once, into some other world not quite discernible through the evening
mist on Worcester College lake. And the 'Oh good,' the 'Yes!' of his
arrival, the sight of his beautiful head and provoking little penis, were
all Nick got, really, from Wani, in those Oxford years, when he himself
was in disguise, behind books and beer glasses, 'out' as an aesthete, a
bit of a poet, 'the man who likes Bruckner!' but fearful of himself. And
now here he was with Wani, posing for this transient portrait, almost
challenging him in the glass - and it was like the first week again: he
was tensed for him to disappear.
He said, 'Do you ever sleep with Martine?' It hurt him to ask, and
his face stiffened jealously for the answer.
Wani looked round for his wallet. 'What an extraordinary
question.'
'Well, you're quite an extraordinary person, darling,' said Nick,
thinking, with his horror of discord, tliat he'd been too abrupt, and
pulling a hand through Wani's springy black curls.
'Here, have some of this and shut up,' said Wani, and grabbed
him between the legs as he came round the chair, like boys in a
playground, and perhaps with the same eagerness and confusion. Nick
didn't resist. He snorted up his line, and stepped away. Then Wani too,
re-rolling the note, bent his head and was about to swoop when they
both heard the dim cracks of footsteps, very close, already on the turn
of the top stairs; and a voice, under the breath, indistinguishable.
Wani twitched round and glared at the lock of the door, and Nick
with his heart racing ran through the memory of turning the key. Wani
snorted his line, up one nostril, pocketed the note and the wrapper
and turned over the book, all in a second or two. 'What are we doing?'
he mutteredNick shook his head. 'What are we doing…? Just talking about
the script Wani gave an absurd sigh, as if it might just do. Nick had
never seen him so anxious; and somehow he knew, as he held his
gaze, that Wani would punish him for having observed this moment of
panic. It wasn't the drugs so much as the hint of a guilty intimacy.
And now that it was done it was surely the locking of the door that was
suspicious. 'No, just ten minutes, baby,' the same voice said, Nick
smiled and closed his eyes, it was Jasper's phoney drawl, the familiar
floorboard outside the bathroom creaked, a dress brushed the wall,
and they heard the door of Catherine's room close, and almost at once
the rattle of the key. Nick and Wani nodded slowly and smiles of relief
and amusement and anticipation moved in sequence across their
faces.
For Wani the first hit of coke was always an erotic rush, and for
Nick too. They had kissed the first time they did coke together, their
first kiss, Wani's mouth sour with wine, his tongue darting, his eyes
timidly closed. Each time after that was a re-enactment of a thrilling
beginning. Anything seemed possible - the world was not only doable,
conquerable, but lovable: it showed its weaknesses and you knew it
would submit to you. You saw your own charm reflected in its eyes.
Nick stood and kissed Wani in the middle of the room - two or three
heavenly minutes that had been waiting to happen, a glowing collision,
a secret rift in the end of the day. They stood there, in their suits,
Wani's lightweight Italian 'grey', black really, like one of his father's
suits but made to hint and flow, Nick, in the needle-fine pinstripe Wani
had bought him, like one of the keen young professionals of the age,
the banker, the dealer, the estate agent even… Funny how sound
travelled in an old house - through blocked-off chimney spaces, along
joists. A rhythm almost inaudible to the cautious couple or
unsuspecting soloist who made it was relayed as a workmanlike
thump through the ceiling below or, as in this case, a busy squeak in
the room next door. Stroking Wani's penis through his open fly,
kissing his neck so that his skin stood up in shivers, Nick laughed but
he was embarrassed too, almost shocked to hear them at it (which he
never had before) and at it so prompdy and so fast. No wasteful
foreplay there - it made him wonder if Catherine was liking it, if Jasper
wasn't being a brute with her, when surely she needed such careful
handling. He felt Wani's grip tighten on his shoulder, pressing him
down, and he went down on one knee, looking up at him sternly, and
then on both knees and pulled his cock into his mouth. Wani wasn't
big but he was very pretty, and his hard-ons, at least until the coke
piled on too deep, were boyishly steep and rigid.
Nick worked on him easily and steadily, his own dick still
buttoned away in a hard diagonal, something else waiting to happen,
and the squeak of the telltale floorboard coming in rapid runsNick squeezed Wani's neck with each clause: 'I wish we didn't
have to carry on like this, I feel I've got to tell someone, I wish we could
tell people.'
'If you tell one person you've told everybody,' Wani said. 'You
might as well take a full-page ad in the Telegraph.'
'Well, I know you're very important, of course…'
'You don't think we'd be at a party like this if people knew what
we did, do you?'
'Mm. I don't see why not.'
You think you'd be hobnobbing with Dolly Kimbolton if she knew
you were a pretty boy.'
'She does know I'm a - that's such an absurd phrase!'
'You think so?'
'And anyway hobnobbing, as you call it, with Dolly Kimbolton is
hardly an indispensable part of my life. I've never pretended not to be
gay, it's you that's doing that, my dear. This is 1986. Things have
changed.'
'Yes. All the poofs are dropping like flies. Don't you think the
mother and father of Antoine might worry a bit about that?'
'That's not really the point, is it?'Wani made a litde moue. 'It's part of the point,' he said. 'You
know I have to be incredibly careful. You know the situation… There!'
He raised his hands as if he'd balanced something. 'Now there's a line
of beauty for you!' And he looked aside into the mirror, first at Nick
and then at himself. 'I think we have a pretty good time,' he said, in a
sudden weak appeal, but it was short of what Nick wanted.
Something happened when you looked in the mirror together.
You asked it, as always, a question, and you asked each other
something too; and the space, shadowy but glossy, the further room in
which you found yourself, as if on a stage, vibrated with ironies and
sentimental admissions. Or so it seemed to Nick. Now it was like a
doorway into the past, into the moment he had thought 'Oh good'
when Ouradi first appeared, having missed the start of term, in the
Anglo-Saxon class, and was called on to translate a bit of King Alfred,
which he did very decently - Nick had fixed on him already and
expected him, as a latecomer and a foreigner, to look for a friend in
this group of raw eighteen-year-olds. But he had vanished again at
Ah,' said Nick, unable to rise to such a wretched brag. In I be
back window of the car shiny white cushions were neatly aligned; he
couldn't see the number plate but the thought that it must be BO
something made him smirk - he pressed the a litde harder into a
ghasdy smile of admiration. One of (Catherine's neuroses was a horror
of maroon; it outdid her phobia of die au sound, or augmented it
perhaps, with some worse intimation. Nick saw what she meant.
Bertrand asked him a few questions about the recital, and paid
attention to die answers as though at a useful professional briefing.
'Amazing technique,' he repeated. 'Still very young,' he said, and shook
his head and dissected his salmon. High and capable though he was,
Nick hesitated to play die aesthete very thoroughly, hesitated to be
himself, in case his tone was GOO intimate and revealing. The
influence of Bertrand was as in its way as the coke, and he found
himself speaking gruffly to him. He wondered actually, despite diekeenness of his feelings, if Nina had been much good. Reactions were
skewed by her being so young. He pretended he was Dolly Kimbolton
and said, 'The Beedioven was heartbreaking,' but it wasn't a phrase
that Bertrand saw a use for. He looked at him narrowly and said, 'That
last thing she played was bloody good.'
Nick glanced out into the room to find Wani, who was sitting at a
table with his mother and a middle-aged woman who looked quite
prickly and confused under his long-lashed gaze. It was almost a decoy
of Wani's to let his gaze rest emptily but seductively on a woman. He
still hadn't spoken to Nick since his arrival; there had been a turn and
a nod, a sigh, as if to say, 'These crowds, these duties,' when they were
taking their seats. If it made him uneasy to see his lover and his father
tete-a-tete he was too clever to show it. Bertrand said, 'That son of
mine, who's he flirting with now?'
