The Business

CHAPTER THREE

Over the next few hours Blysecrag changed in character and became suddenly very busy. Cars, trucks and coaches arrived separately and in convoy, thundering up the mile-long slope that was the finishing straight of the driveway. Helicopters touched down briefly to disgorge people on to the pad between the tennis courts and the polo ground, from where the guests, security people, technicians, entertainers and others were ferried to the house itself by a pair of people-carriers.

Uncle Freddy was in nominal charge of all this, though as usual the people really masterminding everything were those of the Business's quaintly entitled Conjurations and Interludans division, or the Charm Monsters as they were commonly known within the company.

So up from London was flown one of the most famous chefs in the country, along with his entourage (an extremely annoyed and insistent fly-on-the-wall TV crew from the BBC were only prevented from accompanying him by being physically barred from the helicopter).

Arranged through long-predated paperwork in a manner that would make it look like a coincidence, a photo shoot with a similarly world-renowned photographer was set up for the weekend, too, by a fashion magazine belonging to one of our wholly owned subsidiaries. This was supposed to make look less sordid the fact that we had a house full of rich and powerful men, none of them accompanied by wives or partners, and a rather larger number of stunningly beautiful and allegedly unattached young women all desperate to make a name for themselves in the world of fashion, modelling, glamour photography, acting or, well, almost anything.

Additional cooks, servants, entertainers and so on decamped from a series of coaches and minibuses. I spotted Miss Heggies at one point, surveying everything that was going on from a third-floor gallery window. She looked like a proud, solitary old lioness whose territory had just been invaded by about three hundred loping hyenas.

Our own security people swarmed over the place, chunkily crew-cut and sober-suited to a man and a woman, most of them in dark glasses, all of them with a little wire connecting one ear and their collar and muttering into concealed lapel mikes. You could tell the ones new enough never to have encountered Blysecrag before by the sheen of sweat on their foreheads and their look of barely controlled professional horror. With all its lifts, cellars, walkways, passages, stairways, galleries, dumb-waiters, laundry-handling wardrobe hoists and complexly interconnecting rooms, securing the house in any meaningful sense was simply impossible. The best they could do was sweep the grounds, be grateful there was never less than a two-kilometre distance between the high wall that bordered the entire estate and the house itself, and try hard not to get lost.

Prince Suvinder Dzung of Thulahn arrived from Leeds-Bradford airport by car. Twenty years earlier, the Prince had lost his wife of a few months in a helicopter crash in the Himalayas, which was why he didn't arrive in one of the machines now. His transport was from Uncle Freddy's collection: a Bucciali Tav 12, which must count as one of the world's more outrageous-looking cars, having a hood — or bonnet, as we'd say here — about the same length as a Mini. Shortly after sending the e-mail to Brussels that would dispatch somebody Freddy and I trusted to Silex in Motherwell, I joined Uncle Freddy on the front steps to greet our guest of honour.

'Frederick! Ah, and the lovely Kate! Ah, I am so glad to see you both! Kate: as ever, you take my breath away!'

'Always gratifying to be compared with a blow to the solar plexus, Prince.'

'Hello hello hello!' Uncle Freddy shouted, apparently of the opinion that the Prince had become suddenly deaf and deserved greeting in triplicate. The Prince accepted a hearty handshake from a beaming Uncle Freddy and imposed a prolonged hug upon me before planting a moist kiss on my right middle finger. He fluttered his eyelids at me and smiled. 'You are still right-handed, my lovely Miss Telman?'

I pulled my hand away and put it behind my back to wipe it. 'In a fight I'm a southpaw, Prince. How nice to see you again. Welcome back to Blysecrag.'

'Thank you. It is like coming home.' Suvinder Dzung was a marginally tubby but light-footed fellow of a little more than average height with glisteningly smooth dark olive skin and a rakish, perfectly black moustache, which matched his glossily waved and exquisitely sculpted hair. Educated at Eton, he spoke without a trace of a sub-continental accent unless he was profoundly drunk, and when in England dressed in Savile Row's conservative best. His major affectation, apart from being a bit of a show-off on the dance floor, was his collection of gold rings, which glittered with emeralds, rubies and diamonds.

