The Line of Beauty (15 page)

"OK, babe," Leo said quietly. "Well, I'll see you soon. We'll get it together at the weekend, yeah? I've got to go—my mum
wants the phone."

"I'll ring you tomorrow . . ."

"Yeah, well, lovely to chat."

And in the silence of the room afterwards, shaken, tight-lipped, Nick clutched at that cosy but cynical cockney
lovely.
Of course Leo was inhibited by being at home, he wanted to say more. Just think of this afternoon. It was terribly sweet
that he'd rung at all. The chat was a romantic bonus, but nothing was certain when it came to words, there were nettles among
the poppies. For a minute or two Nick felt their separation like a tragedy, a drama of the thickening dusk—he saw Leo at large
on his bike while he stood in this awful office with its filing cabinets, its decanters, and the enlarged photograph, just
back from the framers, of the hundred and one new Tory MPs.

In the kitchen he found that people had dispersed to bathe and change, and these further unstoppable rhythms made him feel
like a ghost. Rachel was sitting at the table writing place cards with her italic fountain pen. She glanced up at him, and
there was a slight tension in her manner as well as obvious solicitude, a desire not to offend in a moment of kindness. She
said, "All well?"

"Yes, thank you—fine . . ." said Nick, shaking himself into seeing that of course life was pretty wonderful, it was just that
there was more to it than he expected—and less as well.

"Now should I put Badger or Derek, do you think? I think I'll put Derek, just to put him in his place."

"Well, they are place cards," said Nick.

"Exactly!" said Rachel, and blew on the ink. She looked up at him again briefly. "You know, my dear, you can always bring
friends here if you want to."

"Oh, yes . . . thank you . . ."

"I mean we would absolutely hate it if you were to feel you couldn't do that. This is your home for however long you are with
us." And it was the "we," the general benevolence, that struck him and upset him; and then the practical acknowledgement that
he wouldn't be there for ever.

"I know, you're very kind. I will, of course."

"I don't know . . . Catherine says you have a . . . a special new friend," and she was stern for a second, magnanimous but
at a disadvantage: what should she call such a person? "I just want you to know he'd be very welcome here."

"Thank you," said Nick again, and smiled through a blush at the thing being out. It was confusingly straightforward. He felt
relieved and cheated. He wasn't sure he could rise to the freedom being offered—he saw himself bringing home some nice white
graduate from the college instead, for a pointless tea, or convivial evening bleak with his own cowardice.

"We're such broody old things," Rachel said, "now that Toby's moved out. So do it just for our sake!" This was a charming
exaggeration, in a woman of forty-seven, with thirteen for dinner, but it acknowledged a truth too: it didn't quite say she
thought of him as a son—it didn't elevate or condescend—but it admitted a habit, a need for a young man and his friends about
the house. She tapped the cards together and came across the room and Nick gave her a kiss, which she seemed to find quite
right.

In fact Toby and Sophie were there that night. They came early and Nick had a gin-and-tonic with them in the drawing room.
They seemed to bring along their own complacent atmosphere, the mood of their life together in the Chelsea flat, and of some
larger future when they might curl up a leg on the sofa or stand with an elbow on the mantelpiece in a room as enormous as
this. Toby played the lightly chivvied "husband" very sweetly, and Sophie claimed him in the childish ways of someone experimenting
with her power, with little exasperations and innuendos. She did a performance about how Toby ground his teeth in his sleep.
Nick tittered warily at this glimpse of the bedroom, but found her lack of subtlety oddly reassuring. She'd got Toby, snoring
and twitching, but the romantic reach of Nick's feelings for him, the web of sacrifice and nonsense and scented Oxford nights,
survived untouched. Toby was very sweet to Nick too. He left his position by the fireplace and came and sprawled on the rug
by his chair, so that Nick could have reached out and stroked the back of his neck. For a moment Sophie looked disconcerted,
but then she took possession of that situation as well. "Ah—you two should see more of each other," she said. "It's good to
see you together." A minute later, looking vaguely self-conscious, Toby got up and pretended to search for a book.

"And what about your lovely friend . . . ?" Sophie wanted to know.

"Oh . . . Leo, do you mean?"

