The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [131]
"So who's down here now?" asked Wani.
"Just us at the moment, I'm afraid," said Toby: "Ma and Pa, me and Catherine—oh, and Jasper."
"Oh, is that her little boyfriend . . ."
"Yeah, have you met him, he's an estate agent."
"I think I know who you mean," said Wani.
"Jasper and Pa seem to have become best friends. I think he'll have the house on the market by the time we leave."
Nick gave a snuffly laugh from the back seat, and thought what a terrible little operator Jasper was, oiling his way into the family with his forelock and his dodgy voice; and Wani too—how flawless he was, making his quick social reconnaissance, everything hidden from Toby, his old friend. He looked at the backs of their heads, Wani's black curls, Toby's cropped and sunburned nape, and felt for an eerie moment what strangers they were to him, and perhaps to each other. They were only boys, but the height and territorial presumption of the Range Rover threw them into relief as men of the world, Toby sporting and unimaginative, Wani languid, with the softness and vigilance of money about him. Perhaps being old friends didn't mean very much, they shared assumptions rather than lives.
Wani said, "Oh, I bought the Clerkenwell building by the way."
"Oh, you did," said Toby, "good."
"Four hundred K. I thought, really . . ."
"Yah . . ." said Toby, setting his face, looking bored. There was something stiff but acceptably adult to them both about this, about saying so little. Wani hadn't even mentioned the deal to Nick. It was typical of his secrecy, both grand and petty, since he had given Nick the five thousand: he made him feel how that sum was eclipsed by the unnamed sublimities of his own transactions.
Nick said, "Oh, that's great, I can't wait to see it." He found he tried to keep up, as if to show that he had money, for the first time in his life; but having some money, and sitting in a car behind Toby and Wani, only made him realize how little money he had—he felt self-conscious with them now in a way that he never had when he was penniless.
"So no chance of Martine joining us?" Toby said.
"I don't think my mother can spare her," said Wani, in a tone of imponderable irony.
"She'll have to one day," said Toby, and gave a big laugh.
"I know . . . " said Wani; "anyway, what about you, you fucker, are you seeing anyone?"
"Nah . . . " said Toby, with a sour grin of independence, and then gratefully, as if the joke could never fade, "Ah! Here's our wrinkled retainer." An old man was riding a bicycle towards them over the patchy road surface, his slowly rising and falling knees jutting out sideways—he stopped and tottered into the grass verge as Toby pulled up. "Bonjour, Dede . . . Et comment va Liliane aujourd'hui?"
The old man held on to the car and looked in at them cautiously and with a hint of cunning. "Pas bien," he said.
"Ah, je suis desole," said Toby—insincerely it seemed to Nick, but it was only the play-acting, the capable new persona that came with speaking in a foreign language. A longish conversation followed, Toby fluent but with little attempt at a French accent, a sense of heightened goodwill and simplicity between them, and the old man's laconic answers coming like stamps of authenticity to the new arrivals, trying to hear and follow what was being said. Wani of course was a native French-speaker, but for Nick there was a warm sense of success when he could make out Dede's words. Jokes understood in a foreign language became amusing in a further, exemplary way: he was storing them already as the coinage, the argot, of their ten-day visit. He sat back, smiling tolerantly, loving the heat and the sunlight through the huge old roadside oaks and chestnuts, and the sense of a prepared surprise, of being led through screened back ways towards a view. There was that tingle in the air that you got in even modestly mountainous country, the imminence of a drop, of space instead of mass.
Toby wound up the conversation, they all nodded solicitously at Dede, and the car crept on again. Nick said, "I hope your