'Come in, come in, come in, old chap!' Uncle Freddy said, still apparently addressing a triumvirate of princes and waving his shepherd's crook so enthusiastically that it nearly felled the Prince's private secretary, a small, pale, beady-eyed fellow called B. K. Bousande, who was standing at the Prince's side holding a briefcase. 'Oops! Sorry, BK!' Uncle Freddy laughed. 'This way, Prince, we have your usual suite.'

'My dearest Kate,' Suvinder Dzung said, bowing to me and winking as he turned to go. 'See you later, alligator.'

I laughed. 'In a while, Cayman Isler.'

He looked confused.

'Well, thank God we didn't put much money into Russia!' Uncle Freddy exclaimed. He passed the port to me and picked up his cigar from the ashtray, pulling on it and rolling the smoke round his mouth. 'What a fucking débâcle!'

'I was under the impression we put quite a lot of money into Russia,' Mr Hazleton said, from the other side of the table, opposite me. He watched as I poured myself a small measure. I had permitted myself a relatively unphallic Guantanamo cigar along with my coffee.

The evening's fun was barely begun: we had been promised the run of the casino later, where we would each be given a stack of chips, plus there would be dancing. So far there had been no mention of anything as vulgar as our buying Suvinder Dzung's country off him. I handed the port to the Prince.

There were eleven of us around a small dining-table in a modest room set off Blysecrag's cavernous main dining room. We had been many more for dinner, our fellow diners having included our titled photographer, a television presenter, a couple of Italian opera singers — one soprano, one tenor — a French cardinal, a USAF general, a pair of boyish pop stars I'd heard of but didn't recognise plus an older rock singer I did, an American conductor, a cabinet minister, a fashionable young black poet, a couple of lords, one duke and two dons; one from Oxford and one from Chicago.

After pudding, we had excused ourselves to talk business, taking the Prince with us, though as I say not much business had actually been talked so far. All this to impress Suvinder. I wondered if we weren't appearing a little desperate. Maybe we were anticipating problems during the negotiating sessions, which would start tomorrow.

There were a few of our own junior people present, too, lurking quietly in the background, plus a couple of the Prince's servants, and — standing with his feet spread and his hands clasped in the shadows behind his boss — the taut and bulky presence of Mr Walker, Hazleton's chief of security.

'Well, we did,' Uncle Freddy told Hazleton, 'depending on what you call a lot of money, but the point is we put in a lot less than most people and a hell of a lot less than a few. Proportionately, we're ahead when the pain's shared out.'

'How comforting.' Mr Hazleton was a very tall, very imposing man with a broad, tanned, slightly pock-marked face under a lot of white hair, which was as millimetrically controlled as Uncle Freddy's was wildly abandoned. He had a deep voice and an accent that seemed to originate somewhere between Kensington and Alabama. When I'd first met him he'd sounded like an archetypal smooth English toff (as opposed to Uncle F's batty variety), but, like me, he'd lived in the States for the last ten years or so and had picked up some of the local intonation. This gave him an accent that was either quite charming or made him sound like an English actor trying to sound like somebody from the Deep South, depending on your prejudices.

Hazleton was cradling a crystal bowl of Bunnahabhain in one large, walnut hand and pulling on a cigar the size of a stick of dynamite.

I've always found it hard to look at Level Ones like Hazleton without automatically multiplying the image they presented to me by their wealth, as though all their money, possessions and stock options acted like giant mirrors, proliferating them across any given social space like opposing mirrors in a lift. These days, we were getting close to being able to assume that anyone at Level One was a billionaire; not quite in the same financially stratospheric league represented by Bill Gates or the Sultan of Brunei, but not far off it; maybe a factor of ten away.

The only other Level One exec present was Madame Tchassot, a small, brittle-looking lady of about sixty who sported tiny glasses and wore her unfeasibly black hair in a tight bun. She had a thin, pinched face and was chain-smoking Dunhills.

Besides Uncle Freddy there were five other second level people, including the recently promoted Adrian Poudenhaut, Hazleton's protégé and main man in Europe. He was a tall but podgy Englishman with a mid-Atlantic accent who until I'd come along had been the youngest person to make it to Level Three. We'd never got on, though Uncle Freddy had a soft spot for him because he was another petrol head and so always got a tour of the car collection when he came to Blysecrag. He was rumoured to have some sort of thing going with Madame Tchassot, though nobody was sure, and as she rarely left Switzerland and he was often at Hazleton's side in the States, it could only have been pretty sporadic. Personally I found the very idea of the two of them bumping uglies profoundly unsettling.

