The Line of Beauty

  "You British . . . " said Treat, only half-relinquishing his childlike gaze at Betsy Tilden. She seemed to loom for him as a marvel and a dare, and Nick could see him going over to her. She was much too young for Mrs Gereth, and quite wrong for Fleda Vetch. "You're so brutal!"

  "Mm . . . ?" said Nick.

  "You know, 'he's a cripple'—really."

  "Oh . . . " said Nick, and blushed as if it was his lurking snobbery that had been criticized and not whatever this was. "I'm sorry, but that's actually what the Duke calls himself. He hasn't walked since he was a boy." He was slightly winded to be called on a point of delicacy—and one that impinged, obliquely but perceptibly, on their lunch. He cleared his throat and said, "You know, there's something I should tell you . . . Ah, here we are." He raised a hand as Wani appeared at the desk by the door, and as he got up he heard both Americans murmuring, "Oh my god . . ."

  He went over to him, smiling and capable but in a fluster of emotions—pity, defiance, a desire to support him, and a dread of people seeing him. The girl held his stick for him as she helped him off with his coat. "Hello," said Wani; he didn't seem to want Nick to kiss him. He took his stick again, which was an elegant black one with a silver handle, and tapped across the marble floor with it. He still wasn't quite convincing with the stick; he was like a student actor playing an old man. The stick itself seemed both to focus and repel attention. People looked and looked away.

  The Americans stood up, Treat clutching his napkin to his chest. "Hey, Antoine, great to see you!"

  "How are you!" said Brad, in a sporting wheeze. He laid his hand for a moment on Wani's back, and Nick on his other side was doing the same, so that they seemed to congratulate him; though what they felt was the knobs of his spine through the wool of his suit. Wani sat down, smiling with distant courtesy, as if this was a weekly meeting, with a known format and outcome. There was a brief pause of silent adjustment. Nick smiled at Wani, but the shock was refreshed by the presence of their guests and a bubble rose in his throat.

  "So what were you talking about?" said Wani. His voice was if anything more languid than before, though with a hint that it couldn't be forced.

  "I was just explaining to Brad and Treat about the Chirks," said Nick.

  "Ah yes," said Wani, as if this was a very old and silly story. "It's only a nineteenth-century dukedom, of course."

  "Right . . . " said Brad, peeping at him and seeming to share, out of mere nerves and inattentiveness, the view that this was absurdly recent.

  Treat laughed brightly and said, "That's old enough for me. That'll do just fine."

  Nick said, "It was really Sharon who saved the day—the Duchess . . ." and offered the story to Wani.

  "Yes, a life-saving transfusion of vinegar," said Wani; they all laughed loudly, as at the joke of a tyrant; and there did seem to be a trace of cruelty in the remark, against himself and thus obscurely against them. "Shall we order straight away." Wani turned and raised a hand to Fabio and as he did so Brad and Treat looked at each other with expressionless clarity for three or four seconds. Fabio was with them at once, and as always seemed to guess and applaud their decisions, to echo and confide to memory each item they mentioned; and perhaps it was only Nick who felt the new briskness in his tone and the quick decay of his laugh. Brad asked about the pansy salad and Fabio obliged with a noncommittal joke, and moved round the table holding the reclaimed menus flat against his chest. Nick said how well the restaurant was doing and smiled to insist on their part in its success, since Wani and he had been guests at its opening last year and had made it their local; and Fabio said, "We can't complain . . . er, Nick, we can't complain," just glancing at Wani on the second complain with something cold in his eyes, and then at the new arrivals at the door, who typically were the Stallards. Nick watched Fabio go to greet them and the coldness had gone—he heard the usual mutual primping of head waiter and fashionable customers. Well, Fabio must have been shaken to see Wani so changed; but there was something else in his reaction, fear and displeasure, as if Wani's presence was no longer good for business.

  Sophie and Jamie came over, Jamie slapping Wani on the shoulder and Sophie wrinkling her nose across the table rather than kissing him. Jamie had just played the romantic lead in a low-budget Hollywood comedy, and had been praised for his uncanny re-creation of a dim but handsome Old Etonian with floppy hair. Sophie was pregnant, and thus resting, though thick packets that could well have been film scripts lay in the cradle-like basket she was carrying. Treat and Brad were thrilled to meet them, since Jamie was still a possible for Owen Gereth in Spoils; cards were exchanged, and social visits that were never going to happen were delightedly agreed on. Nothing was said about Wani's health, though Sophie, as they went off to their table, looked back with a finger-wave and a cringing smile of condolence.

