The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [133]
"Yah, what was the name of the brothel we went to in Venice?" said Wani. He was unpacking too, though as coyly and delayingly as he had undressed that day at the Highgate Ponds.
"Oh, the ridotto?" said Nick. "Yes, it's this really exquisite little casino, I suppose it was a brothel, really. Tl ridotto della Procuratoressa Venier.' It's just behind San Marco."
"There you are," said Wani.
"It's been done up by the American branch of Venice in Peril. You ring the bell and the lady shows it to you."
"OK . . ." said Toby. "So it's not a functioning brothel . . ."
Wani said, "Anyone less like a madam than the lady from Venice in Peril it would be hard to imagine. I'm having a feature on the top brothels of the world in my first issue."
"Your advertisers will love that," said Toby.
"Don't you think?" said Wani. "Well, beautiful brothels." He looked at Nick, whose idea the feature had entirely been. "You know—risottos."
Toby said, "You should have taken me with you. You can't expect poor old Guest to go sniffing round tarts' parlours."
"No, you'd have been much more use," Wani said, and gave him a level grin, so that Nick was jealous for a second and went on to wonder—it had never been clear—if Wani fancied Toby. Well, it was possible, but unlikely, for some large social reason, which perhaps boiled down to the fact that Toby couldn't be bought.
"Drinks at six," Toby said. "But come and have a swim first. Everyone's outside"—and he slapped off down the echoing hallway.
Then Nick strode across Wani's room, pushed open the loosely coupled shutters, and had his first look at the view: of wooded spurs, dropping from either side like interlaced fingers, and beyond them one bright curve of the Dronne with a rocky bluff above it, bright too in the late afternoon sun. There was the glare of France in high summer, the colours simplified, dry and drab, but twitching with light, and the shadows baffling, like deep grey gauze. Down below, three or four stony terraces dropped away from the house, linked by stairways—it was hard from here to work them out. "Yeah, I'm going to change," said Wani.
"Good idea," said Nick, turning and smiling.
"Hmm. OK . . ."—with the frowning reluctance of a boy.
"Darling, I spent half last night with my tongue up your arse, I'm not going to be too shocked if you take your shirt off."
Wani gave a dry little laugh and arranged his various pairs of slippers and moccasins on the floor of the wardrobe. "It's what people might say," he muttered.
"What, because I'm gay, you mean?" Nick said, with a flash of the eyebrows. "Well, there's no one else in the house. And I'll just carry on looking out of the window . . . I'll crane out of the window": which he did, to see that directly below there was a white awning, covering, presumably, the table, the famous table evoked by Gerald—with apologies to Napoleon—as the first dining room of Europe. It was the table and the awning that made it their view—the one often referred to by Gerald as his own landscape, one of the few things, like the music of Strauss, on which he was all unembarrassed sensibility. Of course it wasn't quite what Nick had expected; again it took a minute for the reality to blot and erase the long-imagined, subtly finer view.
Beyond the awning, steps led down on the left through the shade of a sprawling fig tree towards a low-roofed further structure, which Nick thought must be the pool-house. And just then Catherine came up them, noiselessly barefoot, on tiptoe at the heat of the stones, a blue towel round her shoulders and her hair still wet. She looked very young, childlike, nipping across the terrace, peering about; and with a vague air of crisis to her, Nick felt, as if she'd been dressed like this in a London street.