The Line of Beauty (8 page)

"Well, I wouldn't want her at my twenty-first," he said.

"I don't think Toby really wanted her," Nick put in apologetically. The touching thing was that Catherine had clearly taken
her father's fantasy as the truth, and then used it to lure Russell. The dream of the leader's presence seeped through to
an unexpected depth.

"Well, Toby would have been perfectly happy with a party at home," she said. She wasn't quite sure whose side she was on,
when it came to a difference between her father and her brother; Nick saw that she wanted to impress Russell with the right
kind of disaffection. "But then Gerald has to get hold of it and invite the ministers for everything. It's not a party, darling,
it's a party conference!"

"Well . . . " Russell chuckled and dangled his long arms and clapped his hands together loosely a few times, as if ready to
take them on.

"We've got an enormous house of our own," Catherine said. "Not that Uncle Lionel's isn't fantastic, of course." They turned
and frowned at it across the smooth lawn and the formal scrolls of the parterre. The steep slate roofs were topped with bronze
finials so tall and fanciful they looked like drops of liquid sliding down a thread. "I just don't think Uncle Lionel will
be all that pleased when Toby's rowing friends start throwing up on the whatsits."

"The whatnots," Nick made a friendly correction.

Russell blinked at him. "He's a fruit, is he, Uncle Lionel?" he said.

"No, no," Catherine said, faltering for a moment at the expression. "Nothing like that."

Nick's dinner jacket had belonged to his great-uncle Archie; it was double-breasted and wide on the shoulder in a way that
was once again fashionable. It had glazed, pointed lapels which reached almost to the armpits, and shiny silk-covered buttons.
As he crossed the drawing room he acknowledged himself with a flattered smile in a mirror. He was wearing a wing collar, and
something dandyish in him, some memory of the licence and discipline of being in a play, lifted his mood. The only trouble
with the jacket, on a long summer night of eating and bopping, was that when it warmed up it gave off, more and more unignorably,
a sharp stale smell, the re-awoken ghost of numberless long-ago dinner-dances in Lincolnshire hotels. Nick had dabbed himself
all over with "Je Promets" in the hope of delaying and complicating the effect.

Drinks were being served on the long terrace, and when he came out through the French windows there were two or three small
groups already laughing and glowing. You could tell that everyone had been on holiday, and like the roses and begonias they
seemed to take and hold the richly filtered evening light. Gerald was talking to a somehow familiar man and his blonde-helmeted
wife; Nick knew from his smiles and guffaws that he was being recklessly agreeable. None of his particular friends was here
yet, and Toby was still upstairs with Sophie, interminably getting dressed. He took a flute of champagne from a dark-eyed
young waiter, and strolled off into the knee-high maze of the parterre. He wondered what the waiter thought of him, and if
he was watching him in his solitary meandering over trimmed grass and pea gravel. He had worked as a waiter himself, two Christmases
ago, and stood about with a tray in a similar way at two neighbouring hunt balls. It was not impossible that he would do so
again. He felt he might look like a person with no friends, and that the waiter might know that he didn't really belong to
this looking-glass world. Could he even tell, any more than Lord Kessler could, that he was gay? He felt there had been a
flashing hint, in their moment of contact, of some more luxurious understanding, of a longer gaze, full of humour and curiosity,
that they might have shared . . . He thought at the second contact, the refill, he would make it all right. The curlicue of
the path brought him round to a view of the house again, but the waiter had moved off, and instead he saw Paul Tompkins ambling
towards him.

"My dear!"

At Oxford Tompkins was widely known as Polly, but Nick said, "Hello, Paul," because the nickname seemed suddenly too intimate
or too critical. "How are you?" He realized that in the romantic retrospect of his undergraduate life Paul was a figure he
had painted out.

"I'm extremely well," Paul said meaningly. He was large and round in the middle and seemed to taper away, in his tight evening
suit, towards narrow feet and a tall, jowly head. He had been a noise, a recurrent clatter of bitchery and ambition, a kind
of monster of the Union and the MCR, throughout Nick's years in college. He had come out just below the top in the Civil Service
exams, and had recently started in some promising capacity in Whitehall. He looked pop-eyed already from the tussle between
pompous discretion and a natural love of scandal. He raised his glass. "My compliments to wicked old Lionel Kessler. The waiters
here are sheer heaven."