  "Wow, what a sweet guy," said Brad.

  Nick, taking praise for the introduction, said, "Old Jamie . . . ?Yeah. . ."

  "You guys go way back?"

  "Yes—well, again we were all at Oxford together. He's really much more a friend of Wani's."

  But Wani seemed to disown any further intimacy. He sat very still, with his slender hands on the tablecloth. His square-shouldered jacket was buttoned but stood forward like a loose coat. He commanded attention now by pity and respect as he once had by beauty and charm. The claim to attention was constant, but it had turned fiercer and quieter. Nick thought he still looked wonderful in a way, though to admit it was to make an unbearable comparison. He was twenty-five years old. He said, "Stallard has always been an absurd figure, and he's found the perfect partner in the lovely Miss Tipper."

  "Oh . . ." said Brad. "Is she . . . er . . ."

  "It was a good match for him. She's the daughter of the ninth richest man in Britain, and he's the son of a bishop."

  "Bishops don't make that much, I guess," said Treat, and took another pull on his cocktail straw.

  "Bishops make absolutely nothing," said Wani; and after a second he flashed a smile round the table at the imbecility of bishops. Everyone else smiled too, in nervous collusion. Wani's face, gaunt and blotched, had taken on new possibilities of expression—the repertoire of someone not only older but quite different, someone passed unknown in the street, was unexpectedly his. He must have looked at himself in the mirror, winced and raised his eyebrows, and seen this unbearable stranger mugging back at him. Clearly he couldn't be held responsible for the latest ironies and startlements of his face, though there were moments when he seemed to exploit them. The cheekbones were delicate, the frontal bone heavy, even brutal—it was his father's look, brought out sometimes in the past by candlelight and now exposed to the light of day.

  Nick said, "You know Wani's father's been made a lord," not sure whom he was pandering to.

  "Oh wow," said Brad. "Does that mean you'll be a lord one day too?" There were several seconds of silence till Wani said, "It's not hereditary. What on earth are you drinking, by the way, Treat?"

  "Don't ask . . . !" said Brad, eager with embarrassment.

  "It's. . . what's he called? . . . Humphrey? Humphrey's latest invention. It's a Black Monday."

  Wani gave his grin again, bright and sarcastic in effect. "That didn't take long," he said. Humphrey was Gusto's venerable barman, keeper (up to a point) of long tabs and starlets' secrets. "He trained on the Queen Mary. There's nothing he doesn't know about cocktails."

  "Well it's, what is it? It's dark rum, and cherry brandy, and sambuca. And loads of lemon juice. It tastes like a really old-fashioned laxative," said Treat.

  "I can't drink any more," said Wani, "but when I hear that, I don't mind."

  There was a brief pause. Treat ran his finger along his fringe, and Brad sighed and said, "Yeah . . . I wanted to ask . . . " They both of them, nicely enough, seemed relieved the subject had been brought up.

  Wani tucked in his chin. "Oh, a disaster," he said, frowning from one to the other. "Quite unbelievable. One of my bloody companies lost two-thi
rds of its value between lunchtime and teatime."

  "Oh . . . oh, right," said Brad, and gave an awkward laugh. "Yeah, we had it real bad too."

  "Fifty billion wiped off the London stock exchange in one day."

  Treat looked at him levelly, to show he'd registered but wouldn't challenge this evasion, and said, "Hey, the Dow was down five hundred points."

  "God, yes," said Wani, "well, it was all your fault."

  Brad didn't argue, but said job losses on Wall Street were terrible.

  "Oh, fuck that," said Wani. "Anyway, it bounces back. It has already. It always recovers. It always recovers."

  "It's a worrying time for all of us," said Nick responsibly.

  Wani gave a mocking look and said, "We'll all be absolutely fine." And after that it was impossible to approach him on the subject of his fatal illness. Nick saw it was perplexing for the Americans, who had met him as a man about to get married. Now natural concern was mixed with furtive thinking back.

