The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [209]
"Pasticcio, si," she said, with a hard laugh. They'd had a certain amount of fun over the years with each other's Italian. She went into the pantry, and spoke to him without turning round, so that he had to follow her.
"I'm sorry?"
"How long you been here now?" She peered up at the shelved tins.
"In Kensington Park Gardens?—Oh, four years last summer, four and . . . a quarter years."
"Four years. A good time."
"Yes, it has been a good time"—he grunted at the little blur of idiom. She was reaching up, and Nick, not that much taller, stretched past her. "The borlotti?" He put the can into her hands, so that she had at least to nod in thanks; then he followed her out again, as if hoping for another task. She jammed the beans under the tin opener and cranked round the handle, something Nick felt he'd seen her do scores, hundreds of times, with her tomato puree and her fagioli and all the things she preferred canned to fresh. And suddenly it was obvious to him. He said, "Elena, I've decided it's time to hand in my resignation."
She looked at him sharply, to make sure she'd understood him; then she nodded again, in acknowledgement. She might almost have smiled at his apt phrasing. She moved back to the table, and her busyness expressed her purpose but also perhaps hid some sort of regret at the news. Nick was very shaken by it himself. He glanced at her hopefully. Behind her on the wall were all the family photos, and she seemed to stand, stooped and efficient, in an angled but intimate relation to them—indeed she appeared in one of them, displaying a lordly Toby in his pram: she'd been there from the beginning, in the legendary Highgate days . . . She started chopping some onions, but looked up again and said, "You remember when you first come here?"
"Yes, of course," said Nick.
"The first time we meet . . ."
"Yes, I do," and he chuckled fondly and went a little pink, because of course they'd never been over that minute of confusion in the hall. He saw he was pleased she'd mentioned it. It was hardly even an embarrassment, since all he had done was be charming to her; he'd treated her not as an equal but as a superior.
"You thought I was Miz Fed."
"Yes, I know I did . . . Well, I'd never met either of you. I thought, a good-looking woman . . ."
Elena squeezed her eyes shut over the onions—it seemed for a moment like a slide into another emotion. Then she said, "I think to myself that day, this one's . . . sciocco, you know, he don't know anything, oh, he's all very nice, lady, but he's you know . . . " she tapped her forehead with a finger.
"Pazzo . . . ?" said Nick, taking a last sick chance.
"He's no good," said Elena.
Nick went up to his room, and stood looking at the window sill. Late-morning, late-October sunlight dimmed and brightened indifferently over it. He was lost in thought, but it was thought without words, pure abstraction, luminous and sad. Then a simple form of words appeared, almost as if written. It would have been best in a letter, where it could have been done beautifully, with complete control. Spoken, it risked tremors and deflections. He went downstairs to see Gerald.
The study door was ajar, and he could hear him talking to Barry Groom. He stood in the passage, as he felt he had often done in this house, as an accidental eavesdropper. Decisions were being made all the time, in an adjacent room, in a phone call half-curiously overheard. He liked the noise of business and politics, it was an adult reassurance, like the chatter of parents on a night journey, meaningless, fragmentary, and consoling to the sleepy child on the back seat. Sometimes of course he did pick up on a secret, a surprise still being contrived, and his pleasure was a very private one, the boosted glow of his own trustworthiness. Barry was saying, "I can't think how you let it happen." Gerald made a gloomy rumble and single hard cough but said nothing. "I mean, what's the little pansy doing here? Why have you got a little ponce hanging round your house the whole fucking time?"
The last words were louder and louder, and