The other Level Twos were M. M. Abillah, a small, mostly silent seventy-year-old Moroccan, Christophe Tieschler, a merry-looking German geezer of extravagant and seemingly self-satisfied plumpness, and Jesus Becerrea, an aristocratic-looking Portuguese with darkly hooded eyes.

There was only one other Level Three there: Stephen Buzetski, a sandy-haired, rangy-limbed guy with freckles, crinkly eyes, a few years older than me, whom I loved, and whom I'd loved from the first moment I'd set eyes on him, and who knew this, and who was obviously and genuinely flattered and embarrassed by this in equal measure, and who was so intolerably perfect and nice and lovable that he wouldn't cheat on his wife, to whom he wasn't even all that happily married, just faithful, the bastard.

'They do say the Russians need a strong man; their tsars, their Stalin,' Suvinder Dzung put in, letting one of his servants pour his port while he undid his bow-tie and unbuttoned his dinner jacket. The Prince wore a dark purple cummerbund secured by golden clasps. He was given to sticking both thumbs into the broad belt and stretching it against his belly. I wondered if he was trying to twang it; maybe he didn't know a good cummerbund doesn't twang. 'Perhaps,' the Prince said, 'they need another one.'

'What they might get, Prince, is the Communists back,' Hazleton drawled. 'If I didn't think Yeltsin was just an alcoholic clown I could believe he was secretly a Communist himself, supposed to appear to attempt capitalism but then make such a God-awful mess of it that the Brezhnev days look like a golden age in comparison and the Marxist-Leninists like saviours.'

'Ms Telman,' Madame Tchassot said suddenly in her sharp little voice, 'I understand you visited Russia recently. Have you any thoughts on the matter?'

I blew out some smoke. I'd intended to keep my head down for the rest of the after-dinner discussion, having earlier revealed myself to all as a dangerous radical. I'd contrasted, unfavourably, the West's reaction to a bunch of the already very rich getting caught out in their hedge-fund speculations with that of the response to the unfolding catastrophe caused by Hurricane Mitch. In one case a rescue fund of several billion US dollars was put together within a few days; in the other a couple of million had eventually been pledged as long as there was no dangerous talk about a debt moratorium or even — perish the thought — a total write-off.

'Yes, I was,' I said. 'But I was there to look at a few interesting technologies rather than at their society as a whole.'

'What's happened,' Adrian Poudenhaut said, 'is that the Russians have created their own form of capitalism in the image of what was portrayed to them as the reality of the West by the old Soviet Union's propaganda machine. They were informed that there was nothing but gangsterism, gross and endemic corruption, naked profiteering, a vast, starving, utterly exploited underclass and a tiny number of rapacious, vicious capitalist crooks who were entirely above the law. Of course, even at its most laissez-faire the West was never remotely like that, but that's what the Russians have now created for themselves.'

'You mean Radio Free Europe didn't convince them how sweet life here in the West really was?' Hazleton said, with a smile.

'Maybe it did,' Poudenhaut conceded. 'Maybe most thought it was diametrically equivalent propaganda and took an average.'

'The Soviets never slandered the West like that,' I said.

'No?' Poudenhaut said. 'I've seen the old films. Looked like it to me.'

'Very old, and not representative, then. The point is that the Russians don't really have capitalism at all right now. People don't pay their taxes, so the state can't pay its employees; the majority of people exist through self-sufficiency and bartering. And there's negligible accumulation of capital, reinvestment and development because all the money's siphoned off to Swiss banks, including ours. So what they actually have is barbarism.'

'I'm not saying many Russians believed life in the West was as awful as it was sometimes portrayed,' Poudenhaut said. 'There's just a nice symmetry to the fact that it's the caricature they're in the process of copying, not the reality. I don't think they understand it themselves.'

'Whereas you obviously do,' I suggested.

'Anything we could do?' Hazleton asked me.

'To profit us or to help them?' I asked.

'Well, preferably both.'

I thought. 'We'd probably be doing civilisation in general a favour if we had — ' (here I mentioned a fairly well-known Russian politician) ' — killed.'

