The Line of Beauty (53 page)

(ii)

"Bloody hell, Nick . . . !" said Toby next morning.

Nick chewed his cheek. "I know . . ."

"I had absolutely no idea about this. None of us did." He pushed his copy of
Today
away from him, across the dining-room table, and fell back in his chair.

"Well, the Cat did, obviously. She twigged when we were all in France last year." He used the family nickname with a sense
that his licence to do so had probably expired.

Toby gave him a wounded look which seemed to search and find him back at the manoir, under the awning, or by the pool, where
they'd got drunk alone together that long hot afternoon. "You could have told me, you know, you could have trusted me." Toby
had told his own secrets that day, his problems with intimacy—he'd entered into Nick's realm of examined feelings, it had
been a triumph of intimacy in itself for him. "I mean, two of my best mates, you know? I feel such a blasted idiot."

"I was always longing to tell you, darling." Again Toby's face seemed to close against the endearment. "But Wani just wouldn't
hear of it." He looked shyly at his old friend. "I know people take it very personally when they find they've been kept out
of a secret. But really secrets are sort of impersonal. They're simply things that can't be told, irrespective of who they
can't be told to."

"Hm. And now this." Toby pulled out the
Sun
from the slew of newsprint on the table. " 'Gay Sex Romp at MP's Holiday Home.'" He threw it away from him, with a look of
disdain and a hint of a challenge.

"It's really rather sweet their idea of what constitutes a romp," Nick said, to try and put it in proportion.

"Sweet
. . . ?" said Toby, incredulously, but with a flinch of regret as well, that he should be speaking like this to someone he'd
always simply trusted. He stood up, and walked awkwardly along to the far end of the table. The mood of an extended morning-after
still reigned in the room, with sunshine seeping in over the top of the shutters, and the gilt wall lamps casting a crimson
glow. He stood with his back to the Lenbach portrait of—what was he?—his great-grandfather: a stout bourgeois figure in a
tightly buttoned black coat. Nick, with his eye for the family line, saw Toby growing into a likeness. Toby himself had on
a dark suit, blue shirt, and red tie. He was going to a meeting, and this little chat was a bit like a meeting too. He seemed
to share with his ancestor a respect for the obvious importance of business, as well as a dignified failure to anticipate
the scandals of this week.

"God, I'm sorry, Toby," said Nick.

"Yah, well," said Toby, with a big sigh that seemed to weigh a burden and hint at a threat. Unexpected intimacies were blowing
up all around him. He leant on the table and looked at a paper to hide his discomfort. "First it's Dad and Penny, with this
fraud thing going on too, then there's you and Ouradi, with the plague thing . . ."

"Well, you knew Wani had AIDS."

"Mm, yah . . . " said Toby uncertainly. He squared up the newspapers in a pile, with distracted firmness. They were the astonishing
evidence of his situation. "And my bloody old sis going clean off the rails."

"She has rather landed us in it."

"It's as if she hates Dad."

"It's difficult . . ."

"And hates you too. I mean, how did she get like this?"

It was the long-ago talk by the lake, the solemn explanation . . . "I don't think she hates us," said Nick. "Since she crawled
out from under the lithium she's just been in a mood to tell the truth. Actually, she always has been, when you think about
it. I'm certain she'd never actually want to hurt us. She's been got at by people who do hate Gerald, perhaps; that's the
thing."

"Anyway, it's a fuck-up," said Toby, quickly resisting the role-reversal. And Nick caught that startling thing, the stared-out
threat of tears, the miserable twitch of the mouth.

"It's a fuck-up," Nick agreed. He winced at his own readiness to explain Toby's story to him. Poor Toby had been tricked,
or not trusted, which seemed a form of trickery, by everyone around him: it was awful, and Nick found a smile creeping out
of the corners of his mouth in bizarre amusement.

"I must say the
Independent
has by far the best-quality photographs," Toby said. "They've achieved consistently high standards."

"Yes, the
Telegraph's
are very murky in comparison."

