The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [33]
"I'm also really touched," Toby said, "that my old friends Josh and Caroline have come all the way from South Africa. Oh, and I understand they're also squeezing in a wedding ceremony while they're here." There was good-natured applause, though no one really knew who Josh and Caroline were. Nick found himself listening almost abstractly to Toby's voice, hearing its harmless pretensions, which were the opposite of Gerald's. Gerald was a knowing, self-confident speaker, trained at the Oxford Union, polished at innumerable board meetings, and his tone combined candour and insincerity to oddly charming effect. Toby, like many of his friends, spoke in the latest public-school accent, an inefficient blur of class denial. Now he was a bit drunk, and under pressure, and older vowels were showing through as he said that it was "awfully good of" his parents to have tolerated him. He too seemed not to know what the point of his speech was; he came over like a cross between a bridegroom and the winner of an award, with a list of people to thank. His boyish technique was to deflect attention from himself onto his friends, and in this he was also the opposite of his father. He made various jokes such as "Sam will need two pairs of trousers" and "No more creme de menthe for Mary," which clearly alluded to old disgraces, and began to bore the MPs. Nick sensed a touching nostalgia for the Oxford years, on which a door, an oak perhaps, seemed gently but firmly to have closed. He himself was not referred to; but he took this as a sign of intimacy. His gaze embraced Toby, and from behind his helpless grin and raised applauding hands he saw his dream-self run forwards to hold him and kiss his hot face.
Up in his room Nick slipped out of his jacket, and sniffed at it resignedly: time for a further dowsing in "Je Promets." He went into his bathroom, and opened the little turret dormer; he splashed cold water on his cheeks. It was the toasts that had done for him—there was always one glass that tipped him over, unfairly and jokingly, into being drunk. And there were hours of the party still to come. It was a great ritual of fun, a tradition, a convention, which everyone was loving for its lavishness and truth to form. Now there was going to be a move to the dance floor, and all the couples would be allowed to make love to each other with their hips and thighs and sliding hands. Nick gazed in the mirror and saw someone teeteringly alone. The love he had felt for Toby ten minutes before migrated into a sudden hungry imagining of Leo, his transfiguring kisses, his shaving rash, and the wonderful shaved depth between the cheeks of his arse. The exactness of memory, the burning fact of what had happened, blinded him and held him for a while. When he came back, perhaps only seconds later, to the image in the mirror, he saw the flush in his cheeks and his mouth gasping in re-enacted surrender. He re-tied his tie, very perfectly, and ran a hand through his hair. There was a kind of tenderness for himself in the movement of his hand through his curls, as if it had been taught a lesson by Leo. The mirror was a chaste ellipse in a maplewood frame. The washstand was a real Louis Seize commode cut and drilled to hold a basin and a pair of tall hoarse-throated taps. Well, if you owned a Louis Seize commode, if you owned dozens of them, you could be as barbarous with them as you liked; and a commode after all was meant for ease. And after all it was marvellous to be staying in a house like this, a friend of the family, not the son of the man who wound the clocks.
As he trotted down the stairs he saw Wani Ouradi coming up. Nick sometimes greeted Wani with a friendly grope between the legs, or a long breathless snog, and he'd once had him tied up naked in his college room for a whole night; he had sodomized him tirelessly more often