The Line of Beauty (7 page)

Lord Kessler looked round, and came back to him. "Ah yes," he said, with a smile. "You couldn't be more right. In fact it
was made for Mme de Pompadour."

"How amazing!" They stood and admired the bulbous, oddly diminutive desk—kingwood, was it?—with fronds of ormolu. Lord Kessler
pulled open a drawer, which rattled with little china boxes stowed away inside it; then pushed it shut. "You know about furniture,"
he said.

"A bit," Nick said. "My father's in the antiques business."

"Yes, that's right, jolly good," said Gerald, as if he'd confessed to being the son of a dustman. "He's one of my constituents,
so I should know."

"Well, you must look around everywhere," Lord Kessler said. "Look at anything and everything."

"You really should," said Gerald. "You know, the house is never open to the public, Nick."

Lord Kessler himself took him off into the library, where the books were apparently less important than their bindings, which
were as important as could be. The heavy gilding of the spines, seen through the fine gilt grilles of the carved and gilded
bookcases, created a mood of minatory opulence. They seemed to be books in some quite different sense from those that Nick
used and handled every day. Lord Kessler opened a cage and took down a large volume:
Fables Choisies de La Fontaine,
bound in greeny-brown leather tooled and gilded with a riot of rococo fronds and tendrils. It was an imitation of nature
that had triumphed as pure design and pure expense. They stood side by side to admire it, Nick noticing the pleasant smell
of Lord Kessler's clean suit and discreet cologne. He wasn't allowed to hold the book himself, and was given only a glimpse
of the equally fantastic plates, peopled with elegant birds and animals. Lord Kessler showed the book in a quick dry way that
was not in itself dismissive but allowed for Nick's ignorance and perhaps merely polite interest. In fact Nick loved the book,
but didn't want to bore his host by asking for a longer look. It wasn't clear if it was the jewel of the collection or had
been chosen at random.

"It's all rather . . . " Lord Kessler said.

After a moment, Nick said, "I
know
. . . "

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. What was it Henry James said, about Trollope and
his 'great heavy shovelfuls of testimony to constituted English matters'?"

Lord Kessler paid a moment's wry respect to this bit of showing-off, but said, "Oh, Trollope's good. He's very good on money."

"Oh . . . yes . . . " said Nick, feeling doubly disqualified by his complete ignorance of money and by the aesthetic prejudice
which had stopped him from ever reading Trollope. "To be honest, there's a lot of him I haven't yet read."

"You must know that one, though," said Lord Kessler.

"No, this one is pretty good," Nick said, gazing at the spine with an air of judicious concession. Sometimes his memory of
books he pretended to have read became almost as vivid as that of books he had read and half-forgotten, by some fertile process
of auto-suggestion. He pressed the volume back into place and closed the gilded cage. He had a sense, which was perhaps only
his own self-consciousness, of some formal bit of business, new to him but deeply familiar to his host, being carried out
in a sociable disguise.

"You were at school with Tobias?"

"Oh . . . no, sir." Nick found he'd decided not to mention Barwick Grammar. "We were at Oxford together, both at Worcester
College . . . Though I read English and Toby of course read PPE."

"Quite . . ." said Lord Kessler, who perhaps hadn't been sure of this fact. "You were contemporaries."

"Yes, we were, exactly," said Nick, and the word seemed to throw a historic light across the mere three years since he had
first seen Toby in the porter's lodge and felt a sudden obliviousness of everything else.

"And you took a First?"

Nick loved the murmured challenging confidence of the question because he could answer "Yes." If it had been no, if he'd got
a Second like Toby, he felt everything would have been different, and a lie would have been very ill-advised.

"And how do you rate my nephew's chances?" said Lord Kessler with a smile, though it wasn't clear to Nick what contest, what
eventuality he was alluding to.

"I think he'll do very well," he said, smiling back, and feeling he had struck a very subtle register, of loyal affirmation
hedged with allowable irony.

Lord Kessler weighed this for a moment. "And for you, what now?"

"I'm starting at UCL next month; doing graduate work in English."

