The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [59]
"You can't go worrying about what your parents will think," said Nick.
"That's right," said Toby. "Anyway, your ma's very with-it. She's always going to way-out concerts and things."
"No, she'll be fine."
Toby chuckled. "Of course your father's most famous remark is that he wished Shakespeare had never been born."
"I don't know that that's his most famous remark," said Sophie, with a hint of pique. In fact if Maurice Tipper had made a famous remark at all it would probably have been something about profit margins and good returns for shareholders. "He only said it after getting bitten to death by mosquitoes watching Pericles in Worcester College gardens."
"Ah . . . " murmured Nick, whose own memory was of Toby's bashful swagger as a Lord of Tyre, when Sophie had been the Marina.
"You're too horrid about my poor papa," said Sophie in a highly affected way, as if in her mind she was already on stage.
Catherine came in, dressed for her night out in a tiny spangled frock, over which she was wearing an unbuttoned light-grey raincoat. She wore high-heeled black shoes and stockings with a whitish sheen to them.
"Goodness!" said Toby.
"Hello, darling," said Catherine confidentially to Sophie, stooping to give her a kiss. Sophie clearly found Catherine the most challenging aspect of an affair with Toby, and Catherine knew this, and treated her with the kind of clucking condescension that Sophie would otherwise have lavished on her. "Love your clever frock," she said.
"Oh . . . thank you," said Sophie, smiling and blinking.
"Are you going out, then, sis?" said Toby.
Catherine headed towards the drinks table. "I'm going out tonight," she said. "Russell's taking me to an opening in Stoke Newington."
"And where might that be?" said Toby.
"It's a well-known area of London," Catherine said. "It's very fashionable, isn't it, Soph?"
"Yes, of course—darling, you've heard of it," said Sophie.
"I was joking," said Toby; and Nick thought it was true, you never expected him to; and when he did you couldn't always be sure that he had. And then the idea of a party, not this one, but a noisy party with cans of beer and trails of pot smoke, through which he moved with his lover, as his lover, came over him like a pang and he envied Catherine. It was an image of an Oxford party, but blended with something known only from television, a house full of black people.
Toby said, "I'm just going upstairs to see if I can find those trousers. Are you going to Nat's bash, Nick?"
"What is it?" said Nick, with another dimmer pang at the thought of another kind of party, a posh white hetero one, at which his presence was not thought necessary.
"Oh, he's having this Seventies party . . ." said Toby hopelessly.
"No, I'm not invited," said Nick, with a superior smile, thinking of the loving closeness he had felt with Nat at Hawkeswood, when they were both stoned and sitting on the floor. "Is it in London?"
"That's the thing. It's up at the blasted castle," said Toby.
"Yes . . . It's absurdly soon, isn't it, for a Seventies party?" said Nick. "I mean, the Seventies were so ghastly, why would anyone want to go back to them?" He'd been longing for a chance to see the castle—a marcher fortress with Wyatt interiors.
"Well, public schoolboys love reliving their puberty, don't they Soph," said Catherine, coming back with a very tall drink.
"I know," said Sophie crossly.
"Some of them spend their whole lives doing it," Catherine said. She stood in front of the fireplace, with a hand on her hip, and seemed already to be moving to the music of a future very remote from any such nonsense.
Toby shrugged apologetically and said, "I just hope I've still got those disco pants!"
Nick almost said, "Oh . . . the purple ones . . . ?"—since he knew just where they were, having been through everything in Toby's room, read his schoolboy diary, sniffed the gauzy lining of his outgrown swimming trunks, and even tried on the flared purple