The Line of Beauty (10 page)

"I hope it will be a long engagement," Nick heard himself saying.

"Ah, here she is . . ."—and they looked down together at the young woman who was climbing the shallow red-carpeted stairs
towards them. She was wearing a pearl-coloured blouse and a long, rather stiff black skirt, which she held raised a little
with both hands, so that she seemed to curtsey to them on each step. She created a sober impression, well groomed but not
fashionable. "This is Martine," Wani said. "This is Nick Guest, we were at Worcester together."

Nick took Martine's cool hand, smiling at Wani's knowing his name, and feeling himself to be briefly the subject of humorous
suspicion as an unknown friend from her fiance's past. He said, "I'm pleased to meet you, congratulations." All this congratulating
was giving him a vague masochistic buzz.

"Oh—thank you so much. Yes, Antoine has told you." She had a French accent, which in turn suggested to Nick the unknown networks
of Wani's family and past, Paris perhaps, Beirut . . . the real life of the international rich from which Wani had occasionally
descended on Oxford to read an essay on Dry den or translate an Anglo-Saxon riddle. Antoine was his real name, and Wani, his
infantile attempt at saying it, his universal nickname.

"You must be very happy."

Martine smiled but said nothing, and Nick looked at her wide pale face for signs of the triumph he would have felt himself
if he had become engaged to Wani.

"We're just going to our room," Wani said, "and then we'll be down for the bopping."

"Well, you will be bopping perhaps," said Martine, showing already a mind of her own, but with the same patient expression,
which registered with Nick, as he went on down the stairs, as decidedly adult. It must be the face of a steady happiness,
a calm possession, that he couldn't imagine, or even exactly hope for.

He needed some air, but there was a clatter in the hall as people ran back indoors. Outside, from an obscured night sky, a
fine rain had started falling. Nick watched it drifting and gleaming in the upcast light of a large globed lantern. Out in
the circle of the drive a couple of chauffeurs were sitting in the front of a Daimler with the map-light on, waiting and chatting.
And there was Wani's soft-top Mercedes, with its embarrassing number plate WHO 6. A voice brayed, "Right! Everyone on the
dance floor!" And there was a ragged chorus of agreement.

"Hoorah! Dancing!" said a drunk Sloanish girl, staring into Nick's face as though with an effort she might remember him.

"Where is the ruddy dance floor?" said the braying boy. They had wandered back into the hall, which was being cleared with
illusionless efficiency by the staff.

Nick said, "It's in the smoking room," excited by knowing this, and by suddenly taking the lead. They all straggled after
him, the Sloaney girl laughing wildly and shouting, "Yah, it's in the smoking room!" and sending him up, as the funny little
man who knew the way.

A friend of Toby's had come down from London to do the disco, and red and blue spotlights flashed on and off above the paintings
of the first Baron Kessler's numerous racehorses. Most of the group started grooving around at once, a little awkwardly, but
with happy, determined expressions. Nick lounged along the wall, as if he might start dancing any moment, then came back,
nodding his head to the beat, and walked quickly out of the room. It was that song "Every Breath You Take" that they'd played
over and over last term at Oxford. It made him abruptly sad.

He felt restless and forgotten, peripheral to an event which, he remembered, had once been thought of as his party too. His
loneliness bewildered him for a minute, in the bleak perspective of the bachelors' corridor: a sense close to panic that he
didn't belong in this house with these people. Some of the guests had gone into the library and as he approached the open
door he took in the scant conversational texture, over which one or two voices held forth as if by right. Gerald said words
Nick couldn't catch the meaning of, and through the general laughter another voice, which he half-recognized, put in a quick
correcting "Not if I know Margaret!" Nick stood at the doorway of the lamplit room and felt for a second like a drunken student,
which he was, and also, more shadowy and inconsolable, a sleepless child peering in at an adult world of bare shoulders, flushed
faces, and cigar smoke. Rachel caught his eye, and smiled, and he went in—Gerald, standing at the empty fireplace in the swaggering
stance of someone warming himself, called out, "Ah, Nick!" but there were too many people for introductions, a large loose
circle who turned momentarily to inspect him and turned back as if they'd failed to see anything at all.

Rachel was sitting on a small sofa, apart from the others, with a wrinkled old lady dressed in black, who made Rachel in her
turn seem a beautiful, rather mischievous young woman. She said, "Judy, have you met Nick Guest, Toby's great friend? This
is Lady Partridge—Gerald's mother."

