The Line of Beauty (54 page)

The last words were louder and louder, and Nick's pulse thumped as he waited, four or five seconds, for Gerald to put him
right. He was warm with indignation, and a new combative excitement. Barry Groom had no idea of the life they led in this
house. "I suppose I'd have to say," said Gerald, "that it was an error of judgement. Untypical—I'm a pretty sharp judge of
character as a rule. But yes . . . an error."

"It's an error you've paid a very high price for," said Barry Groom unrelentingly.

"He was a friend of the children, you know. We've always had an open-door policy towards the children's friends."

"Hmm," said Barry, who had publicly disinherited his son Quentin "on principle," to make him learn about money from scratch.
"Well, I never trusted him. I can tell you that, unequivocally. I know the type. Never says anything—always nursing his little
criticisms. I remember sitting next to him after dinner here, years ago, and thinking, you don't fit in here, do you, you
little cocksucker, you're out of your depth. And I'll tell you something else: he knew that. I could see he wished he was
upstairs with the women."

"Oh . . ." said Gerald, in wan protest. "We always got along all right, you know."

"So
fucking
superior." Barry Groom swore harshly and humourlessly, as if swearing were the guarantee of any unpalatable truth. It was
just what he'd done that night, after dinner, with an effect Nick could still remember, of having absolutely no style. "They
hate us, you know, they can't breed themselves, they're parasites on generous fools who can. Crawling to you, crawling to
the fucking Ouradis. I'm not remotely surprised he led your poor lovely daughter astray like this, exploited her, there's
no other word for it. A typical homo trick, of course."

Gerald murmured something, with an effect of grumpy submission. Nick stood clenched by the door, leaning forward slightly,
as if about to knock, in a novel confusion of feelings, anger at Gerald's failure to support him, and a strange delighted
hatred of Barry Groom. Barry was a multiple adulterer and ex-bankrupt—to be hated by him was surely a mark of probity. But
Gerald . . . well, Gerald, for all his failings, was a friend.

"Dolly Kimbolton's completely furious about all this, I need hardly say," Barry said. "Ouradi's just given another half-million
to the Party."

Nick trod quietly away and sat down at his old place in the dining room. He looked again at the picture of "Banger" Fedden
and Penny Kent embracing, taken from hundreds of feet away and so blown up that the lovers broke down into a pattern of meaningless
dots.

Gerald let Barry out and a minute later Nick went back to the study, knocked, and put his head round the door. He looked about
quickly, as though checking Gerald was alone, and drawing on some humorous shared relief that Barry had gone. Gerald was standing
at his desk, surveying various documents, and glanced up over his half-moon glasses. "Is this a good moment?" Nick said. Gerald
grunted, a loudish dense sound made up of "what?," "no," "yes," and a furious sigh. Nick came in and shut the door, not wanting
to be overheard by anyone. The room still seemed to tingle with what had recently been said in it. The low leather armchair
still showed where the visitor had sat. A process went on here, there were meetings and decisions, a sense of importance as
seasoned and stifling as the odour of leather, stale cigar smoke and polish.

"A good moment," said Gerald, plucking off his glasses and giving Nick a quick cold smile.

"Yes, well . . ." said Nick, hearing the words bleakly dilate. "I mean I won't be more than a moment."

"Oh . . ." said Gerald snootily, as if to say it would take more than a moment to get through the business he had in mind.
He threw his glasses onto the desk, and walked over to the window. He was wearing cavalry twill trousers and a buff crew-neck
sweater. The effect was of symbolic abasement mixed with military resolve—the strategy for a comeback must already be in hand.
Nick had a silly sense of privilege in seeing him in private and in trouble; and at the same time, which was more of a shock,
he felt almost oppressively bored by him. Gerald gazed into the garden, but really into his own sense of grievance. Nick wasn't
sure whether to speak, it was as hard as he expected, and he stood holding the back of a chair, tensed against what he thought
Gerald was preparing to say. "How's Wani?" Gerald said.

"Oh . . ." The question showed a kind of chilly decency. "He's terribly ill, as you know. It doesn't look at all hopeful .
. ."

Gerald nodded slightly, to show it was therefore typical of a lot of things. "Bloody tough on the parents." He turned to stare
at Nick, as if challenging him to sympathize. "Poor old Bertrand and Monique!"

"I know . . ."

