The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [29]
"No, dear, but Rachel's got a lot more class. Jewish class, but still class. And her husband's not called Norman."
Nick had some further objections to what Paul was saying, but didn't want to seem humourless. "No, or Ken," he said.
Paul inhaled tolerantly and blew the smoke out in a long sibilant jet. "I must say Gerald is looking quite delicious this evening."
"Gerald Fedden . . . ?"
"Absolutely . . ."
"You're pulling my leg."
"Now I've shocked you," Paul said unapologetically.
"Not at all," said Nick, to whom life was a series of shocks, more or less well mastered. "No, I can see he's . . ."
"Of course now you're living in his house you've probably grown accustomed to his sheer splendour."
Nick laughed and together they watched the MP as he wound up a story (which was all chortling patter with booming emphases) and the blue-dressed women around him rippled and staggered about slightly on the fine gravel. "I wouldn't deny that he's very charming," Nick said.
"Aha . . . So who is it at the house, just you and them and the Sleeping Beauty?"
Nick loved hearing Toby described like that, the praise in the mockery. "I'm afraid the Sleeping Beauty isn't there much any more, you know he's been given his own flat. But there's Catherine, of course."
"Oh, yes, I love Catherine. I just caught her smoking a joint about a yard long with a very dodgy-looking man. She's quite a girl."
"She's certainly a very unhappy one," Nick said, swelling for a moment with his portentous secret knowledge of her.
Paul's eyebrow suggested that this was a wrong note. "Really? Every time I see her she's got a new man. She really should be happy, she must have everything a girl could want."
"You sound just like her father, I've heard him say exactly the same thing."
"Ah, there you are!" said Paul. He grinned and stamped out his half-smoked cigarette on the path. "There's Toby now." He nodded towards the door from the drawing room, where Toby was emerging with Sophie on his arm, more like a wedding than a birthday party. "Christ, the jammy bitchl" Paul murmured, in an oddly sincere surrender to the sheer dazzle of the couple.
"I know, I do hate her."
"Oh, she's marvellous. She's good-looking, she's as thick as a jug—and of course she's a highly promising actress."
"Exactly."
Paul smiled at him, as if at a country cousin. "My dear, don't take it so seriously. Anyway, they're all tarts, these boys, they've all got a price. Get Toby at two in the morning, when he's had a bottle of brandy, and you'll be able to do what you want with him. I promise you."
This idea was so wildly, almost grimly, exciting to Nick that he could hardly smile. It was clever of old Polly to tamper so intimately with his feelings. Nick said, "Mm, this is rather a festival of the girlfriend, though, I'm afraid."
And it was true that as the crowd quickly doubled and trebled on the terrace it took on more and more the air of an efficiently reproductive species. The boys, most of them Nick's Oxford contemporaries, all in their black and white, glanced across at politicians and people on the telly, and caught a glimpse of themselves as high-achieving adults too—they had that canny glint of self-discovery that comes with putting on a disguise. They didn't mingle unnecessarily with the girls. It was almost as if the High Victorian codes of the house, with its smoking room and bachelors' wing, still guided and restrained them. But the girls, in a shimmer of velvet and silk, and brilliantly made-up, like smaller children who had raided their mothers' dressing tables, had new power and authority too. As the sunlight lowered it grew more searching and theatrical, and cast intriguing shadows.
Paul said, "I should warn you, Wani Ouradi's got engaged."
"Oh, no," said Nick. It was such a snub, an engagement. "He might have thought about it a bit longer." He could picture a happy alternative future for himself and Wani—who was sweet-natured, very rich, and beautiful