Nick laughed easily and said, 'Oh, I don't know. Some MP's wife, I
expect.'
'Flirting, flirting, that's all he bloody does!' said Bertrand, with a
mocking flutter of his own eyelashes. Dapper and primped as he was,
he became almost camp. Nick pictured the daily task of shaving above
and below that line of moustache, the joy of the matutinal steel, and
then the joy of the dressing room that was like a department of a shop.
He said, 'He may flirt, but you know he never really looks at another
woman,' and was thrilled by his own wickedness.
'I know, I know,' said Bertrand, as though cross at being taken
seriously, but also perhaps reassured. 'So how's it going - at the
office?'
'Oh fine, I think.'
'You still got all those pretty boys there?'
'Um 'I don't know why he has to have all these bloody pretty
poofy boys.'
"Well, I think they're very good at their jobs,' Nick said, so
horrified he sounded almost apologetic. 'Simon Jones is an excellent
graphic designer, and Howard Wasserstein is a brilliant script editor.'
'So when does the bloody shooting start on the film?'
'Ah - you'd have to ask Wani that.'
Bertrand popped a new potato into his mouth and said, 'I already
did - he never tells me nothing.' He flapped his napkin. 'What is the
bloody film anyway?'
'Well, we're thinking about adapting The Spoils ofPoynton, um…'
'Plenty of smooching, plenty of action,' Bertrand said.
Nick smiled thinly and thought rapidly and discovered that these
were two elements entirely lacking from the novel. He said, 'Wani's
hoping to get James Stallard to be in it.' Bertrand gave him a wary
look. 'Another pretty boy?''Well, he's generally agreed to be very good-looking. He's one of
the rising young stars.'
'I read something about him 'Well, he recently got married to
Sophie Tipper,' Nick said. 'Sir Maurice Tipper's daughter. It was in all
the papers. Of course she used to go out with Toby - Gerald and
Rachel's son.' He produced all this hetero stuff like a distracting proof;
he hoped he wouldn't normally be so cravenly reassuring.
Bertrand smiled as if nothing would surprise him. 'I heard he let
a big fish go.'
Nick blushed for some reason, and started talking about the
magazine, with the brightness of a novice salesman, not yet committed
and not yet cynical; he told him that he and Wani were going on a trip
to research subjects for it - and that was the nearest he could get to
stating the unspeakable fact of their affair.
For a second he imagined telling Bertrand the truth, in all its
mischievous beauty, imagined describing, like some praiseworthy
business initiative, the skinhead rent boy they'd had in last week for a
threesome. Just then he felt a kind of sadness - well, the shine went
off things, as he'd known it would, his mood was petering into
greyness, a grey restlessness. He felt condemned to this with Bertrand.
It was just what had happened at Lowndes Square: the secret certainty
faded after half an hour and gave way to a somehow enhanced state of
doubt. The manageable joke of Bertrand became a penance. Nick was
powerless, fidgety, sulkily appeasing, in the grip of a man who seemed
to him in every way the opposite of himself, a tight litde bundle of ego
in a shiny suit. Something awful happened with a waitress, who was
taking round a wine bottle. She was black, and Nick had noticed
already the flickers of discomfort and mimes of broadmindedness as
she moved through the room and gave everyone what they wanted.
Bertrand held out his glass and she filled it with Chablis for him - he
watched her as she did it, and as she smiled and turned interrogatively
to Nick, Bertrand said, 'No, you bloody idiot, do you think I drink this?
I want mineral water.' The girl recoiled for just a second at the smart of
his tone, at the slap-down of service, and then apologized with steely
insincerity. Nick said, 'Oh, I'm sure we can get you some water, we've
got masses of water!' in a sweedy anxious way, as if to soften
Bertrand's tone, to apologize for him himself, to give a breath of
laughter to a rough moment; while Bertrand held the glass out stiffly
towards her, expressionless save for a steady contemptuous blink. She
held her dignity for a moment longer, while Nick's smile pleaded with
her not to mind and with him to relent. But Bertrand said, 'Don't you
know bloody nothing?
- Take this away,' and glared at Nick as if to enlist or excite a
similar outrage in him. Then when the girl had marched off, without
saying a word, he looked down, sighed, and smiled ruefully, almosttenderly at Nick, as though to say that he would have liked to spare
him such a scene, but that he himself was afraid of no one.
Nick knew he should move away, but he hadn't finished his main
course; he took shameful refuge in it as a reason not to make a scene
of his own. Other people must have heard. Tucked away in the window
seat they must look like conspirators. Bertrand was talking about
property now, and weighing the merits of wn against those of SW3; it
seemed he too was thinking of moving to the neighbourhood. He
looked at the room as if trying it on. 'Well, it's lovely here,' Nick said
sadly, and gazed out of the window at the familiar street, at Bertrand's
horrible maroon car, at the half-recognized evening life in the houses
opposite, and at the big blond man who came up from the area of one
of them, unlocked the big black motorbike that stood on the pavement
outside, straddled it, pulled on and buckled his helmet, kicked the
bike into eager life and three seconds later was gone. Only a buzz, a
drone that faded as it rose, could be heard amid the high noise of talk
in the room. It was as if the summons of the Chopin had been
answered and the freedom seized by a lucky third person.
'Aah…' Gerald was saying, hovering like a waiter himself, the best
of all waiters, 'I hope everything's all right.' He held a bottle of water in
one hand and a freshly opened bottle of Taittinger in the other, as if
hedging his bets.
'Marvellous!' said Bertrand, pretending not to notice these things,
and then making a Gallic gesture of flattered surprise. 'You're very
kind, to wait on me yourself.'
'These young girls don't always know what they're doing,' said
Gerald. Nick said, 'Gerald, obviously you've met… Mr Ouradi.'
'We haven't really met,' said Gerald, bowing and smiling
secretively, 'but I'm absolutely delighted you're here.'
'Well, what a marvellous concert,' Bertrand said. 'The pianist had
amazing technique. For one so young…'
'Amazing,' Gerald agreed. 'Well, you saw her here first!'
With an effect of creaking diplomatic machinery Dolly Kimbolton
rolled into view, and Bertrand stood up, passing his plate with its
toppling knife and fork to Nick. 'Hello!' she said.
'Have you met Lady Kimbolton? Mr Bertram Ouradi, one of our
great supporters.'
They shook hands, Dolly leaning forward with the air of a busy
headmistress rounding up stragglers for some huge collective effort.
Bertrand said, in his tone of clear, childish self-importance, 'Yes, I'm
making quite a contribution.
Quite a big contribution to the party.'
'Splendid!' said Dolly, and gave him a smile in which political zeal
managed almost entirely to disguise some older instinct about Middle
Eastern shopkeepers.'I don't know if we might all have a litde chat…?' said Gerald,
raising the champagne bottle. 'And I think we might be needing this.'
The suggestion obviously didn't include Nick, who as so often wasn't
visible and certainly wasn't relevant, and who was left, when the other
three went off, holding Bertrand's unfinished supper as well as his
own. He closed the door, locked the door, and reached out for Wani,
who patted him and kissed him on die nose as he turned away.
'Where's the stuff?' said Wani.
Nick went over to the desk, unhappy but caught up too in the
business of the coke, which if he was patient enough might make them
both happy again. He got out the tin from the bottom drawer. Wani
said, 'A tin is such an obvious place to hide it.'
'Darling, no one even knows I've got anything to hide.' He passed
Wani the packet and smiled reproachfully. 'It's just like our wonderful
secret love affair.'
Wani pulled out the chair and sat down at the desk, litde clouds
and gleams of possible rejoinders passing across his features. He
peered at the stack of library books and selected Henry James and the
Question of Romance by Mildred R.
