The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [41]
There was a giggling protest from Sam Zeman, curly-headed genius who'd gone straight into Kesslers on twenty thousand a year. "You're in a house full of Jews here, can you shut up about the fucking Final Solution, it's a party . . ."—and he reached for his drink with the frown and snuffle of a subtle person obliged to be brusque.
"I can go on to Stalin . . . " said Gareth facetiously.
After a minute's reflection Roddy Shepton said robustly, "Well, I'm not bloody Jewish."
"Tobias is," said his girlfriend, "aren't you, darling?"
"For god's sake, Claire . . ." said Roddy.
Claire gazed at Toby with eyes of deepening conviction. "Wasn't someone saying the Home Sectary's Jewish too . . . ?" she said.
"Calm down, Claire!" said Roddy furiously. It was his own conviction that his large placid girlfriend, who had never been known to raise her voice, was dangerously excitable. Perhaps it was his way of implying he had tamed a sexual volcano; which in turn perhaps helped him to explain why he was going out with a strictly middle-class girl, the daughter of his father's estate manager.
Claire looked round in pursuit of her new idea. "You're Jewish, aren't you, Nat?"
"I am, darling," said Nat, "or half Jewish, anyway."
"And the other half's a bloody Welshman," said Roddy. He turned his head on her knee and squinted up at her. "God, you're drunk," he said.
This was the kind of insult that passed for wit at the Martyrs' Club, and was in fact one of the things most often said there. Toby had once taken Nick to the club's poky panelled dining room, where Christ Church toffs and Union hacks conformed deafeningly to type and boozed and plotted and howled unacceptable remarks at each other and at the harried staff. It was another world, defiantly impervious, in which it was a shock to find that Toby had a place.
"You are so fucking drunk, Shepton," Toby said. He had pulled off his socks and rolled them into a ball and he threw them very hard and accurately at the fat peer's head.
"Fucking Christ, Fedden," Roddy muttered, but left it at that.
Nick was explaining about the sea in Conrad's novels being a metaphor for both escape from the self and discovery of the self—a point which took on more and more revelatory force as he repeated it. He laughed at the beauty of it. He wasn't a strong smoker, and a second frowning toke, taken in the belief that the first one had had no effect, could leave him swimming and gabbling for hours. Nat Hanmer was sitting on the floor beside him, and his warm thigh was pressed against his own. There was something charmingly faggy about Nat tonight. He nodded and smiled into Nick's eyes as he was talking. Nick thought the pressure of the dope on his temples was as if his skull was being gently squeezed by Nat's big hands. Sam Zeman was nodding and smiling too and corrected, as if it really didn't matter, a plot detail in Victory that Nick had got wrong. Nick loved Sam because he was an economist but he'd read everything and played the viola and took a flattering interest in people less sublimely omniscient than himself.
He wanted to lie back and listen and perhaps have a long deep snog with Nat Hanmer, whose lips were not so full and soft as Leo's, but who was (Nick hadn't seen it before) almost beautiful, as well of course as being a marquess. The two of them in their shirtsleeves. Nat said he was having a go at writing a novel himself. He'd bought a computer, which he said was "a really sexy machine." In the warm explanatory light of the pot Nick saw what he meant. "I'd love to read it," he said. Across the room Gareth had switched wars and was describing the Battle of Jutland to a paralysed circle of young women. His big velvet bow tie was all donnish conceit. He was going to go on like this for forty-five years.
Nick heard himself saying how he missed his boyfriend, and then his heart speeded up. Sam smiled—he was purely and maturely straight, but he was cool with everything. Nat said broad-mindedly, "Oh, you've got a . . . you've got a bloke?" and Nick said, "Yeah . . . " and