The Line of Beauty

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'Ah,' said Nick, unable to rise to such a wretched brag. In the back window of the car shiny white cushions were neatly aligned; he couldn't see the number plate but the thought that it must be BO something made him smirk-he pressed the smirk a little harder into a ghastly smile of admiration. One of Catherine's neuroses was a horror of maroon; it outdid her phobia of the au sound, or augmented it perhaps, with some worse intimation. Nick saw what she meant.

Bertrand asked him a few questions about the recital, and paid attention to the answers as though at a useful professional briefing. 'Amazing technique,' he repeated. 'Still very young,' he said, and shook his head and dissected his salmon. High and capable though he was, Nick hesitated to play the aesthete very thoroughly, hesitated to be himself, in case his tone was too intimate and revealing. The influence of Bertrand was as strong in its way as the coke, and he found himself speaking gruffly to him. He wondered actually, despite the keenness of his feelings, if Nina had been much good. Reactions were skewed by her being so young. He pretended he was Dolly Kimbolton and said, 'The Beethoven was heartbreaking,' but it wasn't a phrase that Bertrand saw a use for. He looked at him narrowly and said, 'That last thing she played was bloody good.'

Nick glanced out into the room to find Wani, who was sitting at a table with his mother and a middle-aged woman who looked quite prickly and confused under his long-lashed gaze. It was almost a decoy of Wani's to let his gaze rest emptily but seductively on a woman. He still hadn't spoken to Nick since his arrival; there had been a turn and a nod, a sigh, as if to say, 'These crowds, these duties,' when they were taking their seats. If it made him uneasy to see his lover and his father tete-a-tete he was too clever to show it. Bertrand said, 'That son of mine, who's he flirting with now?'

Nick laughed easily and said, 'Oh, I don't know. Some MP's wife, I expect.'

'Flirting, flirting, that's all he bloody does!' said Bertrand, with a mocking flutter of his own eyelashes. Dapper and primped as he was, he became almost camp. Nick pictured the daily task of shaving above and below that line of moustache, the joy of the matutinal steel, and then the joy of the dressing room that was like a department of a shop. He said, 'He may flirt, but you know he never really looks at another woman,' and was thrilled by his own wickedness.

'I know, I know,' said Bertrand, as though cross at being taken seriously, but also perhaps reassured. 'So how's it going-at the office?'

'Oh fine, I think.'

'You still got all those pretty boys there?'

'Um…'

'I don't know why he has to have all these bloody pretty poofy boys.' 'Well, I think they're very good at their jobs,' Nick said, so horrified he sounded almost apologetic. 'Simon Jones is an excellent graphic designer, and Howard Wasserstein is a brilliant script editor.'

'So when does the bloody shooting start on the film?'

'Ah-you'd have to ask Wani that.'

Bertrand popped a new potato into his mouth and said, 'I already did-he never tells me nothing.' He flapped his napkin. 'What is the bloody film anyway?'

'Well, we're thinking about adapting The Spoils of Poynton, um…'

'Plenty of smooching, plenty of action,' Bertrand said.

Nick smiled thinly and thought rapidly and discovered that these were two-elements entirely lacking from the novel. He said, 'Wani's hoping to get James Stallard to be in it.'

Bertrand gave him a wary look. 'Another pretty boy?'

'Well, he's generally agreed to be very good-looking. He's one of the rising young stars.'

'I read something about him…'

'Well, he recently got married to Sophie Tipper,' Nick said. 'Sir Maurice Tipper's daughter. It was in all the papers. Of course she used to go out with Toby-Gerald and Rachel's son.' He produced all this hetero stuff like a distracting proof; he hoped he wouldn't normally be so cravenly reassuring.