Pullman, which had a sleek Mylar sleeve protecting its dark
jacket. 'This should do,' he said. He had never been in Nick's room
before, and it was clear that it held no magic for him of the kind Nick
had felt in Wani's room at Lowndes Square. Well, he wasn't one who
noticed such things. He didn't thank Nick for meeting Ronnie or show
any intuition of the scary drama it had been for him.
Nick said, to remind him,
'I had such a sweet litde chat with Ronnie. It seems he's hoping to
move to this area.' Wani said nothing, tipping out a bit of the rough
powder onto the book.
'He is very nice, isn't he?' Nick went on. 'It was quite a business -
ringing him and waiting and ringing again… And of course he was
late…!'
Wani said, 'You only like him because he's a wog. You probably
fancy him.'
'Not particularly,' said Nick, whose wave of sexual feeling for him
had been just a part of the criminal excitement, tension and relief at
the same time, the feeling that Ronnie accepted not only his money but
him; and then, to get it done, '1 wish you wouldn't use that word. I
keep trying to believe you're not as irredeemable as your father.'
Wani weighed this up for a moment. 'So what was Papa talking to
you about?' he said.Nick sighed and paced across the room - where they both were
again, in the subdy glamorized light and depth of the wardrobe mirror.
He had imagined Wani's being here so often, lor secret sleepovers and
also, in some other dispensation, Irccly and openly, as his lover and
partner. He said, 'Oh, he wants to move to this area too, apparently.'
He gave a snuffly kllgh. 'I ought to put him in touch with Jasper.'
"That Jasper's a sexy litde slut,' said Wani, and it wasn't i|iiite
his usual tone. 'Yeah…? All white boys look the same to me,' said Nick.
'Ha ha.' Wani studied his work. 'So - what else did he say?'
'Your old man? Oh, he was just pumping me again about you,
and about the film.
He has no idea what's going on, of i ourse, but I think he's
decided that I hold the key to the mystery. I did what I could to
persuade him there wasn't a mystery'
'Maybe you're the mystery,' said Wani. 'He doesn't know what to
make of you.'
This was probably true, but also terribly unfair. Nick was longing
to make a declaration, and now he felt violent towards Wani as well:
his pulse was thumping in his neck as he stood behind him, then put
his hands on his shoulders. All evening he'd needed to touch him, and
the contact was convulsive when it came. Wani was working
painstakingly and a little defensively with his gold card, making rapid
hatching movements to and fro across the partially visible features of
Henry James - not the great bald Master but the quick-eyed, tender,
brilliant twenty-year-old, with an irrepressible kink in his dark hair. Nick squeezed Wani's neck with each clause: 'I wish we didn't
have to carry on like this, I feel I've got to tell someone, I wish we could
tell people.'
'If you tell one person you've told everybody,' Wani said. 'You
might as well take a full-page ad in the Telegraph.'
'Well, I know you're very important, of course…'
'You don't think we'd be at a party like this if people knew what
we did, do you?'
'Mm. I don't see why not.'
You think you'd be hobnobbing with Dolly Kimbolton if she knew
you were a pretty boy.'
'She does know I'm a - that's such an absurd phrase!'
'You think so?'
'And anyway hobnobbing, as you call it, with Dolly Kimbolton is
hardly an indispensable part of my life. I've never pretended not to be
gay, it's you that's doing that, my dear. This is 1986. Things have
changed.'
'Yes. All the poofs are dropping like flies. Don't you think the
mother and father of Antoine might worry a bit about that?'
'That's not really the point, is it?'Wani made a litde moue. 'It's part of the point,' he said. 'You
know I have to be incredibly careful. You know the situation… There!'
He raised his hands as if he'd balanced something. 'Now there's a line
of beauty for you!' And he looked aside into the mirror, first at Nick
and then at himself. 'I think we have a pretty good time,' he said, in a
sudden weak appeal, but it was short of what Nick wanted.
Something happened when you looked in the mirror together.
You asked it, as always, a question, and you asked each other
something too; and the space, shadowy but glossy, the further room in
which you found yourself, as if on a stage, vibrated with ironies and
sentimental admissions. Or so it seemed to Nick. Now it was like a
doorway into the past, into the moment he had thought 'Oh good'
when Ouradi first appeared, having missed the start of term, in the
Anglo-Saxon class, and was called on to translate a bit of King Alfred,
which he did very decently - Nick had fixed on him already and
expected him, as a latecomer and a foreigner, to look for a friend in
this group of raw eighteen-year-olds. But he had vanished again at
once, into some other world not quite discernible through the evening
mist on Worcester College lake. And the 'Oh good,' the 'Yes!' of his
arrival, the sight of his beautiful head and provoking little penis, were
all Nick got, really, from Wani, in those Oxford years, when he himself
was in disguise, behind books and beer glasses, 'out' as an aesthete, a
bit of a poet, 'the man who likes Bruckner!' but fearful of himself. And
now here he was with Wani, posing for this transient portrait, almost
challenging him in the glass - and it was like the first week again: he
was tensed for him to disappear.
He said, 'Do you ever sleep with Martine?' It hurt him to ask, and
his face stiffened jealously for the answer.
Wani looked round for his wallet. 'What an extraordinary
question.'
'Well, you're quite an extraordinary person, darling,' said Nick,
thinking, with his horror of discord, tliat he'd been too abrupt, and
pulling a hand through Wani's springy black curls.
'Here, have some of this and shut up,' said Wani, and grabbed
him between the legs as he came round the chair, like boys in a
playground, and perhaps with the same eagerness and confusion. Nick
didn't resist. He snorted up his line, and stepped away. Then Wani too,
re-rolling the note, bent his head and was about to swoop when they
both heard the dim cracks of footsteps, very close, already on the turn
of the top stairs; and a voice, under the breath, indistinguishable.
Wani twitched round and glared at the lock of the door, and Nick
with his heart racing ran through the memory of turning the key. Wani
snorted his line, up one nostril, pocketed the note and the wrapper
and turned over the book, all in a second or two. 'What are we doing?'
he muttered.Nick shook his head. 'What are we doing…? Just talking about
the script Wani gave an absurd sigh, as if it might just do. Nick had
never seen him so anxious; and somehow he knew, as he held his
gaze, that Wani would punish him for having observed this moment of
panic. It wasn't the drugs so much as the hint of a guilty intimacy.
And now that it was done it was surely the locking of the door that was
suspicious. 'No, just ten minutes, baby,' the same voice said, Nick
smiled and closed his eyes, it was Jasper's phoney drawl, the familiar
floorboard outside the bathroom creaked, a dress brushed the wall,
and they heard the door of Catherine's room close, and almost at once
the rattle of the key. Nick and Wani nodded slowly and smiles of relief
and amusement and anticipation moved in sequence across their
faces.
For Wani the first hit of coke was always an erotic rush, and for
Nick too. They had kissed the first time they did coke together, their
first kiss, Wani's mouth sour with wine, his tongue darting, his eyes
timidly closed. Each time after that was a re-enactment of a thrilling
beginning. Anything seemed possible - the world was not only doable,
conquerable, but lovable: it showed its weaknesses and you knew it
would submit to you. You saw your own charm reflected in its eyes.
