The Line of Beauty

takeover they were both interested in, though Gerald didn't look quite serious with a fruit-choked tumbler in his fist. Lady Tipper complained to Rachel about the smell of hot dogs in the Royal Festival Hall. Rachel said surely that would all change now they'd got rid of Red Ken, but Lady Tipper shook her head as if deaf to any such comfort. Nick tried naively to interest Maurice Tipper in local beauty spots which he hadn't yet seen himself. 'You're a fine one to talk!' said Sir Maurice-grinning quickly at Gerald and Toby to show he wasn't so easily taken in. He was used to total deference, and mere pleasantness aroused his suspicion. The democracy of house-party life wasn't going to come naturally to him. Nick looked at his smooth clerical face and gold rimmed glasses in the light of a new idea, that the ownership of immense wealth might not be associated with pleasure-at least as pleasure was sought and unconsciously defined by the rest of them here.

Sally Tipper had a lot of blonde hair in expensive confusion, and a lot of clicking, rattling, sliding jewellery. She shook and nodded her head a good deal. It was virtually a twitch-of annoyance, or of almost more exasperated agreement. She had a smile that came all at once and went all at once, with no humorous gradations. She said before dinner she'd like to have drinks indoors, which, since the whole point and fetish of the manoir for the Feddens was to do everything possible outside, didn't promise well. They sat in the drawing room with all the overhead lights on, like a waiting room. Nick had seen the names 'Sir Maurice and Lady Tipper' in gold letters on the donors' board at Covent Garden, and had seen her there in person, sometimes with Sophie, but never with her husband. He thought they might have a theme for the week, and said quietly that the recent Tannhduser hadn't been very good.

'Very good… I know… I thought… ' said Lady Tipper, and shook her head in wounded defiance of all the carpers and whiners. 'Now, Judy, that you really should see,' she went on loudly. 'You'll know that one, the Pilgrims' Chorus.'

Lady Partridge, fortified by being enfamille and half-tight, said, 'It's no use asking me, dear. I've never set foot in an opera house, except once, and that was thirty years ago, when… my son took me,' and she nodded abstrusely at Gerald.

'What did you see, Judy?' said Nick.

'I think it was Salome,' Lady Partridge said after a minute.

'How marvellous!' said Lady Tipper.

'I know, ghastly,' said Lady Partridge.

'Oh, Ma!' said Gerald, who was listening in with a distracted smile from a chat about shares with Sir Maurice.

'I applaud your taste, Judy,' said Nick, with the necessary emphasis to get through, and heard what a twit he sounded.

'Mm, I think it was by Stravinsky.'

'No, no,' said Nick, 'it's by the dreaded…: Richard Strauss. Oh, by the way, Gerald, I've found the most marvellous quote, by Stravinsky, in fact, about the dreaded.'

'Sorry, Maurice… ' murmured Gerald.

'Robert Craft asks him, 'Do you now admit any of the operas of Richard Strauss?' and Stravinsky says'-and Nick beat it out, conducted it, in the weird overexcitement of the Strauss feud-' T would like to admit all Strauss operas to whichever purgatory punishes triumphant banality. Their musical substance is cheap and poor; it cannot interest a musician today.''

'What?' snorted Gerald.

'Well, I'd rather have Strauss than Stravinsky myself, any day! I'm afraid to say!' said Lady Tipper. Sir Maurice looked at Nick, in the flush of his arcane triumph, with baffled distaste.

At dinner Gerald was already pretty drunk. He seemed to have had an idea of taking Maurice Tipper with him, and making their first night a rush of high spirits, followed next morning by the rueful bond of a shared hangover. But Sir Maurice drank as suspiciously as he did business, covering his glass with a dwindling flicker of amusement each time Gerald leant over his shoulder with the bottle. Gerald's face leaning into the candlelight had a glow of obstinate merriment. He sat down and summarized for the second time the division of the Perigord into areas called green, white, black and purple. 'And we're in the white,' said Maurice Tipper drily.

