The Line of Beauty

  "How are you, darling?"

  "I'm fine. Gerald's having an affair, did you know?"

  Nick blinked and recoiled offendedly, but then tried to keep smiling. "Gerald?" His whole image of the coming ten days was changing; he would have to find out who knew, and how much Catherine knew, of course. He felt horribly guilty himself for knowing, and doing nothing, and his main wish, in this first instant, was to clear himself. "You can't be serious," he said, postponing for a further second or two the really irreversible question, with whom?

  "No, it's true. He's having an affair with Jasper."

  Nick gasped. "Darling! How outrageous!"

  "I know, it's a scandal."

  "Has it been going on long?"

  "The whole week. There's this hideous room called the fumoir and they go in there together and play chess and smoke cigars. Well, you'll see. No one else can bear to go in, so we don't know exactly what they get up to."

  "Let's hope the press don't get to hear about it," Nick said, with a giddy feeling of reprieve mixed up with the real and re-awoken sense of risk.

  "It's like being kissed by a lav."

  "Oh . . . the cigars . . . ?"

  "Incidentally," she said to Wani, "we're on septic here, so nothing funny down the bog."

  "No . . . right . . . " said Wani, and chuckled and frowned. It was just comic brusqueness, an urge to ruffle this exquisite new arrival, and also clairvoyant, Nick felt, as though she knew that a closeted cokehead would always be in the WC. She led them down the stairs, under the wide leaves of the fig tree, and out onto the flagged surround of the swimming pool.

  The pool occupied another long terrace, open to the south, so that the glitter of the water seemed to reach and hang against the distance. At the near end was the pool-house, a little cottage in itself, with shuttered windows and wet footprints going in and out at the door. Thick-cushioned loungers, turned towards the sun at different times, lay abandoned around the pool, but close by, under a huge red umbrella, Rachel was stretched out with her eyes closed, and the straps of her black swimsuit looped down over her upper arms. Her mouth was slightly open, she might have been asleep, or in the border-zone of voices where the sunned mind dallies with sleep for seconds at a time. She was more beautiful and vulnerable than Nick was prepared for; he had never seen her undressed—he thought it was a private view she might not want Wani to share. A few feet away, at an angle, Gerald was lying, propped up, with the meltwater of a long drink in a beaker beside him, dark glasses on, head bent over a book in his lap, but unambiguously asleep, since the pages of the book stood up in a quivering comb. Beyond them, Jasper sprawled on his tummy on the blue-tiled ledge just below the surface of the pool, looking away at the view, and giving an impression of adolescent boredom. He was wearing huge multi-coloured swimming-bags, and as he lazily kicked the water they glistened and ballooned, deflated and clung, one buttock pink, the other lime-green. Nick saw Wani looking at him. Then Toby came marching out of the pool-house, and Catherine, wanting to take the credit, shouted, "Here they are!" and woke them all up. "You look such old wrecks lying there," she said, and cackled in the "mad" style that she now allowed herself. Gerald started speaking at once, Rachel wriggled as she stretched and sat up, and the two boys bent down rivalrously to kiss her. Jasper came sploshing across the pool. Nick hadn't seen them for a while, of course, and finding them here, in the nearly naked torpor of their private world, he saw everything that was wonderful about them, and something else, like one of Catherine's glittering intuitions, their unsuspecting readiness for pain.

  At dinner under the awning Nick and Wani were given the second stage of their welcome, which was to be made to feel how dull and plotless life had been without them, and how enjoyable it was going to be now they were here. They all revealed their frustrations, and made bids on the new arrivals to do the things they had been wanting to do themselves. After a week of family deadlock, of interlocking boredoms, there was going to be an outburst of activity, a high plateau of achievement. Wani politely agreed to everything that was proposed, though he looked a bit queasy at Toby's plan to discover an underground lake. Gerald said, "We really must do the Hautefort hike again, twenty kilometres, take all day if we need to." Jasper squeezed Nick's knee under the table and said there was a little bar in Podier, which "a man of discrimination such as yourself should certainly visit; and Catherine, perhaps satirically, said she'd always wanted to do some hang-gliding. Then she said she was going to paint Nick's portrait, but everyone objected that it would take too much of his time. It was left to Rachel to say, with her ironic quiver, that she hoped Nick and Wani would feel free to do nothing at all.

