The Line of Beauty

'I love to go to Harrods Food Hall,' Monique said, 'and look at the big… homards...'

'The lobsters,' muttered Wani, without looking at her, as though it was his accepted function to interpret for his mother.

'Oh, I know!' said Martine, with a smile of faint-hearted rebellion. Nick saw them often doing it, days probably were spent in Harrods, just round the corner but another world of possibilities, something for everyone who could afford it.

Bertrand gave them a patient five seconds, like a strict but fair-minded schoolmaster, and then said, 'So now, you know, Nick, I got thirty-eight Mira Food Halls all round the country, Harrogate I got one, Altrincham I just opened one; and more than eight hundred bloody Mira Marts.' He was suddenly very genial-he almost shrugged as well at the easy immensity of it. 'It's a great story, no?'

'Amazing,' said Nick. 'It's kind of you to tell me a story you must know so well'-making his face specially solemn. He saw the bright orange fascia of the Notting Hill Food Hall, where Gerald himself sometimes popped round late at night with a basket and a bashful look as though everyone recognized him, shopping for pate and Swiss chocolates. And he saw the corner Mira Mart in Barwick, with its sadder produce in sloping racks, remote poor cousins of the Knightsbridge obelisks, and its dense stale smell of a low-ceilinged shop where everything is sold together. An orange, of course, topped by two green leaves, was an emblem of the chain. Then he looked at Wani, who was eating pickily (coke killed the appetite) and entirely without expression. His eyes were on his plate, or on the gleaming red veneer just beyond it; he might have been listening thoughtfully to his father, but Nick could tell he had slipped away into a world his father had never imagined. His submissiveness to Bertrand's tyranny was the price of his freedom. Uncle Emile, too, looked down, as if properly crushed by his brother-in-law's initiative and success; Nick himself quickly saw the charm of running off to Harrods with the ladies.

Then Bertrand actually said, 'All this one day will be yours, my son.'

'Ah, my poor boy!' Monique protested.

'I know, I know,' said Bertrand, nettled, and then smirking rather awfully. 'That day is doubtless a long way off. Let him have his magazines and his films. Let him learn his business.'

Wani said, 'Thank you, Papa,' but his smile was for his mother, and his look, briefly and eloquently, as the smile faded, for Nick. He was at home with his father's manner, his uncontradicted bragging, but to let a friend in on the act showed a special confidence in the friend. Wani rarely blushed, or showed embarrassment of any kind, beyond the murmured self-chastisement with which he offered a seat to a lady or confessed his ignorance of some trivial thing. Nick absorbed his glance, and the secret warmth of what it acknowledged.

'No, no,' said Bertrand, with a quick tuck of the chin as if he'd been unfairly criticized, 'Wani is in all things his own master. At the moment fruit and veggies don't seem to interest him. Fine.' He spread his hands. 'Just as getting married to his bloody lovely bride doesn't seem to interest him. But we sit back, and we wait on the fullness of time. Eh, Wani?' And he laughed by himself at his own frankness, as though to soften its effect, but in fact acknowledging and heightening it.

'We're going to make a lot of money first,' Wani said. 'You'll see.'

Bertrand looked conspiratorially at Nick. 'Now you know, Nick, the big simple thing about money? The really big thing-'

Nick placed his napkin gently on the table, and murmured, 'I'm terribly sorry… I must just…'-pushing back his chair and wondering if this was even worse manners in Beirut than it was here.

'Eh…? Ah, weak bloody bladder,' said Bertrand, as if he'd expected it. 'Just like my son.' Nick was ready to take on any imputation that enabled him to leave the room; and Wani, with a bored, almost impatient look, got up too and said,

'I'll show you the way.'

