The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [161]
A little later they were having a glass of champagne when Nick looked down from the drawing-room window and saw the Bentley pulling up a second time. Now it was Lionel himself who climbed out of it, and who carried across the pavement the small flat packing case. He glanced up and made a shooshing sign, half frown, half kiss. Nick, his champagne working nicely with a first short line of charlie, smiled secretly back. The subtle bachelor sympathy between himself and the little bald peer brought a tear to the corner of his eye—he felt quite silly for a moment at being so "in love" with the family, and with this member of it in particular. A minute later Lionel was shown into the room amid groans of gratitude. He kissed his sister and her children, and shook hands with Gerald and Nick, who felt for the fervour in his briskness. The ewer was on the mantelpiece, crowded today with white lilies and white mop-headed chrysanths. "Well, you had to have silver," Lionel said, "but I wanted you to have this as well. It came up in Paris last week, and since we're all feeling a little light-headed . . ." Something called the Big Bang had just happened, Nick didn't fully understand what it meant, but everyone with money seemed highly exhilarated, and he had a suspicion he was going to benefit from it too. Here was Lord Kessler, with a box under his arm, to give it his own superior licence.
It was Rachel who took and opened the box, with Nick standing by as if it was his present, as if he was giving it and perhaps also receiving it—he felt generous and possessive all at once. He kept himself from exclaiming when she lifted out a small oil painting. He determinedly said nothing. "My dear . . . " said Rachel, fascinated, hesitant, but controlled, as though to be surprised would be to have some vulgar advantage taken of her. She held it up, so that everyone could see it. "It's perfectly lovely," she said.
"Mm . . . " said Lionel, with the canny little smile of someone who has made a good decision.
Gerald said, "You're too kind, really . . . " and stared earnestly at the picture, hoping someone would say what it was. It was a landscape, about nine inches wide by twelve high, painted entirely in vertical dabs of a fine brush, so that the birch trees and meadow seemed to quiver in the breeze and warmth of a spring morning. A black-and-white cow lay under a bank at the front; a white-shawled woman talked to a brown-hatted man on the path in the near distance. It was in a plain dull-gilt frame.
"Hah, jolly nice," said Toby.
Catherine, looking comically from side to side as though detecting a trick, said, "It's a Gauguin, isn't it," and Nick, who after all couldn't bear not to say, said, "It's a Gauguin" at the same time.
"It's a nice one, isn't it," said Lionel, "he Matin aux Champs—it's a study, or a little version, of the picture in Brussels. I snatched it from the teeth of the head of Sony. Actually, I think it was a bit small for him. Not quite the ideally expensive picture"—and he chuckled with Nick as if they both knew just what to expect from the head of Sony.
"Really . . . Lionel . . . " Gerald was saying, shaking his head slowly and blinking to disguise his calculations as another kind of wonder. "That and the silver . . . um . . ."
Catherine shook her head too, and said, "God . . . !" in simultaneous glee and scorn of her rich family.
The picture was handed round, and they each smiled and sighed, and turned it to the light, and passed it on with a little shudder, as if they'd been oblivious for a moment, in the spell of sheer physical possession. "Where on earth shall we put it?" said Gerald, when it came back to him; Nick laughed to cover his graceless tone.
Just then the front door slammed and Rachel went to look over the banisters; it was a day of incessant arrivals. "Oh, come up, dear," she said. "It's Penny."
"Ah, she can give us her thoughts about the picture," said Gerald, as if from a view of her general usefulness. He got rid of the picture by propping it against