The Line of Beauty

made to feel how dull and plotless life had been without them, and how enjoyable it was going to be now they were here. They all revealed their frustrations, and made bids on the new arrivals to do the things they had been wanting to do themselves. After a week of family deadlock, of interlocking boredoms, there was going to be an outburst of activity, a high plateau of achievement. Wani politely agreed to everything that was proposed, though he looked a bit queasy at Toby's plan to discover an underground lake. Gerald said, 'We really must do the Hautefort hike again, twenty kilometres, take all day if we need to.' Jasper squeezed Nick's knee under the table and said there was a little bar in Podier, which 'a man of discrimination such as yourself should certainly visit; and Catherine, perhaps satirically, said she'd always wanted to do some hang-gliding. Then she said she was going to paint Nick's portrait, but everyone objected that it would take too much of his time. It was left to Rachel to say, with her ironic quiver, that she hoped Nick and Wani would feel free to do nothing at all.

'No, of course,' said Gerald insincerely. He was lazy, but he wasn't good at pure idleness, which he felt like a failure of self-assertion. He was obviously finding his annual poolside trek through one of the fatter Trollopes an irksomely passive exercise, though he said how splendid it was, and what great fun. 'I think they might enjoy the hike,' he said. 'We haven't done it since '83.' He poured himself a full glass of wine, and passed the bottle along the candlelit table.

'How did you get on in Venice?' Rachel said. She was looking at Nick, but Nick passed the question to Wani with a steady look.

'Fascinating!' he said. 'What a fascinating place.'

'Iknow…isn't it fascinating, 'said Rachel. 'Had you never been before?'

'Do you know, I'd never been before.' Wani, who barely knew Gerald and Rachel, had immediately absorbed their echoing and affirmative style of chat.

'Where did you stay?'

'We stayed at the Gritti,' said Wani, with a shrug and a wince, as if to say they'd taken the path of least resistance.

'Goodness…! Well…!' Rachel said, in dazzled surrender to the magnificence of this, but somehow agreeing that they could have made a subtler and more deeply informed choice.

'You must have stayed there yourself,' said Wani.

Rachel shook her head. 'I think perhaps once…'

'Mm, where was it we stayed, Puss?' said Gerald.

'I don't know,' said Catherine. After her breakdown last year she had gone with her parents to Venice for a tense attempt at recuperation, which she now claimed scarcely to remember.

'We had a marvellous time, I must say,' said Gerald, with jovial shortness of memory.

'Yeah, amazing place,' said Jasper, and smiled at him, with the candlelight in his eyes, as if recalling some intimate moment.

'Oh, when were you last there?' said Nick airily.

'Ooh, must be two… three years ago?' said Jasper, dropping his head and letting his forelock tumble.

'And where did you stay?' Wani asked, and watched for the answer as if himself imagining some intimacy-sweat-dampened sheets, discarded towels. Jasper appeared to consider several possible answers, very quickly, before saying, 'Some friends of ours have got a flat there, actually, yah.'

'Oh, well, you are lucky,' said Rachel smoothly, leaving a doubt as to whether she believed him.

'Near San Marco?' said Nick.

'Not far from there,' Jasper said, and made a business of passing the wine bottle back to Gerald, who emptied the last of it and said,

'We loved the Caravaggios.'

Nick said nothing, and couldn't decide if he wanted Wani to make a fool of himself. Wani was wary enough to say, 'I'm not sure…' Rachel was blinking and saying, 'No, darling, aren't the Caravaggios -' and Catherine said, 'They're Carpaccios,' and slapped her hand on the table.

Gerald gave a wounded smile and said, 'You can remember those anyway.'

Wani, never ruffled, almost sinisterly charming, said, 'What made an enormous impression on me was the rococo architecture in Munich.'

This statement was left to resonate for a few moments, while they each forked over how to tackle it. Wani looked along the table with an absence of self-irony that was very like his father's-and in the upward glow of the candles the deep sculpture of his face was like his father's too. What touched Nick was partly his lover's conscienceless appropriation of anything useful he said, and partly Wani's evident feeling that in France, on the terrace of a beautiful old house, among Nick's own 'family,' he could play the aesthete as confidently as Nick did at Lowndes Square. The actual history of their stays in both cities, the coke, the sex, the 'late starts,' was their glamorous secret; the further story, of unseen treasures, wasted time and money, the dull dawn of the truth that Wani was rather a philistine, was Nick's secret alone. He said, 'Yes, you loved that stuff, didn't you.'

'You went to Munich, darling… ' Rachel said to Gerald.

'Oh, yes,' said Gerald, with the fond, embarrassed look he had when recalling his humbler pre-Rachel life. 'Badger and I stopped off at Munich, didn't we, on our famous drive to Greece. Badger would seem, on reflection, to have kept me away from that city's more rococo... um…'

'There's one quite fabulous church,' said Nick.

Toby, who had been quiet since they'd moved on from potholing, said, 'What's the difference between baroque and rococo?'

'Oh,' said Wani, smiling tolerantly at his old friend, 'well, the baroque is more muscular, the rococo is lighter and more decorative. And asymmetrical,' he remembered, making a trailing gesture in the air with his left hand and batting his long lashes so that Nick thought he had absorbed far more from him than his capsule guides to style-it was extraordinary that they couldn't see at once what he was like. 'The rococo is the final deliquescence of the baroque,' he said, as if he really couldn't be plainer.

'Mm, extraordinary stuff,' said Gerald vaguely.

'Yuk,' said Catherine, 'I can't stand that kind of thing, it's all froth.'

'Well, we'd hardly expect you to like it, old girl, if we like it ourselves,' said Gerald.

'It's just make-believe for rich people,' said Catherine. 'It's like naughty lingerie.'

'Right…' said Toby, as if slowly getting the picture, but he blushed too.

Wani, not wanting controversy, said, 'It's really just a great subject for the magazine. Think luxury artwork!' And then, 'It was Nick's idea, actually.'

'Ah well, now it all makes sense,' said Toby.

'Oh, I hope it doesn't make that,' said Nick, and they all laughed at his droll murmur and the hint of a paradox.

He lay in the dark, as the smell of the burning mosquito coil spread through the room. The night was very still, the doors didn't quite reach the floor, and he could hear Wani moving about in his room across the landing. He wanted to be with him, as he had been, more or less, for the past ten days, in the thoughtless luxury of top-class hotels; but he felt the relief of being alone as well: the usual relief of a guest who has closed his door, and a deeper thing, the forgotten solitude which measures and verifies the strength of an affair, and which, being temporary, is a kind of pleasure. He heard Wani switch off his lamp, and his own darkness deepened a fraction, without the faint spill of his light under the door. He wondered if they were sharing this sense of ghostly proximity, if Wani was lying with his eyes open, thinking of him, listening for him, masturbating perhaps as Nick half consciously was-not even that, just a boyish solace and reflex of being alone, the blind friendship of the hand… Or had he plumped his pillow, tussled his head and shoulder into it with a sigh, drawn up his legs in the defensive position which made Nick want to curl in behind him and shelter him? It would be easy to go to him now, they both had wide beds, but he could hear already the echo of the door latches in the long corridor like triggers to Wani's sense of danger.

When he woke an hour later out of a Venice dream he stared in a sort of panic at the grey square of the window and the unrecognized mass of the chest of drawers. Then it came back to him, like going upstairs, the shocks and connections of the past twenty-four hours. He felt horribly hot, and kicked off the sheet and drank the dimly visible glass of water. In the dream Wani was drowning: he stood on the canal-side, knees bent in a tense crouch, looking back over his shoulder with an undecided but accusing expression, then fell in with a dead splash.