The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [140]
"Yeah, I don't like to wear it when her mum's about," said Jasper considerately. He posed for Nick, held in his brown stomach, and flashed him his number-two smile.
"What do you think?" said Catherine, grinning, a bit breathless, in her tone of sexual fixation.
"Hmm," said Nick, peering at the sleek pouch in which Jaz's crown jewels, as he called them, were boyishly slumped. "You'd have to say, darling, it leaves disappointingly little to the imagination." He made a sorry moue and strolled off to the lounger at the far end of the pool, where he had left his book.
He was reading Henry James's memoir of his childhood, A Small Boy and Others, and feeling crazily horny, after three days without as much as a peck from Wani. It was a hopeless combination. The book showed James at his most elderly and elusive, and demanded a pure commitment unlikely in a reader who was worrying excitedly about his boyfriend and semi-spying, through dark glasses, on another boy who was showing off in front of him and clearly trying to excite him. From-time to time the book tilted and wobbled in his lap, and the weight of the deckle-edged pages pressed on his erection through the sleek black nylon. He noted droll phrases for later use: "an oblong farinaceous compound" was James's euphemism for a waffle—compound was sublime in its clinching vagueness. He wondered just what Wani was up to in Perigueux. He suspected he was picking up some charlie, which seemed a shame and a danger—he wished Wani wasn't so fond of it; then he felt frustratedly, after three days off that as well, how lovely and just right it would be to have a line. It was amazing, it went really to the heart of Wani's mystique, that he knew how to find the stuff in any European city. In Munich Nick had waited in the taxi outside a bank, gazed tensely for ten minutes at the chamfered rustication of its walls and the massive swirling ironwork of its doors, while Wani was inside "seeing a friend." The photographer in Perigueux was probably another such friend. There were childish shrieks from the pool, as Jasper dive-bombed Catherine. Nick was delighted Wani had missed this airing, or drenching, of the thong; he would tease him about it later, over their first line. He longed to have a swim himself, but now the young couple were in a huddle, standing just within their depth, laughing and spluttering as they kissed: the pool was theirs, like a bedroom. They were mad with sex, in love with their own boldness; Nick felt Jasper might try to involve him too if he went in. His role was to be Uncle Nick, adult and sceptical, which seemed to make the baffled Jasper more and more provocative. He thought he could probably have him if he wanted, but he didn't want to give him that satisfaction. A minute later they got out, intently casual, Jasper's stocky hard-on sticking up at an angle, and went into the pool-house and closed the door. Edgar Allan Poe, James said, though a figure in his childhood, had not been "personally present"— indeed, "the extremity of personal absence had just overtaken him." Minute after minute went by, now the hiss of the pool-house shower could be heard, and Nick lay and flicked a fly from his leg, and felt the morning's discontent rise into envy and impatience. "The extremity of personal absence": at times the Master was so tactful he was almost brutal. He remembered what Rachel had said about Wani's wedding, and the image of him doing to Martine what Jasper was doing to Catherine filled him with a bitter jealousy—well, it was probably nonsense, probably