Chapter 5 - Season 2 The łine of beauty

of what he was doing more perhaps than the actual sensations and the

dull very private smell. He twisted his own pants down to his knees,

and smiled at the liberated bounce of his dick in the cool night air, and

kissed his smile into Leo's sphincter. Then when he fucked Leo, which

was what he did next, a sensation as interesting as it was delicious, he

couldn't help laughing quietly. I'm glad you think it's funny,' Leo

muttered.

'No, it's not that,' said Nick; but there was something hilarious in

the shivers of pleasure that ran up his back and squeezed his neck,

and ran down his arms to his fingers - he felt he'd been switched on

for the first time, gently gripping Leo's hips, and then reaching round

him to help unbutton his shirt and get it off and hold his naked body

against him. It was all so easy. He'd worried a lot the night before that

there might be some awful knack to it - 'Mind that shirt,'

Leo said: 'it's my sister's.'

That made Nick love him much more, he couldn't say why. 'Your

arse is so smooth,' he whispered, while his hands stroked hungrily

through the short rough hair on his chest and belly.

'Yeah… shave it…' said Leo, between grunted breaths as Nick got

quicker and bolder, 'get arse-knit… fucking murder… on the bike…'

Nick kissed the back of his neck. Poor Leo! With his arse-knit and his

ingrowing beard he was a martyr to his hair. 'Yeah, like that,' he said,

with a sweet tone of revelation. He was leaning forward on one arm

now, and masturbating in a pounding hurry. Nick was more and more

seriously absorbed, but then just before he came he had a brief vision

of himself, as if the trees and bushes had rolled away and all the lights

of London shone in on him: little Nick Guest from Barwick, Don and

Dot Guests boy, fucking a stranger in a Notting Hill garden at night.

Leo was right, it was so bad, and it was so much the best thing he'd

ever done.

Later Nick sat for a minute on a bench by the gravel walk, while

Leo took a piss on the lawn. It wasn't clear whether the tall stooping

figure in white shirtsleeves had seen this. Leo sat down beside Nick

and there was a sense that some last, more formal part of their date

was to be enacted. Nick felt abruptly heavy-hearted, and thought

perhaps he had been silly to let Leo see how happy he was - he

couldn't stifle his sense of achievement, and his love-starved mind and

body wanted more and more of Leo. The air seemed to josde with

nothing but the presence and names of Nick and Leo, which hung in a

sad sharp chemical tang of knowledge among the sleeping laurels and

azaleas. The tall man walked past them, hesitated, and turned. 'You do

know it's keyholders only.'

'I'm sorry?'The mingled light from the backs of the houses revealed a

flushed summer-holiday face, soft and weak-chinned, perched at an

altitude under thin grey hair. 'Only this is a private garden.'

'Oh, yes - we're keyholders,' the phrase subsuming Leo, who

made a litde grunt, not of lust this time but of indignant confirmation.

He set his hands on his knees in a proprietary attitude, his knees wide

apart, sexy and insolent too.

'Ah, fine…' The man gave a squinting half-smile. 'I didn't think I'd

seen you before.' He avoided looking at Leo, who was obviously die

cause of this edgy exchange - and that for Nick was another of the

commonplace revelations of the evening, of being out with a black

man.

'I'm often here, actually,' Nick said. He gestured away behind him

towards the Feddens' garden gate. 'I live at number 48.'

'Fine… fine…' - the man walked on a couple of steps, dien looked

back, doubtful but eager. 'But then you must mean at the Feddens'

Nick said quietly, 'Yes, that's right.'

The news affected the man visibly - in the softly blotted glare,

which reminded Nick for a moment of plays put on in college gardens,

he seemed to melt into excited intimacy. 'Goodness… you're living

there. Well, isn't it all splendid!

We couldn't be more delighted. I'm Geoffrey Titchfield, by the

way, number 52 - tfiough we only have the garden flat, unlike… unlike

some!' Nick nodded, and smiled noncommittally. 'I'm Nick Guest.'

Some solidarity with Leo kept him from standing up, shaking hands.

Of course it was Geoffrey's voice he had heard from the balcony on the

night he had put Leo off, and Geoffrey's guests whose regular tireless

laughter had heightened his loneliness, and now here he was in person

and Nick felt he'd got one past him, he'd fucked Leo in the keyholders'

garden, it was a secret victory. 'Aah… aah…' went Geoffrey. 'It's such

good news. We're on the local association, and we couldn't be more

thrilled. Good old Gerald.'

'I'm really just a friend of Toby's,' Nick said. 'We were saying only

the other night, Gerald Fedden will be in the Cabinet by Christmas. He

knows me, by the way, you must give him all the very best from both

of us, from Geoffrey andTrudi.' Nick seemed to shrug in acquiescence.

'He's just the sort of Tory we need. A splendid neighbour, I should say

at once, and I fancy a splendid parliamentarian.' This last word was

played out with a proud, fond rise and fall and almost whimsical

rubato in its full seven syllables.

'He's certainly a very nice man,' Nick said, and added briskly, to

finish the conversation, 'I'm really more a friend of Toby and

Catherine.'

After Geoffrey had wandered off Leo stood up and took command

of his bike. Nick didn't know what to say without making mattersworse, and they walked along the path together in silence. He avoided

looking up at the Feddens', at his own window high up in the roof, but

he had a sense of being noticed by the house, and the verdict of 'vulgar

and unsafe' seemed to creep out like a mist and tarnish the triumph of

the evening.

'Well,' said Leo under his breath, 'two sorts of arse-licking in ten

minutes' - so that Nick laughed and hit him on the arm and

immediately felt better. 'Look, I'll see you, my friend,' Leo said, as Nick

opened the gate. They came out a bit shiftily on to the street, and Nick

couldn't tell if the sentence really meant its opposite. So he was clear

about it.

'I want to see you,' he said, and the five light words seemed to

open and deepen the night, with the prickling of his eyes, the starred

lights of die cars rushing past them and down the long hill

northwards, towards other boroughs, and neighbourhoods known only

from their mild skyward glare.

Leo stooped to fit on his lamps, front and back. Then he leant the

bike against the fence. 'Come here,' he said, in that part-time cockney

voice that shielded little admissions and surrenders. 'Give us a hug.'

He stepped up to him and held him tight, but with none of the

certainty of minutes before, beside the compost heap. He pressed his

forehead against Leo's, who was so much the right size for him, such a

good match, and gave him a quick firm kiss with pursed lips - there

was a jeer and a horn-blast from a passing car. 'Wankers,' murmured

Leo, though to Nick it felt like a shout of congratulations.

Leo sat on the bike, one foot straight down like a dancer's to die

pavement, the other in the raised stirrup. A kind of envy that Nick had

felt all evening for the bike and its untouchable place in Leo's heart

fused with a new resentment of it and of the ease with which it would

take him away. 'Look, I've got a couple more to see, yeah?' At which

Nick nodded dumbly. 'But I'm not letting you go.'

He settled back on the saddle, the bike wobbled and then he rode

round in ratcheting circles, so that Nick was always facing the wrong

way. 'Besides,' said Leo, you're a damn good fuck.' He winked and

smiled and then darted out across the road and down the hill without

looking back. - Nick's birthday was eight days after Toby's, and for a

moment there had been an idea that the party for Toby's twenty-first

should be a joint celebration. 'Makes obvious sense,'

Gerald had said; and Rachel had called it 'a fascinating idea'.

Since the party was to be held at Hawkeswood, which was the country

house of Rachel's brother, Lord Kessler, the plan almost frightened

Nick with its social grandeur, with what it would confer on him and

demand from him. Thereafter, though, it had never been mentioned

again. Nick felt he couldn't allude to it himself, and after a while he

allowed his mother to make arrangements for his own family party atBarwick a week later: he looked forward to that with queasy

resignation.

Toby's party was on the last Sunday in August, when the Notting

Hill Carnival would be pounding to its climax, and when many local

residents shuttered and locked their houses and left for their second

homes with their fingers crossed: since the race riots of two summers

earlier the carnival had been a site of heightened hopes and fears. Nick

had lain in bed the night before and heard the long-legged beat of

reggae from down the hill, mixed in, like the pulse of pleasure, with the

sighing of the garden trees. It was his second night without Leo. He lay

wide-eyed, dwelling on him in a state beyond mere thought, a kind of

dazzled grief, in which everything they'd done together was vivid to

him, and the strain of loss was as keen as the thrill of success. Next

morning at eleven they gathered in the hall. Nick, seeing Gerald was

wearing a tie, ran up and put one on too. Rachel wore a white linen

dress, and her dark hair, with its candid streaks of grey, had the

acknowledged splendour of a new cut and a new shape.

She smiled her readiness at them, and Nick felt their fondness

and efficiency as a family unit. He and Elena stowed the overnight

luggage in the Range Rover, and then Gerald drove them out, past

blocked-off streets, through gathering crowds.

Everywhere there were groups of policemen, to whom he nodded

and raised his hand authoritatively from the wheel. Nick, sitting in the

back with Elena, felt foolish and conceited at once. He dreaded seeing

Leo, on his bike, and dreaded being seen by Leo. He imagined him

cruising the carnival, and yearned to belong there in the way that Leo

did. He saw him dancing happily with strangers in the street, or biding

his turn in the dense mutating crowds at the underground urinals. His

longing jumped out in a little groan, which became a throat-clearing

and an exclamation: 'Oh I say, look at that amazing float.'