Bertrand smiled as if nothing would surprise him. 'I heard he let a big fish go-'

Nick blushed for some reason, and started talking about the magazine, with the brightness of a novice salesman, not yet committed and not yet cynical; he told him that he and Wani were going on a trip to research subjects for it-and that was the nearest he could get to stating the unspeakable fact of their affair. For a second he imagined telling Bertrand the truth, in all its mischievous beauty, imagined describing, like some praiseworthy business initiative, the skinhead rent boy they'd had in last week for a threesome. Just then he felt a kind of sadness-well, the shine went off things, as he'd known it would, his mood was petering into greyness, a grey restlessness. He felt condemned to this with Bertrand. It was just what had happened at Lowndes Square: the secret certainty faded after half an hour and gave way to a somehow enhanced state of doubt. The manageable joke of Bertrand became a penance. Nick was powerless, fidgety, sulkily appeasing, in the grip of a man who seemed to him in every way the opposite of himself, a tight little bundle of ego in a shiny suit.

Something awful happened with a waitress, who was taking round a wine bottle. She was black, and Nick had noticed already the flickers of discomfort and mimes of broadmindedness as she moved through the room and gave everyone what they wanted. Bertrand held out his glass and she filled it with Chablis for him-he watched her as she did it, and as she smiled and turned interrogatively to Nick, Bertrand said, 'No, you bloody idiot, do you think I drink this? I want mineral water.' The girl recoiled for just a second at the smart of his tone, at the slap-down of service, and then apologized with steely insincerity. Nick said, 'Oh, I'm sure we can get you some water, we've got masses of water!' in a sweetly anxious way, as if to soften Bertrand's tone, to apologize for him himself, to give a breath of laughter to a rough moment; while Bertrand held the glass out stiffly towards her, expressionless save for a steady contemptuous blink. She held her dignity for a moment longer, while Nick's smile pleaded with her not to mind and with him to relent. But Bertrand said, 'Don't you know bloody nothing?-Take this away,' and glared at Nick as if to enlist or excite a similar outrage in him. Then when the girl had marched off, without saying a word, he looked down, sighed, and smiled ruefully, almost tenderly at Nick, as though to say that he would have liked to spare him such a scene, but that he himself was afraid of no one.

Nick knew he should move away, but he hadn't finished his main course; he took shameful refuge in it as a reason not to make a scene of his own. Other people must have heard. Tucked away in the window seat they must look like conspirators. Bertrand was talking about property now, and weighing the merits of wn against those of sw3; it seemed he too was thinking of moving to the neighbourhood. He looked at the room as if trying it on. 'Well, it's lovely here,' Nick said sadly, and gazed out of the window at the familiar street, at Bertrand's horrible maroon car, at the half-recognized evening life in the houses opposite, and at the big blond man who came up from the area of one of them, unlocked the big black motorbike that stood on the pavement outside, straddled it, pulled on and buckled his helmet, kicked the bike into eager life and three seconds later was gone. Only a buzz, a drone that faded as it rose, could be heard amid the high noise of talk in the room. It was as if the summons of the Chopin had been answered and the freedom seized by a lucky third person.

'Aah… ' Gerald was saying, hovering like a waiter himself, the best of all waiters, 'I hope everything's all right.' He held a bottle of water in one hand and a freshly opened bottle of Taittinger in the other, as if hedging his bets.

'Marvellous!' said Bertrand, pretending not to notice these things, and then making a Gallic gesture of flattered surprise. 'You're very kind, to wait on me yourself.'

'These young girls don't always know what they're doing,' said Gerald.

Nick said, 'Gerald, obviously you've met… Mr Ouradi.'

'We haven't really met,' said Gerald, bowing and smiling secretively, 'but I'm absolutely delighted you're here.'

'Well, what a marvellous concert,' Bertrand said. 'The pianist had amazing technique. For one so young…'

'Amazing,' Gerald agreed. 'Well, you saw her here first!'

With an effect of creaking diplomatic machinery Dolly Kimbolton rolled into view, and Bertrand stood up, passing his plate with its toppling knife and fork to Nick. 'Hello!' she said.

'Have you met Lady Kimbolton? Mr Bertram Ouradi, one of our great supporters.'

They shook hands, Dolly leaning forward with the air of a busy headmistress rounding up stragglers for some huge collective effort. Bertrand said, in his tone of clear, childish self-importance, 'Yes, I'm making quite a