When Nick went upstairs in the afternoon Catherine came too, a little behind him, so that it wasn't clear if she was following him; he glanced back in the long passageway and saw her plotting expression. He left his door open, and a few moments later she came wandering in. "Hello, darling," said Nick.
"Mm, hello again, darling," said Catherine, looking quickly at him, and then peering mysteriously around the room.
"Are you OK?"
"Oh, yes . . . fine. I'm fine."
Nick smiled tenderly, but she seemed almost irritated by the question, and he thought perhaps she'd got over Pat, with her odd emotional economy, of feelings fiercely inhabited and then discarded. She was wearing tight white shorts and a grey tank top of Jasper's, in which her small breasts moved alertly. No one had come to his room before, and it felt intimate, and pleasantly tense, like a first date. She sat on the bed and tested the springs.
"Poor old Nick, you always get the worst room."
"I love my room," said Nick, gazing to left and right.
"This used to be my room. It's where they put the children. God, I remember those creepy pictures."
"They are a bit spooky, aren't they." They were the little German paintings on glass: Autumn, where a woman with an aigrette filled a girl's apron with easily reached fruit, and Winter, where men in red coats shot and skated and a bird sang on a bare branch. It was hard to put your finger on it, but they had a sort of sinister geniality.
"Still, you're nice and near your friend."
"I can hear old Ouradi snoring, yes," said Nick, rather heartily, and sat down at the table.
"Actually I don't mind old Ouradi," said Catherine.
"He's all right, isn't he."
"I always thought he was just a spoilt little ponce, but there's a wee bit more to him than that. He can even be quite funny."
"I know . . ." said Nick, who thought of himself as much funnier than Wani.
"I mean he's bloody moody. Sometimes he's just not there, he's like a shop dummy going charming . . . duchess . . . et cetera; and sometimes he's the life and soul."
"I know what you mean," said Nick, with a wary laugh at her mimicry. "You get used to that."
Catherine leaned back on her arms and swung her legs. "I'm quite glad I'm not his fiancee, I must say."
"I think she's probably used to that too."
"She's certainly had time to get used to it . . ."
Nick looked down, realigned the books on his table, his notebooks, Henry James's memoirs covering the Spartacus gay guide to the world. He assumed Catherine had come here with a purpose. She glanced round, and then got up and closed the door, in the abstracted way of someone already working on the next thing.
"I must say I'm beginning to wonder about old Wani," she said.
"How do you mean . . . ?"
"He's rather brilliant, actually."
"Oh . . . ?"
"He's completely pulled the wool over your blue eyes."
Nick smiled dimly, with anxiety and a vague sense of a compliment. "Quite probably," he said.
Catherine sat down and said, "My little Jaz has got a theory."
"Oh, yes?" said Nick. "I wouldn't automatically credit a theory of little Jaz's."
Catherine carried on as if she didn't mind him sounding like her father. "Perhaps not, but. . .Jasper's very observant, you know, well, you probably don't believe me . . . anyway, he thinks he's a fag."
"Oh!" Nick tutted disappointedly. "Yeah, people are always saying that. It's just because he bathes so often and wears see-through trousers." The odd thing, Nick thought, was that people said it so rarely.
"Jasper says he follows him round all the time trying to get a look at his knob."
"Mm . . . It sounds to me a bit like vanity, darling. Jasper's always following me round trying to show me his knob." Perhaps this was too frank. "You must admit, he can be a bit of a flirt." Nick was surprised by his own presence of mind, but still he sniggered, and crossed his legs in complex discomfort.
"Wani hasn't said anything at all, then? About Jaz? I suppose he would be extra careful to keep it from you, wouldn't he—in case you got the wrong idea! Wouldn't do at all!" said Catherine, perhaps not convinced by her own theory.
Nick was blushing, but he looked at her levelly. "I don't know, darling," he said, and bit his lower lip. "Aren't they alone together down at the pool right now? Who knows what might be happening?"
"At least he's not wearing his thong today," said Catherine.
"No, quite . . ." Nick pushed on defensively with his rough joke. "Though once they get into the pool-house together . . ."
