He wanted to lie back and listen and perhaps have a long deep snog with Nat Hanmer, whose lips were not so full and soft as Leo's, but who was (Nick hadn't seen it before) almost beautiful, as well of course as being a marquess. The two of them in their shirtsleeves. Nat said he was having a go at writing a novel himself. He'd bought a computer, which he said was "a really sexy machine." In the warm explanatory light of the pot Nick saw what he meant. "I'd love to read it," he said. Across the room Gareth had switched wars and was describing the Battle of Jutland to a paralysed circle of young women. His big velvet bow tie was all donnish conceit. He was going to go on like this for forty-five years.
Nick heard himself saying how he missed his boyfriend, and then his heart speeded up. Sam smiled—he was purely and maturely straight, but he was cool with everything. Nat said broad-mindedly, "Oh, you've got a . . . you've got a bloke?" and Nick said, "Yeah . . . " and already he'd told them all about answering the advertisement, and their meeting and having sex in the garden and the funny episode with Geoffrey from two doors down. And how they were now going out together on a regular basis. Pot was a kind of truth drug for him—with a twist. He had an urge to tell, and show himself to them as a functioning sexual being, but as he did so he seemed to hear how odd and unseen his life was, and added easy touches to it, that made it more shapely and normal.
"I didn't know about all this," said Toby, who was going round in his bare feet with a bottle of brandy. He was grinning, slightly scandalized, even hurt perhaps that Nick hadn't told him he was having an affair.
"Oh, yes . . ." said Nick, "sorry . . . He's this really attractive black guy, called Leo."
"You should have brought him tonight," Toby said. "Why didn't you say?
"I know," said Nick; but he could only imagine Leo here in his falling-down jeans and his sister's shirt, and the jarring of his irony against the loaded assumptions of the Oxford lot.
"May one ask why?" said Lord Shepton, who had lately been snoring but had now been tickled awake and had a blearily vengeful look. Nobody knew what he was talking about. "We've already got bloody . . . Woggoo here," and he struggled upright, with a grimace of pretended guilt, to see if Charlie Mwegu, the Worcester loose-head prop and the only black person at the party, was in the room. "I mean, fucking hell," he said. Shepton was a licensed buffoon, an indulged self-parody, and Nick merely raised his eyebrows and sighed; for a moment the old dreariness and wariness surfaced again through the newer romance of the pot.
Claire was looking tenderly at Nick, and said, "I think black men can be so attractive . . . they have sweet little ears, don't they . . . sometimes . . . I don't know . . . It must be nice —"
"Calm down, Claire!" barked Roddy Shepton, as if his very worst fears had been confirmed. He struggled towards his glass on the floor.
"No, I'm quite jealous actually," said Claire, and gave Lord Shepton a playful poke in the stomach.
"Oh, you cow!" said Lord Shepton; his attention refocusing, slowly but greedily, on Wani Ouradi, who had just come into the room. "Ah, Ouradi, there you are. I hope you're going to give me some of that white powder, you bloody Arab."
"Oh, really!" said Claire, appealing hopelessly to the others.
But Wani ignored Shepton and stepped through the group towards the bed and Toby. He had changed into a green velvet smoking jacket. Nick had a moment of selfless but intensely curious immersion in his beauty. The forceful chin with its slight saving roundness, the deep-set eyes with their confounding softness, the cheekbones and the long nose, the little ears and springy curls, the cruel charming curve of his lips, made everything else in the house seem stale, over-artful, or beside the point. Nick longed to abandon handsome Nat and climb back on to the King's bed. He rolled his eyes in apology for Shepton, but Wani gave no answering sign of special recognition. And the group soon started talking about something else. Wani lay back on his elbow beside Toby for a minute, and took in the room through the filters of his lashes. Toby had picked up one of the girls' pink chiffon scarves, and was winding it into a turban with drunk perseverance. Wani said nothing about the turban, as if they were almost too familiar with each other to comment, as if they were figures of some other time and culture. Nick heard him say, "Si tu veux . . . " before getting up and going into the bathroom. Toby sat a while longer, laughing artificially at the conversation, and then went off with a yawn and a stumble after him. Nick sat sunk in himself, jealous of both of them, shocked almost to the point of panic by what they were doing. When they came back, he watched them like a child curious for evidence of its parents' vices. He could see their tiny effort to muffle their excitement, the little mock solemnity that made them seem oddly less happy and smashed than the rest of the party. They had a gleam of secret knowledge about them.
