The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [211]
"Oh . . ." The question showed a kind of chilly decency. "He's terribly ill, as you know. It doesn't look at all hopeful . . ."
Gerald nodded slightly, to show it was therefore typical of a lot of things. "Bloody tough on the parents." He turned to stare at Nick, as if challenging him to sympathize. "Poor old Bertrand and Monique!"
"I know . . ."
"To lose one child . . . " They both heard a touch of Lady Bracknell in this, and Gerald turned promptly away from the danger of a joke. "Well, one can only imagine." He shook his head slowly and came back to the desk. He had the heavy-faced look, indeed like someone resisting a laugh, that was his attempt at solemn sympathy. Though there was a mawkish hint too that he had somehow "lost" a child himself: he absorbed the Ouradis' crisis into his own. "And ghastly for the girl too."
For a moment Nick couldn't think what he meant. "Oh, Martine, do you mean?"
"The fiancee."
"Oh . . . yes, but she wasn't actually his girlfriend."
"No, no, they were going to get married."
"They might have got married, but it was just a front, Gerald. She was only a paid companion."
Gerald pondered this and then flicked up his eyebrows in sour resignation. The facts of gay life had always been taboo with him: he and Nick had never shared a frank word or knowing joke about them, and this was an odd place to start. With a nervous laugh Nick went on, "I'll miss him, of course."
Gerald busied himself with some papers, shuffled them into a box-folder and snapped down the spring. He glanced, as if for approval, at the two framed photos, of Rachel and the Prime Minister, and said, "Remind me how you came to be here."
Nick wasn't sure if courtesy really required him to do so. He shrugged, "Well, as you know, I came here as a friend of Toby's."
"Aha," said Gerald, with a nod, but still not looking at him. He sat down at the desk, in the spaceship black chair. He made an exaggerated moue of puzzlement. "But were you a friend of Toby's?"
"Of course I was," said Nick.
"A funny sort of friendship, wasn't it . . . ?" He glanced up casually.
"I don't think so."
"I don't think he knew anything about you."
"Well, I'm just me, Gerald! I'm not some alien invader. We'd been in the same college for three years."
Gerald didn't concede this point, but swivelled and stared out of the window again. "You've always been comfortable here, haven't you?"
Nick gasped with disappointment at the question. "Of course . . ."
"I mean, we've always been very kind to you, actually, I think, haven't we? Made you a part of our life—in the widest sense. You've made the acquaintance of many remarkable people through being a friend of ours. Going up indeed to the very highest levels."
"Yes, certainly." Nick took a deep breath. "That's partly why I'm so dreadfully sorry about everything that's happened," and he pushed on, earnestly but slyly, "you know, with Catherine's latest episode."
Gerald looked very affronted by this—he didn't want some defusing apology from Nick, and especially one that turned out not to be an apology but a commiseration about his daughter. He said, as though parenthetically, "I'm afraid you've never understood my daughter."
Nick flattered Gerald by taking this as a subtle point. "I suppose it's difficult for anyone who hasn't suffered from it to understand her kind of illness, isn't it, not only moment by moment, but in its long-term patterns. I know it doesn't mean she loves you and Rachel any the less that she's done all this. . . damage. When she's manic she lives in a world of total possibility. Though actually you could say that all she's done is tell the truth." He thought he'd perhaps got through to Gerald—who frowned ahead and said nothing; but then, rather