Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

"Darling…?" said Rachel, with a note of anger, but looking him over quickly, to see if he was hurt.

"Dad," said Toby, and shook his head disappointedly.

Gerald stood staring at them, and then hunched and grinned. He said, "I'm on holiday!"

"Yes, darling, you are," said Rachel. "You ought to calm down." She was solicitous, but firm: her own calm was a reproof. Nick stood in the doorway and looked at them, bright-eyed. There was a collective sense that they could tame Gerald.

"Beaten at boules by a bloody A-rab!" said Gerald, and gasped at his own candour, and as if it might be a joke.

"For god's sake, Dad," said Toby.

"What…?" said Gerald.

"You'll be calling me a bloody Jew-boy next."

"I would never do that," said Gerald. "Don't be monstrous."

"Well, I hope not," said Toby, and coloured at his own emotion. "Wani's my friend," he said, with an effect of simple decency, so that Gerald stared and thought and then went out of the room. They heard him calling out, "Wani! Wani, my apologies! OK…? Yup! So sorry… " with improper cheerfulness, and tailing off as he turned indoors, as if it was a mere routine. He came back into the kitchen with a twitch of a smile, since Wani hadn't heard the thing he should really have been apologizing for. He drifted absent-mindedly into the larder and emerged with a dusty bottle of claret.

"Why don't you go and have a swim, Gerald. Or find Jasper, and take him for a walk," recommended Rachel.

"Jasper isn't a cocker spaniel, you know," said Gerald, amusingly but with a bit of a snap.

"Well, no," said Rachel.

Gerald turned the little wooden-handled corkscrew with furtive keenness. "Well, roll on Sunday, and Lionel's visit!" he said, to please Rachel and cover the exuberant pop of the cork.

"It's a bit early for that, isn't it Gerald?" said Rachel.

"For god's sake, Dad," said Toby again.

"He wants to let it breathe," said Nick with an anxious laugh.

Gerald looked at them all, and there was an odd charge of unhappiness, a family instinct, communicated, not quite understood. "I just feel like a fucking drink, OK?" he said, and went off to the end room with the bottle.

Just before lunch, in the shade of the awning, he was more cheerful, but also more freely in touch with his troubles. "The fucking Tippers!" he said, counting carelessly on his mother's deafness. "God knows what the consequences of this little episode will be-for the business, I mean."

"I'm sure you can do brilliantly without him," said Rachel. "You've been doing brilliantly without him so far."

"True," said Gerald. "True." He looked wryly along the table that he ruled. "I'm afraid they didn't fit in here, exactly, did they?"

"They didn't quite get the hang of it," said Rachel.

"Yah, why did they go?" said Jasper.

"Oh, who knows!" said Rachel. "Now, Judy, asparagus!"

Gerald snuffled and seemed to ponder the question, like some undecid-able conflict of loyalties, some inescapable regret. Nick couldn't help noticing that his own remarks were received very coolly that day, and sometimes he was ignored and talked over.

At the end of lunch Gerald took up his grievances again; it was clear that he was in the grip of his own schemes, and living only half attentively, after a bottle and a half of wine, in the chatter and family teasing at the table. There was something rehearsed and implausible in his tone. He went on about work, and the "important papers" he had to deal with. "You don't know what it's like," he said. "It may be vacation for you, it may be the recess for me, but actually the work simply doesn't let up. Well, you've seen the number of faxes coming through. And I'm terribly behind with the diary."

He waited, sighing but vigilant, till Rachel said, "Well, why don't you have some help?"

Gerald puffed and slumped, as if to say that was hardly possible; but then said, "I do rather wonder whether we won't have to send for Penny."

"Not Penny Dreadful," said Catherine. "Anyway, she can't go in the sun.

Rachel didn't contradict this, but gave her enabling shrug. "If you really need Penny, darling, by all means ask her out."

"Do you think…?"

"I mean, she's perfectly pleasant company. If she didn't mind…"

"Oh, she's not pleasant company," said Catherine. "She's a humourless white bug."

