The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [45]
"I did, my darling, yes"—going towards her to help her with a trug of long-stemmed yellow roses that she had brought in from the garden. She didn't need help, and the gallant little pantomime passed off almost unnoticed, as their common idiom. "Penny's going to come over for a chat. Norman says she's far too high-minded to work for the Tories."
"She'll be very glad of a job," said Rachel. Norman Kent, whose temperamental portraits of Toby and Catherine hung in the drawing room and the second-floor landing respectively, was one of Rachel's "left-wing" friends from her student days, whom she'd stayed stubbornly loyal to; Penny was his blushing blonde daughter, also just down from Oxford. There was a notion she might come and work for Gerald. "Is Catherine up yet? Or down?" Rachel asked.
"Mm . . . ? No—she's neither up nor down, in fact she's out. She's gone to see the man with the Face."
"Ah." Rachel clipped expressively at the rose stems. "Well, I hope she'll be back for lunch with your mother."
"I'm not sure . . ." said Gerald, who doubtless thought lunch would be a good deal easier without her, especially since Toby and Sophie were coming. He listened through to the final recommendation on Ein Heldenleben, and pensively turned off the radio. He said, "He's all right, this fellow, isn't he, Nick?"
"Who . . . Russell? I think he's all right." Having given him a fervent testimonial two weeks ago, when he hadn't even met him, he was obliged to remain vaguely positive now that he had met him and knew that he couldn't stand him.
"Oh, good," said Gerald, glad to have got that cleared up.
"I thought he was rather sinister,1' Rachel said.
"I know what you mean," said Nick.
"One thing we have learnt, Nick," said Gerald, "is that all her boyfriends are marvellous. Criticism from us is the last betrayal. The more unprepossessing the individual the more strenuously we admire him."
"We love Russell," said Rachel.
"He's not much to look at," Nick quickly conceded, knowing that that was part of his glamour for Catherine, who described him as "a blinding fuck."
"Oh, come on, he's a thug," said Rachel, with an unsparing smile. "The photographs he took at Hawkeswood were purely malicious, making everyone look like fools."
"An easy target," said Gerald, clearly meaning something different. Catherine had passed round a selection of the pictures at dinner the week before. They were grainy, black and white, taken without a flash on long exposures which dragged people's features into leering masks. The photograph of Gerald and the Home Secretary being photographed for Tatler was a minor masterpiece. Not shown were those of guests fornicating, mooning, pissing in the fountain, and snorting cocaine. "Is that what The Face is like?" said Gerald. "Sort of satire . . ."
"Not really," said Nick. "It's more pop—and fashion."
"I wouldn't mind seeing a copy," said Rachel warily. And Nick found himself climbing up the four flights of stairs to search for one in Catherine's room. A sense of criminal intrusiveness, a nagging memory of what had almost happened there three weeks before, made him hurry back down. He glanced through the magazine as he passed by the door of his hosts' bedroom, just to make sure it wasn't too outrageous. He quite liked The Face, but there was a lot of it he didn't understand. The picture of a blanched and ringleted Boy George on the cover had been taken by Russell. As he came back into the kitchen Nick felt suddenly embarrassed, as if he'd brought down one of his four porn mags by mistake. He handed it over and they placed it on the table and looked through it together.
"Mm . . . perfectly harmless," murmured Gerald.
"Yah—it's just a kids' thing," said Nick, hovering to interpret and deflect. He wasn't much use as a guide to his own youth culture, but he knew it wasn't just a kids' thing. They paused at a fashion spread that showed some sexy half-naked models in a camp pretence of a pillow fight. Gerald frowned faintly, to deny any