The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [124]
"I know . . . " said Gerald. He still looked a bit flushed from the effort, in need of a shower perhaps, hair smeared back, a bit barmy still with adrenalin. "It went to five rounds but I got him in the end. I won convincingly." Dot Guest glanced about the densely furnished room, gestured at one seat after another, and seemed to feel that the house was too small altogether for Gerald. He kicked against things, he was untamed, it was almost as if the pig had come barging in after him. He went to the window at the back and said, "What a charming view. You're virtually in the country here, aren't you."
Courteously, and very timidly, clearing a space on a side table, Dot murmured, "Yes . . . we are . . . as good as . . ." and then looked up gratefully as Don came in with gin-and-tonics on a silver tray. Gerald had entirely forgotten about the field.
"Well, what a day, who'd have thought it," he said: "welly-whanging: another string to my bow." And he flung himself down in Don's armchair as if he lived there, just to put them at their ease. "Thanks so much, Don"— reaching up for his drink. "I feel I've earned this."
"Where is the pig?" Nick's father said.
"Oh, I've given it to the hospital. One doesn't keep the prize, obviously, on these occasions. Good health!"
Nick watched them all take refuge in their first sip. He felt ashamed of the smallness of the drinks, and the way his father had made them in the kitchen and brought them in like a treat. His parents looked at Gerald proudly but nervously. They were so small and neat, almost childlike, and Gerald was so glowing and sprawling and larger than local life. Don was wearing a bright red bow tie. When he was little Nick had revered his father's bow ties, the conjuror's trick of their knotting, the aesthetic contrasts and implications of the different colours and patterns—he'd had keen favourites, and almost a horror of one or two, he had lived in the daily drama of those strips of paisley silk and spotted terylene, so superior to the kipper ties of other dads. But now he was made uneasy by the scarlet twist below the trim white beard; he thought his father looked a bit of a twit.
Dot said, "We're lucky you had time to come and see us. I know you must be terribly busy. And you're about to go away, aren't you?" It was one of her "professional" worries, all parts of the great worry of London itself, along with fainting Guardsmen and the tedium of being in The Mousetrap, as to how MPs coped with their massive workloads; it was something Nick had been asked to find out when he moved in. His conclusion, that Gerald didn't do the work at all, but relied on briefings by hard-working secretaries and assistants, was considered cynical and therefore untrue by his mother.
Gerald said, "Yes, we're off on Monday," and gave a great shrug of relief. Nick could see him, bored and suggestible, start brooding at once on the superior pleasures of the manoir.
"I wonder how you fit it all in," Dot said, "all the reading you must have to do. It worries me—Nick says I'm silly . . . You probably never sleep, do you, I don't see how you could! That's what they say about . . . the Lady, isn't it?"
Nick had inculcated his parents with Gerald's form the Lady, but was embarrassed to hear them use it in front of him. He seemed to take it as a tribute, however, both to her and to himself. "What, four hours a night?" he said, with an admiring chuckle. "Yes, but the PM's a phenomenon—terrifying energy! I'm a mere mortal, I need my beauty sleep, I'm not ashamed to say."
"She looks beautiful without any sleep, then," said Dot piously, and Don nodded his agreement, too shy, as yet, to ask the question that burned in them both: what was she like?
Gerald, knowing they wanted to ask that, showed he hadn't lost sight of the original question. "But you're right, of course." He took them into his confidence. "The paperwork can be quite overwhelming at times. I'm lucky in that I'm a fast reader. And I've got a memory like