The Line of Beauty

that. I could see he wished he was upstairs with the women.'

'Oh…' said Gerald, in wan protest. 'We always got along all right, you know.'

'So fucking superior.' Barry Groom swore harshly and humourlessly, as if swearing were the guarantee of any unpalatable truth. It was just what he'd done that night, after dinner, with an effect Nick could still remember, of having absolutely no style. 'They hate us, you know, they can't breed themselves, they're parasites on generous fools who can. Crawling to you, crawling to the fucking Ouradis. I'm not remotely surprised he led your poor lovely daughter astray like this, exploited her, there's no other word for it. A typical homo trick, of course.'

Gerald murmured something, with an effect of grumpy submission. Nick stood clenched by the door, leaning forward slightly, as if about to knock, in a novel confusion of feelings, anger at Gerald's failure to support him, and a strange delighted hatred of Barry Groom. Barry was a multiple adulterer and ex-bankrupt-to be hated by him was surely a mark of probity. But Gerald… well, Gerald, for all his failings, was a friend.

'Dolly Kimbolton's completely furious about all this, I need hardly say,' Barry said. 'Ouradi's just given another half-million to the Party.'

Nick trod quietly away and sat down at his old place in the dining room. He looked again at the picture of 'Banger' Fedden and Penny Kent embracing, taken from hundreds of feet away and so blown up that the lovers broke down into a pattern of meaningless dots.

Gerald let Barry out and a minute later Nick went back to the study, knocked, and put his head round the door. He looked about quickly, as though checking Gerald was alone, and drawing on some humorous shared relief that Barry had gone. Gerald was standing at his desk, surveying various documents, and glanced up over his half-moon glasses. 'Is this a good moment?' Nick said. Gerald grunted, a loudish dense sound made up of 'what?,' 'no,' 'yes,' and a furious sigh. Nick came in and shut the door, not wanting to be overheard by anyone. The room still seemed to tingle with what had recently been said in it. The low leather armchair still showed where the visitor had sat. A process went on here, there were meetings and decisions, a sense of importance as seasoned and stifling as the odour of leather, stale cigar smoke and polish.

'A good moment,' said Gerald, plucking off his glasses and giving Nick a quick cold smile.

'Yes, well…' said Nick, hearing the words bleakly dilate. 'I mean I won't be more than a moment.'

'Oh…' said Gerald snootily, as if to say it would take more than a moment to get through the business he had in mind. He threw his glasses onto the desk, and walked over to the window. He was wearing cavalry twill trousers and a buff crew-neck sweater. The effect was of symbolic abasement mixed with military resolve-the strategy for a comeback must already be in hand. Nick had a silly sense of privilege in seeing him in private and in trouble; and at the same time, which was more of a shock, he felt almost oppressively bored by him. Gerald gazed into the garden, but really into his own sense of grievance. Nick wasn't sure whether to speak, it was as hard as he expected, and he stood holding the back of a chair, tensed against what he thought Gerald was preparing to say. 'How's Wani?' Gerald said.

'Oh…' The question showed a kind of chilly decency. 'He's terribly ill, as you know. It doesn't look at all hopeful…'

Gerald nodded slightly, to show it was therefore typical of a lot of things. 'Bloody tough on the parents.' He turned to stare at Nick, as if challenging him to sympathize. 'Poor old Bertrand and Monique!'

'I know…'

'To lose one child… ' They both heard a touch of Lady Bracknell in this, and Gerald turned promptly away from the danger of a joke. 'Well, one can only imagine.' He shook his head slowly and came back to the desk. He had the heavy-faced look, indeed like someone resisting a laugh, that was his attempt at solemn sympathy. Though there was a mawkish hint too that he had somehow 'lost' a child himself: he absorbed the Ouradis' crisis into his own. 'And ghastly for the girl too.'

For a moment Nick couldn't think what he meant. 'Oh, Martine, do you mean?'

'The fiancee.'

'Oh… yes, but she wasn't actually his girlfriend.'

