The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [105]
"I'm telling you, I'm moving up here, too fucking right I am," said Ronnie, in his protesting murmur.
"Mm, you should," said Nick, unsure if he was humouring him or sharing a wry joke, but excited anyway at the thought of having him as a neighbour. He was sexy, Ronnie, in his haggard spectral way . . .
"Get away from that woman, I'm telling you"—he shook his head and laughed illusionlessly. "I hope you're not having woman trouble, do you, Rick?"
"Oh . . . no . . . I don't," said Nick. "Still bad, is it?"
"I'm telling you," said Ronnie.
Nick could see that Ronnie might be a bit of a handful, and that his line of work might make a certain kind of girl uneasy. He wanted to lean over and get out his probably long and beautiful penis and give him the consolation that a man so perfectly understands—right here, in the car, in the dappled shade across the windscreen. But Ronnie had to get on—he offered his hand, coming down at an angle from a high raised elbow.
Nick got out of the car and turned to walk the two hundred yards to the house. In the street the sense of danger squeezed about him again, and the people who passed him as they came home from work frowned and sneered as they saw that he held a tiny parcel, a crass mistake, a heavy sentence, gripped tight in his hand in his pocket, ready, at the dreaded moment, to be flung down a drain. But when he turned up the steps and looked to left and right he had a gathering rapturous feeling he had got away with it. Of course nobody knew, it was totally safe, nobody had seen, it was nothing but an unknown car that slipped past the end of the street in a second. And now a flood of pleasure was waiting to be released. He rushed through the hall, up the stone stairs, there were voices already in the drawing room, the moan and yap of the first guests' opening platitudes, up and up, up the familiar creaking attic stairs, and into his hot still room that was waiting for him with birdsong through the window and the bed reflected in the wardrobe mirror. He closed the door, locked the door, and over a smiling five minutes changed his shirt, put in cufflinks, tied a tie and pulled on his suit trousers, all intercut with tipping out, chopping and snorting a trial line of the new stuff, hiding the rest in his desk, unrolling the banknote and rolling it up backwards, wiping the desk with his finger and his finger on his gums. Then he shrugged on the jacket, tied his shoes, leapt downstairs and talked brilliantly to Sir Maurice Tipper about the test match.
Nick sat at the end of a row, like an usher. He could see out onto the first-floor landing, where little Nina Glaserova, with her long red hair in a braid down her back, was standing and staring, not into the room but at a clear point in the dark oak of the threshold. Her eyes seemed to work straight through it, into a space where Chopin, Schubert and Beethoven waited for justice to be done to them. She listened as Gerald told the story—father a notable dissident—imprisoned—travelling scholarship withheld—without seeming to recognize it as her own, or knowing of course that dissident wasn't generally a term of approval in Gerald's book; artistic freedom was unemphatically invoked, and there was a joke, which she didn't get, though it made her look up, into the room, at the rows of utterly unknown laughing people, people of great consequence perhaps, whom it was her mission to enthral. The clapping started, Nick gave her an encouraging nod, she paused for a second, then scuttled in through the audience, looking so much like a determined waif that a sigh of startled tenderness seemed to sound like an undertone of the applause. She gave a momentary bow, sat down and began immediately—it was almost funny as well as thrilling when the motorbike summons of the Chopin Scherzo rang out.
There were about fifty people in the room, a loose coalition of family, colleagues and friends. Nina Glaserova was an unknown quantity, and Gerald's claims for her were political as much as artistic. He hoped