"TO WHOM DO YOU BEAUTIFULLY BELONG?"(1986)

7

NICK WENT AHEAD on the path and held the gate open for Wani, so that for several seconds the outside world had a view of naked flesh before the gate, with its "Men Only" sign, swung shut behind them. It was a small compound, a concrete yard, with benches round the walls under a narrow strip of roof. It was like a courtyard of the classical world reduced to pipes and corrugated iron. There was something distantly classical, too, in the protracted nakedness, and something English, school-like and comfortless in the concrete and tin and the pond-water smell. Nick crossed the open space, past the books and towels of one or two sunbathers, and he saw it take account of them, someone greeted him, conversations stretched and lulled, and he felt the gaze of the little crowd, like idle fingertips, run over him and come to rest, more tenderly and curiously, on Wani. Wani, in ice-blue mirror shades, was a figure of novel beauty, and only Nick perhaps, sitting down and beckoning to him, saw the wariness in his half-smile.

"Mm, very primitive," Wani said, as if the place confirmed a suspicion he had about Nick.

Nick said, "I know," and grinned-it was just what he loved about it.

"Where do we put our things?"

"Just leave them here, they'll be fine."

But Wani flinched at this. He had the keys to the Mercedes in his jeans pocket, and his watch, as he had told Nick more than once, cost a thousand pounds. "Yah, maybe I won't go in." And maybe Nick, who had never owned anything, was guilty of failing to imagine the worries of a millionaire.

"Really, it'll be fine. Put your stuff in here," he said, offering him the Tesco carrier bag which had held his towel and trunks.

"This watch cost a thousand pounds," said Wani.

"Perhaps don't tell everyone about it," Nick said.

There was an old man drying near them, squat and bandy and brown all over, and Nick remembered him from last year, an occupant of the place, of the compound and the jetty and the pond, and more especially of the screened inner yard where on a hot day men sunbathed naked, hip to hip. He was lined but handsome, and Nick felt that smoothed and uniformed, in vigilant half-profile, his picture could well have accompanied the obituary of a general or air vice-marshal. He nodded amiably at him, as a leathery embodiment of the spirit of the place, and the old man said, "George has gone, then. Steve's just told me, went last night."

"Oh," said Nick, "I'm sorry. No, I didn't know George," but assuming that by "gone" the old boy didn't mean gone on holiday. It was George who needed the obituary.

"You knew George." He looked at Wani as well, who was undressing in a slow, abstracted way, with pauses for thought before each sock, each button. "He was always here. He was only thirty-one."

"I've never been here before," Wani said, courteous but cold. The old man frowned back and nodded, accepting his mistake, but perhaps thinking less of them for not knowing George.

After a pause Nick said, "How's the water?" and held his stomach in as he took his shirt off because he wanted the man to admire him. But he didn't reply, and perhaps he hadn't heard the question.

Out on the jetty Nick strode ahead again, in his blue Speedos, and opened his arms to meet the embrace of the view, the green and silver expanse of the pond, young willows and hawthorns all round it, and the Heath behind, glimpsed only as patches of sunlit hillside. Nick was pleased with his own body, and he preened in pardonable ways, stretching and flicking his feet up against his buttocks as he ran on the spot. Across the surface of the water moved the dotted heads of swimmers. There was something sociable and inquisitive about them. Out in the middle of the pond was the old wooden raft, the site of endless easy contacts, and the floating platform of some of Nick's steadiest fantasies. Half a dozen men were on it now, and soon he would be with them. He turned round and grinned to encourage Wani, who was dawdling by the curved downward rail of the ladder, and gazing at the distant heads of the swimmers as if wondering how they'd ever got there. It seemed swimming was a rare omission from the list of things he did beautifully. There was a mild and interesting cruelty in bringing him here, so far out of his element. "You've got to jump in," he said. "You'll find it torture going in slowly." He smiled at Wani's tight black trunks, the smoothness and delicacy of his pale brown body, and the usual provocation of his penis, now held upright over his balls like a bold exclamation mark. Then he jumped in himself, to show how easy it was, and felt the shock of the cold water just below the thin warmth of the surface. He hung there, kicking back and nodding at Wani, who stood stooped like a skier, but with one hand pinching his nose; and then flung himself into the pond. When he came up he was gasping and sploshing about and for a second he had a look of undisguised fear. His black curls were half unwound by the water, and hung over his eyes and ears. Nick bobbed beside him and felt his grip on his upper arm; he let his legs wander and slide consolingly between Wani's, and with his free hand he swept his hair back, and that seemed to steady Wani, who swam off in a hasty, upright breaststroke, as if nothing had happened.

For a few minutes they pushed along in a rough circle, following the white cords strung between floating rings which marked the boundary of the swimming area. Beyond it, Nick supposed, the water must lie too shallowly over the deep soft mud. Wani swam well enough, in fact, with head up and the facetious expression of someone forced to be a good sport; he stopped at one of the rings and clung to it for a rest, with a heavy-breathing grin, and a shake of the head that seemed to say "I can do this" as well as "I'll get you back for it." Nick pulled up the goggles that were bobbing loosely round his throat, and duck-dived. Under the yellowish sparkle of the surface the water was muddy green, deepening into murky brown, a world of bottle-glass colours. He twisted round, deciding what trick to play on Wani. Bubbles, dazzles from the rippling surface, stirred-up specks of black leaves swung and fled around Wani's legs, which hung there, lazily chasseing, in a princely pretence that no underwater attack was expected. And perhaps it was too childish, with Wani all at his mercy-instead of a grab or a tickle he shot up bursting for breath and laughing in his face. He would have kissed him if a watchful old gent hadn't been cruising so very close by them.

When they set off again, Nick raced ahead and came back, triumphing over Wani, decorating his steady course with curlicues, and all the while looking out for who else was there. It was hard to tell from their sleeked heads in the water; but through the smear of the goggles each figure waiting on the jetty or clambering onto the raft had the gleam of a new possibility. Nick swam close to the raft once, and kicked round it on his back, while he and a couple who were standing on it wondered if they knew each other.

After an almost complete turn of the pond Wani had done enough, and they trod water for a minute and talked while Nick glanced to left and right with his naked eyes. He loved it here but he was disappointed, it was too early in the season perhaps, he matched the calm of today and the chill of the water against the swarming heat wave Sundays of last year, the raft mad with clutching and jumping, the toilets crowded and intent, the queens on the grass outside packed like a city in a dozen rivalrous districts.

There were shouts and splashes from the raft, where a new group had converged. Nick felt the tug of curiosity and saw the chance to show Wani off and to show off to him, which was a lovely double vanity. Wani shivered and Nick said, "You need to keep moving," and kicked away towards the middle of the pond. A couple of dark men in black trunks were standing up, clumsily repelling a big blond muscle-queen who was trying to climb onto the stiffly lurching deck. Two other men who were crouching on the edge fell in, they half threw themselves in, like kids, and then scrambled back to join the assault. Thirty seconds of struggle followed, which some took more seriously than others, or with more thought for how they looked. Nick followed it all with smiling intensity, looking for his place in it.

Now there was a kind of truce, and everyone got back on board, so that when Nick cruised past he had a view of dangling legs, pinched dicks at funny angles, streaked hair and glistening skin, a floating tableau of men against the sky. Sex made them half conscious, half forgetful of the picture they made; they were sportsmen resting in stunned camaraderie, but some of them wriggled and held hands and breathed lustfully in each other's faces. They kicked their feet in the water, indolent but purposeful. One of them who was standing behind leant forward, out of the sky and the trees, and Nick reached him a hand and shot up and hopped out streaming as two queens plumped apart to make room for him. He stood breathing and grinning in a loose but curious embrace with the men in the middle. He had a sense of something fleeting and harmonic, longed for and repeated-it was the circling trees, perhaps, and the silver water, the embrace of a solitary childhood, and the need to be pulled up into a waiting circle of men.

"Don't I see you at Bang last week?" the man beside him said, who had put a steadying hand on Nick's shoulder and left it there.

"I think not," said Nick, who in fact had never been there. But he carried some memory-print of this man, some unplaced excitement. It took him a moment to realize that he used to see him at the Y, last year perhaps, in the showers there; and a moment more to confirm that as Nick had grown slowly and unseriously heavier, the Spaniard, if that's what he was, black-haired and lean, with large rosy nipples, had grown perceptibly thinner, into an eerily beautiful, etched-out version of himself. He leant lighdy on Nick now, and seemed almost to shrug off this undeniable fact, or perhaps to challenge him to see it, but not himself to allude to it in any way, unless by a lingering, fearful glance. Nick twisted casually away from him, and what came back gleaming out of the blur of memory was his round bottom and the tiny black curls just showing when he bent over: an image which also reminded him of Wani. He scanned the water blandly, and thought that perhaps he had gone in-just then the fun began again, the Spaniard abruptly dive-bombed, everyone shouted, and the raft itself groaned and creaked. Nick hopped around, laughing and shouting something himself into the unavoidable drench after drench as people jumped in. And there, in the wallow, was Wani's face, almost tearful with concentration as he tried to avoid the reckless arms and legs of the other men and find a moment to clamber out.

"Hello, darling!" said Nick, and went down on one knee to help him heave himself up. Wani didn't answer and didn't smile.

A few minutes later it was almost calm again. They were sitting there beside a man of fifty with thick grey chest hair and a restlessly sociable manner. His much younger friend, a Malaysian perhaps, was swimming some way from the raft, cruising other men outrageously, and doing clever duck-dives which made his trunks come off. "Oh, he gives me some trouble, that one," the man said. "Look at him." Wani smiled politely and turned to Nick; he wasn't used to meeting people like this, in the near-naked free-for-all of a public place. "Don't get me wrong, though-it's all good fun." The man waved cheerfully as if the boy was paying him even the faintest attention, and said, "He's devoted to me, you know. I don't know why, but he is."

"What's his name, then?" said a rough-voiced man, who was squatting behind them.

"He's called Andy."

"Andy, yeah?" said the man. "Here, Andy," he shouted, getting to his feet, "show us your arse!"

"He will!" said his old protector. "He will!"

The raft shook and on the other side of them a sleekly muscly man twisted up out of the water and landed with a promising thump on the boards. Nick saw Wani glance across at him from under his long lashes, as if assessing a new kind of problem or possibility; Nick himself had seen him here last year. He was balding and dark eyed, round faced, with a nice long nose and the lazy but focused expression of a man who thinks of nothing but sex. Nick remembered his idling gaze, the huge dark pupils that seemed to fill his eyes, and the curving weight of him in his black trunks. His stomach was a smooth curve outwards as he sat, and it seemed his destiny to be fat, but for now the fat was held in easy balance with the muscle.

Wani was sitting with his knees drawn up, his hair swept back in shiny waves but bunching and tightening again as it dried. He had got back some of his social poise, and with it an oblique deprecating manner, as though afraid he might be recognized or fancied. The older man talked across him to Nick. "He's getting so particular," he said.

"Aha…" said Nick.

"KY not good enough any more, apparently. We have to have some other substance called Melisma. Then Melisma's not good enough, apparently, either. We're moving on to Crest. But you have to be careful, don't you, with these awful rubber johnnies. I never thought the day would come… What do you use?"

"Should keep him nice and clean, anyway," said the rough-voiced man, who was clearly taking quite an interest in Andy. "Crest's a kind of toothpaste, mate," and shortly afterwards he dived in and swam powerfully in his direction.

"I'm Leslie, by the way," said the older man.

Wani turned his head and nodded. "Hi. Antoine."

"Now where would you be from, I wonder?"

"I'm Lebanese," said Wani, with a quick dry smile, in his driest English accent. Nick watched his aquiline profile and smiled mischievously. He liked to see another man acknowledge Wani's glamour, it gave him a quick jealous shot of the passion he had felt for him since Oxford, which was lust enlarged and diffused by mystery. Now he was looking down again, his extraordinary eyelashes lowered. Nick remembered him sometimes, after a class, or after dinner on a rarer night when he was unclaimed by his other worlds, coming back to the room of some poor student, with its shelf of paperbacks and a Dylan poster, and talking a bit more about Culture and Anarchy or North and South, swapping notes over Nescafe, and making a sweetly respectful attempt to show that he shared the concerns of these other boys, and like visiting royalty was quite unconscious of their clumsiness and deference. Wani, who could really only bear fresh coffee, with a little jug of hot milk on the side. Some of the snobbier people in college, like Polly Tompkins, mocked his fanciness and said he was only the son of a grocer, an immigrant orange-and-lemon seller, "a Levantine cockney tart" was Polly's phrase-he was a cute little Lebanese boy who'd been sent to Harrow and turned into a drawling English gentleman. Some of them thought he must have been turned into a poof as well, on no stronger grounds than his tight trousers and his bewildering good looks.

"So what do you do?" said Leslie.

"I've got my own film-production company," Wani said.

"Oh…" said Leslie, crushed and intrigued at once. And then, in a rather roundabout response, "Did you see A Room with a View? I wonder what you thought of that, if you're in the film world."

"I didn't, I'm afraid," said Wani, with another tiny but chilling smile.

"Didn't I see you in the Volunteer last week?" Leslie said after a bit-at which Wani looked quite blank, but the question was aimed at the dark-eyed man, who all this time had been lying back on his elbow, with one knee raised and his tackle slumped unignorably towards them. It was difficult to tell if his vague smile was a reaction to their conversation, or even if he was looking at them. His eyes seemed to work on some scene of imminent gratification, unfolding on a screen that hung between himself and the afternoon. There was something confidently patient about him, no lecherous effort or rush. But when he was spoken to it was as if they'd already been talking, and there was an understanding between them. Nick gazed at him, feeling he allowed and absorbed gazes, and at the glinting water beyond, with a twinge of sadness that when they stopped talking they would have to leave the little sun-struck oblong of the raft and swim back to the solid world. Wani was looking at the man again too, but also at the waiting ladder of the jetty, with the flicker of someone calculating his escape.

When they were getting dried and dressed in the compound Wani nodded and said, "There's our friend Ricky again." Nick looked over his shoulder and saw the sexy man emerging round the fence of the nudist yard and pulling carelessly at the draw-string of his trunks.

"Oh, yes. I didn't know he was called Pdcky," Nick said.

"Well, he looks like a Ricky," said Wani, while getting out of his trunks sitting down and wrapped in a towel.

"Have you got an erection or something?" said Nick.

"Don't be puerile," Wani said. He gave Nick a look that was part challenge and part broody supplication. "Why don't you ask him if he'd like to come home with us?"

"What, 'Ricky'?"

"Isn't that what goes on at this sort of place? I didn't imagine we'd come here for the exercise."

Nick sniggered. "You don't have to go mad," he said, "the first time I take you out."

Wani coloured a little but he held his gaze. "It could be a lot of fun," he said. "I should have thought. He's very common."

Nick glanced round again at Ricky, who was loitering amiably by the path to the toilets, and loitered too of course in his memory, as unexplored potential. At the same time he felt a little clutch of warning. Wani didn't know what he might be getting them into, and nor did Nick. When he looked back Wani was standing up in his underpants and tugging on his jeans. "I'm sure it could be," Nick said drily. At which Wani, with a twitch of his eyebrows and a sour compression of his lips, seemed to shrug the thing off. He took his watch from his pocket and put it on.

"If you don't ask him soon," he said, "we won't have time. I'm sorry, I thought you liked him."

"Yes, he's hot," said Nick, and found he was describing himself, in his unexpected anxiety. He hated to see Wani's beautiful mouth curl like that, and to feel his disdain, so amusing and exciting when applied to others, fall on him. He wanted only love, and today perhaps a kind of obedience, from Wani, who knew that the local tactics of argument and persuasion confused and upset him. "All right, I'll go and get him," he said, pretending that for him as well to ask was naturally to get, and knowing that he could never allow Wani to ask him himself.

"I mean I know he's not one of your nig-nogs."

"Oh, fuck off," Nick said, and marched away, in his jeans, but still shirtless, towards the toilet. He felt the disadvantage of the clothed among the naked; and the floor of the lavatory, when he entered it, was unpleasantly wet under his bare feet.

The door of one of the two cubicles was shut, and at the raised tin trough of the urinal the man was standing, his big sleek back and arse to the room, but turning his head, in his odd expressionless way, to see who had come in. And that look, and the smell of the place, piss and disinfectant, the atmosphere of permission, the rules all changed by keen but furtive consent, gripped Nick and melted him. He went over and stood beside the man and a few seconds later the spray from the excited fizz of the flush was coldly tickling the tips of their two erections. Nick slid his foreskin slowly backwards and forwards and gazed at the other man's blunt-headed shaft. Then he looked into his eyes, and it was like when they had chatted on the raft, totally expected, the reason they were here, as commonplace as it was deep. He seemed to swim in that dark gaze, with little flickers of conjecture. The man tilted his head towards the open cubicle, so that Nick wondered if he could do that, quickly or partially, before "getting" him, or trying to get him, to come home with them, but there was the snap of the bolt, the other door opened halfway and little Andy, the Malaysian handful, slipped out, and crossed the room to wash his hands. In the mirror Nick saw the mischief in his eyes fade into blankness. Then as if by magic the flush sounded, the door opened wide, and a grey-haired man, who was not his friend Leslie and not his rough-voiced admirer either, emerged and made off with a preoccupied look.

Now they were alone, and Nick felt there was something almost romantic in their patience, and in the man's delayed grab at his penis, and his own half embrace of the man's waist, his hand between his buttocks. The man was breathing in his face and Nick muttered, "Wait… wait… what's your name?"

"Ricky," said the man, and tried to kiss him again.

Nick giggled as he pulled back his head. "I just wondered if you wanted to come home with me and my friend? You know, have a bit of fun…"

" Well… " Ricky clearly thought it was a lot of bother when he had him here already. "How far is it?"

"Only… Kensington!"

"Kensington? Fuck-I don't know, mate." And he pressed against Nick with another impatient nod at the waiting lockup. Nick hugged him clumsily, and grunted at how much he would like to have him right here; but it would be a scandal with Wani waiting round the corner. He said,

"We've got a fantastic car."

"Yeah?" said Ricky. "Which is he, anyway, your friend? Sort of dark curly hair?" He gently pinched and twisted Nick's nipple, and Nick gasped as he said,

"You saw him…"

Ricky pondered and nodded and let Nick free himself. They took a moment to make themselves decent. "He's a bit stuck-up, is he, that one? Butter wouldn't melt in his arse?"

"I wouldn't say that… He's a bit shy," said Nick.

"We'll see about that, then," said Pdcky.

As they went out Nick said, "Can you do us a favour?"

"I bloody well hope so."

Nick winced. "Can you pretend you're married-or at least you've got a girlfriend…"

Ricky shrugged and shook his head. "I have got a girlfriend."

"Have you?" Nick stopped for a second with his chin tucked in, while Ricky stared at him and then winked.

"Quick on the uptake, aren't I?"

Nick tutted and blushed. "I must say you're fucking quick," he said, almost in Ricky's voice.

Outside on the path Wani hurried ahead with the preoccupied look of a famous person, while Nick and Ricky followed behind. Ricky clearly never hurried, he was his own lazy happening. He kept his eyes on the pretty back view of Wani, which made Nick proud and also apprehensive. He wondered just what they were going to do, and couldn't distinguish the nerves that are a part of excitement from a kind of resentment. Wani's nerves showed in his cool dissociating manner. They went along beside the wide grass bank, and one of the sunbathing men called out something to Ricky, who gave him a nod and a dirty smile back-Nick smiled too, as if he knew what was going on.

In the lane above, Wani, who was playing with the car keys, flipping the leather fob about, said, "You can drive, Nick," and threw them over to him. It was typical of Wani to dress up a command as a treat. Nick had often been the passenger in WHO 6, but he had only driven it once before, by himself, a short hop from the river back to Kensington that became a whole glittering evening of darting about, the Brompton Road, Queen's Gate, along by the Park, round and round, and with the curious feeling (with the roof down and the coldish air blustering in) of passing for Wani, of being WHO, that glamorous enigma. All of which rather withered as he slid back into the driving seat. The car was parked in close to the rustic fence, under the lime trees, and their sticky exudations had already stippled the windscreen. He held down the button to retract the roof and watched in the mirror as it lifted and folded away behind him and sunlight through the leaves fell in glancingly on the dials and knobs and amber walnut. The other two stood waiting for him to pull out, but not talking. Then Wani gestured Ricky into the back, where he sat with his knees wide apart, since there was very little legroom. "You all right there?" said Nick, looking over at the squashed contour of his packet and feeling oddly apologetic about both the splendour and the inconvenience of the car.

"I'm all right," said Ricky, as if he was driven about like this every day.

They started on the steep hill towards Highgate and Nick was amazed all over again by the power leaping up under the ball of his foot. They seemed to wolf up the lane, in four thoughtless growls. He caught Ricky's eye in the mirror and said, "So what time's your girlfriend getting back?"

Ricky said, "She won't be back till really late, actually," more clearly than when he told the truth, and then added, "She's gone round to see her Uncle Nigel," with a tolerant cluck. This bit of business acted visibly on Wani, who cleared his throat and half-turned in his seat to say,

"That's good." The absurdity of the situation, something quite uncomfortable, tied a sudden knot in Nick, and at the top of the lane, instead of turning right down the hill towards town he turned the other way and climbed again towards Highgate village. He probably didn't need to explain, since as far as Wani was concerned they could have been in Lincolnshire, and Ricky would sit there with his half-smile of anticipation wherever they went, but he said,

"There's something I want to have a quick look at." At the top he made an abrupt left into the long shady row that he knew must be The Grove. He was fairly sure he'd never been here before, it was something he'd imagined doing, a piece of research, historical, emotional… but as he peered through the line of trees at the beautiful old brick houses behind high railings, the house where Coleridge had lived and died, and then, as they crept along, bigger Georgian houses with flights of steps and carriage yards, he had the ghostly impression that he had been here, had been brought here on some unlocatable evening for some irrecoverable event. "This is where Coleridge lived," he said, with a glow of piety intended to stir Wani too, and then protracted to defy his evident lack of interest.

"OK," said Wani.

"I just want to see where the Feddens used to live. Some old friends of mine," he explained to Ricky. "I know it was number thirty-eight…"

"This is sixteen," said Wani.

It was one of the Feddens' sentimental routines to refer to their "Highgate days," and Gerald would evoke the house where they had first lived in a tone of nostalgia and self-ridicule, as if remembering student digs. Rachel usually said it was "a darling house," it was where she had raised her children, and a snapshot of Toby and Catherine, aged ten and eight, sitting on the front steps, remained in a silver frame on her dressing table. To Nick the place had an obscure proxy romance, as the first home of his second family. When they got to it there was a skip outside piled high with splintered timber, and a blue Portaloo in the front garden.

"Hm," said Wani. "OK… " And he turned and gave Ricky an encouraging glance, in case he was getting bored. "Not much left."

The house was having a restoration so thorough it looked like demolition. The roof was like another house, made of scaffolding and sheeting. Most of the stucco had been hacked from the walls, and you could see the buried arcs of brick over each window. Through the front door you saw the garden at the back. On the surviving white-stucco pier by the side gate there was a painted black finger and the words TRADESMEN'S ENTPJVNCE; underneath which, in red spray-paint, a wit had written CUNTS EN-TPJVNCE, with an arrow pointing the other way.

"So much for that," said Wani. A workman in overalls and a blue helmet came out through the aperture of the front door and stared at them like a janitor, trying to decide if they mattered. They were one of a thousand carloads of easy wealth that roared and fluttered round London, knocking things down and flinging things up. They might be due for deference or contempt, or for the sour mixture of the two aroused by young money. Nick nodded affably at the man as he pulled away. Mixed in with his unease, and the rueful lesson of the skip and the scaffolding, was a feeling that the builder knew just what they would be getting up to half an hour from now.

Though half an hour later they were creeping down Park Lane. The decisive plunge from the heights had slowed and stalled in the inexhaustible confusion of traffic and roadworks and construction. The wolfish bites had turned into thwarted snaps, the squeals of half a dozen near-collisions. Shuddering lorries squeezed them and dared them and flushed their reeking fumes through the coverless car, as four lanes funnelled into one outside the Hilton Hotel. Wani had whisked Nick up one night to the top-floor bar of the Hilton, perhaps not fully aware of its glassy vulgarity-it was a place his father liked to take guests to, and there was something touchingly studied in the paying for the cocktails and the lordly gaze out over the parks and the palace and the fur and diamonds of the London night. And now here they were, trapped, motionless, half asphyxiated on the roadway outside. Since Nick was driving he felt guilty and clumsy, as if it were his fault, as well as angry and slightly nauseous. Wani's face tightened and his lips were pursed with blame. Even Ricky was letting out puffing sighs. Wani reached over and put a hand on Packy's thigh and Nick kept an eye on them in the mirror. He tried to make normal conversation, but Ricky had no views on any current topic, and was marvellously incurious about his new friends. He'd given up his job at a warehouse in favour of doing nothing, and now obviously he couldn't find a job even if he wanted to, with three and a quarter million out of work: he smiled at that. He didn't drink, he didn't smoke, and he never read books. "Perhaps we'll put you in a film," said Wani archly, and Ricky said, "All right." He seemed to have forgotten he had a girlfriend, until Nick asked another question about her. At last they rushed out into Hyde Park Corner, and jostled their way round into Knightsbridge. Wani said, "What's your girlfriend's name?"

"Felicity," said Ricky-which was written on the awning of Felicity Prior's flower shop just beside them. "Yeah…"

Wani turned and said, in a painfully roguish tone, "Felicity's a very lucky girl."

"Yeah, she is, isn't she," said Ricky.

When they reached Wani's place there was no one in the office, the boys had left, and they went straight upstairs to the flat, Ricky following Wani, and Nick coming close behind, unpleasantly jealous of the other two. It was like the tension of a first date, but with an extra player who was also a competitor and critic. He was squeamish at the thought of Wani's little predilections being exposed, and angry because he was the one who had been trusted with the secret of them. He didn't know if he could go through with that drama in the presence of Ricky, whom obviously, elsewhere, he would have loved to fuck. Or perhaps it wouldn't be like that, they would just fool about a bit. He went across the room and put the car keys down on the side table, and when he looked back Ricky and Wani were snogging, nothing had been said, there were sighs of consent, a moment's glitter of saliva before a shockingly tender second kiss. Nick gave a breathy laugh, and looked away, in the grip of a misery unfelt since childhood, and too fierce and shaming to be allowed to last.

He took down the leather-bound Poems and Plays of Addison and got out the hidden gram of coke-all that was left of last week's quarter-ounce. He knelt down by the glass coffee table to deal with it, polishing a clean spot. The new issue of Harper's was open at "Jennifer's Diary," and he peered at the picture of Mr Antoine Ouradi and Miss Martine Ducros at the Duchess of Flintshire's May ball. The pale inverted reflection of the two men kissing floated on the glass beside the photographed couple. If this was one of Wani's films-not the ones he wanted to make but the ones he liked to watch-Nick would have to join them in a moment. Sometimes there was an unaccountably boring scene where one man knelt and sucked the dicks of the other two in turn, or even tried to get them both in his mouth, and Nick could see Wani needing to do that. He chopped and drew out the fine white fuses of pleasure and watched Pdcky tug at the buckle of his lover's belt.

8

WANI'S NEW CENTRE of operations was an 1830s house in Abingdon Road which he had had converted by Parkes Perrett Bozoglu. On the ground floor was the glinting open-plan Ogee office, and on the two upper floors a flat that was full of eclectic features, lime-wood pediments, coloured glass, surprising apertures; the Gothic bedroom had an Egyptian bathroom. The high tech of the office, PPB seemed to say, was less the logic of the future than another style in their postmodern repertoire. The house had been featured in The World of Interiors, whose art director had moved the furniture around, hung a large abstract painting in the dining room, and introduced a number of ceramic lamps like colossal gourds. Wani said this didn't matter at all. He himself seemed elegantly and equally at home in the reflecting glass and steel of the office and among the random cultural allusions of the flat. He knew very little about art and design, and his pleasure in the place was above all that of having had something expensive done for him.

Nick smiled to himself at the flat's pretensions, but inhabited it with his old wistful keenness, as he did the Feddens' house, as a fantasy of prosperity that he could share, and as the habitat of a man he was in love with. He felt he took to it well, the comfort and convenience, the discreet glimpsed world of things that the rich had done for them. It was a system of minimized stress, of guaranteed flattery. Nick loved the huge understanding depth of the sofas and the peculiarly gilding light of the lamps that flanked the bathroom basin; he had never looked so well as he did when he shaved or cleaned his teeth there. Of course the house was vulgar, as almost everything postmodern was, but he found himself taking a surprising pleasure in it. The hallway, where the grey glass bells of the lampshades cast cloudy reflections in the ox-blood-marble walls, was like the lavatory of a restaurant, though evidently of a very smart and fashionable one.

He slept there from time to time, in the fantasy of the canopied bed, with its countless pillows. The ogee curve was repeated in the mirrors and pelmets and in the wardrobes, which looked like Gothic confessionals; but its grandest statement was in the canopy of the bed, made of two transecting ogees crowned by a boss like a huge wooden cabbage. It was as he lay beneath it, in uneasy post-coital vacancy, that the idea of calling Wani's outfit Ogee had come to him: it had a lightness to it, being both English and exotic, like so many things he loved. The ogee curve was pure expression, decorative not structural; a structure could be made from it, but it supported nothing more than a boss or the cross that topped an onion dome. Wani was distant after sex, as if assessing a slight to his dignity. He turned his head aside in thoughtful grievance. Nick looked for reassurance in remembering social triumphs he had had, clever things he had said. He expounded the ogee to an appreciative friend, who was briefly the Duchess, and then Catherine, and then a different lover from Wani. The double curve was Hogarth's "line of beauty," the snakelike flicker of an instinct, of two compulsions held in one unfolding movement. He ran his hand down Wani's back. He didn't think Hogarth had illustrated this best example of it, the dip and swell-he had chosen harps and branches, bones rather than flesh. Really it was time for a new Analysis of Beauty.

On the floor below was the "library," a homage to Lutyens neo-Georgian, with one black wall and pilastered bookcases. A glass bowl, some framed photos, and a model car took up space between the sparse clumps of books. There were big books on gardens and film stars, and some popular biographies, and books valued for being by people Wani knew, such as Ted Heath's Sailing and Nat Hanmer's "really rather good" first novel Pig Sty. The room had a proper Georgian desk, and sofas, a huge staring television and a VCR with high-speed rewind. It was here, a few days after the Ricky episode, with its large tacit adjustment to Nick's understanding of things, that Wani had sat down, plucked the top off his Mont Blanc and made out a cheque to Nicholas Guest for £5,000.

Nick had looked at the cheque, drawn on Coutts & Co. in the Strand, with a mixture of suspicion and glee. He handled it lightly, noncommittally, but he knew in a second or two that he was fiercely attached to it, and dreaded its being taken away from him. He said, "What on earth's this?"

"What…?" said Wani, as if he'd already forgotten it, but with a tremor of drama that he couldn't fully suppress. "I'm just fed up with paying for you the whole fucking time."

This was quite a witty remark, Nick could see, and he took the roughness of it as a covert tenderness. Still, there was a sense that he might have agreed to something, when he was drunk and high-that he'd forgotten his side of a bargain. "It doesn't seem right," he said, already seeing himself doing the paying, taking out Toby, or Nat perhaps, to Betty's or La Stupenda; having a credit card, therefore…

"Yah, just don't tell anyone," said Wani, pressing a video into the slot of the player, and picking up the remote control, with which he poked and chivvied the machine from a frowning distance. "And don't just blue it all in a week on charlie."

"Of course not," said Nick-though the idea, and the hidden calculation he made, brought him up against the limits of £5,000 fairly quickly. If he was going to have to pay for himself, it wasn't nearly enough. Seen in that light, it was rather mean of Wani, it was a bit of a tease. "I'll invest it," he said.

"Do that," said Wani. "You can pay me back when you've made your first five grand profit." At which Nick sniggered, out of sheer ignorance. It was all a bit tougher than he thought, if he was going to have to pay it back. But he didn't want to whinge.

"Well, thank you, my dear," he said, folding the cheque reflectively, and going towards him to give him a kiss. Wani reached up his cheek, like a thanked but busy parent, and as Nick went out of the room Wani's favourite scene from Oversize Load was already on the screen, and the man in black was performing his painful experiment on the excited little blond.

"Oh, baby…!" Wani chuckled, but Nick knew he wasn't being called back.

A couple of nights a week Wani spent uncomplainingly at his parents' house in Lowndes Square. Nick had been ironical about this at first, and piqued that he seemed to feel no regret at passing up a night they could have spent together. The family instinct was weak in him-or if it flared it involved some family other than his own. But he soon learned that to Wani it was as natural as sex and as irrefutable in its demands. On other nights of the week he might be in and out of the lavatories of smart restaurants with his wrap of coke, and roar home in WHO 6 for a punishing session of sexual make-believe; but on the family nights he went off to Knightsbridge in a mood of unquestioning compliance, almost of relief, to have dinner with his mother and father, any number of travelling relations, and, as a rule, his fiancee. Then Nick would go back jealously to Kensington Park Gardens and the hospitable Feddens, who all seemed to believe his story that on other nights he worked at his thesis on Wani's computer and used a "put-me-up" at his flat. He had never been invited to Lowndes Square, and in his mind the house, the ruthless figure of Bertrand Ouradi, the exotic family protocols, the enormous monosyllable of the very word Lowndes, all combined in an impression of forbidding substance.

On one of his nights alone, Nick went to Tannhauser and met Sam Zeman in the interval. They gossiped competitively about the edition being used, an awkward hybrid of the Paris and Dresden versions; Sam had the edge in relevant and precisely remembered fact. Nick said there was something he wanted to ask him, and they agreed to have lunch the following week. "Come in early," said Sam, "and try out the new gym." Kesslers had just rebuilt their City premises, with a steel and glass atrium and high-tech dealing-floors fitted in behind the old palazzo facade.

When the day came Nick turned up early at the bank and waited under a palm tree in the atrium. People hurried in, nodding to the commissionaire, who still wore a tailcoat and a top hat. On the exposed escalators the employees were carried up and down, looking both slavish and intensely important. Nick watched the motorbike messengers in their sweaty waterproofs and leathers, and heavy boots. He felt abashed and agitated by closeness to so many people at work, in costume, in character, in the know. The building itself had the glitter of confidence, and made and retained an unending and authentic noise out of air vents, the hubbub of voices and the impersonal trundling of the escalators. Nick craned upwards for a glimpse of the regions where Lord Kessler himself might be conducting business, at that level surely a matter of mere blinks and ironies, a matter of telepathy. He knew that the old panelled boardroom had been retained, and that Lionel had hung some remarkable pictures there. In fact he had said that Nick should call in one day and see the Kandinsky…

Sam took him through and down into a chlorine-smelling basement where the gym and lap-pool were. "It's such a godsend, this place," he said. Nick thought it was very small, and hardly compared with the Y; he saw that he came to a gym as a gay place, but that this one wasn't gay. An old man in a white jacket handed out towels and looked seasoned to the obscenities of the bankers. Nick did a perfunctory circuit, really just to oblige Sam, who was pedalling on a bike and filling in the Times crossword. He felt he didn't know Sam very well, and had a vague sensation of being patronized. Sam's friendly Oxford cleverness had hardened, he had a glint to him like the building itself, a watchful half-smile of secret knowledge. All around them other men were slamming weights up and down. Nick wasn't sure if they were working up their aggression or working it off. In the showers they shouted esoteric boasts from stall to stall.

Nick had seen their lunch taking place in a murmurous old City dining room with oak partitions and tailcoated waiters. The restaurant Sam took him to was so bright, noisy and enormous that he had to shout out the details of his £5,000. When Sam understood he flinched backwards for a second to show he'd thought it was going to be something important. "Well, what fun," he said.

It was nearly all men in the restaurant. Nick was glad he'd worn his best suit and almost wished he'd worn a tie. There were sharp-eyed older men, looking faintly harassed by the speed and noise, their dignity threatened by the ferocious youngsters who already had their hands on a new kind of success. Some of the young men were beautiful and exciting; a sort of ruthless sex-drive was the way Nick imagined their sense of their own power. Others were the uglies and misfits from the school playground who'd made money their best friend. It wasn't so much a public-school thing. As everyone had to shout there seemed to be one great rough syllable in the air, a sort of "wow" or "yow." Sam was somewhat aloof from them but he didn't disown them. He said, "I saw a marvellous Frau ohne Schatten in Frankfurt."

"Ah yes… well, you know my feelings about Strauss," said Nick.

Sam looked at him disappointedly. "Oh, Strauss is good," he said. "He's very good on women."

"That wouldn't in itself put me off!" said Nick.

Sam chuckled at the point, but went on, "The orchestral music's all about men and the operas are all about women. The only interesting male parts he wrote are both trouser-roles, Octavian, of course, and the Composer in Ariadne."

"Yes, quite," said Nick, slightly pressured. "He's not universal. He's not like Wagner, who understood everything."

"He's not like Wagner at all," said Sam. "But he's still rather a genius." They didn't get round to Nick's money till the end of lunch. "It's just a little inheritance," said Nick. "I thought it might be fun to see what could be made of it."

"Mm," said Sam. "Well, property's the thing now."

"I wouldn't get much for five thousand," said Nick.

Sam gave a single laugh. "I'd buy shares in Eastaugh. They're developing half the City. Share price like the north wall of the Eiger."

"Going up fast, you mean."

"Or there's Fedray, of course."

"What, Gerald's company?"

"Amazing performance last quarter, actually."

Nick felt stirred but on balance uneasy at this idea. "How does one go about it?" he said, with a gasp at his own silliness, but a certain recklessness too, after four glasses of Chablis. "I wondered if you'd look after it for me."

Sam put his napkin on the table and gestured to the waiter. "OK!" he said brightly, to show it was a game, a bit of silliness of his own. "We'll go for maximum profits. We'll see how far we can go."

Nick fumbled earnestly for his wallet but Sam put the lunch on expenses. "Important investor from out of town," he said. He had Kesslers' own platinum MasterCard. Nick watched the procedure with a bead of anticipation in his eye. Outside on the pavement, Sam said, "All right, my dear, send me a cheque. I'm going this way," as if Nick had made it clear he was going the other. Then they shook hands, and as they did so Sam said, "Shall we say three per cent commission," so that they seemed to have solemnized the arrangement. Nick flushed and grinned because he'd never thought of that: he minded terribly. It was only later that it came to seem a good, optimistic thing, with the proper stamp of business to it.

Wani was still "building up his team" at Ogee, and Nick was silently amazed by both his confidence and his lack of urgency. A woman called Melanie, dressed for a Dallas cocktail party, came in to do the typing, and artfully protracted her few bits of filing and phoning through the afternoon. Whenever her mother rang her she said things were "hectic." Wani had a wonderful Talkman, which was a portable phone he could take with him in the car or even into a restaurant, and Melanie was encouraged to call him on it if he was in a meeting and give him some figures. Then there were the boys, Howard and Simon, not actually a couple, but always referred to together, and acting together in the comfortable way of schoolboy best chums. Howard was very tall and square-jawed and Simon was short and owlish and pretended not to mind being fat. If anyone took them for lovers Simon shrieked with laughter and Howard explained tactfully that they were merely good friends. Nick liked nattering with them when he dropped into the office, and enjoyed their glancing hints that they both rather fancied him. "Well, I swim and I work out a couple of times a week," Nick would say, leaning back in his chair with the glow of shame that for him was still the cost of bragging; and Simon would say, "Oh, I suppose I ought to try that." They all carried on as if they'd never noticed Wani's beauty, and as if they took him entirely seriously. If his picture appeared in the social pages of Tatler or Harper's and Queen Melanie passed the magazine round like a validation of their whole enterprise.

