The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [143]
"What?" snorted Gerald.
"Well, I'd rather have Strauss than Stravinsky myself, any day! I'm afraid to say!" said Lady Tipper. Sir Maurice looked at Nick, in the flush of his arcane triumph, with baffled distaste.
At dinner Gerald was already pretty drunk. He seemed to have had an idea of taking Maurice Tipper with him, and making their first night a rush of high spirits, followed next morning by the rueful bond of a shared hangover. But Sir Maurice drank as suspiciously as he did business, covering his glass with a dwindling flicker of amusement each time Gerald leant over his shoulder with the bottle. Gerald's face leaning into the candlelight had a glow of obstinate merriment. He sat down and summarized for the second time the division of the Perigord into areas called green, white, black and purple. "And we're in the white," said Maurice Tipper drily.
The talk came round, as it often did with the Feddens, to the Prime Minister. Nick saw Catherine clench in annoyance when her grandmother said, "She's put this country on its feet!"—clearly forgetting, in her fervour, which country she was now in. "She showed them in the Falklands, didn't she?"
"You mean she's a hideous old battleaxe," muttered Catherine.
"She's certainly a manxome foe," said Gerald. Sir Maurice looked blank. "One wouldn't want to be on the wrong side of her."
"Indeed," said Sir Maurice.
Wani somehow got people to look at him, and said, "People say that, but you know, I've always seen a very different side of her. An immensely kind woman . . ."; he let them see him searching a fund of heart-warming anecdote, but then said discreetly, "She takes such extraordinary pains to help those she . . . cares about."
Maurice Tipper expressed both respect and resentment in a dark throat-clearing, and Gerald said, "Of course you know her as a family friend," smiling resolutely as he conceded to Wani the thing, so clearly seen, that he hankered for himself.
"Well . . ." said Wani, "yes . . . !"
"I love her!" exclaimed Sally Tipper, hoping perhaps they would take love to include friendship, as well as surpassing it.
"I know," said Gerald. "It's those blue eyes. Don't you just want to swim in them—what?"
Sir Maurice didn't seem ready to go quite that far, and Rachel said, "Not everyone's as infatuated as my husband," lightly but meaningly.
Nick looked out over their heads at the vast night landscape, where the lights of farms and roads invisible by day shone in mysterious prominence. He said very little, holding on to the ignored romance of the place and the hour, the soft gusts in the trees, the stars that peeped in the grey above the silhouetted woods. It turned out to be Wani who saved the evening. He clearly admired Maurice Tipper, and tried to amuse him as well as impress him, neither an easy task. He had a significant lavatory break after the main course, and for the next half-hour supplied a sense of purpose and fun that the others had been groping for. Even Catherine was laughing at his farfetched imitation of Michael Foot, and Lady Partridge, who kept waking from brief sleeps with a cough and a furtive stare, laughed too.
In the morning, before it was too hot, the Tippers went down to the pool, she with a clutch of sunscreens and a huge hat, he with the new Dick Francis in one hand as a decoy for the briefcase in the other. It was the time when Nick liked to do his fifty lengths—at least he invented this tradition to focus his resentment of the newcomers. When he went down a bit later, Lady Partridge, a keen but almost unmoving swimmer, was halfway across the shallow end, apparently unaware that Sally Tipper, beside her in the water, was asking her about her hip replacement: she glanced at her from time to time with mild apprehension. Maurice Tipper had got a table and chair fixed up under an umbrella and sat in tight biscuit-coloured shorts reading and annotating a sheaf of faxes. His lips quivered