The Line of Beauty

1

PETER CROWTHER'S BOOK on the election was already in the shops. It was called Landslide!, and the witty assistant at Dillon's had arranged the window in a scaled-down version of that natural disaster. The pale-gilt image of the triumphant Prime Minister rushed towards the customer in a gleaming slippage. Nick stopped in the street, and then went in to look at a copy. He had met Peter Crowther once, and heard him described as a hack and also as a "mordant analyst": his faint smile, as he flicked through the pages, concealed his uncertainty as to which account was nearer the truth. There was clearly something hacklike in the speed of publication, only two months after the event; and in the actual writing, of course. The book's mordancy seemed to be reserved for the efforts of the Opposition. Nick looked carefully at the photographs, but only one of them had Gerald in it: a group picture of "The 101 New Tory MPs," in which he'd been clever enough, or quick enough, to get into the front row. He sat there smiling and staring as if in his own mind it was already the front bench. The smile, the white collar worn with a dark shirt, the floppy breast-pocket handkerchief would surely be famous when, the chaps in the rows behind were mere forgotten grins and frowns. Even so, he was mentioned only twice in the text-as a "bon viveur," and as one of the "dwindling minority" of Conservative MPs who had passed, "as Gerald Fedden, the new Member for Barwick, so obviously has," through public school and Oxbridge. Nick left the shop with a shrug; but out in the street he felt delayed pride at this sighting of a person he knew in a published book.

He had a blind date at eight that evening, and the hot August day was a shimmer of nerves, with little breezy interludes of lustful dreaming. The date wasn't totally blind-"just very short-sighted," Catherine Fedden said, when Nick showed her the photograph and the letter. She seemed to like the look of the man, who was called Leo, and who she said was so much her type; but his handwriting made her jumpy. It was both elaborate and impetuous. Catherine had a paperback called Graphology: The Mind in the Hand, which gave her all sorts of warnings about people's tendencies and repressions ("Artist or Madman?" "Pet or Brute?"). "It's those enormous ascenders, darling," she said: "I see a lot of ego." They had pursed their lips again over the little square of cheap blue writing paper. "You're sure that doesn't just mean a very strong sex drive?" Nick asked. But she seemed to think not. He had been excited, and even rather moved, to get this letter from a stranger; but it was true the text itself raised few expectations. "Nick-OK! Ref your letter, am in Personnel (London Borough of Brent). We can meet up, discuss Interests and Ambitions. Say When. Say Where"- and then the enormous rampant L of Leo going halfway down the page.

Nick had moved into the Feddens' big white Notting Hill house a few weeks before. His room was up in the roof, still clearly the children's zone, with its lingering mood of teenage secrets and rebellions. Toby's orderly den was at the top of the stairs, Nick's room just along the skylit landing, and Catherine's at the far end; Nick had no brothers or sisters but he was able to think of himself here as a lost middle child. It was Toby who had brought him here, in earlier vacations, for his London "seasons," long thrilling escapes from his own far less glamorous family; and Toby whose half-dressed presence still haunted the attic passage. Toby himself had never perhaps known why he and Nick were friends, but had amiably accepted, the evidence that they were. In these months after Oxford he was rarely there, and Nick had been passed on as a friend to his little sister and to their hospitable parents. He was a friend of the family; and there was something about him they trusted, a gravity, a certain shy polish, something not quite apparent to Nick himself, which had helped the family agree that he should become their lodger. When Gerald had won Barwick, which was Nick's home constituency, the arrangement was jovially hailed as having the logic of poetry, or fate.

Gerald and Rachel were still in France, and Nick found himself almost resenting their return at the end of the month. The housekeeper came in early each morning, to prepare the day's meals, and Gerald's secretary, with sunglasses on top of her head, looked in to deal with the imposing volume of post. The gardener announced himself by the roar of the mower outside an open window. Mr Duke, the handyman (His Grace, as the family called him), was at work on various bits of maintenance. And Nick was in residence, and almost, he felt, in possession. He loved coming home to Kensington Park Gardens in the early evening, when the wide treeless street was raked by the sun, and the two white terraces stared at each other with the glazed tolerance of rich neighbours. He loved letting himself in at the three-locked green front door, and locking it again behind him, and feeling the still security of the house as he looked into the red-walled dining room, or climbed the stairs to the double drawing room, and up again past the half-open doors of the white bedrooms. The first flight of stairs, fanning out into the hall, was made of stone; the upper flights had the confidential creak of oak. He saw himself leading someone up them, showing the house to a new friend, to Leo perhaps, as if it was really his own, or would be one day: the pictures, the porcelain, the curvy French furniture so different from what he'd been brought up with. In the dark polished wood he was partnered by reflections as dim as shadows. He'd taken the chance to explore the whole house, from the wedge-shaped attic cupboards to the basement junk room, a dim museum in itself, referred to by Gerald as the trou de gloire. Above the drawing-room fireplace there was a painting by Guardi, a capriccio of Venice in a gilt rococo frame; on the facing wall were two large gilt-framed mirrors. Like his hero Henry James, Nick felt that he could "stand a great deal of gilt."

Sometimes Toby would have come back, and there would be loud music in the drawing room; or he was in his father's study at the back of the house making international phone calls and having a gin-and-tonic-all this done not in defiance of his parents but in rightful imitation of their own freedoms in the place. He would go into the garden and pull his shirt off impatiently and sprawl in a deckchair reading the sport in the Telegraph. Nick would see him from the balcony and go down to join him, slightly breathless, knowing Toby quite liked his rower's body to be looked at. It was the easy charity of beauty. They would have a beer and Toby would say, "My sis all right? Not too mad, I hope," and Nick would say, "She's fine, she's fine," shielding his eyes from the dropping August sun, and smiling back at him with reassurance, among other unguessed emotions.

Catherine's ups and downs were part of Nick's mythology of the house. Toby had told him about them, as a mark of trust, one evening in college, sitting on a bench by the lake. "She's pretty volatile, you know," he said, quietly impressed by his own choice of word. "Yah, she has these moods." To Nick the whole house, as yet only imagined, took on the light and shade of moods, the life that was lived there as steeped in emotion as the Oxford air was with the smell of the lake water. "She used to, you know, cut her arms, with a razor blade." Toby winced and nodded. "Thank god she's grown out of all that now." This sounded more challenging than mere moods, and when Nick first met her he found himself glancing tensely at her arms. On one forearm there were neat parallel lines, a couple of inches long, and on the other a pattern of right-angled scars that you couldn't help trying to read as letters; it might have been an attempt at the word ELLE. But they were long healed over, evidence of something that would otherwise be forgotten; sometimes she traced them abstractedly with a finger.

"Looking after the Cat" was how Gerald had put it before they went away, with the suggestion that the task was as simple as that, and as responsible. It was Catherine's house but it was Nick who was in charge. She camped nervously in the place, as though she and not Nick was the lodger. She was puzzled by his love of its pompous spaces, and mocked his knowledgeable attachment to the paintings and furniture. "You're such a snob," she said, with a provoking laugh; coming from the family he was thought to be snobbish about, this was a bit of a facer. "I'm not really," said Nick, as if a small admission was the best kind of denial, "I just love beautiful things." Catherine peered around comically, as though at so much junk. In her parents' absence her instincts were humbly transgressive, and mainly involved smoking and asking strangers home. Nick came back one evening to find her drinking in the kitchen with an old black minicab driver and telling him what the contents of the house were insured for.

At nineteen she already had a catalogue of failed boyfriends, each with a damning epithet, which was sometimes all Nick knew them by: "Crabs" or "Drip-Dry" or "Quantity Surveyor." A lot of them seemed almost consciously chosen for their unacceptability at Kensington Park Gardens: a tramplike Welshman in his forties whom she'd met in the Notting Hill Record Exchange; a beautiful punk with FUCK tattooed on his neck; a Rastafarian from round the corner who moaned prophetically about Babylon and the downfall of Thatcher. Others were public schoolboys and sleek young professionals on the make in the Thatcher slump. Catherine was slight but physically reckless; what drew boys to her often frightened them away. Nick, in his secret innocence, felt a certain respect for her experience with men: to have so many failures required a high rate of preliminary success. He could never judge how attractive she was. In her case the genetic mixture of two good-looking parents had produced something different from Toby's sleepy beauty: Gerald's large confidence-winning mouth had been awkwardly squashed into the slender ellipse of Rachel's face. Catherine's emotions always rushed to her mouth.

She loved anything satirical, and was a clever vocal mimic. When she and Nick got drunk she did funny imitations of her family, so that oddly they seemed not to have gone away. There was Gerald, with his facetious boom, his taste for the splendid, his favourite tags from the Alice books. "Really, Catherine," protested Catherine, "you would try the patience of an oyster." Or, "You recall the branches of arithmetic, Nick? Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision…?" Nick joined in, with a sense of treacherously bad manners. It was Rachel's style that attracted him more, as a code both aristocratic and distantly foreign. Her group sounded nearly Germanic, and the sort of thing she would never belong to; her philistine, pronounced as a French word, seemed to cover, by implication, anyone who said it differently. Nick tried this out on Catherine, who laughed but perhaps wasn't much impressed. Toby she couldn't be bothered to mimic; and it was true that he was hard to "get." She did a funny turn as her godmother, the Duchess of Flintshire, who as plain Sharon Feingold had been Rachel's best friend at Cranborne Chase school, and whose presence in their lives gave a special archness to their joke about Mr Duke the odd-job man. The Duke that Sharon had married had a twisted spine and a crumbling castle, and the Feingold vinegar fortune had come in very handy. Nick hadn't met the Duchess yet, but after Catherine's impression of a thoughtless social dynamo he felt he'd had the pleasure without the concomitant anxiety.

Nick never talked to Catherine about his crush on her brother. He was afraid she would find it funny. But they talked a good deal about Leo, in the week of waiting, a week that crawled and jumped and crawled. There wasn't much to go on, but enough for two lively imaginations to build a character from: the pale-blue letter, with its dubious ascenders; his voice, which only Nick had heard, in the stilted cheerful chat which finalized the plans, and which was neutrally London, not recognizably black, though he sensed a special irony and lack of expectation in it; and his colour photograph, which showed that if Leo wasn't as handsome as he claimed he still demanded to be looked at. He was sitting on a park bench, seen from the waist up and leaning back-it was hard to tell how tall he was. He was wearing a dark bomber jacket and gazed away with a frown, which seemed to cast a shadow over his features, or to be a shadow rising within them. Behind him you could see the silver-grey crossbar of a racing bike, propped against the bench.

The substance of the original ad ("Black guy, late 20s, v. good-looking, interests cinema, music, politics, seeks intelligent like-minded guy 18-40") was half-obliterated by Nick's later dreamings and Catherine's premonitions, which dragged Leo further and further off into her own territory of uncomfortable sex and bad faith. At times Nick had to reassure himself that he and not Catherine was the one who had a date with him. Hurrying home that evening he glanced through the requirements again. He couldn't help feeling he was going to fall short of his new lover's standards. He was intelligent, he had just got a first-class degree from Oxford University, but people meant such different things by music and politics. Well, knowing the Feddens would give him an angle. He found the tolerant age range comforting. He was only twenty, but he could have been twice that age and Leo would still have wanted him. In fact he might be going to stay with Leo for twenty years: that seemed to be the advertisement's coded promise.

The second post was still scattered across the hall, and there was no sound from upstairs; but he felt, from a charge in the air, that he wasn't alone. He gathered up the letters and found that Gerald had sent him a postcard. It was a black-and-white picture of a Romanesque doorway, with flanking saints and a lively Last Judgement in the tympanum: "Eglise de Podier, XII siecle." Gerald had large, impatient handwriting, in which most of the letters were missed out, and perhaps unnegotiable with his very thick nib. The author of Graphology might have diagnosed an ego as big as Leo's, but the main impression was of almost evasive haste. He had a sign-off that could have been "Love" but could have been "Yours" or even, absurdly, "Hello"-so you didn't quite know where you stood with him. As far as Nick could make out they were enjoying themselves. He was pleased to have the card, but it cast a slight shadow, by reminding him that the August idyll would soon be over.

He went into the kitchen, where Catherine, it must be, had made a mess since Elena's early morning visit. The cutlery drawers tilted heavily open. There was a vague air of intrusion. He darted into the dining room, but the boulle clock ticked on in its place on the mantelpiece, and the silver safe was locked. The brown Lenbach portraits of Rachel's forebears stared as sternly as Leo himself. Upstairs in the drawing room the windows were open on to the curving rear balcony, but the blue lagoon of the Guardi still gleamed and flashed above the mantelpiece. A low cupboard in the break-fronted bookcase stood open. Funny how mere living in a house like this could have the look of a burglary. He peered down from the balcony, but there was no one in the garden. He went more calmly up the further three flights of stairs, and when his nerves about Leo took hold of him again they were almost a relief from the grown-up anxieties of guarding the house. He saw Catherine moving in her room, and called out to her. A breeze had slammed his door and his own room was stifling, the books and papers on the table by the window curled up and hot. He said, "I thought we'd had a break-in for a moment"-but the fear of it had already gone.

He picked out two possible shirts on their hangers, and was looking in the mirror when Catherine came in and stood behind him. He sensed at once her desire to touch him and her inability to do so. She didn't meet his eye in the mirror, she simply looked at him, at his shoulder, as though he would know what to do. She had the bewildered slight smile of someone only just coping with pain. Nick smiled back more broadly, to make a few seconds of delay, as if it might still be one of their jokes. "Blue or white?" he said, covering himself with the shirts again, like two wings. Then he dropped his arms and the shirts trailed on the floor. He saw night falling already and Leo on his racing bike racing home to Willesden. "Not too good?" he said.

She walked over and sat on the bed, where she leant forward and glanced up at him, with her ominous hint of a smile. He had seen her in this little flowered dress day after day, it was what she strode about the streets in, something off the Portobello Road that looked just right for the district or her fantasy of it, but now, armless, backless, legless, seemed hardly a garment at all. Nick sat beside her and gave her a hug and a rub, as if to warm her up, though she felt hot as a sick child. She let it happen, then shifted away from him a little. Nick said, "What can I do, then?" and saw that he was hoping to be comforted himself. In the deep, bright space of the mirror he noticed two young people in an undisclosed crisis.

She said, "Can you get the stuff out of my room. Yeah, take it all downstairs."

"OK."

Nick went along the landing and into her room, where as usual the curtains were closed and the air soured with smoke. The dense red gauze wrapped round the lampshade gave off a dangerous smell, and filtered the light across a chaos of bedclothes, underwear, LPs. Drawers and cupboards had been gone through-the imaginary burglary might have reached its frustrated climax here. Nick peered around and though he was alone he mugged a good-natured readiness to take control. His mind was working quickly and responsibly, but he clung to his last few moments of ignorance. He made a low quiet concentrating sound, looking over the table, the bed, the junk heap on the lovely old walnut chest. The cupboard in the corner had a wash-basin in it, and Catherine had laid out half a dozen things on the tiled surround, like instruments before an operation: a heavy carving knife, a curved two-handled chopper, a couple of honed-down filleting knives, and the two squat little puncheons that Nick had seen Gerald use to grapple and turn a joint with, almost as though it might still get away. He gathered them up in an awkward clutch, and took them carefully downstairs, with new, heavy-hearted respect for them.

She was adamant that he shouldn't call anyone-she hinted that worse things would follow if he did. Nick paced about in his uncertainty over this. His ignorance of what to do was a sign of his much larger ignorance about the world in which he'd recently arrived. He pictured the sick shock of her parents when they found out, and saw the stain on the record of his new life with the Feddens. He was untrustworthy after all, as he had suspected he was, and they had not. He had a dread of being in the wrong, but was also frightened of taking action. Perhaps he should try to find Toby? But Toby was a non-person to Catherine, treated at best with inattentive politeness.

Nick was shaping the story in his head. He persuaded himself that disaster had been contemplated, stared at, and rejected. There had been a ritual of confrontation, lasting an hour, a minute, all afternoon-and maybe it would never have been more than a ritual. Now she was almost silent, passive, she yawned a lot, and Nick wondered if the episode had already been taken away, screened and isolated by some effective mechanism. Perhaps his own return had always played a part in her design. Certainly it made it hard for him to refuse her when she said, "For god's sake don't leave me alone." He said, "Of course I won't," and felt the occasion close in on him, suffocatingly, from a great distance. It was something else Toby had mentioned, by the lake: there are times when she can't be alone, and she has to have someone with her. Nick had yearned then to share Toby's duty, to steep himself in the difficult romance of the family. And now here he was, with his own romance about to unfold in the back bar of the Chepstow Castle, and he was the person she had to have with her. She couldn't explain, but no one else would do.

Nick brought her down to the drawing room and she chose some music by going to the record cupboard and pulling out a disc without looking and then putting it on. She seemed to say she could act, but that deliberations were beyond her. It came on jarringly. The arm had come down in the wrong place, as if looking for a single. "Ah yes…!" said Nick. It was the middle of the scherzo of Schumann's Fourth Symphony. He kept an eye on her, and felt he understood the way she let the music take care of her; he saw her drifting along in it, not knowing where she was particularly, but grateful and semi-interested. He was agitated by indecision, but he went with it himself for a few moments. The trio returned, but only for a brief airing before the magical transition to the finale… based, very obviously, on that of Beethoven's Fifth: he could have told her that, and how it was really the second symphony, and how all the material grew from the opening motif, except the unexpected second subject of the finale… He stood back and decided, in the bleak but proper light of responsibility, that he would go downstairs at once and ring Catherine's parents. But then, as he left the room, he thought suddenly of Leo, and felt sure he was losing his only chance with him: so he rang him instead, and put off the call to France until later. He didn't know how to explain it to Leo: the bare facts seemed too private to tell a stranger, and a watered-down version would sound like an invented excuse. Again he saw himself in the wrong. He kept clearing his throat as he dialled the number.

Leo answered very briskly, but that was only because he was having his dinner and still had to get ready-facts which Nick found illuminating. His voice, with its little reserve of mockery, was exactly what he had heard before, but had lost in the remembering. Nick had only begun his apologies when Leo got the point and said in an amiable way that he was quite relieved, and dead busy himself. "Oh good," said Nick, and then felt almost at once that Leo could have been more put out. "If you're sure you don't mind…" he added.

"That's all right, my friend," said Leo quietly, so that Nick had the impression there was someone else there.

"I'd still really like to meet you."

There was a pause before Leo said, "Absolutely."

"Well, what about the weekend?"

"No. The weekend I cannot do."

Nick wanted to say "Why not?" but he knew the answer must be that Leo would be seeing other hopefuls then; it must be like auditions. "Next week?" he said with a shrug. He wanted to do it before Gerald and Rachel got back, he wanted to use the house.

"Yeah, going to the Carnival?" said Leo.

"Perhaps on the Saturday-we're away over the bank holiday. Let's get together before then." Nick longed for the Carnival, but felt humbly that it was Leo's element. He saw himself losing Leo on their first meeting, where a whole street moves in a solid current and you can't turn back.

"The best thing is, if you give us a ring next week," said Leo.

"I most certainly will," said Nick, pretending he thought all this was positive but feeling abruptly miserable and stiff in the face. "Look, I'm really sorry about tonight, I'll make it up to you." There was another pause in which he knew his sentence was being decided-his whole future perhaps. But then Leo said, in a throaty whisper,

"You bet you will!"-and as Nick started to giggle he hung up. So that little pause had been conspiratorial, a conspiracy of strangers. It wasn't so bad. It was beautiful even. Nick hung up too and went to look at himself in the high gilt arch of the hall mirror. With the sudden hilarity of relief he thought how nice-looking he was, small but solid, clear-skinned and curly-headed. He could see Leo falling for him. Then the colour drained from him, and he climbed the stairs.

When it had cooled Nick and Catherine went down into the garden and out through the gate into the communal gardens beyond. The communal gardens were as much a part of Nick's romance of London as the house itself: big as the central park of some old European city, but private, and densely hedged on three sides with holly and shrubbery behind high Victorian railings. There were one or two places, in the surrounding streets, where someone who wasn't a keyholder could see through to a glade among the planes and tall horse chestnuts-across which perhaps a couple would saunter or an old lady wait for her even slower dog. And sometimes in these summer evenings, with thrush and blackbird song among the leaves, Nick would glimpse a boy walking past on the outside and feel a surprising envy of him, though it was hard to know how a smile would be received, coming from the inside. There were hidden places, even on the inside, the path that curled, as if to a discreet convenience, to the gardener's hut behind a larch-lap fence; the enclosure with the sandpit and the children's slide, where genuine uniformed nannies still met and gossiped with a faint air of truancy; and at the far end the tennis courts, whose overlapping rhythms of serves and rallies and calls lent a calming reminder of other people's exertions to the August dusk.

From end to end, just behind the houses, ran the broad gravel walk, with its emphatic camber and its metal-edged gutters where a child's ball would come to rest and the first few plane leaves, dusty but still green, were already falling, since the summer had been so hot and rainless all through. Nick and Catherine strolled along there, arm in arm, like a slow old couple; Nick felt paired with Catherine in a new, almost formal way. At regular intervals there were Victorian cast-iron benches, made with no thought of comfort, and between them on the grass a few people were sitting or picnicking in the warm early twilight.

After a minute Nick said, "Feeling a bit better?" and Catherine nodded and pressed against him as they walked. The sense of responsibility came back to him, a grey weight in his chest, and he saw them from the point of view of the picnickers or an approaching jogger: not a dear old couple at all but a pair of kids, a skinny girl with a large nervous mouth and a solemn little blond boy pretending he wasn't out of his depth. Of course he must ring France, and hope that he got Rachel, since Gerald wasn't always good with these things. He wished he knew more about what had happened and why, but he was squeamish too. "You'll be all right," he said. He thought that asking her about it might only reopen the horror, and added, "I wonder what it was all about," as if referring to a mystery of long ago. She gave him a look of painful uncertainty, but didn't answer. "Can't really say?" Nick said, and heard, as he sometimes did, his own father's note of evasive sympathy. It was how his family sidled round its various crises; nothing was named, and you never knew for sure if the tone was subtly comprehensive, or just a form of cowardice.

"No, not really."

"Well, you know you always can tell me," he said.

At the end of the path there was the gardener's cottage, huddled quaintly and servilely under the cream cliff of the terrace. Beyond it a gate gave on to the street and they stood and looked out through its iron scrolls at the sporadic evening traffic. Nick waited, and thought despairingly of Leo at large in the same summer evening. Catherine said, "It's when everything goes black and glittering."

"Mm."

"It's not like when you're down in the dumps, which is brown."

"Right…"

"Oh, you wouldn't understand."

"No, please go on."

"It's like that car," she said, nodding at a black Daimler that had stopped across the road to let out a distinguished-looking old man. The yellow of the early street lights was reflected in its roof, and as it pulled away reflections streamed and glittered in its dark curved sides and windows.

"It sounds almost beautiful."

"It is beautiful, in a sense. But that isn't the point."

Nick felt he had been given an explanation which he was too stupid, or unimaginative, to follow. "It must be horrible as well," hesaid, "obviously…"

"Well, it's poisonous, you see. It's glittering but it's deadly at the same time. It doesn't want you to survive it. That's what it makes you realize." She stepped away from Nick, so as to use her hands. "It's the whole world just as it is," she said, stretching out to frame it or hold it off: "everything exactly the same. And it's totally negative. You can't survive in it. It's like being on Mars or something." Her eyes were fixed but blurred. "There you are, that's the best I can do," she said, and turned her back.

He followed her. "But then it changes back again…" he said.

"Yes, Nick, it does," she said, with the offended tone that sometimes follows a moment of self-exposure.

"I'm only trying to understand." He thought her tears might be a sign of recovery, and put an arm round her shoulder-though after a few seconds she made another gesture that meant freeing herself. Nick felt a hint of sexual repudiation, as if she thought he was taking advantage of her.

Later on, in the drawing room, she said, "Oh, god, this was your night with Leo."

Nick couldn't believe that she'd only just thought of that. But he said, "It's all right. I've put him off till next week."

Catherine smiled ruefully. "Well, he wasn't really your type," she said.

Schumann had given way to The Clash, who in turn had yielded to a tired but busy silence between them. Nick prayed that she wouldn't put on any more music-most of the stuff she liked had him clenched in resistance. He looked at his watch. They were an hour later in France, it was too late to ring them now, and he welcomed this rational and thoughtful postponement with a sense of cloudy relief. He went over to the much-neglected piano, its black lid the podium for various old art folios and a small bronze bust of Liszt-which seemed to give a rather pained glance at his sight-reading from the Mozart album on the stand. To Nick himself the faltering notes were like raindrops on a sandy path, and he was filled with a sense of what his evening could have been. The simple Andante became a vivid dialogue in his mind between optimism and recurrent pain; in fact it heightened both feelings to an unnecessary degree. It wasn't long until Catherine stood up and said, "For god's sake, darling, it's not a fucking funeral."

"Sorry, darling," said Nick, and vamped through a few seconds of what they called Waldorf music before getting up and wandering out on to the balcony. They had only just started calling each other darling, and it seemed a nice part of the larger conspiracy of life at Kensington Park Gardens; but outside in the cool of the night Nick felt he was play-acting, and that Catherine was frighteningly strange to him. Her mirage of the beautiful poisonous universe shimmered before him again for a moment, but he couldn't hold it, and it slipped quickly away.

There was a supper party in a nearby back garden, and the talk and light clatter carried on the still air. A man called Geoffrey was making everyone laugh, and the women kept calling out his name in excited protest between the semi-audible paragraphs of his story. Out in the communal gardens someone was walking a small white dog, which looked almost luminous as it bobbed and scampered in the late dusk. Above the trees and rooftops the dingy glare of the London sky faded upwards into weak violet heights. In summer, when windows everywhere were open, night seemed made of sound as much as shadow, the whisper of the leaves, the unsleeping traffic rumble, far-off car horns and squeals of brakes; voices, faint shouts, a waveband twiddle of unconnected music. Nick yearned for Leo, away to the north, three miles up the long straight roads, but possibly anywhere, moving with invisible speed on his silver bike. He wondered again in which park the photo of him had been taken; and of course what person, routinely intimate with Leo, had taken it. He felt hollow with frustration and delay. The girl with the white dog came back along the gravel path, and he thought how he might appear to her, if she glanced up, as an enviable figure, poised against the shining accomplished background of the lamplit room. Whereas, looking out, leaning out over the iron railing, Nick felt he had been swept to the brink of some new promise, a scented vista or vision of the night, and then held there.

2

"SOMETHING FOR EVERYBODY!" Gerald Fedden said, striding into the kitchen with a rattling brown-paper carrier bag. "All must have prizes!" He was tanned and tireless, and a lost energy came back into the house with him, the flash of his vanity and confidence-it was almost as though the words of the returning officer were fresh in his ears and he were responding to applause with these high-spirited promises. On the side of the bag was the emblem of a famous Perigueux delicatessen, a blue goose with its head through what looked like a life-saving ring, its beak curling Disney-wise in a complacent smile.

"Yuk, not foie gras," Catherine said.

"In fact this quince jelly is for the Purring One," said Gerald, taking out a jar in a gingham cap and bow and sliding it across the kitchen table.

Catherine said, "Thanks," but left it there and wandered away to the window.

"And what was it for Tobias?"

"The… um… " Rachel gestured. "The carnet."

"Of course." Gerald rummaged discreetly before passing his son a small notebook, bound in odorous green suede.

"Thanks, Pa," said Toby, who was sprawling in shorts on the long banquette and obliquely reading the paper while he listened to his mother's news. Behind him, the wall was a great hilarious page of family history, with numerous framed photographs of holidays and handshakes with the famous, as well as two wicked caricatures of Gerald, which he had made a point of buying from the cartoonists. When Gerald was in the kitchen, guests always found themselves contrasting him with his grinning, hawk-nosed cartoon image; the comparison was obviously to his advantage, though it couldn't help stirring the suspicion that under his handsome everyday mask this predatory goon might indeed be lurking.

Now, in linen shorts and espadrilles, busying back and forth from the car, he was full of anecdotes about life at the manoir, and mentioned particular local characters to stir up amusement and regret in his children. "It's such a shame we couldn't all be there together. And you know, you really should come down one year, Nick."

"Well, I'd love to," said Nick, who had been hovering with an encouraging but modest expression. Of course it would have been grand to summer with the Feddens at the manoir, but less marvellous, he couldn't help feeling, than staying in London without them. How different the room looked now, with all of them noisily and unnoticingly back in it. Their return marked the end of his custodianship, and his real pleasure in seeing them again was stained with a kind of sadness he associated with adolescence, sadness of time flying and missed opportunities. He was keen for a word of gratitude to ease the mysterious ache. Of course his main achievement, in the crisis with Catherine, went unmentioned. It seemed an omission which could still be redeemed, by a quick firm gesture of good conscience, and Catherine herself looked nervously aware of the unstated subject; but Nick saw, in the unsuspecting presence of her parents, that he had somehow sided with her, and that it was never going to be declared. "

However," said Gerald, "it was simply great for us that you could be here to look after the Cat that Walks by Herself. I hope she wasn't any trouble?"

"Well… " Nick grinned and looked down.

As an outsider, he had no pet name, and was exempt from the heavy drollery of the family lingo. His own gift was a small knobbly bottle of cologne called "Je Promets." He took an appreciative sniff, and read into it various nice discriminations on the part of the donors; certainly his own parents would never have given him anything so fragrant or ambiguous. "I trust it's all right," said Gerald, as if to say he'd made a generous stab at something outside his competence.

"It's wonderful-thank you so much," said Nick. As an outsider he found himself floating again in a pleasant medium of social charm and good humour. Toby and Catherine could frown and sulk, and exercise their prerogative not to be impressed or amused by their parents. Nick, though, conversed with his hosts in an idiom of tremendous agreement. "Did you have glorious weather?" "I must say we had glorious weather." "I hope the traffic wasn't too frightful…" "Frightful!" "I'd love to see the little church at Podier." "I think you'd love the little church at Podier." So they knitted their talk together. Even disagreements, for instance over Gerald's taste for Richard Strauss, had a glow of social harmony to them, of relished licence, and counted almost as agreements transposed into a more exciting key.

There was a lot of wine in the back of the Range Rover and Nick offered to help Gerald carry it in. He couldn't help noticing the almost annoying firmness of the MP's backside, pumped up no doubt by daily tennis and swimming in France. The suntanned legs were a further hint of sexual potential that Nick would normally have thought impossible in a man of forty-five-he thought perhaps he was so excited by the prospect of Leo that he was reacting to other men with indiscriminate alertness. When the last case was in, Gerald said, "We were stung for a hell of a lot of duty on this stuff."

Toby said, "Of course if trade barriers were lifted in the EC you wouldn't have to worry about that sort of thing."

Gerald smiled thinly to show he wasn't rising to the bait. There were a couple of bottles for Elena, who was involved in an anxious transfer of household powers to Rachel, and put them aside in her black shopping bag, to take home. Elena, a widow in her sixties, was treated with affection and a careful pretence of equality by the family, so it was revealing to see her nervousness as she accounted for what she had done in their absence. Nick couldn't quite rid himself of a sense of embarrassment with her, the ghost of an elaborate but misdirected courtesy. On his first visit to Kensington Park Gardens, he'd been welcomed by Toby and then left briefly alone in the house, with the warning that his mother would soon be home. Hearing the front door open and close, Nick went downstairs and introduced himself to the good-looking woman with jet-black hair who was sorting out the mail on the hall stand. He spoke excitedly about the painting he'd been looking at in the drawing room, and it was only slowly, in face of the woman's smiling deference and heavily accented murmurings, that he realized he wasn't talking to the Honourable Rachel but to the Italian housekeeper. Of course there was nothing wrong in being charming to the housekeeper, and Elena's views on Guardi were probably just as interesting as Rachel's and more so than Gerald's, but still the moment which she seemed to remember for its charm Nick recalled as a tiny faux pas.

Even so, sliding on to the seat beside Toby, taking in the soap and coffee smell of him, pressing briefly against his bare knee as he reached for the sugar, he felt what a success he had had. That was a year ago, and now everything was rich with association. He picked up the notebook, which had barely been looked at, and stroked the soft pile of its cover, to make up for Toby's lack of appreciation and remotely, too, as if he were thumbing some warm and hairy part of Toby himself. Toby was talking of becoming a journalist, so the gift was vaguely insulting, a lazy attempt at aptness, the sense of mere duty in the givers disguised by the stinking costliness of the production. The notebook wouldn't open flat, and a few addresses or "ideas" would have filled it. It was certainly hard to imagine Toby using it as he visited a picket line or jostled for an answer from a camera-mobbed minister.

"You heard about Maltby, of course," said Toby.

Immediately Nick felt the air in the room begin to tingle, as if at the onset of an allergic reaction. Hector Maltby, a junior minister in the Foreign Office, had been caught with a rent boy in his Jaguar at Jack Straw's Castle, and had rapidly resigned from his post and, it seemed, from his marriage. The story had been all over the papers last week, and it was silly of Nick to feel as self-conscious as he suddenly did, blushing as if he'd been caught in a Jaguar himself. It was often like this when the homosexual subject came up, and even in the Feddens' tolerant kitchen he stiffened in apprehension about what might carelessly be said-some indirect insult to swallow, a joke to be weakly smiled at. Even the case of the absurd fat Maltby, a real-life cartoon of the greedy "new" Tory, seemed to Nick to allude to his own quiet case and, in a brief twinge of paranoia, to raise a question about his closeness to Toby's beautiful brown leg.

"Silly old Hector," said Gerald.

"I don't think we were terribly surprised," Rachel said, with her characteristic tremor of irony.

"You must have known him?" Toby asked, in a ponderous new "interview" style he had.

"A bit," said Rachel.