Nick was confident that none of them knew he was sleeping with the boss, and with ten or more years of practice he could head off almost any train of talk that might end in a thought-provoking blush. Part of him longed for the scandalous acclaim, but Wani exacted total secrecy, and Nick enjoyed keeping secrets. He worked up his earlier adventures as a cover, and told Howard and Simon a different version of the Ricky incident, replacing Wani with a Frenchman he'd met at the Pond the previous summer.

"So was he handsome, this Ricky?" said Simon.

Handsomeness was neither here nor there with Ricky, it was his look of stupid certainty, the steady heat of him, the way you started in deep, as though the first kiss was an old kiss interrupted and picked up again at full intensity-Nick said, "Oh, magnificent. Dark eyes, round face, nice big nose-"

"Mmm," said Simon.

"Perhaps a trifle too punctually, though not yet quite lamentably, bald."

There was a moment's thought before Simon said, "That's one of your things, isn't it?"

"What…?" said Nick, with a vaguely wounded look.

"A trifle too… how did it go?"

"I can't remember what I said… 'a trifle too punctually, though not yet quite lamentably, bald'?"

Howard sat back, with the nod of someone submitting to an easy old trick, and said, "So did he have a beard?"

"Far from it," said Nick. "No, no-he spoke, as to cheek and chin, of the joy of the matutinal steel."

They all laughed contentedly. It was one of Nick's routines to slip these plums of periphrasis from Henry James's late works into unsuitable parts of his conversation, and the boys marvelled at them and tried feebly to remember them-really they just wanted Nick to say them, in his brisk but weighty way.

"So what's that from, then?"

"The baldness? It's from The Outcry, it's a novel by Henry James that no one's ever heard of." This was taken philosophically by the boys, who hadn't really heard of any novels by Henry James. Nick felt he was prostituting the Master, but then there was an element of self-mockery in these turns of phrase-it was something he was looking at in his thesis. He was at the height of a youthful affair with his writer, in love with his rhythms, his ironies, and his idiosyncrasies, and loving his most idiosyncratic moments best of all.

"It sounds like Henry James called everyone beautiful and marvellous," said Sam, a little sourly, "from what you say."

"Oh, beautiful, magnificent… wonderful. I suppose it's really more what the characters call each other, especially when they're being wicked. In the later books, you know, they do it more and more, when actually they're more and more ugly-in a moral sense."

"Right… " said Simon.

"The worse they are the more they see beauty in each other."

"Interesting," said Howard drily.

Nick cast a fond glance at his little audience. "There's a marvellous bit in his play The High Bid, when a man says to the butler in a country house, T mean, to whom do you beautifully belong?'"

Simon grunted, and looked round to see if Melanie could hear. He said, "So what was his knob like, then?… You know, Ricky?"

Well, it was certainly worth describing, and embellishing. Nick wondered for a moment how Henry would have got round it. If he had fingered so archly at beards and baldness, the fine paired saliences of his own appearance, what flirtings and flutterings might he not have performed to conjure up Ricky's solid eight inches? Nick said, "Oh, it was … of a dimension," and watched Simon work what excitement he could out of that.

So he prattled on, mixing up sex and scholarship, and enjoying his wanderings away from the strict truth. In fact that was really the fun of it. And it seemed to fit in with the air of fantasy in the Ogee office, the distant sense of an avoided issue.

Nick couldn't quite have defined his own role there, and he only learned what it was when he was suddenly invited to Lowndes Square for Sunday lunch. He'd been dancing at Heaven till three the night before, and was still struggling with the rubber mask, the wobbly legs, the trill and glare of a beer and brandy hangover when Bertrand Ouradi grasped his hand very hard and said, "Ah, so you're Antoine's aesthete."

"That's me!" said Nick, returning the handshake as firmly as he could, and grinning in the hope that even an aesthete might be a good thing to be if it was sanctioned by his beloved son.

"Ha ha!" said Bertrand, and turned away along the chequered marble floor of the hall. "Well, we need our aesthetes." He stretched out his arms in a graceful shrug, and seemed to gesture at the shiny paintings and Empire torcheres as necessary trappings of his position. He had an aesthete of his own, he seemed to say, on a small retainer. Nick followed on, wincing at the high polish on everything. He had the feeling there was only one thing in the house he would ever want to see. "I'll join you in a moment," Bertrand said, with a tiny gesture of deterrence, as Nick found himself following him into the lavatory. The dark little woman who'd opened the door led him dutifully upstairs, and he followed her instead, smiling and doomed. So Wani himself must have called him his aesthete, that was how he'd explained him to his parents…

He was shown into the pink and gold confusion of a drawing room. Wani called out, "Ah, Nick… " like an old man remembering, and came across to shake his hand. "Now here's Martine, who's been longing to see you… " (Nick stopped by the sofa where she was sitting and shook her hand as well with an exaggerated bow)-"and you haven't met my mother." Nick was aware of himself advancing in the high mirror which hung over the fireplace, and at a slight tilt, so that the room seemed to climb into a luminous middle distance. He kept up a wide smile, in self-protection, and only caught his own eye for an unwise second. It was a dazzled smile, perhaps even the smile of someone about to make a sequence of witty remarks. Monique Ouradi said she had been to Mass at Westminster Cathedral, and smiled back, but seemed not quite ready yet for mere social communication. "And this is my Uncle Emile, and my cousin, little Antoine," said Wani, as two people came in unexpectedly behind him. Everything impinged on Nick, but he couldn't take it in. He shook hands with Uncle Emile, who said "Enchante" in a coughing sort of voice, and Nick said "Enchante" back. Wani rested his hand on his little cousin's head, and the boy looked up at him adoringly before also shaking hands with Nick. Nick felt a tear rise to his eye at the thought of the child's utter innocence of hangovers.

Nick had decided in the taxi that he would stick to water, but when Bertrand came in saying, "Now, drinks!" he at once saw the point of a bloody Mary. Bertrand moved towards a drinks tray on a far table and at just that moment an old man in a black jacket hurried in with a salver and took control of the business. Nick gazed at them with the patient surmise of the hungover, a sense of mysterious displacement and slow revelation. Bertrand could make a mere gesture towards an action which would at once be performed by someone else-there was a signalled readiness and then a prompt, never-doubted relief! It explained everything.

Really it was best to prop oneself at a life-like angle in the corner of the sofa and let the family talk trail back and forth… At the tall front windows white net curtains rippled very gently into the room. Outside on the balcony there were two pointed trees in tubs, and beyond them the planes in the square, forest-height, filled the entire view. Nick's thoughts drifted out and perched there.

Little Antoine had a remote-controlled toy car, which Wani was encouraging him to crash into the legs of the repro Louis Quinze tables and chairs. It was a bright-red Ferrari with a whiplike antenna. Nick crouched forward to watch it haring round, and made histrionic groans when it banged into the skirting board or got stuck under the bureau. He was pretending to enjoy the game, and trying to attach himself to it, but the two boys seemed oblivious of him, Wani almost snatching the controls now and then to cause a top-speed collision. Bertrand was standing talking to Uncle Emile, and shuffled obligingly out of the way a couple of times, with a certain hardening of expression. In the tilting mirror Nick saw them all, as if from a privileged angle, like actors on a set.

The parents were fascinating, Bertrand short and handsome as an old-fashioned film star, and Monique too, very smart and austere, with a black bob and a diamond brooch, evincing foreignness like a time-shift, into the chic of twenty years before. There was a subdued shine to Bertrand's dark suit, which was double-breasted, square-shouldered, and worn with a crimson breast-pocket handkerchief; he seemed to resolve into a pattern of squares and lozenges, with his square jaw, tougher than Wani's, and the same long hawkish nose, all parts of the pattern. Along his full upper lip he wore a thin black moustache. The light, low-cut patent slippers he had on seemed to Nick an eastern note. Wani had several pairs himself, with ridged rubber soles, "for walking on marble" as he explained. Bertrand's voice, strongly accented, casual but coercive, dominated the room.

Martine was sitting at the other end of Nick's sofa, in what felt like her "place," adjacent to Wani's mother. They were speaking quietly in French, in a kind of listless female conspiracy, while the men boomed and frowned and crashed cars. Nick smiled at them undemandingly. Martine in her long engagement must have become a fixture, a passive poor relation, who was waiting and waiting to turn into a millionairess. She seemed shy of speaking to Nick, for reasons he could only guess at. Wani's claim that she was longing to see him had been wishful social prompting-he had a habit of languidly implanting his wishes. But Martine, in her mild unexpectant way, had always seemed to have her own mind. So it was a minute or two before she slid a dish of olives towards him on the low glass table and said, "And how are you getting on?"

"Oh, fine!" said Nick, blinking and smirking. "I'm feeling a bit delicate, actually"-and he waggled his glass. "This is helping. It's a miracle how it does." He thought what extraordinary things one said.

She was too delicate herself to take on the subject of his hangover. "Work is all fine?" she said.

"Oh-yes… thank you. Well-I'm trying to finish my thesis this summer, and of course I'm very behind," he said, as if she must be familiar with his weaknesses, they seemed to grin out of him as he sat there. "I'm so terribly lazy and disorganized."

"I hope not," she said, as if he could only be joking. "And what is it concerning, this thesis?"

"Oh… it's concerning-Henry James… " He'd developed a reluctance that was Jamesian in itself to say exactly what its subject was. There was a lot to do with hidden sexuality, which struck him as better avoided.

"But Antoine says you are working with him too, at the Ogee?"

"Oh, I don't really do very much."

"You are not writing a film? That is what he says."

"Well, I'd like to. In a way, yes… We have a few ideas." He smiled politely beyond her to take Wani's mother as well into the conversation. Since it was all he had, he said, "Actually, I've always rather wanted to make a film of The Spoils of Poynton… " Monique settled back with an appreciative nod at this, and Nick felt encouraged to go on, "I think it could be rather marvellous, don't you. You know Ezra Pound said it was just a novel about furniture, rneaning to dismiss it of course, but that was really what made me like the sound of it!"

Monique sipped at her gin-and-tonic and looked at him with vague concern, and then, as if searching for the point, glanced about at the tables and chairs. Of course she had no idea what he was talking about.

Martine said, "So you want to make zfxlm about furniture?"

Monique said, raising her voice as the Ferrari tore past her ankles, "We saw the latest film, which was so nice, of The Room with the View."

"Ah yes," said Nick.

"Mainly it took place in Italy, which we love so much, it was delightful."

Martine slightly surprised him by saying, "I think it's so boring now, everything takes place in the past."

"Oh… I see. You mean, all these costume dramas…"

"Costume dramas. All of this period stuff. Don't the English actors get fed up with it-they are all the time in evening dress."

"It's true," said Nick. "Though actually everyone is in evening dress all the time these days, aren't they." He was thinking really of Wani, who owned three dinner jackets and had gone to the Duchess's charity ball in white tie and tails. He saw he was under attack, since the Poynton project would naturally involve a lot of dressing up.

Monique Ouradi said, "I'm sure my son will make a beautiful film, with your help"-so that Nick felt she was encouraging him in some larger sense, in the inscrutable way that mothers sometimes do.

"Yes, perhaps you don't know him all that well," Martine agreed. "You will need to push and shove him."

"I'll remember that," said Nick with a laugh, and amazing arousing images of Wani in bed glowed in front of him, so that Martine was like a person in the beam of a slide projector, half exposed, half coloured over, and a little ridiculous.

The Ferrari smacked into Bertrand's slipper once again, and little Antoine made it rev and whine as it tried to climb over it, until Bertrand bent down and picked the toy up and held it like a furious insect in the air. Antoine came round from behind the sofa, dawdling as he caught the moment of pure fury on his uncle's face and then gasping with laughter as the glare curled into a pantomime snarl. "Enough Ferrari for today," Bertrand said, and gave it back to the child with no fear of being disobeyed. Nick felt abruptly nervous at the thought of crossing Bertrand, and those same naked images of his son melted queasily away.

Wani said, "You must be longing to see round the house."

"Oh, yes," said Nick, getting up with a flattered smile. He felt that Wani had almost overdone the coolness and dissimulation, he'd barely spoken to him, and even now, as he lifted Nick on a wave of secret intentions, his expression gave nothing away, not even the warmth that the family might have expected between two old college friends.

"Yes, take him round," said Bertrand. "Show him all the bloody pictures and bloody things we've got."

"I'd love that," said Nick, seeing the hidden advantage of the aesthete persona, even in a house where the good things had the glare of reproductions. "Will I go too?" said little Antoine, who was clearly as fond of his cousin's touch and smile as Nick was; but Emile crossly made him stay.

"We'll begin at the top," Wani announced as they left the room and started upstairs two at a time. On the second flight he said quietly, "You didn't say where you were last night."

"Oh, I went to Heaven," said Nick, with mild apprehension at telling an innocent truth.

"I wondered," said Wani, without looking round. "Did you fuck anyone?"

"Of course I didn't fuck anyone. I was with Howard and Simon."

"I suppose that follows," said Wani, and then allowed Nick a tiny smile. "What did you do, then?"

"Well, you have been to a nightclub, darling," said Nick in a voice where sarcasm almost wished itself away. "You've been photographed in several with your fiancee. We danced and danced and drank and drank."

"Mm. Did you take your shirt off?"

"I think I'll leave that to your jealous imagination," Nick said.

They went along the landing and into Wani's bedroom. Wani bustled through, with a just perceptible air of granting a concession, of counting on Nick not to look too closely at what the room contained, and went into a white bathroom beyond. Nick followed slowly. Everything in the bedroom interested him, it was dead and alive at once, group photographs, from Harrow, from Oxford, the Martyrs' Club in their pink coats, Toby and Roddy Shepton and the rest; and the books, the Arnold and the Arden Shakespeare and the cracked orange spines of the Penguin Middlemarch and Tom Jones, the familiar colours and lettering, the series and ideas of all that phase of their life, stranded and fading here as in a thousand outgrown bedrooms, never to be looked at again; and the young man's princely bed, almost a double; and the mirror, where Nick now timidly checked his own progress-he looked perfectly all right. The puzzlement of a hangover… the creeping hilarity of the new drink… He strolled on into the bathroom.

Wani had got his wallet out, and was crushing and chopping a generous spill of coke on the wide rim of the washbasin. "A lot of funny old stuff in there," he said.

"I know," said Nick. "It's a little early for that, isn't it?" It was a lovely slide they were on with the coke, but sometimes Wani was a bit serious, a bit premature with it.

"You looked as if you needed it."

"Well, just a small line," said Nick. He looked around this room as well, with tense insouciance. He didn't really want to go down to lunch in reckless unaccountable high spirits and make a different kind of fool of himself. But a line wasn't feasibly resisted. He loved the etiquette of the thing, the chopping with a credit card, the passing of the tightly rolled note, the procedure courteous and dry, "all done with money," as Wani said-it was part of the larger beguilement, and once it had begun it squeezed him with its charm and promise. Being careful not to nudge him as he worked, he hugged Wani lightly from behind and slid a hand into his left trouser pocket.

"Oh fuck," said Wani distantly. In about three seconds he was hard, and Nick too, pressing against him. Everything they did was clandestine, and therefore daring and therefore childlike, since it wasn't really daring at all. Nick didn't know how long it could go on-he didn't dream of it stopping, but it was silly and degrading at twenty-three to be sneaking sex like this, like a pickpocket as Wani said. But then again, on a hungover morning, moronic with lust, he saw a beauty in the slyness of it. There were several pound coins in the flannel depths of the pocket, and they tumbled round Nick's hand as he stroked Wani's dick.

Wani drew the powder into two long lines. "You'd better close the door," he said.

Nick lingeringly disengaged himself: "Yeah, we've only got a minute." He pushed the door to and came forward to take the rolled £20 note.

"Turn the key," said Wani. "That little boy follows me everywhere."

"Ah, who can blame him," said Nick graciously.

Wani gave him a narrow took-he was often dissatisfied by praise. They stooped in turn and zipped up the powder, and then stood for a minute, sniffing and nodding, reading each other's faces for comparison and confirmation of the effect. Wani's features seemed to soften, there was a subtle but involuntary smile that Nick loved to see at the moment of achievement and surrender. He grinned back at him, and reached out to stroke his neck, and with his other hand rubbed playfully at Wani's oblique erection. They were on to such a good thing. He said, "This is fucking good stuff."

"God yes," said Wani. "Ronnie always comes through."

"I hope you haven't given me too much," Nick said; though over the next thirty seconds, holding Wani to him and kissing him lusciously, he knew that everything had become possible, and that the long demanding lunch would be a waltz and that he would play with Bertrand the tycoon and charm them all. He sighed and pulled Wani's left arm up to look at his famous watch. "We'd better go down," he said.

"OK." Wani stepped back, and quickly undid his trousers.

"Darling, they're waiting for us…" But Wani's look was so fathomlessly interesting to him, command and surrender on another deeper level, the raw needs of so aloof a man, the silly sense of privilege in their romantic secret-Nick knelt anyway, and turned him round in his hands, and pulled his pants, the loose old-fashioned drawers that Wani wore, down between his thighs.

On the way downstairs they met little Antoine, who had been dying to look for them and was going into every room in a mime of happy exasperation. It had taken a couple of flushes to dispose of the rubber, and they had got out with thirty seconds to spare. The boy claimed them and then wanted to know what they were laughing about.

"I was showing Uncle Nick my old photographs," Wani said.

"They were rather funny," said Nick, pierced by the generous twist to his lie, and also, absurdly, by the missed opportunity of seeing the photos.

"Oh," said little Antoine, perhaps with a similar regret.

"You'd better have a quick look in here," Wani said, and pushed open the door of the room above the drawing room, which was his parents' bedroom. He swept a hand over the switches and all the lights came on, the curtains began to close automatically and "Spring" from The Four Seasons was heard as if coming from a great distance. Little Antoine clearly loved this part, and asked to be allowed to do it all again whilst Nick glanced humorously around. Everything was luxurious and he feigned dismay at his own deep footprints in the carpet. The richness of the room was its mixture of shiny pomp, glazed swagged curtains, huge mirrors, onyx and glaring gilt, with older, rougher and better things, things perhaps they'd brought from Beirut, Persian rugs and fragments of Roman statuary. On top of a small chest of drawers there was a white marble head of Wani, presumably, done at about the same age as little Antoine was now, the wider, plumper face of a child. It was charming and Nick thought if he could have anything in the house, any object, it would be that. Bertrand and Monique had separate dressing rooms-each of them, in its order and abundance, like a department of a shop. "You'd better look at this too," Wani said, showing him a large yellow painting of Buckingham Palace that hung on the landing.

"It's a Zitt, I see," said Nick, reading the signature dashed across the right-hand corner of the sky.

"He's rather buying into Zitt," said Wani.

"Oh-well, it's absolutely ghastly," said Nick.

"Is it?" said Wani. "Well, try and break it to him gently."

They went down into the dining room, with little Antoine going in before them, lolling his head from side to side and saying "eb-solutely gharstly" over and over to himself. Wani caught him from behind and gave him an enjoyable strangle.

Nick was placed on Monique's right, beside little Antoine, with Uncle Emile opposite. Uncle Emile had the air of a less successful brother, baggy and gloomy rather than gleamingly triangular. But it turned out that in fact he was Monique's brother-in-law, on a visit of indefinite duration from Lyon, where he ran an ailing scrap-metal business. Nick took in this story and smiled along the table as if they were being told a simmeringly good joke; it was only Wani's tiny frown that made him suspect he might be looking too exhilarated by his tour of the house. It was the magic opposite, all this, of the jolted witless hangover state of half an hour earlier. All their secrets seemed to fuse and glow. Though for Wani himself, severely self-controlled, it seemed hardly worth having taken the drug. The little old couple were bringing in elaborately fanned slices of melon and orange. It was clear that citrus fruits were treated with special acclaim in the house; here as in the drawing room there was a daringly stacked obelisk of oranges and lemons on a side table. The effect was both humble and proprietorial. Another Zitt, of the Stock Exchange and the Mansion House, done in mauve, hung between the windows.

"I see you're admiring my husband's new Zitt," said Monique, with a hint of mischief, as if she would value a second opinion.

"Ah yes…!"

"He's really an Impressionist painter, you know."

"Mm, and almost, somehow, an Expressionist one, too," said Nick.

"He's extremely contemporary," said Monique.

"He's a bold colourist," said Nick. "Very bold…"

"So, Nick," said Bertrand, spreading his napkin, and steadying his swivelling array of knives on the glassy polish of the table top: "how is our friend Gerald Fedden?" The "our" might have referred to just the two of them, or to a friendship with the family, or to a vaguer sense that Gerald was on their side.

"Oh, he's absolutely fine," said Nick. "He's in great form. Wildly busy-as always…!" Bertrand's look was humorous but persistent, as if to show that they could be candid with each other; having ignored him for the first half-hour he was turning the beam of his confidence on him, with the instinct of a man who gets his way.

"You live in his house, no?"

"Yes, I do. I went to stay for a few weeks and I've ended up staying for nearly three years!"

Bertrand nodded and shrugged, as if this was quite a normal arrangement.

Uncle Emile himself, perhaps, might turn out to be just such a visitor. "I know where it is. We're invited to the concert, whatever it is, next week, which we'll be charmed to come to."

"Oh, good," said Nick. "I think it should be quite fun. The pianist is a young star from Czechoslovakia."

Bertrand frowned. "I know they say he's a bloody good man."

"No, actually… oh, Gerald, you mean-yes, absolutely!"

"He's going to go to the very top of the ladder. Or almost to the top. What's your opinion of that?"

"Oh-oh, I don't know," said Nick. "I don't know anything about politics."

Bertrand twitched. "I know you're the bloody aesthete…"

Nick was often pressed for insider views on Gerald's character and prospects, and as a rule he was wafflingly loyal. Now he said, "I do know he's madly in love with the Prime Minister. But it's not quite clear if the passion is returned. She may be playing hard to get." Little Antoine did the furtive double-take of a child who is not supposed to have heard something, and Bertrand's frown deepened over his melon. It occurred to Nick that he was in a household with a very serious view of sexual propriety. But it was Monique who said,

"Ah, they're all in love with her. She has blue eyes, and she hypnotizes them." Her own dark gaze went feelingly down the table to her husband, and then to her son.

"It's only a sort of courtly love, isn't it," said Nick.

"Yah… " said Wani with a nod and a short laugh.

"You've met the lady, I imagine," Bertrand said.

"I never have," said Nick, humbly but cheerfully.

Bertrand made a pinched plump expression with his lips and stared into an imaginary distance for a moment before saying, "You know, of course, she's a good friend of mine."

"Oh, yes, Wani told me you knew her."

"Of course, she is a great figure of the age. But she is a very kind woman too." He had the mawkish look of a brute who praises the kindness of another brute. "She has always been very kind to me, hasn't she, my love?

And of course I intend to return the compliment."

"Aha…"

"I mean in a practical way, in a financial way. I saw her the other day, and… " he waved his left hand impatiently to show he wouldn't be going into what had been said; but then went on, with weird candour, "I will make a significant donation to the party funds, and… who knows what then." He stabbed and swallowed a slice of orange. "I believe you have to pay back, my friend, if you have been given help"-and he stabbed the air with his empty fork.

"Oh, quite," said Nick. "No, I'm sure you do." He felt he had inadvertently become the focus of some keen resentment of Bertrand's.

"You won't hear any complaints about the lady in this house."

"Well, nor in mine, I assure you!"

Nick glanced around at the submissive faces of the others, and thought that actually, at Kensington Park Gardens, the worship of "the lady," the state of mesmerized conjecture into which she threw Gerald, was offset at least by Catherine's monologues about homeless people and Rachel's wry allusions to "the other woman" in her husband's life.

"So he's on the up-and-up, our friend Gerald," Bertrand said more equably. "What's his role actually?"

"He's a minister in the Home Office," Nick said.

"That's good. He did that bloody quickly."

"Well, he's ambitious. And he has the… the lady's eye."

"I'll have a chat with him when I come to the house. I've met him, of course, but you can introduce us again."

"I'd be happy to," said Nick; "by all means." The black-jacketed man removed the plates, and just then Nick felt the steady power of the coke begin to fade, it was something else taken away, the elation grew patchy and dubious. In four or five minutes it would yield to a flatness bleaker than the one it had replaced. However, the wine was served soon after, so there was an amusing sense of relief and dependency. Bertrand himself, Nick noted, drank only Malvern water.

Nick tried for a while to talk to Emile about scrap metal, which tested his Cornelian French to the limits; but Bertrand, who had been looking on with an insincere smile and a palpable sense of neglect, broke in, "Nick, Nick, I don't know what you two young men are getting up to, I don't like to ask too many questions…"

"Oh…"

"But I hope it's soon going to start bringing in some money."

"It will, Papa," said Wani quickly, while Nick blushed in horror at the chasm he'd just hopped over, and said, "I'm the aesthete, remember! I don't know about the money side of things." He tried to smile out through his blush, but he saw that Bertrand's little challenges were designed to show him up in a very passive light.

Bertrand said,

"You're the writing man-" which again was something allowed for, an item in a budget, but under scrutiny and probably dispensable.

Nick felt writing men were important, and though he had nothing to show for it as yet he said again, "That's me." He realized belatedly, and rather sickeningly, that he would have to improvise, to answer to Wani's advantage, to give body to what his father must have thought were merely fantasies.

"You know I want to start this magazine, Papa," Wani said.

"Ah-well," Bertrand said, with a puff. "Yes, a magazine can be good. But there is a whole world of difference, my son, running a magazine than having your bloody face in a magazine!"

"It wouldn't be like that," Wani said, somehow both crossly and courteously.

"All right, but then probably it won't sell."

"It's going to be an art magazine-very high quality photography-very high quality printing and paper-all extraordinary exotic things, buildings, weird Indian sculptures." He searched mentally through the list Nick had made for him. "Miniatures. Everything." Nick felt that even with his hangover he could have made this speech better himself, but there was something touching and revealing in how Wani made his pitch.

"And who do you suppose is going to want to buy that?"

Wani shrugged and spread his hands. "It will be beautiful."

Nick put in the forgotten line. "People will want to collect the magazine, just as they would want to collect the things that are pictured in it."

Bertrand took a moment or two to see whether this was nonsense or not. Then he said, "All this bloody top-quality stuff sounds like a lot of money. So you have to charge ten pounds, fifteen pounds for your magazine." He took an irritable swig from his glass of water.

Wani said, "Top-quality advertising. You know, Gucci, Cartier…Mercedes," reaching for names far more lustrous than Watteau or Borromini. "Luxury goods are what people want these days. That's where the money is."

"So you've got a name for the bloody thing."

"Yah, we're calling it Ogee, like the company," Wani said, very straightforwardly.

Bertrand pursed his plump lips. "I don't get it, what is it…? 'Oh Gee!,' " is that it?" he said, bad-tempered but pleased to have made a joke. "You'll have to tell me again because no one's ever heard of this bloody 'ogee.' "

"I thought he was saying 'Orgy,'" said Martine.

"Orgy?!" said Bertrand.

Wani looked across the table, and since this unheard-of name had originally been his idea Nick said, "You know, it's a double curve, such as you see in a window or a dome." He made the shape of half an hourglass with his hands raised in the air, just as Monique, in one of her occasional collusive gestures, did the same and smiled at him as if salaaming.

"It goes first one way, and then the other," she said.

"Exactly. It originates in… well, in the Middle East, in fact, and then you see it in English architecture from about the fourteenth century onwards. It's like Hogarth's line of beauty," Nick said, with a mounting sense of fatuity, "except that there are two of them, of course… I suppose the line of beauty's a sort of animating principle, isn't it…" He looked around and swooped his hand suggestively in the air. It wasn't perhaps the animating principle here.

Bertrand set down his knife and fork, and gave a puncturing smile. He seemed to savour his irony in advance, as well as the uncertainty, the polite smiles of anticipation, on the faces of the others. He said, "You know, um… Nick, I came to this country, twenty years ago nearly, 1967, not a bloody good time in Lebanon incidentally, just to see what the chances were in your famous swinging London. So I look around, you know the big thing then is the supermarkets are starting up, you know, self-service, help-yourself-you're used to it, you probably go to one every bloody other day: but then…!"

Nick simpered obediently at the notion of how accustomed he was. He wasn't sure if the Ogee talk was over, or being treated to some large cautionary digression. He said coolly, "No, I can see what a… what a revolution there's been."

Like other egotists Bertrand cast only a momentary, doubting glance at the possibility of irony aimed at himself, and stamped on it anyway. "Of course it is! It's a bloody revolution." He turned to gesture the old man to pour more wine for the others, and watched with an air of practised forbearance as the burgundy purled into the cut-glass goblets. "You know, I had a fruit shop, up in Finchley, to start off with." He waved his other arm fondly at that distant place and time. "Bought it up, flew in the fresh citrus, which was our own product by the way, we grew all that, we didn't have to buy it off bloody nobody. Lebanon, a great place for growing fruit. You know, all that's come out of Lebanon in the last twenty years? Fruit and brains, fruit and talent. No one with any brains or any talent wants to stay in the bloody place."

"Mm, the civil war, you mean." He'd meant to mug up a bit on the past twenty years of Lebanese history, but Wani grew pained and evasive when he mentioned it, and now here it came. He didn't want to concur in his host's harsh judgement on his own country, it was itself a bit of a minefield.

Monique said, "Our house was knocked down, you know, by a bomb," as though not expecting to be heard.

"Oh, how terrible," said Nick gratefully, since it was another voice in the room.

"Yes," she said, "it was very terrible."

"As Antoine's mother says," said Bertrand, "our family house was virtually destroyed."

"Was it an old house?" Nick asked her.

"Yes, it was quite old. Not as old as this, of course"-and she gave a little shiver, as if Lowndes Square dated from the Middle Ages. "We have photographs, many…"

"Oh, I'd love to see them," said Nick, "I'm so interested in that kind of thing."

"Anyway," said Bertrand, "1969 I open the first Mira Mart, up in Finchley, up in Finchley, it's still there today, you can go and see it any time. You know what the secret of it is?"

"Um…"

"That's what I saw, that's what you got in London, back then-twenty years ago. You got the supermarkets and you got the old local shops, the corner shops going back hundreds of years. So what do I do, I put the two bloody things together, supermarket and corner shop, and I make the mini-mart-all the range of stuff you get in Tesco or whatever the bloody place, but still with the local feeling, comer-shop feeling." He held up his glass and drank as if to his own ingenuity. "And you know the other thing, of course?"

"Oh!-um…"

"The hours."

"The hours, yes…"

"Open early and close up late, get people before work and get people after work, not just the dear bloody housewifes going out for a packet of ciggies and a chit-chat."

Nick wasn't sure if this was Bertrand's special tone for talking to an idiot or if its simplicity reflected his own vision of affairs. He said, critically, "Some of them aren't like that, though, are they? The one in Notting Hill, for instance, that we always go to. It's quite grand"-and he shrugged in dulled respect.

"Well, now you're talking about the Food Halls! It's two different bloody things: the Mira Marts and the Mira Food Halls… The latter, the Food Halls, being for the bloody rich, posh areas. We got that round here. You know where that comes from."

"Harrods," said Wani.

Bertrand gave him a quick frown. "Of course it does. The mother of all bloody food halls in the whole world!"

"I love to go to Harrods Food Hall," Monique said, "and look at the big… homards..."

"The lobsters," muttered Wani, without looking at her, as though it was his accepted function to interpret for his mother.

"Oh, I know!" said Martine, with a smile of faint-hearted rebellion. Nick saw them often doing it, days probably were spent in Harrods, just round the corner but another world of possibilities, something for everyone who could afford it.

Bertrand gave them a patient five seconds, like a strict but fair-minded schoolmaster, and then said, "So now, you know, Nick, I got thirty-eight Mira Food Halls all round the country, Harrogate I got one, Altrincham I just opened one; and more than eight hundred bloody Mira Marts." He was suddenly very genial-he almost shrugged as well at the easy immensity of it. "It's a great story, no?"

"Amazing," said Nick. "It's kind of you to tell me a story you must know so well"-making his face specially solemn. He saw the bright orange fascia of the Notting Hill Food Hall, where Gerald himself sometimes popped round late at night with a basket and a bashful look as though everyone recognized him, shopping for pate and Swiss chocolates. And he saw the corner Mira Mart in Barwick, with its sadder produce in sloping racks, remote poor cousins of the Knightsbridge obelisks, and its dense stale smell of a low-ceilinged shop where everything is sold together. An orange, of course, topped by two green leaves, was an emblem of the chain. Then he looked at Wani, who was eating pickily (coke killed the appetite) and entirely without expression. His eyes were on his plate, or on the gleaming red veneer just beyond it; he might have been listening thoughtfully to his father, but Nick could tell he had slipped away into a world his father had never imagined. His submissiveness to Bertrand's tyranny was the price of his freedom. Uncle Emile, too, looked down, as if properly crushed by his brother-in-law's initiative and success; Nick himself quickly saw the charm of running off to Harrods with the ladies.

Then Bertrand actually said, "All this one day will be yours, my son."

"Ah, my poor boy!" Monique protested.

"I know, I know," said Bertrand, nettled, and then smirking rather awfully. "That day is doubtless a long way off. Let him have his magazines and his films. Let him learn his business."

Wani said, "Thank you, Papa," but his smile was for his mother, and his look, briefly and eloquently, as the smile faded, for Nick. He was at home with his father's manner, his uncontradicted bragging, but to let a friend in on the act showed a special confidence in the friend. Wani rarely blushed, or showed embarrassment of any kind, beyond the murmured self-chastisement with which he offered a seat to a lady or confessed his ignorance of some trivial thing. Nick absorbed his glance, and the secret warmth of what it acknowledged.

"No, no," said Bertrand, with a quick tuck of the chin as if he'd been unfairly criticized, "Wani is in all things his own master. At the moment fruit and veggies don't seem to interest him. Fine." He spread his hands. "Just as getting married to his bloody lovely bride doesn't seem to interest him. But we sit back, and we wait on the fullness of time. Eh, Wani?" And he laughed by himself at his own frankness, as though to soften its effect, but in fact acknowledging and heightening it.

"We're going to make a lot of money first," Wani said. "You'll see."

Bertrand looked conspiratorially at Nick. "Now you know, Nick, the big simple thing about money? The really big thing-"

Nick placed his napkin gently on the table, and murmured, "I'm terribly sorry… I must just…"-pushing back his chair and wondering if this was even worse manners in Beirut than it was here.

"Eh…? Ah, weak bloody bladder," said Bertrand, as if he'd expected it. "Just like my son." Nick was ready to take on any imputation that enabled him to leave the room; and Wani, with a bored, almost impatient look, got up too and said,

"I'll show you the way."

9

THE PIANO TUNER came in the morning, and then the pianist herself, little Nina Something-over as Gerald called her, came from two to five to practise: it was a wearing day. The tuner was a cardiganed sadist who tutted at the state of the piano and took a dim view in general of its tone, the tiny delay and bell-like bloom that were its special charm. ("Oh," said Rachel, "I know Liszt enjoyed playing it…") From time to time he would break off his pitiless ascent of the keyboard to dash out juicy chords and arpeggios, with the air of a frustrated concert pianist, which was even worse than the tuning. Little Nina, too, drove them mad with her fragments of Chopin and Schubert, which went on long enough to catch and lull the heart before they dropped it again, over and over. She had a lot of temperament and a terrifying left hand. She played the beginning of Chopin's Scherzo No. 2 like a courier starting a motorbike. When she'd finished Nick helped Elena bring up and arrange the old gilt ballroom chairs from the trou de gloire. The sofas were trundled into new alignments, tall flower arrangements mounted the stairs on Elena's legs, and the room took on an unnerving appearance of readiness. Nick had one more task to do, which was to phone Ronnie, and he eyed the clock, in the run-up to six, as jumpily as if he was giving a recital himself.

He went out to a phone box on Ladbroke Grove, but it was back-to-back with another and he thought perhaps the man who was in it would hear what he said; he seemed almost to be expecting him, since he wasn't evidently talking, just leaning there. And it was still very close to home; it seemed to implicate Gerald. He went on down the hill, into a street that looked far more amenable to drug-dealing, where a man who could well have been an addict was just coming out of the phone box on the corner. Nick went in after him, and stood in the stuffy half-silence, fiddling in his wallet for the paper with the number on it, and wishing he'd already had a line of coke, or at least a gin-and-tonic, to put him in charge. He wished Wani could have done this, as usual, in the car, with the Talkman. Having given Nick the money, Wani liked to set him challenges, which were generally tasks he could more easily have done himself. Wani claimed never to have used a phone box, just as he had never been on a bus, which he said must be a ghastly experience. So he had never breathed this terrible air, black plastic, dead piss, old smoke, the compound breath of the mouthpiece-

"Yep."

"Oh, hello… is that Ronnie?"

"Yeah."

"Oh, hi! It's Nick here," said Nick, with an urgent smile at a spot low down on the wall. It was like calling someone you'd fancied at a party, but much more frightening. "Do you remember-I'm a friend of, um, Antony's…"

Ronnie thought for quite a while, while Nick panted encouragingly into the phone. "I don't know any Antony. No. You don't mean Andy?"

Nick tittered. "You know-sort of Lebanese guy, has a white Mercedes… sometimes calls himself Wani…"

"All right, yeah-enough said! Yeah, Ronnie..." said Ronnie, and chuckled affectionately, or with a hint of ridicule, so that Nick didn't know for a moment what he thought of Wani himself, any view of him seemed plausible. "The man with the portable telephone. He's Lebanese, is he? I didn't know he was Lebanese."

"Wani? Well actually he was born in Beirut, but he went to school here, and in fact he's lived in London since he was ten," said Nick, getting snagged as usual in a sub-clause to a more important sentence.

"… right…" said Ronnie after a bit. "Well I expect you'll be wanting to see me then. About something."

The great thing about Ronnie, as Wani said, was that he always came through. The stuff was tip-top, he dealt to some big names, and if the price, at one-twenty a gram, was a little steep, the mark-down at three-fifty for a quarter-ounce was a deal indeed. (A quarter-ounce, seven grams, was the only metric equivalent Nick had yet been able to memorize.) The downside of Ronnie was a strange delaying manner that would have seemed sleepy if it hadn't been also a kind of vigilance. He never rushed, he was never on time, and he had a puzzled porous memory. Nick had only met him once, when they'd driven round the block in his red Toyota and he'd watched the simple way the exchange was made. Ronnie was a cockneyfied Jamaican, with a tall shaved head and doleful eyes. He talked a lot about girlfriend troubles, perhaps just to make things clear. His voice was an intimate murmur, and since he was giving them something they wanted he had seemed to Nick both seductive and forgivable.

Today, it all felt much less happy. Ronnie asked him to ring back ten minutes later, when the routine of the first call was repeated almost verbatim, and again ten minutes after that, to check he was on his way. After each call Nick hung around the streets and felt glaringly criminal as well as vulnerable, with £350 rolled up tight in rubber bands in his pocket. The area seemed suddenly to be infested with police cars. For several minutes a helicopter hammered overhead. Nick wondered how he would explain the money to the police, then thought it was more likely they would wait until he got into the car before they made their move. He wondered if Gerald would be able to keep it out of the papers, if they'd be able to get Gerald into the papers, it was more than vulgar and unsafe, he could lose his seat if it came out that drugs were being taken in his house. How long would the sentence be? Ten years? For a first offence… And then, god, how would a pretty little poof with an Oxford accent survive in prison? They'd all be after his arse. He saw himself sobbing in a doorless lavatory. But perhaps a character reference from Professor Ettrick would help, or even someone at the Home Office-Gerald might not abandon him entirely! He was already at the place, the corner by the Chepstow Castle-a minute or two early. He perched at one of the picnic tables outside. The pub itself was shut, bleared light came out through plastic sheeting as work went on after hours, a new brewery had bought it, they were knocking the little old bars into one big room to make it more spacious and unwelcoming. Twelve minutes went past. It was very suspicious the way that man at the bus stop kept glancing at him and never got on a bus. Ronnie was getting careless, his phone was obviously tapped, it would be what they called a knock, when everyone in the street, the blind man, the pizza boy, the lady with the dog, were revealed in a second as plain-clothes officers. The car pulled up, Nick strolled over and got in and they cruised off round the block.

