The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [200]
"Turn it down a bit, darling . . . ?"
She did so, and tutted, "Uncle Nick!" Out from the speakers came the sinister little jumps that start Rachmaninov's Symphonic Dances. "There, you like that," she said.
"Up to a point," said Nick, knowing how much he didn't want to hear it.
"Oh, it's wonderful," she said, staring from the stage at an invisible dress circle and raising her arms. It was a piece he'd adored as a teenager, and played all the time in his first year at Oxford to confirm and deepen the regretful longing which seemed now to have been the medium he lived in—it unfolded for him like that endless tune on the alto sax. Now its melancholy felt painful, even vicious. He half watched Catherine sweeping through the room, alarmingly unselfconscious. He had danced to it himself, but by himself, in his room, drunk, at the end of days brightened or not by contact with Toby.
"It is a bit God-dammery," he said, as a Russian Orthodox chant made itself heard. Catherine waved her arms hectically. "It's a bit like having a bop in St Basil's Cathedral." He tried to throw off his embarrassment with these square little jokes. She smiled, stretched out a hand to him, and scowled for a second because he wouldn't join her. He thought of her four months ago, trailing her hopelessness from room to room like a sad child with an inseparable rag; and now, mere chemistry, she was Makarova. She didn't notice the melancholy, the insidious, shifting harmonies; it was movement and therefore life. He said, "The thing is, darling, there's a bit of a crisis going on. You know, it looks rather odd leaping round like this when your mum's so anxious—well, we all are." He spoke consciously as one of the family, to cover his private unease, at being both needed and excluded by the terms of the crisis. Catherine didn't pay attention, she hummed, serenely, stubbornly, and a while later stopped dancing as if on her own decision. She wandered to the big bay window at the back, and stood looking out through her reflection at the lights beyond the trees. They seemed perhaps like elements in a pattern, which, read with the right intuition for shape and meaning, might reveal an instruction. When she turned round she gave Nick a smile that hovered before various possible cajolements. She sat on the broad arm of his chair and slid in sideways against him.
"I know," she said, "let's go out for a bit. Have you got the car here?"
"Um, yes," said Nick. "Round the corner. But. . . well, Gerald will be back soon."
"Gerald could be ages. You know they don't vote till midnight sometimes, if they're filimandering."
"Or gerrybustering."
"Exactly! We needn't be long. I've just got an idea."
Of course the idea of not being here when Gerald got back was very attractive. Rachel came in, and Nick felt he'd been caught larking about, Catherine squashing him like some bolshie teenage attempt at seduction. "Gerald's just rung," Rachel said. "It seems they're going to be really awfully late. It's a bill he's got to, um, you know, keep a bit of an eye on."
"How is he?" said Catherine fondly.
"He sounds fine. He says really not to worry." She had a new confidence, an almost pleasurable glow, and Nick felt sure she'd just been told how much she was loved. She moved across the room, looking for some small task to perform; found fallen chrysanthemum petals on a table top, swept them into her open palm, and dropped them in the wastebasket. "Oh, I like this," she said. "Isn't it Rachmaninov?" The sad waltz of the second movement was just catching fire. She stood gazing over their heads at the caprice by Guardi, and perhaps at some memory of her own. Nick thought for a moment she was going to start dancing too—she seemed suddenly very like her daughter. But really it was only in charades or the adverb game that she took the licence to be silly.
Catherine said, "Mum, Nick and I are going out for half an hour."
"Oh,