"To lose
one
child . . . " They both heard a touch of Lady Bracknell in this, and Gerald turned promptly away from the danger of a joke.
"Well, one can only imagine." He shook his head slowly and came back to the desk. He had the heavy-faced look, indeed like
someone resisting a laugh, that was his attempt at solemn sympathy. Though there was a mawkish hint too that he had somehow
"lost" a child himself: he absorbed the Ouradis' crisis into his own. "And ghastly for the girl too."

For a moment Nick couldn't think what he meant. "Oh, Martine, do you mean?"

"The fiancee."

"Oh . . . yes, but she wasn't actually his girlfriend."

"No, no, they were going to get married."

"They might have got married, but it was just a front, Gerald. She was only a paid companion."

Gerald pondered this and then flicked up his eyebrows in sour resignation. The facts of gay life had always been taboo with
him: he and Nick had never shared a frank word or knowing joke about them, and this was an odd place to start. With a nervous
laugh Nick went on,
"I'll
miss him, of course."

Gerald busied himself with some papers, shuffled them into a box-folder and snapped down the spring. He glanced, as if for
approval, at the two framed photos, of Rachel and the Prime Minister, and said, "Remind me how you came to be here."

Nick wasn't sure if courtesy really required him to do so. He shrugged, "Well, as you know, I came here as a friend of Toby's."

"Aha," said Gerald, with a nod, but still not looking at him. He sat down at the desk, in the spaceship black chair. He made
an exaggerated moue of puzzlement. "But were you a friend of Toby's?"

"Of course I was," said Nick.

"A funny sort of friendship, wasn't it . . . ?" He glanced up casually.

"I don't think so."

"I don't think he knew anything about you."

"Well, I'm just me, Gerald! I'm not some alien invader. We'd been in the same college for three years."

Gerald didn't concede this point, but swivelled and stared out of the window again. "You've always been comfortable here,
haven't you?"

Nick gasped with disappointment at the question. "Of course . . ."

"I mean, we've always been very kind to you, actually, I think, haven't we? Made you a part of our life—in the widest sense.
You've made the acquaintance of many remarkable people through being a friend of ours. Going up indeed to the very highest
levels."

"Yes, certainly." Nick took a deep breath. "That's partly why I'm so dreadfully sorry about everything that's happened," and
he pushed on, earnestly but slyly, "you know, with Catherine's latest episode."

Gerald looked very affronted by this—he didn't want some defusing apology from Nick, and especially one that turned out not
to be an apology but a commiseration about his daughter. He said, as though parenthetically, "I'm afraid you've never understood
my daughter."

Nick flattered Gerald by taking this as a subtle point. "I suppose it's difficult for anyone who hasn't suffered from it to
understand her kind of illness, isn't it, not only moment by moment, but in its long-term patterns. I know it doesn't mean
she loves you and Rachel any the less that she's done all this. . . damage. When she's manic she lives in a world of total
possibility. Though actually you could say that all she's done is tell the truth." He thought he'd perhaps got through to
Gerald—who frowned ahead and said nothing; but then, rather as he did in TV interviews, carried on with his own line, as if
no answer or objection had been made.

"I mean, didn't it strike you as rather odd, a bit queer, attaching yourself to a family like this?"

Nick thought it was unusual—that was the beauty of it, or had been, but he said, "I'm only the lodger. It was Toby who suggested
I live with you." He took a risk and added, "You could just as well say that the family attached itself to me."

Gerald said, "I've been giving it some thought. It's the sort of thing you read about, it's an old homo trick. You can't have
a real family, so you attach yourself to someone else's. And I suppose after a while you just couldn't bear it, you must have
been very envious I think of everything we have, and coming from your background too perhaps . . . and you've wreaked some
pretty awful revenge on us as a result. And actually, you know . . ."he raised his hands, "all we asked for was loyalty."

The strange, the marvellous thing was that at no point did Gerald say what he considered Nick actually to have done. It seemed
as natural as day to him to dress up the pet lamb as the scapegoat. There was no point in fighting, but Nick said, as if eerily
detached from the very young man who was gripping the chair back, tearful with surprise, "I haven't the faintest idea what
you're talking about, Gerald. But I must say it's a bit steep to talk to me about loyalty, of all things." It struck him he'd
never spoken a word of criticism to Gerald before. It clearly struck Gerald too, from his incredulous recoil, and the grappling
way he turned Nick's words on him.

