The sign said "Staff Only," so that Nick looked round too—it was probably a back way through to the Fairfax Suite. Inside there was a service passage, less glaringly lit, and he saw Gerald's head through the small wired window in another swing door—and Penny's too, giggling: that was good, it meant things were under control. The door was still settling back in lazy wafts which was why perhaps the noise of Nick pushing it open didn't alert them—it was just a further rhythmic displacement of the stale air. He managed to make a kerfuffle, half turning back, trapping his leg and dropping the folder so that neither of them would know he had seen Penny's hand, like an amorous teenager's, tucked in the back pocket of Gerald's trousers.
However, he had seen it, and the shock of it, trite but enormous, made him distracted at dinner, when the anticipated crabwise conversation about Gerald took place. He agreed rather sourly with their jokey criticisms and spoke of him as if he'd never much cared for him. This made them even more uneasy. There was a summer repeat of Sedley on ITV, and they watched it after dinner in their excited ceremonious way, Dot saying (quite tipsy by now), "My son knows him, you know! He's a great friend of Patrick Grayson!" and Nick thinking, why can't you see what a frightful old poof he is.
When they turned in, unbelievably early, the high summer twilight still beautiful outside, Nick called out, "Sleep well!" and closed his door with a bewildering sense of loss, as though Gerald and Rachel were really his parents, and not the undeviating old pair in their twin beds in the next room. Later he heard his father snoring through the wall, and the creak of his mother's bed—he pictured her pulling the blankets over her ears. Rachel had once admitted to Nick that Gerald snored too, though she'd done it in the way she sometimes pretended to a disadvantage, from polite awareness of her own good fortune ("I know, we can never get into Tante Claire"): "He can make a bit of a rumpus," she'd said. Nick drew and resisted various conclusions from what he had seen; he was greedy and then reluctant for unpleasant sensations. He thought perhaps he was being a bit of a prig. He thought of Gerald's regular visits to Barwick with Penny, almost always without Rachel. It was a system, a secret so routine it must have come to seem secure. And the steady disguise, of course, of the "loathing" for Barwick, the chore of the surgery, the boredom of meetings with Archie Manning . . . And what about in London? Presumably they couldn't do it there, the risk of detection would be too great. Or didn't much actually go on? Could Penny possibly be the sort of girl for all that? There might be some other excuse for the glimpse he had had in the hotel. Impossible to think of one. He wondered if Gerald was snoring now, and the image of what he probably was doing rose alarmingly in Nick's sex-picturing mind. Or if he was snoring, then it seemed to his partner like a bearable penalty of an illicit affair . . . Nick stopped and drew back with distaste for his own imagining of the thing. A little later he woke and the house was silent again, and the shock of what was happening came over him, his grown-up scorn of its utter banality and his child's ache of despair. He saw it had already become a secret of his own, a thing to carry unwillingly, a sour confusion of duties. He lay awake listening to the silence, which was illusory, a cover to a register of other sounds. . . the sigh of a grey poplar, the late half-conscious toppings-up of the cistern overhead, and within his ears remote soft percussions, like doors closing in non-existent wings of the house.
11
(i)
Toby said, "You get a glimpse of the chateau on your left," and he slowed down as a gap in the trees appeared. They saw steep slate roofs, purple-black brick, plate glass, the special nineteenth-century hardness.
"Right . . ." said Wani. "But you don't have that any longer?"
"My grandfather sold it after the war," said Toby.
"So who lives there now?" said Nick, whose heart was always caught by a lodge-house on a side road or a pinnacle among trees, and by Gothic Revival more than Gothic itself. "Can we go in?"
"It's a retirement home for old gendarmes," Toby said. "I have been in—it's pretty depressing"; and he pushed on along the potholed lane.
"Oh," said Nick doubtfully.
"They don't give you any trouble?" Wani wanted to know.
"They can get a bit rowdy," Toby said. "Once or twice we've had to call the police"—and he looked in the mirror to see if Nick smiled at his joke. Oh, Toby's jokes!—they made Nick want to scrunch him up in a protesting hug.