In a side street a team of young black men with high yellow wings

and tails like birds of paradise were preparing for the parade. 'It's

marvellous what they do,' said Rachel.

'Not very nice music,' said Elena, with a cheerful shiver. Nick

didn't reply - and found himself in fact at one of those unforeseen

moments of inner transition, when an old prejudice dissolves into a

new desire. The music shocked him with its clear repetitive statement

of what he wanted. Then one vast sound system warred happily with

the next, so that there were different things he wanted, beautiful

jarring futures for him - all this in forty or fifty seconds as trie car

slipped out and away into the ordinary activity of the weekend streets.

Still, if he couldn't be with Leo it was best to be somewhere quite

different.

Gerald drove them out along the A40, at a somehow

preferentially high speed, as if led by an invisible police escort. Soon,however, they came into massive /IC roadworks, and a long

unimpressionable tailback, as you did everywhere these days. Here

they were taking out the last old roundabouts and traffic lights and

forcing an unimpeded freeway across the scruffy flat semi-country.

Nick gazed out politely at the desert of digging and concrete, and

beyond it a field where local boys were roaring round and round on

dirt-bikes in breakneck contempt for the idea of actually going

anywhere. They didn't care about the Carnival, they'd never heard of

Hawkeswood, and they'd chosen to spend the day in this field rather

than anything else. Beside them perhaps a mile of solid traffic stood

stationary on the motorway of the future.

As always, Nick felt a need to make things all right. He said, 'I

wonder where we are. Is this Middlesex, I suppose?'

'I suppose it's Middlesex,' Gerald said. He hated to be thwarted

and was already impatient. 'Not very nice,' said Elena.

'No…' said Nick, hesitantly, humorously, as if considering a

defence of it, to pass the time. He knew Elena was anxious about the

party, and about her role for the evening. She had asked a couple of

questions already about Fales, who was Lionel Kessler's new butler,

with whom she was about to find herself pressed into some unspecified

relation.

'If Lionel's giving us lunch,' said Gerald, 'we'd better stop

somewhere and ring ahead. We'll be late.'

'Oh, Lionel won't mind,' said Rachel, 'we're just taking pot luck.'

'Hmm,' said Gerald, '«)nr doesn't as a rule find the words Lionel

and pot link used in the same sentence.' The tone was mocking, but

su^ested a leiiain anxiety of his own about his brother-in-law. atnl «??•

uw nl obligation. Rachel settled back contentedly.

'Everything, will In IMU h., u.| Ami in Cut the traffic did then

make a IIIOVI, in. I an njituiiiMii Altitude, which was the only sort

GeiaU uillhl IM-. II. wa* mutlmitly indulged. Nick thought about the

old-fashioned name Lionel. Of course it was related to Leo; but Lionel

was a little heraldic lion, whereas Leo was a big live beast. Five

minutes later they were at a standstill.

'This fucking traffic,' said Gerald; at which Elena looked a bit

flustered.

'As well as everything else,' Nick said, with determined

brightness, 'I can't wait to see the house.' "Well, you're going to have

to,' said Gerald. Ah, the house,' said Rachel, with a sighing laugh.

Nick said, 'Or perhaps you don't like it. It must be different for

you, having grown up there.' He felt he was rather fawning on her.

'I don't know,' Rachel admitted. 'I hardly know if I like it or not.'

'You'd have to say, I think,' said Gerald, 'that it's the contents

that make Hawkeswood. The house itself is something of a Victorian

monstrosity''Mmm…' In Rachel's conversation a murmured 'mmm' or drily

drawn-out 'I know…' could carry a note of surprising scepticism. Nick

loved the upper-class economy of her talk, her way of saying nothing

except by hinted shades of agreement and disagreement; he longed to

master it himself. It was so different from the bounding effort of

Gerald's conversation that he sometimes wondered if Gerald himself

understood her. He said, 'I think I'll like the house as well as the

contents.'

Rachel looked grateful, but remained vague about the whole

thing, and Nick felt slightly snubbed. Perhaps it was impossible to

describe a place one had known all one's life. She didn't disparage

Nick's interest, but she showed she couldn't quite be expected to be

interested herself. It had been her fortune not to describe but to enjoy.

She said, 'You know of course there's modern art, as well as the

Rembrandts,' with a brief smile at having retrieved a notable detail.

A-7

Hawkeswood had been built in the 1880s for the first Baron Kessler. It

stood on an artificially flattened hilltop among the Buckinghamshire

beech woods, which had since grown up to hide all but its topmost

spirelets from outside view. The approach, after trailing through the

long linked villages, entering past a lodge and a cattle grid and

climbing the half-mile of drive among grazing deer, was a complex

climax for Nick; as the flashing windows of the house came into view

he found himself smiling widely while his eyes darted critically,

admiringly - he didn't know what - over the steep slate roofs and stone

walls the colour of French mustard. He had read the high-minded but

humorous entry in Pevsner, which described a seventeenth-century

chateau re-imagined in terms of luxurious modernity, with plate-glass

windows, under-floor central heating, numerous bathrooms, and

running hot water; but it had left him unprepared for the sheer staring

presence of the place. Gerald pulled up in front of the porte cochere

and they got out and went in, Nick coming last and looking at

everything, while Fales, a real butler in striped morning trousers,

materialized to meet them.

There they were, already, in the central hall, the great feature of

the house, two storeys high, with an arcaded gallery on the upper

level, and a giant cliinineypiece made from bits of a baroque tomb.

Nick felt he'd. stepped into the strange and seductive fusion of an art

museum and a luxury hotel.

Pot luck turned out to be an exquisite light lunch served at a

round table in a room lined with rococo koiseries that had beenremoved wholesale from some grand Parisian townhouse, and painted

pale blue. On the ceiling, in a flowered ellipse, two naked females held:

i wic. iih ol RMMi Nick saw at once that the landscape over the lirepl. ii

«• WAS A «IcViinnc. It gave him a hilar ious sense of his own*oi i, il

displacement. It was one of those moments thai only tlir mli •*»iiltt.

irjir, and which came for Nick all wrapped up in iu own ilrmnption, so

that he was already iviouiiniif. M i..?? • 11•???.•..iblr other person - a

person, that is, as impressionable as himself. He didn't know whether

he should refer to it, but Lord Kessler said as he sat down, 'You see

I've moved that Cezanne.'

Rachel peered at it briefly and said, 'Oh yes.' Her whole manner

was comfortable, almost sleepy; she made a charming shrug of

welcome, of dissolved formality, gesturing Nick to his place. Gerald

looked at the painting more critically, with a sharp way he had of

scanning any document which might come in useful later on.

Nick thought he could say, 'It's very beautiful.' And Lord Kessler

said, 'Yes, isn't it a nice one.'

Kessler was perhaps sixty, shorter and stouter than Rachel, bald,

with an alert, not quite symmetrical face. He had on a dark grey three-

piece suit which made no concession to fashion or even to the season;

he looked warm in it, but seemed to say that this was simply what one

wore. He ate his salmon and drank his rather sweet hock with an

indefinable air of relished routine, an admission of lifelong lunching in

boardrooms and country houses and festival restaurants all over

Europe. He said, 'So Tobias and Catherine are coming down when?'

'I wouldn't want to put too precise a time on it,' said Gerald.

'Toby is driving down with a girlfriend, Sophie Tipper, who's a daughter

of Maurice Tipper, incidentally, and a very promising young actress.'

He looked to Rachel and she said, 'No, she's awfully promising…' - the

remark hesitating towards something she seemed to see in the middle

distance but which, as so often, she left amiably unexpressed. Nick

sometimes felt that being people's children was the only claim that

some of his friends had on the attention of their preoccupied elders. He

observed Lord Kessler's snuffle and murmur at the name of Maurice

Tipper, the incalculable ironies of different kinds of rich people about

each other. The Sophie Tipper thing had been dragging on pointlessly

since the second year at Oxford, as if Toby were pliably fulfilling

expectations by dating the daughter of a tycoon.

'As for Catherine,' Gerald went on, 'she's being brought down by

a so-called boyfriend whose name escapes me and whom I'm bound to

say I've never met.' He smiled broadly at this. 'But I expect a late

arrival and burning rubber.

Actually Nick probably knows more on this front than we do.'

Nick knew almost nothing. He said, 'Russell, you mean? Yes, he's

terribly nice.He's a very up-and-coming photographer' - in a successful

imitation of their manner and point of view. Russell had only been

announced as a boyfriend the day before, in a helpless reaction, Nick

felt, to his own success with Leo, which of course he'd had the

pleasure of describing to Catherine, entirely truthfully. He hadn't in

fact met Russell, but he thought he'd better say again, 'He's awfully

nice.'

Lord Kessler said, 'Well, there are umpteen bedrooms ready here,

and Fales has made bookings at the Fox and Hounds and the Horse

and Groom, both perfectly decent, I'm told. As to the precise

arrangements, I avert my eyes.' Kessler had never married, but there

was nothing perceptibly homosexual about him. Towards any young

people in his social orbit he maintained a strategy of enlightened

avoidance. And we're not getting the PM,' he added.

'We're not getting the PM,' Gerald said, as if for a while it had

really been likely. A relief, I must say.'

'It is rather a relief,' said Rachel.

