The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [208]
Nick felt his life horribly and needlessly broken open, but with a tiny hard part of himself he observed what was happening with detachment as well as contempt. He cringed with dismay at the shame he had brought on his parents, but he felt he himself had learned nothing new. His long talk on the phone with his father, and then with his mother, had been all the harder for his lack of surprise; to them it was "a bit of a bombshell," it called for close explanation, almost for some countering offensive. He had found himself sounding flippant, and wounded them more, since of course, when it came to it, all their deep instincts were for him, for his safety, and protection. They took it utterly seriously, but rattled him with their clear admissions that they'd expected trouble of some kind, they'd known something wasn't quite right. Nick resisted that, he wasn't shocked, and couldn't capture at all the shock that was fuelling the press. He'd known about Penny, and he'd known about himself and Wani. The real horror was the press itself. "Greed drives out Prudence," wrote Peter Crowther, as if nobody'd ever thought of that before. He saw the romance of his years with the Feddens, deep, evolving, and profoundly private, framed and explained to the world by this treacherous hack.
The doorbell rang, and since no one answered it Nick went out and peered through the new spyhole: in which the furious, conceited features of Barry Groom loomed and then fled sideways as he rang the bell again. Nick opened the door; and glanced out past the MP at the now almost deserted street. "Hello, Barry, come in . . . Yes, they've virtually all gone now."
"No thanks to you," said Barry, stepping past him and frowning his eyebrows and mouth into two thin parallel lines. "I've come to see Gerald."
"Yes, of course." It wasn't clear if Barry was treating him as a servant or an obstacle. "Come this way," he said, and went on gracefully, as he turned back down the hall, "I'm so sorry about all this ghastly business." There was a strange smooth relish in saying that. For a second Barry seemed to take it as his due, then his face soured again. He said,
"Shut up, you stupid little pansy!" It was a quaint sentence, and somehow the more expressive for that.
"Oh . . . !"—Nick darted a look in the big hall mirror, as though for witnesses. "That's hardly—"
"Shut up, you little cuntl" said Barry, with a biting clench of the jaw, and pushed past him and down the passage towards Gerald's study.
"Oh, fuck off," said Nick, in fact he only mouthed the words, because he thought Barry might turn back and punch him in the face. Gerald opened his door and looked out like a headmaster.
"Ah, Barry, good of you to come," he said, and gave Nick a momentary stare of reproach.
"You ignorant, humourless, greedy, ugly cunt . . . " Nick went on to himself, in the shocked hilarity of having been insulted. He wandered in the hall, blinking in astonishment at the black-and-white marble squares of the floor. He couldn't quite tell, when he went into the kitchen, if Elena had heard this outburst. She always protested, dimly but sincerely, at Gerald's unguarded fucks—she was serious about all that.
"Hello, Elena!" said Nick.
"So, Mr Barry Groom come," said Elena. She was a little woman but she occupied the kitchen from wall to wall. She patrolled it. "He want coffee?"
"Come to think of it, he never said. But I rather think not."
"He don't want?"
"No . . . " He looked at Elena with cautious tenderness, uncertain what credit remained from his years of diligent niceness to her. "By the way, I won't be here for dinner tonight." Elena raised her eyebrows and pinched her lips. The new revelations about Nick and Wani must be amazing to her. It wasn't clear if she'd even taken in that Nick was gay. He said, "It's all a bit of a mess, isn't it? Un pasticcio . . . un imbroglio"