Alan Hollinghurst

Line of Beauty

deniz

He saw that interests weren't always a sexy thing. A shared passion for a subject, large or small, could quickly put two strangers into a special state of subdued rapture and rivalry, distantly resembling love; but you had to hit on the subject.

He is very much like me, a conversationalist; a people pleaser, even.

He liked to be charming, and hardly noticed when he drifted excitedly into insincerity. But he also knew the state of suspense, the faked insouciance, of bringing friends home, the playful vigilance with which certain subjects had to be headed off even before they had arisen; you took only a distracted, irrelevant part in the conversation because you were thirty seconds, a minute, ten minutes ahead of it, detecting those magnetic embarrassments towards which it would always twitch and bend.

This was taken philosophically by the boys, who hadn't really heard of any novels by Henry James. Nick felt he was prostituting the Master, but then there was an element of self-mockery in these turns of phrase it was something he was looking at in his thesis. He was at the height of a youthful affair with his writer, in love with his rhythms, his ironies, and his idiosyncrasies, and loving his most idiosyncratic moments best of all.

Something happened when you looked in the mirror together. You asked it, as always, a question, and you asked each other something too; and the space, shadowy but glossy, the further room in which you found yourself, as if on a stage, vibrated with ironies and sentimental admissions. 

People are lovely because we love them, not the other way round.

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