"No, actually, you haven't the faintest fucking idea what you're talking about!" He stood up convulsively, and then sat down
again, with a sort of sneer. "Do you honestly imagine that your affairs can be talked about in the same terms as mine? I mean—I
ask you again, who are you? What the fuck are you doing here?" The slight rephrasing, the sharpening of his position, loosed
a flood of anger, which moving visibly through his face seemed almost to bewilder him, like a physical seizure.

Trembling with the contagion of madness Nick said the thing he'd come to say, but in a tone of cheap sarcasm he'd never intended
to use: "Well, you'll be devastated to hear that I'm moving out of the house today. I just dropped in to tell you."

And Gerald, furiously pretending not to have heard, said, "I want you out of the house today."

18

T
HE DUCHESS INSISTED
that Gerald and Rachel go to the wedding. Gerald had made a noisily abject phone call: "Really, Sharon,
I could never forgive myself if I caused you a moment's embarrassment on so joyous a day," and before Sharon, in her robust
way, had finished saying that he shouldn't talk nonsense, he had rapidly said, "Oh good, oh good," in a tone which suggested
he hadn't really meant it in the first place. It was a tiny protocol of self-abasement that he had found himself reluctantly
obliged to follow. "I just thought I should ask," he said, as if the offer and not its cause might be the social false note.
He didn't really believe he could be an embarrassment to anyone. They drove off to Yorkshire on the Friday morning.

Wani had had an exquisite new morning suit and dinner suit made, with narrow trousers and a smaller chest disguised by flyaway
lapels. They looked like the formal dress of a little prince, which might only be worn once before he grew out of it. Nick
saw them laid out on the ogee bed, with the new Oxfords and evening slippers aligned on the floor beneath. It was as if two
people even more insubstantial than Wani were lying back side by side on the covers. He helped Wani pack, and peeked out of
habit in his leather stud-box, where there was a flesh-pink paper packet an inch long. He took it out and hid it, with a sense
of a new code of honour overriding an old one.

He found Wani lying on the sofa, in front of some heavy-duty video: but his eyes were closed, his mouth open and askew. Nick
took a second or two to burn off his horror in the slower flame of his pity. Twice now he had come across Wani dozing and
leaned over him not, as he used to, for the private marvel of the view, but to check that he was alive. He sat by him with
a sigh and felt the strange tenderness towards himself that came with looking after someone else, the sense of his own prudence
and mortality. He thought it might be like parenthood, the capable concealment of one's worries. He hadn't told Wani, but
he was having another HIV test in the afternoon: it was another solemn thing, and even more frightening than it need have
been for not being talked about. From the corner of his eye, the video seemed to pullulate, like some primitive life form,
with abstract determination. It was an orgy, unattributable organs and orifices at work in a spectrum of orange, pink, and
purple. He looked more closely for a moment, with a mixture of scorn and regret. It was what they were already calling a "classic,"
from the days before the antiseptic sheen of rubbers was added to the porn palette—Wani had hated that development, he was
an aesthete at least in that. Turned down low, the actors grunted their binary code—
yeah . . . oh yeah, oh yeah . . . yeah
. . .
oh .
. .
yeah, yeah . . . oh
yeah .
. .

"Is the car here?" said Wani, still waking, with a look of dread, as if he longed for his word to be challenged and the trip
to be cancelled. His father's chauffeur was to drive him to Harrogate in the maroon Silver Shadow. A nurse was travelling
with them, a black-haired, blue-eyed Scotsman called Roy, whom Nick felt pleasantly jealous about. "Roy will be here in a
moment," he said, ignoring Wani's weak sulk of resentment; and then, to encourage him, "I must say, he's very cute."

Wani sat up slowly, and swung his legs round. "He speaks his mind, young Roy," he said.

"And what does he say?"

"He's a bit of a bully."

"Nurses have to be pretty firm, I suppose."

Wani pouted. "Not when I'm paying them a thousand pounds a minute, they don't."

"I thought you liked a bit of rough," said Nick, and heard the creaky condescension of his tone. He helped Wani up. "Anyway,
four hours in a Rolls-Royce should smooth him out."

"That's just it," said Wani. "He's madly left-wing." And the ghostly smile of an old perversity gleamed for a moment in his
face.

