The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [206]
"I thought I'd better come in and see to things."
"Good idea," said Nick.
"I've said I'll keep an eye on things."
"Well, that's marvellous." Nick smiled with the real but finite politeness of someone who's been interrupted; he put a clinching warmth into it. The joke in the family had always been that Eileen had a crush on Gerald, who kept up an unseemly mockery of her efficiency and forethought. She was part of Nick's earliest idea of the house, in that first magic summer of possession which Rachel was now turning over like a stone. She'd been keeping an eye on things then. She came forward and put her hand on the tight bottom curl of the stair rail.
"I've brought the Standard," she said. She'd been gripping it in her other hand, almost behind her, shielding them from it. "I don't know that you'll like it very much." She came up a few steps and Nick came down, with a vague sense of receiving a summons, and took it from her. He felt he should be specially diligent, and take the brunt of it on Rachel's behalf. He stood capably, with one foot on the stair above, and shook the paper flat. He saw the picture of himself, and thought, I'll come back to that in a second, and looked at the headline, which didn't make sense, and looked at the picture again and the one beside it of Wani. There was hardly any room for the article itself. The words and the pictures crowded out any sense of what they might mean. He felt oddly sorry for Bertrand: "Peer's Playboy Son Has AIDS". That was the subheading. "Gay Sex Link to Minister's House." Hard to get all that in. Didn't flow very well. Nick had a strange subliminal sensation that the banister wasn't there, and that the hall floor had hurtled up to meet him, like fainting but remaining fully conscious. He could tell it was very bad news. Then he realized where it had come from, and started to read the article, with a feeling like a thump in the sternum.
(ii)
"Bloody hell, Nick . . . !" said Toby next morning.
Nick chewed his cheek. "I know . . ."
"I had absolutely no idea about this. None of us did." He pushed his copy of Today away from him, across the dining-room table, and fell back in his chair.
"Well, the Cat did, obviously. She twigged when we were all in France last year." He used the family nickname with a sense that his licence to do so had probably expired.
Toby gave him a wounded look which seemed to search and find him back at the manoir, under the awning, or by the pool, where they'd got drunk alone together that long hot afternoon. "You could have told me, you know, you could have trusted me." Toby had told his own secrets that day, his problems with intimacy—he'd entered into Nick's realm of examined feelings, it had been a triumph of intimacy in itself for him. "I mean, two of my best mates, you know? I feel such a blasted idiot."
"I was always longing to tell you, darling." Again Toby's face seemed to close against the endearment. "But Wani just wouldn't hear of it." He looked shyly at his old friend. "I know people take it very personally when they find they've been kept out of a secret. But really secrets are sort of impersonal. They're simply things that can't be told, irrespective of who they can't be told to."
"Hm. And now this." Toby pulled out the Sun from the slew of newsprint on the table. " 'Gay Sex Romp at MP's Holiday Home.'" He threw it away from him, with a look of disdain and a hint of a challenge.
"It's really rather sweet their idea of what constitutes a romp," Nick said, to try and put it in proportion.
"Sweet. . . ?" said Toby, incredulously,