The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [96]
Wani said, "You must be longing to see round the house."
"Oh, yes," said Nick, getting up with a flattered smile. He felt that Wani had almost overdone the coolness and dissimulation, he'd barely spoken to him, and even now, as he lifted Nick on a wave of secret intentions, his expression gave nothing away, not even the warmth that the family might have expected between two old college friends.
"Yes, take him round," said Bertrand. "Show him all the bloody pictures and bloody things we've got."
"I'd love that," said Nick, seeing the hidden advantage of the aesthete persona, even in a house where the good things had the glare of reproductions. "Will I go too?" said little Antoine, who was clearly as fond of his cousin's touch and smile as Nick was; but Emile crossly made him stay.
"We'll begin at the top," Wani announced as they left the room and started upstairs two at a time. On the second flight he said quietly, "You didn't say where you were last night."
"Oh, I went to Heaven," said Nick, with mild apprehension at telling an innocent truth.
"I wondered," said Wani, without looking round. "Did you fuck anyone?"
"Of course I didn't fuck anyone. I was with Howard and Simon."
"I suppose that follows," said Wani, and then allowed Nick a tiny smile. "What did you do, then?"
"Well, you have been to a nightclub, darling," said Nick in a voice where sarcasm almost wished itself away. "You've been photographed in several with your fiancee. We danced and danced and drank and drank."
"Mm. Did you take your shirt off?"
"I think I'll leave that to your jealous imagination," Nick said.
They went along the landing and into Wani's bedroom. Wani bustled through, with a just perceptible air of granting a concession, of counting on Nick not to look too closely at what the room contained, and went into a white bathroom beyond. Nick followed slowly. Everything in the bedroom interested him, it was dead and alive at once, group photographs, from Harrow, from Oxford, the Martyrs' Club in their pink coats, Toby and Roddy Shepton and the rest; and the books, the Arnold and the Arden Shakespeare and the cracked orange spines of the Penguin Middlemarch and Tom Jones, the familiar colours and lettering, the series and ideas of all that phase of their life, stranded and fading here as in a thousand outgrown bedrooms, never to be looked at again; and the young man's princely bed, almost a double; and the mirror, where Nick now timidly checked his own progress—he looked perfectly all right. The puzzlement of a hangover . . . the creeping hilarity of the new drink . . . He strolled on into the bathroom.
Wani had got his wallet out, and was crushing and chopping a generous spill of coke on the wide rim of the washbasin. "A lot of funny old stuff in there," he said.
"I know," said Nick. "It's a little early for that, isn't it?" It was a lovely slide they were on with the coke, but sometimes Wani was a bit serious, a bit premature with it.
"You looked as if you needed it."
"Well, just a small line," said Nick. He looked around this room as well, with tense insouciance. He didn't really want to go down to lunch in reckless unaccountable high spirits and make a different kind of fool of himself. But a line wasn't feasibly resisted. He loved the etiquette of the thing, the chopping with a credit card, the passing of the tightly rolled note, the procedure courteous and dry, "all done with money," as Wani said—it was part of the larger beguilement, and once it had begun it squeezed him with its charm and promise. Being