The Line of Beauty (42 page)

Catherine laughed, and so did Nick, though the image was a sad one, was pathetic, as she said: of Wani with his pants round
his ankles, too crammed with coke to get an erection, in slavish subjection to the orgy on screen, whilst Nick, in the sitting
room of their stuffy little suite, made a bed for himself on the sofa. He could hear Wani, through the door, talking to the
people in the film. Catherine said, "He sounds a
nightmare,
actually, darling."

"He's very exciting too, but . . ."

"I mean, I rather worry about you, if you're loving him so much as you say, and he's treating you like this. Actually, I wonder
if you do really love him, you see."

He saw this was her usual hyperbole, and her usual solicitous undermining of his affairs. "No, no," he said, with a disparaging
chuckle. It wasn't that she'd shown him the truth of the matter, but that telling her these few amusing details he'd told
himself something he couldn't now retract. He had a witness too. "Anyway," he said, "I probably shouldn't have told you all
this."

(vi)

The Tippers left the following day. Secret smiles of relief admitted also a dim sense of guilt, and a resultant hardening
and defiance. Gerald was gloomily preoccupied, and seemed to carry the blame round with him, not knowing where to put it down.
Wani was the only one who expressed real regret and surprise; he'd felt at home with the Tippers, they were the sort of people
he'd been brought up to respect. It was Rachel who tried hardest to be diplomatic; her supple good manners struggled to contain
the awkward turn of events, which she minded entirely for Gerald's sake.

The departure was handled very briskly. Sir Maurice was offended, active, in a surprising way fulfilled—this was what he looked
for, a clarified antipathy, a somehow reassuring trustlessness. "We're not enjoying it much here," he said; and his wife took
her usual strange pleasure in his hardness and roughness; they were her animating cause, his feelings were as unanswerable
as his ulcers . . . Toby loaded up the luggage, with the straight-faced satisfaction of a porter.

After they'd gone, Wani, watchful and charming, suggested a game of boules to Gerald, and they went out and started playing
in the bald space where the Tippers' car had stood. The day for once was overcast, and Nick sat in the drawing room with his
book. The tingle of freedom made it a little hard to concentrate: he felt aware of the pleasure, the primacy of reading, but
the content seemed to glint from a distance, as if through mist. Then Lady Partridge tottered in in her sundress, clearly
pleased, repossessing the place, but also at a loose end without the irritant of Sally at her ear. The Tippers had been a
subject for her, they'd annoyed her and they'd excited her with the raw fascination of money. She sat down in an armchair.
She didn't say anything, but Nick knew that she was jealous of his book. From outside, through the open front door, came the
cracks and clicks and yelps of the boules game.

"Mm, what are you reading?" said Lady Partridge.

"Oh . . ." said Nick, disowning the book with a shake of the head, "it's just something I'm reviewing." She turned her ear
enquiringly. "It's a study of John Berryman."

"Ah . . . !" said Lady Partridge, sitting back with the mocking contentment of the non-reader. "The poet . . . Funny man."

"Oh—um . . . !" Nick gasped. "Yes, he was rather funny, I suppose . . . in a way."

"I always thought."

Nick smiled at her narrowly, and went on, to test the ground, "It's a sad life, of course. He suffered from these terrible
depressions."

Lady Partridge smacked her lips illusionlessly, and rolled her eyes back—a more terrible effect than she realized. "Like .
. . er, young madam," she said.

"Well, quite," said Nick, "though we hope it won't end the same way! He drank a tremendous lot, you know."

"I wouldn't be at all surprised if he drank a lot," said Lady Partridge, with a hint of solidarity.

"And then, of course," said Nick clinchingly, but with a sad loll of the head, "he jumped off a bridge into the Mississippi."

Lady Partridge reflected on this, as if she thought it unlikely. "I always rather liked him on the telly. Came over awfully
well. Perhaps you never saw those . . . He went to the seaside. Or, you know, poking round old churches and what-not. Even
those weren't too bad. He had what I'd call an infectious laugh. I think I'm right in saying he became the Poet Laureate."

"Ah . . . No," said Nick. "No, actually—"

"Fuck!"
came a howl from the forecourt, hardly recognizable as Gerald's voice. Lady Partridge's gaze slid uncertainly away. Nick
got up with a soft laugh and went out into the hall to see what had happened. Gerald was coming in from outside, his face
in a spasm of emotion that might have been rage or glee, and veered away from Nick into the kitchen, where Toby was sitting
having coffee with Rachel. Nick glanced out of the front door, and saw Wani collecting up the boules with a dutiful but unrepentant
expression.

