The Line of Beauty

Badger frowned and hummed. 'Well, exactly,' he said. 'Didn't I promise to safeguard your morals, or something?' He rubbed his hands together and had a good look at her.

'I'm not sure anyone thinks you'd be the best person for that,' Catherine said, sipping her gin and sitting down sideways on a low armchair.

'You're going easy on that stuff, aren't you, Puss?' said Gerald.

'It's my first one, Daddy,' Catherine said; but Nick could see why Gerald was anxious, she was high on her own defiance tonight. He watched Badger watching her, his grey-striped peak slicked back after his shower, something disreputable and unattached about him; in parts of Africa, according to Toby, he was known not as Badger but by one of a number of words for hyena. Certainly he circled, and was hungry for something. His lecherous teasing of his god-daughter was allowed because it was of course impossible, a clownish joke.

Catherine stayed long enough to meet everyone and to test her claim that Barry Groom never said hello. Gerald played along and said, 'Hello, Barry,' and not only seized his hand but covered it confirmingly with his other hand, as if he was canvassing: at which Barry, looking round the room with a suspicious smile, said, 'Gerald, I'm surprised at you'-holding him there long enough to make him uneasy-'a green front door, that's hardly sending the right signal.' He got a laugh, which was warmer and more complex than he expected-there was a second or two while he grew into it, squared his shoulders. He followed Gerald across the room, nodding in a vain, critical way as he was introduced, but not saying hello. When Catherine shook his hand, he said, 'Aha! Beautiful creature!' with a vaguely menacing presumption of charm. Catherine asked him where his wife was and he said she was still parking the car.

It was good that Catherine should want to be present, to be presented, to help entertain the guests, but to the family it was also a little sinister. She put everyone on edge by having her coat on indoors, and seemed to be playing with her father's hopes that at any moment she might leave. He glanced at her distractedly from time to time, as if he would have liked to say something but had made the calculation that the oddity of the coat was preferable to the naked flesh beneath it. He introduced her to Morden Lipscomb with visible reluctance. The grey old American, with his tiny granite-like sparkle of charm, shook her hand and smiled mockingly, as if being confronted with an ancient indiscretion he meant entirely to deny. Toby and Nick were both watching her and Toby said, 'God, my sis looks like, you know, one of those girls who try and lure you into striptease parlours.'

'She looks like a strippergram,' Sophie said.

Lady Partridge came in with that air of social vexation Nick had seen in her before: she wanted to appear totally at home here and she also wanted her arrival to be an event; her deafness added a querulous uncertainty as to which effect she was having. Badger got her a drink and flirted with her, and she allowed herself to be flirted with. She liked Badger, having known him since he was a boy, and nursed him through mumps once, when he was staying in the holidays-an episode that was still referred to as a touchstone of their friendship, and in a vaguely risque way, since apparently Badger's balls had been the size of grapefruit. Nick had heard them joke about it earlier in the week, and it had sounded like jokes he had with his own parents, that were ribald little reference points in a past before everything changed and became indescribable.

All the time Nick was thinking about Leo, so that Leo seemed to be the element, the invisible context, in which these daunting disparate people were meeting and sparring and congratulating each other. They didn't know it, which made it all the funnier and more beautiful. He mixed himself a fresh gin-and-tonic, Gerald-style, quinine lost in juniper, and drifted round not minding if he wasn't spoken to. He looked at the pictures with a new keenness, as though explaining them to Leo, his grateful pupil. The other MP and his wife, John and Greta Timms, were standing in front of the Guardi with the look of people who had come to the wrong party, who wanted more of a challenge, he in a grey suit, she in the helpless boldness of a blue maternity dress with a white bow at the neck: it was as if the PM herself were pregnant. John Timms was a junior minister in the Home Office; he must have been several years younger than Gerald, but he had precocious gravitas and unflappable self-importance. If Barry Groom never said hello, John Timms seemed at first not to blink. His gaze was fixed and almost sensual, and his speech had a hypnotic steadiness of pace and tone, irrespective of meaning: he was inspired, he seemed constantly to admit, but he wasn't in any dubious way excitable. They were talking about the Falklands War and the need to commemorate it with a monument and to celebrate it with an annual public holiday. 'A Trafalgar Day for our times,' said Timms, and his wife, in whom his certainty produced a more vibrant kind of urgency, said, 'Why not revive Trafalgar Day itself? Trafalgar Day itself must be revived! Our children are forgetting the War Against the French…'John Timms gazed out into the room as though flattered by his wife's zeal and loving her for it, but not himself being ready to go so far. He hadn't been introduced to Nick (indeed the Timmses were really speaking to each other), and his gaze played on him for a moment, seemed to feel him and test him and doubt him. 'You'd like to see a permanent Falklands memorial, wouldn't you,' he said.