"Not really," said Gerald.

Catherine was still gazing out of the window, indulging her dream of not being connected to her family. "I really don't see why he has to go to jail," she said.

"He's not going to jail, you daft old puss," Gerald said. "Unless you know something I don't. He was only caught with his trousers down." By some half-conscious association he looked to Nick for confirmation of this.

"As far as I know," said Nick, trying to make the five little words sound both casual and judicious. It was horrible to imagine Hector Maltby with his trousers down; and the disgraced MP didn't seem after all to merit much in the way of solidarity. Nick's taste was for aesthetically radiant images of gay activity, gathering in a golden future for him, like swimmers on a sunlit bank.

"Well, I don't see why he had to resign," Catherine said. "Who cares if he likes a blow-job now and then?"

Gerald smoothed this over but he was clearly shocked. "No, no, he had to go. There was really no alternative." His tone was ruffled but responsible, and the sense of his own voice submitting to the common line and formula of politics was vaguely disturbing, though Catherine laughed at it.

"It may all do him good," she said. "Help him to find out who he really is.

Gerald frowned, and pulled a bottle from the cardboard crate. "You have the oddest idea of what might do people good," he said, musingly but indignantly. "Now I thought we might have the Podier St-Eustache with dinner."

"Mm, lovely," Rachel murmured. "The thing is, darling, quite simply, that it's vulgar and unsafe," she said, in one of her sudden hard formulations.

Gerald said, "You'll dine with us tonight, Nick?"

Nick smiled and looked away because the generous question raised a new uncertainty about his status on subsequent nights. How much and how often would he be sharing with them? They had mentioned he might sometimes be called on to make up numbers. "I'm terribly sorry, but I can't tonight," he said.

"Oh… what a shame, our first night back…"

He wasn't sure how to put it. Catherine watched his hesitation with a fascinated smile. "No, Nick can't because he's got a date," she said. It was annoying to have her frankness applied to his tender plans, and a treacherous reward for his silence about her affairs. He coloured, and felt a further crackle of social static pass through the room. Everyone seemed to be humming, doubtful, encouraging, embarrassed, he couldn't tell.

Nick had never been on a date with a man before, and was much less experienced than Catherine imagined. In the course of their long conversations about men he had let one or two of his fantasies assume the status of fact, had lied a little, and had left some of Catherine's assumptions about him unchallenged. His confessed but entirely imaginary seductions took on-partly through the special effort required to invent them and repeat them consistently-the quality of real memories. He sometimes had the sense, from a hint of reserve in people he was talking to, that while they didn't believe him they saw he was beginning to believe himself. He had only come out fully in his last year at Oxford, and had used his new licence mainly to flirt with straight boys. His heart was given to Toby, with whom flirting would have been inappropriate, almost sacrilegious. He wasn't quite ready to accept the fact that if he was going to have a lover it wouldn't be Toby, or any other drunk straight boy hopping the fence, it would be a gay lover-that compromised thing that he himself would then become. Proper queens, whom he applauded and feared and hesitantly imitated, seemed often to find something wrong with him, pretty and clever though he was. At any rate they didn't want to go to bed with him, and he was free to wander back, in inseparable relief and discouragement, to his inner theatre of sexual make-believe. There the show never ended and the actors never tired and a certain staleness of repetition was the only hazard. So the meeting with Leo, pursued through all the obstacles of the system which alone made it possible, was momentous for Nick. Pausing for a last hopeful gaze into the gilt arch of the hall mirror, which monitored all comings and goings, he found it reluctant to give its approval; when he pulled the door shut and set off along the street he felt giddily alone, and had to remind himself he was doing all this for pleasure. It had taken on the mood of a pointless dare.

As he hurried down the hill he started focusing again on his Interests and Ambitions, the rather surprising topic for the meeting. He saw that interests weren't always a sexy thing. A shared passion for a subject, large or small, could quickly put two strangers into a special state of subdued rapture and rivalry, distantly resembling love; but you had to hit on the subject. As for ambitions, he felt it was hard to announce them without sounding either self-deluding or feeble, and in fact unambitious. Gerald could say, "I want to be Home Secretary," and have people smiling but conceding the possibility. Whereas Nick's ambition was to be loved by a handsome black man in his late twenties with a racing bike and a job in local government. This was the one thing he wasn't going to be able to admit to Leo himself.

He fixed his thoughts for the hundredth time on the little back bar of the Chepstow Castle, which he had chosen for its shadowy semi-privacy-a space incuriously glanced into by people being served in the public bar, but barely used on summer evenings when everyone stood outside on the pavement. There was an amber light in there, among the old whisky mirrors and photographs of horse-drawn drays. He saw himself sitting shoulder to shoulder with Leo, their hands joined in secret on the dusty moquette.

As he approached the pub he registered a black man at the edge of the crowd of drinkers, then knew it was Leo, then pretended he hadn't seen him. So he was quite small; and he'd grown a kind of beard. Why was he waiting in the street? Nick was already beside him and looked again, very nervously, and saw his questioning smile.

"If you don't want to know me…" Leo said.

Nick staggered and laughed and stuck out his hand. "I thought you'd be inside."

Leo nodded, and looked down the street. "This way I can see you coming."

"Ah… " Nick laughed again.

"Besides, I wasn't sure about the bike, in this area." And there the bike was, refined, weightless, priceless, the bike of the future, shackled to the nearest lamp-post.

"Oh, I'm sure it will be fine." Nick frowned and gazed. He was surprised that Leo thought this a bad area. Of course he thought it was rather dangerous himself; and three or four corners away there were pubs he knew he could never enter, so bad were their names, and so intense the mana of their glimpsed interiors. But here… A tall Rastafarian strolled by, and his roll of the head was a greeting to Leo, who nodded and then looked away with what seemed to Nick a guarded admission of kinship.

"We'll have a little chat outside, eh?"

Nick went in to get the drinks. He stood at the counter looking through to the back bar-where in fact there were several people talking, perhaps one of those groups that meet in a pub, and the room was brighter than he remembered it or would have wanted it. Everything seemed to be a bit different. Leo was only having a Coke, but Nick needed courage for the evening and his own identical-looking drink had a double rum in it. He had never drunk rum before, and was always astonished that anyone liked Coke. His mind held the floating image of the man he had longed to meet, whom he had touched for a moment and left outside in all his disconcerting reality. He was too sexy, he was too much what he wanted, in his falling-down jeans and his tight blue shirt. Nick was worried by his obvious intention to seduce, or at least to show his capacity for seduction. He took the drinks out with a light tremble.

There wasn't anywhere to sit down, so they stood and leaned against a brown-tiled window sill; in the opaque lower half of the window the word SPIRITS was etched in fancy Victorian capitals, their serifs spiralling out in interlacing tendrils. Leo looked at Nick frankly, since that was what he was here for, and Nick grinned and blushed, which made Leo smile too, for a moment.

Nick said, "You're growing a beard, I see."

"Yeah-sensitive skin… it's a bloodbath when I shave. Literally," said Leo, with a quick glance that showed Nick that he liked to make his point. "Then if I don't shave, I get these ingrowing hairs, fucking murder, have to pick the ends out with a pin." He stroked his stubbly jaw with a small fine hand, and Nick saw that he had those shaving-bumps he had half-noticed on other black men. "I tend to leave it for four days, say, five days, maybe, then have a good shave: try and avoid both problems that way."

"Right… " said Nick, and smiled, partly because he was learning something interesting.

"Most of them still recognize me, though," said Leo, and gave a wink.

"No, it wasn't that," said Nick, who was too shy to explain his own shyness. His glance slipped up and down between Leo's loose crotch and the neat shallow cushion of his hair, and tended to avoid his handsome face. He was taking Leo's word for it that he was handsome, but it didn't quite cover the continuing shock of what was beautiful, strange, and even ugly about him. The phrase "most of them" slowly took on meaning in his mind. "Anyway," he said, and took a quick sip of his drink, which had a reassuring burn to it. "I suppose you've had lots of replies." Sometimes when he was nervous he asked questions to which he would rather not have known the answers.

Leo made a little puff of comic exhaustion. "Yeah… yeah, I'm not answering some of them. It's a joke. They don't include a picture, or if they do they look horrible. Or they're ninety-nine years old. I even had a thing from a woman, a lesbian woman admittedly, with a view to would I father her child." Leo frowned indignantly but there was something sly and flattered in his look too. "And some of the stuff they write. It's disgusting! It's not like I'm just looking for a bonk, is it? This is something a bit different."

"Quite," said Nick-though bonk was a troublingly casual way of referring to something which preoccupied him so much.

"This dog's been round the block a few times," Leo said, and looked off down the street as if he might spot himself coming home. "Anyway, you looked nice. You've got nice writing."

"Thanks. So have you."

Leo took in the compliment with a nod. "And you can spell," he said.

Nick laughed. "Yes, I'm good at that." He'd been afraid that his own little letter sounded pedantic and virginal, but it seemed he'd got it about right. He didn't remember it calling for any great virtuosity of spelling. "I always have trouble with 'moccasin,'" he said.

"Ah, there you are… " said Leo, with a wary chuckle, before changing the subject. "It's nice where you live," he said.

"Oh… yes…" said Nick, as if he couldn't quite remember where it was.

"I went by there the other day, on the bike. I nearly rang your bell."

"Mm-you, should have. I've had the place virtually to myself." He felt sick at the thought of the missed chance.

"Yeah? I saw this girl going in…"

"Oh, that was probably only Catherine."

Leo nodded. "Catherine. She's your sister, yeah?"

"No, I don't have a sister. She's actually the sister of my friend Toby." Nick smiled and stared: "It's not my house."

"Oh…" said Leo. "Oh."

"God, I don't come from that sort of background. No, I just live there. It belongs to Toby's parents. I've just got a tiny little room up in the attic." Nick was rather surprised to hear himself throwing his whole fantasy of belonging there out of the window.

Leo looked a bit disappointed. He said, "Right… " and shook his head slowly.

"I mean they're very good friends, they're a sort of second family to me, but I probably won't be there for long. It's just to help me out, while I'm getting started at university."

"And I thought I'd got myself a nice little rich boy," Leo said. And perhaps he meant it, Nick couldn't be sure, they were total strangers after all, though a minute before he'd imagined them naked together in the Feddens' emperor-size bed. Was that why his letter did the trick-the address, the Babylonian notepaper?

"Sorry," he said, with a hint of humour. He drank some more of the sweet strong rum and Coke, so obviously not his kind of drink. The refined blue of the dusk sky was already showing its old lonely reach.

Leo laughed. "I'm only kidding you!"

"I know," Nick said, with a little smile, as Leo reached out and squeezed his shoulder, just by his shirt collar, and slowly let go. Nick reacted with his own quick pat at Leo's side. He was absurdly relieved. A charge passed into him through Leo's fingers, and he saw the two of them kissing passionately, in a rush of imagination that was as palpable as this awkward pavement rendezvous.

"Still, your friends must be rich," Leo said.

Nick was careful not to deny this. "Oh, they're rolling in money."

"Yeah… " Leo crooned, with a fixed smile; he might have been savouring the fact or condemning it. Nick saw further questions coming, and decided at once he wouldn't tell him about Gerald. The evening demanded enough courage as it was. A Tory MP would shadow their meeting like an unwelcome chaperon, and Leo would get on his bike and leave them to it. He could say something about Rachel's family, perhaps, if an explanation was called for. But in fact Leo emptied his glass and said, "Same again?"

Nick hastily finished his own drink, and said, "Thanks. Or maybe this time I'll have a shot of rum in it."

After half an hour more Nick had slid into a kind of excited trance brought on by his new friend's presence and a feeling, as the sky darkened and the street lamps brightened from pink to gold, that it was going to work out. He felt nervous, slightly breathless, but at the same time buoyant, as if a lonely responsibility had been taken off him. A couple of places came free at the end of a picnic table with fixed benches, and they sat leaning towards each other as though playing, and then half-forgetting, some invisible game. For Nick the ease and comfort of the rum were indistinguishable parts of the intimacy which he felt deepening like the dusk.

He found himself wondering how they looked and sounded to the people around them, the couple beside them at the table. It was all getting noisier as the evening went on, with a vague sense of heterosexual threat. Nick guessed Leo's other dates would have met him in a gay pub, but he had flunked that further challenge. Now he regretted the freedom he would have had there. He wanted to stroke Leo's cheek and kiss him, with a sigh of surrender.

Nothing very personal was said. Nick found it hard to interest Leo in his own affairs, and his various modest leads about his family and his background were not picked up. There were things he'd prepared and phrased and turned into jokes that were not to be heard-or not tonight. Once or twice he took Leo with him: into a falsely cheerful dismissal of the idea that Toby, though fairly attractive, was of any real interest to him (Leo would think him a weirdo to have loved so long and pointlessly); into a sketch of Rachel's banking family, which Leo interrupted with a sour smile, as if it was all proof of some general iniquity. He had a certain caustic preoccupation with money, Nick could see; and when he told Leo that his father was an antiques dealer the two words, with the patina of old money and the flash of business, seemed to combine in a dull glare of privilege. Among his smart Oxford friends Nick managed to finesse his elbow-patched old man, with his Volvo estate full of blanket-wrapped mirrors and Windsor chairs, into a more luminous figure, a scholar and friend of the local aristocracy. Now he felt a timid need to humble him. And he was wrong, because Leo's long-time boyfriend, Pete, had been an antiques dealer, on the Portobello Road. "Mainly French work," Leo said. "Ormolu. Boulle." It was the first clear thing he had said about his private past. And then he changed the subject.

Leo was certainly quite an egotist-Catherine's graphological analysis had been spot on. But he didn't expound his inner feelings. He did something Nick couldn't imagine doing himself, which was to make statements about the sort of person he was. "I'm the sort of guy who needs a lot of sex," he said, and, "I'm like that, I always say what I think." Nick wondered for a moment if he'd inadvertently contradicted him. "I don't bear grudges," Leo said sternly: "I'm not that kind of person." "I'm sure you're not," Nick said, with a quick discountenancing shudder. And perhaps this was a useful skill, or tactic, in the blind-date world, even if Nick's modesty and natural fastidiousness kept him from replying in the same style ("I'm the sort of guy who likes Pope more than Wordsworth," "I'm crazy about sex but I haven't had it yet"). It added to the excitement of the evening. He wasn't here to share quickly matched intuitions with an Oxford friend. He loved the hard self-confidence of his date; and at the same time, in his silent, superior way, he thought he heard how each little brag was the outward denial of an inner doubt.

With the third drink Nick grew warm and half-aroused and he looked undisguisedly at Leo's lips and neck and imagined unbuttoning the shiny blue short-sleeved shirt that cut so tightly under his arms. Leo hooded his eyes for a second, a signal, secret and ironic, and Nick wondered if it meant he could see he was drunk. He wasn't sure if he should somehow signal back-he grinned and took another quick sip. He had the feeling that Leo had drunk Coke since he was a child, and that it was one of the nearly unnoticed facts of life to him, beyond choice or criticism. Whereas in his family it was one of a thousand things that were frowned on-there had never been a can or bottle of it in the house. Leo couldn't possibly have imagined it, but the glass of Coke in Nick's hand was a secret sign of submission, and afterwards the biting sweetness of the drink, like flavouring in a medicine, seemed fused with the other experiments of the night in a complex impression of darkness and freedom. Leo yawned and Nick glanced into his mouth, its bright white teeth uncorrupted by all the saccharine and implying, Nick humbly imagined, an almost racial disdain for his own stoppings and slants. He put his hand on Leo's forearm for a moment, and then wished he hadn't-it made Leo look at his watch.

"Time's getting on," he said. "I can't be late getting back."

Nick looked down and mumbled, "Do you have to get back?" He tried to smile but he knew his face was stiff with sudden anxiety. He moved his wet glass in circles on the rough-sawn table top. When he glanced up again he found Leo was gazing at him sceptically, one eyebrow arched.

"I meant back to your place, of course," he said.

Nick grinned and reddened at the beautiful reversal, like a teased child abruptly reprieved, rewarded. But then he had to say, "I don't think we can…"

Leo looked at him levelly. "Not enough room?"

Nick winced and waited-the truth was he didn't dare, he just couldn't do that to Rachel and Gerald, it was vulgar and unsafe, the consequences unspooled ahead of him, their happy routines of chortling agreement would wither for ever. "I don't think we can. I don't mind going up to your place."

Leo shrugged. "It's not practical," he said.

"I can jump on the bus," said Nick, who had studied the London A-Z in absorbed conjecture about Leo's street, neighbourhood, historic churches, and access to public transport.

"Nah-" Leo looked away with a reluctant smile and Nick saw that he was embarrassed. "My old lady's at home." This first hint of shyness and shame, and the irony that tried to cover it, cockneyfied and West Indian too, made Nick want to jump on him and kiss him. "She's dead religious," Leo said, with a short defeated chuckle.

"I know what you mean," said Nick. So there they were, two men on a summer night, with nowhere to call their own. There was a kind of romance to that. "I've got an idea," he said tentatively. "If you don't mind, um, being outside."

"I don't care," said Leo, and looked lazily over his shoulder. "I'm not dropping my pants in the street."

"No, no…"

"I'm not that sort of slut."

Nick laughed anxiously. He wasn't sure what people meant when they said they'd had sex "in the street"-even "on Oxford Street," he'd once heard. In six months' time perhaps he would know, he'd have sorted out the facts from the figures of speech. He watched Leo twist and lift a knee to clamber free of the bench-he looked keen to get on with it, and he acted of course as if Nick knew the procedure. Nick followed him with a baked smile and a teeming inward sense of occasion. He was consenting and powerless in the thrust of the event, the rich foregone conclusion of the half-hour that opened ahead of them: it made his heart race with its daring and originality, though it also seemed, as Leo squatted to unlock his bike, something everyday and inevitable. He ought to tell Leo it was his first time; then he thought it might bore him or put him off. He gazed down at his strictly shaved nape, the back of a stranger's,head, which any minute now he would be allowed to touch. The label of Leo's skimpy blue shirt was turned up at the collar and showed the temp's signature of Miss Selfridge. It was a little secret given away, a vanity exposed-Nick was light-headed, it was so funny and touching and sexy. He saw the long muscles of his back shifting in its sleek grip, and then, as Leo hunkered on his heels and his loose jeans stood away from his waist, the street lamp shining in on the brown divide of his buttocks and the taut low line of his briefs.

He unlocked the gate and let Leo go in ahead of him. "Cycling isn't permitted in the gardens, but I dare say you can walk your bike."

Leo hadn't learnt his mock-pompous tone yet. "I dare say bumshoving isn't permitted either," he said. The gate closed behind them, an oiled click, and they were together in the near-darkness of the shrubbery. Nick wanted to hold Leo and kiss him at once; but he wasn't quite certain. Bumshoving was unambiguous, and encouraging, but not romantic exactly… They strolled cautiously forward, leaning against each other for a step or two as they steered for the path. There was the slightest chill in the air now, but Nick shivered wildly in a spasm of excitement. His fingers felt oddly stiff, as though he was wearing very tight gloves. Even in the deep shadow he wanted to conceal his weird smirk of apprehension. He did so hope it would be him who got to do the shoving, but didn't know how you arranged that, perhaps it all just became clear. Perhaps they both had to have a go. He led Leo through on to a wide inner lawn, the bike bouncing out beside them, controlled only by a hand on its saddle-it seemed to quiver and explore just ahead of them. To the right rose a semicircle of old planes and a copper beech whose branches plunged to the ground and made a broad bell-tent that was cool and gloomy even at midday. Away to the left ran the gravel walk, and beyond it the tall outline of the terrace, and the long, intermitted rhythm of glowing windows. As they skirted the lawn Nick counted confusedly, searching for the Feddens'. He found the first-floor balcony, the proud brightness of the room beyond the open French windows.

"Yeah, how far is it?" said Leo.

"Oh, just over here…"-Nick giggled because he didn't know if Leo's grumpiness was real. He went ahead a bit, anxiously responsible. As his eyes adjusted to the semi-darkness nowhere seemed private enough-there was more show-through from the street lights, voices on the pavement were unnervingly close. And of course on a summer night there were keyholders still at large, picnickers charmed into long late reminiscence, walkers of white dogs. He stooped under the copper beech, but the branches were rough and confusing and the mast crackled underfoot. He backed out again, bashing into Leo and gripping his waist for a moment to steady himself. "Sorry… " The feel of his warm hard body under the silky shirt was almost worryingly beautiful, a promise too lavish to believe in. He prayed that Led didn't think he was a fool. The other men in Leo's life, anonymous partners, answerers of ads, old boyfriends, old Pete, massed impatiently behind him-as if a match had flared he saw their predatory eyes and moustaches and hardened sex-confidence. He led the way quickly to the little compound of the gardener's hut.

"All right, this'll do," said Leo, propping his bike against the larch-lap screen. For a moment it seemed he was going to chain it up again, then he stopped himself and left it there with a regretful laugh. Nick tried the door of the hut even though it was padlocked. Beside it there was a shadowy area where a flatbedded barrow was kept, and a broken bench; there were laurels, and a yew tree hanging over; the dusty sour smell of the yew was mixed with the muted sweetness of a huge compost heap, a season's grass cuttings mounded high in a chicken-wire coop. Leo came up to Nick and hesitated for a second, looking away, trailing his fingers over the warm cuttings. "You know, these composts get really hot inside," he said.

"Yes… " Nick had known this all his life.

"Too hot to touch-like a hundred degrees."

"Is that right…?" He reached out like a tired child.

"Anyway," Leo said, letting Nick's hand slide round his waist, putting his arm, his elbow, round Nick's neck to pull him close against him. "Anyway… " His face slipped sideways across Nick's as he breathed the word, the unguessed softness of his lips touched his cheeks and neck, while Nick sighed violently and ran his hand up and down on Leo's back. He pushed his mouth towards Leo's, and they met, and hurried into a kiss. To Nick it felt simply like a helpless admission of need, and the shocking thing was the proof of Leo's need, in the force and thoroughness with which he worked on him. They pushed apart, Leo faintly smiling, Nick gasping and tormented just by the hope that they would do it again.

They kissed for a minute more-two minutes, Nick wasn't counting, half-hypnotized by the luscious rhythm, the generous softness of Leo's lips and the thick insistence of his tongue. He was gasping from the rush of reciprocity, the fact of being made love to. Nothing at the pub, in their aimless conversation, had even hinted at it. He'd never seen it described in a book. He was achingly ready and completely unprepared. He felt the coaxing caress of Leo's hand on the back of his head, roaming through the curls there, and then lifted his other hand to stroke Leo's head, so beautifully alien in its hard stubbly angles and the dry dense firmness of his hair. He thought he saw the point of kissing but also its limitations-it was an instinct, a means of expression, of mouthing a passion but not of satisfying it. So his right hand, that was lightly clutching Leo's waist, set off, still doubting its freedom, to dawdle over his plump buttocks and then squeeze them through the soft old denim. The prodding of Leo's angled erection against the top of Nick's thigh seemed to tell him more and more clearly to do what he wanted, and get his hand inside his waistband and inside the stretched little briefs. His middle finger pushed into the deep divide, as smooth as a boy's, his fingertip even pressed a little way into the dry pucker so that Leo let out a happy grunt. "You're a bad boy," he said.

He moved away from Nick, who clung to him, then let him go with a sulky laugh. "I'm coming back," Leo said, and edged off past the shed. Nick stood for a little while, holding himself and sighing, alone again, aware of the unending soft roar of London and a night breeze hardly dipping the dark leaves of the laurel. What was Leo doing? He was getting something from the slim side pannier of his bike. He was amazing with his habits, he was fabulous, but then Nick's skin prickled for a moment at the thought of himself out here in the dark with a stranger, the risk of it, silly little fool, anything could happen. Leo felt his way back, shadow among shadows. "I think we might be needing this," he said, so that the rush of risk flowed beautifully into the mood of adventure.

Next day Nick wandered for lost half-hours through what he'd done, taking the tube of gel, that was folded back neatly, three-quarters empty, and peering at it in the gloom with relief and embarrassment; turning Leo round in his arms and unbuttoning his jeans as if they were his own, and prising his broad blunt hard-on from his pants as he eased them down, and pushing him forward to hold on to the bench as he knelt behind him and paid the kind of homage with his tongue and lips that he'd dreamed of paying for years to a whole night-catalogue of other men. He loved the scandalous idea of what he was doing more perhaps than the actual sensations and the dull very private smell. He twisted his own pants down to his knees, and smiled at the liberated bounce of his dick in the cool night air, and kissed his smile into Leo's sphincter. Then when he fucked Leo, which was what he did next, a sensation as interesting as it was delicious, he couldn't help laughing quietly. "I'm glad you think it's funny," Leo muttered. "No, it's not that," said Nick; but there was something hilarious in the shivers of pleasure that ran up his back and squeezed his neck, and ran down his arms to his fingers-he felt he'd been switched on for the first time, gently gripping Leo's hips, and then reaching round him to help unbutton his shirt and get it off and hold his naked body against him. It was all so easy. He'd worried a lot the night before that there might be some awful knack to it-

"Mind that shirt," Leo said: "it's my sister's."

That made Nick love him much more, he couldn't say why. "Your arse is so smooth," he whispered, while his hands stroked hungrily through the short rough hair on his chest and belly.

"Yeah… shave it…" said Leo, between grunted breaths as Nick got quicker and bolder, "get arse-knit… fucking murder… on the bike… " Nick kissed the back of his neck. Poor Leo! With his arse-knit and his ingrowing beard he was a martyr to his hair. "Yeah, like that," he said, with a sweet tone of revelation. He was leaning forward on one arm now, and masturbating in a pounding hurry. Nick was more and more seriously absorbed, but then just before he came he had a brief vision of himself, as if the trees and bushes had rolled away and all the lights of London shone in on him: little Nick Guest from Barwick, Don and Dot Guest's boy, fucking a stranger in a Notting Hill garden at night. Leo was right, it was so bad, and it was so much the best thing he'd ever done.

Later Nick sat for a minute on a bench by the gravel walk, while Leo took a piss on the lawn. It wasn't clear whether the tall stooping figure in wlnte shirtsleeves had seen this. Leo sat down beside Nick and there was a sense that some last, more formal part of their date was to be enacted. Nick felt abruptly heavy-hearted, and thought perhaps he had been silly to let Leo see how happy he was-he couldn't stifle his sense of achievement, and his love-starved mind and body wanted more and more of Leo. The air seemed to jostle with nothing but the presence and names of Nick and Leo, which hung in a sad sharp chemical tang of knowledge among the sleeping laurels and azaleas. The tall man walked past them, hesitated, and turned.

"You do know it's keyholders only."

"I'm sorry?"

The mingled light from the backs of the houses revealed a flushed summer-holiday face, soft and weak-chinned, perched at an altitude under thin grey hair. "Only this is a private garden."

"Oh, yes-we're keyholders," the phrase subsuming Leo, who made a little grunt, not of lust this time but of indignant confirmation. He set his hands on his knees in a proprietary attitude, his knees wide apart, sexy and insolent too.

"Ah, fine… " The man gave a squinting half-smile. "I didn't think I'd seen you before." He avoided looking at Leo, who was obviously the cause of this edgy exchange-and that for Nick was another of the commonplace revelations of the evening, of being out with a black man.

"I'm often here, actually," Nick said. He gestured away behind him towards the Feddens' garden gate. "I live at number 48."

"Fine… fine…"-the man walked on a couple of steps, then looked back, doubtful but eager. "But then you must mean at the Feddens'…"

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

The news affected the man visibly-in the softly blotted glare, which reminded Nick for a moment of plays put on in college gardens, he seemed to melt into excited intimacy. "Goodness… you're living there. Well, isn't it all splendid! We couldn't be more delighted. I'm Geoffrey Titchfield, by the way, number 52-though we only have the garden flat, unlike… unlike some!"

Nick nodded, and smiled noncommittally. "I'm Nick Guest." Some solidarity with Leo kept him from standing up, shaking hands. Of course it was Geoffrey's voice he had heard from the balcony on the night he had put Leo off, and Geoffrey's guests whose regular tireless laughter had heightened his loneliness, and now here he was in person and Nick felt he'd got one past him, he'd fucked Leo in the keyholders' garden, it was a secret victory.

"Aah… aah… " went Geoffrey. "It's such good news. We're on the local association, and we couldn't be more thrilled. Good old Gerald."

"I'm really just a friend of Toby's," Nick said.

"We were saying only the other night, Gerald Fedden will be in the Cabinet by Christmas. He knows me, by the way, you must give him all the very best from both of us, from Geoffrey and Trudi." Nick seemed to shrug in acquiescence. "He's just the sort of Tory we need. A splendid neighbour, I should say at once, and I fancy a splendid parliamentarian." This last word was played out with a proud, fond rise and fall and almost whimsical rubato in its full seven syllables.

"He's certainly a very nice man," Nick said, and added briskly, to finish the conversation, "I'm really more a friend of Toby and Catherine."

After Geoffrey had wandered off Leo stood up and took command of his bike. Nick didn't know what to say without making matters worse, and they walked along the path together in silence. He avoided looking up at the Feddens', at his own window high up in the roof, but he had a sense of being noticed by the house, and the verdict of "vulgar and unsafe" seemed to creep out like a mist and tarnish the triumph of the evening.

"Well," said Leo under his breath, "two sorts of arse-licking in ten minutes"- so that Nick laughed and hit him on the arm and immediately felt better. "Look, I'll see you, my friend," Leo said, as Nick opened the gate. They came out a bit shiftily on to the street, and Nick couldn't tell if the sentence really meant its opposite. So he was clear about it.

"I want to see you," he said, and the five light words seemed to open and deepen the night, with the prickling of his eyes, the starred lights of the cars rushing past them and down the long hill northwards, towards other boroughs, and neighbourhoods known only from their mild skyward glare.

Leo stooped to fit on his lamps, front and back. Then he leant the bike against the fence. "Come here," he said, in that part-time cockney voice that shielded little admissions and surrenders. "Give us a hug."

He stepped up to him and held him tight, but with none of the certainty of minutes before, beside the compost heap. He pressed his forehead against Leo's, who was so much the right size for him, such a good match, and gave him a quick firm kiss with pursed lips-there was a jeer and a horn-blast from a passing car. "Wankers," murmured Leo, though to Nick it felt like a shout of congratulations.

Leo sat on the bike, one foot straight down like a dancer's to the pavement, the other in the raised stirrup. A kind of envy that Nick had felt all evening for the bike and its untouchable place in Leo's heart fused with a new resentment of it and of the ease with which it would take him away. "Look, I've got a couple more to see, yeah?" At which Nick nodded dumbly. "But I'm not letting you go." He settled back on the saddle, the bike wobbled and then he rode round in ratcheting circles, so that Nick was always facing the wrong way. "Besides," said Leo, "you're a damn good fuck." He winked and smiled and then darted out across the road and down the hill without looking back.

3

NICK'S BIRTHDAY WAS eight days after Toby's, and for a moment there had been an idea that the party for Toby's twenty-first should be a joint celebration. "Makes obvious sense," Gerald had said; and Rachel had called it "a fascinating idea." Since the party was to be held at Hawkeswood, which was the country house of Rachel's brother, Lord Kessler, the plan almost frightened Nick with its social grandeur, with what it would confer on him and demand from him. Thereafter, though, it had never been mentioned again. Nick felt he couldn't allude to it himself, and after a while he allowed his mother to make arrangements for his own family party at Barwick a week later: he looked forward to that with queasy resignation.

Toby's party was on the last Sunday in August, when the Notting Hill Carnival would be pounding to its climax, and when many local residents shuttered and locked their houses and left for their second homes with their fingers crossed: since the race riots of two summers earlier the carnival had been a site of heightened hopes and fears. Nick had lain in bed the night before and heard the long-legged beat of reggae from down the hill, mixed in, like the pulse of pleasure, with the sighing of the garden trees. It was his second night without Leo. He lay wide-eyed, dwelling on him in a state beyond mere thought, a kind of dazzled grief, in which everything they'd done together was vivid to him, and the strain of loss was as keen as the thrill of success.

Next morning at eleven they gathered in the hall. Nick, seeing Gerald was wearing a tie, ran up and put one on too. Rachel wore a white linen dress, and her dark hair, with its candid streaks of grey, had the acknowledged splendour of a new cut and a new shape. She smiled her readiness at them, and Nick felt their fondness and efficiency as a family unit. He and Elena stowed the overnight luggage in the Range Rover, and then Gerald drove them out, past blocked-off streets, through gathering crowds. Everywhere there were groups of policemen, to whom he nodded and raised his hand authoritatively from the wheel. Nick, sitting in the back with Elena, felt foolish and conceited at once. He dreaded seeing Leo, on his bike, and dreaded being seen by Leo. He imagined him cruising the carnival, and yearned to belong there in the way that Leo did. He saw him dancing happily with strangers in the street, or biding his turn in the dense mutating crowds at the underground urinals. His longing jumped out in a little groan, which became a throat-clearing and an exclamation: "Oh I say, look at that amazing float."

In a side street a team of young black men with high yellow wings and tails like birds of paradise were preparing for the parade. "It's marvellous what they do," said Rachel.

"Not very nice music," said Elena, with a cheerful shiver. Nick didn't reply-and found himself in fact at one of those unforeseen moments of inner transition, when an old prejudice dissolves into a new desire. The music shocked him with its clear repetitive statement of what he wanted. Then one vast sound system warred happily with the next, so that there were different things he wanted, beautiful jarring futures for him-all this in forty or fifty seconds as the car slipped out and away into the ordinary activity of the weekend streets.