"So the house we're going to . . . ?" said Wani.
"The manoir . . . was the original big house on the estate. It's jolly old, sort of sixteenth century I think—well, you'll see. It's not as big as the chateau, but it's much nicer. At least we all think so."
"Pdght . . . " Wani drawled again, with a slight suggestion that he might have preferred the larger house, but was ready to muck in at the manoir. "And this still belongs to Lionel?"
"Strictly speaking, yah," said Toby.
Wani gazed out of the window as though he knew the value of everything. "And so one day, old chap, it will all belong to you," he said, with a mixture of rivalry and satisfaction.
"Well, me and my sis, of course." This occupied a future that Nick couldn't easily imagine.
"So who's down here now?" asked Wani.
"Just us at the moment, I'm afraid," said Toby: "Ma and Pa, me and Catherine—oh, and Jasper."
"Oh, is that her little boyfriend . . ."
"Yeah, have you met him, he's an estate agent."
"I think I know who you mean," said Wani.
"Jasper and Pa seem to have become best friends. I think he'll have the house on the market by the time we leave."
Nick gave a snuffly laugh from the back seat, and thought what a terrible little operator Jasper was, oiling his way into the family with his forelock and his dodgy voice; and Wani too—how flawless he was, making his quick social reconnaissance, everything hidden from Toby, his old friend. He looked at the backs of their heads, Wani's black curls, Toby's cropped and sunburned nape, and felt for an eerie moment what strangers they were to him, and perhaps to each other. They were only boys, but the height and territorial presumption of the Range Rover threw them into relief as men of the world, Toby sporting and unimaginative, Wani languid, with the softness and vigilance of money about him. Perhaps being old friends didn't mean very much, they shared assumptions rather than lives.
Wani said, "Oh, I bought the Clerkenwell building by the way."
"Oh, you did," said Toby, "good."
"Four hundred K. I thought, really . . ."
"Yah . . ." said Toby, setting his face, looking bored. There was something stiff but acceptably adult to them both about this, about saying so little. Wani hadn't even mentioned the deal to Nick. It was typical of his secrecy, both grand and petty, since he had given Nick the five thousand: he made him feel how that sum was eclipsed by the unnamed sublimities of his own transactions.
Nick said, "Oh, that's great, I can't wait to see it." He found he tried to keep up, as if to show that he had money, for the first time in his life; but having some money, and sitting in a car behind Toby and Wani, only made him realize how little money he had—he felt self-conscious with them now in a way that he never had when he was penniless.
"So no chance of Martine joining us?" Toby said.
"I don't think my mother can spare her," said Wani, in a tone of imponderable irony.
"She'll have to one day," said Toby, and gave a big laugh.
"I know . . . " said Wani; "anyway, what about you, you fucker, are you seeing anyone?"
"Nah . . . " said Toby, with a sour grin of independence, and then gratefully, as if the joke could never fade, "Ah! Here's our wrinkled retainer." An old man was riding a bicycle towards them over the patchy road surface, his slowly rising and falling knees jutting out sideways—he stopped and tottered into the grass verge as Toby pulled up. "Bonjour, Dede . . . Et comment va Liliane aujourd'hui?"
The old man held on to the car and looked in at them cautiously and with a hint of cunning. "Pas bien," he said.
; "Ah, je suis desole," said Toby—insincerely it seemed to Nick, but it was only the play-acting, the capable new persona that came with speaking in a foreign language. A longish conversation followed, Toby fluent but with little attempt at a French accent, a sense of heightened goodwill and simplicity between them, and the old man's laconic answers coming like stamps of authenticity to the new arrivals, trying to hear and follow what was being said. Wani of course was a native French-speaker, but for Nick there was a warm sense of success when he could make out Dede's words. Jokes understood in a foreign language became amusing in a further, exemplary way: he was storing them already as the coinage, the argot, of their ten-day visit. He sat back, smiling tolerantly, loving the heat and the sunlight through the huge old roadside oaks and chestnuts, and the sense of a prepared surprise, of being led through screened back ways towards a view. There was that tingle in the air that you got in even modestly mountainous country, the imminence of a drop, of space instead of mass.