"Darling . . . ?" said Rachel, with a note of anger, but looking him over quickly, to see if he was hurt.

"Dad,"
said Toby, and shook his head disappointedly.

Gerald stood staring at them, and then hunched and grinned. He said, "I'm on holiday!"

"Yes, darling, you are," said Rachel. "You ought to calm down." She was solicitous, but firm: her own calm was a reproof.
Nick stood in the doorway and looked at them, bright-eyed. There was a collective sense that they could tame Gerald.

"Beaten at boules by a bloody A-rab!" said Gerald, and gasped at his own candour, and as if it might be a joke.

"For god's sake, Dad," said Toby.

"What . . . ?" said Gerald.

"You'll be calling me a bloody Jew-boy next."

"I would never do that," said Gerald. "Don't be monstrous."

"Well, I hope not," said Toby, and coloured at his own emotion. "Wani's my friend," he said, with an effect of simple decency,
so that Gerald stared and thought and then went out of the room. They heard him calling out, "Wani! Wani, my apologies! OK
. . . ? Yup! So sorry . . . " with improper cheerfulness, and tailing off as he turned indoors, as if it was a mere routine.
He came back into the kitchen with a twitch of a smile, since Wani hadn't heard the thing he should really have been apologizing
for. He drifted absent-mindedly into the larder and emerged with a dusty bottle of claret.

"Why don't you go and have a swim, Gerald. Or find Jasper, and take him for a walk," recommended Rachel.

"Jasper isn't a cocker spaniel, you know," said Gerald, amusingly but with a bit of a snap.

"Well, no," said Rachel.

Gerald turned the little wooden-handled corkscrew with furtive keenness. "Well, roll on Sunday, and Lionel's visit!" he said,
to please Rachel and cover the exuberant pop of the cork.

"It's a bit early for that, isn't it Gerald?" said Rachel.

"For god's sake, Dad," said Toby again.

"He wants to let it breathe," said Nick with an anxious laugh.

Gerald looked at them all, and there was an odd charge of unhappiness, a family instinct, communicated, not quite understood.
"I just feel like a fucking drink, OK?" he said, and went off to the end room with the bottle.

Just before lunch, in the shade of the awning, he was more cheerful, but also more freely in touch with his troubles. "The
fucking Tippers!" he said, counting carelessly on his mother's deafness. "God knows what the consequences of this little episode
will be—for the business, I mean."

"I'm sure you can do brilliantly without him," said Rachel. "You've been doing brilliantly without him so far."

"True," said Gerald. "True." He looked wryly along the table that he ruled. "I'm afraid they didn't fit in here, exactly,
did they?"

"They didn't quite get the hang of it," said Rachel.

"Yah, why did they go?" said Jasper.

"Oh, who knows!" said Rachel. "Now, Judy, asparagus!"

Gerald snuffled and seemed to ponder the question, like some undecid-able conflict of loyalties, some inescapable regret.
Nick couldn't help noticing that his own remarks were received very coolly that day, and sometimes he was ignored and talked
over.

At the end of lunch Gerald took up his grievances again; it was clear that he was in the grip of his own schemes, and living
only half attentively, after a bottle and a half of wine, in the chatter and family teasing at the table. There was something
rehearsed and implausible in his tone. He went on about work, and the "important papers" he had to deal with. "You don't know
what it's like," he said. "It may be vacation for you, it may be the recess for me, but actually the work simply doesn't let
up. Well, you've seen the number of faxes coming through. And I'm terribly behind with the diary."

He waited, sighing but vigilant, till Rachel said, "Well, why don't you have some help?"

Gerald puffed and slumped, as if to say that was hardly possible; but then said, "I do rather wonder whether we won't
have
to send for Penny."

"Not Penny Dreadful," said Catherine. "Anyway, she can't go in the sun.

Rachel didn't contradict this, but gave her enabling shrug. "If you really
need
Penny, darling, by all means ask her out."

"Do you think . . . ?"

"I mean, she's perfectly pleasant company. If
she
didn't mind . . ."

"Oh, she's
not
pleasant company," said Catherine. "She's a humourless white bug."

