The Line of Beauty Read Online Free PDF

the bait. There were a couple of bottles for Elena, who was involved in an
     anxious transfer of household powers to Rachel, and put them aside in her black shopping bag, to take home. Elena, a widow
     in her sixties, was treated with affection and a careful pretence of equality by the family, so it was revealing to see her
     nervousness as she accounted for what she had done in their absence. Nick couldn't quite rid himself of a sense of embarrassment
     with her, the ghost of an elaborate but misdirected courtesy. On his first visit to Kensington Park Gardens, he'd been welcomed
     by Toby and then left briefly alone in the house, with the warning that his mother would soon be home. Hearing the front door
     open and close, Nick went downstairs and introduced himself to the good-looking woman with jet-black hair who was sorting
     out the mail on the hall stand. He spoke excitedly about the painting he'd been looking at in the drawing room, and it was
     only slowly, in face of the woman's smiling deference and heavily accented murmurings, that he realized he wasn't talking
     to the Honourable Rachel but to the Italian housekeeper. Of course there was nothing wrong in being charming to the housekeeper,
     and Elena's views on Guardi were probably just as interesting as Rachel's and more so than Gerald's, but still the moment
     which she seemed to remember for its charm Nick recalled as a tiny faux pas.
    Even so, sliding on to the seat beside Toby, taking in the soap and coffee smell of him, pressing briefly against his bare
     knee as he reached for the sugar, he felt what a success he had had. That was a year ago, and now everything was rich with
     association. He picked up the notebook, which had barely been looked at, and stroked the soft pile of its cover, to make up
     for Toby's lack of appreciation and remotely, too, as if he were thumbing some warm and hairy part of Toby himself. Toby was
     talking of becoming a journalist, so the gift was vaguely insulting, a lazy attempt at aptness, the sense of mere duty in
     the givers disguised by the stinking costliness of the production. The notebook wouldn't open flat, and a few addresses or
     "ideas" would have filled it. It was certainly hard to imagine Toby using it as he visited a picket line or jostled for an
     answer from a camera-mobbed minister.
    "You heard about Maltby, of course," said Toby.
    Immediately Nick felt the air in the room begin to tingle, as if at the onset of an allergic reaction. Hector Maltby, a junior
     minister in the Foreign Office, had been caught with a rent boy in his Jaguar at Jack Straw's Castle, and had rapidly resigned
     from his post and, it seemed, from his marriage. The story had been all over the papers last week, and it was silly of Nick
     to feel as self-conscious as he suddenly did, blushing as if he'd been caught in a Jaguar himself. It was often like this
     when the homosexual subject came up, and even in the Feddens' tolerant kitchen he stiffened in apprehension about what might
     carelessly be said—some indirect insult to swallow, a joke to be weakly smiled at. Even the case of the absurd fat Maltby,
     a real-life cartoon of the greedy "new" Tory, seemed to Nick to allude to his own quiet case and, in a brief twinge of paranoia,
     to raise a question about his closeness to Toby's beautiful brown leg.
    "Silly old Hector," said Gerald.
    "I don't think we were terribly surprised," Rachel said, with her characteristic tremor of irony.
    "You must have known him?" Toby asked, in a ponderous new "interview" style he had.
    "A bit," said Rachel.
    "Not really," said Gerald.
    Catherine was still gazing out of the window, indulging her dream of not being connected to her family. "I really don't see
     why he has to go to jail," she said.
    "He's not going to jail, you daft old puss," Gerald said. "Unless you know something I don't. He was only caught with his
     trousers down." By some half-conscious association he looked to Nick for confirmation of