The Line of Beauty

Rachel stood where she was, in her own house and her indignation, and Nick edged away from her, still reluctantly holding the thread of her accusation, and went down a few steps to look over the banister. But it wasn't Catherine. It was Eileen, Gerald's 'old' secretary. She gazed up into the stairwell. She was wearing a dark overcoat and holding a black handbag. She looked like someone who'd come for a smart party on the wrong night. Nick thought she must have wanted to look good for the press. 'Hello, Eileen,' he said.

'I thought I'd better come in and see to things.'

'Good idea,' said Nick.

'I've said I'll keep an eye on things.'

'Well, that's marvellous.' Nick smiled with the real but finite politeness of someone who's been interrupted; he put a clinching warmth into it. The joke in the family had always been that Eileen had a crush on Gerald, who kept up an unseemly mockery of her efficiency and forethought. She was part of Nick's earliest idea of the house, in that first magic summer of possession which Rachel was now turning over like a stone. She'd been keeping an eye on things then. She came forward and put her hand on the tight bottom curl of the stair rail.

'I've brought the Standard,' she said. She'd been gripping it in her other hand, almost behind her, shielding them from it. 'I don't know that you'll like it very much.' She came up a few steps and Nick came down, with a vague sense of receiving a summons, and took it from her. He felt he should be specially diligent, and take the brunt of it on Rachel's behalf. He stood capably, with one foot on the stair above, and shook the paper flat. He saw the picture of himself, and thought, I'll come back to that in a second, and looked at the headline, which didn't make sense, and looked at the picture again and the one beside it of Wani. There was hardly any room for the article itself. The words and the pictures crowded out any sense of what they might mean. He felt oddly sorry for Bertrand: 'Peer's Playboy Son Has AIDS'. That was the subheading. 'Gay Sex Link to Minister's House.' Hard to get all that in. Didn't flow very well. Nick had a strange subliminal sensation that the banister wasn't there, and that the hall floor had hurtled up to meet him, like fainting but remaining fully conscious. He could tell it was very bad news. Then he realized where it had come from, and started to read the article, with a feeling like a thump in the sternum.

(ii)

'Bloody hell, Nick…!' said Toby next morning.

Nick chewed his cheek. 'I know…'

'I had absolutely no idea about this. None of us did.' He pushed his copy of Today away from him, across the dining-room table, and fell back in his chair.

'Well, the Cat did, obviously. She twigged when we were all in France last year.' He used the family nickname with a sense that his licence to do so had probably expired.

Toby gave him a wounded look which seemed to search and find him back at the manoir, under the awning, or by the pool, where they'd got drunk alone together that long hot afternoon. 'You could have told me, you know, you could have trusted me.' Toby had told his own secrets that day, his problems with intimacy-he'd entered into Nick's realm of examined feelings, it had been a triumph of intimacy in itself for him. 'I mean, two of my best mates, you know? I feel such a blasted idiot.'

'I was always longing to tell you, darling.' Again Toby's face seemed to close against the endearment. 'But Wani just wouldn't hear of it.' He looked shyly at his old friend. 'I know people take it very personally when they find they've been kept out of a secret. But really secrets are sort of impersonal. They're simply things that can't be told, irrespective of who they can't be told to.'

'Hm. And now this.' Toby pulled out the Sun from the slew of newsprint on the table. ' 'Gay Sex Romp at MP's Holiday Home.'' He threw it away from him, with a look of disdain and a hint of a challenge.

'It's really rather sweet their idea of what constitutes a romp,' Nick said, to try and put it in proportion.

'Sweet…?' said Toby, incredulously, but with a flinch of regret as well, that he should be speaking like this to someone he'd always simply trusted. He stood up, and walked awkwardly along to the far end of the table. The mood of an extended morning-after still reigned in the room, with sunshine seeping in over the top of the shutters, and the gilt wall lamps casting a crimson glow. He stood with his back to the Lenbach portrait of-what was he?-his great-grandfather: a stout bourgeois figure in a tightly buttoned black coat. Nick, with his eye for the family line, saw Toby growing into a likeness. Toby himself had on a dark suit, blue shirt, and red tie. He was going to a meeting, and this little chat was a bit like a meeting too. He seemed to share with his ancestor a respect for the obvious importance of business, as well as a dignified failure to anticipate the scandals of this week.

'God, I'm sorry, Toby,' said Nick.

'Yah, well,' said Toby, with a big sigh that seemed to weigh a burden and hint at a threat. Unexpected intimacies were blowing up all around him. He leant on the table and looked at a paper to hide his discomfort. 'First it's Dad and Penny, with this fraud thing going on too, then there's you and Ouradi, with the plague thing…'

'Well, you knew Wani had AIDS.'

'Mm, yah… ' said Toby uncertainly. He squared up the newspapers in a pile, with distracted firmness. They were the astonishing evidence of his situation. 'And my bloody old sis going clean off the rails.'

'She has rather landed us in it.'

'It's as if she hates Dad.'

'It's difficult…'

'And hates you too. I mean, how did she get like this?'

It was the long-ago talk by the lake, the solemn explanation… 'I don't think she hates us,' said Nick. 'Since she crawled out from under the lithium she's just been in a mood to tell the truth. Actually, she always has been, when you think about it. I'm certain she'd never actually want to hurt us. She's been got at by people who do hate Gerald, perhaps; that's the thing.'

'Anyway, it's a fuck-up,' said Toby, quickly resisting the role-reversal. And Nick caught that startling thing, the stared-out threat of tears, the miserable twitch of the mouth.

'It's a fuck-up,' Nick agreed. He winced at his own readiness to explain Toby's story to him. Poor Toby had been tricked, or not trusted, which seemed a form of trickery, by everyone around him: it was awful, and Nick found a smile creeping out of the corners of his mouth in bizarre amusement.

'I must say the Independent has by far the best-quality photographs,' Toby said. 'They've achieved consistently high standards.'

'Yes, the Telegraph's are very murky in comparison.'

'The Mail's somewhat better, though.' Toby snapped back the pages. The Mordant Analyst had been given a double spread to explore the whole situation, drawing on his inside knowledge of 'the Fedden set.' The picture of Toby clasping Sophie on the dance floor at Hawkeswood was one of Russell's. Toby looked away at the floor and still didn't meet Nick's eye when he said, 'I don't know quite where this leaves us.'

'No,' said Nick. 'Everything's rather in the air, isn't it.'

'I mean, I don't see how you can stay here.' Then he did look at Nick for several seconds, and the lovely brown gaze, which had always softened or faltered, didn't do so.

'No, no, of course,' said Nick, with a scowl as if Toby was insulting him to suggest he thought he could.

Toby pursed his lips, stood up straight and buttoned his jacket. There was a sense that, though it could have been done better, he'd performed a bit of business, and his uneasy satisfaction carried him quickly to the door. 'I'm going to have a word with Ma,' he said. 'Sorry.'

Nick sat for a while, feeling that Toby's anger was the worst part of it, the one utterly unprecedented thing; and looking over the papers in which his own image appeared. He was letting himself in at the front door of this house, and also, four years younger, in a bow tie and his Uncle Archie's dinner jacket, looking very drunk. It was fascinating, if you thought about it, that they hadn't got hold of the picture of him and the PM. Still, they had all the rest, sex, money, power: it was everything they wanted. And it was everything Gerald wanted too. There was a strange concurrence about that.

Nick felt his life horribly and needlessly broken open, but with a tiny hard part of himself he observed what