Chapter 6 - season 3 The łine øf beauty

'I don't know,' said Nick, chirpily, half numbed by drink to the

looming new failure.

'I got to go.' Tristao tugged his bow tie out of his pocket, and

fiddled with the elastic and the clip. Nick waited for him to take his

apron off. 'Look, OK, I see you, by the main stairs, three o'clock.'

'Oh… OK, great!' said Nick, and found a happy relief in both the

arrangement and the delay. 'Three o'clock 'Sharp,' said Tristao, with a

scowl. He looked in at the door of Toby's bedroom. A group of his

friends had come up here when the music stopped at two, and they

seemed lazily to assess him. 'Come in and close the door, for god's

sake,' said Toby, beckoning from the vast bed where he was propped

up among sprawling friends. He had been given the King's Room,

where Edward VII had slept - the swags of blue silk above the bedhead

were gathered into a vaguely comic gilded crown. On the opposite wall

hung a comfortable Renoir nude. Nick picked his way between groups

sitting on the floor in front of an enormous sofa where fat Lord

Shepton was lying with his tie undone and his head on the thigh of an

attractive drunk girl. The curtains were parted and a window open to

carry the reek of marijuana far away from the nose of the Home

Secretary. Somehow they had recreated the mood of a colleg«room late

at night, girls' stockinged feet stretched out across boyfriends' knees,

smoke in the air, two or three voices domi nating. Nick felt the charm

as well as the threat of the group Gareth Lane was holding forth about

Hitler and Goebbels, and his lecturing drone and yapping laughs at his

own puns brought back something dreary from the Oxford days. He

was said to be the 'ablest historian of his year', but he had failed to get

a first, and seemed now to be acting out some endless redemptive viva.

The talk went on, but there felt to Nick's tingling drunk ears to be a

residual silence in the room, on which his own movements and words

were an intrusion… and yet left no trace. Several o(his other pals were

here, but the two months since term had distanced them more than he

could explain. Some simple but strong and long-prepared change had

occurred, they had taken up their real lives, and left him alone in his.

He came back and perched on the edge of the bed and Toby leaned

forward and passed him the joint.'Thanks…' Nick smiled at him, and at last some old sweetness of

reassurance glowed between them, what he'd been waiting for all

night.

'God, darling, you smell like a tart's parlour,' Toby said. Nick

carried on gazing at him, paralysed for the moment by the need to hold

in the smoke, a tickle in his throat, blushing with shame and pleasure.

He was holding in the unprecedented 'darling' and it was making him

as warm and giddy as the pot. Then he let out the smoke and saw the

baldly hetero claims of the rest of the remark.

He said,

'And how would you know?' - wondering primly if Toby really had been

to a tart's parlour. It was an image of him lurching up a narrow

staircase. Toby winked.

'Having a good time?'

'Yes, fantastic' Nick looked around appreciatively, glossing over

his inner vision of the night as a long stumbling journey, hall chase,

half flight, like one of his country-house dreams, his staircase dreams.

'What's happened to Sophie, by the way?'

'She had to go back to London. Yeah. She's got an audition on

Monday.'

'Ah… right…' This was good news to Nick, and Toby himself,

drunk, stoned, eyes glistening, seemed happy about it he liked the

adult note of responsibility in sending her home, and he liked being

free of her too. He raised his voice and said, 'Oh, do shut up about

fucking Goebbels!' But after a brief incredulous whirr Gareth's shock-

proof mechanism rattled on.

Toby was king tonight, on his great big bed, and his friends (or

once were his subjects. He was acting the role with high spirits, in a

childishly approximate way. Nick found it very touching and exciting.

As the pot took its delayed effect, squeezing and freeing like some

psychic massage, he reached back and took Toby's hand, and they

lolled there like that for thirty or forty seconds of heaven. It was as if

the room had been steeped in a mood of amorous hilarity as sweetly

unignorable as '|e Promets'. He recalled what Polly had said in the

garden long before, and thought that maybe, at last, for once, Toby

would actually be his.

There was a surrounding murmur of stoned gossip, heads

nodding over rolling papers, the figures blurred but glowing in the

lamplight. 'But did the Fiihrer license the Final Solution?' Gareth

asked himself; and it was clear rhat the arguments on this famous

question were about to be passed in detailed review.There was a giggling protest from Sam Zeman, curly-headed

genius who'd gone straight into Kesslers on twenty thousand a year.

'You're in a house full of Jews here, can you shut up about the fucking

Final Solution, it's a party…' - and he reached for his drink with the

frown and snuffle of a subtle person obliged to be brusque. 'I can go on

to Stalin -? •' said Gareth facetiously.

After a minute's reflection Roddy Shepton said robustly, 'Well, I'm

not bloody Jewish.'

'Tobias is,' said his girlfriend, 'aren't you, darling?'

'For god's sake, Claire? • •' said Roddy.

Claire gazed at Toby with eyes of deepening conviction. 'Wasn't

someone saying the Home Sectary's Jewish too…?' she said.

'Calm down, Claire!' said Roddy furiously. It was his own

conviction that his large placid girlfriend, who had never been known

to raise her voice, was dangerously excitable. Perhaps it was his way of

implying he had tamed a sexual volcano; which in turn perhaps helped

him to explain why he was going out with a strictly middle-class girl,

the daughter of his father's estate manager.

Claire looked round in pursuit of her new idea. 'You're Jewish,

aren't you, Nat?'

'I am, darling,' said Nat, 'or half Jewish, anyway'

'And the other half's a bloody Welshman,' said Roddy. He turned

his head on her knee and squinted up at her. 'God, you're drunk,' he

said.

This was the kind of insult that passed for wit at the Martyrs'

Club, and was in fact one of the things most often said there. Toby had

once taken Nick to the club's poky panelled dining room, where Christ

Church toffs and Union hacks conformed deafeningly to type and

boozed and plotted and howled unacceptable remarks at each other

and at the harried staff. It was another world, defiantly impervious, in

which it was a shock to find that Toby had a place.

'You are so fucking drunk, Shepton,' Toby said. He had pulled off

his socks and rolled them into a ball and he threw them very hard and

accurately at the fat peer's head. 'Fucking Christ, Fedden,' Roddy

muttered, but left it at that. Nick was explaining about the sea in

Conrad's novels being a metaphor for both escape from the self and

discovery of the self - a point which took on more and more revelatory

force as he repeated it. He laughed at the beauty of it. He wasn't a

strong smoker, and a second frowning toke, taken in the belief that the

first one had had no effect, could leave him swimming and gabbling for

hours. Nat Hanmer was sitting on the floor beside him, and his warm

thigh was pressed against his own. There was something charmingly

faggy about Nat tonight. He nodded and smiled into Nick's eyes as he

was talking. Nick thought the pressure of the dope on his temples was

as if his skull was being gently squeezed by Nat's big hands. SamZeman was nodding and smiling too and corrected, as if it really didn't

matter, a plot detail in Victory that Nick had got wrong. Nick loved

Sam because he was an economist but he'd read everything and

played the viola and took a flattering interest in people less sublimely

omniscient than himself.

He wanted to lie back and listen and perhaps have a long deep

snog with Nat Hanmer, whose lips were not so full and soft as Leo's,

but who was (Nick hadn't seen it before) almost beautiful, as well of

course as being a marquess. The two of them in their shirtsleeves. Nat

said he was having a go at writing a novel himself. He'd bought a

computer, which he said was 'a really sexy machine'. In the warm

explanatory light of the pot Nick saw what he meant. 'I'd love to read

it,' he said. Across the room Garetli had switched wars and was

describing the Battle of Jutland to a paralysed circle of young women.

His big velvet bow tie was all donnish conceit. He was going to go on

like this for forty-five years.

Nick heard himself saying how he missed his boyfriend, and then

his heart speeded up. Sam smiled - he was purely and maturely

straight, but he was cool with everything. Nat said broad-mindedly,

'Oh, you've got a… you've got a bloke?' and Nick said, 'Yeah…' and

already he'd told them all about answering the advertisement, and

their meeting and having sex in the garden and the funny episode with

Geoffrey from two doors down. And how they were now going out

together on a regular basis. Pot was a kind of truth drug for him - with

a twist. He had an urge to tell, and show himself to them as a

functioning sexual being, but as he did so he seemed to hear how odd

and unseen his life was, and added easy touches to it, that made it

more shapely and normal.

'I didn't know about all this,' said Toby, who was going round in

his bare feet with a bottle of brandy. He was grinning, slightly

scandalized, even hurt perhaps that Nick hadn't told him he was

having an affair.

'Oh, yes…' said Nick, 'sorry… He's this really attractive black guy,

called Leo.'

'You should have brought him tonight,' Toby said. 'Why didn't

you say?'

'I know,' said Nick; but he could only imagine Leo here in his

falling-down jeans and his sister's shirt, and the jarring of his irony

against the loaded assumptions of the Oxford lot.

'May one ask why?' said Lord Shepton, who had lately been

snoring but had now been tickled awake and had a blearily vengeful

look. Nobody knew what he was talking about. 'We've already got

bloody… Woggoo here,' and he struggled upright, with a grimace of

pretended guilt, to see if Charlie Mwegu, the Worcester loose-head

prop and the only black person at the party, was in the room. 'I mean,fucking hell,' he said. Shepton was a licensed buffoon, an indulged

self-parody, and Nick merely raised his eyebrows and sighed; for a

moment the old dreariness and wariness surfaced again through the

newer romance of the pot. Claire was looking tenderly at Nick, and

said, 'I think black men can be so attractive… they have sweet little

ears, don't they… sometimes… I don't know… It must be nice-'

' Calm down, Claire! barked Roddy Shepton, as if his very worst

fears had been confirmed. He struggled towards his glass on the floor.

'No, I'm quite jealous actually,' said Claire, and gave Lord

Shepton a playful poke in the stomach.

'Oh, you cow!' said Lord Shepton; his attention refocusing, slowly

but greedily, on Wani Ouradi, who had just come into the room. 'Ah,

Ouradi, there you are. I hope you're going to give me some of that

white powder, you bloody Arab.'

