The Line of Beauty

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.

'So what do you do?' said Leslie.

'I've got my own film-production company,' Wani said.

'Oh…' said Leslie, crushed and intrigued at once. And then, in a rather roundabout response, 'Did you see A Room with a View? I wonder what you thought of that, if you're in the film world.'

'I didn't, I'm afraid,' said Wani, with another tiny but chilling smile.

'Didn't I see you in the Volunteer last week?' Leslie said after a bit-at which Wani looked quite blank, but the question was aimed at the dark-eyed man, who all this time had been lying back on his elbow, with one knee raised and his tackle slumped unignorably towards them. It was difficult to tell if his vague smile was a reaction to their conversation, or even if he was looking at them. His eyes seemed to work on some scene of imminent gratification, unfolding on a screen that hung between himself and the afternoon. There was something confidently patient about him, no lecherous effort or rush. But when he was spoken to it was as if they'd already been talking, and there was an understanding between them. Nick gazed at him, feeling he allowed and absorbed gazes, and at the glinting water beyond, with a twinge of sadness that when they stopped talking they would have to leave the little sun-struck oblong of the raft and swim back to the solid world. Wani was looking at the man again too, but also at the waiting ladder of the jetty, with the flicker of someone calculating his escape.

When they were getting dried and dressed in the compound Wani nodded and said, 'There's our friend Ricky again.' Nick looked over his shoulder and saw the sexy man emerging round the fence of the nudist yard and pulling carelessly at the draw-string of his trunks.

'Oh, yes. I didn't know he was called Pdcky,' Nick said.

'Well, he looks like a Ricky,' said Wani, while getting out of his trunks sitting down and wrapped in a towel.

'Have you got an erection or something?' said Nick.

'Don't be puerile,' Wani said. He gave Nick a look that was part challenge and part broody supplication. 'Why don't you ask him if he'd like to come home with us?'

'What, 'Ricky'?'

'Isn't that what goes on at this sort of place? I didn't imagine we'd come here for the exercise.'

Nick sniggered. 'You don't have to go mad,' he said, 'the first time I take you out.'

Wani coloured a little but he held his gaze. 'It could be a lot of fun,' he said. 'I should have thought. He's very common.'

Nick glanced round again at Ricky, who was loitering amiably by the path to the toilets, and loitered too of course in his memory, as unexplored potential. At the same time he felt a little clutch of warning. Wani didn't know what he might be getting them into, and nor did Nick. When he looked back Wani was standing up in his underpants and tugging on his jeans. 'I'm sure it could be,' Nick said drily. At which Wani, with a twitch of his eyebrows and a sour compression of his lips, seemed to shrug the thing off. He took his watch from his pocket and put it on.

'If you don't ask him soon,' he said, 'we won't have time. I'm sorry, I thought you liked him.'

'Yes, he's hot,' said Nick, and found he was describing himself, in his unexpected anxiety. He hated to see Wani's beautiful mouth curl like that, and to feel his disdain, so amusing and exciting when applied to others, fall on him. He wanted only love, and today perhaps a kind of obedience, from Wani, who knew that the local tactics of argument and persuasion confused and upset him. 'All right, I'll go and get him,' he said, pretending that for him as well to ask was naturally to get, and knowing that he could never allow Wani to ask him himself.

'I mean I know he's not one of your nig-nogs.'

'Oh, fuck off,' Nick said, and marched away, in his jeans, but still shirtless, towards the toilet. He felt the disadvantage of the clothed among the naked; and the floor of the lavatory, when he entered it, was unpleasantly wet under his bare feet.

The door of one of the two cubicles was shut, and at the raised tin trough of the urinal the man was standing, his big sleek back and arse to the room, but turning his head, in his odd expressionless way, to see who had come in. And that look, and the smell of the place, piss and disinfectant, the atmosphere of permission, the rules all changed by keen but furtive consent, gripped Nick and melted him. He went over and stood beside the man and a few seconds later the spray from the excited fizz of the flush was coldly tickling the tips of their two erections. Nick slid his foreskin slowly backwards and forwards and gazed at the other man's blunt-headed shaft. Then he looked into his eyes, and it was like when they had chatted on the raft, totally expected, the reason they were here, as commonplace as it was deep. He seemed to swim in that dark gaze, with little flickers of conjecture. The man tilted his head towards the open cubicle, so that Nick wondered if he could do that, quickly or partially, before 'getting' him, or trying to get him, to come home with them, but there was the snap of the bolt, the other door opened halfway and little Andy, the Malaysian handful, slipped out, and crossed the room to wash his hands. In the mirror Nick saw the mischief in his eyes fade into blankness. Then as if by magic the flush sounded, the door opened wide, and a grey-haired man, who was not his friend Leslie and not his rough-voiced admirer either, emerged and made off with a preoccupied look.

Now they were alone, and Nick felt there was something almost romantic in their patience, and in the man's delayed grab at his penis, and his own half embrace of the man's waist, his hand between his buttocks. The man was breathing in his face and Nick muttered, 'Wait… wait… what's your name?'

'Ricky,' said the man, and tried to kiss him again.

Nick giggled as he pulled back his head. 'I just wondered if you wanted to come home with me and my friend? You know, have a bit of fun…'

' Well… ' Ricky clearly thought it was a lot of bother when he had him here already. 'How far is it?'

'Only… Kensington!'

'Kensington? Fuck-I don't know, mate.' And he pressed against Nick with another impatient nod at the waiting lockup. Nick hugged him clumsily, and grunted at how much he would like to have him right here; but it would be a scandal with Wani waiting round the corner. He said,

'We've got a fantastic car.'

'Yeah?' said Ricky. 'Which is he, anyway, your friend? Sort of dark curly hair?' He gently pinched and twisted Nick's nipple, and Nick gasped as he said,

'You saw him…'

Ricky pondered and nodded and let Nick free himself. They took a moment to make themselves decent. 'He's a bit stuck-up, is he, that one? Butter wouldn't melt in his arse?'

'I wouldn't say that… He's a bit shy,' said Nick.

'We'll see about that, then,' said Pdcky.

As they went out Nick said, 'Can you do us a favour?'

'I bloody well hope so.'

Nick winced. 'Can you pretend you're married-or at least you've got a girlfriend…'

Ricky shrugged and shook his head. 'I have got a girlfriend.'

'Have you?' Nick stopped for a second with his chin tucked in, while Ricky stared at him and then winked.

'Quick on the uptake, aren't I?'

Nick tutted and blushed. 'I must say you're fucking quick,' he said, almost in Ricky's voice.

Outside on the path Wani hurried ahead with the preoccupied look of a famous person, while Nick and Ricky followed behind. Ricky clearly never hurried, he was his own lazy happening. He kept his eyes on the pretty back view of Wani, which made Nick proud and also apprehensive. He wondered just what they were going to do, and