Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

On the way downstairs they met little Antoine, who had been dying to look for them and was going into every room in a mime of happy exasperation. It had taken a couple of flushes to dispose of the rubber, and they had got out with thirty seconds to spare. The boy claimed them and then wanted to know what they were laughing about.

"I was showing Uncle Nick my old photographs," Wani said.

"They were rather funny," said Nick, pierced by the generous twist to his lie, and also, absurdly, by the missed opportunity of seeing the photos.

"Oh," said little Antoine, perhaps with a similar regret.

"You'd better have a quick look in here," Wani said, and pushed open the door of the room above the drawing room, which was his parents' bedroom. He swept a hand over the switches and all the lights came on, the curtains began to close automatically and "Spring" from The Four Seasons was heard as if coming from a great distance. Little Antoine clearly loved this part, and asked to be allowed to do it all again whilst Nick glanced humorously around. Everything was luxurious and he feigned dismay at his own deep footprints in the carpet. The richness of the room was its mixture of shiny pomp, glazed swagged curtains, huge mirrors, onyx and glaring gilt, with older, rougher and better things, things perhaps they'd brought from Beirut, Persian rugs and fragments of Roman statuary. On top of a small chest of drawers there was a white marble head of Wani, presumably, done at about the same age as little Antoine was now, the wider, plumper face of a child. It was charming and Nick thought if he could have anything in the house, any object, it would be that. Bertrand and Monique had separate dressing rooms-each of them, in its order and abundance, like a department of a shop. "You'd better look at this too," Wani said, showing him a large yellow painting of Buckingham Palace that hung on the landing.

"It's a Zitt, I see," said Nick, reading the signature dashed across the right-hand corner of the sky.

"He's rather buying into Zitt," said Wani.

"Oh-well, it's absolutely ghastly," said Nick.

"Is it?" said Wani. "Well, try and break it to him gently."

They went down into the dining room, with little Antoine going in before them, lolling his head from side to side and saying "eb-solutely gharstly" over and over to himself. Wani caught him from behind and gave him an enjoyable strangle.

Nick was placed on Monique's right, beside little Antoine, with Uncle Emile opposite. Uncle Emile had the air of a less successful brother, baggy and gloomy rather than gleamingly triangular. But it turned out that in fact he was Monique's brother-in-law, on a visit of indefinite duration from Lyon, where he ran an ailing scrap-metal business. Nick took in this story and smiled along the table as if they were being told a simmeringly good joke; it was only Wani's tiny frown that made him suspect he might be looking too exhilarated by his tour of the house. It was the magic opposite, all this, of the jolted witless hangover state of half an hour earlier. All their secrets seemed to fuse and glow. Though for Wani himself, severely self-controlled, it seemed hardly worth having taken the drug. The little old couple were bringing in elaborately fanned slices of melon and orange. It was clear that citrus fruits were treated with special acclaim in the house; here as in the drawing room there was a daringly stacked obelisk of oranges and lemons on a side table. The effect was both humble and proprietorial. Another Zitt, of the Stock Exchange and the Mansion House, done in mauve, hung between the windows.

"I see you're admiring my husband's new Zitt," said Monique, with a hint of mischief, as if she would value a second opinion.

"Ah yes…!"

"He's really an Impressionist painter, you know."

"Mm, and almost, somehow, an Expressionist one, too," said Nick.

"He's extremely contemporary," said Monique.

"He's a bold colourist," said Nick. "Very bold…"

"So, Nick," said Bertrand, spreading his napkin, and steadying his swivelling array of knives on the glassy polish of the table top: "how is our friend Gerald Fedden?" The "our" might have referred to just the two of them, or to a friendship with the family, or to a vaguer sense that Gerald was on their side.

"Oh, he's absolutely fine," said Nick. "He's in great form. Wildly busy-as always…!" Bertrand's look was humorous but persistent, as if to show that they could be candid with each other; having ignored him for the first half-hour he was turning the beam of his confidence on him, with the instinct of a man who gets his way.

"You live in his house, no?"

"Yes, I do. I went to stay for a few weeks and I've ended up staying for nearly three years!"

Bertrand nodded and shrugged, as if this was quite a normal arrangement.

Uncle Emile himself, perhaps, might turn out to be just such a visitor. "I know where it is. We're invited to the concert, whatever it is, next week, which we'll be charmed to come to."

"Oh, good," said Nick. "I think it should be quite fun. The pianist is a young star from Czechoslovakia."

Bertrand frowned. "I know they say he's a bloody good man."

"No, actually… oh, Gerald, you mean-yes, absolutely!"

"He's going to go to the very top of the ladder. Or almost to the top. What's your opinion of that?"

"Oh-oh, I don't know," said Nick. "I don't know anything about politics."

Bertrand twitched. "I know you're the bloody aesthete…"

Nick was often pressed for insider views on Gerald's character and prospects, and as a rule he was wafflingly loyal. Now he said, "I do know he's madly in love with the Prime Minister. But it's not quite clear if the passion is returned. She may be playing hard to get." Little Antoine did the furtive double-take of a child who is not supposed to have heard something, and Bertrand's frown deepened over his melon. It occurred to Nick that he was in a household with a very serious view of sexual propriety. But it was Monique who said,

"Ah, they're all in love with her. She has blue eyes, and she hypnotizes them." Her own dark gaze went feelingly down the table to her husband, and then to her son.

"It's only a sort of courtly love, isn't it," said Nick.

"Yah… " said Wani with a nod and a short laugh.

"You've met the lady, I imagine," Bertrand said.

"I never have," said Nick, humbly but cheerfully.

Bertrand made a pinched plump expression with his lips and stared into an imaginary distance for a moment before saying, "You know, of course, she's a good friend of mine."

"Oh, yes, Wani told me you knew her."

"Of course, she is a great figure of the age. But she is a very kind woman too." He had the mawkish look of a brute who praises the kindness of another brute. "She has always been very kind to me, hasn't she, my love?

And of course I intend to return the compliment."

"Aha…"

"I mean in a practical way, in a financial way. I saw her the other day, and… " he waved his left hand impatiently to show he wouldn't be going into what had been said; but then went on, with weird candour, "I will make a significant donation to the party funds, and… who knows what then." He stabbed and swallowed a slice of orange. "I believe you have to pay back, my friend, if you have been given help"-and he stabbed the air with his empty fork.

"Oh, quite," said Nick. "No, I'm sure you do." He felt he had inadvertently become the focus of some keen resentment of Bertrand's.

"You won't hear any complaints about the lady in this house."

"Well, nor in mine, I assure you!"

Nick glanced around at the submissive faces of the others, and thought that actually, at Kensington Park Gardens, the worship of "the lady," the state of mesmerized conjecture into which she threw Gerald, was offset at least by Catherine's monologues about homeless people and Rachel's wry allusions to "the other woman" in her husband's life.