Still, if he couldn't be with Leo it was best to be somewhere quite different. Gerald drove them out along the A40, at a somehow preferentially high speed, as if led by an invisible police escort. Soon, however, they came into massive roadworks, and a long unimpressionable tailback, as you did everywhere these days. Here they were taking out the last old roundabouts and traffic lights and forcing an unimpeded freeway across the scruffy flat semi-country. Nick gazed out politely at the desert of digging and concrete, and beyond it a field where local boys were roaring round and round on dirt-bikes in breakneck contempt for the idea of actually going anywhere. They didn't care about the carnival, they'd never heard of Hawkeswood, and they'd chosen to spend the day in this field rather than anything else. Beside them perhaps a mile of solid traffic stood stationary on the motorway of the future.

As always, Nick felt a need to make things all right. He said, "I wonder where we are. Is this Middlesex, I suppose?"

"I suppose it's Middlesex," Gerald said. He hated to be thwarted and was already impatient.

"Not very nice," said Elena.

"No… " said Nick, hesitantly, humorously, as if considering a defence of it, to pass the time. He knew Elena was anxious about the party, and about her role for the evening. She had asked a couple of questions already about Fales, who was Lionel Kessler's new butler, with whom she was about to find herself pressed into some unspecified relation.

"If Lionel's giving us lunch," said Gerald, "we'd better stop somewhere and ring ahead. We'll be late."

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

"Hmm," said Gerald. "One doesn't as a rule find the words Lionel and pot luck used in the same sentence." The tone was mocking, but suggested a certain anxiety of his own about his brother-in-law, and a sense of obligation. Rachel settled back contentedly.

"Everything will be fine," she said. And in fact the traffic did then make a move, and an optimistic attitude, which was the only sort Gerald could bear, was cautiously indulged. Nick thought about the old-fashioned name Lionel. Of course it was related to Leo; but Lionel was a little heraldic lion, whereas Leo was a big live beast.

Five minutes later they were at a standstill.

"This fucking traffic," said Gerald; at which Elena looked a bit flustered.

"As well as everything else," Nick said, with determined brightness, "I can't wait to see the house."

"Well, you're going to have to," said Gerald.

"Ah, the house," said Rachel, with a sighing laugh.

Nick said, "Or perhaps you don't like it. It must be different for you, having grown up there." He felt he was rather fawning on her.

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

"You'd have to say, I think," said Gerald, "that it's the contents that make Hawkeswood. The house itself is something of a Victorian monstrosity."

"Mmm…" In Rachel's conversation a murmured "mmm" or drily drawn-out "I know..." could carry a note of surprising scepticism. Nick loved the upper-class economy of her talk, her way of saying nothing except by hinted shades of agreement and disagreement; he longed to master it himself. It was so different from the bounding effort of Gerald's conversation that he sometimes wondered if Gerald himself understood her. He said,

"I think I'll like the house as well as the contents."

Rachel looked grateful, but remained vague about the whole thing, and Nick felt slightly snubbed. Perhaps it was impossible to describe a place one had known all one's life. She didn't disparage Nick's interest, but she showed she couldn't quite be expected to be interested herself. It had been her fortune not to describe but to enjoy. She said, "You know of course there's modern art, as well as the Rembrandts," with a brief smile at having retrieved a notable detail.

Hawkeswood had been built in the 1880s for the first Baron Kessler. It stood on an artificially flattened hilltop among the Buckinghamshire beech woods, which had since grown up to hide all but its topmost spirelets from outside view. The approach, after trailing through the long linked villages, entering past a lodge and a cattle grid and climbing the half-mile of drive among grazing deer, was a complex climax for Nick; as the flashing windows of the house came into view he found himself smiling widely while his eyes darted critically, admiringly-he didn't know what-over the steep slate roofs and stone walls the colour of French mustard. He had read the high-minded but humorous entry in Pevsner, which described a seventeenth-century chateau re-imagined in terms of luxurious modernity, with plate-glass windows, under-floor central heating, numerous bathrooms, and running hot water; but it had left him unprepared for the sheer staring presence of the place. Gerald pulled up in front of the porte cochere and they got out and went in, Nick coming last and looking at everything, while Fales, a real butler in striped morning trousers, materialized to meet them. There they were, already, in the central hall, the great feature of the house, two storeys high, with an arcaded gallery on the upper level, and a giant chimneypiece made from bits of a baroque tomb. Nick felt he'd stepped into the strange and seductive fusion of an art museum and a luxury hotel.

Pot luck turned out to be an exquisite light lunch served at a round table in a room lined with rococo boiseries that had been removed wholesale from some grand Parisian town house, and painted pale blue. On the ceiling, in a flowered ellipse, two naked females held a wreath of roses. Nick saw at once that the landscape over the fireplace was a Cezanne. It gave him a hilarious sense of his own social displacement. It was one of those moments that only the rich could create, and which came for Nick all wrapped up in its own description, so that he was already recounting it to some impressionable other person-a person, that is, as impressionable as himself. He didn't know whether he should refer to it, but Lord Kessler said as he sat down, "You see I've moved that Cezanne."

Rachel peered at it briefly and said, "Oh yes." Her whole manner was comfortable, almost sleepy; she made a charming shrug of welcome, of dissolved formality, gesturing Nick to his place. Gerald looked at the painting more critically, with a sharp way he had of scanning any document which might come in useful later on.

Nick thought he could say, "It's very beautiful." And Lord Kessler said, "Yes, isn't it a nice one."

Kessler was perhaps sixty, shorter and stouter than Rachel, bald, with an alert, not quite symmetrical face. He had on a dark grey three-piece suit which made no concession to fashion or even to the season; he looked warm in it, but seemed to say that this was simply what one wore. He ate his salmon and drank his rather sweet hock with an indefinable air of relished routine, an admission of lifelong lunching in boardrooms and country houses and festival restaurants all over Europe. He said, "So Tobias and Catherine are coming down when?"

"I wouldn't want to put too precise a time on it," said Gerald. "Toby is driving down with a girlfriend, Sophie Tipper, who's a daughter of Maurice Tipper, incidentally, and a very promising young actress." He looked to Rachel and she said,

"No, she's awfully promising…"-the remark hesitating towards something she seemed to see in the middle distance but which, as so often, she left amiably unexpressed. Nick sometimes felt that being people's children was the only claim that some of his friends had on the attention of their preoccupied elders. He observed Lord Kessler's snuffle and murmur at the name of Maurice Tipper, the incalculable ironies of different kinds of rich people about each other. The Sophie Tipper thing had been dragging on pointlessly since the second year at Oxford, as if Toby were pliably fulfilling expectations by dating the daughter of a tycoon.

"As for Catherine," Gerald went on, "she's being brought down by a so-called boyfriend whose name escapes me and whom I'm bound to say I've never met." He smiled broadly at this. "But I expect a late arrival and burning rubber. Actually Nick probably knows more on this front than we do."

Nick knew almost nothing. He said, "Russell, you mean? Yes, he's terribly nice. He's a very up-and-coming photographer"-in a successful imitation of their manner and point of view. Russell had only been announced as a boyfriend the day before, in a helpless reaction, Nick felt, to his own success with Leo, which of course he'd had the pleasure of describing to Catherine, entirely truthfully. He hadn't in fact met Russell, but he thought he'd better say again, "He's awfully nice."

Lord Kessler said, "Well, there are umpteen bedrooms ready here, and Fales has made bookings at the Fox and Hounds and the Horse and Groom, both perfectly decent, I'm told. As to the precise arrangements, I avert my eyes." Kessler had never married, but there was nothing perceptibly homosexual about him. Towards any young people in his social orbit he maintained a strategy of enlightened avoidance. "And we're not getting the PM," he added.

"We're not getting the PM," Gerald said, as if for a while it had really been likely.

"A relief, I must say."

"It is rather a relief," said Rachel.

Gerald murmured in humorous protest, and retorted that various ministers, including the Home Secretary, very much were still expected.

"Them we can handle," Lord Kessler said, and shook the little bell to call in the servant.

After lunch they strolled through several large rooms that had the residual hush, the rich refined dry smell of a country house on a hot summer day. The sensations were familiar to Nick from visits he made with his father to wind the clocks in several of the great houses round Barwick-they went back to childhood, though in those much older and remoter houses the smells were generally mixed up with dogs and damp. Here there was a High Victorian wealth of everything, pictures, tapestries, ceramics, furniture-it made Kensington Park Gardens look rather bare. The furniture was mostly French, and of astonishing quality. Nick straggled behind to gaze at it and found his heart beating with knowledge and suspicion. He said, "That Louis Quinze escritoire… is an amazing thing, sir, surely?" His father had taught him to address all lords as sir-bumping into one had been a constant thrilling hazard on their clock-winding visits, and now he took pleasure in the tone of smooth submission.

Lord Kessler looked round, and came back to him. "Ah yes," he said, with a smile. "You couldn't be more right. In fact it was made for Mme de Pompadour."

"How amazing!" They stood and admired the bulbous, oddly diminutive desk-kingwood, was it?-with fronds of ormolu. Lord Kessler pulled open a drawer, which rattled with little china boxes stowed away inside it; then pushed it shut. "You know about furniture," he said.

"A bit," Nick said. "My father's in the antiques business."

"Yes, that's right, jolly good," said Gerald, as if he'd confessed to being the son of a dustman. "He's one of my constituents, so I should know."

"Well, you must look around everywhere," Lord Kessler said. "Look at anything and everything."

"You really should," said Gerald. "You know, the house is never open to the public, Nick."

Lord Kessler himself took him off into the library, where the books were apparently less important than their bindings, which were as important as could be. The heavy gilding of the spines, seen through the fine gilt grilles of the carved and gilded bookcases, created a mood of minatory opulence. They seemed to be books in some quite different sense from those that Nick used and handled every day. Lord Kessler opened a cage and took down a large volume: Fables Choisies de La Fontaine, bound in greeny-brown leather tooled and gilded with a riot of rococo fronds and tendrils. It was an imitation of nature that had triumphed as pure design and pure expense. They stood side by side to admire it, Nick noticing the pleasant smell of Lord Kessler's clean suit and discreet cologne. He wasn't allowed to hold the book himself, and was given only a glimpse of the equally fantastic plates, peopled with elegant birds and animals. Lord Kessler showed the book in a quick dry way that was not in itself dismissive but allowed for Nick's ignorance and perhaps merely polite interest. In fact Nick loved the book, but didn't want to bore his host by asking for a longer look. It wasn't clear if it was the jewel of the collection or had been chosen at random.

"It's all rather… " Lord Kessler said.

After a moment, Nick said, "I know… "

After that they browsed for a minute or two in a semi-detached fashion. Nick found a set of Trollope which had a relatively modest and approachable look among the rest, and took down The Way We Live Now, with an armorial bookplate, the pages uncut. "What have you found there?" said Lord Kessler, in a genially possessive tone. "Ah, you're a Trollope man, are you?"

"I'm not sure I am, really," said Nick. "I always think he wrote too fast. What was it Henry James said, about Trollope and his 'great heavy shovelfuls of testimony to constituted English matters'?"

Lord Kessler paid a moment's wry respect to this bit of showing-off, but said, "Oh, Trollope's good. He's very good on money."

"Oh… yes… " said Nick, feeling doubly disqualified by his complete ignorance of money and by the aesthetic prejudice which had stopped him from ever reading Trollope. "To be honest, there's a lot of him I haven't yet read."

"You must know that one, though," said Lord Kessler.

"No, this one is pretty good," Nick said, gazing at the spine with an air of judicious concession. Sometimes his memory of books he pretended to have read became almost as vivid as that of books he had read and half-forgotten, by some fertile process of auto-suggestion. He pressed the volume back into place and closed the gilded cage. He had a sense, which was perhaps only his own self-consciousness, of some formal bit of business, new to him but deeply familiar to his host, being carried out in a sociable disguise.

"You were at school with Tobias?"

"Oh… no, sir." Nick found he'd decided not to mention Barwick Grammar. "We were at Oxford together, both at Worcester College… Though I read English and Toby of course read PPE."

"Quite…" said Lord Kessler, who perhaps hadn't been sure of this fact. "You were contemporaries."

"Yes, we were, exactly," said Nick, and the word seemed to throw a historic light across the mere three years since he had first seen Toby in the porter's lodge and felt a sudden obliviousness of everything else.

"And you took a First?"

Nick loved the murmured challenging confidence of the question because he could answer "Yes." If it had been no, if he'd got a Second like Toby, he felt everything would have been different, and a lie would have been very ill-advised.

"And how do you rate my nephew's chances?" said Lord Kessler with a smile, though it wasn't clear to Nick what contest, what eventuality he was alluding to.

"I think he'll do very well," he said, smiling back, and feeling he had struck a very subtle register, of loyal affirmation hedged with allowable irony.

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

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

"Ah… yes… " Lord Kessler's faint smile and tucked-in chin suggested an easily mastered disappointment. "And what is your chosen field?"

"Mm. I want to have a look at style," Nick said. This flashing emphasis on something surely ubiquitous had impressed the admissions board, though Lord Kessler appeared uncertain. A man who owned Mme de Pompadour's escritoire could hardly be indifferent to style, Nick felt; but his reply seemed to have in mind some old wisdom about style and substance.

"Style tout court?"

"Well, style at the turn of the century-Conrad, and Meredith, and Henry James, of course." It all sounded perfectly pointless, or at least a way of wasting two years, and Nick blushed because he really was interested in it and didn't yet know-not having done the research-what he was going to prove.

"Ah," said Lord Kessler intelligently: "style as an obstacle."

Nick smiled. "Exactly… Or perhaps style that hides things and reveals things at the same time." For some reason this seemed rather near the knuckle, as though he were suggesting Lord Kessler had a secret. "James is a great interest of mine, I must say."

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

"Oh, absolutely!"-and Nick grinned with pleasure and defiance, it was a kind of coming out, which revealed belatedly why he wasn't and never would be married to Trollope.

"Henry James stayed here, of course. I'm afraid he found us rather vulgar," Lord Kessler said, as if it had been only last week.

"How fascinating!" said Nick.

"You might be rather fascinated by the old albums. Let me see." Lord Kessler went to one of the cupboards beneath the bookcases, turned a scratchy-sounding key and bent down to take out a pair of large leather-bound albums, which he carried over to a central table. Again the inspection was hurried and tantalizing. He stopped now and then, as the heavy pages fell, to display a Victorian photograph of the gardens, with their wide bald views over newly planted woods, or of the interiors, almost comically crowded with chairs and tables, vases on stands, paintings on easels, and everywhere, in every vista, the arching, drooping leaves of potted palms. Now the house seemed settled and seasoned, a century old, with its own historic light and odour, but then it was ostentatiously new. In the second album there were group photographs, posed on the steps of the terrace, and annotated in a tiny florid script: Nick wanted days to read them, countesses, baronets, American duchesses, Balfours and Sassoons, Goldsmids and Stuarts, numerous Kesslers. The gravel was bizarrely covered with fur rugs for the group that centred on Edward VII in a tweed cape and Homburg hat. And then, May 1903, a gathering of twenty or so, second row, Lady Fairlie, The Hon. Simeon Kessler, Mr Henry James, Mrs Langtry, The Earl of Hexham… a cheerful informal picture. The Master, with his thumb in his striped waistcoat, eyes shaded by a traveller's widebrimmed hat, looked rather crafty.

"So what do you think of the house?" said Catherine, coming across the lawn.

"Well… obviously, it's amazing… " He was tingling to the point of fatigue with the afternoon's impressions, but was cautious as to what to say to her.

"Yeah, it's fucking amazing, isn't it!" she agreed, with a bright, brainless laugh. She didn't normally talk like this, and Nick supposed it was part of the persona she was showing to Russell. Russell wasn't actually present (he was busy with his camera somewhere) but it would have taken an unnecessary effort to get out of role. Other elements of the performance were a strange dragging walk and a stunned, vaguely cunning, smile. Nick assumed these were meant to convey sexual satiation.

"How was your journey?"

"Oh, fine-he drives so dangerously."

"Oh… We were held up for ages by the roadworks. Your dad got in quite a state about it."

Catherine gave him a pitying glance. "He obviously went the wrong way," she said.

They wandered on among the formal gardens, where rose scents were mixed with the cat's-piss smell of low box hedges, and the round ponds reflected a summer sky now faintly scrimmed with high white cloud. "God, let's sit down," said Catherine, as though they'd been walking for hours. They went to a stone bench supervised by two naked minor deities. Marvellous the great rallies of the undressed that rich people summoned to wait on them. Lord Kessler at home must be almost constantly in view of a sprawling nymph or unselfconscious hero. "Russell should be finished soon, then you can meet him. I wonder if you'll like him."

"I've already told everyone how charming he is, so I rather feel I've got to."

"Yeah…?" said Catherine, with a grateful, intrigued smile. She felt for cigarettes in her spangled evening bag. "He's doing lots of stuff for The Face at the moment. He's a brilliant photographer."

"I told them that too. They all take The Face, of course."

Catherine grunted. "I suppose Gerald was mouthing off about him."

"He was just saying he didn't have an opinion about him because he'd never met him."

"Mm… That doesn't normally prevent him. In fact that doesn't sound like him at all." She clicked her lighter and took in a first deep drag of smoke-the breathing out accompanied by a little toss of the head and a comforted settling back. "At all, at all, at all," she went on, meaninglessly assuming an Irish accent.

"Well… " Nick wanted everyone to get on, but for once he couldn't be bothered to work at it. He wished he was in a position to speak about Leo as freely as she spoke about Russell-he thought if he did bring the subject up she would say something upsetting and possibly true. She said,

"Did my mother show you round the house?"

"No, actually, your uncle did. I felt rather honoured."

Catherine paused and blew out smoke admiringly. "What do you make of him, then?"

"He seems very nice."

"Mm. What do you think, he's not gay, is he?"

"No, I didn't feel anything like that," Nick said, a little solemnly. He knew he was supposed to be able to tell; in fact he tended to think people were when they weren't, and so lived with a recurrent sense of disappointment, at them and at his own inadequate sensors. He didn't tell Catherine, but his uncertainty on the house tour had actually been the other way round. Had his own gayness somehow put Lord Kessler off and made him seem unreliable and lightweight in the old boy's eyes? Had Lord Kessler even registered-in his clever, unimpressionable way-that Nick was gay? "He asked me what I was going to do. It was a bit like an interview, except I hadn't applied for a job."

"Well, you may want a job one day," said Catherine. "And then he's bound to remember. He's got a memory like an ostrich."

"Perhaps… I'm not quite sure what he actually does."

She looked at him as if he must be joking. "He's got this bank, darling…"

"Yes, I know-"

"It's a big building chock-a-block full of money." She waved her cigarette arm around hilariously. "And he goes in and turns it into even more money."

Nick let this simple sarcasm pass over him. "I see, you don't know what he actually does either."

She stared at him and then gave another neighing laugh. "Haven't a clue, darling!"

There was a shaking in the trimmed beech hedge away to the right, and then a tall man came hopping out of it sideways, holding up a camera that was strung round his neck. They watched him as he strolled towards them, Catherine leaning back on one hand with a nervously triumphant expression. "Yeah, hold that," he said, and took a couple of exposures very quickly, as he was still moving. "Lovely," he said.

So Russell was one of her older boyfriends, thirty perhaps, dark, balding, with the casual but combative look of the urban photographer, black T-shirt and baseball boots, twenty-pocketed waistcoat and bandolier of film. He passed in front of them, clicking away, cheerily exploiting this little episode of his arrival, Nick's awkwardness and Catherine's hunger for the spontaneous, the outrageous. She lolled backwards, and touched her upper lip with her tongue. Was it good when her men were older, or not? He could be Protector or Abuser-it was a great deep uncertainty, like the ones in her graphology book. He pulled her up and gave her a hug and then Catherine said, almost reluctantly,

"Oh, this is Nick, by the way."

"Hello, Nick," said Russell.

"Hello!"

"Did you meet anyone?" asked Catherine, showing a hint of anxiety.

"Yeah, I've just been talking to the caterers round the back. Apparently Thatcher's not coming."

"Oh, sorry, Russell," Catherine said.

Nick said, "We are getting the Home Secretary, though," in his mock-pompous tone, which Russell, like Leo, failed to pick up on.

"I wanted Thatcher doing the twist, or pissed."

"Yeah, Thatcher pogoing!" said Catherine, and laughed rather madly. Russell didn't look especially amused.

"Well, I wouldn't want her at my twenty-first," he said.

"I don't think Toby really wanted her," Nick put in apologetically. The touching thing was that Catherine had clearly taken her father's fantasy as the truth, and then used it to lure Russell. The dream of the leader's presence seeped through to an unexpected depth.

"Well, Toby would have been perfectly happy with a party at home," she said. She wasn't quite sure whose side she was on, when it came to a difference between her father and her brother; Nick saw that she wanted to impress Russell with the right kind of disaffection. "But then Gerald has to get hold of it and invite the ministers for everything. It's not a party, darling, it's a party conference!"

"Well… " Russell chuckled and dangled his long arms and clapped his hands together loosely a few times, as if ready to take them on.

"We've got an enormous house of our own," Catherine said. "Not that Uncle Lionel's isn't fantastic, of course." They turned and frowned at it across the smooth lawn and the formal scrolls of the parterre. The steep slate roofs were topped with bronze finials so tall and fanciful they looked like drops of liquid sliding down a thread. "I just don't think Uncle Lionel will be all that pleased when Toby's rowing friends start throwing up on the whatsits."

"The whatnots," Nick made a friendly correction.

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

"No, no," Catherine said, faltering for a moment at the expression. "Nothing like that."

Nick's dinner jacket had belonged to his great-uncle Archie; it was double-breasted and wide on the shoulder in a way that was once again fashionable. It had glazed, pointed lapels which reached almost to the armpits, and shiny silk-covered buttons. As he crossed the drawing room he acknowledged himself with a flattered smile in a mirror. He was wearing a wing collar, and something dandyish in him, some memory of the licence and discipline of being in a play, lifted his mood. The only trouble with the jacket, on a long summer night of eating and bopping, was that when it warmed up it gave off, more and more unignorably, a sharp stale smell, the re-awoken ghost of numberless long-ago dinner-dances in Lincolnshire hotels. Nick had dabbed himself all over with "Je Promets" in the hope of delaying and complicating the effect.

Drinks were being served on the long terrace, and when he came out through the French windows there were two or three small groups already laughing and glowing. You could tell that everyone had been on holiday, and like the roses and begonias they seemed to take and hold the richly filtered evening light. Gerald was talking to a somehow familiar man and his blonde-helmeted wife; Nick knew from his smiles and guffaws that he was being recklessly agreeable. None of his particular friends was here yet, and Toby was still upstairs with Sophie, interminably getting dressed. He took a flute of champagne from a dark-eyed young waiter, and strolled off into the knee-high maze of the parterre. He wondered what the waiter thought of him, and if he was watching him in his solitary meandering over trimmed grass and pea gravel. He had worked as a waiter himself, two Christmases ago, and stood about with a tray in a similar way at two neighbouring hunt balls. It was not impossible that he would do so again. He felt he might look like a person with no friends, and that the waiter might know that he didn't really belong to this looking-glass world. Could he even tell, any more than Lord Kessler could, that he was gay? He felt there had been a flashing hint, in their moment of contact, of some more luxurious understanding, of a longer gaze, full of humour and curiosity, that they might have shared… He thought at the second contact, the refill, he would make it all right. The curlicue of the path brought him round to a view of the house again, but the waiter had moved off, and instead he saw Paul Tompkins ambling towards him.

"My dear!"

At Oxford Tompkins was widely known as Polly, but Nick said, "Hello, Paul," because the nickname seemed suddenly too intimate or too critical. "How are you?" He realized that in the romantic retrospect of his undergraduate life Paul was a figure he had painted out.

"I'm extremely well," Paul said meaningly. He was large and round in the middle and seemed to taper away, in his tight evening suit, towards narrow feet and a tall, jowly head. He had been a noise, a recurrent clatter of bitchery and ambition, a kind of monster of the Union and the MCR, throughout Nick's years in college. He had come out just below the top in the Civil Service exams, and had recently started in some promising capacity in Whitehall. He looked pop-eyed already from the tussle between pompous discretion and a natural love of scandal. He raised his glass. "My compliments to wicked old Lionel Kessler. The waiters here are sheer heaven."

"I know…"

"That one with the champagne is from Madeira, which is rather funny."

"Oh, really… "

"Well, better than the other way round. Now, however, he lives in Fulham: really awfully close to me."

"You mean that one there."

"Tristao." Paul gave Nick a look of concentrated mischief. "Ask me more after our date next week, my dear."

"Ah." Nick's face was tight with regret for a second, the pinch of his own incompetence. It was a mystery to him that fat old Polly, who was rutted with acne scars and completely lacking in ordinary kindness, had such a conspicuous success with men. In college he had brought off a number of almost impossible seductions, from kitchen boys to the solemnly hetero Captain of Boats. Nothing that lasted, but startling triumphs of will, opportunism and technique, even so. Nick was slightly frightened of him. He walked on a pace or two, round the plinth of a large urn, and looked across the roses at the assembling guests. A famous TV interviewer was exerting his charm over a group of flattered girls. Nick said, "It's rather a distinguished crowd."

"Mmm." Paul's murmur had a note of scepticism in it as well as a suggestion that here too there were opportunities. He got out, and lit, a cigarette. "That depends very much on your idea of distinction. But aren't the wives marvellous, since the last election? It's as if any doubts they had the first time round have now been completely discounted. The men did something naughty, and got away with it, and not only did they get away with it but they've been asked to do it again, with a huge majority. That's so much the mood in Whitehall-the economy's in ruins, no one's got a job, and they just don't care, it's bliss. And the wives, you see, all look like… her-they've all got the blue bows, and the hair."

"Well, Rachel hasn't," said Nick, who rather doubted that Paul could sum up the mood in Whitehall when he'd only been there five minutes.

"No, dear, but Rachel's got a lot more class. Jewish class, but still class. And her husband's not called Norman."

Nick had some further objections to what Paul was saying, but didn't want to seem humourless. "No, or Ken," he said.

Paul inhaled tolerantly and blew the smoke out in a long sibilant jet. "I must say Gerald is looking quite delicious this evening."

"Gerald Fedden…?"

"Absolutely…"

"You're pulling my leg."

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

"Not at all," said Nick, to whom life was a series of shocks, more or less well mastered. "No, I can see he's…"

"Of course now you're living in his house you've probably grown accustomed to his sheer splendour."

Nick laughed and together they watched the MP as he wound up a story (which was all chortling patter with booming emphases) and the blue-dressed women around him rippled and staggered about slightly on the fine gravel. "I wouldn't deny that he's very charming," Nick said.

"Aha… So who is it at the house, just you and them and the Sleeping Beauty?"

Nick loved hearing Toby described like that, the praise in the mockery. "I'm afraid the Sleeping Beauty isn't there much any more, you know he's been given his own flat. But there's Catherine, of course."

"Oh, yes, I love Catherine. I just caught her smoking a joint about a yard long with a very dodgy-looking man. She's quite a girl."

"She's certainly a very unhappy one," Nick said, swelling for a moment with his portentous secret knowledge of her.

Paul's eyebrow suggested that this was a wrong note. "Really? Every time I see her she's got a new man. She really should be happy, she must have everything a girl could want."

"You sound just like her father, I've heard him say exactly the same thing."

"Ah, there you are!" said Paul. He grinned and stamped out his half-smoked cigarette on the path. "There's Toby now." He nodded towards the door from the drawing room, where Toby was emerging with Sophie on his arm, more like a wedding than a birthday party. "Christ, the jammy bitchl" Paul murmured, in an oddly sincere surrender to the sheer dazzle of the couple.

"I know, I do hate her."

"Oh, she's marvellous. She's good-looking, she's as thick as a jug-and of course she's a highly promising actress."

"Exactly."

Paul smiled at him, as if at a country cousin. "My dear, don't take it so seriously. Anyway, they're all tarts, these boys, they've all got a price. Get Toby at two in the morning, when he's had a bottle of brandy, and you'll be able to do what you want with him. I promise you."

This idea was so wildly, almost grimly, exciting to Nick that he could hardly smile. It was clever of old Polly to tamper so intimately with his feelings. Nick said, "Mm, this is rather a festival of the girlfriend, though, I'm afraid."

And it was true that as the crowd quickly doubled and trebled on the terrace it took on more and more the air of an efficiently reproductive species. The boys, most of them Nick's Oxford contemporaries, all in their black and white, glanced across at politicians and people on the telly, and caught a glimpse of themselves as high-achieving adults too-they had that canny glint of self-discovery that comes with putting on a disguise. They didn't mingle unnecessarily with the girls. It was almost as if the High Victorian codes of the house, with its smoking room and bachelors' wing, still guided and restrained them. But the girls, in a shimmer of velvet and silk, and brilliantly made-up, like smaller children who had raided their mothers' dressing tables, had new power and authority too. As the sunlight lowered it grew more searching and theatrical, and cast intriguing shadows.

Paul said, "I should warn you, Wani Ouradi's got engaged."

"Oh, no," said Nick. It was such a snub, an engagement. "He might have thought about it a bit longer." He could picture a happy alternative future for himself and Wani-who was sweet-natured, very rich, and beautiful as a John the Baptist painted for a boy-loving pope. His father owned the Mira supermarket chain, and whenever Nick went into a Mira Mart for a bottle of milk or a bar of chocolate he had a vague erotic sense of slipping the money into Wani's pocket. He said, "I think he's coming tonight."

"He is, the old tart, I saw that vulgar motor car of his in the drive." Tart was Paul's word for anyone who had agreed to have sex with him; though as far as Nick was aware, he had never got anywhere with Wani. Wani, like Toby, remained in the far pure reach of fantasy, which grew all the keener and more inventive to meet the challenge of his unavailability. He felt the loss of him as though he had really stood a chance with him, he'd gone so far with him in his mind, as he lay alone in bed. He saw the great heterosexual express pulling out from the platform precisely on time, and all his friends were on it, in the first-class carriage-in the wagons-lits! He clung to what he had, as it gathered speed: that quarter of an hour with Leo by the compost heap, which was his first sharp taste of coupledom. "Are you and I the only homos here?" he said.

"I doubt it," said Paul, who didn't look keen to become Nick's partner for the night on the strength of that chance connection. "Oh my god, it's the fucking Home Secretary. I must wiggle. How do I look?"

"Fantastic," said Nick.

"Oh, I knew it." He knuckled his hair, with its oily fringe, like a vain schoolboy. "Gotta go, girl!" he said, silly but focused, an outrageous new seduction in view. And off he went, eagerly striding and hopping over the little low hedges. Nick saw him reach the group where Gerald was introducing his son to the Home Secretary: it was almost as if there were two guests of honour, each good-humouredly perplexed by the presence of the other. Polly hovered and then pushed in shamelessly; Nick caught his look of unironic excitement as the group closed round him.

"So what's he like?" said Russell. "Her old man. What's he into?" He glanced at Catherine, across the table, before his eyes drifted back down the room to Gerald, who was smiling at the blonde woman beside him but had the fine glaze of preoccupation of someone about to make a speech. They were in the great hall, at a dozen tables. It was the end of dinner, and there was a mood of noisy expectancy.

"Wine," said Nick, who was drunk and fluent, but still wary of Russell's encouraging tone. He twirled his glass on the rucked tablecloth. "Wine. His wife… um…"

"Power," said Catherine sharply.

"Power…"-Nick nodded it into the list. "Wensleydale cheese he's also very keen on. Oh, and the music of Richard Strauss-that particularly."

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

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

Russell blinked at him in a way that suggested he didn't understand him or was about to punch him in the face. But then he smiled reluctantly. "So he's not into anything kinky at all."

"Power," said Catherine again. "And making speeches." As the glass tinkled and the hubbub quickly died a lot of people heard her saying, "He loves making speeches."

Nick pushed his chair back to get a clear view of Gerald, and also of Toby, who had coloured up and was looking round with a tight grin of apprehension. There were ten minutes of oddly relished ordeal ahead of him, being teased and praised by his father and cheered by his drunk friends-his contemporaries. Nick grinned back at him, and wanted to help him, but was powerless, of course. He was blushing himself with the anxiety and forced eagerness of awaiting a speech by a friend.

Gerald had donned his rarely seen half-moon spectacles, and held a small card at arm's length. "Your Grace, my lords, ladies, and gentlemen," he said, offering the old formula with an ironic negligence which had the clever effect of making you think-yes, the Duchess, of course, and her son were here, as well as Lord Kessler and fat young Lord Shepton, a Martyrs' Club pal of Toby's. "Distinguished guests, family and friends. I'm very happy to see you all here tonight, in this truly splendid setting, and very grateful indeed to Lionel Kessler for giving the Worcester College First XV the run of his world-famous porcelain collection. Well, as the sign in Selfridge's says, or used to say, 'all breakages must be paid for.' " This drew a few titters, though Nick wasn't sure it struck the right tone. "We're honoured by the presence of statesmen, and film stars, and I suspect Tobias is thoroughly flattered that so many members of Her Majesty's government were able to be here. My witty daughter, I understand, has said that it's 'not so much a party as a party conference.'" Uncertain laughter, through which, with good timing: "I only hope I get to play an equally important role when we meet at Blackpool in October." The MPs chuckled amiably at this, though the Home Secretary, who'd taken the epithet of statesman more gravely than the rest, smiled inscrutably at the coffee cup in front of him. Russell said "Good girl!" quite loudly, and clapped a couple of times.

