The Line of Beauty

contribution. Quite a big contribution to the party.'

'Splendid!' said Dolly, and gave him a smile in which political zeal managed almost entirely to disguise some older instinct about Middle Eastern shopkeepers.

'I don't know if we might all have a little chat…?' said Gerald, raising the champagne bottle. 'And I think we might be needing this.' The suggestion obviously didn't include Nick, who as so often wasn't visible and certainly wasn't relevant, and who was left, when the other three went off, holding Bertrand's unfinished supper as well as his own.

He closed the door, locked the door, and reached out for Wani, who patted him and kissed him on the nose as he turned away.

'Where's the stuff?' said Wani.

Nick went over to the desk, unhappy but caught up too in the business of the coke, which if he was patient enough might make them both happy again. He got out the tin from the bottom drawer. Wani said, 'A tin is such an obvious place to hide it.'

'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.