Poudenhaut snorted with laughter. Hazleton's blue eyes partially disappeared; a fine network of lines appeared at the corners of his eyes. 'I have a feeling we may have had some sort of dealings with the gentleman already,' he said. 'He has his moments of slapstick, too, I'll grant, but he might not be quite as black as he's painted.'

I raised my eyebrows and smiled. One of the other gentlemen cleared his throat, somewhere down the table.

By my side, the Prince sneezed. A servant appeared flourishing a handkerchief.

'You think he is as black as he's painted, Ms Telman?' Hazleton said easily.

'I have this very odd feeling,' I said, 'that somebody like me - though probably male,' I added, with a general smile, just catching the concerned-looking gaze of Stephen Buzetski, 'was sitting here nearly seventy years ago saying the same sort of thing about Germany and a faintly comical small-time politician called Adolf Hitler.' It was really only at about this point that it struck me quite how outspoken I was being. I had to remind myself — a little late, perhaps — quite how powerful the people in this room were. Adrian Poudenhaut laughed again, then saw that Hazleton was looking very levelly and seriously at me, and stopped.

'That's quite a comparison to make, Ms Telman,' Hazleton said.

'Hitler?' Uncle Freddy said suddenly, as though waking up. 'Did you say Hitler, dear girl?' I was suddenly aware that just about everybody in the room was looking at me. Herr Tieschler was politely studying his cigar.

'Perhaps the trouble is you never can tell,' Stephen Buzetski said reasonably. 'Maybe if somebody had shot Hitler seventy years ago somebody else would have taken his place and things would have worked out much the same. It depends whether you believe in the primacy of individuals or social forces, I guess.' He shrugged.

'I sincerely hope I'm completely wrong,' I admitted. 'I imagine I probably am. But right now Russia is the sort of place that makes thinking along such lines seem quite natural.'

'Hitler was a strong man,' M. M. Abillah pointed out.

'He made the cattle trucks run on time,' I agreed.

'The man was an evil genius and no mistake,' the Prince informed us, 'but Germany was in a sorry mess when he took over, was it not?' Suvinder Dzung looked at Herr Tieschler as though for support, but was ignored.

'Oh, yes,' I said. 'It was left in a far better state after a hundred divisions of the Red Army had paid a visit and a succession of thousand-bomber raids had stopped by.'

'Well, now—' began Stephen Buzetski.

'Do you really think it is our business to go around having politicians shot, Ms Telman?' asked Jesus Becerrea, raising his voice to shout down Stephen.

'No,' I said. I looked at Hazleton, whom I knew had made a lot of money for himself and us in both Central and South America over the years. 'I'm sure that would never even cross our minds.'

'Or if it did we would swiftly dismiss it, Ms Telman,' Hazleton said with a steely smile, 'because acting upon such a thought would make us bad people, would it not?'

Was I being ganged up on? I was certainly being invited to keep deepening the hole I seemed already to be digging for myself.

'It might make us no better than everybody else,' I said, then looked at Uncle Freddy, blinking furiously beneath his cloud of white hair to my left. 'However, proportionately — to quote Mr Ferrindonald — we might hope to be ahead when the pain's shared out.'

'Pain can be a good thing,' Poudenhaut said.

'Relatively,' I said. 'In evolutionary terms, it's better to feel pain and rest up than to carry on walking and hunting on an injured leg, say. But —'

'But it's about discipline, isn't it?' Poudenhaut said.

'Is it?'

'Pain teaches you a lesson.'

'It's one way. There are others.'

'Sometimes there is no alternative.'

'Really?' I widened my eyes. 'Gosh.'

'It's like a child,' he explained patiently. 'You can argue with it and get nowhere, or you can just administer a short, sharp smack, and it's all cleared up. That applies to parents with children, schools…any relationship where one half knows what's best for the other half.'

'I see, Mr Poudenhaut,' I said. 'And do you beat your other half? I mean, do you beat your own children?'

'I don't beat them,' Poudenhaut said, with a laugh. 'I give them the occasional slap.' He looked round the others. 'Every family has a naughty stick, doesn't it?'

'Were you beaten as a child, Adrian?' I asked.

He smiled. 'Quite a lot, at school, actually.' He lowered his head a little as he looked round again, as though quietly proud of this proof he'd obviously been a bit of a lad. 'It never did me any harm.'

'My God,' I said, sitting back. 'You mean you'd have been like this anyway?'

'You don't have any children, do you, Kate?' he said, oblivious.

