Now he had chanced on one of he standard hard-on sessions of the shower, as on both sides of him and across the room three queens sported horizontal members which they turned around from time to time to conceal or display, barely exchanging looks as they resolved. The old men took no interest in this activity, knowing perhaps from long experience that it rarely meant anything or led anywhere, was a brief and helpless surrender to the forcin..
There was the noise itself, which he thought of vaguely as the noise of classical music, sameish and rhetorical, full of feelings people surely never had
They had kissed the first time they did coke together, their first kiss, Wani's mouth sour with wine, his tongue darting, his eyes timidly closed. Each time after that was a re-enactment of a thrilling beginning. Anything seemed possible - the world was not only doable, conquerable, but lovable: it showed its weaknesses and you knew it would submit to you. You saw your own charm reflected in its eyes. Nick stood and kissed Wani in the middl..
but he felt the relief of being alone as well...the forgotten solitude which measures and verifies the strength of an affair, and which, being temporary, is a kind of pleasure.
She felt something similar, but worse in a way, about hundreds and hundreds of books she'd read, novels, biographies, occasional books, about music and art--she could remember nothing about them at all, so that it seemed rather pointless even to say that she had read them; such claims were things people set great store by but she hardly supposed they recalled any more than she did. Sometimes a book persisted as a coloured shadow at the edge..
On the stairs he was crying so much he hardly saw where he was going - not a mad boo-hoo but wailing sheets of tears, shaken into funny groans by the bump of each step as he hurried down.
She felt that at some point she must finally and formally talk to Louisa about Hubert, and ask her to acknowledge that the worst possible thing had happened to her as well.
He knew he was giving off the mischievous contentment of someone left behind for an afternoon, sleepy hints that he might have got up to something but in fact had done the more enviable and inexplicable nothing
After that they browsed for a minute or two in a semi-detached fashion. Nick found a set of Trollope which had a relatively modest and approachable look among the rest, and took down The Way We Live Now, with an armorial bookplate, the pages uncut. "What have you found there?" said Lord Kessler, in a genially possessive tone. "Ah, you're a Trollope man, are you?" "I'm not sure I am, really," said Nick. "I always think he wrote too fast. Wh..
I can't bear the smell of cigars, can you?" said Lady Partridge. "Lionel hates it too," murmured Rachel. As did Nick, to whom the dry lavatorial stench of cigars signified the inexplicable confidence of other men's tastes and habits, and their readiness to impose them on their fellows."
'Can't really say?' Nick said, and heard, as he sometimes did, his own father's note of evasive sympathy. It was how his family sidled round its various crises; nothing was named, and you never knew for sure if the tone was subtly comprehensive, or just a form of cowardice.
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.
And something else came back, from that later first morning at Kensington Park Gardens: a sense that the house was not only an enhancement of Toby's interest but a compensation for his lack of it.
He thought other resourceful people would have come, over the years, to look at it, and that the house would wear its own mild frown of self-regard, a certain half-friendly awareness of being admired. It would live up to its fame. But really there was nothing to see. The upstairs windows seemed to ponder blankly on the reflections of clouds.
I was applying myself to the subtler connoisseurship of the out-of-season, days without warmth and nights without encounters, empty pleasure-grounds and the violence of the tides.
Hello, Badger,' said Nick, still self-conscious at teasing a virtual stranger about the yellow-grey stripe in his dark hair, at having to enrol in the family cult of Badger as a character, but finding it easier after all than the sober, the critical, the almost hostile-sounding 'Derek'. Badger in turn was clearly puzzled by Nick's presence in his old friend's house and made facetious attempts at understanding him. It was a part of his gener..
The seat I had taken was marked for the use of the elderly and handicapped, but had another claimant come, a figure like Charles, for instance, I would have been prepared to leave the train, when my stop came, with a lurching gait or limb held awry to designate my previously unguessed incapacity.
But of course he had never done more than hug Toby and kiss him on the cheek; he had twice had a peep at his penis at a college urinal. Here, in a tiny flat in unknown Willesden, he was talking to the mother of the man who called him not only a 'damn good fuck' but also a 'hot little cocksucker' with 'a first-class degree in arse-licking'. Which clearly was way beyond hugging and peeping. Nick gazed at her in a trance of revelation and grat..
Then he stood up straight, sprang the catches, and released the heady and authentic gentleman's smell: toilet water, starch, and the slowly fading reek of leather.
The peculiar things a singer did with words, the vowels that turned into other vowels under the strain of a high note, made it all harder and weirder. Picturing