"How's it going, Rick?" Ronnie said, his mournful head not moving but his glance going from side to side and back to the rear-view mirror. Nick laughed and cleared his throat. "Very well, thanks," he said. They sat low in the Celica, Ronnie long-legged, arms on his knees, like a boy in a go-kart, long fingers turning the wheel by its crossbar rather than the rim. "Yeah?" said Ronnie. "Well, that's good. How's that Ronnie, then?"

Nick laughed nervously again. "Oh, he's fine, he's very busy." It was a wonderfully approximate world the real Ronnie lived in, and perhaps he liked it that way, his customers all nicknames and mishearings, it was tactful and safe. He looked in the mirror again, and at the same time his left hand went to his waistcoat pocket and then across to Nick, with the neat little thing held invisible under it. Nick was ready for that but he had to grope for the roll of notes in his pocket. Ronnie accelerated through an amber light, and it struck Nick he was breaking the law by not wearing a seatbelt. Ronnie wasn't wearing his either, that was the sort of world he was moving in, and he thought it might hurt his feelings if he belatedly buckled up. The journey must be nearly over, and the chances were they wouldn't have a prang. Awful, though, to get pulled over for a seatbelt violation, and then be questioned, and then searched… He nudged Ronnie's arm and he took the money and lost it, again without looking.

They pulled in behind the church at the crown of Ladbroke Grove, in the shadowy crescent of plane trees. "Thanks very much," said Nick. He really had to rush but he didn't want to seem unfriendly. Ronnie was looking out thoughtfully through the windscreen.

"This is an old church, Rick," he said. "This must be old."

"Yeah-well, it's Victorian, I suppose, isn't it," said Nick, who in fact knew all about it.

"Yeah?" said Ronnie, and nodded. "God, there's some old stuff round here."

Nick couldn't tell quite what he was getting at. He said, "It's not that old-sort of 1840s?" He knew not everybody had a sense of history, a useful image, as he had, of the centuries like rooms in enfilade. For half a second he glimpsed what he knew about the church, that the reredos was designed by Aston Webb, that it was built on the site of the grandstand of a long-vanished racetrack. It was a knobbly Gothic oddity in a street of stucco.

"I'm telling you, I'm moving up here, too fucking right I am," said Ronnie, in his protesting murmur.

"Mm, you should," said Nick, unsure if he was humouring him or sharing a wry joke, but excited anyway at the thought of having him as a neighbour. He was sexy, Ronnie, in his haggard spectral way…

"Get away from that woman, I'm telling you"-he shook his head and laughed illusionlessly. "I hope you're not having woman trouble, do you, Rick?"

"Oh… no… I don't," said Nick. "Still bad, is it?"

"I'm telling you," said Ronnie.

Nick could see that Ronnie might be a bit of a handful, and that his line of work might make a certain kind of girl uneasy. He wanted to lean over and get out his probably long and beautiful penis and give him the consolation that a man so perfectly understands-right here, in the car, in the dappled shade across the windscreen. But Ronnie had to get on-he offered his hand, coming down at an angle from a high raised elbow.

Nick got out of the car and turned to walk the two hundred yards to the house. In the street the sense of danger squeezed about him again, and the people who passed him as they came home from work frowned and sneered as they saw that he held a tiny parcel, a crass mistake, a heavy sentence, gripped tight in his hand in his pocket, ready, at the dreaded moment, to be flung down a drain. But when he turned up the steps and looked to left and right he had a gathering rapturous feeling he had got away with it. Of course nobody knew, it was totally safe, nobody had seen, it was nothing but an unknown car that slipped past the end of the street in a second. And now a flood of pleasure was waiting to be released. He rushed through the hall, up the stone stairs, there were voices already in the drawing room, the moan and yap of the first guests' opening platitudes, up and up, up the familiar creaking attic stairs, and into his hot still room that was waiting for him with birdsong through the window and the bed reflected in the wardrobe mirror. He closed the door, locked the door, and over a smiling five minutes changed his shirt, put in cufflinks, tied a tie and pulled on his suit trousers, all intercut with tipping out, chopping and snorting a trial line of the new stuff, hiding the rest in his desk, unrolling the banknote and rolling it up backwards, wiping the desk with his finger and his finger on his gums. Then he shrugged on the jacket, tied his shoes, leapt downstairs and talked brilliantly to Sir Maurice Tipper about the test match.

Nick sat at the end of a row, like an usher. He could see out onto the first-floor landing, where little Nina Glaserova, with her long red hair in a braid down her back, was standing and staring, not into the room but at a clear point in the dark oak of the threshold. Her eyes seemed to work straight through it, into a space where Chopin, Schubert and Beethoven waited for justice to be done to them. She listened as Gerald told the story-father a notable dissident-imprisoned-travelling scholarship withheld-without seeming to recognize it as her own, or knowing of course that dissident wasn't generally a term of approval in Gerald's book; artistic freedom was unemphatically invoked, and there was a joke, which she didn't get, though it made her look up, into the room, at the rows of utterly unknown laughing people, people of great consequence perhaps, whom it was her mission to enthral. The clapping started, Nick gave her an encouraging nod, she paused for a second, then scuttled in through the audience, looking so much like a determined waif that a sigh of startled tenderness seemed to sound like an undertone of the applause. She gave a momentary bow, sat down and began immediately-it was almost funny as well as thrilling when the motorbike summons of the Chopin Scherzo rang out.

There were about fifty people in the room, a loose coalition of family, colleagues and friends. Nina Glaserova was an unknown quantity, and Gerald's claims for her were political as much as artistic. He hoped for a success but he wasn't making a great social effort. Beside Nick a thin-lipped man from the Cabinet Office groped for his programme sheet as if the music had come as a slightly unpleasant surprise-he made a little scuffle with his chair and the paper. One or two people snapped their glasses cases as they tried well-meaningly to catch up with the leaping flood of sound. It was all so sudden and serious, the piano was quivering, the sound throbbed through the floorboards, and there were hints on some faces that it could be thought rather bad form to make quite so much noise indoors.

Nick could see the far curve of the front row, with Lady Partridge at the end, next to Bertrand Ouradi and his wife, and then Wani, in steep profile against the raised piano lid. Catherine, just behind them, was leaning on her boyfriend Jasper's shoulder, and Polly Tompkins was casually squashing against Jasper from the other side. Then there was Morgan, a steely young woman from Central Office whom Polly had brought along as if no one would be surprised. To see Nina herself Nick had to crane round the big white bonce of Norman Kent, who was as sensitive to music as he was to conservatives, and kept shifting in his seat. His frayed denim jacket collar made its own effect among a dozen grades of pinstripe. Penny was sitting beside him, and pressing against him to calm him and to thank him for coming. Nick wondered what he thought of Nina, he wondered what he thought of her himself, too assailed by the sound, by the astounding phenomenon of it, to know if she was really any good. Here came the opening again, the admonitory rumble, the reckless, accurate leap. She had clearly been ferociously schooled, she was like those implacable little gymnasts who sprang out from behind the Iron Curtain, curling and vaulting along the keyboard. As the sadly questioning middle section gathered weight, she put on a fearless turn of speed. She gestured very hard at her effects, and made you doubt she knew their cause. For, the programme sheet Nick had rifled some old sleeve notes, to give a professional look to things, and he had put in Schumann's description of the B-flat minor Scherzo as "overflowing with tenderness, boldness, love and contempt." He played the words through to himself as he gazed across the rows at his lover's head.

When the Chopin had finished, Nina bowed and rushed out, and Nick saw her on the landing again, waiting in fact like someone about to jump, too young and high-minded to care very much for applause, or to know what to do with it. Gerald was clapping in the loud, steady, hollow way he had. One or two people stood up, the man from the Cabinet Office took in the next item on the agenda, and the lady behind Nick said, "No, sadly we're at Badminton that weekend."

It was a couple of Schubert Impromptus that followed, the C minor and the stream-like E-flat major, which requires such unfaltering evenness of touch. Nick had heard her play through the very beginning of it a dozen times, until he was screaming at her in his head to go on. Well, now she did, watching her own hands busying up and down the keyboard as if they were astonishing automata that she had wound up and set in motion, in perfect synchrony, to produce this silvery flow of sound. She made it seem a bit like an exercise, but you could tell, if you listened, that the piece was life itself, in its momentum and its evanescence. The modulations in it were like instants of dizziness. Nick felt she played the B minor middle section too abruptly, so that the visionary coherence of the thing was spoiled.

He found himself staring at Gerald's mother and Wani's father, who made a funny pair. Bertrand was sitting there in the lustrous housing of his suit, very still, in respect for the tedious protocol of the event, with only his thin black moustache to betray his impatience as he pursed and flexed his lips in unconscious little kisses. Beside him Lady Partridge, her head tilted up, her face a mask of blusher and brown powder, like someone just back from a skiing holiday, was also clearly elsewhere. From time to time she glanced sideways at her neighbour, and at his drably dressed wife. Nick knew it was upsetting for her to sit next to what she always called an A-rab, but something seemed to kindle in her too at the closeness of so much money.

They had decided before the concert that they would do without an interval, so after the Schubert Gerald stood up and said in his genial, penetrating tone, the tone of a commander among friends, that they would go straight into the final item, Beethoven's "Farewell" Sonata, and then they could all have more to drink and some rather good salmon-an idea that was greeted with applause all of its own. Nina came back in looking slighted and doubly determined, Nick clapped her very vigorously, and when she played the first three descending notes, "Le-be-wohl," a shiver ran up his back. The man beside him looked at him suspiciously. But for Nick, to listen to music, to great music, which was all necessity, and here in the house, where the floor trembled to the sudden resolve of the Allegro, and the piano shook on its locked brass wheels-well, it was a startling experience. He felt shaken and reassured all at once-the music expressed life and explained it and left you having to ask again. If he believed anything he believed that. Not everyone here, of course, felt the same: Lady Kimbolton, there, the tireless party fund-raiser, kept a careful frown as she looked discreetly through her appointments diary, then shook the bangles down her arm as she came to attention again-the grey attention, mere good behaviour, of the governing class; she might have been in church, at the memorial service of some unloved colleague, in a world of unmeant expressions, the opposite of Beethoven. Gerald, at the other end of Nick's row, loved music, and was nodding now and then, just off the beat, like someone catching on to an idea, but afterwards Nick knew he would say it had all been either "glorious" or "great fun"-even Parsifal he had described as "great fun," when "glorious" had seemed the more likely option. Others were clearly touched by what they heard: it was Beethoven, after all, and the piece told a story, of departure, absence and return, which no one could fail to follow or to feel.

It was the absence that was best, and little Nina, whom it was hard to think of without her "little," seemed almost visibly to grow up as she played it. It was a proper andante espressivo, it moved and it moved along, she didn't ham up the emotion, in fact you saw her curbing some keen emotion of her own to the wisdom of Beethoven, so that the numbness of absence, the wistful solitude, the stifled climaxes of longing, came luminously through. Nick searched out Wani again, the sliver of profile, the dark curls crowding behind his ear-and wondered if he was touched, and if so in what way. He was watching his ear but he couldn't tell what he heard. In Wani, it was hard to distinguish complete attention from complete abstraction. Nick focused on him, so that everything else swam and Wani alone, or the bit of him he could see, throbbed minutely against the glossy double curve of the piano lid. He felt he floated forwards into another place, beautiful, speculative, even dangerous, a place created and held open by the music, but separate from it. It had the mood of a troubling dream, where nothing could be known for certain or offer a solid foothold to memory after one had woken. What really was his understanding with Wani? The pursuit of love seemed to need the cultivation of indifference. The deep connection between them was so secret that at times it was hard to believe it existed. He wondered if anyone knew-had even a flicker of a guess, an intuition blinked away by its own absurdity. How could anyone tell? He felt there must always be hints of a secret affair, some involuntary tenderness or respect, a particular way of not noticing each other… He wondered if it ever would be known, or if they would take the secret to the grave. For a minute he felt unable to move, as if he were hypnotized by Wani's image. It took a little shudder to break the charm.

There was a strange rough breath from Norman Kent, who was crying steadily-making rather a thing of it perhaps, pulling off his glasses and swiping his face with his hand. Nick admired the spirit of it, the defiant sensitivity, and also felt put out, since he often cried at music himself but on this occasion hadn't managed to do so. Penny rested her hand on her father's shoulder, and braved this familiar embarrassment. Nick saw she was blushing, which she easily did. Then the music turned on a sixpence, and the light-headed rush of the finale began. The marvellous marking, Vivacissi-mamente, was a red rag to Nina, and the music flashed by in delirious chirrups and stampings. Nick seemed to see Beethoven, or rather Nina herself, striding up and down some sonorous wooden-floored room in frenzied impatience for the joyful return. Norman made a grunt of rueful amusement, and Penny twisted round, as if freed by the optimistic turn of events, and looked gently, and still blushing, at Gerald, who caught her eye, lowered his gaze and coloured slightly also. Well, there was such an old tension between the two men, on stubborn matters of principle; for years it had been only Rachel's stubbornness that could make them forget their principles enough to meet, and nod at each other, and exchange doggish banter. Of course it was painful for Penny, and now perhaps she was making her own plea for reconciliation. Typing up Gerald's diary from the tape each day she must have a useful sense of his feelings.

The sonata finished and firm applause broke out, given a new edge of enthusiasm by the fact of its being the end-the whole experience was suddenly seen in a brighter light, it was time for a drink, they'd all done rather well. Norman Kent clapped with his hands above his head when Nina came back in, Catherine called out a hectic "Bravo," and Jasper imitated her and grinned as if he'd made a joke in class. For a second or two Nina stood there stiffly, then she sat down without a word and played Rachmaninov's Prelude in C-sharp minor. It was a piece the older members of the audience tended to know well, and though they didn't specially want to hear it, they indulged it and exchanged distracted smiles. After that there was very decisive applause, the piece had gone on for quite a while, one or two people looked round at the drinks table and the exit and started talking, and Nina came back in and played Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, in the famous Busoni transcription. At this Lady Kimbolton looked at her watch as if she was virtually blind, holding her arm up to the light, and a number of people started fanning themselves with their programme sheets. This caught on as a form of mutiny, with the associated jiggling of bracelets. When Nina came back the next time Gerald had stood up and was saying, "Um… aah," as if amiably bringing a meeting to order, but she sat down anyway and played the Sabre Dance by Khachaturian. It all seemed quite natural to Nick, she must have been told to have three encores ready, but there was still a possibility that she had four, so at a sign from Gerald he went out after her and congratulated her and asked her to stop. She stood on the landing and gazed down the pompous curve of the stairs as the applause pattered quickly to a close and the greedy roar of the party began.

"Hello, Judy!"

"My dear." Lady Partridge stood rigid while he kissed her rosy cheek-Nick never knew if she regarded a kiss as a homage or a liberty. He grinned at her, as if she was having as much fun as he was. "You seem very cheerful," she said.

Nick looked in the mirror where he did appear bright-eyed, sharing a rich secret with himself. "Well, a successful recital, I thought."

"Did you," said Lady Partridge; and then, merely to be agreeable, "I liked the last piece she played. I think I've heard it before."

"Oh, the Khachaturian."

She gave him a very dry look. "Got a swing to it."

"Mm, it certainly has"-Nick laughed quietly and delightedly, and after a second Lady Partridge smiled slyly too, as if she'd been cleverer than she knew.

A waitress came past and they both took new glasses of champagne. "Extraordinary people… " Lady Partridge was saying. As a rule she was happy and busy in Gerald's political world, she treated his colleagues very graciously, and felt a fierce thrill when, amongst the drab shop talk that alas made up most of their social dealings, they gave her an undiluted fix of policy, the really unanswerable need to reduce manufacturing, curb immigration, rationalize "mental health" (what abuse and waste there were there!), and get public services back into private hands. They were like rehearsals for the telly, and even more inspiring. They liquidated every doubt. Nick said,

"That's Lord Toft, isn't it… the man who builds all the roads."

"Nothing extraordinary about Bernie Toft," Lady Partridge said. Sir Jack himself of course had been in the construction business. "I don't know why Gerald has to ask that awful artist man."

"Oh, Norman, you mean? He's not very good, is he?"

"He's a red-hot socialist," said Lady Partridge.

They both looked over to where Norman Kent was standing by the piano, holding on to it symbolically, and probably conscious of his portrait of Toby hanging behind him, as if it was an element in his own portrait. Most people dodged him with a preoccupied smile and pretended to be searching for someone else, but Catherine and Jasper were talking to him. His voice rose emotionally as he said, "Of course you must, my dear girl, paint and paint and paint," and shook Catherine by the shoulder.

"Do you happen to know who that young man is with my granddaughter?" Lady Partridge said.

"Yes, it's Jasper, he's her new boyfriend."

"Ah… " Lady Partridge gave an illusionless nod or two; but said, "He looks a cut above the last one, anyway."

"Yes, he's all right…"

"He even appears to own shoes."

"I know, amazing!" Nick's main feeling about Jasper, very clear to him at the moment, was that he needed to be tied up face down on a bed for an hour or two. "He's an estate agent, actually."

"Very good-looking," said Lady Partridge, in her own odd lustful way. "I imagine he sells masses of houses."

Trudi Titchfield came past with a grimace, as if not expecting to be remembered. "Lovely party," she said. "It's such a lovely room for a party. We sadly only have the garden flat. Well, one has the garden, but the rooms are rather low."

"Yes," said Lady Partridge.

Trudi lowered her voice. "Not long of course before a very special party. The Silver Wedding…? I hear the PM's coming."

"I don't think the Queen's coming," said Lady Partridge.

"No, not the Queen-the PM"-in a radiant whisper. "The Queen! No, no…"

Lady Partridge blinked magnificently. "All rather hush-hush," she said.

Sam Zeman came past and said, "You're making me a rich man, my dear!" which was charming and funny, but he didn't stop to expand. Perhaps it was just the code of business, but Nick felt they'd used up their store of friendship in the gym and the restaurant, and that they would never be close to each other again.

In the crowd around the buffet (all chaffing courtesy and furtive ruth-lessness) little Nina was mixing with her audience, who in general were nice enough to say "Well done!" and ask her where on earth she had learnt to play like that. She had simple expressionless English, and the English people talked to her in the same way, but louder. "So your father, is in prison? You poor thingl" Just in front of Nick, Lady Kimbolton was greeting the Tippers. Lady Kimbolton's first name was Dolly, and even her close friends found ways of avoiding the natural salutation.

"Good evening, Dolly," said Sir Maurice, with a satirical little bow.

"Hello!" said Sally Tipper. "Well, that was very enjoyable."

"I know, heartbreaking," said Lady Kimbolton. "I imagine you saw the Telegraph this morning?"

"I did indeed," said Sir Maurice. "Congratulations!"

"I do like to hear music in the home," Lady Tipper said, "as in the times of Beethoven and Schubert themselves."

"I know… " said Lady Kimbolton, her square practical face tilting this way and that to see what was on the table.

"Nigel must be chuffed," Sir Maurice said.

"Maurice and I have been to a number of concerts at friends' houses lately, it's an excellent move," said Lady Tipper, who was known to be artistic.

"I know, there seems to be an absolute mania for concerts," Lady Kimbolton said. "This is the second one I've been to this year."

"I hear Lionel Kessler, you know…? had the Medici Quartet at Hawkeswood for a marvellous evening with Giscard d'Estaing."

"I think that's really what gave Gerald the idea," said Nick, joshing in between them as they got to the table.

"Oh, hello…"

"Hello, Dolly," said Nick. He knew he could do quite a funny sketch about Gerald's growing preoccupation with the concert idea, which had come to a peak of competitive angst when Denis Beckwith, a handsome old saurian of the right enjoying fresh acclaim these days, had hired Kiri te Kanawa to sing Mozart and Strauss at his eighty-fifth birthday party. But something made him tread carefully. "You know how competitive he is," he said.

"We're all for competition!" said Dolly Kimbolton, claiming her plate of salmon from the waiter.

"Jolly good, jolly good… " said Gerald, weaving through behind them. "Clever you to introduce us to a new artiste," said Sally Tipper.

"I liked that last thing she played," said Sir Maurice.

Gerald looked round to see where Nina was. "We thought rather than going for a big name…"

The "Badminton" lady was darting in for a bread roll. "You're so right," she said. "I hear Michael's hiring the Royal Philharmonic for their summer party."

"Michael…?" said Gerald.

"Oh?… Heseltine? Yup… yup… " She hunched in fake apology as she backed away. "Yup, the whole blinking RPO. What it must be costing.

But they've had a good year," she added, in a tenderly defiant tone.

"I thought we'd had a pretty good year," Gerald muttered.

Nick had been avoiding Bertrand Ouradi, but as he turned from the table with his plate there Bertrand was. "Aha, my friend the aesthete!" he said, and Nick was reminded of an annoying foreign waiter, perhaps, or taxi driver, for whom he was identified by a single joke. But he was able to say excitedly,

"How are you?"

Bertrand didn't answer-he seemed to suggest the question was both trivial and impertinent. He looked around the room, where people were grouping on the sofas and at little tables brought in by the staff and swiftly covered with white cloths. He didn't know where to settle, among these braying English snobs; his expression was proud and wary. "Bloody hot, isn't it," he said to Nick. "Come and talk to me"; and he led him, again like a waiter, with half-impatient glances over his shoulder, among the dotted supper tables-not to the cool of the great rear balcony but to a window seat at the front, looking onto the street. Perching there, knee to knee, partly screened by the roped-back curtains, they had a worrying degree of privacy. "Bloody hot," said Bertrand again. "Thank god that beast has got bloody air conditioning": he nodded at the maroon Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow parked at the kerb below.

"Ah," said Nick, unable to rise to such a wretched brag. In the back window of the car shiny white cushions were neatly aligned; he couldn't see the number plate but the thought that it must be BO something made him smirk-he pressed the smirk a little harder into a ghastly smile of admiration. One of Catherine's neuroses was a horror of maroon; it outdid her phobia of the au sound, or augmented it perhaps, with some worse intimation. Nick saw what she meant.

Bertrand asked him a few questions about the recital, and paid attention to the answers as though at a useful professional briefing. "Amazing technique," he repeated. "Still very young," he said, and shook his head and dissected his salmon. High and capable though he was, Nick hesitated to play the aesthete very thoroughly, hesitated to be himself, in case his tone was too intimate and revealing. The influence of Bertrand was as strong in its way as the coke, and he found himself speaking gruffly to him. He wondered actually, despite the keenness of his feelings, if Nina had been much good. Reactions were skewed by her being so young. He pretended he was Dolly Kimbolton and said, "The Beethoven was heartbreaking," but it wasn't a phrase that Bertrand saw a use for. He looked at him narrowly and said, "That last thing she played was bloody good."

Nick glanced out into the room to find Wani, who was sitting at a table with his mother and a middle-aged woman who looked quite prickly and confused under his long-lashed gaze. It was almost a decoy of Wani's to let his gaze rest emptily but seductively on a woman. He still hadn't spoken to Nick since his arrival; there had been a turn and a nod, a sigh, as if to say, "These crowds, these duties," when they were taking their seats. If it made him uneasy to see his lover and his father tete-a-tete he was too clever to show it. Bertrand said, "That son of mine, who's he flirting with now?"

Nick laughed easily and said, "Oh, I don't know. Some MP's wife, I expect."

"Flirting, flirting, that's all he bloody does!" said Bertrand, with a mocking flutter of his own eyelashes. Dapper and primped as he was, he became almost camp. Nick pictured the daily task of shaving above and below that line of moustache, the joy of the matutinal steel, and then the joy of the dressing room that was like a department of a shop. He said, "He may flirt, but you know he never really looks at another woman," and was thrilled by his own wickedness.

"I know, I know," said Bertrand, as though cross at being taken seriously, but also perhaps reassured. "So how's it going-at the office?"

"Oh fine, I think."

"You still got all those pretty boys there?"

"Um…"

"I don't know why he has to have all these bloody pretty poofy boys." "Well, I think they're very good at their jobs," Nick said, so horrified he sounded almost apologetic. "Simon Jones is an excellent graphic designer, and Howard Wasserstein is a brilliant script editor."

"So when does the bloody shooting start on the film?"

"Ah-you'd have to ask Wani that."

Bertrand popped a new potato into his mouth and said, "I already did-he never tells me nothing." He flapped his napkin. "What is the bloody film anyway?"

"Well, we're thinking about adapting The Spoils of Poynton, um…"

"Plenty of smooching, plenty of action," Bertrand said.

Nick smiled thinly and thought rapidly and discovered that these were two-elements entirely lacking from the novel. He said, "Wani's hoping to get James Stallard to be in it."

Bertrand gave him a wary look. "Another pretty boy?"

"Well, he's generally agreed to be very good-looking. He's one of the rising young stars."

"I read something about him…"

"Well, he recently got married to Sophie Tipper," Nick said. "Sir Maurice Tipper's daughter. It was in all the papers. Of course she used to go out with Toby-Gerald and Rachel's son." He produced all this hetero stuff like a distracting proof; he hoped he wouldn't normally be so cravenly reassuring.

Bertrand smiled as if nothing would surprise him. "I heard he let a big fish go-"

Nick blushed for some reason, and started talking about the magazine, with the brightness of a novice salesman, not yet committed and not yet cynical; he told him that he and Wani were going on a trip to research subjects for it-and that was the nearest he could get to stating the unspeakable fact of their affair. For a second he imagined telling Bertrand the truth, in all its mischievous beauty, imagined describing, like some praiseworthy business initiative, the skinhead rent boy they'd had in last week for a threesome. Just then he felt a kind of sadness-well, the shine went off things, as he'd known it would, his mood was petering into greyness, a grey restlessness. He felt condemned to this with Bertrand. It was just what had happened at Lowndes Square: the secret certainty faded after half an hour and gave way to a somehow enhanced state of doubt. The manageable joke of Bertrand became a penance. Nick was powerless, fidgety, sulkily appeasing, in the grip of a man who seemed to him in every way the opposite of himself, a tight little bundle of ego in a shiny suit.

Something awful happened with a waitress, who was taking round a wine bottle. She was black, and Nick had noticed already the flickers of discomfort and mimes of broadmindedness as she moved through the room and gave everyone what they wanted. Bertrand held out his glass and she filled it with Chablis for him-he watched her as she did it, and as she smiled and turned interrogatively to Nick, Bertrand said, "No, you bloody idiot, do you think I drink this? I want mineral water." The girl recoiled for just a second at the smart of his tone, at the slap-down of service, and then apologized with steely insincerity. Nick said, "Oh, I'm sure we can get you some water, we've got masses of water!" in a sweetly anxious way, as if to soften Bertrand's tone, to apologize for him himself, to give a breath of laughter to a rough moment; while Bertrand held the glass out stiffly towards her, expressionless save for a steady contemptuous blink. She held her dignity for a moment longer, while Nick's smile pleaded with her not to mind and with him to relent. But Bertrand said, "Don't you know bloody nothing?-Take this away," and glared at Nick as if to enlist or excite a similar outrage in him. Then when the girl had marched off, without saying a word, he looked down, sighed, and smiled ruefully, almost tenderly at Nick, as though to say that he would have liked to spare him such a scene, but that he himself was afraid of no one.

Nick knew he should move away, but he hadn't finished his main course; he took shameful refuge in it as a reason not to make a scene of his own. Other people must have heard. Tucked away in the window seat they must look like conspirators. Bertrand was talking about property now, and weighing the merits of wn against those of sw3; it seemed he too was thinking of moving to the neighbourhood. He looked at the room as if trying it on. "Well, it's lovely here," Nick said sadly, and gazed out of the window at the familiar street, at Bertrand's horrible maroon car, at the half-recognized evening life in the houses opposite, and at the big blond man who came up from the area of one of them, unlocked the big black motorbike that stood on the pavement outside, straddled it, pulled on and buckled his helmet, kicked the bike into eager life and three seconds later was gone. Only a buzz, a drone that faded as it rose, could be heard amid the high noise of talk in the room. It was as if the summons of the Chopin had been answered and the freedom seized by a lucky third person.

"Aah… " Gerald was saying, hovering like a waiter himself, the best of all waiters, "I hope everything's all right." He held a bottle of water in one hand and a freshly opened bottle of Taittinger in the other, as if hedging his bets.

"Marvellous!" said Bertrand, pretending not to notice these things, and then making a Gallic gesture of flattered surprise. "You're very kind, to wait on me yourself."

"These young girls don't always know what they're doing," said Gerald.

Nick said, "Gerald, obviously you've met… Mr Ouradi."

"We haven't really met," said Gerald, bowing and smiling secretively, "but I'm absolutely delighted you're here."

"Well, what a marvellous concert," Bertrand said. "The pianist had amazing technique. For one so young…"

"Amazing," Gerald agreed. "Well, you saw her here first!"

With an effect of creaking diplomatic machinery Dolly Kimbolton rolled into view, and Bertrand stood up, passing his plate with its toppling knife and fork to Nick. "Hello!" she said.

"Have you met Lady Kimbolton? Mr Bertram Ouradi, one of our great supporters."

They shook hands, Dolly leaning forward with the air of a busy headmistress rounding up stragglers for some huge collective effort. Bertrand said, in his tone of clear, childish self-importance, "Yes, I'm making quite a contribution. Quite a big contribution to the party."

"Splendid!" said Dolly, and gave him a smile in which political zeal managed almost entirely to disguise some older instinct about Middle Eastern shopkeepers.

"I don't know if we might all have a little chat…?" said Gerald, raising the champagne bottle. "And I think we might be needing this." The suggestion obviously didn't include Nick, who as so often wasn't visible and certainly wasn't relevant, and who was left, when the other three went off, holding Bertrand's unfinished supper as well as his own.

He closed the door, locked the door, and reached out for Wani, who patted him and kissed him on the nose as he turned away.

"Where's the stuff?" said Wani.

Nick went over to the desk, unhappy but caught up too in the business of the coke, which if he was patient enough might make them both happy again. He got out the tin from the bottom drawer. Wani said, "A tin is such an obvious place to hide it."

"Darling, no one even knows I've got anything to hide." He passed Wani the packet and smiled reproachfully. "It's just like our wonderful secret love affair."

Wani pulled out the chair and sat down at the desk, little clouds and gleams of possible rejoinders passing across his features. He peered at the stack of library books and selected Henry James and the Question of Romance by Mildred R. Pullman, which had a sleek Mylar sleeve protecting its dark jacket. "This should do," he said. He had never been in Nick's room before, and it was clear that it held no magic for him of the kind Nick had felt in Wani's room at Lowndes Square. Well, he wasn't one who noticed such things. He didn't thank Nick for meeting Ronnie or show any intuition of the scary drama it had been for him. Nick said, to remind him,

"I had such a sweet little chat with Ronnie. It seems he's hoping to move to this area." Wani said nothing, tipping out a bit of the rough powder onto the book. "He is very nice, isn't he?" Nick went on. "It was quite a business-ringing him and waiting and ringing again… And of course he was late…!"

Wani said, "You only like him because he's a wog. You probably fancy him."

"Not particularly," said Nick, whose wave of sexual feeling for him had been just a part of the criminal excitement, tension and relief at the same time, the feeling that Ronnie accepted not only his money but him; and then, to get it done, "I wish you wouldn't use that word. I keep trying to believe you're not as irredeemable as your father."

Wani weighed this up for a moment. "So what was Papa talking to you about?" he said.

Nick sighed and paced across the room-where they both were again, in the subtly glamorized light and depth of the wardrobe mirror. He had imagined Wani's being here so often, for secret sleepovers and also, in some other dispensation, freely and openly, as his lover and partner. He said, "Oh, he wants to move to this area too, apparently." He gave a snuffly laugh. "I ought to put him in touch with Jasper."

"That Jasper's a sexy little slut," said Wani, and it wasn't quite his usual tone.

"Yeah…? All white boys look the same to me," said Nick.

"Ha ha." Wani studied his work. "So-what else did he say?"

"Your old man? Oh, he was just pumping me again about you, and about the film. He has no idea what's going on, of course, but I think he's decided that I hold the key to the mystery. I did what I could to persuade him there wasn't a mystery."

"Maybe you're the mystery," said Wani. "He doesn't know what to make of you."

This was probably true, but also terribly unfair. Nick was longing to make a declaration, and now he felt violent towards Wani as well: his pulse was thumping in his neck as he stood behind him, then put his hands on his shoulders. All evening he'd needed to touch him, and the contact was convulsive when it came. Wani was working painstakingly and a little defensively with his gold card, making rapid hatching movements to and fro across the partially visible features of Henry James-not the great bald Master but the quick-eyed, tender, brilliant twenty-year-old, with an irrepressible kink in his dark hair. Nick squeezed Wani's neck with each clause: "I wish we didn't have to carry on like this, I feel I've got to tell someone, I wish we could tell people."

"If you tell one person you've told everybody," Wani said. "You might as well take a full-page ad in the Telegraph."

"Well, I know you're very important, of course…"

"You don't think we'd be at a party like this if people knew what we did, do you?"

"Mm. I don't see why not."

"You think you'd be hobnobbing with Dolly Kimbolton if she knew you were a pretty boy."

"She does know I'm a-that's such an absurd phrase!"

"You think so?"

"And anyway hobnobbing, as you call it, with Dolly Kimbolton is hardly an indispensable part of my life. I've never pretended not to be gay, it's you that's doing that, my dear. This is 1986. Things have changed."

"Yes. All the poofs are dropping like flies. Don't you think the mother and father of Antoine might worry a bit about that?"

"That's not really the point, is it?"

Wani made a little moue. "It's part of the point," he said. "You know I have to be incredibly careful. You know the situation… There!" He raised his hands as if he'd balanced something. "Now there's a line of beauty for you!" And he looked aside into the mirror, first at Nick and then at himself. "I think we have a pretty good time," he said, in a sudden weak appeal, but it was short of what Nick wanted.

Something happened when you looked in the mirror together. You asked it, as always, a question, and you asked each other something too; and the space, shadowy but glossy, the further room in which you found yourself, as if on a stage, vibrated with ironies and sentimental admissions. Or so it seemed to Nick. Now it was like a doorway into the past, into the moment he had thought "Oh good" when Ouradi first appeared, having missed the start of term, in the Anglo-Saxon class, and was called on to translate a bit of King Alfred, which he did very decently-Nick had fixed on him already and expected him, as a latecomer and a foreigner, to look for a friend in this group of raw eighteen-year-olds. But he had vanished again at once, into some other world not quite discernible through the evening mist on Worcester College lake. And the "Oh good," the "Yes!" of his arrival, the sight of his beautiful head and provoking little penis, were all Nick got, really, from Wani, in those Oxford years, when he himself was in disguise, behind books and beer glasses, "out" as an aesthete, a bit of a poet, "the man who likes Bruckner!" but fearful of himself. And now here he was with Wani, posing for this transient portrait, almost challenging him in the glass-and it was like the first week again: he was tensed for him to disappear.

He said, "Do you ever sleep with Martine?" It hurt him to ask, and his face stiffened jealously for the answer.

Wani looked round for his wallet. "What an extraordinary question."

"Well, you're quite an extraordinary person, darling," said Nick, thinking, with his horror of discord, that he'd been too abrupt, and pulling a hand through Wani's springy black curls.

"Here, have some of this and shut up," said Wani, and grabbed him between the legs as he came round the chair, like boys in a playground, and perhaps with the same eagerness and confusion. Nick didn't resist. He snorted up his line, and stepped away. Then Wani too, re-rolling the note, bent his head and was about to swoop when they both heard the dim cracks of footsteps, very close, already on the turn of the top stairs; and a voice, under the breath, indistinguishable. Wani twitched round and glared at the lock of the door, and Nick with his heart racing ran through the memory of turning the key. Wani snorted his line, up one nostril, pocketed the note and the wrapper and turned over the book, all in a second or two. "What are we doing?" he muttered.

Nick shook his head. "What are we doing…? Just talking about the script…"

Wani gave an absurd sigh, as if it might just do. Nick had never seen him so anxious; and somehow he knew, as he held his gaze, that Wani would punish him for having observed this moment of panic. It wasn't the drugs so much as the hint of a guilty intimacy. And now that it was done it was surely the locking of the door that was suspicious. "No, just ten minutes, baby," the same voice said, Nick smiled and closed his eyes, it was Jasper's phoney drawl, the familiar floorboard outside the bathroom creaked, a dress brushed the wall, and they heard the door of Catherine's room close, and almost at once the rattle of the key. Nick and Wani nodded slowly and smiles of relief and amusement and anticipation moved in sequence across their faces.

For Wani the first hit of coke was always an erotic rush, and for Nick too. They had kissed the first time they did coke together, their first kiss, Wani's mouth sour with wine, his tongue darting, his eyes timidly closed. Each time after that was a re-enactment of a thrilling beginning. Anything seemed possible-the world was not only doable, conquerable, but lovable: it showed its weaknesses and you knew it would submit to you. You saw your own charm reflected in its eyes. Nick stood and kissed Wani in the middle of the room-two or three heavenly minutes that had been waiting to happen, a glowing collision, a secret rift in the end of the day. They stood there, in their suits, Wani's lightweight Italian "grey," black really, like one of his father's suits but made to hint and flow, Nick, in the needle-fine pinstripe Wani had bought him, like one of the keen young professionals of the age, the banker, the dealer, the estate agent even…

Funny how sound travelled in an old house-through blocked-off chimney spaces, along joists. A rhythm almost inaudible to the cautious couple or unsuspecting soloist who made it was relayed as a workmanlike thump through the ceiling below or, as in this case, a busy squeak in the room next door. Stroking Wani's penis through his open fly, kissing his neck so that his skin stood up in shivers, Nick laughed but he was embarrassed too, almost shocked to hear them at it (which he never had before) and at it so promptly and so fast. No wasteful foreplay there-it made him wonder if Catherine was liking it, if Jasper wasn't being a brute with her, when surely she needed such careful handling. He felt Wani's grip tighten on his shoulder, pressing him down, and he went down on one knee, looking up at him sternly, and then on both knees and pulled his cock into his mouth. Wani wasn't big but he was very pretty, and his hard-ons, at least until the coke piled on too deep, were boyishly steep and rigid.

Nick worked on him easily and steadily, his own dick still buttoned away in a hard diagonal, something else waiting to happen, and the squeak of the telltale floorboard coming in rapid runs, like a manic mouse, and then with impressive intermittence; Nick almost went with it, but it was a distraction too, like the voices on the stair, a kind of brake or warning. They must have moved the bed, or they were fucking on the floor perhaps. He pictured them, Catherine vaguely and anxiously, Jasper much more vividly.

