The Line of Beauty (9 page)

Nick pushed his chair back to get a clear view of Gerald, and also of Toby, who had coloured up and was looking round with
a tight grin of apprehension. There were ten minutes of oddly relished ordeal ahead of him, being teased and praised by his
father and cheered by his drunk friends—his contemporaries. Nick grinned back at him, and wanted to help him, but was powerless,
of course. He was blushing himself with the anxiety and forced eagerness of awaiting a speech by a friend.

Gerald had donned his rarely seen half-moon spectacles, and held a small card at arm's length. "Your Grace, my lords, ladies,
and gentlemen," he said, offering the old formula with an ironic negligence which had the clever effect of making you think—yes,
the Duchess, of course, and her son were here, as well as Lord Kessler and fat young Lord Shepton, a Martyrs' Club pal of
Toby's. "Distinguished guests, family and friends. I'm very happy to see you all here tonight, in this truly splendid setting,
and very grateful indeed to Lionel Kessler for giving the Worcester College First XV the run of his world-famous porcelain
collection. Well, as the sign in Selfridge's says, or used to say, 'all breakages must be paid for.' " This drew a few titters,
though Nick wasn't sure it struck the right tone. "We're honoured by the presence of statesmen, and film stars, and I suspect
Tobias is thoroughly flattered that so many members of Her Majesty's government were able to be here. My witty daughter, I
understand, has said that it's 'not so much a party as a party conference.'" Uncertain laughter, through which, with good
timing: "I only hope I get to play an equally important role when we meet at Blackpool in October." The MPs chuckled amiably
at this, though the Home Secretary, who'd taken the epithet of statesman more gravely than the rest, smiled inscrutably at
the coffee cup in front of him. Russell said "Good girl!" quite loudly, and clapped a couple of times.

"Now, as you may have heard," Gerald went on, with a delayed quick glance in their direction, "Toby is twenty-one today. I
had been going to give you Dr Johnson's well-known lines on 'long-expected one-and-twenty,' but when I looked them up again
last night I found I didn't know them quite as well as I thought, or indeed as well as many of you, I'm sure, do." Here Gerald
looked down at the card in a marvellously supercilious way. " 'Lavish of your grandsire's guineas,' says the Great Cham, 'Bid
the slaves of thrift farewell. . . When the bonny blade carouses, Pockets full, and spirits high, What are acres? What are
houses? Only dirt, or wet and dry.' So: far from suitable advice to the grandson and nephew of great bankers, or for any young
person coming of age in our splendid property-owning democracy. And the question of wet versus dry, of course, is one on which
indecision is no longer acceptable."

Through the generous laughter Nick caught Toby's eye again, and held it for two or three long seconds, giving him perhaps
a transfusion of reassurance. Toby himself would be too nervous to listen to his father's speech properly, and was laughing
in imitation of the others, not at the jokes themselves. It was typical of Gerald not to have realized that Dr Johnson's poem
was a ruthless little satire. Nick surveyed the room, and was reminded of a college hall, with Gerald and the more influential
guests elected to the high table. Or perhaps of some other institution, such as houses like this had often turned into. Up
in the arcade of the gallery one or two servants were listening impassively, waiting only for the next stage of the evening.
There was a gigantic electrolier, ten feet high, with upward-curling gilt branches opening into cloudy glass lilies of light.
Catherine had refused to sit under it, which was why their whole table had apparently been demoted to this corner of the room.
If it did fall, Nick realized, it would crush Wani Ouradi. He began to feel a little anxious about it himself.

Gerald was now giving a facetious review of Toby's life, and again it made Nick think of a marriage, and the best man's speech,
which everyone dreaded, and the huge heterosexual probability that a twenty-first would be followed soon enough by a wedding.
He could only see the back of Sophie Tipper's head, but he attributed similar thoughts to it, transposed into a bright, successful
key. "As a teenager, then," Gerald said, "Tobias a) believed that Enoch Powell was a socialist, b) set fire to a volume of
Hobbes, and c) had a large and mysterious overdraft. When it came to Oxford, a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics
was the irresistible choice." There was more laughter—and Gerald was leading them along very ably: they were drunkish and
amenable, even gullible, since making a speech was a kind of trick. At the same time there was a bond among the young people,
who were old enough to know that speeches were allowed, and perhaps even supposed, to be embarrassing, and who were rowdy
and superior at once, in the Oxford way. Nick wondered if the women were responding more warmly, if they were picking up,
as Polly did, on their host's "splendour"; perhaps their laughter would seem to him a kind of submission. Nick himself was
lazily exploring the margin between his affection for Gerald and a humorous suspicion, long resisted, that there might be
something rather awful about him. He wished he could see Lord Kessler's reactions.