9

THE PIANO TUNER came in the morning, and then the pianist herself, little Nina Something-over as Gerald called her, came from two to five to practise: it was a wearing day. The tuner was a cardiganed sadist who tutted at the state of the piano and took a dim view in general of its tone, the tiny delay and bell-like bloom that were its special charm. ('Oh,' said Rachel, 'I know Liszt enjoyed playing it…') From time to time he would break off his pitiless ascent of the keyboard to dash out juicy chords and arpeggios, with the air of a frustrated concert pianist, which was even worse than the tuning. Little Nina, too, drove them mad with her fragments of Chopin and Schubert, which went on long enough to catch and lull the heart before they dropped it again, over and over. She had a lot of temperament and a terrifying left hand. She played the beginning of Chopin's Scherzo No. 2 like a courier starting a motorbike. When she'd finished Nick helped Elena bring up and arrange the old gilt ballroom chairs from the trou de gloire. The sofas were trundled into new alignments, tall flower arrangements mounted the stairs on Elena's legs, and the room took on an unnerving appearance of readiness. Nick had one more task to do, which was to phone Ronnie, and he eyed the clock, in the run-up to six, as jumpily as if he was giving a recital himself.

He went out to a phone box on Ladbroke Grove, but it was back-to-back with another and he thought perhaps the man who was in it would hear what he said; he seemed almost to be expecting him, since he wasn't evidently talking, just leaning there. And it was still very close to home; it seemed to implicate Gerald. He went on down the hill, into a street that looked far more amenable to drug-dealing, where a man who could well have been an addict was just coming out of the phone box on the corner. Nick went in after him, and stood in the stuffy half-silence, fiddling in his wallet for the paper with the number on it, and wishing he'd already had a line of coke, or at least a gin-and-tonic, to put him in charge. He wished Wani could have done this, as usual, in the car, with the Talkman. Having given Nick the money, Wani liked to set him challenges, which were generally tasks he could more easily have done himself. Wani claimed never to have used a phone box, just as he had never been on a bus, which he said must be a ghastly experience. So he had never breathed this terrible air, black plastic, dead piss, old smoke, the compound breath of the mouthpiece-

'Yep.'

'Oh, hello… is that Ronnie?'

'Yeah.'

'Oh, hi! It's Nick here,' said Nick, with an urgent smile at a spot low down on the wall. It was like calling someone you'd fancied at a party, but much more frightening. 'Do you remember-I'm a friend of, um, Antony's…'

Ronnie thought for quite a while, while Nick panted encouragingly into the phone. 'I don't know any Antony. No. You don't mean Andy?'

Nick tittered. 'You know-sort of Lebanese guy, has a white Mercedes… sometimes calls himself Wani…'

'All right, yeah-enough said! Yeah, Ronnie...' said Ronnie, and chuckled affectionately, or with a hint of ridicule, so that Nick didn't know for a moment what he thought of Wani himself, any view of him seemed plausible. 'The man with the portable telephone. He's Lebanese, is he? I didn't know he was Lebanese.'

'Wani? Well actually he was born in Beirut, but he went to school here, and in fact he's lived in London since he was ten,' said Nick, getting snagged as usual in a sub-clause to a more important sentence.

'… right…' said Ronnie after a bit. 'Well I expect you'll be wanting to see me then. About something.'

The great thing about Ronnie, as Wani said, was that he always came through. The stuff was tip-top, he dealt to some big names, and if the price, at one-twenty a gram, was a little steep, the mark-down at three-fifty for a quarter-ounce was a deal indeed. (A quarter-ounce, seven grams, was the only metric equivalent Nick had yet been able to memorize.) The downside of Ronnie was a strange delaying manner that would have seemed sleepy if it hadn't been also a kind of vigilance. He never rushed, he was never on time, and he had a puzzled porous memory. Nick had only met him once, when they'd driven round the block in his red Toyota and he'd watched the simple way the exchange was made. Ronnie was a cockneyfied Jamaican, with a tall shaved head and doleful eyes. He talked a lot about girlfriend troubles, perhaps just to make things clear. His voice was an intimate murmur, and since he was giving them something they wanted he had seemed to Nick both seductive and