Gerald murmured in humorous protest, and retorted that various

ministers, including the Home Secretary, very much were still

expected.

'Them we can handle,' Lord Kessler said, and shook the little bell

to call in the servant. After lunch they strolled through several large

rooms that had the residual hush, the rich refined dry smell of a

country house on a hot summer day. The sensations were familiar to

Nick from visits he made with his father to wind the clocks in several

of the great houses round Barwick - they went back to childhood,

though in those much older and remoter houses the smells were

generally mixed up with dogs and damp. Here there was a High

Victorian wealth of everything, pictures, tapestries, ceramics, furniture

- it made Kensington Park Gardens look rather bare. The furniture was

mosdy French, and of astonishing quality. Nick straggled behind to

gaze at it and found his heart betting with knowledge and suspicion.

He said, 'That Louis Quinze escritoire… is an amazing thing, sir,

surely?' His father had taught him to address all lords as sir -

bumping into one had been a constant thrilling hazard on their clock-

winding visits, and now he took pleasure in the tone of smooth

submission.

Lord Kessler looked round, and came back to him. Ah yes,' he

said, with a smile.

'You couldn't be more right. In fact it was made for Mme de

Pompadour.'

'How amazing!' They stood and admired the bulbous, oddly

diminutive desk - kingwood, was it? - with fronds of orrrolu. Lord

Kessler pulled open a drawer, which rattled with ittle china boxes

stowed away inside it; then pushed it shut.You know about furniture,' he said. A bit,' Nick said. 'My father's

in the antiques business.'

'Yes, that's right, jolly good,' said Gerald, as if he'd confessed to

being the son of a dustman. 'He's one of my constituent;, so I should

know.'

'Well, you must look around everywhere,' Lord Kessler aid. 'Look

at anything and everything.'

'You really should,' said Gerald. 'You know, the hou; e is never

open to the public, Nick.'

Lord Kessler himself took him off into the library, where the

books were apparently less important than their bindhgs, which were

as important as could be. The heavy gilding of the spines, seen

through the fine gilt grilles of the carved and gilded bookcases, created

a mood of minatory opulence. They seemed to be books in some quite

different sense from those that Nick used and handled every day. Lord

Kessler opened a cage and took down a large volume: Fables Choisies

de La Fontaine, bound in greeny-brown leather tooled and gilded with

a riot of rococo fronds and tendrils. It was an imitation of nature that

had triumphed as pure design and pure expense. They stood side by

side to admire it, Nick noticing the pleasant smell of Lord Kessler s

clean suit and discreet cologne. He wasn't allowed to hold the book

himself, and was given only a glimpse of the equally fantastic plates,

peopled with elegant birds and animals.

Lord Kessler showed die book in a quick dry way that was not in

itself dismissive but allowed for Nick's ignorance and perhaps merely

polite interest.

In fact Nick loved the book, but didn't want to bore his host by

asking for a longer look. It wasn't clear if it was die jewel of the

collection or had been chosen at random. 'It's all rather…' Lord Kessler

said. After a moment, Nick said, 'I know…' After that they browsed for

a minute or two in a semidetached fashion. Nick found a set of

Trollope which had a relatively modest and approachable look among

the rest, and took down The Way We Live Now, with an armorial

bookplate, the pages uncut. 'What have you found there?' said Lord

Kessler, in a genially possessive tone. Ah, you're a Trollope man, are

you.'

'I'm not sure I am, really,' said Nick. 'I always think he wrote too

fast. What was it Henry James said, about Trollope and his "great

heavy shovelfuls of testimony to constituted English matters"?'

Lord Kessler paid a moment's wry respect to this bit of showing-

off, but said, 'Oh, Trollope's good. He's very good on money.'

'Oh… yes…' said Nick, feeling doubly disqualified by his complete

ignorance of money and by the aesthetic prejudice which had stopped

him from ever reading'You must know that one, though,' said Lord Kessler.

'No, this one is pretty good,' Nick said, gazing at the spine with

an air of judicious concession. Sometimes his memory of books he

pretended to have read became almost as vivid as that of books he had

read and half-forgotten, by some fertile process of auto-suggestion. He

pressed the volume back into place and closed the gilded cage. He had

a sense, which was perhaps only his own self-consciousness, of some

formal bit of business, new to him but deeply familiar to his host,

being carried out in a sociable disguise. 'You were at school with

Tobias?'

'Oh… no, sir.' Nick found he'd decided not to mention Barwick

Grammar. 'We were at Oxford together, both at Worcester College…

Though I read English and Toby of course read PPE.'

'Quite…' said Lord Kessler, who perhaps hadn't been sure of this

fact. 'You were contemporaries.'

Yes, we were, exactly,' said Nick, and the word seemed to throw a

historic light across the mere three years since he had first seen Toby

in the porter's lodge and felt a sudden obliviousness of everything else.

And you took a First?'

Nick loved the murmured challenging confidence of the question

because he could answer 'Yes'. If it had been no, if he'd got a Second

like Toby, he felt everything would have been different, and a lie would

have been very ill-advised.

And how do you rate my nephew's chances?' said Lord Kessler

with a smile, though it wasn't clear to Nick what contest, what

eventuality he was alluding to. 'I think he'll do very well,' he said,

smiling back, and feeling he had struck a very subtle register, of loyal

affirmation hedged with allowable irony.

Lord Kessler weighed this for a moment. 'And for you, what now?'

'I'm starting at UCL next month; doing graduate work in English.'

'Ah… yes…' Lord Kessler s faint smile and tucked-in chin

suggested an easily mastered disappointment. And what is your

chosen field?'

'Mm. I want to have a look at style] Nick said. This flashing

emphasis on something surely ubiquitous had impressed the

admissions board, though Lord Kessler appeared uncertain. A man

who owned Mme de Pompadour's escritoire could hardly be indifferent

to style, Nick felt; but his reply seemed to have in mind some old

wisdom about style and substance. 'Style tout court? 'Well, style at the

turn of the century - Conrad, and Meredith, and Henry James, of

course.' It all sounded perfecdy poindess, or at least a way of wasting

two years, and Nick blushed because he really was interested in it and

didn't yet know - not having done the research - what he was going to

prove. Ah,' said Lord Kessler intelligendy: 'style as an obstacle.' Nick

smiled. 'Exactly… Or perhaps style that hides things and reveals diingsat the same time.' For some reason this seemed rather near the

knuckle, as though he were suggesting Lord Kessler had a secret.

'James is a great interest of mine, I must say'

'Yes, you're a James man, I see now.'

'Oh, absolutely!' - and Nick grinned with pleasure and defiance, it

was a kind of coming out, which revealed belatedly why he wasn't and

never would be married to Trollope. 'Henry James stayed here, of

course. I'm afraid he found us rather vulgar,' Lord Kessler said, as if it

had been only last week. 'How fascinating!' said Nick. 'You might be

rather fascinated by the old albums. Let me vri_ord Kessler went to

one of the cupboards beneath the bookcases, turned a scratchy-

sounding key and bent down to lake out a pair of large leather-bound

albums, which he carried i»vcr to a central table. Again the inspection

was hurried and tan-uli/. ing. He stopped now and then, as the heavy

pages fell, to display a Victorian photograph of the gardens, with their

wide bald views over newly planted woods, or of the interiors, almost

comically crowded with chairs and tables, vases on stands, paintings

on easels, and everywhere, in every vista, the arching, drooping leaves

of potted palms. Now the house seemed settled and seasoned, a

century old, with its own historic light and odour, but then it was

ostentatiously new. In the second album tliere were group

photographs, posed on the steps of the terrace, and annotated in a tiny

florid script: Nick wanted days to read (hem, countesses, baronets,

American duchesses, Balfours and Sassoons, Goldsmids and Stuarts,

numerous Kesslers. The gravel was bizarrely covered with fur rugs for

the group that centred on Edward VII in a tweed cape and Homburg

hat. And then, May 1903, a gathering of twenty or so, second row,

Lady Fairlie, The Hon. Simeon Kessler, Mr Henry James, Mrs Langtry,

The Earl of Hexham… a cheerful informal picture. The Master, with his

thumb in his striped waistcoat, eyes shaded by a traveller's wide-

brimmed hat, looked rather crafty. 'So what do you think of the

house?' said Catherine, coming across the lawn.

'Well… obviously, it's amazing…' He was tingling to the point of

fatigue with the afternoon's impressions, but was cautious as to what

to say to her.

'Yeah, it's fucking amazing, isn't it!' she agreed, with a bright,

brainless laugh. She didn't normally talk like this, and Nick supposed

it was part of the persona she was showing to Russell. Russell wasn't

actually present (he was busy with his camera somewhere) but it

would have taken an unnecessary effort to get out of role- Other

elements of the performance were a strange 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 unselfcon-scious

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 ax. 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

dtag 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 beenthe 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 - tJiat 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 said, and took a

couple of exposures very quickly, as he was still moving.

'Lovely,' he said.

So Russell was one of her older boyfriends, thirty perhaps, dark,

balding, with the casual but combative look of the urban

photographer, black T-shirt and baseball boots, twenty-pocketed

waistcoat and bandolier of film. He passed in front of them, clicking

away, cheerily exploiting this little episode of his arrival, Nick's

awkwardness and Catherine's hunger for the spontaneous, the

outrageous. She lolled backwards, and touched her upper lip with her

tongue. Was it good when her men were older, or not? He could be

Protector or Abuser - it was a great deep uncertainty, like the ones in

her graphology book. He pulled her up and gave her a hug and then

Catherine said, almost reluctantly, 'Oh, this is Nick, by the way.'

