The Line of Beauty (35 page)

"Hello, darling!" Nick opened his arms to the view and then, with the sort of dumb camp she liked, pretended to throw flowers
down at an adoring crowd. She beamed and raised her hands in noiseless applause.

"Come down at once!" she called.

"We're coming . . ."

Wani had put on his swimming trunks under his white linen trousers, and they showed as a provocative black shadow. Nick was
a little exercised about the types of swimwear, and the different registers of poolside life. The knob-flaunting Speedos appropriate
for an unsocial fifty lengths or a scientific hour of sunbathing might seem ill-judged for cocktails or ping-pong, when sexless
bags might be preferred. But perhaps not; sun-worship was half the point of a home in France, and the Feddens might not feel,
as Nick somehow did, that if the contours of his penis were visible, then the question of what he liked to do with it was
at the forefront of everyone's mind.

Catherine kissed the two boys in very different ways: she butted her face against Wani's and brayed, "Hello!" and showed that
she didn't really know him or expect much of him. She pulled Nick into the embrace of her towel, so that her thin body in
its damp swimsuit pressed against him, and he wriggled away laughing as he hugged her. "Thank god you're here at last," she
said.

"How are you, darling?"

"I'm fine. Gerald's having an affair, did you know?"

Nick blinked and recoiled offendedly, but then tried to keep smiling. "Gerald?" His whole image of the coming ten days was
changing; he would have to find out who knew, and how much Catherine knew, of course. He felt horribly guilty himself for
knowing, and doing nothing, and his main wish, in this first instant, was to clear himself. "You can't be serious," he said,
postponing for a further second or two the really irreversible question, with whom?

"No, it's true. He's having an affair with Jasper."

Nick gasped. "Darling! How outrageous!"

"I know, it's a scandal."

"Has it been going on long?"

"The whole week. There's this hideous room called the
fumoir
and they go in there together and play chess and smoke cigars. Well, you'll see. No one else can bear to go in, so we don't
know exactly what they get up to."

"Let's hope the press don't get to hear about it," Nick said, with a giddy feeling of reprieve mixed up with the real and
re-awoken sense of risk.

"It's like being kissed by a lav."

"Oh . . . the cigars . . . ?"

"Incidentally," she said to Wani, "we're on septic here, so nothing funny down the bog."

"No . . . right . . . " said Wani, and chuckled and frowned. It was just comic brusqueness, an urge to ruffle this exquisite
new arrival, and also clairvoyant, Nick felt, as though she knew that a closeted cokehead would always be in the WC. She led
them down the stairs, under the wide leaves of the fig tree, and out onto the flagged surround of the swimming pool.

The pool occupied another long terrace, open to the south, so that the glitter of the water seemed to reach and hang against
the distance. At the near end was the pool-house, a little cottage in itself, with shuttered windows and wet footprints going
in and out at the door. Thick-cushioned loungers, turned towards the sun at different times, lay abandoned around the pool,
but close by, under a huge red umbrella, Rachel was stretched out with her eyes closed, and the straps of her black swimsuit
looped down over her upper arms. Her mouth was slightly open, she might have been asleep, or in the border-zone of voices
where the sunned mind dallies with sleep for seconds at a time. She was more beautiful and vulnerable than Nick was prepared
for; he had never seen her undressed—he thought it was a private view she might not want Wani to share. A few feet away, at
an angle, Gerald was lying, propped up, with the meltwater of a long drink in a beaker beside him, dark glasses on, head bent
over a book in his lap, but unambiguously asleep, since the pages of the book stood up in a quivering comb. Beyond them, Jasper
sprawled on his tummy on the blue-tiled ledge just below the surface of the pool, looking away at the view, and giving an
impression of adolescent boredom. He was wearing huge multi-coloured swimming-bags, and as he lazily kicked the water they
glistened and ballooned, deflated and clung, one buttock pink, the other lime-green. Nick saw Wani looking at him. Then Toby
came marching out of the pool-house, and Catherine, wanting to take the credit, shouted, "Here they are!" and woke them all
up. "You look such old wrecks lying there," she said, and cackled in the "mad" style that she now allowed herself. Gerald
started speaking at once, Rachel wriggled as she stretched and sat up, and the two boys bent down rivalrously to kiss her.
Jasper came sploshing across the pool. Nick hadn't seen them for a while, of course, and finding them here, in the nearly
naked torpor of their private world, he saw everything that was wonderful about them, and something else, like one of Catherine's
glittering intuitions, their unsuspecting readiness for pain.