'Indeed not,' I agreed.

'So you —'

'So I don't really know what I'm talking about, I suppose,' I said breezily. 'Though I do seem to recall being a child.'

'I guess we all need to be taught a lesson,' Stephen Buzetski said casually, reaching for a large onyx ashtray and grinding out his cigar. 'I think I need to be taught that gamblin' don't pay.' He looked towards a rather slumped Uncle Freddy and grinned. 'That casino of yours open yet, sir?'

'Casino!' Uncle Freddy said, sitting upright again. 'What a splendid idea!'

'Just fuck me, Stephen.'

'It wouldn't be right, Kate.'

'Then just let me fuck you. You won't have to do a thing. I'll do it all. It'll be fabulous, dreamlike. You can pretend it never happened.'

'That wouldn't be right either.'

'It would be right. It would be very right. Trust me, it would be the rightest, sweetest, nicest thing that's ever happened to either of us. I know this. I do. I feel it in my water. You can trust me. Just let me.'

'Kate, I made a promise. I took these vows.'

'So? So does everybody. They cheat.'

'I know people cheat.'

'Everybody cheats.'

'No, they don't.'

'Every man does.'

'They do not.'

'Everyone I've met does. Or would, if I let them.'

'That's you. You're just so enticing.'

'Except to you.'

'No, to me too.'

'But you can resist.'

'I'm afraid so.'

We were standing in the darkness by the stone wall at one end of the mile-long reflecting lake; the house lay behind us. Uncle Freddy had had the newly renovated gas flare-path lit for the first time that night; Suvinder Dzung had been allowed to ignite it, and a small plaque to this effect had been unveiled, to the Prince's obvious delight. Gas burbled with a comical farting noise from a hundred different patches of water. Flames burned above, detached torches on a wide obsidian floor fifteen hundred metres long. The converging florettes of yellow flame receded into the distance, becoming tiny, stitching the night.

If you looked closely you could see the little blue cones of pilot lights hissing away at the end of thin copper pipes, sticking out above the water in the middle of each darkly bubbling source of fire.

I had gambled in the casino (I was gambling now, though with no real hope of winning). I had talked to various people — I had even made some sort of peace with Adrian Poudenhaut — I had put off Suvinder Dzung as politely but firmly as possible when he'd tried to get me to come to his room, I had stood on the terrace with everybody else to watch fireworks crack and splash across the night skies above the valley, casually shooing off the straying right ring-encrusted hand of the Prince as he came to stand by me and tried to fondle my bum. Elsewhere in the main house there were rooms you could go to for drugs, and apparently there was one where there was some sort of live sex show going on, which might turn into an orgy later, depending on demand.

I had talked to the poet and the soprano, found myself being embarrassingly girly with the ageing rock singer, on whom I'd had a crush in my teens, and been chatted up by both the American conductor and the Oxford don. I had said hello to the monument in muscle and bronze Armani that was Colin Walker as he stood behind Hazleton, who was playing at the blackjack table, and asked him how he'd been enjoying his visit to Britain. He'd told me, in his soft, measured voice, that he had only flown in yesterday, but that so far it had been just fine, ma'am.

I had danced energetically to what I suppose was rave music in one of the small ballrooms with some of the younger execs and fellow guests, and more sedately to the music of the forties and fifties played by a big band in the largest ballroom, where most of the higher-level people were. Suvinder Dzung, twinkle-toed and undeniably impressive, had swept and dipped me round the room a couple of times, though by then, thankfully, he was starting to become distracted by a couple of lissom beauties, one blonde, one auburn, whom I assumed were the cavalry, dispatched to my rescue by Uncle Freddy.

It was there in the ballroom that I'd encountered Stephen Buzetski again at last and persuaded him to get up on to the floor and danced with him and eventually danced him out into the night air and then along a terrace from which we'd seen again the lights of the reflecting lake. I'd taken my shoes off and he'd carried them for me as we'd crossed the lawn.

It was cold, and my little blue-black Versace number didn't provide much in the way of warmth, so this had given me the perfect excuse to hug him and be hugged by him and have him put his jacket around me, which smelled of him. My shoes stuck out of his jacket pockets.

'Stephen, you're a rich and handsome man, you're a nice guy, but life's too short, dammit. What's wrong with you?' I balled a fist and thumped him gently on the chest. 'Is it me? Am I so unattractive? Am I too old? That is it, isn't it? I'm just too old.'

