• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1087 0

prepared for; he had never seen her undressed—he thought it was a private view she might not want Wani to share. A few feet away, at an angle, Gerald was lying, propped up, with the meltwater of a long drink in a beaker beside him, dark glasses on, head bent over a book in his lap, but unambiguously asleep, since the pages of the book stood up in a quivering comb. Beyond them, Jasper sprawled on his tummy on the blue-tiled ledge just below the surface of the pool, looking away at the view, and giving an impression of adolescent boredom. He was wearing huge multi-coloured swimming-bags, and as he lazily kicked the water they glistened and ballooned, deflated and clung, one buttock pink, the other lime-green. Nick saw Wani looking at him. Then Toby came marching out of the pool-house, and Catherine, wanting to take the credit, shouted, "Here they are!" and woke them all up. "You look such old wrecks lying there," she said, and cackled in the "mad" style that she now allowed herself. Gerald started speaking at once, Rachel wriggled as she stretched and sat up, and the two boys bent down rivalrously to kiss her. Jasper came sploshing across the pool. Nick hadn't seen them for a while, of course, and finding them here, in the nearly naked torpor of their private world, he saw everything that was wonderful about them, and something else, like one of Catherine's glittering intuitions, their unsuspecting readiness for pain.

At dinner under the awning Nick and Wani were given the second stage of their welcome, which was to be made to feel how dull and plotless life had been without them, and how enjoyable it was going to be now they were here. They all revealed their frustrations, and made bids on the new arrivals to do the things they had been wanting to do themselves. After a week of family deadlock, of interlocking boredoms, there was going to be an outburst of activity, a high plateau of achievement. Wani politely agreed to everything that was proposed, though he looked a bit queasy at Toby's plan to discover an underground lake. Gerald said, "We really must do the Hautefort hike again, twenty kilometres, take all day if we need to." Jasper squeezed Nick's knee under the table and said there was a little bar in Podier, which "a man of discrimination such as yourself should certainly visit; and Catherine, perhaps satirically, said she'd always wanted to do some hang-gliding. Then she said she was going to paint Nick's portrait, but everyone objected that it would take too much of his time. It was left to Rachel to say, with her ironic quiver, that she hoped Nick and Wani would feel free to do nothing at all.

"No, of course," said Gerald insincerely. He was lazy, but he wasn't good at pure idleness, which he felt like a failure of self-assertion. He was obviously finding his annual poolside trek through one of the fatter Trollopes an irksomely passive exercise, though he said how splendid it was, and what great fun. "I think they might enjoy the hike," he said. "We haven't done it since '83." He poured himself a full glass of wine, and passed the bottle along the candlelit table.

"How did you get on in Venice?" Rachel said. She was looking at Nick, but Nick passed the question to Wani with a steady look.

"Fascinating!" he said. "What a fascinating place."

"Iknow. . .isn't it fascinating, "said Rachel. "Had you never been before?"

"Do you know, I'd never been before." Wani, who barely knew Gerald and Rachel, had immediately absorbed their echoing and affirmative style of chat.

"Where did you stay?"

"We stayed at the Gritti," said Wani, with a shrug and a wince, as if to say they'd taken the path of least resistance.

"Goodness . . . ! Well . . . !" Rachel said, in dazzled surrender to the magnificence of this, but somehow agreeing that they could have made a subtler and more deeply informed choice.

"You must have stayed there yourself," said Wani.

Rachel shook her head. "I think perhaps once . . ."

"Mm, where was it we stayed, Puss?" said Gerald.

"I don't know," said Catherine. After her breakdown last year she had gone