The Line of Beauty

by Alan Hollinghurst

  "Quite!" said Nick.

  "Two things you can do," said Lionel. "Obviously, don't talk to anyone. And could you bear to pop out and buy the Standard?"

  "Of course," said Nick, suddenly more nervous of the photographers.

  "And a third thing," said Rachel. "Could you try and find my daughter?"

  "Ah, yes . . . " said Lionel.

  "She's frightfully up at the moment," Rachel said. "You've no idea what she'll do."

  "Well, I'll try," said Nick.

  "Isn't she taking the pills?" said Lionel, firm and vague at once.

  "They can't quite get it right," said Rachel. "Two months ago she could barely speak—now she can barely stop speaking. It is a strain."

  They both looked at Nick and he said, "I'll see what I can do." He sensed a certain hardness towards himself, a request that he should prove his usefulness to the family. Then he thought briskness might be a mark of confidence. A structure of command, long laid away in velvet, had been rapidly reassembled.

  Catherine came home about six. She was thinking of buying a house in Barbados, and had been having a long talk with Brentford about it. Nick could tell from the smell of her hair when she kissed him that she'd been smoking pot; she seemed both elated and spaced out. Flashes went off as she opened the front door, but she treated them almost as natural phenomena, the meteors of her own atmosphere. "What was all that about?" she said, hardly waiting for an answer. "Another visit from the Prime Minister?"

  "Not exactly," said Nick, following her upstairs and thinking that whatever was going on made another visit from the PM very unlikely. "We've been wondering where you were," he said. Rachel was on the phone in the drawing room, talking to Gerald in Westminster, and seemed to be getting the reassurances she needed; she was oddly placable. She smiled indulgently at Toby's portrait and said, "Of course, darling, just carry on as normal. We'll try . . . ! We'll see you . . . Yup, yup." Nick went to the front windows, which looked very large and shiny in the early dusk. It was unsettling to know there were men waiting outside, their patience barely tested. The curtains were never closed, and when freed from the brocaded bands that held them back they still curved stiffly apart. Nick leant in to close the shutters, seldom used, which unfolded with alarming cracks.

  When Rachel explained what was going on, Catherine seemed distantly enthusiastic. "Extraordinary . . . " she said.

  "It could be quite serious actually," said Nick.

  "Not prison, you mean?" It was the pot perhaps that gave her this smile of benign speculation.

  "No," said Rachel crossly. "Besides, he's done absolutely nothing wrong. It's clearly all to do with that hateful man Tipper."

  "Then Tipper can go to prison," said Catherine. "Or both the Tippers, better still."

  Rachel gave a twitch of a smile to show the subject of the joke touched her a little too nearly. "They're only making investigations. No one's been arrested, much less charged."

  "Right."

  "Uncle Lionel's been here, and he was very reassuring."

  Nick murmured endorsingly and said, "Would anyone like a drink?"

  "Anyway, darling, you know your father would never do a thing like that. He's far too experienced. Not to mention dead honest!" Rachel coloured slightly at this affirmation.

  "So is it in the paper?"

  "It's not in the Standard tonight. And Toby says they won't touch it at the Telegraph—he's spoken to Gordon. Daddy says it's just the sort of thing the Guardian would love to blow out of all proportion."

  "I'll have um . . . " Catherine said, bearing down on the drinks table with a fascinated smile but in the end only managing to think of a gin-and-tonic. Nick mixed her one, juniper lost in quinine: when she was on the up curve it was best to be careful with alcohol, annoyance, laughter—any cause of excitement. They stood with their glasses at their chins and nodded "Cheers!" in a meaningful way.

  "The thing is, darling," said Rachel, "we simply mustn't talk to anybody at the moment. Oath of silence, Daddy says."

  "I don't know anything about stocks and shares, so you needn't worry."

  "It's what they make you say, though . . . Darling, or they twist your words. They've got no principles."

  "They're not your friend," said Nick, which had been Lionel's dry way of putting it.

  "They've got the morals of rattlesnakes," said Rachel.