"Or what about Eileen?" said Toby. "I'm sure she'd come just like that. You know how she adores Dad!"

Gerald gave a short distracted laugh at this absurd alternative. Nick looked at him with a tense smile, an awful feeling of
collusion. He'd said nothing, he'd dissimulated much more cleverly than Gerald himself: he felt that he'd been, all passively
and peace-lovingly, the real enabler.

"Yes, I'm not so sure about Eileen," said Rachel.

"OK, then . . . " said Gerald, as though conceding to a general wish.

There was a complicated shame-in-triumph which perhaps only Nick could see. The party pushed back their chain, giving hazy
thought to the matter of the afternoon, and Gerald went in to the phone room, with a look of tense reluctance, as if about
to break bad news.

12

F
OR THEIR TWENTY-FIFTH
wedding anniversary, Lionel Kessler gave Gerald and Rachel two presents. The first came round in the
morning, on the back seat of his Bentley, and the chauffeur himself brought the stout wooden box into the kitchen.

"Darling old Lionel," said Toby, before they knew what was in it.

"Silver, I expect," said Gerald, getting a screwdriver, and sounding both greedy and slightly bored.

Inside, held in a metal brace by foam-rubber collars, was a rococo silver ewer. The body of the thing was in the form of a
shell, and the spout was supported by a bearded triton. "Goodness, Nick," said Gerald, so that Nick fell into his role as
interpreter—he said he thought it might be by one of the Huguenot silversmiths working in London in the mid-eighteenth century,
perhaps by Paul de Lamerie, since the greatest name was also the only one he could think of, and with Lionel anything seemed
possible. "Marvellous," said Gerald: "a work of rare device." He looked in the box to see if there was a note, like the watering
instructions that come with some worrying plant, but there wasn't. Nick explained that the tiny scene in relief, of Eros playing
with the sword of justice, meant "Omnia Vincit Amor." "Ah, thoroughly apt," said Gerald, with shy pomp, putting his arm briefly
round Rachel. He perhaps suspected that it was something Lionel had had knocking round at Hawkeswood anyway. Nick carried
on smiling at it, half-conscious of how his father would have stooped and turned it, holding it with a cloth; remembering
their long-ago visits to Monksbury, where the silver had a brassy iridescent colour, since the servants were forbidden to
clean it and scratch it. "We'll have to get that looked at for the insurance," said Gerald.

Toby and Catherine's present was also a bit of silver, a scollop-edged Georgian salver, on which they had had "Gerald and
Rachel ~ 5 November 1986" engraved in a curly script. It couldn't help but look dull, and even vaguely satirical, beside the
ewer, and Gerald gazed into it with a falsely modest expression, as though he was retiring, or had won a local golf tournament.
"It's perfectly lovely," said Rachel. They both seemed gratified, but not excited, and clearly felt no one could actually
want an object of this kind.

A little later they were having a glass of champagne when Nick looked down from the drawing-room window and saw the Bentley
pulling up a second time. Now it was Lionel himself who climbed out of it, and who carried across the pavement the small flat
packing case. He glanced up and made a shooshing sign, half frown, half kiss. Nick, his champagne working nicely with a first
short line of charlie, smiled secretly back. The subtle bachelor sympathy between himself and the little bald peer brought
a tear to the corner of his eye—he felt quite silly for a moment at being so "in love" with the family, and with this member
of it in particular. A minute later Lionel was shown into the room amid groans of gratitude. He kissed his sister and her
children, and shook hands with Gerald and Nick, who felt for the fervour in his briskness. The ewer was on the mantelpiece,
crowded today with white lilies and white mop-headed chrysanths. "Well, you had to have silver," Lionel said, "but I wanted
you to have this as well. It came up in Paris last week, and since we're all feeling a little light-headed . . ." Something
called the Big Bang had just happened, Nick didn't fully understand what it meant, but everyone with money seemed highly exhilarated,
and he had a suspicion he was going to benefit from it too. Here was Lord Kessler, with a box under his arm, to give it his
own superior licence.

It was Rachel who took and opened the box, with Nick standing by as if it was his present, as if he was giving it and perhaps
also receiving it—he felt generous and possessive all at once. He kept himself from exclaiming when she lifted out a small
oil painting. He determinedly said nothing. "My dear . . . " said Rachel, fascinated, hesitant, but controlled, as though
to be surprised would be to have some vulgar advantage taken of her. She held it up, so that everyone could see it. "It's
perfectly lovely," she said.