"The
Mail's
somewhat better, though." Toby snapped back the pages. The Mordant Analyst had been given a double spread to explore the
whole situation, drawing on his inside knowledge of "the Fedden set." The picture of Toby clasping Sophie on the dance floor
at Hawkeswood was one of Russell's. Toby looked away at the floor and still didn't meet Nick's eye when he said, "I don't
know quite where this leaves us."

"No," said Nick. "Everything's rather in the air, isn't it."

"I mean, I don't see how you can stay here." Then he did look at Nick for several seconds, and the lovely brown gaze, which
had always softened or faltered, didn't do so.

"No, no, of course," said Nick, with a scowl as if Toby was insulting him to suggest he thought he could.

Toby pursed his lips, stood up straight and buttoned his jacket. There was a sense that, though it could have been done better,
he'd performed a bit of business, and his uneasy satisfaction carried him quickly to the door. "I'm going to have a word with
Ma," he said. "Sorry."

Nick sat for a while, feeling that Toby's anger was the worst part of it, the one utterly unprecedented thing; and looking
over the papers in which his own image appeared. He was letting himself in at the front door of this house, and also, four
years younger, in a bow tie and his Uncle Archie's dinner jacket, looking very drunk. It was fascinating, if you thought about
it, that they hadn't got hold of the picture of him and the PM. Still, they had all the rest, sex, money, power: it was everything
they wanted. And it was everything Gerald wanted too. There was a strange concurrence about that.

Nick felt his life horribly and needlessly broken open, but with a tiny hard part of himself he observed what was happening
with detachment as well as contempt. He cringed with dismay at the shame he had brought on his parents, but he felt he himself
had learned nothing new. His long talk on the phone with his father, and then with his mother, had been all the harder for
his lack of surprise; to them it was "a bit of a bombshell," it called for close explanation, almost for some countering offensive.
He had found himself sounding flippant, and wounded them more, since of course, when it came to it, all their deep instincts
were for him, for his safety, and protection. They took it utterly seriously, but rattled him with their clear admissions
that they'd expected trouble of some kind, they'd known something wasn't quite right. Nick resisted that, he wasn't shocked,
and couldn't capture at all the shock that was fuelling the press. He'd known about Penny, and he'd known about himself and
Wani. The real horror was the press itself. "Greed drives out Prudence," wrote Peter Crowther, as if nobody'd ever thought
of that before. He saw the romance of his years with the Feddens, deep, evolving, and profoundly private, framed and explained
to the world by this treacherous hack.

The doorbell rang, and since no one answered it Nick went out and peered through the new spyhole: in which the furious, conceited
features of Barry Groom loomed and then fled sideways as he rang the bell again. Nick opened the door; and glanced out past
the MP at the now almost deserted street.
"Hello,
Barry, come in . . . Yes, they've virtually all gone now."

"No thanks to you," said Barry, stepping past him and frowning his eyebrows and mouth into two thin parallel lines. "I've
come to see Gerald."

"Yes, of course." It wasn't clear if Barry was treating him as a servant or an obstacle. "Come this way," he said, and went
on gracefully, as he turned back down the hall, "I'm so sorry about all this ghastly business." There was a strange smooth
relish in saying that. For a second Barry seemed to take it as his due, then his face soured again. He said,

"Shut up, you stupid little pansy!" It was a quaint sentence, and somehow the more expressive for that.

"Oh . . . !"—Nick darted a look in the big hall mirror, as though for witnesses. "That's hardly—"

"Shut up, you little
cuntl"
said Barry, with a biting clench of the jaw, and pushed past him and down the passage towards Gerald's study.

"Oh, fuck off," said Nick, in fact he only mouthed the words, because he thought Barry might turn back and punch him in the
face. Gerald opened his door and looked out like a headmaster.

"Ah, Barry, good of you to come," he said, and gave Nick a momentary stare of reproach.

"You ignorant, humourless, greedy,
ugly
cunt . . . " Nick went on to himself, in the shocked hilarity of having been insulted. He wandered in the hall, blinking
in astonishment at the black-and-white marble squares of the floor. He couldn't quite tell, when he went into the kitchen,
if Elena had heard this outburst. She always protested, dimly but sincerely, at Gerald's unguarded
fucks
—she was serious about all that.

"Hello, Elena!" said Nick.

