The Line of Beauty

Antoine was his real name, and Wani, his infantile attempt at saying it, his universal nickname.

'You must be very happy.'

Martine smiled but said nothing, and Nick looked at her wide pale face for signs of the triumph he would have felt himself if he had become engaged to Wani.

'We're just going to our room,' Wani said, 'and then we'll be down for the bopping.'

'Well, you will be bopping perhaps,' said Martine, showing already a mind of her own, but with the same patient expression, which registered with Nick, as he went on down the stairs, as decidedly adult. It must be the face of a steady happiness, a calm possession, that he couldn't imagine, or even exactly hope for.

He needed some air, but there was a clatter in the hall as people ran back indoors. Outside, from an obscured night sky, a fine rain had started falling. Nick watched it drifting and gleaming in the upcast light of a large globed lantern. Out in the circle of the drive a couple of chauffeurs were sitting in the front of a Daimler with the map-light on, waiting and chatting. And there was Wani's soft-top Mercedes, with its embarrassing number plate WHO 6. A voice brayed, 'Right! Everyone on the dance floor!' And there was a ragged chorus of agreement.

'Hoorah! Dancing!' said a drunk Sloanish girl, staring into Nick's face as though with an effort she might remember him.

'Where is the ruddy dance floor?' said the braying boy. They had wandered back into the hall, which was being cleared with illusionless efficiency by the staff.

Nick said, 'It's in the smoking room,' excited by knowing this, and by suddenly taking the lead. They all straggled after him, the Sloaney girl laughing wildly and shouting, 'Yah, it's in the smoking room!' and sending him up, as the funny little man who knew the way.

A friend of Toby's had come down from London to do the disco, and red and blue spotlights flashed on and off above the paintings of the first Baron Kessler's numerous racehorses. Most of the group started grooving around at once, a little awkwardly, but with happy, determined expressions. Nick lounged along the wall, as if he might start dancing any moment, then came back, nodding his head to the beat, and walked quickly out of the room. It was that song 'Every Breath You Take' that they'd played over and over last term at Oxford. It made him abruptly sad.

He felt restless and forgotten, peripheral to an event which, he remembered, had once been thought of as his party too. His loneliness bewildered him for a minute, in the bleak perspective of the bachelors' corridor: a sense close to panic that he didn't belong in this house with these people. Some of the guests had gone into the library and as he approached the open door he took in the scant conversational texture, over which one or two voices held forth as if by right. Gerald said words Nick couldn't catch the meaning of, and through the general laughter another voice, which he half-recognized, put in a quick correcting 'Not if I know Margaret!' Nick stood at the doorway of the lamplit room and felt for a second like a drunken student, which he was, and also, more shadowy and inconsolable, a sleepless child peering in at an adult world of bare shoulders, flushed faces, and cigar smoke. Rachel caught his eye, and smiled, and he went in-Gerald, standing at the empty fireplace in the swaggering stance of someone warming himself, called out, 'Ah, Nick!' but there were too many people for introductions, a large loose circle who turned momentarily to inspect him and turned back as if they'd failed to see anything at all.

Rachel was sitting on a small sofa, apart from the others, with a wrinkled old lady dressed in black, who made Rachel in her turn seem a beautiful, rather mischievous young woman. She said, 'Judy, have you met Nick Guest, Toby's great friend? This is Lady Partridge-Gerald's mother.'

'Oh no!' said Nick. 'I'm delighted to meet you.'

'How do you do,' said the old lady, with a dry jovial look. Toby's great friend-there was a phrase to savour, to analyse for its generosity, its innocence, its calculation.

Rachel shifted slightly, but there was really no space for him on the sofa. In her great spread stiffish dress of lavender silk she was like a Sargent portrait of eighty years earlier, of the time when Henry James had come to stay. Nick stood before them and smiled.

'You do smell nice,' Rachel said, almost flirtingly, as a mother sometimes speaks to a child who is dressed up.

'I can't bear the smell of cigars, can you?' said Lady Partridge.

'Lionel hates it too,' murmured Rachel. As did Nick, to whom the dry lavatorial stench of cigars signified the inexplicable confidence of other men's tastes and habits, and their readiness to impose them on their fellows. But since Gerald himself was smoking one, frowning and screwing up his left eye, he said nothing.

'I can't think where he picked up the habit,' Lady Partridge said; and Rachel sighed and shook her head in humorous acknowledgement of their shared disappointments as wife and mother. 'Do Tobias and Catherine smoke?'

'No, thank heavens, they've never taken to it,' Rachel said. And again Nick said nothing. What always held him was the family's romance of itself, with its little asperities and collusions that were so much more charming and droll than those in his own family, and which now took on a further dimension in the person of Gerald's mother. Her manner was drawling but vigilant, her face thickly powdered, lips a bold red. There was something autocratic in her that made Nick want to please her. She sounded grander than Gerald by the same factor that Gerald sounded posher than Toby.

'Perhaps we could have some air,' she said, barely looking at Nick. And he went to the window behind them and pushed up the sash and let in the cool damp smell of the grounds.

'There!' he said, feeling they were now friends.

'Are you staying in the house?' Lady Partridge said.

'Yes, I've got a tiny little room on the top floor.'

'I didn't know there were any tiny rooms at Hawkeswood. But then I don't suppose I've ever been on the top floor.' Nick half admired the way she had taken his modesty and dug it deeper for him, and almost found a slur against herself in it.

'I suppose it depends on your standard of tininess,' he said, with a determined flattering smile. The faint paranoia that attaches to drunkenness had set in, and he wasn't certain if he was being rude or charming. He thought perhaps what he'd said was the opposite of what he meant. A waiter came up with a tray and offered him a brandy, and he watched with marvelling passivity as the liquor was poured. 'Oh that's fine… that's fine…!' He was a nice, conspiratorial sort of waiter, but he wasn't Tristao, who had crossed a special threshold in Nick's mind and was now the object of a crush, vivid in his absence. He wondered if he could have a crush on this waiter too-it only needed a couple of sightings, the current mood of frustration, and a single half-conscious decision, and then the boy's shape would be stamped on his mind and make his pulse race whenever he appeared.

Rachel said, 'Nick's also staying with us in London, where he really does have a tiny room in the roof.'

'I think you said you had someone in,' said Lady Partridge, again without looking at Nick. It was as if she had scented his fantasy of belonging, of secret fraternity with her beautiful grandson, and set to eradicate it with a quick territorial instinct. 'Toby's certainly enormously popular,' she said. 'He's so handsome, don't you think?'

'Yes, I do,' said Nick lightly, and blushed and looked away as if to find him.

'You'd never think he was Catherine's brother. He had all the luck.'

'If looks are luck-' Nick was half-saying.

'But do tell me, who is that little person in glasses dancing with the Home Secretary?'

'Mm, I've seen him before,' said Nick, and laughed out loud.

'It's the Mordant Analyst,' said Rachel.

'Morton Danvers,' Lady Partridge noted it.

Rachel raised her voice. 'The children call him the Mordant Analyst. Peter Crowther-he's a journalist.'

'Seen his things in the Mail,' Lady Partridge said.

'Oh, of course…' said Nick. And it was true he did seem to be dancing with the Home Secretary, wooing him, capering in front of him, bending to him with new questions and springing back with startled enlightenment at the answers-a procedure which the Home Secretary, who was heavy footed and had no neck, couldn't help but replicate in a clumsy but courteous way.

'I don't think I'd be quite so excited,' said Lady Partridge. 'He talked a lot of rot at dinner on… the coloured question. I wasn't next to him, but I kept hearing it. Racism, you know'-as if the very word were as disagreeable as the thing it connoted