The Line of Beauty (29 page)

"Nigel must be chuffed," Sir Maurice said.

"Maurice and I have been to a number of concerts at friends' houses lately, it's an excellent move," said Lady Tipper, who
was known to be artistic.

"I know, there seems to be an absolute mania for concerts," Lady Kimbolton said. "This is the second one I've been to this
year."

"I hear Lionel Kessler, you know . . . ? had the Medici Quartet at Hawkeswood for a marvellous evening with Giscard d'Estaing."

"I think that's really what gave Gerald the idea," said Nick, joshing in between them as they got to the table.

"Oh, hello . . ."

"Hello, Dolly," said Nick. He knew he could do quite a funny sketch about Gerald's growing preoccupation with the concert
idea, which had come to a peak of competitive angst when Denis Beckwith, a handsome old saurian of the right enjoying fresh
acclaim these days, had hired Kiri te Kanawa to sing Mozart and Strauss at his eighty-fifth birthday party. But something
made him tread carefully. "You know how competitive he is," he said.

"We're all for competition!" said Dolly Kimbolton, claiming her plate of salmon from the waiter.

"Jolly good, jolly good . . . " said Gerald, weaving through behind them. "Clever you to introduce us to a new artiste," said
Sally Tipper.

"I liked that last thing she played," said Sir Maurice.

Gerald looked round to see where Nina was. "We thought rather than going for a big name . . ."

The "Badminton" lady was darting in for a bread roll. "You're so right," she said. "I hear Michael's hiring
the Royal Philharmonic
for their summer party."

"Michael . . . ?" said Gerald.

"Oh? . . . Heseltine? Yup . . . yup . . . " She hunched in fake apology as she backed away. "Yup, the whole blinking RPO.
What it must be costing.

But they've had a good year," she added, in a tenderly defiant tone.

"I thought we'd had a pretty good year," Gerald muttered.

Nick had been avoiding Bertrand Ouradi, but as he turned from the table with his plate there Bertrand was. "Aha, my friend
the aesthete!" he said, and Nick was reminded of an annoying foreign waiter, perhaps, or taxi driver, for whom he was identified
by a single joke. But he was able to say excitedly,

"How
are
you?"

Bertrand didn't answer—he seemed to suggest the question was both trivial and impertinent. He looked around the room, where
people were grouping on the sofas and at little tables brought in by the staff and swiftly covered with white cloths. He didn't
know where to settle, among these braying English snobs; his expression was proud and wary. "Bloody hot, isn't it," he said
to Nick. "Come and talk to me"; and he led him, again like a waiter, with half-impatient glances over his shoulder, among
the dotted supper tables—not to the cool of the great rear balcony but to a window seat at the front, looking onto the street.
Perching there, knee to knee, partly screened by the roped-back curtains, they had a worrying degree of privacy. "Bloody hot,"
said Bertrand again. "Thank god that beast has got bloody air conditioning": he nodded at the maroon Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow
parked at the kerb below.

"Ah," said Nick, unable to rise to such a wretched brag. In the back window of the car shiny white cushions were neatly aligned;
he couldn't see the number plate but the thought that it must be BO something made him smirk—he pressed the smirk a little
harder into a ghastly smile of admiration. One of Catherine's neuroses was a horror of maroon; it outdid her phobia of the
au
sound, or augmented it perhaps, with some worse intimation. Nick saw what she meant.

Bertrand asked him a few questions about the recital, and paid attention to the answers as though at a useful professional
briefing. "Amazing technique," he repeated. "Still very young," he said, and shook his head and dissected his salmon. High
and capable though he was, Nick hesitated to play the aesthete very thoroughly, hesitated to be himself, in case his tone
was too intimate and revealing. The influence of Bertrand was as strong in its way as the coke, and he found himself speaking
gruffly to him. He wondered actually, despite the keenness of his feelings, if Nina had been much good. Reactions were skewed
by her being so young. He pretended he was Dolly Kimbolton and said, "The Beethoven was heartbreaking," but it wasn't a phrase
that Bertrand saw a use for. He looked at him narrowly and said, "That last thing she played was bloody good."

