The Line of Beauty (26 page)

"I never have," said Nick, humbly but cheerfully.

Bertrand made a pinched plump expression with his lips and stared into an imaginary distance for a moment before saying, "You
know, of course, she's a good friend of mine."

"Oh, yes, Wani told me you knew her."

"Of course, she is a great figure of the age. But she is a very kind woman too." He had the mawkish look of a brute who praises
the kindness of another brute. "She has always been very kind to me, hasn't she, my love?

And of course I intend to return the compliment."

"Aha . . ."

"I mean in a practical way, in a financial way. I saw her the other day, and . . . " he waved his left hand impatiently to
show he wouldn't be going into what had been said; but then went on, with weird candour, "I will make a significant donation
to the party funds, and . . . who knows what then." He stabbed and swallowed a slice of orange. "I believe you have to pay
back, my friend, if you have been given help"—and he stabbed the air with his empty fork.

"Oh, quite," said Nick. "No, I'm sure you do." He felt he had inadvertently become the focus of some keen resentment of Bertrand's.

"You won't hear any complaints about the lady in this house."

"Well, nor in mine, I assure you!"

Nick glanced around at the submissive faces of the others, and thought that actually, at Kensington Park Gardens, the worship
of "the lady," the state of mesmerized conjecture into which she threw Gerald, was offset at least by Catherine's monologues
about homeless people and Rachel's wry allusions to "the other woman" in her husband's life.

"So he's on the up-and-up, our friend Gerald," Bertrand said more equably. "What's his role actually?"

"He's a minister in the Home Office," Nick said.

"That's good. He did that bloody quickly."

"Well, he's ambitious. And he has the . . . the lady's eye."

"I'll have a chat with him when I come to the house. I've met him, of course, but you can introduce us again."

"I'd be happy to," said Nick; "by all means." The black-jacketed man removed the plates, and just then Nick felt the steady
power of the coke begin to fade, it was something else taken away, the elation grew patchy and dubious. In four or five minutes
it would yield to a flatness bleaker than the one it had replaced. However, the wine was served soon after, so there was an
amusing sense of relief and dependency. Bertrand himself, Nick noted, drank only Malvern water.

Nick tried for a while to talk to Emile about scrap metal, which tested his Cornelian French to the limits; but Bertrand,
who had been looking on with an insincere smile and a palpable sense of neglect, broke in, "Nick, Nick, I don't know what
you two young men are getting up to, I don't like to ask too many questions . . ."

"Oh . . ."

"But I hope it's soon going to start bringing in some money."

"It will, Papa," said Wani quickly, while Nick blushed in horror at the chasm he'd just hopped over, and said, "I'm the aesthete,
remember! I don't know about the money side of things." He tried to smile out through his blush, but he saw that Bertrand's
little challenges were designed to show him up in a very passive light.

Bertrand said,

"You're the writing man—" which again was something allowed for, an item in a budget, but under scrutiny and probably dispensable.

Nick felt writing men were important, and though he had nothing to show for it as yet he said again, "That's me." He realized
belatedly, and rather sickeningly, that he would have to improvise, to answer to Wani's advantage, to give body to what his
father must have thought were merely fantasies.

"You know I want to start this magazine, Papa," Wani said.

"Ah—well," Bertrand said, with a puff. "Yes, a magazine can be good. But there is a whole world of difference, my son, running
a magazine than having your bloody face in a magazine!"

"It wouldn't be like that," Wani said, somehow both crossly and courteously.

"All right, but then probably it won't sell."

"It's going to be an art magazine—very high quality photography—very high quality printing and paper—all extraordinary exotic
things, buildings, weird Indian sculptures." He searched mentally through the list Nick had made for him. "Miniatures. Everything."
Nick felt that even with his hangover he could have made this speech better himself, but there was something touching and
revealing in how Wani made his pitch.

"And who do you suppose is going to want to buy that?"

Wani shrugged and spread his hands. "It will be beautiful."

Nick put in the forgotten line. "People will want to collect the magazine, just as they would want to collect the things that
are pictured in it."

Bertrand took a moment or two to see whether this was nonsense or not. Then he said, "All this bloody top-quality stuff sounds
like a lot of money. So you have to charge ten pounds, fifteen pounds for your magazine." He took an irritable swig from his
glass of water.

