The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [35]
A friend of Toby's had come down from London to do the disco, and red and blue spotlights flashed on and off above the paintings of the first Baron Kessler's numerous racehorses. Most of the group started grooving around at once, a little awkwardly, but with happy, determined expressions. Nick lounged along the wall, as if he might start dancing any moment, then came back, nodding his head to the beat, and walked quickly out of the room. It was that song "Every Breath You Take" that they'd played over and over last term at Oxford. It made him abruptly sad.
He felt restless and forgotten, peripheral to an event which, he remembered, had once been thought of as his party too. His loneliness bewildered him for a minute, in the bleak perspective of the bachelors' corridor: a sense close to panic that he didn't belong in this house with these people. Some of the guests had gone into the library and as he approached the open door he took in the scant conversational texture, over which one or two voices held forth as if by right. Gerald said words Nick couldn't catch the meaning of, and through the general laughter another voice, which he half-recognized, put in a quick correcting "Not if I know Margaret!" Nick stood at the doorway of the lamplit room and felt for a second like a drunken student, which he was, and also, more shadowy and inconsolable, a sleepless child peering in at an adult world of bare shoulders, flushed faces, and cigar smoke. Rachel caught his eye, and smiled, and he went in—Gerald, standing at the empty fireplace in the swaggering stance of someone warming himself, called out, "Ah, Nick!" but there were too many people for introductions, a large loose circle who turned momentarily to inspect him and turned back as if they'd failed to see anything at all.
Rachel was sitting on a small sofa, apart from the others, with a wrinkled old lady dressed in black, who made Rachel in her turn seem a beautiful, rather mischievous young woman. She said, "Judy, have you met Nick Guest, Toby's great friend? This is Lady Partridge—Gerald's mother."
"Oh no!" said Nick. "I'm delighted to meet you."
"How do you do," said the old lady, with a dry jovial look. Toby's great friend—there was a phrase to savour, to analyse for its generosity, its innocence, its calculation.
Rachel shifted slightly, but there was really no space for him on the sofa. In her great spread stiffish dress of lavender silk she was like a Sargent portrait of eighty years earlier, of the time when Henry James had come to stay. Nick stood before them and smiled.
"You do smell nice," Rachel said, almost flirtingly, as a mother sometimes speaks to a child who is dressed up.
"I can't bear the smell of cigars, can you?" said Lady Partridge.
"Lionel hates it too," murmured Rachel. As did Nick, to whom the dry lavatorial stench of cigars signified the inexplicable confidence of other men's tastes and habits, and their readiness to impose them on their fellows. But since Gerald himself was smoking one, frowning and screwing up his left eye, he said nothing.
"I can't think where he picked up the habit," Lady Partridge said; and Rachel sighed and shook her head in humorous acknowledgement of their shared disappointments as wife and mother. "Do Tobias and Catherine smoke?"
"No, thank heavens, they've never taken to it," Rachel said. And again Nick said nothing. What always held him was the family's romance of itself, with its little asperities and collusions that were so much more charming and droll than those in his own family, and which now took on a further dimension in the person of Gerald's mother. Her manner was drawling but vigilant, her face thickly powdered, lips a bold red. There was something autocratic in her that made Nick want to please her. She sounded grander than Gerald by the same factor that Gerald sounded posher than Toby.
"Perhaps we could have some air," she said, barely looking at Nick. And he went to the window behind them and pushed up the sash and let in the cool damp smell of the grounds.