her with the kind of clucking condescension that Sophie would otherwise have lavished on her. 'Love your clever frock,' she said.

'Oh… thank you,' said Sophie, smiling and blinking.

'Are you going out, then, sis?' said Toby.

Catherine headed towards the drinks table. 'I'm going out tonight,' she said. 'Russell's taking me to an opening in Stoke Newington.'

'And where might that be?' said Toby.

'It's a well-known area of London,' Catherine said. 'It's very fashionable, isn't it, Soph?'

'Yes, of course-darling, you've heard of it,' said Sophie.

'I was joking,' said Toby; and Nick thought it was true, you never expected him to; and when he did you couldn't always be sure that he had. And then the idea of a party, not this one, but a noisy party with cans of beer and trails of pot smoke, through which he moved with his lover, as his lover, came over him like a pang and he envied Catherine. It was an image of an Oxford party, but blended with something known only from television, a house full of black people.

Toby said, 'I'm just going upstairs to see if I can find those trousers. Are you going to Nat's bash, Nick?'

'What is it?' said Nick, with another dimmer pang at the thought of another kind of party, a posh white hetero one, at which his presence was not thought necessary.

'Oh, he's having this Seventies party…' said Toby hopelessly.

'No, I'm not invited,' said Nick, with a superior smile, thinking of the loving closeness he had felt with Nat at Hawkeswood, when they were both stoned and sitting on the floor. 'Is it in London?'

'That's the thing. It's up at the blasted castle,' said Toby.

'Yes… It's absurdly soon, isn't it, for a Seventies party?' said Nick. 'I mean, the Seventies were so ghastly, why would anyone want to go back to them?' He'd been longing for a chance to see the castle-a marcher fortress with Wyatt interiors.

'Well, public schoolboys love reliving their puberty, don't they Soph,' said Catherine, coming back with a very tall drink.

'I know,' said Sophie crossly.

'Some of them spend their whole lives doing it,' Catherine said. She stood in front of the fireplace, with a hand on her hip, and seemed already to be moving to the music of a future very remote from any such nonsense.

Toby shrugged apologetically and said, 'I just hope I've still got those disco pants!'

Nick almost said, 'Oh… the purple ones…?'-since he knew just where they were, having been through everything in Toby's room, read his schoolboy diary, sniffed the gauzy lining of his outgrown swimming trunks, and even tried on the flared purple trousers (standing foolishly on the long legs). But he merely nodded, and knocked back the rest of his g-and-t.

Gerald came down in a dark suit with characteristic pink shirt, white collar, and blue tie. He seemed to recognize, with a forgiving smile, that he had set a sartorial standard the others were unlikely to match. He kept on smiling as he crossed the room, as a sign of his decision that he would not react to Catherine's appearance. The mac worn over the micro-frock made her look almost naked. When Badger came in he was less circumspect. 'My god, girl!' he said.

'No, your god-daughter actually, Uncle Badger,' said Catherine, with the forced pertness of a much younger child.