'Oh, really!' said Claire, appealing hopelessly to the others.

But Wani ignored Shepton and stepped through the group

towards the bed and Toby.

He had changed into a green velvet smoking jacket. Nick had a

moment of selfless but intensely curious immersion in his beauty. The

forceful chin with its slight saving roundness, the deep-set eyes with

their confounding softness, the cheekbones and the long nose, the

little ears and springy curls, the cruel charming curve of his lips, made

everything else in the house seem stale, over-artful, or beside the

point. Nick longed to abandon handsome Nat and climb back on to the

King's bed. He rolled his eyes in apology for Shepton, but Wani gave no

answering sign of special recognition. And the group soon started

talking about something else. Wani lay back on his elbow beside Toby

for a minute, and took in the room through the filters of his lashes.

Toby had picked up one of the girls' pink chiffon scarves, and was

winding it into a turban with drunk perseverance. Wani said nothing

about the I urban, as if they were almost too familiar with each other

to comment, as if they were figures of some other time and culture.

Nick heard him say, 'Si tu veux…' before getting up and going into the

bathroom. Tobp sat a while longer, laughing artificially at the

conversation, and then went off with a yawn and a stumble after him.

Nick sat sunk in himself, jealous of both of them, shocked almost to

the point of panic by what they were doing. When they came back, he

watched them like a child curious for evidence of its parents' vices. He

could see their tiny effort to muffle their excitement, the little mock

solemnity that made them seem oddly less happy and smashed than

the rest of the party. They had a gleam of secret knowledge about

them.

A joint came round again, and Nick took a serious pull on it.

Then he got up and went to the open window, to look out at the damp

still night. The great beeches beyond the lawn showed in greysilhouette against the first vague paling of the sky. It was a beautiful

effect, so much bigger than the party: the world turning, the bright

practical phrases of the first birds. Though there were hours still,

surely, before sunrise… He stiffened, grabbed at his wrist, and held his

watch steady in front of him. It was 4.07. He turned and looked at the

others in the room, in their stupor and animation, and his main heavy

thought was just how little any of them cared - they could never begin

to imagine a date with a waiter, or the disaster of missing one. He

made the first steps towards the door, and slowed and stopped as the

pot took his sense of direction away.

Where, after all, was he going? Everything seemed to have

petered into a silence, as if by agreement. Nick felt conspicuous

standing there, smiling cautiously, like someone not on to a joke; but

when he looked at the others they seemed equally stilled and bemused.

It must be some amazingly strong stuff. Nick thought his way towards

moving his left leg forward, he could coax his thought down through

the knee to the foot, but it died there with no chance of becoming an

action. It was slightly trying if he had to stand here for a long time. He

looked more boldly round the others, not easy to name at the moment,

some of them. Slow blinks, little twitches of smiles. 'Yah…' said Nat

Hanmer, very measuredly, nodding his head, agreeing with some

statement that only he had heard. 'I suppose…' said Nick, but stopped

and looked around, because that was part of a conversation about

Gerald and the BBC. No one had noticed, though.

'But you're thinking, wasn't that Bismarck's whole point?' Gareth

said. r Nick wasn't sure how it started. Sam Zeman was laughing so

much he lay back on the floor, but then choked and had to sit up. One

of the girls pointed at him mockingly, but it wasn't mockery, she was

laughing uncontrollably herself. Nat was red in the face, pinching the

tears out of his eyes and pulling down the corners of his mouth to try

to stop it. Nick could only stop giggling by glaring at the floor, and as

soon as he looked up he was giggling again convulsively, it was like

hiccups, it was hiccups, all mixed up together with the whooping,

inexplicable r'unniness of the brandy bottle, the Renoir lady, the gilded

plaster crown above the bed, all of them with theit ideas and bow ties

and plans and objections."That's not a Hero's Life," said a critic of the first performance, "but

rather a Dogs Life." Or rather a dog's breakfast, you may well feel, after

hearing that rendition of the battle music by Rudolf Kothner and the

Tallahassee Symphony.' It was Saturday morning, in the kitchen at

Kensington Park Gardens, and a sharp young man was comparing

recordings of Ein Heldenleben on 'Building a Library'.

'Ha, ha,' said Gerald sourly, who had been slouching up and

down, conducting first with a biro, now with a tennis racquet. He loved

these domestic mornings, deferring to Rachel, making lists, carrying

out small invented duties in die kitchen and the cellar. Today was even

better, with his favourite composer on the radio; he lingered and got in

the way, swinging his head from side to side, and not at all minding

having a passage repeated again and again in ever louder rival

interpretations. He took great interest in the breakdown of the Hero's

adversaries into carpers (flutes), vituperators (oboe), and whiners (cor

anglais), and drove them all into the pantry with a vigorous forehand

when the Hero won.

'But let's move on to "The Hero's Works of Peace",' said the

reviewer, where Strauss self-glorifyingly recalls material from his own

earlier symphonic poems and songs.'

'I don't like this chap's tone,' said Gerald. 'Ah, now…! Nick… ' as

the music revelled and swelled enormously. 'You must admit!' Nick sat

at the table, quick-witted after a mug of coffee, and ready to say all

kinds of things. Today especially he was maddened by Strauss's

bumptious self-confidence, which took no account of his own

frustrations, the two tense weeks in which die dream of Leo as a

possible future had faded on the air. But he contented himself with

making a ghastly face. In their ongoing Strauss feud he was always

cheerfully combative and found himself leaping to more and more dizzy

positions -after which he had to take a few moments to reason his way

to them over solid ground. Simply having opposition brought latent

feelings to the surface and polarized views he might otherwise hardly

have bothered to formulate. It became urgent for him to revile Richard

Strauss, and he did it happily but a little hysterically, as if far more

than questions of taste were involved. He could measure the strange

zeal of the process by the degree to which he found himself denying his

own ingenuous pleasure in some of Strauss's material and the magical

things he did with it - this massive tune now, for instance, which

would be running through his mind for days to come. He watched

Gerald revelling and swelling too, and a vague embarrassment at the

sight made it easier for him to say, 'No… no… it just won't do,' as the

music was quickly faded out.

'Herbert von Karajan there, with the strings of the Berlin

Philharmonic in superlative form.''Exacdy, that's the one we've got, isn't it?' Gerald said. 'The

Karajan, Nick?'

- since it was Nick, over the summer months, who had been

through the record cupboard and put all the discs in alphabetical

order. 'Um - I think so…'

'But it's possible, isn't it,' the clever young man went on, 'to

wonder if the sheer opulence of the sound and those very broad tempi

don't push this reading over the edge, losing that essential drop of self-

irony without which the piece can all too easily become an orgy of

vulgarity. Let's hear Bernard Haitink and the Concertgebouw in the

same passage.'

Gerald had the stern, pinched look of someone wounded in

debate and measuring his response with awkward dignity. The

orchestra rampaged all over again. 'I don't think I care for this one

quite so much,' he said. And then a little later, 'I don't see what's

vulgar about being glorious.'

Nick said, 'Oh, if you were worried about vulgarity then you'd

never listen to Strauss at all.'

'Ooh…!' protested Gerald, suddenly cheerful again. 'Perhaps the

early Symphony in F,' Nick said. 'But even that…'

'I'm going over to Russell's,' said Catherine, walking through the

room with a hat on and her fingers in her ears -whether to block out

the Hero's Deeds or her father's objections wasn't clear. In fact Gerald

said, 'OK, Puss,' and stamped his foot exultantly at a blasting entry for

the horns.

It was a clear case of God-dammery, her word for all heavily

scored Romantic music. She went out into the hall and they heard the

slam of the front door.

What the problem was was this colossal redundancy, the

squandering of brilliant technique on cheap material, the sense that

the moral nerves had been cut, leaving the great bloated body to a life

of valueless excess. And then there was the sheer bad taste of applying

the high metaphysical language of Wagner to the banalities of

bourgeois life, an absurdity Strauss seemed only intermittently aware

of! But he couldn't say that, he would sound priggish, he would seem'

to care too much. Gerald would say it was only music. Nick tried to

read the paper for a couple of minutes, but was oddly too excited to

concentrate.

And then the cor anglais, changed at last from whining adversary

to pastoral pipe, introduces die poignant melody which announces the

Hero's impending departure from the world. For how not to do it, let's

go back to that mid-price disc from the Caracas Radio Orchestra,

whose soloist seems not to have been told of this important

transformation in character 'Gerald, did you manage to get hold of

Norman?' Rachel asked, with an insistent tone, as if herself not quitesure of getting through. But a question or command from her had

automatic priority, and he said, 'I did, my darling, yes' - going towards

her to help her with a trug of long-stemmed yellow roses that she had

brought in from the garden. She didn't need help, and the gallant little

pantomime passed off almost unnoticed, as their common idiom.

'Penny's going to come over for a chat. Norman says she's far too high-

minded to work for the Tories.'

'She'll be very glad of a job,' said Rachel. Norman Kent, whose

temperamental portraits of Toby and Catherine hung in the drawing

room and the second-floor landing respectively, was one of Rachel's

'left-wing' friends from her student days, whom she'd stayed

stubbornly loyal to; Penny was his blushing blonde daughter, also just

down from Oxford. There was a notion she might come and work for

Gerald. 'Is Catherine up yet? Or down?' Rachel asked.

'Mm…? No - she's neither up nor down, in fact she's out. She's

gone to see the man with the Face.'

Ah.' Rachel clipped expressively at the rose stems. 'Well, I hope

she'll be back for lunch with your mother.'

'I'm not sure…' said Gerald, who doubtless thought lunch would

be a good deal easier without her, especially since Toby and Sophie

were coming. He listened through to the final recommendation on Ein

Heldenleben, and pensively turned off the radio. He said, 'He's all right,

this fellow, isn't he, Nick?'