When the bell rang, Nick went down and found Roy talking to the chauffeur. Roy was about his own age, wearing dark blue slacks
and an open-neck shirt; Mr Damas wore a dark grey suit and funereal tie and a grey peaked cap. They stood at an angle to each
other—Roy candid and practical, fired up by the crisis of AIDS, throwing down his own bravery and commitment like a challenge
to Mr Damas, who had driven the Ouradis since Wani was a boy and looked on his illness with respect but also, as a creature
of Bertrand's, with an edge of blame. The recent newspaper stories had brought shame on him, and it struggled with the higher
claims of loyalty in his square face and leather-gloved hands. He straightened his cap before accepting the two suitcases
that Nick had brought down.

"So you're not coming, Nick," said Roy, with sexy reprehension.

"No, I've got a few things to sort out here."

"You won't be there to protect me from all these dukes and ladies and what have you."

The sudden reassurance of being flirted with, over Wani's stooping head, was shadowed by a flicker of caution. He was still
getting used to the interest of his own case, something extrinsic to himself, which he registered mainly in the way other
people assumed they knew him. "I think I'd need protection from them myself," he said.

Roy gave him a funny smile. "Do you know who's going to be there?"

"Everyone," came a wheezy voice.

Roy looked into the back of the Rolls, where Wani was fidgeting resentfully with a rug and the copious spare cushions. "Just
get yourself settled down in there," he said, as though Wani was a regular nuisance in class. There was something useful in
his briskness; he seemed to take a bleak view and a hopeful one at the same time.

Mr Damas came round and shut the door with its ineffable
chunk
—it was the sound of the world he moved in, a mystery in his charge though not his possession, the tuned precision of a closing
door. Wani sat, looking forwards, lost in the glinting shadow of the smoked glass. Nick had the feeling he would never see
him again, fading from view in the middle of the day. Such premonitions came to him often now. He made a beckoning gesture,
and Wani buzzed down the glass two inches. "Give Nat my love," Nick said. Wani gazed, not at him, but just past him, into
the middle ground of ironic conjecture, and after a few seconds buzzed the window shut.

Nick went into the deserted office on the ground floor, and started going through his desk. He didn't have to move out of
Abingdon Road, in fact he was staying upstairs while he searched for a flat, but he felt the urge to organize and discard.
It seemed clear, although Wani wouldn't say so, that the Ogee operation was closing down. Nick was glad he wasn't going to
Nat's wedding, and yet his absence, to anyone who noticed, might seem like an admission of guilt, or unworthiness. He saw
a clear sequence, like a loop of film, of his friends not noticing his absence, jumping up from gilt chairs to join in the
swirl of a ball. On analysis he thought it was probably a scene from a Merchant Ivory film.

The doorbell trilled and Nick saw a van in the street where the Rolls had been. He went out and there was a skinny boy in
a baseball cap pacing about, and some very loud music. "Ogee?" he said. "Delivery." He'd left the driver's door open and the
radio on—"I Wanna Be Your Drill Instructor" from
Full Metal Jacket
echoed off the houses while he piled up big square bundles on his trolley and wheeled them into the building. He'd taken
over this bit of the street for five minutes—it was an event. It was the magazine. "Thanks very much," said Nick. He stood
aside with the ineffectual half smile of the nonworker, longing to be left alone with the product. The boy pounded in and
out, breathing sharply: it was as if this delivery was keeping him intolerably from another delivery, as if he'd have liked
to have made all his deliveries at once. He stacked up the bundles, a dozen of them, in four squat columns. Each packet was
bound both ways with tight blue plastic tape; Nick scratched at it and broke a nail. "Sign, please," said the boy, whisking
a manifest and a biro from his jeans pocket. Nick hurried down a loose approximation of his signature, and handed the paper
back, to find the boy looking at him with his head tilted and eyes narrowed. Nick coloured but hardened his features at the
same time. If the boy was a
Mirror
reader he might well recognize him—he sensed a latent aggression muddle and swim towards a focus. "Want to see?" said the
boy, and before Nick understood he'd whisked out a Stanley knife from his other pocket, thumbed the blade forward, and ripped
through the tape on the nearest bundle. He pulled off the loose paper wrapping, slid the first glimpsed shining copy out,
turned it in his hands, and presented it to Nick: "Voila!" Nick held it, like the winner of a prize, happy and unable to hide,
sharing it courteously with the boy, who stood at his elbow working it out. Nick felt very exposed, and hoped there wouldn't
be questions. "Yeah, that's beautiful," said the boy. "That's an angel, is it?"