  "No, of course," said Gerald insincerely. He was lazy, but he wasn't good at pure idleness, which he felt like a failure of self-assertion. He was obviously finding his annual poolside trek through one of the fatter Trollopes an irksomely passive exercise, though he said how splendid it was, and what great fun. "I think they might enjoy the hike," he said. "We haven't done it since '83." He poured himself a full glass of wine, and passed the bottle along the candlelit table.

  "How did you get on in Venice?" Rachel said. She was looking at Nick, but Nick passed the question to Wani with a steady look.

  "Fascinating!" he said. "What a fascinating place."

  "Iknow. . .isn't it fascinating, "said Rachel. "Had you never been before?"

  "Do you know, I'd never been before." Wani, who barely knew Gerald and Rachel, had immediately absorbed their echoing and affirmative style of chat.

  "Where did you stay?"

  "We stayed at the Gritti," said Wani, with a shrug and a wince, as if to say they'd taken the path of least resistance.

  "Goodness . . . ! Well . . . !" Rachel said, in dazzled surrender to the magnificence of this, but somehow agreeing that they could have made a subtler and more deeply informed choice.

  "You must have stayed there yourself," said Wani.

  Rachel shook her head. "I think perhaps once . . ."

  "Mm, where was it we stayed, Puss?" said Gerald.

  "I don't know," said Catherine. After her breakdown last year she had gone with her parents to Venice for a tense attempt at recuperation, which she now claimed scarcely to remember.

  "We had a marvellous time, I must say," said Gerald, with jovial shortness of memory.

  "Yeah, amazing place," said Jasper, and smiled at him, with the candlelight in his eyes, as if recalling some intimate moment.

  "Oh, when were you last there?" said Nick airily.

  "Ooh, must be two . . . three years ago?" said Jasper, dropping his head and letting his forelock tumble.

  "And where did you stay?" Wani asked, and watched for the answer as if himself imagining some intimacy—sweat-dampened sheets, discarded towels. Jasper appeared to consider several possible answers, very quickly, before saying, "Some friends of ours have got a flat there, actually, yah."

  "Oh, well, you are lucky," said Rachel smoothly, leaving a doubt as to whether she believed him.

  "Near San Marco?" said Nick.

  "Not far from there," Jasper said, and made a business of passing the wine bottle back to Gerald, who emptied the last of it and said,

  "We loved the Caravaggios."

  Nick said nothing, and couldn't decide if he wanted Wani to make a fool of himself. Wani was wary enough to say, "I'm not sure. . . ." Rachel was blinking and saying, "No, darling, aren't the Caravaggios —" and Catherine said, "They're Carpaccios," and slapped her hand on the table.

  Gerald gave a wounded smile and said, "You can remember those anyway."

  Wani, never ruffled, almost sinisterly charming, said, "What made an enormous impression on me was the rococo architecture in Munich."

  This statement was left to resonate for a few moments, while they each forked over how to tackle it. Wani looked along the table with an absence of self-irony that was very like his father's—and in the upward glow of the candles the deep sculpture of his face was like his father's too. What touc
hed Nick was partly his lover's conscienceless appropriation of anything useful he said, and partly Wani's evident feeling that in France, on the terrace of a beautiful old house, among Nick's own "family," he could play the aesthete as confidently as Nick did at Lowndes Square. The actual history of their stays in both cities, the coke, the sex, the "late starts," was their glamorous secret; the further story, of unseen treasures, wasted time and money, the dull dawn of the truth that Wani was rather a philistine, was Nick's secret alone. He said, "Yes, you loved that stuff, didn't you."

  "You went to Munich, darling . . . " Rachel said to Gerald.

  "Oh, yes," said Gerald, with the fond, embarrassed look he had when recalling his humbler pre-Rachel life. "Badger and I stopped off at Munich, didn't we, on our famous drive to Greece. Badger would seem, on reflection, to have kept me away from that city's more rococo . . . um . . ."

