The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [216]
When he went into the sitting room, there was the magazine on the table. It was a weird sort of launch, when there was never going to be a second issue. It would be good if people knew that, and prized it as itself, not as a portent or pilot of something to come. It was the only Ogee. Lying there, in a room in his house, at noon on a mild autumn day, it might have been Wani's memorial tablet, with the angel's wing sheltering the blank where his name and achievements should go.
Next morning Nick drove up to Kensington Park Gardens to collect his things. There was intermittent drizzle and he wondered if the wedding hats were being spoiled in Yorkshire. The wide street was empty, with that accidental vacancy of a London street, a momentary lull in which the pavements, the house-fronts, the rain-striped windows have the aura of the deja vu. He let himself in at number 48, hasty in the new skills of avoiding notice: which he countered needlessly by slamming the door shut.
Inside, in the hall: the sound . . . the impassive rumble of London shrunk to a hum, barely noticed, as if the grey light itself were subtly acoustic. Nick felt he'd chanced on the undisturbed atmosphere of the house, larger than this year's troubles, as it had been without him and would be after he'd gone. The gilt lantern burned palely in the stairwell, but in the dining room the ordinary shadows deepened in the corners and hung like smoke in the coving of the ceiling. The boulle clock ticked, with mindless vigilance. He went up the stone stairs and into the drawing room. It was really just a matter of finding his own bits and pieces, the CDs mixed in family-wise with theirs, a book that he'd lent them and watched filter slowly and unread to the bottom of the pile. He stood by the piano and thought about giving the Mozart Andante a final go; but the effect would have been maudlin as well as laughably inept. Toby's portrait looked out at him, an emblem of adolescence in its hormonal glow and expectant frown. It added an urgency to the need to move on. Nick stood in front of the fireplace, holding his possessions against his chest. A lorry passed outside, and the windows throbbed in their frames for a moment, in sympathy with its roar and the rattle of its tailgate, and then the broad quasi-silence disclosed itself again. And something else, what was it?, the smell of the place, tapestry smell, polished wood, lilies, almost churchy—he felt his senses seize and resign the thousand impressions he'd grown used to.
And it all reached back. It spoke of Gerald and Rachel without visible interruption. He went down to the kitchen, where the tidiness and profusion, the jars, the noticeboard, the draped dishcloth, were signs of a wide, deep system. He was already an intruder, glancing up at the photos of these absent celebrities.
He went down again, to the basement, to fetch some cardboard boxes from the trou de gloire. This lumber room under the kitchen was where the gilt ballroom chairs were stacked and interesting old tables and bleary mirrors abandoned; and where Mr Duke kept his paints, ladders, and toolboxes, along with a kettle and a calendar—it was his den, and Nick almost expected to find him there, in the subconscious of the house. He pressed down the light switch and got the shock of the wallpaper, which was purple with a pattern like black wrought iron, only partly hidden by all the junk. It always amazed him. It spoke of a time before Gerald and Rachel, and a different idea from theirs of what was great fun. Like his own parents they seemed to have avoided the '60s, with its novel possibilities and worthwhile mistakes. Perhaps in the Highgate days they'd had a joss stick and a floor cushion, but here the purple room was the junk room. Nick found some old wine boxes, and took them awkwardly upstairs. He wondered who'd lived here before the