'Hello, Nick,' said Russell. 'Hello!'

'Did you nun anyone:"'. iskeil «ailienne, showing a hint of anxiety.

'Yeah, I've just been i. ilkine, to the uierers round the back.

Apparently Thau IK-I'S IUII iiiming '

'Oh, sorry, Kussell,' ('JIIICIIIIC iaitl Nick said, 'We. tie fieiimp, ihr

Home. Sri-rctary, though,' in his mock pompon* tniir, win. h Uumrll,

like l. eo, failed to pick up on. 'I wanted Thatcher doing the twist, or

pissed'Yeah, Thatcher pogoing!' said Catherine, and laughed rather

madly. Russell didn't look especially amused. 'Well, I wouldn't want

her at my twenty-first,' he said.

'I don't think Toby really wanted her,' Nick put in apologetically.

The touching thing was that Catherine had clearly taken her father's

fantasy as the truth, and then used it to lure Russell. The dream of the

leader's presence seeped through to an unexpected depth.

'Well, Toby would have been perfectly happy with a party at

home,' she said. She wasn't quite sure whose side she was on, when it

came to a difference between her father and her brother; Nick saw that

she wanted to impress Russell with the right kind of disaffection. 'But

then Gerald has to get hold of it and invite the ministers for everything.

It's not a party, darling, it's a party conference!'

'Well…' Russell chuckled and dangled his long arms and clapped

his hands together loosely a few times, as if ready to take them on.

'We've got an enormous house of our own,' Catherine said. 'Not

that Uncle Lionel's isn't fantastic, of course.' They turned and frowned

at it across the smooth lawn and the formal scrolls of the parterre. The

steep slate roofs were topped with bronze finials so tall and fanciful

they looked like drops of liquid sliding down a thread. 'I just don't

think Uncle Lionel will be all that pleased when Toby's rowing friends

start throwing up on the whatsits.'

'The whatnots,'

Nick made a friendly correction.

Russell blinked at him. 'He's a fruit, is he, Uncle Lionel?' he said.

'No, no,' Catherine said, faltering for a moment at the expression.

'Nothing like that.' Nick's dinner jacket had belonged to his great-uncle

Archie; it was double-breasted and wide on die shoulder in a way that

was once again fashionable. It had glazed, pointed lapels which

reached almost to the armpits, and shiny silk-covered buttons. As he

crossed the drawing room he acknowledged himself with a flattered

smile in a mirror. He was wearing a wing collar, and something

dandyish in him, some memory of the licence and discipline of being in

a play, lifted his mood. The only trouble with the jacket, on a long

summer night of eating and bopping, was that when it warmed up it

gave off, more and more unig-norably, a sharp stale smell, the re-

awoken ghost of numberless long-ago dinner-dances in Lincolnshire

hotels. Nick had dabbed himself all over with 'Je Promets' in the hope

of delaying and complicating the effect.

Drinks were being served on the long terrace, and when he came

out through the French windows there were two or three small groups

already laughing and glowing. You could tell that everyone had been

on holiday, and like the roses and begonias they seemed to take and

hold the richly filtered evening light.Gerald was talking to a somehow familiar man and his blonde-

helmeted wife; Nick knew from his smiles and guffaws that he was

being recklessly agreeable. None of his particular friends was here yet,

and Toby was still upstairs with Sophie, interminably getting dressed.

He took a flute of champagne from a dark-eyed young waiter, and

strolled off into the knee-high maze of the parterre. He wondered what

the waiter thought of him, and if he was watching him in his solitary

meandering over trimmed grass and pea gravel. He had worked as a

waiter himself, two Christmases ago, and stood about with a tray in a

similar way at two neighbouring hunt balls. It was not impossible that

he would do so again. He felt he might look like a person with no

friends, and that the waiter might know that he didn't really belong to

this looking-glass world. Could he even tell, any more than Lord

Kessler could, that he was gay? He felt there had been a flashing hint,

in their moment of contact, of some more luxurious understanding, of

a longer gaze, full of humour and curiosity, that they might have

shared… He thought at the second contact, the refill, he would make it

all right. The curlicue of the path brought him round to a view of the

house again, but the waiter had moved off, and instead he saw Paul

Tompkins ambling towards him. 'My dear!'

At Oxford Tompkins was widely known as Polly, but Nick said,

'Hello, Paul,' because the nickname seemed suddenly too intimate or

too critical. 'How are you?' He realized that in the romantic retrospect

of his undergraduate life Paul was a figure he had painted out.

'I'm extremely well,' Paul said meaningly. He was large and round

in the middle and seemed to taper away, in his tight evening suit,

towards narrow feet and a tall, jowly head. He had been a noise, a

recurrent clatter of bitchery and ambition, a kind of monster of the

Union and the MCR, throughout Nick's years in college. He had come

out just below the top in the Civil Service exams, and had recently

started in some promising capacity in Whitehall. He looked pop-eyed

already from the tussle between pompous discretion and a natural love

of scandal. He raised his glass. 'My compliments to wicked old Lionel

Kessler. The waiteis here are sheer heaven.'

'I know…'

'That one with the champagne is from Madeira, which is rather

funny.'

'Oh, really…'

'Well, better than the other way round. Now, however, he lives in

Fulham: really awfully close to me.'

'You mean that one there.'

'Tristao.' Paul gave Nick a look of concentrated mischief. 'Ask me

more after our date next week, my dear.' Ah.' Nick's face was tight with

regret for a second, the pinch of his own incompetence. It was a

mystery to him that fat old Polly, who was rutted with acne scars andcompletely lacking in ordinary kindness, had such a conspicuous

success with men. In college he had brought off a number of almost

impossible seductions, from kitchen boys to the solemnly hetero

Captain of Boats. Nothing that lasted, but startling triumphs of will,

opportunism and technique, even so. Nick was slightly frightened of

him. He walked on a pace or two, round the plinth of a large urn, and

looked across the roses at the assembling guests. A famous TV

interviewer was exerting his charm over a group of flattered girls. Nick

said, 'It's rather a distinguished crowd.'

'Mmm.' Paul's murmur had a note of scepticism in it as well as a

suggestion that here too there were opportunities. He got out, and lit, a

cigarette. 'That depends very much on your idea of distinction. But

aren't the wives marvellous, since the last election? It's as if any

doubts they had the first time round have now been completely

discounted. The men did something naughty, and got away with it,

and not only did they get away with it but they've been asked to do it

again, with a huge majority. That's so much the mood in Whitehall -

the economy's in ruins, no one's got a job, and they just don't care, it's

bliss.

And the wives, you see, all look like… her - they've all got the

blue bows, and the hair.'

'Well, Rachel hasn't,' said Nick, who rather doubted that Paul

could sum up the mood in Whitehall when he'd only been there five

minutes.

'No, dear, but Rachel's got a lot more class. Jewish class, but still

class. And her husband's not called Norman.'

Nick had some further objections to what Paul was saying, but

didn't want to seem humourless. 'No, or Ken,' he said.

Paul inhaled tolerantly and blew the smoke out in a long sibilant

jet. 'I must say Gerald is looking quite delicious this evening.'

'Gerald Fedden…?'

'Absolutely 'You're pulling my leg.'

'Now I've shocked you,' Paul said unapologetically.

'Not at all,' said Nick, to whom life was a series of shocks, more

or less well mastered. 'No, I can see he's…'

'Of course now you're living in his house you've probably grown

accustomed to his sheer splendour.'

Nick laughed and together they watched the MP as he wound up

a story (which was all chortling patter with booming emphases) and

the blue-dressed women around him rippled and staggered about

slightly on the fine gravel. 'I wouldn't deny that he's very charming,'

Nick said.

Aha… So who is it at the house, just you and them and the

Sleeping Beauty?'Nick loved hearing Toby described like that, the praise in the

mockery. 'I'm afraid the Sleeping Beauty isn't there much any more,

you know he's been given his own flat. But there's Catherine, of

course.'

'Oh, yes, I love Catherine. I just caught her smoking a joint about

a yard long with a very dodgy-looking man. She's quite a girl.'

'She's certainly a very unhappy one,' Nick said, swelling for a

moment with his portentous secret knowledge of her.

Paul's eyebrow suggested that this was a wrong note. 'Really?

Every time I see her she's got a new man. She really should be happy,

she must have everything a girl could want.'

'You sound just like her father, I've heard him say exactly the

same thing.'

Ah, there you are!' said Paul. He grinned and stamped out his

half-smoked cigarette on the path. 'There's Toby now.' He nodded

towards the door from the drawing room, where Toby was emerging

with Sophie on his arm, more like a wedding than a birthday party.

'Christ, the jammy bitcB' Paul murmured, in an oddly sincere

surrender to the sheer dazzle of the couple. 'I know, I do hate her.'

'Oh, she's marvellous. She's good-looking, she's as trtick as a jug

- and of course she's a highly promising actress.'

'Exactly.'

Paul smiled at him, as if at a country cousin. 'My dear, don't take

it so seriously. Anyway, they're all tarts, these boys, tlieyVe all got a

price. Get Toby at two in the morning, when he's had a bottle of

brandy, and you'll be able to do what you want with him. I promise

you.'