  During lunch Brad, like Wani, drank only water, and Nick and Treat shared a bottle of Chablis. Treat touched Nick's arm a lot, and involved him in quiet side-chats about what they might do later. Nick tried to keep general conversation going. Wani's presiding coolness made them all hesitate. He seemed to play with their anxiety about him. Brad and Treat asked questions, and marvelled at their luck in having Wani to answer them.

  If Nick answered a question Wani listened to him and then gave a flat little codicil or correction. His technique was to hold a subject up and show his command of it, and then to throw it away in smiling contempt for their interest in it. He ate very little, and a sense of his disgust at the expensive food, and at himself for being unable to eat it, seeped into the conversation. He looked at the slivers of chicken and translucent courgettes as pitiful tokens of the world of pleasure, and clutched the table as though to resist a slow tug at the cloth that would sweep the whole vision away.

  The question of the film was slow to come up, and Nick was shy to mention it, just because it was his own project. He'd spent months writing a script, and it was almost as if he'd written the book it was based on: all he wanted was praise. He often imagined watching the film, in the steep circle of the Curzon cinema—absorbing the grateful unanimous sigh of the audience at the exact enactment of what he'd written; in fact he seemed to have directed the film as well. He lay awake in the bliss of Philip French's review. Somehow another James film, The Bostonians, had come up, and the crazy thing that the actor who played Superman starred in it.

  "One can imagine," said Nick, "only too well, the Master's irony, not to speak of his covert excitement, at that idea . . ."; though the others perhaps imagined it less vividly than he did.

  "Oh, we loved your letters, by the way," said Treat, with another squeeze of his arm: "so Britishl"

  "Well, I guess we should talk about. . . our film," said Brad. Just then the desserts, mere bonnes bouches in foot-wide puddles of pink coulis, were set in front of them. Wani looked at his plate as if it and the film were equally unlikely confections. "Or we could talk about it next week . . ."

  "I don't mind," said Nick, his heart thumping. He was suddenly incredulous that his beautiful plan, the best fruit of his passion for Henry James, depended on the cooperation of these two stupid people. He sensed already that it wasn't a question of changes, it was some larger defection from the plan.

  "I mean we love what you've done, Nick."

  "Yeah, it's great," said Treat.

  Brad hesitated, peering at the grid of spun sugar that jutted from his loganberry parfait. "You know, we've talked about this in the letter a certain amount. It's just the problem of the story where the guy doesn't get the girl, and then the stuff they're all fighting over—the Spoils, right?—goes up in flames. It kinda sucks."

  "Does it . . . ?" said Nick; and, trying to be charming, "It's just like life, though, isn't it—maybe too like life for a . . . conventional movie. It's about someone who loves things more than people. And who ends up with nothing, of course. I know it's bleak, but then I think it's probably a very bleak book, even though it's essentially a comedy."

  "Yeah, I haven't read the book," said Treat.

  "Oh . . . " said Nick, and coloured with proxy embarrassment, with the shame Treat should have been feeling. His loose idea of getting some time alone with him vanished in a sigh and a shrug.

  "You've read the book, Antoine?" said Treat.

  Wani was rose-lipped, popping in quarter-spoonfuls of ice cream, sucking them from the spoon and letting them slip down in luxurious spasms like a child with tonsillitis; he said, "No, I haven't. I pay Nick to do that for me."

  "I don't know what you think," said Brad, "about the idea of including just a short love scene for Owen and . . . I'm sorry . . ."

  "Fleda," said Nick. "Fleda Vetch."

  "Fleda Vetchl" said Treat, with a brief blare of a laugh. "What sort of a name is that? Doesn't she sound like the ugliest girl in the school?"

  "I think it's rather a touching name," said Nick; and Brad looked reprovingly across the table.

  "She sounds like a witch," muttered Treat, as if agreeing to shut up; but then went on, "I mean, can I imagine asking Meryl Streep, 'Oh, Miss Streep, we've got this really great role for you, will you please, please play the lovely Fleda Vetch?' She'd think I'd just thrown up all over the phone."

  They all laughed except Wani, who said, very quiet and superior, as if she was someone else they would see at Nat Hanmer's wedding, "Fleda Vetch is what she is called."

