Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

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 want 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."