The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [93]
"Far from it," said Nick. "No, no—he spoke, as to cheek and chin, of the joy of the matutinal steel."
They all laughed contentedly. It was one of Nick's routines to slip these plums of periphrasis from Henry James's late works into unsuitable parts of his conversation, and the boys marvelled at them and tried feebly to remember them—really they just wanted Nick to say them, in his brisk but weighty way.
"So what's that from, then?"
"The baldness? It's from The Outcry, it's a novel by Henry James that no one's ever heard of." This was taken philosophically by the boys, who hadn't really heard of any novels by Henry James. Nick felt he was prostituting the Master, but then there was an element of self-mockery in these turns of phrase—it was something he was looking at in his thesis. He was at the height of a youthful affair with his writer, in love with his rhythms, his ironies, and his idiosyncrasies, and loving his most idiosyncratic moments best of all.
"It sounds like Henry James called everyone beautiful and marvellous," said Sam, a little sourly, "from what you say."
"Oh, beautiful, magnificent. . . wonderful. I suppose it's really more what the characters call each other, especially when they're being wicked. In the later books, you know, they do it more and more, when actually they're more and more ugly—in a moral sense."
"Right . . . " said Simon.
"The worse they are the more they see beauty in each other."
"Interesting," said Howard drily.
Nick cast a fond glance at his little audience. "There's a marvellous bit in his play The High Bid, when a man says to the butler in a country house, T mean, to whom do you beautifully belong?'"
Simon grunted, and looked round to see if Melanie could hear. He said, "So what was his knob like, then? . . . You know, Ricky?"
Well, it was certainly worth describing, and embellishing. Nick wondered for a moment how Henry would have got round it. If he had fingered so archly at beards and baldness, the fine paired saliences of his own appearance, what flirtings and flutterings might he not have performed to conjure up Ricky's solid eight inches? Nick said, "Oh, it was . . . of a dimension," and watched Simon work what excitement he could out of that.
So he prattled on, mixing up sex and scholarship, and enjoying his wanderings away from the strict truth. In fact that was really the fun of it. And it seemed to fit in with the air of fantasy in the Ogee office, the distant sense of an avoided issue.
Nick couldn't quite have defined his own role there, and he only learned what it was when he was suddenly invited to Lowndes Square for Sunday lunch. He'd been dancing at Heaven till three the night before, and was still struggling with the rubber mask, the wobbly legs, the trill and glare of a beer and brandy hangover when Bertrand Ouradi grasped his hand very hard and said, "Ah, so you're Antoine's aesthete."
"That's me!" said Nick, returning the handshake as firmly as he could, and grinning in the hope that even an aesthete might be a good thing to be if it was sanctioned by his beloved son.
"Ha ha!" said Bertrand, and turned away along the chequered marble floor of the hall. "Well, we need our aesthetes." He stretched out his arms in a graceful shrug, and seemed to gesture at the shiny paintings and Empire torcheres as necessary trappings of his position. He had an aesthete of his own, he seemed to say, on a small retainer. Nick followed on, wincing at the high polish on everything. He had the feeling there was only one thing in the house he would ever want to see. "I'll join you in a moment," Bertrand said, with a tiny gesture of deterrence, as Nick found himself following him into the lavatory. The dark little woman who'd opened the door led him dutifully upstairs, and he followed her instead, smiling and doomed. So Wani himself must have called him his aesthete, that was how he'd explained him to his parents . . .
He was shown into the pink and gold confusion of a drawing room. Wani called out,