A joint came round again, and Nick took a serious pull on it. Then he got up and went to the open window, to look out at the damp still night. The great beeches beyond the lawn showed in grey silhouette against the first vague paling of the sky. It was a beautiful effect, so much bigger than the party: the world turning, the bright practical phrases of the first birds. Though there were hours still, surely, before sunrise . . . He stiffened, grabbed at his wrist, and held his watch steady in front of him. It was 4.07. He turned and looked at the others in the room, in their stupor and animation, and his main heavy thought was just how little any of them cared—they could never begin to imagine a date with a waiter, or the disaster of missing one. He made the first steps towards the door, and slowed and stopped as the pot took his sense of direction away. Where, after all, was he going? Everything seemed to have petered into a silence, as if by agreement. Nick felt conspicuous standing there, smiling cautiously, like someone not on to a joke; but when he looked at the others they seemed equally stilled and bemused. It must be some amazingly strong stuff Nick thought his way towards moving his left leg forward, he could coax his thought down through the knee to the foot, but it died there with no chance of becoming an action. It was slightly trying if he had to stand here for a long time. He looked more boldly round at the others, not easy to name at the moment, some of them. Slow blinks, little twitches of smiles. "Yah . . . " said Nat Hanmer, very measuredly, nodding his head, agreeing with some statement that only he had heard. "I suppose . . . " said Nick, but stopped and looked around, because that was part of a conversation about Gerald and the BBC. No one had noticed, though. "But you're thinking, wasn't that Bismarck's whole point?" Gareth said.
Nick wasn't sure how it started. Sam Zeman was laughing so much he lay back on the floor, but then choked and had to sit up. One of the girls pointed at him mockingly, but it wasn't mockery, she was laughing uncontrollably herself. Nat was red in the face, pinching the tears out of his eyes and pulling down the corners of his mouth to try to stop it. Nick could only stop giggling by glaring at the floor, and as soon as he looked up he was giggling again convulsively, it was like hiccups, it was hiccups, all mixed up together with the whooping, inexplicable funniness of the brandy bottle, the Renoir lady, the gilded plaster crown above the bed, all of them with their ideas and bow ties and plans and objections.
4
"‘THAT'S NOT A Hero's Life,' said a critic of the first performance, 'but rather a Dog's Life.' Or rather a dog's breakfast, you may well feel, after hearing that rendition of the battle music by Rudolf Kothner and the Tallahassee Symphony." It was Saturday morning, in the kitchen at Kensington Park Gardens, and a sharp young man was comparing recordings of Ein Heldenleben on "Building a Library."
"Ha, ha," said Gerald sourly, who had been slouching up and down, conducting first with a biro, now with a tennis racquet. He loved these domestic mornings, deferring to Rachel, making lists, carrying out small invented duties in the kitchen and the cellar. Today was even better, with his favourite composer on the radio; he lingered and got in the way, swinging his head from side to side, and not at all minding having a passage repeated again and again in ever louder rival interpretations. He took great interest
in the breakdown of the Hero's adversaries into carpers (flutes), vituperators (oboe), and whiners (cor anglais), and drove them all into the pantry with a vigorous forehand when the Hero won.
"But let's move on to 'The Hero's Works of Peace,' " said the reviewer, "where Strauss self-glorifyingly recalls material from his own earlier symphonic poems and songs."
"I don't like this chap's tone," said Gerald. "Ah, now . . . ! Nick . . ." as the music revelled and swelled enormously. "You must admit!"