Wani's hands stroked and clutched at Nick's hair, tugged on it unpleasantly hard. "They're really going at it," he murmured. "The little sluts… " Nick glanced up and saw him smiling, in his erotic trance, not at him directly but at the two of them in the mirror; and also (Nick knew) staring through the mirror, and the wardrobe itself, into the room beyond, which he had never seen and which was just as readily the motel bedroom of some seedy flick. "They're really going at it-the little sluts"-Nick heard how he loved saying it again, whispering it, and grunted as Wani's little thrusts against his face fell into the accelerating rhythm of the kids next door. He felt awkward, pulled in to service a fantasy he couldn't quite share-he tried again, he'd jerked off a few times about Jasper already, but Catherine was his sister, and on lithium, and, well… a girl. He heard her voice now, quick staccato wails… and Wani's breathing, slipping away from him just at the moment he had him. And then another idea came to him, a second resort, a silent, comical revenge on Wani while he brought him off-it was Ronnie he'd invited in, to solace him for his woman trouble, to give him ten minutes of real care, man to man. It took a little adjustment, of course, a little further twist on make-believe, since the Ronnie he'd imagined was twice the size of Wani-at least. But as Wani pulled out and Nick squeezed his eyes tight shut, it could almost have been Ronnie in front of him, instead of the man he loved.

Downstairs, a little later, in the drawing room, the coda of the party was unwinding, and Gerald opening new bottles of champagne as though he made no distinction between the boring drunks who "sat," and the knowing few of the inner circle, gathered round the empty marble fireplace. The Timmses were there, and Barry Groom, with their different fanatical ways of talking, their shades of zeal and exasperation-all alien to Nick more than ever in the lull after drugs and sex. He saw that Polly Tompkins was sitting with them, as if among equals, and already impatient for something superior. Gerald, it was clear, hadn't yet got round to the new paper on Third World debt. "Have a look at it," said Polly, and nodded at him like a genial don. The strange thing was that it was also Gerald's nod, just as his white collar was Gerald's collar. The mimicry was artful, slightly amorous, and since the love was hopeless, slightly mocking too. Really everything nice about Polly was a calculation.

Morgan, the woman Polly had brought, came to join Gerald's group, where they were going back over the scandal of Oxford refusing the PM an honorary degree. John Timms, with his intense belief in form, regarded the incident as an outrage, but Barry Groom, who hadn't bothered with Oxford, said, "Fuck 'em's what I say," in a sharp frank tone that made Morgan blush and then weigh in like a man herself. The only touching thing about her was her evident uncertainty as to when or why anything was funny. "They seem to think the lady's not for learning," Gerald said. She looked bewilderedfy at their laughing faces.

From the balcony, in the late July evening, the gardens receded in depth beyond depth of green, like some mysterious Hodgkin, to a point where a faintly luminous couple reclined on the grass. The astonishing greenness of London in summer. The great pale height of the after-dusk sky, birds cheeping and falling silent, an invincible solitude stretching out from the past like the slowly darkening east. The darkness climbed the sky, and the colours surrendered, the green became a dozen greys and blacks, the distant couple faded and disappeared.

"Hallo there…!"

"Oh hi, Jasper."

"How are you, then, darling?"-almost tweaking him in the ribs.

"Very well. How are you?"

"Ooh, not bad. A bit tired…"

"Hmm. What have you been up to?"

Young Jasper, no younger probably than Nick, but with his chancy just-out-of-school look, quick and lazy at the same time, his flirtiness, his assumption he knew you, as if by bedding, or flooring, Catherine he gained equal rights, an instant history, with her intimate old friend… Jasper couldn't have known they'd been overheard upstairs, but his little smirk coming and going invited you to guess he'd been up to something. He had the pink of sex about him still. He leant by Nick on the balustrade, and he was clearly fairly drunk.

"Is Catherine OK?"

"Yeah… She's a bit knackered, she's turned in. This isn't really her sort of scene."

Nick stared at the compound presumption of this remark and said, "Things going OK between you two?"

"Ooh yes," said Jasper, with a momentary pout, a wincing frown, to say how very hot it was. "No, she's a lovely lady."

Nick couldn't rise to this. After a moment he said, as nicely as he could, "You are looking after her, aren't you, Jasper?"

"Hark at Uncle Nick," said Jasper, piqued and somehow furtive.

"I mean, she seems quite steady at the moment, but it would just be disastrous if she came off this medication again."

"I think she's got it all sorted out," said Jasper, after a pause, adjusting his tone, his whole accent. He stood back and pushed his right hand through his glossy chestnut forelock, which immediately fell forward again; then the hand went into his jacket pocket, with just the thumb hooked out: subtly annoying gestures meant perhaps to convey commitment and dash to the doubtful house-buyer. "She thinks the world of you, Nick," he said.

Polly Tompkins had come out onto the balcony, perhaps jealous at seeing Nick with the boy he had squashed unavailingly earlier. Nick introduced them in a thinly amused tone which made no great claims for either of them. "I thought you were avoiding me," he said.

Jasper was waiting casually to see what the terms were, and if this big fat double-breasted man, who could have been anything between twenty-five and fifty, was part of the gay conspiracy or the straight one. Polly said, "You're such a social butterfly, I haven't been able to reach you with my net," and looked at Jasper as if to say he could find a use for him, if Nick couldn't.

Nick said, "Well, I was a social caterpillar for years."

Polly smiled and took out a packet of fags. "You seem to be very close with our friend Mr Ouradi. What were you talking to him about, I wonder?"

"Oh, you know… cinema… Beethoven… Henry James."

"Mmm… " Polly looked at the Silk Cut-a quitter's ten-but didn't open them. "Or Lord Ouradi, as I suppose we shall soon be saying."

Nick struggled to look unsurprised as he ran through all the reasons that Polly might be pulling his leg. He said, "I wouldn't be surprised-there's a sort of reverse social gravity these days, isn't there. People just plummet upstairs."

"I think Bertrand's rather more deserving than that," said Polly, successfully resisting and pocketing the cigarettes.

"Anyway, he's not British, is he?" Nick said airily, and rather proud of this objection. It was Polly, after all, who'd once called him a Levantine grocer.

"That's hardly an insuperable problem," said Polly with a quick pitying smile. "Well, we must be going. I just wanted to say goodbye. Morgan has an early start tomorrow. She has to fly up to Edinburgh."

"Well, my dear," said Nick, "one never sees you these days. I've given up keeping your place warm for you at the Shaftesbury"-a kindness, a bit of a sentimental gesture at the sort of friendship they had never actually had.

And Polly did a small but extraordinary thing: he looked at Nick and said, "Not that I remotely concur with what you've just said-about the peerage." He didn't flush or frown or grimace, but his long fat face seemed to harden in a fixative of threat and denial.

He went in, and Jasper followed him, turning to give Nick a curt little nod, in his own unconscious impression of Polly, so that the mannerism seemed to spread, a note of contempt that was a sign of allegiance.

10

THE SERVICE STAIRS were next to the main stairs, separated only by a wall, but what a difference there was between them: the narrow back stairs, dangerously unrailed, under the bleak gleam of a skylight, each step worn down to a steep hollow, turned tightly in a deep grey shaft; whereas the great main sweep, a miracle of cantilevers, dividing and joining again, was hung with the portraits of prince-bishops, and had ears of corn in its wrought-iron banisters that trembled to the tread. It was glory at last, an escalation of delight, from which small doors, flush with the panelling, moved by levers below the prince-bishops' high-heeled and rosetted shoes, gave access, at every turn, to the back stairs, and their treacherous gloom. How quickly, without noticing, one ran from one to the other, after the proud White Rabbit, a well-known Old Harrovian porn star with a sphincter that winked as bells rang, crowds murmured and pigeons flopped about the dormer window while Nick woke and turned in his own little room again, in the comfortable anticlimax of home.

On his back, in the curtained light, the inveterate habits of home took hold of him without a word… Wani, of course… yes, Wani… in the car… and that time with Ricky, the outrage of it… though home, historically, was a shrine of Toby-longing, almost extinct now, worked up only in moods of vicious nostalgia… still, it seemed possible… Toby of three years ago… at Hawkeswood… morning after the great party… calling him into the King's Room, sweaty with hangover under one roiled sheet… "Fuck, what a night…!" and then he darted to the bathroom… only time he saw him naked… great innocent rower's arse… did that happen… did what happened next happen… and Wani that night…

met him on the stairs… who would have dreamt… dark green velvet… oh god, Wani in the flat… tied to the posts of the ogee bed…

It must be Mrs Creeley with his mother in the drive. They were talking about the car, Nick's little Mazda, "a nice little runaround" his father had called it, to minimize their evident anxiety as to how he had come by such a thing. NG 2485: Mrs Creeley was thrilled by the number plate, Mrs Guest perhaps not so sure. ("You must be doing very well, dear," she had said, in just the tone she would use to say "You don't look very well, dear.") Wood pigeons in the trees, in the thick spruces at the front, making their broody calls, reproachful, condoning-who knew? The two women moved away, in the slow trawl of gossip, over the gravel: talk about the sale of the field, syllables only, on the faint breeze through the open top window, overlaid by the pigeons, the talk beaded and chiming, rhythmic and nonsensical, the breeze lifting and dropping the curtain in one lazy breath, hushing the voices. The lie-in: time-honoured concession of school holidays, the rare weekend visits. His father would have gone to the shop-he might have woken to the familiar drag of garage door, thump of car door, and then wandered sideways again into staircase dreams. Mrs Creeley went, he didn't hear his mother come inside, she had probably got up in gardening trousers, an old blouse that didn't matter. They had Gerald descending tonight, and the house, inside and out, would be ready for an inspection… A little later came the leisurely clop of a horse, sounds as abstract and calming as other people's exertions on the tennis courts at home-at his other home. He wasn't sure, but he thought it was right that no horse had equal tone or resonance in all four hooves, as it distanced it made an odd sauntering impression, a syncopation, until lastly only one hoof continued faintly to be heard.

Out on the edge of town was where they were, where they'd carefully and long-sightedly chosen to be, on Cherry Tree Lane, decent post-war houses with plenty of garden, and only a view of fields at the back, and horses leaning in from time to time to chomp at the delphiniums and the weeping willow. And now the dreaded thing had happened, Sidney Hayes had bought next door, and thus at last got access from the lane to the field where he kept his horses, and got planning permission too, exceedingly quickly, five houses to the acre. Everyone had objected to the plans, and Nick had even been made embarrassingly to bring it up with Gerald, as their MP, who said of course he'd put a stop it, but quickly lost interest since no conditions had been breached, in fact rather the reverse, there was a property boom, home ownership was within the grasp of all, and even with the new development on top of them the value of "Linnells" was destined to soar. All this cast a muddling running shadow over Don and Dot Guest's lives. They were more comfortable than they'd ever been, business was better, and yet across their treasured view a long-held worry was about to materialize in bricks and slates.

Despite its long mute presence in his life Nick found it hard to care for the house, its pinkish walls and metal-framed windows; it lacked poetry. At Linnells, as Gerald had said of Hawkeswood, the contents were the thing: a ruck of furniture, crowded families of Staffordshire and Chelsea figures, three clocks ticking competitively in one room, where the real family sat, supervised and even a little oppressed by their own possessions. Which changed, unpredictably, when something came into the shop that Don wanted to live with, or when a buyer was suddenly found for something in the house. So the market squeezed on them, acceptably, amusingly, and they would let a chest or a grandfather clock go, which in Nick's young life had the status of an heirloom already. For years he had had a nice wide walnut bed, a snug double of imagined couplings-the whorls and fans in the grain of the walnut were the underwater blooms of adolescent thought, pale pond-life of a hundred lie-ins. But one Christmas, in fact the one after he had come out, he arrived home to find it had been sold from under him, and replaced by something plain, modem, single and inhibitingly squeaky. In the past year or so, as business boomed, Don had started asking "London prices," which had always been family code for extortion. Meanwhile London prices themselves had climbed, so Guest's was still cheaper and worth a day trip from town. Yesterday, after the big uneasy surprise of the car, Nick had had his own surprise, the missing bureau. "You'll never guess what I got for it," his father said-with a look of unaccustomed and still embarrassed greed.

Nick came downstairs and glanced out coyly at the car. He liked to give himself that little prepared surprise, it was new enough for the thrill of its first arrival to flare up beautifully again each morning. Like a child's new present it lit up a dull day, and made it worth getting up and going out, just to sit in the simmer of London traffic and feel the throb of possession. If it had shocked his parents, then it had shocked him too, the colour, the grin of it, the number plate, all things he wouldn't have chosen for himself. But the burden of choice and discretion had been taken off him, it was what Wani wanted him to have, and he let himself go. The car was his lower nature, wrapped in a gift ribbon, and he came to a quick accommodation with it, and found it not so bad or so low after all. A first car was a big day for a boy, and he wished his parents could just have clapped their hands at the fun of it; but that wasn't their way. He explained, as he smiled anxiously, that it was all to do with work, it was a tax write-off, it was nonsense he didn't understand himself. He tried to entertain them with the mechanism of the roof, and opened the bonnet for his father to look at the cylinders and things, which he did with a nod and a hum; clocks, not engines, were his oily interest. Nick wondered why they couldn't share in his excitement; but had to admit, after ten minutes, that he'd somehow known they wouldn't-the hilarity of his arrival had been a self-delusion. He thought of an obscure childhood incident when he'd stolen ten shillings from his mother to buy her a present of a little china hen; he'd denied it through such storms of tears that he wasn't sure now if he'd stolen the money or not; he'd almost convinced himself of his innocence. The episode still darkened his mind as a failed, an obscurely guilty, attempt to please. It was the same with the car, they couldn't see where it came from, and they were right in a way, since they knew him so well: there was something very important he wasn't telling them. In Rachel's terms the Mazda was certainly vulgar and potentially unsafe; but for Don and Dot its shiny red snout in the drive was more than that, it was the shock of who Nick was, and the disappointment.

Gerald was in Barwick on various duties, first the Summer Fete, which he was opening at two o'clock, and later a dinner at the Crown to mark the retirement of the agent; in between he was due to look in at Cherry Tree Lane for a drink. It was the last weekend before their departure to France, and his usual bad temper about anything to do with Barwick was only soothed by the prospect of making speeches at at least two of these events. Rachel had stayed at home, and Penny had come up with Gerald to write down people's names on bits of paper and prevent those muddles which had caused some bad feeling in the past.

The Barwick Fete, which Nick hadn't been to since his schooldays, was held in Abbots' Field, a park near the middle of town. On a normal Saturday afternoon the field had two dim attractions, a fragment of the once great Augustinian abbey, and a Gents where the maniacal rejoinders and obliterations of the graffiti had come to interest Nick in his adolescence even more than the Curvilinear tracery of the monks' choir. He had never made contact in the Gents, never acted on the graffiti, but whenever he passed it on a walk with his mother and heard the busy unattended flush of the urinal, his look became tense and tactful, he felt the kinship of an unknown crowd. Today the field was ringed with stalls, there was a skittle alley hedged with straw bales, a traction engine let out shrill whistles, and the silver prize band warred euphoniously with a jangling old carousel. Nick wandered round feeling both distinguished and invisible. He stopped to talk to friends of his parents, who were genial but just perceptibly short with him, because of what they knew or guessed about him. The friendliness, a note of bright supportive pity, was really directed to his parents, not to him. It made him wonder for a moment how he was talked about; it must be hard for his mother to boast about him. Being sort of the art adviser on a non-existent magazine was as obscure and unsatisfactory as being gay. He scented a false respect, which perhaps was just good manners; a reluctance to be drawn into truth-telling talk. He saw Mr Leverton, his old English master, who had done The Turn of the Screw with him and sent him off to Oxford, and they had a chat about Nick's doctorate. Nick called him Stanley now, with a residual sense of transgression. He felt a kind of longing behind Mr Leverton's black-framed glasses for the larger field of speculation Nick was moving in, and for other things too. The old tone of crisp enthusiasm quavered with a new anxiety about keeping up. He said, "Come back and see us! Come and talk to the A-level lot. We've had a very jolly Hopkins group this year." Later Nick said hello to Miss Avison, who much earlier in his life had taught him ballroom dancing; his mother had said it would be something he'd always be grateful for. She remembered all the children she'd taught, and with no acknowledgement that they'd grown and changed and hadn't danced a waltz or a two-step for twenty years. Nick felt for a moment he was still a treasured and blissfully obedient little boy.

The tannoy crackled and whined. Nick was at the far end of the field, dawdling behind a group of local lads, and pretending to admire a stall of primitive local pottery. The mayoress made a very dull speech, but it rode on the goodwill of the audience, and on the expectation that it would be over much sooner than it was. Families rambled with a half-attentive air across the grass. Her chain could be seen, the glint of glasses, and her bright-blue, white-bowed prime-ministerial dress, on the low platform; and Gerald, standing behind, with beaming impatience. She said something unfortunate about not being able to get a celebrity to open the proceedings this summer, but at least the person they had got was on time-"unlike a certain star of the airwaves last year!" After this Gerald leapt up to the mike as if seizing the controls of a bus from a drunk.

There was applause, not easy to measure, lost in the open air; as well as one or two shouts and klaxon-squawks to remind Gerald that though he had a large majority there were still constituents unsedated by council-house sales and tax cuts. "I liked it when they had Derek Nimmo," a woman said to Nick. Nick knew what she meant, he absorbed people's gibes about Gerald without protest, but still felt the old secret pride at knowing him. He gazed around, followed the Carter boy's amazing arse with his eyes, smiled loyally at Gerald's jokes, and sensed in them a mixture of piety and condescension rather like his own. He felt so decadent here. And how could you honestly expect Gerald, at the door of the Cabinet, in the Lady's favour, an amusing speaker from the floor of the House, to bother very much for an audience of squalling kids and deaf pensioners? Catherine said Gerald despised his constituents. "If only you didn't have to be MP for somewhere," she said, "Gerald would be completely happy. You know he loathes Barwick, don't you." Nick had laughed at this, but wondered if his "dear ma and pa" were in fact exempt from the loathing. "This is a classic English day," Gerald was saying now, "and a classic English scene." And Nick appealed against Catherine's judgement. Surely something else is happening, beneath the cheerful imposture: it can't help mattering to him-as he speaks these platitudes he comes to think they're fine words after all, he's caught up on a wave of rhetoric and self-esteem. He told a joke about a Frenchman on a cycling holiday that went down well; and as he wound up, at just the right time, he managed to suggest that far from being a rich businessman who came down from London to loathe them he was in fact the spirit of Barwick, the Pickwick of Barwick, opening the fete to them as if it were his own house. He cut the tape, which demarcated nothing, in a decisive lunge: the sliding snap of the shears could be heard over the microphone.

After this Gerald was led off on a quasi-royal tour of the fete, his style hampered by the mayoress, who fell naturally into the role of consort. Nick wanted to keep an eye on who was going into the Gents, but felt the pull of the London party too, and strolled over to join Penny. "That went well," he said.

"Gerald was excellent, of course," said Penny. "We're not very pleased with the mayoress." They watched the mayoress now, at the jam stall, looking at the prices as if they were trying to cheat her, and might need beating down; at which Gerald, who didn't know the shop price of anything except champagne and haircuts, impulsively bought two jars of marmalade for a fiver and posed with them for the local press. "Hold them up a bit, sir!"-and Gerald, always reassured by the attendance of photographers, cupped' them in front of him, almost lewdly, until Penny came forward, silent agent of a wish, and took them from him; he held on to them for a moment as he passed them over and murmured, "Je dois me separer de cette femme commune."

At the tombola he bought ten tickets, and stood around waiting for the draw. The prizes were bottles, of all kinds, from HP Sauce to Johnnie Walker. He hadn't dressed for the country at all, and his keynote blue shirt with white collar and red tie, and his double-breasted pinstripe suit, stood out as a dash of Westminster among the shirtsleeves and jeans and cheap cotton frocks. He nodded and smiled at a woman beside him and said, "Are you having a good day?"

"Mustn't grumble," said the woman. "I'm after that bottle of cherry brandy."

"Jolly good-well, good luck. I don't suppose I'll win anything."

"I don't suppose you need to, do you?"

"All right, Mr Fedden, sir!" said the tombola man.

"Hello! Nice to see you… " said Gerald, which was his politician's way of covering the possibility that they'd met before.

"Here we go, then! HP Sauce, I expect, for you, isn't it, sir?"

"You never know your luck," said Gerald-and then, as the hexagonal drum was cranked round, "Something for everybody! All shall have prizes!"

"Ah, we've heard that before," said a man in gold-rimmed glasses who evidently fell into the category of "smart-alec socialist," the sort who asked questions full of uncheckable statistics.

"Nice to see you too," Gerald said, turning his attention to the numbers.

"Hah!" said the man.

The cherry-brandy lady won a half-bottle of Mira Mart gin, and laughed, and blushed violently, as if she'd already drunk it and disgraced herself. Lemonade, then Guinness, went next. Then Gerald won a bottle of Lambrusco. "Ah, splendid…" he said, and laughed facetiously.

"I understand you like a drop of wine, sir," said the tombola man, handing it over.

"Absolutely!" said Gerald.

"Don't keep it," whispered Penny, just beside him.

"Mmm…?"

"One doesn't keep the prize. Doesn't look good…"

"Looks bloody awful," Gerald muttered; then boomed considerately, "I don't feel I should snatch victory from my own constituents." Shy cheers were sounded. "Barbara-can I persuade you…?"

The lady mayor seemed to register at least three insults in this proposal: to her status, to her taste, and to her well-advertised abstinence. Nick had a hunch too that she wasn't called Barbara. Wasn't she Brenda Nelson? The bottle lay for a moment in Gerald's hands, as if tendered by a mocking sommelier. Then he passed it hastily back to the trestle table. "Give someone else a treat," he said, with a nod.

Still, the feeling that he ought to be allowed to win something had clearly taken hold of him. Seeing his chance, craning round as if he'd lost someone, he struck out by himself through the crowds. Penny trotted patiently after him, clutching the marmalade, and then Nick, some way behind the wake of laughter and agitation that followed Gerald's passage.

The sport of welly-whanging was unknown in the Surrey of Gerald's youth, as it was of course in contemporary Notting Hill; the only wellies he ever touched in middle life were the green ones unhoused from the basement passage for winter weekends with country friends. But at Barwick, which still had a regular livestock market and loose straw blowing in the street, the welly, black, leaden-soled, loose on the heel, was an unembarrassed fact, and whanging it a popular pastime. Gerald approached the flimsy archway made of two poles and a banner, beneath which a white chalk crease had been drawn. "Put me in for a go!" he said. He had the expression of a good sport, since he was new to the game, but a glint of steel showed through.

"That's 25p a whang, sir, or five for a pound."

"Ooh, give us a quid's worth," said Gerald, in a special plummy voice he used for slang. He groped busily in his pockets, but he'd spent all his change already. He got out his wallet and was hesitantly offering a £20 note when Penny stepped forward and put a pound coin on the table. "Ah, splendid… " said Gerald, observing a couple of teenage boys who weren't making an effort-the boot plonked to earth a few feet in front of them. "OK…!"

He took the boot and weighed it in his hand. People gathered round, since it was something of an event, their MP, in his bespoke pinstripe and red tie, clutching an old Wellington boot and about to hurl it through the air. "Know how to whang it, then, Gerald?" said a local, perhaps kindly. Gerald frowned, as though to say that instruction could hardly be necessary. He'd seen the ineffectual lob of the boys. He took his first shot from the chest, in muddled imitation perhaps of a darts-player or shot-putter, the sole to the fore. But he had underestimated the weight of the thing, and it landed between the first two lines. "You've got to really whang it," said a sturdy but anxious-looking woman, "you know…"-and she made a big arcing gesture. The boot was handed back to him by a little boy and he tried again, with a barely amused smile, as if to say that taking advice from working-class women in headscarves and curlers was all part of being their MP. He dutifully imitated her windmilling gesture, but perhaps because of the restriction imposed at the top of the arc by his tightly tailored jacket, he let go of the boot in a twirling spin-it turned over two or three times in the air before thudding to the grass. "Now that's a bit better," someone murmured "Now you're getting there!" Another man called out hectically, "Up the Conservatives!" Nick realized with a soft shock that there was a lot of goodwill for Gerald among the crowd, as well as the common sense of delight at seeing a famous person perform even the simplest task; and Gerald seemed to draw on this for his third attempt. He unbuttoned his jacket, an action which itself was greeted with approval, and sent the welly in a vigorous underarm lob, still wastefully high, but landing beyond the twenty-yard mark. There was applause, and varied advice, as to where to hold the boot, at the top or halfway down or at the heel, and Gerald obligingly tried out the different grips. The fourth go was as wildly wrong as a return off the edge of the racket in tennis. There was some exasperation among the onlookers, again mixed in with a kind of solicitude, and a very ironic voice, which turned out to be that of the smart-alec socialist, said, "That's all right, you have to be prepared to make a fool of yourself." For his final shot, with a sharp snuffle as he let go, Gerald sent the missile in a long low arc, and it landed and bounced wobblingly aside in the uncalibrated zone beyond twenty-five yards. The boy ran in and stuck a blue golf tee at the point of contact. There was applause, and pictures were taken by the press and the public. "I hope I've won a prize," Gerald said.

"Ah, you won't know yet, Gerald," said a helpful local. It was an extension perhaps of the bogus camaraderie of election time, the blind forging of friendships, that constituents felt free to call their MP by his Christian name, and in Gerald's face a momentary coldness was covered by a kind of bashfulness, bogus or not, at being a public property, the people's friend.

"Mr Trevor," murmured Penny at his elbow. "Septic tank."

"Hullo, Trevor," said Gerald, which made him sound like the gardener.

"Five o'clock," Mr Trevor said. "That's when we'll know: one that's thrown the farthest wins the pig." And he pointed to a small pen, previously hidden by the crowd, in which a Gloucester Old Spot was nosing through a pile of cabbage stalks.

"Goodness…" said Gerald, laughing uneasily, as if he'd been shown a python in a tank.

"Breakfast, dinner and tea for a month!" said Mr Trevor.

"Yes, indeed… Though we don't actually eat pork," Gerald said, and he was turning to move on when he saw the man in gold-rimmed glasses approaching the oche and weighing the gumboot knowingly in his hand.

"Ah, Cecil'll show you a thing or two!" shouted out the woman in curlers, who maybe wasn't Gerald's friend after all-you never knew with these people. Cecil was slight, but wiry and determined, and everything he did he did with a thin smile. Gerald waited to see what happened, and Nick and Penny closed in and tried to talk to him about something else. "I bet he knows some trick," said Gerald, "what…?"

Cecil's trick was to take a short run-up, and then with a complete revolution of the arm to send the welly flying as if to a waiting batsman-it was a dropper, the boot descending steeply to a spot a yard beyond Gerald's final mark; the boy ran out and pressed in a red golf tee. Then Cecil had another trick, which was to throw it underarm, lofting it not too high, and bringing it down short of the first shot, but still beyond the blue tee. He had a grasp of the weight and direction of the thing, the trajectory, no mid-air wavering or tumbling. He refined and varied these methods, and with his last go went a good three yards over his own record. Then, wiping his hands, his smile twitchily controlled, he walked over and stood not next to but near Gerald. "Ah, shame, but there you are," said Mr Trevor. "Still, if you've no use for the animal -"

Gerald said breezily, "Oh, damn the animal," and looked from Penny to Nick, and then to the bristlingly insouciant figure of Cecil. He began to remove his jacket, with tiny quick head-shakings, his colour rising, making a joke of his own temperament, frowning and smirking at once. "I feel that can't be allowed to pass without a firm rejoinder," he said, in his humorous but meaningful debating tone. There were cheers, and also a few whistles, as his jacket came off and blue braces, dark sweat-blooms, were revealed: a sense, depending on how you looked at it, that Gerald was being a terrific sport or that he was making a fool of himself, as Cecil had said. Penny, always vigilant, took his jacket with an eyebrow-flicker of caution, but enough of a smile to be publicly supportive. Then she had to search in her bag for another pound coin.

"So you've won a pig!" Nick's mother said, bringing Gerald through into the sitting room at Linnells. "Goodness…"

"I know… " said Gerald. He still looked a bit flushed from the effort, in need of a shower perhaps, hair smeared back, a bit barmy still with adrenalin. "It went to five rounds but I got him in the end. I won convincingly." Dot Guest glanced about the densely furnished room, gestured at one seat after another, and seemed to feel that the house was too small altogether for Gerald. He kicked against things, he was untamed, it was almost as if the pig had come barging in after him. He went to the window at the back and said, "What a charming view. You're virtually in the country here, aren't you."

Courteously, and very timidly, clearing a space on a side table, Dot murmured, "Yes… we are… as good as…" and then looked up gratefully as Don came in with gin-and-tonics on a silver tray. Gerald had entirely forgotten about the field.

"Well, what a day, who'd have thought it," he said: "welly-whanging: another string to my bow." And he flung himself down in Don's armchair as if he lived there, just to put them at their ease. "Thanks so much, Don"- reaching up for his drink. "I feel I've earned this."

"Where is the pig?" Nick's father said.

"Oh, I've given it to the hospital. One doesn't keep the prize, obviously, on these occasions. Good health!"

Nick watched them all take refuge in their first sip. He felt ashamed of the smallness of the drinks, and the way his father had made them in the kitchen and brought them in like a treat. His parents looked at Gerald proudly but nervously. They were so small and neat, almost childlike, and Gerald was so glowing and sprawling and larger than local life. Don was wearing a bright red bow tie. When he was little Nick had revered his father's bow ties, the conjuror's trick of their knotting, the aesthetic contrasts and implications of the different colours and patterns-he'd had keen favourites, and almost a horror of one or two, he had lived in the daily drama of those strips of paisley silk and spotted terylene, so superior to the kipper ties of other dads. But now he was made uneasy by the scarlet twist below the trim white beard; he thought his father looked a bit of a twit.

Dot said, "We're lucky you had time to come and see us. I know you must be terribly busy. And you're about to go away, aren't you?" It was one of her "professional" worries, all parts of the great worry of London itself, along with fainting Guardsmen and the tedium of being in The Mousetrap, as to how MPs coped with their massive workloads; it was something Nick had been asked to find out when he moved in. His conclusion, that Gerald didn't do the work at all, but relied on briefings by hard-working secretaries and assistants, was considered cynical and therefore untrue by his mother.

Gerald said, "Yes, we're off on Monday," and gave a great shrug of relief. Nick could see him, bored and suggestible, start brooding at once on the superior pleasures of the manoir.

"I wonder how you fit it all in," Dot said, "all the reading you must have to do. It worries me-Nick says I'm silly… You probably never sleep, do you, I don't see how you could! That's what they say about… the Lady, isn't it?"

Nick had inculcated his parents with Gerald's form the Lady, but was embarrassed to hear them use it in front of him. He seemed to take it as a tribute, however, both to her and to himself. "What, four hours a night?" he said, with an admiring chuckle. "Yes, but the PM's a phenomenon-terrifying energy! I'm a mere mortal, I need my beauty sleep, I'm not ashamed to say."

"She looks beautiful without any sleep, then," said Dot piously, and Don nodded his agreement, too shy, as yet, to ask the question that burned in them both: what was she like?

Gerald, knowing they wanted to ask that, showed he hadn't lost sight of the original question. "But you're right, of course." He took them into his confidence. "The paperwork can be quite overwhelming at times. I'm lucky in that I'm a fast reader. And I've got a memory like an ostrich. I can gut the Telegraph in ten minutes and the Mail in four-you just get a knack for it."

"Ah," said Dot, and nodded slowly. "And how is your daughter?" She was being attentive and courteous, and Nick saw that she would run through things that troubled her, and hope to get a better answer out of Gerald than she could out of him. "I know you've been worried about her, haven't you?"

"Oh, she's fine," said Gerald breezily; and then seeing some use in the idea of being worried, "She's had her ups and downs, hasn't she, Nick-the old Puss? It's not easy being her. But you know, this thing called librium that she's on has been an absolute godsend. Sort of wonder drug…"

"Mm… lithium," said Nick.

"Oh yes…?" said Dot, looking uneasily from one to the other.

"She's just a much happier young pussycat. I think we've turned the corner."

Nick said, "She's doing some great work now, at St Martin's."

"Yes, she's doing marvellous collages and things," said Gerald.

"Ah, modern art, no doubt," said Don, with a dreary ironic look at Nick.

"Don't pretend to be a philistine, Dad," said Nick, and saw him unable to separate the praise from the reproach; the French pronunciation of philistine didn't help.

"It seems to work for her, anyway," said Gerald, who liked the therapeutic excuse for Catherine's large abstract efforts. "And she's got a super boyfriend, that we're all very happy about. Because we haven't always had good luck on that front."

"Oh… " said Dot, and looked down at her drink as if to say that neither, indeed, had they.

"Mm, we're jolly proud of her, in fact," said Gerald grandly, so that he seemed slightly ashamed. "And we're all going to be together in France this year, which Rachel and I are delighted about. First time for some years. And Nick too, as you know, will be joining us… at least for a bit… long overdue…" and Gerald guzzled the rest of his gin-and-tonic.

"Oh," said Dot, "you didn't say, dear."

"Oh, yes," said Nick. "Well, I'm going with Wani Ouradi, you know, who I'm working with on this magazine-we're going to Italy and Germany to look at things for that, and then we hope to drop in at… the manoir, for a few days on the way back."

"That'll be a wonderful experience for you, old boy," Don said. And Nick thought, really the poor old things, they do as well as they can; but for a minute he almost blamed them for not knowing he was going to Europe with Wani, and for making him tell them a plan so heavy with hidden meaning. It wasn't their fault that they didn't know-Nick couldn't tell them things, and so everything he said and did took on the nature of a surprise, big or little but somehow never wholly benign, since they were aftershocks of the original surprise, that he was, as his mother said, a whatsit.

"Because you normally have Nick to look after the house for you, don't you," she said. "When you're away." She clung to this fact, as a proof of his trustworthiness to important others, who apparently didn't care about his being a whatsit one way or the other.

"Poor old Nick, he has got rather landed with that in the past. This year we'll have our housekeeper and her daughter move in, and they can do a massive clean-up of the house without us getting under their feet. It makes a bit of a holiday for them." Gerald gestured liberally with his empty glass.

"That sounds like the sort of holiday I'm used to!" said Dot, who longed for the spoiling of a hotel, but was subjected to her sister-in-law's cottage at Holkham each September.

Don brought Gerald a refill, and had a tiny one himself; they tended not to go at quite that pace. He said, "He's a good chap, is he, this Ouradi?"

"You haven't met him… no… Oh, he's a charmer, absolutely. My son Tobias and he were great friends at Oxford-well, you all were, weren't you, Nick."

"I didn't get to know him well until a bit later," Nick said carefully, remembering the bathroom of the Flintshires' Mayfair house, the way the coke numbed their lips as they kissed. It gave him a tingle now, the thought of the other world that was waiting for him.

"Someone in his position can't help but do well," said Don.

"I have the feeling… " said Gerald, with a condescending twinkle. "I know high hopes are riding on him. The father's quite a character, of course."

"He's the supermarket chappie, isn't he."

"Bertrand? Oh, a. great man!" said Gerald, who used the word very freely, as if hoping it might stick as easily to himself. "I mean, an outstanding businessman, obviously… Awfully sad, I didn't know till the other day, but you know, they lost their first son."

"Oh, really…"

"Yup, he was knocked down by a lorry in the street, in Beirut of course. The child and his nanny or whatever they call them were both killed. Bertrand Ouradi was telling me about it only the other day."

Nick had to pretend he already knew7 this, and nodded sombrely to confirm it to his parents, who murmured in sympathy but seemed not to care much, as if a death in Beirut were only to be expected. "Yes, it was an awful thing," Nick said. It was a total surprise. His first thought was that his smug reckonings of intimacy with Wani looked very foolish. It was the family mystery, hardly glimpsed, far stronger and darker than their little sexual conspiracy. And Wani was carrying that burden… He seemed instantly more touching, more glamorous and more forgivable.

"His fiancee looks a sweet little thing," said Dot. "I've seen her at the hairdresser's."

"Really…"

"In the Tatler, I mean!"

"Ah, yes…"

"Of course Nick was in the Tatler, after that marvellous party of yours. We dined out on that for months." This was one of his mother's favourite boasts, and strictly a figure of speech, since they only dined out about three times a year. "Who's the other one we see? That great big fat one, that Nick knows?-Lord Shepton: he's always in."

"What about this little runaround of Nick's?" said Don, with anxious enthusiasm.

"Mm, she's a lively little thing," said Gerald.

"Did you say he'd given the car to you, dear, I didn't quite understand…"

"I told you, Mum," Nick said, "it's like a company car. I can drive it while I'm working for him."

"He must think very highly of you," Dot said doubtfully. "Well, it's all another world, isn't it?" No one quite assented to this, and after a moment she went on, "And how's your son?"

"Oh, he's in great shape. Set up his own little company now, we'll see how he gets on."

"We used to see his name in the paper a lot!" said Don, as if Toby's back-half paragraphs on share prospects had been the highlight of their days.

"Mm, I think that was a bit of a wrong turning. He's an outdoor sort of chap, you know, far too confined by office life… Well, it only lasted five minutes; and good on him for giving it a go."

"Oh, absolutely…"

"It was a bit more than that," said Nick.

"Mm? Nick's probably right," said Gerald. "What was it, six months on the Guardian, where I don't think he felt at all at home, and then a year or so on the Telegraph, on the City desk… yah."

"Some of Nick's university friends seem to have made their fortunes already," said Dot. "Who was it, dear, you said had bought a castle or something?"

"Oh… " said Nick, regretting having bragged about this. "Yes, one of them has. It's quite a small castle…! But he's in reinsurance, you know."

"Ah," said Dot. Nick hoped she wouldn't ask him what reinsurance was. "They go so fast these days, don't they!" she said, as if Gerald might be equally breathless at the thought.

"Lord Exmouth's son's doing jolly well," said Don.

"Ah yes," said Gerald. "One of our local blue-bloods!" He had suddenly become a Barwick man at the mention of the indigenous aristocracy.

"That's right," said Don. "Well, I look after the clocks at Monksbury, so I've seen young Lord David on and off since he was a little boy."

"Really…?" Gerald gave him a narrow look over the rim of his glass. "You don't go to the Noseleys, I suppose?"

"Not since the old lady died," said Don. "I did a lot of work out there, ooh, ten years ago now I suppose. Of course they had death-watch beetle at Noseley Abbey. They had a devil of a job getting rid of the little tinkers!"

Nick got up to pass round a dish of stuffed olives and made small waiterly noises to distract his father from saying what he knew was coming next. "Thanks so much," said Gerald.

"No, it's a pleasure doing things at these great houses," Don said. "Even if they're not very quick at settling their accounts." He looked round fondly. "We've got so many of them round here. Nick's tired of hearing this, but I've got two earls, one viscount, one baron and two baronets on my books!"

"Quite a tally," said Gerald. "We'll have to see if we can find you a duke."

"Of course, the fabulous thing," said Nick, in a rush of shame, "is the quality of the furniture in all these houses. Things that have been there for centuries."

"Quite so…" Gerald nodded, as if he took that point very seriously himself. He raised and lowered his eyebrows, in perplexity at his empty glass.

Don said, "Nick tells me you have some lovely pieces at your London house."

"Oh…"

"A fair bit of French work, I believe?"

"Quite a bit of French work, yes," said Gerald, who didn't have a clue where most of it came from.

"And some lovely paintings too."

Gerald gave them a look of thoughtful beneficence, just coloured with impatience, even a kind of disdain-or so it seemed to Nick, who felt for both parties, as though he were witnessing an argument with himself. "You know you really should come and see us, shouldn't they, Nick?-or come even when we're away. Come when we're in France and make yourselves at home. Have the run of the place. You could have a look at all our stuff, while you're about it, and tell us what's what."

"Well, that's immensely kind," said Don, smiling at the seduction of the idea.