"Leo,"
said Sophie.

"Oh, he's—lovely!" Here was the subject again—Nick just hadn't got used to it yet, to the idea of anything so secret, so steeped
in his own fears and fantasies, being cheerfully enquired after by other people. Toby too looked round from the bookcase with
his encouraging grin.

"Such a . . .
lovely
man," said Sophie, whose conversation tended not to develop, but to settle, snugly or naggingly, in one place.

Nick was glad of the praise, and mistrusted it at the same time. "Well, he loved meeting you," he said.

"Aah . . ." Sophie purred, as if to say that people usually did enjoy that. "He's a great fan of your work, Pips," said Toby.

"I know," said Sophie, and sat looking down modestly. Her dark-blonde hair, worn long at Oxford, had been cut and backcombed,
Diana-style, and quivered when she shook her head. She was wearing a red strapless number that didn't really suit her.

"You know she's got a part in a play," said Toby.

"Oh, shoosh . . . " said Sophie.

"No, we've all got to go and see her. Nick—come to the first night, we'll go together."

"Absolutely," said Nick. "What are you doing?"

Sophie quivered and said, "Well, you might as well know," as if being hurried into announcing a different kind of engagement.
"I'm doing
Lady
Windermere
. . . "

"Fantastic. I think you'll be very good at that." It was a surprisingly big part, but Nick could see her as the self-righteous
young wife clipping rose stems in her Westminster drawing room; and delivering those awful soliloquies she has—

"I don't know what it will be like. It's one of these very way-out directors. He's . . . he's gay, actually, too. He says
it's going to be a deconstructionist reading of the play. That doesn't worry me, of course, because I've done deconstruction;
but Mummy and Daddy may not like it."

"You can't go worrying about what your parents will think," said Nick.

"That's right," said Toby. "Anyway, your ma's very with-it. She's always going to way-out concerts and things."

"No, she'll be fine."

Toby chuckled. "Of course your father's most famous remark is that he wished Shakespeare had never been born."

"I don't know that that's his
most
famous remark," said Sophie, with a hint of pique. In fact if Maurice Tipper had made a famous remark at all it would probably
have been something about profit margins and good returns for shareholders. "He only said it after getting bitten to death
by mosquitoes watching
Pericles
in Worcester College gardens."

"Ah . . . " murmured Nick, whose own memory was of Toby's bashful swagger as a Lord of Tyre, when Sophie had been the Marina.

"You're too horrid about my poor papa," said Sophie in a highly affected way, as if in her mind she was already on stage.

Catherine came in, dressed for her night out in a tiny spangled frock, over which she was wearing an unbuttoned light-grey
raincoat. She wore high-heeled black shoes and stockings with a whitish sheen to them.

"Goodness!" said Toby.

"Hello, darling," said Catherine confidentially to Sophie, stooping to give her a kiss. Sophie clearly found Catherine the
most challenging aspect of an affair with Toby, and Catherine knew this, and treated her with the kind of clucking condescension
that Sophie would otherwise have lavished on her. "Love your clever frock," she said.

"Oh . . . thank you," said Sophie, smiling and blinking.

"Are you going out, then, sis?" said Toby.

Catherine headed towards the drinks table. "I'm going
out
tonight," she said. "Russell's taking me to an opening in Stoke Newington."

"And where might that be?" said Toby.

"It's a well-known area of London," Catherine said. "It's very fashionable, isn't it, Soph?"

"Yes, of course—darling, you've heard of it," said Sophie.

"I was joking," said Toby; and Nick thought it was true, you never expected him to; and when he did you couldn't always be
sure that he had. And then the idea of a party, not this one, but a noisy party with cans of beer and trails of pot smoke,
through which he moved with his lover, as his lover, came over him like a pang and he envied Catherine. It was an image of
an Oxford party, but blended with something known only from television, a house full of black people.

Toby said, "I'm just going upstairs to see if I can find those trousers. Are you going to Nat's bash, Nick?"

"What is it?" said Nick, with another dimmer pang at the thought of another kind of party, a posh white hetero one, at which
his presence was not thought necessary.

"Oh, he's having this Seventies party . . ." said Toby hopelessly.

