The Line of Beauty

13

NICK WENT OUT to vote early, and took Catherine with him in the car. She had been up since six to catch Gerald on Good Morning Britain. In the long month of the election campaign she had refused to watch TV, but now that Gerald and Rachel had both gone up to Barwick she seemed able to do little else.

"How was he?" Nick said.

"He was only on for a minute. He said the Tories had brought down unemployment.''

"That is a bit rich."

"It's like Lady Tipper saying the 80s are a marvellous decade for staff."

"Well, it'll soon be over."

"What? Oh, the election, yes." Catherine stared out into the drizzle. "The 80s are going on for ever."

In the long tree-tunnel of Holland Park Avenue it was as if the dawn had been deferred, though it was high summer, and hours after sunrise. It was just the discouraging sort of weather that campaigners dreaded.

"Gerald's bound to get back in, isn't he?" said Nick. At Kensington Park Gardens no one had been able to put this simple question…

Catherine seemed to look up from the depths of her gloom at an impossible consolation. "It would be just so wonderful if he didn't."

At the polling station they gave in their cards and the woman smiled and blushed when she saw the name Fedden and the address. Nick felt she was being unduly confident. In '83 Catherine had fouled her paper, and this time she promised to vote for the Anti-Yuppie Visionary Vegetarian candidate. Nick stood in the plywood booth and turned the thick hexagonal stub of pencil in his fingers. Voting always gave him a heightened sense of irresponsibility. They were in the big classroom of a primary school, with children's drawings and a large and unusual alphabet (N was for Nanny, K for Kiwi-fruit) running round the walls. Today was an unearned holiday. Nick had a moment's glimpse of the hundred little rules and routines of the place, and a mood of truancy came over him. Besides, what happened in the booth was an eternal secret. His pencil twitched above the Labour and Alliance candidates, and then he made his cross very frowningly for the Green man. He knew the Conservative was bound to get back in.

There were doubts, though, in some quarters, and Labour was thought to have had a very good campaign. Nick himself found their press advertisements much wittier than the Tories'. "In Britain the poor have got poorer and the rich have got… well, they've got the Conservatives" was one that even Gerald had laughed at. In general, Gerald's view was that campaigning was over-rated at the national level, and irksome, even counterproductive, in the constituencies. "You know, the best thing I could have done on May 11, when the election was called, would have been to push off for a month's holiday somewhere," he said to Catherine. "Quite possibly on safari." He got fed up with Catherine saying it was a "TV election." "I don't know why you go on about it, Puss," he said, looking in the hall mirror before a "photo-opportunity" for the local news. "All elections are TV elections. And a bloody good thing too. It means you don't have to go and talk to the voters yourself. In fact if you do try and talk to them they're bored to death because they've heard it all already on TV." ("Mm, that may be why," said Catherine.)

He was surprised that he hadn't been asked to appear in more of the major broadcasts and televised press conferences, where the Lady herself had retained a tireless dominance. His personal highlight had been a Question Time on BBC1, where he stood in for the indisposed Home Secretary at the last moment but very much took his own line. He did a lot of smarmy joshing with Robin Day, whom he knew socially, and this irritated the Labour defence spokesman, who was fighting an uphill battle on nuclear disarmament. Nick and Rachel watched it at home. Caught on the TV screen in his own drawing room Gerald looked distinctly alien, fattened and sharpened by the studio lights. He played sulkily with his fountain pen while the other panellists were speaking. His breast-pocket handkerchief billowed upwards like the flame of a torch. He came out in favour of Europe, having as he said a house in France where he spent the summer. He said he believed there were tens of thousands of jobs available if only people would get out and look for them (cries, which he relished, of "Shame"). Lively rudeness and childish antagonism were the point of the programme, and also its limitation. Rachel laughed in fond disparagement once or twice. Gerald's special mixture of laziness and ambition seemed to crystallize under the camera into brutal bumptiousness. A questioner from the floor, who looked like Cecil, the Barwick welly-whanger, accused him of being too rich to care about ordinary people; and while Gerald boomingly deplored the statement you could see it sinking and settling in his flushed features as a kind of acclaim.

When it came to canvassing in Barwick, Gerald felt there was less need than ever to put oneself out. He pooh-poohed the polls. All the Northamptonshire seats were Tory strongholds, even Corby, with its closed-down steelworks. "Even the unemployed know they're better off with us," Gerald said. "Anyway, they've got a computer in the office up there now, and if they can find out how to work it they'll be able to pinpoint any dodgy waverers and bombard them with stuff." "What?" Catherine wanted to know. "Well, pictures of me!" said Gerald. Nick wondered if his cavalier tone was a way of preparing for possible defeat. In the final week there was something called Wobbly Thursday, when everyone at Central Office panicked. The polls showed Labour barging ahead. Toby remarked that his father seemed very unconcerned. "One has merely to cultivate," replied Gerald, "the quality that M. Mitterrand has attributed to the Prime Minister, and which he sees as the supreme political virtue."

"Oh yes, what's that?" said Toby.

"Indifference," said Gerald, almost inaudibly.

" Right… " said Toby; and then, with a certain canny persistence, "But I thought she was climbing up the wall."

"Climbing up the wall, nonsense."

"It's like the adverb game," said Catherine. "Task: Climb up the wall. Manner: Indifferently." At which Gerald went off with a pitying smile to correct his diary.

At the office Nick looked through the mail and dictated a couple of letters to Melanie. In Wani's absence he'd grown fond of dictating, and found himself able to improvise long supple sentences rich in suggestion and syntactic shock, rather as the older Henry James, pacing and declaiming to a typist, had produced his most difficult novels. Melanie, who was used to Wani's costive memos, and even to dressing up the gist of a letter in her own words, stuck out her tongue with concentration as she took down Nick's old-fashioned periods and perplexing semicolons. Today he was answering a couple of rich American queens who had a film-production company perhaps as fanciful, as nominal, as Ogee was, and who were showing interest in the Spoils of Poynton project-though with certain strong reservations about the plot. They felt that it needed an injection of sex-smooching and action as Lord Ouradi had put it. The queens themselves sounded rather like porn actors, being called Treat Rush and Brad Craft. "Dear Treat and Brad," Nick began: "It was with no small interest that we read your newest proposals comma with their comma to us comma so very open brackets indeed comma so startlingly close brackets novel vision of the open quotes sex-life close quotes of italics capital S Spoils semicolon-"

A small commotion at the door, Simon looking up, going over, Melanie setting down her pad. A crop-headed black girl, like a busty little boy, and a skinny white woman with her… it was usually a mistake, or they were market kids trotting round cheap Walkmans, cheap CDs. No one much, sad to say, arrived by design at the Ogee office. Melanie came back. "Oh, Nick, it's a, um, Rosemary Charles to see you. Sorry… " Melanie twitched with her own snobbery, part apology, part reproach-she stood in the way, box-shouldered, high-heeled, so that Nick leant back in his chair to look round her, down the length of the office, and with a view of the two words Rosemary Charles bobbing on the air, weightless signifiers, that took on, over several strange seconds, their own darkness and gravity. He stood up and went towards her, her and the other woman, who seemed to be here as a witness of his confusion. It was a momentary vertigo, a railing withdrawn. He gave them a smile that was welcoming and showed a proper unfrivolous regard for the occasion, and well… he was afraid he knew why they'd come, more or less. He felt something like guilt showed in his pretence that he didn't. He grasped Rosemary's hand and looked at her with allowable pleasure and curiosity-she was still coming clear to him, from four years back, when she was pretty and fluffy and her eyes were sly: and now she was beautiful, revealed, the drizzle silvering the fuzz of her crown, her jaw forward in the tense half-smile of surprise that her brother had had when he'd called for Nick one morning, unannounced, and changed his life.

"Yes, hello," she said, with a hint of hostility, perhaps just the hard note of the resolve that had brought her here. Of course she was looking for him too, down this four-year tunnel: how he used to be and how he'd changed. "This is Gemma."

"Hi," said Nick warmly. "Nick."

"I hope you don't mind," said Rosemary. "We went to your house. The woman there told us where you were."

"It's wonderful to see you!" said Nick, and saw the phrase register with them like some expected annoyance. They had something dreadful about them, with their undeclared purpose and their look of supporting each other for some much bigger challenge than Nick was ever going to offer them. "Come in, come in."

Gemma peered round the room. "Is there somewhere private where we could talk?" she said. She was Yorkshire, older, blue-eyed, hair dyed black, black T-shirt and black jeans and Doc Martens.

"Of course," said Nick. "Why don't you come upstairs."

He took them out and in again and up to the flat, with a responsible smile that threatened to warp into a smirk, as if he was proud of this kitsch apartment and its possible effect on the two women. He saw it all with fresh eyes himself. They sat down in the "Georgian-revival''-revival library.

"Look at all these books… " said Gemma.

On the low table all the papers were laid out, as in the reading room of a club. CHUCK HER OUT, begged the Mirror. THREE TIMES A LADY, bawled the Sun.

Rosemary said, "It's about Leo."

"Well, I thought…"

She looked down, she wasn't settled in the room, on the sofa's edge; then she stared at him for a second or two. She said, "Well, you know, my brother died, three weeks ago." Nick listened to the words, and heard how the West Indian colour and exactness in her tone claimed it as a private thing. It had been one of Leo's tones too: the cockney for defence, the Jamaican crackle and burn for pleasure, just sometimes, rare and beautiful like his black blush.

"Nearly four weeks now, pet," said Gemma, with her own note of bleak solidarity. "Yes, May the sixteenth." She looked at Nick as though the extra days made him more culpable, or useless.

"I'm so sorry," Nick said.

"We're trying to contact all his friends."

"Well, because, you know… " said Gemma.

"All his lovers," said Rosemary firmly. Nick remembered that she was, or had been, a doctor's receptionist; she was used to the facts. She unzipped her shoulder bag and delved into it. He found it screened them both, this angular attention to business-he was flinching at the frighteningly solemn thing she had just told him, and she twitched too at the power of her words, even if (as he thought he saw) they had a certain softness or drabness for her now from use, from their assertion of something that was shifting day by day from the new into the known. He said, with a sense of good manners that took him back to their long-ago meeting,

"How is your mother?"

"OK," said Rosemary. "OK…"

"She has her faith," said Gemma.

"She's got the church," said Nick; "and she's also got you."

"Well… " said Rosemary. "Yes, she has."

The first thing she passed him was a small cream-coloured envelope addressed to Leo in green capitals. He felt he knew it and he didn't know it, like a letter found in an old book. It had a postmark of August 2, 1983. She nodded, and he opened it, while they watched him; it was like learning a new game and having to be a good sport as he lost. He unfolded a little letter in his own best handwriting, and the photo slipped out into his lap. "That's how we knew where to find you," Rosemary said. He had sent it in the blank envelope to Gay Times, doubting how it could survive, how his own wish could take on form and direction, and someone there with a green biro had sent it on-he was seeing the history of his action, and seeing it as Leo himself had seen it, but distant and complete. He picked up the photo with the guarded curiosity he had for his earlier self. It was an Oxford picture, a passport-size square cut out from a larger group: the face of a boy at a party who somehow confides his secret to the camera. He only glanced at what he'd written, on the Feddens' embossed letterhead-the small size, meant for social thank-yous, because he hadn't had much to say. The writing itself looked quaint and studied, though he remembered Leo had praised it: "Hello!" he'd begun, since of course he hadn't yet known Leo's name. The cross-stroke of the H curled back under the uprights like a dog's tail. He saw he'd mentioned Bruckner, Henry James, all his Interests-very artlessly, but it hadn't mattered, and indeed they had never been mentioned again, when the two of them were together. At the top there was Leo's annotation in pencil: Pretty. Rich? Too young? This had been struck through later by a firm red tick.

Nick folded it away and peeped at the two women. It was Gemma's presence, the stranger in the room, that brought it home to him; for a minute she seemed like the fact of the death itself. She didn't know him, but she knew about the letter, the affair, the tender young Nick of four years ago, and his shyness and resentment went for nothing in the new moral atmosphere, like that of a hospital, where everything was found out and fears were justified as diagnoses. He said, "I wish I'd seen him again."

"He didn't want people seeing him," said Rosemary. "Not later on."

"Right… " said Nick.

"You know how vain he was!"-it was a little test for her grief, an indulgent gibe with a twist of true vexation, at Leo's troublesomeness, alive or dead.

"Yes," said Nick, picturing him wearing her shirt. And wondering if the man's shirt she had on now was one of his.

"He always had to look his best."

"He always looked beautiful," said Nick, and the exaggeration released his feelings suddenly. He tried to smile but felt the corners of his mouth pulled downwards. He mastered himself with a rough sigh and said, "Of course I hadn't seen him for a couple of yean."

"OK… " said Rosemary thoughtfully. "You know we never knew who he was seeing."

"No," said Gemma.

"You and old Pete were the only ones who got asked to the house. Until Bradley, of course."

"I don't know about Bradley," said Nick.

"My brother shared a flat with him," said Rosemary. "You knew he moved out."

"Well, I knew he wanted to. That was about the time he… I'm not sure what happened. We stopped seeing each other." He couldn't say the usual accusing phrase he dumped me, it was petty and nearly meaningless in the face of his death. "I think I thought he was seeing someone else." Though this itself wasn't the whole truth: it was the painful story he'd told himself at the time, to screen a glimpse he'd had of a much worse story, that Leo was ill.

But Bradley had been there. He sounded like a square-shouldered practical man, not a twit like Nick.

"Bradley's not well, is he?" said Gemma.

"You knew old Pete died… " said Rosemary.

"Yes, I did," said Nick, and cleared his throat.

"Anyway, you're all right, pet," said Gemma.

"Yes, I'm all right," said Nick. "I'm fine." They looked at him like police officers awaiting a confession or change of heart. "I was lucky. And then I was… careful." He put the letter on the table, and stood up. "Would you like some coffee? Can I get you anything?" Gemma and Rosemary pondered this and for a moment seemed reluctant to accept.

