The Line of Beauty (25 page)

"It's true," said Nick. "Though actually everyone is in evening dress all the time these days, aren't they." He was thinking
really of Wani, who owned three dinner jackets and had gone to the Duchess's charity ball in white tie and tails. He saw he
was under attack, since the
Poynton
project would naturally involve a lot of dressing up.

Monique Ouradi said, "I'm sure my son will make a beautiful film, with your help"—so that Nick felt she was encouraging him
in some larger sense, in the inscrutable way that mothers sometimes do.

"Yes, perhaps you don't know him all that well," Martine agreed. "You will need to push and shove him."

"I'll remember that," said Nick with a laugh, and amazing arousing images of Wani in bed glowed in front of him, so that Martine
was like a person in the beam of a slide projector, half exposed, half coloured over, and a little ridiculous.

The Ferrari smacked into Bertrand's slipper once again, and little Antoine made it rev and whine as it tried to climb over
it, until Bertrand bent down and picked the toy up and held it like a furious insect in the air. Antoine came round from behind
the sofa, dawdling as he caught the moment of pure fury on his uncle's face and then gasping with laughter as the glare curled
into a pantomime snarl. "Enough Ferrari for today," Bertrand said, and gave it back to the child with no fear of being disobeyed.
Nick felt abruptly nervous at the thought of crossing Bertrand, and those same naked images of his son melted queasily away.

Wani said, "You must be longing to see round the house."

"Oh, yes," said Nick, getting up with a flattered smile. He felt that Wani had almost overdone the coolness and dissimulation,
he'd barely spoken to him, and even now, as he lifted Nick on a wave of secret intentions, his expression gave nothing away,
not even the warmth that the family might have expected between two old college friends.

"Yes, take him round," said Bertrand. "Show him all the bloody pictures and bloody things we've got."

"I'd love that," said Nick, seeing the hidden advantage of the aesthete persona, even in a house where the good things had
the glare of reproductions. "Will I go too?" said little Antoine, who was clearly as fond of his cousin's touch and smile
as Nick was; but Emile crossly made him stay.

"We'll begin at the top," Wani announced as they left the room and started upstairs two at a time. On the second flight he
said quietly, "You didn't say where you were last night."

"Oh, I went to Heaven," said Nick, with mild apprehension at telling an innocent truth.

"I wondered," said Wani, without looking round. "Did you fuck anyone?"

"Of course I didn't fuck anyone. I was with Howard and Simon."

"I suppose that follows," said Wani, and then allowed Nick a tiny smile. "What did you do, then?"

"Well, you have been to a nightclub, darling," said Nick in a voice where sarcasm almost wished itself away. "You've been
photographed in several with your fiancee. We danced and danced and drank and drank."

"Mm. Did you take your shirt off?"

"I think I'll leave that to your jealous imagination," Nick said.

They went along the landing and into Wani's bedroom. Wani bustled through, with a just perceptible air of granting a concession,
of counting on Nick not to look too closely at what the room contained, and went into a white bathroom beyond. Nick followed
slowly. Everything in the bedroom interested him, it was dead and alive at once, group photographs, from Harrow, from Oxford,
the Martyrs' Club in their pink coats, Toby and Roddy Shepton and the rest; and the books, the Arnold and the Arden Shakespeare
and the cracked orange spines of the Penguin
Middlemarch
and
Tom Jones,
the familiar colours and lettering, the series and ideas of all that phase of their life, stranded and fading here as in
a thousand outgrown bedrooms, never to be looked at again; and the young man's princely bed, almost a double; and the mirror,
where Nick now timidly checked his own progress—he looked perfectly all right. The puzzlement of a hangover . . . the creeping
hilarity of the new drink . . . He strolled on into the bathroom.

Wani had got his wallet out, and was crushing and chopping a generous spill of coke on the wide rim of the washbasin. "A lot
of funny old stuff in there," he said.

"I know," said Nick. "It's a little early for that, isn't it?" It was a lovely slide they were on with the coke, but sometimes
Wani was a bit serious, a bit premature with it.

"You looked as if you needed it."

