Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

"Shit…?"

"They're as mean as shit! He let Gerald pay for the whole of lunch. It was over;£500, I worked it out, you know… And not a single word of thanks."

"I don't think they really wanted to go."

"Then when we went into Podier afterwards, we went into the church-"

"Hello, Sally!" said Nick, getting up and smiling delightedly to annul what she might have heard. "Have you had fun?"

It seemed to come as an unexpected and even slightly offensive question, and she twitched her hair back several times as she confronted it. Then she said severely, "I suppose we have. Yes. Yes, we have!"

"Oh good. I believe it's a marvellous restaurant, isn't it. Well, you're back in time for drinks. Toby's just making a jug of Pimm's. We thought we might have it outside this evening."

"Mm. OK. And what have you done all day?" She looked at him with a touch of criticism. He knew he was giving off the mischievous contentment of someone left behind for an afternoon, sleepy hints that he might have got up to something but in fact had done the more enviable and inexplicable nothing.

"I'm afraid we were very lazy," he said, as Toby, red from dozing in the sun, came out with the jug. He saw that this was what he wanted her to understand, his deep and idle togetherness with the son of the house.

Gerald and Rachel didn't appear for a while, and so the Tippers sat down with the youngsters for a drink. Toby gave Sir Maurice a glass so thick with fruit and vegetables that he left it untested on the table. Catherine blinked a lot and put her head on one side ponderingly. "You're really very rich, aren't you, Sir Maurice," she said after a while.

"Yes, I am," he said, with a snuffle of frankness.

"How much money have you got?"

His expression was sharp, but not entirely displeased. "It's hard to say exactly."

Sally said, "You can never say exactly, can you-it goes up so fast all the time… these days."

"Well, roughly," said Catherine.

"If I died tomorrow."

Sally looked solemn, but interested. "My dear man…!" she murmured.

"Say, a hundred and fifty million."

"Yep… " said Sally, nodding illusionlessly.

Catherine was blank with concealed astonishment. "A hundred and fifty million pounds."

"Well, not lire, young lady, I can assure you. Or Bolivian bolivianos, either."

There was a pause while Catherine allowed them to enjoy her confusion, and Toby said something smooth about the markets, which Sir Maurice merely shrugged at, to show he couldn't be expected to talk about such things at their level.

Catherine poked at a segmental log of cucumber in her drink and said, "I noticed you gave some money to the appeal at Podier church."

"Oh, we give to endless churches and appeals," said Sally.

"How much did you give?"

"I don't recall exactly."

"Probably quite a lot, knowing Maurice!" Sir Maurice had the super-complacent look of someone being criticized.

"You gave five francs," said Catherine. "Which is about fifty new pence. But you could have given"-she raised her glass and swept it across the vista of hills and the far glimpse of river-"a million francs, without noticing really, and single-handedly saved the Romanesque narthex!"

These were two terms Maurice Tipper had never had to deal with singly, much less together. "I don't know about not noticing," he said, rather leniently.

"You simply can't give to everything," said Sally. "You know, we've got Covent Garden…"

"No, OK," said Catherine, tactically, as if she'd been quite silly.

"What's all this…?" said Gerald, coming out in shorts and espadrilles, with a towel over his shoulder.

"The young lady was giving me some criticism. Apparently I'm rather mean."

"Not in so many words," said Catherine.

"I'm afraid the fact is that some people just are very rich," said Sally.

Gerald, clearly sick of his guests, and glancing tensely towards the steps to the pool, said, "My daughter tends to think we should give everything we've worked for away."

"Not everything, obviously. But it might be nice to help when you can." She gave them a toothy smile.

"Well, did you put something in the box?" said Sir Maurice.

"I didn't have any money with me," said Catherine.

Gerald went on, "My daughter lives her life under the strange delusion that she's a pauper, rather than-well, what she is. I'm afraid she's impossible to argue with because she keeps saying the same thing."

"It's not that," said Catherine vaguely and irritably. "I just don't see why, when you've got, say, forty million you absolutely have to turn it into eighty million."

"Oh…!" said Sir Maurice, as if at an absurdly juvenile mistake.

"It sort of turns itself, actually," said Toby.

"I mean who needs so much money? It's just like power, isn't it. Why do people want it? I mean, what's the point of having power?"

"The point of having power," said Gerald, "is that you can make the world a better place."

"Quite so," said Sir Maurice.

"So do you start off wanting to do particular things, or just to have the sensation of power, to know you can do things if you want to?"

"It's the chicken and the egg, isn't it," said Sally with conviction.

"It's rather a good question," said Toby, seeing that Maurice was getting fed up.

"If I had power," said Catherine, "which god forbid-"

"Amen to that," murmured Gerald.

"I think I should stop people having a hundred and fifty million pounds."

"There you are, then," said Sir Maurice, "you've answered your own question." He laughed briefly. "I must say, I hadn't expected to hear this kind of talk in a place like this."

Gerald moved off, saying, "It's art school, I'm afraid, Maurice," but not looking sure that this routine disparagement would please his guest any more than the lunch at Chez Claude.

During dinner that evening the phone rang. Everyone out on the terrace looked ready for a call, and a self-denying smirk spread along the table as they listened to Liliane answering it. Nick was expecting nothing himself, but he saw the Tippers being called home by some opportune disaster. Liliane came out into the edge of the candlelight and said it was for Madame. The conversation at table continued thinly and with a vague humorous concern for the odd phrases of Rachel's that could be made out; then she must have closed the phone-room door. A few minutes later Nick saw her bedroom light go on; her half-eaten grilled trout and untouched side plate of salad took on an air of crisis. When she came back out and said, "Yes, please," with a gracious smile at Gerald's offer of more wine, she seemed both to encourage and prohibit questions. "Not bad news, I hope," said Sally Tipper. "We always get bad news when we're on holiday."

Rachel sighed and hesitated, and held Catherine's gaze, which was alert and apprehensive. "Awfully sad, darling," she said. "It's godfather Pat. I'm afraid he died this morning."

Catherine, with her knife and fork held unthinkingly in the air, forgot to chew as she stared at her mother and tears slipped down her cheeks.

"Oh, I'mso sorry," said Nick, movedby her instant distress more than by the news itself, and feeling the AIDS question rear up, sudden and undeflectable, and somehow his responsibility, as the only recognized gay man present. Still, there was a communal effort by the rest of the family to veil the matter.

"Awfully sad," said Gerald, and explained, "Pat Grayson, you know, the TV actor…? Old, old friend of Rachel's… " Nick saw something distancing already in this and remembered how Gerald had called Pat a "film star" at Hawkeswood three years earlier, when he was successful and well. "Who was it, darling, on the phone?"

"Oh, it was Terry," said Rachel, so tactfully and privately she was almost inaudible.