Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

"Good flight, Gran?" said Toby, kissing her cheek.

"It was perfectly all right," said Lady Partridge, with her usual indifference to a kiss. "It's quite a trek from the airport. Sally's been explaining to me all about operas"-and she gave the three boys a shrewd smile.

Sally Tipper said, "The first-class seats were just the same as tourist class, you got proper china, that was all. Maurice is going to write to John about it." She watched her husband, who came and shook hands with Toby, and said, "Tobias," in a coldly pitying tone.

"Welcome, welcome!" said Toby, in a weak flourish of good manners, avoiding the eye of the man who might have been his father-in-law, and going to the boot to take care of the bags. Nick got an inattentive hello from each of them, and the feeling, which he'd had in the past, of being an element they could neither accept nor ignore. Catherine came out of the house, as if to inspect some damage.

"Oh, how are you, Cathy?" said Sally Tipper.

"Still mad!" said Catherine.

Then Gerald and Rachel appeared. "Good, good…" said Gerald. "You found us…"

"We thought at first it was sure to be that splendid chateau up the road," said Lady Tipper.

"Ah no," said Gerald, "we're not at the chateau any more, we muddle along down here." There was a complicated double round of kisses, ending up with Sir Maurice facing Gerald and saying, "Oh no, not even in France…!" and laughing thinly.

The Tippers were not natural holidayers. They came beautifully equipped, with four heavy steel-cornered suitcases, and numerous other little bags which had to be handled carefully, but something else, unnoticed by them, was missing. They muttered questions to each other, and gave an impression of covert anxiety or irritation. When they came down on their first afternoon Sir Maurice said a lot of faxes would be coming through for him, and could they be sure there was enough paper in the machine. He was clearly looking forward to the arrival of the faxes above all. Wani sucked up to him and said he was expecting some faxes too, meaning that he would keep an eye on the machine, but Sir Maurice gave him a sharp look and said he hoped they wouldn't impede his own faxes. It was only four thirty but Gerald was marking his guests' arrival with a Pimm's, and Lady Partridge, with her son as her licence, accompanied him in a gin and Dubonnet. The Tippers asked for tea, and sat under the awning, glancing mistrustfully at the view. When Liliane, slow, stoical, and clearly unwell, came out with the tray, Sally Tipper gave her instructions about different pillows she needed. Sir Maurice talked to Gerald about a takeover they were both interested in, though Gerald didn't look quite serious with a fruit-choked tumbler in his fist. Lady Tipper complained to Rachel about the smell of hot dogs in the Royal Festival Hall. Rachel said surely that would all change now they'd got rid of Red Ken, but Lady Tipper shook her head as if deaf to any such comfort. Nick tried naively to interest Maurice Tipper in local beauty spots which he hadn't yet seen himself. "You're a fine one to talk!" said Sir Maurice-grinning quickly at Gerald and Toby to show he wasn't so easily taken in. He was used to total deference, and mere pleasantness aroused his suspicion. The democracy of house-party life wasn't going to come naturally to him. Nick looked at his smooth clerical face and gold rimmed glasses in the light of a new idea, that the ownership of immense wealth might not be associated with pleasure-at least as pleasure was sought and unconsciously defined by the rest of them here.

Sally Tipper had a lot of blonde hair in expensive confusion, and a lot of clicking, rattling, sliding jewellery. She shook and nodded her head a good deal. It was virtually a twitch-of annoyance, or of almost more exasperated agreement. She had a smile that came all at once and went all at once, with no humorous gradations. She said before dinner she'd like to have drinks indoors, which, since the whole point and fetish of the manoir for the Feddens was to do everything possible outside, didn't promise well. They sat in the drawing room with all the overhead lights on, like a waiting room. Nick had seen the names "Sir Maurice and Lady Tipper" in gold letters on the donors' board at Covent Garden, and had seen her there in person, sometimes with Sophie, but never with her husband. He thought they might have a theme for the week, and said quietly that the recent Tannhduser hadn't been very good.

"Very good… I know… I thought… " said Lady Tipper, and shook her head in wounded defiance of all the carpers and whiners. "Now, Judy, that you really should see," she went on loudly. "You'll know that one, the Pilgrims' Chorus."

Lady Partridge, fortified by being enfamille and half-tight, said, "It's no use asking me, dear. I've never set foot in an opera house, except once, and that was thirty years ago, when… my son took me," and she nodded abstrusely at Gerald.

"What did you see, Judy?" said Nick.

"I think it was Salome," Lady Partridge said after a minute.

"How marvellous!" said Lady Tipper.

"I know, ghastly," said Lady Partridge.

"Oh, Ma!" said Gerald, who was listening in with a distracted smile from a chat about shares with Sir Maurice.

"I applaud your taste, Judy," said Nick, with the necessary emphasis to get through, and heard what a twit he sounded.

"Mm, I think it was by Stravinsky."

"No, no," said Nick, "it's by the dreaded…: Richard Strauss. Oh, by the way, Gerald, I've found the most marvellous quote, by Stravinsky, in fact, about the dreaded."

"Sorry, Maurice… " murmured Gerald.

"Robert Craft asks him, 'Do you now admit any of the operas of Richard Strauss?' and Stravinsky says"-and Nick beat it out, conducted it, in the weird overexcitement of the Strauss feud-" T would like to admit all Strauss operas to whichever purgatory punishes triumphant banality. Their musical substance is cheap and poor; it cannot interest a musician today.'"

"What?" snorted Gerald.

"Well, I'd rather have Strauss than Stravinsky myself, any day! I'm afraid to say!" said Lady Tipper. Sir Maurice looked at Nick, in the flush of his arcane triumph, with baffled distaste.

At dinner Gerald was already pretty drunk. He seemed to have had an idea of taking Maurice Tipper with him, and making their first night a rush of high spirits, followed next morning by the rueful bond of a shared hangover. But Sir Maurice drank as suspiciously as he did business, covering his glass with a dwindling flicker of amusement each time Gerald leant over his shoulder with the bottle. Gerald's face leaning into the candlelight had a glow of obstinate merriment. He sat down and summarized for the second time the division of the Perigord into areas called green, white, black and purple. "And we're in the white," said Maurice Tipper drily.

The talk came round, as it often did with the Feddens, to the Prime Minister. Nick saw Catherine clench in annoyance when her grandmother said, "She's put this country on its feet!"-clearly forgetting, in her fervour, which country she was now in. "She showed them in the Falklands, didn't she?"

"You mean she's a hideous old battleaxe," muttered Catherine.

"She's certainly a manxome foe," said Gerald. Sir Maurice looked blank. "One wouldn't want to be on the wrong side of her."

"Indeed," said Sir Maurice.

Wani somehow got people to look at him, and said, "People say that, but you know, I've always seen a very different side of her. An immensely kind woman…"; he let them see him searching a fund of heart-warming anecdote, but then said discreetly, "She takes such extraordinary pains to help those she… cares about."

Maurice Tipper expressed both respect and resentment in a dark throat-clearing, and Gerald said, "Of course you know her as a family friend," smiling resolutely as he conceded to Wani the thing, so clearly seen, that he hankered for himself.