The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [31]
"Now, as you may have heard," Gerald went on, with a delayed quick glance in their direction, "Toby is twenty-one today. I had been going to give you Dr Johnson's well-known lines on 'long-expected one-and-twenty,' but when I looked them up again last night I found I didn't know them quite as well as I thought, or indeed as well as many of you, I'm sure, do." Here Gerald looked down at the card in a marvellously supercilious way. " 'Lavish of your grandsire's guineas,' says the Great Cham, 'Bid the slaves of thrift farewell. . . When the bonny blade carouses, Pockets full, and spirits high, What are acres? What are houses? Only dirt, or wet and dry.' So: far from suitable advice to the grandson and nephew of great bankers, or for any young person coming of age in our splendid property-owning democracy. And the question of wet versus dry, of course, is one on which indecision is no longer acceptable."
Through the generous laughter Nick caught Toby's eye again, and held it for two or three long seconds, giving him perhaps a transfusion of reassurance. Toby himself would be too nervous to listen to his father's speech properly, and was laughing in imitation of the others, not at the jokes themselves. It was typical of Gerald not to have realized that Dr Johnson's poem was a ruthless little satire. Nick surveyed the room, and was reminded of a college hall, with Gerald and the more influential guests elected to the high table. Or perhaps of some other institution, such as houses like this had often turned into. Up in the arcade of the gallery one or two servants were listening impassively, waiting only for the next stage of the evening. There was a gigantic electrolier, ten feet high, with upward-curling gilt branches opening into cloudy glass lilies of light. Catherine had refused to sit under it, which was why their whole table had apparently been demoted to this corner of the room. If it did fall, Nick realized, it would crush Wani Ouradi. He began to feel a little anxious about it himself.
Gerald was now giving a facetious review of Toby's life, and again it made Nick think of a marriage, and the best man's speech, which everyone dreaded, and the huge heterosexual probability that a twenty-first would be followed soon enough by a wedding. He could only see the back of Sophie Tipper's head, but he attributed similar thoughts to it, transposed into a bright, successful key. "As a teenager, then," Gerald said, "Tobias a) believed that Enoch Powell was a socialist, b) set fire to a volume of Hobbes, and c) had a large and mysterious overdraft. When it came to Oxford, a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics was the irresistible choice." There was more laughter—and Gerald was leading them along very ably: they were drunkish and amenable, even gullible, since making a speech was a kind of trick. At the same time there was a bond among the young people, who were old enough to know that speeches were allowed, and perhaps even supposed, to be embarrassing, and who were rowdy and superior at once,