In the kitchen he gazed out of the window as the kettle boiled. The rain fell thin and silvery against the dark bushes of the garden and the brick backs of the houses in the next street. He gazed at the familiar but unknown windows. In a bright drawing room a maid was hoovering. At the edge of hearing an ambulance wailed. Then the kettle throbbed and clicked off.

He took the coffee tray through. "This is so sad," he said. He had always thought of this as a slight word, but its effect now was larger than mere tactful understatement. It seemed to surround the awful fact with a shadowing of foreknowledge and thus of acceptance.

Rosemary raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips. There was something stubborn about her, and Nick thought perhaps it was only a brave hard form of shyness, unlike his own shyness, which ran off into flattery and evasion. She said, "So you met Leo through a lonely hearts?"

"Yes, that's right," said Nick, since she obviously knew this. He had never been sure if it was a shameful or a witty way to meet someone. He didn't know what the women would think either (Gemma gave him a sighing smile). "It was such a wonderful piece of luck he chose me," he said.

"Paght… " said Rosemary, with a look of sisterly sarcasm; which maybe wasn't that, but a hint that he shouldn't keep boasting about his luck.

"I mean he had hundreds of replies."

"Well, he had a lot." She reached into her bag again, and brought out a bundle of letters, pinched in a thick rubber band.

"Oh," said Nick.

She pulled off the rubber band and rolled it back over her hand. For a moment he was at the doctor's-or the doctor was visiting him, with the bundled case notes of all her calls. Both brother and sister were orderly and discreet. "I thought some of them might mean something to you."

"Oh, I don't know."

"So that we can tell them."

"What did he do?" said Gemma. "He went out and tried them all?"

Rosemary sorted the letters into two piles. "I don't want to go chasing people up if they're dead," she said.

"That's the thing!" said Gemma.

"I don't expect I'll know anyone," said Nick. "It's very unlikely…" It was all too bleakly businesslike for him-he'd only just heard the news.

The funny thing was that all the envelopes were addressed in the same hand, in green or sometimes purple capitals. It was like one crazed adorer laying siege to Leo. The name came up at him relentlessly off the sheaf of letters. "It must have looked odd, these arriving all the time," he said. A lot of them had the special-issue army stamps of that summer.

"He told us it was all to do with some cycling thing, a cycling club," said Rosemary.

"His bike was his first love," said Nick, unsure if this was merely a quip or the painful truth. "It was clever of him."

"These ones I think he didn't see. They've got a cross on."

"There's even a woman wrote to him," said Gemma.

So Nick started going through the letters, knowing it was pointless, but trapped by the need to honour or humour Rosemary. He saw her as a stickler for procedure, however unwelcome. He didn't need to read them in detail, but the first two or three were eerily interesting-as the private efforts of his unknown rivals. He concealed his interest behind a dull pout of consideration, and slow shakes of the head. The terms of the ad were still clear to him, and the broad-minded age-range, "18 to 40." "Hi there!" wrote Sandy from Enfield, "I'm early 40s, but saw that little old ad of yours and thought I'd write in anyway! I'm in the crazy world of stationery!" A snap of a solidly built man of fifty was attached to the page with a pink paper clip. Leo had written, House/Car. Age? And then, presumably after he'd seen him, Too inexperienced. Glenn, "late 20s," from Barons Court, was a travel agent, and sent a Polaroid of himself in swimming trunks in his flat. He said, "I love to party! And sexpecially in bed! (Or on the floor! Or halfway up a ladder!! Whoops-!)" Too much? wondered Leo, before making the discovery: Invisible dick. "Dear Friend," wrote serious-looking black Ambrose from Forest Hill, "I like the sound of you. I think we have some love to share." The exclamation marks, which gave the other letters their air of inane self-consciousness, were resisted by Ambrose until his final "Peace!" Nick liked the look of him, but Leo had written, Bottom. Boring. Nick made a stealthy attempt to remember the address.

When he'd read a letter he passed it back to Rosemary, who put it face down on the table, by the coffee pot. The sense of a game ebbed very quickly with his lack of success. The fact was these were all men who'd wanted his boyfriend, who'd applied for what Nick had gone on to get. Some of them were pushy and explicit, but there was always the vulnerable note of courtship: they were asking an unknown man to like them, or want them, or find them equal to their self-descriptions. He recognized one of the men from his photo and murmured, "Ah…!" but then let it go with a shrug and a throat-clearing. It was a Spanish guy who'd turned up everywhere, who'd been a nice dark thread in the pattern of Nick's early gym days and bar nights, almost an emblem of the scene for him, its routine and compulsion, and he knew he must be dead-he'd seen him a year ago at the Ponds, defying his own fear and others' fear of him. Javier, he was called. He was thirty-four. He worked for a building society, and lived in West Hampstead. The mere facts in his letter of seduction had the air of an obituary.

Nick stopped and drank some coffee. "Was he ill for a long time?" he asked.

"He had pneumonia last November, he nearly died; but he came through it. Then things got, well, a lot worse in the spring. He was in hospital for about ten days at the end."

"He went blind, didn't he," said Gemma, in the way people clumsily handle and offer facts which they can neither accept nor forget.

"Poor Leo," said Nick. Relief at not having witnessed this was mixed with regret at not having been called on to do so.

"Did you bring the photos?" said Gemma.

"If you want to see…" said Rosemary, after a pause.

"I don't know," said Nick, embarrassed. It was a challenge; and then he felt powerless in the flow of the moment, as he had on his first date with Leo, he met it as something that was going to happen, and took the Kodak wallet. He looked at a couple of the pictures and then handed them back.

"You can have one if you like," said Rosemary.

"No," said Nick; "thank you."

He sat, rather hard-faced, over his coffee.

After a bit Gemma said, "This is proper coffee, isn't it."

"Oh…!" said Nick, "do you like it. It's Kenyan Rich, medium roast… It comes from Myers' in Kensington Church Street. They import their own. One pays more, but I think it's worth it."

"Mm, it's lovely and rich," said Gemma.

"I'd rather not look at the other letters now," Nick said.

Rosemary nodded. "OK," she said, as if skimming forward for another appointment, a cancellation. "I can leave them with you…?"

"No, please don't," said Nick. He felt he was being pressed very hard very fast, as in some experiment on his emotions.

Gemma went to the lavatory-she murmured the directions to herself as she tried the door, and then slipped in as if she'd met a friend. There was silence for a while between Nick and Rosemary. The extremity of events excused anything, of course, but her hardness towards him was another shock to get used to: it added puzzlingly to the misery of the day. She was his lover's sister, and he thought of her naturally as a friend, and with spontaneous fondness and fresh sympathy on top of mere politeness. But it seemed it didn't work the other way round. He smiled tentatively. There was such a physical likeness now that he might have been asking Leo himself to be nice to him, after some row. But she'd decided against the note of tenderness, even towards Leo himself.

"So you hadn't seen him for a year or two?" she said.

"That's right…"

She looked up at him warily, as though starting to concede his own, homosexual claim on her brother and wondering where such a shift might lead her. "Did you miss him?" she said.

"Yes… I did. I certainly did."

"Do you remember the last time you saw him?"

"Well, yes," said Nick, and stared at the floor. The questions were sentimental, but the manner was detached, almost bored. "It was all very difficult."

She said, "He hadn't made a will."

"Oh, well… he was so young!" said Nick, frowning because he found himself on the edge of tears again, at the thought that she was going to offer him something of Leo's-of course she was cold because she found it all so difficult herself.

"We had him cremated," Rosemary said. "I think it's what he would have wanted, though we didn't ask him. We didn't like to."

"Hm," said Nick, and found he was crying anyway.

When Gemma came back she said, "You must see the toilet." Rosemary gave a loyal but repressive smile. "Or is that trick photography?"

"Oh…!" said Nick. "No… no, it's real, I'm afraid." He was glad of the absurd change of subject.

"There's a picture of him dancing with Maggie!"

It was one of the photos from the Silver Wedding, Nick red-faced and staring, the Prime Minister with a look of caution he hadn't been aware of at the time. He wasn't sure Gemma would get the special self-irony of the lavatory gallery. It was something he'd learnt from his public-school friends. "Do you know her, then?" she said.

"No, no," said Nick, "I just got drunk at a party…" as if it could happen to anyone.

"Go on, I bet you voted for her, didn't you?" Gemma wanted to know.

"I did not," said Nick, quite sternly. Rosemary showed no interest in this, and he said, "I remember I promised to tell your mother if I ever met her."

"Oh…?"

He smiled apprehensively. "I mean, how has she coped with all this?"

"You remember what she's like," said Rosemary.

"I'll write to her," said Nick. "Or I could drive over and see her." He pictured her at home with her pamphlets and her hat on the chair. He had a sense of his charm not having worked on her years ago and was ready to do something now to make good. "I'm sure she's been wonderful."

Rosemary gave him a pinched look, and as she stood up and collected her things she seemed to decide to say, "That's what you said before, wasn't it? When you came to see us?"

"What…?"

"Leo told us, you said we were wonderful."

"Did I?" said Nick, who remembered it painfully. "Well, that's not such a bad thing to be." He paused, unsure if he'd been accused of something. He felt there was a mood of imminent blame, for everything that had happened: they had hoped to pin it on him, and had failed, and were somehow more annoyed with him as a result. "Of course, she didn't know, did she, that Leo was gay? She was talking about getting him to the altar."

"Well, he's been to the altar now," said Rosemary with a harsh little laugh, as though it was her mother's fault. "Almost, anyway."

"It's a terrible way to find out," said Nick.

"She doesn't accept it."

"She doesn't accept the death…"

"She doesn't accept he was gay. It's a mortal sin, you see," said Rosemary, and now the Jamaican stress was satirical. "And her son was no sinner."

"Yes, I've never understood about sin," said Nick, in a tone they didn't catch.

"Oh, the mortal ones are the worst," said Gemma.

"So she doesn't think AIDS is a punishment, at least."

"No, it can be," said Rosemary. "But Leo got it off a toilet seat at the office, which is full of godless socialists, of course."

"Or a sandwich," prompted Gemma.

There was something very unseemly in their mockery. Nick tried to imagine the house surprised by guilt and blame, the helpless harshness of the bereaved… he didn't know.

Rosemary said, "She's got him back at the house."

"How do you mean?"

"She's got the ashes in a jar, on the mantelpiece."

"Oh!" Nick was so disturbed by this that he said, rather drolly, "Yes, I remember, there's a shelf, isn't there, over the gas fire, with figures of Jesus and Mary and so on -"

"There's Jesus, and the Virgin Mary, and St Antony of Padua… and Leo."

"Well, he's in very good company!" said Nick.

"I know," said Gemma, shaking her head and laughing grimly. "I can't stand it, I can't go in there!"

"She says she likes to feel he's still there."

Nick shivered but said, "I suppose you can't begrudge her her fantasies, can you, when she's lost her son."

"They don't really help, though," said Rosemary.

"Well, they don't help us, pet, do they?" said Gemma, and rubbed Rosemary's back vigorously.

Rosemary's eyes were hooded for a moment, just like her mother's, with the family stubbornness. She said, "She won't accept it about him, and she won't accept it about us." And then almost at once she shouldered her bag to go Nick blushed at his slowness, and then was mortified that they might think he was blushing about them.

When the women had gone, he went back upstairs, but in the remorseless glare of the news, so that the flat looked even more tawdry and pretentious. He was puzzled to think he had spent so much time in it so happily and conceitedly. The pelmets and mirrors, the spotlights and blinds, seemed rich in criticism. It was what you did if you had millions but no particular taste: you made your private space like a swanky hotel; just as such hotels flattered their customers by being vulgar simulacra of lavish private homes. A year ago it had at least the glamour of newness. Now it bore signs of occupation by a rich boy who had lost the knack of looking after himself. The piping on the sofa cushions was rubbed through where Wani had sprawled incessantly in front of the video. The crimson damask was blotted with his own and other boys' fluids. He wondered if Gemma had noticed as she sat there, making her inanely upsetting remarks. He wasn't letting her in here again, in her black boots. Nick felt furious with Wani for fucking up the cushions. The Georgian desk was marked with drink stains and razor etchings that even the optimistic Don Guest would have found it hard to disguise. "That's beyond cosmetic repair, old boy," Don would say. Nick fingered at the little abrasions and found himself gasping and whooping with grief.

He sat on the sofa and started reading the Telegraph, as if it was known to be a good thing to do. He was sick of the election, but excited to think it was happening today. There was something primitive and festive about it. He heard Rosemary saying, "Well, he died, you know…" or "Well, you know, he died… " in recurrent, almost overlapping runs and pounces-his heart thumped at the dull detonation of the phrase. He was horrified by the thought of his ashes in the house, and kept picturing them, in an unlikely rococo urn. The last photo she had shown him was terrible: a Leo with his life behind him. Nick remembered making jokes, early on, in the first unguarded liberty of a first affair, about their shared old age, Leo being sixty when Nick was fifty. And there he was already; or he'd been sixty for a week before he died. He was in bed, in a sky-blue hospital gown; his face was hard to read, since AIDS had taken it and written its message of terror and exhaustion on it; against which Leo seemed frailly to assert his own character in a doubtful half smile. His vanity had become a kind of fear, that he would frighten the people he smiled at. It was the loneliest thing Nick had ever seen.

