The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [34]
"Hi, Wani!" said Nick.
"Hi!" said Wani warmly, perhaps not able to remember his name.
"I believe I have to congratulate you . . ."
"Oh . . . yes . . ." Wani grinned and looked down. "Thank you so much." Nick thought, as he had thought before, in the slow hours of the seminar room, that a view of the world through such long eyelashes must be one extraordinarily shadowed and filtered. They both suddenly decided to shake hands. Wani glanced back again with a murmur of exasperation so fond and well mannered that it seemed to include Nick in some harmless conspiracy. "You must meet Martine," he said. A provoking thing about him was the way his penis always showed, a little jutting bulge to the left, modest, unconscious, but unignorable, and a trigger to greedy thoughts in Nick. He checked for it now, in a woozy half-second. He was rather like a pop star of the 60s, with the penis and the dark curly hair—though the look was quite at odds with the bemused courtesy of his manner.
"I hope it will be a long engagement," Nick heard himself saying.
"Ah, here she is . . ."—and they looked down together at the young woman who was climbing the shallow red-carpeted stairs towards them. She was wearing a pearl-coloured blouse and a long, rather stiff black skirt, which she held raised a little with both hands, so that she seemed to curtsey to them on each step. She created a sober impression, well groomed but not fashionable. "This is Martine," Wani said. "This is Nick Guest, we were at Worcester together."
Nick took Martine's cool hand, smiling at Wani's knowing his name, and feeling himself to be briefly the subject of humorous suspicion as an unknown friend from her fiance's past. He said, "I'm pleased to meet you, congratulations." All this congratulating was giving him a vague masochistic buzz.
"Oh—thank you so much. Yes, Antoine has told you." She had a French accent, which in turn suggested to Nick the unknown networks of Wani's family and past, Paris perhaps, Beirut . . . the real life of the international rich from which Wani had occasionally descended on Oxford to read an essay on Dry den or translate an Anglo-Saxon riddle. Antoine was his real name, and Wani, his infantile attempt at saying it, his universal nickname.
"You must be very happy."
Martine smiled but said nothing, and Nick looked at her wide pale face for signs of the triumph he would have felt himself if he had become engaged to Wani.
"We're just going to our room," Wani said, "and then we'll be down for the bopping."
"Well, you will be bopping perhaps," said Martine, showing already a mind of her own, but with the same patient expression, which registered with Nick, as he went on down the stairs, as decidedly adult. It must be the face of a steady happiness, a calm possession, that he couldn't imagine, or even exactly hope for.
He needed some air, but there was a clatter in the hall as people ran back indoors. Outside, from an obscured night sky, a fine rain had started falling. Nick watched it drifting and gleaming in the upcast light of a large globed lantern. Out in the circle of the drive a couple of chauffeurs were sitting in the front of a Daimler with the map-light on, waiting and chatting. And there was Wani's soft-top Mercedes, with its embarrassing number plate WHO 6. A voice brayed, "Right! Everyone on the dance floor!" And there was a ragged chorus of agreement.
"Hoorah! Dancing!" said a drunk Sloanish girl, staring into Nick's face as though with an effort she might remember him.
"Where is the ruddy dance floor?" said the braying boy. They had wandered back into the hall, which was being cleared with illusionless efficiency by the staff.
Nick said, "It's in the smoking room," excited by knowing this, and by suddenly taking the lead. They all straggled after him, the Sloaney girl laughing wildly and shouting, "Yah, it's in the smoking room!" and sending him up,