  "There's one quite fabulous church," said Nick.

  Toby, who had been quiet since they'd moved on from potholing, said, "What's the difference between baroque and rococo?"

  "Oh," said Wani, smiling tolerantly at his old friend, "well, the baroque is more muscular, the rococo is lighter and more decorative. And asymmetrical," he remembered, making a trailing gesture in the air with his left hand and batting his long lashes so that Nick thought he had absorbed far more from him than his capsule guides to style—it was extraordinary that they couldn't see at once what he was like. "The rococo is the final deliquescence of the baroque," he said, as if he really couldn't be plainer.

  "Mm, extraordinary stuff," said Gerald vaguely.

  "Yuk," said Catherine, "I can't stand that kind of thing, it's all froth."

  "Well, we'd hardly expect you to like it, old girl, if we like it ourselves," said Gerald.

  "It's just make-believe for rich people," said Catherine. "It's like naughty lingerie."

  "Right . . ." said Toby, as if slowly getting the picture, but he blushed too.

  Wani, not wanting controversy, said, "It's really just a great subject for the magazine. Think luxury artwork!" And then, "It was Nick's idea, actually."

  "Ah well, now it all makes sense," said Toby.

  "Oh, I hope it doesn't make that," said Nick, and they all laughed at his droll murmur and the hint of a paradox.

  He lay in the dark, as the smell of the burning mosquito coil spread through the room. The night was very still, the doors didn't quite reach the floor, and he could hear Wani moving about in his room across the landing. He wanted to be with him, as he had been, more or less, for the past ten days, in the thoughtless luxury of top-class hotels; but he felt the relief of being alone as well: the usual relief of a guest who has closed his door, and a deeper thing, the forgotten solitude which measures and verifies the strength of an affair, and which, being temporary, is a kind of pleasure. He heard Wani switch off his lamp, and his own darkness deepened a fraction, without the faint spill of his light under the door. He wondered if they were sharing this sense of ghostly proximity, if Wani was lying with his eyes open, thinking of him, listening for him, masturbating perhaps as Nick half consciously was—not even that, just a boyish solace and reflex of being alone, the blind friendship of the hand . . . Or had he plumped his pillow, tussled his head and shoulder into it with a sigh, drawn up his legs in the defensive position which made Nick want to curl in behind him and shelter him? It would be easy to go to him now, they both had wide beds, but he could hear already the echo of the door latches in the long corridor like triggers to Wani's sense of danger.

  When he woke an hour later out of a Venice dream he stared in a sort of panic at the grey square of the window and the unrecognized mass of the chest of drawers. Then it came back to him, like going upstairs, the shocks and connections of the past twenty-four hours. He felt horribly hot, and kicked off the sheet and drank the dimly visible glass of water. In the dream Wani was drowning: he stood on the canal-side, knees bent in a tense crouch, looking back over his shoulder with an undecided but accusing expression, then fell in with a dead splash.

  It had been very hot all the trip, the hottest Nick had ever known; in Venice, for all its dazzlements, they had moved in a heatwave stink of decay; in Munich, in the glaring avenues, the temperature reached a hundred and four. The heat put a strain on them which they didn't acknowledge to each other. They went to the Asamkirche, which had Nick beaming and sighing with delight; Wani strolled about with an air of provisional goodwill, as if waiting for an explanation. Nick longed to share the beauty with him, to communicate with him through it, but Wani, out of shyness or pride, was lightly mocking of what Nick said. You could really only tell Wani one useful thing at a time—too much information was an affront to his self-esteem. Nick stayed on in the church, and the loneliness heightened his pleasure and his pride in his own responsiveness. At the Nymphenburg Palace, among surging coachloads, the pleasure was harder won, but he felt he took in these marvels of the rococo by right—they might have been make-believe for rich people when they were built, but now they were more than that, they were celebrations in and of themselves.

