The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [217]
He stopped on the second-floor landing, set down the boxes and went into Gerald and Rachel's bedroom. From the window there was the view of the gardens, in slanting rain, the large brown leaves of the planes dropping and blowing. It was a grander but closer view than the one he'd grown used to upstairs, the treetop view, with other rooftops and a spire beyond. The gardens grew smaller at this time of year: you saw the far fence and the street outside. He turned and walked softly on the pale carpet towards the bed. Who slept on which side?—Rachel here, clearly, with the novels and the earplugs. The little Gauguin landscape Lionel had given them hung opposite. On the round walnut table, with a bowl of lavender, and china boxes, stood the photographs in silver, ivory, or red-velvet frames.
He picked up the one of Toby as a Lord of Tyre—Nick couldn't remember his name. He was the trusty minister who looked after things while Pericles went on his travels; he only came on at the beginning and the end, and spent the middle acts lounging restively around the cricket pavilion, which was used as the green room for these open-air plays. It was June, the smell of the lake and cut grass outside, creosote and linseed in the stuffy pavilion. Toby took off his heavy tunic, and blocked imaginary deliveries with a cricket bat as he waited for Sophie, who was playing Marina, to come off. Someone had photographed him then. He wore dark tights, and his own suede shoes. His naked upper body looked very white against the line round his neck where the make-up ended. His face was feminine, over-beautiful, a dancer's face, his body muscular and jutting enough to cause amusement in others. Nick had the brief but memorable role of Cerimon, the Lord of Ephesus who revives Queen Thaissa when she's washed ashore in her coffin: it was one of the intensest experiences of his life: "I hold it ever / Virtue and cunning were endowments greater / Than nobleness and riches . . .", his heart slamming, tears in his eyes; and then it was over, he made his dignified exit—a sense of floating and thinness, a forced adaptation to the scene outside the circle of lit stage and dark audience, who were already attending to what came afterwards. He peeled off his grey beard, twirled off his cloak, and had a jealous bottle of Guinness while Toby "unconsciously" flexed his biceps for Sophie—they were preoccupied by each other and by having still to go on. Toby wasn't a very good actor, but the role was only a bit of rhetoric, quite unpsycho-logical, and he was warmly applauded—there was something right about him. He did it as if there was no more to acting than to rowing or passing a rugger ball. He was neither modest nor vain.
Nick knew he would never see the picture again, and found it hard to put it back on the table. It gleamed in the rainy light as an emblem of why he'd come here. It wasn't clear with Toby, any more than with Leo and Wani, if fantasy could hold back time, if this sleek second-year with his sportsman's legs and marvellous arse could still excite him when he knew the fat Toby of five years on. Well, not in the mind, perhaps, but in an image, a photo: it took a certain aesthetic nerve to fly in the face of the facts. He did something silly and solemn, and left on the glass the light, blurred imprint of his lips and the tip of his nose.
Up in his room he pulled handfuls of books from his shelves and thrust them like bricks into the boxes. He hardened himself against his taste for nostalgia—the long-breathed leisure of the old days was over, matters were more urgent and unsure. The week ahead was already shadowed by the wait for his test results. The boost, the premature