The Line of Beauty

  Though half an hour later they were creeping down Park Lane. The decisive plunge from the heights had slowed and stalled in the inexhaustible confusion of traffic and roadworks and construction. The wolfish bites had turned into thwarted snaps, the squeals of half a dozen near-collisions. Shuddering lorries squeezed them and dared them and flushed their reeking fumes through the coverless car, as four lanes funnelled into one outside the Hilton Hotel. Wani had whisked Nick up one night to the top-floor bar of the Hilton, perhaps not fully aware of its glassy vulgarity—it was a place his father liked to take guests to, and there was something touchingly studied in the paying for the cocktails and the lordly gaze out over the parks and the palace and the fur and diamonds of the London night. And now here they were, trapped, motionless, half asphyxiated on the roadway outside. Since Nick was driving he felt guilty and clumsy, as if it were his fault, as well as angry and slightly nauseous. Wani's face tightened and his lips were pursed with blame. Even Ricky was letting out puffing sighs. Wani reached over and put a hand on Packy's thigh and Nick kept an eye on them in the mirror. He tried to make normal conversation, but Ricky had no views on any current topic, and was marvellously incurious about his new friends. He'd given up his job at a warehouse in favour of doing nothing, and now obviously he couldn't find a job even if he wanted to, with three and a quarter million out of work: he smiled at that. He didn't drink, he didn't smoke, and he never read books. "Perhaps we'll put you in a film," said Wani archly, and Ricky said, "All right." He seemed to have forgotten he had a girlfriend, until Nick asked another question about her. At last they rushed out into Hyde Park Corner, and jostled their way round into Knightsbridge. Wani said, "What's your girlfriend's name?"

  "Felicity," said Ricky—which was written on the awning of Felicity Prior's flower shop just beside them. "Yeah . . ."

  Wani turned and said, in a painfully roguish tone, "Felicity's a very lucky girl."

  "Yeah, she is, isn't she," said Ricky.

  When they reached Wani's place there was no one in the office, the boys had left, and they went straight upstairs to the flat, Ricky following Wani, and Nick coming close behind, unpleasantly jealous of the other two. It was like the tension of a first date, but with an extra player who was also a competitor and critic. He was squeamish at the thought of Wani's little predilections being exposed, and angry because he was the one who had been trusted with the secret of them. He didn't know if he could go through with that drama in the presence of Ricky, whom obviously, elsewhere, he would have loved to fuck. Or perhaps it wouldn't be like that, they would just fool about a bit. He went across the room and put the car keys down on the side table, and when he looked back Ricky and Wani were snogging, nothing had been said, there were sighs of consent, a moment's glitter of saliva before a shockingly tender second kiss. Nick gave a breathy laugh, and looked away, in the grip of a misery unfelt since childhood, and too fierce and shaming to be allowed to last.

  He took down the leather-bound Poems and Plays of Addison and got out the hidden gram of coke—all that was left of last week's quarter-ounce. He knelt down by the glass coffee table to deal with it, polishing a clean spot. The new issue of Harper's was open at "Jennifer's Diary," and he peered at the picture of Mr Antoine Ouradi and Miss Martine Ducros at the Duchess of Flintshire's May ball. The pale inverted reflection of the two men kissing floated on the glass beside the photographed couple. If this was one of Wani's films—not the ones he wanted to make but the ones he liked to watch—Nick would have to join them in a moment. Sometimes there was an unaccountably boring scene where one man knelt and sucked the dicks of the other two in turn, or even tried to get them both in his mouth, and Nick could see Wani needing to do that. He chopped and drew out the fine white fuses of pleasure and watched Pdcky tug at the buckle of his lover's belt.

  8

  WANI'S NEW CENTRE of operations was an 1830s house in Abingdon Road which he had had converted by Parkes Perrett Bozoglu. On the ground floor was the glinting open-plan Ogee office, and on the two upper floors a flat that was full of eclectic features, lime-wood pediments, coloured glass, surprising apertures; the Gothic bedroom had an Egyptian bathroom. The high tech of the office, PPB seemed to say, was less the logic of the future than another style in their postmodern repertoire. The house had been featured in The World of Interiors, whose art director had moved the furniture around, hung a large abstract painting in the dining room, and introduced a number of ceramic lamps like colossal gourds. Wani said this didn't matter at all. He himself seemed elegantly and equally at home in the reflecting glass and steel of the office and among the random cultural allusions of the flat. He knew very little about art and design, and his pleasure in the place was above all that of having had something expensive done for him.