"Oh no!" said Nick. "I'm delighted to meet you."

"How do you do," said the old lady, with a dry jovial look.
Toby's great
friend
—there was a phrase to savour, to analyse for its generosity, its innocence, its calculation.

Rachel shifted slightly, but there was really no space for him on the sofa. In her great spread stiffish dress of lavender
silk she was like a Sargent portrait of eighty years earlier, of the time when Henry James had come to stay. Nick stood before
them and smiled.

"You do smell nice," Rachel said, almost flirtingly, as a mother sometimes speaks to a child who is dressed up.

"I can't bear the smell of cigars, can you?" said Lady Partridge.

"Lionel hates it too," murmured Rachel. As did Nick, to whom the dry lavatorial stench of cigars signified the inexplicable
confidence of other men's tastes and habits, and their readiness to impose them on their fellows. But since Gerald himself
was smoking one, frowning and screwing up his left eye, he said nothing.

"I can't think where he picked up the habit," Lady Partridge said; and Rachel sighed and shook her head in humorous acknowledgement
of their shared disappointments as wife and mother. "Do Tobias and Catherine smoke?"

"No, thank heavens, they've never taken to it," Rachel said. And again Nick said nothing. What always held him was the family's
romance of itself, with its little asperities and collusions that were so much more charming and droll than those in his own
family, and which now took on a further dimension in the person of Gerald's mother. Her manner was drawling but vigilant,
her face thickly powdered, lips a bold red. There was something autocratic in her that made Nick want to please her. She sounded
grander than Gerald by the same factor that Gerald sounded posher than Toby.

"Perhaps we could have some air," she said, barely looking at Nick. And he went to the window behind them and pushed up the
sash and let in the cool damp smell of the grounds.

"There!" he said, feeling they were now friends.

"Are you staying in the house?" Lady Partridge said.

"Yes, I've got a tiny little room on the top floor."

"I didn't know there were any tiny rooms at Hawkeswood. But then I don't suppose I've ever been on the top floor." Nick half
admired the way she had taken his modesty and dug it deeper for him, and almost found a slur against herself in it.

"I suppose it depends on your standard of tininess," he said, with a determined flattering smile. The faint paranoia that
attaches to drunkenness had set in, and he wasn't certain if he was being rude or charming. He thought perhaps what he'd said
was the opposite of what he meant. A waiter came up with a tray and offered him a brandy, and he watched with marvelling passivity
as the liquor was poured. "Oh that's fine . . . that's fine . . . !" He was a nice, conspiratorial sort of waiter, but he
wasn't Tristao, who had crossed a special threshold in Nick's mind and was now the object of a crush, vivid in his absence.
He wondered if he could have a crush on this waiter too—it only needed a couple of sightings, the current mood of frustration,
and a single half-conscious decision, and then the boy's shape would be stamped on his mind and make his pulse race whenever
he appeared.

Rachel said, "Nick's also staying with us in London, where he really does have a tiny room in the roof."

"I think you said you had someone in," said Lady Partridge, again without looking at Nick. It was as if she had scented his
fantasy of belonging, of secret fraternity with her beautiful grandson, and set to eradicate it with a quick territorial instinct.
"Toby's certainly enormously popular," she said. "He's so handsome, don't you think?"

"Yes, I do," said Nick lightly, and blushed and looked away as if to find him.

"You'd never think he was Catherine's brother. He had all the luck."

"If looks
are
luck—" Nick was half-saying.

"But do tell me, who is that little person in glasses dancing with the Home Secretary?"

"Mm, I've seen him before," said Nick, and laughed out loud.

"It's the Mordant Analyst," said Rachel.

"Morton Danvers," Lady Partridge noted it.

Rachel raised her voice. "The children call him the Mordant Analyst. Peter Crowther—he's a journalist."

"Seen his things in the
Mail,"
Lady Partridge said.

"Oh, of course . . ." said Nick. And it was true he did seem to be dancing with the Home Secretary, wooing him, capering in
front of him, bending to him with new questions and springing back with startled enlightenment at the answers—a procedure
which the Home Secretary, who was heavy footed and had no neck, couldn't help but replicate in a clumsy but courteous way.

"I don't think I'd be quite so excited," said Lady Partridge. "He talked a lot of rot at dinner on . . . the
coloured
question. I wasn't next to him, but I kept hearing it.
Racism,
you know"—as if the very word were as disagreeable as the thing it connoted was generally held to be.