He thought he should write a letter and sat down at the desk. He felt a need to console Leo's mother, or to put himself right with her. Some deep convolution of feelings about his own mother, as the one person who really suffered for his homosexuality, made him see Mrs Charles as a figure to be appeased as well as comforted. "Dear Mrs Charles," he wrote, "I was so terribly sorry to learn about Leo's death": there, it existed, he'd hesitated, but written it, and it couldn't be unwritten. He had a feeling, an anxious refinement of tact, that he shouldn't actually mention the death. "Your sad news," "recent sad events"…: "Leo's death" was brutal. Then he worried that "I was so terribly sorry" might sound like gush to her, like calling her wonderful. He knew his own forms of truth could look like insincerity to others. He was frightened of her, as a grieving woman, and uncertain what feelings to attribute to her. It seemed she had taken it all in her own way, perhaps even with a touch of zealous cheerfulness. He could see her being impressed by his educated form of words and best handwriting. Then he saw her looking mistrustfully at what he'd written. He felt the limits of his connoisseurship of tone. It was what he was working on, and yet… He stared out of the window, and after a minute found Henry James's phrase about the death of Poe peering back at him. What was it? The extremity of personal absence had just overtaken him. The words, which once sounded arch and even facetious, were suddenly terrible to him, capacious, wise, and hard. He understood for the first time that they'd been written by someone whose life had been walked through, time and again, by death. And then he saw himself, in six months' time perhaps, sitting down to write a similar letter to the denizens of Lowndes Square.

14

WHEN HE GOT back to Kensington Park Gardens he didn't tell Catherine about Leo straight away. To himself he seemed to gleam with his news, to be both the pale bereaved and the otherworldly messenger. He found himself lengthening his natural sighs and stares to provoke a question. But after ten minutes he accepted that she hadn't noticed. She was slumped in an armchair, with newspapers all around her, and half-empty glasses of water and mugs of tea on the table beside her. He looked down on her from behind, and she seemed as small and passive as a sick child. She looked up and said, with an effort at brightness, "Oh, Nick, it's Election Special after the news," as though it had taken great effort to find this out, as though it was itself a piece of good news.

"OK, darling," said Nick. "Great, we'll watch that." He gazed round the room, feeling for the precedence, the protocol of their relative afflictions. "Um… yes… OK!" It didn't seem right to land her with the news of a death. He felt that like all news it had its own momentum, and it would somehow go stale and unsayable if it was left too long.

He went up to his room with a slight mental stoop from the burden of Catherine's condition. It was hard work living with someone so helpless and negative, and much worse if you'd known them critical and funny. Well, sometimes, perhaps, it made your own problems look light; at others it amplified them, by a troubling sympathetic gloom. He had borrowed a book of Rachel's by Dr Edelman, who was treating Catherine, A Path Through the Mountains: Clinical Responses to Manic Depression. He had groaned over Dr Edelman's style, and corrected his grammar to protect himself from a superstitious fear that the book awoke in him: of finding the symptoms in himself, now he knew what they were. They certainly seemed to be present in all the more volatile, the more irascible or oddly lethargic people he knew.

The book had helpful facts in it, but it left Nick with an imaginative uncertainty, as to where Catherine was when he looked at her and spoke to her: not in the black and shiny place of her old depressions, but in some other unfeatured place, policed by Dr Edelman's heavy new dosage of lithium. She lacked the energy and motivation to describe it herself. She said she couldn't concentrate on a book, or even an article. Sometimes she acted in her quick pert way, but it was a reflex: she observed it herself with bewilderment and a kind of longing. Mostly she sat and waited, but without any colour of expectation. Nick found himself talking with awful brightness of purpose, as if to someone old and deaf; and it was more awful because she didn't find it condescending.

There were various phone calls that evening. Nick's mother rang and talked excitedly about the election, which she seized on as a chance to share in Nick's London life. He was cool and humourless with her, and saw himself, as so often, almost blaming her for not knowing the important thing he was incapable of telling her. She had never heard of Leo, and he thought if he did try to tell her they would work each other up into a state of mutual resentment at the fact. She gave an account of Gerald's performance on the local radio, as if Nick needed to hear praise of him. "He said we don't want these, you know, lesbian workshops," she said, not unaware of her own bravery in using the word. Then Gerald himself was on the other line, and she rang off as if she'd been caught. "All well?" said Gerald airily, obviously wanting to talk about himself. It was the long evening's wait for the results, when his confidence was the most stretched, and he was fishing for sympathy, almost as though he'd lost. "How did your speech go?" said Nick. "Went down like dinner," Gerald said. "Which is more than I can say for dinner itself-what? God these provincial hotels." Nick felt a punitive urge to make Gerald listen to his problem, since he'd met Leo and had even been gingerly in favour of him; but he knew he wouldn't get his attention, it was the wrong moment, the wrong week, and actually the wrong death.

Elena had prepared some cannelloni, which Nick and Catherine ate in the kitchen, under the family gallery of photographs and cartoons; this had now spread over the pantry door and down the other side, where Marc's caricature of Gerald had pride of place. Gerald had still not received the accolade of a Spitting Image puppet in his likeness, but it was one of his main hopes for the new Parliament. Catherine stared at her food as she worked through it, like someone performing a meaningless task as a punishment, and Nick found himself contrasting her to her eager six-year-old self, with only half her big teeth, and a grin of excitement so intense it was almost painful; and to a feature from Harper's ten years later, where rich people's children modelled evening clothes, and white gloves covered the first scars on her arms. Really, though, it was Gerald's wall, and his wife and children appeared as decorative adjuncts to the hero's life, unfolding in a sequence of handshakes with the famous. The Gorbachev was the latest trophy, not a handshake, but a moment of conversation, the Soviet leader's smile just hinting at the tedium of hearing English puns explained by an interpreter. Nick said, "Can you remember when that picture of you was taken?" and Catherine said, "No, I can't. I can only remember the picture." She glanced up over her shoulder with an apologetic cringe. It was as if all the pictures might come bashing down about her ears.

He said, "Mum says there's a cartoon of Gerald in the Northants Standard; she's sending it down for possible inclusion."

"Oh…" said Catherine. She looked at him steadily. "I don't know about cartoons."

"You love satire, darling, especially if it's of Gerald."

"I know. Just imagine if people did look like that, though. Hydrocephalous is the word. Monstrous teeth of Gerald… " and her hand shook. She seemed startled to recall these words.

Afterwards they went up to the drawing room, and Nick, suddenly shaky too, poured himself a large Scotch. They sat side by side on the sofa, in the heavy but unselfconscious silence she generated. He remembered the one time Leo had come to this room, and surprised him, moved him, and slightly rattled him by playing Mozart on the piano. They'd both had a glass of whisky then, the only time he'd known Leo to drink. He caught the beautiful rawness of those days again, the life of instinct opening in front of him, the pleasure of the streets and London itself unfolding in the autumn chill; everything tingling with newness and risk, glitter of frost and glow of body heat, the shock of finding and holding what he wanted among millions of strangers. His sense of the scandalous originality of making love to a man had faded week by week into the commonplace triumph of a love affair. He saw Leo crossing this room, the scene brilliant and dwindling, as if watched in a convex mirror. It was the night he had stepped warily, with many ironic looks, into Nick's deeper fantasy of possession: his lover in his house, Nick owning them both by right of taste and longing.

Now the rain had stopped, and the sky brightened a little just as the dusk was falling. Pale neutral light stretched in through the front windows, seemed to search and fail and then probe again. Nick formulated the thing, "I had some terribly sad news today, I heard that Leo's died, you remember…"; but it stayed shut in his head, like a difficult confession.

He listened to the birdsong from the gardens, with a more analytical ear than usual for the notes of warning and protest and ruffled submission. The long neutral light grew more tender and burning as it touched the gilt handles of the fire irons and the white-marble vines beneath the mantelpiece. Then it reached the turned legs of an old wooden chair and made them glow with new and unsuspected presence, like little people, skittle-people, with bellies and collars and Punchinello hats, shining fiercely and stoically with their one truth, that they would last for centuries longer than the young live people who were looking at them.

On the nine o'clock news they were talking already about a Tory landslide. Nick had another huge whisky, and felt a familiar relief begin to smooth down the bleak edges of the day. He felt he was missing the regard that was due to the bereaved, the indulgence, like a special sad prize, that was given to boys at school when the news came through. He even wondered for a while about a toot, but he knew he didn't want the irrelevant high spirits of coke. Drink showed more respect for the night, and seemed ready to mediate, for three or four hours, between the demands of grief and current affairs.

The election unrolled at its own unsatisfactory tempo. For ages the pundits sat in the studio, waiting for results to process and pronounce on. The tedium of the four long weeks of the election reached its purest form in their attempts to summarize and predict. Various old maxims and traditions were rehearsed, with a consoling effect of pantomime. Reporters were seen, perched in a dozen town halls with nothing as yet to report. Below them, out of focus, the tellers at their long tables were racing to finish, so that another game seemed to flourish on the back of the main contest. They were going to show the Barwick declaration later on, and for five seconds Nick saw the council room in the Market Hall and the not quite familiar figures at work; then there was a film clip showing the main candidates canvassing. Gerald's style was one of crisp confidence, striding through the square with glancing "Good morning"s, like a boss coming into an office, and not listening to anything that was being said. The inexperienced Alliance woman, by contrast, got snagged in well-meaning debate with Tracey Weeks, who she was slow to realize, and on camera was reluctant to acknowledge, wasn't all there. It was sad that the Barwick electorate should be exemplified to the nation by old Tracey; Nick distanced himself from his home town with a cagey laugh, though he was very curious to see it on TV. It had a steady provincial look to it, surprised but not overwhelmed to have been noticed by the outside world. It wasn't exactly the place he knew.

Later Nick was downstairs -when Catherine called out, "It's Polly Thing!" and he rushed back up and leant over the back of the sofa-the returning officer was already speaking. Polly Tompkins was standing for Pershore, traditionally Tory but with a strong SDP vote in '83; he couldn't be sure of getting in, and Gerald, who admired Polly, warned that his age might tell against him. Nick had read an article about young candidates-of the hundred and fifty or so under thirty the dry expectation was that half a dozen would get elected. Standing in the middle of the stage, fat and hot in a double-breasted suit, Polly could have passed for forty-five; he seemed camouflaged in his own elected future. Nick couldn't decide if he wanted him to win or not. It was a spectacle, and he looked at it with untroubled cruelty, like a boxing match. It would be good to see him smacked down. Nick supposed the candidates must know the result by now, since they'd been at the count; but perhaps not, if it was very close. Now Polly was staring out into the challenge of the lights, the invisible millions who suddenly had their eyes on him. The tiny Labour vote was announced, and he gave a heartless wince of commiseration. And now his own name was being said, "Tompkins, Paul Frederick Gervase"-("Conservative" in murmured parenthesis)-"seventeen thousand, two hundred and thirty-eight votes": the word votes shouted over a roar of triumph so quick that Polly himself seemed not to have worked it out-there was a moment's blankness in his face, and then you saw him give in to the roar and grin like a boy and raise two fists in the air-he was monstrous, Catherine said, "God…" in her dullest tone, but Nick felt his grin turn wistful with unexpected pleasure as the returning officer fought on against the noise, "And I therefore declare the said Paul Frederick Gervase Tompkins duly elected… " "Paul Tompkins," said the reporter briskly, showing in his equable tone that he hadn't known Polly as the nightmare queen of the Worcester MCR, "only twenty-eight years old…"as Polly shook hands crushingly with the losers, and then stepped backwards, peered round with a kind of cunning confusion, using the crowd's indulgence, his first thrill of popularity, and stretched out an arm to call a woman forward from the back of the stage. She strode up to him, nudged against him, their fingers fumbled together, and then he jerked their hands upwards in the air. "A great night for Paul Tompkins's wife, too," said the commentator: "only married last month-Morgan Stevens, one of the guiding lights at Conservative Central Office-I know she's been working tirelessly behind the scenes on this campaign… " Polly carried on shaking their awkwardly linked fists above their heads, his lapel dragged up against his jowls, and something he couldn't disguise in his face, something deeper than scorn, the madness of self-belief. It was already time for him to make a speech, but he milked the acclaim crudely-he looked a bit of a buffoon. He stepped forward, still loosely holding Morgan's hand, and then dodged back and kissed her, not wedding-style, but as one might kiss an aunt. He had hardly started to speak when the viewers were abruptly returned to the studio.

"Is Morgan really a woman?" said Catherine.

"Very fair question," said Nick; "but I think so."

"She's got a man's name."

"Well, there was Morgan Le Fay, wasn't there, the famous witch."

"Was there?"

"Anyway, she's married to a man called Polly, so it's probably all right."

Now the results were coming in too fast to be sure of individual notice. The talk of a landslide took shape in vertiginous diagrams. "I thought it was a landslide last time," said Catherine. "We had that book about it."

"Yes, it was," said Nick.

She stared at the screen, where the famous swingometer was virtually at rest. "But nothing's changing," she said. "I mean there's two more Labour seats. That's not a landslide."

"Oh, I see," said Nick.

"I mean a landslide's a disaster, it changes everything."

"So you thought… " Nick thought he saw that Catherine, in her inattentive but literal way, had convinced herself it was a Labour landslide. "It's a dead metaphor, darling. It just means a crushing victory."

"Oh god," said Catherine, almost tearfully.

"I mean, the land did slide once, as we all know. And it looks very much as though it's going to stay slidden."

Barwick came up half an hour later. There was a buzz in the studio, as if they knew something was about to happen. Nick and Catherine sat forward on the sofa. "Welcome to Barwick," said the bearded young reporter: "where we're in the splendid Market Hall built by Sir Christopher Wren." ("No, you are not," said Nick.) "We're expecting the declaration in the next minute. Barwick of course held by Gerald Fedden since the last election-a minister in the Home Office-something of a maverick, but could be looking at a Cabinet post in the next government-he had a majority of over eight thousand in '83, but we're expecting to see a big increase in the Alliance vote here-Muriel Day, a very popular figure locally… " The camera found the two rivals, each in discussion with their people, Gerald chaffing as if nothing was going on, Muriel Day already rehearsing the smile of a good loser. The Labour man, perhaps under a delusion about the outcome, was running over a three-page speech.