  Catherine sat on a sofa, swayed her head over her glass, and looked from one to the other of them. She started to smile and they flinched, with the feeling they were being mocked; but the smile spread and they saw it was to do with something else, the flowering of a clear belief, just touched with playful calculation, that they would share her happiness. "I've had such a thrilling day," she said.

  They sat down to dinner in the kitchen. Normally Nick enjoyed the nights when Gerald was kept late at Westminster—the mood of snug reduction and humorously tolerated crisis; if they had guests, or if Gerald and Rachel were due out, there was even a thrill to Gerald's absence: it was a wing-brush of power, the sign of demands and decisions greater than dinner. Tonight his absence was more critical. It was odd that he hadn't come home. Clearly he attached great importance to carrying on normally.

  Catherine said, "What's Gerald voting about?"

  "Oh, darling, I don't know . . . it's obviously something pretty major."

  "Can't we ring him?"

  "Well, he's not answering the phone in the office. And if he's in the Chamber, or somewhere else about the Palace," said Rachel impressively, "then we couldn't reach him anyway."

  "He'll be back straight after the vote," said Nick. He knew that Gerald had Penny's new mobile phone; Rachel must be trying to spare him a wild, irrelevant pep talk from his daughter.

  "What is a takeover?" said Catherine.

  "Well, it's when one company buys up another."

  "They acquire a majority of the shares," said Nick. "Then they have control."

  "So are they saying Gerald didn't have these shares?"

  Rachel said, as if judiciously filtering the facts for her child, "I think sometimes perhaps people fiddle with the price of the shares."

  "Make them more valuable?"

  "Exactly."

  "Or less, of course," said Nick.

  "Mm . . . " said Rachel.

  "And how would they do that?"

  "Well, I suppose they sort of. . . um . . ."

  "Mm . . . " said Nick, after a bit.

  They smiled doubtfully at their own unworldliness.

  "It's not the same as asset-stripping, anyway," said Catherine.

  "No . . . " said Rachel, with hesitant firmness.

  "Because that's what Sir Maurice Tipper does. Toby told me. Maurice Tipper, Asset Stripper. That's when they get hold of something, it's like an old house, they strip out all the marble fireplaces before they demolish it."

  "And leave everyone on the street," said Nick.

  "Exactly!" said Catherine.

  "That, of course, is what Badger's supposed to have done all over Africa," said Rachel, with a guilty grimace. "I don't know if it's true."

  "Oh, Badger . . ." said Catherine, indulgent and dismissive at once. "What's become of poor old Badger, lately, I wonder."

  "He's often away," said Rachel, as if to excuse her vagueness about him.

  "I'm going to get in touch with him."

  "Well, you could."

  "I'm going to catch up with quite a number of people who've dropped out of my life. It's so pathetic to lose touch," Catherine said, with a lively but disgusted look at her last summer, when everything about her had been pathetic.

  "I'm sure he's not expecting a call . . . " said Rachel.

  "I saw Russell today, for instance."

  "Oh really?" said Rachel thinly.

  "Do you remember?"

  "Oh, I do."

  "Me too," said Nick.

  "He was asking about everybody."

  "I should still be a bit careful with Russell," said Nick, with a supportive glance a
t Rachel.

  "But that was all before . . . !" said Catherine, in happy exasperation.

  Later, she said, "If Gerald resigns, you'll be able to come to Barbados with me, that would be perfect, wouldn't it, until things blow over."

  "That's very kind," said Rachel. "Though I can't help feeling there's more than one ' if in that sentence."

  "Oh, Mum, this house has got an enormous swimming pool, as well as being right on the beach. You just take your pick!"

  "No, I'm sure it's delightful."

  "It could be just what he needs. A complete change of direction."

  "You have the oddest idea of just what people need," said Rachel. "I've noticed it before."

  "Well, let's face it, he certainly doesn't need the pathetic little empees salary."

  ' 'What you perhaps forget is that. . . your father wants to serve his country.''

  "OK, when you get back, plunge into charity work! Probably much more useful than being Monster for Social Welfare and cutting everyone's grants. He could found something. The Gerald Fedden Trust. People often have a complete change of heart when something like this happens. You know, they go into the East End."

