The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [125]
"Ah," said Dot, and nodded slowly. "And how is your daughter?" She was being attentive and courteous, and Nick saw that she would run through things that troubled her, and hope to get a better answer out of Gerald than she could out of him. "I know you've been worried about her, haven't you?"
"Oh, she's fine," said Gerald breezily; and then seeing some use in the idea of being worried, "She's had her ups and downs, hasn't she, Nick—the old Puss? It's not easy being her. But you know, this thing called librium that she's on has been an absolute godsend. Sort of wonder drug . . ."
"Mm . . . lithium," said Nick.
"Oh yes . . . ?" said Dot, looking uneasily from one to the other.
"She's just a much happier young pussycat. I think we've turned the corner."
Nick said, "She's doing some great work now, at St Martin's."
"Yes, she's doing marvellous collages and things," said Gerald.
"Ah, modern art, no doubt," said Don, with a dreary ironic look at Nick.
"Don't pretend to be a philistine, Dad," said Nick, and saw him unable to separate the praise from the reproach; the French pronunciation of philistine didn't help.
"It seems to work for her, anyway," said Gerald, who liked the therapeutic excuse for Catherine's large abstract efforts. "And she's got a super boyfriend, that we're all very happy about. Because we haven't always had good luck on that front."
"Oh . . . " said Dot, and looked down at her drink as if to say that neither, indeed, had they.
"Mm, we're jolly proud of her, in fact," said Gerald grandly, so that he seemed slightly ashamed. "And we're all going to be together in France this year, which Rachel and I are delighted about. First time for some years. And Nick too, as you know, will be joining us . . . at least for a bit . . . long overdue . . ." and Gerald guzzled the rest of his gin-and-tonic.
"Oh," said Dot, "you didn't say, dear."
"Oh, yes," said Nick. "Well, I'm going with Wani Ouradi, you know, who I'm working with on this magazine—we're going to Italy and Germany to look at things for that, and then we hope to drop in at . . . the manoir, for a few days on the way back."
"That'll be a wonderful experience for you, old boy," Don said. And Nick thought, really the poor old things, they do as well as they can; but for a minute he almost blamed them for not knowing he was going to Europe with Wani, and for making him tell them a plan so heavy with hidden meaning. It wasn't their fault that they didn't know—Nick couldn't tell them things, and so everything he said and did took on the nature of a surprise, big or little but somehow never wholly benign, since they were aftershocks of the original surprise, that he was, as his mother said, a whatsit.
"Because you normally have Nick to look after the house for you, don't you," she said. "When you're away." She clung to this fact, as a proof of his trustworthiness to important others, who apparently didn't care about his being a whatsit one way or the other.
"Poor old Nick, he has got rather landed with that in the past. This year we'll have our housekeeper and her daughter move in, and they can do a massive clean-up of the house without us getting under their feet. It makes a bit of a holiday for them." Gerald gestured liberally with his empty glass.
"That sounds like the sort of holiday I'm used to!" said Dot, who longed for the spoiling of a hotel, but was subjected to her sister-in-law's cottage at Holkham each September.
Don brought Gerald a refill, and had a tiny one himself; they tended not to go at quite that pace. He said, "He's a good chap, is he, this Ouradi?"
"You haven't met him . . . no . . . Oh, he's a charmer, absolutely. My son Tobias and he were great friends at Oxford—well, you all were, weren't you, Nick."
"I didn't get to know him well until a bit later," Nick said carefully, remembering the bathroom of the Flintshires' Mayfair house, the way the coke numbed their lips as they kissed. It gave him a tingle now, the thought of