The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [201]
"There's just something we've got to do. I'm not going to tell you, but . . . We'll be back!"
"Is it quite the best moment . . . ?"
"Yes, I wonder," said Nick.
"I'm not going to talk to anyone, don't worry!"
Rachel thought, and said, "Well, if you are going out, then obviously Nick should go with you."
"We'll just go in the car," said Catherine. "Nick will be with me the whole time." And she hugged him to her in the chair with a delighted laugh.
Rachel looked rather narrowly at Nick, as the guarantor of this excursion. He thought he might be going to put up more resistance than he did. He gave a half smile, a slow nod, a wearily tolerant closing of the eyes. She said, "Please don't be long. And take the back way. Take a torch."
They went out, and as they started downstairs Nick heard the minatory little fanfares interrupt the waltz, and wondered if Rachel would go on listening to it after they'd gone. In the hall it was still quite loud. The whole house seemed steeped in a wilful air of romance.
Catherine wouldn't tell him where they were going, only where to turn. Nick sighed good-humouredly at this, and was half glad she didn't notice his tension as they left the house further and further behind, and Rachel in it alone. When they swung around Marble Arch and down Park Lane he said, "It looks as though we might be going to Westminster."
"In a sense," said Catherine. "You'll see." Her seductiveness had hardened to a brightness.
"There's absolutely no point in going to the House of Commons."
"No, no," she said.
They went down Grosvenor Place, wound through Victoria, and then headed straight towards Westminster. The floodlit front of the Abbey appeared, and then they were gunning out into Parliament Square, the bright face of Big Ben, always stirring to Nick, like the best picture in a child's book, showing 9.30: 9.30 was striking, iron circles fading in the bus roar. He said, quite relieved, "I can't go in there, you know." But she made him turn left instead, towards Whitehall, past Downing Street, and the Banqueting House, and then suddenly towards the river, and into a side street walled right up to the sky by a vast Victorian building. It was a feature of the London riverscape Nick had almost unconsciously absorbed, without ever deducing or being told what it was: he had an image of its roof, like a Loire chateau. He parked opposite, outside some dark ministry. The whole street was oddly dark, except for the glowing glass canopies of the chateau's doorways, somehow redolent of gaslight and cab horses, at one of which a porter in a peaked cap was silhouetted. For a moment a London sensation, unnoticed and perpetual as the throb of traffic, came clear for him: of order and power, rhythmic and intricate, endlessly sure of obedience. Then he remembered. "This is where Badger lives, isn't it?"
"It was just Mum mentioning him," said Catherine, as if it was an obvious breakthrough.
Nick saw that she was crazy, that the trip was not an inspiration but an irrelevance. He slumped and pursed his lips in tender annoyance. He tried kindly to find a reason in her craziness. "You think Badger can somehow throw a light on this business? He's probably not here, is he, darling—isn't he in South Africa?" But she had opened the car door, with no sign in her face or voice that she was even aware of Nick's worry, or of any possible objection. She had her certainty, a source of joy and tension, like revealed religion. Nick's objection was mainly that he didn't like Badger, that it was mutual, and that Badger would like him even less for bringing his manic god-daughter round. It was a fuck-flat, in Barry Groom's hard phrase, not a proper home. He had an image of small hotel-like rooms in which Badger conducted strained affairs with much younger women; of Badger shooting a line as phoney as the prints on the wall and the Chippendale cocktail cabinet.
They went in under one of the glass canopies, and through a brown-marble entrance hall; a porter in a cubbyhole was listening to the radio and nodded