The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [175]
"Oh yes, what's that?" said Toby.
"Indifference," said Gerald, almost inaudibly.
" Right . . . " said Toby; and then, with a certain canny persistence, "But I thought she was climbing up the wall."
"Climbing up the wall, nonsense."
"It's like the adverb game," said Catherine. "Task: Climb up the wall. Manner: Indifferently." At which Gerald went off with a pitying smile to correct his diary.
At the office Nick looked through the mail and dictated a couple of letters to Melanie. In Wani's absence he'd grown fond of dictating, and found himself able to improvise long supple sentences rich in suggestion and syntactic shock, rather as the older Henry James, pacing and declaiming to a typist, had produced his most difficult novels. Melanie, who was used to Wani's costive memos, and even to dressing up the gist of a letter in her own words, stuck out her tongue with concentration as she took down Nick's old-fashioned periods and perplexing semicolons. Today he was answering a couple of rich American queens who had a film-production company perhaps as fanciful, as nominal, as Ogee was, and who were showing interest in the Spoils of Poynton project—though with certain strong reservations about the plot. They felt that it needed an injection of sex—smooching and action as Lord Ouradi had put it. The queens themselves sounded rather like porn actors, being called Treat Rush and Brad Craft. "Dear Treat and Brad," Nick began: "It was with no small interest that we read your newest proposals comma with their comma to us comma so very open brackets indeed comma so startlingly close brackets novel vision of the open quotes sex-life close quotes of italics capital S Spoils semicolon—"
A small commotion at the door, Simon looking up, going over, Melanie setting down her pad. A crop-headed black girl, like a busty little boy, and a skinny white woman with her . . . it was usually a mistake, or they were market kids trotting round cheap Walkmans, cheap CDs. No one much, sad to say, arrived by design at the Ogee office. Melanie came back. "Oh, Nick, it's a, um, Rosemary Charles to see you. Sorry . . . " Melanie twitched with her own snobbery, part apology, part reproach—she stood in the way, box-shouldered, high-heeled, so that Nick leant back in his chair to look round her, down the length of the office, and with a view of the two words Rosemary Charles bobbing on the air, weightless signifiers, that took on, over several strange seconds, their own darkness and gravity. He stood up and went towards her, her and the other woman, who seemed to be here as a witness of his confusion. It was a momentary vertigo, a railing withdrawn. He gave them a smile that was welcoming and showed a proper unfrivolous regard for the occasion, and well . . . he was afraid he knew why they'd come, more or less. He felt something like guilt showed in his pretence that he didn't. He grasped Rosemary's hand and looked at her with allowable pleasure and curiosity—she was still coming clear to him, from four years back, when she was pretty and fluffy and her eyes were sly: and now she was beautiful, revealed, the drizzle silvering the fuzz of her crown, her jaw forward in the tense half-smile of surprise that her brother had had when he'd called for Nick one morning, unannounced, and changed his life.
"Yes, hello," she said, with a hint of hostility, perhaps just the hard note of the resolve that had brought her here. Of course she was