The Line of Beauty (36 page)

On their first afternoon there Nick went into a gay shop called Follow Me—something Wani did at last with a deprecating snigger.
Surrounded by harnesses and startlingly juvenile pornography they bought the
Spartacus
gay guide to the world and a siege supply of rubbers, which Wani affected to have nothing to do with: he handled the book
lightly, as if assessing its threat, the thick sleek india-paper weight of the thing, some heretical bible. They took a taxi
to the English Garden, and had walked only a short distance under the trees when they realized that the people ahead of them
were naked. There were families having picnics in their unembarrassable German way, and old men with peeling crowns standing
by themselves like forgotten games masters, and then a zone that was mainly young men, sitting and sprawling in an air of
casual tension as palpable as the dust and insects in the slanting sunlight. A wonderful cold stream, the Eisbach, chuckled
past between steep banks, and Nick stripped off and clambered down into it—when he lifted his feet from the pebbly bottom
he was swept along laughing and breathless, waving back to Wani, and then out of sight, racing past the lawns, the naked smiling
figures on the bank, boys with guitars, games with rubber balls, in a rush of beautiful cold abandon towards a wood and a
distant pagoda . . . until he saw that the boys were jeering and pointing and the people walking dogs were clothed and severely
normal, as if they could have no connection with the happy nude species hidden round the bend in the river. So then he toiled
back against the current, feet curled and aching on the slippery stones, until he could pull himself out and skulk back along
the bank, giving quick furtive tugs to his embarrassingly shrivelled penis.

He woke again and took a long distracted moment to see that this hadn't happened. He'd been lying in the richly coloured recall
of the minutes before sleep and the holiday story had slipped and run with its own fast current into an anecdote odder than
the afternoon they had lived through, Wani's bright fixated attempt to pick up the boy who roamed through the gardens with
a bucket shouting "Pepsi!"—his astonishment that he couldn't be bought. Nick turned his pillow, and coughed and settled again.
He sank through backlit clouds, pink and grey, the landing at Bordeaux airport that morning. There had been a storm, but it
was turning aside, and they saw suddenly how close the ground was, the sunlight passing in a crawling wink across ponds, glasshouses
and canals, seams of gold flashing through the vapour in fiery collusion.

(ii)

On Monday morning Wani asked if he could make some phone calls. Rachel said, "Absolutely!" and Gerald said, "Please . . .
my dear fellow!" with a gesture towards the cupboard-like room where the phone and the expectant new fax machine were.

"It's just these business things I've got to deal with," Wani sighed, cleverly apologizing for what Gerald liked best about
him. He went into the room and rather awkwardly, since everyone was watching him, closed the door. He had told them last night
about the property he'd just bought in Clerkenwell, and had asked for Gerald's advice on aspects of the sale and the planned
redevelopment: a wall had come down, and they'd suddenly seen how they might get on. When Wani emerged from the phone room
he asked him if he could borrow the Range Rover to go into Perigueux, and this time it was vaguer magazine "business" that
he mentioned. Nick knew that frown of pretended vexation, the bold contempt for obstacles on the path to pleasure, and it
made him nervous. But Gerald, clearing his throat and as it were waking up to his own kindness and reasonableness, said, "Well
yes . . . why not!—feel free . . . " And then added, "Anything for business!"

"It's just that I can meet a very good photographer there, and after the fascinating things you were saying about the cathedral
. . ."

"Oh, St Front," said Gerald, warily flattered. "Yes indeed . . ."

Nick almost said, "Oh, but you know it's all a nineteenth-century rehash . . ."

"Will you be back for lunch?" said Rachel. Wani promised he would. He didn't suggest taking Nick, and Nick felt both jealous
and relieved. They stood at the front door and watched the car disappear from the forecourt. It was the sort of moment when
in London they would have begun a bold and funny family inquest into the absent person; but today that didn't feel right.

They went out onto the terrace, and Gerald nodded several times at Nick and said, "Charming fellow, your friend."

"He certainly is," said Nick, seeing that Gerald wanted reassurance, and noting that Wani was now properly his friend rather
than Toby's.

"One doesn't quite know whether to mention the fiancee," Gerald said.

"Oh, well I did," said Rachel. "And it's all right. He told me all about it. Apparently they're getting married next spring."

"Ah, fine," said Gerald, while Nick turned away with a protesting thump of the heart to look at the view.

The morning post brought several thick packets of papers for Gerald and he took them off to the end room, sighing petulantly.
It was clear that without Penny he felt he couldn't tackle work, and clear too, presumably, that he couldn't invite Penny
here. He had taken over the end room as an office; Nick wasn't sure what he did in it, but he always emerged with a watchful
smile, even tiptoeing a little, like someone about to break a piece of news. The Penny question weighed on Nick, and then
appeared so remote and unsubstantiated that he might have imagined it. Gerald was being thoroughly affectionate to Rachel,
and when they lay side by side in the sun they seemed soaked in their own intimate history, as well as disconcertingly sexy
and young. Even so there was something difficult and self-indulgent about Gerald, as if the holiday was both a licence and
a penance.

Nick wandered off to explore the hidden corners of the little estate. He found the morning, and the freedom to use it, weighed
rather heavily on him now Wani had gone. He went down the crumbling steps from terrace to terrace, like a descent into his
own melancholy. The lower levels dropped more steeply, they were hidden from the house and had a neglected air: the parched
stony soil showed through the thin grass. Clearly Dede and his son hardly bothered with these bits—perhaps it was only guests,
in their appreciative aimlessness, who ever climbed down here. There was a look of disused agricultural terraces as much as
garden; a distant whine of farm machinery, and the scurry of lizards running over dead leaves. On each level there were walnut
trees thick with half-hidden green fruit. Nick went through a gap in a hedge and found some old stone sheds, a grassy woodpile,
a rusty tractor. He was doing what he always did, poking and memorizing, possessing the place by knowing it better than his
hosts. If Rachel had said, "If only we still had that pogo stick!" Nick could have cried, like a painfully eager child, "But
we do, it's in the old shed with the broken butter churn and the prize rosettes for onions nailed to the beams." It struck
him that a sign of real possession was a sort of negligence, was to have an old wood-yard you'd virtually forgotten about.

