The Line of Beauty

squiggles of hair. 'There! No, I must sign it'-and she scrawled 'Wonnie by Cath' underneath. Nick saw how accurate it was, and said, 'He doesn't look like that at all.'

'Hmm?' said Catherine teasingly, feeling she'd made a point but not knowing where it had got her.

'All I can say is, when he comes into the room-like when he got back late for lunch the other day, when we'd been gossiping about him, and I was playing along with you, sort of agreeing, actually-when he came in, I just thought, yes, I'm in the right place, this is enough.'

Catherine said, 'I think that's awfully dangerous, Nick. Actually I think it's mad.'

'Well, you're an artist,' said Nick, 'surely?' Whenever he'd imagined telling someone this, the story, the idea, had met with a thrilled concurrence and a sense of revelation. He had never expected to be contested on every point of his own beliefs. He said, 'Well, I'm sorry, that's how I am, you should know that by now.'

'You'd fall in love with someone just because they were beautiful, as you call it.'

'Not anyone, obviously. That would be mad.' He resented her way, now she'd gained access to his fantasy, of belittling the view. It was like her attitude to the room they were sitting in. 'It's not something we can argue about, it's a fact of life.'

Catherine cast her mind back helpfully. 'I mean, no one could have called Denton beautiful, could they?'

'Denny had a beautiful bottom,' Nick said primly. 'That was what mattered at the time. I wasn't in love with him.'

'And what about little thing? Leo? He wasn't beautiful exactly, I wouldn't have thought. You were crazy about him.' She looked at him interestedly to see if she'd gone too far.

Nick said solemnly but feebly, 'Well, he was beautiful to me.'

'Exactly!' said Catherine. 'People are lovely because we love them, not the other way round.'

'Hmm.'

'Did you hear anything more from him, by the way?'

'No, not since spring of last year,' said Nick, and got up to go to the lavatory.

The bathroom window looked out across the forecourt and the lane at the other, unmentioned view, northwards: over rising pastures towards a white horizon-and beyond that, in the mind's distance, northern France, the Channel, England, London, lying in the same sunlight, the gate opening from the garden to the gravel walk, and the plane trees, and the groundsmen's compound with the barrow and the compost heap. It came to Nick in a flash of acute nostalgia, as though he could never visit that scene of happiness again. He waited a minute longer, in the heightened singleness of someone who has slipped out for a minute from a class, a meeting, ears still ringing, face still solemn, into another world of quiet corridors, the neutral gleam of the day. He couldn't unwind the line of beauty for Catherine, because it explained almost everything, and to her it would seem a trivial delusion, it would seem mad, as she said. He wouldn't be here in this room, in this country, if he hadn't seen Toby that morning in the college lodge, if Toby hadn't burnt in five seconds onto the eager blank of his mind. How he chased Toby, the covert pursuit, the unguessed courage, the laughable timidity (it seemed to him now), the inch or two gained by pressure on Toby's unsuspecting good nature, the sudden furlongs of dreamlike advance when Toby asked him up to town-he could never tell her that. Her own view was that Toby was a 'vacuous lump.'

When he went back into the room she had found the Spartacus guide, and was looking at it, and then over it at him, with a mocking gape, as if this was the silliest thing of all. 'It's too hysterical,' she said.

'Marvellous, isn't it,' said Nick, slightly prickly, but glad of the distraction.

'Hang on… Paris… I'm just looking up Paraquat. I don't believe this book.' She studied the page, in her illiterate excitable way.

'I shouldn't think there's much there,' said Nick, who had already looked it up and imagined with mingled longing and satire the one disco and the designated park.

'Well, there's a disco, darling. Wed to Sat, 11 to 3. L'An des Roys,' she said, in her plonking French accent. 'We must go! How hilarious.'

'I'm glad you find it so amusing.'

'We'll suggest it to Ouradi, and see what he says… God, there's everything in here.'

'Yes, it's very useful,' said Nick.

'Cruising areas, my god! Look at this, rue St Front-we went there with the Tippers yesterday. If only they'd known… What does AYOR mean?'

'AYOR? At Your Own Risk.'

'Oh… right… Right… And it's the whole world!'

'Look up Afghanistan,' said Nick, because there was a famous warning about the roughness of Afghan sex. But she carried on flicking through. Nick disguised his interest, the vague comical rakishness he seemed to admit by having the book, and went and sat on the bed.

'I'm just looking up Lebanon,' she said, after a minute.

'Oh yes…' said Nick.

'It sounds marvellous. Mediterranean climate, well we knew that, and it says homosexuality is a delight.'

'Really,' said Nick.

'It does. 'L'homosexualite est un delit,' ' she read, sounding like General de Gaulle.

'Yes, delit is a crime, unfortunately.'

'Oh, is it?'

'Delight is delice, delit is a misdemeanour.'

'Well, it's bloody close…'

'Well, they often are,' said Nick, and felt rather pleased with himself. Catherine was bored with the book. She held Nick's eye, and said, 'So what's he into, old Ouradi?'

'He's into me.'

'Well, yes,' said Catherine, as if she could see round this.

'OK, he likes to get fucked,' said Nick briskly, and got up as if that was really all she was going to get out of him.

'I always thought he must be into some pretty weird sort of gay stuff.'

'You didn't even know he was gay till ten minutes ago.'

'I knew deep down.'

Nick smiled reproachfully. Telling the story for the first time he saw its news value, already wearing off on Catherine, the quick fade of a shock, and felt the old requirement not to disappoint her. It was their original game of talking about men, boasting and mocking, and he knew its compulsion, the quickened pulse of rivalry and the risk of trust. There were phrases about Wani that he'd carried and polished for some occasion like this and he imagined saying them now, and the effect on himself as much as on her, mere reluctant admission melting into the relief of confession. There was nothing, exactly, to confess. The secrecy of the past six months was not to be mistaken for the squeeze of guilt. He thought, I won't tell her about the hotel pom. He sat down again, to mark a wary transition to frankness.

'Well, he's quite into threesomes,' he said.

'Mm, not my cup of tea,' said Catherine.

'OK, we won't ask you.'

She gave a tart smile. 'So who do you have threesomes with?'

'Oh, just with strangers. He gets me to pick people up for him. Or we get a rent boy in, you know. A Strieker.'

'A what?'

'That's what they call them in Munich.'

'I see,' said Catherine. 'Isn't that a bit risky, if he's so into secrecy?'

'Oh, I think the risk's quite the thing,' said Nick. 'He likes the danger. And he likes to submit. I don't quite understand it myself, but he likes having a witness. He likes everything that's the opposite of what he seems.'

'It all sounds rather pathetic, somehow,' said Catherine.

Nick went on, not knowing if it was evidence for the defence or the prosecution, 'He's quite a screamer, actually.'

'A screaming queen, you mean?'

'I mean he makes a lot of noise.' It would probably be better not to tell her about that morning in Munich. 'It