Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

"That's me!" said Nick, returning the handshake as firmly as he could, and grinning in the hope that even an aesthete might be a good thing to be if it was sanctioned by his beloved son.

"Ha ha!" said Bertrand, and turned away along the chequered marble floor of the hall. "Well, we need our aesthetes." He stretched out his arms in a graceful shrug, and seemed to gesture at the shiny paintings and Empire torcheres as necessary trappings of his position. He had an aesthete of his own, he seemed to say, on a small retainer. Nick followed on, wincing at the high polish on everything. He had the feeling there was only one thing in the house he would ever want to see. "I'll join you in a moment," Bertrand said, with a tiny gesture of deterrence, as Nick found himself following him into the lavatory. The dark little woman who'd opened the door led him dutifully upstairs, and he followed her instead, smiling and doomed. So Wani himself must have called him his aesthete, that was how he'd explained him to his parents…

He was shown into the pink and gold confusion of a drawing room. Wani called out, "Ah, Nick… " like an old man remembering, and came across to shake his hand. "Now here's Martine, who's been longing to see you… " (Nick stopped by the sofa where she was sitting and shook her hand as well with an exaggerated bow)-"and you haven't met my mother." Nick was aware of himself advancing in the high mirror which hung over the fireplace, and at a slight tilt, so that the room seemed to climb into a luminous middle distance. He kept up a wide smile, in self-protection, and only caught his own eye for an unwise second. It was a dazzled smile, perhaps even the smile of someone about to make a sequence of witty remarks. Monique Ouradi said she had been to Mass at Westminster Cathedral, and smiled back, but seemed not quite ready yet for mere social communication. "And this is my Uncle Emile, and my cousin, little Antoine," said Wani, as two people came in unexpectedly behind him. Everything impinged on Nick, but he couldn't take it in. He shook hands with Uncle Emile, who said "Enchante" in a coughing sort of voice, and Nick said "Enchante" back. Wani rested his hand on his little cousin's head, and the boy looked up at him adoringly before also shaking hands with Nick. Nick felt a tear rise to his eye at the thought of the child's utter innocence of hangovers.

Nick had decided in the taxi that he would stick to water, but when Bertrand came in saying, "Now, drinks!" he at once saw the point of a bloody Mary. Bertrand moved towards a drinks tray on a far table and at just that moment an old man in a black jacket hurried in with a salver and took control of the business. Nick gazed at them with the patient surmise of the hungover, a sense of mysterious displacement and slow revelation. Bertrand could make a mere gesture towards an action which would at once be performed by someone else-there was a signalled readiness and then a prompt, never-doubted relief! It explained everything.

Really it was best to prop oneself at a life-like angle in the corner of the sofa and let the family talk trail back and forth… At the tall front windows white net curtains rippled very gently into the room. Outside on the balcony there were two pointed trees in tubs, and beyond them the planes in the square, forest-height, filled the entire view. Nick's thoughts drifted out and perched there.

Little Antoine had a remote-controlled toy car, which Wani was encouraging him to crash into the legs of the repro Louis Quinze tables and chairs. It was a bright-red Ferrari with a whiplike antenna. Nick crouched forward to watch it haring round, and made histrionic groans when it banged into the skirting board or got stuck under the bureau. He was pretending to enjoy the game, and trying to attach himself to it, but the two boys seemed oblivious of him, Wani almost snatching the controls now and then to cause a top-speed collision. Bertrand was standing talking to Uncle Emile, and shuffled obligingly out of the way a couple of times, with a certain hardening of expression. In the tilting mirror Nick saw them all, as if from a privileged angle, like actors on a set.

The parents were fascinating, Bertrand short and handsome as an old-fashioned film star, and Monique too, very smart and austere, with a black bob and a diamond brooch, evincing foreignness like a time-shift, into the chic of twenty years before. There was a subdued shine to Bertrand's dark suit, which was double-breasted, square-shouldered, and worn with a crimson breast-pocket handkerchief; he seemed to resolve into a pattern of squares and lozenges, with his square jaw, tougher than Wani's, and the same long hawkish nose, all parts of the pattern. Along his full upper lip he wore a thin black moustache. The light, low-cut patent slippers he had on seemed to Nick an eastern note. Wani had several pairs himself, with ridged rubber soles, "for walking on marble" as he explained. Bertrand's voice, strongly accented, casual but coercive, dominated the room.

Martine was sitting at the other end of Nick's sofa, in what felt like her "place," adjacent to Wani's mother. They were speaking quietly in French, in a kind of listless female conspiracy, while the men boomed and frowned and crashed cars. Nick smiled at them undemandingly. Martine in her long engagement must have become a fixture, a passive poor relation, who was waiting and waiting to turn into a millionairess. She seemed shy of speaking to Nick, for reasons he could only guess at. Wani's claim that she was longing to see him had been wishful social prompting-he had a habit of languidly implanting his wishes. But Martine, in her mild unexpectant way, had always seemed to have her own mind. So it was a minute or two before she slid a dish of olives towards him on the low glass table and said, "And how are you getting on?"

"Oh, fine!" said Nick, blinking and smirking. "I'm feeling a bit delicate, actually"-and he waggled his glass. "This is helping. It's a miracle how it does." He thought what extraordinary things one said.

She was too delicate herself to take on the subject of his hangover. "Work is all fine?" she said.

"Oh-yes… thank you. Well-I'm trying to finish my thesis this summer, and of course I'm very behind," he said, as if she must be familiar with his weaknesses, they seemed to grin out of him as he sat there. "I'm so terribly lazy and disorganized."

"I hope not," she said, as if he could only be joking. "And what is it concerning, this thesis?"

"Oh… it's concerning-Henry James… " He'd developed a reluctance that was Jamesian in itself to say exactly what its subject was. There was a lot to do with hidden sexuality, which struck him as better avoided.

"But Antoine says you are working with him too, at the Ogee?"

"Oh, I don't really do very much."

"You are not writing a film? That is what he says."

"Well, I'd like to. In a way, yes… We have a few ideas." He smiled politely beyond her to take Wani's mother as well into the conversation. Since it was all he had, he said, "Actually, I've always rather wanted to make a film of The Spoils of Poynton … " Monique settled back with an appreciative nod at this, and Nick felt encouraged to go on, "I think it could be rather marvellous, don't you. You know Ezra Pound said it was just a novel about furniture, rneaning to dismiss it of course, but that was really what made me like the sound of it!"

Monique sipped at her gin-and-tonic and looked at him with vague concern, and then, as if searching for the point, glanced about at the tables and chairs. Of course she had no idea what he was talking about.

Martine said, "So you want to make zfxlm about furniture?"

Monique said, raising her voice as the Ferrari tore past her ankles, "We saw the latest film, which was so nice, of The Room with the View."