The Line of Beauty (24 page)

Wani was still "building up his team" at Ogee, and Nick was silently amazed by both his confidence and his lack of urgency.
A woman called Melanie, dressed for a Dallas cocktail party, came in to do the typing, and artfully protracted her few bits
of filing and phoning through the afternoon. Whenever her mother rang her she said things were "hectic." Wani had a wonderful
Talkman, which was a portable phone he could take with him in the car or even into a restaurant, and Melanie was encouraged
to call him on it if he was in a meeting and give him some figures. Then there were the boys, Howard and Simon, not actually
a couple, but always referred to together, and acting together in the comfortable way of schoolboy best chums. Howard was
very tall and square-jawed and Simon was short and owlish and pretended not to mind being fat. If anyone took them for lovers
Simon shrieked with laughter and Howard explained tactfully that they were merely good friends. Nick liked nattering with
them when he dropped into the office, and enjoyed their glancing hints that they both rather fancied him. "Well, I swim and
I work out a couple of times a week," Nick would say, leaning back in his chair with the glow of shame that for him was still
the cost of bragging; and Simon would say, "Oh, I suppose I ought to try that." They all carried on as if they'd never noticed
Wani's beauty, and as if they took him entirely seriously. If his picture appeared in the social pages of
Tatler
or
Harper's and Queen
Melanie passed the magazine round like a validation of their whole enterprise.

Nick was confident that none of them knew he was sleeping with the boss, and with ten or more years of practice he could head
off almost any train of talk that might end in a thought-provoking blush. Part of him longed for the scandalous acclaim, but
Wani exacted total secrecy, and Nick enjoyed keeping secrets. He worked up his earlier adventures as a cover, and told Howard
and Simon a different version of the Ricky incident, replacing Wani with a Frenchman he'd met at the Pond the previous summer.

"So was he handsome, this Ricky?" said Simon.

Handsomeness was neither here nor there with Ricky, it was his look of stupid certainty, the steady heat of him, the way you
started in deep, as though the first kiss was an old kiss interrupted and picked up again at full intensity—Nick said, "Oh,
magnificent. Dark eyes, round face, nice big nose—"

"Mmm," said Simon.

"Perhaps a trifle too punctually, though not yet quite lamentably, bald."

There was a moment's thought before Simon said, "That's one of your things, isn't it?"

"What . . . ?" said Nick, with a vaguely wounded look.

"A trifle too . . . how did it go?"

"I can't remember what I said . . . 'a trifle too punctually, though not yet quite lamentably, bald'?"

Howard sat back, with the nod of someone submitting to an easy old trick, and said, "So did he have a beard?"

"Far from it," said Nick. "No, no—he spoke, as to cheek and chin, of the joy of the matutinal steel."

They all laughed contentedly. It was one of Nick's routines to slip these plums of periphrasis from Henry James's late works
into unsuitable parts of his conversation, and the boys marvelled at them and tried feebly to remember them—really they just
wanted Nick to say them, in his brisk but weighty way.

"So what's that from, then?"

"The baldness? It's from
The Outcry,
it's a novel by Henry James that no one's ever heard of." 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.

"It sounds like Henry James called everyone beautiful and marvellous," said Sam, a little sourly, "from what you say."

"Oh, beautiful, magnificent. . .
wonderful.
I suppose it's really more what the characters call each other, especially when they're being wicked. In the later books,
you know, they do it more and more, when actually they're more and more ugly—in a moral sense."

"Right . . . " said Simon.

"The worse they are the more they see beauty in each other."

"Interesting," said Howard drily.

Nick cast a fond glance at his little audience. "There's a marvellous bit in his play
The High Bid,
when a man says to the butler in a country house, T mean, to whom do you beautifully
belong?'
"

Simon grunted, and looked round to see if Melanie could hear. He said, "So what was his knob like, then? . . . You know, Ricky?"

Well, it was certainly worth describing, and embellishing. Nick wondered for a moment how Henry would have got round it. If
he had fingered so archly at beards and baldness, the fine paired saliences of his own appearance, what flirtings and flutterings
might he not have performed to conjure up Ricky's solid eight inches? Nick said, "Oh, it was
. . . of a dimension,"
and watched Simon work what excitement he could out of that.

