Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

She looked at him sharply, to make sure she'd understood him; then she nodded again, in acknowledgement. She might almost have smiled at his apt phrasing. She moved back to the table, and her busyness expressed her purpose but also perhaps hid some sort of regret at the news. Nick was very shaken by it himself. He glanced at her hopefully. Behind her on the wall were all the family photos, and she seemed to stand, stooped and efficient, in an angled but intimate relation to them-indeed she appeared in one of them, displaying a lordly Toby in his pram: she'd been there from the beginning, in the legendary Highgate days… She started chopping some onions, but looked up again and said, "You remember when you first come here?"

"Yes, of course," said Nick.

"The first time we meet…"

"Yes, I do," and he chuckled fondly and went a little pink, because of course they'd never been over that minute of confusion in the hall. He saw he was pleased she'd mentioned it. It was hardly even an embarrassment, since all he had done was be charming to her; he'd treated her not as an equal but as a superior.

"You thought I was Miz Fed."

"Yes, I know I did… Well, I'd never met either of you. I thought, a good-looking woman…"

Elena squeezed her eyes shut over the onions-it seemed for a moment like a slide into another emotion. Then she said, "I think to myself that day, this one's… sciocco, you know, he don't know anything, oh, he's all very nice, lady, but he's you know… " she tapped her forehead with a finger.

"Pazzo …?" said Nick, taking a last sick chance.

"He's no good," said Elena.

Nick went up to his room, and stood looking at the window sill. Late-morning, late-October sunlight dimmed and brightened indifferently over it. He was lost in thought, but it was thought without words, pure abstraction, luminous and sad. Then a simple form of words appeared, almost as if written. It would have been best in a letter, where it could have been done beautifully, with complete control. Spoken, it risked tremors and deflections. He went downstairs to see Gerald.

The study door was ajar, and he could hear him talking to Barry Groom. He stood in the passage, as he felt he had often done in this house, as an accidental eavesdropper. Decisions were being made all the time, in an adjacent room, in a phone call half-curiously overheard. He liked the noise of business and politics, it was an adult reassurance, like the chatter of parents on a night journey, meaningless, fragmentary, and consoling to the sleepy child on the back seat. Sometimes of course he did pick up on a secret, a surprise still being contrived, and his pleasure was a very private one, the boosted glow of his own trustworthiness. Barry was saying, "I can't think how you let it happen." Gerald made a gloomy rumble and single hard cough but said nothing. "I mean, what's the little pansy doing here? Why have you got a little ponce hanging round your house the whole fucking time?"

The last words were louder and louder, and Nick's pulse thumped as he waited, four or five seconds, for Gerald to put him right. He was warm with indignation, and a new combative excitement. Barry Groom had no idea of the life they led in this house. "I suppose I'd have to say," said Gerald, "that it was an error of judgement. Untypical-I'm a pretty sharp judge of character as a rule. But yes… an error."

"It's an error you've paid a very high price for," said Barry Groom unrelentingly.

"He was a friend of the children, you know. We've always had an open-door policy towards the children's friends."

"Hmm," said Barry, who had publicly disinherited his son Quentin "on principle," to make him learn about money from scratch. "Well, I never trusted him. I can tell you that, unequivocally. I know the type. Never says anything-always nursing his little criticisms. I remember sitting next to him after dinner here, years ago, and thinking, you don't fit in here, do you, you little cocksucker, you're out of your depth. And I'll tell you something else: he knew that. I could see he wished he was upstairs with the women."

"Oh…" said Gerald, in wan protest. "We always got along all right, you know."

"So fucking superior." Barry Groom swore harshly and humourlessly, as if swearing were the guarantee of any unpalatable truth. It was just what he'd done that night, after dinner, with an effect Nick could still remember, of having absolutely no style. "They hate us, you know, they can't breed themselves, they're parasites on generous fools who can. Crawling to you, crawling to the fucking Ouradis. I'm not remotely surprised he led your poor lovely daughter astray like this, exploited her, there's no other word for it. A typical homo trick, of course."

Gerald murmured something, with an effect of grumpy submission. Nick stood clenched by the door, leaning forward slightly, as if about to knock, in a novel confusion of feelings, anger at Gerald's failure to support him, and a strange delighted hatred of Barry Groom. Barry was a multiple adulterer and ex-bankrupt-to be hated by him was surely a mark of probity. But Gerald… well, Gerald, for all his failings, was a friend.

"Dolly Kimbolton's completely furious about all this, I need hardly say," Barry said. "Ouradi's just given another half-million to the Party."

Nick trod quietly away and sat down at his old place in the dining room. He looked again at the picture of "Banger" Fedden and Penny Kent embracing, taken from hundreds of feet away and so blown up that the lovers broke down into a pattern of meaningless dots.

Gerald let Barry out and a minute later Nick went back to the study, knocked, and put his head round the door. He looked about quickly, as though checking Gerald was alone, and drawing on some humorous shared relief that Barry had gone. Gerald was standing at his desk, surveying various documents, and glanced up over his half-moon glasses. "Is this a good moment?" Nick said. Gerald grunted, a loudish dense sound made up of "what?," "no," "yes," and a furious sigh. Nick came in and shut the door, not wanting to be overheard by anyone. The room still seemed to tingle with what had recently been said in it. The low leather armchair still showed where the visitor had sat. A process went on here, there were meetings and decisions, a sense of importance as seasoned and stifling as the odour of leather, stale cigar smoke and polish.

"A good moment," said Gerald, plucking off his glasses and giving Nick a quick cold smile.

"Yes, well…" said Nick, hearing the words bleakly dilate. "I mean I won't be more than a moment."

"Oh…" said Gerald snootily, as if to say it would take more than a moment to get through the business he had in mind. He threw his glasses onto the desk, and walked over to the window. He was wearing cavalry twill trousers and a buff crew-neck sweater. The effect was of symbolic abasement mixed with military resolve-the strategy for a comeback must already be in hand. Nick had a silly sense of privilege in seeing him in private and in trouble; and at the same time, which was more of a shock, he felt almost oppressively bored by him. Gerald gazed into the garden, but really into his own sense of grievance. Nick wasn't sure whether to speak, it was as hard as he expected, and he stood holding the back of a chair, tensed against what he thought Gerald was preparing to say. "How's Wani?" Gerald said.

"Oh…" The question showed a kind of chilly decency. "He's terribly ill, as you know. It doesn't look at all hopeful…"

Gerald nodded slightly, to show it was therefore typical of a lot of things. "Bloody tough on the parents." He turned to stare at Nick, as if challenging him to sympathize. "Poor old Bertrand and Monique!"

"I know…"

"To lose one child… " They both heard a touch of Lady Bracknell in this, and Gerald turned promptly away from the danger of a joke. "Well, one can only imagine." He shook his head slowly and came back to the desk. He had the heavy-faced look, indeed like someone resisting a laugh, that was his attempt at solemn sympathy. Though there was a mawkish hint too that he had somehow "lost" a child himself: he absorbed the Ouradis' crisis into his own. "And ghastly for the girl too."