"Now, as you may have heard," Gerald went on, with a delayed quick glance in their direction, "Toby is twenty-one today. I had been going to give you Dr Johnson's well-known lines on 'long-expected one-and-twenty,' but when I looked them up again last night I found I didn't know them quite as well as I thought, or indeed as well as many of you, I'm sure, do." Here Gerald looked down at the card in a marvellously supercilious way. " 'Lavish of your grandsire's guineas,' says the Great Cham, 'Bid the slaves of thrift farewell… When the bonny blade carouses, Pockets full, and spirits high, What are acres? What are houses? Only dirt, or wet and dry.' So: far from suitable advice to the grandson and nephew of great bankers, or for any young person coming of age in our splendid property-owning democracy. And the question of wet versus dry, of course, is one on which indecision is no longer acceptable."

Through the generous laughter Nick caught Toby's eye again, and held it for two or three long seconds, giving him perhaps a transfusion of reassurance. Toby himself would be too nervous to listen to his father's speech properly, and was laughing in imitation of the others, not at the jokes themselves. It was typical of Gerald not to have realized that Dr Johnson's poem was a ruthless little satire. Nick surveyed the room, and was reminded of a college hall, with Gerald and the more influential guests elected to the high table. Or perhaps of some other institution, such as houses like this had often turned into. Up in the arcade of the gallery one or two servants were listening impassively, waiting only for the next stage of the evening. There was a gigantic electrolier, ten feet high, with upward-curling gilt branches opening into cloudy glass lilies of light. Catherine had refused to sit under it, which was why their whole table had apparently been demoted to this corner of the room. If it did fall, Nick realized, it would crush Wani Ouradi. He began to feel a little anxious about it himself.

Gerald was now giving a facetious review of Toby's life, and again it made Nick think of a marriage, and the best man's speech, which everyone dreaded, and the huge heterosexual probability that a twenty-first would be followed soon enough by a wedding. He could only see the back of Sophie Tipper's head, but he attributed similar thoughts to it, transposed into a bright, successful key. "As a teenager, then," Gerald said, "Tobias a) believed that Enoch Powell was a socialist, b) set fire to a volume of Hobbes, and c) had a large and mysterious overdraft. When it came to Oxford, a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics was the irresistible choice." There was more laughter-and Gerald was leading them along very ably: they were drunkish and amenable, even gullible, since making a speech was a kind of trick. At the same time there was a bond among the young people, who were old enough to know that speeches were allowed, and perhaps even supposed, to be embarrassing, and who were rowdy and superior at once, in the Oxford way. Nick wondered if the women were responding more warmly, if they were picking up, as Polly did, on their host's "splendour"; perhaps their laughter would seem to him a kind of submission. Nick himself was lazily exploring the margin between his affection for Gerald and a humorous suspicion, long resisted, that there might be something rather awful about him. He wished he could see Lord Kessler's reactions.

"And now, as you know, Tobias has opted," Gerald said, "at least for the moment, for a career in journalism. I'm bound to admit this made me anxious at first, but he assures me he has no interest in becoming a parliamentary sketch writer. There's been puzzling talk of the Guardian, which we hope will blow over, though for the time being I'm thinking hard before answering any of his questions, and have decided to strenuously deny everything."

Nick glanced round, in a little shrug of amusement, and saw that Tristao, the waiter from Madeira, was standing in the doorway behind him, following the proceedings with a vacant stare. As a caterers' waiter he must have to listen to an abnormal number of speeches, each of them built around private jokes and allusions. What was he thinking? What was he thinking of all of them? His hands were huge and beautiful, the hands of a virtuoso. His dressy trouser-front curved forwards with telling asymmetry. When he saw that Nick was looking his way he gave him the vaguest smile and inclined his head, as if waiting for a murmured order. Nick thought, he doesn't even realize I like him, he thinks I'm just one of these toffs who never look at waiters for their own sake. He shook his head and turned back, and his disappointment was practised and invisible. He saw that Catherine was stuffing things into her bag and flashing irritable looks at Russell, who mouthed, "What?" at her, and was getting irritable in his turn. "So, Toby," Gerald said, raising his voice and slowing his words, "we congratulate you, we bless you, we love you: happy birthday! Will you-all-please raise your glasses: to Toby!"

"Toby!" the overlapping burble went up, followed by a sudden release of tension in cheers and whistles and applause-applause for Toby, not for the speaker, the heightened, unreal acclaim of a special occasion, amongst which Nick lifted his champagne glass with tears in his eyes, and kept on sipping from it to hide his emotion. But Catherine had jumped her little gilt chair back from the table and hurried out, past Tristao, who followed her for a second, to see if he could help. Then Nick and Russell stared at each other, but Toby was getting to his feet, and Nick was damned if he was chasing after her this time, he really did love Toby, more than anyone in this high magnificent room, and he was going to be with him as he spoke.

"No," said Toby, "I'm afraid Pa got that a bit wrong. I tried to get him an interview with the Guardian, but they just weren't interested!" This wasn't quite a witticism, but it drew a loud laugh from his friends, and Gerald, who'd assumed a self-congratulating air, was forced to make a quick moue of humility. " 'Wait till he does something big,' they said." He turned to his father. "Of course I told them they wouldn't have to wait long."

There was something artless in Toby's delivery; he was working in the family tradition of teasing, but he was too relenting and couldn't yet match Gerald's heavy archness. When he had stood up he was strikingly pale, like someone about to faint, but when he relaxed a little the colour suddenly burned in his cheeks, and his grin was a nervous acknowledgement of his blush. He said, "I'm not going to say much -" vague groans of disappointment-"but above all I want to thank my dear sweet generous Uncle Lionel for having us all here tonight. I can't imagine anything more wonderful than this party-and I have a horrible feeling that after this the rest of my life is going to be one long anticlimax." This brought cheers and applause for Lord Kessler, who was surely used to being thanked, but not to such public declarations of love. Again the family note was strong and sentimental, and a little surprising. Nick was smiling at Toby in an anxious trance of lust and encouragement. It was like watching a beautiful actor in a play, following him and wanting him.

"I'm also really touched," Toby said, "that my old friends Josh and Caroline have come all the way from South Africa. Oh, and I understand they're also squeezing in a wedding ceremony while they're here." There was good-natured applause, though no one really knew who Josh and Caroline were. Nick found himself listening almost abstractly to Toby's voice, hearing its harmless pretensions, which were the opposite of Gerald's. Gerald was a knowing, self-confident speaker, trained at the Oxford Union, polished at innumerable board meetings, and his tone combined candour and insincerity to oddly charming effect. Toby, like many of his friends, spoke in the latest public-school accent, an inefficient blur of class denial. Now he was a bit drunk, and under pressure, and older vowels were showing through as he said that it was "awfully good of" his parents to have tolerated him. He too seemed not to know what the point of his speech was; he came over like a cross between a bridegroom and the winner of an award, with a list of people to thank. His boyish technique was to deflect attention from himself onto his friends, and in this he was also the opposite of his father. He made various jokes such as "Sam will need two pairs of trousers" and "No more creme de menthe for Mary," which clearly alluded to old disgraces, and began to bore the MPs. Nick sensed a touching nostalgia for the Oxford years, on which a door, an oak perhaps, seemed gently but firmly to have closed. He himself was not referred to; but he took this as a sign of intimacy. His gaze embraced Toby, and from behind his helpless grin and raised applauding hands he saw his dream-self run forwards to hold him and kiss his hot face.

Up in his room Nick slipped out of his jacket, and sniffed at it resignedly: time for a further dowsing in "Je Promets." He went into his bathroom, and opened the little turret dormer; he splashed cold water on his cheeks. It was the toasts that had done for him-there was always one glass that tipped him over, unfairly and jokingly, into being drunk. And there were hours of the party still to come. It was a great ritual of fun, a tradition, a convention, which everyone was loving for its lavishness and truth to form. Now there was going to be a move to the dance floor, and all the couples would be allowed to make love to each other with their hips and thighs and sliding hands. Nick gazed in the mirror and saw someone teeteringly alone. The love he had felt for Toby ten minutes before migrated into a sudden hungry imagining of Leo, his transfiguring kisses, his shaving rash, and the wonderful shaved depth between the cheeks of his arse. The exactness of memory, the burning fact of what had happened, blinded him and held him for a while. When he came back, perhaps only seconds later, to the image in the mirror, he saw the flush in his cheeks and his mouth gasping in re-enacted surrender. He re-tied his tie, very perfectly, and ran a hand through his hair. There was a kind of tenderness for himself in the movement of his hand through his curls, as if it had been taught a lesson by Leo. The mirror was a chaste ellipse in a maplewood frame. The washstand was a real Louis Seize commode cut and drilled to hold a basin and a pair of tall hoarse-throated taps. Well, if you owned a Louis Seize commode, if you owned dozens of them, you could be as barbarous with them as you liked; and a commode after all was meant for ease. And after all it was marvellous to be staying in a house like this, a friend of the family, not the son of the man who wound the clocks.

As he trotted down the stairs he saw Wani Ouradi coming up. Nick sometimes greeted Wani with a friendly grope between the legs, or a long breathless snog, and he'd once had him tied up naked in his college room for a whole night; he had sodomized him tirelessly more often than he could remember. Wani himself, glancing back to see if his girlfriend, his intended, was following, had no idea of all this, of course; indeed, they hardly knew each other.

"Hi, Wani!" said Nick.

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

"I believe I have to congratulate you…"

"Oh… yes…" Wani grinned and looked down. "Thank you so much." Nick thought, as he had thought before, in the slow hours of the seminar room, that a view of the world through such long eyelashes must be one extraordinarily shadowed and filtered. They both suddenly decided to shake hands. Wani glanced back again with a murmur of exasperation so fond and well mannered that it seemed to include Nick in some harmless conspiracy. "You must meet Martine," he said. A provoking thing about him was the way his penis always showed, a little jutting bulge to the left, modest, unconscious, but unignorable, and a trigger to greedy thoughts in Nick. He checked for it now, in a woozy half-second. He was rather like a pop star of the 60s, with the penis and the dark curly hair-though the look was quite at odds with the bemused courtesy of his manner.

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

"Ah, here she is…"-and they looked down together at the young woman who was climbing the shallow red-carpeted stairs towards them. She was wearing a pearl-coloured blouse and a long, rather stiff black skirt, which she held raised a little with both hands, so that she seemed to curtsey to them on each step. She created a sober impression, well groomed but not fashionable. "This is Martine," Wani said. "This is Nick Guest, we were at Worcester together."

Nick took Martine's cool hand, smiling at Wani's knowing his name, and feeling himself to be briefly the subject of humorous suspicion as an unknown friend from her fiance's past. He said, "I'm pleased to meet you, congratulations." All this congratulating was giving him a vague masochistic buzz.

"Oh-thank you so much. Yes, Antoine has told you." She had a French accent, which in turn suggested to Nick the unknown networks of Wani's family and past, Paris perhaps, Beirut… the real life of the international rich from which Wani had occasionally descended on Oxford to read an essay on Dry den or translate an Anglo-Saxon riddle. Antoine was his real name, and Wani, his infantile attempt at saying it, his universal nickname.

"You must be very happy."

Martine smiled but said nothing, and Nick looked at her wide pale face for signs of the triumph he would have felt himself if he had become engaged to Wani.

"We're just going to our room," Wani said, "and then we'll be down for the bopping."

"Well, you will be bopping perhaps," said Martine, showing already a mind of her own, but with the same patient expression, which registered with Nick, as he went on down the stairs, as decidedly adult. It must be the face of a steady happiness, a calm possession, that he couldn't imagine, or even exactly hope for.

He needed some air, but there was a clatter in the hall as people ran back indoors. Outside, from an obscured night sky, a fine rain had started falling. Nick watched it drifting and gleaming in the upcast light of a large globed lantern. Out in the circle of the drive a couple of chauffeurs were sitting in the front of a Daimler with the map-light on, waiting and chatting. And there was Wani's soft-top Mercedes, with its embarrassing number plate WHO 6. A voice brayed, "Right! Everyone on the dance floor!" And there was a ragged chorus of agreement.

"Hoorah! Dancing!" said a drunk Sloanish girl, staring into Nick's face as though with an effort she might remember him.

"Where is the ruddy dance floor?" said the braying boy. They had wandered back into the hall, which was being cleared with illusionless efficiency by the staff.

Nick said, "It's in the smoking room," excited by knowing this, and by suddenly taking the lead. They all straggled after him, the Sloaney girl laughing wildly and shouting, "Yah, it's in the smoking room!" and sending him up, as the funny little man who knew the way.

A friend of Toby's had come down from London to do the disco, and red and blue spotlights flashed on and off above the paintings of the first Baron Kessler's numerous racehorses. Most of the group started grooving around at once, a little awkwardly, but with happy, determined expressions. Nick lounged along the wall, as if he might start dancing any moment, then came back, nodding his head to the beat, and walked quickly out of the room. It was that song "Every Breath You Take" that they'd played over and over last term at Oxford. It made him abruptly sad.

He felt restless and forgotten, peripheral to an event which, he remembered, had once been thought of as his party too. His loneliness bewildered him for a minute, in the bleak perspective of the bachelors' corridor: a sense close to panic that he didn't belong in this house with these people. Some of the guests had gone into the library and as he approached the open door he took in the scant conversational texture, over which one or two voices held forth as if by right. Gerald said words Nick couldn't catch the meaning of, and through the general laughter another voice, which he half-recognized, put in a quick correcting "Not if I know Margaret!" Nick stood at the doorway of the lamplit room and felt for a second like a drunken student, which he was, and also, more shadowy and inconsolable, a sleepless child peering in at an adult world of bare shoulders, flushed faces, and cigar smoke. Rachel caught his eye, and smiled, and he went in-Gerald, standing at the empty fireplace in the swaggering stance of someone warming himself, called out, "Ah, Nick!" but there were too many people for introductions, a large loose circle who turned momentarily to inspect him and turned back as if they'd failed to see anything at all.

Rachel was sitting on a small sofa, apart from the others, with a wrinkled old lady dressed in black, who made Rachel in her turn seem a beautiful, rather mischievous young woman. She said, "Judy, have you met Nick Guest, Toby's great friend? This is Lady Partridge-Gerald's mother."

"Oh no!" said Nick. "I'm delighted to meet you."

"How do you do," said the old lady, with a dry jovial look. Toby's great friend-there was a phrase to savour, to analyse for its generosity, its innocence, its calculation.

Rachel shifted slightly, but there was really no space for him on the sofa. In her great spread stiffish dress of lavender silk she was like a Sargent portrait of eighty years earlier, of the time when Henry James had come to stay. Nick stood before them and smiled.

"You do smell nice," Rachel said, almost flirtingly, as a mother sometimes speaks to a child who is dressed up.

"I can't bear the smell of cigars, can you?" said Lady Partridge.

"Lionel hates it too," murmured Rachel. As did Nick, to whom the dry lavatorial stench of cigars signified the inexplicable confidence of other men's tastes and habits, and their readiness to impose them on their fellows. But since Gerald himself was smoking one, frowning and screwing up his left eye, he said nothing.

"I can't think where he picked up the habit," Lady Partridge said; and Rachel sighed and shook her head in humorous acknowledgement of their shared disappointments as wife and mother. "Do Tobias and Catherine smoke?"

"No, thank heavens, they've never taken to it," Rachel said. And again Nick said nothing. What always held him was the family's romance of itself, with its little asperities and collusions that were so much more charming and droll than those in his own family, and which now took on a further dimension in the person of Gerald's mother. Her manner was drawling but vigilant, her face thickly powdered, lips a bold red. There was something autocratic in her that made Nick want to please her. She sounded grander than Gerald by the same factor that Gerald sounded posher than Toby.

"Perhaps we could have some air," she said, barely looking at Nick. And he went to the window behind them and pushed up the sash and let in the cool damp smell of the grounds.

"There!" he said, feeling they were now friends.

"Are you staying in the house?" Lady Partridge said.

"Yes, I've got a tiny little room on the top floor."

"I didn't know there were any tiny rooms at Hawkeswood. But then I don't suppose I've ever been on the top floor." Nick half admired the way she had taken his modesty and dug it deeper for him, and almost found a slur against herself in it.

"I suppose it depends on your standard of tininess," he said, with a determined flattering smile. The faint paranoia that attaches to drunkenness had set in, and he wasn't certain if he was being rude or charming. He thought perhaps what he'd said was the opposite of what he meant. A waiter came up with a tray and offered him a brandy, and he watched with marvelling passivity as the liquor was poured. "Oh that's fine… that's fine…!" He was a nice, conspiratorial sort of waiter, but he wasn't Tristao, who had crossed a special threshold in Nick's mind and was now the object of a crush, vivid in his absence. He wondered if he could have a crush on this waiter too-it only needed a couple of sightings, the current mood of frustration, and a single half-conscious decision, and then the boy's shape would be stamped on his mind and make his pulse race whenever he appeared.

Rachel said, "Nick's also staying with us in London, where he really does have a tiny room in the roof."

"I think you said you had someone in," said Lady Partridge, again without looking at Nick. It was as if she had scented his fantasy of belonging, of secret fraternity with her beautiful grandson, and set to eradicate it with a quick territorial instinct. "Toby's certainly enormously popular," she said. "He's so handsome, don't you think?"

"Yes, I do," said Nick lightly, and blushed and looked away as if to find him.

"You'd never think he was Catherine's brother. He had all the luck."

"If looks are luck-" Nick was half-saying.

"But do tell me, who is that little person in glasses dancing with the Home Secretary?"

"Mm, I've seen him before," said Nick, and laughed out loud.

"It's the Mordant Analyst," said Rachel.

"Morton Danvers," Lady Partridge noted it.

Rachel raised her voice. "The children call him the Mordant Analyst. Peter Crowther-he's a journalist."

"Seen his things in the Mail," Lady Partridge said.

"Oh, of course…" said Nick. And it was true he did seem to be dancing with the Home Secretary, wooing him, capering in front of him, bending to him with new questions and springing back with startled enlightenment at the answers-a procedure which the Home Secretary, who was heavy footed and had no neck, couldn't help but replicate in a clumsy but courteous way.

"I don't think I'd be quite so excited," said Lady Partridge. "He talked a lot of rot at dinner on… the coloured question. I wasn't next to him, but I kept hearing it. Racism, you know"-as if the very word were as disagreeable as the thing it connoted was generally held to be.

"A lot of rot certainly is talked on that subject," Nick said, with generous ambiguity. The old lady looked at him ponderingly.

They turned and watched Gerald come forward to rescue the Home Secretary, with a solicitous smile on his lips and a flicker of jealousy in his eyes. He led him away, stooping confidentially over him, almost embracing him, but looking quickly round like someone who has organized a surprise: and there was a flash and a whirr and another flash.

"Ah! The Tatler," exclaimed Lady Partridge, "at long last." She patted her hair and assumed an expression of… coquetry… command… welcome… ancient wisdom… It was hard to say for sure what effect she was after.

Catherine was hurrying Nick and Pat Grayson along the bachelors' corridor towards the thump of the dance music.

"Are you all right, darling?" Nick said.

"Sorry, darling. It was that ghastly speech-one just couldn't take any more!" She was lively, but her reactions were slow and playful, and he decided she must be stoned.

"I suppose it was a bit self-centred."

She smiled, with a condescension worthy of her grandmother. "It would have been a marvellous speech for his own birthday, wouldn't it. Poor Fedden!"

Pat, who must have been the person described in the speech as a film star, said, "Ooh, I didn't think it was all that bad, considering"; though considering what, he didn't specify. Nick had seen him as the smooth eponymous rogue in Sedley on TV, and was struck by how much smaller, older and camper he was in real life. Sedley was his mother's favourite series, though it wasn't clear if she knew that Pat was a whatnot. "Ooh, I don't know about this, love…" he said as they came into the room. But Catherine pulled him into the crowd and he started rather nimbly circling round her, flicking his fingers and frowning sexily at her. She seemed to love everything that was uncool about this, but to Nick, Pat was an unwelcome future, a famous man who was a fool, a silly old queen. He slipped away across the room, and found he was being shouted and smiled at by people and roughly hugged as if he was very popular. The brandy was having its way. But for a minute he was ashamed of snubbing Pat Grayson, and pretending to be part of this hetero mob. He felt pretty good, and grinned at Tim Carswell, who came across the floor and seized him and whirled him round till they were both stumbling and Tim's damp breath was burning his cheek, and Tim shouted "Whoa!" and slowly pulled away, still slamming from side to side and then backing into the crowd with a Jaggerish raised arm. "How's the bonny blade?" said Nick, and Sophie Tipper looked at him over her shoulder with faint recognition as she danced annoyingly with Toby-Nick kissed them both on the cheek before they could stop him, and shouted "How are you?" again, beaming and heartbroken, and Toby put out a fist with a raised thumb, and shortly after that they moved away. Nick danced on, his collar was tight and he was sweating, he undid his jacket and then did it up again-ah, a window was open at the far end of the room and he jigged around in front of it for a while, turning his face to that rainy garden smell. Martine was sitting on the raised banquette that ran along the wall, and in the beam of green light that flashed on every few seconds her patient profile looked haggard and lost. "Hi-i!" Nick called, stopping and half-kneeling beside her. "Isn't Wani with you?" She looked round with a shrug: "Oh, he's somewhere…" And Nick really wanted to see him, suddenly certain of a welcome like the ones he gave him in his fantasies, and there was a twist of calculation too-he could press himself, heavy and semi-incapable, into Wani's arms. Three girls were doing disco routines in a line, turning round and touching their elbows. Nick couldn't do that. The girls danced better than the boys, as if it was really their element, where their rowdy partners were making twits of themselves. Nick didn't like it near the door, where some of the older couples had wandered in and were trotting to and fro as if quite at home with Spandau Ballet. The ultraviolet light made Nat Hanmer's dress shirt glow and the whites of his eyes were thrillingly strange. They held hands for a few moments and Nat goggled at him for the freaky effect, then he shouted, "You old poof!" and slapped his back and gave him a barging kiss on the ear before he moved off "Your eyes!" Mary Sutton gasped at Nick, and he goggled too. It was easy to trip over the raised edge of the hearthstone if you were bopping near the fireplace, and Nick fell against Graham Strong and said, "It's so great to see you!" because he'd sometimes hungered for Graham too, he hardly knew him, and he said, "We must have a dance together later," but Graham had already turned his back, and Nick fetched up with Catherine and Russell and Pat Grayson, where he was very welcome since they were an awkward threesome.

He opened a door from the hall into a small drawing room where a man in shirtsleeves got up and said, "I'm sorry, sir," and came towards him unsmilingly.

"I'm so sorry," Nick said, "I'm on the wrong side," and he went out again and pulled the door closed with a boom.

He could hear the music in the distance, and the burble and laughter from the library, and a high ringing in his own ears. Up above, the hundred lilies of the electrolier glowed and twitched-there was a hesitant animation to things, all beating to his own pulse. He went sidling and parading through a suite of lit rooms, abandoned, amusing, a bolster or pulled-back curtain like a glimpse of a person in hiding. Stopped and stooped now and then to appreciate a throbbing little bronze or table that revolved as you looked away from it. Leant caressingly, a little heavily, on the escritoire of the dear old Marquise de Pompadour, which creaked-he was a lover of that sort of thing, if anyone was watching… He went into the dining room where they'd had lunch, found the light switches and looked very closely at the landscape by Cezanne, which pulsed as well, with secret geometries. Why did he talk to himself about it? The imaginary friend was at his shoulder, the only child's devoted companion, needing his guidance. The composition, he said… the different greens… He had a keen idea, which he was cloaking and avoiding, and then licensing step by step as he opened a side door into a brown passageway, that turned a corner, and had other doors off it, and then came in a quickening cool draught to an open back door with the service yard beyond, glittering in drizzle. The glare was bright and unsentimental here. No enriching glow of candles or picture lights. Men in jeans were stacking and crashing things, and carried on shouting to each other as they passed Nick, so that he felt like a ghost whose "Thanks!" and "Sorry!" were inaudible. Tristao was washing glasses in a pantry and he walked in behind him with his heart suddenly thumping, smiling as if they were more than friends, and aware none the less that Tristao was working, it was one in the morning, and he himself was just a bow-tied drunk, a walking wrong note of hope and need.

"Hi there!"

Tristao looked round and sighed, then turned back to his work. "You come to help?" The glasses came in on metal trays, half full, lipstick-smeared, fag ends in claret, jagged edges on stems.

"Urn… I'm sure I'd break everything," Nick said, and gazed at him from behind with wonder and a sense of luck and again the suspicion of a rebuff.

"Oof…! I'm tired," Tristao said, and came across the room so that Nick felt in the way. "I been up on my feet nine hours now."

"You must be," said Nick, leaning towards him with a friendly stroke or pat, which fell short and was ignored. He wondered if he might be going to fall over. "So… When do you finish?"

"Oh, we go on till you go off, baby." He dried his hands on a tea towel, and lit himself a cigarette, half offering one to Nick as an afterthought. Nick hated tobacco, but he accepted at once. The first sharp drag made his head fizz. "You enjoying the party, anyway?" Tristao said.

"Yeah…" said Nick, and gave a shrug and a large ironical.laugh. He wanted to impress Tristao as a Hawkeswood guest, and to mock at the guests as well. He wanted to suggest that he was having a perfectly good time, that the staff, certainly, could not have done more, but that he could take it or leave it; and besides (here he half closed his eyes, suavely and daringly) he had a better idea about how to have fun. Tristao perhaps didn't get all that at once. He looked at Nick moodily, as at a kind of problem. And Nick looked back at him, with a simmering drunk smile, as if he knew what he was doing.

Tristao had lost his bow tie, and the top two buttons of his shirt were open over a white singlet. His sleeves were rolled up, there were streaked black hairs on his forearms, but from his heart to his knees he wore a white apron tied round tight, which made a secret of what had been such a heavy hint before. The pantry was lit by a single fluorescent tube, so that his tired sallow face was shown without flattery. He looked quite different from what Nick had remembered, and it took a little effort of lustful will to find him attractive-there seemed almost to be an excuse for giving up on him and going back to the party. "A lot of people here, yeah?" said Tristao. He glanced sourly at the trays of glasses and debris, and blew out smoke in that same critical sibilant way that Polly had, like a sign of some shared expertise. And then Nick found himself bitterly jealous at the idea of Polly getting Tristao, and knew that he had to stay. "Yeah, he got a lot of friends, this Mr Toby… I like him. He's like a hactor, no?"-and Tristao made a gesture, long fingers spread like a fan beside his face to indicate the general eclat of Toby's features, bone structure, complexion.

"Yes, he is," said Nick, with a chuckle and a puff of smoke. Toby's face seemed to hover for a moment in front of the waiter's, which was less beautiful in each respect… But wasn't the fact that he didn't admire Tristao so much a part of the lesson, what he thought of as the homosexual second-best solution? This backstairs visit was all about sex, not nonsensical longings: he wasn't going to get what he wanted elsewhere. There was a challenge in the boy's deep-set eyes and something coded in his foreignness-were Madeirans in fact susceptible to casual sex? Nick couldn't see why they shouldn't be…

"So how much you had to drink?" Tristao said.

"Oh, masses," said Nick.

"Yeah?" said Tristao.

"Well, not as much as some people," said Nick. He smoked, and held his cigarette by his lapel, and felt that his smoking was unpractised and revealing. Of course the wonderful thing about his date with Leo had been that it was a date-they both knew what they were there for. Whereas the Tristao thing might well be all in his own head. He wasn't sure if the thinness of their conversation showed how futile it was, or if it was a sign of its authenticity. He suspected chat-ups should be more colourful and provocative. He said, "So you're from Madeira, I gather," with the flicker of an eyebrow.

Tristao narrowed his eyes and gave his first little smile. "How you know that?" he said. Nick took the moment to hold his gaze. "Oh, I know, the big guy tell you."

"Huge," said Nick-"well, round the middle anyway!"

Tristao looked inside his packet of cigarettes, where he'd stowed Polly's card. "That him?" he said. Nick glanced dismissively at the card but felt he'd been taught a lesson by it. Dr Paul Tompkins, 23 Lovelock Mansions… so established already, like a consulting room, with the boys coming through. He turned the card over, where Polly had scribbled Sep 4, 8pm sharp! "Why he say sharp?" said Tristao.

"Oh, he's a very busy man," said Nick, and feeling it was the moment he made a sudden movement forwards, two steps, his arms out, and a smirk of ineffable irony about Polly on his lips.

"Sorry, mate -": a red-faced man looked in at the door, then tucked in his chin and gave a confident dry laugh. "Wondered what was going on there for a moment!" Nick reddened and Tristao had the proper provoking presence of mind to snort quietly and say, "Bob, how's things?"

Bob gave him some instructions about the different rooms, "his lordship" was referred to a couple of times, with servants' irony as well as pitying respect, and Nick swayed from side to side with a tolerant smile, to convey to the men that he knew Lord Kessler personally, they'd had lunch together and he'd shown him the Moroni. When Bob had gone, Tristao said, "What am I going to do with you?" without much warmth or sense of teasing.

"I don't know," said Nick, chirpily, half numbed by drink to the looming new failure.

"I got to go." Tristao tugged his bow tie out of his pocket, and fiddled with the elastic and the clip. Nick waited for him to take his apron off. "Look, OK, I see you, by the main stairs, three o'clock."

"Oh… OK, great!" said Nick, and found a happy relief in both the arrangement and the delay. "Three o'clock…"

"Sharp," said Tristao, with a scowl.

He looked in at the door of Toby's bedroom. A group of his friends had come up here when the music stopped at two, and they seemed lazily to assess him. "Come in and close the door, for god's sake," said Toby, beckoning from the vast bed where he was propped up among sprawling friends. He had been given the King's Room, where Edward VII had slept-the swags of blue silk above the bedhead were gathered into a vaguely comic gilded crown. On the opposite wall hung a comfortable Renoir nude. Nick picked his way between groups sitting on the floor in front of an enormous sofa where fat Lord Shepton was lying with his tie undone and his head on the thigh of an attractive drunk girl. The curtains were parted and a window open to carry the reek of marijuana far away from the nose of the Home Secretary. Somehow they had re-created the mood of a college room late at night, girls' stockinged feet stretched out across boyfriends' knees, smoke in the air, two or three voices dominating. Nick felt the charm as well as the threat of the group. Gareth Lane was holding forth about Hitler and Goebbels, and his lecturing drone and yapping laughs at his own puns brought back something dreary from the Oxford days. He was said to be the "ablest historian of his year," but he had failed to get a first, and seemed now to be acting out some endless redemptive viva. The talk went on, but there felt to Nick's tingling drunk ears to be a residual silence in the room, on which his own movements and words were an intrusion… and yet left no trace. Several of his other pals were here, but the two months since term had distanced them more than he could explain. Some simple but strong and long-prepared change had occurred, they had taken up their real lives, and left him alone in his. He came back and perched on the edge of the bed and Toby leaned forward and passed him the joint.

"Thanks… " Nick smiled at him, and at last some old sweetness of reassurance glowed between them, what he'd been waiting for all night.

"God, darling, you smell like a tart's parlour," Toby said. Nick carried on gazing at him, paralysed for the moment by the need to hold in the smoke, a tickle in his throat, blushing with shame and pleasure. He was holding in the unprecedented "darling" and it was making him as warm and giddy as the pot. Then he let out the smoke and saw the baldly hetero claims of the rest of the remark. He said,

"And how would you know?"-wondering primly if Toby really had been to a tart's parlour. It was an image of him lurching up a narrow staircase.

Toby winked. "Having a good time?"

"Yes, fantastic." Nick looked around appreciatively, glossing over his inner vision of the night as a long stumbling journey, half chase, half flight, like one of his country-house dreams, his staircase dreams. "What's happened to Sophie, by the way?"

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

"Ah… right… " This was good news to Nick, and Toby himself, drunk, stoned, eyes glistening, seemed happy about it-he liked the adult note of responsibility in sending her home, and he liked being free of her too. He raised his voice and said,

"Oh, do shut up about fucking Goebbels!" But after a brief incredulous whirr Gareth's shock-proof mechanism rattled on.

Toby was king tonight, on his great big bed, and his friends for once were his subjects. He was acting the role with high spirits, in a childishly approximate way. Nick found it very touching and exciting. As the pot took its delayed effect, squeezing and freeing like some psychic massage, he reached back and took Toby's hand, and they lolled there like that for thirty or forty seconds of heaven. It was as if the room had been steeped in a mood of amorous hilarity as sweetly unignorable as "Je Promets." He recalled what Polly had said in the garden long before, and thought that maybe, at last, for once, Toby would actually be his.

There was a surrounding murmur of stoned gossip, heads nodding over rolling papers, the figures blurred but glowing in the lamplight. "But did the Fiihrer license the Final Solution?" Gareth asked himself; and it was clear that the arguments on this famous question were about to be passed in detailed review.

There was a giggling protest from Sam Zeman, curly-headed genius who'd gone straight into Kesslers on twenty thousand a year. "You're in a house full of Jews here, can you shut up about the fucking Final Solution, it's a party…"-and he reached for his drink with the frown and snuffle of a subtle person obliged to be brusque.

"I can go on to Stalin… " said Gareth facetiously.

After a minute's reflection Roddy Shepton said robustly, "Well, I'm not bloody Jewish."

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

"For god's sake, Claire…" said Roddy.

Claire gazed at Toby with eyes of deepening conviction. "Wasn't someone saying the Home Sectary's Jewish too…?" she said.

"Calm down, Claire!" said Roddy furiously. It was his own conviction that his large placid girlfriend, who had never been known to raise her voice, was dangerously excitable. Perhaps it was his way of implying he had tamed a sexual volcano; which in turn perhaps helped him to explain why he was going out with a strictly middle-class girl, the daughter of his father's estate manager.

Claire looked round in pursuit of her new idea. "You're Jewish, aren't you, Nat?"

"I am, darling," said Nat, "or half Jewish, anyway."

"And the other half's a bloody Welshman," said Roddy. He turned his head on her knee and squinted up at her. "God, you're drunk," he said.