Nick flopped back in the sofa with a laugh, to break the mood. Staring at the screen he felt awkwardly responsible, as if the place he'd come from, the very room that he'd measured and drawn as a schoolboy, was about to deliver its verdict on the room he was sitting in now. It was embarrassing, but there was nothing he could do. He watched the event quickly clarify, the intent activity was finished, the people redeployed themselves, officials were briefly in conference, and out of the toil of the day, metal boxes and rented tables, pure process without poetry, a kind of theatre emerged, so thick with precedent that it looked instinctual.

Old Arthur State was saying, extremely slowly, "I, Arthur Henry State, being the returning officer for the parliamentary constituency of Barwick in the county of Northamptonshire… " and surely expanding his text with various quaint heraldic clauses, while Catherine eyed her father on the podium behind him. Nick glanced at her in profile. She had a look of exhaustion, as at an object constantly but inexplicably in her way; but a twitch of excitement too: she was powerless, but tonight there were other powers stirring. Something might happen. The Labour man was called Brown and so came first-he'd got eight thousand, three hundred and twenty-one votes ("that's more than three thousand up on last time"), and was cheered defiantly. Next was Muriel Day, and her vote too was well up on that of her predecessor, two and a half thousand up, at eleven thousand, five hundred and seven. She took the applause with a grateful but distracted smile, almost hushing her supporters to let them hear the rest-since Arthur always waited for total silence, and went back to the start of any sentence that was interrupted. It was a serious figure, and Gerald had a look Nick knew well, the condescending simper that covered a process of mental arithmetic. The suspense was made worse by the unignorable but somehow forgotten figure of Ethelred Egg ("Monster Raving Loony Party"), who'd only polled thirty-one votes but seemed to have a hall-full of supporters. He plucked off and waved his green top hat and capered about in his clown's suit. You couldn't help seeing some slight kinship between him and Gerald, whose white collar and pink tie were half hidden by a vast blue rosette with long tabs or streamers below and the breast-pocket handkerchief struggling above. "Oh lose, lose…" muttered Catherine. "Fedden," said Arthur State, "Gerald John" ("Conservative…"), and because there was a klaxon squawk he repeated it, the strange momentary levelling and exposure of the cited second name, "eleven thousand, eight hundred and ninety-three"-so that Gerald grinned and coloured for a second, and perhaps thought he'd lost after all. The cheer that followed was a funny sound, because it had a loud "Woo-oo" mixed in with it, at the luck of a man who had just got away with something.

Nick topped up his drink and went out onto the balcony. He rallied to the surprising chill out there. Gerald's close shave at the ballot box was a drama and an embarrassment, and it was going to be hard to know what to say when he got home. Congratulations might sound sarcastic or unduly blithe, even to Gerald. Anyway, he was in, and everything could go on as planned. His gleaming grin floated against the dark trees for a while, and then faded, as perishable as all news. Slowly the trees themselves took on shape and detail in the light from the houses and from the softly reflecting night clouds. Nick loved the gardens; when he strolled between the house and the gardens through the private gate he seemed to glance up at his own good luck, in the towering planes on one side and the white-stuccoed cliff on the other. It would be good to be out there now; but it was too dripping and cold. There were wonderful expanses of summer ahead, no need to panic.

He remembered taking Leo there, in a jitter of nerves and shadows, the night they'd finally met; and quite a few other men too, the summer before last, on the sand path behind the workmen's hut-it had been his trick, done confidently, dwindling a little in charm and danger. Something basic and unsocial about it, no giving them a drink or a shower: it was good. And perhaps it had been a secret tribute to Leo, a memory honoured and scuffed over in each careless encounter. Leo never knew how much Nick had imagined him, before he'd met him; or how the first kiss, the first feel of his body, had staggered a boy who till then had lived all in his mind. Leo wasn't imaginative: that was part of the point and the beauty of him. But he had a kind of genius, as far as Nick was concerned. That big red tick on his letter had bounced him into life.

He swilled round the whisky in his glass and shivered. There was a mood of homage and forgiveness: how could you begrudge the dead? And there was something else, a need to be forgiven himself, though he frowned the thought away. When Rosemary had asked him about the last time he'd seen her brother, he had blinked at her through the bleak little image of a parting on Oxford Street. The dense blind crowd, which could hide all kinds of intimacy in its rush, had this time made things impossible. Leo pushed away on his bike, crept through the red light and round the corner, without looking back. In fact the crowd almost hid the thing that Nick was remembering-the latest of several unhappy goodbyes not marked in any way as the last of all. In the following weeks he'd had to rescue that routine sequence of actions, and clarify it in the light of what it had turned out to be. At the time it was just an impatient escape into the traffic.

But then, far more recently, three or four months ago, on a wet late February night, something else had happened, which he hadn't quite thought of this morning. Wani must already have been in Paris, and Nick had gone into the Shaftesbury on a sudden urge to pick up, the glow in his chest and the ache in his thighs. He went in through the little back bar, with its gas fire and non-combatant atmosphere, where you got served quicker. He noticed a couple of friends in his first half-sociable push through the crowd, and took in, while he waited to be served, the little black guy in a woolly hat, with his back to him, talking to a middle-aged white man. He saw how his beltless jeans stood away from his waist to give a glimpse of blue underwear, and had a moment's sharp unexpected recall of Leo, the double curve of his lower back and muscular bottom. There was sadness in the likeness, but the image lay quiet; it had more of the warmth of a blessing than the chill of a loss. Nick was pleased at that. The pub was all potential-he gazed busily over the counter into the main bar, which was jostling with sexy self-regard. This little guy was much too skinny, really, to excite him, and too odd: he had a beard that was so bushy you could see it from behind, the black touched with grey beside the ears. Still, Nick looked at the chap he was talking to, caught his eye for a second, with a tiny smile of collusion. Then instead of ordering the usual practical pint, he asked for a rum and Coke.

He moved away with it, spoke to someone he knew, glancing off to check his own looks in one of the pub's many mirrors, and saw the black man in profile, turning briefly, unconsciously, to full face, and turning back again to answer his friend. Even then, the nostalgic idea that he was like Leo held off for a second or two the recognition that he was Leo. The greying beard hid the gauntness of his features, and the hat was rolled down to his eyebrows. Even after that Nick shunned the possibility, looked away, in case the man should meet his eye in the mirror with an answering slide into shock, and then glanced back, already hardened in the fiction that he hadn't recognized him. He pressed through into the other room. There was a party of French boys, there was a man he'd fancied at the Y, the whole bar was a fierce collective roar, and he edged and smiled politely through it like a sober late arrival at a wild party. His heart was thumping, and the expectant glow in his chest had become some neighbouring sensation, a clench of guilt and regret. It was simply an instinct, a reflex, that had made him turn away. A minute later he saw it could just as easily have thrown him towards Leo; but he was a coward. He was frightened of him-afraid of being rebuffed and full of grim doubts about what was happening to him. Perhaps he should go back in and check that it really was him-he was suddenly happy at the thought that it couldn't have been. He shouldered back through the crowd, sensing their vague annoyance at moving for him again; but stopped and got talking to the man from the Y, boldly but inattentively. He knew he had a bluebird tattooed on his left buttock, and he'd seen him with a sensible erection in the showers, but these cute memories seemed steadily more meaningless. He knocked back his drink in distracted gulps. Then he went downstairs to the Gents, and found, when he peeped sideways along the reeking trough, that the man had followed him; so they stood there for a bit, in a tense delay whilst other people came and went, until the man nodded towards the empty lock-up. Nick said it was too risky, felt almost annoyed that this was happening, yet curiously timid and grateful too. The man said he lived in Soho, they could go there, five minutes' walk, and Nick said OK. It was a kind of shield. Actually it was a brilliant quick success, a fantasy granted, but Nick couldn't feel it. "We'll go out the side way," said the man, who also gave his name, Joe. "Oh, OK," said Nick. They went through the back bar, Nick with his hand on Joe's broad shoulder, sticking cheerfully close to him and turning a blank gaze across the room to find the little woolly-hatted figure, utterly unknown to Joe, who had once been his lover.

15

"OH MY!" said Treat. "Pansy salad!" "It's really rather good," said Nick.

Treat watched him, over his cocktail glass, to see if he was joking. "Is it all pansies?"

"What's that?" said Brad.

"It's mostly rather butch lettuce," said Nick. "They just put one or two pansies on top."

"Butch lettuce…!" said Treat, full of flirty reproach.

"They're token pansies," said Nick.

"I'm going to have to try it," said Treat.

"You should certainly have it once," said Nick.

"What's that?" said Brad.

"Treat wants to try the pansy salad," said Nick.

"Oh… oh, I see, 'pansy salad': oh my!"

"I just said that," said Treat.

Nick smiled round the restaurant, relieved to see two famous writers at one table, and a famous actress at another. Brad Craft and Treat Rush, till now mere muscular spondees of American suggestion, had turned out to be a socially hungry pair. Brad was indeed big and muscular, handsome and pleasant, if rather slow on the uptake. Treat was the talker, about Nick's height, with a shiny blond fringe that he kept in line with a pointed little finger. They had come over for Nat Hanmer's wedding, and were spending the whole of October in England ("Anything to escape the New England fall!" said Treat). Today there was the film to talk about, but they were clearly working, with one eye always on the square beyond, at a thorough penetration of London, and were full of slapdash questions about people and titles. The point seemed to be to ask questions; they didn't bother much with the answers. They held out the threat of being easily bored. Nick hoped Gusto would amuse them. He saw Treat watching the kitchen through the blue glass wall, which turned the chef and his sweating minions into a faintly erotic cabaret of hard work.

"Do you know this guy Julius Money?" said Brad.

"Well, I've met him," said Nick.

"Isn't that a great name? And kind of appropriate, I guess, right?"

"Oh yes," said Nick. "They have this huge Jacobean house in Norfolk, with a fabulous collection of paintings. Actually, I've always thought -"

"Oh, what about Pomona Brinkley!" said Treat. "We met her. Now what's she all about?"

"I don't know her," said Nick.

"She was great," said Treat.

"Oh, yeah, we met this guy Lord John… Fanshaw?" said Brad. "He knows all about you! He said you were the most charming man in London."

"Yeah," said Treat, and looked lingeringly at Nick again.

"I feel he must have been thinking of someone else," said Nick coyly, and didn't come clean that he'd never heard of his lordship.

"You know Nat really well, right?" said Treat.

"Oh yes," said Nick, with suaver confidence. "We were at Oxford together. Though these days I suppose I see more of his mother than him.

She's a great friend of my friend Rachel Fedden." He watched the name make its frail bid for recognition.

"He's so sweet."

"No, he's lovely. He's had, you know, he's had a lot of problems."

"Yeah…?" said Treat. "It's such a shame he's not family."

"Well…" said Nick. "Where did you two meet him?"

"Oh, we met him at the Rosenheims' last fall, in East Hampton? Which of course is when we also met… Antoine."

"And Martina," said Brad.

"Yes, Martine," said Nick.

"Yes, Brad loved Antoine," said Treat. He put the straw to his lips and sucked pointedly at the reddish brown liquid.

Brad said, "Yeah, what a lovely guy."

"So you haven't seen him since?" Nick knew he should warn them, but didn't know how to start.

"So Nat's some kind of lord, right?" said Brad.

"Yes," said Nick. "He's a marquess."

"Oh my god…!" said Treat under his breath.

"What, so he's Marquess… is it Chirk?"

"Chirk is the family name. His title is Marquess of Hanmer."

"Brad…? You see who's over there?"

"So what do we call his old man?" said Brad, shaking his head as he turned in his chair.

"His father's the Duke of Flintshire. I should just call him sir."

"Treat, my god, you're right… it's Betsy!"

"I want her to be in my film," said Treat. "She's such a great British actress."

"I don't know if you will meet the Duke," Nick went on, uncertain how much pomp he was borrowing from mere use of the word. He aimed to speak of the aristocracy in a factual tone, because of his shame at his father's tally of earls. "I've only met him once. He never leaves the Castle. You know he's a cripple."

"You British… " said Treat, only half-relinquishing his childlike gaze at Betsy Tilden. She seemed to loom for him as a marvel and a dare, and Nick could see him going over to her. She was much too young for Mrs Gereth, and quite wrong for Fleda Vetch. "You're so brutal!"

"Mm…?" said Nick.

"You know, 'he's a cripple'-really."

"Oh… " said Nick, and blushed as if it was his lurking snobbery that had been criticized and not whatever this was. "I'm sorry, but that's actually what the Duke calls himself. He hasn't walked since he was a boy." He was slightly winded to be called on a point of delicacy-and one that impinged, obliquely but perceptibly, on their lunch. He cleared his throat and said, "You know, there's something I should tell you… Ah, here we are." He raised a hand as Wani appeared at the desk by the door, and as he got up he heard both Americans murmuring, "Oh my god…"

He went over to him, smiling and capable but in a fluster of emotions-pity, defiance, a desire to support him, and a dread of people seeing him. The girl held his stick for him as she helped him off with his coat. "Hello," said Wani; he didn't seem to want Nick to kiss him. He took his stick again, which was an elegant black one with a silver handle, and tapped across the marble floor with it. He still wasn't quite convincing with the stick; he was like a student actor playing an old man. The stick itself seemed both to focus and repel attention. People looked and looked away.

The Americans stood up, Treat clutching his napkin to his chest. "Hey, Antoine, great to see you!"

"How are you!" said Brad, in a sporting wheeze. He laid his hand for a moment on Wani's back, and Nick on his other side was doing the same, so that they seemed to congratulate him; though what they felt was the knobs of his spine through the wool of his suit. Wani sat down, smiling with distant courtesy, as if this was a weekly meeting, with a known format and outcome. There was a brief pause of silent adjustment. Nick smiled at Wani, but the shock was refreshed by the presence of their guests and a bubble rose in his throat.