Nick glanced out into the room to find Wani, who was sitting at a table with his mother and a middle-aged woman who looked
quite prickly and confused under his long-lashed gaze. It was almost a decoy of Wani's to let his gaze rest emptily but seductively
on a woman. He still hadn't spoken to Nick since his arrival; there had been a turn and a nod, a sigh, as if to say, "These
crowds, these duties," when they were taking their seats. If it made him uneasy to see his lover and his father tete-a-tete
he was too clever to show it. Bertrand said, "That son of mine, who's he flirting with now?"

Nick laughed easily and said, "Oh, I don't know. Some MP's wife, I expect."

"Flirting, flirting, that's all he bloody does!" said Bertrand, with a mocking flutter of his own eyelashes. Dapper and primped
as he was, he became almost camp. Nick pictured the daily task of shaving above and below that line of moustache, the joy
of the matutinal steel, and then the joy of the dressing room that was like a department of a shop. He said, "He may flirt,
but you know he never really looks at another woman," and was thrilled by his own wickedness.

"I know, I know," said Bertrand, as though cross at being taken seriously, but also perhaps reassured. "So how's it going—at
the office?"

"Oh fine, I think."

"You still got all those pretty boys there?"

"Um . . ."

"I don't know why he has to have all these bloody pretty poofy boys." "Well, I think they're very good at their jobs," Nick
said, so horrified he sounded almost apologetic. "Simon Jones is an excellent graphic designer, and Howard Wasserstein is
a brilliant script editor."

"So when does the bloody shooting start on the film?"

"Ah—you'd have to ask Wani that."

Bertrand popped a new potato into his mouth and said, "I already did—he never tells me nothing." He flapped his napkin. "What
is the bloody film anyway?"

"Well, we're thinking about adapting
The Spoils of Poynton,
um . . ."

"Plenty of smooching, plenty of action," Bertrand said.

Nick smiled thinly and thought rapidly and discovered that these were two-elements entirely lacking from the novel. He said,
"Wani's hoping to get James Stallard to be in it."

Bertrand gave him a wary look. "Another pretty boy?"

"Well, he's generally agreed to be very good-looking. He's one of the rising young stars."

"I read something about him . . ."

"Well, he recently got married to Sophie Tipper," Nick said. "Sir Maurice Tipper's daughter. It was in all the papers. Of
course
she
used to go out with Toby—Gerald and Rachel's son." He produced all this hetero stuff like a distracting proof; he hoped he
wouldn't normally be so cravenly reassuring.

Bertrand smiled as if nothing would surprise him. "I heard he let a big fish go-"

Nick blushed for some reason, and started talking about the magazine, with the brightness of a novice salesman, not yet committed
and not yet cynical; he told him that he and Wani were going on a trip to research subjects for it—and that was the nearest
he could get to stating the unspeakable fact of their affair. For a second he imagined telling Bertrand the truth, in all
its mischievous beauty, imagined describing, like some praiseworthy business initiative, the skinhead rent boy they'd had
in last week for a threesome. Just then he felt a kind of sadness—well, the shine went off things, as he'd known it would,
his mood was petering into greyness, a grey restlessness. He felt condemned to this with Bertrand. It was just what had happened
at Lowndes Square: the secret certainty faded after half an hour and gave way to a somehow enhanced state of doubt. The manageable
joke of Bertrand became a penance. Nick was powerless, fidgety, sulkily appeasing, in the grip of a man who seemed to him
in every way the opposite of himself, a tight little bundle of ego in a shiny suit.

