The Line of Beauty

same terms as mine? I mean-I ask you again, who are you? What the fuck are you doing here?' The slight rephrasing, the sharpening of his position, loosed a flood of anger, which moving visibly through his face seemed almost to bewilder him, like a physical seizure.

Trembling with the contagion of madness Nick said the thing he'd come to say, but in a tone of cheap sarcasm he'd never intended to use: 'Well, you'll be devastated to hear that I'm moving out of the house today. I just dropped in to tell you.'

And Gerald, furiously pretending not to have heard, said, 'I want you out of the house today.'

18

THE DUCHESS INSISTED that Gerald and Rachel go to the wedding. Gerald had made a noisily abject phone call: 'Really, Sharon, I could never forgive myself if I caused you a moment's embarrassment on so joyous a day,' and before Sharon, in her robust way, had finished saying that he shouldn't talk nonsense, he had rapidly said, 'Oh good, oh good,' in a tone which suggested he hadn't really meant it in the first place. It was a tiny protocol of self-abasement that he had found himself reluctantly obliged to follow. 'I just thought I should ask,' he said, as if the offer and not its cause might be the social false note. He didn't really believe he could be an embarrassment to anyone. They drove off to Yorkshire on the Friday morning.

Wani had had an exquisite new morning suit and dinner suit made, with narrow trousers and a smaller chest disguised by flyaway lapels. They looked like the formal dress of a little prince, which might only be worn once before he grew out of it. Nick saw them laid out on the ogee bed, with the new Oxfords and evening slippers aligned on the floor beneath. It was as if two people even more insubstantial than Wani were lying back side by side on the covers. He helped Wani pack, and peeked out of habit in his leather stud-box, where there was a flesh-pink paper packet an inch long. He took it out and hid it, with a sense of a new code of honour overriding an old one.

He found Wani lying on the sofa, in front of some heavy-duty video: but his eyes were closed, his mouth open and askew. Nick took a second or two to burn off his horror in the slower flame of his pity. Twice now he had come across Wani dozing and leaned over him not, as he used to, for the private marvel of the view, but to check that he was alive. He sat by him with a sigh and felt the strange tenderness towards himself that came with looking after someone else, the sense of his own prudence and mortality. He thought it might be like parenthood, the capable concealment of one's worries. He hadn't told Wani, but he was having another HIV test in the afternoon: it was another solemn thing, and even more frightening than it need have been for not being talked about. From the corner of his eye, the video seemed to pullulate, like some primitive life form, with abstract determination. It was an orgy, unattributable organs and orifices at work in a spectrum of orange, pink, and purple. He looked more closely for a moment, with a mixture of scorn and regret. It was what they were already calling a 'classic,' from the days before the antiseptic sheen of rubbers was added to the porn palette-Wani had hated that development, he was an aesthete at least in that. Turned down low, the actors grunted their binary code-yeah… oh yeah, oh yeah… yeah… oh... yeah, yeah… oh yeah...

'Is the car here?' said Wani, still waking, with a look of dread, as if he longed for his word to be challenged and the trip to be cancelled. His father's chauffeur was to drive him to Harrogate in the maroon Silver Shadow. A nurse was travelling with them, a black-haired, blue-eyed Scotsman called Roy, whom Nick felt pleasantly jealous about. 'Roy will be here in a moment,' he said, ignoring Wani's weak sulk of resentment; and then, to encourage him, 'I must say, he's very cute.'

Wani sat up slowly, and swung his legs round. 'He speaks his mind, young Roy,' he said.

'And what does he say?'

'He's a bit of a bully.'

'Nurses have to be pretty firm, I suppose.'

Wani pouted. 'Not when I'm paying them a thousand pounds a minute, they don't.'

'I thought you liked a bit of rough,' said Nick, and heard the creaky condescension of his tone. He helped Wani up. 'Anyway, four hours in a Rolls-Royce should smooth him out.'