He grinned, face lit by the dully roaring yellow flames. 'Kate, we've been through this before. You are one of the most beautiful and attractive women I have ever had the good fortune to meet.'

I cuddled into him, hugging him tighter, pathetically, adolescently delighted by what had to be an outright lie. 'Nothing about my age, then,' I muttered into his shirt.

He laughed. 'Look, you're younger than me and you certainly don't look your age anyway. Satisfied?'

'Yes. No.' I pulled back and looked into his eyes. 'So, what? Can't you stand women who take the initiative?'

We had, as he'd said, been through all this before, but this too was a dance, something that had to be gone through. The first time we'd been over this ground, four years earlier, I'd suggested he might be gay. He'd rolled his eyes.

That was when I knew just how perfect he was, from the way he did that. Because rolling his eyes in that way — even if it hadn't seemed like an impossibly cute expression in its own right — just made it so obvious that this had happened to him before, that women had accused him of being gay in the past, in their confused and wounded pride at being rejected, and he was getting fed up hearing it.

That was when I knew it really wasn't just me; it was other women too, very possibly all of them. He really was faithful to his wife, and really not being either especially choosy or mildly sadistic. Which, of course, made him perfect. Because that's what we try to forget, isn't it? If he'll cheat on her with you, he'll cheat on you with somebody else, by and by.

So finding a man like this was like hitting the jackpot, discovering the mother lode, closing the deal of your life…only to find the pot had already been cleaned out, the claim had been staked by somebody else and the papers had already been signed without you.

My girlfriends and I had been over this territory often enough, too. By the time you got to our age all the good ones were gone. But until you got to our age you couldn't tell which ones were the good ones. What were you supposed to do? Marry young and hope, I suppose. Or wait for the divorcees and trust you got one who'd been a cheatee rather than a cheater. Or lower your standards, or settle for a different type of life altogether, which revolved around you as an individual and not you as one half of a couple, and which was anyway what I'd always thought I'd wanted, until I'd met Stephen.

'No, I find it flattering when women take the initiative.'

'You just never give in.'

'What can I tell you? I'm just a boring one-woman guy.' (Which meant, of course, as he was a very honest but also pretty smart guy, and he had chosen not to give me a straight answer, that he probably had strayed, once, and so knew what he was talking about, which only made me even more sad, because it hadn't been with me that he'd been unfaithful, and so I'd lost out not once but twice.)

'Everybody else is doing it, Stephen.'

'Hey, come on, Kate, what sort of argument is that? Besides, I'm not them.'

'But you're missing out. It's an opportunity. You're…missing out,' I repeated, lamely.

'It's not some business thing, Kate.'

'Yes, it is! Everything is. Everything is trade, transactions, options, futures. Marriage is. Always has been. I'm offering you a deal that would be great for both of us, where neither of us loses: pure gain, total satisfaction on both sides; a deal you're crazy to turn down.'

'I've got my peace of mind to lose, Kate. I've got a whole guilt trip waiting for me if I did. I'd have to tell Em.'

'Are you mad? Don't tell her.'

'She might find out anyway. She'd divorce me, take the kids —'

'She'd never know. I'm not asking you to leave her or the children, I just want whatever I can get from you; anything. An affair, a single night, one fuck; anything.'

'I can't, Kate.'

'You don't even love her.'

'I do.'

'No, you don't; you're just comfortable with her.'

'Well, you know. Maybe that's what passion becomes, what it grows into.'

'It doesn't have to be. How can you be so… determined, so ambitious in your business life and so meek in private? You shouldn't settle for so little, or if you need that bland comfort bit, you should have the passion too. With somebody else. With me. You deserve it.'

He let go of me gently, holding my hands in his and looking into my eyes. 'Kate, even with you I don't want to talk about Em and the children.' He looked embarrassed. 'Don't you see? To me this is like having an affair; I get guilty just talking about this sort of thing with you.'

'So you've nothing to lose!'

'So I've everything to lose. Believe me, this guilt is barely registering on my in-built guilt-o-meter, but it still troubles me. If I climbed into bed with you it'd go off the scale.'

I sank back towards him, closing my eyes at the very thought. 'Believe me, Stephen, a lot would go off the scale.'