The talk came round, as it often did with the Feddens, to the Prime Minister. Nick saw Catherine clench in annoyance when her grandmother said, 'She's put this country on its feet!'-clearly forgetting, in her fervour, which country she was now in. 'She showed them in the Falklands, didn't she?'

'You mean she's a hideous old battleaxe,' muttered Catherine.

'She's certainly a manxome foe,' said Gerald. Sir Maurice looked blank. 'One wouldn't want to be on the wrong side of her.'

'Indeed,' said Sir Maurice.

Wani somehow got people to look at him, and said, 'People say that, but you know, I've always seen a very different side of her. An immensely kind woman…'; he let them see him searching a fund of heart-warming anecdote, but then said discreetly, 'She takes such extraordinary pains to help those she… cares about.'

Maurice Tipper expressed both respect and resentment in a dark throat-clearing, and Gerald said, 'Of course you know her as a family friend,' smiling resolutely as he conceded to Wani the thing, so clearly seen, that he hankered for himself.

'Well…' said Wani, 'yes…!'

'I love her!' exclaimed Sally Tipper, hoping perhaps they would take love to include friendship, as well as surpassing it.

'I know,' said Gerald. 'It's those blue eyes. Don't you just want to swim in them-what?'

Sir Maurice didn't seem ready to go quite that far, and Rachel said, 'Not everyone's as infatuated as my husband,' lightly but meaningly.

Nick looked out over their heads at the vast night landscape, where the lights of farms and roads invisible by day shone in mysterious prominence. He said very little, holding on to the ignored romance of the place and the hour, the soft gusts in the trees, the stars that peeped in the grey above the silhouetted woods. It turned out to be Wani who saved the evening. He clearly admired Maurice Tipper, and tried to amuse him as well as impress him, neither an easy task. He had a significant lavatory break after the main course, and for the next half-hour supplied a sense of purpose and fun that the others had been groping for. Even Catherine was laughing at his farfetched imitation of Michael Foot, and Lady Partridge, who kept waking from brief sleeps with a cough and a furtive stare, laughed too.

In the morning, before it was too hot, the Tippers went down to the pool, she with a clutch of sunscreens and a huge hat, he with the new Dick Francis in one hand as a decoy for the briefcase in the other. It was the time when Nick liked to do his fifty lengths-at least he invented this tradition to focus his resentment of the newcomers. When he went down a bit later, Lady Partridge, a keen but almost unmoving swimmer, was halfway across the shallow end, apparently unaware that Sally Tipper, beside her in the water, was asking her about her hip replacement: she glanced at her from time to time with mild apprehension. Maurice Tipper had got a table and chair fixed up under an umbrella and sat in tight biscuit-coloured shorts reading and annotating a sheaf of faxes. His lips quivered and pinched with the sarcastic alertness that was his own brand of happiness. Nick, dispossessed, went off to his favourite corner on a lower terrace and read A Small Boy and Others in the company of a lizard.

At noon there were calls and voices up above as a party was assembled for lunch. Nick went to see them off. Toby had pulled up the spare seats in the back of the Range Rover and was checking they were safely bolted; he was taking the extra trouble that delays a departure and disguises the relief of the person left behind. 'We don't want you flying through the windscreen,' he said to Lady Tipper.

'I think you'll find this restaurant acceptable,' Gerald burbled facetiously, gesturing Maurice Tipper to the front seat beside him.

'He just can't have anything too rich,' said Sally. 'His wretched ulcers…' She twitched while she pulled a long face. 'I'm afraid last night's dinner rather did for him.'

'Oh, they'll look after you, they'll do anything for you,' said Rachel, with unflinching sweetness. Gerald, ruefully baffled by his new guests' failure to notice the beauties of the manoir, was taking them to Chez Claude in Perigueux, normally the last-night treat of the holidays, in the hope of cracking a word of praise out of them.

'See if you agree with us that it merits a third Michelin star,' he said.

'We're not big lunchers,' said Sally Tipper.