"And now, as you know, Tobias has opted," Gerald said, "at least for the moment, for a career in journalism. I'm bound to
admit this made me anxious at first, but he assures me he has no interest in becoming a parliamentary sketch writer. There's
been puzzling talk of the
Guardian,
which we hope will blow over, though for the time being I'm thinking hard before answering any of his questions, and have
decided to strenuously deny everything."

Nick glanced round, in a little shrug of amusement, and saw that Tristao, the waiter from Madeira, was standing in the doorway
behind him, following the proceedings with a vacant stare. As a caterers' waiter he must have to listen to an abnormal number
of speeches, each of them built around private jokes and allusions. What was he thinking? What was he thinking of all of them?
His hands were huge and beautiful, the hands of a virtuoso. His dressy trouser-front curved forwards with telling asymmetry.
When he saw that Nick was looking his way he gave him the vaguest smile and inclined his head, as if waiting for a murmured
order. Nick thought, he doesn't even realize I like him, he thinks I'm just one of these toffs who never look at waiters for
their own sake. He shook his head and turned back, and his disappointment was practised and invisible. He saw that Catherine
was stuffing things into her bag and flashing irritable looks at Russell, who mouthed, "What?" at her, and was getting irritable
in his turn. "So, Toby," Gerald said, raising his voice and slowing his words, "we congratulate you, we bless you, we love
you: happy birthday! Will you—all—please raise your glasses: to Toby!"

"Toby!" the overlapping burble went up, followed by a sudden release of tension in cheers and whistles and applause—applause
for Toby, not for the speaker, the heightened, unreal acclaim of a special occasion, amongst which Nick lifted his champagne
glass with tears in his eyes, and kept on sipping from it to hide his emotion. But Catherine had jumped her little gilt chair
back from the table and hurried out, past Tristao, who followed her for a second, to see if he could help. Then Nick and Russell
stared at each other, but Toby was getting to his feet, and Nick was damned if he was chasing after her this time, he really
did love Toby, more than anyone in this high magnificent room, and he was going to be with him as he spoke.

"No," said Toby, "I'm afraid Pa got that a bit wrong. I
tried
to get him an interview with the
Guardian,
but they just weren't interested!" This wasn't quite a witticism, but it drew a loud laugh from his friends, and Gerald,
who'd assumed a self-congratulating air, was forced to make a quick moue of humility. " 'Wait till he does something big,'
they said." He turned to his father. "Of course I told them they wouldn't have to wait long."

There was something artless in Toby's delivery; he was working in the family tradition of teasing, but he was too relenting
and couldn't yet match Gerald's heavy archness. When he had stood up he was strikingly pale, like someone about to faint,
but when he relaxed a little the colour suddenly burned in his cheeks, and his grin was a nervous acknowledgement of his blush.
He said, "I'm not going to say much —" vague groans of disappointment—"but above all I want to thank my dear sweet generous
Uncle Lionel for having us all here tonight. I can't imagine anything more wonderful than this party—and I have a horrible
feeling that after this the rest of my life is going to be one long anticlimax." This brought cheers and applause for Lord
Kessler, who was surely used to being thanked, but not to such public declarations of love. Again the family note was strong
and sentimental, and a little surprising. Nick was smiling at Toby in an anxious trance of lust and encouragement. It was
like watching a beautiful actor in a play, following him and wanting him.