This was the kind of insult that passed for wit at the Martyrs' Club, and was in fact one of the things most often said there. Toby had once taken Nick to the club's poky panelled dining room, where Christ Church toffs and Union hacks conformed deafeningly to type and boozed and plotted and howled unacceptable remarks at each other and at the harried staff. It was another world, defiantly impervious, in which it was a shock to find that Toby had a place.

"You are so fucking drunk, Shepton," Toby said. He had pulled off his socks and rolled them into a ball and he threw them very hard and accurately at the fat peer's head.

"Fucking Christ, Fedden," Roddy muttered, but left it at that.

Nick was explaining about the sea in Conrad's novels being a metaphor for both escape from the self and discovery of the self-a point which took on more and more revelatory force as he repeated it. He laughed at the beauty of it. He wasn't a strong smoker, and a second frowning toke, taken in the belief that the first one had had no effect, could leave him swimming and gabbling for hours. Nat Hanmer was sitting on the floor beside him, and his warm thigh was pressed against his own. There was something charmingly faggy about Nat tonight. He nodded and smiled into Nick's eyes as he was talking. Nick thought the pressure of the dope on his temples was as if his skull was being gently squeezed by Nat's big hands. Sam Zeman was nodding and smiling too and corrected, as if it really didn't matter, a plot detail in Victory that Nick had got wrong. Nick loved Sam because he was an economist but he'd read everything and played the viola and took a flattering interest in people less sublimely omniscient than himself.

He wanted to lie back and listen and perhaps have a long deep snog with Nat Hanmer, whose lips were not so full and soft as Leo's, but who was (Nick hadn't seen it before) almost beautiful, as well of course as being a marquess. The two of them in their shirtsleeves. Nat said he was having a go at writing a novel himself. He'd bought a computer, which he said was "a really sexy machine." In the warm explanatory light of the pot Nick saw what he meant. "I'd love to read it," he said. Across the room Gareth had switched wars and was describing the Battle of Jutland to a paralysed circle of young women. His big velvet bow tie was all donnish conceit. He was going to go on like this for forty-five years.

Nick heard himself saying how he missed his boyfriend, and then his heart speeded up. Sam smiled-he was purely and maturely straight, but he was cool with everything. Nat said broad-mindedly, "Oh, you've got a… you've got a bloke?" and Nick said, "Yeah… " and already he'd told them all about answering the advertisement, and their meeting and having sex in the garden and the funny episode with Geoffrey from two doors down. And how they were now going out together on a regular basis. Pot was a kind of truth drug for him-with a twist. He had an urge to tell, and show himself to them as a functioning sexual being, but as he did so he seemed to hear how odd and unseen his life was, and added easy touches to it, that made it more shapely and normal.

"I didn't know about all this," said Toby, who was going round in his bare feet with a bottle of brandy. He was grinning, slightly scandalized, even hurt perhaps that Nick hadn't told him he was having an affair.

"Oh, yes…" said Nick, "sorry… He's this really attractive black guy, called Leo."

"You should have brought him tonight," Toby said. "Why didn't you say?

"I know," said Nick; but he could only imagine Leo here in his falling-down jeans and his sister's shirt, and the jarring of his irony against the loaded assumptions of the Oxford lot.

"May one ask why?" said Lord Shepton, who had lately been snoring but had now been tickled awake and had a blearily vengeful look. Nobody knew what he was talking about. "We've already got bloody… Woggoo here," and he struggled upright, with a grimace of pretended guilt, to see if Charlie Mwegu, the Worcester loose-head prop and the only black person at the party, was in the room. "I mean, fucking hell," he said. Shepton was a licensed buffoon, an indulged self-parody, and Nick merely raised his eyebrows and sighed; for a moment the old dreariness and wariness surfaced again through the newer romance of the pot.

Claire was looking tenderly at Nick, and said, "I think black men can be so attractive… they have sweet little ears, don't they… sometimes… I don't know… It must be nice -"

"Calm down, Claire!" barked Roddy Shepton, as if his very worst fears had been confirmed. He struggled towards his glass on the floor.

"No, I'm quite jealous actually," said Claire, and gave Lord Shepton a playful poke in the stomach.

"Oh, you cow!" said Lord Shepton; his attention refocusing, slowly but greedily, on Wani Ouradi, who had just come into the room. "Ah, Ouradi, there you are. I hope you're going to give me some of that white powder, you bloody Arab."

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

But Wani ignored Shepton and stepped through the group towards the bed and Toby. He had changed into a green velvet smoking jacket. Nick had a moment of selfless but intensely curious immersion in his beauty. The forceful chin with its slight saving roundness, the deep-set eyes with their confounding softness, the cheekbones and the long nose, the little ears and springy curls, the cruel charming curve of his lips, made everything else in the house seem stale, over-artful, or beside the point. Nick longed to abandon handsome Nat and climb back on to the King's bed. He rolled his eyes in apology for Shepton, but Wani gave no answering sign of special recognition. And the group soon started talking about something else. Wani lay back on his elbow beside Toby for a minute, and took in the room through the filters of his lashes. Toby had picked up one of the girls' pink chiffon scarves, and was winding it into a turban with drunk perseverance. Wani said nothing about the turban, as if they were almost too familiar with each other to comment, as if they were figures of some other time and culture. Nick heard him say, "Si tu veux… " before getting up and going into the bathroom. Toby sat a while longer, laughing artificially at the conversation, and then went off with a yawn and a stumble after him. Nick sat sunk in himself, jealous of both of them, shocked almost to the point of panic by what they were doing. When they came back, he watched them like a child curious for evidence of its parents' vices. He could see their tiny effort to muffle their excitement, the little mock solemnity that made them seem oddly less happy and smashed than the rest of the party. They had a gleam of secret knowledge about them.

A joint came round again, and Nick took a serious pull on it. Then he got up and went to the open window, to look out at the damp still night. The great beeches beyond the lawn showed in grey silhouette against the first vague paling of the sky. It was a beautiful effect, so much bigger than the party: the world turning, the bright practical phrases of the first birds. Though there were hours still, surely, before sunrise… He stiffened, grabbed at his wrist, and held his watch steady in front of him. It was 4.07. He turned and looked at the others in the room, in their stupor and animation, and his main heavy thought was just how little any of them cared-they could never begin to imagine a date with a waiter, or the disaster of missing one. He made the first steps towards the door, and slowed and stopped as the pot took his sense of direction away. Where, after all, was he going? Everything seemed to have petered into a silence, as if by agreement. Nick felt conspicuous standing there, smiling cautiously, like someone not on to a joke; but when he looked at the others they seemed equally stilled and bemused. It must be some amazingly strong stuff Nick thought his way towards moving his left leg forward, he could coax his thought down through the knee to the foot, but it died there with no chance of becoming an action. It was slightly trying if he had to stand here for a long time. He looked more boldly round at the others, not easy to name at the moment, some of them. Slow blinks, little twitches of smiles. "Yah… " said Nat Hanmer, very measuredly, nodding his head, agreeing with some statement that only he had heard. "I suppose… " said Nick, but stopped and looked around, because that was part of a conversation about Gerald and the BBC. No one had noticed, though. "But you're thinking, wasn't that Bismarck's whole point?" Gareth said.

Nick wasn't sure how it started. Sam Zeman was laughing so much he lay back on the floor, but then choked and had to sit up. One of the girls pointed at him mockingly, but it wasn't mockery, she was laughing uncontrollably herself. Nat was red in the face, pinching the tears out of his eyes and pulling down the corners of his mouth to try to stop it. Nick could only stop giggling by glaring at the floor, and as soon as he looked up he was giggling again convulsively, it was like hiccups, it was hiccups, all mixed up together with the whooping, inexplicable funniness of the brandy bottle, the Renoir lady, the gilded plaster crown above the bed, all of them with their ideas and bow ties and plans and objections.

4

"‘THAT'S NOT A Hero's Life,' said a critic of the first performance, 'but rather a Dog's Life.' Or rather a dog's breakfast, you may well feel, after hearing that rendition of the battle music by Rudolf Kothner and the Tallahassee Symphony." It was Saturday morning, in the kitchen at Kensington Park Gardens, and a sharp young man was comparing recordings of Ein Heldenleben on "Building a Library."

"Ha, ha," said Gerald sourly, who had been slouching up and down, conducting first with a biro, now with a tennis racquet. He loved these domestic mornings, deferring to Rachel, making lists, carrying out small invented duties in the kitchen and the cellar. Today was even better, with his favourite composer on the radio; he lingered and got in the way, swinging his head from side to side, and not at all minding having a passage repeated again and again in ever louder rival interpretations. He took great interest in the breakdown of the Hero's adversaries into carpers (flutes), vituperators (oboe), and whiners (cor anglais), and drove them all into the pantry with a vigorous forehand when the Hero won.

"But let's move on to 'The Hero's Works of Peace,' " said the reviewer, "where Strauss self-glorifyingly recalls material from his own earlier symphonic poems and songs."

"I don't like this chap's tone," said Gerald. "Ah, now…! Nick…" as the music revelled and swelled enormously. "You must admit!"

Nick sat at the table, quick-witted after a mug of coffee, and ready to say all kinds of things. Today especially he was maddened by Strauss's bumptious self-confidence, which took no account of his own frustrations, the two tense weeks in which the dream of Leo as a possible future had faded on the air. But he contented himself with making a ghastly face. In their ongoing Strauss feud he was always cheerfully combative and found himself leaping to more and more dizzy positions-after which he had to take a few moments to reason his way to them over solid ground. Simply having opposition brought latent feelings to the surface and polarized views he might otherwise hardly have bothered to formulate. It became urgent for him to revile Richard Strauss, and he did it happily but a little hysterically, as if far more than questions of taste were involved. He could measure the strange zeal of the process by the degree to which he found himself denying his own ingenuous pleasure in some of Strauss's material and the magical things he did with it-this massive tune now, for instance, which would be running through his mind for days to come. He watched Gerald revelling and swelling too, and a vague embarrassment at the sight made it easier for him to say, "No… no… it just won't do," as the music was quickly faded out.

"Herbert von Karajan there, with the strings of the Berlin Philharmonic in superlative form."

"Exactly, that's the one we've got, isn't it?" Gerald said. "The Karajan, Nick?"-since it was Nick, over the summer months, who had been through the record cupboard and put all the discs in alphabetical order.

"Um-I think so…"

"But it's possible, isn't it," the clever young man went on, "to wonder if the sheer opulence of the sound and those very broad tempi don't push this reading over the edge, losing that essential drop of self-irony without which the piece can all too easily become an orgy of vulgarity. Let's hear Bernard Haitink and the Concertgebouw in the same passage."

Gerald had the stern, pinched look of someone wounded in debate and measuring his response with awkward dignity. The orchestra rampaged all over again. "I don't think I care for this one quite so much," he said. And then a little later, "I don't see what's vulgar about being glorious."

Nick said, "Oh, if you were worried about vulgarity then you'd never listen to Strauss at all."

"Ooh…!" protested Gerald, suddenly cheerful again.

"Perhaps the early Symphony in F," Nick said. "But even that…"

"I'm going over to Russell's," said Catherine, walking through the room with a hat on and her fingers in her ears-whether to block out the Hero's Deeds or her father's objections wasn't clear. In fact Gerald said, "OK, Puss," and stamped his foot exultantly at a blasting entry for the horns. It was a clear case of God-dammery, her word for all heavily scored Romantic music. She went out into the hall and they heard the slam of the front door.

What the problem was was this colossal redundancy, the squandering of brilliant technique on cheap material, the sense that the moral nerves had been cut, leaving the great bloated body to a life of valueless excess. And then there was the sheer bad taste of applying the high metaphysical language of Wagner to the banalities of bourgeois life, an absurdity Strauss seemed only intermittently aware of! But he couldn't say that, he would sound priggish, he would seem to care too much. Gerald would say it was only music. Nick tried to read the paper for a couple of minutes, but was oddly too excited to concentrate.

"And then the cor anglais, changed at last from whining adversary to pastoral pipe, introduces the poignant melody which announces the Hero's impending departure from the world. For how not to do it, let's go back to that mid-price disc from the Caracas Radio Orchestra, whose soloist seems not to have been told of this important transformation in character…"

"Gerald, did you manage to get hold of Norman?" Rachel asked, with an insistent tone, as if herself not quite sure of getting through. But a question or command from her had automatic priority, and he said,

"I did, my darling, yes"-going towards her to help her with a trug of long-stemmed yellow roses that she had brought in from the garden. She didn't need help, and the gallant little pantomime passed off almost unnoticed, as their common idiom. "Penny's going to come over for a chat. Norman says she's far too high-minded to work for the Tories."

"She'll be very glad of a job," said Rachel. Norman Kent, whose temperamental portraits of Toby and Catherine hung in the drawing room and the second-floor landing respectively, was one of Rachel's "left-wing" friends from her student days, whom she'd stayed stubbornly loyal to; Penny was his blushing blonde daughter, also just down from Oxford. There was a notion she might come and work for Gerald. "Is Catherine up yet? Or down?" Rachel asked.

"Mm…? No-she's neither up nor down, in fact she's out. She's gone to see the man with the Face."

"Ah." Rachel clipped expressively at the rose stems. "Well, I hope she'll be back for lunch with your mother."

"I'm not sure…" said Gerald, who doubtless thought lunch would be a good deal easier without her, especially since Toby and Sophie were coming. He listened through to the final recommendation on Ein Heldenleben, and pensively turned off the radio. He said, "He's all right, this fellow, isn't he, Nick?"

"Who… Russell? I think he's all right." Having given him a fervent testimonial two weeks ago, when he hadn't even met him, he was obliged to remain vaguely positive now that he had met him and knew that he couldn't stand him.

"Oh, good," said Gerald, glad to have got that cleared up.

"I thought he was rather sinister,1' Rachel said.

"I know what you mean," said Nick.

"One thing we have learnt, Nick," said Gerald, "is that all her boyfriends are marvellous. Criticism from us is the last betrayal. The more unprepossessing the individual the more strenuously we admire him."

"We love Russell," said Rachel.

"He's not much to look at," Nick quickly conceded, knowing that that was part of his glamour for Catherine, who described him as "a blinding fuck."

"Oh, come on, he's a thug," said Rachel, with an unsparing smile. "The photographs he took at Hawkeswood were purely malicious, making everyone look like fools."

"An easy target," said Gerald, clearly meaning something different. Catherine had passed round a selection of the pictures at dinner the week before. They were grainy, black and white, taken without a flash on long exposures which dragged people's features into leering masks. The photograph of Gerald and the Home Secretary being photographed for Tatler was a minor masterpiece. Not shown were those of guests fornicating, mooning, pissing in the fountain, and snorting cocaine. "Is that what The Face is like?" said Gerald. "Sort of satire…"

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

"I wouldn't mind seeing a copy," said Rachel warily. And Nick found himself climbing up the four flights of stairs to search for one in Catherine's room. A sense of criminal intrusiveness, a nagging memory of what had almost happened there three weeks before, made him hurry back down. He glanced through the magazine as he passed by the door of his hosts' bedroom, just to make sure it wasn't too outrageous. He quite liked The Face, but there was a lot of it he didn't understand. The picture of a blanched and ringleted Boy George on the cover had been taken by Russell. As he came back into the kitchen Nick felt suddenly embarrassed, as if he'd brought down one of his four porn mags by mistake. He handed it over and they placed it on the table and looked through it together.

"Mm… perfectly harmless," murmured Gerald.

"Yah-it's just a kids' thing," said Nick, hovering to interpret and deflect. He wasn't much use as a guide to his own youth culture, but he knew it wasn't just a kids' thing. They paused at a fashion spread that showed some sexy half-naked models in a camp pretence of a pillow fight. Gerald frowned faintly, to deny any interest in the women, and Nick realized his paradigm for this inspection was some difficult encounter with his own parents, who would have blushed at the sexualized style of the whole magazine, and called it "daft" or "rubbish" because they couldn't mention the sex thing itself Nick looked at the sprawling beautiful men and blushed appallingly too. He said, "I always think the typography's rather a nightmare."

"Isn't it a nightmare?" said Rachel gratefully. "One feels quite lost." They all started reading an article which began, " 'Get that motherfucker out of here!' says Daddy Mambo of Collision."

"OK," said Gerald, with a dismissive drawl, flicking through pages of advertisements for clubs and albums. He seemed vaguely distressed, not at the magazine itself, but that Rachel should have seen it. "This doesn't have the young genius's work in it…?"

"Urn-yes, he did the cover on this one."

"Ah…" Gerald peered at it in an affectedly donnish way. "Oh yes, 'photo Russell Swinburne-Stevenson.'"

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

"Much less two," said Gerald-as if perhaps he might not be such a bad sort.

They looked at Boy George's carmine smile and unusual hat. He wasn't at all sexy to Nick, but he carried a large sexual implication.

"Boy George is a man, isn't he?" said Rachel.

"Yes, he is," said Nick.

"Not like George Eliot."

"No, not at all."

"Very fair question," said Gerald.

The doorbell rang-it was a quick brassy rattle as much as a ping. "Is that Judy already?" said Rachel, fairly crossly. Gerald went into the hall and they heard him pluck open the front door and boom "Hello" in a peremptory and discouraging way he had. And then, in another timbre that made Nick's heart thump and the still air in the house shiver and gleam, Leo saying, "Good morning, Mr Fedden, sir. I was wondering if young Nicholas was at home."

"Urn, yes, yes he is… Nick!" he called back-but Nick was already coming through, with a strange stilted walk, it seemed to himself, of embarrassment and pride. It was abrupt and confusing but he couldn't stop smiling. It was the first time in his life he'd had a lover call for him, and the fact had a scandalous dazzle to it. Gerald didn't ask Leo in, but stood back a little to let Nick pass and to see if there was going to be any kind of trouble.

"Hello, Nick," said Leo.

"Leo!"

Nick shook his hand and kept holding it as he stepped out onto the shallow porch, between the gleaming Tuscan pillars.

"How's it going?" said Leo, giving his cynical little smile, but his eyes almost caressing, passing Nick a secret message, and then nodding him a sign that Gerald had withdrawn; though he must have been able to hear him saying, "… some pal of Nick's…" and a few moments later, "No, black chappie."

"I'm so pleased to see you," Nick said, with a certain caution because he didn't want to look mad with excitement. And then, "I've been thinking of you. And wondering what you were up to," sounding a bit like his mother when she was fondly suppressing a critical note. He looked at Leo's head as if he had never seen anything like it before, his nose, his stubble, the slow sheepish smile that admitted his own vulnerability.

"Yeah, got your message," Leo said. He gazed down the wide white street, and Nick remembered his authentic but mysterious phrase about how he'd been round the block a few times. "Sorry I didn't get back to you."

"Oh, that's all right," said Nick, and he found the weeks of waiting and failure were already half forgotten.

"Yeah, I've been a bit off colour," Leo said.

"Oh, no." Nick poured himself into believing this, and felt the lovely new scope it gave him for sympathy and interference. "I'm so sorry…"

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

"But you're better now…"

"Ooh, yeah!" said Leo, with a wink and a squirm; which made Nick think he could say,

"Too much outdoor sex, I expect." Really he didn't know what was allowed, what was funny and what was inept. He feared his innocence showed.

"You're bad, you are," said Leo appreciatively. "You're a very bad boy." He was wearing the same old jeans of their first date, which for Nick now had a touching anecdotal quality, he knew them and loved them; and a zipped-up tracksuit top which made him look ready for action, or for inaction, the rigours and hanging about of training. "I haven't forgotten our little tangle in the bushes."

"Nor have I," said Nick, with giddy understatement, glancing over his shoulder.

"I thought, he's a shy one, a bit stuck-up, but there's something going on inside those corduroy trousers, I'll give him a go. And how right I was, Henry!"

Nick blushed with pleasure and wished there was a way to distinguish shy from stuck-up-the muddle had dogged him for years. He wanted pure compliments, just as he wanted unconditional love.

"Anyway, I was in the area, so I thought I'd try my luck." Leo looked him up and down meaningfully, but then said, "I've just got to drop in on old Pete, down the Portobello-I don't know if you want to come."

"Sure!" said Nick, thinking that a visit to Leo's ex was hardly his ideal scenario for their second date.

"Just for a minute. He's not been well, old Pete."

"Oh, I'm sorry… " said Nick, though this time without the rush of possessive sympathy. He watched a black cab crawling towards them, a figure peering impatiently in the back; it stopped just in front of them, and the driver clawed round through his open window to release the rear door. When the passenger (who Nick knew was Lady Partridge) didn't emerge, a very rare thing happened and the cabbie got out of the cab and yanked the door open himself, standing aside with a flourish which she acknowledged drily as she stepped out.

"Now who's this old battleaxe?" said Leo. And there was certainly something combative in her sharp glance at the two figures on the front steps, and in her sharp blue dress and jacket, as if she'd come for dinner rather than a family lunch. Nick smiled broadly at her and called out, "Hello, Lady Partridge!"

"Hullo," said Lady Partridge, with the minimal warmth, the hurrying good grace, of a famous person hailed by an unknown fan. Nick couldn't believe that she'd forgotten him, and went on with almost satirical courtesy,

"May I introduce my friend Leo Charles? Lady Partridge." Up close the old woman's jacket, heavily embroidered with glinting black and silver thread, had a scaly texture, on which finer fabrics might have snagged and laddered. She smiled and said,

"How do you do?" in an extraordinarily cordial tone, in which none the less something final was conveyed-the certainty that they would never speak again. Leo was saying hello and offering his hand but she had already drifted past him and in through the open front door. "Gerald, Rachel darling!" she called, edgy with the need for reassurance.

The Portobello Road was only two minutes' stroll from the Feddens' green front door, and there was no time for a love scene. Leo was walking his bike with one hand, and Nick ambled beside him, possibly looking quite normal but feeling giddily attentive, as if hovering above himself. It was that experience of walking on air, perhaps, that people spoke of, and which, like roller skating, you could master with practice, but which on this first try had him teetering and lurching. He had such an important question to ask that he found himself saying something else instead. "I see you know about Gerald, then," he said.

"Your splendid Mr Fedden," said Leo, in his deadpan way, almost as if he knew that splendid was one of Gerald's top words. "Well, I could tell there was something you didn't want me to know, and that always gets me-I'm like that. And then your friend Geoffrey in the garden was going on something about parliament-I thought, I'll look into all this at work. Electoral roll, Who's Who, we know all about you…"

"I see," said Nick, flattered but taken aback by this first glimpse of the professional Leo. Of course he'd done similar researches himself when he'd fallen for Toby. There had been a proxy thrill to it, Gerald's date of birth, pastimes, and various directorships standing in somehow for the intimate details, the kisses and more he had wanted from his son. He thought it probably wasn't like that for Leo.

"He's quite nice-looking for a Tory," Leo said.

"Yes, everyone seems to fancy him except me," said Nick.

Leo gave him a shrewd little smile. "I don't say I fancy him exactly," he said. "He's like someone on the telly."

"Well, soon I'm sure he will be someone on the telly. Actually of course there are monsters on both sides-looks-wise."

"True enough."

Nick hesitated. "There is a sort of aesthetic poverty about conservatism, though, isn't there."

"Yeah?"

"That blue's an impossible colour."

Leo nodded thoughtfully. "I wouldn't say that was their main problem," he said.

The weekend crowds were pressing steadily along the lane from the station and down the steep hill into the market. Pete's establishment was in the curving row of shops on the left: PETER MAWSON in gold on black, like an old jeweller's, the windows covered in mesh though today the shop was open. Leo shouldered the door and the wired doormat, as he stood there manoeuvring the bike in, kept sounding a warning chime. Nick had peered into the shop before, on one of the dead weekdays, when it was all locked up, and the mail lay unattended across the floor. There was a pair of marble-topped Empire tables in the windows flanking the door, and beyond that a space that looked more like a half-empty warehouse than a shop.

Pete could be heard on the phone in a back room. Leo propped up his bike in a familiar way and wandered through, and Nick was left alone, blinking longingly at that last image of him, the slight bounce or dance in his step. He heard Pete ringing off, a murmur of kissing and hugging. "Ooh, you know… " said Pete. "No, I'm a bit better."

"I've brought my nice new friend Nick round to see you," said Leo, in a silly cheerful voice which made Nick realize this might be an awkward half-hour for all of them. He was very sensitive to anything that might be said. As so often he felt he had the wrong kind of irony, the wrong knowledge, for gay life. He was still faintly shocked, among other emotions of interest and excitement, at the idea of a male couple. He and Leo had come together, in their odd transitory way, but the truth was they weren't yet a couple themselves.

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

"This is Pete, this is Nick," said Leo, with a large smile and a mime of urging them together. The effort to charm and reassure was a side of him that Nick hadn't seen before; it seemed to make all sorts of other things possible, in the longer view. "Pete's my best old friend," he said, in his cockney voice of concessions. "Aren't you, darlin'?" They shook hands, and Pete winced, as at the grip of something not quite welcome, and said,

"I see you've been hanging around the school gates again, you terrible old man."

Leo raised an eyebrow and said, "Well, I won't remind you how old I was when you snatched me from my pram."

Nick laughed eagerly, though it was a kind of camp slapstick he didn't naturally find funny, and it was surprisingly painful to be given a glimpse of their past together. He found himself picturing and half believing the story of Leo in his pram. Being small and fresh-faced was usually an advantage, but he was anxious not to be thought a child. "Actually, I'm twenty-one," he said, in a mock-gruff tone.

"Hark at him!" Pete said.

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

"Oh. Very nice."

"Well, I'm just staying there for a while, with an old college friend."

Leo tactfully didn't elaborate; he said, "He knows about furniture. His old man's in the trade."

Pete made a shrugging gesture that took in the sparse contents of the shop. "Feel free… " he said; so Nick had politely to do that, while the old lovers fell back into quiet scoffing chatter, which he deliberately blocked out with tunes in his head, not wanting to learn anything, good or bad. He examined some knocked-about Louis Seize chairs, a marble head of a boy, a suspiciously brilliant ormolu-mounted cabinet, and the pair of tables in the window, which made him think of the ones turned into washstands at Hawkeswood. One wall was covered with a huge dreary tapestry showing a bacchanalian scene, with figures dancing and embracing under red and brown trees; it was too high for the space, and on its loosely rolled bottom edge a satyr with a grin seemed to slide forwards like a limbo dancer on to the floor.

The only real object of interest, the thing to acknowledge and be equal to, was Pete himself. He was perhaps in his mid-forties, with a bald patch in his sandy hair and a bit of grey in his thin beard. He was lean, an inch or two taller than Nick and Leo, but already slightly stooped. He wore tight old jeans and a denim shirt, and something else, which was an attitude, a wearily aggressive challenge-he seemed to come forward from an era of sexual defiance and fighting alliances and to cast a dismissive eye over a little chit like Nick, who had never fought for anything. Or so Nick explained his own sense of discomfort, the recurrent vague snobbery and timidity with which he peered into the world of actually existing gayness. Nick had pictured Pete as the fruity kind of antique-dealer, or even as a sexless figure like his own father, with a bow tie and a trim white beard. That Pete should be as he was threw such a novel light over Leo. He glanced at Leo now, with his sublime little bottom perched on the corner of Pete's desk, and saw him totally at home with a far from attractive middle-aged man-he had been his lover and done a hundred things with him that Nick still only dreamed of, time and time again. Nick didn't know how it had ended, or when; they seemed to share the steadiness of something both long established and over, and he envied them, although it wasn't quite what he wanted himself. It was part of Leo's game, or maybe just his style, to have told Nick almost nothing; but if Pete was Leo's kind of man it looked suddenly unlikely that Nick would be chosen to replace him.

"Have a look at that, Nick," Pete called out, as if amiably trying to keep him occupied. "You know what that is."

"That's a nice little piece," said Leo.

"It's a very nice little piece," said Pete. "Louis Quinze."

Nick ran his eye over the slightly cockled boulle inlay. "Well, it's an encoignure," he said, and with a chance at charm: "n'est-ce pas?"

"It's what we call a corner cupboard," Pete said. "Where did you get this one, babe?"

"Ooh… I just found him on the street," said Leo, gazing quite sweetly at Nick and then giving him a wink. "He looked a bit lost."

"Hardly a mark on him," said Pete.

"Not yet," said Leo.

"So where's your father's shop, Nick?" said Pete.

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

"Don't they pronounce that Barrick?"

"Only frightfully grand people."

Pete lit a cigarette, drew on it deeply, and then coughed and looked almost sick. "Ah, that's better," he said. "Yes, Bar-wick. I know Barwick. It's what you'd call a funny old place, isn't it."

"It has a very fine eighteenth-century market hall," Nick said, to help him to remember it.

"I picked up a little Directoire bureau there once, bombe it was, you'll know what that means."

"That probably wasn't from us. It was probably Gaston's. My father sells mainly English things."

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

"Pretty slow, actually," Nick said.

"It's at a fucking standstill here. It's going backwards. Another four years of Madam and we'll all be on the street." Pete coughed again and flapped away Leo's attempt to take the cigarette off him. "So how long have you been in London, Nick?"

"About… six weeks?"

"Six weeks… I see. You'll still be doing the rounds, then. Or are you just shopping local? You've done the Volunteer."

Leo saw Nick hesitating, and said, "I wouldn't want him going to that old flea-box. At least not till he's sixty, like everyone else in there."

"I'm exploring a bit," said Nick.

"I don't know, where do the young things go these days?"

"Well, there's the Shaftesbury," Nick said, naming a pub that Polly Tompkins had described as the scene of frequent conquests.

"You're not so much of a pubber, though, are you?" Leo said.

"He wants to get down the Lift," said Pete, "if he's a bit of a chocoholic."

Nick blushed and shook his head dumbly. "I don't know really." He was very embarrassed, in front of Leo, but undeniably fascinated to have his taste guessed at and defined. He felt he had only just guessed at it himself.

"When did you meet Miss Leontyne?"

That he knew exactly, but said, "About three weeks ago," feeling more foolish with his quick straight answers to chaffing questions. He didn't flinch at the girl's name for Leo, and he had sometimes laboured through whole conversations calling Polly Tompkins "she," but he'd never found it as necessary or hilarious as some people did.

"That's what I call her," said Pete, "Leontyne Price-tag. I hope you've got your chequebook ready."

There was nothing to say to this, but Leo muttered dutifully, "There's not much you don't know about price tags, is there, Pete."

Nick tittered and watched the affronted look fade from Pete's drawn features as he smoked and gazed at the dreary tapestry. It could have been one of those items which never sell, which the dealer ends up almost giving away because they seem to bring bad luck on the whole shop. He remembered that Pete had been ill, though he didn't know in what way. "I've got this fucking great bed," Pete said. "I can't shift it." The phone rang, and he went off into the back room. "Have a look at it."

The bed had been taken apart and the fluted poles, the ornate square frame of the canopy and the head- and footboards inset with painted rococo scenes were leaning up against the wall. "Let's have a look at this, then," Leo said, wandering over and briefly stroking Nick's arm as he passed; he was being sweet to both of them, he surely didn't really want to look at the bed. They didn't want to move anything in case it all fell over. Nick peered at the faded gilt and the unpolished inner edges that would normally be hidden. All his life he'd looked at furniture from odd angles, and he still had his childhood sense of tables and sideboards as elaborate little wooden buildings that you could crawl into, their bosses and capitals and lion-heads at face height, their rough under-surfaces retaining a dim odour of the actual wood. This was a very grand bed, but there was worm in the frame and apparently it had no hangings with it. He felt the old impulse to put it together and get into it. Leo squatted down to look at the picture on the footboard. "This is nice," he said. "What do you think?"

Nick, standing behind him, gazed down on him as he had on their first date, when he was fiddling with the bike. Then he looked away, almost guiltily, at the wide-skirted ladies and their lovers in doublets, plucking at lutes; the trees that were blue and silver. Then he looked down again, at where Leo's beltless jeans stood away from his waist. He had lived and lingered through that glimpse a hundred times since their first meeting, it was almost more powerful and emblematic than the sex that had followed: the swell of Leo's hardened buttocks, the provoking blue horizontal of his briefs. So to be offered a second look had a double force, like the confirmation of a promise, and Nick's hesitation was only the twitch of wariness he felt at any prospect of happiness. "It's very nice," he said.

Leo shifted slightly on his heels. "Can you see?" he said.

Nick was grinning and sighing at the same time. "Yes, I can see," he said, in a murmur that shrank the conversation away from Pete into heady subterfuge.

"And what do you think?" asked Leo brightly.

"Oh… it's beautiful," Nick whispered. He checked the open door to the back room before he stooped and slid his hand in and verified that this time there was no blue horizontal, there was only smooth, shaved, curving Leo. A second or two, and then Nick straightened up and put his hands gently round Leo's neck-who tipped back against his legs for support, and rolled his shoulder a couple of times against Nick's hard-on.

"Mm, you do like it," he said.

"I love it," said Nick.

When Pete came back in they were loafing round the room with their hands in their pockets. "You won't believe this," he said. "I think I've sold the bed."

"Oh yes?" said Leo. "Nick was just saying what a nice piece it was. But he says it'll take quite a bit of work, don't you, Nick?"

Their final few minutes in the shop had an atmosphere of ridiculous oddity. It was hard to take in what the other two were saying-Nick felt radiantly selfish and inattentive, and left it to Leo to wind things up. The furniture and objects took on a richer lustre and at the same time seemed madly irrelevant. It must have been obvious to Pete that something was up, that the air was gleaming and trembling; and it wouldn't have been beyond him to make some tart comment about it. But he didn't. It struck Nick that perhaps Pete was really over Leo, realistic and resigned, and he noticed he regretted this slightly, because he wanted Pete to be jealous.

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

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

They all laughed and shook hands, and when Pete had hugged Leo he pushed him away with a quick pat.

