The Line of Beauty

by Alan Hollinghurst

For Nick the ease and comfort of the rum were indistinguishable parts of the intimacy which he felt deepening like the dusk.

“Time’s getting on,” he said. “I can’t be late getting back.” Nick looked down and mumbled, “Do you have to get back?” He tried to smile but he knew his face was stiff with sudden anxiety. He moved his wet glass in circles on the rough-sawn table top. When he glanced up again he found Leo was gazing at him sceptically, one eyebrow arched. “I meant back to your place, of course,” he said. Nick grinned and reddened at the beautiful reversal, like a teased child abruptly

great rallies of the undressed that rich people summoned

He glanced at Leo now, with his sublime little bottom perched on the corner of Pete’s desk, and saw him totally at home with a far from attractive middle-aged man—he had been his lover and done a hundred things with him that Nick still only dreamed of, time and time again. Nick didn’t know how it had ended, or when; they seemed to share the steadiness of something both long established and over, and he envied them, although it wasn’t quite what he wanted himself.

All the time Nick was thinking about Leo, so that Leo seemed to be the element, the invisible context, in which these daunting disparate people were meeting and sparring and congratulating each other. They didn’t know it, which made it all the funnier and more beautiful.

“It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process,” said Nick.

It was the first time he had seen Leo naked, and the first time he had seen the masking shadow of his face, lazily watchful, easily cynical, clever and obtuse by turns, melt into naked feeling. Leo breathed through his mouth, and his look was a wince of lust and also, it seemed to Nick, of self-accusation—that he had been so slow, so vain, so blind.

“It sounds like Henry James called everyone beautiful and marvellous,” said Sam, a little sourly, “from what you say.” “Oh, beautiful, magnificent… wonderful. I suppose it’s really more what the characters call each other, especially when they’re being wicked. In the later books, you know, they do it more and more, when actually they’re more and more ugly—in a moral sense.” “Right …” said Simon. “The worse they are the more they see beauty in each other.” “Interesting,” said Howard drily. Nick cast a fond glance at his little audience. “There’s a marvellous bit in his play The High Bid, when a man says to the butler in a country house, “I mean, to whom do you beautifully belong?’ ”

Nick was a little exercised about the types of swimwear, and the different registers of poolside life. The knob-flaunting Speedos appropriate for an unsocial fifty lengths or a scientific hour of sunbathing might seem ill-judged for cocktails or ping-pong, when sexless bags might be preferred. But perhaps not; sun-worship was half the point of a home in France, and the Feddens might not feel, as Nick somehow did, that if the contours of his penis were visible, then the question of what he liked to do with it was at the forefront of everyone’s mind.

It struck him that a sign of real possession was a sort of negligence, was to have an old wood-yard you’d virtually forgotten about.

Toby was still beautiful, even though he was letting himself go. His beauty was held in an eerie balance with its own neglect.

He said, “I suppose it wasn’t all that great, you know, the sexual side of things.” He looked bitter and guilty too to be saying this. “Oh …” “You know, she called it ‘doings.’ ” “That’s not very promising, I agree.”

meridional

He felt warmed and saddened by his drug secrets and his sex secrets, like an adulterous parent playing with an unsuspecting child. It struck him as a strange eventuality, when for years the idea of romping almost naked in the water with Toby would have been one of choking romance.

“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.”

This is the passage everyone highlights, but it's really the next one that represents Nick's actual views on the matter.

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.

“Hi there!” wrote Sandy from Enfield, “I’m early 40s, but saw that little old ad of yours and thought I’d write in anyway! I’m in the crazy world of stationery!” A snap of a solidly built man of fifty was attached to the page with a pink paper clip. Leo had written, House/Car. Age? And then, presumably after he’d seen him, Too inexperienced. Glenn, “late 20s,” from Barons Court, was a travel agent, and sent a Polaroid of himself in swimming trunks in his flat. He said, “I love to party! And sexpecially in bed! (Or on the floor! Or halfway up a ladder!! Whoops—!)” Too much? wondered Leo, before making the discovery: Invisible dick. “Dear Friend,” wrote serious-looking black Ambrose from Forest Hill, “I like the sound of you. I think we have some love to share.” The exclamation marks, which gave the other letters their air of inane self-consciousness, were resisted by Ambrose until his final “Peace!” Nick liked the look of him, but Leo had written, Bottom. Boring. Nick made a stealthy attempt to remember the address.

“Does it … ?” said Nick; and, trying to be charming, “It’s just like life, though, isn’t it—maybe too like life for a … conventional movie. It’s about someone who loves things more than people. And who ends up with nothing, of course. I know it’s bleak, but then I think it’s probably a very bleak book, even though it’s essentially a comedy.”

minatory

It was a sort of terror, made up of emotions from every stage of his short life, weaning, homesickness, envy and self-pity; but he felt that the self-pity belonged to a larger pity. It was a love of the world that was shockingly unconditional.