"A lot of rot certainly is talked on that subject," Nick said, with generous ambiguity. The old lady looked at him ponderingly.

They turned and watched Gerald come forward to rescue the Home Secretary, with a solicitous smile on his lips and a flicker
of jealousy in his eyes. He led him away, stooping confidentially over him, almost embracing him, but looking quickly round
like someone who has organized a surprise: and there was a flash and a whirr and another flash.

"Ah! The
Tatler,"
exclaimed Lady Partridge, "at long last." She patted her hair and assumed an expression of. . . coquetry . . . command .
. . welcome . . . ancient wisdom . . . It was hard to say for sure what effect she was after.

Catherine was hurrying Nick and Pat Grayson along the bachelors' corridor towards the thump of the dance music.

"Are you all right, darling?" Nick said.

"Sorry, darling. It was that ghastly speech—one just couldn't take any more!" She was lively, but her reactions were slow
and playful, and he decided she must be stoned.

"I suppose it was a bit self-centred."

She smiled, with a condescension worthy of her grandmother. "It would have been a marvellous speech for his own birthday,
wouldn't it. Poor Fedden!"

Pat, who must have been the person described in the speech as a film star, said, "Ooh, I didn't think it was all that bad,
considering"; though considering what, he didn't specify. Nick had seen him as the smooth eponymous rogue in
Sedley
on TV, and was struck by how much smaller, older and camper he was in real life.
Sedley
was his mother's favourite series, though it wasn't clear if she knew that Pat was a whatnot. "Ooh, I don't know about this,
love . . ." he said as they came into the room. But Catherine pulled him into the crowd and he started rather nimbly circling
round her, flicking his fingers and frowning sexily at her. She seemed to love everything that was uncool about this, but
to Nick, Pat was an unwelcome future, a famous man who was a fool, a silly old queen. He slipped away across the room, and
found he was being shouted and smiled at by people and roughly hugged as if he was very popular. The brandy was having its
way. But for a minute he was ashamed of snubbing Pat Grayson, and pretending to be part of this hetero mob. He felt pretty
good, and grinned at Tim Carswell, who came across the floor and seized him and whirled him round till they were both stumbling
and Tim's damp breath was burning his cheek, and Tim shouted "Whoa!" and slowly pulled away, still slamming from side to side
and then backing into the crowd with a Jaggerish raised arm. "How's the bonny blade?" said Nick, and Sophie Tipper looked
at him over her shoulder with faint recognition as she danced annoyingly with Toby—Nick kissed them both on the cheek before
they could stop him, and shouted "How are you?" again, beaming and heartbroken, and Toby put out a fist with a raised thumb,
and shortly after that they moved away. Nick danced on, his collar was tight and he was sweating, he undid his jacket and
then did it up again—ah, a window was open at the far end of the room and he jigged around in front of it for a while, turning
his face to that rainy garden smell. Martine was sitting on the raised banquette that ran along the wall, and in the beam
of green light that flashed on every few seconds her patient profile looked haggard and lost. "Hi-i!" Nick called, stopping
and half-kneeling beside her. "Isn't Wani with you?" She looked round with a shrug: "Oh, he's somewhere . . ." And Nick really
wanted to see him, suddenly certain of a welcome like the ones he gave him in his fantasies, and there was a twist of calculation
too—he could press himself, heavy and semi-incapable, into Wani's arms. Three girls were doing disco routines in a line, turning
round and touching their elbows. Nick couldn't do that. The girls danced better than the boys, as if it was really their element,
where their rowdy partners were making twits of themselves. Nick didn't like it near the door, where some of the older couples
had wandered in and were trotting to and fro as if quite at home with Spandau Ballet. The ultraviolet light made Nat Hanmer's
dress shirt glow and the whites of his eyes were thrillingly strange. They held hands for a few moments and Nat goggled at
him for the freaky effect, then he shouted, "You old poof!" and slapped his back and gave him a barging kiss on the ear before
he moved off "Your eyes!" Mary Sutton gasped at Nick, and he goggled too. It was easy to trip over the raised edge of the
hearthstone if you were bopping near the fireplace, and Nick fell against Graham Strong and said, "It's so great to see you!"
because he'd sometimes hungered for Graham too, he hardly knew him, and he said, "We must have a dance together later," but
Graham had already turned his back, and Nick fetched up with Catherine and Russell and Pat Grayson, where he was very welcome
since they were an awkward threesome.