'No, no, they were going to get married.'

'They might have got married, but it was just a front, Gerald. She was only a paid companion.'

Gerald pondered this and then flicked up his eyebrows in sour resignation. The facts of gay life had always been taboo with him: he and Nick had never shared a frank word or knowing joke about them, and this was an odd place to start. With a nervous laugh Nick went on, 'I'll miss him, of course.'

Gerald busied himself with some papers, shuffled them into a box-folder and snapped down the spring. He glanced, as if for approval, at the two framed photos, of Rachel and the Prime Minister, and said, 'Remind me how you came to be here.'

Nick wasn't sure if courtesy really required him to do so. He shrugged, 'Well, as you know, I came here as a friend of Toby's.'

'Aha,' said Gerald, with a nod, but still not looking at him. He sat down at the desk, in the spaceship black chair. He made an exaggerated moue of puzzlement. 'But were you a friend of Toby's?'

'Of course I was,' said Nick.

'A funny sort of friendship, wasn't it…?' He glanced up casually.

'I don't think so.'

'I don't think he knew anything about you.'

'Well, I'm just me, Gerald! I'm not some alien invader. We'd been in the same college for three years.'

Gerald didn't concede this point, but swivelled and stared out of the window again. 'You've always been comfortable here, haven't you?'

Nick gasped with disappointment at the question. 'Of course…'

'I mean, we've always been very kind to you, actually, I think, haven't we? Made you a part of our life-in the widest sense. You've made the acquaintance of many remarkable people through being a friend of ours. Going up indeed to the very highest levels.'

'Yes, certainly.' Nick took a deep breath. 'That's partly why I'm so dreadfully sorry about everything that's happened,' and he pushed on, earnestly but slyly, 'you know, with Catherine's latest episode.'

Gerald looked very affronted by this-he didn't want some defusing apology from Nick, and especially one that turned out not to be an apology but a commiseration about his daughter. He said, as though parenthetically, 'I'm afraid you've never understood my daughter.'

Nick flattered Gerald by taking this as a subtle point. 'I suppose it's difficult for anyone who hasn't suffered from it to understand her kind of illness, isn't it, not only moment by moment, but in its long-term patterns. I know it doesn't mean she loves you and Rachel any the less that she's done all this… damage. When she's manic she lives in a world of total possibility. Though actually you could say that all she's done is tell the truth.' He thought he'd perhaps got through to Gerald-who frowned ahead and said nothing; but then, rather as he did in TV interviews, carried on with his own line, as if no answer or objection had been made.

'I mean, didn't it strike you as rather odd, a bit queer, attaching yourself to a family like this?'

Nick thought it was unusual-that was the beauty of it, or had been, but he said, 'I'm only the lodger. It was Toby who suggested I live with you.' He took a risk and added, 'You could just as well say that the family attached itself to me.'

Gerald said, 'I've been giving it some thought. It's the sort of thing you read about, it's an old homo trick. You can't have a real family, so you attach yourself to someone else's. And I suppose after a while you just couldn't bear it, you must have been very envious I think of everything we have, and coming from your background too perhaps… and you've wreaked some pretty awful revenge on us as a result. And actually, you know…'he raised his hands, 'all we asked for was loyalty.'

The strange, the marvellous thing was that at no point did Gerald say what he considered Nick actually to have done. It seemed as natural as day to him to dress up the pet lamb as the scapegoat. There was no point in fighting, but Nick said, as if eerily detached from the very young man who was gripping the chair back, tearful with surprise, 'I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about, Gerald. But I must say it's a bit steep to talk to me about loyalty, of all things.' It struck him he'd never spoken a word of criticism to Gerald before. It clearly struck Gerald too, from his incredulous recoil, and the grappling way he turned Nick's words on him.

'No, actually, you haven't the faintest fucking idea what you're talking about!' He stood up convulsively, and then sat down again, with a sort of sneer. 'Do you honestly imagine that your affairs can be talked about in the