"So, Mr Barry Groom come," said Elena. She was a little woman but she occupied the kitchen from wall to wall. She patrolled
it. "He want coffee?"

"Come to think of it, he never said. But I rather think not."

"He don't want?"

"No . . . " He looked at Elena with cautious tenderness, uncertain what credit remained from his years of diligent niceness
to her. "By the way, I won't be here for dinner tonight." Elena raised her eyebrows and pinched her lips. The new revelations
about Nick and Wani must be amazing to her. It wasn't clear if she'd even taken in that Nick was gay. He said, "It's all a
bit of a mess, isn't it?
Un pasticcio
. . .
un imbroglio"

"Pasticcio, si,"
she said, with a hard laugh. They'd had a certain amount of fun over the years with each other's Italian. She went into the
pantry, and spoke to him without turning round, so that he had to follow her.

"I'm sorry?"

"How long you been here now?" She peered up at the shelved tins.

"In Kensington Park Gardens?—Oh, four years last summer, four and . . . a quarter years."

"Four years. A good time."

"Yes, it has been a good time"—he grunted at the little blur of idiom. She was reaching up, and Nick, not that much taller,
stretched past her. "The borlotti?" He put the can into her hands, so that she had at least to nod in thanks; then he followed
her out again, as if hoping for another task. She jammed the beans under the tin opener and cranked round the handle, something
Nick felt he'd seen her do scores, hundreds of times, with her tomato puree and her
fagioli
and all the things she preferred canned to fresh. And suddenly it was obvious to him. He said, "Elena, I've decided it's
time to hand in my resignation."

She looked at him sharply, to make sure she'd understood him; then she nodded again, in acknowledgement. She might almost
have smiled at his apt phrasing. She moved back to the table, and her busyness expressed her purpose but also perhaps hid
some sort of regret at the news. Nick was very shaken by it himself. He glanced at her hopefully. Behind her on the wall were
all the family photos, and she seemed to stand, stooped and efficient, in an angled but intimate relation to them—indeed she
appeared in one of them, displaying a lordly Toby in his pram: she'd been there from the beginning, in the legendary Highgate
days . . . She started chopping some onions, but looked up again and said, "You remember when you first come here?"

"Yes, of course," said Nick.

"The first time we meet . . ."

"Yes, I do," and he chuckled fondly and went a little pink, because of course they'd never been over that minute of confusion
in the hall. He saw he was pleased she'd mentioned it. It was hardly even an embarrassment, since all he had done was be charming
to her; he'd treated her not as an equal but as a superior.

"You thought I was Miz Fed."

"Yes, I know I did . . . Well, I'd never met either of you. I thought, a good-looking woman . . ."

Elena squeezed her eyes shut over the onions—it seemed for a moment like a slide into another emotion. Then she said, "I think
to myself that day, this one's . . .
sciocco,
you know, he don't know anything, oh, he's all very nice, lady, but he's you know . . . " she tapped her forehead with a
finger.

"Pazzo
. . . ?" said Nick, taking a last sick chance.

"He's no good," said Elena.

Nick went up to his room, and stood looking at the window sill. Late-morning, late-October sunlight dimmed and brightened
indifferently over it. He was lost in thought, but it was thought without words, pure abstraction, luminous and sad. Then
a simple form of words appeared, almost as if written. It would have been best in a letter, where it could have been done
beautifully, with complete control. Spoken, it risked tremors and deflections. He went downstairs to see Gerald.

The study door was ajar, and he could hear him talking to Barry Groom. He stood in the passage, as he felt he had often done
in this house, as an accidental eavesdropper. Decisions were being made all the time, in an adjacent room, in a phone call
half-curiously overheard. He liked the noise of business and politics, it was an adult reassurance, like the chatter of parents
on a night journey, meaningless, fragmentary, and consoling to the sleepy child on the back seat. Sometimes of course he did
pick up on a secret, a surprise still being contrived, and his pleasure was a very private one, the boosted glow of his own
trustworthiness. Barry was saying, "I can't think how you let it happen." Gerald made a gloomy rumble and single hard cough
but said nothing. "I mean, what's the little pansy doing here? Why have you got a little ponce hanging round your house the
whole fucking time?"