The Line of Beauty Read Online Free PDF Page B

this.
    "As far as I know," said Nick, trying to make the five little words sound both casual and judicious. It was horrible to imagine
     Hector Maltby with his trousers down; and the disgraced MP didn't seem after all to merit much in the way of solidarity. Nick's
     taste was for aesthetically radiant images of gay activity, gathering in a golden future for him, like swimmers on a sunlit
     bank.
    "Well, I don't see why he had to resign," Catherine said. "Who cares if he likes a blow-job now and then?"
    Gerald smoothed this over but he was clearly shocked. "No, no, he had to go. There was really no alternative." His tone was
     ruffled but responsible, and the sense of his own voice submitting to the common line and formula of politics was vaguely
     disturbing, though Catherine laughed at it.
    "It may all do him good," she said. "Help him to find out who he really is.
    Gerald frowned, and pulled a bottle from the cardboard crate. "You have the oddest idea of what might do people good," he
     said, musingly but indignantly. "Now I thought we might have the Podier St-Eustache with dinner."
    "Mm, lovely," Rachel murmured. "The thing is, darling, quite simply, that it's vulgar and unsafe," she said, in one of her
     sudden hard formulations.
    Gerald said, "You'll dine with us tonight, Nick?"
    Nick smiled and looked away because the generous question raised a new uncertainty about his status on subsequent nights.
     How much and how often would he be sharing with them? They had mentioned he might sometimes be called on to make up numbers.
     "I'm terribly sorry, but I can't tonight," he said.
    "Oh . . . what a shame, our first night back . . ."
    He wasn't sure how to put it. Catherine watched his hesitation with a fascinated smile. "No, Nick can't because he's got a
     date," she said. It was annoying to have her frankness applied to his tender plans, and a treacherous reward for his silence
     about her affairs. He coloured, and felt a further crackle of social static pass through the room. Everyone seemed to be humming,
     doubtful, encouraging, embarrassed, he couldn't tell.
    Nick had never been on a date with a man before, and was much less experienced than Catherine imagined. In the course of their
     long conversations about men he had let one or two of his fantasies assume the status of fact, had lied a little, and had
     left some of Catherine's assumptions about him unchallenged. His confessed but entirely imaginary seductions took on—partly
     through the special effort required to invent them and repeat them consistently—the quality of real memories. He sometimes
     had the sense, from a hint of reserve in people he was talking to, that while they didn't believe him they saw he was beginning
     to believe himself. He had only come out fully in his last year at Oxford, and had used his new licence mainly to flirt with
     straight boys. His heart was given to Toby, with whom flirting would have been inappropriate, almost sacrilegious. He wasn't
     quite ready to accept the fact that if he was going to have a lover it wouldn't be Toby, or any other drunk straight boy hopping
     the fence, it would be a gay lover—that compromised thing that he himself would then become. Proper queens, whom he applauded
     and feared and hesitantly imitated, seemed often to find something wrong with him, pretty and clever though he was. At any
     rate they didn't want to go to bed with him, and he was free to wander back, in inseparable relief and discouragement, to
     his inner theatre of sexual make-believe. There the show never ended and the actors never tired and a certain staleness of
     repetition was the only hazard. So the meeting with Leo, pursued through all the obstacles of the system which alone made
     it possible, was momentous for Nick. Pausing for a last hopeful gaze into the gilt arch of the hall mirror, which monitored
     all comings and goings, he found it reluctant to give its approval; when he pulled the door shut and set off along the