"That's right," said Nick. Simon had done a wonderful job—clear glossy black, with the white Borromini cherub on the right-hand
side, its long wing stretching in a double curve on to the spine, where its tip touched the wing tip of another cherub in
the same position on the back, the two wings forming together an exquisitely graceful ogee. No lettering, except at the foot
of the spine, OGEE, ISSUE i in plain Roman caps.

Nick thought he'd rather not open it, he was teeming with curiosity and hot-faced reluctance; he needed to be alone. The boy
shook his head admiringly. "Yeah, fucking beautiful," he said. "Pardon my French." He stuck his hand out, and Nick shook it.
"See you, mate."

"Yes . . . thanks a lot, by the way!"

"No worries."

Nick smiled, and watched his first critic bound out of the office.

"Right . . ." he said, when he was alone, and even then he smiled selfconsciously. He sat down at Melanie's empty desk, the
magazine squarely in the centre, and turned back the cover with an expression of vacant surmise. And of course what he saw
was the wonderland of luxury, for the first three glossy spreads, Bulgari, Dior, BMW, astounding godparents to Nick and Wani's
whimsical coke-child. He went quickly to his name under the masthead —"Executive Editor: Antoine Ouradi. Consulting Editor:
Nicholas Guest"—and blushed, out of pride and a vague sense of imposture. He thought how relieved his parents would be to
see that, to see his name in print as a distinction, not a shameful worry. It fortified him. He went on through, stopping
for a moment on each page—he'd read every word of it ten times in proof and passed the pages for the printer but he felt they
had undergone a further unaccountable mutation to become a magazine . . . he blurred his eyes against the impossible late
mistake.

His own article, deferentially far back, behind Anthony Burgess on brothels and Marco Cassani on the Gothic revival in Italy,
was about the Line of Beauty, illustrated with sumptuous photos of brooches, mirrors, lakes, the legs of rococo saints and
sofas. He read it with a beating heart, going back once or twice to ride the slide of an elegant sentence again. Beside him
as he read were other admirers. . . Professor Ettrick, his trust in a little-seen student restored . . . Anthony Burgess,
in Monaco, brought to a marvelling halt as he skimmed his contributor's copy . . . Lionel Kessler, relaxing perhaps on a Louis
Quinze day bed, garlanded all round with lines of beauty, seeing welcome proof that his clever maligned young friend was a
mensch. Nick went on, with a confident smile, through the latter pages, the glowing short features on mah-jong sets and toy
soldiers of the Raj. The inside back cover, to his satisfaction, was an ad for "Je Promets." And after that the answering
angel with its lifted wing. Nick took the highest view of it all, his initial timidity was flooded out by its opposite, a
conviction that they'd produced a masterpiece.

Strange teetering mood of culmination. Five minutes later he wished he had it to read through fresh again; but that could
never happen. He took a copy upstairs to the flat, and opened it at random several times—to find that its splendour had a
glint to it, a glassy malignity. No, it was very good. It was lustrous. The lustre was perfected and intense—it was the shine
of marble and varnish. It was the gleam of something that was over.

How he wished Wani could have been here to see it—he'd missed it by five minutes. He could have taken it with him to Yorkshire,
given copies to the guests, to Toby, to Sophie, to the Duchess, to Brad and Treat. Nick pictured Roddy Shepton, huge in tails
and top hat, casting a wary eye over it as he waited for a drink. He pictured Wani himself, shuffling through the rooms in
chilly defiance to show them the one beautiful thing he had managed to make out of his millions—it would confirm or confound
their slight expectations that he was or wasn't going to do something. The reflex acclaim for anything published by a child
of the fellow-rich would be loud, but tempered by disgust at his illness and remembered unease about his origins. Copies would
be left behind in bedrooms and lavatories. Nick sighed over their fate and then thought how silly he was, since Wani hadn't
taken the magazine with him; and really there were worse things to imagine. He was afraid, for instance, that he hadn't been
careful enough in checking Wani's bags—he could easily have had other wraps of coke in his pockets or in his rolled socks.
The crisis in May had forcibly broken his habit, but the reprieve, the return to London and its suddenly finite pleasures,
must have pulsed with temptation. Nat himself was clean now, but his friends included half a dozen steady users, who could
easily and carelessly offer Wani a line. And his heart was very weak. It would be a kind of suicide. Nick stood at the kitchen
window, hardly seeing the house-backs opposite as he lived through the phone call, from Sharon perhaps, or from Gerald himself,
tersely dutiful: a massive heart attack. There was nothing they could do.