The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [154]
"Hoorah!" said Nick, and grinned at her, while his mind raced round a series of right-angled bends.
"I thought he'd flushed it, but Gerald came snooping round, and we only escaped by a hare's breath."
"I'm surprised she knew what it was."
"It's too pathetic," said Catherine, who of course had missed last night's sex-education class. "We're all adults, for god's sake."
"I know . . ."
"You can't do it in the house, because the noise carries."
"That can be a problem."
"Actually, god, fuck, that's really weird . . . !" Catherine stared at him in excited self-doubt, whilst Nick felt his disguise grow eerily thinner. He smiled, not knowing if he'd been recognized, or if, by sitting still, he could avoid detection. "Because I'm sure we didn't use one yesterday."
"You must always use a rubber," said Nick. "There's no point in sometimes using one and sometimes not. You don't know where he's been."
"Oh, Nick, he's a total innocent. He's never been with anyone else."
"No, well . . ."
Catherine gaped. "So if it wasn't us."
"It might have been there from the day before, I suppose," said Nick, with doomed insouciance, watching Catherine as she went on an Agatha Christie-like tour of the possible and frankly impossible suspects. He thought that perhaps like Poirot she had known the answer before she came into the room; but when she stood up, walked to the window, and turned he saw the shock, the disgust even, of discovery in her face.
"God, I've been stupid," she said.
Nick looked at her, and she looked at him. He felt the painful stupidity of detection himself, and also a kind of pride, lurking still, waiting for permission to smile. She couldn't deny the scale and class of the deception. He thought he saw her quick recovery, her feel for anything salacious. He said, "Perhaps he is rather brilliant, yes."
Catherine came and sat down again, as dignified as she could be. "I don't think he's brilliant any more," she said.
Nick said carefully, "You mean he was brilliant when you thought he was tricking me, but not when it turns out he's tricking you." He felt, without time to work it out, that there could be a brilliance of concealment, over something simple and even sordid; and there could be a simple, dumb concealment of something glitteringly unexpected. Caught up in it, inured to it, he didn't know which was more nearly the case with himself and Wani. "Of course, it's all for him," he said.
"I mean how can he bear it?"
"The secrecy, you mean? Or me?"
"Ha, ha."
"Well, the secrecy . . . " Often in life Nick felt he hadn't mastered the arguments, and could hardly present his own case, let alone someone else's; but on this particular matter he was watertight, if only from the regular need to convince himself. He checked off the points on his fingers: "He's a millionaire, he's Lebanese, he's the only child, he's engaged to be married, his father's a psychopath."
"I mean how did it start?" said Catherine, finding these points either too obvious or too involved to take up. "How long's it been going on? I mean—god, really, Nick!"
"Ooh, about six months."
"Six months!"—and again Nick couldn't tell if this was too long or not long enough. She stared at him. "I'm going to write that poor long-suffering French girl a letter!"
"You're to do nothing of the kind. A year from now that poor French girl will be blissfully married."
"To a Lebanese poofter with a psychopath for a father . . ."
"No, darling, to a very beautiful and very rich young man, who will make her very happy and give her lots of beautiful rich children." It was a tiringly ample prospect.
"And what about you?"
"Oh, I'll be all right."
"You're not going to carry on bumshoving him when he's married to the poor little French girl, I hope?"
"Of course not," said Nick, with a glassy smile at the one thing he didn't want to think about. "No—I shall move on!"
Catherine shook her head at him, she had the moral she wanted: "God, men!" she said. Nick laughed uneasily, as an object of both sympathy and attack.
"But really, swear not to say a word to