"So what were you talking about?" said Wani. His voice was if anything more languid than before, though with a hint that it couldn't be forced.

"I was just explaining to Brad and Treat about the Chirks," said Nick.

"Ah yes," said Wani, as if this was a very old and silly story. "It's only a nineteenth-century dukedom, of course."

"Right… " said Brad, peeping at him and seeming to share, out of mere nerves and inattentiveness, the view that this was absurdly recent.

Treat laughed brightly and said, "That's old enough for me. That'll do just fine."

Nick said, "It was really Sharon who saved the day-the Duchess…" and offered the story to Wani.

"Yes, a life-saving transfusion of vinegar," said Wani; they all laughed loudly, as at the joke of a tyrant; and there did seem to be a trace of cruelty in the remark, against himself and thus obscurely against them. "Shall we order straight away." Wani turned and raised a hand to Fabio and as he did so Brad and Treat looked at each other with expressionless clarity for three or four seconds. Fabio was with them at once, and as always seemed to guess and applaud their decisions, to echo and confide to memory each item they mentioned; and perhaps it was only Nick who felt the new briskness in his tone and the quick decay of his laugh. Brad asked about the pansy salad and Fabio obliged with a noncommittal joke, and moved round the table holding the reclaimed menus flat against his chest. Nick said how well the restaurant was doing and smiled to insist on their part in its success, since Wani and he had been guests at its opening last year and had made it their local; and Fabio said, "We can't complain… er, Nick, we can't complain," just glancing at Wani on the second complain with something cold in his eyes, and then at the new arrivals at the door, who typically were the Stallards. Nick watched Fabio go to greet them and the coldness had gone-he heard the usual mutual primping of head waiter and fashionable customers. Well, Fabio must have been shaken to see Wani so changed; but there was something else in his reaction, fear and displeasure, as if Wani's presence was no longer good for business.

Sophie and Jamie came over, Jamie slapping Wani on the shoulder and Sophie wrinkling her nose across the table rather than kissing him. Jamie had just played the romantic lead in a low-budget Hollywood comedy, and had been praised for his uncanny re-creation of a dim but handsome Old Etonian with floppy hair. Sophie was pregnant, and thus resting, though thick packets that could well have been film scripts lay in the cradle-like basket she was carrying. Treat and Brad were thrilled to meet them, since Jamie was still a possible for Owen Gereth in Spoils; cards were exchanged, and social visits that were never going to happen were delightedly agreed on. Nothing was said about Wani's health, though Sophie, as they went off to their table, looked back with a finger-wave and a cringing smile of condolence.

"Wow, what a sweet guy," said Brad.

Nick, taking praise for the introduction, said, "Old Jamie…?Yeah…"

"You guys go way back?"

"Yes-well, again we were all at Oxford together. He's really much more a friend of Wani's."

But Wani seemed to disown any further intimacy. He sat very still, with his slender hands on the tablecloth. His square-shouldered jacket was buttoned but stood forward like a loose coat. He commanded attention now by pity and respect as he once had by beauty and charm. The claim to attention was constant, but it had turned fiercer and quieter. Nick thought he still looked wonderful in a way, though to admit it was to make an unbearable comparison. He was twenty-five years old. He said, "Stallard has always been an absurd figure, and he's found the perfect partner in the lovely Miss Tipper."

"Oh…" said Brad. "Is she… er…"

"It was a good match for him. She's the daughter of the ninth richest man in Britain, and he's the son of a bishop."

"Bishops don't make that much, I guess," said Treat, and took another pull on his cocktail straw.

"Bishops make absolutely nothing," said Wani; and after a second he flashed a smile round the table at the imbecility of bishops. Everyone else smiled too, in nervous collusion. Wani's face, gaunt and blotched, had taken on new possibilities of expression-the repertoire of someone not only older but quite different, someone passed unknown in the street, was unexpectedly his. He must have looked at himself in the mirror, winced and raised his eyebrows, and seen this unbearable stranger mugging back at him. Clearly he couldn't be held responsible for the latest ironies and startlements of his face, though there were moments when he seemed to exploit them. The cheekbones were delicate, the frontal bone heavy, even brutal-it was his father's look, brought out sometimes in the past by candlelight and now exposed to the light of day.

Nick said, "You know Wani's father's been made a lord," not sure whom he was pandering to.

"Oh wow," said Brad. "Does that mean you'll be a lord one day too?" There were several seconds of silence till Wani said, "It's not hereditary. What on earth are you drinking, by the way, Treat?"

"Don't ask…!" said Brad, eager with embarrassment.

"It's… what's he called?… Humphrey? Humphrey's latest invention. It's a Black Monday."

Wani gave his grin again, bright and sarcastic in effect. "That didn't take long," he said. Humphrey was Gusto's venerable barman, keeper (up to a point) of long tabs and starlets' secrets. "He trained on the Queen Mary. There's nothing he doesn't know about cocktails."

"Well it's, what is it? It's dark rum, and cherry brandy, and sambuca. And loads of lemon juice. It tastes like a really old-fashioned laxative," said Treat.

"I can't drink any more," said Wani, "but when I hear that, I don't mind."

There was a brief pause. Treat ran his finger along his fringe, and Brad sighed and said, "Yeah… I wanted to ask… " They both of them, nicely enough, seemed relieved the subject had been brought up.

Wani tucked in his chin. "Oh, a disaster," he said, frowning from one to the other. "Quite unbelievable. One of my bloody companies lost two-thirds of its value between lunchtime and teatime."

"Oh… oh, right," said Brad, and gave an awkward laugh. "Yeah, we had it real bad too."

"Fifty billion wiped off the London stock exchange in one day."

Treat looked at him levelly, to show he'd registered but wouldn't challenge this evasion, and said, "Hey, the Dow was down five hundred points."

"God, yes," said Wani, "well, it was all your fault."

Brad didn't argue, but said job losses on Wall Street were terrible.

"Oh, fuck that," said Wani. "Anyway, it bounces back. It has already. It always recovers. It always recovers."

"It's a worrying time for all of us," said Nick responsibly.

Wani gave a mocking look and said, "We'll all be absolutely fine." And after that it was impossible to approach him on the subject of his fatal illness. Nick saw it was perplexing for the Americans, who had met him as a man about to get married. Now natural concern was mixed with furtive thinking back.

During lunch Brad, like Wani, drank only water, and Nick and Treat shared a bottle of Chablis. Treat touched Nick's arm a lot, and involved him in quiet side-chats about what they might do later. Nick tried to keep general conversation going. Wani's presiding coolness made them all hesitate. He seemed to play with their anxiety about him. Brad and Treat asked questions, and marvelled at their luck in having Wani to answer them.

If Nick answered a question Wani listened to him and then gave a flat little codicil or correction. His technique was to hold a subject up and show his command of it, and then to throw it away in smiling contempt for their interest in it. He ate very little, and a sense of his disgust at the expensive food, and at himself for being unable to eat it, seeped into the conversation. He looked at the slivers of chicken and translucent courgettes as pitiful tokens of the world of pleasure, and clutched the table as though to resist a slow tug at the cloth that would sweep the whole vision away.

The question of the film was slow to come up, and Nick was shy to mention it, just because it was his own project. He'd spent months writing a script, and it was almost as if he'd written the book it was based on: all he wanted was praise. He often imagined watching the film, in the steep circle of the Curzon cinema-absorbing the grateful unanimous sigh of the audience at the exact enactment of what he'd written; in fact he seemed to have directed the film as well. He lay awake in the bliss of Philip French's review. Somehow another James film, The Bostonians, had come up, and the crazy thing that the actor who played Superman starred in it.

"One can imagine," said Nick, "only too well, the Master's irony, not to speak of his covert excitement, at that idea…"; though the others perhaps imagined it less vividly than he did.

"Oh, we loved your letters, by the way," said Treat, with another squeeze of his arm: "so Britishl"

"Well, I guess we should talk about… our film," said Brad. Just then the desserts, mere bonnes bouches in foot-wide puddles of pink coulis, were set in front of them. Wani looked at his plate as if it and the film were equally unlikely confections. "Or we could talk about it next week…"

"I don't mind," said Nick, his heart thumping. He was suddenly incredulous that his beautiful plan, the best fruit of his passion for Henry James, depended on the cooperation of these two stupid people. He sensed already that it wasn't a question of changes, it was some larger defection from the plan.

"I mean we love what you've done, Nick."

"Yeah, it's great," said Treat.

Brad hesitated, peering at the grid of spun sugar that jutted from his loganberry parfait. "You know, we've talked about this in the letter a certain amount. It's just the problem of the story where the guy doesn't get the girl, and then the stuff they're all fighting over-the Spoils, right?-goes up in flames. It kinda sucks."

"Does it…?" said Nick; and, trying to be charming, "It's just like life, though, isn't it-maybe too like life for a… conventional movie. It's about someone who loves things more than people. And who ends up with nothing, of course. I know it's bleak, but then I think it's probably a very bleak book, even though it's essentially a comedy."

"Yeah, I haven't read the book," said Treat.

"Oh… " said Nick, and coloured with proxy embarrassment, with the shame Treat should have been feeling. His loose idea of getting some time alone with him vanished in a sigh and a shrug.

"You've read the book, Antoine?" said Treat.

Wani was rose-lipped, popping in quarter-spoonfuls of ice cream, sucking them from the spoon and letting them slip down in luxurious spasms like a child with tonsillitis; he said, "No, I haven't. I pay Nick to do that for me."

"I don't know what you think," said Brad, "about the idea of including just a short love scene for Owen and… I'm sorry…"

"Fleda," said Nick. "Fleda Vetch."

"Fleda Vetchl" said Treat, with a brief blare of a laugh. "What sort of a name is that? Doesn't she sound like the ugliest girl in the school?"

"I think it's rather a touching name," said Nick; and Brad looked reprovingly across the table.

"She sounds like a witch," muttered Treat, as if agreeing to shut up; but then went on, "I mean, can I imagine asking Meryl Streep, 'Oh, Miss Streep, we've got this really great role for you, will you please, please play the lovely Fleda Vetch?' She'd think I'd just thrown up all over the phone."

They all laughed except Wani, who said, very quiet and superior, as if she was someone else they would see at Nat Hanmer's wedding, "Fleda Vetch is what she is called."

"Yeah, I don't care overly what she's called," said Brad. "But… Owen and Fleda-we need to see them together more. We need some… passion!"

"We need him getting all hot," said Treat, flicking his glance towards Jamie's table. Then he winked at Nick. "Did he ever… you know…" lowering his voice and looking coyly away, "at Oxford… like, with other guys-I'm sure I heard someone say-"

"He's straight," said Wani.

"Oh, OK," said Treat, with a wobble of the head, as if to say, who's talking about straight here? But there was something bleaker than impatience in Wani's tone. He was pale and motionless, gazing at the far rim of his plate but clearly caught by some unpostponable inner reckoning. He jerked his chair back a little, and his stick, swinging off from the back of it, fell on the marble with a ringing clatter: he groped round for it, bending down, and Brad jumped up to help him, and reclaimed the stick and managed to absorb the blame and reassure the restaurant with his friendly bulk. Wani's mouth was held shut and he had an intensely private expression of imminent surrender. It made Nick think for a second of the bedroom. He stood and went off at a hobbling lurch among the tables.

A few seconds later Nick followed, frowning down at the floor, giving a brisk nod to Fabio's cool "Signore?" In the black marble lavatory there were two cubicles, and in one of them, with the door still ajar, Wani was stooping and vomiting. Nick came in behind him and stood there for a moment before laying a hand on his side. Wani flinched, whispered, "Oh fuck…" and crouched and shuddered as he threw up again. There seemed to be far more coming out than the invalidish meal that had gone in. Nick touched him lightly, wanting to help him and discourage him at the same time. He looked over his shoulder into the bowl, with a certain resolve, and saw the bits of chicken and greens in the pool of the promptly regurgitated ice cream. He plucked out sheets of paper from the dispenser and wondered if he should wipe Wani's face for him; then he stood and waited, which Wani didn't object to. He thought with bleak hilarity that this was their most intimate moment for many months. He looked at the streaky black walls and found himself thinking of nights here the year before, both cubicles sometimes carelessly busy with the crackle of paper and patter of credit card. There was a useful shiny ledge above the cistern, and they would go in in turn. The nights sped by in unrememberable brilliance. "Well," said Wani, grasping his stick and giving Nick a fearful smile, "no more parfait for Antoine."

Wani had brought the car to Gusto, and Nick drove him back in it to Lowndes Square. "Thanks very much," said Wani, in a whispery drawl.

"That's all right, old chap," said Nick. He parked opposite the house and they sat for a minute. Wani was taking deep breaths, as if to ready himself for a race or plunge. He didn't try to help Nick by explaining himself-well, he never had, he was his own law and his own licence. If Nick asked him how he felt he was drily impatient with him, both for not knowing and for wanting to know. It was the unfair prerogative of illness. Nick reached a hand over the steering wheel and swept the thin dust off the black leather hood of the dashboard. How cars themselves changed as they aged; at first they were possibilities made solid and fast, agents of dreams that kept a glint of dreams about them, a keen narcotic smell; then slowly they disclosed their unguessed quaintness and clumsiness, they seemed to fade into the dim disgrace between one fashion and another.

"I really must get a new car," said Wani.

"I know, it's frightfully dusty."

"It's a fucking antique."

Nick peered over his shoulder into the cramped back seat, and remembered Pdcky, the stupid genius of the old days (which was to say, last summer), sitting there with his legs wide apart. "I suppose you'll keep the number plate."

"God, yes. It's worth a thousand pounds."

"Dear old WHO 6."

"OK…" said Wani, cold at any touch of sentiment.