"Oh, I don't think we could," said Dot, whose fear of liberties in general included even those that might be allowed to herself. "I mean, it's awfully nice of you, of course…" She looked crushed by the offer, and bit her cheek as she peered at Don. Nick thought his mother sometimes obtuse and narrow-minded, he deplored her sillinesses, and at the same time he was so attuned to her moods, to the currents of implication between a mother and an only child, that he could trace the lines of her anxiety without effort. To come to Kensington Park Gardens, to stay in the house and rootle hesitantly around in it, would satisfy a curiosity; but it would also give unforgettable shape and detail to the world in which Nick lived, with its tolerance and its expenditure, its wine cellars and its housekeepers who hardly spoke English, and the Home Secretary ringing up just like that, which Nick said sometimes happened. It would be a flood of knowledge, and in general, as she said, she would rather not know anything more.

"Give it some thought, anyway," said Gerald; and Nick knew, as his parents murmured and glowed, that it would never be mentioned again.

He drove into the Market Square and slowed down as they approached CLOCKS D. N. GUEST ANTIQUES: "There's our shop!"-he raised an arm, as if showing him the Doge's Palace or some other great thing he was about to visit.

"Absolutely!" said Gerald. Nick could only glance at it, but it had a presence for him, like a surprise he had prepared for someone else who could never feel it as keenly as he did himself. That side of the square was in shadow now, though the sun still glared on the other side, on the white stucco front of the Crown Hotel. A cloudless sky above the roofs, the shops all shut, emptiness of a country town on a high summer evening; not quite empty, as weekenders strolled before dinner, peering into the locked shops, with a look of hoping to get the best from the place, and some lads, or "louts," roamed about under the arches of the market hall. The market hall was the jewel of the town, a cage of glass and stone on a high arcade, still locally claimed, against all the evidence, as a work of Sir Christopher Wren. It had been the pride of Nick's childhood, he had done a project about it at school with measured plans and elevations, at the age of twelve it had ranked with the Taj Mahal and the Parliament Building in Ottawa in his private architectural heaven. The moment of accepting that it was not by Wren had been as bleak and exciting as puberty. Now he revved round it, the lads looked up, and he savoured the triumph of coming home in a throaty little runaround. It was as though the achievements of sex and equities and titles and drugs blew out in a long scarf behind him. No, it was real superiority, it was almost lonely, a world of pleasures and privileges these boys couldn't imagine, and thus beyond their envy. He pulled up in front of the Crown and Gerald sprang out, pushing a hand through his hair, torn between his sporty show-off self and a hint of compromised dignity, even of some worse anomaly in being seen in such a car with a young gay man. Penny was waiting, with her blush and her tight smile, her obedient strictness, and he went gratefully towards her. "Have fun!" said Nick, and roared off half round the square again, thinking just how much he would like to do so himself.

He pulled into a parking space in the middle, where the market was on a Thursday, and turned off the engine. He would have to go home in a minute for dinner, and a cautious post-mortem on Gerald's visit. There would be a sense, at dinner, of new avenues of worry opened up… the suspicion, now Gerald had gone, that they didn't quite trust him: for all their nerves and good manners they had a sharp ear for bombast, they were more sensitive than they admitted; they would have noticed that Gerald asked them nothing at all about themselves; and they would think about Nick's London life from now on with a degree or two less of reassurance. His eyes ran over the shop again, which looked very shut, empty but purposeful, everything shadowy beyond the chairs in the window. It seemed freshly strange to have his family name there on a shopfront, he felt his schoolboy pride and his Oxford snobbery pinch on it from both directions, on his very own name, N. GUEST, plumb in the middle. He watched a group of boys passing slowly behind him, and moved his head to follow them in the mirror, where they seemed to prance and linger in a tinted distance. There was the clatter of a kicked can, a belch that echoed across the square. He thought, what if he'd stayed here, so far from the essentials of Heaven, the Opera, Ronnie's deliveries…? For a moment he laboured in the fiction of that alternative life-there were cultured people here, of course, with books and gramophones: when he tried to picture them they all took the form of his teachers at Barwick Grammar, Mr Leverton and his Hopkins group. There were one or two school friends he could probably count on. Statistically there ought to be five or six hundred homos in Barwick, hidden away, more or less, behind these shopfronts and unreadable upper windows. The Gents in Abbots' Field would become a wearisome magnet, an awful symbol.

Across the road, half-dazzled by the evening sun, couples were arriving at the Crown for the dinner, the women in long skirts, their hair done, the men in suits, greeting each other with little pats and after-yous, confusing attempts at social kissing (not between the men, of course), all of them excited to be hearing their MP later on, but calm too with the sense of accumulated lightness in being Conservatives. And fuck, there was Gary Carter, setting out on the scent of his own Saturday night, in a short denim jacket and stiffly tight new jeans and that terrible sexy haircut; he called across to a mate under the market hall, he showed himself off to him somehow, with the funny unchallengeable poofiness of a handsome straight boy in a country town. Though girls apparently loved boys' bums too-good judgement, though Nick wasn't sure what they wanted with them. Gary passed under the market hall and out the other side, and started to amble back along the pavement behind. It was time to go; Nick sensed the atmosphere of Linnells waiting, in all its stolid innocence of what it was taking him away from. Then he shook himself, shocked to be dragged under and back by these small-town dreams. One way or another the place had to be left; he felt his long adolescence, its boredom and lust and its aesthetic ecstasies, laid up in amber in the sun-thickened light of the evening square; how he always loved the place, and how he used to yearn for London across the imagined miles of wheat fields, piggeries, and industrial sidings. He thought he would just cruise out past Gary and stir his interest and fix a picture of him in his mind for later. He started the car, and craning round to reverse into the road he saw the folder with Gerald's speech in it lying on the back seat.

Penny was sure to have another copy for him, in the hotel, though probably one without these inked-in jokes, underlinings and reminders: the text was revealingly marked up for so confident a speaker. The names "Archie" and "Veronica" were ringed in red at the top of the first sheet. The thing to do was to find Penny and insinuate the speech back into Gerald's hands. Drinks would be under way now, and Nick pictured already one of the grimly decorous "suites," used for low-grade business conferences and Rotary dinnen, where the function would be taking place. He was only wearing crumpled linen trousers and a short-sleeved shirt, but he could dart in like a stagehand with a forgotten prop, he could be functionally invisible, and for the Barwick Conservatives disbelief could remain suspended.

In the crowded front hall he was still the driver, the messenger, and if any of the guests recognized him, members of the Operatic, men who had filled his teeth and fitted him for school blazers, they didn't show it. If it was a snub it was also a relief. He asked at reception, and the girl thought Gerald had gone out to the car park at the rear-she thought he wanted some air. Nick sidled out and went into the long corridor which turned and stepped up and stepped down through various awkward annexes towards the back of the building. Here hunting prints and old Speed maps of the county were hung against red-flock wallpaper; and the carpet was red, with an oppressive black swirl, like monstrous paisley. Couples came towards him, half-smiling, crisply reassuring each other about the locked car, the tidied hair, the tablets patted in a pocket. They seemed satisfied by this passageway, the sketchy historical sham of it, the beer smells and cooked lamb smells in the spaces between fire doors. And there was Gerald, at the next corner, glancing to left and right as if planning an escape, a last quick minute of his real life before the show started-Nick didn't shout out because of the people in between, but he saw him push open a door at the side and pop in.

The sign said "Staff Only," so that Nick looked round too-it was probably a back way through to the Fairfax Suite. Inside there was a service passage, less glaringly lit, and he saw Gerald's head through the small wired window in another swing door-and Penny's too, giggling: that was good, it meant things were under control. The door was still settling back in lazy wafts which was why perhaps the noise of Nick pushing it open didn't alert them-it was just a further rhythmic displacement of the stale air. He managed to make a kerfuffle, half turning back, trapping his leg and dropping the folder so that neither of them would know he had seen Penny's hand, like an amorous teenager's, tucked in the back pocket of Gerald's trousers.

However, he had seen it, and the shock of it, trite but enormous, made him distracted at dinner, when the anticipated crabwise conversation about Gerald took place. He agreed rather sourly with their jokey criticisms and spoke of him as if he'd never much cared for him. This made them even more uneasy. There was a summer repeat of Sedley on ITV, and they watched it after dinner in their excited ceremonious way, Dot saying (quite tipsy by now), "My son knows him, you know! He's a great friend of Patrick Grayson!" and Nick thinking, why can't you see what a frightful old poof he is.

When they turned in, unbelievably early, the high summer twilight still beautiful outside, Nick called out, "Sleep well!" and closed his door with a bewildering sense of loss, as though Gerald and Rachel were really his parents, and not the undeviating old pair in their twin beds in the next room. Later he heard his father snoring through the wall, and the creak of his mother's bed-he pictured her pulling the blankets over her ears. Rachel had once admitted to Nick that Gerald snored too, though she'd done it in the way she sometimes pretended to a disadvantage, from polite awareness of her own good fortune ("I know, we can never get into Tante Claire"): "He can make a bit of a rumpus," she'd said. Nick drew and resisted various conclusions from what he had seen; he was greedy and then reluctant for unpleasant sensations. He thought perhaps he was being a bit of a prig. He thought of Gerald's regular visits to Barwick with Penny, almost always without Rachel. It was a system, a secret so routine it must have come to seem secure. And the steady disguise, of course, of the "loathing" for Barwick, the chore of the surgery, the boredom of meetings with Archie Manning… And what about in London? Presumably they couldn't do it there, the risk of detection would be too great. Or didn't much actually go on? Could Penny possibly be the sort of girl for all that? There might be some other excuse for the glimpse he had had in the hotel. Impossible to think of one. He wondered if Gerald was snoring now, and the image of what he probably was doing rose alarmingly in Nick's sex-picturing mind. Or if he was snoring, then it seemed to his partner like a bearable penalty of an illicit affair… Nick stopped and drew back with distaste for his own imagining of the thing. A little later he woke and the house was silent again, and the shock of what was happening came over him, his grown-up scorn of its utter banality and his child's ache of despair. He saw it had already become a secret of his own, a thing to carry unwillingly, a sour confusion of duties. He lay awake listening to the silence, which was illusory, a cover to a register of other sounds… the sigh of a grey poplar, the late half-conscious toppings-up of the cistern overhead, and within his ears remote soft percussions, like doors closing in non-existent wings of the house.

11

(i)

Toby said, "You get a glimpse of the chateau on your left," and he slowed down as a gap in the trees appeared. They saw steep slate roofs, purple-black brick, plate glass, the special nineteenth-century hardness.

"Right…" said Wani. "But you don't have that any longer?"

"My grandfather sold it after the war," said Toby.

"So who lives there now?" said Nick, whose heart was always caught by a lodge-house on a side road or a pinnacle among trees, and by Gothic Revival more than Gothic itself. "Can we go in?"

"It's a retirement home for old gendarmes," Toby said. "I have been in-it's pretty depressing"; and he pushed on along the potholed lane.

"Oh," said Nick doubtfully.

"They don't give you any trouble?" Wani wanted to know.

"They can get a bit rowdy," Toby said. "Once or twice we've had to call the police"-and he looked in the mirror to see if Nick smiled at his joke. Oh, Toby's jokes!-they made Nick want to scrunch him up in a protesting hug.

"So the house we're going to…?" said Wani.

"The manoir… was the original big house on the estate. It's jolly old, sort of sixteenth century I think-well, you'll see. It's not as big as the chateau, but it's much nicer. At least we all think so."

"Pdght… " Wani drawled again, with a slight suggestion that he might have preferred the larger house, but was ready to muck in at the manoir. "And this still belongs to Lionel?"

"Strictly speaking, yah," said Toby.

Wani gazed out of the window as though he knew the value of everything. "And so one day, old chap, it will all belong to you," he said, with a mixture of rivalry and satisfaction.

"Well, me and my sis, of course." This occupied a future that Nick couldn't easily imagine.

"So who's down here now?" asked Wani.

"Just us at the moment, I'm afraid," said Toby: "Ma and Pa, me and Catherine-oh, and Jasper."

"Oh, is that her little boyfriend…"

"Yeah, have you met him, he's an estate agent."

"I think I know who you mean," said Wani.

"Jasper and Pa seem to have become best friends. I think he'll have the house on the market by the time we leave."

Nick gave a snuffly laugh from the back seat, and thought what a terrible little operator Jasper was, oiling his way into the family with his forelock and his dodgy voice; and Wani too-how flawless he was, making his quick social reconnaissance, everything hidden from Toby, his old friend. He looked at the backs of their heads, Wani's black curls, Toby's cropped and sunburned nape, and felt for an eerie moment what strangers they were to him, and perhaps to each other. They were only boys, but the height and territorial presumption of the Range Rover threw them into relief as men of the world, Toby sporting and unimaginative, Wani languid, with the softness and vigilance of money about him. Perhaps being old friends didn't mean very much, they shared assumptions rather than lives.

Wani said, "Oh, I bought the Clerkenwell building by the way."

"Oh, you did," said Toby, "good."

"Four hundred K. I thought, really…"

"Yah…" said Toby, setting his face, looking bored. There was something stiff but acceptably adult to them both about this, about saying so little. Wani hadn't even mentioned the deal to Nick. It was typical of his secrecy, both grand and petty, since he had given Nick the five thousand: he made him feel how that sum was eclipsed by the unnamed sublimities of his own transactions.

Nick said, "Oh, that's great, I can't wait to see it." He found he tried to keep up, as if to show that he had money, for the first time in his life; but having some money, and sitting in a car behind Toby and Wani, only made him realize how little money he had-he felt self-conscious with them now in a way that he never had when he was penniless.

"So no chance of Martine joining us?" Toby said.

"I don't think my mother can spare her," said Wani, in a tone of imponderable irony.

"She'll have to one day," said Toby, and gave a big laugh.

"I know… " said Wani; "anyway, what about you, you fucker, are you seeing anyone?"

"Nah… " said Toby, with a sour grin of independence, and then gratefully, as if the joke could never fade, "Ah! Here's our wrinkled retainer." An old man was riding a bicycle towards them over the patchy road surface, his slowly rising and falling knees jutting out sideways-he stopped and tottered into the grass verge as Toby pulled up. "Bonjour, Dede… Et comment va Liliane aujourd'hui?"

The old man held on to the car and looked in at them cautiously and with a hint of cunning. "Pas bien," he said.

"Ah, je suis desole," said Toby-insincerely it seemed to Nick, but it was only the play-acting, the capable new persona that came with speaking in a foreign language. A longish conversation followed, Toby fluent but with little attempt at a French accent, a sense of heightened goodwill and simplicity between them, and the old man's laconic answers coming like stamps of authenticity to the new arrivals, trying to hear and follow what was being said. Wani of course was a native French-speaker, but for Nick there was a warm sense of success when he could make out Dede's words. Jokes understood in a foreign language became amusing in a further, exemplary way: he was storing them already as the coinage, the argot, of their ten-day visit. He sat back, smiling tolerantly, loving the heat and the sunlight through the huge old roadside oaks and chestnuts, and the sense of a prepared surprise, of being led through screened back ways towards a view. There was that tingle in the air that you got in even modestly mountainous country, the imminence of a drop, of space instead of mass.

Toby wound up the conversation, they all nodded solicitously at Dede, and the car crept on again. Nick said, "I hope your grandmother's still coming down."

"Don't worry," said Toby, "she's coming on Tuesday. And the Tippers are coming too, I'm sorry about that."

"That's fine," said Wani.

"It's bloody good to have you guys here," Toby said, and looked affectionately for Nick again in the mirror.

"It's fabulous to be here," said Nick, with just a shiver, as they turned ill between urn-crowned gate-piers, of the old feeling, from the first day at Oxford, the first morning at Kensington Park Gardens, of innocence and longing.

A three-sided courtyard was made by the sombre entrance front of the house, creeper-covered and small-windowed, a lower wing to the left, and an old barn and stable on the right. The house itself hid the view, and it was only through the open front door and the shadowy hallway that Nick caught a hint of the dazzle beyond, a further small doorway of light. He picked his bags out from the car, and watched Wani gesturing belatedly as Toby plucked up his cases and strode indoors with them, his sandalled feet thwacking on the stone flags and his calf muscles square and brown. He seemed to tread there for a moment, framed and silhouetted, as he had at the Worcester lodge, all those years ago, in the archway that led from the outside world to the inner garden: Toby, who was born to use the gateway, the loggia, the stairs without looking at them or thinking about them. And something else came back, from that later first morning at Kensington Park Gardens: a sense that the house was not only an enhancement of Toby's interest but a compensation for his lack of it.

From the hall they caught a glimpse through a series of rooms curtained against the steep sunlight, but stabbed across by it here and there. There were china bowls, oak tables, books and newspapers, straw hats, the remotely threatening mood of holiday routines, of other people's leisure, of games to be inducted into, things the Feddens had already said and done lingering in the shadows among the squashy old armchairs. The rooms were tall, deep-raftered, stone-walled, so that you would have a sense of living in the depths of them, like rooms in a castle or an old school. But for now they were deserted, the party were all elsewhere.

Toby led them on up the wide shallow stairs. On the upper floor an ochre-tiled passageway ran the length of the house, with bedrooms opening off it like prettily appointed cells. Nick and Wani were at the far end. "Mum's put you in opposite rooms," said Toby, "so I hope you're not fed up with each other." Wani raised his eyebrows, puffed and shrugged like a Frenchman: they did their double act. It was hard for a moment to believe this wasn't the usual discreet arrangement for an unmarried couple, that Toby wasn't in on the secret, hadn't the first suspicion. Nick was used to deceiving adults but he felt sad about tricking Toby. He saw the wound it would be to his childish good nature if he found out. But Wani presumably was hardened against such anxieties. Nick looked at him, and had a brief cold intuition of their different shades of relief about the rooms-his own that they were close, and Wani's that they were apart. Wani was on the front, and Nick, as family perhaps, had the smaller, darker room looking out at the end of the house into the branches of an ancient plane tree. "Fantastic!" he said. He got on with unpacking, and hung up the suits he had brought-always wary of what rich people meant by "informal." His laundry had all been done by the hotel in Munich, and was rustlingly interleaved with tissue paper. He noticed that a tap in his bathroom dripped and was leaving a rusty stain. By the bed there was a bookcase with old French novels, left-behind Frederick Forsyths, odd leather-bound volumes of history and memoirs with the coroneted Kessler bookplate. There was a pair of strange little paintings on glass in varnished pearwood frames. He took possession of the room, and talked himself out of a tiny sense of disappointment with it.

Toby was still chatting in Wani's doorway, his hands in his shorts pockets, the undeniable bulge above the waistband these days, something comfy about him, as well as something passive and perplexed. Nick loved him with that fondness of an old friendship that accepts a degree of boredom, and is soothed and even sustained by it. What he felt was distilled affection, undemanding but principled. "Ah, he can tell us," Toby said.

"Yah, what was the name of the brothel we went to in Venice?" said Wani. He was unpacking too, though as coyly and delayingly as he had undressed that day at the Highgate Ponds.

"Oh, the ridotto?" said Nick. "Yes, it's this really exquisite little casino, I suppose it was a brothel, really. Tl ridotto della Procuratoressa Venier.' It's just behind San Marco."

"There you are," said Wani.

"It's been done up by the American branch of Venice in Peril. You ring the bell and the lady shows it to you."

"OK…" said Toby. "So it's not a functioning brothel…"

Wani said, "Anyone less like a madam than the lady from Venice in Peril it would be hard to imagine. I'm having a feature on the top brothels of the world in my first issue."

"Your advertisers will love that," said Toby.

"Don't you think?" said Wani. "Well, beautiful brothels." He looked at Nick, whose idea the feature had entirely been. "You know-risottos."

Toby said, "You should have taken me with you. You can't expect poor old Guest to go sniffing round tarts' parlours."

"No, you'd have been much more use," Wani said, and gave him a level grin, so that Nick was jealous for a second and went on to wonder-it had never been clear-if Wani fancied Toby. Well, it was possible, but unlikely, for some large social reason, which perhaps boiled down to the fact that Toby couldn't be bought.

"Drinks at six," Toby said. "But come and have a swim first. Everyone's outside"-and he slapped off down the echoing hallway.

Then Nick strode across Wani's room, pushed open the loosely coupled shutters, and had his first look at the view: of wooded spurs, dropping from either side like interlaced fingers, and beyond them one bright curve of the Dronne with a rocky bluff above it, bright too in the late afternoon sun. There was the glare of France in high summer, the colours simplified, dry and drab, but twitching with light, and the shadows baffling, like deep grey gauze. Down below, three or four stony terraces dropped away from the house, linked by stairways-it was hard from here to work them out. "Yeah, I'm going to change," said Wani.

"Good idea," said Nick, turning and smiling.

"Hmm. OK…"-with the frowning reluctance of a boy.

"Darling, I spent half last night with my tongue up your arse, I'm not going to be too shocked if you take your shirt off."

Wani gave a dry little laugh and arranged his various pairs of slippers and moccasins on the floor of the wardrobe. "It's what people might say," he muttered.

"What, because I'm gay, you mean?" Nick said, with a flash of the eyebrows. "Well, there's no one else in the house. And I'll just carry on looking out of the window… I'll crane out of the window": which he did, to see that directly below there was a white awning, covering, presumably, the table, the famous table evoked by Gerald-with apologies to Napoleon-as the first dining room of Europe. It was the table and the awning that made it their view-the one often referred to by Gerald as his own landscape, one of the few things, like the music of Strauss, on which he was all unembarrassed sensibility. Of course it wasn't quite what Nick had expected; again it took a minute for the reality to blot and erase the long-imagined, subtly finer view.

Beyond the awning, steps led down on the left through the shade of a sprawling fig tree towards a low-roofed further structure, which Nick thought must be the pool-house. And just then Catherine came up them, noiselessly barefoot, on tiptoe at the heat of the stones, a blue towel round her shoulders and her hair still wet. She looked very young, childlike, nipping across the terrace, peering about; and with a vague air of crisis to her, Nick felt, as if she'd been dressed like this in a London street. Toby came out from the house and she said, "Are they here?"-in her way of not quite noticing him even though she was asking him a question. "They'll be down in a minute," Toby said, going on himself towards the steps to the pool. Catherine sat on her towel on the low terrace wall, pushed back her hair, and her eyes drifted slowly upwards across the front of the house until she saw Nick leaning out of the end window and grinning at her. "Hello, darling!"

"Hello, darling!" Nick opened his arms to the view and then, with the sort of dumb camp she liked, pretended to throw flowers down at an adoring crowd. She beamed and raised her hands in noiseless applause.

"Come down at once!" she called.

"We're coming…"

Wani had put on his swimming trunks under his white linen trousers, and they showed as a provocative black shadow. Nick was a little exercised about the types of swimwear, and the different registers of poolside life. The knob-flaunting Speedos appropriate for an unsocial fifty lengths or a scientific hour of sunbathing might seem ill-judged for cocktails or ping-pong, when sexless bags might be preferred. But perhaps not; sun-worship was half the point of a home in France, and the Feddens might not feel, as Nick somehow did, that if the contours of his penis were visible, then the question of what he liked to do with it was at the forefront of everyone's mind.

Catherine kissed the two boys in very different ways: she butted her face against Wani's and brayed, "Hello!" and showed that she didn't really know him or expect much of him. She pulled Nick into the embrace of her towel, so that her thin body in its damp swimsuit pressed against him, and he wriggled away laughing as he hugged her. "Thank god you're here at last," she said.

"How are you, darling?"

"I'm fine. Gerald's having an affair, did you know?"

Nick blinked and recoiled offendedly, but then tried to keep smiling. "Gerald?" His whole image of the coming ten days was changing; he would have to find out who knew, and how much Catherine knew, of course. He felt horribly guilty himself for knowing, and doing nothing, and his main wish, in this first instant, was to clear himself. "You can't be serious," he said, postponing for a further second or two the really irreversible question, with whom?

"No, it's true. He's having an affair with Jasper."

Nick gasped. "Darling! How outrageous!"

"I know, it's a scandal."

"Has it been going on long?"

"The whole week. There's this hideous room called the fumoir and they go in there together and play chess and smoke cigars. Well, you'll see. No one else can bear to go in, so we don't know exactly what they get up to."

"Let's hope the press don't get to hear about it," Nick said, with a giddy feeling of reprieve mixed up with the real and re-awoken sense of risk.

"It's like being kissed by a lav."

"Oh… the cigars…?"

"Incidentally," she said to Wani, "we're on septic here, so nothing funny down the bog."

"No… right… " said Wani, and chuckled and frowned. It was just comic brusqueness, an urge to ruffle this exquisite new arrival, and also clairvoyant, Nick felt, as though she knew that a closeted cokehead would always be in the WC. She led them down the stairs, under the wide leaves of the fig tree, and out onto the flagged surround of the swimming pool.

The pool occupied another long terrace, open to the south, so that the glitter of the water seemed to reach and hang against the distance. At the near end was the pool-house, a little cottage in itself, with shuttered windows and wet footprints going in and out at the door. Thick-cushioned loungers, turned towards the sun at different times, lay abandoned around the pool, but close by, under a huge red umbrella, Rachel was stretched out with her eyes closed, and the straps of her black swimsuit looped down over her upper arms. Her mouth was slightly open, she might have been asleep, or in the border-zone of voices where the sunned mind dallies with sleep for seconds at a time. She was more beautiful and vulnerable than Nick was prepared for; he had never seen her undressed-he thought it was a private view she might not want Wani to share. A few feet away, at an angle, Gerald was lying, propped up, with the meltwater of a long drink in a beaker beside him, dark glasses on, head bent over a book in his lap, but unambiguously asleep, since the pages of the book stood up in a quivering comb. Beyond them, Jasper sprawled on his tummy on the blue-tiled ledge just below the surface of the pool, looking away at the view, and giving an impression of adolescent boredom. He was wearing huge multi-coloured swimming-bags, and as he lazily kicked the water they glistened and ballooned, deflated and clung, one buttock pink, the other lime-green. Nick saw Wani looking at him. Then Toby came marching out of the pool-house, and Catherine, wanting to take the credit, shouted, "Here they are!" and woke them all up. "You look such old wrecks lying there," she said, and cackled in the "mad" style that she now allowed herself. Gerald started speaking at once, Rachel wriggled as she stretched and sat up, and the two boys bent down rivalrously to kiss her. Jasper came sploshing across the pool. Nick hadn't seen them for a while, of course, and finding them here, in the nearly naked torpor of their private world, he saw everything that was wonderful about them, and something else, like one of Catherine's glittering intuitions, their unsuspecting readiness for pain.

At dinner under the awning Nick and Wani were given the second stage of their welcome, which was to be made to feel how dull and plotless life had been without them, and how enjoyable it was going to be now they were here. They all revealed their frustrations, and made bids on the new arrivals to do the things they had been wanting to do themselves. After a week of family deadlock, of interlocking boredoms, there was going to be an outburst of activity, a high plateau of achievement. Wani politely agreed to everything that was proposed, though he looked a bit queasy at Toby's plan to discover an underground lake. Gerald said, "We really must do the Hautefort hike again, twenty kilometres, take all day if we need to." Jasper squeezed Nick's knee under the table and said there was a little bar in Podier, which "a man of discrimination such as yourself should certainly visit; and Catherine, perhaps satirically, said she'd always wanted to do some hang-gliding. Then she said she was going to paint Nick's portrait, but everyone objected that it would take too much of his time. It was left to Rachel to say, with her ironic quiver, that she hoped Nick and Wani would feel free to do nothing at all.

"No, of course," said Gerald insincerely. He was lazy, but he wasn't good at pure idleness, which he felt like a failure of self-assertion. He was obviously finding his annual poolside trek through one of the fatter Trollopes an irksomely passive exercise, though he said how splendid it was, and what great fun. "I think they might enjoy the hike," he said. "We haven't done it since '83." He poured himself a full glass of wine, and passed the bottle along the candlelit table.

"How did you get on in Venice?" Rachel said. She was looking at Nick, but Nick passed the question to Wani with a steady look.

"Fascinating!" he said. "What a fascinating place."

"Iknow…isn't it fascinating, "said Rachel. "Had you never been before?"

"Do you know, I'd never been before." Wani, who barely knew Gerald and Rachel, had immediately absorbed their echoing and affirmative style of chat.

"Where did you stay?"

"We stayed at the Gritti," said Wani, with a shrug and a wince, as if to say they'd taken the path of least resistance.

"Goodness…! Well…!" Rachel said, in dazzled surrender to the magnificence of this, but somehow agreeing that they could have made a subtler and more deeply informed choice.

"You must have stayed there yourself," said Wani.

Rachel shook her head. "I think perhaps once…"

"Mm, where was it we stayed, Puss?" said Gerald.

"I don't know," said Catherine. After her breakdown last year she had gone with her parents to Venice for a tense attempt at recuperation, which she now claimed scarcely to remember.

"We had a marvellous time, I must say," said Gerald, with jovial shortness of memory.

"Yeah, amazing place," said Jasper, and smiled at him, with the candlelight in his eyes, as if recalling some intimate moment.

"Oh, when were you last there?" said Nick airily.

"Ooh, must be two… three years ago?" said Jasper, dropping his head and letting his forelock tumble.

"And where did you stay?" Wani asked, and watched for the answer as if himself imagining some intimacy-sweat-dampened sheets, discarded towels. Jasper appeared to consider several possible answers, very quickly, before saying, "Some friends of ours have got a flat there, actually, yah."

"Oh, well, you are lucky," said Rachel smoothly, leaving a doubt as to whether she believed him.

"Near San Marco?" said Nick.

"Not far from there," Jasper said, and made a business of passing the wine bottle back to Gerald, who emptied the last of it and said,

"We loved the Caravaggios."

Nick said nothing, and couldn't decide if he wanted Wani to make a fool of himself. Wani was wary enough to say, "I'm not sure…" Rachel was blinking and saying, "No, darling, aren't the Caravaggios -" and Catherine said, "They're Carpaccios," and slapped her hand on the table.

Gerald gave a wounded smile and said, "You can remember those anyway."

Wani, never ruffled, almost sinisterly charming, said, "What made an enormous impression on me was the rococo architecture in Munich."

This statement was left to resonate for a few moments, while they each forked over how to tackle it. Wani looked along the table with an absence of self-irony that was very like his father's-and in the upward glow of the candles the deep sculpture of his face was like his father's too. What touched Nick was partly his lover's conscienceless appropriation of anything useful he said, and partly Wani's evident feeling that in France, on the terrace of a beautiful old house, among Nick's own "family," he could play the aesthete as confidently as Nick did at Lowndes Square. The actual history of their stays in both cities, the coke, the sex, the "late starts," was their glamorous secret; the further story, of unseen treasures, wasted time and money, the dull dawn of the truth that Wani was rather a philistine, was Nick's secret alone. He said, "Yes, you loved that stuff, didn't you."

"You went to Munich, darling… " Rachel said to Gerald.

"Oh, yes," said Gerald, with the fond, embarrassed look he had when recalling his humbler pre-Rachel life. "Badger and I stopped off at Munich, didn't we, on our famous drive to Greece. Badger would seem, on reflection, to have kept me away from that city's more rococo... um…"

"There's one quite fabulous church," said Nick.

Toby, who had been quiet since they'd moved on from potholing, said, "What's the difference between baroque and rococo?"

"Oh," said Wani, smiling tolerantly at his old friend, "well, the baroque is more muscular, the rococo is lighter and more decorative. And asymmetrical," he remembered, making a trailing gesture in the air with his left hand and batting his long lashes so that Nick thought he had absorbed far more from him than his capsule guides to style-it was extraordinary that they couldn't see at once what he was like. "The rococo is the final deliquescence of the baroque," he said, as if he really couldn't be plainer.

"Mm, extraordinary stuff," said Gerald vaguely.

"Yuk," said Catherine, "I can't stand that kind of thing, it's all froth."

"Well, we'd hardly expect you to like it, old girl, if we like it ourselves," said Gerald.

"It's just make-believe for rich people," said Catherine. "It's like naughty lingerie."

"Right…" said Toby, as if slowly getting the picture, but he blushed too.

Wani, not wanting controversy, said, "It's really just a great subject for the magazine. Think luxury artwork!" And then, "It was Nick's idea, actually."

"Ah well, now it all makes sense," said Toby.

"Oh, I hope it doesn't make that," said Nick, and they all laughed at his droll murmur and the hint of a paradox.

He lay in the dark, as the smell of the burning mosquito coil spread through the room. The night was very still, the doors didn't quite reach the floor, and he could hear Wani moving about in his room across the landing. He wanted to be with him, as he had been, more or less, for the past ten days, in the thoughtless luxury of top-class hotels; but he felt the relief of being alone as well: the usual relief of a guest who has closed his door, and a deeper thing, the forgotten solitude which measures and verifies the strength of an affair, and which, being temporary, is a kind of pleasure. He heard Wani switch off his lamp, and his own darkness deepened a fraction, without the faint spill of his light under the door. He wondered if they were sharing this sense of ghostly proximity, if Wani was lying with his eyes open, thinking of him, listening for him, masturbating perhaps as Nick half consciously was-not even that, just a boyish solace and reflex of being alone, the blind friendship of the hand… Or had he plumped his pillow, tussled his head and shoulder into it with a sigh, drawn up his legs in the defensive position which made Nick want to curl in behind him and shelter him? It would be easy to go to him now, they both had wide beds, but he could hear already the echo of the door latches in the long corridor like triggers to Wani's sense of danger.

When he woke an hour later out of a Venice dream he stared in a sort of panic at the grey square of the window and the unrecognized mass of the chest of drawers. Then it came back to him, like going upstairs, the shocks and connections of the past twenty-four hours. He felt horribly hot, and kicked off the sheet and drank the dimly visible glass of water. In the dream Wani was drowning: he stood on the canal-side, knees bent in a tense crouch, looking back over his shoulder with an undecided but accusing expression, then fell in with a dead splash.

It had been very hot all the trip, the hottest Nick had ever known; in Venice, for all its dazzlements, they had moved in a heatwave stink of decay; in Munich, in the glaring avenues, the temperature reached a hundred and four. The heat put a strain on them which they didn't acknowledge to each other. They went to the Asamkirche, which had Nick beaming and sighing with delight; Wani strolled about with an air of provisional goodwill, as if waiting for an explanation. Nick longed to share the beauty with him, to communicate with him through it, but Wani, out of shyness or pride, was lightly mocking of what Nick said. You could really only tell Wani one useful thing at a time-too much information was an affront to his self-esteem. Nick stayed on in the church, and the loneliness heightened his pleasure and his pride in his own responsiveness. At the Nymphenburg Palace, among surging coachloads, the pleasure was harder won, but he felt he took in these marvels of the rococo by right-they might have been make-believe for rich people when they were built, but now they were more than that, they were celebrations in and of themselves.

On their first afternoon there Nick went into a gay shop called Follow Me-something Wani did at last with a deprecating snigger. Surrounded by harnesses and startlingly juvenile pornography they bought the Spartacus gay guide to the world and a siege supply of rubbers, which Wani affected to have nothing to do with: he handled the book lightly, as if assessing its threat, the thick sleek india-paper weight of the thing, some heretical bible. They took a taxi to the English Garden, and had walked only a short distance under the trees when they realized that the people ahead of them were naked. There were families having picnics in their unembarrassable German way, and old men with peeling crowns standing by themselves like forgotten games masters, and then a zone that was mainly young men, sitting and sprawling in an air of casual tension as palpable as the dust and insects in the slanting sunlight. A wonderful cold stream, the Eisbach, chuckled past between steep banks, and Nick stripped off and clambered down into it-when he lifted his feet from the pebbly bottom he was swept along laughing and breathless, waving back to Wani, and then out of sight, racing past the lawns, the naked smiling figures on the bank, boys with guitars, games with rubber balls, in a rush of beautiful cold abandon towards a wood and a distant pagoda… until he saw that the boys were jeering and pointing and the people walking dogs were clothed and severely normal, as if they could have no connection with the happy nude species hidden round the bend in the river. So then he toiled back against the current, feet curled and aching on the slippery stones, until he could pull himself out and skulk back along the bank, giving quick furtive tugs to his embarrassingly shrivelled penis.

He woke again and took a long distracted moment to see that this hadn't happened. He'd been lying in the richly coloured recall of the minutes before sleep and the holiday story had slipped and run with its own fast current into an anecdote odder than the afternoon they had lived through, Wani's bright fixated attempt to pick up the boy who roamed through the gardens with a bucket shouting "Pepsi!"-his astonishment that he couldn't be bought. Nick turned his pillow, and coughed and settled again. He sank through backlit clouds, pink and grey, the landing at Bordeaux airport that morning. There had been a storm, but it was turning aside, and they saw suddenly how close the ground was, the sunlight passing in a crawling wink across ponds, glasshouses and canals, seams of gold flashing through the vapour in fiery collusion.


(ii)

On Monday morning Wani asked if he could make some phone calls. Rachel said, "Absolutely!" and Gerald said, "Please… my dear fellow!" with a gesture towards the cupboard-like room where the phone and the expectant new fax machine were.

"It's just these business things I've got to deal with," Wani sighed, cleverly apologizing for what Gerald liked best about him. He went into the room and rather awkwardly, since everyone was watching him, closed the door. He had told them last night about the property he'd just bought in Clerkenwell, and had asked for Gerald's advice on aspects of the sale and the planned redevelopment: a wall had come down, and they'd suddenly seen how they might get on. When Wani emerged from the phone room he asked him if he could borrow the Range Rover to go into Perigueux, and this time it was vaguer magazine "business" that he mentioned. Nick knew that frown of pretended vexation, the bold contempt for obstacles on the path to pleasure, and it made him nervous. But Gerald, clearing his throat and as it were waking up to his own kindness and reasonableness, said, "Well yes… why not!-feel free… " And then added, "Anything for business!"

"It's just that I can meet a very good photographer there, and after the fascinating things you were saying about the cathedral…"

"Oh, St Front," said Gerald, warily flattered. "Yes indeed…"

Nick almost said, "Oh, but you know it's all a nineteenth-century rehash…"

"Will you be back for lunch?" said Rachel. Wani promised he would. He didn't suggest taking Nick, and Nick felt both jealous and relieved. They stood at the front door and watched the car disappear from the forecourt. It was the sort of moment when in London they would have begun a bold and funny family inquest into the absent person; but today that didn't feel right.

They went out onto the terrace, and Gerald nodded several times at Nick and said, "Charming fellow, your friend."

"He certainly is," said Nick, seeing that Gerald wanted reassurance, and noting that Wani was now properly his friend rather than Toby's.

"One doesn't quite know whether to mention the fiancee," Gerald said.

"Oh, well I did," said Rachel. "And it's all right. He told me all about it. Apparently they're getting married next spring."

"Ah, fine," said Gerald, while Nick turned away with a protesting thump of the heart to look at the view.

The morning post brought several thick packets of papers for Gerald and he took them off to the end room, sighing petulantly. It was clear that without Penny he felt he couldn't tackle work, and clear too, presumably, that he couldn't invite Penny here. He had taken over the end room as an office; Nick wasn't sure what he did in it, but he always emerged with a watchful smile, even tiptoeing a little, like someone about to break a piece of news. The Penny question weighed on Nick, and then appeared so remote and unsubstantiated that he might have imagined it. Gerald was being thoroughly affectionate to Rachel, and when they lay side by side in the sun they seemed soaked in their own intimate history, as well as disconcertingly sexy and young. Even so there was something difficult and self-indulgent about Gerald, as if the holiday was both a licence and a penance.

Nick wandered off to explore the hidden corners of the little estate. He found the morning, and the freedom to use it, weighed rather heavily on him now Wani had gone. He went down the crumbling steps from terrace to terrace, like a descent into his own melancholy. The lower levels dropped more steeply, they were hidden from the house and had a neglected air: the parched stony soil showed through the thin grass. Clearly Dede and his son hardly bothered with these bits-perhaps it was only guests, in their appreciative aimlessness, who ever climbed down here. There was a look of disused agricultural terraces as much as garden; a distant whine of farm machinery, and the scurry of lizards running over dead leaves. On each level there were walnut trees thick with half-hidden green fruit. Nick went through a gap in a hedge and found some old stone sheds, a grassy woodpile, a rusty tractor. He was doing what he always did, poking and memorizing, possessing the place by knowing it better than his hosts. If Rachel had said, "If only we still had that pogo stick!" Nick could have cried, like a painfully eager child, "But we do, it's in the old shed with the broken butter churn and the prize rosettes for onions nailed to the beams." It struck him that a sign of real possession was a sort of negligence, was to have an old wood-yard you'd virtually forgotten about.

