The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [191]
Nick said, "You know Wani's father's been made a lord," not sure whom he was pandering to.
"Oh wow," said Brad. "Does that mean you'll be a lord one day too?" There were several seconds of silence till Wani said, "It's not hereditary. What on earth are you drinking, by the way, Treat?"
"Don't ask . . . !" said Brad, eager with embarrassment.
"It's. . . what's he called? . . . Humphrey? Humphrey's latest invention. It's a Black Monday."
Wani gave his grin again, bright and sarcastic in effect. "That didn't take long," he said. Humphrey was Gusto's venerable barman, keeper (up to a point) of long tabs and starlets' secrets. "He trained on the Queen Mary. There's nothing he doesn't know about cocktails."
"Well it's, what is it? It's dark rum, and cherry brandy, and sambuca. And loads of lemon juice. It tastes like a really old-fashioned laxative," said Treat.
"I can't drink any more," said Wani, "but when I hear that, I don't mind."
There was a brief pause. Treat ran his finger along his fringe, and Brad sighed and said, "Yeah . . . I wanted to ask . . . " They both of them, nicely enough, seemed relieved the subject had been brought up.
Wani tucked in his chin. "Oh, a disaster," he said, frowning from one to the other. "Quite unbelievable. One of my bloody companies lost two-thirds of its value between lunchtime and teatime."
"Oh . . . oh, right," said Brad, and gave an awkward laugh. "Yeah, we had it real bad too."
"Fifty billion wiped off the London stock exchange in one day."
Treat looked at him levelly, to show he'd registered but wouldn't challenge this evasion, and said, "Hey, the Dow was down five hundred points."
"God, yes," said Wani, "well, it was all your fault."
Brad didn't argue, but said job losses on Wall Street were terrible.
"Oh, fuck that," said Wani. "Anyway, it bounces back. It has already. It always recovers. It always recovers."
"It's a worrying time for all of us," said Nick responsibly.
Wani gave a mocking look and said, "We'll all be absolutely fine." And after that it was impossible to approach him on the subject of his fatal illness. Nick saw it was perplexing for the Americans, who had met him as a man about to get married. Now natural concern was mixed with furtive thinking back.
During lunch Brad, like Wani, drank only water, and Nick and Treat shared a bottle of Chablis. Treat touched Nick's arm a lot, and involved him in quiet side-chats about what they might do later. Nick tried to keep general conversation going. Wani's presiding coolness made them all hesitate. He seemed to play with their anxiety about him. Brad and Treat asked questions, and marvelled at their luck in having Wani to answer them.
If Nick answered a question Wani listened to him and then gave a flat little codicil or correction. His technique was to hold a subject up and show his command of it, and then to throw it away in smiling contempt for their interest in it. He ate very little, and a sense of his disgust at the expensive food, and at himself for being unable to eat it, seeped into the conversation. He looked at the slivers of chicken and translucent courgettes as pitiful tokens of the world of pleasure, and clutched the table as though to resist a slow tug at the cloth that would sweep the whole vision away.
The question of the film was slow to come up, and Nick was shy to mention it, just because it was his own project. He'd spent months writing a script, and it was almost as if he'd written the book it was based on: all he wanted was praise. He often imagined watching the film, in the steep circle of the Curzon cinema—absorbing the grateful unanimous sigh of the audience at the exact enactment of what he'd written; in