"I know . . ."

"That one with the champagne is from Madeira, which is rather funny."

"Oh, really . . . "

"Well, better than the other way round. Now, however, he lives in Fulham: really awfully close to me."

"You mean that one there."

"Tristao." Paul gave Nick a look of concentrated mischief. "Ask me more after our date next week, my dear."

"Ah." Nick's face was tight with regret for a second, the pinch of his own incompetence. It was a mystery to him that fat
old Polly, who was rutted with acne scars and completely lacking in ordinary kindness, had such a conspicuous success with
men. In college he had brought off a number of almost impossible seductions, from kitchen boys to the solemnly hetero Captain
of Boats. Nothing that lasted, but startling triumphs of will, opportunism and technique, even so. Nick was slightly frightened
of him. He walked on a pace or two, round the plinth of a large urn, and looked across the roses at the assembling guests.
A famous TV interviewer was exerting his charm over a group of flattered girls. Nick said, "It's rather a distinguished crowd."

"Mmm." Paul's murmur had a note of scepticism in it as well as a suggestion that here too there were opportunities. He got
out, and lit, a cigarette. "That depends very much on your idea of distinction. But aren't the wives marvellous, since the
last election? It's as if any doubts they had the first time round have now been completely discounted. The men did something
naughty, and got away with it, and not only did they get away with it but they've been asked to do it again, with a huge majority.
That's so much the mood in Whitehall—the economy's in ruins, no one's got a job, and they just don't care, it's bliss. And
the wives, you see, all look like . . . her—they've all got the blue bows, and the hair."

"Well, Rachel hasn't," said Nick, who rather doubted that Paul could sum up the mood in Whitehall when he'd only been there
five minutes.

"No, dear, but Rachel's got a lot more class. Jewish class, but still class. And her husband's not called Norman."

Nick had some further objections to what Paul was saying, but didn't want to seem humourless. "No, or Ken," he said.

Paul inhaled tolerantly and blew the smoke out in a long sibilant jet. "I must say Gerald is looking quite delicious this
evening."

"Gerald Fedden . . . ?"

"Absolutely . . ."

"You're pulling my leg."

"Now I've shocked you," Paul said unapologetically.

"Not at all," said Nick, to whom life was a series of shocks, more or less well mastered. "No, I can see he's . . ."

"Of course now you're living in his house you've probably grown accustomed to his sheer splendour."

Nick laughed and together they watched the MP as he wound up a story (which was all chortling patter with booming emphases)
and the blue-dressed women around him rippled and staggered about slightly on the fine gravel. "I wouldn't deny that he's
very charming," Nick said.

"Aha . . . So who is it at the house, just you and them and the Sleeping Beauty?"

Nick loved hearing Toby described like that, the praise in the mockery. "I'm afraid the Sleeping Beauty isn't there much any
more, you know he's been given his own flat. But there's Catherine, of course."

"Oh, yes, I love Catherine. I just caught her smoking a joint about a yard long with a very dodgy-looking man. She's quite
a girl."

"She's certainly a very unhappy one," Nick said, swelling for a moment with his portentous secret knowledge of her.

Paul's eyebrow suggested that this was a wrong note. "Really? Every time I see her she's got a new man. She really should
be happy, she must have everything a girl could want."

"You sound just like her father, I've heard him say exactly the same thing."

"Ah, there you are!" said Paul. He grinned and stamped out his half-smoked cigarette on the path. "There's Toby now." He nodded
towards the door from the drawing room, where Toby was emerging with Sophie on his arm, more like a wedding than a birthday
party. "Christ, the jammy
bitchl"
Paul murmured, in an oddly sincere surrender to the sheer dazzle of the couple.

"I know, I do hate her."

"Oh, she's marvellous. She's good-looking, she's as thick as a jug—and of course she's a highly promising actress."

"Exactly."

Paul smiled at him, as if at a country cousin. "My dear, don't take it so seriously. Anyway, they're all tarts, these boys,
they've all got a price. Get Toby at two in the morning, when he's had a bottle of brandy, and you'll be able to do what you
want with him. I promise you."