Wani said, "Top-quality advertising. You know, Gucci, Cartier . . .
Mercedes,"
reaching for names far more lustrous than Watteau or Borromini. "Luxury goods are what people want these days. That's where
the money is."

"So you've got a name for the bloody thing."

"Yah, we're calling it
Ogee,
like the company," Wani said, very straightforwardly.

Bertrand pursed his plump lips. "I don't get it, what is it . . . ? 'Oh Gee!,' " is that it?" he said, bad-tempered but pleased
to have made a joke. "You'll have to tell me again because no one's ever heard of this bloody 'ogee.' "

"I thought he was saying 'Orgy,'" said Martine.

"Orgy?!" said Bertrand.

Wani looked across the table, and since this unheard-of name had originally been his idea Nick said, "You know, it's a double
curve, such as you see in a window or a dome." He made the shape of half an hourglass with his hands raised in the air, just
as Monique, in one of her occasional collusive gestures, did the same and smiled at him as if salaaming.

"It goes first one way, and then the other," she said.

"Exactly. It originates in . . . well, in the Middle East, in fact, and then you see it in English architecture from about
the fourteenth century onwards. It's like Hogarth's line of beauty," Nick said, with a mounting sense of fatuity, "except
that there are two of them, of course . . . I suppose the line of beauty's a sort of animating principle, isn't it . . ."
He looked around and swooped his hand suggestively in the air. It wasn't perhaps the animating principle here.

Bertrand set down his knife and fork, and gave a puncturing smile. He seemed to savour his irony in advance, as well as the
uncertainty, the polite smiles of anticipation, on the faces of the others. He said, "You know, um . . .
Nick,
I came to this country, twenty years ago nearly, 1967, not a bloody good time in Lebanon incidentally, just to see what the
chances were in your famous swinging London. So I look around, you know the big thing then is the supermarkets are starting
up, you know, self-service, help-yourself—you're used to it, you probably go to one every bloody other day: but
then
. . . !"

Nick simpered obediently at the notion of how accustomed he was. He wasn't sure if the
Ogee
talk was over, or being treated to some large cautionary digression. He said coolly, "No, I can see what a . . . what a revolution
there's been."

Like other egotists Bertrand cast only a momentary, doubting glance at the possibility of irony aimed at himself, and stamped
on it anyway. "Of course it is! It's a bloody revolution." He turned to gesture the old man to pour more wine for the others,
and watched with an air of practised forbearance as the burgundy purled into the cut-glass goblets. "You know, I had a fruit
shop, up in Finchley, to start off with." He waved his other arm fondly at that distant place and time. "Bought it up, flew
in the fresh citrus, which was our own product by the way, we grew all that, we didn't have to buy it off bloody nobody. Lebanon,
a great place for growing fruit. You know, all that's come out of Lebanon in the last twenty years? Fruit and brains, fruit
and talent. No one with any brains or any talent wants to stay in the bloody place."

"Mm, the civil war, you mean." He'd meant to mug up a bit on the past twenty years of Lebanese history, but Wani grew pained
and evasive when he mentioned it, and now here it came. He didn't want to concur in his host's harsh judgement on his own
country, it was itself a bit of a minefield.

Monique said, "Our house was knocked down, you know, by a bomb," as though not expecting to be heard.

"Oh, how terrible," said Nick gratefully, since it was another voice in the room.

"Yes," she said, "it was very terrible."

"As Antoine's mother says," said Bertrand, "our family house was virtually destroyed."

"Was it an old house?" Nick asked her.

"Yes, it was quite old. Not as old as this, of course"—and she gave a little shiver, as if Lowndes Square dated from the Middle
Ages. "We have photographs, many . . ."

"Oh, I'd love to see them," said Nick, "I'm so interested in that kind of thing."

"Anyway," said Bertrand, "1969 I open the first Mira Mart, up in Finchley, up in Finchley, it's still there today, you can
go and see it any time. You know what the secret of it is?"

"Um . . ."