He fetched his book and went down to the pool. The heat was climbing and a high-up lid of thin cloud had soon expired into
the blue. Jasper and Catherine were already in the water, and Jasper looked pleased to be discovered struggling with her,
almost fucking her; he winked at Nick as he went into the pool-house to change. The wink seemed to follow him in. There was
a bare suggestive atmosphere in the pool-house, which always felt cool and secret after the dazzle of the pool-side, and seemed
to carry some coded memory or promise of a meeting. Nick would have had Wani there last night if Gerald hadn't been hanging,
even snooping about. There was the first room, with a sink and a fridge and bright plastic pool toys, lilos and rings, an
old rowing machine standing on end; and the changing room beyond, with a slatted bench and clothes hooks, and the shower opening
straight off it, behind a blue curtain. Only the rather smelly lavatory had a door that could be locked.

Nick came out in his new little Speedos and walked along the pool's edge. The water was the clear bright answer to the morning,
a mesmerizing play of light and depth. A few dead leaves were floating on it, and others had sunk and patched the blue concrete
bottom. Dragonflies paid darting visits. He crouched and stirred the surface with his hand. On the far side Jasper had lifted
Catherine up to sit on the tiled shelf, with the water lapping between her legs, and him hanging on to her, looking as if
he'd like to do the same. She made some quick remark about Nick's being there, and then called, "Hello, darling!" Jasper turned
and floated free and gave Nick his sure-fire smile, said nothing, but lazily trod water and kept looking at him. He had a
tiny repertoire, a starter kit, of seducer's tricks, and got obvious satisfaction from deploying them, regardless of results.
Nick found him embarrassing and resistible, which didn't preclude his figuring in some of his most punitive fantasies: in
fact it made them all the more pointed. Jasper kicked across the pool towards him and it looked at first, in the welter of
refractions, as if he was naked; then, when he sprang out streaming on to the poolside, he saw that he was wearing a little
cut-away flesh-coloured item. "What do you think of Jaz's thong?" said Catherine, obviously assuming that Nick fancied him.

"Yeah, I don't like to wear it when her mum's about," said Jasper considerately. He posed for Nick, held in his brown stomach,
and flashed him his number-two smile.

"What do you think?" said Catherine, grinning, a bit breathless, in her tone of sexual fixation.

"Hmm," said Nick, peering at the sleek pouch in which Jaz's crown jewels, as he called them, were boyishly slumped. "You'd
have to say, darling, it leaves disappointingly little to the imagination." He made a sorry moue and strolled off to the lounger
at the far end of the pool, where he had left his book.

He was reading Henry James's memoir of his childhood,
A Small Boy and
Others,
and feeling crazily horny, after three days without as much as a peck from Wani. It was a hopeless combination. The book
showed James at his most elderly and elusive, and demanded a pure commitment unlikely in a reader who was worrying excitedly
about his boyfriend and semi-spying, through dark glasses, on another boy who was showing off in front of him and clearly
trying to excite him. From-time to time the book tilted and wobbled in his lap, and the weight of the deckle-edged pages pressed
on his erection through the sleek black nylon. He noted droll phrases for later use: "an oblong farinaceous compound" was
James's euphemism for a waffle—
compound
was sublime in its clinching vagueness. He wondered just what Wani was up to in Perigueux. He suspected he was picking up
some charlie, which seemed a shame and a danger—he wished Wani wasn't so fond of it; then he felt frustratedly, after three
days off that as well, how lovely and just right it would be to have a line. It was amazing, it went really to the heart of
Wani's mystique, that he knew how to find the stuff in any European city. In Munich Nick had waited in the taxi outside a
bank, gazed tensely for ten minutes at the chamfered rustication of its walls and the massive swirling ironwork of its doors,
while Wani was inside "seeing a friend." The photographer in Perigueux was probably another such friend. There were childish
shrieks from the pool, as Jasper dive-bombed Catherine. Nick was delighted Wani had missed this airing, or drenching, of the
thong; he would tease him about it later, over their first line. He longed to have a swim himself, but now the young couple
were in a huddle, standing just within their depth, laughing and spluttering as they kissed: the pool was theirs, like a bedroom.
They were mad with sex, in love with their own boldness; Nick felt Jasper might try to involve him too if he went in. His
role was to be Uncle Nick, adult and sceptical, which seemed to make the baffled Jasper more and more provocative. He thought
he could probably have him if he wanted, but he didn't want to give him that satisfaction. A minute later they got out, intently
casual, Jasper's stocky hard-on sticking up at an angle, and went into the pool-house and closed the door. Edgar Allan Poe,
James said, though a figure in his childhood, had not been "personally present"— indeed, "the extremity of personal absence
had just overtaken him." Minute after minute went by, now the hiss of the pool-house shower could be heard, and Nick lay and
flicked a fly from his leg, and felt the morning's discontent rise into envy and impatience. "The extremity of personal absence":
at times the Master was so tactful he was almost brutal. He remembered what Rachel had said about Wani's wedding, and the
image of him doing to Martine what Jasper was doing to Catherine filled him with a bitter jealousy—well, it was probably nonsense,
probably waffle. The words slid and stuck meaninglessly in front of his eyes.

(iii)