  "Well, let's just wait and see, shall we," said Rachel, folding her napkin and pushing back her chair.

  Nick and Catherine went up to the drawing room. "Will you put on some music, darling," said Catherine.

  "I'm not sure your mother really . . ."

  "Oh, just something nice. I don't mean God-dammery. All right, I'll choose." She went to the record cupboard, and knelt with her head cocked sideways, humming teasingly as she picked out an LP and prepared to put it on. Nick heard the needle drop, the kindling crackle.

  "Turn it down a bit, darling . . . ?"

  She did so, and tutted, "Uncle Nick!" Out from the speakers came the sinister little jumps that start Rachmaninov's Symphonic Dances. "There, you like that," she said.

  "Up to a point," said Nick, knowing how much he didn't want to hear it.

  "Oh, it's wonderful," she said, staring from the stage at an invisible dress circle and raising her arms. It was a piece he'd adored as a teenager, and played all the time in his first year at Oxford to confirm and deepen the regretful longing which seemed now to have been the medium he lived in—it unfolded for him like that endless tune on the alto sax. Now its melancholy felt painful, even vicious. He half watched Catherine sweeping through the room, alarmingly unselfconscious. He had danced to it himself, but by himself, in his room, drunk, at the end of days brightened or not by contact with Toby.

  "It is a bit God-dammery," he said, as a Russian Orthodox chant made itself heard. Catherine waved her arms hectically. "It's a bit like having a bop in St Basil's Cathedral." He tried to throw off his embarrassment with these square little jokes. She smiled, stretched out a hand to him, and scowled for a second because he wouldn't join her. He thought of her four months ago, trailing her hopelessness from room to room like a sad child with an inseparable rag; and now, mere chemistry, she was Makarova. She didn't notice the melancholy, the insidious, shifting harmonies; it was movement and therefore life. He said, "The thing is, darling, there's a bit of a crisis going on. You know, it looks rather odd leaping round like this when your mum's so anxious—well, we all are." He spoke consciously as one of the family, to cover his private unease, at being both needed and excluded by the terms of the crisis. Catherine didn't pay attention, she hummed, serenely, stubbornly, and a while later stopped dancing as if on her own decision. She wandered to the big bay window at the back, and stood looking out through her reflection at the lights beyond the trees. They seemed perhaps like elements in a pattern, which, read with the right intuition for shape and meaning, might reveal an instruction. When she turned round she gave Nick a smile that hovered before various possible cajolements. She sat on the broad arm of his chair and slid in sideways against him.

  "I know," she said, "let's go out for a bit. Have you got the car here?"

  "Um, yes," said Nick. "Round the corner. But. . . well, Gerald will be back soon."

  "Gerald could be ages. You know they don't vote till midnight sometimes, if they're filimandering."

  "Or gerrybustering."

  "Exactly! We needn't be long. I've just got an idea."

  Of course the idea of not being here when Gerald got back was very attractive. Rachel came in, and Nick felt he'd been caught larking about, Catherine squashing him like some bolshie teenage attempt at seduction. "Gerald's just rung," Rachel said. "It seems they're going to be really awfully late. It's a bill he's got to, um, you know, keep a bit of an eye on."

  "How is he?" said Catherine fondly.

  "He sounds fine. He says really not to worry." She had a new confidence, an almost pleasurable glow, and Nick felt sure she'd just been told how much she was loved. She moved across the room, looking for some small task to perform; found fallen chrysanthemum petals on a table top, swept them into her open palm, and dropped them in the wastebasket. "Oh, I like this," she said. "Isn't it Rachmaninov?" The sad waltz of the second movement was just catching fire. She stood gazing over their heads at the caprice by Guardi, and perhaps at some memory of her own. Nick thought for a moment she was going to start dancing too—she seemed suddenly very like her daughter. But really it was only in charades or the adverb game that she took the licence to be silly.

  Catherine said, "Mum, Nick and I are going out for half an hour."

  "Oh, darling . . . really?"

  "There's just something we've got to do. I'm not going to tell you, but . . . We'll be back!"