'Mm, I wonder… ' said Nick, not disrespectfully, and marvelled at just how unavailable his thoughts on the subject were. The doubtlessness of Timms was a wonder in itself. He imagined Leo being here beside him, and having one salient fact or objection to produce, of the kind Nick could never remember. Catherine came past, sampling each of the little power-centres in the room. 'We were talking about the Falklands,' said Nick.

'I understand the Prime Minister favours an annual parade,' said John Timms, 'as well as a prominent memorial. It was truly her triumph.'

'And the men's,' said Greta Timms, with her rich hormonal flush. 'The men were staunch.'

'They were certainly staunch, my darling,' said John Timms. 'They were dauntless.'

'No,' said Catherine, covering her ears and grinning, 'it's no good, I just can't bear words with that au sound in. Do you know what I mean?'

'Oh… ' said Greta Timms. 'I think I've always found them rather splendid words!'

'Right, I'm off!' said Catherine, turning to the room with the big smile which perhaps all her life would seem unguarded and vulnerable. A rough chorus of 'Bye's, a chuckling 'Oh, is she off?,' and she was gazed at with relief, the suddenly conjured good humour that sends a child up to its early bed. 'Bye, Gran!' she said, specially loudly, kissing Lady Partridge in the middle of the room. 'See you in the morning, Dad.' And picking up her bag she stalked out on her tall heels. Lady Partridge peeped at Morden Lipscomb to gauge his surprise; if he seemed amused by this vision of a sex-club door-girl she was ready to take some droll credit as her grandmother. But Lipscomb was looking disappointedly at Gerald.

Lady Partridge was taken in to dinner by Lipscomb. They didn't really 'take people in' at the Feddens', but the procession from the drawing room, down the stone stairs, and into the candlelight, awoke a memory sometimes, or an anxiety, in guests. Lipscomb, with ponderous New World formality, presented his elbow to the senior lady, and Gerald's mother, who had a hurtling look to her after two gin-and-tonics, pressed against him like an old flame. In the dining room Lipscomb peered around with guarded curiosity as people found their places. 'Yes, I always think what a splendid room,' Lady Partridge said, trailing away towards her chair.

'And are these your forebears, Lady Partridge?' Lipscomb asked.

'Yes… yes…' said Lady Partridge, in a daze of graciousness.

'No, they are not her forebears,' said Rachel, quietly but firmly. 'They're my grandfather and my great-aunt.'

Nick was placed in the middle of the table, with Penny Kent on his right and Jenny Groom on his left-the dullest place of all, but he didn't mind because he had company of his own. He tucked into his crab cake as if sharing a joke. 'How do you fit in?' Jenny Groom wanted to know, with the air of someone steeled to unpleasant surprises.

'Oddly but snugly,' said Nick; and since she didn't like this, 'No, I'm an old friend of Toby's.'

'Oh, Gerald's son, you mean… And I hear he's working for the Guardianl' The scandal of Toby's having a traineeship at the Guardian seemed to Nick to eclipse his own dissidence, to be enough scandal for one household.

'Well, you can ask him. He's sitting just over there,' said Nick, loud enough to intrude on Toby as he listened to Greta Timms extolling the virtues of the Family: Toby gave a half-secret smile of acknowledgement but said, 'Yes, I see,' to Greta to show she still had his attention.

'Oh, of course. He's got his father's looks,' said Jenny with a frown. 'So what do you do?'

'I'm doing a doctorate at UCL-on… on Henry James,' said Nick, seeing the style question might lose her completely.

'Oh…' said Jenny warily, getting a hook on it. 'Yes. I've never got round to Henry James.'