This idea was so wildly, almost grimly, exciting to Nick that he

could hardly smile. It was clever of old Polly to tamper so intimately

with his feelings.

Nick said, 'Mm, this is rather a festival of the girlfriend, though,

I'm afraid.'

And it was true that as the crowd quickly doubled and trebled on

the terrace it took on more and more the air of an efficiently

reproductive species. The boys, most of them Nick's Oxford

contemporaries, all in their black and white, glanced across at

politicians and people on the telly, and caught a glimpse of themselves

as high- achieving adults too - they had that canny glint of self-

discovery that comes with putting on a disguise. They didn't mingle

unnecessarily with the girls. It was almost as if the High Victorian

codes of the house, with its smoking room and bachelors' wing, still

guided and restrained them. But the girls, in a shimmer of velvet and

silk, and brilliantly made up, like smaller children who had raided

their mothers' dressing tables, had new power and authority too. As

the sunlight lowered it grew more searching and theatrical, and castintriguing shadows. Paul said, 'I should warn you, Wani Ouradi's got

engaged.'

'Oh, no,' said Nick. It was such a snub, an engagement. 'He

might have thought about it a bit longer.' He could picture a happy

alternative future for himself and Wani - who was sweet-natured, very

rich, and beautiful as a John the Baptist painted for a boy-loving pope.

His father owned the Mira supermarket chain, and whenever Nick

went into a Mira Mart for a bottle of milk or a bar of chocolate he had a

vague erotic sense of slipping the money into Wani s pocket. He said, 'I

think he's coming tonight.'

'He is, the old tart, I saw that vulgar motor car of his in the drive.'

Tart was Paul's word for anyone who had agreed to have wx with him;

though as far as Nick was aware, he had never got anywhere with

Wani. Wani, like Toby, remained in the far pure teach of fantasy,

which grew all the keener and more inventive to meet the challenge of

his unavailability. He felt the loss of liim as though he had really stood

a chance with him, he'd gone M far with him in his mind, as he lay

alone in bed. He saw the great heterosexual express pulling out from

the platform precisely on time, and all his friends were on it, in the

first-class carriage - in the wagons-lit! He clung to what he had, as it

gathered speed: that quarter of an hour with Leo by the compost heap,

which was his first sharp taste of coupledom. Are you and I the only

homos here?' he said.

'I doubt it,' said Paul, who didn't look keen to become Nick's

partner for the night on the strength of that chance connection. '()h my

god, it's the fucking Home Secretary. I must wiggle. I low do I look?'

'Fantastic,' said Nick.

'Oh, I knew it.' He knuckled his hair, with its oily fringe, like a

vain schoolboy. 'Gotta go, girl!' he said, silly but focused, an

outrageous new seduction in view. And off he went, eagerly striding

and hopping over the little low hedges. Nick saw him reach the group

where Gerald was introducing his son to the lome Secretary: it was

almost as if there were two guests of honour, each good-humouredly

perplexed by the presence of the other. Polly hovered and then pushed

in shamelessly; Nick caught his look of unironic excitement as the

group closed round him. 'So what's he like?' said Russell. 'Her old

man. What's he into?' He glanced at Catherine, across the table, before

his eyes drifted back down the room to Gerald, who was smiling at the

blonde woman beside him but had the fine glaze of preoccupation of

someone about to make a speech. They were in the great hall, at a

dozen tables. It was the end of dinner, and there was a mood of noisy

expectancy.

'Wine,' said Nick, who was drunk and fluent, but still wary of

Russell's encouraging tone. He twirled his glass on the rucked

tablecloth. 'Wine. His wife… um 'Power,' said Catherine sharply.'Power…' - Nick nodded it into the list. 'Wensleydale cheese he's

also very keen on. Oh, and the music of Richard Strauss - that

particularly'

'Right,' said Russell. 'Yeah, I like a bit of Richard Strauss myself.'

'Oh, I'd always prefer a bit of Wensleydale cheese,' said Nick.

Russell blinked at him in a way that suggested he didn't

understand him or was about to punch him in the face. But then he

smiled reluctantly. 'So he's not into anything kinky at all.'

'Power,' said Catherine again. 'And making speeches.' As the

glass tinkled and the hubbub quickly died a lot of people heard her

saying, 'He loves making speeches.'

Nick pushed his chair back to get a clear view of Gerald, and also

of Toby, who had coloured up and was looking round with a tight grin

of apprehension. There were ten minutes of oddly relished ordeal

ahead of him, being teased and praised by his father and cheered by

his drunk friends - his contemporaries. Nick grinned back at him, and

wanted to help him, but was powerless, of course. He was blushing

himself with the anxiety and forced eagerness of awaiting a speech by

a friend.

Gerald had donned his rarely seen half-moon spectacles, and

held a small card at arm's length. 'Your Grace, my lords, ladies, and

gentlemen,' he said, offering the old formula with an ironic negligence

which had the clever effect of making you think -yes, the Duchess, of

course, and her son were here, as well as 1-ord Kessler and fat young

Lord Shepton, a Martyrs' Club pal of Toby's.

'Distinguished guests, family and friends. I'm very happy to see

you all here tonight, in this truly splendid setting, and very grateful

indeed to Lionel Kessler for giving the Worcester College First XV the

run of his world-famous porcelain collection. Well, as the sign in

Selfridge's says, or used to.*ay, "all breakages must be paid for".' This

drew a few titters, though Nick wasn't sure it struck the right tone.

'We're honoured by the presence of statesmen, and film stars, and I

suspect Ibbias is thoroughly flattered that so many members of Her

Majesty's government were able to be here. My witty daughter, I

understand, has said that it's "not so much a party as a party

conference".' Uncertain laughter, through which, with good liming: 'I

only hope I get to play an equally important role when we meet at

Blackpool in October.' The MPs chuckled amiably at this, though the

Home Secretary, who'd taken die epithet of statesman more gravely

than the rest, smiled inscrutably at the coffee cup in front of him.

Russell said 'Good Mil!' quite loudly, and clapped a couple of

times.

'Now, as you may have heard,' Gerald went on, with a delayed

quick glance in their direction, 'Toby is twenty-one today. I had been

going to give you Dr Johnson's well-known lines on "long-expectedone-and-twenty", but when I looked them up again last night I found I

didn't know them quite as well as I thought, or indeed as well as many

of you, I'm sure, do.' Here Gerald looked down at the card in a

marvellously. supercilious way. '"Lavish of your grandsire's guineas,"

says the (ircat Cham, "Bid the slaves of thrift farewell… When the

bonny blade carouses, Pockets full, and spirits high, What are acres?

What are houses? Only dirt, or wet and dry." So: far from suitable

advice to the grandson and nephew of great bankers, or lor any young

person coming of age in our splendid property- owning democracy.

And the question of wet versus dry, of course, is one on which

indecision is no longer acceptable.'

Through the generous laughter Nick caught Toby's eye again,

and held it for two or three long seconds, giving him perhaps a

transfusion of reassurance. Toby himself would be too nervous to

listen to his father's speech properly, and was laughing in imitation of

the others, not at the jokes themselves. It was typical of Gerald not to

have realized that Dr Johnson's poem was a ruthless little satire. Nick

surveyed the room, and was reminded of a college hall, with Gerald

and the more influential guests elected to the high table. Or perhaps of

some other institution, such as houses like this had often turned into.

Up in the arcade of the gallery one or two servants were listening

impassively, waiting only for the next stage of the evening. There was a

gigantic electrolier, ten feet high, with upward-curling gilt branches

opening into cloudy glass lilies of light. Catherine had refused to sit

under it, which was why their whole table had apparently been

demoted to this corner of the room. If it did fall, Nick realized, it would

crush Wani Ouradi. He began to feel a little anxious about it himself.

Gerald was now giving a facetious review of Toby's life, and again

it made Nick think of a marriage, and the best man's speech, which

everyone dreaded, and the huge heterosexual probability that a

twenty-first would be followed soon enough by a wedding. He could

only see the back of Sophie Tipper's head, but he attributed similar

thoughts to it, transposed into a bright, successful key. As a teenager,

then,' Gerald said, 'Tobias a) believed that Enoch Powell was a

socialist, b) set fire to a volume of Hobbes, and c) had a large and

mysterious overdraft. When it came to Oxford, a degree in Politics,

Philosophy and Economics was the irresistible choice.' There was more

laughter - and Gerald was leading them along very ably: they were

drunkish and amenable, even gullible, since making a speech was a

kind of trick. At the same time there was a bond among the young

people, who were old enough to know that speeches were allowed, and

perhaps even supposed, to be embarrassing, and who were rowdy and

superior at once, in the Oxford way. Nick wondered if the women were

responding more warmly, if (hey were picking up, as Polly did, on their

host's 'splendour'; perhaps their laughter would seem to him a kind ofsubmission. Nick himself was lazily exploring the margin between his

affection for Gerald and a humorous suspicion, long resisted, that

there might be something rather awful about him.

He wished lie could see Lord Kessler's reactions.

'And now, as you know, Tobias has opted,' Gerald said, 'at least

for the moment, for a career in journalism. I'm bound to Unit this

made me anxious at first, but he assures me he has no interest in

becoming a parliamentary sketch writer.

