The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [23]
"I wouldn't want to put too precise a time on it," said Gerald. "Toby is driving down with a girlfriend, Sophie Tipper, who's a daughter of Maurice Tipper, incidentally, and a very promising young actress." He looked to Rachel and she said,
"No, she's awfully promising . . ."—the remark hesitating towards something she seemed to see in the middle distance but which, as so often, she left amiably unexpressed. Nick sometimes felt that being people's children was the only claim that some of his friends had on the attention of their preoccupied elders. He observed Lord Kessler's snuffle and murmur at the name of Maurice Tipper, the incalculable ironies of different kinds of rich people about each other. The Sophie Tipper thing had been dragging on pointlessly since the second year at Oxford, as if Toby were pliably fulfilling expectations by dating the daughter of a tycoon.
"As for Catherine," Gerald went on, "she's being brought down by a so-called boyfriend whose name escapes me and whom I'm bound to say I've never met." He smiled broadly at this. "But I expect a late arrival and burning rubber. Actually Nick probably knows more on this front than we do."
Nick knew almost nothing. He said, "Russell, you mean? Yes, he's terribly nice. He's a very up-and-coming photographer"—in a successful imitation of their manner and point of view. Russell had only been announced as a boyfriend the day before, in a helpless reaction, Nick felt, to his own success with Leo, which of course he'd had the pleasure of describing to Catherine, entirely truthfully. He hadn't in fact met Russell, but he thought he'd better say again, "He's awfully nice."
Lord Kessler said, "Well, there are umpteen bedrooms ready here, and Fales has made bookings at the Fox and Hounds and the Horse and Groom, both perfectly decent, I'm told. As to the precise arrangements, I avert my eyes." Kessler had never married, but there was nothing perceptibly homosexual about him. Towards any young people in his social orbit he maintained a strategy of enlightened avoidance. "And we're not getting the PM," he added.
"We're not getting the PM," Gerald said, as if for a while it had really been likely.
"A relief, I must say."
"It is rather a relief," said Rachel.
Gerald murmured in humorous protest, and retorted that various ministers, including the Home Secretary, very much were still expected.
"Them we can handle," Lord Kessler said, and shook the little bell to call in the servant.
After lunch they strolled through several large rooms that had the residual hush, the rich refined dry smell of a country house on a hot summer day. The sensations were familiar to Nick from visits he made with his father to wind the clocks in several of the great houses round Barwick—they went back to childhood, though in those much older and remoter houses the smells were generally mixed up with dogs and damp. Here there was a High Victorian wealth of everything, pictures, tapestries, ceramics, furniture—it made Kensington Park Gardens look rather bare. The furniture was mostly French, and of astonishing quality. Nick straggled behind to gaze at it and found his heart beating with knowledge and suspicion. He said, "That Louis Quinze escritoire . . . is an amazing thing, sir, surely?" His father had taught him to address all lords as sir—bumping into one had been a constant thrilling hazard on their clock-winding visits, and now he took pleasure in the tone of smooth submission.
Lord Kessler looked round, and came back to him. "Ah yes," he said, with a smile. "You couldn't be more right. In fact it was made for Mme