Free The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst Page B

dragging walk and a stunned, vaguely cunning, smile. Nick assumed these were meant to convey sexual satiation.
    "How was your journey?"
    "Oh, fine—he drives so dangerously."
    "Oh . . . We were held up for ages by the roadworks. Your dad got in quite a state about it."
    Catherine gave him a pitying glance. "He obviously went the wrong way," she said.
    They wandered on among the formal gardens, where rose scents were mixed with the cat's-piss smell of low box hedges, and the
     round ponds reflected a summer sky now faintly scrimmed with high white cloud. "God, let's sit down," said Catherine, as though
     they'd been walking for hours. They went to a stone bench supervised by two naked minor deities. Marvellous the great rallies
     of the undressed that rich people summoned to wait on them. Lord Kessler at home must be almost constantly in view of a sprawling
     nymph or unselfconscious hero. "Russell should be finished soon, then you can meet him. I wonder if you'll like him."
    "I've already told everyone how charming he is, so I rather feel I've got to."
    "Yeah . . . ?" said Catherine, with a grateful, intrigued smile. She felt for cigarettes in her spangled evening bag. "He's
     doing lots of stuff for The Face at the moment. He's a brilliant photographer."
    "I told them that too. They all take The Face, of course."
    Catherine grunted. "I suppose Gerald was mouthing off about him."
    "He was just saying he didn't have an opinion about him because he'd never met him."
    "Mm . . . That doesn't normally prevent him. In fact that doesn't sound like him at all." She clicked her lighter and took
     in a first deep drag of smoke—the breathing out accompanied by a little toss of the head and a comforted settling back. "At
     all, at all, at all," she went on, meaninglessly assuming an Irish accent.
    "Well . . . " Nick wanted everyone to get on, but for once he couldn't be bothered to work at it. He wished he was in a position
     to speak about Leo as freely as she spoke about Russell—he thought if he did bring the subject up she would say something
     upsetting and possibly true. She said,
    "Did my mother show you round the house?"
    "No, actually, your uncle did. I felt rather honoured."
    Catherine paused and blew out smoke admiringly. "What do you make of him, then?"
    "He seems very nice."
    "Mm. What do you think, he's not gay, is he?"
    "No, I didn't feel anything like that," Nick said, a little solemnly. He knew he was supposed to be able to tell; in fact
     he tended to think people were when they weren't, and so lived with a recurrent sense of disappointment, at them and at his
     own inadequate sensors. He didn't tell Catherine, but his uncertainty on the house tour had actually been the other way round.
     Had his own gayness somehow put Lord Kessler off and made him seem unreliable and lightweight in the old boy's eyes? Had Lord
     Kessler even registered—in his clever, unimpressionable way—that Nick was gay? "He asked me what I was going to do. It was a bit like an interview, except I hadn't applied for a job."
    "Well, you may want a job one day," said Catherine. "And then he's bound to remember. He's got a memory like an ostrich."
    "Perhaps . . . I'm not quite sure what he actually does."
    She looked at him as if he must be joking. "He's got this bank, darling . . ."
    "Yes, I know—"
    "It's a big building chock-a-block full of money." She waved her cigarette arm around hilariously. "And he goes in and turns
     it into even more money."
    Nick let this simple sarcasm pass over him. "I see, you don't know what he actually does either."
    She stared at him and then gave another neighing laugh. "Haven't a clue, darling!"
    There was a shaking in the trimmed beech hedge away to the right, and then a tall man came hopping out of it sideways, holding
     up a camera that was strung round his neck. They watched him as he strolled towards them, Catherine leaning back on one hand
     with a nervously triumphant expression. "Yeah, hold that," he