The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [195]
Wani looked across and then almost closed his eyes in droll disdain. All his old habits were there, and the beat of his lashes brought back occasions in the past when Nick had basked in his selfishness. He reached beside the seat for his stick. "How are you getting back?"
"I think I'll walk," said Nick, unthinkingly fit. "I could do with some exercise."
Wani pulled back the handle and the door cracked open onto the cold blue afternoon.
"You know I love you very much, don't you," said Nick, not meaning it in the second before he said it, but moved by saying it into feeling it might still be true. It seemed a way of covering his ungraciousness about Wani's will, of showing he was groping for a sense of scale. Wani snuffled, looked across the road at his mother, but didn't echo Nick's words. He had never told him he loved him. But it seemed possible to Nick that he might mean it without saying it. He said,
"By the way, I should warn you that Gerald seems to be in a bit of trouble."
"Oh, really?" said Nick.
"I don't know exactly what's happened, but it's something to do with the Fedray takeover last year. A spot of creative accounting."
"Really? What, you mean the Maurice Tipper thing."
"I think you can be pretty sure Maurice has covered his back. And Gerald will probably be all right. But there may be a bit of a fuss."
"Goodness . . . " Nick thought of Rachel first of all, and then of Catherine, who for the past few weeks had been in a wildly excitable state. "How do you know about this?"
"I had a call from Sam Zeman earlier."
"Right," said Nick, slightly jealous. "I must give him a ring."
They got out of the car, and Nick dawdled across the road, finding it hard to go at Wani's pace. He kissed Monique and explained that Wani had brought up his lunch; she nodded, pursed her lips and swallowed in a funny mimetic reflex. She was dignified and withdrawn, but as she touched her son's upper arm the glow of a long-surrendered power over him came into her face, the animal solace of being allowed to love and protect him, even against such hopeless odds. Wani himself, with the women at each elbow, seemed to shrink into their keeping; the sustaining social malice of the past two hours abandoned him at the threshold. They forgot their manners, and the door was closed again without anyone saying goodbye.
16
NICK CROSSED KNIGHTSBRIDGE and went through Albert Gate into the Park. He swung his arms, and his calves and thighs ached with guilty vigour. There was so much to think about, and the Park itself seemed pensive, the chestnuts standing in pools of their shed leaves, the great planes, slower to change, still towering tan and gold; but all he wanted to do was march along. A group of young women on horseback came trotting down Rotten Row, and he crossed behind them, over the damp, crusted sand. He didn't mind the north-easterly breeze. It was the time of year when the atmosphere streamed with unexpected hints and memories, and a paradoxical sense of renewal. He thought of meeting Leo after work, always early, the chill of promise in the air. Once or twice they met at the bandstand, away over there, with the copper ogee roof: strange that that particular shape should have floated on its slender pillars above the quick kiss, quick touch, odd nervous avoidance of their meetings. He took the long diagonal that went past Watts's monument to, or of, Physical Energy: the huge-thighed horseman reining back and gazing, in a ferment of discovery, towards Kensington Palace. Nick gave it the smug glance which showed that as a critic he noticed it and as a Londoner he took it for granted.
He thought about the Clerkenwell building. What Wani had bought was three narrow Victorian properties making a corner block, one extending deep behind the others into a high iron-and-glass-roofed workshop. They were solidly built, of blackened brick which showed up plum red when they were knocked down. There were doorbells of moribund trades, a glass beveller, a "Church and