"That's what I saw, that's what you got in London, back then—twenty years ago. You got the supermarkets and you got the old
local shops, the corner shops going back hundreds of years. So what do I do, I put the two bloody things together, supermarket
and corner shop, and I make the mini-mart—all the range of stuff you get in Tesco or whatever the bloody place, but still
with the local feeling, comer-shop feeling." He held up his glass and drank as if to his own ingenuity. "And you know the
other thing, of course?"

"Oh!—um . . ."

"The hours."

"The hours, yes . . ."

"Open early and close up late, get people before work and get people after work, not just the dear bloody housewifes going
out for a packet of ciggies and a chit-chat."

Nick wasn't sure if this was Bertrand's special tone for talking to an idiot or if its simplicity reflected his own vision
of affairs. He said, critically, "Some of them aren't like that, though, are they? The one in Notting Hill, for instance,
that we always go to. It's quite
grand"
—and he shrugged in dulled respect.

"Well, now you're talking about the Food Halls! It's two different bloody things: the Mira Marts and the Mira Food Halls .
. . The latter, the Food Halls, being for the bloody rich, posh areas. We got that round here. You know where that comes from."

"Harrods," said Wani.

Bertrand gave him a quick frown. "Of course it does. The mother of all bloody food halls in the whole world!"

"I love to go to Harrods Food Hall," Monique said, "and look at the big . . .
homards . .
."

"The lobsters," muttered Wani, without looking at her, as though it was his accepted function to interpret for his mother.

"Oh, I know!" said Martine, with a smile of faint-hearted rebellion. Nick saw them often doing it, days probably were spent
in Harrods, just round the corner but another world of possibilities, something for everyone who could afford it.

Bertrand gave them a patient five seconds, like a strict but fair-minded schoolmaster, and then said, "So now, you know, Nick,
I got thirty-eight Mira Food Halls all round the country, Harrogate I got one, Altrincham I just opened one; and more than
eight hundred bloody Mira Marts." He was suddenly very genial—he almost shrugged as well at the easy immensity of it. "It's
a great story, no?"

"Amazing," said Nick. "It's kind of you to tell me a story you must know so well"—making his face specially solemn. He saw
the bright orange fascia of the Notting Hill Food Hall, where Gerald himself sometimes popped round late at night with a basket
and a bashful look as though everyone recognized him, shopping for pate and Swiss chocolates. And he saw the corner Mira Mart
in Barwick, with its sadder produce in sloping racks, remote poor cousins of the Knightsbridge obelisks, and its dense stale
smell of a low-ceilinged shop where everything is sold together. An orange, of course, topped by two green leaves, was an
emblem of the chain. Then he looked at Wani, who was eating pickily (coke killed the appetite) and entirely without expression.
His eyes were on his plate, or on the gleaming red veneer just beyond it; he might have been listening thoughtfully to his
father, but Nick could tell he had slipped away into a world his father had never imagined. His submissiveness to Bertrand's
tyranny was the price of his freedom. Uncle Emile, too, looked down, as if properly crushed by his brother-in-law's initiative
and success; Nick himself quickly saw the charm of running off to Harrods with the ladies.

Then Bertrand actually said, "All this one day will be yours, my son."

"Ah, my poor boy!" Monique protested.

"I know, I know," said Bertrand, nettled, and then smirking rather awfully. "That day is doubtless a long way off. Let him
have his magazines and his films. Let him learn his business."

Wani said, "Thank you, Papa," but his smile was for his mother, and his look, briefly and eloquently, as the smile faded,
for Nick. He was at home with his father's manner, his uncontradicted bragging, but to let a friend in on the act showed a
special confidence in the friend. Wani rarely blushed, or showed embarrassment of any kind, beyond the murmured self-chastisement
with which he offered a seat to a lady or confessed his ignorance of some trivial thing. Nick absorbed his glance, and the
secret warmth of what it acknowledged.

"No, no," said Bertrand, with a quick tuck of the chin as if he'd been unfairly criticized, "Wani is in all things his own
master. At the moment fruit and veggies don't seem to interest him. Fine." He spread his hands. "Just as getting married to
his bloody lovely bride doesn't seem to interest him. But we sit back, and we wait on the fullness of time. Eh, Wani?" And
he laughed by himself at his own frankness, as though to soften its effect, but in fact acknowledging and heightening it.