There's been puzzling talk of the Guardian, which we hope will

blow over, though for the time being I'm thinking hard before

answering any of his questions, and have decided to strenuously deny

everything.'

Nick glanced round, in a little shrug of amusement, and saw that

Tristao, the waiter from Madeira, was standing in the doorway behind

him, following the proceedings with a vacant stare. As a caterers'

waiter he must have to listen to an abnormal number of speeches,

each of them built around private jokes and allusions. What was he

thinking? What was he thinking of all ol them? His hands were huge

and beautiful, the hands of a virtuoso. His dressy trouser-front curved

forwards with telling asymmetry. When he saw that Nick was looking

his way he gave him the vaguest smile and inclined his head, as if

waiting for a murmured order. Nick thought, he doesn't even realize I

like him, he thinks I'm just one of these toffs who never look at waiters

for tlieir own sake. He shook his head and turned back, and his

disappointment was practised and invisible. He saw that (Catherine

was stuffing things into her bag and flashing irritable looks at Russell,

who mouthed, 'What?' at her, and was getting irritable in his turn. 'So,

Toby,' Gerald said, raising his voice and slowing his words, 'we

congratulate you, we bless you, we love you: happy birthday! Will you -

all - please raise your glasses: to Toby!'

'Toby!' the overlapping burble went up, followed by a sudden

release of tension in cheers and whistles and applause - applause for

Toby, not for the speaker, the heightened, unreal acclaim of a special

occasion, amongst which Nick lifted his champagne glass with tears in

his eyes, and kept on sipping from it to hide his emotion. But

Catherine had jumped her little gilt chair back from the table and

hurried out, past Tristao, who followed her for a second, to see if he

could help. Then Nick and Russell stared at each other, but Toby was

getting to his feet, and Nick was damned if he was chasing after her

this time, he really did love Toby, more than anyone in this high

magnificent room, and he was going to be with him as he spoke.

'No,' said Toby, 'I'm afraid Pa got that a bit wrong. I tried to get

him an interview with the Guardian, but they just weren't interested!'

This wasn't quite a witticism, but it drew a loud laugh from his friends,and Gerald, who'd assumed a self-congratulating air, was forced to

make a quick moue of humility.

'"Wait till he does something big," they said.' He turned to his

father. 'Of course I told them they wouldn't have to wait long.'

There was something artless in Toby's delivery; he was working

in the family tradition of teasing, but he was too relenting and couldn't

yet match Gerald's heavy archness. When he had stood up he was

strikingly pale, like someone about to faint, but when he relaxed a

little the colour suddenly burned in his cheeks, and his grin was a

nervous acknowledgement of his blush. He said, 'I'm not going to say

much - ' vague groans of disappointment - 'but above all I want to

thank my dear sweet generous Uncle Lionel for having us all here

tonight. I can't imagine anything more wonderful than this party - and

I have a horrible feeling that after this the rest of my life is going to be

one long anticlimax.' This brought cheers and applause for Lord

Kessler, who was surely used to being thanked, but not to such public

declarations of love. Again the family note was strong and sentimental,

and a little surprising. Nick was smiling at Toby in an anxious trance

of lust and encouragement. It was like watching a beautiful actor in a

play, following him and wanting him. 'I'm also really touched,' Toby

said, 'that my old friends Josh and Caroline have come all the way

from South Africa.

Oh, and I understand they're also squeezing in a wedding

ceremony while they're here.' There was good-natured applause,

though no one really knew who Josh and Caroline were. Nick found

himself listening almost abstractly to Toby's voice, hearing its

harmless pretensions, which were the opposite of Gerald's. Gerald was

a knowing, self-confident speaker, trained at the Oxford Union,

polished at innumerable board meetings, and his tone combined

candour and insincerity to oddly charming effect. Toby, like many of

his friends, spoke in the latest public-school accent, an inefficient blur

of class denial. Now he was a bit drunk, and under pressure, and older

vowels were showing through as he said that it was 'awfully good of his

parents to have tolerated him. He too seemed not to know what the

point of his speech was; he came over like a cross between a

bridegroom and the winner of an award, with a list of people to (hank.

His boyish technique was to deflect attention from himself onto his

friends, and in this he was also the opposite of his lather. He made

various jokes such as 'Sam will need two pairs of trousers' and 'No

more creme de menthe for Mary,' which clearly alluded to old

disgraces, and began to bore the MPs. Nick sensed a touching

nostalgia for the Oxford years, on which a door, an oak perhaps,

seemed gently but firmly to have i losed. He himself was not referred

to; but he took this as a sign of intimacy. His gaze embraced Toby, and

from behind his helpless grin and raised applauding hands he saw hisdream-self run forwards to hold him and kiss his hot face. Up in his

room Nick slipped out of his jacket, and sniffed at it resignedly: time

for a further dowsing in 'Je Promets'. He went into his bathroom, and

opened the little turret dormer; he splashed cold water on his cheeks.

It was the toasts that had done for him - there was always one glass

that tipped him over, unfairly and jokingly, into being drunk. And

there were hours of the party still to come. It was a great ritual of fun,

a tradition, a convention, which everyone was loving for its lavishness

and truth to form. Now there was going to be a move to the dance

floor, and all the couples would be allowed to make love to each other

with their hips and thighs and sliding hands. Nick gazed in the mirror

and saw someone teeteringly alone.

The love he had felt for Toby ten minutes before migrated into a

sudden hungry imagining of Leo, his transfiguring kisses, his shaving

rash, and the wonderful shaved depth between the cheeks of his arse.

The exactness of memory, the burning fact of what had happened,

blinded him and held him for a while. When he came back, perhaps

only seconds later, to the image in the mirror, he saw die flush in his

cheeks and his mouth gasping in re-enacted surrender. He re-tied his

tie, very perfectly, and ran a hand through his hair. There was a kind

of tenderness for himself in the movement of his hand through his

curls, as if it had been taught a lesson by Leo. The mirror was a chaste

ellipse in a maplewood frame. The washstand was a real Louis Seize

commode cut and drilled to hold a basin and a pair of tall hoarse-

throated taps. Well, if you owned a Louis Seize commode, if you owned

dozens of them, you could be as barbarous with them as you liked;

and a commode after all was meant for ease. And after all it was

marvellous to be staying in a house like this, a friend of the family, not

die son of the man who wound the clocks. As he trotted down the

stairs he saw Wani Ouradi coming up. Nick sometimes greeted Wani

with a friendly grope between the legs, or a long breathless snog, and

he'd once had him tied up naked in his college room for a whole night;

he had sodomized him tirelessly more often than he could remember.

Wani himself, glancing back to see if his girlfriend, his intended, was

following, had no idea of all this, of course; indeed, they hardly knew

each other. 'Hi, Wani!' said Nick.

'Hi!' said Wani warmly, perhaps not able to remember his name.

'I believe I have to congratulate you…'

'Oh… yes…' Wani grinned and looked down. 'Thank you so

much.' Nick thought, as he had thought before, in the slow hours of

the seminar room, that a view of the world through such long

eyelashes must be one extraordinarily shadowed and filtered. They

both suddenly decided to shake hands. Wani glanced back again with

a murmur of exasperation so fond and well mannered that it seemed to

include Nick in some harmless conspiracy. 'You must meet Martine,'he said. A provoking thing about him was the way his penis always

showed, a little jutting bulge to the left, modest, unconscious, but

unignorable, and i trigger to greedy thoughts in Nick. He checked for it

now, in i woozy half-second. He was rather like a pop star of the 60s,

with the penis and the dark curly hair - though the look was quite at

odds with the bemused courtesy of his manner.

'I hope it will be a long engagement,' Nick heard himself saying.

'Ah, here she is…' - and they looked down together at the young

woman who was climbing the shallow red-carpeted stair; towards

them. She was wearing a pearl-coloured blouse and i long, rather stiff

black skirt, which she held raised a little with both hands, so that she

seemed to curtsey to them on each step She created a sober

impression, well groomed but not fashion- able. 'This is Marine,' Wani

said. 'This is Nick Guest, we were at Worcester together.

Nick took Maftmes co°' hand, smiling at Wani's knowing his

name, and feeling himself to be briefly the subject of humorous

suspicion** an unknown friend from her fiance's past. He said, Trf1

pleased to meet you, congratulations.' All this congratulating was

giving him a vague masochistic buzz.

'Oh - thank yoiiso much. Yes, Antoine has told you.' She had a

French accent, v/hich in turn suggested to Nick the unknown

networks of Wani's family and past, Paris perhaps, Beirut… the real

life of the international rich from which Wani had occasionally

descended on Oxford to read an essay on Dryden or translate an

Anglo'Saxon riddle. Antoine was his real name, and Wani, his infantile

attempt at saying it, his universal nickname. 'You must be vd7 happy.'

Martine smiled but said nothing, and Nick looked at her wide

pale face for signs of the triumph he would have felt himself if he had

become engaged to Wani.

'We're just going to our room,' Wani said, 'and then we'll be down

for the bopping- 'Well, you will i»e bopping perhaps,' said Martine,

showing already a mind of her own, but with the same patient

expression, which registered v/itn Nick, as he went on down the stairs,

as decidedly adult. It I™51 oe $ amp; face °f a steady happiness, a

calm possession, that he couldn't imagine, or even exactly hope for.

He needed some air» but there was a clatter in the hall as people

ran back indoors. Outside, from an obscured night sky, a fine rain had

sfJrtecl falling.