  Nick smiled to himself at the flat's pretensions, but inhabited it with his old wistful keenness, as he did the Feddens' house, as a fantasy of prosperity that he could share, and as the habitat of a man he was in love with. He felt he took to it well, the comfort and convenience, the discreet glimpsed world of things that the rich had done for them. It was a system of minimized stress, of guaranteed flattery. Nick loved the huge understanding depth of the sofas and the peculiarly gilding light of the lamps that flanked the bathroom basin; he had never looked so well as he did when he shaved or cleaned his teeth there. Of course the house was vulgar, as almost everything postmodern was, but he found himself taking a surprising pleasure in it. The hallway, where the grey glass bells of the lampshades cast cloudy reflections in the ox-blood-marble walls, was like the lavatory of a restaurant, though evidently of a very smart and fashionable one.

  He slept there from time to time, in the fantasy of the canopied bed, with its countless pillows. The ogee curve was repeated in the mirrors and pelmets and in the wardrobes, which looked like Gothic confessionals; but its grandest statement was in the canopy of the bed, made of two transecting ogees crowned by a boss like a huge wooden cabbage. It was as he lay beneath it, in uneasy post-coital vacancy, that the idea of calling Wani's outfit Ogee had come to him: it had a lightness to it, being both English and exotic, like so many things he loved. The ogee curve was pure expression, decorative not structural; a structure could be made from it, but it supported nothing more than a boss or the cross that topped an onion dome. Wani was distant after sex, as if assessing a slight to his dignity. He turned his head aside in thoughtful grievance. Nick looked for reassurance in remembering social triumphs he had had, clever things he had said. He expounded the ogee to an appreciative friend, who was briefly the Duchess, and then Catherine, and then a different lover from Wani. The double curve was Hogarth's "line of beauty," the snakelike flicker of an instinct, of two compulsions held in one unfolding movement. He ran his hand down Wani's back. He didn't think Hogarth had illustrated this best example of it, the dip and swell—he had chosen harps and branches, bones rather than flesh. Really it was time for a new Analysis of Beauty.

  On the floor below was the "library," a homage to Lutyens neo-Georgian, with one black wall and pilastered bookcases. A glass bowl, some framed photos, and a model car took up space between the sparse clumps of books. There were big books on gardens and film stars, and some popular biographies, and books valued for being by people Wani knew, such as Ted Heath's Sailing and Nat Hanmer's "really rather good" first novel Pig Sty. The room had a proper Georgian desk, and sofas, a huge staring television and a VCR with high-speed rewind. It was here, a few days after the Ricky episode, with its large tacit adjustment to Nick's understanding of things, that Wani had sat down, plucked the top off his Mont Blanc and made out a cheque to Nicholas Guest for £5,000.

  Nick had looked at the cheque, drawn on Coutts & Co. in the Strand, with a mixture of suspicion and glee. He handled it lightly, noncommittally, but he knew in a second or two that he was fiercely attached to it, and dreaded its being taken away from him. He said, "What on earth's this?"

  "What. . . ?" said Wani, as if he'd already forgotten it, but with a
tremor of drama that he couldn't fully suppress. "I'm just fed up with paying for you the whole fucking time."

  This was quite a witty remark, Nick could see, and he took the roughness of it as a covert tenderness. Still, there was a sense that he might have agreed to something, when he was drunk and high—that he'd forgotten his side of a bargain. "It doesn't seem right," he said, already seeing himself doing the paying, taking out Toby, or Nat perhaps, to Betty's or La Stupenda; having a credit card, therefore . . .

  "Yah, just don't tell anyone," said Wani, pressing a video into the slot of the player, and picking up the remote control, with which he poked and chivvied the machine from a frowning distance. "And don't just blue it all in a week on charlie."

  "Of course not," said Nick—though the idea, and the hidden calculation he made, brought him up against the limits of £5,000 fairly quickly. If he was going to have to pay for himself, it wasn't nearly enough. Seen in that light, it was rather mean of Wani, it was a bit of a tease. "I'll invest it," he said.