He fetched his book and went down to the pool. The heat was climbing and a high-up lid of thin cloud had soon expired into the blue. Jasper and Catherine were already in the water, and Jasper looked pleased to be discovered struggling with her, almost fucking her; he winked at Nick as he went into the pool-house to change. The wink seemed to follow him in. There was a bare suggestive atmosphere in the pool-house, which always felt cool and secret after the dazzle of the pool-side, and seemed to carry some coded memory or promise of a meeting. Nick would have had Wani there last night if Gerald hadn't been hanging, even snooping about. There was the first room, with a sink and a fridge and bright plastic pool toys, lilos and rings, an old rowing machine standing on end; and the changing room beyond, with a slatted bench and clothes hooks, and the shower opening straight off it, behind a blue curtain. Only the rather smelly lavatory had a door that could be locked.

Nick came out in his new little Speedos and walked along the pool's edge. The water was the clear bright answer to the morning, a mesmerizing play of light and depth. A few dead leaves were floating on it, and others had sunk and patched the blue concrete bottom. Dragonflies paid darting visits. He crouched and stirred the surface with his hand. On the far side Jasper had lifted Catherine up to sit on the tiled shelf, with the water lapping between her legs, and him hanging on to her, looking as if he'd like to do the same. She made some quick remark about Nick's being there, and then called, "Hello, darling!" Jasper turned and floated free and gave Nick his sure-fire smile, said nothing, but lazily trod water and kept looking at him. He had a tiny repertoire, a starter kit, of seducer's tricks, and got obvious satisfaction from deploying them, regardless of results. Nick found him embarrassing and resistible, which didn't preclude his figuring in some of his most punitive fantasies: in fact it made them all the more pointed. Jasper kicked across the pool towards him and it looked at first, in the welter of refractions, as if he was naked; then, when he sprang out streaming on to the poolside, he saw that he was wearing a little cut-away flesh-coloured item. "What do you think of Jaz's thong?" said Catherine, obviously assuming that Nick fancied him.

"Yeah, I don't like to wear it when her mum's about," said Jasper considerately. He posed for Nick, held in his brown stomach, and flashed him his number-two smile.

"What do you think?" said Catherine, grinning, a bit breathless, in her tone of sexual fixation.

"Hmm," said Nick, peering at the sleek pouch in which Jaz's crown jewels, as he called them, were boyishly slumped. "You'd have to say, darling, it leaves disappointingly little to the imagination." He made a sorry moue and strolled off to the lounger at the far end of the pool, where he had left his book.

He was reading Henry James's memoir of his childhood, A Small Boy and Others, and feeling crazily horny, after three days without as much as a peck from Wani. It was a hopeless combination. The book showed James at his most elderly and elusive, and demanded a pure commitment unlikely in a reader who was worrying excitedly about his boyfriend and semi-spying, through dark glasses, on another boy who was showing off in front of him and clearly trying to excite him. From-time to time the book tilted and wobbled in his lap, and the weight of the deckle-edged pages pressed on his erection through the sleek black nylon. He noted droll phrases for later use: "an oblong farinaceous compound" was James's euphemism for a waffle-compound was sublime in its clinching vagueness. He wondered just what Wani was up to in Perigueux. He suspected he was picking up some charlie, which seemed a shame and a danger-he wished Wani wasn't so fond of it; then he felt frustratedly, after three days off that as well, how lovely and just right it would be to have a line. It was amazing, it went really to the heart of Wani's mystique, that he knew how to find the stuff in any European city. In Munich Nick had waited in the taxi outside a bank, gazed tensely for ten minutes at the chamfered rustication of its walls and the massive swirling ironwork of its doors, while Wani was inside "seeing a friend." The photographer in Perigueux was probably another such friend. There were childish shrieks from the pool, as Jasper dive-bombed Catherine. Nick was delighted Wani had missed this airing, or drenching, of the thong; he would tease him about it later, over their first line. He longed to have a swim himself, but now the young couple were in a huddle, standing just within their depth, laughing and spluttering as they kissed: the pool was theirs, like a bedroom. They were mad with sex, in love with their own boldness; Nick felt Jasper might try to involve him too if he went in. His role was to be Uncle Nick, adult and sceptical, which seemed to make the baffled Jasper more and more provocative. He thought he could probably have him if he wanted, but he didn't want to give him that satisfaction. A minute later they got out, intently casual, Jasper's stocky hard-on sticking up at an angle, and went into the pool-house and closed the door. Edgar Allan Poe, James said, though a figure in his childhood, had not been "personally present"- indeed, "the extremity of personal absence had just overtaken him." Minute after minute went by, now the hiss of the pool-house shower could be heard, and Nick lay and flicked a fly from his leg, and felt the morning's discontent rise into envy and impatience. "The extremity of personal absence": at times the Master was so tactful he was almost brutal. He remembered what Rachel had said about Wani's wedding, and the image of him doing to Martine what Jasper was doing to Catherine filled him with a bitter jealousy-well, it was probably nonsense, probably waffle. The words slid and stuck meaninglessly in front of his eyes.


(iii)

Next day Toby was teaching Nick and Wani how to play boules: they were out on the dusty compacted square of the forecourt. Wani had been wet about the game until he turned out to be good at it, and now he was absorbed and unironical, tripping after the ball, yapping and grinning when he bombed the other boules away from the jack-ball, or cochonnet. "Bien tire!" said Toby, with a sweeter kind of happiness, at retouching an old friendship through a game, and with comic disconcertment, since he usually won games himself. Nick was applauded when he made a fluky good throw, but it was really a tussle between Wani and Toby. Now he'd got the drugs Wani had become more natural and more popular. "Yup, seems to be settling in," said Gerald, taking the credit himself, like the manager of a hotel renowned for its beneficial regime. "I know… " said Rachel, who had borne the brunt of Wani's princely charm: "he seems to be getting in the holiday mood." A nod went round which admitted the reservations they'd had before, and a mood of solidarity was discovered, just in time, before the arrival of the Tippers and Lady Partridge. Nobody but Gerald wanted to see the Tippers, and Nick paced and stood about in the drive, bored by the game, but already sentimental about their little routines here, and his esoteric success, being deep in France, in a lovely old house, with his two beautiful boys.

Toby had just flung the cochonnet across the court when a big white Audi with Sir Maurice Tipper at the wheel swung in through the gate and ran over it. "Fucking great," said Toby, and waved and smiled resignedly. In the back were his grandmother and Lady Tipper, who had the passive air of women of all classes, nattering dutifully as they were driven they hardly knew where. Lady Partridge gestured in a general way at the house, as if to say she thought it was the right one. Nick ran over to open her door, and in the momentary release of chilled air the scent of leather and hairspray seemed to carry the story of the whole journey. "I know," said Lady Partridge, establishing her feet on the ground before pushing herself up, and looking for attention but not for help. "I have always caught the train."

"Good flight, Gran?" said Toby, kissing her cheek.

"It was perfectly all right," said Lady Partridge, with her usual indifference to a kiss. "It's quite a trek from the airport. Sally's been explaining to me all about operas"-and she gave the three boys a shrewd smile.

Sally Tipper said, "The first-class seats were just the same as tourist class, you got proper china, that was all. Maurice is going to write to John about it." She watched her husband, who came and shook hands with Toby, and said, "Tobias," in a coldly pitying tone.

"Welcome, welcome!" said Toby, in a weak flourish of good manners, avoiding the eye of the man who might have been his father-in-law, and going to the boot to take care of the bags. Nick got an inattentive hello from each of them, and the feeling, which he'd had in the past, of being an element they could neither accept nor ignore. Catherine came out of the house, as if to inspect some damage.

"Oh, how are you, Cathy?" said Sally Tipper.

"Still mad!" said Catherine.

Then Gerald and Rachel appeared. "Good, good…" said Gerald. "You found us…"

"We thought at first it was sure to be that splendid chateau up the road," said Lady Tipper.

"Ah no," said Gerald, "we're not at the chateau any more, we muddle along down here." There was a complicated double round of kisses, ending up with Sir Maurice facing Gerald and saying, "Oh no, not even in France…!" and laughing thinly.

The Tippers were not natural holidayers. They came beautifully equipped, with four heavy steel-cornered suitcases, and numerous other little bags which had to be handled carefully, but something else, unnoticed by them, was missing. They muttered questions to each other, and gave an impression of covert anxiety or irritation. When they came down on their first afternoon Sir Maurice said a lot of faxes would be coming through for him, and could they be sure there was enough paper in the machine. He was clearly looking forward to the arrival of the faxes above all. Wani sucked up to him and said he was expecting some faxes too, meaning that he would keep an eye on the machine, but Sir Maurice gave him a sharp look and said he hoped they wouldn't impede his own faxes. It was only four thirty but Gerald was marking his guests' arrival with a Pimm's, and Lady Partridge, with her son as her licence, accompanied him in a gin and Dubonnet. The Tippers asked for tea, and sat under the awning, glancing mistrustfully at the view. When Liliane, slow, stoical, and clearly unwell, came out with the tray, Sally Tipper gave her instructions about different pillows she needed. Sir Maurice talked to Gerald about a takeover they were both interested in, though Gerald didn't look quite serious with a fruit-choked tumbler in his fist. Lady Tipper complained to Rachel about the smell of hot dogs in the Royal Festival Hall. Rachel said surely that would all change now they'd got rid of Red Ken, but Lady Tipper shook her head as if deaf to any such comfort. Nick tried naively to interest Maurice Tipper in local beauty spots which he hadn't yet seen himself. "You're a fine one to talk!" said Sir Maurice-grinning quickly at Gerald and Toby to show he wasn't so easily taken in. He was used to total deference, and mere pleasantness aroused his suspicion. The democracy of house-party life wasn't going to come naturally to him. Nick looked at his smooth clerical face and gold rimmed glasses in the light of a new idea, that the ownership of immense wealth might not be associated with pleasure-at least as pleasure was sought and unconsciously defined by the rest of them here.

Sally Tipper had a lot of blonde hair in expensive confusion, and a lot of clicking, rattling, sliding jewellery. She shook and nodded her head a good deal. It was virtually a twitch-of annoyance, or of almost more exasperated agreement. She had a smile that came all at once and went all at once, with no humorous gradations. She said before dinner she'd like to have drinks indoors, which, since the whole point and fetish of the manoir for the Feddens was to do everything possible outside, didn't promise well. They sat in the drawing room with all the overhead lights on, like a waiting room. Nick had seen the names "Sir Maurice and Lady Tipper" in gold letters on the donors' board at Covent Garden, and had seen her there in person, sometimes with Sophie, but never with her husband. He thought they might have a theme for the week, and said quietly that the recent Tannhduser hadn't been very good.

"Very good… I know… I thought… " said Lady Tipper, and shook her head in wounded defiance of all the carpers and whiners. "Now, Judy, that you really should see," she went on loudly. "You'll know that one, the Pilgrims' Chorus."

Lady Partridge, fortified by being enfamille and half-tight, said, "It's no use asking me, dear. I've never set foot in an opera house, except once, and that was thirty years ago, when… my son took me," and she nodded abstrusely at Gerald.

"What did you see, Judy?" said Nick.

"I think it was Salome," Lady Partridge said after a minute.

"How marvellous!" said Lady Tipper.

"I know, ghastly," said Lady Partridge.

"Oh, Ma!" said Gerald, who was listening in with a distracted smile from a chat about shares with Sir Maurice.

"I applaud your taste, Judy," said Nick, with the necessary emphasis to get through, and heard what a twit he sounded.

"Mm, I think it was by Stravinsky."

"No, no," said Nick, "it's by the dreaded…: Richard Strauss. Oh, by the way, Gerald, I've found the most marvellous quote, by Stravinsky, in fact, about the dreaded."

"Sorry, Maurice… " murmured Gerald.

"Robert Craft asks him, 'Do you now admit any of the operas of Richard Strauss?' and Stravinsky says"-and Nick beat it out, conducted it, in the weird overexcitement of the Strauss feud-" T would like to admit all Strauss operas to whichever purgatory punishes triumphant banality. Their musical substance is cheap and poor; it cannot interest a musician today.'"

"What?" snorted Gerald.

"Well, I'd rather have Strauss than Stravinsky myself, any day! I'm afraid to say!" said Lady Tipper. Sir Maurice looked at Nick, in the flush of his arcane triumph, with baffled distaste.

At dinner Gerald was already pretty drunk. He seemed to have had an idea of taking Maurice Tipper with him, and making their first night a rush of high spirits, followed next morning by the rueful bond of a shared hangover. But Sir Maurice drank as suspiciously as he did business, covering his glass with a dwindling flicker of amusement each time Gerald leant over his shoulder with the bottle. Gerald's face leaning into the candlelight had a glow of obstinate merriment. He sat down and summarized for the second time the division of the Perigord into areas called green, white, black and purple. "And we're in the white," said Maurice Tipper drily.

The talk came round, as it often did with the Feddens, to the Prime Minister. Nick saw Catherine clench in annoyance when her grandmother said, "She's put this country on its feet!"-clearly forgetting, in her fervour, which country she was now in. "She showed them in the Falklands, didn't she?"

"You mean she's a hideous old battleaxe," muttered Catherine.

"She's certainly a manxome foe," said Gerald. Sir Maurice looked blank. "One wouldn't want to be on the wrong side of her."

"Indeed," said Sir Maurice.

Wani somehow got people to look at him, and said, "People say that, but you know, I've always seen a very different side of her. An immensely kind woman…"; he let them see him searching a fund of heart-warming anecdote, but then said discreetly, "She takes such extraordinary pains to help those she… cares about."

Maurice Tipper expressed both respect and resentment in a dark throat-clearing, and Gerald said, "Of course you know her as a family friend," smiling resolutely as he conceded to Wani the thing, so clearly seen, that he hankered for himself.

"Well…" said Wani, "yes…!"

"I love her!" exclaimed Sally Tipper, hoping perhaps they would take love to include friendship, as well as surpassing it.

"I know," said Gerald. "It's those blue eyes. Don't you just want to swim in them-what?"

Sir Maurice didn't seem ready to go quite that far, and Rachel said, "Not everyone's as infatuated as my husband," lightly but meaningly.

Nick looked out over their heads at the vast night landscape, where the lights of farms and roads invisible by day shone in mysterious prominence. He said very little, holding on to the ignored romance of the place and the hour, the soft gusts in the trees, the stars that peeped in the grey above the silhouetted woods. It turned out to be Wani who saved the evening. He clearly admired Maurice Tipper, and tried to amuse him as well as impress him, neither an easy task. He had a significant lavatory break after the main course, and for the next half-hour supplied a sense of purpose and fun that the others had been groping for. Even Catherine was laughing at his farfetched imitation of Michael Foot, and Lady Partridge, who kept waking from brief sleeps with a cough and a furtive stare, laughed too.

In the morning, before it was too hot, the Tippers went down to the pool, she with a clutch of sunscreens and a huge hat, he with the new Dick Francis in one hand as a decoy for the briefcase in the other. It was the time when Nick liked to do his fifty lengths-at least he invented this tradition to focus his resentment of the newcomers. When he went down a bit later, Lady Partridge, a keen but almost unmoving swimmer, was halfway across the shallow end, apparently unaware that Sally Tipper, beside her in the water, was asking her about her hip replacement: she glanced at her from time to time with mild apprehension. Maurice Tipper had got a table and chair fixed up under an umbrella and sat in tight biscuit-coloured shorts reading and annotating a sheaf of faxes. His lips quivered and pinched with the sarcastic alertness that was his own brand of happiness. Nick, dispossessed, went off to his favourite corner on a lower terrace and read A Small Boy and Others in the company of a lizard.

At noon there were calls and voices up above as a party was assembled for lunch. Nick went to see them off. Toby had pulled up the spare seats in the back of the Range Rover and was checking they were safely bolted; he was taking the extra trouble that delays a departure and disguises the relief of the person left behind. "We don't want you flying through the windscreen," he said to Lady Tipper.

"I think you'll find this restaurant acceptable," Gerald burbled facetiously, gesturing Maurice Tipper to the front seat beside him.

"He just can't have anything too rich," said Sally. "His wretched ulcers…" She twitched while she pulled a long face. "I'm afraid last night's dinner rather did for him."

"Oh, they'll look after you, they'll do anything for you," said Rachel, with unflinching sweetness. Gerald, ruefully baffled by his new guests' failure to notice the beauties of the manoir, was taking them to Chez Claude in Perigueux, normally the last-night treat of the holidays, in the hope of cracking a word of praise out of them.

"See if you agree with us that it merits a third Michelin star," he said.

"We're not big lunchers," said Sally Tipper.

Catherine and Jasper came out last, and Wani squashed in with them excitedly in the third row. Toby closed the doors like a guard and off they went, with a soft superior roar, perched and crammed, for what Nick pictured as a little outing in hell-not the starry Chez Claude or the turret-crowned countryside, but the atmosphere they carried with them. Toby put his arm round Nick's shoulder and they went into the silent house-both of them lightly excited and self-conscious.

Toby made them sandwiches for lunch, in a deliberately enthusiastic way, heaping in cold chicken and lettuce and olives and tomato rings which the first bite would send squirting and dropping from the edges. It was a bit of a mess, a mishmash, lots of dressing was sploshed in-it was almost as though he was saying to Nick, who had once had a job in a sandwich shop, "I'm not a poof, I haven't got style, I can't help it." They took them down to the poolside and sat under an umbrella to eat them, with the dressing and tomatoes squirting out and the lettuce dropping into their laps.

"Mm, lovely and quiet, isn't it," said Toby after a bit.

"I know," said Nick, and grinned. They were both wearing dark glasses, and had to search for each other's gaze.

"Fancy a beer?" said Toby.

"Why not," said Nick. Toby went into the pool-house, and came back with a couple of Stellas from the fridge. It seemed to signal a desire to talk, but he didn't know how to start. Nick said, "So when are Maurice and Sally going?" though he knew the answer.

"Funny you should say that," said Toby. "I was just thinking the same thing."

"I can cope with her, somehow."

Toby looked at him almost reproachfully: "You're being a hero with her. Of course, she's a great opera queen, isn't she."

Nick tried to work out, through their two pairs of sunglasses, if this was a joke-but it seemed to have been said in equal innocence of queens and opera.

"He's a total philistine," he said.

"Oh, he's a bastard," said Toby, who, unlike his father, hardly ever swore.

Nick did it for him. "He's a cunt."

"No, he really is."

"I mean, why are they here actually?"

"Oh, business, of course… " Toby looked uneasy at hearing himself criticize his father: "You know, I think Dad thought we were going to be one big happy family; but then there was… the Sophie thing, but-anyway, he's carrying on as if nothing had gone wrong."

"Business as usual," said Nick, reluctant to get into the Sophie thing all over again. "I suppose Tipper's very powerful, isn't he?"

"Obviously he's one of the biggest."

"What is it, exactly?"

"Nick, really…! You've heard of TipperCo, for Heaven's sake, it's a huge conglomerate."

"No, of course…"

"It was a huge asset-stripping story in the 70s, he was very unpopular but he made millions."

"Right…"

"Yeah, you were probably doing Chaucer that week."

Nick got as always a tiny amorous frisson from being teased by Toby; he coloured and giggled acceptingly. Of course, Toby knew about all this stuff, but you forgot that he did. It was as wonderful in its way that he'd written articles in newspapers as that his father should have something to do with immigration policy, or who went to prison. "I had a look at a few of his faxes, but they were in some foreign language."

"Oh, I wonder what that was."

"You know, numbers and things."

"Ha! Yeah, I had a look too, actually. There's a lot of property stuff going on now, which I guess is what Dad's interested in."

"Sam Zeman says Gerald's doing awfully well."

"Yah, he's plotting something."

"I suppose he's a plotter…?"

"Oh, yes. Well, you know how bored he gets."

"That's true, actually…"

"I mean, he's bored to death down here."

"He always says how much he loves it."

"He loves the idea of it. You know…" This was an interesting idea itself, and came somehow formulated, like the sage things Toby used to say at Oxford, as if he'd got it off a family friend.

"He's probably missing London," said Nick, just wondering if Toby had an inkling of what he meant.

"I think he misses work," said Toby.

Nick gave a hesitant laugh, but said nothing else. He stood up, and pulled off his T-shirt.

"Good idea," said Toby, and did the same, and stood stretching needlessly. There was a little rise, for Nick, in the sexual charge of the afternoon. Toby was still beautiful, even though he was letting himself go. His beauty was held in an eerie balance with its own neglect. He tucked his chin in, the corners of his mouth twitched down as he looked down his body. It was a shame, but it was also oddly comforting, even lightly arousing, how he grew plumper, while Wani, whose smooth sleekness had been part of his charm, seemed to Nick to grow leaner and ever more aquiline. Toby sat back down, looked at Nick, and took a couple of quick swigs from his bottle, shy about what he wanted to say. "Yeah, you're in pretty good shape these days, Nick," he said. "I was noticing."

Nick pushed his chest out, flattened his stomach. "Yeah," he said, and had a quick proud suck on his own bottle.

"You're not seeing anyone at the moment, are you?"

He was touched by these little steps into intimacy, the sense that talking frankly to a friend was a kind of experiment for Toby, a puzzling luxury. It was an echo of the Oxford days, when Nick had invented occasions, engineered conversations, and led Toby into solemn and slightly bewildered talk about his feelings and his family. It was a pity now to have to say, as carelessly as he could, "No, not really." He sighed. "You're right, actually, why haven't I got someone! It's a scandal!" And then, incautiously, "How about you, by the way? Have you got your sights set on someone new?"

"No," said Toby, "not yet." He smiled grimly at Nick, and said, "That bloody business with Sophie, you know…" He shook his head slowly, invoking the shock of it. "I mean, what went wrong there, Nick? We were going to get married, and everything."

"I know… " said Nick, "I know…"-scenting a chance to tell the truth, which was sometimes a questionable pleasure.

"I mean, to go off with one of my own best mates."

"I think eventually," said Nick, conscious of having said this to Toby four or five times already, "you'll come to see it as a fortunate escape."

"Bloody Jamie," said Toby.

"Of course she was a fool," said Nick, with brotherly rectitude and secret tenderness. "But just imagine, having all your summer holidays with Maurice and Sally."

"Of course he blames me for not hanging on to her, Maurice does. He thought it was a good match."

"It was a good match, darling, for her: far too fucking good."

"Mm, thanks, Nick." Toby pulled on his beer and stared across the water. Nick's language seemed to set off a train of thought. He said, "I suppose it wasn't all that great, you know, the sexual side of things." He looked bitter and guilty too to be saying this.

"Oh…"

"You know, she called it 'doings.'"

"That's not very promising, I agree."

"She was a bit… babyish. I don't think she liked it very much, actually." Nick couldn't help saying, "Surely…?"

Toby sighed. "She used to say I hurt her, and… I don't know."

There were various possible explanations of this: that Sophie, child of the chilly Tippers, was frigid herself; or of course that Toby's knob was too big, or that he didn't know what to do with it, or that he was just too big and heavy altogether for a slender young woman. Nick said, "Well, if the sex was no good, that's another reason to think you had a lucky escape." It struck him that the man who'd been the focus of his longings for three years or more, and performed untiringly in his fantasies, was perhaps after all not much good at sex, or not yet, was clumsy from inexperience or the choice of the wrong partner. He'd been so lucky, himself, to be shown the way by someone so practised and insatiably keen. And for a second or two, in the meridional heat, the thrill of that first London autumn touched him and shivered him.

Toby mulled the thing over, emptied his bottle, and then went to the pool-house to get a couple more.

Later they had a swim, never quite saying if they were racing or not. It pleased Nick to beat Toby in a race, and then made him feel sorry. He felt warmed and saddened by his drug secrets and his sex secrets, like an adulterous parent playing with an unsuspecting child. It struck him as a strange eventuality, when for years the idea of romping almost naked in the water with Toby would have been one of choking romance. He pulled himself up and sat on the half-submerged shelf, with the water slapping round his balls, and looked at the view, and then the other way, at the pool-house, the steps up under the fig tree, and the high end-wall of the manor house, the windows shuttered against the sun. Afternoon randiness, the mood of desertion, opportunity silent and wide-he watched Toby getting out with a magnificent jump and shake of his big unsuspecting backside.

They had another beer together, lying flat in the sun. "I wonder how they're getting on," said Toby.

"I'm so glad I'm not there," said Nick. "I mean, I'm sure it's a lovely place…"

"It's been great just to spend some time with you, old chap," said Toby, as if they had really used the time. "How are you getting on with Wani, by the way?"

"OK, actually," said Nick. "He's been very generous to me."

"He told me he relies on you a lot."

"Oh, did he…? Yes… He's quite a particular person."

"He always has been. But you'll get used to that in time. I know him inside out by now."

"Yes, you're very old friends, aren't you?"

"God, yes." said Toby.

Nick smeared on some sunscreen, and Toby did his back for him, rather anxiously, and describing all the time what he was doing. Then Toby lay face down on his lounger, and Nick for the first time ever squatted over him, and squirted the thin cream across his shoulder blades, and set to working it in, briskly but thoroughly. He had the premonitory tingle of a headache from the sun and the beer, he felt parched and heavy-lidded, and he had a highly inconvenient erection. His hands moved sleekly over Toby's upper body, in weird practical mimicry of a thousand fantasies. His heart started beating hard when he dealt with the curve of the lower back, he turned it into a bit of a massage, a bit of a method, as he moved towards the upward rise of his arse and the low loosish waistband of his trunks. And Toby just took it, leaving Nick with a haunting tumultuous sense of how he might have gone on. He finished, jumped away, and lay down quickly and uncomfortably on his front. For a few minutes the two boys said things, widely spaced, calling only for mumbled answers, like a couple in bed.

Nick woke to a strange tearing sound, like an engine that wouldn't start. Sharp vocalized breaths came in rhythm with it. He turned over, looked blearily round, and saw that Toby had brought out the rowing machine from the pool-house. It had a sliding seat and stirrups and a hand-bar that pulled out a coiled and fiercely retracting white cord. Nick lay on his side and watched, with a suspicion that Toby was showing off to him, shooting forwards and backwards with each tug and each letting go. He was very powerful. The sun beat down on his back and sweat trickled from his armpits. His stomach muscles clenched and relaxed, clenched and relaxed. His breaths were keen and humourless, lips funnelled into a rigid kiss. It was surreal to be rowing so hard on dry land, beside a sheet of still blue water. The machine made its noise, like distant sawing or planing, a rhythmic nag and lull. And Nick remembered an evening in Oxford, drifting out through the Meadows to the Isis, and along by the boathouses, the eights all in and stowed, but one or two rowers still about, as if held by the late light, the mood of freedom and discipline by the river. The wide gritty path was streaked and puddled where the dripping boats had been carried across it. He dawdled along, and then saw what he'd hoped to see, Toby out in a single scull, shirtless, glowing, moving with astonishing speed across the welling water.

Nick was reading under the awning when he heard the slam of car doors and then tired, unsocial voices. For thirty seconds he was gripped by his old reflex of possession, resenting the real owners as intruders. The great glass jar was shattered, and the warm afternoon was spilt for ever. Catherine came clattering out, bent forward in a mime of exhaustion and nausea.

"Good lunch?" said Nick.

"Oh! Nick! God… " She subsided into a mumble and groped for him, for the table edge.

"Sit down, darling, sit down."

"The Tippers." She dragged a chair over the flags and fell onto it. "You wouldn't believe. They're as ignorant as shit. And as mean as… as…"

"Shit…?"

"They're as mean as shit! He let Gerald pay for the whole of lunch. It was over;£500, I worked it out, you know… And not a single word of thanks."

"I don't think they really wanted to go."

"Then when we went into Podier afterwards, we went into the church-"

"Hello, Sally!" said Nick, getting up and smiling delightedly to annul what she might have heard. "Have you had fun?"

It seemed to come as an unexpected and even slightly offensive question, and she twitched her hair back several times as she confronted it. Then she said severely, "I suppose we have. Yes. Yes, we have!"

"Oh good. I believe it's a marvellous restaurant, isn't it. Well, you're back in time for drinks. Toby's just making a jug of Pimm's. We thought we might have it outside this evening."

"Mm. OK. And what have you done all day?" She looked at him with a touch of criticism. He knew he was giving off the mischievous contentment of someone left behind for an afternoon, sleepy hints that he might have got up to something but in fact had done the more enviable and inexplicable nothing.

"I'm afraid we were very lazy," he said, as Toby, red from dozing in the sun, came out with the jug. He saw that this was what he wanted her to understand, his deep and idle togetherness with the son of the house.

Gerald and Rachel didn't appear for a while, and so the Tippers sat down with the youngsters for a drink. Toby gave Sir Maurice a glass so thick with fruit and vegetables that he left it untested on the table. Catherine blinked a lot and put her head on one side ponderingly. "You're really very rich, aren't you, Sir Maurice," she said after a while.

"Yes, I am," he said, with a snuffle of frankness.

"How much money have you got?"

His expression was sharp, but not entirely displeased. "It's hard to say exactly."

Sally said, "You can never say exactly, can you-it goes up so fast all the time… these days."

"Well, roughly," said Catherine.

"If I died tomorrow."

Sally looked solemn, but interested. "My dear man…!" she murmured.

"Say, a hundred and fifty million."

"Yep… " said Sally, nodding illusionlessly.

Catherine was blank with concealed astonishment. "A hundred and fifty million pounds."

"Well, not lire, young lady, I can assure you. Or Bolivian bolivianos, either."

There was a pause while Catherine allowed them to enjoy her confusion, and Toby said something smooth about the markets, which Sir Maurice merely shrugged at, to show he couldn't be expected to talk about such things at their level.

Catherine poked at a segmental log of cucumber in her drink and said, "I noticed you gave some money to the appeal at Podier church."

"Oh, we give to endless churches and appeals," said Sally.

"How much did you give?"

"I don't recall exactly."

"Probably quite a lot, knowing Maurice!" Sir Maurice had the super-complacent look of someone being criticized.

"You gave five francs," said Catherine. "Which is about fifty new pence. But you could have given"-she raised her glass and swept it across the vista of hills and the far glimpse of river-"a million francs, without noticing really, and single-handedly saved the Romanesque narthex!"

These were two terms Maurice Tipper had never had to deal with singly, much less together. "I don't know about not noticing," he said, rather leniently.

"You simply can't give to everything," said Sally. "You know, we've got Covent Garden…"

"No, OK," said Catherine, tactically, as if she'd been quite silly.

"What's all this…?" said Gerald, coming out in shorts and espadrilles, with a towel over his shoulder.

"The young lady was giving me some criticism. Apparently I'm rather mean."

"Not in so many words," said Catherine.

"I'm afraid the fact is that some people just are very rich," said Sally.

Gerald, clearly sick of his guests, and glancing tensely towards the steps to the pool, said, "My daughter tends to think we should give everything we've worked for away."

"Not everything, obviously. But it might be nice to help when you can." She gave them a toothy smile.

"Well, did you put something in the box?" said Sir Maurice.

"I didn't have any money with me," said Catherine.

Gerald went on, "My daughter lives her life under the strange delusion that she's a pauper, rather than-well, what she is. I'm afraid she's impossible to argue with because she keeps saying the same thing."

"It's not that," said Catherine vaguely and irritably. "I just don't see why, when you've got, say, forty million you absolutely have to turn it into eighty million."

"Oh…!" said Sir Maurice, as if at an absurdly juvenile mistake.

"It sort of turns itself, actually," said Toby.

"I mean who needs so much money? It's just like power, isn't it. Why do people want it? I mean, what's the point of having power?"

"The point of having power," said Gerald, "is that you can make the world a better place."

"Quite so," said Sir Maurice.

"So do you start off wanting to do particular things, or just to have the sensation of power, to know you can do things if you want to?"

"It's the chicken and the egg, isn't it," said Sally with conviction.

"It's rather a good question," said Toby, seeing that Maurice was getting fed up.

"If I had power," said Catherine, "which god forbid-"

"Amen to that," murmured Gerald.

"I think I should stop people having a hundred and fifty million pounds."

"There you are, then," said Sir Maurice, "you've answered your own question." He laughed briefly. "I must say, I hadn't expected to hear this kind of talk in a place like this."

Gerald moved off, saying, "It's art school, I'm afraid, Maurice," but not looking sure that this routine disparagement would please his guest any more than the lunch at Chez Claude.


(iv)

During dinner that evening the phone rang. Everyone out on the terrace looked ready for a call, and a self-denying smirk spread along the table as they listened to Liliane answering it. Nick was expecting nothing himself, but he saw the Tippers being called home by some opportune disaster. Liliane came out into the edge of the candlelight and said it was for Madame. The conversation at table continued thinly and with a vague humorous concern for the odd phrases of Rachel's that could be made out; then she must have closed the phone-room door. A few minutes later Nick saw her bedroom light go on; her half-eaten grilled trout and untouched side plate of salad took on an air of crisis. When she came back out and said, "Yes, please," with a gracious smile at Gerald's offer of more wine, she seemed both to encourage and prohibit questions. "Not bad news, I hope," said Sally Tipper. "We always get bad news when we're on holiday."

Rachel sighed and hesitated, and held Catherine's gaze, which was alert and apprehensive. "Awfully sad, darling," she said. "It's godfather Pat. I'm afraid he died this morning."

Catherine, with her knife and fork held unthinkingly in the air, forgot to chew as she stared at her mother and tears slipped down her cheeks.

"Oh, I'mso sorry," said Nick, movedby her instant distress more than by the news itself, and feeling the AIDS question rear up, sudden and undeflectable, and somehow his responsibility, as the only recognized gay man present. Still, there was a communal effort by the rest of the family to veil the matter.

"Awfully sad," said Gerald, and explained, "Pat Grayson, you know, the TV actor…? Old, old friend of Rachel's… " Nick saw something distancing already in this and remembered how Gerald had called Pat a "film star" at Hawkeswood three years earlier, when he was successful and well. "Who was it, darling, on the phone?"

"Oh, it was Terry," said Rachel, so tactfully and privately she was almost inaudible.

"We see so little TV," said Sally Tipper. "We don't have the time! What with Maurice's work, and all our travelling… And really I don't think I miss it. What was he in, your friend?"

Toby, clearly moved, said, "He starred in Sedley. He was bloody funny, actually."

"Oh, sitcoms," said Sally Tipper, with a twitch.

"Would you say, Nick?" said Gerald. "Not a sitcom exactly…"

"It was sort of a comedy thriller," said Nick, who wanted them to like Pat before they found out the truth. "Sedley was the charming rogue who always got away with it."

"Mm, quite a lady-killer," said Gerald.

Wani said, "I thought he was so charming when I met him… at Lionel's house, it must have been… frightfully funny!"

"I know… " said Rachel distractedly, stroking Catherine's hand across the table, enabling and containing the little episode of grief. She had probably been crying herself in her room, and now drew a certain resolve from having her daughter to look after.

Gerald, with his frowning moping manner of comprehending the feelings of others while being quite untouched and even lightly repelled by them, made little sighs and rumbles from the head of the table. "Poor old Puss," he said. "Uncle Pat was her godfather. Not her real uncle, obviously…!"

"Madly left-wing," said Lady Partridge, but with a chuckle of posthumous indulgence, as though that had been something else rather roguish about him. "She had two-a true-blue one and a red-hot socialist. Godfathers."

"Well, he might have been a red-hot socialist when Mum first met him," said Toby. "But you should have heard him on the Lady."

"What…?" said Gerald.

"Loved the Lady!"

"Of course he did," said Gerald warmly, not wanting to risk the old jokes about Rachel's left-wing pals in front of the Tippers. "Her godmother, of course, is Sharon, um, Flintshire… you know, yup, the Duchess."

"You and Pat were old friends," said Wani, with his instinct for social connections. "You were at Oxford together."

"He was Benedick to my Beatrice," said Rachel, with a beautiful smile which seemed conscious of the spotlight of sympathy, "and indeed Hector Hushabye to my Hesione!"

"Mm, jolly good!" said Gerald, outshone and subtly embarrassed.

This was enough to rouse Maurice Tipper, who said, in the airy unsurprisable way of a suspicious person, "So how did he die?"

Gerald made a sort of panting noise, and Rachel said quietly, "It was pneumonia, I'm afraid. But he hadn't been well, poor old Pat."

"Oh," said Maurice Tipper.

Rachel peered into the distance beneath the glazed earthenware salad bowl. "He picked up some extraordinary bug in the Far East last year. No one knew what it was. It's thought to be some incredibly rare thing. It's just frightfully bad luck."

Nick felt a kind of relief that this sinister fiction was being maintained, and looked at ignorant little Jasper, who was nodding at it and not quite meeting his girlfriend's eye. Then he saw him wince in anticipation.

"Mum, for Christ's sake!" said Catherine. "He had AIDS!"-with a phlegmy catch in her voice, which her anger fought with. "He was gay… he liked anonymous sex… he liked…"

"Darling, you don't know that… " said Rachel. It wasn't clear how much of the story she hoped to throw doubt over.

"Of course he did," said Catherine, whose view of gay sex was both tragic and cartoonlike. She grinned incredulously down the table. Nick felt himself included in her scorn.

"Anyway…!" said Gerald, with a smile and a deep breath, as if the nasty moment had passed, lifting and tilting the bottle enquiringly towards his mother.

"Oh, it's pathetic!" shouted Catherine, with the rush and stare of someone hurtled along by a strong new mix of emotions. "I mean surely the least we can do is tell the truth about him?"-and she smacked the table hard, but still somehow childishly and comically; there were one or two nervous smiles. She jumped her chair back over the flags and hurried indoors.

"Um… should I…?" said Jasper, and sniggered.

"No, no, I'll go," said Rachel. "In a minute or two."

"Experience suggests to wait a bit," said Gerald, as if explaining some other local custom to his guests.

"An emotional young lady," said Maurice Tipper with a grin of displeasure.

"She's a very emotional young lady," said Jasper, in a cowardly mixture of boasting and mockery.

"She's quite unbalanced," Lady Partridge agreed confidentially.

Gerald hesitated, peering over his raised wine glass, but took his daughter's part. "I think I'd say she's just very softhearted," he said; which it seemed to Nick was just what she wasn't.

Rachel said, with a hint of frost, "Does Sophie ever get upset?"

Sir Maurice seemed to think the question impertinent. His wife said, "If she does, she doesn't let it show. Unless she's on stage, of course. Then she's all passion." Nick thought of her performance in Lady Windermere's Fan, where all she had had to say was "Yes, mamma."

After dinner the four boys were in the drawing room, though Jasper fidgeted and soon went upstairs to skulk around Catherine's door. Wani was reading Sir Maurice's Financial Times, and Toby was sitting in the puzzlement of bereavement, tilting a glass of cognac from side to side, and trying occasional rephrasings of the same idea to Nick: "God it's awful, poor old Pat, I can't believe it."

Nick lowered the book he had just started, smiled to suggest the book itself was a bore. "I know," he said. "Isn't it awful. I'm so sorry." He thought of the two of them down by the pool after lunch, and the lustful tenderness he felt for Toby seemed to glow and fill the room. He was excited by Toby's grief, and the boyish need he seemed to feel for Nick's comfort, and for something wise Nick might say. Nick himself was impressed by Pat's death, and had a distantly acknowledged feeling of guilt, that he'd done nothing for Pat-though Pat, in another sense, had done nothing for him; Nick hadn't liked his brand of cagey camp, and had been snotty and even priggish with him: so that, more shamefully still, he felt subtly disembarrassed by the death, since it erased the memory of his own bad grace. "I wonder how Terry's coping," he said, to focus Toby's thoughts.