Catherine gave him a bothered stare, and coloured a little herself. She knew of course that Nick knew that Jasper fucked her in the pool-house, it was a silent brag; but of course she didn't know that Nick had fucked Wani there last night, after the awful dinner, in a storm of pent-up anger. She said, "Oh, god, don't mention the pool-house."
"What . . . ?"
"Gerald was on to me about it this morning, and behaving broadly like an ape, I must say."
"Oh, darling . . . I saw something was going on": and the image of Gerald standing by the pool, head down, shoulders rounded in accusing disappointment, was somehow ape-like, it was true.
"Apparently her ladyship found a rubber johnny floating in the lav. She was frightfully upset, as you can imagine. It quite ruined her early-morning bathe."
"Hoorah!" said Nick, and grinned at her, while his mind raced round a series of right-angled bends.
"I thought he'd flushed it, but Gerald came snooping round, and we only escaped by a hare's breath."
"I'm surprised she knew what it was."
"It's too pathetic," said Catherine, who of course had missed last night's sex-education class. "We're all adults, for god's sake."
"I know . . ."
"You can't do it in the house, because the noise carries."
"That can be a problem."
"Actually, god, fuck, that's really weird . . . !" Catherine stared at him in excited self-doubt, whilst Nick felt his disguise grow eerily thinner. He smiled, not knowing if he'd been recognized, or if, by sitting still, he could avoid detection. "Because I'm sure we didn't use one yesterday."
"You must always use a rubber," said Nick. "There's no point in sometimes using one and sometimes not. You don't know where he's been."
"Oh, Nick, he's a total innocent. He's never been with anyone else."
"No, well . . ."
Catherine gaped. "So if it wasn't us."
"It might have been there from the day before, I suppose," said Nick, with doomed insouciance, watching Catherine as she went on an Agatha Christie-like tour of the possible and frankly impossible suspects. He thought that perhaps like Poirot she had known the answer before she came into the room; but when she stood up, walked to the window, and turned he saw the shock, the disgust even, of discovery in her face.
"God, I've been stupid," she said.
Nick looked at her, and she looked at him. He felt the painful stupidity of detection himself, and also a kind of pride, lurking still, waiting for permission to smile. She couldn't deny the scale and class of the deception. He thought he saw her quick recovery, her feel for anything salacious. He said, "Perhaps he is rather brilliant, yes."
Catherine came and sat down again, as dignified as she could be. "I don't think he's brilliant any more," she said.
Nick said carefully, "You mean he was brilliant when you thought he was tricking me, but not when it turns out he's tricking you." He felt, without time to work it out, that there could be a brilliance of concealment, over something simple and even sordid; and there could be a simple, dumb concealment of something glitteringly unexpected. Caught up in it, inured to it, he didn't know which was more nearly the case with himself and Wani. "Of course, it's all for him," he said.
"I mean how can he bear it?"
"The secrecy, you mean? Or me?"
"Ha, ha."
"Well, the secrecy . . . "
Often in life Nick felt he hadn't mastered the arguments, and could hardly present his own case, let alone someone else's; but on this particular matter he was watertight, if only from the regular need to convince himself. He checked off the points on his fingers: "He's a millionaire, he's Lebanese, he's the only child, he's engaged to be married, his father's a psychopath."
"I mean how did it start?" said Catherine, finding these points either too obvious or too involved to take up. "How long's it been going on? I mean—god, really, Nick!"
"Ooh, about six months."
"Six months!"—and again Nick couldn't tell if this was too long or not long enough. She stared at him. "I'm going to write that poor long-suffering French girl a letter!"
"You're to do nothing of the kind. A year from now that poor French girl will be blissfully married."
"To a Lebanese poofter with a psychopath for a father . . ."
"No, darling, to a very beautiful and very rich young man, who will make her very happy and give her lots of beautiful rich children." It was a tiringly ample prospect.
"And what about you?"
"Oh, I'll be all right."
"You're not going to carry on bumshoving him when he's married to the poor little French girl, I hope?"