"Or what about Eileen?" said Toby. "I'm sure she'd come just like that. You know how she adores Dad!"

Gerald gave a short distracted laugh at this absurd alternative. Nick looked at him with a tense smile, an awful feeling of collusion. He'd said nothing, he'd dissimulated much more cleverly than Gerald himself: he felt that he'd been, all passively and peace-lovingly, the real enabler.

"Yes, I'm not so sure about Eileen," said Rachel.

"OK, then… " said Gerald, as though conceding to a general wish.

There was a complicated shame-in-triumph which perhaps only Nick could see. The party pushed back their chain, giving hazy thought to the matter of the afternoon, and Gerald went in to the phone room, with a look of tense reluctance, as if about to break bad news.

FOR THEIR TWENTY-FIFTH wedding anniversary, Lionel Kessler gave Gerald and Rachel two presents. The first came round in the morning, on the back seat of his Bentley, and the chauffeur himself brought the stout wooden box into the kitchen.

"Darling old Lionel," said Toby, before they knew what was in it.

"Silver, I expect," said Gerald, getting a screwdriver, and sounding both greedy and slightly bored.

Inside, held in a metal brace by foam-rubber collars, was a rococo silver ewer. The body of the thing was in the form of a shell, and the spout was supported by a bearded triton. "Goodness, Nick," said Gerald, so that Nick fell into his role as interpreter-he said he thought it might be by one of the Huguenot silversmiths working in London in the mid-eighteenth century, perhaps by Paul de Lamerie, since the greatest name was also the only one he could think of, and with Lionel anything seemed possible. "Marvellous," said Gerald: "a work of rare device." He looked in the box to see if there was a note, like the watering instructions that come with some worrying plant, but there wasn't. Nick explained that the tiny scene in relief, of Eros playing with the sword of justice, meant "Omnia Vincit Amor." "Ah, thoroughly apt," said Gerald, with shy pomp, putting his arm briefly round Rachel. He perhaps suspected that it was something Lionel had had knocking round at Hawkeswood anyway. Nick carried on smiling at it, half-conscious of how his father would have stooped and turned it, holding it with a cloth; remembering their long-ago visits to Monksbury, where the silver had a brassy iridescent colour, since the servants were forbidden to clean it and scratch it. "We'll have to get that looked at for the insurance," said Gerald.

Toby and Catherine's present was also a bit of silver, a scollop-edged Georgian salver, on which they had had "Gerald and Rachel ~ 5 November 1986" engraved in a curly script. It couldn't help but look dull, and even vaguely satirical, beside the ewer, and Gerald gazed into it with a falsely modest expression, as though he was retiring, or had won a local golf tournament. "It's perfectly lovely," said Rachel. They both seemed gratified, but not excited, and clearly felt no one could actually want an object of this kind.

A little later they were having a glass of champagne when Nick looked down from the drawing-room window and saw the Bentley pulling up a second time. Now it was Lionel himself who climbed out of it, and who carried across the pavement the small flat packing case. He glanced up and made a shooshing sign, half frown, half kiss. Nick, his champagne working nicely with a first short line of charlie, smiled secretly back. The subtle bachelor sympathy between himself and the little bald peer brought a tear to the corner of his eye-he felt quite silly for a moment at being so "in love" with the family, and with this member of it in particular. A minute later Lionel was shown into the room amid groans of gratitude. He kissed his sister and her children, and shook hands with Gerald and Nick, who felt for the fervour in his briskness. The ewer was on the mantelpiece, crowded today with white lilies and white mop-headed chrysanths. "Well, you had to have silver," Lionel said, "but I wanted you to have this as well. It came up in Paris last week, and since we're all feeling a little light-headed…" Something called the Big Bang had just happened, Nick didn't fully understand what it meant, but everyone with money seemed highly exhilarated, and he had a suspicion he was going to benefit from it too. Here was Lord Kessler, with a box under his arm, to give it his own superior licence.