Nick stood and kissed Wani in the middle of the room - two or three
heavenly minutes that had been waiting to happen, a glowing collision,
a secret rift in the end of the day. They stood there, in their suits,
Wani's lightweight Italian 'grey', black really, like one of his father's
suits but made to hint and flow, Nick, in the needle-fine pinstripe Wani
had bought him, like one of the keen young professionals of the age,
the banker, the dealer, the estate agent even… Funny how sound
travelled in an old house - through blocked-off chimney spaces, along
joists. A rhythm almost inaudible to the cautious couple or
unsuspecting soloist who made it was relayed as a workmanlike
thump through the ceiling below or, as in this case, a busy squeak in
the room next door. Stroking Wani's penis through his open fly,
kissing his neck so that his skin stood up in shivers, Nick laughed but
he was embarrassed too, almost shocked to hear them at it (which he
never had before) and at it so prompdy and so fast. No wasteful
foreplay there - it made him wonder if Catherine was liking it, if Jasper
wasn't being a brute with her, when surely she needed such careful
handling. He felt Wani's grip tighten on his shoulder, pressing him
down, and he went down on one knee, looking up at him sternly, and
then on both knees and pulled his cock into his mouth. Wani wasn't
big but he was very pretty, and his hard-ons, at least until the coke
piled on too deep, were boyishly steep and rigid.
Nick worked on him easily and steadily, his own dick still
buttoned away in a hard diagonal, something else waiting to happen,
and the squeak of the telltale floorboard coming in rapid runs, like amanic mouse, and then with impressive intermittence; Nick almost
went with it, but it was a distraction too, like the voices on the stair, a
kind of brake or warning. They must have moved the bed, or they were
fucking on the floor perhaps. He pictured tliem, Catherine vaguely and
anxiously, Jasper much more vividly.
Wani's hands stroked and clutched at Nick's hair, tugged on it
unpleasantly hard. 'They're really going at it,' he murmured. 'The little
sluts…' Nick glanced up and saw him smiling, in his erotic trance, not
at him directly but at the two of them in the mirror; and also (Nick
knew) staring through the mirror, and me wardrobe itself, into die
room beyond, which he had never seen and which was just as readily
the motel bedroom of some seedy flick. 'They're really going at it - die
little sluts' - Nick heard how he loved saying it again, whispering it,
and grunted as Wani's little dirusts against his face fell into the
accelerating rhythm of the kids next door. He felt awkward, pulled in
to service a fantasy he couldn't quite share - he tried again, he'd jerked
off a few times about Jasper already, but Catherine was his sister, and
on lidiium, and, well… a girl. He heard her voice now, quick staccato
wails… and Wani's breathing, slipping away from him just at the
moment he had him. And then another idea came to him, a second
resort, a silent, comical revenge on Wani while he brought him off- it
was Ronnie he'd invited in, to solace him for his woman trouble, to give
him ten minutes of real care, man to man. It took a little adjustment,
of course, a little further twist on make-believe, since the Ronnie he'd
imagined was twice the size of Wani - at least. But as Wani pulled out
and Nick squeezed his eyes tight shut, it could almost have been
Ronnie in front of him, instead of the man he loved.
Downstairs, a litde later, in die drawing room, the coda of the
party was unwinding, and Gerald opening new bottles of champagne
as though he made no distinction between the boring drunks who 'sat',
and die knowing few of the inner circle, gathered round the empty
marble fireplace. The Timmses were there, and Barry Groom, with
their different fanatical ways of talking, their shades of zeal and
exasperation - all alien to Nick more than ever in die lull after drugs
and sex. He saw that Polly Tompkins was sitting with them, as if
among equals, and already impatient for somediing superior. Gerald, it
was clear, hadn't yet got round to die new paper on Third World debt.
'Have a look at it,' said Polly, and nodded at him like a genial don. The
strange thing was that it was also Gerald's nod, just as his white collar
was Gerald's collar. The mimicry wasf artful, slightly amorous, and
since the love was hopeless, slighdy mocking too.
Really everything nice about Polly was a calculation.
Morgan, the woman Polly had brought, came to join Gerald's
group, where they were going back over the scandal of Oxford refusing
the PM an honorary degree.John Timms, with his intense belief in form, regarded the
incident as an outrage, but Barry Groom, who hadn't bothered with
Oxford, said, 'Fuck 'em's what I say,' in a sharp frank tone that made
Morgan blush and then weigh in like a man herself. The only touching
thing about her was her evident uncertainty as to when or why
anything was funny. 'They seem to think the lady's not for learning,'
Gerald said. She looked bewilderedly at their laughing faces.
From the balcony, in the late July evening, the gardens receded
in depth beyond depth of green, like some mysterious Hodgkin, to a
point where a faintly luminous couple reclined on the grass. The
astonishing greenness of London in summer. The great pale height of
the after-dusk sky, birds cheeping and falling silent, an invincible
solitude stretching out from the past like the slowly darkening east.
The darkness climbed the sky, and die colours surrendered, the green
became a dozen greys and blacks, the distant couple faded and
disappeared.
'Hallo there…!'
'Oh hi, Jasper.'
'How are you, then, darling?' - almost tweaking him in the ribs.
'Very well. How are you?'
'Ooh, not bad. A bit tired…'
'Hmm. What have you been up to?'
Young Jasper, no younger probably than Nick, but with his
chancy just-out-of-school look, quick and lazy at the same time, his
flirtiness, his assumption he knew you, as if by bedding, or flooring,
Catherine he gained equal rights, an instant history, with her intimate
old friend… Jasper couldn't have known they'd been overheard
upstairs, but his little smirk coming and going invited you to guess
he'd been up to something. He had the pink of sex about him still. He
leant by Nick on the balustrade, and he was clearly fairly drunk. 'Is
Catherine OK?'
'Yeah… She's a bit knackered, she's turned in. This isn't really
her sort of scene.'
Nick stared at the compound presumption of this remark and
said, 'Things going OK between you two?'
'Ooh yes,' said Jasper, with a momentary pout, a wincing frown,
to say how very hot it was. 'No, she's a lovely lady.'
Nick couldn't rise to this. After a moment he said, as nicely as he
could, 'You are looking after her, aren't you, Jasper?'
'Hark at Uncle Nick,' said Jasper, piqued and somehow furtive.
'I mean, she seems quite steady at the moment, but it would just
be disastrous if she came off this medication again.'
'I think she's got it all sorted out,' said Jasper, after a pause,
adjusting his tone, his whole accent. He stood back and pushed his
right hand through his glossy chestnut forelock, which immediately fellforward again; then the hand went into his jacket pocket, with just the
thumb hooked out: subtly annoying gestures meant perhaps to convey
commitment and dash to the doubtful house-buyer. 'She thinks the
world of you, Nick,' he said. Polly Tompkins had come out onto the
balcony, perhaps jealous at seeing Nick with the boy he had squashed
unavailingly earlier. Nick introduced them in a thinly amused tone
which made no great claims for either of them. 'I thought you were
avoiding me,' he said.
Jasper was waiting casually to see what the terms were, and if
this big fat double-breasted man, who could have been anything
between twenty-five and fifty, was part of the gay conspiracy or the
straight one. Polly said, 'You're such a social butterfly, I haven't been
able to reach you with my net,' and looked at Jasper as if to say he
could find a use for him, if Nick couldn't. Nick said, 'Well, I was a
social caterpillar for years.'
Polly smiled and took out a packet of fags. 'You seem to be very
close with our friend Mr Ouradi. What were you talking to him about, I
wonder?'
'Oh, you know… cinema… Beethoven… Henry |ames.'
'Mmm…' Polly looked at the Silk Cut - a quitter's ten -but didn't
open them. 'Or Lord Ouradi, as I suppose we shall soon be saying.'
Nick struggled to look unsurprised as he ran through all the
reasons that Polly might be pulling his leg. He said, 'I wouldn't be
surprised - there's a sort of reverse social gravity these days, isn't
there. People just plummet upstairs.'
'I think Bertrand's rather more deserving than that,' said Polly,
successfully resisting and pocketing the cigarettes.
Anyway, he's not British, is he?' Nick said airily, and rather
proud of this objection. It was Polly, after all, who'd once called him a
Levantine grocer.
'That's hardly an insuperable problem,' said Polly with a i|iiick
pitying smile.