'Who… Russell? I think he's all right.' Having given him a fervent

testimonial two weeks ago, when he hadn't even met him, he was

obliged to remain vaguely positive now that he had met him and knew

that he couldn't stand him. 'Oh, good,' said Gerald, glad to have got

that cleared up. 'I thought he was rather sinister,' Rachel said. 'I know

what you mean,' said Nick.

'One thing we have learnt, Nick,' said Gerald, 'is that all her

boyfriends are marvellous. Criticism from us is the last betrayal. The

more" unprepossessing the individual the more strenuously we admire

him.'

'We love Russell,' said Rachel. / 'He's not much to look at,' Nick

quickly conceded, knowing that that was part of his glamour for

Catherine, who described him as 'a blinding fuck'.

'Oh, come on, hes a thug,' said Rachel, with an unsparing smile.

'The photographs he took at Hawkeswood were purely malicious,

making everyone look like fools.'

'An easy target,' said Gerald, clearly meaning something different.

Catherine had passed round a selection of the pictures at dinner

the week before. They were grainy, black and white, taken without a

flash on long exposures which dragged people's features into leering

masks. The photograph of Gerald and the Home Secretary being

photographed for Tatler was a minor masterpiece. Not shown werethose of guests fornicating, mooning, pissing in the fountain, and

snorting cocaine. 'Is that what The Face is like?' said Gerald.

'Sort of satire…'

'Not really,' said Nick. 'It's more pop - and fashion.'

'I wouldn't mind seeing a copy,' said Rachel warily. And Nick

found himself climbing up the four flights of stairs to search for one in

Catherine's room. A sense of criminal intru-siveness, a nagging

memory of what had almost happened there three weeks before, made

him hurry back down. He glanced through the magazine as he passed

by the door of his hosts' bedroom, just to make sure it wasn't too

outrageous. He quite liked The Face, but there was a lot of it he didn't

understand. The picture of a blanched and ringleted Boy (leorge on the

cover had been taken by Russell. As he came back into the kitchen

Nick felt suddenly embarrassed, as if he'd brought down one of his

four porn mags by mistake. He handed it over and they placed it on

the table and looked (lirough it together. 'Mm… perfectly harmless,'

murmured Gerald.

'Yah - it's just a kids' thing,' said Nick, hovering to interpret and

deflect.

He wasn't much use as a guide to his own youth culture, but he

knew it wasn't just a kids' thing. They paused at a fashion spread that

showed some sexy half-naked models in a camp pretence of a pillow

fight. Gerald frowned faintly, to deny any interest in the women, and

Nick realized his paradigm for this inspection was some difficult

encounter with his own parents, who would have blushed at the

sexualized style of the whole magazine, and called it 'daft' or 'rubbish'

because they couldn't mention the sex thing itself. Nick looked at the

sprawling beautiful men and blushed appallingly too. He said, 'I

always think the typography's rather a nightmare.'

'Isn't it a nightmare?' said Rachel gratefully. 'One feels quite lost.'

They all started reading an article which began, '"Get that

motherfucker out of here!" says Daddy Mambo of (Collision.'

'OK,' said Gerald, with a dismissive drawl, flicking through pages

of advertisements for clubs and albums. He seemed vaguely distressed,

not at the magazine itself, but that Rachel should have seen it. 'This

doesn't have the young genius's work in it…?'

'Um - yes, he did the cover on this one.'

'Ah…' Gerald peered at it in an affectedly donnish way. 'Oh yes,

"photo Russell Swinburne-Stevenson".'

'I didn't know he had a surname,' said Rachel.

'Much less two,' said Gerald - as if perhaps he might not be such

a bad sort.

They looked at Boy Georges carmine smile and unusual hat. He

wasn't at all sexy to Nick, but he carried a large sexual implication.'Boy George is a man, isn't he?' said Rachel. 'Yes, he is,' said Nick. 'Not

like George Eliot.'

'No, not at all.'

'Very fair question,' said Gerald.

The doorbell rang - it was a quick brassy rattle as much as a

ping. 'Is that Judy already?' said Rachel, fairly crossly. Gerald went

into the hall and they heard him pluck open the front door and boom

'Hello' in a peremptory and discouraging way he had. And then, in

another timbre that made Nick's heart thump and the still air in the

house shiver and gleam, Leo saying, 'Good morning, Mr Fedden, sir. I

was wondering if young Nicholas was at home.'

'Um, yes, yes he is… Nick!' he called back - but Nick was already

coming through, with a strange stilted walk, it seemed to himself, of

embarrassment and pride. It was abrupt and confusing but he couldn't

stop smiling. It was the first time in his life he'd had a lover call for

him, and the fact had a scandalous dazzle to it. Gerald didn't ask Leo

in, but stood back a little to let Nick pass and to see if there was going

to be any kind of trouble. 'Hello, Nick,' said Leo. 'Leo!' Nick shook his

hand and kept holding it as he stepped out onto the shallow porch,

between the gleaming Tuscan pillars. 'How's it going?' said Leo, giving

his cynical litde smile, but his eyes almost caressing, passing Nick a

secret message, and then nodding him a sign that Gerald had

withdrawn; though he must have been able to hear him saying, '…

some pal of Nick's…' and a few moments later, 'No, black chappie.'

'I'm so pleased to see you,' Nick said, with a certain caution

because he didn't want to look mad with excitement. And then, 'I've

been thinking of you. And wondering what you were up to,' sounding a

bit like his mother when she was fondly suppressing a critical note. He

looked at Leo's head as if he had never seen anything like it before, his

nose, his stubble, the slow sheepish smile that admitted his own

vulnerability.

'Yeah, got your message,' Leo said. He gazed down the wide white

street, and Nick remembered his authentic but mysterious phrase

about how he'd been round the block a few limes. 'Sorry I didn't get

back to you.'

'Oh, that's all right,' said Nick, and he found the weeks of waiting

and failure were already half forgotten. 'Yeah, I've been a bit off colour,'

Leo said.

'Oh, no.' Nick poured himself into believing this, and felt the

lovely new scope it gave him for sympathy and interference. 'I'm so

sorry…'

'Chesty thing,' said Leo: 'couldn't seem to shake it off.'

'But you're better now…'

'Ooh, yeah!' said Leo, with a wink and a squirm; which made

Nick think he could say, 'Too much outdoor sex, I expect.' Really hedidn't know what was allowed, what was funny and what was inept.

He Icared his innocence showed.

'You're bad, you are,' said Leo appreciatively. 'You're a very bad

boy.' He was wearing the same old jeans of their first date, which for

Nick now had a touching anecdotal quality, he knew them and loved

them; and a zipped-up tracksuit top which made him look ready for

action, or for inaction, the rigours and hanging about of training. 'I

haven't forgotten our little tangle in the bushes.'

'Nor have I,' said Nick, with giddy understatement, glancing over

his shoulder.

'I drought, he's a shy one, a bit stuck-up, but there's something

going on inside drose corduroy trousers, I'll give him a go. And how

right I was, Henry!'

Nick blushed with pleasure and wished there was a way to

distinguish shy from stuck-up - the muddle had dogged him for years.

He wanted pure compliments, just as he wanted unconditional love.

'Anyway, I was in the area, so I thought I'd try my luck.' Leo

looked him up and down meaningfully, but then said, 'I've just got to

drop in on old Pete, down the Portobello - I don't know if you want to

come.'

'Sure!' said Nick, thinking that a visit to Leo's ex was hardly his

ideal scenario for their second date. 'Just for a minute. He's not been

well, old Pete.'

'Oh, I'm sorry… ' said Nick, though this time without the rush of

possessive sympathy. He watched a black cab crawling towards diem,

a figure peering impatiendy in the back; it stopped just in front of

them, and the driver clawed round through his open window to release

the rear door. When the passenger (who Nick knew was Lady Partridge)

didn't emerge, a very rare thing happened and the cabbie got out of the

cab and yanked the door open himself, standing aside with a flourish

which she acknowledged drily as she stepped out.

'Now who's this old batdeaxe?' said Leo. And there was certainly

something combative in her sharp glance at the two figures on the

front steps, and in her sharp blue dress and jacket, as if she'd come

for dinner rather than a family lunch. Nick smiled broadly at her and

called out, 'Hello, Lady Partridge!'

'Hullo,' said Lady Partridge, with the minimal warmth, the

hurrying good grace, of a famous person hailed by an unknown fan.

Nick couldn't believe that she'd forgotten him, and went on with almost

satirical courtesy, 'May I introduce my friend Leo Charles? Lady

Partridge.' Up close the old woman's jacket, heavily embroidered with

glinting black and silver thread, had a scaly texture, on which finer

fabrics might have snagged and laddered. She smiled and said, 'How

do you do?' in an extraordinarily cordial tone, in which none the lesssomething final was conveyed - the certainty that they would never

speak again.

Leo was saying hello and offering his hand but she had already

drifted past him and in through the open front door. 'Gerald, Rachel

darling!' she called, edgy with the need for reassurance.

The Portobello Road was only two minutes' stroll from the

Feddens' green front door, and there was no time for a love scene. Leo

was walking his bike with one hand, and Nick ambled beside him,

possibly looking quite normal but feeling giddily attentive, as if

hovering above himself. It was that experience of walking on air,

perhaps, that people spoke of, and which, like roller skating, you could

master with practice, but which on this first try had him teetering and

lurching. He had such an important question to ask that he found

himself saying something else instead. 'I see you know about Gerald,

then,' he said.

'Your splendid Mr Fedden,' said Leo, in his deadpan way, almost

as if he knew that splendid was one of Gerald's top words. 'Well, I

could tell there was something you didn't want me to know, and diat

always gets me - I'm like that.

And then your friend Geoffrey in the garden was going on

something about parliament - I thought, I'll look into all this at work.

Electoral roll, Who's Who, we know all about you 'I see,' said Nick,

flattered but taken aback by this first glimpse of the professional Leo.

Of course he'd done similar researches himself when he'd fallen for

Toby. There had been a proxy thrill to it, Gerald's date of birth,

pastimes, and various directorships standing in somehow for the

intimate details, the kisses and more he had wanted from his son. He

thought it probably wasn't like that for Leo. 'He's quite nice-looking for

a Tory,' Leo said. 'Yes, everyone seems to fancy him except me,' said

Nick.