"Well, just a small line," said Nick. He looked around this room as well, with tense insouciance. He didn't really want to
go down to lunch in reckless unaccountable high spirits and make a different kind of fool of himself. But a line wasn't feasibly
resisted. He loved the etiquette of the thing, the chopping with a credit card, the passing of the tightly rolled note, the
procedure courteous and dry, "all done with money," as Wani said—it was part of the larger beguilement, and once it had begun
it squeezed him with its charm and promise. Being careful not to nudge him as he worked, he hugged Wani lightly from behind
and slid a hand into his left trouser pocket.

"Oh fuck," said Wani distantly. In about three seconds he was hard, and Nick too, pressing against him. Everything they did
was clandestine, and therefore daring and therefore childlike, since it wasn't really daring at all. Nick didn't know how
long it could go on—he didn't dream of it stopping, but it was silly and degrading at twenty-three to be sneaking sex like
this, like a pickpocket as Wani said. But then again, on a hungover morning, moronic with lust, he saw a beauty in the slyness
of it. There were several pound coins in the flannel depths of the pocket, and they tumbled round Nick's hand as he stroked
Wani's dick.

Wani drew the powder into two long lines. "You'd better close the door," he said.

Nick lingeringly disengaged himself: "Yeah, we've only got a minute." He pushed the door to and came forward to take the rolled
£20 note.

"Turn the key," said Wani. "That little boy follows me everywhere."

"Ah, who can blame him," said Nick graciously.

Wani gave him a narrow took—he was often dissatisfied by praise. They stooped in turn and zipped up the powder, and then stood
for a minute, sniffing and nodding, reading each other's faces for comparison and confirmation of the effect. Wani's features
seemed to soften, there was a subtle but involuntary smile that Nick loved to see at the moment of achievement and surrender.
He grinned back at him, and reached out to stroke his neck, and with his other hand rubbed playfully at Wani's oblique erection.
They were on to such a good thing. He said, "This is fucking good stuff."

"God yes," said Wani. "Ronnie always comes through."

"I hope you haven't given me too much," Nick said; though over the next thirty seconds, holding Wani to him and kissing him
lusciously, he knew that everything had become possible, and that the long demanding lunch would be a waltz and that he would
play with Bertrand the tycoon and charm them all. He sighed and pulled Wani's left arm up to look at his famous watch. "We'd
better go down," he said.

"OK." Wani stepped back, and quickly undid his trousers.

"Darling, they're waiting for us. . ." But Wani's look was so fathomlessly interesting to him, command and surrender on another
deeper level, the raw needs of so aloof a man, the silly sense of privilege in their romantic secret—Nick knelt anyway, and
turned him round in his hands, and pulled his pants, the loose old-fashioned drawers that Wani wore, down between his thighs.

On the way downstairs they met little Antoine, who had been dying to look for them and was going into every room in a mime
of happy exasperation. It had taken a couple of flushes to dispose of the rubber, and they had got out with thirty seconds
to spare. The boy claimed them and then wanted to know what they were laughing about.

"I was showing Uncle Nick my old photographs," Wani said.

"They were rather funny," said Nick, pierced by the generous twist to his lie, and also, absurdly, by the missed opportunity
of seeing the photos.

"Oh," said little Antoine, perhaps with a similar regret.

"You'd better have a quick look in here," Wani said, and pushed open the door of the room above the drawing room, which was
his parents' bedroom. He swept a hand over the switches and all the lights came on, the curtains began to close automatically
and "Spring" from
The Four Seasons
was heard as if coming from a great distance. Little Antoine clearly loved this part, and asked to be allowed to do it all
again whilst Nick glanced humorously around. Everything was luxurious and he feigned dismay at his own deep footprints in
the carpet. The richness of the room was its mixture of shiny pomp, glazed swagged curtains, huge mirrors, onyx and glaring
gilt, with older, rougher and better things, things perhaps they'd brought from Beirut, Persian rugs and fragments of Roman
statuary. On top of a small chest of drawers there was a white marble head of Wani, presumably, done at about the same age
as little Antoine was now, the wider, plumper face of a child. It was charming and Nick thought if he could have anything
in the house, any object, it would be that. Bertrand and Monique had separate dressing rooms—each of them, in its order and
abundance, like a department of a shop. "You'd better look at this too," Wani said, showing him a large yellow painting of
Buckingham Palace that hung on the landing.