'That's just it,' said Wani. 'He's madly left-wing.' And the ghostly smile of an old perversity gleamed for a moment in his face.

When the bell rang, Nick went down and found Roy talking to the chauffeur. Roy was about his own age, wearing dark blue slacks and an open-neck shirt; Mr Damas wore a dark grey suit and funereal tie and a grey peaked cap. They stood at an angle to each other-Roy candid and practical, fired up by the crisis of AIDS, throwing down his own bravery and commitment like a challenge to Mr Damas, who had driven the Ouradis since Wani was a boy and looked on his illness with respect but also, as a creature of Bertrand's, with an edge of blame. The recent newspaper stories had brought shame on him, and it struggled with the higher claims of loyalty in his square face and leather-gloved hands. He straightened his cap before accepting the two suitcases that Nick had brought down.

'So you're not coming, Nick,' said Roy, with sexy reprehension.

'No, I've got a few things to sort out here.'

'You won't be there to protect me from all these dukes and ladies and what have you.'

The sudden reassurance of being flirted with, over Wani's stooping head, was shadowed by a flicker of caution. He was still getting used to the interest of his own case, something extrinsic to himself, which he registered mainly in the way other people assumed they knew him. 'I think I'd need protection from them myself,' he said.

Roy gave him a funny smile. 'Do you know who's going to be there?'

'Everyone,' came a wheezy voice.

Roy looked into the back of the Rolls, where Wani was fidgeting resentfully with a rug and the copious spare cushions. 'Just get yourself settled down in there,' he said, as though Wani was a regular nuisance in class. There was something useful in his briskness; he seemed to take a bleak view and a hopeful one at the same time.

Mr Damas came round and shut the door with its ineffable chunk-it was the sound of the world he moved in, a mystery in his charge though not his possession, the tuned precision of a closing door. Wani sat, looking forwards, lost in the glinting shadow of the smoked glass. Nick had the feeling he would never see him again, fading from view in the middle of the day. Such premonitions came to him often now. He made a beckoning gesture, and Wani buzzed down the glass two inches. 'Give Nat my love,' Nick said. Wani gazed, not at him, but just past him, into the middle ground of ironic conjecture, and after a few seconds buzzed the window shut.

Nick went into the deserted office on the ground floor, and started going through his desk. He didn't have to move out of Abingdon Road, in fact he was staying upstairs while he searched for a flat, but he felt the urge to organize and discard. It seemed clear, although Wani wouldn't say so, that the Ogee operation was closing down. Nick was glad he wasn't going to Nat's wedding, and yet his absence, to anyone who noticed, might seem like an admission of guilt, or unworthiness. He saw a clear sequence, like a loop of film, of his friends not noticing his absence, jumping up from gilt chairs to join in the swirl of a ball. On analysis he thought it was probably a scene from a Merchant Ivory film.

The doorbell trilled and Nick saw a van in the street where the Rolls had been. He went out and there was a skinny boy in a baseball cap pacing about, and some very loud music. 'Ogee?' he said. 'Delivery.' He'd left the driver's door open and the radio on-'I Wanna Be Your Drill Instructor' from Full Metal Jacket echoed off the houses while he piled up big square bundles on his trolley and wheeled them into the building. He'd taken over this bit of the street for five minutes-it was an event. It was the magazine. 'Thanks very much,' said Nick. He stood aside with the ineffectual half smile of the nonworker, longing to be left alone with the product. The boy pounded in and out, breathing sharply: it was as if this delivery was keeping him intolerably from another delivery, as if he'd have liked to have made all his deliveries at once. He stacked up the bundles, a dozen of them, in four squat columns. Each packet was bound both ways with tight blue plastic tape; Nick scratched at it and broke a nail. 'Sign, please,' said the boy, whisking a manifest and a biro from his jeans pocket. Nick hurried down a loose approximation of his signature, and handed the paper back, to find the boy