So there they were, out in the street, being nudged and flooded round by the crowds, and heedlessly obstructive in their own slow walk, which unfurled down the hill to the faint silky ticking of Leo's bicycle wheels. It was all new to Nick, this being with another man, carried along on the smooth swelling current of mutual feeling-with its eddies sometimes into shop doorways or under the awnings of the bric-a-brac stalls. There was no more talk of lunch, which was a good sign. In fact they didn't say anything much, but now and then they shared glances which flowered into wonderful smirks. Lust prickled Nick's thighs and squeezed his stomach and throat, and made him almost groan between his smiles, as if it just wasn't fair to be promised so much. He fell behind a step or two and walked along shaking his head. He wanted to be Leo's jeans, in their casual rhythmical caress of his strolling legs, their momentary grip and letting go. His hands flickered against Leo time and again, to draw attention to things, a chair, a plate, a passing punk's head of blue spikes. He must have come first, out of all the men Leo had auditioned. He kept touching Leo on the bottom, in the simple pleasure of permission. Leo didn't reciprocate exactly, he had his own canny eye for the street, he even raised a sly eyebrow at the sexy shock of other boys going past, but it didn't matter because they were a kind of superfluity, the glancing overspill of his brimming desire for Nick. As they dawdled through the crowd Nick saw himself rushing ahead through neglected years of his moral education. This was what it was like!

Under the fringed canopy of a stall he saw the down-turned profile of Sophie Tipper, studying a lot of old rings and bracelets pinned on a ramp of black velvet. His first thought was to ignore her or avoid her. He felt his old envy of her. But then Toby rolled into view behind her, leaning forward with a little pursed smile of vacant interest-very like a husband. He rested his chin on her shoulder for a moment, and she murmured something to him, so that Nick had the uncomfortable feeling of peering at their own heedless self-content. They made a necessarily beautiful couple, somehow luminous against the dark jumble of the market, like models in a subtle but artificial glare. Nick turned away and looked for something he could buy for Leo; he longed to do that. He saw all the reasons the impending social encounter might not be a success. "Hey, Guest!" said Toby, loping round the stall, grabbing him and giving him a firm kiss on the cheek.

"Hi-Toby… " Their kissing was a new thing, since the party, somehow made possible and indemnified by the presence of Sophie. And it seemed almost a relief to Toby, as if it erased some old low-level embarrassment about their not kissing. To Nick himself it was lovely, all the warmth of Toby for a moment against him, but unignorably sad too, since it was clearly the limit of concessions, granted in the certainty that nothing more intimate would ever follow.

"Hello, Nick!" said Sophie, coming round and kissing him on both cheeks with beaming goodwill, which he put down to her being such an up-and-coming actress. He wanted to introduce Leo, but he thought something wrong might be said, based on his excited gabble at Hawkeswood, when he was stoned. It was one of those inevitable but still surprising moments when mere wishful thinking was held to account by the truth. He said,

"You're going to be late for lunch," and thought he sounded rather rude.

"I know," said Toby. "Gran wants one of her sessions with Sophie. So we're keeping it as short as possible."

"Well, I love your grandmother," Sophie said, with mock petulance.

"No, she's a marvellous old girl," said Toby; and it reminded Nick of second-hand things he used to say at Oxford, sagacious remarks about his parents' famous friends. He smiled vaguely at Leo. If Sophie hadn't been there, Nick thought, then he could have shown Toby off to Leo as a glamorous accessory to his own past, perhaps something more… But like this Toby was hopelessly claimed and placed.

Nick said, "Sophie Tipper, Toby Fedden: Leo Charles," and Leo said "Leo" both times as he shook hands.

"Right," said Toby, "fantastic… We know all about you," and he gave an encouraging grin.

"Oh, do you," said Leo, drily doubtful at the return of his own phrase.

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

Nick only took a quick agonized peep at Leo, whose expression was scarily blank, as if to dramatize his unrelinquished power of choice. The welling confidence of a few minutes before looked a foolish thing. Nick said, "Well, we don't want to jump the gun."

"But that's wonderful," said Sophie, as though Nick's welfare, his unhappy heart, had long been her concern. He saw her reaching wide to bless the double triumph of boyfriend and black.

"He's been keeping you very much to himself," said Toby. "But now we've caught you at it. So to speak!" And he blushed.

"We're just going for a little toddle," said Leo.

"That's marvellous." Toby seemed as thrilled as Sophie by what they imagined was happening, and Nick had a sad clear sighting of his deeper, perhaps even unconscious reason: that an obscure pressure, a sense of unvoiced expectations, might be lifted from him by the transference of Nick's adoration to another man. As Gerald might have said of something quite different, it was hugely to be encouraged. And maybe Sophie sensed that too. They'd probably even talked about it, before sleep, as a vague problem-just for a moment, before it shrank into irrelevance like shoes kicked off at the end of the bed…"So you're not joining us for lunch?" Toby went on.

"Not invited," said Leo, but with a cheerful shake of the head. Nick raced away from the mere idea of it, as a nexus of every snobbery and worry, scene of tortured intercessions between different departments of his own life: Leo-Gerald-Toby-Sophie-Lady Partridge…

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

"I knew we wouldn't find my ring," said Sophie, with the crossness that hides a sweetness that hides a toughness.

"We'll come back after lunch. The girl's got to have a ring," Toby explained, which Nick didn't like the sound of.

Leo had kept up an attitude of steady ironic contemplation of the young couple, but then he said, "I know I've seen you," and looked faintly embarrassed by his own gambit. Sophie's face was a lesson in hesitant delight.

"Oh…"

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

Disappointed, she seemed to struggle to remember. "Oh, no… Clever you, but no, I wasn't in that one."

"That was Betsy Tilden," said Nick.

"Right, oh yeah, Betsy… No, I know I've seen you…"

Nick wanted to say that she'd only been in two things, an episode of Bergerac and a student-made film of The White Devil, bankrolled by her father, which had had a single late-night screening at the Gate.

"I was in a film that was called The White Devil," said Sophie, as though speaking to a child.

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

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

Leo was smiling and staring, as if the scenes were spooling through his head again, miraculously matched by the woman in front of him. "Yeah, when he poisons him, and… Did you see this film, Nick, White Devil…?"

"Stupidly, I missed it," Nick said; though he had a clear recollection of undergraduates acting at being film-makers, bouncing round in jeeps and wearing dark glasses at night; the Flamineo, Jamie Stallard, a drawling Martyrs' Club twit, was one of his favourite betes noires.

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

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

"You're not wrong, girl," laughed Leo, so lit up with sassy excitement that Nick thought he might be teasing Sophie. "But he's not, though-you'd better tell me-he's not... is he…?"

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

Leo took it philosophically. "Well, when it comes on again I'm definitely taking him," he said, tutting as if they both thought cultivated, first-class Nick, still heavy-headed with exam knowledge, steeped to the chaps in revenge tragedy, was a bit of a slob.

"All right," said Nick, seeing it at least as a couple of hours in the warm dark together, rather than behind a bush. "And I can tell you all about Jamie Stallard," he added.

But Leo's real interest was in Sophie. "So what are you doing next?" he said. Nick raised his eyebrows apologetically to Toby, who shook his head kindly, as if to say that going out with a promising actress he was bound to find himself in an attendant role. Sophie herself looked slightly overexcited, partly at the praise but partly because she wasn't used to talking to anyone like Leo, and it seemed to be going really well. "I'll let you know," she was saying. "I can get your number off Nick!"

Nick wished he could match Toby's confidence. He felt snubbed by Leo's attentions to Sophie, but perhaps it was only because he felt foolish, childish at having put it about that they were boyfriends. Toby said, "Really, we must go, Pips," and there was something so silly about this nickname that it helped Nick not to care.

But then, alone again in the street with Leo, neither of them saying anything, he had a sense of what an affair might actually be like, and the endless miraculous permission was only a part of it. His limbs were oddly stiff, his hands tingling as if he'd just come in from snowballing to stand by a blazing fire. He felt the moment echoing other occasions when he had just missed success through a failure of nerve, or a stupidly happy anticipation. All Leo's effusiveness with Pete and then with Sophie had ebbed away, and left just the two of them, in this horrible noise and crush. Nick glanced at him with a tight smile; at which Leo stretched his neck with a moody, uninvolved air. "Well," said Nick finally, "where do you want to go?"

"I don't know, boyfriend," Leo said.

Nick laughed ruefully, and something kept him back from a further He. "A caff?" he said. "Indian? A sandwich?"-which was the most he could imagine managing.

"Well, I need something," said Leo, in his tone of flat goading irony, looking at him sharply. "And it isn't a sandwich."

Nick didn't take a risk on what this might mean. "Ah… " he said. Leo turned his head and scowled at a stall of cloudy green and brown glassware, which was taking its place in their crisis, and seemed to gleam with hints of a settled domestic life. Leo said,

"At least with old Pete we had his place, but where are me and you ever going to go?"

Could this be his only objection, the only obstacle…? "I know, we're homeless," Nick said.

"Homeless love," said Leo, shrugging and then cautiously nodding, as if weighing up a title for a song.

5

NICK CHOSE A moment before dinner to pay the rent. It was always awkward. "Oh… my dear… " said Rachel, as if the two ten-pound notes were a form of mild extravagance, like a box of chocolates, or like flowers brought by a dinner guest, which were also a bit of a nuisance. She looked for somewhere to put down her bowl of steeping apricots. "If you're sure… "

Nick shrugged and snuffled. "Heavens," he said. He had just spent five pounds on a taxi, he was doing all sorts of incautious things, and would have loved not to pay.

"Well, thank you!" Rachel took the money, and stood folding it appreciatively, not sure where to put it. Then Gerald and Badger Brogan came in from tennis-there was the flat chime of their feet on the iron stair from the garden, and then they were in the kitchen like two big hot boys. Just for a second Gerald noted the transaction that was taking place. The next second he said, "Thrashed him!" and threw down his racquet on the bench.

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

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

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

This wasn't quite acceptable to either player. "I chose not to question some frankly fantastic line calls," said Badger. He roamed round by the table, picking up a spoon and putting it down, and then a garlic press, without noticing. Nick smiled as if amused by the drama of their game, though in fact he felt challenged by Badger's free and easy way here, by the mood of competition he stirred up in Gerald, and perhaps by its counterpart, his longer and deeper claim on Gerald's affection. "Hello, Nick!" said Badger, in his probing, sarcastic tone.

"Hello, Badger," said Nick, still self-conscious at teasing a virtual stranger about the yellow-grey stripe in his dark hair, at having to enrol in the family cult of Badger as a character, but finding it easier after all than the sober, the critical, the almost hostile-sounding "Derek."

Badger in turn was clearly puzzled by Nick's presence in his old friend's house and made facetious attempts at understanding him. It was a part of his general mischief-he lurched about all day, asked leading questions, rubbed up old scandals and scratched beadily for new ones. He said, "So what have you been up to today, Nick?"

"Oh, just the usual," said Nick. "You know, morning in the library, waiting for books to come up from the stacks; bibliography class in the afternoon, 'How to describe textual variants.' " He made himself as dull as he could for Badger, like a brown old binding, though to his own eye "textual variants" glinted with hints at what he'd actually done, which was to cut the class and have two hours of sex with Leo on Hampstead Heath. That would have been more scandal than Badger could manage. On the first night of his stay he had described an Oxford friend of theirs as the most ghastly shirtlifter.

"LBW, Badge?" said Gerald.

"Thanks, Banger," said Badger, using an interesting old nickname that Nick couldn't see himself making free with, and which Gerald was wise enough not to object to. The two men stood there, in their tennis whites, drinking their tall glasses of lemon barley water, gasping and grinning between swigs. Gerald's legs were still brown, and his confusingly firm buttocks were set off by his tight Fred Perry shorts. Badger was leaner and seedier, and his Aertex shirt was sweatier and pulled askew by being used to mop his face. He was wearing scruffy old plimsolls, whereas Gerald seemed to bounce or levitate slightly in the new thick-soled "trainers."

Elena hurried in from the pantry with the joint, or limb, of venison, plastered up in a blood-stained paste of flour and water. The whole business of the deer, culled at Hawkeswood each September and sent to hang for a fortnight in the Feddens' utility room, was an ordeal for Elena, and an easy triumph for Gerald, who always fixed a series of dinner parties to advertise it and eat it. Elena set the heavy dish on the table just as Catherine came down from her room, with her hands held up like blinkers to avoid the sight. "Mm-look at that, Cat!" said Badger.

"Fortunately I won't even have to look at you eating it," said Catherine; though she did quickly peer at it with a kind of relish of revulsion.

"Are you going out, then, old Puss?" said Gerald, his eagerness damped at once by a wounded frown.

"You'll have a drink with us, darling?" said Rachel.

"I might do if there's time," said Catherine. "Is it all MPs?"

"No," said Gerald. "Your grandmother's not an MP."

"Thank Christ, actually," said Catherine.

"And nor is Morden Lipscomb an MP."

"There are two MPs coming," said Rachel, and it wasn't clear if she thought this rather few or quite enough.

"Yup, Timms and Groom!" said Gerald, as if they were the joiliest company imaginable.

"The man who never says 'hello'!"

"You're too absurd," said Gerald. "I'm sure I have heard him say it…"

"If Morden Lipscomb's coming I'm going to keep my coat on, he makes my blood run cold."

"Morden's an important man," said Gerald. "He has the ear of the President."

"Will Nick be making up numbers, I suppose," said Catherine.

Nick fluttered his eyelashes and Gerald said, "Nick doesn't make up numbers, child, he's part of the… part of the household."

Catherine looked at Nick, slightly mockingly, across the space that separates good and bad children. She said, "He's the perfect little courtier, isn't he?"

"Oh, Elena," said Rachel, "Catherine's not dining, we'll be one fewer for dinner-yes, one less." Elena went into the dining room to adjust the placings, and came back a moment later with an objection.

"Miz Fed, you know is thirteen."

"Ah… " said Rachel, and then gave an apologetic shrug.

"Yes, well I don't think any of us are triskaidekaphobes here, are we?" said Gerald. They were all very up on the names of phobias, since at various times Catherine had suffered from aichmo, dromo, keno, and nyctophobia, among a number of more commonplace ones-it was a bit of a game with them, but it cut no ice with Elena, who stood there biting her lip.

"You see, you'll have to stay," said Badger, reaching out clumsily to hold Catherine. "How can you resist that beautiful venison?"

"Hmm," said Catherine. "It looks like something out of a field hospital." And she shot a tiny forbidding glance at Nick, who saw that it was probably the aichmophobia, the horror of sharp objects, that made the serving and carving of a haunch of venison impossible for her. The family knew about her trouble in the past, but had happily forgotten it when it seemed not to recur. It was only Nick who knew about the recent challenge of the carving knives. He said,

"I don't mind dropping out too if I'm going to spoil the seating." He enjoyed the well-oiled pomp of the dinners here, but he knew he was too much in love to do more than smile in the candlelight and dream of Leo. He would be quiet and inattentive. And already he felt a tingle in the air, the more-than-reality of the memory of being with his boyfriend.

"No, no," murmured Rachel, with an impatient twitch of the head.

"Elena, we'll risk it!" Gerald pronounced. "Si… va bene… Nick, you'll just have to be the odd man… um…" Elena went back into the dining room with that look of unhappy subjection that no one but Nick ever noticed or worried about. "We're not living in twelfth-century Calabria," said Gerald, as the phone started ringing and he plucked it from the wall and grunted, "Fedden," in his new no-nonsense style. "Yes… Hello… What?… Yes, yes he is… Yes, all right… Mm, and to you," then holding the receiver out towards Nick: "It's Leo." Nick coloured as though his thoughts of a few moments before had been audible to all of them; the kitchen had accidentally fallen silent and Gerald gave him a look which Nick felt was stern and disappointed, but perhaps was merely abstracted, the frown of a broken train of thought.

Catherine said, "If it's Leo, they'll be hours." And Rachel nodded sympathetically and said, "Yes, why don't you take it in the study." Gerald looked at him again as if to say that the brute reality of gay life, of actual phone calls between shirtlifters, was rather more than he had ever imagined being asked to deal with; but then nodded and said genially, "By all means, it's the red phone."

"Ah, hotline," said Badger, whose scandal-sensors were warming to something awkward in the air. Though as Nick went down the hall what struck him was that Rachel knew what was going on, and was protecting him. Gerald never really noticed anything about other people, they were moving parts in a social process, they agreed with him or they thwarted him, his famous hospitality disguised an odd lack of particular, personal skills-all this came clear to Nick in a liberating rush as he pushed open the study door. After which it was beautifully surreal to stand and talk in sexy murmurs beside his desk, to hear Leo's voice in the one room in the house which expressed Gerald's own taste, which was a vacuum of taste, green leather armchairs, upholstered fender, brass lamps, the stage set for his own kind of male conspiracy.

"Well, that was very jolly," said Leo, with a half-teasing, half-aspiring use of a Nick word. "Very jolly indeed."

"Did you enjoy it, darling?" said Nick.

"I didn't mind it," said Leo.

Nick glowed and grinned. "I thought it was bearable."

"I expect you can bear it," said Leo. "You don't have to ride a bike."

Nick looked around at the half-open door. "Was it too much for you?" he said wonderingly, and with a sense that recurred and recurred these weeks-of enormous freedom claimed through tiny details, of everything he said being welcome.

"You're a very bad boy," said Leo.

"Mm, so you keep saying."

"So what are you doing?"

"Well… " said Nick. It was lovely to be talking to Leo, but he wasn't quite sure why he had rung, and as it was the first time he had ever done so it made Nick uneasily expectant; until it struck him that probably Leo himself was only claiming the simple pleasure of talking to his lover, of talking, as he said he loved to fuck, for the sake of it. "I'm sitting behind Gerald's desk with a most tremendous hard-on," said Nick.

There was a pause and Leo murmured, "Now don't get me going. My old lady's here."

It was shadowy already in the room, and Nick pulled the chain that switched on the desk lamp. Gerald, like an uxorious bigamist, had photos of both Rachel and the Prime Minister in silver frames. A large desk diary was open at the "Notes" pages at the back, where Gerald had written, "Barwick: Agent (Manning)-wife Veronica NOT Janet (Parker's wife)." With his breezily asking Parker how Veronica was and Manning how Janet was, he had got some very confused looks. Nick knew Janet Parker, of course, she was a manager at Rackhams and sang in the Operatic. "So what are you doing later?" Leo wanted to know.

"Oh, we've got a big dinner party," Nick said. He noticed that he hoped to impress Leo with their life at Kensington Park Gardens and at the same time was ready to repudiate it. "It'll probably be very tedious-they only really ask me to make up the numbers."

"Oh," said Leo doubtfully.

"It'll be a lot of horrible old Tories," Nick said, in an attempt at Leo's language and point of view, and sniggered.

"Oh, is Grandma coming, then?"

"She certainly is," said Nick.

"Old bitch," said Leo; the passing insult of their doorstep meeting, unregistered at the time, had risen later like a bruise. "You ought to ask me over, to continue our fascinating conversation," he said.

The theme of Leo's coining over had cropped up several times since their first date, and hung and faded. Nick said, "Look, I'm sure I can get out of this." And really it did seem as if the logic of the evening-the numbers, the etiquette, the superstition-was only an expression of a deeper natural force, a love logic, pulling him out of the house and back into Leo's arms. "I'm sure I can get out of it," he said again. Though as he did so he felt there was also a lightness in not seeing Leo, a romance in separation, while the fabulous shock of their afternoon together sank in. Days like these had their design, their upward and downward curves: it would be unshapely to change the plan.

"No, you enjoy yourself," said Leo, wise perhaps with the same instinct. "Have a glass of wine."

"Yes, I expect I'll do that. Unless you've got a better idea… " Nick swivelled in the desk chair with a tensely mischievous smile-the red phone cord stretched and bounced. The chair was a high-backed scoop of black leather, a spaceship commander's.

"You're insatiable, you are," said Leo.

"That's because I love you," said Nick, singsong with the truth.

Leo took in this chance for an echoing avowal; it was a brief deep silence, as tactical as it was undiscussable. He said, "That's what you tell all the boys"-a phrase of lustreless backchat that Nick could only bear as a form of shyness. He turned it inside out in his mind and found what he needed in it. He said quietly, "No, only you."

"Yeah," said Leo, all relaxed-sounding, and gave a big fake yawn. "Yeah, I'll probably pop down to old Pete's a bit later, see how he's getting on."

"Right," said Nick quickly. "Well-give him my best!" It was a sting of worry-hidden, unexpected.

"Will do," said Leo.

"How is old Pete?" said Nick.

"Well, he's a bit low. This illness has taken all the life out of him."

"Oh dear," said Nick, but felt he couldn't enquire any further, out of delicacy for his own feelings. He looked about on the desk, to focus his thoughts on where he was rather than on imagined intimacies at Pete's flat. There was a thick typescript with a printed card, "From the Desk of Morden Lipscomb," on "National Security in a Nuclear Age," which Gerald had marked with ticks and underlinings on the first two pages. "NB: nuclear threat," he had written.

"OK, babe," Leo said quietly. "Well, I'll see you soon. We'll get it together at the weekend, yeah? I've got to go-my mum wants the phone."

"I'll ring you tomorrow…"

"Yeah, well, lovely to chat."

And in the silence of the room afterwards, shaken, tight-lipped, Nick clutched at that cosy but cynical cockney lovely. Of course Leo was inhibited by being at home, he wanted to say more. Just think of this afternoon. It was terribly sweet that he'd rung at all. The chat was a romantic bonus, but nothing was certain when it came to words, there were nettles among the poppies. For a minute or two Nick felt their separation like a tragedy, a drama of the thickening dusk-he saw Leo at large on his bike while he stood in this awful office with its filing cabinets, its decanters, and the enlarged photograph, just back from the framers, of the hundred and one new Tory MPs.

In the kitchen he found that people had dispersed to bathe and change, and these further unstoppable rhythms made him feel like a ghost. Rachel was sitting at the table writing place cards with her italic fountain pen. She glanced up at him, and there was a slight tension in her manner as well as obvious solicitude, a desire not to offend in a moment of kindness. She said, "All well?"

"Yes, thank you-fine…" said Nick, shaking himself into seeing that of course life was pretty wonderful, it was just that there was more to it than he expected-and less as well.

"Now should I put Badger or Derek, do you think? I think I'll put Derek, just to put him in his place."

"Well, they are place cards," said Nick.

"Exactly!" said Rachel, and blew on the ink. She looked up at him again briefly. "You know, my dear, you can always bring friends here if you want to."

"Oh, yes… thank you…"

"I mean we would absolutely hate it if you were to feel you couldn't do that. This is your home for however long you are with us." And it was the "we," the general benevolence, that struck him and upset him; and then the practical acknowledgement that he wouldn't be there for ever.

"I know, you're very kind. I will, of course."

"I don't know… Catherine says you have a… a special new friend," and she was stern for a second, magnanimous but at a disadvantage: what should she call such a person? "I just want you to know he'd be very welcome here."

"Thank you," said Nick again, and smiled through a blush at the thing being out. It was confusingly straightforward. He felt relieved and cheated. He wasn't sure he could rise to the freedom being offered-he saw himself bringing home some nice white graduate from the college instead, for a pointless tea, or convivial evening bleak with his own cowardice.

"We're such broody old things," Rachel said, "now that Toby's moved out. So do it just for our sake!" This was a charming exaggeration, in a woman of forty-seven, with thirteen for dinner, but it acknowledged a truth too: it didn't quite say she thought of him as a son-it didn't elevate or condescend-but it admitted a habit, a need for a young man and his friends about the house. She tapped the cards together and came across the room and Nick gave her a kiss, which she seemed to find quite right.

In fact Toby and Sophie were there that night. They came early and Nick had a gin-and-tonic with them in the drawing room. They seemed to bring along their own complacent atmosphere, the mood of their life together in the Chelsea flat, and of some larger future when they might curl up a leg on the sofa or stand with an elbow on the mantelpiece in a room as enormous as this. Toby played the lightly chivvied "husband" very sweetly, and Sophie claimed him in the childish ways of someone experimenting with her power, with little exasperations and innuendos. She did a performance about how Toby ground his teeth in his sleep. Nick tittered warily at this glimpse of the bedroom, but found her lack of subtlety oddly reassuring. She'd got Toby, snoring and twitching, but the romantic reach of Nick's feelings for him, the web of sacrifice and nonsense and scented Oxford nights, survived untouched. Toby was very sweet to Nick too. He left his position by the fireplace and came and sprawled on the rug by his chair, so that Nick could have reached out and stroked the back of his neck. For a moment Sophie looked disconcerted, but then she took possession of that situation as well. "Ah-you two should see more of each other," she said. "It's good to see you together." A minute later, looking vaguely self-conscious, Toby got up and pretended to search for a book.

"And what about your lovely friend…?" Sophie wanted to know.

"Oh… Leo, do you mean?"

"Leo," said Sophie.

"Oh, he's-lovely!" Here was the subject again-Nick just hadn't got used to it yet, to the idea of anything so secret, so steeped in his own fears and fantasies, being cheerfully enquired after by other people. Toby too looked round from the bookcase with his encouraging grin.

"Such a… lovely man," said Sophie, whose conversation tended not to develop, but to settle, snugly or naggingly, in one place.

Nick was glad of the praise, and mistrusted it at the same time. "Well, he loved meeting you," he said.

"Aah…" Sophie purred, as if to say that people usually did enjoy that. "He's a great fan of your work, Pips," said Toby.

"I know," said Sophie, and sat looking down modestly. Her dark-blonde hair, worn long at Oxford, had been cut and backcombed, Diana-style, and quivered when she shook her head. She was wearing a red strapless number that didn't really suit her.

"You know she's got a part in a play," said Toby.

"Oh, shoosh… " said Sophie.

"No, we've all got to go and see her. Nick-come to the first night, we'll go together."

"Absolutely," said Nick. "What are you doing?"

Sophie quivered and said, "Well, you might as well know," as if being hurried into announcing a different kind of engagement. "I'm doing Lady Windermere… "

"Fantastic. I think you'll be very good at that." It was a surprisingly big part, but Nick could see her as the self-righteous young wife clipping rose stems in her Westminster drawing room; and delivering those awful soliloquies she has-

"I don't know what it will be like. It's one of these very way-out directors. He's… he's gay, actually, too. He says it's going to be a deconstructionist reading of the play. That doesn't worry me, of course, because I've done deconstruction; but Mummy and Daddy may not like it."

"You can't go worrying about what your parents will think," said Nick.

"That's right," said Toby. "Anyway, your ma's very with-it. She's always going to way-out concerts and things."

"No, she'll be fine."

Toby chuckled. "Of course your father's most famous remark is that he wished Shakespeare had never been born."

"I don't know that that's his most famous remark," said Sophie, with a hint of pique. In fact if Maurice Tipper had made a famous remark at all it would probably have been something about profit margins and good returns for shareholders. "He only said it after getting bitten to death by mosquitoes watching Pericles in Worcester College gardens."

"Ah… " murmured Nick, whose own memory was of Toby's bashful swagger as a Lord of Tyre, when Sophie had been the Marina.

"You're too horrid about my poor papa," said Sophie in a highly affected way, as if in her mind she was already on stage.

Catherine came in, dressed for her night out in a tiny spangled frock, over which she was wearing an unbuttoned light-grey raincoat. She wore high-heeled black shoes and stockings with a whitish sheen to them.

"Goodness!" said Toby.

"Hello, darling," said Catherine confidentially to Sophie, stooping to give her a kiss. Sophie clearly found Catherine the most challenging aspect of an affair with Toby, and Catherine knew this, and treated her with the kind of clucking condescension that Sophie would otherwise have lavished on her. "Love your clever frock," she said.

"Oh… thank you," said Sophie, smiling and blinking.

"Are you going out, then, sis?" said Toby.

Catherine headed towards the drinks table. "I'm going out tonight," she said. "Russell's taking me to an opening in Stoke Newington."

"And where might that be?" said Toby.

"It's a well-known area of London," Catherine said. "It's very fashionable, isn't it, Soph?"

"Yes, of course-darling, you've heard of it," said Sophie.

"I was joking," said Toby; and Nick thought it was true, you never expected him to; and when he did you couldn't always be sure that he had. And then the idea of a party, not this one, but a noisy party with cans of beer and trails of pot smoke, through which he moved with his lover, as his lover, came over him like a pang and he envied Catherine. It was an image of an Oxford party, but blended with something known only from television, a house full of black people.

Toby said, "I'm just going upstairs to see if I can find those trousers. Are you going to Nat's bash, Nick?"

"What is it?" said Nick, with another dimmer pang at the thought of another kind of party, a posh white hetero one, at which his presence was not thought necessary.

"Oh, he's having this Seventies party…" said Toby hopelessly.

"No, I'm not invited," said Nick, with a superior smile, thinking of the loving closeness he had felt with Nat at Hawkeswood, when they were both stoned and sitting on the floor. "Is it in London?"

"That's the thing. It's up at the blasted castle," said Toby.

"Yes… It's absurdly soon, isn't it, for a Seventies party?" said Nick. "I mean, the Seventies were so ghastly, why would anyone want to go back to them?" He'd been longing for a chance to see the castle-a marcher fortress with Wyatt interiors.

"Well, public schoolboys love reliving their puberty, don't they Soph," said Catherine, coming back with a very tall drink.

"I know," said Sophie crossly.

"Some of them spend their whole lives doing it," Catherine said. She stood in front of the fireplace, with a hand on her hip, and seemed already to be moving to the music of a future very remote from any such nonsense.

Toby shrugged apologetically and said, "I just hope I've still got those disco pants!"

Nick almost said, "Oh… the purple ones…?"-since he knew just where they were, having been through everything in Toby's room, read his schoolboy diary, sniffed the gauzy lining of his outgrown swimming trunks, and even tried on the flared purple trousers (standing foolishly on the long legs). But he merely nodded, and knocked back the rest of his g-and-t.

Gerald came down in a dark suit with characteristic pink shirt, white collar, and blue tie. He seemed to recognize, with a forgiving smile, that he had set a sartorial standard the others were unlikely to match. He kept on smiling as he crossed the room, as a sign of his decision that he would not react to Catherine's appearance. The mac worn over the micro-frock made her look almost naked. When Badger came in he was less circumspect. "My god, girl!" he said.

"No, your god-daughter actually, Uncle Badger," said Catherine, with the forced pertness of a much younger child.

Badger frowned and hummed. "Well, exactly," he said. "Didn't I promise to safeguard your morals, or something?" He rubbed his hands together and had a good look at her.

"I'm not sure anyone thinks you'd be the best person for that," Catherine said, sipping her gin and sitting down sideways on a low armchair.

"You're going easy on that stuff, aren't you, Puss?" said Gerald.

"It's my first one, Daddy," Catherine said; but Nick could see why Gerald was anxious, she was high on her own defiance tonight. He watched Badger watching her, his grey-striped peak slicked back after his shower, something disreputable and unattached about him; in parts of Africa, according to Toby, he was known not as Badger but by one of a number of words for hyena. Certainly he circled, and was hungry for something. His lecherous teasing of his god-daughter was allowed because it was of course impossible, a clownish joke.

Catherine stayed long enough to meet everyone and to test her claim that Barry Groom never said hello. Gerald played along and said, "Hello, Barry," and not only seized his hand but covered it confirmingly with his other hand, as if he was canvassing: at which Barry, looking round the room with a suspicious smile, said, "Gerald, I'm surprised at you"-holding him there long enough to make him uneasy-"a green front door, that's hardly sending the right signal." He got a laugh, which was warmer and more complex than he expected-there was a second or two while he grew into it, squared his shoulders. He followed Gerald across the room, nodding in a vain, critical way as he was introduced, but not saying hello. When Catherine shook his hand, he said, "Aha! Beautiful creature!" with a vaguely menacing presumption of charm. Catherine asked him where his wife was and he said she was still parking the car.

It was good that Catherine should want to be present, to be presented, to help entertain the guests, but to the family it was also a little sinister. She put everyone on edge by having her coat on indoors, and seemed to be playing with her father's hopes that at any moment she might leave. He glanced at her distractedly from time to time, as if he would have liked to say something but had made the calculation that the oddity of the coat was preferable to the naked flesh beneath it. He introduced her to Morden Lipscomb with visible reluctance. The grey old American, with his tiny granite-like sparkle of charm, shook her hand and smiled mockingly, as if being confronted with an ancient indiscretion he meant entirely to deny. Toby and Nick were both watching her and Toby said, "God, my sis looks like, you know, one of those girls who try and lure you into striptease parlours."

"She looks like a strippergram," Sophie said.

Lady Partridge came in with that air of social vexation Nick had seen in her before: she wanted to appear totally at home here and she also wanted her arrival to be an event; her deafness added a querulous uncertainty as to which effect she was having. Badger got her a drink and flirted with her, and she allowed herself to be flirted with. She liked Badger, having known him since he was a boy, and nursed him through mumps once, when he was staying in the holidays-an episode that was still referred to as a touchstone of their friendship, and in a vaguely risque way, since apparently Badger's balls had been the size of grapefruit. Nick had heard them joke about it earlier in the week, and it had sounded like jokes he had with his own parents, that were ribald little reference points in a past before everything changed and became indescribable.

