The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [118]
met him on the stairs. . . who would have dreamt. . . dark green velvet. . . oh god, Wani in the flat . . . tied to the posts of the ogee bed . . .
It must be Mrs Creeley with his mother in the drive. They were talking about the car, Nick's little Mazda, "a nice little runaround" his father had called it, to minimize their evident anxiety as to how he had come by such a thing. NG 2485: Mrs Creeley was thrilled by the number plate, Mrs Guest perhaps not so sure. ("You must be doing very well, dear," she had said, in just the tone she would use to say "You don't look very well, dear.") Wood pigeons in the trees, in the thick spruces at the front, making their broody calls, reproachful, condoning—who knew? The two women moved away, in the slow trawl of gossip, over the gravel: talk about the sale of the field, syllables only, on the faint breeze through the open top window, overlaid by the pigeons, the talk beaded and chiming, rhythmic and nonsensical, the breeze lifting and dropping the curtain in one lazy breath, hushing the voices. The lie-in: time-honoured concession of school holidays, the rare weekend visits. His father would have gone to the shop—he might have woken to the familiar drag of garage door, thump of car door, and then wandered sideways again into staircase dreams. Mrs Creeley went, he didn't hear his mother come inside, she had probably got up in gardening trousers, an old blouse that didn't matter. They had Gerald descending tonight, and the house, inside and out, would be ready for an inspection . . . A little later came the leisurely clop of a horse, sounds as abstract and calming as other people's exertions on the tennis courts at home—at his other home. He wasn't sure, but he thought it was right that no horse had equal tone or resonance in all four hooves, as it distanced it made an odd sauntering impression, a syncopation, until lastly only one hoof continued faintly to be heard.
Out on the edge of town was where they were, where they'd carefully and long-sightedly chosen to be, on Cherry Tree Lane, decent post-war houses with plenty of garden, and only a view of fields at the back, and horses leaning in from time to time to chomp at the delphiniums and the weeping willow. And now the dreaded thing had happened, Sidney Hayes had bought next door, and thus at last got access from the lane to the field where he kept his horses, and got planning permission too, exceedingly quickly, five houses to the acre. Everyone had objected to the plans, and Nick had even been made embarrassingly to bring it up with Gerald, as their MP, who said of course he'd put a stop it, but quickly lost interest since no conditions had been breached, in fact rather the reverse, there was a property boom, home ownership was within the grasp of all, and even with the new development on top of them the value of "Linnells" was destined to soar. All this cast a muddling running shadow over Don and Dot Guest's lives. They were more comfortable than they'd ever been, business was better, and yet across their treasured view a long-held worry was about to materialize in bricks and slates.
Despite its long mute presence in his life Nick found it hard to care for the house, its pinkish walls and metal-framed windows; it lacked poetry. At Linnells, as Gerald had said of Hawkeswood, the contents were the thing: a ruck of furniture, crowded families of Staffordshire and Chelsea figures, three clocks ticking competitively in one room, where the real family