"Oh!—um . . ."
"The hours."
"The hours, yes . . ."
"Open early and close up late, get people before work and get people after work, not just the dear bloody housewifes going out for a packet of ciggies and a chit-chat."
Nick wasn't sure if this was Bertrand's special tone for talking to an idiot or if its simplicity reflected his own vision of affairs. He said, critically, "Some of them aren't like that, though, are they? The one in Notting Hill, for instance, that we always go to. It's quite grand"—and he shrugged in dulled respect.
"Well, now you're talking about the Food Halls! It's two different bloody things: the Mira Marts and the Mira Food Halls . . . The latter, the Food Halls, being for the bloody rich, posh areas. We got that round here. You know where that comes from."
"Harrods," said Wani.
Bertrand gave him a quick frown. "Of course it does. The mother of all bloody food halls in the whole world!"
"I love to go to Harrods Food Hall," Monique said, "and look at the big . . . homards . . ."
"The lobsters," muttered Wani, without looking at her, as though it was his accepted function to interpret for his mother.
"Oh, I know!" said Martine, with a smile of faint-hearted rebellion. Nick saw them often doing it, days probably were spent in Harrods, just round the corner but another world of possibilities, something for everyone who could afford it.
Bertrand gave them a patient five seconds, like a strict but fair-minded schoolmaster, and then said, "So now, you know, Nick, I got thirty-eight Mira Food Halls all round the country, Harrogate I got one, Altrincham I just opened one; and more than eight hundred bloody Mira Marts." He was suddenly very genial—he almost shrugged as well at the easy immensity of it. "It's a great story, no?"
"Amazing," said Nick. "It's kind of you to tell me a story you must know so well"—making his face specially solemn. He saw the bright orange fascia of the Notting Hill Food Hall, where Gerald himself sometimes popped round late at night with a basket and a bashful look as though everyone recognized him, shopping for pate and Swiss chocolates. And he saw the corner Mira Mart in Barwick, with its sadder produce in sloping racks, remote poor cousins of the Knightsbridge obelisks, and its dense stale smell of a low-ceilinged shop where everything is sold together. An orange, of course, topped by two green leaves, was an emblem of the chain. Then he looked at Wani, who was eating pickily (coke killed the appetite) and entirely without expression. His eyes were on his plate, or on the gleaming red veneer just beyond it; he might have been listening thoughtfully to his father, but Nick could tell he had slipped away into a world his father had never imagined. His submissiveness to Bertrand's tyranny was the price of his freedom. Uncle Emile, too, looked down, as if properly crushed by his brother-in-law's initiative and success; Nick himself quickly saw the charm of running off to Harrods with the ladies.
Then Bertrand actually said, "All this one day will be yours, my son."
"Ah, my poor boy!" Monique protested.
"I know, I know," said Bertrand, nettled, and then smirking rather awfully. "That day is doubtless a long way off. Let him have his magazines and his films. Let him learn his business."
Wani said, "Thank you, Papa," but his smile was for his mother, and his look, briefly and eloquently, as the smile faded, for Nick. He was at home with his father's manner, his uncontradicted bragging, but to let a friend in on the act showed a special confidence in the friend. Wani rarely blushed, or showed embarrassment of any kind, beyond the murmured self-chastisement with which he offered a seat to a lady or confessed his ignorance of some trivial thing. Nick absorbed his glance, and the secret warmth of what it acknowledged.
"No, no," said Bertrand, with a quick tuck of the chin as if he'd been unfairly criticized, "Wani is in all things his own master. At the moment fruit and veggies don't seem to interest him. Fine." He spread his hands. "Just as getting married to his bloody lovely bride doesn't seem to interest him. But we sit back, and we wait on the fullness of time. Eh, Wani?" And he laughed by himself at his own frankness, as though to soften its effect, but in fact acknowledging and heightening it.
"We're going to make a lot of money first," Wani said. "You'll see."
Bertrand looked conspiratorially at Nick. "Now you know, Nick, the big simple thing about money? The really big thing—"
Nick placed his napkin gently on the table, and murmured, "I'm terribly sorry . . . I must just. . ."—pushing back his chair and wondering if this was even worse manners in Beirut than it was here.
"Eh . . . ? Ah, weak bloody bladder," said Bertrand, as if he'd expected it. "Just like my son." Nick was ready to take on any imputation that enabled him to leave the room; and Wani, with a bored, almost impatient look, got up too and said,
"I'll show you the way."