Leo gave him a shrewd litde smile. 'I don't say I fancy him

exacdy,' he said.

'He's like someone on die telly.'

'Well, soon I'm sure he will be someone on the telly. Actually of

course there are monsters on both sides - looks-wise.'

'True enough.'

Nick hesitated. 'There is a sort of aesthetic poverty about

conservatism, though, isn't there.'

'Yeah?'

'That blue's an impossible colour.'

Leo nodded dioughtfully. 'I wouldn't say that was their main

problem,' he said.

The weekend crowds were pressing steadily along the lane from

die station and down the steep hill into the market. Pete's

establishment was in the curving row of shops on the left: PETERMAWSON in gold on black, like an old jeweller's, the windows covered

in mesh though today the shop was open. Leo shouldered the door and

the wired doormat, as he stood there manoeuvring the bike in, kept

sounding a warning chime. Nick had peered into the shop before, on

one of the dead weekdays, when it was all locked up, and the mail lay

unattended across the floor. There was a pair of marble-topped Empire

tables in the windows flanking the door, and beyond that a space that

looked more like a half-empty warehouse than a shop.

Pete could be heard on the phone in a back room. Leo propped

up his bike in a familiar way and wandered through, and Nick was left

alone, blinking longingly at that last image of him, the slight bounce or

dance in his step. He heard Pete ringing off, a murmur of kissing and

hugging. 'Ooh, you know… ' said Pete. 'No, I'm a bit better.'

'I've brought my nice new friend Nick round to see you,' said Leo,

in a silly cheerful voice which made Nick realize this might be an

awkward half-hour for all of them. He was very sensitive to anything

that might be said.

As so often he felt he had the wrong kind of irony, the wrong

knowledge, for gay life. He was still faintly shocked, among other

emotions of interest and excitement, at the idea of a male couple. He

and Leo had come together, in their odd transitory way, but the truth

was they weren't yet a couple themselves.

'So what's all this?' Pete asked, following Leo back into the room.

'This is Pete, this is Nick,' said Leo, with a large smile and a

mime of urging them together. The effort to charm and reassure was a

side of him that Nick hadn't seen before; it seemed to make all sorts of

other things possible, in the longer view. 'Pete's my best old friend,' he

said, in his cockney voice of concessions. Aren't you, darlin'?' They

shook hands, and Pete winced, as at the grip of something not quite

welcome, and said, 'I see you've been hanging around the school gates

again, you terrible old man.'

Leo raised an eyebrow and said, 'Well, I won't remind you how

old I was when you snatched me from my pram.'

Nick laughed eagerly, though it was a kind of camp slapstick he

didn't naturally find funny, and it was surprisingly painful to be given

a glimpse of their past together. He found himself picturing and half

believing the story of Leo in his pram. Being small and fresh-faced was

usually an advantage, but he was anxious not to be thought a child.

Actually, I'm twenty-one,' he said, in a mock-gruff tone. 'Hark at him!'

Pete said.

'Nick lives just round the corner,' said Leo. 'Kensington Park

Gardens.'

'Oh.

Very nice.'

'Well, I'm just staying there for a while, with an old college friend.'Leo tactfully didn't elaborate; he said, 'He knows about furniture.

His old man's in trie trade.'

Pete made a shrugging gesture that took in die sparse contents of

die shop.

'Feel free…' he said; so Nick had politely to do that, while die old

lovers fell back into quiet scoffing chatter, which he deliberately

blocked out widi tunes in his head, not wanting to learn anything,

good or bad. He examined some knocked-about Louis Seize chairs, a

marble head of a boy, a suspiciously brilliant ormolu-mounted cabinet,

and the pair of tables in the window, which made him think of the

ones turned into washstands at Hawkeswood. One wall was covered

widi a huge dreary tapestry showing a bacchanalian scene, with

figures dancing and embracing under red and brown trees; it was too

high for the space, and on its loosely rolled bottom edge a satyr with a

grin seemed to slide forwards like a limbo dancer on to the floor.

The only real object of interest, the thing to acknowledge and be

equal to, was Pete himself. He was perhaps in his mid-forties, with a

bald patch in his sandy hair and a bit of grey in his thin beard. He was

lean, an inch or two taller than Nick and Leo, but already slightly

stooped. He wore tight old jeans and a denim shirt, and something

else, which was an attitude, a wearily aggressive challenge - he seemed

to come forward from an era of sexual defiance and fighting alliances

and to cast a dismissive eye over a litde chit like Nick, who had never

fought for anything. Or so Nick explained his own sense of discomfort,

the recurrent vague snobbery and timidity with which he peered into

the world of actually existing gayness. Nick had pictured Pete as die

fruity kind of antique-dealer, or even as a sexless figure like his own

father, with a bow tie and a trim white beard. That Pete should be as

he was threw such a novel light over Leo. He glanced at Leo now, widi

his sub- lime little bottom perched on the corner of Pete's desk, and

saw him totally at home with a far from attractive middle-aged man -

he had been his lover and done a hundred things with him that Nick

still only dreamed of, time and time again. Nick didn't know how it had

ended, or when; they seemed to share the steadiness of something

both long established and over, and he envied them, although it wasn't

quite what he wanted himself. It was part of Leo's game, or maybe just

his style, to have told Nick almost nothing; but if Pete was Leo's kind of

man it looked suddenly unlikely that Nick would be chosen to replace

him.

'Have a look at that, Nick,' Pete called out, as if amiably trying to

keep him occupied. 'You know what that is.'

'That's a nice litde piece,' said Leo. 'It's a very nice little piece,'

said Pete. 'Louis Quinze.'

Nick ran his eye over the slightly cockled boulle inlay. 'Well, it's

an encoignurel he said, and with a chance at charm: 'n'est-ce pas?''It's what we call a corner cupboard,' Pete said. 'Where did you

get this one, babe?'

'Ooh… I just found him on the street,' said Leo, gazing quite

sweetly at Nick and then giving him a wink. 'He looked a bit lost.'

'Hardly a mark on him,' said Pete. 'Not yet,' said Leo. 'So where's

your father's shop, Nick?' said Pete.

'Oh, it's in Barwick - in Northamptonshire?'

'Don't they pronounce that Barrick?'

'Only frightfully grand people.'

Pete lit a cigarette, drew on it deeply, and then coughed and

looked almost sick. 'Ah, that's better,' he said. 'Yes, Bar-wick. I know

Barwick. It's what you'd call a funny old place, isn't it.'

'It has a very fine eighteenth-century market hall,' Nick said, to

help him to remember it.

'I picked up a little Directoire bureau there once, bombe it was,

you'll know what that means.'

'That probably wasn't from us. It was probably Gaston's. My

father sells mainly English things.'

'Yeah? What's trade like up there these days?'

'Pretty slow, actually,' Nick said.

'It's at a fucking standstill here. It's going backwards. Another

four years of Madam and we'll all be on the street.' Pete coughed again

and flapped away Leo's attempt to take the cigarette off him. 'So how

long have you been in London, Nick?'

'About… six weeks?'

'Six weeks… I see. You'll still be doing the rounds, then. Or are

you just shopping local? You've done the Volunteer.'

Leo saw Nick hesitating, and said, 'I wouldn't want him going to

that old flea-box. At least not till he's sixty, like everyone else in there.'

'I'm exploring a bit,' said Nick. 'I don't know, where do the young

things go these days?'

'Well, there's the Shaftesbury,' Nick said, naming a pub that Polly

Tompkins had described as the scene of frequent conquests. You're not

so much of a pubber, though, are you?' Leo said. 'He wants to get

down the Lift,' said Pete, 'if he's a bit of a chocoholic' Nick blushed and

shook his head dumbly. 'I don't know really.' He was very

embarrassed, in front of Leo, but undeniably fascinated to have his

taste guessed at and defined. He felt he had only just guessed at it

himself. 'When did you meet Miss Leontyne?' That he knew exactly,

but said, About three weeks ago,' feeling more foolish with his quick

straight answers to chaffing questions. He didn't flinch at the girl's

name for Leo, and he had sometimes laboured through whole

conversations calling Polly Tompkins 'she', but he'd never found it as

necessary or hilarious as some people did.'That's what I call her,' said Pete, 'Leontyne Price-tag. I hope

you've got your chequebook ready.'

There was nothing to say to this, but Leo muttered dutifully,

'There's not much you don't know about price tags, is there, Pete.'

Nick tittered and watched the affronted look fade from Pete's

drawn features as he smoked and gazed at the dreary tapestry. It

could have been one of those items which never sell, which the dealer

ends up almost giving away because they seem to bring bad luck on

the whole shop. He remembered that Pete had been ill, though he

didn't know in what way. 'I've got this fucking great bed,' Pete said.

'I can't shift it.' The phone rang, and he went off into the back

room. 'Have a look at it.'

The bed had been taken apart and the fluted poles, the ornate

square frame of the canopy and the head- and footboards inset with

painted rococo scenes were leaning up against the wall. 'Let's have a

look at this, then,' Leo said, wandering over and briefly stroking Nick's

arm as he passed; he was being sweet to both of them, he surely didn't

really want to look at the bed. They didn't want to move anything in

case it all fell over. Nick peered at the faded gilt and the unpolished

inner edges that would normally be hidden. All his life he'd looked at

furniture from odd angles, and he still had his childhood sense of

tables and sideboards as elaborate little wooden buildings that you

could crawl into, their bosses and capitals and lion-heads at face

height, their rough under-surfaces retaining a dim odour of the actual

wood. This was a very grand bed, but there was worm in the frame and

apparendy it had no hangings with it.

He felt the old impulse to put it together and get into it. Leo

squatted down to look at the picture on the footboard. 'This is nice,' he

said. 'What do you think?'