"Yah, poor guy. God it's awful, this bloody plague."

"I know."

"You'd bloody well better not get the fucking thing," said Toby.

"I'll be all right," said Nick. "I've been taking very good care since-well, since we knew about it." He glanced across at Wani, who was screened above the knees by the raised pink broadsheet with its headlines about record share prices, record house prices. From time to time he smacked the page flat. "You don't have to worry about me," Nick said.

Toby looked a bit shame-faced. "I didn't know Pat, you know, slept around."

"Well… " said Nick. He knew very well, because Catherine was indiscreet, that Pat had liked very rough sex. "Don't believe everything Catherine says. She lives in a world of her own hyperbole."

"Yah, but she was pretty close to Pat, Nick-he took her out to dinner quite often. She stayed at Haslemere three or four times. If she says he liked anonymous sex-"

Nick saw that the Tippers had come in. They'd been up to their room and now they'd come down, tight-lipped and close together, as though they felt obliged to put in another half-hour. Maurice had clearly been very displeased by the scene at dinner, and a suspicion of deviancy seemed to hang for him now over the whole party. The boys all stood up, and Nick set his book, face down, on the arm of his chair. Sally Tipper peered at it, to deflect her discomfort on to a neutral object, and said, "Ah, that's Maurice's book, I see."

"Um… oh," said Nick, sure of himself but confused as to her reasoning; it was a study of the poetry of John Berryman. "I don't think…"

"Do you see that, darling?"

Maurice brought his gleaming lenses to bear on it. "What? Oh yes," he said. He went towards Wani, who was quickly refolding the FT.

"You're very welcome to read it," Nick said, with a frank little laugh, "but it's actually mine-it was sent on to me this morning. I'm reviewing it for the THES."

"Oh I see, no, no," said Sally, with a coldly tactful smile. "No, Maurice owns Pegasus-I just noticed they publish it."

"I didn't know that."

"I've bought it," said Sir Maurice. "I've bought the whole group. It's in the paper." And he sat down and glared at the vase of thistles and dried honesty in the grate.

"I'm just going up to see if my sis is OK," said Toby, as though all this had decided him.

Nick didn't feel he could go out after him. He sat down again, opposite Sally, but not quite in relation with her, like guests in a hotel lounge. He said, "I'm afraid this news has rather spoilt the evening."

"Yes," said Sally, "it's most unfortunate."

"Awful losing an old friend," said Nick.

"Mm," said Sally, with a twitch, as if to say her meaning had been twisted. "So you knew him too, did you, the man?"

"Pat-yes, a bit," said Nick. "He was a great charmer." He smiled and the word seemed to linger and insist, like a piece of code.

Sally said, "As I say, we never saw him." She took up a copy of Country Life, and sat staring at the estate agents' advertisements. Her expression was tough, as if she was arguing the prices down; but also self-conscious, so that it seemed just possible she wanted to talk about what had happened. She looked up, and said with a great twitch, "I mean, they must have seen it coming."

"Oh…" said Nick, "I see. I don't know. Perhaps. One always hopes that it won't be the case. And even if you know it's going to happen, it doesn't make it any less awful when it does." It had become unclear to him whether she knew that he was gay; he'd always assumed it was the cause for her coldness, her way of not paying attention to him, but now he'd started to suspect she was blind to it. He felt the large subject massing, with its logic and momentum. There would be the social strain of coming out to such people in such a place, and the wider matter of AIDS concerning them all, more or less. He said, "I think I heard you say your mother had a long final illness."

"That was utterly different," Sir Maurice put in curtly.

"It was a blessed relief," said Sally, "when she finally went."

"She hadn't brought it on herself," said Sir Maurice.

"No, that's true," Sally sighed. "I mean, they're going to have to learn, aren't they, the… homosexuals."

"It's a hard way to have to learn," said Nick, "but yes, we are learning to be safe."

Sally Tipper stared at him. "Right… " she said.

Sir Maurice seemed not to notice this, but in her there was a little spectacle of ingestion. Nick tried to put it in her language, but couldn't think what the term would be. "You know, there are very simple things that need to be done. For instance, people have got to use protection… you know, when they're… when they're humping."

"I see," said Sally, with another shake of the head. He wasn't sure she followed. Were such cheerful genteelisms any use? She had an air of being ready to take things on, and simultaneously an air of puzzled and frightened offence. "That's what he'd been doing, had he, I suppose, your friend the actor? Humping?"

"Almost undoubtedly," said Nick. Sir Maurice made a rough, dyspeptic sound, as if chewing a mint. "But as we all know," Nick went on flatteringly, and with a sort of weary zeal now the moment had come, "there are other things one can do. I mean there's oral sex, which may be dangerous, but is certainly less so."

Sally received this stoically. "Kissing, you mean."

Sir Maurice looked at him sharply and said, "I'm afraid what you're saying fills me with a physical revulsion," and seemed to be laughing in his distaste. "I just don't see why anyone's remotely surprised. The whole thing had got completely out of hand. They had it coming to them."

Sally, enlightened for a minute by her unusual talk with Nick, said wildly, "Oh, Maurice is medieval on this one, he's like Queen Victoria!" It was a little shot at freedom, her silliness of tone almost invited correction.

"I'm not ashamed of what I think," said Sir Maurice.

"Of course you're not, darling," said Sally.

"No, well nor am I, as a matter of fact," said Nick.

"What do you think, Wani," said Sally, "as a younger person, you know, on the other side of the picture?"

Wani had been watching Nick with mischievous patience. "I suppose Nick must be right, you know… everyone's going to have to be more careful. There's really no excuse for getting the thing now." He smiled wisely. "I think it's so sad with little children having it-babies born with it, even."

"That is awfully sad," said Sally.

"I'm probably just old-fashioned on these things, but actually I was brought up to believe in no sex before marriage."

"My own view entirely," said Sir Maurice, as fiercely as if he was contradicting him.

Nick, tingling with ironies and astonishment, said merely, "But if we're never going to get married…"

"Sort of sex-mad, isn't it, the world we live in," said Sally, as if that was their general conclusion.

"I know… " said Wani.


(v)

Next morning there was a briefbit of shouting between Gerald and Catherine, down by the pool. Nick couldn't quite hear what it was about. He was surprised by it, so soon after Pat's death, when Gerald might have bothered to tread carefully; but it seemed also to make a kind of sense, as an awkward aftershock of that event. Nothing more was said about it in the day.

When Nick went upstairs in the afternoon Catherine came too, a little behind him, so that it wasn't clear if she was following him; he glanced back in the long passageway and saw her plotting expression. He left his door open, and a few moments later she came wandering in. "Hello, darling," said Nick.

"Mm, hello again, darling," said Catherine, looking quickly at him, and then peering mysteriously around the room.

"Are you OK?"

"Oh, yes… fine. I'm fine."

Nick smiled tenderly, but she seemed almost irritated by the question, and he thought perhaps she'd got over Pat, with her odd emotional economy, of feelings fiercely inhabited and then discarded. She was wearing tight white shorts and a grey tank top of Jasper's, in which her small breasts moved alertly. No one had come to his room before, and it felt intimate, and pleasantly tense, like a first date. She sat on the bed and tested the springs.

"Poor old Nick, you always get the worst room."

"I love my room," said Nick, gazing to left and right.

"This used to be my room. It's where they put the children. God, I remember those creepy pictures."

"They are a bit spooky, aren't they." They were the little German paintings on glass: Autumn, where a woman with an aigrette filled a girl's apron with easily reached fruit, and Winter, where men in red coats shot and skated and a bird sang on a bare branch. It was hard to put your finger on it, but they had a sort of sinister geniality.

"Still, you're nice and near your friend."

"I can hear old Ouradi snoring, yes," said Nick, rather heartily, and sat down at the table.

"Actually I don't mind old Ouradi," said Catherine.

"He's all right, isn't he."

"I always thought he was just a spoilt little ponce, but there's a wee bit more to him than that. He can even be quite funny."

"I know…" said Nick, who thought of himself as much funnier than Wani.

"I mean he's bloody moody. Sometimes he's just not there, he's like a shop dummy going charming… duchess… et cetera; and sometimes he's the life and soul."

"I know what you mean," said Nick, with a wary laugh at her mimicry. "You get used to that."

Catherine leaned back on her arms and swung her legs. "I'm quite glad I'm not his fiancee, I must say."

"I think she's probably used to that too."

"She's certainly had time to get used to it…"

Nick looked down, realigned the books on his table, his notebooks, Henry James's memoirs covering the Spartacus gay guide to the world. He assumed Catherine had come here with a purpose. She glanced round, and then got up and closed the door, in the abstracted way of someone already working on the next thing.

"I must say I'm beginning to wonder about old Wani," she said.

"How do you mean…?"

"He's rather brilliant, actually."

"Oh…?"

"He's completely pulled the wool over your blue eyes."

Nick smiled dimly, with anxiety and a vague sense of a compliment. "Quite probably," he said.

Catherine sat down and said, "My little Jaz has got a theory."

"Oh, yes?" said Nick. "I wouldn't automatically credit a theory of little Jaz's."

Catherine carried on as if she didn't mind him sounding like her father. "Perhaps not, but…Jasper's very observant, you know, well, you probably don't believe me… anyway, he thinks he's a fag."

"Oh!" Nick tutted disappointedly. "Yeah, people are always saying that. It's just because he bathes so often and wears see-through trousers." The odd thing, Nick thought, was that people said it so rarely.

"Jasper says he follows him round all the time trying to get a look at his knob."

"Mm… It sounds to me a bit like vanity, darling. Jasper's always following me round trying to show me his knob." Perhaps this was too frank. "You must admit, he can be a bit of a flirt." Nick was surprised by his own presence of mind, but still he sniggered, and crossed his legs in complex discomfort.

"Wani hasn't said anything at all, then? About Jaz? I suppose he would be extra careful to keep it from you, wouldn't he-in case you got the wrong idea! Wouldn't do at all!" said Catherine, perhaps not convinced by her own theory.

Nick was blushing, but he looked at her levelly. "I don't know, darling," he said, and bit his lower lip. "Aren't they alone together down at the pool right now? Who knows what might be happening?"

"At least he's not wearing his thong today," said Catherine.

"No, quite…" Nick pushed on defensively with his rough joke. "Though once they get into the pool-house together…"

Catherine gave him a bothered stare, and coloured a little herself. She knew of course that Nick knew that Jasper fucked her in the pool-house, it was a silent brag; but of course she didn't know that Nick had fucked Wani there last night, after the awful dinner, in a storm of pent-up anger. She said, "Oh, god, don't mention the pool-house."

"What…?"

"Gerald was on to me about it this morning, and behaving broadly like an ape, I must say."

"Oh, darling… I saw something was going on": and the image of Gerald standing by the pool, head down, shoulders rounded in accusing disappointment, was somehow ape-like, it was true.

"Apparently her ladyship found a rubber johnny floating in the lav. She was frightfully upset, as you can imagine. It quite ruined her early-morning bathe."

"Hoorah!" said Nick, and grinned at her, while his mind raced round a series of right-angled bends.

"I thought he'd flushed it, but Gerald came snooping round, and we only escaped by a hare's breath."

"I'm surprised she knew what it was."

"It's too pathetic," said Catherine, who of course had missed last night's sex-education class. "We're all adults, for god's sake."

"I know…"

"You can't do it in the house, because the noise carries."

"That can be a problem."

"Actually, god, fuck, that's really weird…!" Catherine stared at him in excited self-doubt, whilst Nick felt his disguise grow eerily thinner. He smiled, not knowing if he'd been recognized, or if, by sitting still, he could avoid detection. "Because I'm sure we didn't use one yesterday."

"You must always use a rubber," said Nick. "There's no point in sometimes using one and sometimes not. You don't know where he's been."

"Oh, Nick, he's a total innocent. He's never been with anyone else."

"No, well…"

Catherine gaped. "So if it wasn't us."

"It might have been there from the day before, I suppose," said Nick, with doomed insouciance, watching Catherine as she went on an Agatha Christie-like tour of the possible and frankly impossible suspects. He thought that perhaps like Poirot she had known the answer before she came into the room; but when she stood up, walked to the window, and turned he saw the shock, the disgust even, of discovery in her face.

"God, I've been stupid," she said.

Nick looked at her, and she looked at him. He felt the painful stupidity of detection himself, and also a kind of pride, lurking still, waiting for permission to smile. She couldn't deny the scale and class of the deception. He thought he saw her quick recovery, her feel for anything salacious. He said, "Perhaps he is rather brilliant, yes."

Catherine came and sat down again, as dignified as she could be. "I don't think he's brilliant any more," she said.

Nick said carefully, "You mean he was brilliant when you thought he was tricking me, but not when it turns out he's tricking you." He felt, without time to work it out, that there could be a brilliance of concealment, over something simple and even sordid; and there could be a simple, dumb concealment of something glitteringly unexpected. Caught up in it, inured to it, he didn't know which was more nearly the case with himself and Wani. "Of course, it's all for him," he said.

"I mean how can he bear it?"

"The secrecy, you mean? Or me?"

"Ha, ha."

"Well, the secrecy… " Often in life Nick felt he hadn't mastered the arguments, and could hardly present his own case, let alone someone else's; but on this particular matter he was watertight, if only from the regular need to convince himself. He checked off the points on his fingers: "He's a millionaire, he's Lebanese, he's the only child, he's engaged to be married, his father's a psychopath."

"I mean how did it start?" said Catherine, finding these points either too obvious or too involved to take up. "How long's it been going on? I mean-god, really, Nick!"

"Ooh, about six months."

"Six months!"-and again Nick couldn't tell if this was too long or not long enough. She stared at him. "I'm going to write that poor long-suffering French girl a letter!"

"You're to do nothing of the kind. A year from now that poor French girl will be blissfully married."

"To a Lebanese poofter with a psychopath for a father…"

"No, darling, to a very beautiful and very rich young man, who will make her very happy and give her lots of beautiful rich children." It was a tiringly ample prospect.

"And what about you?"

"Oh, I'll be all right."

"You're not going to carry on bumshoving him when he's married to the poor little French girl, I hope?"

"Of course not," said Nick, with a glassy smile at the one thing he didn't want to think about. "No-I shall move on!"

Catherine shook her head at him, she had the moral she wanted: "God, men!" she said. Nick laughed uneasily, as an object of both sympathy and attack.

"But really, swear not to say a word to anybody."

She weighed this up, teasingly, and teasing meant more to her than to Nick. She was on the side of dissidence and sex, but she was still huffy with her discovery, with having been tricked and not trusted. In the pause that followed they heard the faint scratch of footsteps on the stairs and then the clip of hard-soled slippers, which Nick knew at once, along the tiled hallway. He bit his lip, winced, and curled his head forward as if he was praying, to enjoin silence. Wani was coming up to his room, to change probably, which he did more often than anyone else, as if strictly observing an etiquette the others had let slide. And for another reason too, so that his reappearance in pressed white linen trousers or bright silk shirt was a cover and almost an explanation for his new liveliness; as if he sprang back to noiseless applause. He went into his room, and they could see him hesitate, the shadow on the gleam of the tiles under Nick's door, which wasn't normally closed. Then he closed his own door, and seconds later the catch jumped and settled. The door catches here had a life of their own, and kicked and rattled with stored energy, in accusing jumps.

As they sat there, compromised, staring attentively, but not at each other, waiting for Wani to be done, Nick pictured him having a line, his air of cleverness and superiority, and almost hoped that they would hear him, and that that secret would come out too. To hear it, like a lovers' rendezvous, a rhythm, a ritual: evidence of the other great affair in Wani's life. But he was probably in his bathroom. A light aircraft droned and throbbed in the heights, a summer sound, that came and went on the mind.

When he'd gone downstairs again, Catherine said, "Of course switchers are a nightmare. Everyone knows that."

"I don't suppose everyone knows it," said Nick.

"God, you remember Roger?"

"He was Drip-Dry, wasn't he?" Nick felt annoyed, slighted, but undeniably relieved that Catherine had decided to show him up with talk about her own boyfriends. "Always something just a little bit funny about the sex-as if he wished you had a hairy chest… you know. And the feeling that you never had his absolutely undivided attention."

"I'm not sure one wants that, does one," said Nick, not quite meaning it, but seeing as he said it that it could be a helpful kind of wisdom, if you shared your lover with a woman as well as a drug.

"They say they love you, but there's more reason than usual to disbelieve them." In fact Wani had never said that, and Nick had stopped saying it, because of the discomforting silence that followed when he did. "I'm surprised, actually, I wouldn't have thought he was your type."

"Oh!" said Nick, and gasped at the thought of him.

"I mean, he's not black, really, he's been to university."

Nick smiled disparagingly at this sketch of his tastes. He felt embarrassed-not at sex talk, which was always an enjoyable surrender, a game of risked and relished blushes, but at the exposure of something more private than sex and weirdly chivalrous. He said, "I just think he's the most beautiful man I've ever met."

"Darling," said Catherine, in a protesting murmur, as if he'd said something very childish and untenable. "You can't really?" Nick looked at his desk and flinched irritably. "I can sort of see what you mean," Catherine said. "He's like a parody of a good-looking person, isn't he." She smiled. "Give me your pen": and on the top of Nick's notepad she made a quick drawing, a few curves, cheekbones, lips, lashes, heavily inked squiggles of hair. "There! No, I must sign it"-and she scrawled "Wonnie by Cath" underneath. Nick saw how accurate it was, and said, "He doesn't look like that at all."

"Hmm?" said Catherine teasingly, feeling she'd made a point but not knowing where it had got her.

"All I can say is, when he comes into the room-like when he got back late for lunch the other day, when we'd been gossiping about him, and I was playing along with you, sort of agreeing, actually-when he came in, I just thought, yes, I'm in the right place, this is enough."

Catherine said, "I think that's awfully dangerous, Nick. Actually I think it's mad."

"Well, you're an artist," said Nick, "surely?" Whenever he'd imagined telling someone this, the story, the idea, had met with a thrilled concurrence and a sense of revelation. He had never expected to be contested on every point of his own beliefs. He said, "Well, I'm sorry, that's how I am, you should know that by now."

"You'd fall in love with someone just because they were beautiful, as you call it."

"Not anyone, obviously. That would be mad." He resented her way, now she'd gained access to his fantasy, of belittling the view. It was like her attitude to the room they were sitting in. "It's not something we can argue about, it's a fact of life."

Catherine cast her mind back helpfully. "I mean, no one could have called Denton beautiful, could they?"

"Denny had a beautiful bottom," Nick said primly. "That was what mattered at the time. I wasn't in love with him."

"And what about little thing? Leo? He wasn't beautiful exactly, I wouldn't have thought. You were crazy about him." She looked at him interestedly to see if she'd gone too far.

Nick said solemnly but feebly, "Well, he was beautiful to me."

"Exactly!" said Catherine. "People are lovely because we love them, not the other way round."

"Hmm."

"Did you hear anything more from him, by the way?"

"No, not since spring of last year," said Nick, and got up to go to the lavatory.

The bathroom window looked out across the forecourt and the lane at the other, unmentioned view, northwards: over rising pastures towards a white horizon-and beyond that, in the mind's distance, northern France, the Channel, England, London, lying in the same sunlight, the gate opening from the garden to the gravel walk, and the plane trees, and the groundsmen's compound with the barrow and the compost heap. It came to Nick in a flash of acute nostalgia, as though he could never visit that scene of happiness again. He waited a minute longer, in the heightened singleness of someone who has slipped out for a minute from a class, a meeting, ears still ringing, face still solemn, into another world of quiet corridors, the neutral gleam of the day. He couldn't unwind the line of beauty for Catherine, because it explained almost everything, and to her it would seem a trivial delusion, it would seem mad, as she said. He wouldn't be here in this room, in this country, if he hadn't seen Toby that morning in the college lodge, if Toby hadn't burnt in five seconds onto the eager blank of his mind. How he chased Toby, the covert pursuit, the unguessed courage, the laughable timidity (it seemed to him now), the inch or two gained by pressure on Toby's unsuspecting good nature, the sudden furlongs of dreamlike advance when Toby asked him up to town-he could never tell her that. Her own view was that Toby was a "vacuous lump."

When he went back into the room she had found the Spartacus guide, and was looking at it, and then over it at him, with a mocking gape, as if this was the silliest thing of all. "It's too hysterical," she said.

"Marvellous, isn't it," said Nick, slightly prickly, but glad of the distraction.

"Hang on… Paris… I'm just looking up Paraquat. I don't believe this book." She studied the page, in her illiterate excitable way.

"I shouldn't think there's much there," said Nick, who had already looked it up and imagined with mingled longing and satire the one disco and the designated park.

"Well, there's a disco, darling. Wed to Sat, 11 to 3. L'An des Roys," she said, in her plonking French accent. "We must go! How hilarious."

"I'm glad you find it so amusing."

"We'll suggest it to Ouradi, and see what he says… God, there's everything in here."

"Yes, it's very useful," said Nick.

"Cruising areas, my god! Look at this, rue St Front-we went there with the Tippers yesterday. If only they'd known… What does AYOR mean?"

"AYOR? At Your Own Risk."

"Oh… right… Right… And it's the whole world!"

"Look up Afghanistan," said Nick, because there was a famous warning about the roughness of Afghan sex. But she carried on flicking through. Nick disguised his interest, the vague comical rakishness he seemed to admit by having the book, and went and sat on the bed.

"I'm just looking up Lebanon," she said, after a minute.

"Oh yes…" said Nick.

"It sounds marvellous. Mediterranean climate, well we knew that, and it says homosexuality is a delight."

"Really," said Nick.

"It does. 'L'homosexualite est un delit,' " she read, sounding like General de Gaulle.

"Yes, delit is a crime, unfortunately."

"Oh, is it?"

"Delight is delice, delit is a misdemeanour."

"Well, it's bloody close…"

"Well, they often are," said Nick, and felt rather pleased with himself. Catherine was bored with the book. She held Nick's eye, and said, "So what's he into, old Ouradi?"

"He's into me."

"Well, yes," said Catherine, as if she could see round this.

"OK, he likes to get fucked," said Nick briskly, and got up as if that was really all she was going to get out of him.

"I always thought he must be into some pretty weird sort of gay stuff."

"You didn't even know he was gay till ten minutes ago."

"I knew deep down."

Nick smiled reproachfully. Telling the story for the first time he saw its news value, already wearing off on Catherine, the quick fade of a shock, and felt the old requirement not to disappoint her. It was their original game of talking about men, boasting and mocking, and he knew its compulsion, the quickened pulse of rivalry and the risk of trust. There were phrases about Wani that he'd carried and polished for some occasion like this and he imagined saying them now, and the effect on himself as much as on her, mere reluctant admission melting into the relief of confession. There was nothing, exactly, to confess. The secrecy of the past six months was not to be mistaken for the squeeze of guilt. He thought, I won't tell her about the hotel pom. He sat down again, to mark a wary transition to frankness.

"Well, he's quite into threesomes," he said.

"Mm, not my cup of tea," said Catherine.

"OK, we won't ask you."

She gave a tart smile. "So who do you have threesomes with?"

"Oh, just with strangers. He gets me to pick people up for him. Or we get a rent boy in, you know. A Strieker."

"A what?"

"That's what they call them in Munich."

"I see," said Catherine. "Isn't that a bit risky, if he's so into secrecy?"

"Oh, I think the risk's quite the thing," said Nick. "He likes the danger. And he likes to submit. I don't quite understand it myself, but he likes having a witness. He likes everything that's the opposite of what he seems."

"It all sounds rather pathetic, somehow," said Catherine.

Nick went on, not knowing if it was evidence for the defence or the prosecution, "He's quite a screamer, actually."

"A screaming queen, you mean?"

"I mean he makes a lot of noise." It would probably be better not to tell her about that morning in Munich. "It was hilarious one morning in Munich," he said. "He made so much noise in the room, I don't think he noticed, but the chambermaids were all laughing about us in the corridor outside."

Catherine snuffled. "Russell always liked me to shout a lot," she said.

Again Nick allowed the allusion; he smiled thinly through it, and thought and said with a wince, "He's got this rather awful thing for porn, actually." "Oh?"

"I mean, nothing wrong with porn, but you sometimes feel it's the real deep template for his life."

Catherine raised her eyebrows and gave a deep sigh. "Oh dear…" she said.

Nick looked away, at the open window, and the closed door. "It just got a bit out of hand, actually, in Germany. You know, there's endless porn on the hotel TV."

"Oh…" said Catherine, to whom porn was a blankly masculine mystery.

"He lay there all evening watching it-straight stuff, of course, which he likes just as much, if not more. One night, I'm afraid, I had to go off to dinner by myself. He just wouldn't turn it off."

Catherine laughed, and so did Nick, though the image was a sad one, was pathetic, as she said: of Wani with his pants round his ankles, too crammed with coke to get an erection, in slavish subjection to the orgy on screen, whilst Nick, in the sitting room of their stuffy little suite, made a bed for himself on the sofa. He could hear Wani, through the door, talking to the people in the film. Catherine said, "He sounds a nightmare, actually, darling."

"He's very exciting too, but…"

"I mean, I rather worry about you, if you're loving him so much as you say, and he's treating you like this. Actually, I wonder if you do really love him, you see."

He saw this was her usual hyperbole, and her usual solicitous undermining of his affairs. "No, no," he said, with a disparaging chuckle. It wasn't that she'd shown him the truth of the matter, but that telling her these few amusing details he'd told himself something he couldn't now retract. He had a witness too. "Anyway," he said, "I probably shouldn't have told you all this."


(vi)

The Tippers left the following day. Secret smiles of relief admitted also a dim sense of guilt, and a resultant hardening and defiance. Gerald was gloomily preoccupied, and seemed to carry the blame round with him, not knowing where to put it down. Wani was the only one who expressed real regret and surprise; he'd felt at home with the Tippers, they were the sort of people he'd been brought up to respect. It was Rachel who tried hardest to be diplomatic; her supple good manners struggled to contain the awkward turn of events, which she minded entirely for Gerald's sake.

The departure was handled very briskly. Sir Maurice was offended, active, in a surprising way fulfilled-this was what he looked for, a clarified antipathy, a somehow reassuring trustlessness. "We're not enjoying it much here," he said; and his wife took her usual strange pleasure in his hardness and roughness; they were her animating cause, his feelings were as unanswerable as his ulcers… Toby loaded up the luggage, with the straight-faced satisfaction of a porter.

After they'd gone, Wani, watchful and charming, suggested a game of boules to Gerald, and they went out and started playing in the bald space where the Tippers' car had stood. The day for once was overcast, and Nick sat in the drawing room with his book. The tingle of freedom made it a little hard to concentrate: he felt aware of the pleasure, the primacy of reading, but the content seemed to glint from a distance, as if through mist. Then Lady Partridge tottered in in her sundress, clearly pleased, repossessing the place, but also at a loose end without the irritant of Sally at her ear. The Tippers had been a subject for her, they'd annoyed her and they'd excited her with the raw fascination of money. She sat down in an armchair. She didn't say anything, but Nick knew that she was jealous of his book. From outside, through the open front door, came the cracks and clicks and yelps of the boules game.

"Mm, what are you reading?" said Lady Partridge.

"Oh…" said Nick, disowning the book with a shake of the head, "it's just something I'm reviewing." She turned her ear enquiringly. "It's a study of John Berryman."

"Ah…!" said Lady Partridge, sitting back with the mocking contentment of the non-reader. "The poet… Funny man."

"Oh-um…!" Nick gasped. "Yes, he was rather funny, I suppose… in a way."

"I always thought."

Nick smiled at her narrowly, and went on, to test the ground, "It's a sad life, of course. He suffered from these terrible depressions."

Lady Partridge smacked her lips illusionlessly, and rolled her eyes back-a more terrible effect than she realized. "Like… er, young madam," she said.

"Well, quite," said Nick, "though we hope it won't end the same way! He drank a tremendous lot, you know."

"I wouldn't be at all surprised if he drank a lot," said Lady Partridge, with a hint of solidarity.

"And then, of course," said Nick clinchingly, but with a sad loll of the head, "he jumped off a bridge into the Mississippi."

Lady Partridge reflected on this, as if she thought it unlikely. "I always rather liked him on the telly. Came over awfully well. Perhaps you never saw those… He went to the seaside. Or, you know, poking round old churches and what-not. Even those weren't too bad. He had what I'd call an infectious laugh. I think I'm right in saying he became the Poet Laureate."

"Ah… No," said Nick. "No, actually-"

"Fuck!" came a howl from the forecourt, hardly recognizable as Gerald's voice. Lady Partridge's gaze slid uncertainly away. Nick got up with a soft laugh and went out into the hall to see what had happened. Gerald was coming in from outside, his face in a spasm of emotion that might have been rage or glee, and veered away from Nick into the kitchen, where Toby was sitting having coffee with Rachel. Nick glanced out of the front door, and saw Wani collecting up the boules with a dutiful but unrepentant expression.

"Darling…?" said Rachel, with a note of anger, but looking him over quickly, to see if he was hurt.

"Dad," said Toby, and shook his head disappointedly.

Gerald stood staring at them, and then hunched and grinned. He said, "I'm on holiday!"

"Yes, darling, you are," said Rachel. "You ought to calm down." She was solicitous, but firm: her own calm was a reproof. Nick stood in the doorway and looked at them, bright-eyed. There was a collective sense that they could tame Gerald.

"Beaten at boules by a bloody A-rab!" said Gerald, and gasped at his own candour, and as if it might be a joke.

"For god's sake, Dad," said Toby.

"What…?" said Gerald.

"You'll be calling me a bloody Jew-boy next."

"I would never do that," said Gerald. "Don't be monstrous."

"Well, I hope not," said Toby, and coloured at his own emotion. "Wani's my friend," he said, with an effect of simple decency, so that Gerald stared and thought and then went out of the room. They heard him calling out, "Wani! Wani, my apologies! OK…? Yup! So sorry… " with improper cheerfulness, and tailing off as he turned indoors, as if it was a mere routine. He came back into the kitchen with a twitch of a smile, since Wani hadn't heard the thing he should really have been apologizing for. He drifted absent-mindedly into the larder and emerged with a dusty bottle of claret.

"Why don't you go and have a swim, Gerald. Or find Jasper, and take him for a walk," recommended Rachel.

"Jasper isn't a cocker spaniel, you know," said Gerald, amusingly but with a bit of a snap.

"Well, no," said Rachel.

Gerald turned the little wooden-handled corkscrew with furtive keenness. "Well, roll on Sunday, and Lionel's visit!" he said, to please Rachel and cover the exuberant pop of the cork.

"It's a bit early for that, isn't it Gerald?" said Rachel.

"For god's sake, Dad," said Toby again.

"He wants to let it breathe," said Nick with an anxious laugh.

Gerald looked at them all, and there was an odd charge of unhappiness, a family instinct, communicated, not quite understood. "I just feel like a fucking drink, OK?" he said, and went off to the end room with the bottle.

Just before lunch, in the shade of the awning, he was more cheerful, but also more freely in touch with his troubles. "The fucking Tippers!" he said, counting carelessly on his mother's deafness. "God knows what the consequences of this little episode will be-for the business, I mean."

"I'm sure you can do brilliantly without him," said Rachel. "You've been doing brilliantly without him so far."

"True," said Gerald. "True." He looked wryly along the table that he ruled. "I'm afraid they didn't fit in here, exactly, did they?"

"They didn't quite get the hang of it," said Rachel.

"Yah, why did they go?" said Jasper.

"Oh, who knows!" said Rachel. "Now, Judy, asparagus!"

Gerald snuffled and seemed to ponder the question, like some undecid-able conflict of loyalties, some inescapable regret. Nick couldn't help noticing that his own remarks were received very coolly that day, and sometimes he was ignored and talked over.

At the end of lunch Gerald took up his grievances again; it was clear that he was in the grip of his own schemes, and living only half attentively, after a bottle and a half of wine, in the chatter and family teasing at the table. There was something rehearsed and implausible in his tone. He went on about work, and the "important papers" he had to deal with. "You don't know what it's like," he said. "It may be vacation for you, it may be the recess for me, but actually the work simply doesn't let up. Well, you've seen the number of faxes coming through. And I'm terribly behind with the diary."

He waited, sighing but vigilant, till Rachel said, "Well, why don't you have some help?"

Gerald puffed and slumped, as if to say that was hardly possible; but then said, "I do rather wonder whether we won't have to send for Penny."

"Not Penny Dreadful," said Catherine. "Anyway, she can't go in the sun.

Rachel didn't contradict this, but gave her enabling shrug. "If you really need Penny, darling, by all means ask her out."

"Do you think…?"

"I mean, she's perfectly pleasant company. If she didn't mind…"

"Oh, she's not pleasant company," said Catherine. "She's a humourless white bug."

"Or what about Eileen?" said Toby. "I'm sure she'd come just like that. You know how she adores Dad!"

Gerald gave a short distracted laugh at this absurd alternative. Nick looked at him with a tense smile, an awful feeling of collusion. He'd said nothing, he'd dissimulated much more cleverly than Gerald himself: he felt that he'd been, all passively and peace-lovingly, the real enabler.

"Yes, I'm not so sure about Eileen," said Rachel.

"OK, then… " said Gerald, as though conceding to a general wish.

There was a complicated shame-in-triumph which perhaps only Nick could see. The party pushed back their chain, giving hazy thought to the matter of the afternoon, and Gerald went in to the phone room, with a look of tense reluctance, as if about to break bad news.

12

FOR THEIR TWENTY-FIFTH wedding anniversary, Lionel Kessler gave Gerald and Rachel two presents. The first came round in the morning, on the back seat of his Bentley, and the chauffeur himself brought the stout wooden box into the kitchen.

"Darling old Lionel," said Toby, before they knew what was in it.

"Silver, I expect," said Gerald, getting a screwdriver, and sounding both greedy and slightly bored.

Inside, held in a metal brace by foam-rubber collars, was a rococo silver ewer. The body of the thing was in the form of a shell, and the spout was supported by a bearded triton. "Goodness, Nick," said Gerald, so that Nick fell into his role as interpreter-he said he thought it might be by one of the Huguenot silversmiths working in London in the mid-eighteenth century, perhaps by Paul de Lamerie, since the greatest name was also the only one he could think of, and with Lionel anything seemed possible. "Marvellous," said Gerald: "a work of rare device." He looked in the box to see if there was a note, like the watering instructions that come with some worrying plant, but there wasn't. Nick explained that the tiny scene in relief, of Eros playing with the sword of justice, meant "Omnia Vincit Amor." "Ah, thoroughly apt," said Gerald, with shy pomp, putting his arm briefly round Rachel. He perhaps suspected that it was something Lionel had had knocking round at Hawkeswood anyway. Nick carried on smiling at it, half-conscious of how his father would have stooped and turned it, holding it with a cloth; remembering their long-ago visits to Monksbury, where the silver had a brassy iridescent colour, since the servants were forbidden to clean it and scratch it. "We'll have to get that looked at for the insurance," said Gerald.

Toby and Catherine's present was also a bit of silver, a scollop-edged Georgian salver, on which they had had "Gerald and Rachel ~ 5 November 1986" engraved in a curly script. It couldn't help but look dull, and even vaguely satirical, beside the ewer, and Gerald gazed into it with a falsely modest expression, as though he was retiring, or had won a local golf tournament. "It's perfectly lovely," said Rachel. They both seemed gratified, but not excited, and clearly felt no one could actually want an object of this kind.

A little later they were having a glass of champagne when Nick looked down from the drawing-room window and saw the Bentley pulling up a second time. Now it was Lionel himself who climbed out of it, and who carried across the pavement the small flat packing case. He glanced up and made a shooshing sign, half frown, half kiss. Nick, his champagne working nicely with a first short line of charlie, smiled secretly back. The subtle bachelor sympathy between himself and the little bald peer brought a tear to the corner of his eye-he felt quite silly for a moment at being so "in love" with the family, and with this member of it in particular. A minute later Lionel was shown into the room amid groans of gratitude. He kissed his sister and her children, and shook hands with Gerald and Nick, who felt for the fervour in his briskness. The ewer was on the mantelpiece, crowded today with white lilies and white mop-headed chrysanths. "Well, you had to have silver," Lionel said, "but I wanted you to have this as well. It came up in Paris last week, and since we're all feeling a little light-headed…" Something called the Big Bang had just happened, Nick didn't fully understand what it meant, but everyone with money seemed highly exhilarated, and he had a suspicion he was going to benefit from it too. Here was Lord Kessler, with a box under his arm, to give it his own superior licence.

It was Rachel who took and opened the box, with Nick standing by as if it was his present, as if he was giving it and perhaps also receiving it-he felt generous and possessive all at once. He kept himself from exclaiming when she lifted out a small oil painting. He determinedly said nothing. "My dear… " said Rachel, fascinated, hesitant, but controlled, as though to be surprised would be to have some vulgar advantage taken of her. She held it up, so that everyone could see it. "It's perfectly lovely," she said.

"Mm… " said Lionel, with the canny little smile of someone who has made a good decision.

Gerald said, "You're too kind, really… " and stared earnestly at the picture, hoping someone would say what it was. It was a landscape, about nine inches wide by twelve high, painted entirely in vertical dabs of a fine brush, so that the birch trees and meadow seemed to quiver in the breeze and warmth of a spring morning. A black-and-white cow lay under a bank at the front; a white-shawled woman talked to a brown-hatted man on the path in the near distance. It was in a plain dull-gilt frame.

"Hah, jolly nice," said Toby.

Catherine, looking comically from side to side as though detecting a trick, said, "It's a Gauguin, isn't it," and Nick, who after all couldn't bear not to say, said, "It's a Gauguin" at the same time.

"It's a nice one, isn't it," said Lionel, "he Matin aux Champs-it's a study, or a little version, of the picture in Brussels. I snatched it from the teeth of the head of Sony. Actually, I think it was a bit small for him. Not quite the ideally expensive picture"-and he chuckled with Nick as if they both knew just what to expect from the head of Sony.

"Really… Lionel… " Gerald was saying, shaking his head slowly and blinking to disguise his calculations as another kind of wonder. "That and the silver… um…"

Catherine shook her head too, and said, "God…!" in simultaneous glee and scorn of her rich family.

The picture was handed round, and they each smiled and sighed, and turned it to the light, and passed it on with a little shudder, as if they'd been oblivious for a moment, in the spell of sheer physical possession. "Where on earth shall we put it?" said Gerald, when it came back to him; Nick laughed to cover his graceless tone.

Just then the front door slammed and Rachel went to look over the banisters; it was a day of incessant arrivals. "Oh, come up, dear," she said. "It's Penny."

"Ah, she can give us her thoughts about the picture," said Gerald, as if from a view of her general usefulness. He got rid of the picture by propping it against Liszt's nose on the piano.

"Penny!" said Catherine. "Why? I mean, she wouldn't have a clue," and then laughed submissively, since it wasn't her day.

"Well," said Gerald, beaming and blustering, "well, her father's a painter." And he turned away to see to the champagne; he had a fresh glass in his hand when Penny came into the room.

"Hello, Penny," said Rachel, in her coolly maternal way.

"Congratulations to you both," said Penny, coming forward with her curious bossy diffidence, her air, that was almost maternal in itself, of putting her duty to forgetful, forgivable Gerald before any thought of her own pleasure. "I really came to do the diary."

