The Line of Beauty

large leather-bound albums, which he carried over to a central table. Again the inspection was hurried and tantalizing. He stopped now and then, as the heavy pages fell, to display a Victorian photograph of the gardens, with their wide bald views over newly planted woods, or of the interiors, almost comically crowded with chairs and tables, vases on stands, paintings on easels, and everywhere, in every vista, the arching, drooping leaves of potted palms. Now the house seemed settled and seasoned, a century old, with its own historic light and odour, but then it was ostentatiously new. In the second album there were group photographs, posed on the steps of the terrace, and annotated in a tiny florid script: Nick wanted days to read them, countesses, baronets, American duchesses, Balfours and Sassoons, Goldsmids and Stuarts, numerous Kesslers. The gravel was bizarrely covered with fur rugs for the group that centred on Edward VII in a tweed cape and Homburg hat. And then, May 1903, a gathering of twenty or so, second row, Lady Fairlie, The Hon. Simeon Kessler, Mr Henry James, Mrs Langtry, The Earl of Hexham… a cheerful informal picture. The Master, with his thumb in his striped waistcoat, eyes shaded by a traveller's widebrimmed hat, looked rather crafty.

'So what do you think of the house?' said Catherine, coming across the lawn.

'Well… obviously, it's amazing… ' He was tingling to the point of fatigue with the afternoon's impressions, but was cautious as to what to say to her.

'Yeah, it's fucking amazing, isn't it!' she agreed, with a bright, brainless laugh. She didn't normally talk like this, and Nick supposed it was part of the persona she was showing to Russell. Russell wasn't actually present (he was busy with his camera somewhere) but it would have taken an unnecessary effort to get out of role. Other elements of the performance were a strange dragging walk and a stunned, vaguely cunning, smile. Nick assumed these were meant to convey sexual satiation.

'How was your journey?'

'Oh, fine-he drives so dangerously.'

'Oh… We were held up for ages by the roadworks. Your dad got in quite a state about it.'

Catherine gave him a pitying glance. 'He obviously went the wrong way,' she said.

They wandered on among the formal gardens, where rose scents were mixed with the cat's-piss smell of low box hedges, and the round ponds reflected a summer sky now faintly scrimmed with high white cloud. 'God, let's sit down,' said Catherine, as though they'd been walking for hours. They went to a stone bench supervised by two naked minor deities. Marvellous the great rallies of the undressed that rich people summoned to wait on them. Lord Kessler at home must be almost constantly in view of a sprawling nymph or unselfconscious hero. 'Russell should be finished soon, then you can meet him. I wonder if you'll like him.'

'I've already told everyone how charming he is, so I rather feel I've got to.'

'Yeah…?' said Catherine, with a grateful, intrigued smile. She felt for cigarettes in her spangled evening bag. 'He's doing lots of stuff for The Face at the moment. He's a brilliant photographer.'

'I told them that too. They all take The Face, of course.'

Catherine grunted. 'I suppose Gerald was mouthing off about him.'

'He was just saying he didn't have an opinion about him because he'd never met him.'

'Mm… That doesn't normally prevent him. In fact that doesn't sound like him at all.' She clicked her lighter and took in a first deep drag of smoke-the breathing out accompanied by a little toss of the head and a comforted settling back. 'At all, at all, at all,' she went on, meaninglessly assuming an Irish accent.

'Well… ' Nick wanted everyone to get on, but for once he couldn't be bothered to work at it. He wished he was in a position to speak about Leo as freely as she spoke about Russell-he thought if he did bring the subject up she would say something upsetting and possibly true. She said,

'Did my mother show you round the house?'

'No, actually, your uncle did. I felt rather honoured.'

Catherine paused and blew out smoke admiringly. 'What do you make of him, then?'

'He seems very nice.'

'Mm. What do you think, he's not gay, is he?'

'No, I didn't feel anything like that,' Nick said, a little solemnly. He knew he was supposed to be able to tell; in fact he tended to think people were when they weren't, and so lived with a recurrent sense of disappointment, at them and at his own inadequate sensors. He didn't tell Catherine, but his uncertainty on the house tour had actually been the other way round. Had his own gayness somehow put Lord Kessler off and made him seem unreliable and lightweight in the old boy's eyes? Had Lord Kessler even registered-in his clever, unimpressionable way-that Nick was gay? 'He asked me what I was going to do. It was a bit like an interview, except I hadn't applied for a job.'

'Well, you may want a job one day,' said Catherine. 'And then he's bound to remember. He's got a memory like an ostrich.'

'Perhaps… I'm not quite sure what he actually does.'

She looked at him as if he must be joking. 'He's got this bank, darling…'

'Yes, I know-'

'It's a big building chock-a-block full of money.' She waved her cigarette arm around hilariously. 'And he goes in and turns it into even more money.'

Nick let this simple sarcasm pass over him. 'I see, you don't know what he actually does either.'

She stared at him and then gave another neighing laugh. 'Haven't a clue, darling!'

There was a shaking in the trimmed beech hedge away to the right, and then a tall man came hopping out of it sideways, holding up a camera that was strung round his neck. They watched him as he strolled towards them, Catherine leaning back on one hand with a nervously triumphant expression. 'Yeah, hold that,' he said, and took a couple of exposures very quickly, as he was still moving. 'Lovely,' he said.

So Russell was one of her older boyfriends, thirty perhaps, dark, balding, with the casual but combative look of the urban photographer, black T-shirt and baseball boots, twenty-pocketed waistcoat and bandolier of film. He passed in front of them, clicking away, cheerily exploiting this little episode of his arrival, Nick's awkwardness and Catherine's hunger for the spontaneous, the outrageous. She lolled backwards, and touched her upper lip with her tongue. Was it good when her men were older, or not? He could be Protector or Abuser-it was a great deep uncertainty, like the ones in her graphology book. He pulled her up and gave her a hug and then Catherine said, almost reluctantly,

'Oh, this is Nick, by the way.'

'Hello, Nick,' said Russell.

'Hello!'

'Did you meet anyone?' asked Catherine, showing a hint of anxiety.

'Yeah, I've just been talking to the caterers round the back. Apparently Thatcher's not coming.'

'Oh, sorry, Russell,' Catherine said.

Nick said, 'We are getting the Home Secretary, though,' in his mock-pompous tone, which Russell, like Leo, failed to pick up on.

'I wanted Thatcher doing the twist, or pissed.'

'Yeah, Thatcher pogoing!' said Catherine, and laughed rather madly. Russell didn't look especially amused.

'Well, I wouldn't want her at my twenty-first,' he said.

'I don't think Toby really wanted her,' Nick put in apologetically. The touching thing was that Catherine had clearly taken her father's fantasy as the truth, and then used it to lure Russell. The dream of the leader's presence seeped through to an unexpected depth.

'Well, Toby would have been perfectly happy with a party at home,' she said. She wasn't quite sure whose side she was on, when it came to a difference between her father and her brother; Nick saw that she wanted to impress Russell with the right kind of disaffection. 'But then Gerald has to get hold of it and invite the ministers for everything. It's not a party, darling, it's a party conference!'

'Well… ' Russell chuckled and dangled his long arms and clapped his hands together loosely a few times, as if ready to take them on.

'We've got an enormous house of our own,' Catherine said. 'Not that Uncle Lionel's isn't fantastic, of course.' They turned and frowned at it across the smooth lawn and the formal scrolls of the parterre. The steep slate roofs were topped with bronze finials so tall and fanciful they looked like drops of liquid sliding down a thread. 'I just don't think Uncle Lionel will be all that pleased when Toby's rowing friends start throwing up on the whatsits.'