Nick watched it drifting and gleaming in the upcast nght of a

large globed lantern. Out in the circle of the drive a couple of

chauffeurs were sitting in the front of a Daimler wA the map-light on,

waiting and chatting. And there was Wafii's soft-top Mercedes, with its

embarrassing number plate WHO 6. A voice brayed, 'Right! Everyone

on the dance floor!' And there was a ragged chorus of agreement.'Hoorah! Dancing!' said a drunk Sloanish girl, staring into Nick's face

as though with an effort she might remember him.

'Where is the ruddy dance floor?' said the braying boy. They had

wandered back into the hall, which was being cleared with illusionless

efficiency by the staff.

Nick said, 'It's in the smoking room,' excited by knowing this, and

by suddenly taking the lead. They all straggled after him, the Sloaney

girl laughing wildly and shouting, 'Yah, it s in the smoking room!' and

sending him up, as the funny little man who knew the way.

A friend of Toby's had come down from London to do the disco,

and red and blue spotlights flashed on and off above the paintings of

the first Baron Kessler's numerous racehorses. Most of the group

started grooving around at once, a little awkwardly, but with happy,

determined expressions. Nick lounged along the wall, as if he might

start dancing any moment, then came back, nodding his head to the

beat, and walked quickly out of the room. It was that song 'Every

Breath You Take' that they'd played over and over last term at Oxford.

It made him abruptly sad.

He felt restless and forgotten, peripheral to an event which, he

remembered, had once been thought of as his party too. His loneliness

bewildered him for a minute, in the bleak perspective of the bachelors'

corridor: a sense close to panic that he didn't belong in this house with

these people. Some of the guests had gone into the library and as he

approached the open door he took in the scant conversational texture,

over which one or two voices held forth as if by right. Gerald said

words Nick couldn't catch the meaning of, and through the general

laughter another voice, which he half-recognized, put in a quick

correcting 'Not if I know Margaret!' Nick stood at the doorway of the

lamplit room and felt for a second like a drunken student, which he

was, and also, more shadowy and inconsolable, a sleepless child

peering in at an adult world of bare shoulders, flushed faces, and cigar

smoke. Rachel caught his eye, and smiled, and he went in - Gerald,

standing at the empty fireplace in the swaggering stance of someone

warming himself, called out, 'Ah, Nick!' but there were too many people

for introductions, a large loose circle who turned momentarily to

inspect him and turned back as if they'd foiled to see anything at all.

Rachel was sitting on a small sofa, apart from the others, with a

wrinkled old lady dressed in black, who made Rachel in her turn seem

a beautiful, rather mischievous young woman. She said, 'Judy, have

you met Nick Guest, Toby's great friend? This is Lady Partridge -

Gerald's mother.'

'Oh no!' said Nick. 'I'm delighted to meet you.'

'How do you do,' said the old lady, with a dry jovial look. Toby's

great friend'- there was a phrase to savour, to analyse for its

generosity, its innocence, its calculationRachel shifted slightly, but there was really no space for him on

the sofa. In her great spread stiffish dress of lavender silk she was like

a Sargent portrait of eighty years earlier, of the time when Henry

James had come to stay. Nick stood before them and smiled.

'You do smell nice,' Rachel said, almost flirtingly, as a mother

sometimes speaks to a child who is dressed up. 'I can't bear the smell

of cigars, can you?' said Lady Partridge.

'Lionel hates it too,' murmured Rachel. As did Nick, to whom the

dry lavatorial stench of cigars signified the inexplicable confidence of

other men's tastes and habits, and their readiness to impose them on

their fellows. But since Gerald himself was smoking one, frowning and

screwing up his left eye, he said nothing.

'I can't think where he picked up the habit,' Lady Partridge said;

and Rachel sighed and shook her head in humorous acknowledgement

of their shared disappointments as wife and mother. 'Do Tobias and

Catherine smoke?'

'No, thank heavens, they've never taken to it,' Rachel said. And

again Nick said nothing. What always held him was the family's

romance of itself, with its little asperities and collusions that were so

much more charming and droll than those in his own family, and

which now took on a further dimension in the person of Gerald's

mother. Her manner was drawling but vigilant, her face thickly

powdered, lips a bold red. There was something autocratic in her that

made Nick want to please her. She sounded grander than Gerald by

the same factor that Gerald sounded posher than Toby.

'Perhaps we could have some air,' she said, barely looking at

Nick. And he went to the window behind them and pushed up the sash

and let in the cool damp smell of the grounds. 'There!' he said, feeling

they were now friends. Are you staying in the house?' Lady Partridge

said. 'Yes, I've got a tiny little room on the top floor.'

'I didn't know there were any tiny rooms at Hawkeswood. But

then I don't suppose I've ever been on the top floor.' Nick half admired

the way she had taken his modesty and dug it deeper for him, and

almost found a slur against herself in it.

'I suppose it depends on your standard of tininess,' he said, with

a determined flattering smile. The faint paranoia that attaches to

drunkenness had set in, and he wasn't certain if he was being rude or

charming. He thought perhaps what he'd said was the opposite of what

he meant. A waiter came up with a tray and offered him a brandy, and

he watched with marvelling passivity as the liquor was poured. 'Oh

that's fine… that's fine…!' He was a nice, conspiratorial sort of waiter,

but he wasn't Tristao, who had crossed a special threshold in Nick's

mind and was now the object of a crush, vivid in his absence. He

wondered if he could have a crush on this waiter too - it only needed a

couple of sightings, the current mood of frustration, and a single halfconscious decision, and then the boy's shape would be stamped on his

mind and make his pulse race whenever he appeared.

Rachel said, 'Nick's also staying with us in London, where he

really does have a tiny room in the roof 'I think you said you had

someone in,' said Lady Partridge, again without looking at Nick. It was

as if she had scented his fantasy of belonging, of secret fraternity with

her beautiful grandson, and set to eradicate it with a quick territorial

instinct. 'Toby's certainly enormously popular,' she said.

'He's so handsome, don't you think?'

'Yes, I do,' said Nick lightly, and blushed and looked away as if to

find him.

'You'd never think he was Catherine's brother. He had all the

luck.'

'If looks are luck-' Nick was half-saying.

'But do tell me, who is that little person in glasses dancing with

the Home Secretary?'

'Mm, I've seen him before,' said Nick, and laughed out loud. 'It's

the Mordant Analyst,' said Rachel. 'Morton Danvers,' Lady Partridge

noted it.

Rachel raised her voice. 'The children call him the Mordant

Analyst. Peter Crowther - he's a journalist.'

'Seen his things in the Mail,' Lady Partridge said.

'Oh, of course…' said Nick. And it was true he did seem to be

dancing with the Home Secretary, wooing him, capering in front of

him, bending to him with new questions and springing back with

startled enlightenment at the answers - a procedure which the Home

Secretary, who was heavy-footed and had no neck, couldn't help but

replicate in a clumsy but courteous way.

'I don't think I'd be quite so excited,' said Lady Partridge. 'He

talked a lot of rot at dinner on… the coloured question. I wasn't next to

him, but I kept hearing it. Racism, you know' -as if the very word were

as disagreeable as the thing it connoted was generally held to be.

A lot of rot certainly is talked on that subject,' Nick said, with

generous ambiguity. The old lady looked at him ponderingly. They

turned and watched Gerald come forward to rescue the Home

Secretary, with a solicitous smile on his lips and a flicker of jealousy in

his eyes. He led him away, stooping confidentially over him, almost

embracing him, but looking quickly round like someone who has

organized a surprise: and there was a flash and a whirr and another

flash.

Ah! The Tatler,' exclaimed Lady Partridge, 'at long last.' She

patted her hair and assumed an expression of… coquetry…

command… welcome… ancient wisdom… It was hard to say for sure

what effect she was after. Catherine was hurrying Nick and PatGrayson along the bachelors' corridor towards the thump of the dance

music.

Are you all right, darling?' Nick said.

'Sorry, darling. It was that ghastly speech - one just couldn't take

any more!'

She was lively, but her reactions were slow and playful, and he

decided she must be stoned. 'I suppose it was a bit self-centred.'

She smiled, with a condescension worthy of her grandmother. 'It

would have been a marvellous speech for his own birthday, wouldn't it.

Poor Fedden!'

Pat, who must have been the person described in the speech as a

film star, said, 'Ooh, I didn't think it was all that bad, considering';

though considering what, he didn't specify. Nick had seen him as the

smooth eponymous rogue in Sedley on TV, and was struck by how

much smaller, older and camper he was in real life.

