The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [11]
Even so, sliding on to the seat beside Toby, taking in the soap and coffee smell of him, pressing briefly against his bare knee as he reached for the sugar, he felt what a success he had had. That was a year ago, and now everything was rich with association. He picked up the notebook, which had barely been looked at, and stroked the soft pile of its cover, to make up for Toby's lack of appreciation and remotely, too, as if he were thumbing some warm and hairy part of Toby himself. Toby was talking of becoming a journalist, so the gift was vaguely insulting, a lazy attempt at aptness, the sense of mere duty in the givers disguised by the stinking costliness of the production. The notebook wouldn't open flat, and a few addresses or "ideas" would have filled it. It was certainly hard to imagine Toby using it as he visited a picket line or jostled for an answer from a camera-mobbed minister.
"You heard about Maltby, of course," said Toby.
Immediately Nick felt the air in the room begin to tingle, as if at the onset of an allergic reaction. Hector Maltby, a junior minister in the Foreign Office, had been caught with a rent boy in his Jaguar at Jack Straw's Castle, and had rapidly resigned from his post and, it seemed, from his marriage. The story had been all over the papers last week, and it was silly of Nick to feel as self-conscious as he suddenly did, blushing as if he'd been caught in a Jaguar himself. It was often like this when the homosexual subject came up, and even in the Feddens' tolerant kitchen he stiffened in apprehension about what might carelessly be said—some indirect insult to swallow, a joke to be weakly smiled at. Even the case of the absurd fat Maltby, a real-life cartoon of the greedy "new" Tory, seemed to Nick to allude to his own quiet case and, in a brief twinge of paranoia, to raise a question about his closeness to Toby's beautiful brown leg.
"Silly old Hector," said Gerald.
"I don't think we were terribly surprised," Rachel said, with her characteristic tremor of irony.
"You must have known him?" Toby asked, in a ponderous new "interview" style he had.
"A bit," said Rachel.
"Not really," said Gerald.
Catherine was still gazing out of the window, indulging her dream of not being connected to her family. "I really don't see why he has to go to jail," she said.
"He's not going to jail, you daft old puss," Gerald said. "Unless you know something I don't. He was only caught with his trousers down." By some half-conscious association he looked to Nick for confirmation of 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.