The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [219]
"You've heard about his new directorship."
"Yes . . . yes, I have."
"It's rather amazing, isn't it? With the share thing hanging over him . . ."
"Oh, they'll want him," said Penny.
"Yes," said Nick. He remembered her when she first came here, with nothing but a good degree behind her, innocent, pliant, a little complacent at the candlelit table; now her eyes looked tired and guarded from the glare of the lights. "It's rather amazing to resign in disgrace one day and be offered a job at eighty thousand a year the next."
He was afraid she resented his word "disgrace." "That's how this world works, Nick. Gerald can't lose. You've got to understand that." She sat down at the desk and looked around it. He had the sense of her clearing it of any scraps of sentiment—it was a secret raid.
"I expect you'd like to be left alone," he said. He came and stood in front of her so as to glance at the fax, which he saw was in Gerald's impossible handwriting: it ended with that breezy ideogram that might have been "Love" or "Yours" or "Hello" and a big "G" and a line of crosses. Then he found Penny was looking at him tensely, with a look that acknowledged the writing and the kisses, and with hurried blinks as she decided.
"I'm not giving him up, Nick."
"Oh . . ." said Nick.
"I'm not."
"I see."
"I don't care what Dad says, or Madam, or the Editor of the Sun."
Nick stared respectfully, but said, "I thought he'd virtually been given up for you."
"What. . . ? Oh, I see—well, publicly, yes. That's what we want people to think."
"You say ' we . '"
"We're very much in love."
Nick looked at the floor, perhaps impatiently. It seemed everything was going to go stubbornly on: first it was Rachel who wouldn't leave Gerald, and now Penny wouldn't either. He must have something extraordinary, Gerald, something Nick had been incapable of understanding. He saw the story reaching on through an obscure futurity; innumerable articles by the Mordant Analyst. He said, "But how can you bear the secrecy?" with a real curiosity as to how someone else would answer this question.
"Perhaps it won't be a secret."
"Hmm . . . " Nick's raised eyebrow and dry chuckle made her blush but not apparently change her mind.
"Anyway, I don't care," she said.
"Well . . ."
"Catherine's always mocked and jeered at Gerald," said Penny, as if not quite able to bear the line of talk she'd started.
Nick said hesitantly, "I think it's pretty mutual." Penny's world seemed only to make sense to her as a forcefield of detestations.
"I know she's always hated me," she said, with a grim laugh that didn't quite spare Nick either; she didn't come out with it, but she seemed to know what he'd thought and said about her over the years.
"You know that's not true," said Nick, in a mutter at the pointlessness of saying it. "I think it's herself that she hates most at the moment."
Penny tucked her chin in, and gave him a very old-fashioned look. "She was revelling in the whole thing, I would say."
"That's not revelling, Penny. At first it seems thrilling, but then it becomes a kind of torment to her, being manic." He realized that Penny's main source of views on Catherine would be Gerald; just as his own, besides a friend's intuition, was the strenuous prose of Dr E. J. Edelman.
"Well, it's nothing to the torment she's caused," said Penny unrepentantly.
Nick shook his head at her in astonishment, and thought he might as well leave her to it. She was too excited to look at him as she said, "I assume it was you that told her, was it?"
"Absolutely not!" said Nick.
"Well, that's certainly what Gerald thinks."
Nick said, "You see it's typical of Gerald to think she couldn't work it out for herself. Actually she's the cleverest one of us all."
"I could tell you suspected something when you were with us in France," Penny said.
"I was very worried