  On their first afternoon there Nick went into a gay shop called Follow Me—something Wani did at last with a deprecating snigger. Surrounded by harnesses and startlingly juvenile pornography they bought the Spartacus gay guide to the world and a siege supply of rubbers, which Wani affected to have nothing to do with: he handled the book lightly, as if assessing its threat, the thick sleek india-paper weight of the thing, some heretical bible. They took a taxi to the English Garden, and had walked only a short distance under the trees when they realized that the people ahead of them were naked. There were families having picnics in their unembarrassable German way, and old men with peeling crowns standing by themselves like forgotten games masters, and then a zone that was mainly young men, sitting and sprawling in an air of casual tension as palpable as the dust and insects in the slanting sunlight. A wonderful cold stream, the Eisbach, chuckled past between steep banks, and Nick stripped off and clambered down into it—when he lifted his feet from the pebbly bottom he was swept along laughing and breathless, waving back to Wani, and then out of sight, racing past the lawns, the naked smiling figures on the bank, boys with guitars, games with rubber balls, in a rush of beautiful cold abandon towards a wood and a distant pagoda . . . until he saw that the boys were jeering and pointing and the people walking dogs were clothed and severely normal, as if they could have no connection with the happy nude species hidden round the bend in the river. So then he toiled back against the current, feet curled and aching on the slippery stones, until he could pull himself out and skulk back along the bank, giving quick furtive tugs to his embarrassingly shrivelled penis.

  He woke again and took a long distracted moment to see that this hadn't happened. He'd been lying in the richly coloured recall of the minutes before sleep and the holiday story had slipped and run with its own fast current into an anecdote odder than the afternoon they had lived through, Wani's bright fixated attempt to pick up the boy who roamed through the gardens with a bucket shouting "Pepsi!"—his astonishment that he couldn't be bought. Nick turned his pillow, and coughed and settled again. He sank through backlit clouds, pink and grey, the landing at Bordeaux airport that morning. There had been a storm, but it was turning aside, and they saw suddenly how close the ground was, the sunlight passing in a crawling wink across ponds, glasshouses and canals, seams of gold flashing through the vapour in fiery collusion.

  (ii)

  On Monday morning Wani asked if he could make some phone calls. Rachel said, "Absolutely!" and Gerald said, "Please . . . my dear fellow!" with a gesture towards the cupboard-like room where the phone and the expectant new fax machine were.

  "It's just these business things I've got to deal with," Wani sighed, cleverly apologizing for what Gerald liked best about him. He went into the room and rather awkwardly, since everyone was watching him, closed the door. He had told them last night about the property he'd just bought in Clerkenwell, and had asked for
Gerald's advice on aspects of the sale and the planned redevelopment: a wall had come down, and they'd suddenly seen how they might get on. When Wani emerged from the phone room he asked him if he could borrow the Range Rover to go into Perigueux, and this time it was vaguer magazine "business" that he mentioned. Nick knew that frown of pretended vexation, the bold contempt for obstacles on the path to pleasure, and it made him nervous. But Gerald, clearing his throat and as it were waking up to his own kindness and reasonableness, said, "Well yes . . . why not!—feel free . . . " And then added, "Anything for business!"

  "It's just that I can meet a very good photographer there, and after the fascinating things you were saying about the cathedral . . ."

  "Oh, St Front," said Gerald, warily flattered. "Yes indeed . . ."

  Nick almost said, "Oh, but you know it's all a nineteenth-century rehash . . ."

  "Will you be back for lunch?" said Rachel. Wani promised he would. He didn't suggest taking Nick, and Nick felt both jealous and relieved. They stood at the front door and watched the car disappear from the forecourt. It was the sort of moment when in London they would have begun a bold and funny family inquest into the absent person; but today that didn't feel right.

  They went out onto the terrace, and Gerald nodded several times at Nick and said, "Charming fellow, your friend."

  "He certainly is," said Nick, seeing that Gerald wanted reassurance, and noting that Wani was now properly his friend rather than Toby's.

  "One doesn't quite know whether to mention the fiancee," Gerald said.

  "Oh, well I did," said Rachel. "And it's all right. He told me all about it. Apparently they're getting married next spring."

  "Ah, fine," said Gerald, while Nick turned away with a protesting thump of the heart to look at the view.