Nick glanced up and saw Lady Ouradi looking down from one of the drawing-room windows. She held the net curtain aside and gazed out into the browning leaves of the plane trees, the long dull chasm of the square. Nick waved, but she seemed not to have seen them; or perhaps she had already seen them but let her gaze wander, as it was clearly prone to, down the imagined vista of the past or future. He noted her austere wool dress, the single string of pearls. To Nick she was a creature of indoors, of unimaginable exiled mornings and measured afternoons; her gesture as she held the white curtain back was like the parting of a medium through which she wasn't quite supposed to see or be seen.

"You're OK for money?" Wani said.

"Darling, I'm fine." Nick turned and smiled at him, with the mischievous tenderness of a year ago. "Your little start-up present has grown and grown, you know." He put his hand discreetly into Wani's, where it lay on his thigh. A few seconds later Wani withdrew his hand, so as to get out his handkerchief. There was a question in the air, all this week, since he had come back from Paris, and it was only his pride which kept it from being asked: which it wouldn't be in words, but in some brave melting gesture. Instead he said, "You should really move out of the Feddens'. Get a place of your own."

"I know," said Nick, "it is rather dotty. But we muddle along somehow… I'm not at all sure they could manage without me."

"One never knows…" said Wani. He turned his head away and looked out at the pavement, the ugly concrete planters in the square gardens, a bicycle frame chained to the railings. "I was thinking I might leave you the Clerkenwell building."

"Oh… " Nick glanced at him and then away, almost scowling in shock and reproach.

"Of course I don't mean you should live there."

"Well, no, that's not the point…"

"I suppose it's a bit odd leaving you something unfinished."

After a couple of breaths, Nick said, "Let's not talk about you leaving things." And went on, with awful delicacy, "Anyway, it will be finished by then." It was impossible to say the right thing. Wani grinned at him coldly for a second. Until now he had only had the story of Wani being ill; he had taken the news about with him and brought off the sombre but thrilling effect, once or twice, of saying, "I'm afraid he's dying," or "He nearly died." It had been his own drama, in which he'd felt, as well as the horror and pity of it, the thump of a kind of self-importance. Now, sitting beside him and being offered buildings, he felt humbled and surprisingly angry.

"Well, we'll see," said Wani. "I mean, I'm assuming you'd like it."

"I don't find it easy to think about," said Nick.

"I need to get this sorted out, Nick. I'm seeing the lawyers on Friday."

"What would I do with the Clerkenwell building?" said Nick sulkily.

"You'd own it," said Wani. "It'll have thirty thousand square feet of office space. You can get someone to manage it for you and you can live on the rent for the rest of your life."

Nick didn't ask how he was supposed to go about finding a manager. Possibly Sam Zeman could help him with that. The phrase "the rest of your life" had come out pat, almost weightless, a futurity Wani wasn't going to bother imagining. For Nick it was very strange to find it attached to an office block near Smithfield Market. Wani knew he hated the design of the building; there was a sharp tease in the gift, even a kind of lesson. "What are you going to do about Martine?" said Nick.

"Oh, just the same. She'll carry on getting her allowance, at least until she marries. Then she gets a lump sum."

"Oh… " Nick nodded dimly at the wisdom of this, but then had to say, "I didn't know you gave her an allowance."

Wani slid him the smile that had once been slyly grand but now had something vicious in it. "Well, not me," he said. "I assumed you'd worked it out. Mamma's always paid her. Or kept her, rather."

"I see… " said Nick, after a moment, thinking how little Wani had taught him about Lebanese customs. He seemed to search for the discreet transaction in the tilted mantelpiece mirror. He glanced at the house again, but Wani's mother had dropped the curtain and absolute discretion reigned: the black front door, the veiled windows, the eggshell sheen of property.

"What a charming arrangement, to keep your son's girlfriend."

"For god's sake," murmured Wani, looking away. "She was never my girlfriend."

"No, of course not, I see…" said Nick, blushing and hurrying to cover his own foolishness, and also feeling absurdly relieved.

"Of course you must never tell Papa. It's his last illusion."

Nick didn't imagine seeing much of Bertrand in "the rest of his life." The little aesthete already felt the prohibition of that closed black door: which opened as he looked at it, to reveal Monique and the old servant woman, dressed in black, ready but not coming forward. "They're expecting you," Nick said quietly.

Wani looked across and then almost closed his eyes in droll disdain. All his old habits were there, and the beat of his lashes brought back occasions in the past when Nick had basked in his selfishness. He reached beside the seat for his stick. "How are you getting back?"

"I think I'll walk," said Nick, unthinkingly fit. "I could do with some exercise."

Wani pulled back the handle and the door cracked open onto the cold blue afternoon.

"You know I love you very much, don't you," said Nick, not meaning it in the second before he said it, but moved by saying it into feeling it might still be true. It seemed a way of covering his ungraciousness about Wani's will, of showing he was groping for a sense of scale. Wani snuffled, looked across the road at his mother, but didn't echo Nick's words. He had never told him he loved him. But it seemed possible to Nick that he might mean it without saying it. He said,

"By the way, I should warn you that Gerald seems to be in a bit of trouble."

"Oh, really?" said Nick.

"I don't know exactly what's happened, but it's something to do with the Fedray takeover last year. A spot of creative accounting."

"Really? What, you mean the Maurice Tipper thing."

"I think you can be pretty sure Maurice has covered his back. And Gerald will probably be all right. But there may be a bit of a fuss."

"Goodness… " Nick thought of Rachel first of all, and then of Catherine, who for the past few weeks had been in a wildly excitable state. "How do you know about this?"

"I had a call from Sam Zeman earlier."

"Right," said Nick, slightly jealous. "I must give him a ring."

They got out of the car, and Nick dawdled across the road, finding it hard to go at Wani's pace. He kissed Monique and explained that Wani had brought up his lunch; she nodded, pursed her lips and swallowed in a funny mimetic reflex. She was dignified and withdrawn, but as she touched her son's upper arm the glow of a long-surrendered power over him came into her face, the animal solace of being allowed to love and protect him, even against such hopeless odds. Wani himself, with the women at each elbow, seemed to shrink into their keeping; the sustaining social malice of the past two hours abandoned him at the threshold. They forgot their manners, and the door was closed again without anyone saying goodbye.

16

NICK CROSSED KNIGHTSBRIDGE and went through Albert Gate into the Park. He swung his arms, and his calves and thighs ached with guilty vigour. There was so much to think about, and the Park itself seemed pensive, the chestnuts standing in pools of their shed leaves, the great planes, slower to change, still towering tan and gold; but all he wanted to do was march along. A group of young women on horseback came trotting down Rotten Row, and he crossed behind them, over the damp, crusted sand. He didn't mind the north-easterly breeze. It was the time of year when the atmosphere streamed with unexpected hints and memories, and a paradoxical sense of renewal. He thought of meeting Leo after work, always early, the chill of promise in the air. Once or twice they met at the bandstand, away over there, with the copper ogee roof: strange that that particular shape should have floated on its slender pillars above the quick kiss, quick touch, odd nervous avoidance of their meetings. He took the long diagonal that went past Watts's monument to, or of, Physical Energy: the huge-thighed horseman reining back and gazing, in a ferment of discovery, towards Kensington Palace. Nick gave it the smug glance which showed that as a critic he noticed it and as a Londoner he took it for granted.

He thought about the Clerkenwell building. What Wani had bought was three narrow Victorian properties making a corner block, one extending deep behind the others into a high iron-and-glass-roofed workshop. They were solidly built, of blackened brick which showed up plum red when they were knocked down. There were doorbells of moribund trades, a glass beveller, a "Church and Legal" printer. There were boarded-up windows, industrial wiring, the light vandalism of use. Wani had taken Nick to see them, and Nick's whole impulse was to do them up and live in them. He went into the cellars and attics, heaved open trapdoors, climbed onto the leads, and looked down through the steep glass roof into the workshop where Wani was pacing around in his beautiful suit, flipping his car keys in his hand. Nick saw their friends coming to parties and dancing in that room.

Something in Wani's impatient, unseeing manner told him this was never going to happen. He felt like a child whose desperate visionary plea has no chance of persuading a parent. And of course the buildings came down-for a month or two the backs of other buildings not seen for a century felt the common sunlight, and then Baalbek House, named by Wani as if he'd written a poem, started to go up. Nick cast about but really he'd never seen a more meretricious design than that of Baalbek House. His own ideas were discounted with the grunting chuckle of someone wedded to another vision of success and defiantly following cheaper advice. And now this monster Lego house, with its mirror windows and maroon marble cladding, was to be Nick's for life.

When he turned into Kensington Park Gardens Nick remembered what Wani had said about Gerald, and started walking more slowly, as if to resist a strange acceleration of trouble. He was shy about meeting Gerald, who could be aggressive when in the wrong and sarcastic when he needed support. The Range Rover was parked outside the house, which might mean he'd come back early from Parliament. It looked significant. As so often, Nick didn't know what he was supposed to know-or indeed what he did know, since creative accounting was just a jocular phrase to him. Behind the Range Rover a man in a reddish leather jacket was leaning on the roof of a parked car and talking to another man sitting at the wheel. He looked up as Nick approached, and carried on talking while his eyes, in one fluent sequence, seemed to find him, hold him, scan him and dismiss him. Nick turned in at No. 48, and glanced back while he felt for his keys: the man was staring at him, and raised his chin as though about to call out, but then said nothing. He smiled unnervingly. His friend in the car passed him a camera through the window and he put it to his eye and took three pictures in two seconds-Nick was mesmerized by the lazy precision of the clicks; and too surprised to know what he felt. He felt victimized, and flattered, pretty important and utterly insignificant, since they clearly had no idea who he was. He thought in dignity he shouldn't answer questions, and was confused by their not asking him any. It took him an age to open the blue door.

In the hall everything seemed calm. Elena was in the kitchen and Nick said hello and waited for a sign from her. She was preparing the "meal and a half," the separate portion, like a child's or an invalid's, that was made for Gerald when he was going to be late at the House. "Have you seen what's going on outside?" said Nick. Elena thumbed her pastry expressively, but only said,

"I don't know."

"Is Gerald here?"

"Is gone to work."

"Oh good…"

"Miz Fed upstairs with his Lord." Elena radiated resentment, and Nick didn't risk exploring its cause, whether it was Gerald or what was being done to him: it felt large enough to include everyone. "You take the tray?" she said.

The kettle was coming to the boil, and the tray was ready with two teacups and the little sweet lebkuchen that Rachel liked. Nick warmed the pot and put in two spoonfuls of lapsang. It was the set with a pink Petit Trianon in a wreath on each cup and saucer, dull and pale now from the fury of the dishwasher. He poured on the water, gave it a good stir, dropped the lid on, and picked up the tray. Elena looked at him more amiably but shook her head. "Is Street of Shame," she said. "Is Street of Shame, Nick." It was the Private Eye phrase for Fleet Street, which Gerald had once teased Toby with, but Nick wasn't sure if she meant that or if she meant that Kensington Park Gardens itself had been brought down.

The drawing-room door was open, and Nick slowed again before going in. Lionel was saying, "If he has been a bloody fool then he'll have to face the consequences. If he hasn't, then we have infinite resources to demonstrate the fact." His manner was as quiet as ever, but without its usual cordiality: he sounded as if he expected the former option, and the stain it would bring on the family. Nick rattled the tray and went in. Rachel was standing by the mantelpiece, Lionel sitting in an armchair, and for a second Nick thought of the scene in The Portrait of a Lady when Isabel discovers her husband sitting while Mme Merle is standing, and sees at once that they are more intimate than she had realized. "Ah, my dear… " said Rachel, as Nick came forward with a slight mime of servility, which wasn't spotted as a joke. Lionel greeted him with his eyes, and went on, "When's he due back?" "He's got a late division," Rachel murmured. And Nick, setting down the tray, saw that though he hadn't chanced in on a secret he had caught the note of an older, more unguarded friendship than he'd heard before, the shared intelligence of brother and sister.

"Thanks so much," said Rachel.

"Did you have your picture taken?" said Lionel.

"I did," said Nick; and for some reason went on, "Not my best side, I'm afraid."

"No, they're awful about that," said Lionel, clearly resolving to show by his humour and by sitting down squarely and comfortably that there was nothing to worry about. "I was tipped off, so I came through the gardens."

"Thank heavens for the gardens," said Rachel. "With four exits they really can't keep it covered."

Nick smiled and hesitated. There wasn't a cup for him, but he longed to be included. He said tactfully, "Is there anything I can do?"

"Oh… " Lionel and Rachel looked at each other, searching for an answer among their own proprieties and uncertainties. Perhaps it was too shaming, even with the press outside, for Rachel to talk about. "Some rather awful things are being said about Gerald," she said, in her tellingly passive fashion.

Nick bit his cheek and said, "Wani… Ouradi told me something about it."

"Oh, well it's out, then," said Rachel.

"It will come out, darling," said Lionel.

Rachel poured the tea, and seemed lost in this sombre idea, passing Lionel a cup and the plate of lebkuchen. "And what about Maurice Tipper?" she said.

Lionel sat scrunching his biscuit in a vigilant squirrel-like way, and licked the sugar from his lips before saying, "Maurice Tipper is a cold-blooded thug."

"That's certainly true," said Rachel.

"My guess is that he'll only help Gerald if doing so helps himself."

"Mm… I saw Sophie at lunchtime," Nick offered. "I thought she was rather evasive."

"Thank god Tobias didn't marry that false little girl!" said Rachel, clutching at this out-of-date consolation and laughing with new bitterness and relief.

"Quite!" said Nick.

"Two things you can do," said Lionel. "Obviously, don't talk to anyone. And could you bear to pop out and buy the Standard?"

"Of course," said Nick, suddenly more nervous of the photographers.

"And a third thing," said Rachel. "Could you try and find my daughter?"

"Ah, yes… " said Lionel.

"She's frightfully up at the moment," Rachel said. "You've no idea what she'll do."

"Well, I'll try," said Nick.

"Isn't she taking the pills?" said Lionel, firm and vague at once.