Toby wound up the conversation, they all nodded solicitously at Dede, and the car crept on again. Nick said, "I hope your grandmother's still coming down."
"Don't worry," said Toby, "she's coming on Tuesday. And the Tippers are coming too, I'm sorry about that."
"That's fine," said Wani.
"It's bloody good to have you guys here," Toby said, and looked affectionately for Nick again in the mirror.
"It's fabulous to be here," said Nick, with just a shiver, as they turned ill between urn-crowned gate-piers, of the old feeling, from the first day at Oxford, the first morning at Kensington Park Gardens, of innocence and longing.
A three-sided courtyard was made by the sombre entrance front of the house, creeper-covered and small-windowed, a lower wing to the left, and an old barn and stable on the right. The house itself hid the view, and it was only through the open front door and the shadowy hallway that Nick caught a hint of the dazzle beyond, a further small doorway of light. He picked his bags out from the car, and watched Wani gesturing belatedly as Toby plucked up his cases and strode indoors with them, his sandalled feet thwacking on the stone flags and his calf muscles square and brown. He seemed to tread there for a moment, framed and silhouetted, as he had at the Worcester lodge, all those years ago, in the archway that led from the outside world to the inner garden: Toby, who was born to use the gateway, the loggia, the stairs without looking at them or thinking about them. And something else came back, from that later first morning at Kensington Park Gardens: a sense that the house was not only an enhancement of Toby's interest but a compensation for his lack of it.
From the hall they caught a glimpse through a series of rooms curtained against the steep sunlight, but stabbed across by it here and there. There were china bowls, oak tables, books and newspapers, straw hats, the remotely threatening mood of holiday routines, of other people's leisure, of games to be inducted into, things the Feddens had already said and done lingering in the shadows among the squashy old armchairs. The rooms were tall, deep-raftered, stone-walled, so that you would have a sense of living in the depths of them, like rooms in a castle or an old school. But for now they were deserted, the party were all elsewhere.
Toby led them on up the wide shallow stairs. On the upper floor an ochre-tiled passageway ran the length of the house, with bedrooms opening off it like prettily appointed cells. Nick and Wani were at the far end. "Mum's put you in opposite rooms," said Toby, "so I hope you're not fed up with each other." Wani raised his eyebrows, puffed and shrugged like a Frenchman: they did their double act. It was hard for a moment to believe this wasn't the usual discreet arrangement for an unmarried couple, that Toby wasn't in on the secret, hadn't the first suspicion. Nick was used to deceiving adults but he felt sad about tricking Toby. He saw the wound it would be to his childish good nature if he found out. But Wani presumably was hardened against such anxieties. Nick looked at him, and had a brief cold intuition of their different shades of relief about the rooms—his own that they were close, and Wani's that they were apart. Wani was on the front, and Nick, as family perhaps, had the smaller, darker room looking out at the end of the house into the branches of an ancient plane tree. "Fantastic!" he said. He got on with unpacking, and hung up the suits he had brought—always wary of what rich people meant by "informal." His laundry had all been done by the hotel in Munich, and was rustlingly interleaved with tissue paper. He noticed that a tap in his bathroom dripped and was leaving a rusty stain. By the bed there was a bookcase with old French novels, left-behind Frederick Forsyths, odd leather-bound volumes of history and memoirs with the coroneted Kessler bookplate. There was a pair of strange little paintings on glass in varnished pearwood frames. He took possession of the room, and talked himself out of a tiny sense of disappointment with it.
Toby was still chatting in Wani's doorway, his hands in his shorts pockets, the undeniable bulge above the waistband these days, something comfy about him, as well as something passive and perplexed. Nick loved him with that fondness of an old friendship that accepts a degree of boredom, and is soothed and even sustained by it. What he felt was distilled affection, undemanding but principled. "Ah, he can tell us," Toby said.