So he prattled on, mixing up sex and scholarship, and enjoying his wanderings away from the strict truth. In fact that was
really the fun of it. And it seemed to fit in with the air of fantasy in the Ogee office, the distant sense of an avoided
issue.

Nick couldn't quite have defined his own role there, and he only learned what it was when he was suddenly invited to Lowndes
Square for Sunday lunch. He'd been dancing at Heaven till three the night before, and was still struggling with the rubber
mask, the wobbly legs, the trill and glare of a beer and brandy hangover when Bertrand Ouradi grasped his hand very hard and
said, "Ah, so you're Antoine's aesthete."

"That's me!" said Nick, returning the handshake as firmly as he could, and grinning in the hope that even an aesthete might
be a good thing to be if it was sanctioned by his beloved son.

"Ha ha!" said Bertrand, and turned away along the chequered marble floor of the hall. "Well, we need our aesthetes." He stretched
out his arms in a graceful shrug, and seemed to gesture at the shiny paintings and Empire torcheres as necessary trappings
of his position. He had an aesthete of his own, he seemed to say, on a small retainer. Nick followed on, wincing at the high
polish on everything. He had the feeling there was only one thing in the house he would ever want to see. "I'll join you in
a moment," Bertrand said, with a tiny gesture of deterrence, as Nick found himself following him into the lavatory. The dark
little woman who'd opened the door led him dutifully upstairs, and he followed her instead, smiling and doomed. So Wani himself
must have called him his aesthete, that was how he'd explained him to his parents . . .

He was shown into the pink and gold confusion of a drawing room. Wani called out, "Ah, Nick . . . " like an old man remembering,
and came across to shake his hand. "Now here's Martine, who's been longing to see you . . . " (Nick stopped by the sofa where
she was sitting and shook her hand as well with an exaggerated bow)—"and you haven't met my mother." Nick was aware of himself
advancing in the high mirror which hung over the fireplace, and at a slight tilt, so that the room seemed to climb into a
luminous middle distance. He kept up a wide smile, in self-protection, and only caught his own eye for an unwise second. It
was a dazzled smile, perhaps even the smile of someone about to make a sequence of witty remarks. Monique Ouradi said she
had been to Mass at Westminster Cathedral, and smiled back, but seemed not quite ready yet for mere social communication.
"And this is my Uncle Emile, and my cousin, little Antoine," said Wani, as two people came in unexpectedly behind him. Everything
impinged on Nick, but he couldn't take it in. He shook hands with Uncle Emile, who said "Enchante" in a coughing sort of voice,
and Nick said "Enchante" back. Wani rested his hand on his little cousin's head, and the boy looked up at him adoringly before
also shaking hands with Nick. Nick felt a tear rise to his eye at the thought of the child's utter innocence of hangovers.

Nick had decided in the taxi that he would stick to water, but when Bertrand came in saying, "Now, drinks!" he at once saw
the point of a bloody Mary. Bertrand moved towards a drinks tray on a far table and at just that moment an old man in a black
jacket hurried in with a salver and took control of the business. Nick gazed at them with the patient surmise of the hungover,
a sense of mysterious displacement and slow revelation. Bertrand could make a mere gesture towards an action which would at
once be performed by someone else—there was a signalled readiness and then a prompt, never-doubted relief! It explained everything.

Really it was best to prop oneself at a life-like angle in the corner of the sofa and let the family talk trail back and forth
. . . At the tall front windows white net curtains rippled very gently into the room. Outside on the balcony there were two
pointed trees in tubs, and beyond them the planes in the square, forest-height, filled the entire view. Nick's thoughts drifted
out and perched there.

