The Line of Beauty

  "No, she's awfully promising . . ."—the remark hesitating towards something she seemed to see in the middle distance but which, as so often, she left amiably unexpressed. Nick sometimes felt that being people's children was the only claim that some of his friends had on the attention of their preoccupied elders. He observed Lord Kessler's snuffle and murmur at the name of Maurice Tipper, the incalculable ironies of different kinds of rich people about each other. The Sophie Tipper thing had been dragging on pointlessly since the second year at Oxford, as if Toby were pliably fulfilling expectations by dating the daughter of a tycoon.

  "As for Catherine," Gerald went on, "she's being brought down by a so-called boyfriend whose name escapes me and whom I'm bound to say I've never met." He smiled broadly at this. "But I expect a late arrival and burning rubber. Actually Nick probably knows more on this front than we do."

  Nick knew almost nothing. He said, "Russell, you mean? Yes, he's terribly nice. He's a very up-and-coming photographer"—in a successful imitation of their manner and point of view. Russell had only been announced as a boyfriend the day before, in a helpless reaction, Nick felt, to his own success with Leo, which of course he'd had the pleasure of describing to Catherine, entirely truthfully. He hadn't in fact met Russell, but he thought he'd better say again, "He's awfully nice."

  Lord Kessler said, "Well, there are umpteen bedrooms ready here, and Fales has made bookings at the Fox and Hounds and the Horse and Groom, both perfectly decent, I'm told. As to the precise arrangements, I avert my eyes." Kessler had never married, but there was nothing perceptibly homosexual about him. Towards any young people in his social orbit he maintained a strategy of enlightened avoidance. "And we're not getting the PM," he added.

  "We're not getting the PM," Gerald said, as if for a while it had really been likely.

  "A relief, I must say."

  "It is rather a relief," said Rachel.

  Gerald murmured in humorous protest, and retorted that various ministers, including the Home Secretary, very much were still expected.

  "Them we can handle," Lord Kessler said, and shook the little bell to call in the servant.

  After lunch they strolled through several large rooms that had the residual hush, the rich refined dry smell of a country house on a hot summer day. The sensations were familiar to Nick from visits he made with his father to wind the clocks in several of the great houses round Barwick—they went back to childhood, though in those much older and remoter houses the smells were generally mixed up with dogs and damp. Here there was a High Victorian wealth of everything, pictures, tapestries, ceramics, furniture—it made Kensington Park Gardens look rather bare. The furniture was mostly French, and of astonishing quality. Nick straggled behind to gaze at it and found his heart beating with knowledge and suspicion. He said, "That Louis Quinze escritoire . . . is an amazing thing, sir, surely?" His father had taught him to address all lords as sir—bumping into one had been a constant thrilling hazard on their clock-winding visits, and now he took pleasure in the tone of smooth submission.

  Lord Kessler looked round, and came back to him. "Ah yes," he said, with a smile. "You couldn't be more right. In fact it was made for Mme de Pompadour."

  "How amazing!" They stood and admired the bulbous, oddly diminutive desk—kingwood, was it?—with fronds of ormolu. Lord Kessler pulled open a drawer, which rattled with little china boxes stowed away inside it; then pushed it shut. "You know about furniture," he said.

  "A bit," Nick said. "My father's in the antiques business."

  "Yes, that's right, jolly good," said Gerald, as if he'd confessed to being the son of a dustman. "He's one of my constituents, so I should know."

  "Well, you must look around everywhere," Lord Kessler said. "Look at anything and everything."

  "You really should," said Gerald. "You know, the house is never open to the public, Nick."

  Lord Kessler himself took him off into the library, where the books were apparently less important than their bindings, which were as important as could be. The heavy gilding of the spines, seen through the fine gilt grilles of the carved and gilded bookcases, created a mood of minatory opulence. They seemed to be books in some quite different sense from those that Nick used and handled every day. Lord Kessler opened a cage and took down a large volume: Fables Choisies de La Fontaine, bound in greeny-brown leather tooled and gilded with a riot of rococo fronds and tendrils. It was an imitation of nature that had triumphed as pure design and pure expense. They stood side by side to admire it, Nick noticing the pleasant smell of Lord Kessler's clean suit and discreet cologne. He wasn't allowed to hold the book himself, and was given only a glimpse of the equally fantastic plates, peopled with elegant birds and animals. Lord Kessler showed the book in a quick dry way that was not in itself dismissive but allowed for Nick's ignorance and perhaps merely polite interest. In fact Nick loved the book, but didn't want to bore his host by asking for a longer look. It wasn't clear if it was the jewel of the collection or had been chosen at random.