"It's a Zitt, I see," said Nick, reading the signature dashed across the right-hand corner of the sky.

"He's rather buying into Zitt," said Wani.

"Oh—well, it's absolutely ghastly," said Nick.

"Is it?" said Wani. "Well, try and break it to him gently."

They went down into the dining room, with little Antoine going in before them, lolling his head from side to side and saying
"eb-solutely gharstly" over and over to himself. Wani caught him from behind and gave him an enjoyable strangle.

Nick was placed on Monique's right, beside little Antoine, with Uncle Emile opposite. Uncle Emile had the air of a less successful
brother, baggy and gloomy rather than gleamingly triangular. But it turned out that in fact he was Monique's brother-in-law,
on a visit of indefinite duration from Lyon, where he ran an ailing scrap-metal business. Nick took in this story and smiled
along the table as if they were being told a simmeringly good joke; it was only Wani's tiny frown that made him suspect he
might be looking too exhilarated by his tour of the house. It was the magic opposite, all this, of the jolted witless hangover
state of half an hour earlier. All their secrets seemed to fuse and glow. Though for Wani himself, severely self-controlled,
it seemed hardly worth having taken the drug. The little old couple were bringing in elaborately fanned slices of melon and
orange. It was clear that citrus fruits were treated with special acclaim in the house; here as in the drawing room there
was a daringly stacked obelisk of oranges and lemons on a side table. The effect was both humble and proprietorial. Another
Zitt, of the Stock Exchange and the Mansion House, done in mauve, hung between the windows.

"I see you're admiring my husband's new Zitt," said Monique, with a hint of mischief, as if she would value a second opinion.

"Ah yes . . . !"

"He's really an Impressionist painter, you know."

"Mm, and almost, somehow, an Expressionist one, too," said Nick.

"He's extremely contemporary," said Monique.

"He's a bold colourist," said Nick. "Very bold . . ."

"So, Nick," said Bertrand, spreading his napkin, and steadying his swivelling array of knives on the glassy polish of the
table top: "how is our friend Gerald Fedden?" The "our" might have referred to just the two of them, or to a friendship with
the family, or to a vaguer sense that Gerald was on their side.

"Oh, he's absolutely fine," said Nick. "He's in great form. Wildly busy—as always . . . !" Bertrand's look was humorous but
persistent, as if to show that they could be candid with each other; having ignored him for the first half-hour he was turning
the beam of his confidence on him, with the instinct of a man who gets his way.

"You live in his house, no?"

"Yes, I do. I went to stay for a few weeks and I've ended up staying for nearly three years!"

Bertrand nodded and shrugged, as if this was quite a normal arrangement.

Uncle Emile himself, perhaps, might turn out to be just such a visitor. "I know where it is. We're invited to the concert,
whatever it is, next week, which we'll be charmed to come to."

"Oh, good," said Nick. "I think it should be quite fun. The pianist is a young star from Czechoslovakia."

Bertrand frowned. "I know they say he's a bloody good man."

"No, actually . . . oh, Gerald, you mean—yes, absolutely!"

"He's going to go to the very top of the ladder. Or almost to the top. What's your opinion of that?"

"Oh—oh, I don't know," said Nick. "I don't know anything about politics."

Bertrand twitched. "I know you're the bloody aesthete . . ."

Nick was often pressed for insider views on Gerald's character and prospects, and as a rule he was wafflingly loyal. Now he
said, "I do know he's madly in love with the Prime Minister. But it's not quite clear if the passion is returned. She may
be playing hard to get." Little Antoine did the furtive double-take of a child who is not supposed to have heard something,
and Bertrand's frown deepened over his melon. It occurred to Nick that he was in a household with a very serious view of sexual
propriety. But it was Monique who said,

"Ah, they're all in love with her. She has blue eyes, and she hypnotizes them." Her own dark gaze went feelingly down the
table to her husband, and then to her son.

"It's only a sort of courtly love, isn't it," said Nick.

"Yah . . . " said Wani with a nod and a short laugh.

"You've met the lady, I imagine," Bertrand said.