Sedley was his mother's favourite series, though it wasn't clear if

she knew that Pat was a whatnot. 'Ooh, I don't know about this, love…'

he said as they came into the room. But Catherine pulled him into the

crowd and he started rather nimbly circling round her, flicking his

fingers and frowning sex-ily at her. She seemed to love everything that

was uncool about this, but to Nick Pat was an unwelcome future, a

famous man who was a fool, a silly old queen. He slipped away across

the room, and found he was being shouted and smiled at by people

and roughly hugged as if he was very popular. The brandy was having

its way. But for a minute he was ashamed of snubbing Pat Grayson,

and pretending to be part of this hetero mob. He felt pretty good, and

grinned at Tim Carswell, who came across the floor and seized him

and whirled him round till they were both stumbling and Tim's damp

breath was burning his cheek, and Tim shouted 'Whoa!' and slowly

pulled away, still slamming from side to side and then backing into the

crowd with a Jaggerish raised arm. 'How's the bonny blade?' said Nick,

and Sophie Tipper looked at him over her shoulder with faint

recognition as she danced annoyingly with Toby - Nick kissed them

both on the cheek before they could stop him, and shouted 'How are

you?' again, beaming and heartbroken, and Toby put out a fist with a

raised thumb, and shortly after that they moved away. Nick danced

on, his collar was tight and he was sweating, he undid his jacket and

then did it up again - ah, a window was open at the far end of the

room and he jigged around in front of it for a while, turning his face to

that rainy garden smell. Martine was sitting on the raised banquette

that ran along the wall, and in the beam of green light that flashed on

every few seconds her patient profile looked haggard and lost. 'Hi-i!'

Nick called, stopping and half-kneeling beside her. 'Isn't Wani with

you?' She looked round with a shrug: 'Oh, he's somewhere…' And Nick

really wanted to see him, suddenly certain of a welcome like the oneshe gave him in his fantasies, and there was a twist of calculation too -

he could press himself, heavy and semi-incapable, into Wani's arms.

Three girls were doing disco routines in a line, turning round and

touching their elbows. Nick couldn't do that. The girls danced better

than the boys, as if it was really their element, where their rowdy

partners were making twits of themselves. Nick didn't like it near the

door, where some of the older couples had wandered in and were

trotting to and fro as if quite at home with Spandau Ballet. The

ultraviolet light made Nat Hanmer's dress shirt glow and the whites of

his eyes were thrillingly strange. They held hands for a few moments

and Nat goggled at him for the freaky effect, then he shouted 'You old

poof!' and slapped his back and gave him a barging kiss on the ear

before he moved off.

'Your eyes!' Mary Sutton gasped at Nick, and he goggled too. It

was easy to trip over the raised edge of the hearthstone if you were

bopping near the fireplace, and Nick fell against Graham Strong and

said, 'It's so great to see you!' because he'd sometimes hungered for

Graham too, he hardly knew him, and he said, 'We must have a dance

together later,' but Graham had already turned his back, and Nick

fetched up with Catherine and Russell and Pat Grayson, where he was

very welcome since they were an awkward threesome.

He opened a door from the hall into a small drawing room where

a man in shirtsleeves got up and said, 'I'm sorry, sir,' and came

towards him unsmilingly.

'I'm so sorry,' Nick said, 'I'm on the wrong side,' and he went out

again and pulled the door closed with a boom.

He could hear the music in the distance, and the burble and

laughter from the library, and a high ringing in his own ears. Up

above, the hundred lilies of the electrolier glowed and twitched - there

was a hesitant animation to things, all beating to his own pulse. He

went sidling and parading through a suite of lit rooms, abandoned,

amusing, a bolster or pulled-back curtain like a glimpse of a person in

hiding. Stopped and stooped now and then to appreciate a throbbing

little bronze or table that revolved as you looked away from it. Leant

caressingly, a little heavily, on the escritoire of the dear old Marquise

de Pompadour, which creaked - he was a lover of that sort of thing, if

anyone was watching… He went into the dining room where they'd had

lunch, found the light switches and looked very closely at the

landscape by Cezanne, which pulsed as well, with secret geometries.

Why did he talk to himself about it? The imaginary friend was at his

shoulder, the only child's devoted companion, needing his guidance.

The composition, he said… the different greens… He had a keen idea,

which he was cloaking and avoiding, and then licensing step by step

as he opened a side door into a brown passageway, that turned a

corner, and had other doors off it, and then came in a quickening cooldraught to an open back door with the service yard beyond, glittering

in drizzle. The glare was bright and unsentimental here. No enriching

glow of candles or picture lights. Men in jeans were stacking and

crashing things, and carried on shouting to each other as they passed

Nick, so that he felt like a ghost whose 'Thanks!' and 'Sorry!' were

inaudible. Tristao was washing glasses in a pantry and he walked in

behind him with his heart suddenly thumping, smiling as if they were

more than friends, and aware none the less that Tristao was working,

it was one in the morning, and he himself was just a bow-tied drunk, a

walking wrong note of hope and need. 'Hi there!'

Tristao looked round and sighed, then turned back to his work.

'You come to help?' The glasses came in on metal trays, half full,

lipstick smeared, fag ends in claret, jagged edges on stems.

'Um… I'm sure I'd break everything,' Nick said, and gazed at him

from behind with wonder and a sense of luck and again the suspicion

of a rebuff.

'Oof…! I'm tired,' Tristao said, and came across the room so that

Nick felt in the way. 'I been up on my feet nine hours now.'

'You must be,' said Nick, leaning towards him with a friendly

stroke or pat, which fell short and was ignored. He wondered if he

might be going to fall over.

'So… When do you finish?'

'Oh, we go on till you go off, baby.' He dried his hands on a tea

towel, and lit himself a cigarette, half offering one to Nick as an

afterthought. Nick hated tobacco, but he accepted at once. The first

sharp drag made his head fizz. 'You enjoying the party, anyway?'

Tristao said.

'Yeah…' said Nick, and gave a shrug and a large ironical laugh.

He wanted to impress Tristao as a Hawkeswood guest, and to mock at

the guests as well. He wanted to suggest that he was having a perfectly

good time, that the staff, certainly, could not have done more, but that

he could take it or leave it; and besides (here he half closed his eyes,

suavely and daringly) he had a better idea about how to have fun.

Tristao perhaps didn't get all that at once. He looked at Nick moodily,

as at a kind of problem. And Nick looked back at him, with a

simmering drunk smile, as if he knew what he was doing.

Tristao had lost his bow tie, and the top two buttons of his shirt

were open over a white singlet. His sleeves were rolled up, there were

streaked black hairs on his forearms, but from his heart to his knees

he wore a white apron tied round tight, which made a secret of what

had been such a heavy hint before.

The pantry was lit by a single fluorescent tube, so that his tired

sallow face was shown without flattery. He looked quite different from

what Nick had remembered, and it took a little effort of lustful will to

find him attractive - there seemed almost to be an excuse for giving upon him and going back to the party. 'A lot of people here, yeah?' said

Tristao. He glanced sourly at the trays of glasses and debris, and blew

out smoke in that same critical sibilant way that Polly had, like a sign

of some shared expertise. And then Nick found himself bitterly jealous

at the idea of Polly getting Tristao, and knew that he had to stay.

'Yeah, he got a lot of friends, this Mr Toby… I like him. He's like a

hactor, no?' - and Tristao made a gesture, long fingers spread like a

fan beside his face to indicate the general eclat of Toby's features, bone

structure, complexion.

'Yes, he is,' said Nick, with a chuckle and a puff of smoke. Toby's

face seemed to hover for a moment in front of the waiter's, which was

less beautiful in each respect… But wasn't the fact that he didn't

admire Tristao so much a part of the lesson, what he thought of as the

homosexual second-best solution? This backstairs visit was all about

sex, not nonsensical longings: he wasn't going to get what he wanted

elsewhere. There was a challenge in the boy's deep-set eyes and

something coded in his foreignness - were Madeirans in fact

susceptible to casual sex? Nick couldn't see why they shouldn't be…

'So how much you had to drink?' Tristao said. 'Oh, masses,' said Nick.

'Yeah?' said Tristao.

'Well, not as much as some people,' said Nick. He smoked, and

held his cigarette by his lapel, and felt that his smoking was

unpractised and revealing. Of course the wonderful thing about his

date with Leo had been that it was a date - they both knew what they

were there for. Whereas the Tristao thing might well be all in his own

head. He wasn't sure if the thinness of their conversation showed how

futile it was, or if it was a sign of its authenticity He suspected chat-

ups should be more colourful and provocative. He said, 'So you're from

Madeira, I gather,' with the flicker of an eyebrow.

Tristao narrowed his eyes and gave his first little smile. 'How you

know that?' he said. Nick took the moment to hold his gaze. 'Oh, I

know, the big guy tell you.'

'Huge,' said Nick - 'well, round the middle anyway!'

Tristao looked inside his packet of cigarettes, where he'd stowed

Polly's card.

'That him?' he said. Nick glanced dismis-sively at the card but

felt he'd been taught a lesson by it. Dr Paul Tompkins, 23 Lovelock

Mansions… so established already, like a consulting room, with the

boys coming through. He turned the card over, where Polly had

scribbled Sep 4, 8pm sharp!"Why he say sharp?' said TristSo.

'Oh, he's a very busy man,' said Nick, and feeling it was the

moment he made a sudden movement forwards, two steps, his arms

out, and a smirk of ineffable irony about Polly on his lips. 'Sorry, mate-

': a red-faced man looked in at the door, then tucked in his chin and

gave a confident dry laugh. 'Wondered what was going on there for amoment!' Nick reddened and Tristao had the proper provoking

presence of mind to snort quietly and say, 'Bob, how's things?'

Bob gave him some instructions about the different rooms, 'his

lordship' was referred to a couple of times, with servants' irony as well

as pitying respect, and Nick swayed from side to side with a tolerant

smile, to convey to the men that he knew Lord Kessler personally,

they'd had lunch together and he'd shown him the Moroni. When Bob

had gone, Tristao said, "What am I going to do with you?' without

much warmth or sense of teasing