The Line of Beauty

4

'‘THAT'S NOT A Hero's Life,' said a critic of the first performance, 'but rather a Dog's Life.' Or rather a dog's breakfast, you may well feel, after hearing that rendition of the battle music by Rudolf Kothner and the Tallahassee Symphony.' It was Saturday morning, in the kitchen at Kensington Park Gardens, and a sharp young man was comparing recordings of Ein Heldenleben on 'Building a Library.'

'Ha, ha,' said Gerald sourly, who had been slouching up and down, conducting first with a biro, now with a tennis racquet. He loved these domestic mornings, deferring to Rachel, making lists, carrying out small invented duties in the kitchen and the cellar. Today was even better, with his favourite composer on the radio; he lingered and got in the way, swinging his head from side to side, and not at all minding having a passage repeated again and again in ever louder rival interpretations. He took great interest in the breakdown of the Hero's adversaries into carpers (flutes), vituperators (oboe), and whiners (cor anglais), and drove them all into the pantry with a vigorous forehand when the Hero won.

'But let's move on to 'The Hero's Works of Peace,' ' said the reviewer, 'where Strauss self-glorifyingly recalls material from his own earlier symphonic poems and songs.'

'I don't like this chap's tone,' said Gerald. 'Ah, now…! Nick…' as the music revelled and swelled enormously. 'You must admit!'

Nick sat at the table, quick-witted after a mug of coffee, and ready to say all kinds of things. Today especially he was maddened by Strauss's bumptious self-confidence, which took no account of his own frustrations, the two tense weeks in which the dream of Leo as a possible future had faded on the air. But he contented himself with making a ghastly face. In their ongoing Strauss feud he was always cheerfully combative and found himself leaping to more and more dizzy positions-after which he had to take a few moments to reason his way to them over solid ground. Simply having opposition brought latent feelings to the surface and polarized views he might otherwise hardly have bothered to formulate. It became urgent for him to revile Richard Strauss, and he did it happily but a little hysterically, as if far more than questions of taste were involved. He could measure the strange zeal of the process by the degree to which he found himself denying his own ingenuous pleasure in some of Strauss's material and the magical things he did with it-this massive tune now, for instance, which would be running through his mind for days to come. He watched Gerald revelling and swelling too, and a vague embarrassment at the sight made it easier for him to say, 'No… no… it just won't do,' as the music was quickly faded out.

'Herbert von Karajan there, with the strings of the Berlin Philharmonic in superlative form.'

'Exactly, that's the one we've got, isn't it?' Gerald said. 'The Karajan, Nick?'-since it was Nick, over the summer months, who had been through the record cupboard and put all the discs in alphabetical order.

'Um-I think so…'

'But it's possible, isn't it,' the clever young man went on, 'to wonder if the sheer opulence of the sound and those very broad tempi don't push this reading over the edge, losing that essential drop of self-irony without which the piece can all too easily become an orgy of vulgarity. Let's hear Bernard Haitink and the Concertgebouw in the same passage.'

Gerald had the stern, pinched look of someone wounded in debate and measuring his response with awkward dignity. The orchestra rampaged all over again. 'I don't think I care for this one quite so much,' he said. And then a little later, 'I don't see what's vulgar about being glorious.'

Nick said, 'Oh, if you were worried about vulgarity then you'd never listen to Strauss at all.'

'Ooh…!' protested Gerald, suddenly cheerful again.

'Perhaps the early Symphony in F,' Nick said. 'But even that…'

'I'm going over to Russell's,' said Catherine, walking through the room with a hat on and her fingers in her ears-whether to block out the Hero's Deeds or her father's objections wasn't clear. In fact Gerald said, 'OK, Puss,' and stamped his foot exultantly at a blasting entry for the horns. It was a clear case of God-dammery, her word for all heavily scored Romantic music. She went out into the hall and they heard the slam of the front door.

What the problem was was this colossal redundancy, the squandering of brilliant technique on cheap material, the sense that the moral nerves had been cut, leaving the great bloated body to a life of valueless excess. And then there was the sheer bad taste of applying the high metaphysical language of Wagner to the banalities of bourgeois life, an absurdity Strauss seemed only intermittently aware of! But he couldn't say that, he would sound priggish, he would seem to care too much. Gerald would say it was only music. Nick tried to read the paper for a couple of minutes, but was oddly too excited to concentrate.

'And then the cor anglais, changed at last from whining adversary to pastoral pipe, introduces the poignant melody which announces the Hero's impending departure from the world. For how not to do it, let's go back to that mid-price disc from the Caracas Radio Orchestra, whose soloist seems not to have been told of this important transformation in character…'

'Gerald, did you manage to get hold of Norman?' Rachel asked, with an insistent tone, as if herself not quite sure of getting through. But a question or command from her had automatic priority, and he said,

'I did, my darling, yes'-going towards her to help her with a trug of long-stemmed yellow roses that she had brought in from the garden. She didn't need help, and the gallant little pantomime passed off almost unnoticed, as their common idiom. 'Penny's going to come over for a chat. Norman says she's far too high-minded to work for the Tories.'

'She'll be very glad of a job,' said Rachel. Norman Kent, whose temperamental portraits of Toby and Catherine hung in the drawing room and the second-floor landing respectively, was one of Rachel's 'left-wing' friends from her student days, whom she'd stayed stubbornly loyal to; Penny was his blushing blonde daughter, also just down from Oxford. There was a notion she might come and work for Gerald. 'Is Catherine up yet? Or down?' Rachel asked.

'Mm…? No-she's neither up nor down, in fact she's out. She's gone to see the man with the Face.'

'Ah.' Rachel clipped expressively at the rose stems. 'Well, I hope she'll be back for lunch with your mother.'

'I'm not sure…' said Gerald, who doubtless thought lunch would be a good deal easier without her, especially since Toby and Sophie were coming. He listened through to the final recommendation on Ein Heldenleben, and pensively turned off the radio. He said, 'He's all right, this fellow, isn't he, Nick?'

'Who… Russell? I think he's all right.' Having given him a fervent testimonial two weeks ago, when he hadn't even met him, he was obliged to remain vaguely positive now that he had met him and knew that he couldn't stand him.

'Oh, good,' said Gerald, glad to have got that cleared up.

'I thought he was rather sinister,1' Rachel said.

'I know what you mean,' said Nick.

'One thing we have learnt, Nick,' said Gerald, 'is that all her boyfriends are marvellous. Criticism from us is the last betrayal. The more unprepossessing the individual the more strenuously we admire him.'

'We love Russell,' said Rachel.

'He's not much to look at,' Nick quickly conceded, knowing that that was part of his glamour for Catherine, who described him as 'a blinding fuck.'

'Oh, come on, he's a thug,' said Rachel, with an unsparing smile. 'The photographs he took at Hawkeswood were purely malicious, making everyone look like fools.'

'An easy target,' said Gerald, clearly meaning something different. Catherine had passed round a selection of the pictures at dinner the week before. They were grainy, black and white, taken without a flash on long exposures which dragged people's features into leering masks. The photograph of Gerald and the Home Secretary being photographed for Tatler was a minor masterpiece. Not shown were those of guests fornicating, mooning, pissing in the fountain, and snorting cocaine. 'Is that what The Face is like?' said Gerald. 'Sort of satire…'

'Not really,' said Nick. 'It's more pop-and fashion.'

'I wouldn't mind seeing a copy,' said Rachel warily. And Nick found himself climbing up the four flights of stairs to search for one in Catherine's room. A sense of criminal intrusiveness, a nagging memory of what had almost happened there three weeks before, made him hurry back down. He glanced through the magazine as he passed