Nick, standing behind him, gazed down on him as he had on

their first date, when he was fiddling with the bike. Then he looked

away, almost guiltily, at the wide-skirted ladies and their lovers in

doublets, plucking at lutes; the trees that were blue and silver. Then

he looked down again, at where Leo's beltless jeans stood away from

his waist. He had lived and lingered through that glimpse a hundred

times since their first meeting, it was almost more powerful and

emblematic than the sex that had followed: the swell of Leo's hardened

buttocks, the provoking blue horizontal of his briefs. So to be offered a

second look had a double force, like the confirmation of a promise, and

Nick's hesitation was only the twitch of wariness he felt at any

prospect of happiness. 'It's very nice,' he said. Leo shifted slighdy on

his heels. 'Can you see?' he said.

Nick was grinning and sighing at the same time. 'Yes, I can see,'

he said, in a murmur that shrank the conversation away from Pete

into heady subterfuge. 'And what do you think?' asked Leo brighdy.'Oh… it's beautiful,' Nick whispered. He checked the open door to

the back room before he stooped and slid his hand in and verified that

this time there was no blue horizontal, there was only smooth, shaved,

curving Leo. A second or two, and then Nick straightened up and put

his hands gendy round Leo's neck - who tipped back against his legs

for support, and rolled his shoulder a couple of times against Nick's

hard-on. 'Mm, you do like it,' he said. 'I love it,' said Nick.

When Pete came back in they were loafing round die room with

their hands in their pockets. 'You won't believe this,' he said. 'I think

I've sold the bed.'

'Oh yes?' said Leo. 'Nick was just saying what a nice piece it was.

But he says it'll take quite a bit of work, don't you, Nick?' Their final

few minutes in the shop had an atmosphere of ridiculous oddity. It

was hard to take in what the other two were saying - Nick felt radiantly

selfish and inattentive, and left it to Leo to wind things up. The

furniture and objects took on a richer lustre and at the same time

seemed madly irrelevant. It must have been obvious to Pete that

something was up, that the air was gleaming and trembling; and it

wouldn't have been beyond him to make some tart comment about it.

But he didn't. It struck Nick that perhaps Pete was really over Leo,

realistic and resigned, and he noticed he regretted this slighdy,

because he wanted Pete to be jealous.

'Well, we must get our lunch,' Leo said. 'I'm hungry, aren't you,

Nick?'

'Starving,' said Nick, in a kind of happy shout.

They all laughed and shook hands, and when Pete had hugged

Leo he pushed him away with a quick pat. So there they were, out in

the street, being nudged and flooded round by the crowds, and

heedlessly obstructive in their own slow walk, which unfurled down

the hill to the faint silky ticking of Leo's bicycle wheels.

It was all new to Nick, this being with another man, carried along

on the smooth swelling current of mutual feeling - with its eddies

sometimes into shop doorways or under the awnings of the bric-a-brac

stalls. There was no more talk of lunch, which was a good sign. In fact

they didn't say anything much, but now and then they shared glances

which flowered into wonderful smirks. Lust prickled Nick's thighs and

squeezed his stomach and throat, and made him almost groan

between his smiles, as if it just wasn't fair to be promised so much. He

fell behind a step or two and walked along shaking his head. He

wanted to be Leo's jeans, in their casual rhythmical caress of his

strolling legs, their momentary grip and letting go. His hands flickered

against Leo time and again, to draw attention to things, a chair, a

plate, a passing punk's head of blue spikes. He must have come first,

out of all the men Leo had auditioned. He kept touching Leo on the

bottom, in the simple pleasure of permission. Leo didn't reciprocateexactly, he had his own canny eye for the street, he even raised a sly

eyebrow at the sexy shock of other boys going past, but it didn't matter

because they were a kind of superfluity, the glancing overspill of his

brimming desire for Nick. As they dawdled through the crowd Nick saw

himself rushing ahead through neglected years of his moral education.

This was what it was like!

Under the fringed canopy of a stall he saw the down-turned

profile of Sophie Tipper, studying a lot of old rings and bracelets

pinned on a ramp of black velvet. His first thought was to ignore her or

avoid her. He felt his old envy of her. But then Toby rolled into view

behind her, leaning forward with a little pursed smile of vacant interest

- very like a husband. He rested his chin on her shoulder for a

moment, and she murmured something to him, so that Nick had the

uncomfortable feeling of peering at their own heedless self-content.

They made a necessarily beautiful couple, somehow luminous against

the dark jumble of the market, like models in a subtle but artificial

glare. Nick turned away and looked for something he could buy for

Leo; he longed to do that. He saw all the reasons the impending social

encounter might not be a success. 'Hey, Guest!' said Toby, loping

round the stall, grabbing him and giving him a firm kiss on the cheek.

'Hi - Toby…' Their kissing was a new thing, since the party,

somehow made possible and indemnified by the presence of Sophie.

And it seemed almost a relief to Toby, as if it erased some old low-level

embarrassment about their not kissing. To Nick himself it was lovely,

all the warmth of Toby for a moment against him, but unignorably sad

too, since it was clearly the limit of concessions, granted in the

certainty that nothing more intimate would ever follow. 'Hello, Nick!'

said Sophie, coming round and kissing him on both cheeks with

beaming goodwill, which he put down to her being such an up-and-

coming actress. He wanted to introduce Leo, but he thought something

wrong might be said, based on his excited gabble at Hawkeswood,

when he was stoned. It was one of those inevitable but still surprising

moments when mere wishful thinking was held to account by the

truth. He said, 'You're going to be late for lunch,' and thought he

sounded rather rude.

'I know,' said Toby. 'Gran wants one of her sessions with Sophie.

So we're keeping it as short as possible.'

'Well, I love your grandmother,' Sophie said, with mock

petulance.

'No, she's a marvellous old girl,' said Toby; and it reminded Nick

of second-hand things he used to say at Oxford, sagacious remarks

about his parents' famous friends. He smiled vaguely at Leo. If Sophie

hadn't been there, Nick thought, men he could have shown Toby off to

Leo as a glamorous accessory to his own past, perhaps something

more… But like this Toby was hopelessly claimed and placed.Nick said, 'Sophie Tipper, Toby Fedden: Leo Charles,' and Leo

said 'Leo' both times as he shook hands.

'Right,' said Toby, 'fantastic… We know all about you,' and he

gave an encouraging grin.

'Oh, do you,' said Leo, drily doubtful at the return of his own

phrase.

'Leo's Nick's new boyfriend,' Toby said to Sophie. 'Yah, it's really

great.'

Nick only took a quick agonized peep at Leo, whose expression

was scarify blank, as if to dramatize his unrelinquished power of

choice. The welling confidence of a few minutes before looked a foolish

tiling. Nick said, 'Well, we don't want to jump the gun.'

'But that's wonderful,' said Sophie, as though Nicks welfare, his

unhappy heart, had long been her concern. He saw her reaching wide

to bless the double triumph of boyfriend and black.

'He's been keeping you very much to himself,' said Toby. 'But

now we've caught you at it. So to speak!' And he blushed. 'We're just

going for a little toddle,' said Leo.

'That's marvellous.' Toby seemed as thrilled as Sophie by what

they imagined was happening, and Nick had a sad clear sighting of his

deeper, perhaps even unconscious reason: that an obscure pressure, a

sense of unvoiced expectations, might be lifted from him by the

transference of Nick's adoration to another man.

As Gerald might have said of something quite different, it was

hugely to be encouraged. And maybe Sophie sensed that too. They'd

probably even talked about it, before sleep, as a vague problem - just

for a moment, before it shrank into irrelevance like shoes kicked off at

the end of the bed… 'So you're not joining us for lunch?' Toby went on.

'Not invited,' said Leo, but with a cheerful shake of the head. Nick

raced away from the mere idea of it, as a nexus of every snobbery and

worry, scene of tortured intercessions between different departments of

his own life: Leo - Gerald -Toby - Sophie - Lady Partridge… 'Well,

another time,' said Toby. 'We must be going, Pips. But let's all meet up

soon?'

'I knew we wouldn't find my ring,' said Sophie, with the crossness

that hides a sweetness that hides a toughness.

'We'll come back after lunch. The girl's got to have a ring,' Toby

explained, which Nick didn't like the sound of.

Leo had kept up an attitude of steady ironic contemplation of the

young couple, but then he said, 'I know I've seen you,' and looked

faindy embarrassed by his own gambit. Sophie's face was a lesson in

hesitant delight. 'Oh…'

'I may be completely wrong,' said Leo. 'Weren't you in English

Rose?Disappointed, she seemed to struggle to remember. 'Oh, no…

Clever you, but no, I wasn't in that one.'

'That was Betsy Tilden,' said Nick. 'Right, oh yeah, Betsy… No, I

know I've seen you…'

Nick wanted to say that she'd only been in two things, an episode

of Bergerac and a student-made film of The White Devil, bankrolled by

her father, which had had a single late-night screening at the Gate.

'I was in a film that was called The White Devil,' said Sophie, as

though speaking to a child.

'That was it!' said Leo. 'Yes! That was a fantastic film. I love that

film.'

'I'm so glad,' said Sophie. 'You are kind!'

Leo was smiling and staring, as if the scenes were spooling

through his head again, miraculously matched by the woman in front

of him. 'Yeah, when he poisons him, and… Did you see this film, Nick,

White Devil..?'

'Stupidly, I missed it,' Nick said; though he had a clear

recollection of undergraduates acting at being film-makers, bouncing

round in jeeps wearing dark glasses at night; the Flamineo, Jamie

Stallard, a drawling Martyrs' Club twit, was one of his favourite betes

noires. 'I've got to tell you, that guy - Jamie, is it? - ooh-ooh…'

'I know,' said Sophie. 'I thought you'd like him.'

'You're not wrong, girl,' laughed Leo, so lit up with sassy

excitement that Nick thought he might be teasing Sophie. 'But he's

not, though - you'd better tell me - he's not… is he…?'

'Oh…! I'm afraid he isn't, no. A lot of people ask that,' Sophie

admitted.

