The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [25]
Nick loved the murmured challenging confidence of the question because he could answer "Yes." If it had been no, if he'd got a Second like Toby, he felt everything would have been different, and a lie would have been very ill-advised.
"And how do you rate my nephew's chances?" said Lord Kessler with a smile, though it wasn't clear to Nick what contest, what eventuality he was alluding to.
"I think he'll do very well," he said, smiling back, and feeling he had struck a very subtle register, of loyal affirmation hedged with allowable irony.
Lord Kessler weighed this for a moment. "And for you, what now?"
"I'm starting at UCL next month; doing graduate work in English."
"Ah . . . yes . . . " Lord Kessler's faint smile and tucked-in chin suggested an easily mastered disappointment. "And what is your chosen field?"
"Mm. I want to have a look at style," Nick said. This flashing emphasis on something surely ubiquitous had impressed the admissions board, though Lord Kessler appeared uncertain. A man who owned Mme de Pompadour's escritoire could hardly be indifferent to style, Nick felt; but his reply seemed to have in mind some old wisdom about style and substance.
"Style tout court?"
"Well, style at the turn of the century—Conrad, and Meredith, and Henry James, of course." It all sounded perfectly pointless, or at least a way of wasting two years, and Nick blushed because he really was interested in it and didn't yet know—not having done the research—what he was going to prove.
"Ah," said Lord Kessler intelligently: "style as an obstacle."
Nick smiled. "Exactly . . . Or perhaps style that hides things and reveals things at the same time." For some reason this seemed rather near the knuckle, as though he were suggesting Lord Kessler had a secret. "James is a great interest of mine, I must say."
"Yes, you're a James man, I see now."
"Oh, absolutely!"—and Nick grinned with pleasure and defiance, it was a kind of coming out, which revealed belatedly why he wasn't and never would be married to Trollope.
"Henry James stayed here, of course. I'm afraid he found us rather vulgar," Lord Kessler said, as if it had been only last week.
"How fascinating!" said Nick.
"You might be rather fascinated by the old albums. Let me see." Lord Kessler went to one of the cupboards beneath the bookcases, turned a scratchy-sounding key and bent down to take out a pair of large leather-bound albums, which he carried over to a central table. Again the inspection was hurried and tantalizing. He stopped now and then, as the heavy pages fell, to display a Victorian photograph of the gardens, with their wide bald views over newly planted woods, or of the interiors, almost comically crowded with chairs and tables, vases on stands, paintings on easels, and everywhere, in every vista, the arching, drooping leaves of potted palms. Now the house seemed settled and seasoned, a century old, with its own historic light and odour, but then it was ostentatiously new. In the second album there were group photographs, posed on the steps of the terrace, and annotated in a tiny florid script: Nick wanted days to read them, countesses, baronets, American duchesses, Balfours and Sassoons, Goldsmids and Stuarts, numerous Kesslers. The gravel was bizarrely covered with fur rugs for the group that centred on Edward VII in a tweed cape and Homburg hat. And then, May 1903, a gathering of twenty or so, second row, Lady Fairlie, The Hon. Simeon Kessler, Mr Henry James, Mrs Langtry, The Earl of Hexham . . . a cheerful informal picture. The Master, with his thumb in his striped waistcoat, eyes shaded by a traveller's widebrimmed hat, looked rather crafty.
"So what do you think of the house?" said Catherine, coming across the lawn.
"Well . . . obviously, it's amazing . . . " He was tingling to the point of fatigue with the afternoon's impressions, but was cautious as to what to say to her.
"Yeah, it's fucking amazing, isn't it!" she agreed, with a bright, brainless laugh. She didn't normally talk like this, and Nick supposed it was part of the persona she was showing