This idea was so wildly, almost grimly, exciting to Nick that he could hardly smile. It was clever of old Polly to tamper
so intimately with his feelings. Nick said, "Mm, this is rather a festival of the girlfriend, though, I'm afraid."

And it was true that as the crowd quickly doubled and trebled on the terrace it took on more and more the air of an efficiently
reproductive species. The boys, most of them Nick's Oxford contemporaries, all in their black and white, glanced across at
politicians and people on the telly, and caught a glimpse of themselves as high-achieving adults too—they had that canny glint
of self-discovery that comes with putting on a disguise. They didn't mingle unnecessarily with the girls. It was almost as
if the High Victorian codes of the house, with its smoking room and bachelors' wing, still guided and restrained them. But
the girls, in a shimmer of velvet and silk, and brilliantly made-up, like smaller children who had raided their mothers' dressing
tables, had new power and authority too. As the sunlight lowered it grew more searching and theatrical, and cast intriguing
shadows.

Paul said, "I should warn you, Wani Ouradi's got engaged."

"Oh, no," said Nick. It was such a snub, an engagement. "He might have thought about it a bit longer." He could picture a
happy alternative future for himself and Wani—who was sweet-natured, very rich, and beautiful as a John the Baptist painted
for a boy-loving pope. His father owned the Mira supermarket chain, and whenever Nick went into a Mira Mart for a bottle of
milk or a bar of chocolate he had a vague erotic sense of slipping the money into Wani's pocket. He said, "I think he's coming
tonight."

"He is, the old tart, I saw that vulgar motor car of his in the drive." Tart was Paul's word for anyone who had agreed to
have sex with him; though as far as Nick was aware, he had never got anywhere with Wani. Wani, like Toby, remained in the
far pure reach of fantasy, which grew all the keener and more inventive to meet the challenge of his unavailability. He felt
the loss of him as though he had really stood a chance with him, he'd gone so far with him in his mind, as he lay alone in
bed. He saw the great heterosexual express pulling out from the platform precisely on time, and all his friends were on it,
in the first-class carriage—in the wagons-lits! He clung to what he had, as it gathered speed: that quarter of an hour with
Leo by the compost heap, which was his first sharp taste of coupledom. "Are you and I the only homos here?" he said.

"I doubt it," said Paul, who didn't look keen to become Nick's partner for the night on the strength of that chance connection.
"Oh my god, it's the fucking
Home Secretary.
I must wiggle. How do I look?"

"Fantastic," said Nick.

"Oh, I knew it." He knuckled his hair, with its oily fringe, like a vain schoolboy. "Gotta go, girl!" he said, silly but focused,
an outrageous new seduction in view. And off he went, eagerly striding and hopping over the little low hedges. Nick saw him
reach the group where Gerald was introducing his son to the Home Secretary: it was almost as if there were two guests of honour,
each good-humouredly perplexed by the presence of the other. Polly hovered and then pushed in shamelessly; Nick caught his
look of unironic excitement as the group closed round him.

"So what's he like?" said Russell. "Her old man. What's he into?" He glanced at Catherine, across the table, before his eyes
drifted back down the room to Gerald, who was smiling at the blonde woman beside him but had the fine glaze of preoccupation
of someone about to make a speech. They were in the great hall, at a dozen tables. It was the end of dinner, and there was
a mood of noisy expectancy.

"Wine," said Nick, who was drunk and fluent, but still wary of Russell's encouraging tone. He twirled his glass on the rucked
tablecloth. "Wine. His wife . . . um . . ."

"Power," said Catherine sharply.

"Power . . ."—Nick nodded it into the list. "Wensleydale cheese he's also very keen on. Oh, and the music of Richard Strauss—that
particularly."

"Right," said Russell. "Yeah, I like a bit of Richard Strauss myself."

"Oh, I'd always prefer a bit of Wensleydale cheese," said Nick.

Russell blinked at him in a way that suggested he didn't understand him or was about to punch him in the face. But then he
smiled reluctantly. "So he's not into anything kinky at all."

"Power," said Catherine again. "And making speeches." As the glass tinkled and the hubbub quickly died a lot of people heard
her saying, "He loves making speeches."