He laughed quietly and pushed me away again. I didn't think you could push somebody away tenderly, but he did. 'I just can't, Kate,' he said solemnly, and the way he said it just had that stamp of closure over it. We' d reached some sort of interim result, if not a conclusion. I could still choose to pursue the matter, if I insisted, but only at the risk of seriously pissing him off.

I shook my head. 'Guilt-o-meter. Really.'

'You know what I mean.'

'Yeah.' I sighed. 'I guess I do.'

He shivered in his white dress shirt. 'Hey, it's getting kind of cold out here, don't you think?'

'It is. Let's go back.'

'Think I'll go for a swim before I turn in.'

'I'll come and watch. May I?'

'Sure.'

Blysecrag's pool was only a little short of Olympic in size, buried underground at the end of a tangle of corridors and locatable principally by smell. I went arm in arm with Stephen down the carpeted corridors. The place was dark when we arrived and we had to search for the light switches, feeling round the walls until we found them and the lights flickered on, above and below the still water. The walls were covered with trompe l'oeil paintings showing pastoral scenes set in a landscape more gently rolling than that surrounding Blysecrag, and partially obscured by white Doric columns spaced every few metres. There were numerous tables, chairs, loungers and potted plants positioned near the walls on two room-long strips of Astroturf, and a bar at the far end of the huge space. The arched roof was painted blue with lots of little white fluffy clouds.

I stood looking out over the calm blue surface while Stephen disappeared into the changing rooms. People had been here earlier — the tiled floor was puddled, there were towels and bits of swimming costumes scattered around, and a welter of pool-side-safe plastic flutes stood or lay by champagne buckets on the tables or had fallen to the pretend-grass floor — but the place was quiet and empty now and the waters lay level, undisturbed by even the slightest ripple now that the recirculating pumps had been switched off.

I looked at my watch. It was five fifteen. Much later than I'd intended to stay up. Ah, well.

Stephen appeared in a pair of baggy blue trunks, grinned at me and dived into the water. It was a beautiful dive, creating what seemed like far too small a splash, just a few tiny waves and a larger swell that moved languidly out from his point of entry. I watched his long tan body glide across the pale blue tiles on the pool's floor. Then he surfaced, shook his head once and settled into a powerful, easy-looking crawl.

I sat down by the edge of the pool, one knee drawn up under my chin, and just watched. He completed a dozen lengths then cut across the waves to me, sticking his elbows into the gutter that ran along the underside of the pool's edge.

'Having fun?' I asked.

'Yeah. Slow pool, though.'

'Slow? What? Is it full of heavy water or something?'

'No, but it's got this side wall,' he told me, patting the tiles above the gutter. 'The waves reflect back out into the pool so you're always slapping into them. Modern pools don't have walls; the water goes right to the top and spills into a flush trench under a grating.'

I thought about this. He was right, of course.

'Carries a lot of the wave energy away,' he said. 'Gives you calmer water. Makes the pool faster.'

'I see.'

He looked puzzled. 'Think you could swim in heavy water?'

'D two O? I suppose so.'

'Oh, well. Think I'll get out now.'

'I'll wait.'

He struck out for the chrome steps in one corner, lifted himself out in one exquisite, flowing movement and dripped away to the changing rooms.

I sat listening to the air-conditioning hum and watched the reflections the waters cast on the ceiling and walls; their long twisting veins of gold shimmered across the artificial sky and flickered amongst the grooved surfaces of the white plaster columns. I looked down at the chopping waters of the pool, recalling how perfectly still and calm they had been when we'd arrived.

Every wave, every ripple on that surface, as well as every dancing flick of light curving across the vault of sky and clouds above had been caused by him, by his body. His muscles, powering the shape and weight and surface of his frame through those waters, had spread that grace and effort throughout the pool and sent the light unwinding across the painted clouds and sky. I rocked forward, reaching one hand down to the water's surface, and let the liquid come up to meet my flattened palm, the little waves hitting my skin like a succession of soft caresses, their gentle, patting beat like that of an inconstant heart.

The waters calmed gradually again, the waves fell back and smoothed slowly out. The veins of light dancing on the ceiling became lazier and broader, like a river flowing towards the sea. The air-conditioner hummed.

'Okay?' Stephen said. I looked up at him.