Little Antoine had a remote-controlled toy car, which Wani was encouraging him to crash into the legs of the repro Louis Quinze
tables and chairs. It was a bright-red Ferrari with a whiplike antenna. Nick crouched forward to watch it haring round, and
made histrionic groans when it banged into the skirting board or got stuck under the bureau. He was pretending to enjoy the
game, and trying to attach himself to it, but the two boys seemed oblivious of him, Wani almost snatching the controls now
and then to cause a top-speed collision. Bertrand was standing talking to Uncle Emile, and shuffled obligingly out of the
way a couple of times, with a certain hardening of expression. In the tilting mirror Nick saw them all, as if from a privileged
angle, like actors on a set.

The parents were fascinating, Bertrand short and handsome as an old-fashioned film star, and Monique too, very smart and austere,
with a black bob and a diamond brooch, evincing foreignness like a time-shift, into the chic of twenty years before. There
was a subdued shine to Bertrand's dark suit, which was double-breasted, square-shouldered, and worn with a crimson breast-pocket
handkerchief; he seemed to resolve into a pattern of squares and lozenges, with his square jaw, tougher than Wani's, and the
same long hawkish nose, all parts of the pattern. Along his full upper lip he wore a thin black moustache. The light, low-cut
patent slippers he had on seemed to Nick an eastern note. Wani had several pairs himself, with ridged rubber soles, "for walking
on marble" as he explained. Bertrand's voice, strongly accented, casual but coercive, dominated the room.

Martine was sitting at the other end of Nick's sofa, in what felt like her "place," adjacent to Wani's mother. They were speaking
quietly in French, in a kind of listless female conspiracy, while the men boomed and frowned and crashed cars. Nick smiled
at them undemandingly. Martine in her long engagement must have become a fixture, a passive poor relation, who was waiting
and waiting to turn into a millionairess. She seemed shy of speaking to Nick, for reasons he could only guess at. Wani's claim
that she was longing to see him had been wishful social prompting—he had a habit of languidly implanting his wishes. But Martine,
in her mild unexpectant way, had always seemed to have her own mind. So it was a minute or two before she slid a dish of olives
towards him on the low glass table and said, "And how are you getting on?"

"Oh, fine!" said Nick, blinking and smirking. "I'm feeling a bit delicate, actually"—and he waggled his glass. "This is helping.
It's a miracle how it does." He thought what extraordinary things one said.

She was too delicate herself to take on the subject of his hangover. "Work is all fine?" she said.

"Oh—yes . . . thank you. Well—I'm trying to finish my thesis this summer, and of course I'm very behind," he said, as if she
must be familiar with his weaknesses, they seemed to grin out of him as he sat there. "I'm so terribly lazy and disorganized."

"I hope not," she said, as if he could only be joking. "And what is it concerning, this thesis?"

"Oh . . . it's concerning—Henry James . . . " He'd developed a reluctance that was Jamesian in itself to say exactly what
its subject was. There was a lot to do with hidden sexuality, which struck him as better avoided.

"But Antoine says you are working with him too, at the Ogee?"

"Oh, I don't really do very much."

"You are not writing a film? That is what he says."

"Well, I'd like to. In a way, yes . . . We have a few ideas." He smiled politely beyond her to take Wani's mother as well
into the conversation. Since it was all he had, he said, "Actually, I've always rather wanted to make a film of
The Spoils of Poynton
. . . " Monique settled back with an appreciative nod at this, and Nick felt encouraged to go on, "I think it
could
be rather marvellous, don't you. You know Ezra Pound said it was just a novel about furniture, rneaning to dismiss it of
course, but that was really what made me like the sound of it!"

Monique sipped at her gin-and-tonic and looked at him with vague concern, and then, as if searching for the point, glanced
about at the tables and chairs. Of course she had no idea what he was talking about.

Martine said, "So you want to make
zfxlm
about furniture?"

Monique said, raising her voice as the Ferrari tore past her ankles, "We saw the latest film, which was so nice, of
The Room with the View."

"Ah yes," said Nick.

"Mainly it took place in Italy, which we love so much, it was delightful."

Martine slightly surprised him by saying, "I think it's so boring now, everything takes place in the past."

"Oh . . . I see. You mean, all these costume dramas . . ."

"Costume dramas. All of this period stuff. Don't the English actors get fed up with it—they are all the time in evening dress."