The Line of Beauty

'Well…' said Nick, not caring if she had or not.

'Or hang on, did I read one? Dr Johnson or something.'

'No… I don't think so…'

'No, not Dr Johnson, obviously…!'

'I mean there's the Boswell.'

'It was set in Africa… I know: Mr Johnson.'

'Oh, Mister Johnson is a novel by Joyce Cary.'

'Exactly, I knew I'd read something by him.'

When the venison came in Gerald yapped, 'Don't touch the plates! Don't touch the plates!' so that it sounded as though something had gone wrong. 'They have to be white hot for the venison.' The fact was that the fat congealed revoltingly if the plates were less than scorching. 'Yes, my brother-in-law has a deer park,' he explained to Morden Lipscomb. 'A rare enough amenity these days.' The guests looked humbly at their helpings. 'No,' Gerald went on, in his bristling way of answering questions he wished someone had asked, 'this is buck venison… comes into season before the doe, and very much superior.' He went round with the burgundy himself. 'I think you'll like this,' he said to Barry Groom, and Barry sniffed at it testily, as if he knew he was thought to have more money than taste.

Nick shared a brief smile down the table with Rachel. It seemed subtly to mock not only Barry but Gerald himself. Nick took his first sip of the burgundy with a frisson at their shared understanding, like the liberty allowed to a child by a confident mother-the pretended conspiracy against the father. He wondered if Gerald and Rachel ever rowed. If anything happened, then it was in the white secrecy of the bedroom, which, with its little vestibule, was removed from hearing behind two heavy doors; it became somehow sexual.

When he thought of Leo after not thinking of him for a minute or two he heard a big orchestral sound in his head. He saw Leo lying on his coat under a bush, his shirt and jersey pushed up under his armpits, his jeans and pants round his knees, small dead leaves sticking to his thighs-and he heard the astonishing chord. It was high and low at once, an abysmal pizzicato, a pounce of the darkest brass, and above it a hair-raising sheen of strings. It seemed to knock him down and fling him up all in one unresisted gesture. He couldn't repeat it immediately, but after a while he would see Leo rising to kiss him, and the love-chord would shiver his skin again. It startled him while Penny was describing the enormous interest of working for Gerald, and he jumped, and smiled at his invisible friend, so that Penny worried that she'd been funny. He wondered if it came from something he knew, or if he'd written it himself. It certainly wasn't the Tristan chord, with its germ of catastrophe. The horrible thought came to him that if it existed, it had probably been written by Richard Strauss, to illustrate some axe-murder or beheading, some vulgar atrocity. Whereas to Nick, though it was frightening, it was also indescribably happy.

'So how are you getting on at UCL?' said Penny kindly, as if it must be a sorry comedown after Oxford. Nick and Penny had never met as students, the word Oxford meant different things to them, but Penny relied on it as a thing they had in common.

'Oh, fine…!' said Nick; and went on obligingly, 'It's not at all like Oxford, you know. The place itself is fairly grim. I've just found out that the English department used to be a mattress factory.'

'Really!' said Penny.

'It is a bit depressing. I suppose it's no wonder half the staff are alcoholics.' Penny laughed, oddly titillated, and Nick felt rather treacherous. In fact he revered Professor Ettrick, who had taken to him with immediate subtle confidence, and seen possibilities in his thesis topic that he himself hadn't dreamt of. But nothing much was being done, and through most of Nick's library days his eyes wandered just beyond the page in a deep monotonous reverie about Leo: the great unfolding sentences of Meredith or James would slow and fade into subliminal parentheses, half-hour subordinate clauses of remembered sex. And he felt guilty, because he wanted to deserve the professor's trust and be as clever and committed as he was meant to be. Penny said, 'Was it Henry James you're working on?'

'Er… yes,' said Nick.

She seemed to settle comfortably on that, but only said, 'My father's got tons of Henry James. I think he calls him the Master.'

'Some of us do,' said Nick. He blinked with the exalted humility of a devotee and sawed off a square of brown meat.

'Art makes life: wasn't that his motto? My father often quotes that.'

'It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process,' said Nick.

'Something like that,' said Penny. She smiled contentedly into the candlelight. 'What would Henry James have made of us, I wonder?' she went on.

' Well… ' Nick chewed it over. He thought she was rather like a high-minded aunt, proposing questions with virginal firmness and ignorance. He wondered condescendingly what her sexual prospects were. A certain kind of man might like to raise the colour in that plump white neck. He said, 'He'd have been very kind to us, he'd have said how wonderful we were and how beautiful we were, he'd have given us incredibly subtle things to say, and we wouldn't have realized until just before the end that he'd seen right through us.'

'Because he did write about high society, didn't he?' said Penny, clearly thinking that was where she was, and also perhaps that it was proof against being seen through.

'Quite a lot,' said Nick; and remembering his chat with Lord Kessler in the summer and really giving a long- pondered answer to him, 'People say he didn't understand about money, but he certainly knew all about the effects of money, and the ways having money made people think.' He looked fondly across at Toby, who out of sheer niceness tried now and then not to think like a rich person, but could never really get the hang of it. 'He hated vulgarity,' he added. 'But he also said that to call something vulgar was to fail to give a proper account of it.'

Penny seemed to be puzzling this over, but in fact she was listening to what Badger was suggesting in her other ear: her sudden blush and giggle showed Nick that this was one of Badger's little sexual challenges to him-it was almost a way of calling him a fag.

Toby was listening to Greta Timms, but leaning past her to keep an eye on Sophie, who was being drily examined by Morden Lipscomb. 'No,' said Sophie reluctantly, 'I've only been in one sort of major film.'

'And what of the stage?' said Lipscomb, with an odd mixture of persistence and indifference.

'Well, I am about to be in something. It's… I'm afraid it's going to be rather a trendy production… it's Lady Windermere's Fan.'

Jenny Groom started asking something about Catherine, was she as mad as they said, and Nick's hesitations as he answered only half allowed him to hear the truth that Lipscomb dragged out of Sophie, that she wasn't playing Lady Windermere herself, but 'Oh, just a minor part… No! Not too much to learn… Oh no, not her, that's a wonderful part… Anyway it will probably all be ruined by the director… ' and that in fact she'd been cast as Lady Agatha, a role which famously contained nothing but the two words 'Yes, mamma.' Nick thought this was very funny, and then felt almost sorry for her.

Rachel said, 'My dear, what fun, we shall all come to your first night,' apparently sincerely, so that a further alliance, of efficient, almost impersonal solidarity, was seen to be in place between the mother and her possible daughter-in-law.

Lady Partridge, jealous of Lipscomb's attention, went off on the unobvious tangent of her hip replacement. 'Oh, I had it at the Dorset… Well, yes, I always go there, I find them marvellous… charming girls… The nurses, yes… One or two of the doctors are coloured, but there's absolutely no need to have anything to do with them… Not that I'm much of a one for hospital!' she reassured him. 'My late husband was there a good deal.'

'Ah… ' said Lipscomb, measuring the distance to a condolence.

She lifted her glass, with a worldly sigh. 'Well, I've outlived two husbands, and that's probably enough,' she said, as if still leaving a tiny loophole for further proposals. She looked at Lipscomb, perhaps wondering if he had said something, and went on, 'Actually they were both called Jack! They couldn't have been more different, as it happens… chalk and cheese… I don't think they'd have got on for a moment-had they ever met!' Nick thought she might almost have been on the phone, hearing answers and questions from far away.