"They can't quite get it right," said Rachel. "Two months ago she could barely speak-now she can barely stop speaking. It is a strain."

They both looked at Nick and he said, "I'll see what I can do." He sensed a certain hardness towards himself, a request that he should prove his usefulness to the family. Then he thought briskness might be a mark of confidence. A structure of command, long laid away in velvet, had been rapidly reassembled.

Catherine came home about six. She was thinking of buying a house in Barbados, and had been having a long talk with Brentford about it. Nick could tell from the smell of her hair when she kissed him that she'd been smoking pot; she seemed both elated and spaced out. Flashes went off as she opened the front door, but she treated them almost as natural phenomena, the meteors of her own atmosphere. "What was all that about?" she said, hardly waiting for an answer. "Another visit from the Prime Minister?"

"Not exactly," said Nick, following her upstairs and thinking that whatever was going on made another visit from the PM very unlikely. "We've been wondering where you were," he said. Rachel was on the phone in the drawing room, talking to Gerald in Westminster, and seemed to be getting the reassurances she needed; she was oddly placable. She smiled indulgently at Toby's portrait and said, "Of course, darling, just carry on as normal. We'll try…! We'll see you… Yup, yup." Nick went to the front windows, which looked very large and shiny in the early dusk. It was unsettling to know there were men waiting outside, their patience barely tested. The curtains were never closed, and when freed from the brocaded bands that held them back they still curved stiffly apart. Nick leant in to close the shutters, seldom used, which unfolded with alarming cracks.

When Rachel explained what was going on, Catherine seemed distantly enthusiastic. "Extraordinary… " she said.

"It could be quite serious actually," said Nick.

"Not prison, you mean?" It was the pot perhaps that gave her this smile of benign speculation.

"No," said Rachel crossly. "Besides, he's done absolutely nothing wrong. It's clearly all to do with that hateful man Tipper."

"Then Tipper can go to prison," said Catherine. "Or both the Tippers, better still."

Rachel gave a twitch of a smile to show the subject of the joke touched her a little too nearly. "They're only making investigations. No one's been arrested, much less charged."

"Right."

"Uncle Lionel's been here, and he was very reassuring."

Nick murmured endorsingly and said, "Would anyone like a drink?"

"Anyway, darling, you know your father would never do a thing like that. He's far too experienced. Not to mention dead honest!" Rachel coloured slightly at this affirmation.

"So is it in the paper?"

"It's not in the Standard tonight. And Toby says they won't touch it at the Telegraph-he's spoken to Gordon. Daddy says it's just the sort of thing the Guardian would love to blow out of all proportion."

"I'll have um… " Catherine said, bearing down on the drinks table with a fascinated smile but in the end only managing to think of a gin-and-tonic. Nick mixed her one, juniper lost in quinine: when she was on the up curve it was best to be careful with alcohol, annoyance, laughter-any cause of excitement. They stood with their glasses at their chins and nodded "Cheers!" in a meaningful way.

"The thing is, darling," said Rachel, "we simply mustn't talk to anybody at the moment. Oath of silence, Daddy says."

"I don't know anything about stocks and shares, so you needn't worry."

"It's what they make you say, though… Darling, or they twist your words. They've got no principles."

"They're not your friend," said Nick, which had been Lionel's dry way of putting it.

"They've got the morals of rattlesnakes," said Rachel.

Catherine sat on a sofa, swayed her head over her glass, and looked from one to the other of them. She started to smile and they flinched, with the feeling they were being mocked; but the smile spread and they saw it was to do with something else, the flowering of a clear belief, just touched with playful calculation, that they would share her happiness. "I've had such a thrilling day," she said.

They sat down to dinner in the kitchen. Normally Nick enjoyed the nights when Gerald was kept late at Westminster-the mood of snug reduction and humorously tolerated crisis; if they had guests, or if Gerald and Rachel were due out, there was even a thrill to Gerald's absence: it was a wing-brush of power, the sign of demands and decisions greater than dinner. Tonight his absence was more critical. It was odd that he hadn't come home. Clearly he attached great importance to carrying on normally.

Catherine said, "What's Gerald voting about?"

"Oh, darling, I don't know… it's obviously something pretty major."

"Can't we ring him?"

"Well, he's not answering the phone in the office. And if he's in the Chamber, or somewhere else about the Palace," said Rachel impressively, "then we couldn't reach him anyway."

"He'll be back straight after the vote," said Nick. He knew that Gerald had Penny's new mobile phone; Rachel must be trying to spare him a wild, irrelevant pep talk from his daughter.

"What is a takeover?" said Catherine.

"Well, it's when one company buys up another."

"They acquire a majority of the shares," said Nick. "Then they have control."

"So are they saying Gerald didn't have these shares?"

Rachel said, as if judiciously filtering the facts for her child, "I think sometimes perhaps people fiddle with the price of the shares."

"Make them more valuable?"

"Exactly."

"Or less, of course," said Nick.

"Mm… " said Rachel.

"And how would they do that?"

"Well, I suppose they sort of… um…"

"Mm… " said Nick, after a bit.

They smiled doubtfully at their own unworldliness.

"It's not the same as asset-stripping, anyway," said Catherine.

"No… " said Rachel, with hesitant firmness.

"Because that's what Sir Maurice Tipper does. Toby told me. Maurice Tipper, Asset Stripper. That's when they get hold of something, it's like an old house, they strip out all the marble fireplaces before they demolish it."

"And leave everyone on the street," said Nick.

"Exactly!" said Catherine.

"That, of course, is what Badger's supposed to have done all over Africa," said Rachel, with a guilty grimace. "I don't know if it's true."

"Oh, Badger…" said Catherine, indulgent and dismissive at once. "What's become of poor old Badger, lately, I wonder."

"He's often away," said Rachel, as if to excuse her vagueness about him.

"I'm going to get in touch with him."

"Well, you could."

"I'm going to catch up with quite a number of people who've dropped out of my life. It's so pathetic to lose touch," Catherine said, with a lively but disgusted look at her last summer, when everything about her had been pathetic.

"I'm sure he's not expecting a call… " said Rachel.

"I saw Russell today, for instance."

"Oh really?" said Rachel thinly.

"Do you remember?"

"Oh, I do."

"Me too," said Nick.

"He was asking about everybody."

"I should still be a bit careful with Russell," said Nick, with a supportive glance at Rachel.

"But that was all before...!" said Catherine, in happy exasperation.

Later, she said, "If Gerald resigns, you'll be able to come to Barbados with me, that would be perfect, wouldn't it, until things blow over."

"That's very kind," said Rachel. "Though I can't help feeling there's more than one ' if in that sentence."

"Oh, Mum, this house has got an enormous swimming pool, as well as being right on the beach. You just take your pick!"

"No, I'm sure it's delightful."

"It could be just what he needs. A complete change of direction."

"You have the oddest idea of just what people need," said Rachel. "I've noticed it before."

"Well, let's face it, he certainly doesn't need the pathetic little empees salary."

' 'What you perhaps forget is that… your father wants to serve his country.''

"OK, when you get back, plunge into charity work! Probably much more useful than being Monster for Social Welfare and cutting everyone's grants. He could found something. The Gerald Fedden Trust. People often have a complete change of heart when something like this happens. You know, they go into the East End."

"Well, let's just wait and see, shall we," said Rachel, folding her napkin and pushing back her chair.

Nick and Catherine went up to the drawing room. "Will you put on some music, darling," said Catherine.

"I'm not sure your mother really…"

"Oh, just something nice. I don't mean God-dammery. All right, I'll choose." She went to the record cupboard, and knelt with her head cocked sideways, humming teasingly as she picked out an LP and prepared to put it on. Nick heard the needle drop, the kindling crackle.

"Turn it down a bit, darling…?"

She did so, and tutted, "Uncle Nick!" Out from the speakers came the sinister little jumps that start Rachmaninov's Symphonic Dances. "There, you like that," she said.

"Up to a point," said Nick, knowing how much he didn't want to hear it.

"Oh, it's wonderful," she said, staring from the stage at an invisible dress circle and raising her arms. It was a piece he'd adored as a teenager, and played all the time in his first year at Oxford to confirm and deepen the regretful longing which seemed now to have been the medium he lived in-it unfolded for him like that endless tune on the alto sax. Now its melancholy felt painful, even vicious. He half watched Catherine sweeping through the room, alarmingly unselfconscious. He had danced to it himself, but by himself, in his room, drunk, at the end of days brightened or not by contact with Toby.

"It is a bit God-dammery," he said, as a Russian Orthodox chant made itself heard. Catherine waved her arms hectically. "It's a bit like having a bop in St Basil's Cathedral." He tried to throw off his embarrassment with these square little jokes. She smiled, stretched out a hand to him, and scowled for a second because he wouldn't join her. He thought of her four months ago, trailing her hopelessness from room to room like a sad child with an inseparable rag; and now, mere chemistry, she was Makarova. She didn't notice the melancholy, the insidious, shifting harmonies; it was movement and therefore life. He said, "The thing is, darling, there's a bit of a crisis going on. You know, it looks rather odd leaping round like this when your mum's so anxious-well, we all are." He spoke consciously as one of the family, to cover his private unease, at being both needed and excluded by the terms of the crisis. Catherine didn't pay attention, she hummed, serenely, stubbornly, and a while later stopped dancing as if on her own decision. She wandered to the big bay window at the back, and stood looking out through her reflection at the lights beyond the trees. They seemed perhaps like elements in a pattern, which, read with the right intuition for shape and meaning, might reveal an instruction. When she turned round she gave Nick a smile that hovered before various possible cajolements. She sat on the broad arm of his chair and slid in sideways against him.

"I know," she said, "let's go out for a bit. Have you got the car here?"

"Um, yes," said Nick. "Round the corner. But… well, Gerald will be back soon."

"Gerald could be ages. You know they don't vote till midnight sometimes, if they're filimandering."

"Or gerrybustering."

"Exactly! We needn't be long. I've just got an idea."

Of course the idea of not being here when Gerald got back was very attractive. Rachel came in, and Nick felt he'd been caught larking about, Catherine squashing him like some bolshie teenage attempt at seduction. "Gerald's just rung," Rachel said. "It seems they're going to be really awfully late. It's a bill he's got to, um, you know, keep a bit of an eye on."

"How is he?" said Catherine fondly.

"He sounds fine. He says really not to worry." She had a new confidence, an almost pleasurable glow, and Nick felt sure she'd just been told how much she was loved. She moved across the room, looking for some small task to perform; found fallen chrysanthemum petals on a table top, swept them into her open palm, and dropped them in the wastebasket. "Oh, I like this," she said. "Isn't it Rachmaninov?" The sad waltz of the second movement was just catching fire. She stood gazing over their heads at the caprice by Guardi, and perhaps at some memory of her own. Nick thought for a moment she was going to start dancing too-she seemed suddenly very like her daughter. But really it was only in charades or the adverb game that she took the licence to be silly.

Catherine said, "Mum, Nick and I are going out for half an hour."

"Oh, darling… really?"

"There's just something we've got to do. I'm not going to tell you, but… We'll be back!"

"Is it quite the best moment…?"

"Yes, I wonder," said Nick.

"I'm not going to talk to anyone, don't worry!"

Rachel thought, and said, "Well, if you are going out, then obviously Nick should go with you."

"We'll just go in the car," said Catherine. "Nick will be with me the whole time." And she hugged him to her in the chair with a delighted laugh.

Rachel looked rather narrowly at Nick, as the guarantor of this excursion. He thought he might be going to put up more resistance than he did. He gave a half smile, a slow nod, a wearily tolerant closing of the eyes. She said, "Please don't be long. And take the back way. Take a torch."

They went out, and as they started downstairs Nick heard the minatory little fanfares interrupt the waltz, and wondered if Rachel would go on listening to it after they'd gone. In the hall it was still quite loud. The whole house seemed steeped in a wilful air of romance.

Catherine wouldn't tell him where they were going, only where to turn. Nick sighed good-humouredly at this, and was half glad she didn't notice his tension as they left the house further and further behind, and Rachel in it alone. When they swung around Marble Arch and down Park Lane he said, "It looks as though we might be going to Westminster."

"In a sense," said Catherine. "You'll see." Her seductiveness had hardened to a brightness.

"There's absolutely no point in going to the House of Commons."

"No, no," she said.

They went down Grosvenor Place, wound through Victoria, and then headed straight towards Westminster. The floodlit front of the Abbey appeared, and then they were gunning out into Parliament Square, the bright face of Big Ben, always stirring to Nick, like the best picture in a child's book, showing 9.30: 9.30 was striking, iron circles fading in the bus roar. He said, quite relieved, "I can't go in there, you know." But she made him turn left instead, towards Whitehall, past Downing Street, and the Banqueting House, and then suddenly towards the river, and into a side street walled right up to the sky by a vast Victorian building. It was a feature of the London riverscape Nick had almost unconsciously absorbed, without ever deducing or being told what it was: he had an image of its roof, like a Loire chateau. He parked opposite, outside some dark ministry. The whole street was oddly dark, except for the glowing glass canopies of the chateau's doorways, somehow redolent of gaslight and cab horses, at one of which a porter in a peaked cap was silhouetted. For a moment a London sensation, unnoticed and perpetual as the throb of traffic, came clear for him: of order and power, rhythmic and intricate, endlessly sure of obedience. Then he remembered. "This is where Badger lives, isn't it?"

"It was just Mum mentioning him," said Catherine, as if it was an obvious breakthrough.