'Well, we must be going. I just wanted to say goodbye. Morgan
has an early start tomorrow. She has to lly up to Edinburgh.'
'Well, my dear,' said Nick, 'one never sees you these days. I've
given up keeping your place warm for you at the Shaftesbury' - a
kindness, a bit of a sentimental gesture at the sort of friendship they
had never actually had.
And Polly did a small but extraordinary thing: he looked at Nick
and said, 'Not that I remotely concur with what you've just said - about
the peerage.' He didn't flush or frown or grimace, but his long fat face
seemed to harden in a fixative of threat and denial.
He went in, and Jasper followed him, turning to give Nick a curt
little nod, in his own unconscious impression of Polly, so that themannerism seemed to spread, a note of contempt that was a sign of
allegiance.The service stairs were next to the main stairs, separated only by a
wall, but what a difference there was between them: the narrow back
stairs, dangerously unrailed, under the bleak gleam of a skylight, each
step worn down to a steep hollow, turned tightly in a deep grey shaft;
whereas the great main sweep, a miracle of cantilevers, dividing and
joining again, was hung with the portraits of prince-bishops, and had
ears of corn in its wrought-iron banisters that trembled to the tread. It
was glory at last, an escalation of delight, from which small doors,
flush with the panelling, moved by levers below the prince-bishops'
high-heeled and rosetted shoes, gave access, at every turn, to the back
stairs, and their treacherous gloom. How quickly, without noticing, one
ran from one to the other, after the proud White Rabbit, a well-known
Old Harrovian porn star with a sphincter that winked as bells rang,
crowds murmured and pigeons flopped about the dormer window while
Nick woke and turned in his own little room again, in the comfortable
anticlimax of home.
On his back, in the curtained light, the inveterate habits of home
took hold of him without a word… Wani, of course… yes, Wani… in the
car… and that time with Ricky, the outrage of it… though home,
historically, was a shrine of Toby-longing, almost extinct now, worked
up only in moods of vicious nostalgia… still, it seemed possible… Toby
of three years ago… at Hawkeswood… morning after the great party…
calling him into the King's Room, sweaty with hangover under one
roiled sheet… 'Fuck, what a night…!' and then he darted to the
bathroom… only time he saw him naked… great innocent rower's
arse… did that happen… did what happened next happen… and Wani
that night… met him on the stairs… who would have dreamt… dark
green velvet… oh god, Wani in the flat… tied to the posts of the ogee
bed… It must be Mrs Creeley with his mother in the drive. They were
talking about the car, Nick's little Mazda, 'a nice litde runaround' his
father had called it, to minimize their evident anxiety as to how he had
come by such a thing. NG 2485: Mrs Creeley was thrilled by the
number plate, Mrs Guest perhaps not so sure.
('You must be doing very well, dear,' she had said, in just the
tone she would use to say 'You don't look very well, dear.') Wood
pigeons in the trees, in the thick spruces at the front, making their
broody calls, reproachful, condoning -who knew? The two women
moved away, in the slow trawl of gossip, over the gravel: talk about thesale of the field, syllables only, on the faint breeze through the open
top window, overlaid by the pigeons, the talk beaded and chiming,
rhythmic and nonsensical, the breeze lifting and dropping the curtain
in one lazy breath, hushing the voices. The lie-in: time-honoured
concession of school holidays, the rare weekend visits. His father
would have gone to the shop - he might have woken to the familiar
drag of garage door, thump of car door, and then wandered sideways
again into staircase dreams. Mrs Creeley went, he didn't hear his
mother come inside, she had probably got up in gardening trousers, an
old blouse that didn't matter. They had Gerald descending tonight, and
the house, inside and out, would be ready for an inspection… A little
later came the leisurely clop of a horse, sounds as abstract and
calming as other people's exertions on the tennis courts at home -at
his other home. He wasn't sure, but he thought it was right that no
horse had equal tone or resonance in all four hooves, as it distanced it
made an odd sauntering impression, a syncopation, until lastly only
one hoof continued faintly to be heard.
Out on the edge of town was where they were, where they'd
carefully and long-sightedly chosen to be, on Cherry Tree Lane, decent
post-war houses with plenty of garden, and only a view of fields at the
back, and horses leaning in from time to time to chomp at the
delphiniums and the weeping willow. And now the dreaded thing had
happened, Sidney Hayes had bought next door, and thus at last got
access from the lane to the field where he kept his horses, and got
planning permission too, exceedingly quickly, five houses to the acre.
Everyone had objected to the plans, and Nick had even been made
embarrassingly to bring it up with Gerald, as their MP, who said of
course he'd put a stop it, but quickly lost interest since no conditions
had been breached, in fact rather the reverse, there was a property
boom, home ownership was within the grasp of all, and even with the
new development on top of them the value of 'Linnells' was destined to
soar. All this cast a muddling running shadow over Don and Dot
Guest's lives. They were more comfortable than they'd ever been,
business was better, and yet across their treasured view a long-held
worry was about to materialize in bricks and slates.
Despite its long mute presence in his life Nick found it hard to
care for the house, its pinkish walls and metal-framed windows; it
lacked poetry. At Linnells, as Gerald had said of Hawkeswood, the
contents were the thing: a ruck of furniture, crowded families of
Staffordshire and Chelsea figures, three clocks ticking competitively in
one room, where the real family sat, supervised and even a little
oppressed by their own possessions. Which changed, unpredictably,
when something came into the shop that Don wanted to live with, or
when a buyer was suddenly found for something in the house. So the
market squeezed on them, acceptably, amusingly, and they would let achest or a grandfather clock go, which in Nick's young life had the
status of an heirloom already. For years he had had a nice wide walnut
bed, a snug double of imagined couplings - the whorls and fans in the
grain of the walnut were the underwater blooms of adolescent thought,
pale pond-life of a hundred lie-ins. But one Christmas, in fact die one
after he had come out, he arrived home to find it had been sold from
under him, and replaced by something plain, modern, single and
inhibitingly squeaky. In the past year or so, as business boomed, Don
had started asking 'London prices', which had always been family code
for extortion.
Meanwhile London prices themselves had climbed, so Guest's
was still cheaper and worth a day trip from town. Yesterday, after the
big uneasy surprise of the car, Nick had had his own surprise, the
missing bureau. 'You'll never guess what I got for it,' his father said -
with a look of unaccustomed and still embarrassed greed.
Nick came downstairs and glanced out coyly at the car. He liked
to give himself that little prepared surprise, it was new enough for the
thrill of its first arrival to flare up beautifully again each morning. Like
a child's new present it lit up a dull day, and made it worth getting up
and going out, just to sit in the simmer of London traffic and feel the
throb of possession. If it had shocked his parents, then it had shocked
him too, die colour, the grin of it, the number plate, all things he
wouldn't have chosen for himself. But the burden of choice and
discretion had been taken off him, it was what Wani wanted him to
have, and he let himself go. The car was his lower nature, wrapped in
a gift ribbon, and he came to a quick accommodation with it, and
found it not so bad or so low after all. A first car was a big day for a
boy, and he wished his parents could just have clapped their hands at
the fun of it; but that wasn't their way. He explained, as he smiled
anxiously, that it was all to do with work, it was a tax write-off, it was
nonsense he didn't understand himself. He tried to entertain diem with
the mechanism of the roof, and opened the bonnet for his father to
look at the cylinders and things, which he did with a nod and a hum;
clocks, not engines, were his oily interest. Nick wondered why they
couldn't share in his excitement; but had to admit, after ten minutes,
that he'd somehow known they wouldn't - the hilarity of his arrival had
been a self-delusion. He thought of an obscure childhood incident
when he'd stolen ten shillings from his mother to buy her a present of
a little china hen; he'd denied it through such storms of tears that he
wasn't sure now if he'd stolen the money or not; he'd almost convinced
himself of his innocence. The episode still darkened his mind as a
failed, an obscurely guilty, attempt to please. It was the same with the
car, they couldn't see where it came from, and they were right in a
way, since they knew him so well: there was something very important
he wasn't telling them. In Rachel's terms the Mazda was certainlyvulgar and potentially unsafe; but for Don and Dot its shiny red snout
in the drive was more than that, it was the shock of who Nick was, and
the disappointment.