"No, I'm not invited," said Nick, with a superior smile, thinking of the loving closeness he had felt with Nat at Hawkeswood,
when they were both stoned and sitting on the floor. "Is it in London?"

"That's the thing. It's up at the blasted castle," said Toby.

"Yes . . . It's absurdly soon, isn't it, for a Seventies party?" said Nick. "I mean, the Seventies were so ghastly, why would
anyone want to go back to them?" He'd been longing for a chance to see the castle—a marcher fortress with Wyatt interiors.

"Well, public schoolboys love reliving their puberty, don't they Soph," said Catherine, coming back with a very tall drink.

"I
know,"
said Sophie crossly.

"Some of them spend their whole lives doing it," Catherine said. She stood in front of the fireplace, with a hand on her hip,
and seemed already to be moving to the music of a future very remote from any such nonsense.

Toby shrugged apologetically and said, "I just hope I've still got those disco pants!"

Nick almost said, "Oh . . . the purple ones . . . ?"—since he knew just where they were, having been through everything in
Toby's room, read his schoolboy diary, sniffed the gauzy lining of his outgrown swimming trunks, and even tried on the flared
purple trousers (standing foolishly on the long legs). But he merely nodded, and knocked back the rest of his g-and-t.

Gerald came down in a dark suit with characteristic pink shirt, white collar, and blue tie. He seemed to recognize, with a
forgiving smile, that he had set a sartorial standard the others were unlikely to match. He kept on smiling as he crossed
the room, as a sign of his decision that he would not react to Catherine's appearance. The mac worn over the micro-frock made
her look almost naked. When Badger came in he was less circumspect. "My god, girl!" he said.

"No, your god-daughter actually, Uncle Badger," said Catherine, with the forced pertness of a much younger child.

Badger frowned and hummed. "Well, exactly," he said. "Didn't I promise to safeguard your morals, or something?" He rubbed
his hands together and had a good look at her.

"I'm not sure anyone thinks you'd be the best person for that," Catherine said, sipping her gin and sitting down sideways
on a low armchair.

"You're going easy on that stuff, aren't you, Puss?" said Gerald.

"It's my first one, Daddy," Catherine said; but Nick could see why Gerald was anxious, she was high on her own defiance tonight.
He watched Badger watching her, his grey-striped peak slicked back after his shower, something disreputable and unattached
about him; in parts of Africa, according to Toby, he was known not as Badger but by one of a number of words for hyena. Certainly
he circled, and was hungry for something. His lecherous teasing of his god-daughter was allowed because it was of course impossible,
a clownish joke.

Catherine stayed long enough to meet everyone and to test her claim that Barry Groom never said hello. Gerald played along
and said,
"Hello,
Barry," and not only seized his hand but covered it confirmingly with his other hand, as if he was canvassing: at which Barry,
looking round the room with a suspicious smile, said, "Gerald, I'm surprised at you"—holding him there long enough to make
him uneasy—"a
green front door,
that's hardly sending the right signal." He got a laugh, which was warmer and more complex than he expected—there was a second
or two while he grew into it, squared his shoulders. He followed Gerald across the room, nodding in a vain, critical way as
he was introduced, but not saying hello. When Catherine shook his hand, he said, "Aha! Beautiful creature!" with a vaguely
menacing presumption of charm. Catherine asked him where his wife was and he said she was still parking the car.

It was good that Catherine should want to be present, to be presented, to help entertain the guests, but to the family it
was also a little sinister. She put everyone on edge by having her coat on indoors, and seemed to be playing with her father's
hopes that at any moment she might leave. He glanced at her distractedly from time to time, as if he would have liked to say
something but had made the calculation that the oddity of the coat was preferable to the naked flesh beneath it. He introduced
her to Morden Lipscomb with visible reluctance. The grey old American, with his tiny granite-like sparkle of charm, shook
her hand and smiled mockingly, as if being confronted with an ancient indiscretion he meant entirely to deny. Toby and Nick
were both watching her and Toby said, "God, my sis looks like, you know, one of those girls who try and lure you into striptease
parlours."

"She looks like a strippergram," Sophie said.