The Line of Beauty

was happening with detachment as well as contempt. He cringed with dismay at the shame he had brought on his parents, but he felt he himself had learned nothing new. His long talk on the phone with his father, and then with his mother, had been all the harder for his lack of surprise; to them it was 'a bit of a bombshell,' it called for close explanation, almost for some countering offensive. He had found himself sounding flippant, and wounded them more, since of course, when it came to it, all their deep instincts were for him, for his safety, and protection. They took it utterly seriously, but rattled him with their clear admissions that they'd expected trouble of some kind, they'd known something wasn't quite right. Nick resisted that, he wasn't shocked, and couldn't capture at all the shock that was fuelling the press. He'd known about Penny, and he'd known about himself and Wani. The real horror was the press itself. 'Greed drives out Prudence,' wrote Peter Crowther, as if nobody'd ever thought of that before. He saw the romance of his years with the Feddens, deep, evolving, and profoundly private, framed and explained to the world by this treacherous hack.

The doorbell rang, and since no one answered it Nick went out and peered through the new spyhole: in which the furious, conceited features of Barry Groom loomed and then fled sideways as he rang the bell again. Nick opened the door; and glanced out past the MP at the now almost deserted street. 'Hello, Barry, come in… Yes, they've virtually all gone now.'

'No thanks to you,' said Barry, stepping past him and frowning his eyebrows and mouth into two thin parallel lines. 'I've come to see Gerald.'

'Yes, of course.' It wasn't clear if Barry was treating him as a servant or an obstacle. 'Come this way,' he said, and went on gracefully, as he turned back down the hall, 'I'm so sorry about all this ghastly business.' There was a strange smooth relish in saying that. For a second Barry seemed to take it as his due, then his face soured again. He said,

'Shut up, you stupid little pansy!' It was a quaint sentence, and somehow the more expressive for that.

'Oh…!'-Nick darted a look in the big hall mirror, as though for witnesses. 'That's hardly-'

'Shut up, you little cuntl' said Barry, with a biting clench of the jaw, and pushed past him and down the passage towards Gerald's study.

'Oh, fuck off,' said Nick, in fact he only mouthed the words, because he thought Barry might turn back and punch him in the face. Gerald opened his door and looked out like a headmaster.

'Ah, Barry, good of you to come,' he said, and gave Nick a momentary stare of reproach.

'You ignorant, humourless, greedy, ugly cunt… ' Nick went on to himself, in the shocked hilarity of having been insulted. He wandered in the hall, blinking in astonishment at the black-and-white marble squares of the floor. He couldn't quite tell, when he went into the kitchen, if Elena had heard this outburst. She always protested, dimly but sincerely, at Gerald's unguarded fucks-she was serious about all that.

'Hello, Elena!' said Nick.

'So, Mr Barry Groom come,' said Elena. She was a little woman but she occupied the kitchen from wall to wall. She patrolled it. 'He want coffee?'

'Come to think of it, he never said. But I rather think not.'

'He don't want?'

'No… ' He looked at Elena with cautious tenderness, uncertain what credit remained from his years of diligent niceness to her. 'By the way, I won't be here for dinner tonight.' Elena raised her eyebrows and pinched her lips. The new revelations about Nick and Wani must be amazing to her. It wasn't clear if she'd even taken in that Nick was gay. He said, 'It's all a bit of a mess, isn't it? Un pasticcio… un imbroglio'

'Pasticcio, si,' she said, with a hard laugh. They'd had a certain amount of fun over the years with each other's Italian. She went into the pantry, and spoke to him without turning round, so that he had to follow her.

'I'm sorry?'

'How long you been here now?' She peered up at the shelved tins.

'In Kensington Park Gardens?-Oh, four years last summer, four and… a quarter years.'

'Four years. A good time.'