  "Is it quite the best moment . . . ?"

  "Yes, I wonder," said Nick.

  "I'm not going to talk to anyone, don't worry!"

  Rachel thought, and said, "Well, if you are going out, then obviously Nick should go with you."

  "We'll just go in the car," said Catherine. "Nick will be with me the whole time." And she hugged him to her in the chair with a delighted laugh.

  Rachel looked rather narrowly at Nick, as the guarantor of this excursion. He thought he might be going to put up more resistance than he did. He gave a half smile, a slow nod, a wearily tolerant closing of the eyes. She said, "Please don't be long. And take the back way. Take a torch."

  They went out, and as they started downstairs Nick heard the minatory little fanfares interrupt the waltz, and wondered if Rachel would go on listening to it after they'd gone. In the hall it was still quite loud. The whole house seemed steeped in a wilful air of romance.

  Catherine wouldn't tell him where they were going, only where to turn. Nick sighed good-humouredly at this, and was half glad she didn't notice his tension as they left the house further and further behind, and Rachel in it alone. When they swung around Marble Arch and down Park Lane he said, "It looks as though we might be going to Westminster."

  "In a sense," said Catherine. "You'll see." Her seductiveness had hardened to a brightness.

  "There's absolutely no point in going to the House of Commons."

  "No, no," she said.

  They went down Grosvenor Place, wound through Victoria, and then headed straight towards Westminster. The floodlit front of the Abbey appeared, and then they were gunning out into Parliament Square, the bright face of Big Ben, always stirring to Nick, like the best picture in a child's book, showing 9.30: 9.30 was striking, iron circles fading in the bus roar. He said, quite relieved, "I can't go in there, you know." But she made him turn left instead, towards Whitehall, past Downing Street, and the Banqueting House, and then suddenly towards the river, and into a side street walled right up to the sky by a vast Victorian building. It was a feature of the London riverscape Nick had almost unconsciously absorbed, without ever deducing or being told what it was: he had an image of its roof, like a Loire chateau. He parked opposite, outside some dark ministry. The whole street was oddly dark, except for the glowing glass canopies of the chateau's doorways, somehow redolent of gaslight and cab horses, at one of which a porter in a peaked cap was silhouetted. For a mo
ment a London sensation, unnoticed and perpetual as the throb of traffic, came clear for him: of order and power, rhythmic and intricate, endlessly sure of obedience. Then he remembered. "This is where Badger lives, isn't it?"

  "It was just Mum mentioning him," said Catherine, as if it was an obvious breakthrough.

  Nick saw that she was crazy, that the trip was not an inspiration but an irrelevance. He slumped and pursed his lips in tender annoyance. He tried kindly to find a reason in her craziness. "You think Badger can somehow throw a light on this business? He's probably not here, is he, darling—isn't he in South Africa?" But she had opened the car door, with no sign in her face or voice that she was even aware of Nick's worry, or of any possible objection. She had her certainty, a source of joy and tension, like revealed religion. Nick's objection was mainly that he didn't like Badger, that it was mutual, and that Badger would like him even less for bringing his manic god-daughter round. It was a fuck-flat, in Barry Groom's hard phrase, not a proper home. He had an image of small hotel-like rooms in which Badger conducted strained affairs with much younger women; of Badger shooting a line as phoney as the prints on the wall and the Chippendale cocktail cabinet.

  They went in under one of the glass canopies, and through a brown-marble entrance hall; a porter in a cubbyhole was listening to the radio and nodded back at them as if they were always in and out. Catherine, in her dark coat, made up, evangelical, had the confidence to pass anywhere; the sense of getting away with something was all Nick's. The wait by the lift was a reasonable but finite chance to turn back: Catherine smiled and quivered, hands thrust into pockets flashing her coat open. "Are you sure about this?" said Nick. He knew he ought to be restraining her and at the same time he was trying to live up to her. Her conviction was a challenge to someone reasonably cowardly. He felt a vague intellectual awe of her insights, however mad. He thought her state might be like the capable elation of coke, but more psychic. There was a warning plink, the doors opened, and Penny came tearing out.