"Of course not," said Nick, with a glassy smile at the one thing he didn't want to think about. "No—I shall move on!"
Catherine shook her head at him, she had the moral she wanted: "God, men!" she said. Nick laughed uneasily, as an object of both sympathy and attack.
"But really, swear not to say a word to anybody."
She weighed this up, teasingly, and teasing meant more to her than to Nick. She was on the side of dissidence and sex, but she was still huffy with her discovery, with having been tricked and not trusted. In the pause that followed they heard the faint scratch of footsteps on the stairs and then the clip of hard-soled slippers, which Nick knew at once, along the tiled hallway. He bit his lip, winced, and curled his head forward as if he was praying, to enjoin silence. Wani was coming up to his room, to change probably, which he did more often than anyone else, as if strictly observing an etiquette the others had let slide. And for another reason too, so that his reappearance in pressed white linen trousers or bright silk shirt was a cover and almost an explanation for his new liveliness; as if he sprang back to noiseless applause. He went into his room, and they could see him hesitate, the shadow on the gleam of the tiles under Nick's door, which wasn't normally closed. Then he closed his own door, and seconds later the catch jumped and settled. The door catches here had a life of their own, and kicked and rattled with stored energy, in accusing jumps.
As they sat there, compromised, staring attentively, but not at each other, waiting for Wani to be done, Nick pictured him having a line, his air of cleverness and superiority, and almost hoped that they would hear him, and that that secret would come out too. To hear it, like a lovers' rendezvous, a rhythm, a ritual: evidence of the other great affair in Wani's life. But he was probably in his bathroom. A light aircraft droned and throbbed in the heights, a summer sound, that came and went on the mind.
When he'd gone downstairs again, Catherine said, "Of course switchers are a nightmare. Everyone knows that."
"I don't suppose everyone knows it," said Nick.
"God, you remember Roger?"
"He was Drip-Dry, wasn't he?" Nick felt annoyed, slighted, but undeniably relieved that Catherine had decided to show him up with talk about her own boyfriends. "Always something just a little bit funny about the sex—as if he wished you had a hairy chest . . . you know. And the feeling that you never had his absolutely undivided attention."
"I'm not sure one wants that, does one," said Nick, not quite meaning it, but seeing as he said it that it could be a helpful kind of wisdom, if you shared your lover with a woman as well as a drug.
"They say they love you, but there's more reason than usual to disbelieve them." In fact Wani had never said that, and Nick had stopped saying it, because of the discomforting silence that followed when he did. "I'm surprised, actually, I wouldn't have thought he was your type."
"Oh!" said Nick, and gasped at the thought of him.
"I mean, he's not black, really, he's been to university."
Nick smiled disparagingly at this sketch of his tastes. He felt embarrassed—not at sex talk, which was always an enjoyable surrender, a game of risked and relished blushes, but at the exposure of something more private than sex and weirdly chivalrous. He said, "I just think he's the most beautiful man I've ever met."
"Darling," said Catherine, in a protesting murmur, as if he'd said something very childish and untenable. "You can't really?" Nick looked at his desk and flinched irritably. "I can sort of see what you mean," Catherine said. "He's like a parody of a good-looking person, isn't he." She smiled. "Give me your pen": and on the top of Nick's notepad she made a quick drawing, a few curves, cheekbones, lips, lashes, heavily inked squiggles of hair. "There! No, I must sign it"—and she scrawled "Wonnie by Cath" underneath. Nick saw how accurate it was, and said, "He doesn't look like that at all."
"Hmm?" said Catherine teasingly, feeling she'd made a point but not knowing where it had got her.
"All I can say is, when he comes into the room—like when he got back late for lunch the other day, when we'd been gossiping about him, and I was playing along with you, sort of agreeing, actually—when he came in, I just thought, yes, I'm in the right place, this is enough."
Catherine said, "I think that's awfully dangerous, Nick. Actually I think it's mad."
"Well, you're an artist," said Nick, "surely?" Whenever he'd imagined telling someone this, the story, the idea, had met with a thrilled concurrence and a sense of revelation. He had never expected to be contested on every point of his own beliefs. He said, "Well, I'm sorry, that's how I am, you should know that by now."
