The Line of Beauty

It's just frightfully bad luck.'

Nick felt a kind of relief that this sinister fiction was being maintained, and looked at ignorant little Jasper, who was nodding at it and not quite meeting his girlfriend's eye. Then he saw him wince in anticipation.

'Mum, for Christ's sake!' said Catherine. 'He had AIDS!'-with a phlegmy catch in her voice, which her anger fought with. 'He was gay… he liked anonymous sex… he liked…'

'Darling, you don't know that… ' said Rachel. It wasn't clear how much of the story she hoped to throw doubt over.

'Of course he did,' said Catherine, whose view of gay sex was both tragic and cartoonlike. She grinned incredulously down the table. Nick felt himself included in her scorn.

'Anyway…!' said Gerald, with a smile and a deep breath, as if the nasty moment had passed, lifting and tilting the bottle enquiringly towards his mother.

'Oh, it's pathetic!' shouted Catherine, with the rush and stare of someone hurtled along by a strong new mix of emotions. 'I mean surely the least we can do is tell the truth about him?'-and she smacked the table hard, but still somehow childishly and comically; there were one or two nervous smiles. She jumped her chair back over the flags and hurried indoors.

'Um… should I…?' said Jasper, and sniggered.

'No, no, I'll go,' said Rachel. 'In a minute or two.'

'Experience suggests to wait a bit,' said Gerald, as if explaining some other local custom to his guests.

'An emotional young lady,' said Maurice Tipper with a grin of displeasure.

'She's a very emotional young lady,' said Jasper, in a cowardly mixture of boasting and mockery.

'She's quite unbalanced,' Lady Partridge agreed confidentially.

Gerald hesitated, peering over his raised wine glass, but took his daughter's part. 'I think I'd say she's just very softhearted,' he said; which it seemed to Nick was just what she wasn't.

Rachel said, with a hint of frost, 'Does Sophie ever get upset?'

Sir Maurice seemed to think the question impertinent. His wife said, 'If she does, she doesn't let it show. Unless she's on stage, of course. Then she's all passion.' Nick thought of her performance in Lady Windermere's Fan, where all she had had to say was 'Yes, mamma.'

After dinner the four boys were in the drawing room, though Jasper fidgeted and soon went upstairs to skulk around Catherine's door. Wani was reading Sir Maurice's Financial Times, and Toby was sitting in the puzzlement of bereavement, tilting a glass of cognac from side to side, and trying occasional rephrasings of the same idea to Nick: 'God it's awful, poor old Pat, I can't believe it.'

Nick lowered the book he had just started, smiled to suggest the book itself was a bore. 'I know,' he said. 'Isn't it awful. I'm so sorry.' He thought of the two of them down by the pool after lunch, and the lustful tenderness he felt for Toby seemed to glow and fill the room. He was excited by Toby's grief, and the boyish need he seemed to feel for Nick's comfort, and for something wise Nick might say. Nick himself was impressed by Pat's death, and had a distantly acknowledged feeling of guilt, that he'd done nothing for Pat-though Pat, in another sense, had done nothing for him; Nick hadn't liked his brand of cagey camp, and had been snotty and even priggish with him: so that, more shamefully still, he felt subtly disembarrassed by the death, since it erased the memory of his own bad grace. 'I wonder how Terry's coping,' he said, to focus Toby's thoughts.

'Yah, poor guy. God it's awful, this bloody plague.'

'I know.'

'You'd bloody well better not get the fucking thing,' said Toby.

'I'll be all right,' said Nick. 'I've been taking very good care since-well, since we knew about it.' He glanced across at Wani, who was screened above the knees by the raised pink broadsheet with its headlines about record share prices, record house prices. From time to time he smacked the page flat. 'You don't have to worry about me,' Nick said.

Toby looked a bit shame-faced. 'I didn't know Pat, you know, slept around.'

'Well… ' said Nick. He knew very well, because Catherine was indiscreet, that Pat had liked very rough sex. 'Don't believe everything Catherine says. She lives in a world of her own hyperbole.'

'Yah, but she was pretty close to Pat, Nick-he took her out to dinner quite often. She stayed at Haslemere three or four times. If she says he liked anonymous sex-'

Nick saw that the Tippers had come in. They'd been up to their room and now they'd come down, tight-lipped and close together, as though they felt obliged to put in another half-hour. Maurice had clearly been very displeased by the scene at dinner, and a suspicion of deviancy seemed to hang for him now over the whole party. The boys all stood up, and Nick set his book, face down, on the arm of his chair. Sally Tipper peered at it, to deflect her discomfort on to a neutral object, and said, 'Ah, that's Maurice's book, I see.'

'Um… oh,' said Nick, sure of himself but confused as to her reasoning; it was a study of the poetry of John Berryman. 'I don't think…'

'Do you see that, darling?'

Maurice brought his gleaming lenses to bear on it. 'What? Oh yes,' he said. He went towards Wani, who was quickly refolding the FT.

'You're very welcome to read it,' Nick said, with a frank little laugh, 'but it's actually mine-it was sent on to me this morning. I'm reviewing it for the THES.'

'Oh I see, no, no,' said Sally, with a coldly tactful smile. 'No, Maurice owns Pegasus-I just noticed they publish it.'

'I didn't know that.'

'I've bought it,' said Sir Maurice. 'I've bought the whole group. It's in the paper.' And he sat down and glared at the vase of thistles and dried honesty in the grate.

'I'm just going up to see if my sis is OK,' said Toby, as though all this had decided him.

Nick didn't feel he could go out after him. He sat down again, opposite Sally, but not quite in relation with her, like guests in a hotel lounge. He said, 'I'm afraid this news has rather spoilt the evening.'

'Yes,' said Sally, 'it's most unfortunate.'

'Awful losing an old friend,' said Nick.

'Mm,' said Sally, with a twitch, as if to say her meaning had been twisted. 'So you knew him too, did you, the man?'

'Pat-yes, a bit,' said Nick. 'He was a great charmer.' He smiled and the word seemed to linger and insist, like a piece of code.

Sally said, 'As I say, we never saw him.' She took up a copy of Country Life, and sat staring at the estate agents' advertisements. Her expression was tough, as if she was arguing the prices down; but also self-conscious, so that it seemed just possible she wanted to talk about what had happened. She looked up, and said with a great twitch, 'I mean, they must have seen it coming.'

'Oh…' said Nick, 'I see. I don't know. Perhaps. One always hopes that it won't be the case. And even if you know it's going to happen, it doesn't make it any less awful when it does.' It had become unclear to him whether she knew that he was gay; he'd always assumed it was the cause for her coldness, her way of not paying attention to him, but now he'd started to suspect she was blind to it. He felt the large subject massing, with its logic and momentum. There would be the social strain of coming out to such people in such a place, and the wider matter of AIDS concerning them all, more or less. He said, 'I think I heard you say your mother had a long final illness.'

'That was utterly different,' Sir Maurice put in curtly.

'It was a blessed relief,' said Sally, 'when she finally went.'

'She hadn't brought it on herself,' said Sir Maurice.

'No, that's true,' Sally sighed. 'I mean, they're going to have to learn, aren't they, the… homosexuals.'

'It's a hard way to have to learn,' said Nick, 'but yes, we are learning to be safe.'

Sally Tipper stared at him. 'Right… ' she said.

Sir Maurice seemed not to notice this, but in her there was a little spectacle of ingestion. Nick tried to put it in her language, but couldn't think what the term would be. 'You know, there are very simple things that need to be done. For instance, people have got to use protection… you know, when they're… when they're humping.'

'I see,' said Sally, with another shake of the head. He wasn't sure she followed. Were such cheerful