All the time Nick was thinking about Leo, so that Leo seemed to be the element, the invisible context, in which these daunting disparate people were meeting and sparring and congratulating each other. They didn't know it, which made it all the funnier and more beautiful. He mixed himself a fresh gin-and-tonic, Gerald-style, quinine lost in juniper, and drifted round not minding if he wasn't spoken to. He looked at the pictures with a new keenness, as though explaining them to Leo, his grateful pupil. The other MP and his wife, John and Greta Timms, were standing in front of the Guardi with the look of people who had come to the wrong party, who wanted more of a challenge, he in a grey suit, she in the helpless boldness of a blue maternity dress with a white bow at the neck: it was as if the PM herself were pregnant. John Timms was a junior minister in the Home Office; he must have been several years younger than Gerald, but he had precocious gravitas and unflappable self-importance. If Barry Groom never said hello, John Timms seemed at first not to blink. His gaze was fixed and almost sensual, and his speech had a hypnotic steadiness of pace and tone, irrespective of meaning: he was inspired, he seemed constantly to admit, but he wasn't in any dubious way excitable. They were talking about the Falklands War and the need to commemorate it with a monument and to celebrate it with an annual public holiday. "A Trafalgar Day for our times," said Timms, and his wife, in whom his certainty produced a more vibrant kind of urgency, said, "Why not revive Trafalgar Day itself? Trafalgar Day itself must be revived! Our children are forgetting the War Against the French…"John Timms gazed out into the room as though flattered by his wife's zeal and loving her for it, but not himself being ready to go so far. He hadn't been introduced to Nick (indeed the Timmses were really speaking to each other), and his gaze played on him for a moment, seemed to feel him and test him and doubt him. "You'd like to see a permanent Falklands memorial, wouldn't you," he said.

"Mm, I wonder… " said Nick, not disrespectfully, and marvelled at just how unavailable his thoughts on the subject were. The doubtlessness of Timms was a wonder in itself. He imagined Leo being here beside him, and having one salient fact or objection to produce, of the kind Nick could never remember. Catherine came past, sampling each of the little power-centres in the room. "We were talking about the Falklands," said Nick.

"I understand the Prime Minister favours an annual parade," said John Timms, "as well as a prominent memorial. It was truly her triumph."

"And the men's," said Greta Timms, with her rich hormonal flush. "The men were staunch."

"They were certainly staunch, my darling," said John Timms. "They were dauntless."

"No," said Catherine, covering her ears and grinning, "it's no good, I just can't bear words with that au sound in. Do you know what I mean?"

"Oh… " said Greta Timms. "I think I've always found them rather splendid words!"

"Right, I'm off!" said Catherine, turning to the room with the big smile which perhaps all her life would seem unguarded and vulnerable. A rough chorus of "Bye"s, a chuckling "Oh, is she off?," and she was gazed at with relief, the suddenly conjured good humour that sends a child up to its early bed. "Bye, Gran!" she said, specially loudly, kissing Lady Partridge in the middle of the room. "See you in the morning, Dad." And picking up her bag she stalked out on her tall heels. Lady Partridge peeped at Morden Lipscomb to gauge his surprise; if he seemed amused by this vision of a sex-club door-girl she was ready to take some droll credit as her grandmother. But Lipscomb was looking disappointedly at Gerald.

Lady Partridge was taken in to dinner by Lipscomb. They didn't really "take people in" at the Feddens', but the procession from the drawing room, down the stone stairs, and into the candlelight, awoke a memory sometimes, or an anxiety, in guests. Lipscomb, with ponderous New World formality, presented his elbow to the senior lady, and Gerald's mother, who had a hurtling look to her after two gin-and-tonics, pressed against him like an old flame. In the dining room Lipscomb peered around with guarded curiosity as people found their places. "Yes, I always think what a splendid room," Lady Partridge said, trailing away towards her chair.

"And are these your forebears, Lady Partridge?" Lipscomb asked.

"Yes… yes…" said Lady Partridge, in a daze of graciousness.

"No, they are not her forebears," said Rachel, quietly but firmly. "They're my grandfather and my great-aunt."

Nick was placed in the middle of the table, with Penny Kent on his right and Jenny Groom on his left-the dullest place of all, but he didn't mind because he had company of his own. He tucked into his crab cake as if sharing a joke. "How do you fit in?" Jenny Groom wanted to know, with the air of someone steeled to unpleasant surprises.

"Oddly but snugly," said Nick; and since she didn't like this, "No, I'm an old friend of Toby's."

"Oh, Gerald's son, you mean… And I hear he's working for the Guardianl" The scandal of Toby's having a traineeship at the Guardian seemed to Nick to eclipse his own dissidence, to be enough scandal for one household.

"Well, you can ask him. He's sitting just over there," said Nick, loud enough to intrude on Toby as he listened to Greta Timms extolling the virtues of the Family: Toby gave a half-secret smile of acknowledgement but said, "Yes, I see," to Greta to show she still had his attention.

"Oh, of course. He's got his father's looks," said Jenny with a frown. "So what do you do?"

"I'm doing a doctorate at UCL-on… on Henry James," said Nick, seeing the style question might lose her completely.

"Oh…" said Jenny warily, getting a hook on it. "Yes. I've never got round to Henry James."

"Well…" said Nick, not caring if she had or not.

"Or hang on, did I read one? Dr Johnson or something."

"No… I don't think so…"

"No, not Dr Johnson, obviously…!"

"I mean there's the Boswell."

"It was set in Africa… I know: Mr Johnson."

"Oh, Mister Johnson is a novel by Joyce Cary."

"Exactly, I knew I'd read something by him."

When the venison came in Gerald yapped, "Don't touch the plates! Don't touch the plates!" so that it sounded as though something had gone wrong. "They have to be white hot for the venison." The fact was that the fat congealed revoltingly if the plates were less than scorching. "Yes, my brother-in-law has a deer park," he explained to Morden Lipscomb. "A rare enough amenity these days." The guests looked humbly at their helpings. "No," Gerald went on, in his bristling way of answering questions he wished someone had asked, "this is buck venison… comes into season before the doe, and very much superior." He went round with the burgundy himself. "I think you'll like this," he said to Barry Groom, and Barry sniffed at it testily, as if he knew he was thought to have more money than taste.

Nick shared a brief smile down the table with Rachel. It seemed subtly to mock not only Barry but Gerald himself. Nick took his first sip of the burgundy with a frisson at their shared understanding, like the liberty allowed to a child by a confident mother-the pretended conspiracy against the father. He wondered if Gerald and Rachel ever rowed. If anything happened, then it was in the white secrecy of the bedroom, which, with its little vestibule, was removed from hearing behind two heavy doors; it became somehow sexual.

When he thought of Leo after not thinking of him for a minute or two he heard a big orchestral sound in his head. He saw Leo lying on his coat under a bush, his shirt and jersey pushed up under his armpits, his jeans and pants round his knees, small dead leaves sticking to his thighs-and he heard the astonishing chord. It was high and low at once, an abysmal pizzicato, a pounce of the darkest brass, and above it a hair-raising sheen of strings. It seemed to knock him down and fling him up all in one unresisted gesture. He couldn't repeat it immediately, but after a while he would see Leo rising to kiss him, and the love-chord would shiver his skin again. It startled him while Penny was describing the enormous interest of working for Gerald, and he jumped, and smiled at his invisible friend, so that Penny worried that she'd been funny. He wondered if it came from something he knew, or if he'd written it himself. It certainly wasn't the Tristan chord, with its germ of catastrophe. The horrible thought came to him that if it existed, it had probably been written by Richard Strauss, to illustrate some axe-murder or beheading, some vulgar atrocity. Whereas to Nick, though it was frightening, it was also indescribably happy.

"So how are you getting on at UCL?" said Penny kindly, as if it must be a sorry comedown after Oxford. Nick and Penny had never met as students, the word Oxford meant different things to them, but Penny relied on it as a thing they had in common.

"Oh, fine…!" said Nick; and went on obligingly, "It's not at all like Oxford, you know. The place itself is fairly grim. I've just found out that the English department used to be a mattress factory."

"Really!" said Penny.

"It is a bit depressing. I suppose it's no wonder half the staff are alcoholics." Penny laughed, oddly titillated, and Nick felt rather treacherous. In fact he revered Professor Ettrick, who had taken to him with immediate subtle confidence, and seen possibilities in his thesis topic that he himself hadn't dreamt of. But nothing much was being done, and through most of Nick's library days his eyes wandered just beyond the page in a deep monotonous reverie about Leo: the great unfolding sentences of Meredith or James would slow and fade into subliminal parentheses, half-hour subordinate clauses of remembered sex. And he felt guilty, because he wanted to deserve the professor's trust and be as clever and committed as he was meant to be. Penny said, "Was it Henry James you're working on?"

"Er… yes," said Nick.

She seemed to settle comfortably on that, but only said, "My father's got tons of Henry James. I think he calls him the Master."

"Some of us do," said Nick. He blinked with the exalted humility of a devotee and sawed off a square of brown meat.

"Art makes life: wasn't that his motto? My father often quotes that."

"It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process," said Nick.

"Something like that," said Penny. She smiled contentedly into the candlelight. "What would Henry James have made of us, I wonder?" she went on.

" Well… " Nick chewed it over. He thought she was rather like a high-minded aunt, proposing questions with virginal firmness and ignorance. He wondered condescendingly what her sexual prospects were. A certain kind of man might like to raise the colour in that plump white neck. He said, "He'd have been very kind to us, he'd have said how wonderful we were and how beautiful we were, he'd have given us incredibly subtle things to say, and we wouldn't have realized until just before the end that he'd seen right through us."

"Because he did write about high society, didn't he?" said Penny, clearly thinking that was where she was, and also perhaps that it was proof against being seen through.

"Quite a lot," said Nick; and remembering his chat with Lord Kessler in the summer and really giving a long-pondered answer to him, "People say he didn't understand about money, but he certainly knew all about the effects of money, and the ways having money made people think." He looked fondly across at Toby, who out of sheer niceness tried now and then not to think like a rich person, but could never really get the hang of it. "He hated vulgarity," he added. "But he also said that to call something vulgar was to fail to give a proper account of it."

Penny seemed to be puzzling this over, but in fact she was listening to what Badger was suggesting in her other ear: her sudden blush and giggle showed Nick that this was one of Badger's little sexual challenges to him-it was almost a way of calling him a fag.

Toby was listening to Greta Timms, but leaning past her to keep an eye on Sophie, who was being drily examined by Morden Lipscomb. "No," said Sophie reluctantly, "I've only been in one sort of major film."

"And what of the stage?" said Lipscomb, with an odd mixture of persistence and indifference.

"Well, I am about to be in something. It's… I'm afraid it's going to be rather a trendy production… it's Lady Windermere's Fan."

Jenny Groom started asking something about Catherine, was she as mad as they said, and Nick's hesitations as he answered only half allowed him to hear the truth that Lipscomb dragged out of Sophie, that she wasn't playing Lady Windermere herself, but "Oh, just a minor part… No! Not too much to learn… Oh no, not her, that's a wonderful part… Anyway it will probably all be ruined by the director… " and that in fact she'd been cast as Lady Agatha, a role which famously contained nothing but the two words "Yes, mamma." Nick thought this was very funny, and then felt almost sorry for her.

Rachel said, "My dear, what fun, we shall all come to your first night," apparently sincerely, so that a further alliance, of efficient, almost impersonal solidarity, was seen to be in place between the mother and her possible daughter-in-law.

Lady Partridge, jealous of Lipscomb's attention, went off on the unobvious tangent of her hip replacement. "Oh, I had it at the Dorset… Well, yes, I always go there, I find them marvellous… charming girls… The nurses, yes… One or two of the doctors are coloured, but there's absolutely no need to have anything to do with them… Not that I'm much of a one for hospital!" she reassured him. "My late husband was there a good deal."

"Ah… " said Lipscomb, measuring the distance to a condolence.

She lifted her glass, with a worldly sigh. "Well, I've outlived two husbands, and that's probably enough," she said, as if still leaving a tiny loophole for further proposals. She looked at Lipscomb, perhaps wondering if he had said something, and went on, "Actually they were both called Jack! They couldn't have been more different, as it happens… chalk and cheese… I don't think they'd have got on for a moment-had they ever met!" Nick thought she might almost have been on the phone, hearing answers and questions from far away. "Jack Fedden, of course, Gerald's father, a funny sort of man, in a way… He was in the law, very much a law man… very, very handsome… and Jack Partridge, Sir Jack, of course… No, not a law man… Not at all… He was a practical man, a builder, he built some of the new motorways, as you may know… Yes, some of the Ms… the M, um… He did marvellous work…"

At the head of the table Gerald was perceptibly distracted by his mother's talk. Nick knew that Jack Partridge had gone bust not long after getting his knighthood, in one of the funny reversals of these recent years; it was a subject which might seem to tarnish his stepson by association. Gerald made a firm intervention and said, "So, Morden, I was absolutely gripped by your paper on SDL"

"Ah… " said Lipscomb, with a smile that showed he wasn't so easily flattered. "I wasn't sure that you'd agree with my conclusions."

"Oh, absolutely," said Gerald, with a surprising mocking smile which confirmed to Nick that he hadn't read beyond those first few pages. "How could one not!"

"Well… you'd be surprised," said Lipscomb.

"Is this the telephones?" said Lady Partridge.

"It's missile defence, Ma," said Gerald loudly.

"You know, Gran, Star Wars," said Toby.

"You're thinking of STD, Judy," said Badger.

"Ah," said Lady Partridge, and chuckled, not in embarrassment but at the attention she'd won for herself.

"The President announced the Strategic Defence Initiative six months ago," said Morden Lipscomb, gravely but a little impatiently. "It aims to protect the United States from any attack by guided missile systems. In effect a defensive shield will be created to repel and destroy nuclear weapons before they can reach us."

"Delightful idea," said Lady Partridge. This sounded satirical, and the plan had indeed been greeted with derision as well as dismay; but then Nick thought, no, the old lady would take pleasure in weaponry, and arms budgets generally.

"It is, I believe, an irresistible one," said Lipscomb, laying his left hand commandingly on the table. He wore a signet ring on his little finger, but no wedding ring. Of course that didn't mean much; Nick's own father and his father's male friends didn't wear wedding rings, they were thought, for all their symbolism, to be vaguely effeminate. He thought of the card, "From the Desk of Morden Lipscomb"-it made one wonder where else it might have come from: "the Back-burner," "the Rest-room," "From the Closet of Morden Lipscomb"… well, it was an idea. He was clearly a man with his own defensive systems.

After pudding the ladies withdrew. Nick's thoughts went with them as they climbed the stairs; he stood with one knee on his chair, hoping he might somehow be allowed to join them. "Slide along, Nick," said Gerald. The men all closed up together at Gerald's end of the table, in a grimly convivial movement, occupying the absent women's places. Nick handed Lady Partridge's lipstick-daubed napkin to Elena, who had come through to sort them out. There were many all-male occasions that he liked, but now he missed the buffer of a female, even Jenny Groom, whose general impatience he'd decided was a sad flower of her hatred of her husband. Now Barry Groom was sitting down opposite him with a scowl, as if familiar to the point of weariness with the etiquette of such occasions. Nick looked across to Toby for help, but he was laying out a box of cigars and the cigar cutter; Gerald was setting the decanters off on their circuit. Nick pictured Leo, as he had left him today, walking his bike away, and the love-chord sounded, warily now-he didn't want the others to hear it. How could he describe it, even to himself, Leo's step, his bounce, his beautiful half-knowing, half-unconscious deployment of his own effects? "I'll give you one piece of advice," said Barry Groom, choosing imperiously between the unmarked port and claret decanters.

"Oh, yes," said Nick, and felt his erection begin to subside. "Never speculate with more than twelve per cent of your capital."

"Oh…" Nick gasped humorously, but seeing Barry Groom was almost angrily in earnest he went on, "Twelve per cent. Right… I'll try and remember that. No, that sounds like good advice."

"Twelve per cent," said Barry Groom: "it's the best advice I can give you." He slid the decanters over to him, since they formed the bridge, furthest from Gerald. Nick took some port and passed it on to Morden Lipscomb, with a little show of promptness and charm. Lipscomb was just clipping a cigar, and his thin mouth, turned down in concentration, seemed to brood on some disdain, not of the cigar, but of the company he found himself in. This was presumably the moment when he should be made way for, in the solemn but disinhibiting absence of the women, but he was cagey, or sulky. Nick felt sorry for Gerald, but didn't see how he could help. His own way of getting on terms with people was through the sudden intimacy of talk about art and music, a show of sensibility; but he felt Lipscomb would rebuff him, as though refusing intimacy of another kind. He wondered again what Leo would have said and done: he had such clear, sarcastic opinions about things.

"So, Derek," said Barry Groom, in his cuttingly casual tone, "how long are you staying here?"

Badger puffed coaxingly for a second or two, and then let out a roguish cloud of smoke. "As long as the old Banger'll have me," he said, jerking his head towards Gerald.

"Ah, that's what you call him, is it?" said Barry, with a rivalrous twitch.

Badger grunted, took a quick suck on his cigar, and said, "Oxford days…" knowing how easy Barry was to tease. "No, I'm having a place done up at the moment, that's why I'm here."

"Oh, really? Where is it?" said Barry suspiciously.

Badger was deaf to this question, so Barry repeated it and he said at length, as if conceding a clue to a slow guesser, "Well, it's quite near your place of work, actually." The secrecy was presumably a further tease, though it fitted with something seedily hush-hush about Badger. "It's just a little flat-a little pied-a-terre."

"A fuck-flat in other words," said Barry, sharply, to make sure the illusionless phrase, and his offensiveness in using it, struck home. Even Badger looked slightly abashed. Gerald gave a disparaging gasp and plunged as if confidentially into new talk with John Timms and his old mentor about the genius of the Prime Minister. Nick glanced across at Toby, who half closed his eyes at him in general if unfocused solidarity.

"I had wondered whether the Prime Minister might be with us this evening," said Lipscomb. "But I see of course it's not that kind of party."

"Oh…" said Gerald, looking slightly guilty. "I'm so sorry. I'm afraid she wasn't free. But if you'd like me to bring you together…"

Lipscomb gave a rare smile. "We're lunching on Tuesday, so it's not at all necessary."

"Oh, you are?" said Gerald, and smiled too, in a genial little mask of envy.

And so it went on for ten or fifteen minutes, Nick perching at the corner of two conversations, the "odd man," as Gerald had briskly predicted. He passed the decanters appreciatively, and sat smiling faintly at the reflections of the candelabra in the table top or at a disengaged space just above Barry Groom's head. He grunted noncommittally at some of Badger's jokes, Badger appearing in the candlelight and its mollifications as almost a friend among the other guests. He nodded thoughtfully, without following the thread, at one or two of Lipscomb's remarks that caused general pauses of respect. The cigar stench was the whole atmosphere, but the alcohol was a secret security. There was something so irksome about Barry Groom that he had a fascination: you longed for him to annoy you again. He was incredibly chippy, was that the thing?-all his longings came out as a kind of disdain for what he longed for. And yet he got on with Gerald, they were business partners, they saw a use for each other; and that perhaps was the imponderable truth behind this adult gathering.

Barry said, "The way you Oxford fuckers go on about the Martyrs' Club," and frowned sharply as he swallowed some claret. "What were you martyrs to, that's what I'd like to know."

"Ooh… hangovers," said Badger.

"Yes, drink," Toby put in, and nodded frankly.

"Overdrafts and class distinctions," said Nick drolly.

Barry stared at him, "What, were you a member?"

"No, no…" said Nick.

"I didn't think so!"

And then there was a rattle in the hall as the front door was opened and the bang of it slamming shut. Then immediately the bell rang, in three urgent bursts. There was a shout of vexation, the door was jerked open again, and Catherine, it must have been, was talking-from the dining room they heard only the hurried shape of her talk. Nick's eyes slid round the faces of the others at the table, who looked puzzled, displeased, or even lightly titillated. John Timms stared unblinking towards the closed door of the room; Badger sat back in a curl of smoke. "All right!" It was Catherine.

"That child would try the patience of an oyster," said Gerald, with evident feeling but also a snuffle of amusement, a darting glance to judge the effect of his allusion.

Then the front door closed again, more thoughtfully, and a man's voice was heard-"You need to be careful, girl… " Nick gave a little snigger, trying to commute it into Russell's voice, but Gerald had set down his cigar and stood up: "Sorry…"he murmured, and walked towards the door with a dwindling smile. "That's my sis," said Toby. "As I was saying… " said Morden Lipscomb. When Gerald opened the door, the man was going on quietly but urgently, "You need to calm down, Cathy, I don't like it, I don't like seeing you like this at all…" and Nick's heart went out to the Caribbean accent, in instant sentimental allegiance-he felt himself float out towards it from the cigar-choked huddle at the table, the Oxonian burble and Barry's whine.

"Who are you?" said Gerald.

"Oh, Christ, Dad!" said Catherine, and it was clear she was crying, the last word broke as she raised her voice.

"And are you Cathy's father, then…"

Nick got up and went into the hall, with the feeling he must try to curb Gerald's unhelpful sharpness, and an anxious sense of the things Gerald didn't know, that might now have to be named and negotiated. He was half in the dark himself. If someone told you they were OK, was it wrong to believe them? She was standing at the foot of the stairs, gripping the gold chain of her bag in both hands and looking both angry and vulnerable: Nick almost laughed, as you do for a second at the latest catastrophe of a child, and seem to mock it when you mean to reassure it; though he was frightened too. There was quite a chance he'd have to do something. He peered at her, with the frank curiosity allowed in a crisis-it really was childlike, the quick fall; she had only gone out two hours ago. Her mouth quivered, as if with accusation. She was tiny in her high heels. Nick knew the man, he was the minicab driver she'd been friendly with, the one she'd had back to the house when Gerald and Rachel were away, fiftyish, grizzled at the temples, heavy-built, a sweet hint of ganja about him: well, all the Orbis drivers sold the stuff. He was completely and critically different from everything else in the house. Nick said, "Hi!" under his breath, and rested a hand on his shoulder.

"What's happened, darling?" he said.

"Who is this man?" said Gerald.

"I'm called Brentford, since you're asking," the man said slowly. "I brought Cathy home."

"That's really kind of you," said Nick.

"How do you know my daughter?" said Gerald.

"She needs taking care of," said Brentford. "I can't help her tonight, I got a job."

"He's the minicab driver," said Nick.

"Does he need paying?" said Gerald.

"I don't charge her," said Brentford. "She call me when he dump her."

"Is this true?" said Gerald.

"It's really kind of you," said Nick.

Catherine made a little scream of disbelief, and came and took Brentford's arm, but he kept a wary dignity with her too and didn't hold her: he pushed her gently towards Nick, and she leaned against him, wailing but not holding on to him. She was in her own distress, she wasn't seeking solace from Nick, just somewhere to stand; still he put a cautious arm round her. "Is it Russell?" he said. But she couldn't begin to answer.

"What is it, darling?" said Rachel, hurrying downstairs.

Gerald explained, "That bloody little shit's dumped her," clearly saying, through pretended indignation, what he most hoped had happened. "Poor old Puss."

Rachel looked at the three men, and there was a hint of fear in her face, as if Brentford had brought some threat much larger than Catherine's tantrum into the house. "Come upstairs, darling," she said.

Barry Groom had come out into the hall, staring and twitching his head, and so drunk suddenly that there were unconscious delays to his aggression. "Look here, you!" he shouted at Brentford. "I don't know who you are. You fucker!"

Gerald put a hand on his wrist. "It's all right, Barry."

"You keep your hands off her, you…"

"Oh, shut up… you arsehole!" said Nick, without planning to, and shaken by the sound of his own raised voice.

"Yes, shut up, you wanker!" said Catherine, through her tears.

"Now, now!" said Barry, and then something awful, a sly smile, slid on to his face.

"God, I'm really sorry… " said Nick to Brentford.

"Why are we all standing here?" said Gerald.

"Darling, come up," said Rachel.

"Let's finish our port and cigars," said Gerald, turning his back on Brentford. He had to show, for the sake of the party, that he took scenes like this with habitual good humour. "Will you take her up, darling?" he said, as if there were really a chance he might do it himself.

Catherine moved away and started up the stairs, and Rachel tried to put an arm round her, but she shook it off. Nick took Brentford to the door. "Are you sure we can't pay you?" he said, though he doubted he had the price of a fare from Stoke Newington himself. He wanted Brentford to know he wasn't guilty of the thing the whole house stood accused of.

"He's a bad man," said Brentford, on the doorstep.

"Oh… " said Nick, "yes… " He wasn't certain which man was being referred to, and Brentford's shake of the head and flap of the arm seemed to write them all off.

Nick stood on the pavement for a while after the Sierra had gone, and heard the laughter of the women from an open window above. It was good to be out of the house, in the night air. He was trembling a little from having shouted at someone he hated. He thought of Leo, and smiled, and hugged his hands under his armpits. He wondered what Leo was doing, the afternoon flared up again and warmed him with amazement; then the thought of Pete came over it like the chill of a cloud. He went in and slowed as he passed by the half-open door of the dining room: "… the beggar stank of pot!" Gerald was saying, to odd humourless laughter. Now perhaps he could really go upstairs, and taste the freedom of being the odd man. He didn't have a place in either of the two parties. It was bad form to go away, it admitted a prior desire to do so; but he couldn't go back and sit with Barry Groom. He thought Gerald might be angry with him too, but he would surely be glad of his taking an interest in Catherine. It couldn't be called a shirking of responsibility. Nick started to climb the stone stairs, and had hummed several bright anticipatory bars from Schumann's Fourth Symphony before he stopped himself.

6

"GOD YOU'RE A twit," said Leo. He looked fretfully at different parts of Nick, unable to place his dissatisfaction exactly. In the end he licked his thumb and rubbed his cheek, as if Nick was a child. This word twit, a tiny sting, had come up before, and signalled some complex of minor reproaches, class envy, or pity, the obvious frustrations of having a boy like Nick to teach. As always Nick searched for something else in it too, which was Leo's tutting indulgence of his pupil; he still longed for flawless tenderness, but he forgave Leo, who for once was nervous himself. They were on the Willesden pavement, ten yards from his front gate. "You're so fucking preppy," said Leo.

"I don't know what that means."

Leo shook his head. "What am I going to do with you?"

They had met after work, across the road from the Council offices, and Leo was wearing a dark grey suit with square shoulders and a white shirt and a wide but sober tie. It was the first time Nick had seen this beautiful everyday metamorphosis, and he couldn't help smiling. He was in love to the point of idolatry, but the smiles, the appreciative glances, seemed to strike Leo like a kind of sarcasm. "You look so handsome," Nick said.

"Yeah, and so do you," said Leo. "Right, we're going in. Now what did I tell you, don't take the name of the Lord in vain. Don't say, 'Oh my god!' Don't even say, 'Good Lord!' " (Leo fluted these phrases in the way that was his puzzling imitation of Nick.) "Don't say, 'Jesus fucking bollocks.' "

"I'll try not."

Nick was always a favourite with mothers, he was known to be a nice young man, and he liked the unthreatening company of older people. He liked to be charming, and hardly noticed when he drifted excitedly into insincerity. But he also knew the state of suspense, the faked insouciance, of bringing friends home, the playful vigilance with which certain subjects had to be headed off even before they had arisen; you took only a distracted, irrelevant part in the conversation because you were thirty seconds, a minute, ten minutes ahead of it, detecting those magnetic embarrassments towards which it would always twitch and bend.

"My sister sort of knows," said Leo. "You wrant to watch her."

"Rosemary."

"She's pretty."

Nick followed him up the short concrete path and said in his ear, "Not as pretty as you, I bet," one of his light flirty jokes that he watched swoop to earth under its own weight of adoration.

Mrs Charles and her son and daughter lived on the ground floor of a small red-brick terrace house; there were two front doors side by side in the shallow recess of the porch. Leo applied himself to the right-hand one, and it was one of those locks that require tender probings and tuggings, infinitesimal withdrawals, to get the key to turn. Nick reflected briefly on the coloured glass in the inset window and the old Palm Sunday cross pinned above the doorbell. He pictured Leo going through this routine every day; and he noted his own small effort of adjustment, his disguised shock at the sight of the street and the house-perhaps he was a twit after all. When he stepped inside he had a memory, as sharp as the cooking smell in the hall, of school afternoons of community service, going into the homes of the old and disabled, each charitable visit a lesson in life and also-to Nick at least-in the subtle snobbery of aesthetics.

He took in the tiny kitchen in a photographic glance, the wall units with sliding frosted-glass doors, the orange curtains, the church calendar with its floating Jesus, the evidence of little necessary systems, heaped papers, scary wiring, bowls stacked within bowls, and the stove with plates misted and beaded on the rack above a bubbling pan; and at the centre Leo's mother, fiftyish, petite, with hooded eyes and straightened hair and a charitable smile of her own. "You're very welcome," she said, and her voice had the warm West Indian colour that Leo kept only as a special effect or a temporary camouflage. "Thank you," said Nick. "It's very good to meet you." He was so used to living by hints and approximations that there had always been something erotic in meeting the family of a man he was in love with, as if he could get a further vicarious fix on him by checking genetic oddities, the shared curve of the nose or echoing laziness of step. In the rich air of Kensington Park Gardens he seemed to live in the constant diffused presence of Toby, among people who were living allusions to him and thus a torment as well as a kind of consolation. But of course he had never done more than hug Toby and kiss him on the cheek; he had twice had a peep at his penis at a college urinal. Here, in a tiny flat in unknown Willesden, he was talking to the mother of the man who called him not only a "damn good fuck" but also a "hot little cocksucker" with "a first-class degree in arse-licking." Which clearly was way beyond hugging and peeping. Nick gazed at her in a trance of revelation and gratitude.

And then there was Rosemary, coming in from work, home early, it seemed, to help her mother out with this underexplained guest they had. She was a doctor's receptionist, and wore a blouse and skirt under her belted mac. They had an awkward introduction, edging round Leo's bike in the hall. Perhaps it was shyness, but she seemed disdainful of Nick. He looked for her prettiness, and thought she was like a silky fluffy version of Leo, without the devastating detail of an ingrowing beard. Then brother and sister both went off to change. Nick couldn't work out the plan of the house, but there were subdivided rooms at the back, and a sense of carrying closeness that made the bike entirely necessary; it waited there, shuddered and jangled faintly as Nick bumped against it, as if conscious of its own trapped velocity.

"Ah, that bicycle," said Mrs Charles, as if it was some profane innovation. "I told him…"

They went into the front room, in which a heavy oak dining table and chain, with bulbous Jacobean-style legs, were jammed in beside a three-piece suite that was covered in shiny ginger leather, or something like it. There was a gas fire with a beaten copper surround under a ledge crowded with religious souvenirs. Mrs Charles's church life clearly involved a good deal of paperwork, and half the table was stacked with box-files and a substantial print-run of the tract "Welcoming Jesus In Today." Nick sat down at the end of the sofa and peered politely at the pictures, a large framed "mural" of a palm-fronded beach and a reproduction of Holman Hunt's The Shadow of Death. There were also studio photos of Leo and Rosemary as children, in which Nick felt himself taking an almost paedophiliac interest.

"Now, young sir," said Mrs Charles, with a clarity of enunciation that sounded both anxious and arch, "he tells me next to nothing, Leo, you know, at all. But I think you're the fellow who lives in the big white house, belongs to the MP?"

"Yes, I am," Nick said, with a self-deprecating laugh which seemed to puzzle her. Leo must have been talking up these facts to impress her, though on other occasions they were the object of vague derision.

"And how do you like it?" Mrs Charles asked.

"Well, I'm very lucky," Nick said. "I'm only there because I was at university with one of their children."

"So, you met her?"

Nick smiled back with a little pant of uncertainty. "What, Mrs Fedden, you mean…"

"No…! Mrs Fedden… I assume you met Mrs Fedden, if I'm saying her name correctly." Nick blushed, and then smiled as he saw the way, simple but nimble, religious even, that she'd gone for the big question. "No-her. The lady herself. Mrs T!"

"Oh… No. No, I haven't. Not yet…" He felt obliged to go on, rather indiscreetly, "I know they'd love to have her round, he, um, Gerald Fedden, has tried to get her at least once. He's very ambitious."

"Ah, you want to make sure and meet Mrs T."

"Well, I'll certainly tell you if I do," said Nick, looking round gratefully as Leo came into the room. He was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and Nick had a vivid image of him ejaculating. Then he saw the heavy spit as it loitered and drooled down the taut ginger back of the sofa. He felt deliciously brainwashed by sex, when he closed his eyes phallus chased phallus like a wallpaper pattern across the dark, and at any moment the imagery of anal intercourse, his new triumph and skill, could gallop in surreal montage across the street or classroom or dining table.

"And can I be allowed to hope you are a regular church-attender?"

Nick crossed his legs to hide his excitement and said, "I'm not really, I'm afraid. At the moment, anyway."

Mrs Charles looked used to such disappointments, and almost cheerful, as if taking a very long view. "And what about your father and mother?"

"Oh, they're very religious. My father's a churchwarden, and my mother often does the church flowers… for instance." He hoped this compensated, rather than merely highlighting, his own delinquency.

"I'm very happy to hear it. And what is your father's occupation?" she demanded, pressing on in interview mode, which made Nick wonder if she did somehow know, however subconsciously, that he was trying to tie his life to her son's. He was a puzzle, Nick, in many contexts-he was often being interviewed obliquely, to see how he fitted in.

He said, "He's an antiques dealer-old furniture and clocks, mostly, and china."

Mrs Charles looked up at Leo. "Well, isn't that the exact same thing as old Pete!"

"Yeah," said Leo, whose whole manner was withdrawn and unhelpful. He dragged out one of the dining chairs and sat down at the table behind them. "There's a lot of antique dealers about."

"The exact same thing," said Mrs Charles. "You go on, look around. We got some good old antiques here. You don't know old Pete?"

"Yes, I do," Nick said, glancing round the room and wondering what Pete had said about it all before him, and how Pete had been explained to her.

"It's a small little world," she marvelled.

"Well, Leo introduced me to him…"

"Ah, he's a good man, old Pete. You know we always called him 'old' Pete, though he can't be not more than fifty."