Leo took it philosophically. 'Well, when it comes on again I'm

definitely taking him,' he said, tutting as if they both thought

cultivated, first-class Nick, still heavy-headed with exam knowledge,

steeped to the chaps in revenge tragedy, was a bit of a slob.

'All right,' said Nick, seeing it at least as a couple of hours in the

warm dark together, rather than behind a bush. 'And I can tell you all

about Jamie Stallard,' he added.

But Leo's real interest was in Sophie. 'So what are you doing

next?' he said.

Nick raised his eyebrows apologetically to Toby, who shook his

head kindly, as if to say that going out with a promising actress he was

bound to find himself in an attendant role. Sophie herself looked

slightly overexcited, pardy at the praise but partly because she wasn't

used to talking to anyone like Leo, and it seemed to be going really

well. 'I'll let you know,' she was saying. 'I can get your number off

Nick!'

Nick wished he could match Toby's confidence. He felt snubbed

by Leo's attentions to Sophie, but perhaps it was only because he feltfoolish, childish at having put it about that they were boyfriends. Toby

said, 'Really, we must go, Pips,' and there was something so silly about

this nickname that it helped Nick not to care.

But then, alone again in the street with Leo, neither of them

saying anything, he had a sense of what an affair might actually be

like, and the endless miraculous permission was only a part of it. His

limbs were oddly stiff, his hands tingling as if he'd just come in from

snowballing to stand by a blazing fire. He felt the moment echoing

other occasions when he had just missed success through a failure of

nerve, or a stupidly happy anticipation. All Leo's effusiveness with Pete

and then with Sophie had ebbed away, and left just the two of them, in

this horrible noise and crush. Nick glanced at him with a tight smile;

at which Leo stretched his neck with a moody, uninvolved air. 'Well,'

said Nick finally, 'where do you want to go?'

'I don't know, boyfriend,' Leo said. Nick laughed ruefully, and

something kept him back from a further lie. A caff?' he said. 'Indian? A

sandwich?' - which was the most he could imagine managing.

'Well, I need something,' said Leo, in his tone of flat goading

irony, looking at him sharply. And it isn't a sandwich.'

Nick didn't take a risk on what this might mean. Ah…' he said.

Leo turned his head and scowled at a stall of cloudy green and brown

glassware, which was taking its place in their crisis, and seemed to

gleam with hints of a settled domestic life. Leo said, At least with old

Pete we had his place, but where are me and you ever going to go?'

Could this be his only objection, the only obstacle…? 'I know,

we're homeless,'

Nick said.

'Homeless love,' said Leo, shrugging and then cautiously

nodding, as if weighing up a tide for a song.Nick chose a moment before dinner to pay the rent. It was always

awkward. 'Oh… my dear…' said Rachel, as if the two ten-pound notes

were a form of mild extravagance, like a box of chocolates, or like

flowers brought by a dinner guest, which were also a bit of a nuisance.

She looked for somewhere to put down her bowl of steeping apricots. 'If

you're sure…Nick chose a moment before dinner to pay the rent. It was always

awkward. 'Oh… my dear…' said Rachel, as if the two ten-pound notes

were a form of mild extravagance, like a box of chocolates, or like

flowers brought by a dinner guest, which were also a bit of a nuisance.

She looked for somewhere to put down her bowl of steeping apricots. 'If

you're sure…Nick shrugged and snuffled. 'Heavens,' he said. He had just

spent five pounds on a taxi, he was doing all sorts of incautious

things, and would have loved not to pay.

"Well, thank you!' Rachel took the money, and stood folding it

appreciatively, not sure where to put it. Then Gerald and Badger

Brogan came in from tennis - there was the flat chime of their feet on

the iron stair from the garden, and then they were in the kitchen like

two big hot boys. Just for a second Gerald noted the transaction that

was taking place. The next second he said, 'Thrashed him!' and threw

down his racquet on the bench.

'God, Fedden, you're a liar,' said Badger. 'It was 6-4, Rache, in

the third set.'

Gerald shook his head in the savour of triumph. 'I let him have it

hot.'

'I'm sure you were very well matched,' said Rachel prudendy.

This wasn't quite acceptable to either player. 'I chose not to

question some frankly fantastic line calls,' said Badger. He roamed

round by the table, picking up a spoon and putting it down, and then

a garlic press, without noticing. Nick smiled as if amused by die drama

of their game, though in fact he felt challenged by Badger's free and

easy way here, by the mood of competition he stirred up in Gerald, and

perhaps by its counterpart, his longer and deeper claim on Gerald's

affection. 'Hello, Nick!' said Badger, in his probing, sarcastic tone.

'Hello, Badger,' said Nick, still self-conscious at teasing a virtual

stranger about the yellow-grey stripe in his dark hair, at having to

enrol in the family cult of Badger as a character, but finding it easier

after all than the sober, the critical, the almost hostile-sounding

'Derek'.

Badger in turn was clearly puzzled by Nick's presence in his old

friend's house and made facetious attempts at understanding him. It

was a part of his general mischief - he lurched about all day, asked

leading questions, rubbed up old scandals and scratched beadily for

new ones. He said, 'So what have you been up to today, Nick?'

'Oh, just the usual,' said Nick. 'You know, morning in the library,

waiting for books to come up from the stacks; bibliography class in the

afternoon, "How to describe textual variants".' He made himself as dull

as he could for Badger, like a brown old binding, though to his own eye

'textual variants' glinted with hints at what he'd actually done, which

was to cut the class and have two hours of sex with Leo on Hampstead

Heath. That would have been more scandal than Badger could

manage. On the first night of his stay he had described an Oxford

friend of theirs as the most ghastly shirdifter. • 'LBW, Badge?' said

Gerald.

'Thanks, Banger,' said Badger, using an interesting old nickname

diat Nick couldn't see himself making free with, and which Gerald waswise enough not to object to. The two men stood there, in their tennis

whites, drinking their tall glasses of lemon barley water, gasping and

grinning between swigs. Geralds legs were still brown, and his

confusingly firm buttocks were set off by his tight Fred Perry shorts.

Badger was leaner and seedier, and his Aertex shirt was sweatier and

pulled askew by being used to mop his face. He was wearing scruffy

old plimsolls, whereas Gerald seemed to bounce or levitate slightly in

the new thick-soled 'trainers'.

Elena hurried in from the pantry with the joint, or limb, of

venison, plastered up in a blood-stained paste of flour and water. The

whole business of the deer, culled at Hawkeswood each September and

sent to hang for a fortnight in the Feddens' utility room, was an ordeal

for Elena, and an easy triumph for Gerald, who always fixed a series of

dinner parties to advertise it and eat it. Elena set the heavy dish on the

table just as Catherine came down from her room, with her hands held

up like blinkers to avoid the sight. 'Mm - look at that, Cat!' said

Badger.

'Fortunately I won't even have to look at you eating it,' said

Catherine; though she did quickly peer at it with a kind of relish of

revulsion.

'Are you going out, then, old Puss?' said Gerald, his eagerness

damped at once by a wounded frown. 'You'll have a drink with us,

darling?' said Rachel. 'I might do if there's time,' said Catherine. 'Is it

all MPs?'

'No,' said Gerald.

'Your grandmother's not an MR'

'Thank Christ, actually,' said Catherine. And nor is Morden

Lipscomb an MR'

'There are two MPs coming,' said Rachel, and it wasn't clear if

she thought this rather few or quite enough.

'Yup, Timms and Groom!' said Gerald, as if they were the jolliest

company imaginable. 'The man who never says "hello"!'

'You're too absurd,' said Gerald. 'I'm sure I have heard him say

it…'

'If Morden Lipscomb's coming I'm going to keep my coat on, he

makes my blood run cold.'

'Morden's an important man,' said Gerald. 'He has the ear of the

President.'

'Will Nick be making up numbers, I suppose,' said Catherine.

Nick fluttered his eyelashes and Gerald said, 'Nick doesn't make

up numbers, child, he's part of the… part of the household.'

Catherine looked at Nick, slightly mockingly, across the space

that separates good and bad children. She said, 'He's the perfect little

courtier, isn't he?''Oh, Elena,' said Rachel, 'Catherine's not dining, we'll be one

fewer for dinner - yes, one less.' Elena went into the dining room to

adjust the placings, and came back a moment later with an objection.

'Miz Fed, you know is thirteen.'

Ah…' said Rachel, and then gave an apologetic shrug.

'Yes, well I don't think any of us are triskaidekaphobes here, are

we?' said Gerald. They were all very up on the names of phobias, since

at various times Catherine had suffered from aichmo, dromo, keno,

and nyctophobia, among a number of more commonplace ones - it was

a bit of a game with them, but it cut no ice with Elena, who stood there

biting her lip.

'You see, you'll have to stay,' said Badger, reaching out clumsily

to hold Catherine. 'How can you resist that beautiful venison?'

'Hmm,' said Catherine. 'It looks like something out of a field

hospital.' And she shot a tiny forbidding glance at Nick, who saw that

it was probably the aichmophobia, the horror of sharp objects, that

made the serving and carving of a haunch of venison impossible for

her. The family knew about her trouble in the past, but had happily

forgotten it when it seemed not to recur. It was only Nick who knew

about the recent challenge of the carving knives. He said, 'I don't mind

dropping out too if I'm going to spoil the seating.' He enjoyed the well-

oiled pomp of the dinners here, but he knew he was too much in love

to do more than smile in the candlelight and dream of Leo. He would

be quiet and inattentive. And already he felt a tingle in the air, the

more-than-reality of the memory of being with his boyfriend.

'No, no,' murmured Rachel, with an impatient twitch of the head.

'Elena, we'll risk it!' Gerald pronounced. 'Si… va bene… Nick,

you'll just have to be the odd man… um…' Elena went back into the

dining room with that look of unhappy subjection that no one but Nick

ever noticed or worried about. 'We're not living in twelfth-century

Calabria,' said Gerald, as the phone started ringing and he plucked it

from the wall and grunted, 'Fedden,' in his new no-nonsense style.

