The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [100]
"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.