9
THE PIANO TUNER came in the morning, and then the pianist herself, little Nina Something-over as Gerald called her, came from two to five to practise: it was a wearing day. The tuner was a cardiganed sadist who tutted at the state of the piano and took a dim view in general of its tone, the tiny delay and bell-like bloom that were its special charm. ("Oh," said Rachel, "I know Liszt enjoyed playing it . . .") From time to time he would break off his pitiless ascent of the keyboard to dash out juicy chords and arpeggios, with the air of a frustrated concert pianist, which was even worse than the tuning. Little Nina, too, drove them mad with her fragments of Chopin and Schubert, which went on long enough to catch and lull the heart before they dropped it again, over and over. She had a lot of temperament and a terrifying left hand. She played the beginning of Chopin's Scherzo No. 2 like a courier starting a motorbike. When she'd finished Nick helped Elena bring up and arrange the old gilt ballroom chairs from the trou de gloire. The sofas were trundled into new alignments, tall flower arrangements mounted the stairs on Elena's legs, and the room took on an unnerving appearance of readiness. Nick had one more task to do, which was to phone Ronnie, and he eyed the clock, in the run-up to six, as jumpily as if he was giving a recital himself.
He went out to a phone box on Ladbroke Grove, but it was back-to-back with another and he thought perhaps the man who was in it would hear what he said; he seemed almost to be expecting him, since he wasn't evidently talking, just leaning there. And it was still very close to home; it seemed to implicate Gerald. He went on down the hill, into a street that looked far more amenable to drug-dealing, where a man who could well have been an addict was just coming out of the phone box on the corner. Nick went in after him, and stood in the stuffy half-silence, fiddling in his wallet for the paper with the number on it, and wishing he'd already had a line of coke, or at least a gin-and-tonic, to put him in charge. He wished Wani could have done this, as usual, in the car, with the Talkman. Having given Nick the money, Wani liked to set him challenges, which were generally tasks he could more easily have done himself. Wani claimed never to have used a phone box, just as he had never been on a bus, which he said must be a ghastly experience. So he had never breathed this terrible air, black plastic, dead piss, old smoke, the compound breath of the mouthpiece—
"Yep."
"Oh, hello . . . is that Ronnie?"
"Yeah."
"Oh, hi! It's Nick here," said Nick, with an urgent smile at a spot low down on the wall. It was like calling someone you'd fancied at a party, but much more frightening. "Do you remember—I'm a friend of, um, Antony's . . ."
Ronnie thought for quite a while, while Nick panted encouragingly into the phone. "I don't know any Antony. No. You don't mean Andy?"
Nick tittered. "You know—sort of Lebanese guy, has a white Mercedes . . . sometimes calls himself Wani . . ."
"All right, yeah—enough said! Yeah, Ronnie . . ." said Ronnie, and chuckled affectionately, or with a hint of ridicule, so that Nick didn't know for a moment what he thought of Wani himself, any view of him seemed plausible. "The man with the portable telephone. He's Lebanese, is he? I didn't know he was Lebanese."
"Wani? Well actually he was born in Beirut, but he went to school here, and in fact he's lived in London since he was ten," said Nick, getting snagged as usual in a sub-clause to a more important sentence.
" . . . right..." said Ronnie after a bit. "Well I expect you'll be wanting to see me then. About something."
The great thing about Ronnie, as Wani said, was that he always came through. The stuff was tip-top, he dealt to some big names, and if the price, at one-twenty a gram, was a little steep, the mark-down at three-fifty for a quarter-ounce was a deal indeed. (A quarter-ounce, seven grams, was the only metric equivalent Nick had yet been able to memorize.) The downside of Ronnie was a strange delaying manner that would have seemed sleepy if it hadn't been also a kind of vigilance. He never rushed, he was never on time, and he had a puzzled porous memory. Nick had only met him once, when they'd driven round the block in his red Toyota and he'd watched the simple way the exchange was made. Ronnie was a cockneyfied Jamaican, with a tall shaved head and doleful eyes. He talked a lot about girlfriend troubles, perhaps just to make things clear. His voice was an intimate murmur, and since he was giving them something they wanted he had seemed to Nick both seductive and forgivable.
