The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [27]
So Russell was one of her older boyfriends, thirty perhaps, dark, balding, with the casual but combative look of the urban photographer, black T-shirt and baseball boots, twenty-pocketed waistcoat and bandolier of film. He passed in front of them, clicking away, cheerily exploiting this little episode of his arrival, Nick's awkwardness and Catherine's hunger for the spontaneous, the outrageous. She lolled backwards, and touched her upper lip with her tongue. Was it good when her men were older, or not? He could be Protector or Abuser—it was a great deep uncertainty, like the ones in her graphology book. He pulled her up and gave her a hug and then Catherine said, almost reluctantly,
"Oh, this is Nick, by the way."
"Hello, Nick," said Russell.
"Hello!"
"Did you meet anyone?" asked Catherine, showing a hint of anxiety.
"Yeah, I've just been talking to the caterers round the back. Apparently Thatcher's not coming."
"Oh, sorry, Russell," Catherine said.
Nick said, "We are getting the Home Secretary, though," in his mock-pompous tone, which Russell, like Leo, failed to pick up on.
"I wanted Thatcher doing the twist, or pissed."
"Yeah, Thatcher pogoing!" said Catherine, and laughed rather madly. Russell didn't look especially amused.
"Well, I wouldn't want her at my twenty-first," he said.
"I don't think Toby really wanted her," Nick put in apologetically. The touching thing was that Catherine had clearly taken her father's fantasy as the truth, and then used it to lure Russell. The dream of the leader's presence seeped through to an unexpected depth.
"Well, Toby would have been perfectly happy with a party at home," she said. She wasn't quite sure whose side she was on, when it came to a difference between her father and her brother; Nick saw that she wanted to impress Russell with the right kind of disaffection. "But then Gerald has to get hold of it and invite the ministers for everything. It's not a party, darling, it's a party conference!"
"Well . . . " Russell chuckled and dangled his long arms and clapped his hands together loosely a few times, as if ready to take them on.
"We've got an enormous house of our own," Catherine said. "Not that Uncle Lionel's isn't fantastic, of course." They turned and frowned at it across the smooth lawn and the formal scrolls of the parterre. The steep slate roofs were topped with bronze finials so tall and fanciful they looked like drops of liquid sliding down a thread. "I just don't think Uncle Lionel will be all that pleased when Toby's rowing friends start throwing up on the whatsits."
"The whatnots," Nick made a friendly correction.
Russell blinked at him. "He's a fruit, is he, Uncle Lionel?" he said.
"No, no," Catherine said, faltering for a moment at the expression. "Nothing like that."
Nick's dinner jacket had belonged to his great-uncle Archie; it was double-breasted and wide on the shoulder in a way that was once again fashionable. It had glazed, pointed lapels which reached almost to the armpits, and shiny silk-covered buttons. As he crossed the drawing room he acknowledged himself with a flattered smile in a mirror. He was wearing a wing collar, and something dandyish in him, some memory of the licence and discipline of being in a play, lifted his mood. The only trouble with the jacket, on a long summer night of eating and bopping, was that when it warmed up it gave off, more and more unignorably, a sharp stale smell, the re-awoken ghost of numberless long-ago dinner-dances in Lincolnshire hotels. Nick had dabbed himself all over with "Je Promets" in the hope of delaying and complicating the effect.
Drinks were being served on the long terrace, and when he came out through the French windows there were two or three small groups already laughing and glowing. You could tell that everyone had been on holiday, and like the roses and begonias they seemed to take and hold the richly filtered evening light. Gerald was