"Ah . . . yes . . . " Lord Kessler's faint smile and tucked-in chin suggested an easily mastered disappointment. "And what
is your chosen field?"

"Mm. I want to have a look at
style,"
Nick said. This flashing emphasis on something surely ubiquitous had impressed the admissions board, though Lord Kessler
appeared uncertain. A man who owned Mme de Pompadour's escritoire could hardly be indifferent to style, Nick felt; but his
reply seemed to have in mind some old wisdom about style and substance.

"Style
tout court?"

"Well, style at the turn of the century—Conrad, and Meredith, and Henry James, of course." It all sounded perfectly pointless,
or at least a way of wasting two years, and Nick blushed because he really was interested in it and didn't yet know—not having
done the research—what he was going to prove.

"Ah," said Lord Kessler intelligently: "style as an obstacle."

Nick smiled. "Exactly . . . Or perhaps style that hides things and reveals things at the same time." For some reason this
seemed rather near the knuckle, as though he were suggesting Lord Kessler had a secret. "James is a great interest of mine,
I must say."

"Yes, you're a James man, I see now."

"Oh, absolutely!"—and Nick grinned with pleasure and defiance, it was a kind of coming out, which revealed belatedly why he
wasn't and never would be married to Trollope.

"Henry James stayed here, of course. I'm afraid he found us rather vulgar," Lord Kessler said, as if it had been only last
week.

"How fascinating!" said Nick.

"You
might
be rather fascinated by the old albums. Let me see." Lord Kessler went to one of the cupboards beneath the bookcases, turned
a scratchy-sounding key and bent down to take out a pair of large leather-bound albums, which he carried over to a central
table. Again the inspection was hurried and tantalizing. He stopped now and then, as the heavy pages fell, to display a Victorian
photograph of the gardens, with their wide bald views over newly planted woods, or of the interiors, almost comically crowded
with chairs and tables, vases on stands, paintings on easels, and everywhere, in every vista, the arching, drooping leaves
of potted palms. Now the house seemed settled and seasoned, a century old, with its own historic light and odour, but then
it was ostentatiously new. In the second album there were group photographs, posed on the steps of the terrace, and annotated
in a tiny florid script: Nick wanted days to read them, countesses, baronets, American duchesses, Balfours and Sassoons, Goldsmids
and Stuarts, numerous Kesslers. The gravel was bizarrely covered with fur rugs for the group that centred on Edward VII in
a tweed cape and Homburg hat. And then, May 1903, a gathering of twenty or so, second row, Lady Fairlie, The Hon. Simeon Kessler,
Mr Henry James, Mrs Langtry, The Earl of Hexham . . . a cheerful informal picture. The Master, with his thumb in his striped
waistcoat, eyes shaded by a traveller's widebrimmed hat, looked rather crafty.

"So what do you think of the house?" said Catherine, coming across the lawn.

"Well . . . obviously, it's amazing . . . " He was tingling to the point of fatigue with the afternoon's impressions, but
was cautious as to what to say to her.

"Yeah, it's fucking amazing, isn't it!" she agreed, with a bright, brainless laugh. She didn't normally talk like this, and
Nick supposed it was part of the persona she was showing to Russell. Russell wasn't actually present (he was busy with his
camera somewhere) but it would have taken an unnecessary effort to get out of role. Other elements of the performance were
a strange dragging walk and a stunned, vaguely cunning, smile. Nick assumed these were meant to convey sexual satiation.

"How was your journey?"

"Oh, fine—he drives
so
dangerously."

"Oh . . . We were held up for ages by the roadworks. Your dad got in quite a state about it."

Catherine gave him a pitying glance. "He obviously went the wrong way," she said.

They wandered on among the formal gardens, where rose scents were mixed with the cat's-piss smell of low box hedges, and the
round ponds reflected a summer sky now faintly scrimmed with high white cloud. "God, let's sit down," said Catherine, as though
they'd been walking for hours. They went to a stone bench supervised by two naked minor deities. Marvellous the great rallies
of the undressed that rich people summoned to wait on them. Lord Kessler at home must be almost constantly in view of a sprawling
nymph or unselfconscious hero. "Russell should be finished soon, then you can meet him. I wonder if you'll like him."

