Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

As always, Nick felt a need to make things all right. He said, "I wonder where we are. Is this Middlesex, I suppose?"

"I suppose it's Middlesex," Gerald said. He hated to be thwarted and was already impatient.

"Not very nice," said Elena.

"No… " said Nick, hesitantly, humorously, as if considering a defence of it, to pass the time. He knew Elena was anxious about the party, and about her role for the evening. She had asked a couple of questions already about Fales, who was Lionel Kessler's new butler, with whom she was about to find herself pressed into some unspecified relation.

"If Lionel's giving us lunch," said Gerald, "we'd better stop somewhere and ring ahead. We'll be late."

"Oh, Lionel won't mind," said Rachel, "we're just taking pot luck."

"Hmm," said Gerald. "One doesn't as a rule find the words Lionel and pot luck used in the same sentence." The tone was mocking, but suggested a certain anxiety of his own about his brother-in-law, and a sense of obligation. Rachel settled back contentedly.

"Everything will be fine," she said. And in fact the traffic did then make a move, and an optimistic attitude, which was the only sort Gerald could bear, was cautiously indulged. Nick thought about the old-fashioned name Lionel. Of course it was related to Leo; but Lionel was a little heraldic lion, whereas Leo was a big live beast.

Five minutes later they were at a standstill.

"This fucking traffic," said Gerald; at which Elena looked a bit flustered.

"As well as everything else," Nick said, with determined brightness, "I can't wait to see the house."

"Well, you're going to have to," said Gerald.

"Ah, the house," said Rachel, with a sighing laugh.

Nick said, "Or perhaps you don't like it. It must be different for you, having grown up there." He felt he was rather fawning on her.

"I don't know," Rachel admitted. "I hardly know if I like it or not."

"You'd have to say, I think," said Gerald, "that it's the contents that make Hawkeswood. The house itself is something of a Victorian monstrosity."

"Mmm…" In Rachel's conversation a murmured "mmm" or drily drawn-out "I know.. ." could carry a note of surprising scepticism. Nick loved the upper-class economy of her talk, her way of saying nothing except by hinted shades of agreement and disagreement; he longed to master it himself. It was so different from the bounding effort of Gerald's conversation that he sometimes wondered if Gerald himself understood her. He said,

"I think I'll like the house as well as the contents."

Rachel looked grateful, but remained vague about the whole thing, and Nick felt slightly snubbed. Perhaps it was impossible to describe a place one had known all one's life. She didn't disparage Nick's interest, but she showed she couldn't quite be expected to be interested herself. It had been her fortune not to describe but to enjoy. She said, "You know of course there's modern art, as well as the Rembrandts," with a brief smile at having retrieved a notable detail.

Hawkeswood had been built in the 1880s for the first Baron Kessler. It stood on an artificially flattened hilltop among the Buckinghamshire beech woods, which had since grown up to hide all but its topmost spirelets from outside view. The approach, after trailing through the long linked villages, entering past a lodge and a cattle grid and climbing the half-mile of drive among grazing deer, was a complex climax for Nick; as the flashing windows of the house came into view he found himself smiling widely while his eyes darted critically, admiringly-he didn't know what-over the steep slate roofs and stone walls the colour of French mustard. He had read the high-minded but humorous entry in Pevsner, which described a seventeenth-century chateau re-imagined in terms of luxurious modernity, with plate-glass windows, under-floor central heating, numerous bathrooms, and running hot water; but it had left him unprepared for the sheer staring presence of the place. Gerald pulled up in front of the porte cochere and they got out and went in, Nick coming last and looking at everything, while Fales, a real butler in striped morning trousers, materialized to meet them. There they were, already, in the central hall, the great feature of the house, two storeys high, with an arcaded gallery on the upper level, and a giant chimneypiece made from bits of a baroque tomb. Nick felt he'd stepped into the strange and seductive fusion of an art museum and a luxury hotel.

Pot luck turned out to be an exquisite light lunch served at a round table in a room lined with rococo boiseries that had been removed wholesale from some grand Parisian town house, and painted pale blue. On the ceiling, in a flowered ellipse, two naked females held a wreath of roses. Nick saw at once that the landscape over the fireplace was a Cezanne. It gave him a hilarious sense of his own social displacement. It was one of those moments that only the rich could create, and which came for Nick all wrapped up in its own description, so that he was already recounting it to some impressionable other person-a person, that is, as impressionable as himself. He didn't know whether he should refer to it, but Lord Kessler said as he sat down, "You see I've moved that Cezanne."

Rachel peered at it briefly and said, "Oh yes." Her whole manner was comfortable, almost sleepy; she made a charming shrug of welcome, of dissolved formality, gesturing Nick to his place. Gerald looked at the painting more critically, with a sharp way he had of scanning any document which might come in useful later on.

Nick thought he could say, "It's very beautiful." And Lord Kessler said, "Yes, isn't it a nice one."

Kessler was perhaps sixty, shorter and stouter than Rachel, bald, with an alert, not quite symmetrical face. He had on a dark grey three-piece suit which made no concession to fashion or even to the season; he looked warm in it, but seemed to say that this was simply what one wore. He ate his salmon and drank his rather sweet hock with an indefinable air of relished routine, an admission of lifelong lunching in boardrooms and country houses and festival restaurants all over Europe. He said, "So Tobias and Catherine are coming down when?"

"I wouldn't want to put too precise a time on it," said Gerald. "Toby is driving down with a girlfriend, Sophie Tipper, who's a daughter of Maurice Tipper, incidentally, and a very promising young actress." He looked to Rachel and she said,

"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."