'Yes… Hello… What?… Yes, yes he is… Yes, all right… Mm, and to

you,' then holding the receiver out towards Nick: 'It's Leo.' Nick

coloured as though his thoughts of a few moments before had been

audible to all of them; the kitchen had accidentally fallen silent and

Gerald gave him a look which Nick felt was stern and disappointed,

but perhaps was merely abstracted, the frown of a broken train of

thought.

Catherine said, 'If it's Leo, they'll be hours' And Rachel nodded

sympathetically and said, 'Yes, why don't you take it in the study.'

Gerald looked at him again as if to say that the brute reality of gay life,

of actual phone calls between shirt-lifters, was rather more than he

had ever imagined being asked to deal with; but then nodded and said

genially, 'By all means, it's the red phonAh, hotline,' said Badger, whose scandal-sensors were warming

to something awkward in the air. Though as Nick went down the hall

what struck him was that Rachel knew what was going on, and was

protecting him. Gerald never really noticed anything about other

people, they were moving parts in a social process, they agreed with

him or they thwarted him, his famous hospitality disguised an odd

lack of particular, personal skills - all this came clear to Nick in a

liberating rush as he pushed open the study door. After which it was

beautifully surreal to stand and talk in sexy murmurs beside his desk,

to hear Leo's voice in the one room in the hi»use which expressed

Gerald's own taste, which was a vacuum of taste, green leather

armchairs, upholstered fender, brass lamps, the stage set for his own

kind of male conspiracy.

'Well, that was very jolly,' said Leo, with a half-teasing, halfJ

aspiring use of a Nick word. 'Very jolly indeed.'

'Did you enjoy it, darling?' said Nick. 'I didn't mind it,' said Leo.

Nick glowed and grinned. 'I thought it was bearable.'

'I expect you can bear it,' said Leo. You don't have to ride a bike.'

Nick looked around at the half-open door. 'Was it too much for

you?' he said wonderingly, and with a sense that recurred and

recurred these weeks - of enormous freedom claimed through tiny

details, of everything he said being welcome. 'You're a very bad boy,'

said Leo. 'Mm, so you keep saying.'

'So what are you doing?'

'Well…' said Nick. It was lovely to be talking to Leo, but he wasn't

quite sure why he had rung, and as it was the first time he had ever

done so it made Nick uneasily expectant; until it struck him that

probably Leo himself was only claiming the simple pleasure of talking

to his lover, of talking, as he said he loved to fuck, for the sake of it.

'I'm sitting behind Gerald's desk with a most tremendous hard-on,'

said Nick.

There was a pause and Leo murmured, 'Now don't get me going.

My old lady's here.'

It was shadowy already in the room, and Nick pulled the chain

that switched on die desk lamp. Gerald, like an uxorious bigamist, had

photos of both Rachel and the Prime Minister in silver frames. A large

desk diary was open at the 'Notes' pages at die back, where Gerald had

written, 'Barwick: Agent (Manning) - wife Veronica NOT Janet (Parker's

wife).' With his breezily asking Parker how Veronica was and Manning

how Janet was, he had got some very confused looks.

Nick knew Janet Parker, of course, she was a manager at

Rackhams and sang in the Operatic. 'So what are you doing later?' Leo

wanted to know.

'Oh, we've got a big dinner party,' Nick said. He noticed that he

hoped to impress Leo with their life at Kensington Park Gardens and atthe same time was ready to repudiate it. 'It'll probably be very tedious -

they only really ask me to make up the numbers.'

'Oh,' said Leo doubtfully.

'It'll be a lot of horrible old Tories,' Nick said, in an attempt at

Leo's language and point of view, and sniggered. 'Oh, is Grandma

coming, then?'

'She certainly is,' said Nick.

'Old bitch,' said Leo; the passing insult of their doorstep meeting,

unregistered at the time, had risen later like a bruise. 'You ought to

ask me over, to continue our fascinating conversation,' he said.

The theme of Leo's coming over had cropped up several times

since their first date, and hung and faded. Nick said, 'Look, I'm sure I

can get out of this.' And really it did seem as if the logic of the evening

- the numbers, the etiquette, the superstition - was only an expression

of a deeper natural force, a love logic, pulling him out of the house and

back into Leo's arms. 'I'm sure I can get out of it,' he said again.

Though as he did so he felt there was also a Tightness in not seeing

Leo, a romance in separation, while the fabulous shock of their

afternoon together sank in. Days like these had their design, their

upward and downward curves: it would be unshapely to change the

plan.

'No, you enjoy yourself,' said Leo, wise. perhaps with the lame

instinct. 'Have a glass of wine.'

'Yes, I expect I'll do that. Unless you've got a better idea…' Nick

swivelled in the desk chair with a tensely mischievous smile - the red

phone cord stretched and bounced. The chair was a high-backed scoop

of black leather, a spaceship commander's. 'You're insatiable, you are,'

said Leo.

'That's because I love you,' said Nick, singsong with the (ruth.

Leo took in this chance for an echoing avowal; it was a brief deep

silence, as tactical as it was undiscussable. He said, 'That's what you

tell all the boys' - a phrase of lustreless backchat that Nick could only

bear as a form of shyness.

He turned it inside out in his mind and found what he needed in

it. He said quietly, 'No, only you.'

'Yeah,' said Leo, all relaxed-sounding, and gave a big fake yawn.

'Yeah, I'll probably pop down to old Pete's a bit later, see how he's

getting on.'

'Right,' said Nick quickly. 'Well - give him my best!' It was a sting

of worry - hidden, unexpected. 'Will do,' said Leo. 'How is old Pete?'

said Nick.

'Well, he's a bit low. This illness has taken all the life out of him.'

'Oh dear,' said Nick, but felt he couldn't enquire any further, out

of delicacy for his own feelings. He looked about on the desk, to focus

his thoughts on where he was rather than on imagined intimacies atPete's flat. There was a thick typescript with a printed card, 'From the

Desk of Morden Lipscomb', on 'National Security in a Nuclear Age',

which Gerald had marked with ticks and underlinings on the first two

pages. 'NB: nuclear threat', he had written.

'OK, babe,' Leo said quietly. 'Well, I'll see you soon. We'll get it

together at the weekend, yeah? I've got to go - my mum wants the

phone.'

'I'll ring you tomorrow…'

'Yeah, well, lovely to chat.'

And in the silence of the room afterwards, shaken, tight-lipped,

Nick clutched at that cosy but cynical cockney lovely. Of course Leo

was inhibited by being at home, he wanted to say more. Just think of

this afternoon. It was terribly sweet that he'd rung at all. The chat was

a romantic bonus, but nothing was certain when it came to words,

there were nettles among the poppies. For a minute or two Nick felt

their separation like a tragedy, a drama of the thickening dusk - he

saw Leo at large on his bike while he stood in this awful office with its

filing cabinets, its decanters, and the enlarged photograph, just back

from the framers, of the hundred and one new Tory MPs.

In the kitchen he found that people had dispersed to bath and

change, and these further unstoppable rhythms made him feel like a

ghost. Rachel was sitting at the table writing place cards with her italic

fountain pen. She glanced up at him, and there was a slight tension in

her manner as well as obvious solicitude, a desire not to offend in a

moment of kindness. She said, 'All well?'

'Yes, thank you - fine…' said Nick, shaking himself into seeing

that of course life was pretty wonderful, it was just that there was

more to it than he expected - and less as well.

'Now should I put Badger or Derek, do you think? I think I'll put

Derek, just to put him in his place.'

'Well, they are place cards,' said Nick. 'Exacdy!' said Rachel, and

blew on the ink. She looked up at him again briefly. 'You know, my

dear, you can always bring friends here if you want to.'

'Oh, yes… tliank you…'

'I mean we would absolutely hate it if you were to feel you

couldn't do that.

This is your home for however long you are with us.' And it was

the 'we', the general benevolence, that struck him and upset him; and

then the practical acknowledgement that he wouldn't be there for ever.

'I know, you're very kind. I will, of course.'

'I don't know… Catherine says you have a… a special new friend,'

and she was stern for a second, magnanimous but at a disadvantage:

what should she call such a person? 'I just want you to know he'd be

very welcome here.''Thank you,' said Nick again, and smiled through a blush at the

thing being out.

It was confusingly straightforward. He felt relieved and cheated.

He wasn't sure he could rise to the freedom being offered - he saw

himself bringing home some nice white graduate from the college

instead, for a pointless tea, or convivial evening bleak with his own

cowardice.

'We're such broody old things,' Rachel said, 'now that Toby's

moved out. So do it just for our sake!' This was a charming

exaggeration, in a woman of forty-seven, with thirteen for dinner, but it

acknowledged a truth too: it didn't quite say she thought of him as a

son - it didn't elevate or condescend - but it admitted a habit, a need

for a young man and his friends about the house.

She tapped the cards together and came across the room and

Nick gave her a kiss, which she seemed to find quite right.

In fact Toby and Sophie were there that night. They came early

and Nick had a gin-and-tonic with them in the drawing room. They

seemed to bring along their own complacent atmosphere, the mood of

their life together in the Chelsea flat, and of some larger future when

they might curl up a leg on the sofa or stand with an elbow on the

mantelpiece in a room as enormous as this. Toby played the lighdy

chivvied 'husband' very sweedy, and Sophie claimed him in the

childish ways of someone experimenting with her power, with little

exasperations and innuendos. She did a performance about how Toby

ground his teeth in his sleep.

Nick tittered warily at this glimpse of the bedroom, but found her

lack of subdety oddly reassuring. She'd got Toby, snoring and

twitching, but the romantic reach of Nick's feelings for him, the web of

sacrifice and nonsense and scented Oxford nights, survived

untouched. Toby was very sweet to Nick too. He left his position by the

fireplace and came and sprawled on the rug by his chair, so that Nick

could have reached out and stroked the back of his neck. For a

moment Sophie looked disconcerted, but then she took possession of

that situation as well. 'Ah - you two should see more of each other,'

she said. 'It's good to see you together.' A minute later, looking vaguely

self-conscious, Toby got up and pretended to search for a book.