One part of me wanted to let him go back by himself, so that I could stay here alone with the humming silence of the air and the slow averaging of the lulling waters, but his freckled face, tired though still smiling and open and friendly, would not let me. I accepted a hand up, we switched off the lights and returned to the main house.

He saw me to my room door, kissed me lightly on the cheek and told me to sleep well, which, eventually, I did.

'Mmm. Yes? Hello?'

'Kathryn, is that you?'

'Uh, speaking. Speaking. Yes. Who is that?'

'Me. Me…me, it is me.'

'Prince? Suvinder?'

'Yes. Kathryn.'

'Suvinder, it's the middle of the night.'

'Ah, no.'

'What?'

'I must…must correct you there. Kathryn. It is not the middle of the night, no no.'

'Prince, it…hold on. It's half six in the morning.'

'There. You see?'

'Suvinder, it's still dark, I've had one hour's sleep and I was hoping for a good five or six more, minimum. As far as I'm concerned it is the middle of the night. Now unless you have something very important to say to me…'

'Kathryn.'

'Yes, Suvinder.'

'Kathryn.'

'…Yes?'

'Kathryn.'

'Prince, you sound terribly drunk.'

'I am, Kathryn. I am very terribly drunk and very sad.'

'Why are you sad, Suvinder?'

'I have been unfaithful to you.'

'What?'

'Those two lovely ladies. I fell for their fanim… manifold charms.'

'You—?'

'Kathryn, I am a man of easy virtue.'

'You and all the rest, Prince. Look, I'm very glad for you. I hope those two young ladies made you extremely happy and you were able to do the same for them. And you mustn't worry. You can't be unfaithful to me because I am not your wife or your girlfriend. We haven't made any promises to each other and therefore you can't be unfaithful. Do you see?'

'But I have.'

'You have what?'

'I have made promises, Kathryn!'

'Not that I was aware of, Suvinder, not to me.'

'No. They were made in my heart, Kathryn.'

'Were they now? Well, I'm very flattered, Suvinder, but you mustn't feel bad about it. I forgive you, all right? I forgive you for any previous and all future transgressions; how's that? You just go on and have a whale of a time to yourself and I won't be bothered in the least. I'll be happy for you.'

'Kathryn.'

'Yes.'

'Kathryn.'

'Suvinder. What?'

'…Can I hope?'

'Hope?'

'That one day you will…you will look upon me kindly.'

'I already do, Suvinder. I look upon you very kindly. I like you. I hope I am your friend.'

'That is not what I meant, Kathryn.'

'No, I didn't think it was.'

'May I hope, Kathryn?'

'Prince…'

'May I, Kathryn?'

'Suvinder…'

'Just say that it is not a lost cause which I am pursuing, Kathryn.'

'Suvinder, I do like you, and I am honestly very flattered indeed that —'

'Always women say this! They say flattered, they say friend, they say like, and always later comes "but". But this, but that. But I am married, but you are too old, but your mother will put a curse on me, but I am too young, but I am not really a girl —'

'What?'

'—I thought you would be different, Kathryn. I hoped that maybe you would not "but". But you do. It is not fair, Kathryn. It is not fair. It is pride, or racism, or, or…or classism.'

'Prince, please. I've had a lot of disturbed sleep recently. I really need to get some quality rest in at some point.'

'Now I have upset you.'

'Suvinder, please.'

'I have made you upset with me. I can tell from your voice. Your patience is exhausted, is it not?'

'Suvinder, just let me go back to sleep, please? Maybe we should just, you know, stop now. We can talk about this in the morning. Things will look different then. I think we both need our sleep.'

'Let me come to see you.

'No, Suvinder.'

'Tell me which room you are in, please, Kathryn.'

'Absolutely not, Suvinder.'

'Please.'

'No.'

'I am a man, Kathryn.'

'What? Yes, I know, Suvinder.'

'A man has needs…What was that? Did you just sigh, Kathryn?'

'Prince, I don't want to be rude, but I really need to get back to sleep now, and I'm asking you to say good night and let me get some rest. So, please, just say good night.'

'Very well. I shall go now…But, Kathryn.'

'Yes?'

'I shall not cease to hope.'

'Good for you.'

'I mean it, Kathryn.'

'I'm sure you do.'

'I do, I mean it.'

'Well, hurrah.'

'Yes. Well. Good night, Kathryn.'

'Good night, Suvinder.'