The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [102]
"Amazing," said Nick. "It's kind of you to tell me a story you must know so well"—making his face specially solemn. He saw the bright orange fascia of the Notting Hill Food Hall, where Gerald himself sometimes popped round late at night with a basket and a bashful look as though everyone recognized him, shopping for pate and Swiss chocolates. And he saw the corner Mira Mart in Barwick, with its sadder produce in sloping racks, remote poor cousins of the Knightsbridge obelisks, and its dense stale smell of a low-ceilinged shop where everything is sold together. An orange, of course, topped by two green leaves, was an emblem of the chain. Then he looked at Wani, who was eating pickily (coke killed the appetite) and entirely without expression. His eyes were on his plate, or on the gleaming red veneer just beyond it; he might have been listening thoughtfully to his father, but Nick could tell he had slipped away into a world his father had never imagined. His submissiveness to Bertrand's tyranny was the price of his freedom. Uncle Emile, too, looked down, as if properly crushed by his brother-in-law's initiative and success; Nick himself quickly saw the charm of running off to Harrods with the ladies.
Then Bertrand actually said, "All this one day will be yours, my son."
"Ah, my poor boy!" Monique protested.
"I know, I know," said Bertrand, nettled, and then smirking rather awfully. "That day is doubtless a long way off. Let him have his magazines and his films. Let him learn his business."
Wani said, "Thank you, Papa," but his smile was for his mother, and his look, briefly and eloquently, as the smile faded, for Nick. He was at home with his father's manner, his uncontradicted bragging, but to let a friend in on the act showed a special confidence in the friend. Wani rarely blushed, or showed embarrassment of any kind, beyond the murmured self-chastisement with which he offered a seat to a lady or confessed his ignorance of some trivial thing. Nick absorbed his glance, and the secret warmth of what it acknowledged.
"No, no," said Bertrand, with a quick tuck of the chin as if he'd been unfairly criticized, "Wani is in all things his own master. At the moment fruit and veggies don't seem to interest him. Fine." He spread his hands. "Just as getting married to his bloody lovely bride doesn't seem to interest him. But we sit back, and we wait on the fullness of time. Eh, Wani?" And he laughed by himself at his own frankness, as though to soften its effect, but in fact acknowledging and heightening it.
"We're going to make a lot of money first," Wani said. "You'll see."
Bertrand looked conspiratorially at Nick. "Now you know, Nick, the big simple thing about money? The really big thing—"
Nick placed his napkin gently on the table, and murmured, "I'm terribly sorry . . . I must just. . ."—pushing back his chair and wondering if this was even worse manners in Beirut than it was here.
"Eh . . . ? Ah, weak bloody bladder," said Bertrand, as if he'd expected it. "Just like my son." Nick was ready to take on any imputation that enabled him to leave the room; and Wani, with a bored, almost impatient look, got up too and said,
"I'll show you the way."
9
THE PIANO TUNER came in the morning, and then the pianist herself, little Nina Something-over as Gerald called her, came from two to five to practise: it was a wearing day. The tuner was a cardiganed sadist who tutted at the state of the piano and took a dim view in general of its tone, the tiny delay and bell-like bloom that were its special charm. ("Oh," said Rachel, "I know Liszt enjoyed playing it . . .") From time to time he would break off his pitiless ascent of the keyboard to dash out juicy chords and arpeggios, with the air of a frustrated concert pianist, which was even worse than the tuning. Little Nina, too, drove them mad with her fragments of Chopin and Schubert, which went on long enough to catch and lull the heart before they dropped it again, over and over. She had a lot of temperament and a terrifying left hand. She played the beginning of Chopin's