  "Do that," said Wani. "You can pay me back when you've made your first five grand profit." At which Nick sniggered, out of sheer ignorance. It was all a bit tougher than he thought, if he was going to have to pay it back. But he didn't want to whinge.

  "Well, thank you, my dear," he said, folding the cheque reflectively, and going towards him to give him a kiss. Wani reached up his cheek, like a thanked but busy parent, and as Nick went out of the room Wani's favourite scene from Oversize Load was already on the screen, and the man in black was performing his painful experiment on the excited little blond.

  "Oh, baby . . . !" Wani chuckled, but Nick knew he wasn't being called back.

  A couple of nights a week Wani spent uncomplainingly at his parents' house in Lowndes Square. Nick had been ironical about this at first, and piqued that he seemed to feel no regret at passing up a night they could have spent together. The family instinct was weak in him—or if it flared it involved some family other than his own. But he soon learned that to Wani it was as natural as sex and as irrefutable in its demands. On other nights of the week he might be in and out of the lavatories of smart restaurants with his wrap of coke, and roar home in WHO 6 for a punishing session of sexual make-believe; but on the family nights he went off to Knightsbridge in a mood of unquestioning compliance, almost of relief, to have dinner with his mother and father, any number of travelling relations, and, as a rule, his fiancee. Then Nick would go back jealously to Kensington Park Gardens and the hospitable Feddens, who all seemed to believe his story that on other nights he worked at his thesis on Wani's computer and used a "put-me-up" at his flat. He had never been invited to Lowndes Square, and in his mind the house, the ruthless figure of Bertrand Ouradi, the exotic family protocols, the enormous monosyllable of the very word Lowndes, all combined in an impression of forbidding substance.

  On one of his nights alone, Nick went to Tannhauser and met Sam Zeman in the interval. They gossiped competitively about the edition being used, an awkward hybrid of the Paris and Dresden versions; Sam had the edge in relevant and precisely remembered fact. Nick said there was something he wanted to ask him, and they agreed to have lunch the following week. "Come in early," said Sam, "and try out the new gym." Kesslers had just rebuilt their City premises, with a steel and glass atrium and high-tech dealing-floors fitted in behind the old palazzo facade.

  When the day came Nick turned up early at the bank and waited under a palm tree in the atrium. People hurried in, nodding to the commissionaire, who still wore a tailcoat and a top hat. On the exposed escalators the employees were carried up and down, looking both slavish and intensely important. Nick watched the motorbike messengers in their sweaty waterproofs and leathers, and heavy boots. He felt abashed and agitated by closeness to so many people at work, in costume, in character, in the know. The building itself had the glitter of confidence, and made and retained an unending and authentic noise out of air vents, the hubbub of voices and the impersonal trundling of the escalators. Nick craned upwards for a glimpse of the regions where Lord Kessler himself might be conducting business, at that level surely a matter of mere blinks and ironies, a matter of telepathy. He knew that the old panelled boardroom had been retained, and that Lionel had hung some remarkable pictures there. In fact he had said that Nick should call in one day and see the Kandinsky . . .

  Sam took him through and down into a chlorine-smelling basement where the gym and lap-pool were. "It's such a godsend, this place," he said. Nick thought it was very small, and hardly compared with the Y; he saw that he came to a gym as a gay place, but that this one wasn't gay. An old man in a white jacket handed out towels and looked seasoned to the obscenities of the bankers. Nick did a perfunctory circuit, really just to oblige Sam, who was pedalling on a bike and filling in the Times crossword. He felt he didn't know Sam very well, and had a vague sensation of being patronized. Sam's friendly Oxford cleverness had hardened, he had a glint to him like the building itself, a watchful half-smile of secret knowledge. All around them other men were slamming weights up and down. Nick wasn't sure if they were working up their aggression or working it off. In the showers they shouted esoteric boasts from stall to stall.

  Nick had seen their lunch taking place in a murmurous old City dining room with oak partitions and tailcoated waiters. The restaurant Sam took him to was so bright, noisy and enormous that he had to shout out the details of his £5,000. When Sam understood he flinched backwards for a second to show he'd thought it was going to be something important. "Well, what fun," he said.