At dinner under the awning Nick and Wani were given the second stage of their welcome, which was to be made to feel how dull
and plotless life had been without them, and how enjoyable it was going to be now they were here. They all revealed their
frustrations, and made bids on the new arrivals to do the things they had been wanting to do themselves. After a week of family
deadlock, of interlocking boredoms, there was going to be an outburst of activity, a high plateau of achievement. Wani politely
agreed to everything that was proposed, though he looked a bit queasy at Toby's plan to discover an underground lake. Gerald
said, "We really must do the Hautefort hike again, twenty kilometres, take all day if we need to." Jasper squeezed Nick's
knee under the table and said there was a little bar in Podier, which "a man of discrimination such as yourself should certainly
visit; and Catherine, perhaps satirically, said she'd always wanted to do some hang-gliding. Then she said she was going to
paint Nick's portrait, but everyone objected that it would take too much of his time. It was left to Rachel to say, with her
ironic quiver, that she hoped Nick and Wani would feel free to do nothing at all.

"No, of course," said Gerald insincerely. He was lazy, but he wasn't good at pure idleness, which he felt like a failure of
self-assertion. He was obviously finding his annual poolside trek through one of the fatter Trollopes an irksomely passive
exercise, though he said how splendid it was, and what great fun. "I think they might enjoy the hike," he said. "We haven't
done it since '83." He poured himself a full glass of wine, and passed the bottle along the candlelit table.

"How did you get on in Venice?" Rachel said. She was looking at Nick, but Nick passed the question to Wani with a steady look.

"Fascinating!" he said. "What a fascinating place."

"Iknow. . .isn't it fascinating, "said Rachel. "Had you never been before?"

"Do you know, I'd never been before." Wani, who barely knew Gerald and Rachel, had immediately absorbed their echoing and
affirmative style of chat.

"Where did you stay?"

"We stayed at the Gritti," said Wani, with a shrug and a wince, as if to say they'd taken the path of least resistance.

"Goodness . . . ! Well . . . !" Rachel said, in dazzled surrender to the magnificence of this, but somehow agreeing that they
could have made a subtler and more deeply informed choice.

"You must have stayed there yourself," said Wani.

Rachel shook her head. "I think perhaps once . . ."

"Mm, where was it we stayed, Puss?" said Gerald.

"I don't know," said Catherine. After her breakdown last year she had gone with her parents to Venice for a tense attempt
at recuperation, which she now claimed scarcely to remember.

"We had a marvellous time, I must say," said Gerald, with jovial shortness of memory.

"Yeah, amazing place," said Jasper, and smiled at him, with the candlelight in his eyes, as if recalling some intimate moment.

"Oh, when were you last there?" said Nick airily.

"Ooh, must be two . . . three years ago?" said Jasper, dropping his head and letting his forelock tumble.

"And where did
you
stay?" Wani asked, and watched for the answer as if himself imagining some intimacy—sweat-dampened sheets, discarded towels.
Jasper appeared to consider several possible answers, very quickly, before saying, "Some friends of ours have got a flat there,
actually, yah."

"Oh, well, you are lucky," said Rachel smoothly, leaving a doubt as to whether she believed him.

"Near San Marco?" said Nick.

"Not far from there," Jasper said, and made a business of passing the wine bottle back to Gerald, who emptied the last of
it and said,

"We loved the Caravaggios."

Nick said nothing, and couldn't decide if he wanted Wani to make a fool of himself. Wani was wary enough to say, "I'm not
sure. . . ." Rachel was blinking and saying, "No, darling, aren't the Caravaggios —" and Catherine said, "They're Carpaccios,"
and slapped her hand on the table.

Gerald gave a wounded smile and said, "You can remember those anyway."

Wani, never ruffled, almost sinisterly charming, said, "What made an enormous impression on me was the rococo architecture
in Munich."

This statement was left to resonate for a few moments, while they each forked over how to tackle it. Wani looked along the
table with an absence of self-irony that was very like his father's—and in the upward glow of the candles the deep sculpture
of his face was like his father's too. What touched Nick was partly his lover's conscienceless appropriation of anything useful
he said, and partly Wani's evident feeling that in France, on the terrace of a beautiful old house, among Nick's own "family,"
he could play the aesthete as confidently as Nick did at Lowndes Square. The actual history of their stays in both cities,
the coke, the sex, the "late starts," was their glamorous secret; the further story, of unseen treasures, wasted time and
money, the dull dawn of the truth that Wani was rather a philistine, was Nick's secret alone. He said, "Yes, you loved that
stuff, didn't you."

