The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [92]
"What, Gerald's company?"
"Amazing performance last quarter, actually."
Nick felt stirred but on balance uneasy at this idea. "How does one go about it?" he said, with a gasp at his own silliness, but a certain recklessness too, after four glasses of Chablis. "I wondered if you'd look after it for me."
Sam put his napkin on the table and gestured to the waiter. "OK!" he said brightly, to show it was a game, a bit of silliness of his own. "We'll go for maximum profits. We'll see how far we can go."
Nick fumbled earnestly for his wallet but Sam put the lunch on expenses. "Important investor from out of town," he said. He had Kesslers' own platinum MasterCard. Nick watched the procedure with a bead of anticipation in his eye. Outside on the pavement, Sam said, "All right, my dear, send me a cheque. I'm going this way," as if Nick had made it clear he was going the other. Then they shook hands, and as they did so Sam said, "Shall we say three per cent commission," so that they seemed to have solemnized the arrangement. Nick flushed and grinned because he'd never thought of that: he minded terribly. It was only later that it came to seem a good, optimistic thing, with the proper stamp of business to it.
Wani was still "building up his team" at Ogee, and Nick was silently amazed by both his confidence and his lack of urgency. A woman called Melanie, dressed for a Dallas cocktail party, came in to do the typing, and artfully protracted her few bits of filing and phoning through the afternoon. Whenever her mother rang her she said things were "hectic." Wani had a wonderful Talkman, which was a portable phone he could take with him in the car or even into a restaurant, and Melanie was encouraged to call him on it if he was in a meeting and give him some figures. Then there were the boys, Howard and Simon, not actually a couple, but always referred to together, and acting together in the comfortable way of schoolboy best chums. Howard was very tall and square-jawed and Simon was short and owlish and pretended not to mind being fat. If anyone took them for lovers Simon shrieked with laughter and Howard explained tactfully that they were merely good friends. Nick liked nattering with them when he dropped into the office, and enjoyed their glancing hints that they both rather fancied him. "Well, I swim and I work out a couple of times a week," Nick would say, leaning back in his chair with the glow of shame that for him was still the cost of bragging; and Simon would say, "Oh, I suppose I ought to try that." They all carried on as if they'd never noticed Wani's beauty, and as if they took him entirely seriously. If his picture appeared in the social pages of Tatler or Harper's and Queen Melanie passed the magazine round like a validation of their whole enterprise.
Nick was confident that none of them knew he was sleeping with the boss, and with ten or more years of practice he could head off almost any train of talk that might end in a thought-provoking blush. Part of him longed for the scandalous acclaim, but Wani exacted total secrecy, and Nick enjoyed keeping secrets. He worked up his earlier adventures as a cover, and told Howard and Simon a different version of the Ricky incident, replacing Wani with a Frenchman he'd met at the Pond the previous summer.
"So was he handsome, this Ricky?" said Simon.
Handsomeness was neither here nor there with Ricky, it was his look of stupid certainty, the steady heat of him, the way you started in deep, as though the first kiss was an old kiss interrupted and picked up again at full intensity—Nick said, "Oh, magnificent. Dark eyes, round face, nice big nose—"
"Mmm," said Simon.
"Perhaps a trifle too punctually, though not yet quite lamentably, bald."
There was a moment's thought before Simon said, "That's one of your things, isn't it?"
"What . . . ?" said Nick, with a vaguely wounded look.
"A trifle too . . . how did it go?"
"I can't remember what I said . . . 'a trifle too punctually, though not yet quite lamentably, bald'?"
Howard sat back, with the nod of