The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [58]
"Thank you," said Nick again, and smiled through a blush at the thing being out. It was confusingly straightforward. He felt relieved and cheated. He wasn't sure he could rise to the freedom being offered—he saw himself bringing home some nice white graduate from the college instead, for a pointless tea, or convivial evening bleak with his own cowardice.
"We're such broody old things," Rachel said, "now that Toby's moved out. So do it just for our sake!" This was a charming exaggeration, in a woman of forty-seven, with thirteen for dinner, but it acknowledged a truth too: it didn't quite say she thought of him as a son—it didn't elevate or condescend—but it admitted a habit, a need for a young man and his friends about the house. She tapped the cards together and came across the room and Nick gave her a kiss, which she seemed to find quite right.
In fact Toby and Sophie were there that night. They came early and Nick had a gin-and-tonic with them in the drawing room. They seemed to bring along their own complacent atmosphere, the mood of their life together in the Chelsea flat, and of some larger future when they might curl up a leg on the sofa or stand with an elbow on the mantelpiece in a room as enormous as this. Toby played the lightly chivvied "husband" very sweetly, and Sophie claimed him in the childish ways of someone experimenting with her power, with little exasperations and innuendos. She did a performance about how Toby ground his teeth in his sleep. Nick tittered warily at this glimpse of the bedroom, but found her lack of subtlety oddly reassuring. She'd got Toby, snoring and twitching, but the romantic reach of Nick's feelings for him, the web of sacrifice and nonsense and scented Oxford nights, survived untouched. Toby was very sweet to Nick too. He left his position by the fireplace and came and sprawled on the rug by his chair, so that Nick could have reached out and stroked the back of his neck. For a moment Sophie looked disconcerted, but then she took possession of that situation as well. "Ah—you two should see more of each other," she said. "It's good to see you together." A minute later, looking vaguely self-conscious, Toby got up and pretended to search for a book.
"And what about your lovely friend . . . ?" Sophie wanted to know.
"Oh . . . Leo, do you mean?"
"Leo," said Sophie.
"Oh, he's—lovely!" Here was the subject again—Nick just hadn't got used to it yet, to the idea of anything so secret, so steeped in his own fears and fantasies, being cheerfully enquired after by other people. Toby too looked round from the bookcase with his encouraging grin.
"Such a . . . lovely man," said Sophie, whose conversation tended not to develop, but to settle, snugly or naggingly, in one place.
Nick was glad of the praise, and mistrusted it at the same time. "Well, he loved meeting you," he said.
"Aah . . ." Sophie purred, as if to say that people usually did enjoy that. "He's a great fan of your work, Pips," said Toby.
"I know," said Sophie, and sat looking down modestly. Her dark-blonde hair, worn long at Oxford, had been cut and backcombed, Diana-style, and quivered when she shook her head. She was wearing a red strapless number that didn't really suit her.
"You know she's got a part in a play," said Toby.
"Oh, shoosh . . . " said Sophie.
"No, we've all got to go and see her. Nick—come to the first night, we'll go together."
"Absolutely," said Nick. "What are you doing?"
Sophie quivered and said, "Well, you might as well know," as if being hurried into announcing a different kind of engagement. "I'm doing Lady Windermere . . . "
"Fantastic. I think you'll be very good at that." It was a surprisingly big part, but Nick could see her as the self-righteous young wife clipping rose stems in her Westminster drawing room; and delivering those awful soliloquies she has—
"I don't know what it will be like. It's one of these very way-out directors. He's . . . he's gay, actually, too. He says it's going to be a deconstructionist