The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [130]
When they turned in, unbelievably early, the high summer twilight still beautiful outside, Nick called out, "Sleep well!" and closed his door with a bewildering sense of loss, as though Gerald and Rachel were really his parents, and not the undeviating old pair in their twin beds in the next room. Later he heard his father snoring through the wall, and the creak of his mother's bed—he pictured her pulling the blankets over her ears. Rachel had once admitted to Nick that Gerald snored too, though she'd done it in the way she sometimes pretended to a disadvantage, from polite awareness of her own good fortune ("I know, we can never get into Tante Claire"): "He can make a bit of a rumpus," she'd said. Nick drew and resisted various conclusions from what he had seen; he was greedy and then reluctant for unpleasant sensations. He thought perhaps he was being a bit of a prig. He thought of Gerald's regular visits to Barwick with Penny, almost always without Rachel. It was a system, a secret so routine it must have come to seem secure. And the steady disguise, of course, of the "loathing" for Barwick, the chore of the surgery, the boredom of meetings with Archie Manning . . . And what about in London? Presumably they couldn't do it there, the risk of detection would be too great. Or didn't much actually go on? Could Penny possibly be the sort of girl for all that? There might be some other excuse for the glimpse he had had in the hotel. Impossible to think of one. He wondered if Gerald was snoring now, and the image of what he probably was doing rose alarmingly in Nick's sex-picturing mind. Or if he was snoring, then it seemed to his partner like a bearable penalty of an illicit affair . . . Nick stopped and drew back with distaste for his own imagining of the thing. A little later he woke and the house was silent again, and the shock of what was happening came over him, his grown-up scorn of its utter banality and his child's ache of despair. He saw it had already become a secret of his own, a thing to carry unwillingly, a sour confusion of duties. He lay awake listening to the silence, which was illusory, a cover to a register of other sounds. . . the sigh of a grey poplar, the late half-conscious toppings-up of the cistern overhead, and within his ears remote soft percussions, like doors closing in non-existent wings of the house.
11
(i)
Toby said, "You get a glimpse of the chateau on your left," and he slowed down as a gap in the trees appeared. They saw steep slate roofs, purple-black brick, plate glass, the special nineteenth-century hardness.
"Right . . ." said Wani. "But you don't have that any longer?"
"My grandfather sold it after the war," said Toby.
"So who lives there now?" said Nick, whose heart was always caught by a lodge-house on a side road or a pinnacle among trees, and by Gothic Revival more than Gothic itself. "Can we go in?"
"It's a retirement home for old gendarmes," Toby said. "I have been in—it's pretty depressing"; and he pushed on along the potholed lane.
"Oh," said Nick doubtfully.
"They don't give you any trouble?" Wani wanted to know.
"They can get a bit rowdy," Toby said. "Once or twice we've had to call the police"—and he looked in the mirror to see if Nick smiled at his joke. Oh, Toby's jokes!—they made Nick want to scrunch him up in a protesting hug.
"So the house we're going to . . . ?" said Wani.
"The manoir . . . was the original big house on the estate. It's jolly old, sort of sixteenth century I think—well, you'll see. It's not as big as the chateau, but it's much nicer. At least we all think so."
"Pdght . . . " Wani drawled again, with a slight suggestion that he might have preferred the larger house, but was ready to muck in at the manoir. "And this still belongs to Lionel?"
"Strictly speaking, yah," said Toby.
Wani gazed out of the window as though he knew the value of everything. "And so one day, old chap, it will all belong to you," he said, with a mixture of rivalry and satisfaction.
"Well, me and my sis, of course." This occupied a future that Nick