"I'm also really touched," Toby said, "that my old friends Josh and Caroline have come all the way from South Africa. Oh,
and I understand they're also squeezing in a wedding ceremony while they're here." There was good-natured applause, though
no one really knew who Josh and Caroline were. Nick found himself listening almost abstractly to Toby's voice, hearing its
harmless pretensions, which were the opposite of Gerald's. Gerald was a knowing, self-confident speaker, trained at the Oxford
Union, polished at innumerable board meetings, and his tone combined candour and insincerity to oddly charming effect. Toby,
like many of his friends, spoke in the latest public-school accent, an inefficient blur of class denial. Now he was a bit
drunk, and under pressure, and older vowels were showing through as he said that it was "awfully good of" his parents to have
tolerated him. He too seemed not to know what the point of his speech was; he came over like a cross between a bridegroom
and the winner of an award, with a list of people to thank. His boyish technique was to deflect attention from himself onto
his friends, and in this he was also the opposite of his father. He made various jokes such as "Sam will need two pairs of
trousers" and "No more creme de menthe for Mary," which clearly alluded to old disgraces, and began to bore the MPs. Nick
sensed a touching nostalgia for the Oxford years, on which a door, an oak perhaps, seemed gently but firmly to have closed.
He himself was not referred to; but he took this as a sign of intimacy. His gaze embraced Toby, and from behind his helpless
grin and raised applauding hands he saw his dream-self run forwards to hold him and kiss his hot face.

Up in his room Nick slipped out of his jacket, and sniffed at it resignedly: time for a further dowsing in "Je Promets." He
went into his bathroom, and opened the little turret dormer; he splashed cold water on his cheeks. It was the toasts that
had done for him—there was always one glass that tipped him over, unfairly and jokingly, into being drunk. And there were
hours of the party still to come. It was a great ritual of fun, a tradition, a convention, which everyone was loving for its
lavishness and truth to form. Now there was going to be a move to the dance floor, and all the couples would be allowed to
make love to each other with their hips and thighs and sliding hands. Nick gazed in the mirror and saw someone teeteringly
alone. The love he had felt for Toby ten minutes before migrated into a sudden hungry imagining of Leo, his transfiguring
kisses, his shaving rash, and the wonderful shaved depth between the cheeks of his arse. The exactness of memory, the burning
fact of what had happened, blinded him and held him for a while. When he came back, perhaps only seconds later, to the image
in the mirror, he saw the flush in his cheeks and his mouth gasping in re-enacted surrender. He re-tied his tie, very perfectly,
and ran a hand through his hair. There was a kind of tenderness for himself in the movement of his hand through his curls,
as if it had been taught a lesson by Leo. The mirror was a chaste ellipse in a maplewood frame. The washstand was a real Louis
Seize commode cut and drilled to hold a basin and a pair of tall hoarse-throated taps. Well, if you owned a Louis Seize commode,
if you owned dozens of them, you could be as barbarous with them as you liked; and a commode after all was meant for ease.
And after all it was marvellous to be staying in a house like this, a friend of the family, not the son of the man who wound
the clocks.

As he trotted down the stairs he saw Wani Ouradi coming up. Nick sometimes greeted Wani with a friendly grope between the
legs, or a long breathless snog, and he'd once had him tied up naked in his college room for a whole night; he had sodomized
him tirelessly more often than he could remember. Wani himself, glancing back to see if his girlfriend, his intended, was
following, had no idea of all this, of course; indeed, they hardly knew each other.

"Hi, Wani!" said Nick.

"Hi!" said Wani warmly, perhaps not able to remember his name.

"I believe I have to congratulate you . . ."

"Oh . . . yes . . ." Wani grinned and looked down. "Thank you so much." Nick thought, as he had thought before, in the slow
hours of the seminar room, that a view of the world through such long eyelashes must be one extraordinarily shadowed and filtered.
They both suddenly decided to shake hands. Wani glanced back again with a murmur of exasperation so fond and well mannered
that it seemed to include Nick in some harmless conspiracy. "You must meet Martine," he said. A provoking thing about him
was the way his penis always showed, a little jutting bulge to the left, modest, unconscious, but unignorable, and a trigger
to greedy thoughts in Nick. He checked for it now, in a woozy half-second. He was rather like a pop star of the 60s, with
the penis and the dark curly hair—though the look was quite at odds with the bemused courtesy of his manner.