Today, it all felt much less happy. Ronnie asked him to ring back ten minutes later, when the routine of the first call was repeated almost verbatim, and again ten minutes after that, to check he was on his way. After each call Nick hung around the streets and felt glaringly criminal as well as vulnerable, with £350 rolled up tight in rubber bands in his pocket. The area seemed suddenly to be infested with police cars. For several minutes a helicopter hammered overhead. Nick wondered how he would explain the money to the police, then thought it was more likely they would wait until he got into the car before they made their move. He wondered if Gerald would be able to keep it out of the papers, if they'd be able to get Gerald into the papers, it was more than vulgar and unsafe, he could lose his seat if it came out that drugs were being taken in his house. How long would the sentence be? Ten years? For a first offence . . . And then, god, how would a pretty little poof with an Oxford accent survive in prison? They'd all be after his arse. He saw himself sobbing in a doorless lavatory. But perhaps a character reference from Professor Ettrick would help, or even someone at the Home Office—Gerald might not abandon him entirely! He was already at the place, the corner by the Chepstow Castle—a minute or two early. He perched at one of the picnic tables outside. The pub itself was shut, bleared light came out through plastic sheeting as work went on after hours, a new brewery had bought it, they were knocking the little old bars into one big room to make it more spacious and unwelcoming. Twelve minutes went past. It was very suspicious the way that man at the bus stop kept glancing at him and never got on a bus. Ronnie was getting careless, his phone was obviously tapped, it would be what they called a knock, when everyone in the street, the blind man, the pizza boy, the lady with the dog, were revealed in a second as plain-clothes officers. The car pulled up, Nick strolled over and got in and they cruised off round the block.
"How's it going, Rick?" Ronnie said, his mournful head not moving but his glance going from side to side and back to the rear-view mirror. Nick laughed and cleared his throat. "Very well, thanks," he said. They sat low in the Celica, Ronnie long-legged, arms on his knees, like a boy in a go-kart, long fingers turning the wheel by its crossbar rather than the rim. "Yeah?" said Ronnie. "Well, that's good. How's that Ronnie, then?"
Nick laughed nervously again. "Oh, he's fine, he's very busy." It was a wonderfully approximate world the real Ronnie lived in, and perhaps he liked it that way, his customers all nicknames and mishearings, it was tactful and safe. He looked in the mirror again, and at the same time his left hand went to his waistcoat pocket and then across to Nick, with the neat little thing held invisible under it. Nick was ready for that but he had to grope for the roll of notes in his pocket. Ronnie accelerated through an amber light, and it struck Nick he was breaking the law by not wearing a seatbelt. Ronnie wasn't wearing his either, that was the sort of world he was moving in, and he thought it might hurt his feelings if he belatedly buckled up. The journey must be nearly over, and the chances were they wouldn't have a prang. Awful, though, to get pulled over for a seatbelt violation, and then be questioned, and then searched . . . He nudged Ronnie's arm and he took the money and lost it, again without looking.
They pulled in behind the church at the crown of Ladbroke Grove, in the shadowy crescent of plane trees. "Thanks very much," said Nick. He really had to rush but he didn't want to seem unfriendly. Ronnie was looking out thoughtfully through the windscreen.
"This is an old church, Rick," he said. "This must be old."
"Yeah—well, it's Victorian, I suppose, isn't it," said Nick, who in fact knew all about it.
"Yeah?" said Ronnie, and nodded. "God, there's some old stuff round here."
Nick couldn't tell quite what he was getting at. He said, "It's not that old—sort of 1840s?" He knew not everybody had a sense of history, a useful image, as he had, of the centuries like rooms in enfilade. For half a second he glimpsed what he knew about the church, that the reredos was designed by Aston Webb, that it was built on the site of the grandstand of a long-vanished racetrack. It was a knobbly Gothic oddity in a street of stucco.
"I'm telling you, I'm moving up here, too fucking right I am," said Ronnie, in his protesting murmur.
"Mm, you should," said Nick, unsure if he was humouring him or sharing a wry joke, but excited anyway at the thought of having him as a neighbour. He was sexy, Ronnie, in his haggard spectral way . . .
"Get away from that woman, I'm telling you"—he shook his head and laughed illusionlessly. "I hope you're not having woman trouble, do you, Rick?"
"Oh . . . no . . . I don't," said Nick. "Still bad, is it?"
"I'm telling you," said Ronnie.
Nick could see that Ronnie might be a bit of a handful, and that his line of work might make a certain kind of girl uneasy. He wanted to lean over and get out his probably long and beautiful penis and give him the consolation that a man so perfectly understands—right here, in the car, in the dappled shade across the windscreen. But Ronnie had to get on—he offered his hand, coming down at an angle from a high raised elbow.
