The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [62]
"And are these your forebears, Lady Partridge?" Lipscomb asked.
"Yes . . . yes . . ." said Lady Partridge, in a daze of graciousness.
"No, they are not her forebears," said Rachel, quietly but firmly. "They're my grandfather and my great-aunt."
Nick was placed in the middle of the table, with Penny Kent on his right and Jenny Groom on his left—the dullest place of all, but he didn't mind because he had company of his own. He tucked into his crab cake as if sharing a joke. "How do you fit in?" Jenny Groom wanted to know, with the air of someone steeled to unpleasant surprises.
"Oddly but snugly," said Nick; and since she didn't like this, "No, I'm an old friend of Toby's."
"Oh, Gerald's son, you mean . . . And I hear he's working for the Guardianl" The scandal of Toby's having a traineeship at the Guardian seemed to Nick to eclipse his own dissidence, to be enough scandal for one household.
"Well, you can ask him. He's sitting just over there," said Nick, loud enough to intrude on Toby as he listened to Greta Timms extolling the virtues of the Family: Toby gave a half-secret smile of acknowledgement but said, "Yes, I see," to Greta to show she still had his attention.
"Oh, of course. He's got his father's looks," said Jenny with a frown. "So what do you do?"
"I'm doing a doctorate at UCL—on . . . on Henry James," said Nick, seeing the style question might lose her completely.
"Oh . . ." said Jenny warily, getting a hook on it. "Yes. I've never got round to Henry James."
"Well . . ." said Nick, not caring if she had or not.
"Or hang on, did I read one? Dr Johnson or something."
"No . . . I don't think so . . ."
"No, not Dr Johnson, obviously . . . !"
"I mean there's the Boswell."
"It was set in Africa . . . I know: Mr Johnson."
"Oh, Mister Johnson is a novel by Joyce Cary."
"Exactly, I knew I'd read something by him."
When the venison came in Gerald yapped, "Don't touch the plates! Don't touch the plates!" so that it sounded as though something had gone wrong. "They have to be white hot for the venison." The fact was that the fat congealed revoltingly if the plates were less than scorching. "Yes, my brother-in-law has a deer park," he explained to Morden Lipscomb. "A rare enough amenity these days." The guests looked humbly at their helpings. "No," Gerald went on, in his bristling way of answering questions he wished someone had asked, "this is buck venison . . . comes into season before the doe, and very much superior." He went round with the burgundy himself. "I think you'll like this," he said to Barry Groom, and Barry sniffed at it testily, as if he knew he was thought to have more money than taste.
Nick shared a brief smile down the table with Rachel. It seemed subtly to mock not only Barry but Gerald himself. Nick took his first sip of the burgundy with a frisson at their shared understanding, like the liberty allowed to a child by a confident mother—the pretended conspiracy against the father. He wondered if Gerald and Rachel ever rowed. If anything happened, then it was in the white secrecy of the bedroom, which, with its little vestibule, was removed from hearing behind two heavy doors; it became somehow sexual.
When he thought of Leo after not thinking of him for a minute or two he heard a big orchestral sound in his head. He saw Leo lying on his coat under a bush, his shirt and jersey pushed up under his armpits, his jeans and pants round his knees, small dead leaves sticking to his thighs—and he heard the astonishing chord. It was high and low at once,