Gerald was in Barwick on various duties, first the Summer Fete,
which he was opening at two o'clock, and later a dinner at the Crown
to mark the retirement of the agent; in between he was due to look in
at Cherry Tree Lane for a drink.
It was the last weekend bef amp; re their departure to France,
and his usual bad temper about anything to do with Barwick was only
soothed by the prospect of making speeches at at least two of these
events. Rachel had stayed at home, and Penny had come tip with
Gerald to write down people's names on bits of paper and prevent
those muddles which had caused some bad feeling in die past.
The Barwick Fete, which Nick hadn't been to since his
schooldays, was held in Abbots' Field, a park near the middle of town.
On a normal Saturday afternoon the field had two dim attractions, a
fragment of the once great Augustinian abbey, and a Gents where the
maniacal rejoinders and obliterations of the graffiti had come to
interest Nick in his adolescence even more than the Curvilinear tracery
of the monks' choir. He had never made contact in the Gents, never
acted on die graffiti, but whenever he passed it on a walk with his
mother and heard the busy unattended flush of the urinal, his look
became tense and tactful, he felt the kinship of an unknown crowd.
Today the field was ringed with stalls, there was a skittle alley hedged
with straw bales, a traction engine let out shrill whistles, and the silver
prize band warred euphoniously with a jangling old carousel. Nick
wandered round feeling both distinguished and invisible. He stopped
to talk to friends of his parents, who were genial but just perceptibly
short with him, because of what they knew or guessed about him.
The friendliness, a note of bright supportive pity, was really
directed to his parents, not to him. It made him wonder for a moment
how he was talked about; it must be hard for his motlier to boast
about him. Being sort of the art adviser on a non-existent magazine
was as obscure and unsatisfactory as being gay. He scented a false
respect, which perhaps was just good manners; a reluctance to be
drawn into truth-telling talk. He saw Mr Leverton, his old English
master, who had done The Turn of the Screw with him and sent him
off to Oxford, and they had a chat about Nick's doctorate. Nick called
him Stanley now, with a residual sense of transgression. He felt a kind
of longing behind Mr Leverton s black-framed glasses for the larger
field of speculation Nick was moving in, and for other things too. The
old tone of crisp enthusiasm quavered with a new anxiety about
keeping up. He said, 'Come back and see us! Come and talk to the A-
level lot. We've had a very jolly Hopkins group this year.' Later Nick
said hello to Miss Avison, who much earlier in his life had taught himballroom dancing; his motlier had said it would be something he'd
always be grateful for.
She remembered all the children she'd taught, and with no
acknowledgement that they'd grown and changed and hadn't danced a
waltz or a two-step for twenty years. Nick felt for a moment he was still
a treasured and blissfully obedient little boy.
The tannoy crackled and whined. Nick was at the far end of the
field, dawdling behind a group of local lads, and pretending to admire
a stall of primitive local pottery. The mayoress made a very dull
speech, but it rode on the goodwill of the audience, and on the
expectation that it would be over much sooner than it was. Families
rambled with a half-attentive air across the grass. Her chain could be
seen, the glint of glasses, and her bright-blue, white-bowed prime-
ministerial dress, on the low platform; and, Gerald, standing behind,
with beaming impatience. She said something unfortunate about not
being. ible to get a celebrity to open the proceedings this summer, but
at least the person they had got was on time - 'unlike a cer-t. iin star of
the airwaves last year!' After this Gerald leapt up to i lie mike as if
seizing the controls of a bus from a drunk.
There was applause, not easy to measure, lost in the open air; as
well as one or two shouts and klaxon-squawks to remind (icrald that
though he had a large majority there were still constituents unsedated
by council-house sales and tax cuts. 'I liked it when they had Derek
Nimmo,' a woman said to Nick. Nick knew what she meant, he
absorbed people's gibes about i Icrald without protest, but still felt the
old secret pride at knowing him. He gazed around, followed the Carter
boy's? hazing arse with his eyes, smiled loyally at Gerald's jokes, and
sensed in them a mixture of piety and condescension rather like his
own. He felt so decadent here. And how could you honestly expect
Gerald, at the door of the Cabinet, in the I. uly's favour, an amusing
speaker from the floor of the House, to bother very much for an
audience of squalling kids and deaf pensioners?
Catherine said Gerald despised his constituents. 'If only you
didn't have to be MP for somewhere,' she said, 'Gerald would be
completely happy. You know he loathes Barwick, don't you.' Nick had
laughed at this, but wondered if his 'dear ma and pa' were in fact
exempt from die loathing. 'This is a classic English day,' Gerald was
saying now, 'and a classic English scene.' And Nick appealed against
Catherine's judgement. Surely something else is happening, beneath
the cheerful imposture: it can't help mattering to him - as he speaks
these platitudes he comes to think they're fine words after all, he's
caught up on a wave of rhetoric and selfesteem. He told a joke about a
Frenchman on a cycling holiday tliat went down well; and as he wound
up, at just the right time, he managed to suggest that far from being a
rich businessman who came down from London to loathe them he wasin fact the spirit of Barwick, the Pickwick of Barwick, opening the fete
to them as if it were his own house. He cut the tape, which demarcated
nothing, in a decisive lunge: the sliding snap of the shears could be
heard over the microphone.
After this Gerald was led off on a quasi-royal tour of the fete, his
style hampered by the mayoress, who fell naturally into the role of
consort. Nick wanted to keep an eye on who was going into the Gents,
but felt the pull of the London party too, and strolled over to join
Penny. 'That went well,' he said.
'Gerald was excellent, of course,' said Penny. 'We're not very
pleased with the mayoress.' They watched the mayoress now, at the
jam stall, looking at the prices as if they were trying to cheat her, and
might need beating down; at which Gerald, who didn't know the shop
price of anything except champagne and haircuts, impulsively bought
two jars of marmalade for a fiver and posed with them for the local
press. 'Hold them up a bit, sir!' - and Gerald, always reassured by the
attendance of photographers, cupped them in front of him, almost
lewdly, until Penny came forward, silent agent of a wish, and took
them from him; he held on to them for a moment as he passed them
over and murmured, 'Je dois me separer de cette femme commune.'
At the tombola he bought ten tickets, and stood around waiting
for the draw. The prizes were bottles, of all kinds, from HP Sauce to
Johnnie Walker. He hadn't dressed for the country at all, and his
keynote blue shirt with white collar and red tie, and'his double-
breasted pinstripe suit, stood out as a dash of Westminster among the
shirtsleeves and jeans and cheap cotton frocks. He nodded and smiled
at a woman beside him and said, 'Are you having a good day?'
'Mustn't grumble,' said the woman. 'I'm after that bottle of cherry
brandy.'
'Jolly good - well, good luck. I don't suppose I'll win anything.'
'I don't suppose you need to, do you?' All right, Mr Fedden, sir!'
said the tombola man.
'Hello! Nice to see you…' said Gerald, which was his politician's
way of covering the possibility that they'd met before. 'Here we go,
then! HP Sauce, I expect, for you, isn't it, sir?'
'You never know your luck,' said Gerald - and then, as the
hexagonal drum was cranked round, 'Something for everybody! All
shall have prizes!'
