The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [84]
Wani was sitting with his knees drawn up, his hair swept back in shiny waves but bunching and tightening again as it dried. He had got back some of his social poise, and with it an oblique deprecating manner, as though afraid he might be recognized or fancied. The older man talked across him to Nick. "He's getting so particular," he said.
"Aha . . ." said Nick.
"KY not good enough any more, apparently. We have to have some other substance called Melisma. Then Melisma's not good enough, apparently, either. We're moving on to Crest. But you have to be careful, don't you, with these awful rubber johnnies. I never thought the day would come . . . What do you use?"
"Should keep him nice and clean, anyway," said the rough-voiced man, who was clearly taking quite an interest in Andy. "Crest's a kind of toothpaste, mate," and shortly afterwards he dived in and swam powerfully in his direction.
"I'm Leslie, by the way," said the older man.
Wani turned his head and nodded. "Hi. Antoine."
"Now where would you be from, I wonder?"
"I'm Lebanese," said Wani, with a quick dry smile, in his driest English accent. Nick watched his aquiline profile and smiled mischievously. He liked to see another man acknowledge Wani's glamour, it gave him a quick jealous shot of the passion he had felt for him since Oxford, which was lust enlarged and diffused by mystery. Now he was looking down again, his extraordinary eyelashes lowered. Nick remembered him sometimes, after a class, or after dinner on a rarer night when he was unclaimed by his other worlds, coming back to the room of some poor student, with its shelf of paperbacks and a Dylan poster, and talking a bit more about Culture and Anarchy or North and South, swapping notes over Nescafe, and making a sweetly respectful attempt to show that he shared the concerns of these other boys, and like visiting royalty was quite unconscious of their clumsiness and deference. Wani, who could really only bear fresh coffee, with a little jug of hot milk on the side. Some of the snobbier people in college, like Polly Tompkins, mocked his fanciness and said he was only the son of a grocer, an immigrant orange-and-lemon seller, "a Levantine cockney tart" was Polly's phrase—he was a cute little Lebanese boy who'd been sent to Harrow and turned into a drawling English gentleman. Some of them thought he must have been turned into a poof as well, on no stronger grounds than his tight trousers and his bewildering good looks.
"So what do you do?" said Leslie.
"I've got my own film-production company," Wani said.
"Oh . . ." said Leslie, crushed and intrigued at once. And then, in a rather roundabout response, "Did you see A Room with a View? I wonder what you thought of that, if you're in the film world."
"I didn't, I'm afraid," said Wani, with another tiny but chilling smile.
"Didn't I see you in the Volunteer last week?" Leslie said after a bit—at which Wani looked quite blank, but the question was aimed at the dark-eyed man, who all this time had been lying back on his elbow, with one knee raised and his tackle slumped unignorably towards them. It was difficult to tell if his vague smile was a reaction to their conversation, or even if he was looking at them. His eyes seemed to work on some scene of imminent gratification, unfolding on a screen that hung between himself and the afternoon. There was something confidently patient about him, no lecherous effort or rush. But when he was spoken to it was as if they'd already been talking, and there was an understanding between them. Nick gazed at him, feeling he allowed and absorbed gazes, and at the glinting water beyond, with a twinge of sadness that when they stopped talking they would have to leave the little sun-struck oblong of the raft and swim back to the solid world. Wani was looking at the man again too, but also at the waiting ladder of the jetty, with the flicker of someone calculating his escape.