The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [63]
"So how are you getting on at UCL?" said Penny kindly, as if it must be a sorry comedown after Oxford. Nick and Penny had never met as students, the word Oxford meant different things to them, but Penny relied on it as a thing they had in common.
"Oh, fine . . . !" said Nick; and went on obligingly, "It's not at all like Oxford, you know. The place itself is fairly grim. I've just found out that the English department used to be a mattress factory."
"Really!" said Penny.
"It is a bit depressing. I suppose it's no wonder half the staff are alcoholics." Penny laughed, oddly titillated, and Nick felt rather treacherous. In fact he revered Professor Ettrick, who had taken to him with immediate subtle confidence, and seen possibilities in his thesis topic that he himself hadn't dreamt of. But nothing much was being done, and through most of Nick's library days his eyes wandered just beyond the page in a deep monotonous reverie about Leo: the great unfolding sentences of Meredith or James would slow and fade into subliminal parentheses, half-hour subordinate clauses of remembered sex. And he felt guilty, because he wanted to deserve the professor's trust and be as clever and committed as he was meant to be. Penny said, "Was it Henry James you're working on?"
"Er . . . yes," said Nick.
She seemed to settle comfortably on that, but only said, "My father's got tons of Henry James. I think he calls him the Master."
"Some of us do," said Nick. He blinked with the exalted humility of a devotee and sawed off a square of brown meat.
"Art makes life: wasn't that his motto? My father often quotes that."
"It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process," said Nick.
"Something like that," said Penny. She smiled contentedly into the candlelight. "What would Henry James have made of us, I wonder?" she went on.
" Well . . . " Nick chewed it over. He thought she was rather like a high-minded aunt, proposing questions with virginal firmness and ignorance. He wondered condescendingly what her sexual prospects were. A certain kind of man might like to raise the colour in that plump white neck. He said, "He'd have been very kind to us, he'd have said how wonderful we were and how beautiful we were, he'd have given us incredibly subtle things to say, and we wouldn't have realized until just before the end that he'd seen right through us."
"Because he did write about high society, didn't he?" said Penny, clearly thinking that was where she was, and also perhaps that it was proof against being seen through.
"Quite a lot," said Nick; and remembering his chat with Lord Kessler in the summer and really giving a long-pondered answer to him, "People say he didn't understand about money, but he certainly knew all about the effects of money, and the ways having money made people think." He looked fondly across at Toby, who out of sheer niceness tried now and then not to think like a rich person, but could never really get the hang of it. "He hated vulgarity," he added. "But he also said that to call something vulgar was to fail to