  "It's all rather . . . " Lord Kessler said.

  After a moment, Nick said, "I know . . . "

  After that they browsed for a minute or two in a semi-detached fashion. Nick found a set of Trollope which had a relatively modest and approachable look among the rest, and took down The Way We Live Now, with an armorial bookplate, the pages uncut. "What have you found there?" said Lord Kessler, in a genially possessive tone. "Ah, you're a Trollope man, are you?"

  "I'm not sure I am, really," said Nick. "I always think he wrote too fast. What was it Henry James said, about Trollope and his 'great heavy shovelfuls of testimony to constituted English matters'?"

  Lord Kessler paid a moment's wry respect to this bit of showing-off, but said, "Oh, Trollope's good. He's very good on money."

  "Oh . . . yes . . . " said Nick, feeling doubly disqualified by his complete ignorance of money and by the aesthetic prejudice which had stopped him from ever reading Trollope. "To be honest, there's a lot of him I haven't yet read."

  "You must know that one, though," said Lord Kessler.

  "No, this one is pretty good," Nick said, gazing at the spine with an air of judicious concession. Sometimes his memory of books he pretended to have read became almost as vivid as that of books he had read and half-forgotten, by some fertile process of auto-suggestion. He pressed the volume back into place and closed the gilded cage. He had a sense, which was perhaps only his own self-consciousness, of some formal bit of business, new to him but deeply familiar to his host, being carried out in a sociable disguise.

  "You were at school with Tobias?"

  "Oh . . . no, sir." Nick found he'd decided not to mention Barwick Grammar. "We were at Oxford together, both at Worcester College . . . Though I read English and Toby of course read PPE."

  "Quite . . ." said Lord Kessler, who perhaps hadn't been sure of this fact. "You were contemporaries."

  "Yes, we were, exactly," said Nick, and the word seemed to throw a historic light across the mere three years since he had first seen Toby in the porter's lodge and felt a sudden obliviousness of everything else.

  "And you took a First?"

  Nick loved the murmured challenging confidence of the question because he could answer "Yes." If it had been no, if he'd got a Second like Toby, he felt everything would have been different, and a lie would have been very ill-advised.

  "And how do you rate my nephew's chances?" said Lord Kessler with a smile, though it wasn't clear to Nick what contest, what eventuality he was alluding to.

  "I think he'll do very well," he said, smiling back, and feeling he had struck a very subtle register, of loyal affirmation hedged with allowable irony.

  Lord Kessler weighed this for a moment. "And for you, what now?"

  "I'm starting at UCL next month; doing graduate work in English."

  "Ah . . . yes . . . " Lord Kessler's faint smile and tucked-in chin suggested an easily mastered disappointment. "And what is your chosen field?"

  "Mm. I w
ant to have a look at style," Nick said. This flashing emphasis on something surely ubiquitous had impressed the admissions board, though Lord Kessler appeared uncertain. A man who owned Mme de Pompadour's escritoire could hardly be indifferent to style, Nick felt; but his reply seemed to have in mind some old wisdom about style and substance.

  "Style tout court?"

  "Well, style at the turn of the century—Conrad, and Meredith, and Henry James, of course." It all sounded perfectly pointless, or at least a way of wasting two years, and Nick blushed because he really was interested in it and didn't yet know—not having done the research—what he was going to prove.

  "Ah," said Lord Kessler intelligently: "style as an obstacle."

  Nick smiled. "Exactly . . . Or perhaps style that hides things and reveals things at the same time." For some reason this seemed rather near the knuckle, as though he were suggesting Lord Kessler had a secret. "James is a great interest of mine, I must say."

  "Yes, you're a James man, I see now."