  It was nearly all men in the restaurant. Nick was glad he'd worn his best suit and almost wished he'd worn a tie. There were sharp-eyed older men, looking faintly harassed by the speed and noise, their dignity threatened by the ferocious youngsters who already had their hands on a new kind of success. Some of the young men were beautiful and exciting; a sort of ruthless sex-drive was the way Nick imagined their sense of their own power. Others were the uglies and misfits from the school playground who'd made money their best friend. It wasn't so much a public-school thing. As everyone had to shout there seemed to be one great rough syllable in the air, a sort of "wow" or "yow." Sam was somewhat aloof from them but he didn't disown them. He said, "I saw a marvellous Frau ohne Schatten in Frankfurt."

  "Ah yes . . . well, you know my feelings about Strauss," said Nick.

  Sam looked at him disappointedly. "Oh, Strauss is good," he said. "He's very good on women."

  "That wouldn't in itself put me off!" said Nick.

  Sam chuckled at the point, but went on, "The orchestral music's all about men and the operas are all about women. The only interesting male parts he wrote are both trouser-roles, Octavian, of course, and the Composer in Ariadne."

  "Yes, quite," said Nick, slightly pressured. "He's not universal. He's not like Wagner, who understood everything."

  "He's not like Wagner at all," said Sam. "But he's still rather a genius." They didn't get round to Nick's money till the end of lunch. "It's just a little inheritance," said Nick. "I thought it might be fun to see what could be made of it."

  "Mm," said Sam. "Well, property's the thing now."

  "I wouldn't get much for five thousand," said Nick.

  Sam gave a single laugh. "I'd buy shares in Eastaugh. They're developing half the City. Share price like the north wall of the Eiger."

  "Going up fast, you mean."

  "Or there's Fedray, of course."

  "What, Gerald's company?"

  "Amazing performance last quarter, actually."

  Nick felt stirred but on balance uneasy at this idea. "How does one go about it?" he said, with a gasp at his own silliness, but a certain recklessness too, after four glasses of Chablis. "I wondered if you'd look after it for me."

  Sam put his napkin on the table and gestured to the waiter. "OK!" he said brightly, to show it was a game, a bit of silliness of his own. "We'll go for maximum profits. We'll see how far we can go."

  Nick fumbled earnestly for his wall
et but Sam put the lunch on expenses. "Important investor from out of town," he said. He had Kesslers' own platinum MasterCard. Nick watched the procedure with a bead of anticipation in his eye. Outside on the pavement, Sam said, "All right, my dear, send me a cheque. I'm going this way," as if Nick had made it clear he was going the other. Then they shook hands, and as they did so Sam said, "Shall we say three per cent commission," so that they seemed to have solemnized the arrangement. Nick flushed and grinned because he'd never thought of that: he minded terribly. It was only later that it came to seem a good, optimistic thing, with the proper stamp of business to it.

  Wani was still "building up his team" at Ogee, and Nick was silently amazed by both his confidence and his lack of urgency. A woman called Melanie, dressed for a Dallas cocktail party, came in to do the typing, and artfully protracted her few bits of filing and phoning through the afternoon. Whenever her mother rang her she said things were "hectic." Wani had a wonderful Talkman, which was a portable phone he could take with him in the car or even into a restaurant, and Melanie was encouraged to call him on it if he was in a meeting and give him some figures. Then there were the boys, Howard and Simon, not actually a couple, but always referred to together, and acting together in the comfortable way of schoolboy best chums. Howard was very tall and square-jawed and Simon was short and owlish and pretended not to mind being fat. If anyone took them for lovers Simon shrieked with laughter and Howard explained tactfully that they were merely good friends. Nick liked nattering with them when he dropped into the office, and enjoyed their glancing hints that they both rather fancied him. "Well, I swim and I work out a couple of times a week," Nick would say, leaning back in his chair with the glow of shame that for him was still the cost of bragging; and Simon would say, "Oh, I suppose I ought to try that." They all carried on as if they'd never noticed Wani's beauty, and as if they took him entirely seriously. If his picture appeared in the social pages of Tatler or Harper's and Queen Melanie passed the magazine round like a validation of their whole enterprise.