"Mm . . . " said Lionel, with the canny little smile of someone who has made a good decision.

Gerald said, "You're too kind, really . . . " and stared earnestly at the picture, hoping someone would say what it was. It
was a landscape, about nine inches wide by twelve high, painted entirely in vertical dabs of a fine brush, so that the birch
trees and meadow seemed to quiver in the breeze and warmth of a spring morning. A black-and-white cow lay under a bank at
the front; a white-shawled woman talked to a brown-hatted man on the path in the near distance. It was in a plain dull-gilt
frame.

"Hah, jolly nice," said Toby.

Catherine, looking comically from side to side as though detecting a trick, said, "It's a Gauguin, isn't it," and Nick, who
after all couldn't bear not to say, said, "It's a Gauguin" at the same time.

"It's a nice one, isn't it," said Lionel,
"he Matin aux Champs
—it's a study, or a little version, of the picture in Brussels. I snatched it from the teeth of the head of Sony. Actually,
I think it was a bit small for him. Not quite the ideally expensive picture"—and he chuckled with Nick as if they both knew
just what to expect from the head of Sony.

"Really . . . Lionel . . . " Gerald was saying, shaking his head slowly and blinking to disguise his calculations as another
kind of wonder. "That and the silver . . . um . . ."

Catherine shook her head too, and said, "God . . . !" in simultaneous glee and scorn of her rich family.

The picture was handed round, and they each smiled and sighed, and turned it to the light, and passed it on with a little
shudder, as if they'd been oblivious for a moment, in the spell of sheer physical possession. "Where on earth shall we put
it?" said Gerald, when it came back to him; Nick laughed to cover his graceless tone.

Just then the front door slammed and Rachel went to look over the banisters; it was a day of incessant arrivals. "Oh, come
up, dear," she said. "It's Penny."

"Ah, she can give us her thoughts about the picture," said Gerald, as if from a view of her general usefulness. He got rid
of the picture by propping it against Liszt's nose on the piano.

"Penny!" said Catherine. "Why? I mean, she wouldn't have a clue," and then laughed submissively, since it wasn't her day.

"Well," said Gerald, beaming and blustering, "well, her father's a painter." And he turned away to see to the champagne; he
had a fresh glass in his hand when Penny came into the room.

"Hello, Penny," said Rachel, in her coolly maternal way.

"Congratulations to you both," said Penny, coming forward with her curious bossy diffidence, her air, that was almost maternal
in itself, of putting her duty to forgetful, forgivable Gerald before any thought of her own pleasure. "I really came to do
the diary."

"The diary can wait," said Gerald, with a note of reckless permissiveness, passing her the glass. "Have a look at what Lord
Kessler's just given us." It struck Nick that he was avoiding any chance of a kiss. "It's by Gauguin," said Gerald,
"he Rencontre aux Champs"
—giving it already his own, more anecdotal title. They all peered at it politely again. "I can't help thinking of our lovely
walks in France," Gerald said, looking round for agreement.

"Oh . . . I see," said Rachel.

"It's nothing like that," said Catherine.

"I don't know," said Gerald. "That could be your mother going down to Podier, and bumping into . . . ooh . . . Nick on the
way."

Nick, pleased to have been put in the picture, said, "I seem to have borrowed Sally Tipper's hat."

Catherine smiled impatiently. "Yeah, but the point is, they're peasants, isn't it, Uncle Lionel. You know, this was when he
went to Brittany, what was it called, to get as far away as possible from the city and the corruption of bourgeois life. It's
about hardship and poverty."

"You're absolutely right, darling," said Lionel, who never stood for cant about money. "Though I expect he sent it to bourgeois
old Paris to be sold."

"Exactly," said Gerald.

"It's funny, it looks like a Hereford cow," said Toby. "Though I don't suppose it can be."

"Probably a Charolais," said Gerald.

"Charolais are a completely different colour," said Toby.

"Anyway, it's very nice," said Penny, for whom being the daughter of Norman Kent had worked as a perfect inoculation against
art.

"We were wondering where to hang it," said Rachel.

They spent five minutes trying the picture in different places, Toby holding it up while the others pursed their lips and
said, "You see, /think it needs to go there . . . " Toby became a boy again, in a family game, pulling faces and then clearly
thinking about something else. "Over 'ere, guv'nor?" he kept saying, in a "hopeless cockney accent which he found funny. He
took down one or two things and replaced them with the Gauguin. The trouble was that the shapes of the other pictures showed
on the wallpaper behind.