Ah, we've heard that before,' said a man in gold-rimmed glasses
who evidently fell into the category of 'smart-alec socialist', the sort
who asked questions full of uncheckable statistics.
'Nice to see you too,' Gerald said, turning his attention to the
numbers. 'Hah!' said the man.
The cherry-brandy lady won a half-bottle of Mira Mart gin, and
laughed, and blushed violendy, as if she'd already drunk it anddisgraced herself. Lemonade, dien Guinness, went next. Then Gerald
won a bottle of Lambrusco. 'Ah, splendid…'he said, and laughed
facetiously.
'I understand you like a drop of wine, sir,' said the tombola man,
handing it over. 'Absolutely!' said Gerald. 'Don't keep it,' whispered
Penny, just beside him. 'Mmm…?'
'One doesn't keep the prize. Doesn't look good…'
'Looks bloody awful,' Gerald muttered; then boomed
considerately, 'I don't feel I should snatch victory from my own
constituents.' Shy cheers were sounded.
'Barbara - can I persuade you…?'
The lady mayor seemed to register at least three insults in this
proposal: to her status, to her taste, and to her well-advertised
abstinence. Nick had a hunch too that she wasn't called Barbara.
Wasn't she Brenda Nelson? The botde lay for a moment in Gerald's
hands, as if tendered by a mocking sommelier. Then he passed it
hastily back to the trestle table. 'Give someone else a treat,' he said,
with a nod.
Still, die feeling that he ought to be allowed to win some-thing\zA
clearly taken hold of him. Seeing his chance, craning round as if he'd
lost someone, he struck out by himself through the crowds. Penny
trotted patiently after him, clutching the marmalade, and then Nick,
some way behind the wake of laughter and agitation that followed
Gerald's passage.
The sport of welly-whanging was unknown in the Surrey of
Gerald's youth, as it was of course in contemporary Notting Hill; the
only wellies he ever touched in middle life were the green ones
unhoused from the basement passage for winter weekends with
country friends. But at Barwick, which still had a regular livestock
market and loose straw blowing in the street, the welly, black, leaden-
soled, loose on the heel, was an unembarrassed fact, and whanging it
a popular pastime. Gerald approached die flimsy archway made of two
poles and a banner, beneatli which a white chalk crease had been
drawn. 'Put me in for a go!' he said. He had die expression of a good
sport, since he was new to the game, but a glint of steel showed
dirough. 'That's 25p a whang, sir, or five for a pound.'
'Ooh, give us a quid's worth,' said Gerald, in a special plummy
voice he used for slang. He groped busily in his pockets, but 1ie'd
spent all his change already. He got out his wallet and was hesitandy
offering a Ј20 note when Penny stepped forward and put a
pound coin on the table. Ah, splendid…' said Gerald, observing a
couple of teenage boys who weren't making an effort - die boot plonked
to earth a few feet in front of them. 'OK…!'
He took the boot and weighed it in his hand. People gathered
round, since it was something of an event, their MP, in his bespokepinstripe and red tie, clutching an old Wellington boot and about to
hurl it through the air. 'Know how to whang it, then, Gerald?' said a
local, perhaps kindly. Gerald frowned, as though to say that
instruction could hardly be necessary. He'd seen the ineffectual lob of
die boys. He took his first shot from the chest, in muddled imitation
perhaps of a darts-player or shot-putter, the sole to die fore. But he
had underestimated die weight of the diing, and it landed between the
first two lines. 'You've got to really whang it,' said a sturdy but
anxious-looking woman, you know…' - and she made a big arcing
gesture. The boot was handed back to him by a litde boy and he tried
again, with a barely amused smile, as if to say that taking advice from
working-class women in headscarves and curlers was all part of being
their MP. He dutifully imitated her windmilling gesture, but perhaps
because of die restriction imposed at the top of the arc by his tighdy
tailored jacket, he let go of the boot in a twirling spin - it turned over
two or diree times in the air before diudding to the grass. 'Now that's a
bit better,' someone murmured. 'Now you're getting there!' Another
man called out hectically, 'Up the Conservatives!' Nick realized with a
soft shock that there was a lot of goodwill for Gerald among the crowd,
as well as the common sense of delight at seeing a famous person
perform even the simplest task; and Gerald seemed to draw on this for
his third attempt. He unbuttoned his jacket, an action which itself was
greeted with approval, and sent the welly in a vigorous underarm lob,
still wastefuUy high, but landing beyond the twenty-yard mark. There
was applause, and varied advice, as to where to hold the boot, at the
top or halfway down or at the heel, and Gerald obligingly tried out the
different grips. The fourth go was as wildly wrong as a return off tlie
edge of the racket in tennis. There was some exasperation among the
onlookers, again mixed in with a kind of solicitude, and a very ironic
voice, which turned out to be that of the smart-alec socialist, said,
'That's all right, you have to be prepared to make a fool of yourself For
his final shot, with a sharp snuffle as he let go, Gerald sent the missile
in a long low arc, and it landed and bounced wobblingly aside in the
uncali-brated zone beyond twenty-five yards. The boy ran in and stuck
a blue golf tee at the point of contact. There was applause, and
pictures were taken by the press and the public. 'I hope I've won a
prize,' Gerald said.
'Ah, you won't know yet, Gerald,' said a helpful local. It was an
extension perhaps of the bogus camaraderie of election time, the blind
forging of friendships, that constituents felt free to call their MP by his
Christian name, and in Geralds face a momentary coldness was
covered by a kind of bashful-ness, bogus or not, at being a public
property, the people's friend. 'Mr Trevor,' murmured Penny at his
elbow. 'Septic tank.''Hullo, Trevor,' said Gerald, which made him sound like the
gardener. 'Five o'clock,' Mr Trevor said. 'That's when we'll know: one
that's thrown the farthest wins the pig.' And he pointed to a small pen,
previously hidden by the crowd, in which a Gloucester Old Spot was
nosing through a pile of cabbage stalks.
'Goodness…' said Gerald, laughing uneasily, as if he'd been
shown a python in a tank. 'Breakfast, dinner and tea for a month!' said
Mr Trevor.
'Yes, indeed… Though we don't actually eat pork,' Gerald said,
and he was turning to move on when he saw the man in gold-rimmed
glasses approaching the oche and weighing the gumboot knowingly in
his hand.
Ah, Cecil'll show you a thing or two!' shouted out the woman in
curlers, who maybe wasn't Gerald s friend after all -you never knew
with these people. Cecil was slight, but wiry and determined, and
everything he did he did with a thin smile. Gerald waited to see what
happened, and Nick and Penny closed in and tried to talk to him about
something else. 'I bet he knows some trick,' said Gerald, 'what…?'
Cecil's trick was to take a short run-up, and then with a
complete revolution of the arm to send the welly flying as if to a waiting
batsman - it was a dropper, the boot descending steeply to a spot a
yard beyond Gerald's final mark; the boy ran out and pressed in a red
golf tee. Then Cecil had another trick, which was to throw it underarm,
lofting it not too high, and bringing it down short of the first shot, but
still beyond the blue tee. He had a grasp of the weight and direction of
the thing, the trajectory, no mid-air wavering or tumbling. He refined
and varied these methods, and with his last go went a good three yards
over his own record. Then, wiping his hands, his smile twitchily
controlled, he walked over and stood not next to but near Gerald. Ah,
shame, but there you are,' said Mr Trevor. 'Still, if you've no use for the
animal -' Gerald said breezily, 'Oh, damn the animal,' and looked from
Penny to Nick, and then to the bristlingly insouciant figure of Cecil. He
began to remove his jacket, with tiny quick head-shakings, his colour
rising, making a joke of his own temperament, frowning and smirking
at once. 'I feel that can't be allowed to pass without a firm rejoinder,'
he said, in his humorous but meaningful debating tone. There were
cheers, and also a few whistles, as his jacket came off and blue braces,
dark sweat-blooms, were revealed: a sense, depending on how you
looked at it, that Gerald was being a terrific sport or that he was
making a fool of himself, as Cecil had said. Penny, always vigilant, took
his jacket with an eyebrow-flicker of caution, but enough of a smile to
be publicly supportive.
