"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
THE 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, brea
thing 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.
When he went into the sitting room, there was the magazine on the table. It was a weird sort of launch, when there was never going to be a second issue. It would be good if people knew that, and prized it as itself, not as a portent or pilot of something to come. It was the only Ogee. Lying there, in a room in his house, at noon on a mild autumn day, it might have been Wani's memorial tablet, with the angel's wing sheltering the blank where his name and achievements should go.
Next morning Nick drove up to Kensington Park Gardens to collect his things. There was intermittent drizzle and he wondered if the wedding hats were being spoiled in Yorkshire. The wide street was empty, with that accidental vacancy of a London street, a momentary lull in which the pavements, the house-fronts, the rain-striped windows have the aura of the deja vu. He let himself in at number 48, hasty in the new skills of avoiding notice: which he countered needlessly by slamming the door shut.
Inside, in the hall: the sound . . . the impassive rumble of London shrunk to a hum, barely noticed, as if the grey light itself were subtly acoustic. Nick felt he'd chanced on the undisturbed atmosphere of the house, larger than this year's troubles, as it had been without him and would be after he'd gone. The gilt lantern burned palely in the stairwell, but in the dining room the ordinary shadows deepened in the corners and hung like smoke in the coving of the ceiling. The boulle clock ticked, with mindless vigilance. He went up the stone stairs and into the drawing room. It was really just a matter of finding his own bits and pieces, the CDs mixed in family-wise with theirs, a book that he'd lent them and watched filter slowly and unread to the bottom of the pile. He stood by the piano and thought about giving the Mozart Andante a final go; but the effect would have been maudlin as well as laughably inept. Toby's portrait looked out at him, an emblem of adolescence in its hormonal glow and expectant frown. It added an urgency to the need to move on. Nick stood in front of the fireplace, holding his possessions against his chest. A lorry passed outside, and the windows throbbed in their frames for a moment, in sympathy with its roar and the rattle of its tailgate, and then the broad quasi-sil
ence disclosed itself again. And something else, what was it?, the smell of the place, tapestry smell, polished wood, lilies, almost churchy—he felt his senses seize and resign the thousand impressions he'd grown used to.
And it all reached back. It spoke of Gerald and Rachel without visible interruption. He went down to the kitchen, where the tidiness and profusion, the jars, the noticeboard, the draped dishcloth, were signs of a wide, deep system. He was already an intruder, glancing up at the photos of these absent celebrities.
He went down again, to the basement, to fetch some cardboard boxes from the trou de gloire. This lumber room under the kitchen was where the gilt ballroom chairs were stacked and interesting old tables and bleary mirrors abandoned; and where Mr Duke kept his paints, ladders, and toolboxes, along with a kettle and a calendar—it was his den, and Nick almost expected to find him there, in the subconscious of the house. He pressed down the light switch and got the shock of the wallpaper, which was purple with a pattern like black wrought iron, only partly hidden by all the junk. It always amazed him. It spoke of a time before Gerald and Rachel, and a different idea from theirs of what was great fun. Like his own parents they seemed to have avoided the '60s, with its novel possibilities and worthwhile mistakes. Perhaps in the Highgate days they'd had a joss stick and a floor cushion, but here the purple room was the junk room. Nick found some old wine boxes, and took them awkwardly upstairs. He wondered who'd lived here before the Feddens. There might well have been only three or four owners in the years since the whole speculation rose up out of the Notting Hill paddocks and slums. It was a house that encouraged the view its inhabitants had of themselves. Nick thought of Gerald's showmanship, the parties, the pathetic climax of the PM's visit. That had been just a year ago, another drizzly autumn wedding . . .