"You'd fall in love with someone just because they were beautiful, as you call it."
"Not anyone, obviously. That would be mad." He resented her way, now she'd gained access to his fantasy, of belittling the view. It was like her attitude to the room they were sitting in. "It's not something we can argue about, it's a fact of life."
Catherine cast her mind back helpfully. "I mean, no one could have called Denton beautiful, could they?"
"Denny had a beautiful bottom," Nick said primly. "That was what mattered at the time. I wasn't in love with him."
"And what about little thing? Leo? He wasn't beautiful exactly, I wouldn't have thought. You were crazy about him." She looked at him interestedly to see if she'd gone too far.
Nick said solemnly but feebly, "Well, he was beautiful to me."
"Exactly!" said Catherine. "People are lovely because we love them, not the other way round."
"Hmm."
"Did you hear anything more from him, by the way?"
"No, not since spring of last year," said Nick, and got up to go to the lavatory.
The bathroom window looked out across the forecourt and the lane at the other, unmentioned view, northwards: over rising pastures towards a white horizon—and beyond that, in the mind's distance, northern France, the Channel, England, London, lying in the same sunlight, the gate opening from the garden to the gravel walk, and the plane trees, and the groundsmen's compound with the barrow and the compost heap. It came to Nick in a flash of acute nostalgia, as though he could never visit that scene of happiness again. He waited a minute longer, in the heightened singleness of someone who has slipped out for a minute from a class, a meeting, ears still ringing, face still solemn, into another world of quiet corridors, the neutral gleam of the day. He couldn't unwind the line of beauty for Catherine, because it explained almost everything, and to her it would seem a trivial delusion, it would seem mad, as she said. He wouldn't be here in this room, in this country, if he hadn't seen Toby that morning in the college lodge, if Toby hadn't burnt in five seconds onto the eager blank of his mind. How he chased Toby, the covert pursuit, the unguessed courage, the laughab
le timidity (it seemed to him now), the inch or two gained by pressure on Toby's unsuspecting good nature, the sudden furlongs of dreamlike advance when Toby asked him up to town—he could never tell her that. Her own view was that Toby was a "vacuous lump."
When he went back into the room she had found the Spartacus guide, and was looking at it, and then over it at him, with a mocking gape, as if this was the silliest thing of all. "It's too hysterical," she said.
"Marvellous, isn't it," said Nick, slightly prickly, but glad of the distraction.
"Hang on . . . Paris . . . I'm just looking up Paraquat. I don't believe this book." She studied the page, in her illiterate excitable way.
"I shouldn't think there's much there," said Nick, who had already looked it up and imagined with mingled longing and satire the one disco and the designated park.
"Well, there's a disco, darling. Wed to Sat, 11 to 3. L'An des Roys," she said, in her plonking French accent. "We must go! How hilarious."
"I'm glad you find it so amusing."
"We'll suggest it to Ouradi, and see what he says . . . God, there's everything in here."
"Yes, it's very useful," said Nick.
"Cruising areas, my god! Look at this, rue St Front—we went there with the Tippers yesterday. If only they'd known . . . What does AYOR mean?"
"AYOR? At Your Own Risk."
"Oh . . . right . . . Right . . . And it's the whole world!"
"Look up Afghanistan," said Nick, because there was a famous warning about the roughness of Afghan sex. But she carried on flicking through. Nick disguised his interest, the vague comical rakishness he seemed to admit by having the book, and went and sat on the bed.
"I'm just looking up Lebanon," she said, after a minute.
"Oh yes . . ." said Nick.
"It sounds marvellous. Mediterranean climate, well we knew that, and it says homosexuality is a delight."
"Really," said Nick.
"It does. 'L'homosexualite est un delit,' " she read, sounding like General de Gaulle.
"Yes, delit is a crime, unfortunately."
"Oh, is it?"
"Delight is delice, delit is a misdemeanour."
"Well, it's bloody close . . ."