The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [111]
Nick glanced out into the room to find Wani, who was sitting at a table with his mother and a middle-aged woman who looked quite prickly and confused under his long-lashed gaze. It was almost a decoy of Wani's to let his gaze rest emptily but seductively on a woman. He still hadn't spoken to Nick since his arrival; there had been a turn and a nod, a sigh, as if to say, "These crowds, these duties," when they were taking their seats. If it made him uneasy to see his lover and his father tete-a-tete he was too clever to show it. Bertrand said, "That son of mine, who's he flirting with now?"
Nick laughed easily and said, "Oh, I don't know. Some MP's wife, I expect."
"Flirting, flirting, that's all he bloody does!" said Bertrand, with a mocking flutter of his own eyelashes. Dapper and primped as he was, he became almost camp. Nick pictured the daily task of shaving above and below that line of moustache, the joy of the matutinal steel, and then the joy of the dressing room that was like a department of a shop. He said, "He may flirt, but you know he never really looks at another woman," and was thrilled by his own wickedness.
"I know, I know," said Bertrand, as though cross at being taken seriously, but also perhaps reassured. "So how's it going—at the office?"
"Oh fine, I think."
"You still got all those pretty boys there?"
"Um . . ."
"I don't know why he has to have all these bloody pretty poofy boys." "Well, I think they're very good at their jobs," Nick said, so horrified he sounded almost apologetic. "Simon Jones is an excellent graphic designer, and Howard Wasserstein is a brilliant script editor."
"So when does the bloody shooting start on the film?"
"Ah—you'd have to ask Wani that."
Bertrand popped a new potato into his mouth and said, "I already did—he never tells me nothing." He flapped his napkin. "What is the bloody film anyway?"
"Well, we're thinking about adapting The Spoils of Poynton, um . . ."
"Plenty of smooching, plenty of action," Bertrand said.
Nick smiled thinly and thought rapidly and discovered that these were two-elements entirely lacking from the novel. He said, "Wani's hoping to get James Stallard to be in it."
Bertrand gave him a wary look. "Another pretty boy?"
"Well, he's generally agreed to be very good-looking. He's one of the rising young stars."
"I read something about him . . ."
"Well, he recently got married to Sophie Tipper," Nick said. "Sir Maurice Tipper's daughter. It was in all the papers. Of course she used to go out with Toby—Gerald and Rachel's son." He produced all this hetero stuff like a distracting proof; he hoped he wouldn't normally be so cravenly reassuring.
Bertrand smiled as if nothing would surprise him. "I heard he let a big fish go-"
Nick blushed for some reason, and started talking about the magazine, with the brightness of a novice salesman, not yet committed and not yet cynical; he told him that he and Wani were going on a trip to research subjects for it—and that was the nearest he could get to stating the unspeakable fact of their affair. For a second he imagined telling Bertrand the truth, in all its mischievous beauty, imagined describing, like some praiseworthy business initiative, the skinhead rent boy they'd had in last week for a threesome. Just then he felt a kind of sadness—well, the shine went off things, as he'd known it would, his mood was petering into greyness, a grey restlessness. He felt condemned to this with Bertrand. It was just what had happened at Lowndes Square: the secret certainty faded after half an hour and gave way to a somehow enhanced state of doubt. The manageable joke of