And what about your lovely friend…?' Sophie wanted to know.

'Oh… Leo, do you mean?'

'Leo,' said Sophie.

'Oh, he's - lovely!' Here was the subject again - Nick just hadn't

got used to it yet, to the idea of anything so secret, so steeped in his

own fears and fantasies, being cheerfully enquired after by other

people. Toby too looked round from the bookcase with his encouraging

grin.'Such a… lovely man,' said Sophie, whose conversation tended

not to develop, but to settle, snugly or naggingly, in one place.

Nick was glad of the praise, and mistrusted it at the same time.

'Well, he loved meeting you,' he said.

Aah…' Sophie purred, as if to say that people usually did enjoy

that. 'He's a great fan of your work, Pips,' said Toby.

'I know,' said Sophie, and sat looking down modestly. Her dark-

blonde hair, worn long at Oxford, had been cut and backcombed,

Diana-style, and quivered when she shook her head. She was wearing

a red strapless number that didn't really suit her. 'You know she's got

a part in a play,' said Toby. 'Oh, shoosh…' said Sophie.

'No, we've all got to go and see her. Nick - come to the first night,

we'll go together.' Absolutely,' said Nick. 'What are you doing?'

Sophie quivered and said, 'Well, you might as well know,' as if

being hurried into announcing a different kind of engagement. 'I'm

doing Lady Windermere…'

'Fantastic. I think you'll be very good at that.' It was a

surprisingly big part, but Nick could see her as the self-righteous

young wife clipping rose stems in her Westminster drawing room; and

delivering those awful soliloquies she has- 'I don't know what it will be

like. It's one of these very way-out directors.

He's… he's gay, actually, too. He says it's going to be a

deconstructionist reading of the play. That doesn't worry me, of course,

because I've done deconstruction; but Mummy and Daddy may not like

it.'

'You can't go worrying about what your parents will think,' said

Nick.

'That's right,' said Toby. Anyway, your ma's very with-it. She's

always going to way-out concerts and things.'

'No, she'll be fine.'

Toby chuckled. 'Of course your father's most famous remark is

that he wished Shakespeare had never been born.'

'I don't know that that's his most famous remark,' said Sophie,

with a hint of pique. In fact if Maurice Tipper had made a famous

remark at all it would probably have been something about profit

margins and good returns for shareholders. 'He only said it after

getting bitten to death by mosquitoes watching Pericles in Worcester

College gardens.'

'Ah…' murmured Nick, whose own memory was of Toby's bashful

swagger as a Lord of Tyre, when Sophie had been the Marina.

'You're too horrid about my poor papa,' said Sophie in a highly

affected way, as if in her mind she was already on stage.

Catherine came in, dressed for her night out in a tiny spangled

frock, over which she was wearing an unbuttoned light-grey raincoat.She wore high-heeled black shoes and stockings with a whitish sheen

to them. 'Goodness!' said Toby.

'Hello, darling,' said Catherine confidentially to Sophie, stooping

to give her a kiss. Sophie clearly found Catherine the most challenging

aspect of an affair with Toby, and Catherine knew this, and treated her

with the kind of clucking condescension that Sophie would otherwise

have lavished on her. 'Love your clever frock,' she said. 'Oh… thank

you,' said Sophie, smiling and blinking.

'Are you going out, then, sis?' said Toby.

Catherine headed towards the drinks table. 'I'm going out

tonight,' she said.

'Russell's taking me to an opening in Stoke Newington.' And

where might that be?' said Toby.

'It's a well-known area of London,' Catherine said. 'It's very

fashionable, isn't it, Soph?'

'Yes, of course - darling, you've heard of it,' said Sophie.

'I was joking,' said Toby; and Nick thought it was true, you never

expected him to; and when he did you couldn't always be sure that he

had. And then the idea of a party, not this one, but a noisy party with

cans of beer and trails of pot smoke, through which he moved with his

lover, as his lover, came over him like a pang and he envied Catherine.

It was an image of an Oxford party, but blended with something known

only from television, a house full of black people.

Toby said, 'I'm just going upstairs to see if I can find those

trousers. Are you going to Nat's bash, Nick?'

'What is it?' said Nick, with another dimmer pang at the thought

of another kind of party, a posh white hetero one, at which his

presence was not thought necessary.

'Oh, he's having this Seventies party…' said Toby hopelessly.

'No, I'm not invited,' said Nick, with a superior smile, thinking of

the loving closeness he had felt with Nat at Hawkeswood, when they

were both stoned and sitting on the floor. 'Is it in London?'

'That's the thing. It's up at the blasted casde,' said Toby.

'Yes… It's absurdly soon, isn't it, for a Seventies party?' said

Nick. 'I mean, the Seventies were so ghastly, why would anyone want

to go back to them?' He'd been longing for a chance to see the casde -

a marcher fortress with Wyatt interiors.

'Well, public schoolboys love reliving their puberty, don't they

Soph,' said Catherine, coming back with a very tall drink. 'I know,' said

Sophie crossly.

'Some of them spend their whole lives doing it,' Catherine said.

She stood in front of the fireplace, with a hand on her hip, and seemed

already to be moving to the music of a future very remote from any

such nonsense.Toby shrugged apologetically and said, 'I just hope I've still got

those disco pants!'

Nick almost said, 'Oh… the purple ones…?'- since he knew just

where they were, having been through everything in Toby's room, read

his schoolboy diary, sniffed the gauzy lining of his outgrown swimming

trunks, and even tried on the flared purple trousers (standing foolishly

on the long legs). But he merely nodded, and knocked back the rest of

his g-and-t.

Gerald came down in a dark suit with characteristic pink shirt,

white collar, and blue tie. He seemed to recognize, with a forgiving

smile, that he had set a sartorial standard the others were unlikely to

match. He kept on smiling as he crossed the room, as a sign of his

decision that he would not react to Catherine's appearance. The mac

worn over the micro-frock made her look almost naked. When Badger

came in he was less circumspect. 'My god, girl!' he said.

'No, your god-daughter actually, Uncle Badger,' said Catherine,

with the forced pertness of a much younger child.

Badger frowned and hummed. 'Well, exactly,' he said. 'Didn't I

promise to safeguard your morals, or something?' He rubbed his

hands together and had a good look at her.

'I'm not sure anyone thinks you'd be the best person for that,'

Catherine said, sipping her gin and sitting down sideways on a low

armchair.

'You're going easy on that stuff, aren't you, Puss?' said Gerald.

'It's my first one, Daddy,' Catherine said; but Nick could see why

Gerald was anxious, she was high on her own defiance tonight. He

watched Badger watching her, his grey-striped peak slicked back after

his shower, something disreputable and unattached about him; in

parts of Africa, according to Toby, he was known not as Badger but by

one of a number of words for hyena. Certainly he circled, and was

hungry for something. His lecherous teasing of his god-daughter was

allowed because it was of course impossible, a clownish joke.

Catherine stayed long enough to meet everyone and to test her claim

that Barry Groom never said hello. Gerald played along and said,

'Hello, Barry,' and not only seized his hand but covered it confirmingly

with his other hand, as if he was canvassing: at which Barry, looking

round the room with a suspicious smile, said, 'Gerald, I'm surprised at

you' - holding him there long enough to make him uneasy - 'a green

front door, that's hardly sending the right signal.' He got a laugh,

which was warmer and more complex than he expected -there was a

second or two while he grew into it, squared his shoulders. He followed

Gerald across the room, nodding in a vain, critical way as he was

introduced, but not saying hello. When Catherine shook his hand, he

said, 'Aha! Beautiful creature!' with a vaguely menacing presumptionof charm. Catherine asked him where his wife was and he said she

was still parking the car.

It was good that Catherine should want to be present, to be

presented, to help entertain the guests, but to the family it was also a

little sinister. She put everyone on edge by having her coat on indoors,

and seemed to be playing with her father's hopes that at any moment

she might leave. He glanced at her distractedly from time to time, as if

he would have liked to say something but had made the calculation

that the oddity of the coat was preferable to the naked flesh beneath it.

He introduced her to Morden Lipscomb with visible reluctance.

The grey old American, with his tiny granite-like sparkle of

charm, shook her hand and smiled mockingly, as if being confronted

with an ancient indiscretion he meant entirely to deny. Toby and Nick

were both watching her and Toby said, 'God, my sis looks like, you

know, one of those girls who try and lure you into striptease parlours.'

'She looks like a strippergram,' Sophie said.

Lady Partridge came in with that air of social vexation Nick had

seen in her before: she wanted to appear totally at home here and she

also wanted her arrival to be an event; her deafness added a querulous

uncertainty as to which effect she was having. Badger got her a drink

and flirted with her, and she allowed herself to be flirted with. She

liked Badger, having known him since he was a boy, and nursed him

through mumps once, when he was staying in the holidays - an

episode that was still referred to as a touchstone of their friendship,

and in a vaguely risque way, since apparently Badger's balls had been

the size of grapefruit. Nick had heard them joke about it earlier in the

week, and it had sounded like jokes he had with his own parents, that

were ribald litde reference points in a past before everything changed

and became indescribable.

All the time Nick was thinking about Leo, so that Leo seemed to

be the element, the invisible context, in which these daunting

disparate people were meeting and sparring and congratulating each

other. They didn't know it, which made it all the funnier and more

beautiful. He mixed himself a fresh gin-and-tonic, Gerald-style,

quinine lost in juniper, and drifted round not minding if he wasn't

spoken to. He looked at the pictures with a new keenness, as though

explaining them to Leo, his grateful pupil. The other MP and his wife,

John and Greta Timms, were standing in front of the Guardi with the

look of people who had come to the wrong party, who wanted more of a

challenge, he in a grey suit, she in the helpless boldness of a blue

maternity dress with a white bow at the neck: it was as if the PM

herself were pregnant. John Timms was a junior minister in the Home

Office; he must have been several years younger than Gerald, but he

had precocious gravitas and unflappable self-importance. If Barry

Groom never said hello, John Timms seemed at first not to blink. His