The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [156]
Catherine said, "I think that's awfully dangerous, Nick. Actually I think it's mad."
"Well, you're an artist," said Nick, "surely?" Whenever he'd imagined telling someone this, the story, the idea, had met with a thrilled concurrence and a sense of revelation. He had never expected to be contested on every point of his own beliefs. He said, "Well, I'm sorry, that's how I am, you should know that by now."
"You'd fall in love with someone just because they were beautiful, as you call it."
"Not anyone, obviously. That would be mad." He resented her way, now she'd gained access to his fantasy, of belittling the view. It was like her attitude to the room they were sitting in. "It's not something we can argue about, it's a fact of life."
Catherine cast her mind back helpfully. "I mean, no one could have called Denton beautiful, could they?"
"Denny had a beautiful bottom," Nick said primly. "That was what mattered at the time. I wasn't in love with him."
"And what about little thing? Leo? He wasn't beautiful exactly, I wouldn't have thought. You were crazy about him." She looked at him interestedly to see if she'd gone too far.
Nick said solemnly but feebly, "Well, he was beautiful to me."
"Exactly!" said Catherine. "People are lovely because we love them, not the other way round."
"Hmm."
"Did you hear anything more from him, by the way?"
"No, not since spring of last year," said Nick, and got up to go to the lavatory.
The bathroom window looked out across the forecourt and the lane at the other, unmentioned view, northwards: over rising pastures towards a white horizon—and beyond that, in the mind's distance, northern France, the Channel, England, London, lying in the same sunlight, the gate opening from the garden to the gravel walk, and the plane trees, and the groundsmen's compound with the barrow and the compost heap. It came to Nick in a flash of acute nostalgia, as though he could never visit that scene of happiness again. He waited a minute longer, in the heightened singleness of someone who has slipped out for a minute from a class, a meeting, ears still ringing, face still solemn, into another world of quiet corridors, the neutral gleam of the day. He couldn't unwind the line of beauty for Catherine, because it explained almost everything, and to her it would seem a trivial delusion, it would seem mad, as she said. He wouldn't be here in this room, in this country, if he hadn't seen Toby that morning in the college lodge, if Toby hadn't burnt in five seconds onto the eager blank of his mind. How he chased Toby, the covert pursuit, the unguessed courage, the laughable timidity (it seemed to him now), the inch or two gained by pressure on Toby's unsuspecting good nature, the sudden furlongs of dreamlike advance when Toby asked him up to town—he could never tell her that. Her own view was that Toby was a "vacuous lump."
When he went back into the room she had found the Spartacus guide, and was looking at it, and then over it at him, with a mocking gape, as if this was the silliest thing of all. "It's too hysterical," she said.
"Marvellous, isn't it," said Nick, slightly prickly, but glad of the distraction.
"Hang on . . . Paris . . . I'm just looking up Paraquat. I don't believe this book." She studied the page, in her illiterate excitable way.
"I shouldn't think there's much there," said Nick, who had already looked it up and imagined with mingled longing and satire the one disco and the designated park.
"Well, there's a disco, darling. Wed to Sat, 11 to 3. L'An des Roys," she said, in her plonking French accent. "We must go! How hilarious."
"I'm glad you find it so amusing."
"We'll suggest it to Ouradi, and see what he says . . . God, there's everything in here."
"Yes, it's very useful," said Nick.
"Cruising areas, my god! Look at this, rue St Front—we went there with the Tippers yesterday. If only they'd known . . . What does AYOR mean?"
"AYOR? At Your Own Risk."
"Oh . . . right . . . Right . . . And it's the whole world!"
"Look up Afghanistan," said Nick, because there was a famous