  "Oh, absolutely!"—and Nick grinned with pleasure and defiance, it was a kind of coming out, which revealed belatedly why he wasn't and never would be married to Trollope.

  "Henry James stayed here, of course. I'm afraid he found us rather vulgar," Lord Kessler said, as if it had been only last week.

  "How fascinating!" said Nick.

  "You might be rather fascinated by the old albums. Let me see." Lord Kessler went to one of the cupboards beneath the bookcases, turned a scratchy-sounding key and bent down to take out a pair of large leather-bound albums, which he carried over to a central table. Again the inspection was hurried and tantalizing. He stopped now and then, as the heavy pages fell, to display a Victorian photograph of the gardens, with their wide bald views over newly planted woods, or of the interiors, almost comically crowded with chairs and tables, vases on stands, paintings on easels, and everywhere, in every vista, the arching, drooping leaves of potted palms. Now the house seemed settled and seasoned, a century old, with its own historic light and odour, but then it was ostentatiously new. In the second album there were group photographs, posed on the steps of the terrace, and annotated in a tiny florid script: Nick wanted days to read them, countesses, baronets, American duchesses, Balfours and Sassoons, Goldsmids and Stuarts, numerous Kesslers. The gravel was bizarrely covered with fur rugs for the group that centred on Edward VII in a tweed cape and Homburg hat. And then, May 1903, a gathering of twenty or so, second row, Lady Fairlie, The Hon. Simeon Kessler, Mr Henry James, Mrs Langtry, The Earl of Hexham . . . a cheerful informal picture. The Master, with his thumb in his striped waistcoat, eyes shaded by a traveller's widebrimmed hat, looked rather crafty.

  "So what do you think of the house?" said Catherine, coming across the lawn.

  "Well . . . obviously, it's amazing . . . " He was tingling to the point of fatigue with the afternoon's impressions, but was cautious as to what to say to her.

  "Yeah, it's fucking amazing, isn't it!" she agreed, with a bright, brainless laugh. She didn't normally talk like this, and Nick supposed it was part of the persona she was showing to Russell. Russell wasn't actually present (he was busy with his camera somewhere) but it would have taken an unnecessary effort to get out of role. Other elements of the performance were a strange dragging walk and a stunned, vaguely cunning, smile. Nick assumed these were meant to convey sexual satiation.

  "How was your journey?"

  "Oh, fine—he drives so dangerously."

  "Oh . . . We were held up for ages by the roadworks. Your dad got in quite a state about it."

  Catherine gave him a pitying glance. "He obviously went the wrong way," she said.

  They wandered on among the formal gardens, where rose scents were mixed with the cat's-piss smell of low box hedges, and the round ponds reflected a summer sky now faintly scrimmed with high white cloud. "God, let's sit down," said Catherine, as though they'd been walking for hours. They went to a stone bench supervised by two naked minor deities. Marvellous the great rallies of the undressed that rich people summoned to wait on them. Lord Kessler at home must be almost constantly in view of a sprawling nymph or unselfconscious hero. "Russell should be finished soon, then you can meet him. I wonder if you'll like him."

  "I've already told everyone how charming he is, so I rather feel I've got to."

  "Yeah . . . ?" said Catherine, with a grateful, intrigued smile. She felt for cigarettes in her spangled evening bag. "He's doing lots of stuff for The Face at the moment. He's a brilliant photographer."

  "I told them that too. They all take The Face, of course."

  Catherine grunted. "I suppose Gerald was mouthing off about him."

  "He was just saying he didn't have an opinion about him because he'd never met him."

  "Mm . . . That doesn't normally prevent him. In fact that doesn't sound like him at all." She clicked her lighter and took in a first deep drag of smoke—the breathing out accompanied by a little toss of the head and a comforted settling back. "At all, at all, at all," she went on, meaninglessly assuming an Irish accent.

  "Well . . . " Nick wanted everyone to get on, but for once he couldn't be bothered to work at it. He wished he was in a position to speak about Leo as freely as she spoke about Russell—he thought if he did bring the subject up she would say something upsetting and possibly true. She said,

  "Did my mother show you round the house?"

  "No, actually, your uncle did. I felt rather honoured."