Nick sat at the table, quick-witted after a mug of coffee, and ready to say all kinds of things. Today especially he was maddened by Strauss's bumptious self-confidence, which took no account of his own frustrations, the two tense weeks in which the dream of Leo as a possible future had faded on the air. But he contented himself with making a ghastly face. In their ongoing Strauss feud he was always cheerfully combative and found himself leaping to more and more dizzy positions—after which he had to take a few moments to reason his way to them over solid ground. Simply having opposition brought latent feelings to the surface and polarized views he might otherwise hardly have bothered to formulate. It became urgent for him to revile Richard Strauss, and he did it happily but a little hysterically, as if far more than questions of taste were involved. He could measure the strange zeal of the process by the degree to which he found himself denying his own ingenuous pleasure in some of Strauss's material and the magical things he did with it—this massive tune now, for instance, which would be running through his mind for days to come. He watched Gerald revelling and swelling too, and a vague embarrassment at the sight made it easier for him to say, "No . . . no. . . it just won't do," as the music was quickly faded out.
"Herbert von Karajan there, with the strings of the Berlin Philharmonic in superlative form."
"Exactly, that's the one we've got, isn't it?" Gerald said. "The Karajan, Nick?"—since it was Nick, over the summer months, who had been through the record cupboard and put all the discs in alphabetical order.
"Um—I think so . . ."
"But it's possible, isn't it," the clever young man went on, "to wonder if the sheer opulence of the sound and those very broad tempi don't push this reading over the edge, losing that essential drop of self-irony without which the piece can all too easily become an orgy of vulgarity. Let's hear Bernard Haitink and the Concertgebouw in the same passage."
Gerald had the stern, pinched look of someone wounded in debate and measuring his response with awkward dignity. The orchestra rampaged all over again. "I don't think I care for this one quite so much," he said. And then a little later, "I don't see what's vulgar about being glorious."
Nick said, "Oh, if you were worried about vulgarity then you'd never listen to Strauss at all."
"Ooh . . . !" protested Gerald, suddenly cheerful again.
"Perhaps the early Symphony in F," Nick said. "But even that . . ."
"I'm going over to Russell's," said Catherine, walking through the room with a hat on and her fingers in her ears—whether to block out the Hero's Deeds or her father's objections wasn't clear. In fact Gerald said, "OK, Puss," and stamped his foot exultantly at a blasting entry for the horns. It was a clear case of God-dammery, her word for all heavily scored Romantic music. She went out into the hall and they heard the slam of the front door.
What the problem was was this colossal redundancy, the squandering of brilliant technique on cheap material, the sense that the moral nerves had been cut, leaving the great bloated body to a life of valueless excess. And then there was the sheer bad taste of applying the high metaphysical language of Wagner to the banalities of bourgeois life, an absurdity Strauss seemed only intermittently aware of! But he couldn't say that, he would sound priggish, he would seem to care too much. Gerald would say it was only music. Nick tried to read the paper for a couple of minutes, but was oddly too excited to concentrate.
"And then the cor anglais, changed at last from whining adversary to pastoral pipe, introduces the poignant melody which announces the Hero's impending departure from the world. For how not to do it, let's go back to that mid-price disc from the Caracas Radio Orchestra, whose soloist seems not to have been told of this important transformation in character . . ."
"Gerald, did you manage to get hold of Norman?" Rachel asked, with an insistent tone, as if herself not quite sure of getting through. But a question or command from her had automatic priority, and he said,
"I did, my darling, yes"—going towards her to help her with a trug of long-stemmed yellow roses that she had brought in from the garden. She didn't need help, and the gallant little pantomime passed off almost unnoticed, as their common idiom. "Penny's going to come over for a chat. Norman says she's far too high-minded to work for the Tories."
"She'll be very glad of a job," said Rachel. Norman Kent, whose temperamental portraits of Toby and Catherine hung in the drawing room and the second-floor landing respectively, was one of Rachel's "left-wing" friends from her student days, whom she'd stayed stubbornly loyal to; Penny was his blushing blonde daughter, also just down from Oxford. There was a notion she might come and work for Gerald. "Is Catherine up yet? Or down?" Rachel asked.
"Mm . . . ? No—she's neither up nor down, in fact she's out. She's gone to see the man with the Face."
"Ah." Rachel clipped expressively at the rose stems. "Well, I hope she'll be back for lunch with your mother."
"I'm not sure . . ." said Gerald, who doubtless thought lunch would be a good deal easier without her, especially since Toby and Sophie were coming. He listened through to the final recommendation on Ein Heldenleben, and pensively turned off the radio. He said, "He's all right, this fellow, isn't he, Nick?"