Something awful happened with a waitress, who was taking round a wine bottle. She was black, and Nick had noticed already
the flickers of discomfort and mimes of broadmindedness as she moved through the room and gave everyone what they wanted.
Bertrand held out his glass and she filled it with Chablis for him—he watched her as she did it, and as she smiled and turned
interrogatively to Nick, Bertrand said, "No, you bloody idiot, do you think I drink this? I want mineral water." The girl
recoiled for just a second at the smart of his tone, at the slap-down of service, and then apologized with steely insincerity.
Nick said, "Oh, I'm sure we can get you some water, we've got masses of water!" in a sweetly anxious way, as if to soften
Bertrand's tone, to apologize for him himself, to give a breath of laughter to a rough moment; while Bertrand held the glass
out stiffly towards her, expressionless save for a steady contemptuous blink. She held her dignity for a moment longer, while
Nick's smile pleaded with her not to mind and with him to relent. But Bertrand said, "Don't you know bloody nothing?—Take
this away," and glared at Nick as if to enlist or excite a similar outrage in him. Then when the girl had marched off, without
saying a word, he looked down, sighed, and smiled ruefully, almost tenderly at Nick, as though to say that he would have liked
to spare him such a scene, but that he himself was afraid of no one.

Nick knew he should move away, but he hadn't finished his main course; he took shameful refuge in it as a reason not to make
a scene of his own. Other people must have heard. Tucked away in the window seat they must look like conspirators. Bertrand
was talking about property now, and weighing the merits of wn against those of sw3; it seemed he too was thinking of moving
to the neighbourhood. He looked at the room as if trying it on. "Well, it's lovely here," Nick said sadly, and gazed out of
the window at the familiar street, at Bertrand's horrible maroon car, at the half-recognized evening life in the houses opposite,
and at the big blond man who came up from the area of one of them, unlocked the big black motorbike that stood on the pavement
outside, straddled it, pulled on and buckled his helmet, kicked the bike into eager life and three seconds later was gone.
Only a buzz, a drone that faded as it rose, could be heard amid the high noise of talk in the room. It was as if the summons
of the Chopin had been answered and the freedom seized by a lucky third person.

"Aah . . . " Gerald was saying, hovering like a waiter himself, the best of all waiters, "I hope everything's all right."
He held a bottle of water in one hand and a freshly opened bottle of Taittinger in the other, as if hedging his bets.

"Marvellous!" said Bertrand, pretending not to notice these things, and then making a Gallic gesture of flattered surprise.
"You're very kind, to wait on me yourself."

"These young girls don't always know what they're doing," said Gerald.

Nick said, "Gerald, obviously you've met . . . Mr Ouradi."

"We haven't really met," said Gerald, bowing and smiling secretively, "but I'm absolutely delighted you're here."

"Well, what a marvellous concert," Bertrand said. "The pianist had amazing technique. For one so young . . ."

"Amazing," Gerald agreed. "Well, you saw her here first!"

With an effect of creaking diplomatic machinery Dolly Kimbolton rolled into view, and Bertrand stood up, passing his plate
with its toppling knife and fork to Nick. "Hello!" she said.

"Have you met Lady Kimbolton? Mr Bertram Ouradi, one of our great supporters."

They shook hands, Dolly leaning forward with the air of a busy headmistress rounding up stragglers for some huge collective
effort. Bertrand said, in his tone of clear, childish self-importance, "Yes, I'm making quite a contribution. Quite a big
contribution to the party."

"Splendid!" said Dolly, and gave him a smile in which political zeal managed almost entirely to disguise some older instinct
about Middle Eastern shopkeepers.

"I don't know if we might all have a little chat. . . ?" said Gerald, raising the champagne bottle. "And I think we might
be needing this." The suggestion obviously didn't include Nick, who as so often wasn't visible and certainly wasn't relevant,
and who was left, when the other three went off, holding Bertrand's unfinished supper as well as his own.

He closed the door, locked the door, and reached out for Wani, who patted him and kissed him on the nose as he turned away.

"Where's the stuff?" said Wani.

Nick went over to the desk, unhappy but caught up too in the business of the coke, which if he was patient enough might make
them both happy again. He got out the tin from the bottom drawer. Wani said, "A tin is such an obvious place to hide it."