  Catherine paused and blew out smoke admiringly. "What do you make of him, then?"

  "He seems very nice."

  "Mm. What do you think, he's not gay, is he?"

  "No, I didn't feel anything like that," Nick said, a little solemnly. He knew he was supposed to be able to tell; in fact he tended to think people were when they weren't, and so lived with a recurrent sense of disappointment, at them and at his own inadequate sensors. He didn't tell Catherine, but his uncertainty on the house tour had actually been the other way round. Had his own gayness somehow put Lord Kessler off and made him seem unreliable and lightweight in the old boy's eyes? Had Lord Kessler even registered—in his clever, unimpressionable way—that Nick was gay? "He asked me what I was going to do. It was a bit like an interview, except I hadn't applied for a job."

  "Well, you may want a job one day," said Catherine. "And then he's bound to remember. He's got a memory like an ostrich."

  "Perhaps . . . I'm not quite sure what he actually does."

  She looked at him as if he must be joking. "He's got this bank, darling . . ."

  "Yes, I know—"

  "It's a big building chock-a-block full of money." She waved her cigarette arm around hilariously. "And he goes in and turns it into even more money."

  Nick let this simple sarcasm pass over him. "I see, you don't know what he actually does either."

  She stared at him and then gave another neighing laugh. "Haven't a clue, darling!"

  There was a shaking in the trimmed beech hedge away to the right, and then a tall man came hopping out of it sideways, holding up a camera that was strung round his neck. They watched him as he strolled towards them, Catherine leaning back on one hand with a nervously triumphant expression. "Yeah, hold that," he said, and took a couple of exposures very quickly, as he was still moving. "Lovely," he said.

  So Russell was one of her older boyfriends, thirty perhaps, dark, balding, with the casual but combative look of the urban photographer, black T-shirt and baseball boots, twenty-pocketed waistcoat and bandolier of film. He passed in front of them, clicking away, cheerily exploiting this little episode of his arrival, Nick's awkwardness and Catherine's hunger for the spontaneous, the outrageous. She lolled backwards, and touched her upper lip with her tongue. Was it good when her men were older, or not? He could be Protector or Abuser—it was a great deep uncertainty, like the ones in her graphology book. He pulled her up and gave her a hug and then Catherine said, almost reluctantly,

  "Oh, this is Nick, by the way."

  "H
ello, Nick," said Russell.

  "Hello!"

  "Did you meet anyone?" asked Catherine, showing a hint of anxiety.

  "Yeah, I've just been talking to the caterers round the back. Apparently Thatcher's not coming."

  "Oh, sorry, Russell," Catherine said.

  Nick said, "We are getting the Home Secretary, though," in his mock-pompous tone, which Russell, like Leo, failed to pick up on.

  "I wanted Thatcher doing the twist, or pissed."

  "Yeah, Thatcher pogoing!" said Catherine, and laughed rather madly. Russell didn't look especially amused.

  "Well, I wouldn't want her at my twenty-first," he said.

  "I don't think Toby really wanted her," Nick put in apologetically. The touching thing was that Catherine had clearly taken her father's fantasy as the truth, and then used it to lure Russell. The dream of the leader's presence seeped through to an unexpected depth.

  "Well, Toby would have been perfectly happy with a party at home," she said. She wasn't quite sure whose side she was on, when it came to a difference between her father and her brother; Nick saw that she wanted to impress Russell with the right kind of disaffection. "But then Gerald has to get hold of it and invite the ministers for everything. It's not a party, darling, it's a party conference!"

  "Well . . . " Russell chuckled and dangled his long arms and clapped his hands together loosely a few times, as if ready to take them on.

  "We've got an enormous house of our own," Catherine said. "Not that Uncle Lionel's isn't fantastic, of course." They turned and frowned at it across the smooth lawn and the formal scrolls of the parterre. The steep slate roofs were topped with bronze finials so tall and fanciful they looked like drops of liquid sliding down a thread. "I just don't think Uncle Lionel will be all that pleased when Toby's rowing friends start throwing up on the whatsits."

  "The whatnots," Nick made a friendly correction.

  Russell blinked at him. "He's a fruit, is he, Uncle Lionel?" he said.