"He's forty-four," said Leo.

"He was a great help to my son. He helped him with getting through college, and with the job on the council. And he didn't stand to get nothing from it-leastways not in this world. I always say to Leo he's his fairy godfather."

"Something like that," said Leo, with the sourness of a child subjected to the astounding iterations of a parent's treasured phrases-treasured often because they put a bright gloss on some anxious denial. The clumsy unconscious joke in this one must have made it specially wearing.

"A proper decent father Leo didn't have," said Mrs Charles candidly, and again with an almost cunning air of satisfaction that they had been so tested. "But the Lord looks after his own. And now, don't you reckon he's a good boy?"

"Yes, he's… splendid!" said Nick.

"What's for tea?" said Leo.

"I'm hoping your sister is bringing it off now," said Mrs Charles. "We're giving our guest our special spicy chops and rice. In this country," she observed to Nick, "you don't fry the chops so much, you're always grilling them, isn't that right?"

"Um… I don't know. I think we do both." He thought of his own mother, as an embodiment of any such supposed tradition; but went on charmingly, "But if you fry them rather than grilling them, then that's also what we do in this country!"

"Ha… " said Mrs Charles, "well that's certainly one way of looking at the matter."

At table the movement of Nick's left arm was limited by the leaning tower of "Welcoming Jesus In Today." He came down on his food in a hesitant but predatory fashion. The meal was a bold combination of bland and garishly spicy, and he wondered if Rosemary had mockingly overdone the chillies to make fun of his good manners. He was full of round-eyed appreciation, which was also a cover for the surprise of having his evening meal at five forty-five; some absurd social reflex, the useful shock of class difference, a childish worry perhaps at a changed routine, all combined in a mood of interesting alienation. At Kensington Park Gardens they ate three hours later, and dinner was sauntered towards through a sequence of other diversions, chats and decantings, gardening and tennis, gramophone records, whisky and gin. In the Charles household there was no room for diversions, no garden to speak of, and no alcohol. The meal came on straight after work, a wide-ranging grace was declaimed, and then it was eaten and done with, and the whole long evening lay ahead. There were things Nick guessed about them, from the habits of his own family, which lay somewhere between the two; but there were others he would have to wait for and learn. He had never been in a black household before. He saw that first love had come with a bundle of other firsts, which he took hold of like a wonderful but worrying bouquet.

After a longish silence Leo said, "So how's it going at college?" as if they hardly knew each other.

"Oh, it's all right," said Nick, disconcerted but then touched by Leo's stiffness. Whenever Leo was cold or rough to him he felt it like a child-then he turned it round and found some thwarted love in it. He was in awe of Leo, but he saw through him too, and each time he followed this little process of indulgence he felt more in love. "It hasn't been very exciting so far. I suppose it's just different from what I've been used to." He always came away from the sunless back court where the English department was with two or three newly shaped anecdotes, which gave his days there a retrospective sparkle; but he found it hard to interest Leo in them and they often went to waste. Or they were stored up, with a shadowy sense of resentment.

"He was at Oxford University before," said Leo.

"And now where is he?" Mrs Charles wondered.

"I'm at University College," Nick said. "I'm doing a doctorate now."

Leo chewed and frowned. "Yeah, what is it again?"

"Oh… " said Nick, with a disparaging wobble of the head, as if he couldn't quite get the words out. "I'm just doing something on style in the-oh, in the English novel!"

"Aaaah yes," said Mrs Charles, with a serene nod, as if to say that this was something infinitely superior but also of course fairly foolish.

Nick said, "Umm…"-but then she broke out,

"He's crazy for studying! I'm wondering just how old he is."

Nick chuckled awkwardly. "I'm twenty-one."

"And he doesn't look like no more than a little boy, does he, Rosemary?"

Rosemary didn't answer exactly, but she raised one eyebrow and seemed to cut her food up in a very ironical way. Nick was blushing red and it took him a moment to notice Leo's embarrassment, the mysterious black blush, frowningly denied. His secret was heavy in his face, and Nick suddenly understood that the difference in their ages mattered to Leo, and that even an innocent reference to it seemed to lay his fantasy bare. Old Pete was licensed by being old, an obscurely benign institution; it was much harder to account for his friendship with a studious little boy of twenty-one.

Nick had to go on, though he could hear that he was out of tune, "Of course one misses one's friends-it takes a while to settle down-I expect it will all be marvellous in the end!" There was another rather critical pause, so he went on, "The English department used to be a mattress factory. At least half the tutors seem to be alcoholics!"

Both these remarks had gone down rather well at Kensington Park Gardens, and had left Nick suppressing a smile at his own silliness. But all families are silly in their own way, and now he was left with a puzzled and possibly offended silence. Leo chewed slowly and gave him a completely neutral look. "Mattresses, yeah?" he said.

Rosemary stared firmly at her plate and said, "I should think they ought to get help."

Nick gave an apologetic laugh. "Oh… of course, they should. You're quite right. I wish they would!"

After a while Mrs Charles said, "You know, all the men like that, that's got that sort of problems, each and every one of them got a great big hole right in the middle of their lives."

"Ah… " Nick murmured, flinching with courteous apprehension.

"And they can fill that hole, if only they know how, with the Lord Jesus. That's what we pray, that's what we always pray. Isn't that so, Rosemary?"

"That's what we do," said Rosemary, with a shake of the head to show there was no denying it.

"So what's your success rate?" said Leo, in a surprisingly sarcastic tone; which explained itself when Mrs Charles leant confidentially towards Nick. You couldn't stop a mother when she was on the track of her "idea."

"I pray for all those in darkness to find Jesus, and I pray for the two children I've brought into this world to get themselves hitched up. At the altar, that's to say." And she laughed fondly, so that Nick couldn't tell what she really thought or knew.

Leo scratched his head and shivered with frustration, though there was a kind of fondness in him too, since he was going to disappoint her. Rosemary, who was clearly her mother's right hand, found herself linked with Leo, and protested flatly that she was ready, just as soon as the perfect man turned up. With her eyes half closed she had her mother's devout look. "There's nothing keeping me from the altar except that one thing," she said, and as the look fell on Leo she seemed to play with betrayal, and then once again to let it go.

When the fruit and ice cream had been brought in, Mrs Charles said to Nick, "I see you been looking at my picture there, of the Lord Jesus in the carpenter's shop."

"Oh… yes," said Nick, who'd really been trying to avoid looking at it, but had none the less found himself gingerly dwelling on it, since it hung just above Leo's shoulder, straight in front of him.

"You know, that's a very famous old picture."

"Yes, it is. You know, I saw the original of it quite recently-it's in Manchester."

"Yeah, I knew that's not the original when I saw one just the same in the Church House."

Nick smiled and blinked, not sure if he was being teased. "The original's huge, it's life-size," he said. "It's by Holman Hunt, of course…"

"Aha," Mrs Charles murmured and nodded, as if a vaguely unlikely attribution had been shown to her in a newly plausible light. It was just the sort of painting, doggedly literal and morbidly symbolic, that Nick liked least, and it was even worse life-size, when the literalism so cried out to be admired. "I heard tell he's the same fellow as painted The Light of the World, with the Lord Jesus knocking on the door."

"Oh yes, that's right," said Nick, like a schoolteacher pleased by the mere fact of a child's interest, and leaving questions of taste for much later. "Well, for that you only have to go to St Paul's Cathedral."

Mrs Charles took this in. "You hear that now, Rosemary? You and me's going out to St Paul's Cathedral any day now to look at that with our own naked eyes." And Nick saw her, in shiny shoes and the small black hat like an air hostess's that was nesting on a chair in the corner, making her way there, with waits at a number of bus stops, and the nervous patience of a pilgrim-he saw her, as if from the air, climbing the steps and going into the stupendous church, which he felt he owned, all ironically and art-historically, more than her, a mere credulous Christian. "Or else, of course, you and me can go… eh?" she said to Nick, somehow shyly not using his name.

"I'd love to do that," Nick said quickly, taking the chance to be kind and likeable that had been denied him earlier on.

"We'll go together and have a good look at it," said Mrs Charles.

"Excellent!" said Nick, and caught the hint of mockery in Leo's eyes.

Mrs Charles said, cocking her head on one side, "You know, they always got something clever about them, these old pictures, don't they?"

"Often they do," Nick agreed.

"And you know the clever thing about this one now… " She gave him the tolerant but crafty look of someone who holds the answer to a trick question. To Nick the clever thing was perhaps the way that the Virgin, kneeling by the chest that holds the hoarded gifts of the Magi, and seeing the portent of the Crucifixion in her son's shadow cast on the rear wall of the room, has her face completely hidden from us, so that the painting's centre of consciousness, as Henry James might have thought of her, is effectively a blank; and that this was surely an anti-Catholic gesture. He said, "Well, the detail is amazing-those wood shavings look almost real, everything about it's so accurate…"

"No, no…" said Mrs Charles, with amiable scorn. "You see, the way the Lord Jesus is standing there, he's making a shadow on the wall that's just the exact same image of himself on the Cross!"

"Oh… yes," said Nick, "indeed… Isn't it called in fact -"

"And of course that all goes to show how the death of the Lord Jesus and his Resurrection is foretold in the Bible from ancient times."

Nick said, "Well, it certainly illustrates that view even if it doesn't prove it," in a perhaps misjudged tone of equable deliberation. Leo shot him a wincing glance and created a diversion.

"Yeah, I like the way he's got him yawning," he said; and he stretched his own arms out and up and tilted his head with a yawn that was just like the Lord Jesus except that he was holding an ice-cream-smeared dessert spoon in his left hand. It was the kind of camp you see sometimes in observant children-and Rosemary watched him with the smothered amazement and mocking anticipation of a good girl whose brother has been insolent and reckless. But she said,

"Mm, it makes me shiver when he does that."

Leo tutted and grinned, as his own shadow, in the room's less brilliant evening light, stretched and shrugged and faltered across the wall above his chair.

When the meal finished Leo was checking his bike and they were out in the street almost at once. Nick was relieved but ashamed-he made a joke of being dragged away in the middle of a sentence, as if Leo was a lively dog on the end of a leash. But Mrs Charles seemed not to mind. "Ah, you go on now," she said, as if she might be quite relieved herself. Or perhaps, he thought, as he hurried along in silence beside Leo, she had sensed his own relief, and been saddened by it for a second, and then had hardened herself against him… Her tone was nearly dismissive, and perhaps she thought he was false… Well, he was condescending, in a way… These anxieties flared dully through him. He began to resent Mrs Charles for thinking he was condescending.

Leo was walking briskly, as if they'd agreed where they were going, but he said nothing. Nick couldn't tell if he was sulky, angry, ashamed, defiant… but he knew that all these emotions could rise and rush and fizzle and mutate very quickly, and that it was wiser to let him settle than to guess his mood and risk the wrong opener. Nick's consciousness of being wise was a small refuge when Leo was difficult or distant. He took in the after-sunset chill, the upswept trails of dark cloud above the rooftops, and the presence of autumn, light but penetrating, in the cold cobalt beyond. In their four weeks together these evening walks, with the ticking bicycle beside them or between them, had taken on a deepening colour of romance. He worried that the silence itself was a kind of comment, and as they reached the end of the road he pulled Leo against him with a quick chafing hug and said, "Mmm, thank you for that, darling."

Leo snorted softly. "What are you thanking me for?"

"Oh, just for taking me home. For introducing me to your family. It means a lot to me." And he found his little avowal released a sentiment he hadn't quite felt before he made it. He was very touched.

"So, now you know what they're like," said Leo, stopping and staring, with just his mother's narrowing of the gaze, across the major road beyond. The evening traffic was let slip from the lights and accelerated down the hill towards them and past them, then thinned, and then there was only a waiting emptiness again.

"They're wonderful," Nick said, meaning only to be kind-though he heard the word hang, in the silence between the lights, as if in inverted commas, and underlined too: the wonderful of gush, of connoisseurship, of Kensington Park Gardens. Leo seemed to find it absurdly unexpected, and kept blinking, but then smiled and said with a dry laugh,

"If you say so… darling"-the darling, longed for by Nick, taking on a dubious ironic twang.

Nick had a large wild plan of his own for the night, but for now he let Leo take charge: they were going to go back to Notting Hill and catch the seven fifteen screening ofScarface at the Gate-it had just come out and Leo had all the facts on it, including its enormous length, 170 minutes, each one of which appeared to Nick like a shadowy unit of body heat, of contact and excitement. They would be pressed together in the warm darkness for three hours. Leo said what a great actor Al Pacino was, and spoke of him almost amorously, which Nick couldn't honestly do-to him Pacino wasn't that sort of idol. There was an interview with him in the new Time Out, which Leo had probably read, since his ideas on film seemed to Nick to be drawn pretty closely from the capsule reviews in that magazine. Still, film was Leo's province, rather humourlessly patrolled against Nick's pretensions, it was one of the interests he'd originally advertised, and Nick conceded, "No, he's a genius," which was a word he could thrill them both with. They stood at the bus stop with that idea in their heads.

When the bus came Nick hopped on and sat looking out at the back at Leo, who was ages fiddling with his bike and then getting on it, dwindling away every second into the night-lit street. Then the bus pulled in at a further stop, and the bike came almost floating up, Leo rising from his forward crouch to glance in at Nick-he seemed to ride the air there for a second, and then he winked and stooped and with a click of the gears he slipped past. Nick was glad of the wink this time, he raised his hand and grinned, and then was left, in the public brightness of the bus, to be eyed by the people opposite with vague suspicion.

The bus threaded down at last across the Harrow Road and began its long descent of Ladbroke Grove. He pictured Leo whizzing ahead, and kept losing him in the gleams and shadows of the night traffic. Where was he now? Nick was still in the alien high reach of the road, with the canal and the council estates, and longing for the other end, his own end, the safety and aloofness of white stucco and private gardens. He wondered what Leo thought as he made the transition, which occurred at the dense middle part by the market and the station, under clangorous bridges, where people loitered and shouted… After that there was a stretch of uneasy gentility, before the Grove climbed, taking palpable advantage of the hill as a social metaphor, and touching into life the hint of an orchard or thicket in the very name of the street. He didn't fool himself that Leo was sensitive to these things-he was a figure of wrenching poetry to Nick, but was not himself poetic, and clearly found something daft and even creepy in Nick's aesthetic promptings and hesitations. Nick sometimes made the mistake of thinking that Leo didn't feel things strongly, and then the shock, when his love and need for him leapt out, angry at being doubted, took his breath away, and almost frightened him. He thought back over the meal, the visit, and saw that of course it had meant a lot to Leo as well, but that everything was squashed and denied by secrecy: if he had been a woman the occasion would have had a ritual meaning, and Leo's mother could have let herself dream of the altar steps at last. To Nick the bulging subject of the visit had been his love for Leo, which obsessed him just as much as Mrs Charles's love of Jesus did her; but she had given herself licence to express her fixation, had embraced a duty to do so, whilst his burned through only in blushes and secret stares. She had eclipsed him completely.

When he got to the cinema he found Leo near the head of the queue. "You made it," he said, looking round at the people behind and nodding-"Yeah, it's the first night," as if it was a bore, he was a martyr to first nights. And when they reached the window it turned out that the cinema was nearly full, and they wouldn't be able to sit together. Nick shrugged and said, "Ah well… " backing into the couple behind them, who were trying to overhear. "We can come at the weekend."

But Leo said, "Yeah, we'll have them-god, we're here now," and gave him a look of friendly concern.

Nick said quietly, "I just thought, if we can't sit together…" since the only reason for sitting through a super-violent three-hour gangster movie was to have Leo's weight and warmth against him and his hand in his open fly. They had touched each other like that, with cautious delirious slowness, in Rumblefish, under the dreamy aegis of Matt Dillon, and in Fellini's And the Ship Sails On, which had been Nick's hopeless choice of picture and a peculiar backdrop to an orgasm. Otherwise, they had only made love in parks, or public lavatories, or once in the back of Pete's shop, which Leo had kept a key to, and which felt even more furtive than these cinema handjobs. The thing about the cinema was that they seemed to share in the long common history of happy snoggers and gropers, and Nick liked that.

But now he was alone again, he felt it very keenly, accepting the "better" ticket, in the middle of the back row. The ads were already showing as he clambered along and in their patchy glare he loomed and ducked and apologized, and was a clumsy intruder in a world of snuggling coupledom. He squeezed in and even the space of his seat seemed half absorbed by the lovers' coats and bags and angled limbs. The 170 minutes stretched out ahead like a long-ago detention, some monstrous test. They stretched out, in fact, like a film he had no wish to see, and for a moment he was gripped by a tearful bolshiness that he himself thought astonishing in a grown man. He saw that he could get up and go home and come back at the end. But then he was frightened of what Leo would say. There was so much at stake. There was a Bacardi advertisement, and the brilliance of tropical sea and white sand lit up the auditorium. He stared at the left side, near the front, to try to spot Leo, but he couldn't find him. Then he did see the squared-off silhouette of his head, and for a moment his oddly distant and attentive profile, played over by the reflected light. Of course the scene of palm trees and surf was much the same as Mrs Charles's mural. Now superbly handsome heterosexuals romped across it.

Critics had already described Scarf ace as "operatic," which perhaps was only their way of saying it was Latin, noisy and bombastic. It was set in a Miami so violent and so opulent, so glittering and soulless, that Nick found himself worrying about how people survived in it, and then about how he would survive in it. In his disaffected mood he kept wandering off from the film itself into paranoid doubts and objections. He saw that he was reacting like his mother, for whom any film on the telly with a sex scene or the word shit in it took on a nearly hostile presence, and was watched thereafter with warm mistrust. Scarface was all about cocaine, which alarmed him. He remembered tensely how Toby had taken it at Hawkeswood with Wani Ouradi. The film confirmed his worst suspicions. Nowhere in it was there a hint of the delicious pleasure that Toby had spoken of. The drug was money and power and addiction-a young blonde actress in the film snorted joyless volumes of it.

The couple on Nick's left were slumped in a slowly evolving embrace. He was aware of a hand on a thigh left bare by a very short skirt-and when it moved, his glance twitched guiltily away. He had an unusual sense of the cinema as a room-a long narrow space with the dusty plaster mouldings of an old theatre. Instead of the proper oblivion of the filmgoer he felt a kind of foreboding. When the picture brightened his eyes yearned down across the shadowy ranks of heads, but Leo was little and so was he, and he never had that one clear view of him again. Because the film was Leo's choice, he imagined him enjoying it, taking it on, adjusting himself, as it went along, to its new standards of hardness. A film that was shocking quickly lowered the threshold, it made people unshockable. Nick felt that if he'd been sitting with Leo he might have tittered and groaned at the shootings and blood like everyone else. But now they were apart, as they might have been on occasion in this very cinema before they even knew of each other's existence, sitting separately in the near dark. It was irrational, perhaps, but the glaring unreality of the film seemed to throw a suspicion of unreality over everything else, and his affair with Leo, which was so odd, so new, so unrecognized, felt open to crude but penetrating doubt. He wondered if he would have noticed Leo a year ago, in the shuffling semi-patience of the exit line, or carried his image home to lie awake with. Well, probably not, since one of Leo's affectations was to sit through to the very last credits, the lenses, the insurers, the thanks to the mayor and police department of… oh, somewhere obscurely a solution and a puzzle at the same time.

And it wasn't in fact until all that was over that Leo came into the foyer, blinking and nodding and then genially puzzled at the troubled look on Nick's face. "All right, babe," he said quietly, and gripped his upper arm to steer him out. "That's what I call snorting coke," he went on, referring to a scene in the film's final hour where Pacino had torn open a huge plastic bag of cocaine on his desk and plunged his nose into it, the slave at last to his own instrument of power. It had struck Nick as completely ridiculous. "Did you like that, then?"

Nick hummed and cleared his throat like an anxious bringer of bad news. "Not much," he said, and gave Leo a thin smile.

"It was quite a laugh," said Leo. "The ending was outrageous."

"Yes… yes it was," Nick agreed, hesitantly but firmly, recalling the comprehensive final bloodbath. As so often he had the feeling that an artistic disagreement, almost immaterial to the other person, was going to be the vehicle of something that mattered to him more than he could say.

But Leo said, "Nah, sorry about that, babe, it was pretty crappy. And we never got our kiss and cuddle."

"I know," said Nick with an archness that covered and somehow dissolved three hours of regrets-in his relief he couldn't see where he was going and grabbed and rattled one of the cinema's already locked glass doors.

Leo went out and into the blocked-offside street where he'd left his bike, and when Nick followed he found him putting his arms round his neck and kissing him, chastely but tenderly, on the forehead; then he kept looking at him, lightly frowning and smiling at the same time, with humorous reproach.

"Nicholas Guest."

"Mm…"-Nick colouring but holding Leo's gaze submissively.

"You worry too much. You know that?"

"I know…"

"Yeah? You do trust your Uncle Leo, don't you?"

"Of course I trust you," Nick burst out quietly, as if he'd been asked a simpler question.

"Well, don't worry so much, then. Will you do that for me?" And again he was all cockney softness.

"Yes," said Nick, glancing a little worriedly none the less to left and right, since Leo was holding him against the wall like a mugger as much as a lover-he worried what people would think. In the wake of his relief this short exchange raised a vague dissatisfaction.

"Don't ever forget it."

"I won't," Nick murmured, and Leo stood back. He wasn't sure what it was that he mustn't forget, he had a restless ear for syntax, but he smiled at the general drift of the little catechism of reassurance. It was lovely that Leo saw at once what was wrong, even if his avuncular tone didn't put it completely right. Nick found he was confident enough, despite his racing heartbeat, to mention his plan.

"You're sure they're not here, yeah?"

"Yes, I'm positive. Well, Catherine might be in."

"Catherine, right, that's your sister, yeah?" And then Leo winked.

The heavy, sharp-edged key to the mortise locks had already cut a gash in Nick's trouser pocket, and the whole bunch was tangled in the torn threads and hanging against the top of his thigh. As he tugged at it a few of the new pound coins dropped ticklingly down his leg and rolled across the tiled floor of the porch. Leo jumped on them. "That's right, throw it away," he said.

A light always burned in the hall, and gave it tonight a somehow eerie vigilance. Nick locked the door behind them, and put the keys back in his pocket, and this time, after two steps, they had shaken their way down his leg and out on to the chequered marble. Leo, peeking in the hall mirror, raised an eyebrow but said nothing. On the console table were spare car keys, opera glasses, one of Gerald's grey fedoras, a letter "By Hand" addressed to the Rt Hon Mr and the Hon Mrs Gerald Fedden-and together, as a careless still life, reflected in the mirror, they seemed to Nick both wonderful and embarrassing. He stood still for a moment and listened. The light, from a brass lantern hanging in the well of the stair, threw steep shadows down inside the threshold of the dining room, revealing only the black satin bodice of a nineteenth-century Kessler. The Hon and the Rt Hon were both in Barwick for the night on constituency business, and whilst he confirmed this to himself he was also rewording the sentence in which he would explain Leo to them if, after all, they came chattering in. He had a sense of their possessing the house and everything in it, calmly but defiantly, and of its stone staircase and climbing cornices reaching rather pitilessly up into the shadows. He gave Leo a passing kiss on the cheek, and drew him into the kitchen, where the under-unit lighting stammered and blinked into life. "Do you want a whisky?"

And for once Leo said, "I don't mind if I do! Yeah, that would be nice. Thanks very much, Nick." He strolled round the room as if not really noticing it, and stood scanning the wall of photographs. One of the Tatler pictures from Toby's twenty-first had now been bought, blown up and framed: a wildly smiling family group in which the Home Secretary seemed to show some awareness of being an intruder. Just above them the student Gerald, in tails, was shaking hands with Harold Macmillan at the Oxford Union. Again Leo made no comment, but when Nick handed him the cold tumbler he saw in his eyes and in his very faint smile that he was noting and storing. Perhaps he was calculating the degree of affront represented by all this Toryness and money. Nick felt his own kudos as family friend, as keyholder, was a very uncertain quantity. "Let's go upstairs," he said.

He went up two at a time, in too much of a hurry, and when he looked back on the turn he saw Leo dawdling by the same factor that he was rushing; he went into the drawing room and pressed switches that brought on lamps on side tables and over pictures-so that when Leo sauntered in he saw the room as Nick had first seen it two years before, all shadows and reflections and the gleam of gilt. Nick stood in front of the fireplace, longing for it to be a triumph, but taking his cue from the suppressed curiosity in Leo's face.

"I'm not used to this," Leo said.

"Oh…"

"I don't drink whisky."

"Ah, no, well -"

"Who knows what it'll do to me? I might get dangerous."

Nick grinned tightly and said, "Is that a threat or a promise?" He reached out and touched Leo's hip-his hand lay there for a second or two. Normally, together, alone, they would have been snogging, holding each other very tightly; though sometimes, it was true, Leo laughed at Nick's urgency and said, "Don't panic, babe! I'm not going anywhere! You've got me!" Leo rested his glass on the mantelpiece, and eyed Guardi's Capriccio with S. Giorgio Maggiore, which certainly seemed a rather pointless picture after The Shadow of Death. It was hard to imagine Rachel haranguing her guests about the clever something in it. Underneath it the invitations were propped, overlapping, making almost one long curlicued social sentence, Mr and Mrs Geoffrey- & Countess of Hexham-Lady Carbury "At Home" for-Michael and Jean-The Secretary of State… and those others, amazingly thick, with chamfered edges, The Lord Chamberlain is Commanded by Her Majesty to Request… which tended to stay there long after the events they referred to, and which gave Nick as well a lingering pompous thrill. Though he saw now, very quickly, that such a pleasure required willing complicity in Gerald's habit of showing off to himself. He turned away, pretending the invitations weren't there, and Leo said, with a derisive tut,

"God, the snobs."

Nick laughed. "They're not really snobs," he said. "Well, he is perhaps a bit. They're…"It was hard to explain, hard to know, in the dense compact of the marriage, who sanctioned what. They were each other's alibi. And Nick saw that Leo was using the word in a looser way, to mean rich people, who lived in nice places, to mean nobs. It struck him that he might be about to take the whole treat of coming to Kensington Park Gardens and making love in a bed as an elaborate but crushing rebuff. He watched him sip some more, deliberately, and then wander towards the front windows. He tried to act on his advice of fifteen minutes earlier, tried to trust his Uncle Leo. The room was devised and laid out for entertaining, on a generous scale, and for a second, as if a thick door had opened, he heard the roar of accumulated talk and laughter, the consensual social roar, instead of the clock's ticking and the fizz of silence.

"That's a nice bit of oyster," Leo said, pointing at a walnut commode. "And that's Sevres, if I'm not wrong, with that blue."

"Yes, I think it is," Nick said, feeling that this nod at a common interest also brought old Pete rather critically into the room. Old Pete would have had some smart gay backchat to deal with an awkward moment like this.

"No, they've got some nice pieces," Leo said, flatly, and a little ponderously, and so perhaps shyly. He turned round, nodding. "You've done well."

"Darling, none of it's mine…"

"I know, I know." Leo sat down at the piano, and after a moment's thought stood his glass on a book on the lid. "What's this, then… Mozart, all right, that's not too bad," checking the cover of the music on the stand, but letting it fall back to the eternally open Andante. "So what key's this in?"-as if the key required some special tactics, like a golf-shot. "F major…"

"It's a funny old piano," said Nick. He felt that if Leo played the piano, especially if he played it badly, it would waken the unconscious demons of the house and bring them in yawning and protesting.

"Ah, that's all right," Leo murmured courteously; and he started to play, with a distracted frown at the page. It was the great second movement of K533, spare, probing, Bach-like, that Nick had discovered, and tried to play, on the night when he'd lost his chance of meeting Leo-till Catherine had complained, and he'd apologized and doodled off into Waldorf music. To apologize for what you most wanted to do, to concede that it was obnoxious, boring, "vulgar and unsafe"-that was the worst thing. And the music seemed to know this, to know the irresistible curve of hope, and its hollow inversion. Leo played it pretty steadily, and Nick stood behind him, willing it along, nudging it through those quickly corrected wrong notes and tense hesitations that are a torture of sight-reading and yet heighten the rewards when everything runs clear and good. When Leo suddenly went steeply wrong he gave a disparaging shout, struck a few random chords, then reached for his glass. "Must be too pissed to play," he said, not necessarily joking.

Nick sniggered. "You're good. I can't play that. I didn't know you could play." He felt very touched, and chastened, as if by a glimpse of his own unquestioned assumptions. It opened a new perspective, the sight of Leo in his jeans and sweatshirt and baseball boots raising Mozart out of the sonorous old Bosendorfer. And it seemed to have loosened him up, he was like a shy guest who makes a brilliant joke, its lustre heightened by delay and distillation, and who suddenly finds he's enjoying himself. Nick grabbed him from behind and squashed a kiss onto his cheek.

Leo chuckled and said, "All right, babe…"

Nick said, "I love you," shaking him in a tight hug, and grunting at the hard muscular heat of him. Leo reached up with his free right hand and gripped his arm. After a while he said,

"That's a terrible picture."

It was Norman Kent's portrait of Toby, aged sixteen, and it was the image-beyond the intimidating bronze bust of Liszt-on which the eyes of the doodling pianist tended to dwell. While Leo had been playing, it had lent its sickly colour to Nick's thoughts.

"I know… Poor Toby."

"Cos he's quite tasty, in my opinion."

"Oh yes."

"You never told me if you had him, when you were all up at Oxford University."

Nick had still not quite let on to Leo that before their tangle in the bushes he had never exactly "had" anyone. He said, "No, no, he's completely straight."

"Yeah?" said Leo, sceptically. "You must have had a go."

"Not really," Nick said. He stood back, with his hands still on Leo's shoulders, and smiled wanly at the pink-faced blazered boy. The old regret could always come alive again, and for a moment even Leo, warm under his hands, seemed cheap and provisional compared to the unattainable bloom of Toby.

"I just thought the way he kissed you and looked at you was a bit poofy."

"Don't!" Nick murmured, and then laughed, pulling Leo to get him up, and get the real kisses from him, the ones that Toby would never give him.

But Leo held out a moment longer. "So they're easy about having a bender in the house, are they, their lordships?"

"Of course," said Nick. "They're absolutely fine with it." And in his mind he heard Catherine saying, "As long as it's never mentioned." He went on, with a degree of exaggeration, "They've got lots of gay friends. In fact they asked me to bring you here, darling."

"Oh," said Leo, with a subtlety of register worthy of Rachel herself.

Nick lay naked on top of the duvet, in quick-pulsed amazement. Leo had rung his mother, told her he was staying over: it was a risk, a yielding, and therefore a commitment. Nick listened to the hiss of the shower in the bathroom across the landing. Then, since he could see himself in the wardrobe mirror, he got under the bedclothes. He lay there, with one hand behind his head, in an almost painful state of happiness and worry. Far down below, the front door was triple-locked, the lights were all out in the drawing room and kitchen, the one lantern cast its cold glare into the hall. Catherine's bedroom door was closed, but he was certain she was out. They had the house to themselves. The window was open a notch, and he could hear the throat-tearing runs and trills of a robin that had taken to singing in the garden at night, and which he had eagerly decided was a nightingale; an old lady standing listening on the gravel path had put him right. He had still, therefore, never heard a nightingale, but he couldn't imagine it bettering his robin. The question was what time would Gerald and Rachel get back. But actually, probably, not till late, it was Gerald's "surgery" in the morning, then a two-hour drive. Nick smiled at their unconscious generosity.

The shower-noise had stopped, and the robin skirled on, with sulky pauses and implacable resumptions. Nick would have liked it even better if Leo had come to bed without showering, he loved the faint sourness of his skin, the sharpness of his armpits, the sweet staleness deep between his legs. Leo's smells were little lessons constantly re-learnt, little shocks of authenticity. But to Leo himself they were a source of annoyance and almost of shame. He had a terribly keen sense of smell, revealed in a queue or a crowded room by a snubbed upper lip and an aristocratic flinching of the nostrils. He insisted he liked Nick's smells, and Nick, who had never really thought of himself as having smells, was nervously unsure if this was truth or chivalry. Perhaps it was a loving mixture of the two.

There was a kind of magic in this-to be lying in bed, a single bed, with all that it implied, and playing gently with himself, and waiting for his lover to appear. It was the posture of a lifelong singleness, incessant imagining, the boy's supremacy in a world of dreams, where men kept turning up to do his bidding; and now, that rattle of the bathroom door, snap of the light cord, squeak of the landing floor, were the signals of an actual arrival, and within three seconds the door would open and Leo would come in-

How black he looked, in the white skirt of a bath towel pulled tight round his buttocks and over the curbed jut of his dick. He held his folded clothes in his hands, like a recruit, stripped and scrubbed and given his slops-he looked around, then put them down on the desk, by the blue library books. He was a trifle formal, he winked at Nick but he was clearly moved by the ordinariness and novelty of the moment. To Nick it darkened, it had the feeling of an elopement, of elated action haunted by the fears it had defied, of two lovers suddenly strangers to each other on their first night in a foreign hotel. But after all they had only eloped upstairs, it was absurd. He felt breathless pride at having Leo here. He threw back the duvet, and said, "I'm sorry about the bed"-shifting a bit to make room.

"Eh…?" said Leo.

"I don't think you'll get much sleep."

Leo let his towel drop to the floor and stared at Nick without smiling. "I'm not planning on getting any," he said.

Nick accepted the challenge with a little moan. It was the first time he had seen Leo naked, and the first time he had seen the masking shadow of his face, lazily watchful, easily cynical, clever and obtuse by turns, melt into naked feeling. Leo breathed through his mouth, and his look was a wince of lust and also, it seemed to Nick, of self-accusation-that he had been so slow, so vain, so blind.