The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [99]
"Ah, they're all in love with her. She has blue eyes, and she hypnotizes them." Her own dark gaze went feelingly down the table to her husband, and then to her son.
"It's only a sort of courtly love, isn't it," said Nick.
"Yah . . . " said Wani with a nod and a short laugh.
"You've met the lady, I imagine," Bertrand said.
"I never have," said Nick, humbly but cheerfully.
Bertrand made a pinched plump expression with his lips and stared into an imaginary distance for a moment before saying, "You know, of course, she's a good friend of mine."
"Oh, yes, Wani told me you knew her."
"Of course, she is a great figure of the age. But she is a very kind woman too." He had the mawkish look of a brute who praises the kindness of another brute. "She has always been very kind to me, hasn't she, my love?
And of course I intend to return the compliment."
"Aha . . ."
"I mean in a practical way, in a financial way. I saw her the other day, and . . . " he waved his left hand impatiently to show he wouldn't be going into what had been said; but then went on, with weird candour, "I will make a significant donation to the party funds, and . . . who knows what then." He stabbed and swallowed a slice of orange. "I believe you have to pay back, my friend, if you have been given help"—and he stabbed the air with his empty fork.
"Oh, quite," said Nick. "No, I'm sure you do." He felt he had inadvertently become the focus of some keen resentment of Bertrand's.
"You won't hear any complaints about the lady in this house."
"Well, nor in mine, I assure you!"
Nick glanced around at the submissive faces of the others, and thought that actually, at Kensington Park Gardens, the worship of "the lady," the state of mesmerized conjecture into which she threw Gerald, was offset at least by Catherine's monologues about homeless people and Rachel's wry allusions to "the other woman" in her husband's life.
"So he's on the up-and-up, our friend Gerald," Bertrand said more equably. "What's his role actually?"
"He's a minister in the Home Office," Nick said.
"That's good. He did that bloody quickly."
"Well, he's ambitious. And he has the . . . the lady's eye."
"I'll have a chat with him when I come to the house. I've met him, of course, but you can introduce us again."
"I'd be happy to," said Nick; "by all means." The black-jacketed man removed the plates, and just then Nick felt the steady power of the coke begin to fade, it was something else taken away, the elation grew patchy and dubious. In four or five minutes it would yield to a flatness bleaker than the one it had replaced. However, the wine was served soon after, so there was an amusing sense of relief and dependency. Bertrand himself, Nick noted, drank only Malvern water.
Nick tried for a while to talk to Emile about scrap metal, which tested his Cornelian French to the limits; but Bertrand, who had been looking on with an insincere smile and a palpable sense of neglect, broke in, "Nick, Nick, I don't know what you two young men are getting up to, I don't like to ask too many questions . . ."
"Oh . . ."
"But I hope it's soon going to start bringing in some money."
"It will, Papa," said Wani quickly, while Nick blushed in horror at the chasm he'd just hopped over, and said, "I'm the aesthete, remember! I don't know about the money side of things." He tried to smile out through his blush, but he saw that Bertrand's little challenges were designed to show him up in a very passive light.
Bertrand said,
"You're the writing man—" which again was something allowed for, an item in a budget, but under scrutiny and probably dispensable.
Nick felt writing men were important, and though he had