"I've already told everyone how charming he is, so I rather feel I've got to."

"Yeah . . . ?" said Catherine, with a grateful, intrigued smile. She felt for cigarettes in her spangled evening bag. "He's
doing lots of stuff for
The Face
at the moment. He's a brilliant photographer."

"I told them that too. They all take
The Face,
of course."

Catherine grunted. "I suppose Gerald was mouthing off about him."

"He was just saying he didn't have an opinion about him because he'd never met him."

"Mm . . . That doesn't normally prevent him. In fact that doesn't sound like him at all." She clicked her lighter and took
in a first deep drag of smoke—the breathing out accompanied by a little toss of the head and a comforted settling back. "At
all, at all, at all," she went on, meaninglessly assuming an Irish accent.

"Well . . . " Nick wanted everyone to get on, but for once he couldn't be bothered to work at it. He wished he was in a position
to speak about Leo as freely as she spoke about Russell—he thought if he did bring the subject up she would say something
upsetting and possibly true. She said,

"Did my mother show you round the house?"

"No, actually, your uncle did. I felt rather honoured."

Catherine paused and blew out smoke admiringly. "What do you make of him, then?"

"He seems very nice."

"Mm. What do you think, he's not gay, is he?"

"No, I didn't feel anything like that," Nick said, a little solemnly. He knew he was supposed to be able to tell; in fact
he tended to think people were when they weren't, and so lived with a recurrent sense of disappointment, at them and at his
own inadequate sensors. He didn't tell Catherine, but his uncertainty on the house tour had actually been the other way round.
Had his own gayness somehow put Lord Kessler off and made him seem unreliable and lightweight in the old boy's eyes? Had Lord
Kessler even registered—in his clever, unimpressionable way—that Nick
was
gay? "He asked me what I was going to do. It was a bit like an interview, except I hadn't applied for a job."

"Well, you may want a job one day," said Catherine. "And then he's bound to remember. He's got a memory like an ostrich."

"Perhaps . . . I'm not quite sure what he actually does."

She looked at him as if he must be joking. "He's got this
bank,
darling . . ."

"Yes, I know—"

"It's a big building chock-a-block full of money." She waved her cigarette arm around hilariously. "And he goes in and turns
it into even more money."

Nick let this simple sarcasm pass over him. "I see, you don't know what he actually does either."

She stared at him and then gave another neighing laugh. "Haven't a clue, darling!"

There was a shaking in the trimmed beech hedge away to the right, and then a tall man came hopping out of it sideways, holding
up a camera that was strung round his neck. They watched him as he strolled towards them, Catherine leaning back on one hand
with a nervously triumphant expression. "Yeah, hold that," he said, and took a couple of exposures very quickly, as he was
still moving. "Lovely," he said.

So Russell was one of her older boyfriends, thirty perhaps, dark, balding, with the casual but combative look of the urban
photographer, black T-shirt and baseball boots, twenty-pocketed waistcoat and bandolier of film. He passed in front of them,
clicking away, cheerily exploiting this little episode of his arrival, Nick's awkwardness and Catherine's hunger for the spontaneous,
the outrageous. She lolled backwards, and touched her upper lip with her tongue. Was it good when her men were older, or not?
He could be Protector or Abuser—it was a great deep uncertainty, like the ones in her graphology book. He pulled her up and
gave her a hug and then Catherine said, almost reluctantly,

"Oh, this is Nick, by the way."

"Hello, Nick," said Russell.

"Hello!"

"Did you meet anyone?" asked Catherine, showing a hint of anxiety.

"Yeah, I've just been talking to the caterers round the back. Apparently Thatcher's not coming."

"Oh, sorry, Russell," Catherine said.

Nick said, "We are getting the Home Secretary, though," in his mock-pompous tone, which Russell, like Leo, failed to pick
up on.

"I wanted Thatcher doing the twist, or pissed."

"Yeah, Thatcher pogoing!" said Catherine, and laughed rather madly. Russell didn't look especially amused.