Nick got out of the car and turned to walk the two hundred yards to the house. In the street the sense of danger squeezed about him again, and the people who passed him as they came home from work frowned and sneered as they saw that he held a tiny parcel, a crass mistake, a heavy sentence, gripped tight in his hand in his pocket, ready, at the dreaded moment, to be flung down a drain. But when he turned up the steps and looked to left and right he had a gathering rapturous feeling he had got away with it. Of course nobody knew, it was totally safe, nobody had seen, it was nothing but an unknown car that slipped past the end of the street in a second. And now a flood of pleasure was waiting to be released. He rushed through the hall, up the stone stairs, there were voices already in the drawing room, the moan and yap of the first guests' opening platitudes, up and up, up the familiar creaking attic stairs, and into his hot still room that was waiting for him with birdsong through the window and the bed reflected in the wardrobe mirror. He closed the door, locked the door, and over a smiling five minutes changed his shirt, put in cufflinks, tied a tie and pulled on his suit trousers, all intercut with tipping out, chopping and snorting a trial line of the new stuff, hiding the rest in his desk, unrolling the banknote and rolling it up backwards, wiping the desk with his finger and his finger on his gums. Then he shrugged on the jacket, tied his shoes, leapt downstairs and talked brilliantly to Sir Maurice Tipper about the test match.
Nick sat at the end of a row, like an usher. He could see out onto the first-floor landing, where little Nina Glaserova, with her long red hair in a braid down her back, was standing and staring, not into the room but at a clear point in the dark oak of the threshold. Her eyes seemed to work straight through it, into a space where Chopin, Schubert and Beethoven waited for j
ustice to be done to them. She listened as Gerald told the story—father a notable dissident—imprisoned—travelling scholarship withheld—without seeming to recognize it as her own, or knowing of course that dissident wasn't generally a term of approval in Gerald's book; artistic freedom was unemphatically invoked, and there was a joke, which she didn't get, though it made her look up, into the room, at the rows of utterly unknown laughing people, people of great consequence perhaps, whom it was her mission to enthral. The clapping started, Nick gave her an encouraging nod, she paused for a second, then scuttled in through the audience, looking so much like a determined waif that a sigh of startled tenderness seemed to sound like an undertone of the applause. She gave a momentary bow, sat down and began immediately—it was almost funny as well as thrilling when the motorbike summons of the Chopin Scherzo rang out.
There were about fifty people in the room, a loose coalition of family, colleagues and friends. Nina Glaserova was an unknown quantity, and Gerald's claims for her were political as much as artistic. He hoped for a success but he wasn't making a great social effort. Beside Nick a thin-lipped man from the Cabinet Office groped for his programme sheet as if the music had come as a slightly unpleasant surprise—he made a little scuffle with his chair and the paper. One or two people snapped their glasses cases as they tried well-meaningly to catch up with the leaping flood of sound. It was all so sudden and serious, the piano was quivering, the sound throbbed through the floorboards, and there were hints on some faces that it could be thought rather bad form to make quite so much noise indoors.
Nick could see the far curve of the front row, with Lady Partridge at the end, next to Bertrand Ouradi and his wife, and then Wani, in steep profile against the raised piano lid. Catherine, just behind them, was leaning on her boyfriend Jasper's shoulder, and Polly Tompkins was casually squashing against Jasper from the other side. Then there was Morgan, a steely young woman from Central Office whom Polly had brought along as if no one would be surprised. To see Nina herself Nick had to crane round the big white bonce of Norman Kent, who was as sensitive to music as he was to conservatives, and kept shifting in his seat. His frayed denim jacket collar made its own effect among a dozen grades of pinstripe. Penny was sitting beside him, and pressing against him to calm him and to thank him for coming. Nick wondered what he thought of Nina, he wondered what he thought of her himself, too assailed by the sound, by the astounding phenomenon of it, to know if she was really any good. Here came the opening again, the admonitory rumble, the reckless, accurate leap. She had clearly been ferociously schooled, she was like those implacable little gymnasts who sprang out from behind the Iron Curtain, curling and vaulting along the keyboard. As the sadly questioning middle section gathered weight, she put on a fearless turn of speed. She gestured very hard at her effects, and made you doubt she knew their cause. For, the programme sheet Nick had rifled some old sleeve notes, to give a professional look to things, and he had put in Schumann's description of the B-flat minor Scherzo as "overflowing with tenderness, boldness, love and contempt." He played the words through to himself as he gazed across the rows at his lover's head.
The Line of Beauty Page 23