Rachel didn't seem to mind too much, but Gerald said, "We can't have the Lady seeing that."

"Oh . . ." said Rachel, with a little tut.

"No, I'm serious," said Gerald. "She's finally agreed to honour us with her company, and everything must be perfect."

"I'd be highly surprised if the Lady noticed," Lionel said candidly. But Gerald shot back, "Believe me, she notices everything,"
and gave a rather grim laugh.

"We'll decide later," said Rachel. "We just might be awfully selfish and have it in our bedroom."

"Though he'll probably get the Lady in there," said Catherine under her breath.

After lunch two men from Special Branch came, to check on matters of security for the PM's visit. They passed through the
house like a pair of unusually discreet bailiffs, noting and evaluating. Nick heard them coming up the top stairs and sat
smiling at his desk with his heart pounding and ten grams of coke in the top drawer while they peered out onto the leads.
Their main concern was with the back gate and they told him a policeman would be on duty all night in the communal gardens.
This made everything look a bit more risky, and when they'd gone down again he had a small line just to steady his nerves.

Later he went downstairs and when he looked out at the front of the house he saw Gerald and Geoffrey Titchfield talking on
the pavement. They both had a look of contained exaltation, like marshals before some great ceremony, not admitting their
own feelings, almost languid with unspoken nerves. Whenever someone walked past, Gerald gave them a nod and a smile, as if
they knew who he was. He had made a very successful speech at Conference last month, since when he'd adopted a manner of approachable
greatness.

Geoffrey was pointing at the front door, the eternally green front door, which Gerald had just had repainted a fierce Tory
blue. It was the moment when Nick had first caught the pitch of Gerald's mania. Catherine, in a vein of wild but focused fantasy,
had said that the PM would be shocked by a green door and that she'd read an article which said all Cabinet ministers had
blue ones; even Geoffrey Titchfield, who was only the chairman of the local association, had a blue front door. Gerald scoffed
at this, but a little later strolled out to the Mira Foodhall for some water biscuits and came back looking troubled. "What
do you think about this, Nick?" he said. "The Titchfields have only got the garden flat, but their front door is unquestionably
blue." Nick said he doubted it mattered, as drolly as possible, and feeling his own nostalgic fervour for the grand dull green.
But the following day Gerald came back to it. "You know, I wonder if the Cat's right about that door," he said. "The Lady
might very well think it's a bit off. She might think we're trying to save the fucking rainforest or something!" He laughed
nervily. "She might think she's been taken to Greenham Common, by mistake," he went on, in a tone somewhere between lampoon
and genuine derangement. At which point Nick knew, since the colour of the door had become a token of Gerald's success, that
Mr Duke would be set to work with a can of conference-blue gloss.

Now Penny came out, with her briefcase of papers, and Nick watched from his window seat as she spoke to the two men. She had
been typing up the diary which Gerald dictated each day onto tape, and which the family resented even more since her busy
week with them in France, when she'd made it quite plain that none of them was in it: it was strictly the record of his political
life, a kind of "archive," she said, "an important historical resource." Penny carried out the diary duty with a smug devotion
which only added to their annoyance.

Catherine drifted into the drawing room, and came to sit with Nick behind the roped-back curtains. "I hate it when we have
everyone in," she said. There was something invalidish, semi-secret, about the window seats, the houses of children's games,
spying on the room and the street.

"I know, isn't it awful," said Nick absent-mindedly.

"Look, there's Gerald showing off outside."

"I think he's just having a chat with old Titch. You know it's his big day."

"It's always his big day these days. He hardly has a small one. Anyway, it's also Ma's big day. And she's got to spend it
with a whole lot of
empees,"
said Catherine, for whom the two syllables were now a mantra of tedium and absurdity. "Plus she's got to play hostess to
the Other Woman in her own house, to cap it all. You can tell he's longing to put up a big sign, 'Tonight! Special Appearance!'"

" 'One Night Only' . . ."

"God I hope so. That Titch man worships Gerald. Have you noticed, every time he walks past the house he sort of smirks at
it fondly, just in case someone's looking out."

"Does he . . . ?" said Nick, not quite forgetting that he had once done the same. He said, "I thought the party was originally
going to be at Hawkeswood."