"Who . . . Russell? I think he's all right." Having given him a fervent testimonial two weeks ago, when he hadn't even met him, he was obliged to remain vaguely positive now that he had met him and knew that he couldn't stand him.
"Oh, good," said Gerald, glad to have got that cleared up.
"I thought he was rather sinister,1' Rachel said.
"I know what you mean," said Nick.
"One thing we have learnt, Nick," said Gerald, "is that all her boyfriends are marvellous. Criticism from us is the last betrayal. The more unprepossessing the individual the more strenuously we admire him."
"We love Russell," said Rachel.
"He's not much to look at," Nick quickly conceded, knowing that that was part of his glamour for Catherine, who described him as "a blinding fuck."
"Oh, come on, he's a thug," said Rachel, with an unsparing smile. "The photographs he took at Hawkeswood were purely malicious, making everyone look like fools."
"An easy target," said Gerald, clearly meaning something different. Catherine had passed round a selection of the pictures at dinner the week before. They were grainy, black and white, taken without a flash on long exposures which dragged people's features into leering masks. The photograph of Gerald and the Home Secretary being photographed for Tatler was a minor masterpiece. Not shown were those of guests fornicating, mooning, pissing in the fountain, and snorting cocaine. "Is that what The Face is like?" said Gerald. "Sort of satire . . ."
"Not really," said Nick. "It's more pop—and fashion."
"I wouldn't mind seeing a copy," said Rachel warily. And Nick found himself climbing up the four flights of stairs to search for one in Catherine's room. A sense of criminal intrusiveness, a nagging memory of what had almost happened there three weeks before, made him hurry back down. He glanced through the magazine as he passed by the door of his hosts' bedroom, just to make sure it wasn't too outrageous. He quite liked The Face, but there was a lot of it he didn't understand. The picture of a blanched and ringleted Boy George on the cover had been taken by Russell. As he came back into the kitchen Nick felt suddenly embarrassed, as if he'd brought down one of his four porn mags by mistake. He handed it over and they placed it on the table and looked through it together.
"Mm . . . perfectly harmless," murmured Gerald.
"Yah—i
t's just a kids' thing," said Nick, hovering to interpret and deflect. He wasn't much use as a guide to his own youth culture, but he knew it wasn't just a kids' thing. They paused at a fashion spread that showed some sexy half-naked models in a camp pretence of a pillow fight. Gerald frowned faintly, to deny any interest in the women, and Nick realized his paradigm for this inspection was some difficult encounter with his own parents, who would have blushed at the sexualized style of the whole magazine, and called it "daft" or "rubbish" because they couldn't mention the sex thing itself Nick looked at the sprawling beautiful men and blushed appallingly too. He said, "I always think the typography's rather a nightmare."
"Isn't it a nightmare?" said Rachel gratefully. "One feels quite lost." They all started reading an article which began, " 'Get that motherfucker out of here!' says Daddy Mambo of Collision."
"OK," said Gerald, with a dismissive drawl, flicking through pages of advertisements for clubs and albums. He seemed vaguely distressed, not at the magazine itself, but that Rachel should have seen it. "This doesn't have the young genius's work in it . . . ?"
"Urn—yes, he did the cover on this one."
"Ah . . ." Gerald peered at it in an affectedly donnish way. "Oh yes, 'photo Russell Swinburne-Stevenson.'"
"I didn't know he had a surname," said Rachel.
"Much less two," said Gerald—as if perhaps he might not be such a bad sort.
They looked at Boy George's carmine smile and unusual hat. He wasn't at all sexy to Nick, but he carried a large sexual implication.
"Boy George is a man, isn't he?" said Rachel.
"Yes, he is," said Nick.
"Not like George Eliot."
"No, not at all."
"Very fair question," said Gerald.
The doorbell rang—it was a quick brassy rattle as much as a ping. "Is that Judy already?" said Rachel, fairly crossly. Gerald went into the hall and they heard him pluck open the front door and boom "Hello" in a peremptory and discouraging way he had. And then, in another timbre that made Nick's heart thump and the still air in the house shiver and gleam, Leo saying, "Good morning, Mr Fedden, sir. I was wondering if young Nicholas was at home."