'Yes, it has been a good time'-he grunted at the little blur of idiom. She was reaching up, and Nick, not that much taller, stretched past her. 'The borlotti?' He put the can into her hands, so that she had at least to nod in thanks; then he followed her out again, as if hoping for another task. She jammed the beans under the tin opener and cranked round the handle, something Nick felt he'd seen her do scores, hundreds of times, with her tomato puree and her fagioli and all the things she preferred canned to fresh. And suddenly it was obvious to him. He said, 'Elena, I've decided it's time to hand in my resignation.'

She looked at him sharply, to make sure she'd understood him; then she nodded again, in acknowledgement. She might almost have smiled at his apt phrasing. She moved back to the table, and her busyness expressed her purpose but also perhaps hid some sort of regret at the news. Nick was very shaken by it himself. He glanced at her hopefully. Behind her on the wall were all the family photos, and she seemed to stand, stooped and efficient, in an angled but intimate relation to them-indeed she appeared in one of them, displaying a lordly Toby in his pram: she'd been there from the beginning, in the legendary Highgate days… She started chopping some onions, but looked up again and said, 'You remember when you first come here?'

'Yes, of course,' said Nick.

'The first time we meet…'

'Yes, I do,' and he chuckled fondly and went a little pink, because of course they'd never been over that minute of confusion in the hall. He saw he was pleased she'd mentioned it. It was hardly even an embarrassment, since all he had done was be charming to her; he'd treated her not as an equal but as a superior.

'You thought I was Miz Fed.'

'Yes, I know I did… Well, I'd never met either of you. I thought, a good-looking woman…'

Elena squeezed her eyes shut over the onions-it seemed for a moment like a slide into another emotion. Then she said, 'I think to myself that day, this one's… sciocco, you know, he don't know anything, oh, he's all very nice, lady, but he's you know… ' she tapped her forehead with a finger.

'Pazzo…?' said Nick, taking a last sick chance.

'He's no good,' said Elena.

Nick went up to his room, and stood looking at the window sill. Late-morning, late-October sunlight dimmed and brightened indifferently over it. He was lost in thought, but it was thought without words, pure abstraction, luminous and sad. Then a simple form of words appeared, almost as if written. It would have been best in a letter, where it could have been done beautifully, with complete control. Spoken, it risked tremors and deflections. He went downstairs to see Gerald.

The study door was ajar, and he could hear him talking to Barry Groom. He stood in the passage, as he felt he had often done in this house, as an accidental eavesdropper. Decisions were being made all the time, in an adjacent room, in a phone call half-curiously overheard. He liked the noise of business and politics, it was an adult reassurance, like the chatter of parents on a night journey, meaningless, fragmentary, and consoling to the sleepy child on the back seat. Sometimes of course he did pick up on a secret, a surprise still being contrived, and his pleasure was a very private one, the boosted glow of his own trustworthiness. Barry was saying, 'I can't think how you let it happen.' Gerald made a gloomy rumble and single hard cough but said nothing. 'I mean, what's the little pansy doing here? Why have you got a little ponce hanging round your house the whole fucking time?'

The last words were louder and louder, and Nick's pulse thumped as he waited, four or five seconds, for Gerald to put him right. He was warm with indignation, and a new combative excitement. Barry Groom had no idea of the life they led in this house. 'I suppose I'd have to say,' said Gerald, 'that it was an error of judgement. Untypical-I'm a pretty sharp judge of character as a rule. But yes… an error.'

'It's an error you've paid a very high price for,' said Barry Groom unrelentingly.

'He was a friend of the children, you know. We've always had an open-door policy towards the children's friends.'

'Hmm,' said Barry, who had publicly disinherited his son Quentin 'on principle,' to make him learn about money from scratch. 'Well, I never trusted him. I can tell you that, unequivocally. I know the type. Never says anything- always nursing his little criticisms. I remember sitting next to him after dinner here, years ago, and thinking, you don't fit in here, do you, you little cocksucker, you're out of your depth. And I'll tell you something else: he knew