"You went to Munich, darling . . . " Rachel said to Gerald.

"Oh, yes," said Gerald, with the fond, embarrassed look he had when recalling his humbler pre-Rachel life. "Badger and I stopped
off at Munich, didn't we, on our famous drive to Greece. Badger would seem, on reflection, to have kept me away from that
city's more
rococo .
. . um . . ."

"There's one quite fabulous church," said Nick.

Toby, who had been quiet since they'd moved on from potholing, said, "What's the difference between baroque and rococo?"

"Oh," said Wani, smiling tolerantly at his old friend, "well, the baroque is more muscular, the rococo is lighter and more
decorative. And asymmetrical," he remembered, making a trailing gesture in the air with his left hand and batting his long
lashes so that Nick thought he had absorbed far more from him than his capsule guides to style—it was extraordinary that they
couldn't see at once what he was like. "The rococo is the final deliquescence of the baroque," he said, as if he really couldn't
be plainer.

"Mm, extraordinary stuff," said Gerald vaguely.

"Yuk," said Catherine, "I can't stand that kind of thing, it's all froth."

"Well, we'd hardly expect you to like it, old girl, if we like it ourselves," said Gerald.

"It's just make-believe for rich people," said Catherine. "It's like naughty lingerie."

"Right . . ." said Toby, as if slowly getting the picture, but he blushed too.

Wani, not wanting controversy, said, "It's really just a great subject for the magazine. Think luxury artwork!" And then,
"It was Nick's idea, actually."

"Ah well, now it all makes sense," said Toby.

"Oh, I hope it doesn't make that," said Nick, and they all laughed at his droll murmur and the hint of a paradox.

He lay in the dark, as the smell of the burning mosquito coil spread through the room. The night was very still, the doors
didn't quite reach the floor, and he could hear Wani moving about in his room across the landing. He wanted to be with him,
as he had been, more or less, for the past ten days, in the thoughtless luxury of top-class hotels; but he felt the relief
of being alone as well: the usual relief of a guest who has closed his door, and a deeper thing, the forgotten solitude which
measures and verifies the strength of an affair, and which, being temporary, is a kind of pleasure. He heard Wani switch off
his lamp, and his own darkness deepened a fraction, without the faint spill of his light under the door. He wondered if they
were sharing this sense of ghostly proximity, if Wani was lying with his eyes open, thinking of him, listening for him, masturbating
perhaps as Nick half consciously was—not even that, just a boyish solace and reflex of being alone, the blind friendship of
the hand . . . Or had he plumped his pillow, tussled his head and shoulder into it with a sigh, drawn up his legs in the defensive
position which made Nick want to curl in behind him and shelter him? It would be easy to go to him now, they both had wide
beds, but he could hear already the echo of the door latches in the long corridor like triggers to Wani's sense of danger.

When he woke an hour later out of a Venice dream he stared in a sort of panic at the grey square of the window and the unrecognized
mass of the chest of drawers. Then it came back to him, like going upstairs, the shocks and connections of the past twenty-four
hours. He felt horribly hot, and kicked off the sheet and drank the dimly visible glass of water. In the dream Wani was drowning:
he stood on the canal-side, knees bent in a tense crouch, looking back over his shoulder with an undecided but accusing expression,
then fell in with a dead splash.

It had been very hot all the trip, the hottest Nick had ever known; in Venice, for all its dazzlements, they had moved in
a heatwave stink of decay; in Munich, in the glaring avenues, the temperature reached a hundred and four. The heat put a strain
on them which they didn't acknowledge to each other. They went to the Asamkirche, which had Nick beaming and sighing with
delight; Wani strolled about with an air of provisional goodwill, as if waiting for an explanation. Nick longed to share the
beauty with him, to communicate with him through it, but Wani, out of shyness or pride, was lightly mocking of what Nick said.
You could really only tell Wani one useful thing at a time—too much information was an affront to his self-esteem. Nick stayed
on in the church, and the loneliness heightened his pleasure and his pride in his own responsiveness. At the Nymphenburg Palace,
among surging coachloads, the pleasure was harder won, but he felt he took in these marvels of the rococo by right—they might
have been make-believe for rich people when they were built, but now they were more than that, they were celebrations in and
of themselves.