The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [117]
Polly Tompkins had come out onto the balcony, perhaps jealous at seeing Nick with the boy he had squashed unavailingly earlier. Nick introduced them in a thinly amused tone which made no great claims for either of them. "I thought you were avoiding me," he said.
Jasper was waiting casually to see what the terms were, and if this big fat double-breasted man, who could have been anything between twenty-five and fifty, was part of the gay conspiracy or the straight one. Polly said, "You're such a social butterfly, I haven't been able to reach you with my net," and looked at Jasper as if to say he could find a use for him, if Nick couldn't.
Nick said, "Well, I was a social caterpillar for years."
Polly smiled and took out a packet of fags. "You seem to be very close with our friend Mr Ouradi. What were you talking to him about, I wonder?"
"Oh, you know . . . cinema . . . Beethoven . . . Henry James."
"Mmm . . . " Polly looked at the Silk Cut—a quitter's ten—but didn't open them. "Or Lord Ouradi, as I suppose we shall soon be saying."
Nick struggled to look unsurprised as he ran through all the reasons that Polly might be pulling his leg. He said, "I wouldn't be surprised—there's a sort of reverse social gravity these days, isn't there. People just plummet upstairs."
"I think Bertrand's rather more deserving than that," said Polly, successfully resisting and pocketing the cigarettes.
"Anyway, he's not British, is he?" Nick said airily, and rather proud of this objection. It was Polly, after all, who'd once called him a Levantine grocer.
"That's hardly an insuperable problem," said Polly with a quick pitying smile. "Well, we must be going. I just wanted to say goodbye. Morgan has an early start tomorrow. She has to fly up to Edinburgh."
"Well, my dear," said Nick, "one never sees you these days. I've given up keeping your place warm for you at the Shaftesbury"—a kindness, a bit of a sentimental gesture at the sort of friendship they had never actually had.
And Polly did a small but extraordinary thing: he looked at Nick and said, "Not that I remotely concur with what you've just said—about the peerage." He didn't flush or frown or grimace, but his long fat face seemed to harden in a fixative of threat and denial.
He went in, and Jasper followed him, turning to give Nick a curt little nod, in his own unconscious impression of Polly, so that the mannerism seemed to spread, a note of contempt that was a sign of allegiance.
10
THE SERVICE STAIRS were next to the main stairs, separated only by a wall, but what a difference there was between them: the narrow back stairs, dangerously unrailed, under the bleak gleam of a skylight, each step worn down to a steep hollow, turned tightly in a deep grey shaft; whereas the great main sweep, a miracle of cantilevers, dividing and joining again, was hung with the portraits of prince-bishops, and had ears of corn in its wrought-iron banisters that trembled to the tread. It was glory at last, an escalation of delight, from which small doors, flush with the panelling, moved by levers below the prince-bishops' high-heeled and rosetted shoes, gave access, at every turn, to the back stairs, and their treacherous gloom. How quickly, without noticing, one ran from one to the other, after the proud White Rabbit, a well-known Old Harrovian porn star with a sphincter that winked as bells rang, crowds murmured and pigeons flopped about the dormer window while Nick woke and turned in his own little room again, in the comfortable anticlimax of home.
On his back, in the curtained light, the inveterate habits of home took hold of him without a word . . . Wani, of course . . . yes, Wani . . . in the car . . . and