The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [120]
The Barwick Fete, which Nick hadn't been to since his schooldays, was held in Abbots' Field, a park near the middle of town. On a normal Saturday afternoon the field had two dim attractions, a fragment of the once great Augustinian abbey, and a Gents where the maniacal rejoinders and obliterations of the graffiti had come to interest Nick in his adolescence even more than the Curvilinear tracery of the monks' choir. He had never made contact in the Gents, never acted on the graffiti, but whenever he passed it on a walk with his mother and heard the busy unattended flush of the urinal, his look became tense and tactful, he felt the kinship of an unknown crowd. Today the field was ringed with stalls, there was a skittle alley hedged with straw bales, a traction engine let out shrill whistles, and the silver prize band warred euphoniously with a jangling old carousel. Nick wandered round feeling both distinguished and invisible. He stopped to talk to friends of his parents, who were genial but just perceptibly short with him, because of what they knew or guessed about him. The friendliness, a note of bright supportive pity, was really directed to his parents, not to him. It made him wonder for a moment how he was talked about; it must be hard for his mother to boast about him. Being sort of the art adviser on a non-existent magazine was as obscure and unsatisfactory as being gay. He scented a false respect, which perhaps was just good manners; a reluctance to be drawn into truth-telling talk. He saw Mr Leverton, his old English master, who had done The Turn of the Screw with him and sent him off to Oxford, and they had a chat about Nick's doctorate. Nick called him Stanley now, with a residual sense of transgression. He felt a kind of longing behind Mr Leverton's black-framed glasses for the larger field of speculation Nick was moving in, and for other things too. The old tone of crisp enthusiasm quavered with a new anxiety about keeping up. He said, "Come back and see us! Come and talk to the A-level lot. We've had a very jolly Hopkins group this year." Later Nick said hello to Miss Avison, who much earlier in his life had taught him ballroom dancing; his mother had said it would be something he'd always be grateful for. She remembered all the children she'd taught, and with no acknowledgement that they'd grown and changed and hadn't danced a waltz or a two-step for twenty years. Nick felt for a moment he was still a treasured and blissfully obedient little boy.
The tannoy crackled and whined. Nick was at the far end of the field, dawdling behind a group of local lads, and pretending to admire a stall of primitive local pottery. The mayoress made a very dull speech, but it rode on the goodwill of the audience, and on the expectation that it would be over much sooner than it was. Families rambled with a half-attentive air across the grass. Her chain could be seen, the glint of glasses, and her bright-blue, white-bowed prime-ministerial dress, on the low platform; and Gerald, standing behind, with beaming impatience. She said something unfortunate about not being able to get a celebrity to open the proceedings this summer, but at least the person they had got was on time—"unlike a certain star of the airwaves last year!" After this Gerald leapt up to the mike as if seizing the controls of a bus from a drunk.
There was applause, not easy to measure, lost in the open air; as well as one or two shouts and klaxon-squawks to remind Gerald that though he had a large majority there were still constituents unsedated by council-house sales and tax cuts. "I liked it when they had Derek Nimmo," a woman said to Nick. Nick knew what she meant, he absorbed people's gibes about Gerald without protest, but still felt the old secret pride at knowing him. He gazed around, followed the Carter boy's amazing arse with his eyes, smiled loyally at Gerald's jokes, and sensed in them a mixture of piety and condescension rather like his own. He felt so decadent here. And how could you honestly expect Gerald, at