"The diary can wait," said Gerald, with a note of reckless permissiveness, passing her the glass. "Have a look at what Lord Kessler's just given us." It struck Nick that he was avoiding any chance of a kiss. "It's by Gauguin," said Gerald, "he Rencontre aux Champs"-giving it already his own, more anecdotal title. They all peered at it politely again. "I can't help thinking of our lovely walks in France," Gerald said, looking round for agreement.

"Oh… I see," said Rachel.

"It's nothing like that," said Catherine.

"I don't know," said Gerald. "That could be your mother going down to Podier, and bumping into… ooh… Nick on the way."

Nick, pleased to have been put in the picture, said, "I seem to have borrowed Sally Tipper's hat."

Catherine smiled impatiently. "Yeah, but the point is, they're peasants, isn't it, Uncle Lionel. You know, this was when he went to Brittany, what was it called, to get as far away as possible from the city and the corruption of bourgeois life. It's about hardship and poverty."

"You're absolutely right, darling," said Lionel, who never stood for cant about money. "Though I expect he sent it to bourgeois old Paris to be sold."

"Exactly," said Gerald.

"It's funny, it looks like a Hereford cow," said Toby. "Though I don't suppose it can be."

"Probably a Charolais," said Gerald.

"Charolais are a completely different colour," said Toby.

"Anyway, it's very nice," said Penny, for whom being the daughter of Norman Kent had worked as a perfect inoculation against art.

"We were wondering where to hang it," said Rachel.

They spent five minutes trying the picture in different places, Toby holding it up while the others pursed their lips and said, "You see, /think it needs to go there… " Toby became a boy again, in a family game, pulling faces and then clearly thinking about something else. "Over 'ere, guv'nor?" he kept saying, in a "hopeless cockney accent which he found funny. He took down one or two things and replaced them with the Gauguin. The trouble was that the shapes of the other pictures showed on the wallpaper behind.

Rachel didn't seem to mind too much, but Gerald said, "We can't have the Lady seeing that."

"Oh…" said Rachel, with a little tut.

"No, I'm serious," said Gerald. "She's finally agreed to honour us with her company, and everything must be perfect."

"I'd be highly surprised if the Lady noticed," Lionel said candidly. But Gerald shot back, "Believe me, she notices everything," and gave a rather grim laugh.

"We'll decide later," said Rachel. "We just might be awfully selfish and have it in our bedroom."

"Though he'll probably get the Lady in there," said Catherine under her breath.

After lunch two men from Special Branch came, to check on matters of security for the PM's visit. They passed through the house like a pair of unusually discreet bailiffs, noting and evaluating. Nick heard them coming up the top stairs and sat smiling at his desk with his heart pounding and ten grams of coke in the top drawer while they peered out onto the leads. Their main concern was with the back gate and they told him a policeman would be on duty all night in the communal gardens. This made everything look a bit more risky, and when they'd gone down again he had a small line just to steady his nerves.

Later he went downstairs and when he looked out at the front of the house he saw Gerald and Geoffrey Titchfield talking on the pavement. They both had a look of contained exaltation, like marshals before some great ceremony, not admitting their own feelings, almost languid with unspoken nerves. Whenever someone walked past, Gerald gave them a nod and a smile, as if they knew who he was. He had made a very successful speech at Conference last month, since when he'd adopted a manner of approachable greatness.

Geoffrey was pointing at the front door, the eternally green front door, which Gerald had just had repainted a fierce Tory blue. It was the moment when Nick had first caught the pitch of Gerald's mania. Catherine, in a vein of wild but focused fantasy, had said that the PM would be shocked by a green door and that she'd read an article which said all Cabinet ministers had blue ones; even Geoffrey Titchfield, who was only the chairman of the local association, had a blue front door. Gerald scoffed at this, but a little later strolled out to the Mira Foodhall for some water biscuits and came back looking troubled. "What do you think about this, Nick?" he said. "The Titchfields have only got the garden flat, but their front door is unquestionably blue." Nick said he doubted it mattered, as drolly as possible, and feeling his own nostalgic fervour for the grand dull green. But the following day Gerald came back to it. "You know, I wonder if the Cat's right about that door," he said. "The Lady might very well think it's a bit off. She might think we're trying to save the fucking rainforest or something!" He laughed nervily. "She might think she's been taken to Greenham Common, by mistake," he went on, in a tone somewhere between lampoon and genuine derangement. At which point Nick knew, since the colour of the door had become a token of Gerald's success, that Mr Duke would be set to work with a can of conference-blue gloss.

Now Penny came out, with her briefcase of papers, and Nick watched from his window seat as she spoke to the two men. She had been typing up the diary which Gerald dictated each day onto tape, and which the family resented even more since her busy week with them in France, when she'd made it quite plain that none of them was in it: it was strictly the record of his political life, a kind of "archive," she said, "an important historical resource." Penny carried out the diary duty with a smug devotion which only added to their annoyance.

Catherine drifted into the drawing room, and came to sit with Nick behind the roped-back curtains. "I hate it when we have everyone in," she said. There was something invalidish, semi-secret, about the window seats, the houses of children's games, spying on the room and the street.

"I know, isn't it awful," said Nick absent-mindedly.

"Look, there's Gerald showing off outside."

"I think he's just having a chat with old Titch. You know it's his big day."

"It's always his big day these days. He hardly has a small one. Anyway, it's also Ma's big day. And she's got to spend it with a whole lot of empees," said Catherine, for whom the two syllables were now a mantra of tedium and absurdity. "Plus she's got to play hostess to the Other Woman in her own house, to cap it all. You can tell he's longing to put up a big sign, 'Tonight! Special Appearance!'"

" 'One Night Only'…"

"God I hope so. That Titch man worships Gerald. Have you noticed, every time he walks past the house he sort of smirks at it fondly, just in case someone's looking out."

"Does he…?" said Nick, not quite forgetting that he had once done the same. He said, "I thought the party was originally going to be at Hawkeswood."

"Oh, well that was Gerald's idea, you bet. But of course Uncle Lionel won't have the Other Woman there."

"Right…"

"It's rather funny," said Catherine coldly. "He's had this dream of getting her there. It's almost what's kept him going. And it's the one thing which simply can't happen."

"I don't quite see why Lionel…"

"Oh, it's all the vandalism she's done to everything. Anyway, that's why he's having this rewiring done, so that no one can get in the house."

Nick laughed protestingly, because he knew Catherine's neat deep readings of the family narrative, but she said, "Oh, god, yes-why do you think he gave them that painting."

"I don't know. You mean, to make up for it," said Nick, considering the idea, which did make sense of his earlier rough impression, that Gerald hadn't liked being given the Gauguin. Perhaps he saw it as the confirmation of a mysterious snub.

"God, that Miss Moneypenny's a pain," said Catherine, for whom the lens of the drawing-room window seemed to focus a world of irritants.

Penny was now taking some impromptu dictation from Gerald, while clutching her briefcase between her knees. "I suppose she must be madly in love with him, mustn't she?"

"Oh, in the noblest, purest way," said Nick.

"She'd have to be, darling, to type all that tripe."

"Some people just live for their work. Norman's an obsessive worker, as we know all too well, and she's got it from him. They're happiest when they're hard at it."

Catherine snorted. "God, the idea…"

"Mm…?"

"Well-Gerald and Penny hard at it."

"Oh… " Nick tutted and coloured.

"Now I've shocked you," Catherine said.

"Hardly," said Nick.

"Actually, she's got herself a boyfriend, you know."

"Really?" murmured Nick, with a dart of treacherous sympathy for Gerald, the doomed older man. "Have you met him?"

"No, but she told me all about him."

"Ah, I see…"

Geoffrey Titchfield moved off, and as Gerald called some friendly command to him he looked back and gave a half-serious salute. Penny and Gerald were left alone. It was a moment when Nick saw they might do something incautious-kiss, or touch in a light but revealing way that would give Catherine's scurrilous joke the chill of reality. It was another of the secrets of the house that he kept, like a sleepy conscience. Gerald looked up as he talked, from floor to floor, and Nick waved to show him they were being watched.

In the hours before the party the atmosphere thickened uncomfortably. The caterers had taken over the kitchen, and made faces behind Elena's back as she went stubbornly about her business; loud squawks and whines came out of the marquee in the garden, where the sound system was being tested; in the dining room the chairs were clustered knee to knee, waiting for orders. Gerald's manner became bright and fixed, and he mocked others for their nervousness. Catherine said she couldn't bear the sight of a cardboard box in a room, and went out to "look at properties" with Jasper. Even Rachel, who delegated with aristocratic confidence, was biting her cheek as Gerald described to her where the Lady would sit, whom she would talk to, and how much she would have to drink. He almost let it seem that the climax of the evening would be when he danced with the Prime Minister. Rachel said, "But you and I will lead off the dancing, won't we, Gerald," so that he said to her, from a rapidly covered distance, "But my love of course we will!" and gave her a blushing hug, and stumbled her through a few unexpected steps.

About six Nick slipped out for a walk. The evening was gloomy and damp. Wet leaves smeared the pavement. He was infected with the house nerves about the PM, wondering what to say to her, and already imagining tomorrow morning, when the party was over, and the enjoyable phase of remembering it and analysing it could begin. The shrieks and bangs of fireworks sounded from the neighbourhood gardens. Sometimes a rocket streaked up over the housetops and shed its stars into the low-hanging cloud. Duffel-coated children were hurried through the murk. Nick's route was an improvised zigzag, an intention glimpsed and disowned; no one watching him could have guessed it, and when he turned the corner and trotted down the steps into the station Gents he wore a frown as if the whole thing was a surprise and a nuisance even to himself.

Walking briskly back down Kensington Park Road he was frowning again, at having done something so vulgar and unsafe-it was suddenly late, the waiting and wondering and then the intent speechless action swallowed up time; his lateness accused him… Nothing "unsafe" in the new sense, of course; but reckless and illegal. It would have made a bad start to the evening to be caught. Simon at the office had said "Rudi" Nureyev used to cruise that particular lav, long ago no doubt, but the prospect of some starry pas de deux seemed to Nick to haunt and redeem the place, every time he went in. Now he was sour and practical, the warmth of a secret naughtiness faded in the November air. He went quickly upstairs, his haste was his apology, and the house had a brilliant quietness to it, a genuine brilliance, planned and paid for and brought to the point.

When he came down there was still a bit of time before the guests arrived. He went out into the dance tent and circled the creaky square of parquet, where suspended burners made pools of heat in the empty chill. The tent was a dreamlike extension to the house-plan. He came back in, across the improvised bridge, through the garlanded and lanterned back passage, and wandered from room to room, among the lights and candles and smell of lilies, with a sense almost of being in church, or at least of the memory of a ceremony. In the hall mirror he was lustre and shadow in his new evening suit and shiny shoes. He greeted Rachel and Catherine in the drawing room, and they chatted as if they were all guests, happily denatured, transformed by silk and velvet, jewels and makeup, into drawing-room creatures. The bangs of fireworks made them skittish. From downstairs came repeated stifled explosions of champagne corks, as the waiters got ready. "Shall I get us a drink?" said Nick.

"Yes, do. And you might find my husband," said Rachel.

He looked into the dining room, crowded like a restaurant with separate tables, where Toby was standing with a card in his hand. He was silently rehearsing his speech. "Keep it short, darling," Nick said.

"Nick… Fuck…!" said Toby, with a worried grin. "You know it's one thing making a speech to your aunts and uncles and, you know, your mates, but it's quite another making a speech to the fucking Prime Minister."

"Don't panic," said Nick. "We'll all shout, 'Hear, hear!'"

Toby laughed gloomily. "You don't suppose she might have to go to a summit or something at the last moment?"

"This is the summit, I'm afraid. It certainly is for your papa." Nick edged between the tables, each place with its mitred napkin and black-inked card. No titles, of course. He leant on the chair-to-be of Sharon Flintshire. "I love these pictures of the happy couple."

"I know," said Toby. "The Cat's done a bit of art."

Catherine had propped up on the sideboard a thing like a school project, where blown-up photographs of Gerald and Rachel before they were married flanked a formal wedding photo, with later family pics below. It looked rather like the placards of the cast outside a long-running West End farce.

"Your mother was so beautiful," Nick said.

"I know. And Dad."

"They're so young."

"Yeah, Dad's not that keen on it actually. He doesn't want the Lady seeing him in his hippy phase." To judge from the photos Gerald's hippy phase had reached its counter-cultural extreme in a pair of mutton-chop whiskers and a floral tie.

"I can't work out how old they were."

"Well, Dad'll be fifty next year, so he was… twenty-four; and Ma's a couple of years older, of course."

"They're our age," said Nick.

"They didn't waste any time," said Toby with a sad little smile.

"They certainly didn't waste any time having you, dear," Nick said, making the amusing calculation. "You must have been conceived on the honeymoon."

"I think I was," said Toby, both proud and embarrassed. "Somewhere in South Africa. Ma was a virgin when she was married, I know that, and three weeks later she was pregnant. No playing around there."

"No, indeed," said Nick, thinking of the years his parents had taken to have him, and with an inward smile at his own freedoms.

Toby looked at his speech again, and bit his lip. Nick watched him affectionately: unbuttoned jacket over crimson cummerbund, heavy black shoes, hair cut short so that he looked fatter-faced, like an embarrassed approximation of his father, but his father as he was now, not when he was twenty-four. On a slow impulse Nick said, "I may have just what you need. If you'd like a little, er, chemical help."

"Have you…?" said Toby, startled but interested.

And Nick murmured to him that he'd managed to get hold of a bit of charlie.

"God, amazing, thanks a lot!" said Toby, and then smiled round guiltily.

They sent a waiter to the drawing room with champagne, and went on up, with a little flutter about "rehearsing." For Nick the flutter was that of sharing the secret. They went into Toby's old bedroom, and locked the door. "The place is crawling with fuzz," Toby said.

"So what are you going to say in your speech?" said Nick, tipping out some powder on the bedside table. The room had a special mood of desertion, not the mute patience of a spare bedroom but the stillness of a place a boy has grown up in and abandoned, with everything settling into silence just as it was. There was a chest of drawers in mahogany and a gilt-framed mirror, very nice pieces, and Toby's school and team photos, a young unguarded class sense to everything; and the wardrobe of clothes Nick had once daringly dressed up in, which had lost their meaning, even to him.

"I thought I might make a joke about the Conference," said Toby. "You know, the Next Move Forward, and Mum and Dad going on for ever, like the Lady."

"Mm." Nick frowned over the busy credit card. "I think the thing is, darling, you should make the speech just as if the Lady wasn't there. And everything you say should be about… your father and your mother. It's their day, not hers, and not just Gerald's."

"Oh," said Toby.

"You might even make it more about Rachel."

"Right… God, I wish you'd write it." Toby slouched anxiously about the room. From downstairs the doorbell was heard and the first guests arriving. "I mean, what can you say about the old girl?"

"You could say what a lot she's had to put up with in Gerald," said Nick, with a dark sense of her not knowing the half of it. "Actually, don't say that," he added prudently; "just keep it short." He pictured Toby standing and speaking, his anxiety grinning through to a crowd that would be warmed with drink into roughness as well as affection. "Remember, everyone loves you," he said, to help him overlook the various monsters who were coming.

Toby stooped and sniffed up his line and stood back; Nick waited and watched for the amorous dissolve, not knowing quite what colour it would take in him. "Haven't done this for yonks," Toby said, half protest, half apology. Then, "Mm, that's very nice…" And a minute later, in beaming surrender, "This is great stuff, Nick, I must say. Where the hell did you get it?"

Nick snorted briskly and wiped the table with the flat of his finger. "Oh, I got it off Ouradi, actually."

"Right," said Toby. "Yah, Ouradi always gets great stuff."

"You used to do it with him in the old days."

"I know, we did once or twice. I didn't know you ever did it, though." Toby pranced towards him, and it was all Nick could do not to kiss him and feel for his dick, as he would have done with Wani himself. Instead he said, "Here, why don't you take the rest of this." It was about a third of a gram.

"God, no, I couldn't," said Toby, with the gleam of possession at once in his face.

"Yeah, go on," said Nick. "I've had enough, but you might need some more." He held out the tiny billet-doux, which as always with Ronnie was made from a page of a girlie mag; a magnified nipple covered it like a seal. Toby took it and put it, after a moment's thought, deep in his breast pocket. "God, that's fantastic!" he said. "Yah, I think tonight'll be all right, you know, I'm just going to keep it short," and he went prattling on in the simple high spirits of a first hit of cocaine. On the way downstairs he said, "Of course, darling, tell me if you want some more-I won't use all this."

"I'll be fine," said Nick.

They sashayed into the drawing room, where Lady Partridge was asking a man from the Treasury about muggers, and Badger Brogan was flirting gingerly with Greta Timms, pregnant with her seventh child. Nick circled through the room, smiling and almost immune to the anxiety he noticed in others, the booming joviality, the glancing inattentiveness, the sense of a lack that was waiting to be filled by the famous arrival. He looked round for a drink. The coke trickle in his throat made him doubly thirsty. Two waiters came in with laden trays, which made him laugh: they were just the answer to a double thirst. He chose, on grounds of beauty, the dark, full-lipped one, "Thanks-oh, hello," Nick said, over his raised glass, knowing the waiter before he knew who he was-just for a second, while everything was shining and suspended, their eyes engaged, the bubbles sailing upwards in a dozen tall glasses. "I remember you," he said then, rather drily, as if he were a waiter who had memorably dropped something.

"Oh… good evenin," the waiter said, pleasantly, so that Nick felt forgiven; and then, "Where do I see you before?"-so that he guessed he was in fact forgotten.

There was a commotion at the window, and Geoffrey Titchfield said, "Ah, the Prime Minister's car has arrived," like an old flunkey, steeped in the grandeur of his masters. He moved towards the door, too exalted by his own words to share in the fuss that they had triggered. Guests glanced into each other's faces for reassurance, one or two seemed already to give up, and withdrew into corners, and among the men there was some thinly amiable jostling. Nick followed through onto the landing, with the sense that the PM was beyond discretion, she'd be piqued if there wasn't a throng, a popular demonstration. He was pressed against the banister at the first turn of the stair, smiling down like an eye-catching unnamed attendant in a history painting. The door was standing open and the damp chill from outside gave an edge to the excitement. The women shivered with happy discomfort. The night was the fractious element they had triumphed against. The Mordant Analyst scurried in, almost tripped, amid laughs and tuts. Gerald was already in the street, in humble alignment with the Special Branch boys. Rachel stood just inside, haloed by the drizzly light and the diaphanous silver sheath of her dress. The well-known voice was heard, there was a funny intent silence of a second or two, and then there she was.

She came in at her gracious scuttle, with its hint of a long-suppressed embarrassment, of clumsiness transmuted into power. She looked ahead, into the unknown house, and everything she saw was a confirmation. The high hall mirror welcomed her, and in it the faces of the welcomers, some of whom, grand though they were, had a look beyond pride, a kind of rapture, that was bold and shy at once. She seemed pleased by the attention, and countered it cheerfully and practically, like modem royalty. She gave no sign of noticing the colour of the front door.

Upstairs, calm was re-established, but of a special kind, the engaged calm of progress once the overture has finished and the curtain has gone up. People recollected themselves. There was a sort of unplanned receiving line when the Lady came into the room (her husband, behind her, slipped modestly towards a drink and an old friend). Barry Groom, bouncing back from a low point with a call girl in the spring, dropped his head with horrible humility as the PM took his hand; it was later claimed that he had even said hello. Wani she greeted humorously, as someone she had seen recently elsewhere-he won the glow of recognition but surrendered the claim to need to speak to her so soon again; though he held on to her hand and it wasn't clear for a moment if he was going to kiss her. Gerald steered her jealously on, murmuring names. Nick watched with primitive interest as she approached; again she was beyond manners, however courtly and jewelled. Her hair was so perfect that he started to picture it wet and hanging over her face. She was wearing a long black skirt and a wide-shouldered white-and-gold jacket, amazingly embroidered, like a Ruritanian uniform, and cut low at the front to display a magnificent pearl necklace. Nick peered at the necklace, and the large square bosom, and the motherly fatness of the neck. "Isn't she beautiful," said Trudi Titchfield, in unselfconscious reverie. Nick was briskly presented, elided almost, in the rhythm of the long social sentence, but with a surprising detail, or fib, "Nick Guest… a great friend of our children… a young don," so that he saw himself enhanced and also compromised, since dons were not the PM's favourite people. He nodded and smiled and felt her blue eyes briefly but unconfidently focus on him before she seized the initiative and called out, "John, hullo…!" to John Timms, who was suddenly right next to him. "Prime Minister…" said John Timms, not shaking her hand but clasping her somehow with the fervour and humour of his tone. At the end of the row were the children themselves, a goggling unmatched pair, Toby still marvellously cheerful and Catherine, who could have sulked or asked an awkward question, shaking hands with a bright "Hello!" and gazing at the PM like a child at a conjuror. "Oh, and this is my boyfriend," she said, producing Jasper but forgetting to name him. "Hello," said the Prime Minister, in a tone just dry enough to suggest that by now she deserved a drink: which Tristao, with his doe eyes and nerveless smile, was at hand to provide.

Nick trotted downstairs from a quick refresher and caught Wani coming out of Gerald and Rachel's bedroom. "God, careful, darling," he said.

"I was just using the lav," said Wani.

"Mm," said Nick. He was too drunk and high himself to take the danger at all seriously. "Do use my lav if you need to."

"The stairs," said Wani.

Nick loved the way the coke took off the blur of champagne, claret, Sautemes, and more champagne. It totted up the points and carried them over as credit in a new account of pleasure. It brought clarity, like a cure-almost, at first, like sobriety. He put an arm round Wani's shoulders, and asked him if he was having a good time. "We see so little of each other," he said. They started to go downstairs and something caught Nick's eye at the third or fourth step, someone else moving in the great white bedroom that Wani had come out of. His instinct as guardian of the house, preventer of trouble, quickened. Jasper came out, businesslike, as if he had the keys and was showing the place to a buyer. He gave Nick a nod and a wink. "Just going up to Cat's room," he said.

"So," said Nick, as he and Wani went on down, with a pensive hesitation each step or two, as though they might stop completely in the charm of a shared thought, "you've been running the house tart up the hill… "

"It's got to be climbed, old chap, it's got to be climbed."

"Yeah," said Nick, with a sniff and a sour turning down of the mouth. He looked for guilt in Wani's oddly rosy face; he glimpsed, like shuffled cards, the two of them together in the bathroom, Wani's love of corruption, all the licence that went with the latest line. "So it's not our secret any more," he said. Wani gave him a look that was scornful but not aggressive. Nick might be in the clear, clever phase, but Wani was much further on, in the phase where high spirits reel and stall and blink at a barely recognized room or friend. Nick let him go, and the high heartbeat of the coke became a short sprint of panic. He smiled defensively, and the smile seemed to search and find a happier subject, in the opening bloom of the drug. It was hard to know what mattered. There was certainly no point in thinking about it now. Out in the marquee the music had started, and everything had the air of an escapade.

He found Catherine in a corner of the drawing room being chatted up by toothy old Jonty Stafford, the retired ambassador, who stooped over her like a convivial Jabberwock. "No, I think you'd like Dubrovnik," he was saying, with a suggestive hooding of the eyes. "The Hotel Diocletian, enormous charm."

"Oh," said Catherine.

"They always gave us the bridal suite, you know… which has the most enormous bed. You could have had an orgy in there."

"Not on your wedding night, presumably."

"Hello, Sir Jonty."

"Ah, now here's your handsome young beau, now I'm for it, now I'm done for!" said SirJonty, and lurched off after another passing female bottom, which happened to be that of the PM. He looked back for a moment with a shake of the head: "Marvellous, you know… the Prime Minister… "

"I think you've just been propositioned by a very drunk old man," said Nick.

"Well, it's nice to be noticed by someone," said Catherine, dropping onto a sofa. "Sit here. Do you know where Jaz is?"

"Haven't seen him," said Nick.

The photographer was at large, and his flash gleamed in the mirrors. He slipped and lingered among the guests, approached with a smile, like a vaguely remembered bore, in his bow tie and dinner jacket, and then poufl-he'd got them. Later he came back, he came around, because most shots catch a bleary blink or a turned shoulder, and got them again. Now they bunched and faced him, or they pretended they hadn't seen him and acted themselves with careless magnificence. Nick dropped onto the sofa beside Catherine, lounged with one leg curled under him and a grin on his face at his own elegance. He felt he could act himself all night. He felt fabulous, he loved these nights, and whilst it would have been good to top the thing off with sex it seemed hardly to matter if he didn't. It made the absolute best of not having sex.

"Mm, you smell nice," said Catherine.

"Oh, it's just the old 'Je Promets,' " said Nick, and shook his cufflinks at her. "Have you had your twelve seconds with the PM yet?"

"I was just about to, but Gerald put a stop to it."

"I heard a bit of her talk at dinner. She does that Great Person thing of being very homely and self-indulgent."

"Greedy," said Catherine.

"They all love it, they breathe sighs of relief, they'd talk about marge versus butter all night, and then suddenly she's on them with the Common Agricultural Policy."

"You've not given her your own thoughts on it."

"Not yet…" said Nick. "She's quite closely managed, isn't she? She's in charge, but she goes where she's told."

"Well, she's not in charge here," said Catherine, beckoning boldly to Tristao. "What do you want to drink?"

"What do I want?'.' said Nick, matching Tristao's formal smile with a sly one, and running his eyes up the waiter's body. "What would I like best?"

"Champagne, sir? Or something stronger?"

"Champagne for now," Nick drawled, "and something stronger later." The view of pleasure deepened in front of him, the lovely teamwork of drugs and drink, the sense of risk nonsensically heightening the sense of security, the new conviction he could do what he wanted with Tristao, after all these years. Tristao himself merely nodded, but as he stooped to reach an empty glass he leant quickly and heavily on Nick's knee. Nick watched him going away through the crowded room and for several long seconds it was all one perspective, here and Hawkeswood, the gilt, the mirrors, room after room, the glimpsed coat-tails of a fugitive idea: which then came to you, by itself, and it was what you wanted. The pursuit was nothing but a restless way of waiting. All shall have prizes: Gerald was right. When Tristao came back and bowed the drinks on their tray towards them, Nick plucked up his glass in a toast that was both general and secret. "To us," he said.

"To us," said Catherine. "Do stop flirting with that waiter."

A minute later she said, "Fedden seems pretty lively tonight. Most unlike himself, I must say." They looked across to where Toby was sprawled on the PM's sofa and telling some unimaginable joke. Just beside the PM the wide dented seat cushion was a reception zone on which supplicants perched for an audience of a minute or two before being amicably dislodged-though Toby, trading perhaps on the triumph of his speech after dinner, had been there rather longer.

"I wouldn't be surprised," said Nick, "if Wani hadn't given him a bit of laughing powder to get him through."

"Oh, god," said Catherine disparagingly, before smiling at the idea of it. "You know what he's like, he'll offer her a poke or whatever it's called."

"She's had a lot to drink, hasn't she. But it doesn't seem to have any effect."

"It's so funny watching the men with her. They come up with their wives but you can see they're an embarrassment-look at that one now, yes, shakes hands, 'Yes, Prime Minister, yes, yes,' can't quite get round to introducing his wife… obviously longing for her to get lost so he can have a hot date with the Lady himself-now she's got to sit on the sofa, he's furious… but yes! she's got him-he's squatting down… he's kneeling on the carpet…"

"Maybe she'll make him kiss her, um…"

"Oh, surely not…"

"Her ring, darling!"

"Oh, maybe. It's a very big one."

"Well, she's quite queenly, isn't she, in that outfit."

"Queenly?… Darling, she looks like a country and western singer."

Catherine gave a brief screech, so that people turned round with varying degrees of humour and irritation. She had a look of running on quite fast inside. She held her trembling glass in front of her face. "These champagne flutes are simply enormous!" she said.

"I know, they're sort of champagne tubas, aren't they," said Nick.

Some very loud fireworks started going off in the communal gardens, mortars and thunderclaps. The windows rattled and the bangs echoed off the houses. People shouted cheerfully and flinched, but the Prime Minister didn't flinch, she fortified her voice with a firm diapason as if rising to the challenge of a rowdy Chamber. Around her her courtiers started like pheasants.

"Actually what amazes me," Nick said, "is the fantastic queenery of the men. The heterosexual queenery."

"I sort of expect that," said Catherine. "You know, having Gerald…"

"Darling, Gerald's like a navvy in overalls, he's a miner on a picket line compared to some of these people. Look at old, um, the Minister for… what is he the Minister for?"

"I don't know, he's the Monster for something. With the pink face. I've seen him on telly."

It was one of the men standing directly behind the PM, like a showman, both protecting and exhibiting her. From time to time he cast covetous glances at her hair. His own grey curls were oiled back in deep crinkly waves, over which he passed a hand that barely touched. He was one of the few men who were wearing a white tuxedo, and his posture was a superb denial of a possible gaffe. The jacket had swooping lapels, with cream silk facings; a line of flashing blue dress studs climbed to a lolling, surely purple, velvet bow tie. His wing collar kept his head framed at a haughty angle, and a tight silk cummerbund kept him erect and deepened the dyspeptic flush on his face.

Catherine said, "I can see no self-respecting homosexual would dress like that."

"Oh, I wouldn't go that far," said Nick, uncertain which of them was being more ironic. "It's just the licensed vanity…"

"He's the Monster of Vanity, darling!" said Catherine with another whoop.

He went to the first-floor lavatory and had a quick line there. It seemed a bit unnecessary to go all furtively upstairs. He snorted with a thumb against each nostril in turn, and smirked back at Gerald shaking hands with Ronald Reagan. You never felt the old boy knew who Gerald was-he had that look of medium-level benevolence. From outside the music was thumping, it had been Big Band jazz and now it was earlyish rock 'n' roll, such as Rachel and Gerald might conceivably have danced to twenty-five years ago. Fireworks popped and screeched. Beyond the locked door the collective boom of the party could be heard, with its undertone of secret opportunities: there were two men here that he wanted. The door handle rattled, he tidied, checked, flushed, tweaked his bow tie in the mirror, and sauntered out, hardly seeing the policeman waiting.

The Duchess had taken his place next to Catherine, so he looked about. The crowded drawing room was his playground. He found himself lounging intently towards the PM's sofa. Toby came away like an actor into the wings, still smiling; he couldn't say what she'd said. Lady Partridge had been hovering, and bent and clasped the Prime Minister's hand. She seemed nearly as speechless as Nick would have been on meeting a revered writer. "I love your work" was really all one could say. But in this case, as Lady Partridge was an old woman, a crinkle of wisdom and maternal pride could be seen beside the childlike awe and submission. Nick couldn't quite hear what she was saying… something about the litter problem?… and he was pretty sure that she herself couldn't hear the PM-but it didn't matter, they hung on to each other's hands, in an act of homage or even of healing which for Judy was a thrilling novelty and for the PM a deeply familiar routine. They were both fairly sozzled, and might almost have been having an argument as they tugged their hands backwards and forwards and raised their voices. There was something in the PM that seemed to say she'd have preferred an argument, it was what she was best at, and as Judy withdrew, crouching blindly backwards, she picked up her empty whisky glass and banged it against the leg of the Monster of Vanity.

It was the simplest thing to do-Nick came forward and sat, half-kneeling, on the sofa's edge, like someone proposing in a play. He gazed delightedly at the Prime Minister's face, at her whole head, beaked and crowned, which he saw was a fine if improbable fusion of the Vorticist and the Baroque. She smiled back with a certain animal quickness, a bright blue challenge. There was the soft glare of the flash-twice-three times-a gleaming sense of occasion, the gleam floating in the eye as a blot of shadow, his heart running fast with no particular need of courage as he grinned and said, "Prime Minister, would you like to dance?"

"You know, I'd like that very much," said the PM, in her chest tones, the contralto of conviction. Around her the men sniggered and recoiled at an audacity that had been beyond them. Nick heard the whole episode already accruing its commentary, its history, as he went out with her among twitches of surprise, the sudden shifting of the centre of gravity, an effect that none of them could have caused and none could resist. He himself smiled down at an angle, ignoring them all, intimately held in what the PM was saying and the brilliant boldness of his replies. Others followed them down the stone stairs and through the lantern-lit passage, to watch, and to play their subsidiary parts. "One's not often asked to dance," said the PM, "by a don." And Nick saw that Gerald hadn't got it quite right: she moved in her own accelerated element, her own garlanded perspective, she didn't give a damn about squares on the wallpaper or blue front doors-she noticed nothing, and yet she remembered everything.

There was sparse but hectic activity on the parquet when they stepped on to it, to the thump of "Get Off Of My Cloud." Gerald was bopping with a tight-lipped Jenny Groom whilst Barry pushed Penny round the floor in a lurching embrace. Rachel, sedately jiving with Jonty Stafford, had a look of exhausted good manners. And then Gerald saw the PM, his idol, who had said before that she wouldn't dance, but who now, a couple of whiskies on, was getting down rather sexily with Nick. All Nick's training with Miss Avison came back, available as the twelve-times table, the nimble footwork, the light grasp of the upper arm; though with it there came a deeper liveliness, a sense he could caper all over the floor with the PM breathless in his grip. Anyway, Gerald put a stop to that.

They were up in Nick's bathroom, the three of them, Wani chewing and sniffing, almost shivering, like someone who is ill. He had a look of wide-eyed gloom, racing and lost. He said he was fine, never better. He concentrated on unfolding the square of Forum magazine, and then scraping the girl's dark pubic mound clear of powder. Nick sat on the edge of the bath, sat in the bath, crossways, with his legs hanging out, and watched Tristao taking a hugely protracted piss.

"Don't put that away," said Wani, which was one of his little jokes.

Tristao clucked and said, "He likes that."

"I know," said Nick.

"I know where I see you now," Tristao said, putting it away none the less, and flushing the lavatory. He washed his hands and talked into the mirror. "Is Mr Toby birthday party. In the big big house. Long time ago."

"That's right," said Nick, struggling up and taking off his jacket. Tristao took his tail-coat off too, as though it were agreed what they were going to do. The instinctive certainty made Nick smile.

"You come lookin for me, in the kitchen. I think you was very pissed."

"Was I?" said Nick vaguely.

"Then I feel very bad because I say I meet you later, and I never come."

"We know why," said Wani.

"Don't worry," said Nick. "I'm sure I forgot too."

Tristao put a hand on Nick's shoulder, and Nick understood and got out his wallet and gave him £20. Tristao tilted his face and stuck his long fat tongue into Nick's mouth, kissed him systematically for ten seconds, then pulled out and turned away. Wani hadn't noticed, busy with the hill of coke. Tristao went and peered over his shoulder. "I get in big trouble for this," he said.

"No trouble," said Wani. "Couldn't be safer. House under police guard."

"Yeah, I mean with my boss. Just a short break, yeah?"

"See how you like it," said Wani, groping back at the waiter's crotch without looking round.

"I mean, do you need more money?" said Nick.

"I've just given him fifty fucking quid," said Wani in a loud drawl.

Tristao mooched about and looked in the mirror again. He said, "So you no bring your wife with you to the party?"

"She's not my fucking wife, you slut," said Wani cheerfully.

Tristao grinned at Nick. "I see you dancin with the big lady tonight," he said. "Jumpin around. I think she likes you."

Wani's head reared in a single laugh. "I'm going to ask her just what she thinks of Nick the next time I see her."

"You a good friend of hers then, are you?" said Tristao, and grinned at Nick again.

"A fucking good friend," said Wani, tapping and peering at his work. "An exceedingly good friend… There…" He turned and stared. "No, don't you love her? Isn't she just beautiful?"

Tristao made a little moue. "Yeah, she OK. OK for me, anyway. Lots of parties, lots of money. Lots of tips. Hundred pound. Two hundred pound…"

"God, you slut," said Wani.

Nick went to the basin and drank two glasses of water. "I need a li-ine," he crooned. They were all wired up now and desperate to go on, with the great, almost numbing reassurance of having packets more stuff. It was beyond pleasure, it was its own motor, pure compulsion, though it gave them the delusion of choice, and of wit in making it.

Tristao bent to snort his line, and Wani felt his cock and Nick felt his arse. "Is good stuff? So where you get this stuff?" he said, stepping back, escaping for a moment, sniffing sharply.

"I get it from Ronnie," said Wani. "That's his name. Ah, that's better"- pinching his nostrils. "I love Ronnie. He's my best friend. He's really my only friend."

"Apart from the Prime Minister," said Nick.

Tristao had the big first smirk on his face. A dozen decisions were already being made for him. He said, "I thought he's your best friend. Him, Nick. No?"

"Nick? He's just a slut," said Wani. "He takes my money."

Nick looked round from the first half of his line. "What he means is he's my employer," he said, with necessary pedantry.

"Not that he does any fucking work," said Wani.

"Actually that's one kind of work I do do," said Nick pertly.

"What-fuckin work?" said Tristao, and laughed like an idiot.

"Anyway," said Nick, "he's a millionaire, so…"

"I'm a mw/tf-millionaire," said Wani, with a sort of airy scowl. "I want you to do your trick now."

"What is his trick?" said Nick.

"You'll see," said Wani.

"I hope this drugs don't make my dicky go soft," said T Tristao.

"If your dicky go soft I'm having my fucking money back," said Wani.

Tristao dropped his trousers and pants round his knees and sat on the edge of the little cane-seated chair. His dark heavy dick hung down. He put his hands up inside his shirt, pushed his shirt up over his ribs, and twisted his nipples. "You want to help me?" he said.

Wani tutted and went to stand behind him, leaned over to watch as he pinched and coaxed the waiter's nipples between forefinger and thumb. Tristao sighed, smiled, and bit his parched lip. He looked down intendy, as if it was always a marvel to him, as his cock stirred, and thickened, twitched its way languorously up across his thigh before floating free with a pink smile of its own as the skin slid back a little. "That's what it's all about," said Wani.

"Is that it?" said Nick.

"You like?" said Tristao, whose face seemed to Nick suddenly greedy and strange. Of course his penis was the latent idea of the night, of this strange little scene, an idea trailed and discounted and lifting at the end as a large stupid fact. Nick said,

"So you've seen this before?"

"Oh, he always want it," said Tristao.

Wani was down on his knees, trying clumsily to do justice to the thing he always wanted. His pants were undone, but his own little penis, depressed by the blitz or blizzard of coke, was puckered up, almost in hiding. He was lost, beyond humiliation-it was what you paid for. He sniffed as he licked and sucked, and gleaming mucus, flecked with blood and undissolved powder, trailed out of his famous nose into the waiter's lap. Obviously the waiter never got like this himself, he'd learnt the danger from Wani's example. Now he was chatty, like someone among friends. He nodded down at Wani and said, "That's when I see him first. Mr Toby party. He give me coke and I fuck him in the hass."

"In the house…? Oh, in the arse, I see." Nick smiled with a funny mixture of coldness and hilarity, a certain respect for mischief, however painful. He watched him pushing his hands through his lover's black curls: which he did in a carefree, patient, familiar way, almost as if Wani wasn't sucking him off, as if he was some beautiful pampered child who'd run in among the adults, hungry for praise and confident of it. Tristao stroked his hair, and grinned and praised him. "He always pay the best."

"I'm sure!" said Nick, and took a condom out of his pocket.

"Here we go," said Tristao.

Downstairs the Prime Minister was leaving. Gerald had danced with her for almost ten minutes. He had the glow of intimacy and lightness of success about him as he saw her to her car, careless of the rain. Late fireworks were still going off, like bombs and rifles, and they glanced upwards. Rachel stood in the doorway, with Penny behind her, whilst Gerald, usurping the secret policeman, leant forward and slammed the car door in a happy involuntary bow. The rain gleamed and needled in the street lamps as the Daimler pulled away with a noise like a brusque sigh.

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