Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

"So he's on the up-and-up, our friend Gerald," Bertrand said more equably. "What's his role actually?"

"He's a minister in the Home Office," Nick said.

"That's good. He did that bloody quickly."

"Well, he's ambitious. And he has the… the lady's eye."

"I'll have a chat with him when I come to the house. I've met him, of course, but you can introduce us again."

"I'd be happy to," said Nick; "by all means." The black-jacketed man removed the plates, and just then Nick felt the steady power of the coke begin to fade, it was something else taken away, the elation grew patchy and dubious. In four or five minutes it would yield to a flatness bleaker than the one it had replaced. However, the wine was served soon after, so there was an amusing sense of relief and dependency. Bertrand himself, Nick noted, drank only Malvern water.

Nick tried for a while to talk to Emile about scrap metal, which tested his Cornelian French to the limits; but Bertrand, who had been looking on with an insincere smile and a palpable sense of neglect, broke in, "Nick, Nick, I don't know what you two young men are getting up to, I don't like to ask too many questions…"

"Oh…"

"But I hope it's soon going to start bringing in some money."

"It will, Papa," said Wani quickly, while Nick blushed in horror at the chasm he'd just hopped over, and said, "I'm the aesthete, remember! I don't know about the money side of things." He tried to smile out through his blush, but he saw that Bertrand's little challenges were designed to show him up in a very passive light.

Bertrand said,

"You're the writing man-" which again was something allowed for, an item in a budget, but under scrutiny and probably dispensable.

Nick felt writing men were important, and though he had nothing to show for it as yet he said again, "That's me." He realized belatedly, and rather sickeningly, that he would have to improvise, to answer to Wani's advantage, to give body to what his father must have thought were merely fantasies.

"You know I want to start this magazine, Papa," Wani said.

"Ah-well," Bertrand said, with a puff. "Yes, a magazine can be good. But there is a whole world of difference, my son, running a magazine than having your bloody face in a magazine!"

"It wouldn't be like that," Wani said, somehow both crossly and courteously.

"All right, but then probably it won't sell."

"It's going to be an art magazine-very high quality photography-very high quality printing and paper-all extraordinary exotic things, buildings, weird Indian sculptures." He searched mentally through the list Nick had made for him. "Miniatures. Everything." Nick felt that even with his hangover he could have made this speech better himself, but there was something touching and revealing in how Wani made his pitch.

"And who do you suppose is going to want to buy that?"

Wani shrugged and spread his hands. "It will be beautiful."

Nick put in the forgotten line. "People will want to collect the magazine, just as they would want to collect the things that are pictured in it."

Bertrand took a moment or two to see whether this was nonsense or not. Then he said, "All this bloody top-quality stuff sounds like a lot of money. So you have to charge ten pounds, fifteen pounds for your magazine." He took an irritable swig from his glass of water.

Wani said, "Top-quality advertising. You know, Gucci, Cartier… Mercedes," reaching for names far more lustrous than Watteau or Borromini. "Luxury goods are what people want these days. That's where the money is."

"So you've got a name for the bloody thing."

"Yah, we're calling it Ogee, like the company," Wani said, very straightforwardly.

Bertrand pursed his plump lips. "I don't get it, what is it…? 'Oh Gee!,' " is that it?" he said, bad-tempered but pleased to have made a joke. "You'll have to tell me again because no one's ever heard of this bloody 'ogee.' "

"I thought he was saying 'Orgy,'" said Martine.

"Orgy?!" said Bertrand.

Wani looked across the table, and since this unheard-of name had originally been his idea Nick said, "You know, it's a double curve, such as you see in a window or a dome." He made the shape of half an hourglass with his hands raised in the air, just as Monique, in one of her occasional collusive gestures, did the same and smiled at him as if salaaming.

"It goes first one way, and then the other," she said.

"Exactly. It originates in… well, in the Middle East, in fact, and then you see it in English architecture from about the fourteenth century onwards. It's like Hogarth's line of beauty," Nick said, with a mounting sense of fatuity, "except that there are two of them, of course… I suppose the line of beauty's a sort of animating principle, isn't it…" He looked around and swooped his hand suggestively in the air. It wasn't perhaps the animating principle here.

Bertrand set down his knife and fork, and gave a puncturing smile. He seemed to savour his irony in advance, as well as the uncertainty, the polite smiles of anticipation, on the faces of the others. He said, "You know, um… Nick, I came to this country, twenty years ago nearly, 1967, not a bloody good time in Lebanon incidentally, just to see what the chances were in your famous swinging London. So I look around, you know the big thing then is the supermarkets are starting up, you know, self-service, help-yourself-you're used to it, you probably go to one every bloody other day: but then …!"

Nick simpered obediently at the notion of how accustomed he was. He wasn't sure if the Ogee talk was over, or being treated to some large cautionary digression. He said coolly, "No, I can see what a… what a revolution there's been."

Like other egotists Bertrand cast only a momentary, doubting glance at the possibility of irony aimed at himself, and stamped on it anyway. "Of course it is! It's a bloody revolution." He turned to gesture the old man to pour more wine for the others, and watched with an air of practised forbearance as the burgundy purled into the cut-glass goblets. "You know, I had a fruit shop, up in Finchley, to start off with." He waved his other arm fondly at that distant place and time. "Bought it up, flew in the fresh citrus, which was our own product by the way, we grew all that, we didn't have to buy it off bloody nobody. Lebanon, a great place for growing fruit. You know, all that's come out of Lebanon in the last twenty years? Fruit and brains, fruit and talent. No one with any brains or any talent wants to stay in the bloody place."

"Mm, the civil war, you mean." He'd meant to mug up a bit on the past twenty years of Lebanese history, but Wani grew pained and evasive when he mentioned it, and now here it came. He didn't want to concur in his host's harsh judgement on his own country, it was itself a bit of a minefield.

Monique said, "Our house was knocked down, you know, by a bomb," as though not expecting to be heard.

"Oh, how terrible," said Nick gratefully, since it was another voice in the room.

"Yes," she said, "it was very terrible."

"As Antoine's mother says," said Bertrand, "our family house was virtually destroyed."

"Was it an old house?" Nick asked her.

"Yes, it was quite old. Not as old as this, of course"-and she gave a little shiver, as if Lowndes Square dated from the Middle Ages. "We have photographs, many…"

"Oh, I'd love to see them," said Nick, "I'm so interested in that kind of thing."

"Anyway," said Bertrand, "1969 I open the first Mira Mart, up in Finchley, up in Finchley, it's still there today, you can go and see it any time. You know what the secret of it is?"

"Um…"

"That's what I saw, that's what you got in London, back then-twenty years ago. You got the supermarkets and you got the old local shops, the corner shops going back hundreds of years. So what do I do, I put the two bloody things together, supermarket and corner shop, and I make the mini-mart-all the range of stuff you get in Tesco or whatever the bloody place, but still with the local feeling, comer-shop feeling." He held up his glass and drank as if to his own ingenuity. "And you know the other thing, of course?"