  "Yeah, I don't care overly what she's called," said Brad. "But. . . Owen and Fleda—we need to see them together more. We need some . . . passion!"

  "We need him getting all hot," said Treat, flicking his glance towards Jamie's table. Then he winked at Nick. "Did he ever . . . you know . . ." lowering his voice and looking coyly away, "at Oxford . . . like, with other guys—I'm sure I heard someone say—"

  "He's straight," said Wani.

  "Oh, OK," said Treat, with a wobble of the head, as if to say, who's talking about straight here? But there was something bleaker than impatience in Wani's tone. He was pale and motionless, gazing at the far rim of his plate but clearly caught by some unpostponable inner reckoning. He jerked his chair back a little, and his stick, swinging off from the back of it, fell on the marble with a ringing clatter: he groped round for it, bending down, and Brad jumped up to help him, and reclaimed the stick and managed to absorb the blame and reassure the restaurant with his friendly bulk. Wani's mouth was held shut and he had an intensely private expression of imminent surrender. It made Nick think for a second of the bedroom. He stood and went off at a hobbling lurch among the tables.

  A few seconds later Nick followed, frowning down at the floor, giving a brisk nod to Fabio's cool "Signore?" In the black marble lavatory there were two cubicles, and in one of them, with the door still ajar, Wani was stooping and vomiting. Nick came in behind him and stood there for a moment before laying a hand on his side. Wani flinched, whispered, "Oh fuck . . ." and crouched and shuddered as he threw up again. There seemed to be far more coming out than the invalidish meal that had gone in. Nick touched him lightly, wanting to help him and discourage him at the same time. He looked over his shoulder into the bowl, with a certain resolve, and saw the bits of chicken and greens in the pool of the promptly regurgitated ice cream. He plucked out sheets of paper from the dispenser and wondered if he should wipe Wani's face for him; then he stood and waited, which Wani didn't object to. He thought with bleak hilarity that this was their most intimate moment for many months. He looked at the streaky black walls and found himself thinking of nights here the year before, both cubicles sometimes carelessly busy with the crackle of paper and patter of credit card. There was a useful shiny ledge above the cistern, and they would go in in turn. The nights sped by in unrememberable brilliance. "Well," said Wani, grasping his stick and giving Nick a fearful smile, "no more parfait for Antoine."

  Wani had brought the car to Gusto, and
Nick drove him back in it to Lowndes Square. "Thanks very much," said Wani, in a whispery drawl.

  "That's all right, old chap," said Nick. He parked opposite the house and they sat for a minute. Wani was taking deep breaths, as if to ready himself for a race or plunge. He didn't try to help Nick by explaining himself—well, he never had, he was his own law and his own licence. If Nick asked him how he felt he was drily impatient with him, both for not knowing and for wanting to know. It was the unfair prerogative of illness. Nick reached a hand over the steering wheel and swept the thin dust off the black leather hood of the dashboard. How cars themselves changed as they aged; at first they were possibilities made solid and fast, agents of dreams that kept a glint of dreams about them, a keen narcotic smell; then slowly they disclosed their unguessed quaintness and clumsiness, they seemed to fade into the dim disgrace between one fashion and another.

  "I really must get a new car," said Wani.

  "I know, it's frightfully dusty."

  "It's a fucking antique."

  Nick peered over his shoulder into the cramped back seat, and remembered Pdcky, the stupid genius of the old days (which was to say, last summer), sitting there with his legs wide apart. "I suppose you'll keep the number plate."

  "God, yes. It's worth a thousand pounds."

  "Dear old WHO 6."

  "OK . . ." said Wani, cold at any touch of sentiment.

  Nick glanced up and saw Lady Ouradi looking down from one of the drawing-room windows. She held the net curtain aside and gazed out into the browning leaves of the plane trees, the long dull chasm of the square. Nick waved, but she seemed not to have seen them; or perhaps she had already seen them but let her gaze wander, as it was clearly prone to, down the imagined vista of the past or future. He noted her austere wool dress, the single string of pearls. To Nick she was a creature of indoors, of unimaginable exiled mornings and measured afternoons; her gesture as she held the white curtain back was like the parting of a medium through which she wasn't quite supposed to see or be seen.