"Yah, what was the name of the brothel we went to in Venice?" said Wani. He was unpacking too, though as coyly and delayingly as he had undressed that day at the Highgate Ponds.
"Oh, the ridotto?" said Nick. "Yes, it's this really exquisite little casino, I suppose it was a brothel, really. Tl ridotto della Procuratoressa Venier.' It's just behind San Marco."
"There you are," said Wani.
"It's been done up by the American branch of Venice in Peril. You ring the bell and the lady shows it to you."
"OK . . ." said Toby. "So it's not a functioning brothel . . ."
Wani said, "Anyone less like a madam than the lady from Venice in Peril it would be hard to imagine. I'm having a feature on the top brothels of the world in my first issue."
"Your advertisers will love that," said Toby.
"Don't you think?" said Wani. "Well, beautiful brothels." He looked at Nick, whose idea the feature had entirely been. "You know—risottos."
Toby said, "You should have taken me with you. You can't expect poor old Guest to go sniffing round tarts' parlours."
"No, you'd have been much more use," Wani said, and gave him a level grin, so that Nick was jealous for a second and went on to wonder—it had never been clear—if Wani fancied Toby. Well, it was possible, but unlikely, for some large social reason, which perhaps boiled down to the fact that Toby couldn't be bought.
"Drinks at six," Toby said. "But come and have a swim first. Everyone's outside"—and he slapped off down the echoing hallway.
Then Nick strode across Wani's room, pushed open the loosely coupled shutters, and had his first look at the view: of wooded spurs, dropping from either side like interlaced fingers, and beyond them one bright curve of the Dronne with a rocky bluff above it, bright too in the late afternoon sun. There was the glare of France in high summer, the colours simplified, dry and drab, but twitching with light, and the shadows baffling, like deep grey gauze. Down below, three or four stony terraces dropped away from the house, linked by stairways—it was hard from here to work them out. "Yeah, I'm going to change," said Wani.
"Good idea," said Nick, turning and smiling.
"Hmm. OK . . ."—with the frowning reluctance of a boy.
"Darling, I spent half last night with my tongue up your arse, I'm not going to be too shocked if you take your shirt off."
Wani gave a dry little laugh and arranged his various pairs of slippers and moccasins on the floor of the wardrobe. "It's what people might say," he muttered.
"What, because I'm gay, you mean?" Nick said, with a flash of the eyebrows. "Well, there's no one else in the house. And I'll just carry on looking out of the window . . . I'll crane out of the window": which he did, to see that directly below there was a white awning, covering, presumably, the table, the famous table evoked by Gerald—with apologies to Napoleon
—as the first dining room of Europe. It was the table and the awning that made it their view—the one often referred to by Gerald as his own landscape, one of the few things, like the music of Strauss, on which he was all unembarrassed sensibility. Of course it wasn't quite what Nick had expected; again it took a minute for the reality to blot and erase the long-imagined, subtly finer view.
Beyond the awning, steps led down on the left through the shade of a sprawling fig tree towards a low-roofed further structure, which Nick thought must be the pool-house. And just then Catherine came up them, noiselessly barefoot, on tiptoe at the heat of the stones, a blue towel round her shoulders and her hair still wet. She looked very young, childlike, nipping across the terrace, peering about; and with a vague air of crisis to her, Nick felt, as if she'd been dressed like this in a London street. Toby came out from the house and she said, "Are they here?"—in her way of not quite noticing him even though she was asking him a question. "They'll be down in a minute," Toby said, going on himself towards the steps to the pool. Catherine sat on her towel on the low terrace wall, pushed back her hair, and her eyes drifted slowly upwards across the front of the house until she saw Nick leaning out of the end window and grinning at her. "Hello, darling!"
"Hello, darling!" Nick opened his arms to the view and then, with the sort of dumb camp she liked, pretended to throw flowers down at an adoring crowd. She beamed and raised her hands in noiseless applause.
The Line of Beauty Page 29