Excerpt from The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

After a minute Nick said, "Feeling a bit better?" and Catherine nodded and pressed against him as they walked. The sense of responsibility came back to him, a grey weight in his chest, and he saw them from the point of view of the picnickers or an approaching jogger: not a dear old couple at all but a pair of kids, a skinny girl with a large nervous mouth and a solemn little blond boy pretending he wasn't out of his depth. Of course he must ring France, and hope that he got Rachel, since Gerald wasn't always good with these things. He wished he knew more about what had happened and why, but he was squeamish too. "You'll be all right," he said. He thought that asking her about it might only reopen the horror, and added, "I wonder what it was all about," as if referring to a mystery of long ago. She gave him a look of painful uncertainty, but didn't answer. "Can't really say?"  Nick said, and heard, as he sometimes did, his own father's note of evasive sympathy. It was how his family sidled round its various crises; nothing was named, and you never knew for sure if the tone was subtly comprehensive, or just a form of cowardice.

"No, not really."

"Well, you know you always can tell me," he said.

At the end of the path there was the gardener's cottage, huddled quaintly and servilely under the cream cliff of the terrace. Beyond it a gate gave on to the street and they stood and looked out through its iron scrolls at the sporadic evening traffic. Nick waited, and thought despairingly of Leo at large in the same summer evening. Catherine said, "It's when everything goes black and glittering."

"Mm".

"It's not like when you're down in the dumps, which is brown." "

Right"

"Oh, you wouldn't understand." 

"No, please go on."

"It's like that car," she said, nodding at a black Daimler that had stopped across the road to let out a distinguished-looking old man. The yellow of the early street lights was reflected in its roof, and as it pulled away reflections streamed and glittered in its dark curved sides and windows. "It sounds almost beautiful."

"It is beautiful, in a sense. But that isn't the point."

Nick felt he had been given an explanation which he was too stupid, or unimaginative, to follow- "It must be horrible as well," he said, "obviously. . ." 

"Well, it's poisonous, you see. It's glittering but it's deadly at the same time. It doesn't want you to survive it.  That's what it makes you realize." She stepped away from Nick, so as to use her hands. "It's the whole world just as it is," she said, stretching out to frame it or hold it off: "everything exactly the same.  And it's totally negative. You can't survive in it. It's like being on Mars or something." Her eyes were fixed but blurred. "There you are, that's the best I can do," she said, and turned her back.

He followed her. "But then it changes back again. . ." he said.

"Yes, Nick, it does," she said, with the offended tone that sometimes follows a moment of self-exposure.

.. "I'm only trying to understand." He thought her tears might be a sign of recovery, and put an arm round her shoulder - though after a few seconds she made another gesture that meant freeing herself.  Nick felt a hint of sexual repudiation, as if she thought he was taking advantage of her.

 

Later on, in the drawing room, she said, "Oh, god, this was your night with Leo."

Nick couldn't believe that she'd only just thought of that.  But he said, "It's all right. I've put him off till next week."

Catherine smiled ruefully. "Well, he wasn't really your type," she said. 

Schumann had given way to The Clash, who in turn had yielded to a tired but busy silence between them. Nick prayed that she wouldn't put on any more music - most of the stuff she liked had him clenched in resistance. He looked at his watch. They were an hour later in France, it was too late to ring them now, and he welcomed this rational and thoughtful postponement with a sense of cloudy relief He went over to the much-neglected piano, its black lid the podium for various old art folios and a small bronze bust of Liszt - which seemed to give a rather pained glance at his sight-reading from the Mozart album on the stand. To Nick himself the faltering notes were like raindrops on a sandy path, and he was filled with a sense of what his evening could have been. The simple Andante became a vivid dialogue in his mind between optimism and recurrent pain; in fact it heightened both feelings to an unnecessary degree. It wasn't long until Catherine stood up and said, "For god's sake, darling, it's not a fucking funeral."

From The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst, pages 3-17.Copyright 2004 by Alan Hollinghurst.  All rights reserved.  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.  Reproduced by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing.