The Line of Beauty

by Alan Hollinghurst

a certain shy polish,

Hollinghurst can convey so much in a small phrase

‘I’m not really,’ said Nick, as if a small admission was the best kind of denial, ‘I just love beautiful things.’

‘Oh . . . yes . . .’ said Nick, as if he couldn’t quite remember where it was.

‘That Louis Quinze escritoire . . . is an amazing thing, sir, surely?’ His father had taught him to address all lords as sir – bumping into one had been a constant thrilling hazard on their clock-winding visits, and now he took pleasure in the tone of smooth submission.

That’s so much the mood in Whitehall – the economy’s in ruins, no one’s got a job, and they just don’t care, it’s bliss.

‘Oh, if you were worried about vulgarity then you’d never listen to Strauss at all.’

He quite liked The Face, but there was a lot of it he didn’t understand.

My son-in-law was once the editor

‘There is a sort of aesthetic poverty about conservatism, though, isn’t there.’

‘That blue’s an impossible colour.’ Leo nodded thoughtfully. ‘I wouldn’t say that was their main problem,’ he said.

‘Overdrafts and class distinctions,’ said Nick drolly.

He liked to be charming, and hardly noticed when he drifted excitedly into insincerity. But

shiny ginger leather, or something like it.

He was full of round-eyed appreciation, which was also a cover for the surprise of having his evening meal at five forty-five; some absurd social reflex, the useful shock of class difference, a childish worry perhaps at a changed routine, all combined in a mood of interesting alienation.

He began to resent Mrs Charles for thinking he was condescending.

Of course the house was vulgar, as almost everything postmodern was, but he found himself taking a surprising pleasure in it. The hallway, where the grey glass bells of the lampshades cast cloudy reflections in the ox-blood-marble walls, was like the lavatory of a restaurant, though evidently of a very smart and fashionable one.

The double curve was Hogarth’s ‘line of beauty’, the snakelike flicker of an instinct, of two compulsions held in one unfolding movement. He

Nick felt he was prostituting the Master, but then there was an element of self-mockery in these turns of phrase – it was something he was looking at in his thesis. He was at the height of a youthful affair with his writer, in love with his rhythms, his ironies, and his idiosyncrasies, and loving his most idiosyncratic moments

‘The worse they are the more they see beauty

And it seemed to fit in with the air of fantasy in the Ogee office, the distant sense of an avoided issue.

‘Exactly. It originates in . . . well, in the Middle East, in fact, and then you see it in English architecture from about the fourteenth century onwards. It’s like Hogarth’s line of beauty,’ Nick said, with a mounting sense of fatuity, ‘except that there are two of them, of course . . . I suppose the line of beauty’s a sort of animating principle, isn’t it . . .’ He looked around and swooped his hand suggestively in the air. It wasn’t perhaps the animating principle here.

getting snagged as usual in a sub-clause to a more important sentence.

He felt shaken and reassured all at once – the music expressed life and explained it and left you having to ask again. If he believed anything he believed that.

‘Now there’s a line of beauty for you!’ And he

And something else came back, from that later first morning at Kensington Park Gardens: a sense that the house was not only an enhancement of Toby’s interest but a compensation for his lack of it.

and heard what a twit he sounded.

“I would like to admit all Strauss operas to whichever purgatory punishes triumphant banality. Their musical substance is cheap and poor; it cannot interest a musician today.” ’

Nick saw Catherine clench in annoyance when her grandmother said, ‘She’s put

this country on its feet!’ – clearly forgetting, in her fervour, which country she was now in. ‘She showed them in the Falklands, didn’t she?’

Rachel said, ‘Not everyone’s as infatuated as my husband,’ lightly but meaningly.

and read A Small Boy and Others in the company of a lizard.

‘Which is about fifty new pence. But you could have given’ – she raised her glass and swept it across the vista of hills and the far glimpse of river – ‘a million francs, without noticing really, and single-handedly saved the Romanesque narthex!’

It’s just like power, isn’t it. Why do people want it? I mean, what’s the point of having power?’

‘I think I should stop people having a hundred and fifty million pounds.’

‘He picked up some extraordinary bug in the Far East last year. No one knew what it was. It’s thought to be some incredibly rare thing. It’s just frightfully bad luck.’

‘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 . . .’

Often in life Nick felt he hadn’t mastered the arguments, and could hardly present his own case, let alone someone else’s; but on this particular matter he was watertight, if only from the regular need to convince himself. He checked off the points on his fingers: ‘He’s a millionaire, he’s Lebanese, he’s the only child, he’s engaged to be married, his father’s a psychopath.’

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

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.

‘Delight is délice, délit is a misdemeanour.’ ‘Well, it’s bloody close . . .’ ‘Well, they often are,’ said Nick, and felt rather pleased with himself.

It was the moment when Nick had first caught the pitch of Gerald’s mania. Catherine, in a vein of wild but focused fantasy, had said that the PM would be shocked by a green door and that she’d read an article which said all Cabinet ministers had blue ones; even Geoffrey Titchfield, who was only the chairman of the local association, had a blue front door.

‘She might think she’s been taken to Greenham Common, by mistake,’ he went on,

‘Oh, it’s all the vandalism she’s done to everything. Anyway, that’s why he’s having this rewiring done, so that no one can get in the house.’

To judge from the photos Gerald’s hippy phase had reached its counter-cultural extreme in a pair of mutton-chop whiskers and a floral tie.

‘So,’ said Nick, as he and Wani went on down, with a pensive hesitation each step or two, as though they might stop completely in the charm of a shared thought, ‘you’ve been running the house tart up the hill . . .’ ‘It’s got to be climbed, old chap, it’s got to be climbed.’

‘Queenly? . . . Darling, she looks like a country and western singer.’

know, they’re sort of champagne tubas, aren’t they,’ said Nick.

‘Actually what amazes me,’ Nick said, ‘is the fantastic queenery of the men. The heterosexual queenery.’

‘What? Oh, the election, yes.’ Catherine stared out into the drizzle. ‘The 80s are going on for ever.’

Voting always gave him a heightened sense of irresponsibility.

Nick owning them both by right of taste and longing.