The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [132]
"Don't worry," said Toby, "she's coming on Tuesday. And the Tippers are coming too, I'm sorry about that."
"That's fine," said Wani.
"It's bloody good to have you guys here," Toby said, and looked affectionately for Nick again in the mirror.
"It's fabulous to be here," said Nick, with just a shiver, as they turned ill between urn-crowned gate-piers, of the old feeling, from the first day at Oxford, the first morning at Kensington Park Gardens, of innocence and longing.
A three-sided courtyard was made by the sombre entrance front of the house, creeper-covered and small-windowed, a lower wing to the left, and an old barn and stable on the right. The house itself hid the view, and it was only through the open front door and the shadowy hallway that Nick caught a hint of the dazzle beyond, a further small doorway of light. He picked his bags out from the car, and watched Wani gesturing belatedly as Toby plucked up his cases and strode indoors with them, his sandalled feet thwacking on the stone flags and his calf muscles square and brown. He seemed to tread there for a moment, framed and silhouetted, as he had at the Worcester lodge, all those years ago, in the archway that led from the outside world to the inner garden: Toby, who was born to use the gateway, the loggia, the stairs without looking at them or thinking about them. And something else came back, from that later first morning at Kensington Park Gardens: a sense that the house was not only an enhancement of Toby's interest but a compensation for his lack of it.
From the hall they caught a glimpse through a series of rooms curtained against the steep sunlight, but stabbed across by it here and there. There were china bowls, oak tables, books and newspapers, straw hats, the remotely threatening mood of holiday routines, of other people's leisure, of games to be inducted into, things the Feddens had already said and done lingering in the shadows among the squashy old armchairs. The rooms were tall, deep-raftered, stone-walled, so that you would have a sense of living in the depths of them, like rooms in a castle or an old school. But for now they were deserted, the party were all elsewhere.
Toby led them on up the wide shallow stairs. On the upper floor an ochre-tiled passageway ran the length of the house, with bedrooms opening off it like prettily appointed cells. Nick and Wani were at the far end. "Mum's put you in opposite rooms," said Toby, "so I hope you're not fed up with each other." Wani raised his eyebrows, puffed and shrugged like a Frenchman: they did their double act. It was hard for a moment to believe this wasn't the usual discreet arrangement for an unmarried couple, that Toby wasn't in on the secret, hadn't the first suspicion. Nick was used to deceiving adults but he felt sad about tricking Toby. He saw the wound it would be to his childish good nature if he found out. But Wani presumably was hardened against such anxieties. Nick looked at him, and had a brief cold intuition of their different shades of relief about the rooms—his own that they were close, and Wani's that they were apart. Wani was on the front, and Nick, as family perhaps, had the smaller, darker room looking out at the end of the house into the branches of an ancient plane tree. "Fantastic!" he said. He got on with unpacking, and hung up the suits he had brought—always wary of what rich people meant by "informal." His laundry had all been done by the hotel in Munich, and was rustlingly interleaved with tissue paper. He noticed that a tap in his bathroom dripped and was leaving a rusty stain. By the bed there was a bookcase with old French novels, left-behind Frederick Forsyths, odd leather-bound volumes of history and memoirs with the coroneted Kessler bookplate. There was a pair of strange little paintings on glass in varnished pearwood frames. He took possession of the room, and talked himself out of a tiny sense of disappointment with it.
Toby was still chatting in Wani's doorway, his hands in his shorts pockets, the undeniable bulge above