The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [134]
"Hello, darling!" Nick opened his arms to the view and then, with the sort of dumb camp she liked, pretended to throw flowers down at an adoring crowd. She beamed and raised her hands in noiseless applause.
"Come down at once!" she called.
"We're coming . . ."
Wani had put on his swimming trunks under his white linen trousers, and they showed as a provocative black shadow. Nick was a little exercised about the types of swimwear, and the different registers of poolside life. The knob-flaunting Speedos appropriate for an unsocial fifty lengths or a scientific hour of sunbathing might seem ill-judged for cocktails or ping-pong, when sexless bags might be preferred. But perhaps not; sun-worship was half the point of a home in France, and the Feddens might not feel, as Nick somehow did, that if the contours of his penis were visible, then the question of what he liked to do with it was at the forefront of everyone's mind.
Catherine kissed the two boys in very different ways: she butted her face against Wani's and brayed, "Hello!" and showed that she didn't really know him or expect much of him. She pulled Nick into the embrace of her towel, so that her thin body in its damp swimsuit pressed against him, and he wriggled away laughing as he hugged her. "Thank god you're here at last," she said.
"How are you, darling?"
"I'm fine. Gerald's having an affair, did you know?"
Nick blinked and recoiled offendedly, but then tried to keep smiling. "Gerald?" His whole image of the coming ten days was changing; he would have to find out who knew, and how much Catherine knew, of course. He felt horribly guilty himself for knowing, and doing nothing, and his main wish, in this first instant, was to clear himself. "You can't be serious," he said, postponing for a further second or two the really irreversible question, with whom?
"No, it's true. He's having an affair with Jasper."
Nick gasped. "Darling! How outrageous!"
"I know, it's a scandal."
"Has it been going on long?"
"The whole week. There's this hideous room called the fumoir and they go in there together and play chess and smoke cigars. Well, you'll see. No one else can bear to go in, so we don't know exactly what they get up to."
"Let's hope the press don't get to hear about it," Nick said, with a giddy feeling of reprieve mixed up with the real and re-awoken sense of risk.
"It's like being kissed by a lav."
"Oh . . . the cigars . . . ?"
"Incidentally," she said to Wani, "we're on septic here, so nothing funny down the bog."
"No . . . right . . . " said Wani, and chuckled and frowned. It was just comic brusqueness, an urge to ruffle this exquisite new arrival, and also clairvoyant, Nick felt, as though she knew that a closeted cokehead would always be in the WC. She led them down the stairs, under the wide leaves of the fig tree, and out onto the flagged surround of the swimming pool.
The pool occupied another long terrace, open to the south, so that the glitter of the water seemed to reach and hang against the distance. At the near end was the pool-house, a little cottage in itself, with shuttered windows and wet footprints going in and out at the door. Thick-cushioned loungers, turned towards the sun at different times, lay abandoned around the pool, but close by, under a huge red umbrella, Rachel was stretched out with her eyes closed, and the straps of her black swimsuit looped down over her upper arms. Her mouth was slightly open, she might have been asleep, or in the border-zone of voices where the sunned mind dallies with sleep for seconds at a time. She was more beautiful and vulnerable than Nick was