The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [36]
"There!" he said, feeling they were now friends.
"Are you staying in the house?" Lady Partridge said.
"Yes, I've got a tiny little room on the top floor."
"I didn't know there were any tiny rooms at Hawkeswood. But then I don't suppose I've ever been on the top floor." Nick half admired the way she had taken his modesty and dug it deeper for him, and almost found a slur against herself in it.
"I suppose it depends on your standard of tininess," he said, with a determined flattering smile. The faint paranoia that attaches to drunkenness had set in, and he wasn't certain if he was being rude or charming. He thought perhaps what he'd said was the opposite of what he meant. A waiter came up with a tray and offered him a brandy, and he watched with marvelling passivity as the liquor was poured. "Oh that's fine . . . that's fine . . . !" He was a nice, conspiratorial sort of waiter, but he wasn't Tristao, who had crossed a special threshold in Nick's mind and was now the object of a crush, vivid in his absence. He wondered if he could have a crush on this waiter too—it only needed a couple of sightings, the current mood of frustration, and a single half-conscious decision, and then the boy's shape would be stamped on his mind and make his pulse race whenever he appeared.
Rachel said, "Nick's also staying with us in London, where he really does have a tiny room in the roof."
"I think you said you had someone in," said Lady Partridge, again without looking at Nick. It was as if she had scented his fantasy of belonging, of secret fraternity with her beautiful grandson, and set to eradicate it with a quick territorial instinct. "Toby's certainly enormously popular," she said. "He's so handsome, don't you think?"
"Yes, I do," said Nick lightly, and blushed and looked away as if to find him.
"You'd never think he was Catherine's brother. He had all the luck."
"If looks are luck—" Nick was half-saying.
"But do tell me, who is that little person in glasses dancing with the Home Secretary?"
"Mm, I've seen him before," said Nick, and laughed out loud.
"It's the Mordant Analyst," said Rachel.
"Morton Danvers," Lady Partridge noted it.
Rachel raised her voice. "The children call him the Mordant Analyst. Peter Crowther—he's a journalist."
"Seen his things in the Mail," Lady Partridge said.
"Oh, of course . . ." said Nick. And it was true he did seem to be dancing with the Home Secretary, wooing him, capering in front of him, bending to him with new questions and springing back with startled enlightenment at the answers—a procedure which the Home Secretary, who was heavy footed and had no neck, couldn't help but replicate in a clumsy but courteous way.
"I don't think I'd be quite so excited," said Lady Partridge. "He talked a lot of rot at dinner on . . . the coloured question. I wasn't next to him, but I kept hearing it. Racism, you know"—as if the very word were as disagreeable as the thing it connoted was generally held to be.
"A lot of rot certainly is talked on that subject," Nick said, with generous ambiguity. The old lady looked at him ponderingly.
They turned and watched Gerald come forward to rescue the Home Secretary, with a solicitous smile on his lips and a flicker of jealousy in his eyes. He led him away, stooping confidentially over him, almost embracing him, but looking quickly round like someone who has organized a surprise: and there was a flash and a whirr and another flash.
"Ah! The Tatler," exclaimed Lady Partridge, "at long last." She patted her hair and assumed an expression of. . . coquetry . . . command . . . welcome . . . ancient wisdom . . . It was hard to say for sure what effect she was after.
Catherine was hurrying Nick and Pat Grayson along the bachelors' corridor towards the thump of the dance music.
"Are you all right, darling?" Nick said.
"Sorry, darling. It was that ghastly speech—one just couldn't take any more!" She was lively, but her reactions were slow and playful, and he decided she must be stoned.
"I suppose it was a bit self-centred."
She smiled, with a condescension