The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [139]
The morning post brought several thick packets of papers for Gerald and he took them off to the end room, sighing petulantly. It was clear that without Penny he felt he couldn't tackle work, and clear too, presumably, that he couldn't invite Penny here. He had taken over the end room as an office; Nick wasn't sure what he did in it, but he always emerged with a watchful smile, even tiptoeing a little, like someone about to break a piece of news. The Penny question weighed on Nick, and then appeared so remote and unsubstantiated that he might have imagined it. Gerald was being thoroughly affectionate to Rachel, and when they lay side by side in the sun they seemed soaked in their own intimate history, as well as disconcertingly sexy and young. Even so there was something difficult and self-indulgent about Gerald, as if the holiday was both a licence and a penance.
Nick wandered off to explore the hidden corners of the little estate. He found the morning, and the freedom to use it, weighed rather heavily on him now Wani had gone. He went down the crumbling steps from terrace to terrace, like a descent into his own melancholy. The lower levels dropped more steeply, they were hidden from the house and had a neglected air: the parched stony soil showed through the thin grass. Clearly Dede and his son hardly bothered with these bits—perhaps it was only guests, in their appreciative aimlessness, who ever climbed down here. There was a look of disused agricultural terraces as much as garden; a distant whine of farm machinery, and the scurry of lizards running over dead leaves. On each level there were walnut trees thick with half-hidden green fruit. Nick went through a gap in a hedge and found some old stone sheds, a grassy woodpile, a rusty tractor. He was doing what he always did, poking and memorizing, possessing the place by knowing it better than his hosts. If Rachel had said, "If only we still had that pogo stick!" Nick could have cried, like a painfully eager child, "But we do, it's in the old shed with the broken butter churn and the prize rosettes for onions nailed to the beams." It struck him that a sign of real possession was a sort of negligence, was to have an old wood-yard you'd virtually forgotten about.
He fetched his book and went down to the pool. The heat was climbing and a high-up lid of thin cloud had soon expired into the blue. Jasper and Catherine were already in the water, and Jasper looked pleased to be discovered struggling with her, almost fucking her; he winked at Nick as he went into the pool-house to change. The wink seemed to follow him in. There was a bare suggestive atmosphere in the pool-house, which always felt cool and secret after the dazzle of the pool-side, and seemed to carry some coded memory or promise of a meeting. Nick would have had Wani there last night if Gerald hadn't been hanging, even snooping about. There was the first room, with a sink and a fridge and bright plastic pool toys, lilos and rings, an old rowing machine standing on end; and the changing room beyond, with a slatted bench and clothes hooks, and the shower opening straight off it, behind a blue curtain. Only the rather smelly lavatory had a door that could be locked.
Nick came out in his new little Speedos and walked along the pool's edge. The water was the clear bright answer to the morning, a mesmerizing play of light and depth. A few dead leaves were floating on it, and others had sunk and patched the blue concrete bottom. Dragonflies paid darting visits. He crouched and stirred the surface with his hand. On the far side Jasper had lifted Catherine up to sit on the tiled shelf, with the water lapping between her legs, and him hanging on to her, looking as if he'd like to do the same. She made some quick remark about Nick's being there, and then called, "Hello, darling!" Jasper turned and floated free and gave Nick his sure-fire smile, said nothing, but lazily trod water and kept looking at him. He had a tiny repertoire, a starter kit, of seducer's tricks, and got obvious satisfaction from deploying