Then she had to search in her bag for another pound coin. 'So
you've won a pig!'Nick's mother said, bringing Gerald through into the sitting room
at Linnells.
'Goodness…'
'I know…' said Gerald. He still looked a bit flushed from the
effort, in need of a shower perhaps, hair smeared back, a bit barmy
still with adrenalin. 'It went to five rounds but I got him in the end. I
won convincingly.' Dot Guest glanced about the densely furnished
room, gestured at one seat after another, and seemed to feel that the
house was too small altogether for Gerald. He kicked against things,
he was untamed, it was almost as if the pig had come barging in after
him. He went to the window at the back and said, 'What a charming
view. You're virtually in the country here, aren't you.'
Courteously, and very timidly, clearing a space on a side table,
Dot murmured, 'Yes… we are… as good as…' and then looked up
gratefully as Don came in with gin-and-tonics on a silver tray. Gerald
had entirely forgotten about the field.
'Well, what a day, who'd have thought it,' he said: 'welly-
whanging: another string to my bow.' And he flung himself down in
Don's armchair as if he lived there, just to put them at their ease.
'Thanks so much, Don' - reaching up for his drink. 'I feel I've earned
this.'
'Where is the pig?' Nick's father said.
'Oh, I've given it to the hospital. One doesn't keep the prize,
obviously, on these occasions. Good health!'
Nick watched them all take refuge in their first sip. He felt
ashamed of the smallness of the drinks, and the way his father had
made them in the kitchen and brought them in like a treat. His
parents looked at Gerald proudly but nervously. They were so small
and neat, almost childlike, and Gerald was so glowing and sprawling
and larger than local life. Don was wearing a bright red bow tie. When
he was little Nick had revered his father's bow ties, the conjurors trick
of their knotting, the aesthetic contrasts and implications of the
different colours and patterns - he'd had keen favourites, and almost a
horror of one or two, he had lived in the daily drama of those strips of
paisley silk and spotted terylene, so superior to the kipper ties of other
dads. But now he was made uneasy by the scarlet twist below the trim
white beard; he thought his father looked a bit of a twit.
Dot said, 'We're lucky you had time to come and see us. I know
you must be terribly busy. And you're about to go away, aren't you?' It
was one of her 'professional' worries, all parts of the great worry of
London itself, along with fainting Guardsmen and the tedium of being
in The Mousetrap, as to how MPs coped with their massive workloads;
it was something Nick had been asked to find out when he moved in.
His conclusion, that Gerald didn't do die work at all, but relied onbriefings by hard-working secretaries and assistants, was considered
cynical and therefore untrue by his mother.
Gerald said, 'Yes, we're off on Monday,' and gave a great shrug of
relief. Nick could see him, bored and suggestible, start brooding at
once on the superior pleasures of the manoir.
'I wonder how you fit it all in,' Dot said, 'all the reading you must
have to do. It worries me - Nick says I'm silly… You probably never
sleep, do you, I don't see how you could! That's what they say about…
the Lady, isn't it?'
Nick had inculcated his parents with Gerald's form the Lady, but
was embarrassed to hear them use it in front of him. He seemed to
take it as a tribute, however, both to her and to himself. 'What, four
hours a night?' he said, with an admiring chuckle. 'Yes, but the PM's a
phenomenon - terrifying energf. I'm a mere mortal, I need my beauty
sleep, I'm not ashamed to say.'
'She looks beautiful without any sleep, then,' said Dot piously,
and Don nodded his agreement, too shy, as yet, to ask the question
that burned in them both: what was she like?
Gerald, knowing they wanted to ask that, showed he hadn't lost
sight of the original question. 'But you're right, of course.' He took
them into his confidence. 'The paperwork can be quite overwhelming at
times. I'm lucky in that I'm a fast reader. And I've got a memory like an
ostrich. I can gut the Telegraph in ten minutes and the Mail in four -
you just get a knack for it.'
'Ah,' said Dot, and nodded slowly. And how is your daughter?'
She was being attentive and courteous, and Nick saw that she would
run through things that troubled her, and hope to get a better answer
out of Gerald than she could out of him. 'I know you've been worried
about her, haven't you?'
'Oh, she's fine,' said Gerald breezily; and then seeing some use in
the idea of being worried, 'She's had her ups and downs, hasn't she,
Nick - the old Puss?
It's not easy being her. But you know, this thing called librium
that she's on has been an absolute godsend. Sort of wonder drug…'
'Mm… lithium,' said Nick.
'Oh yes…?' said Dot, looking uneasily from one to the other.
'She's just a much happier young pussycat. I think we've turned the
corner.' Nick said, 'She's doing some great work now, at St Martin's.'
'Yes, she's doing marvellous collages and things,' said Gerald.
Ah, modern art, no doubt,' said Don, with a dreary ironic look at
Nick.
'Don't pretend to be a philistine, Dad,' said Nick, and saw him
unable to separate the praise from the reproach; the French
pronunciation of philistine didn't help.'It seems to work for her, anyway,' said Gerald, who liked the
therapeutic excuse for Catherine's large abstract efforts. And she's got
a super boyfriend, that we're all very happy about. Because we haven't
always had good luck on that front.'
'Oh…' said Dot, and looked down at her drink as if to say that
neither, indeed, had they.
'Mm, we're jolly proud of her, in fact,' said Gerald grandly, so that
he seemed slightly ashamed. And we're all going to be together in
France this year, which Rachel and I are delighted about. First time for
some years. And Nick too, as you know, will be joining us… at least for
a bit… long overdue…' and Gerald guzzled the rest of his gin-and-
tonic. 'Oh,' said Dot, you didn't say, dear.'
'Oh, yes,' said Nick. 'Well, I'm going with Wani Ouradi, you know,
who I'm working with on this magazine - we're going to Italy and
Germany to look at things for that, and then we hope to drop in at…
the manoir, for a few days on the way back.'
'That'll be a wonderful experience for you, old boy,' Don said. And
Nick thought, really the poor old things, they do as well as they can;
but for a minute he almost blamed them for not knowing he was going
to Europe with Wani, and for making him tell them a plan so heavy
with hidden meaning. It wasn't their fault that they didn't know - Nick
couldn't tell them things, and so everything he said and did took on
the nature of a surprise, big or little but somehow never wholly benign,
since they were aftershocks of the original surprise, that he was, as his
mother said, a whatsit.
'Because you normally have Nick to look after the house for you,
don't you,' she said. 'When you're away.' She clung to this fact, as a
proof of his trustworthiness to important others, who apparently didn't
care about his being a whatsit one way or the other.
'Poor old Nick, he has got rather landed with that in the past.
This year we'll have our housekeeper and her daughter move in, and
they can do a massive clean-up of the house without us getting under
their feet. It makes a bit of a holiday for them.' Gerald gestured
liberally with his empty glass.
'That sounds like the sort of holiday I'm used to!' said Dot, who
longed for the spoiling of a hotel, but was subjected to her sister-in-
law's cottage at Holkham each September.
Don brought Gerald a refill, and had a tiny one himself; they
tended not to go at quite that pace. He said, 'He's a good chap, is he,
this Ouradi?'
'You haven't met him… no… Oh, he's a charmer, absolutely. My
son Tobias and he were great friends at Oxford - well, you all were,
weren't you, Nick.'
'I didn't get to know him well until a bit later,' Nick said carefully,
remembering the bathroom of the Flintshires' Mayfair house, the way