Nick saw that she was crazy, that the trip was not an inspiration but an irrelevance. He slumped and pursed his lips in tender annoyance. He tried kindly to find a reason in her craziness. "You think Badger can somehow throw a light on this business? He's probably not here, is he, darling-isn't he in South Africa?" But she had opened the car door, with no sign in her face or voice that she was even aware of Nick's worry, or of any possible objection. She had her certainty, a source of joy and tension, like revealed religion. Nick's objection was mainly that he didn't like Badger, that it was mutual, and that Badger would like him even less for bringing his manic god-daughter round. It was a fuck-flat, in Barry Groom's hard phrase, not a proper home. He had an image of small hotel-like rooms in which Badger conducted strained affairs with much younger women; of Badger shooting a line as phoney as the prints on the wall and the Chippendale cocktail cabinet.

They went in under one of the glass canopies, and through a brown-marble entrance hall; a porter in a cubbyhole was listening to the radio and nodded back at them as if they were always in and out. Catherine, in her dark coat, made up, evangelical, had the confidence to pass anywhere; the sense of getting away with something was all Nick's. The wait by the lift was a reasonable but finite chance to turn back: Catherine smiled and quivered, hands thrust into pockets flashing her coat open. "Are you sure about this?" said Nick. He knew he ought to be restraining her and at the same time he was trying to live up to her. Her conviction was a challenge to someone reasonably cowardly. He felt a vague intellectual awe of her insights, however mad. He thought her state might be like the capable elation of coke, but more psychic. There was a warning plink, the doors opened, and Penny came tearing out.

"Penny!" said Nick. He dawdled for a moment with a shrug and a helpful half smile. Catherine was already in the lift, narrow-eyed, breathing audibly. Nick, feeling like a silly ass and then also feeling the loose smugness of having discovered something without knowing what it was, grinned, and said considerately, "How are you?"

Penny had stopped and turned round, with a look both peevish and frightened. She went very white; and then a rich hot pink started up in her round cheeks and spread (in the three or four seconds while Catherine stamped and said, "Nick, come on!") into her neck and throat and ears. "Um, Nick," she said, in bossy defiance of her blush, "actually, I shouldn't, um…

Nick, confused, reluctant to be rude, but enjoying Penny's blush, in itself and for not being one of his own, had a foot in the lift, and blocked the thrust of the door with his arm-it kept stolidly reasserting itself. "How's

Gerald?" he said.

"Nick, come on!" Catherine said again.

He stood back into the lift and Penny, shaking her head and stepping forward, said, "He's not here, Nick, he's not here -" as the doors closed.

"Well…!" said Nick. He glanced at Catherine, then at the mirror wall, where they seemed to stand like self-conscious strangers. Even in a stuffy old mansion block like this a slanting FUCK had been scratched on the brushed-steel door. He thought of Badger flirting relentlessly with Penny, years ago now, when Gerald had first taken her on. It was that awful, rivalrous straight thing, taking the girl not only from Nick, who didn't care, but from his best friend, who clearly would. He found himself smirking, looked in the mirror, and said, "God, darling, Badger's going to be furious. We're obviously not supposed to know." But the lift stopped and Catherine slipped out past him with a mocking frown, as if surely she couldn't have anyone so dim or so chicken as a friend.

He followed her along a red-carpeted hallway past brown-varnished doors with bells and nameplates; on one side brown-and-yellow leaded windows gave on to inner light wells, lit now only by the dim back windows of other flats. A telly could be heard from one flat, but otherwise sound was dampened as by the gravest discretion. The subliminal sense of gaslight, of stepping back through time into the depths of this monstrous building, was oppressive but also, for Nick at least, beguiling: his mind ran away for a moment along the panelled dado, the swan's-neck curves of the light fittings. The last door on the left was slightly ajar, waiting perhaps for Penny's return. Catherine pinged the bell, and they stood looking at the card in the brass frame that said "D. S. Brogan Esq." A deeply familiar voice shouted, "It's open," and Catherine stared into Nick's face with a gleam of vindication before she put her arm through his. It was much worse than Nick had thought. He didn't want to go in, and would have run away fast if he hadn't been tightly held there. There was a loud sigh, a soft thump of footsteps, and Gerald plucked open the door. He wasn't wearing shoes or a jacket and tie, and his front stud was undone, so that the white collar stood up skew-whiff. In his left hand he held a cigarette. Nick said, "Oh, hello, Gerald!" and Catherine, gleaming with indignation, said, "Dad! You said you'd given up!"

17

It didn't take the photographers long to work out about the communal gardens, though they were stretched to cover all four gates. They put up their stepladders and looked over the railings and peripheral shrubbery through binoculars or through their telephoto lenses, dreaming of shots. The falling leaves were in their favour. It was news, but it was also a matter of patience. They talked confidently on mobile phones. They were rivals who'd met so often they were friends, sharing their indifference to their victims in companionable Thermos caps of tea. They toasted them sardonically in milk and sugar. Then the house gate would open and Toby, perhaps, would come out, who for a while had worked with these guys and now was dodging them, making towards one exit and then switching and jogging to another-the photographen went swearing and clattering round the long way; one or two jumped in cars. Soon Geoffrey Titchfield was making hourly patrols of the gardens, after several of the buzzards, as he called them, had simply used their ladders to climb in. "You are not keyholders," he said. "I must ask you to leave immediately." Sir Geoffrey was deeply vexed by the whole episode. The exposure of his idol, terribly shocking to him, was brought home, like the threat of a larger disorder, by these incursions on the gardens.

At the front of the house the shutters or curtains stayed closed, so that indoors the day had the colour of an appalling hangover or other failure to get up. Electric light combined with diffused sunlight in a sickly glare. All the papers came as usual, in their long, arhythmical collapse onto the doormat, where they lay like a menace and were approached at last with long-armed reluctance. And there they were, the Millionaire MP, his Elegant Wife, his Blonde, or his Blushing Blonde Secretary. "Troubled daughter speaks of minister's affair." It seemed she'd spoken to Russell, and Russell had spoken to an old friend at the Mirror; after that there was no holding it. Oddly enough, in all the pictures "heartbroken Cathy" was smiling with sublime conviction. That was the first day.

On the second day, Gerald, resenting the demeaning scurry through the gardens, where he looked such a fool to the other keyholders, walking their dogs and knocking up on the tennis courts, put on his widest-brimmed fedora and a dark, double-breasted overcoat, and came out of the front door into the film set of the street. Parked vans, spotlights, shoulder-hefted TV cameras, fluffy boom mikes, the ruck of reporters-everything took on life and purpose with his emergence. The freshly whitened house-front reflected the flashbulbs. Gerald seemed as usual to draw strength from their attention. He was the star of this movie, whatever he did. Nick, looking out from behind an upstairs curtain, saw him step on to the pavement and heard him say loudly, "Thank you, gentlemen, I have nothing to say," in a cordial, plummy tone. The Press were in front of him in a half ellipse, of which his hat formed the centre. They called him Sir and Gerald and Mr Fedden and Minister. "Are you leaving your wife?" "This way, Gerald!" "Mr Fedden, are you guilty of insider dealing?" "Where's your daughter?" "Will you be resigning, Minister?" Nick saw how they enjoyed their deadpan mockery, their brief but decisive wielding of power. He found it frightening. He wondered how he himself would ever square up to that. Gerald moved slowly, with heavy patience, sturdy in the interest of his case and confident of knowing the right form, however humiliating the content, towards the Range Rover; which at last he got into, and drove off, almost running down photographers, to the House of Commons, to hand in his resignation.

Nick let the curtain drop, and made his way carefully around the twin guest beds and on to the brighter landing. Rachel was just coming out of her bedroom. "Sorry about this absurd gloom!" she said. "I find I have the greatest reluctance to have my photograph taken." There was a briskness in her tone that warned off any touch of sympathy.

"I understand."

She was wearing a red-and-black wool suit, a necklace, four or five rings, and would certainly have looked good in a photograph. Nick glanced past her into the shadowy white room. There was the first door, into a small anteroom with the bathroom opening off it, and then the second door, which had always sealed the couple away in a grandeur of privacy. Nick saw the end of the bed, a round table with silver-framed pictures of the children. He had hardly ever been in there, since his first summer, when he had walked around noiselessly, with his hands behind his back, an intruder in the temple of marital love; his own love fantasies had taken envious possession of it, like squatters, in the married couple's absence.

"Mm, strange times," said Rachel, again as if talking to someone barely known, and instinctively disapproved of, whom a crisis had thrust her together with: Nick felt for the tender irony which always lined their little phrases, but he wasn't sure he found it. Perhaps she knew that he had known all along about Gerald and Penny, and her dryness was a form of bitter embarrassment.

He said, "I know…" He was painfully sorry for her, but didn't see how to say so; it was a strange inhibition. In a way it was the moment for a new intimacy, and he hoped to bring her round to it. He glimpsed something beautiful for both of them emerging from the wreckage of the marriage: their old alliance, running rings of secret mockery round Gerald's pompous head, would flourish and be a strength to her. He hesitated, but he was ready.

She looked at him, her lips firming and relenting; then she turned away.

She went unnoticing past Norman Kent's portrait of Catherine, though to Nick it played its part in the unfolding moment. "I wish you would go and get Catherine," she said, as she started downstairs.

"Oh… " said Nick, following behind, with a nervous laugh that he regretted.

"She ought to be here with her family," Rachel said, not turning round. "She needs care. I can't tell you how worried I am about her with that man."

"Of course you are," said Nick promptly, "of course you are," feeling he needed a new tone to console a woman twice his age. He felt he learned as he spoke, and saw how all her worries found an outlet in this one worry. He said, "I'm sure she's safe with him, but if you want me to, I'll go over there, gladly," pressing and then faltering behind her in anxious support and respect. The truth was he was frightened of the reporters and photographers: he didn't know how to deal with them, or with anyone who didn't show support and respect. And he was very wary of Russell, who seemed to have brought about his longed-for exposure of Gerald almost by chance, and now was "looking after Cath" in his Brixton flat, and declining to let anyone see her.

Rachel reached the first-floor landing. "I mean, I can't go over there; I'd have the whole press pack at my heels." It was as if she was in danger even coming down to this level. The world outside her door had revealed itself as not only alien but hostile. And her world within doors had abruptly been robbed of comfort. She turned and her face was stiff apart from her moving lips; Nick thought she might be going to cry, and in a way he hoped she would, because it would be a natural thing to do, as well as a sign of trust-he could hold her, which he'd never done before. He saw the quick sensual crush of his chin against the shoulder of her wool suit, her grey-streaked hair across his mouth; she would clutch him, with a shudder of acceptance and release, and after a while he would lead her into the drawing room, where they would sit down and decide what to do about Gerald.

"No, you mustn't…" he said. "Obviously."

He watched her blink rapidly and choose a different sort of release: "I mean, since you're so good at winkling people out!"

Nick didn't counter this gibe, the first he'd ever had from her. He said, "Oh… " almost modestly, looking away at the carpet, the legs of the Sheraton table, the polished threshold of the drawing room. He felt very low, and Rachel went on,

"You know, we do rather count on you to keep an eye on Catherine."

He tried to think when he'd heard the tone before. It was one of her adorable, unexpectedly funny little moments of exasperated candour about some party official, some simpleton at Conference. "Well," he said, "I have tried… as I hope you know." Rachel didn't endorse this. "But, you know, she is an adult, she leads her own life…!" He gave the soft laugh of sensible conviction, which was all it had ever taken to win Rachel's agreement.

"Well, you say that!" she said, with a quite different kind of laugh, a single hard gasp.

Nick leant back on the mahogany banister, and felt his way into the new conditions. He said, very measuredly, "I think I always have been as good a friend to her as she would allow me to be. As you know, friends come and go with her-and they all disappoint her. So I suppose I must have been doing something right if she still trusts me."

"No, I'm sure she's devoted to you," said Rachel, "we all are," in a sharp but conditional tone, as though it didn't much matter. "It's really the question of your doing what's best for her, I mean, not simply… conspiring with her in whatever she wants you to do. She has a very serious illness."

"Yes, of course," Nick murmured, while his face grew fixed at the rebuke. Rachel was waiting, as if taking the pulse of her feelings; he peeped at her, saw her blink again and draw breath but then only give out a sharp resentful sigh. Nick said, "I left her with Gerald… the other night. That should have been safe enough."

"Ah, safe," she said, "yes. She should never have been there in the first place."

"I promise you, I didn't know where she was taking me…"

"She wasn't taking you anywhere. You were taking her, if you remember, in your horrible little car."

"Oh…!"

"I'm sorry," she said, and Nick wasn't sure if she was instantly retracting or grimly confirming her remark. His impulse was to forgive her, he frowned tenderly, the reflex of a boy who couldn't bear to be in the wrong. "You know the state she was in. Who knows what's happening to her now, if she hasn't got her librium with her."

"Mm… her lithium…"

"There's just rather a question of responsibility, you know? I mean, we'd always supposed you understood your responsibilities to her-and to us, of course."

"Oh, well, yes…!" He flashed a smile at the sting of this.

"We'd imagined you'd tell us if, for instance, anything went seriously wrong." Her steady tone, her emphasizing twitches, were new to Nick; they seemed to signal a change in their relations that wouldn't easily be reversed. He was used to her easy assents, her oddly contented demurrals… "We didn't know until last night, for instance, about this very serious episode four years ago."

"What do you mean?" said Nick, shaking his head. The "we" was fairly unnerving, the apparent solidarity with Gerald.

"I think you know very well what I mean." She peered at him, with an effect of complex distaste; which extended in a reluctance to put it in words. "We had no idea she'd tried to… harm herself while we were away."

"I don't know what you've been told. She didn't harm herself, anyway. She asked me to stay with her-which I did-and she was fine, you know, she'd just had one of her bad moments."

"You didn't tell us about it," said Rachel, pale with anger.

"Please, Rachel! She didn't want to upset you, she didn't want to spoil your holiday." The half-forgotten alibis came back, and the squeezing sensation of being out of his depth. "I stayed with her, I talked her through it." It was a bleat of a boast.

"Yes, she said you were wonderful," said Rachel. "Apparently, she quite raved about you to Gerald the other night." Nick looked at the floor, and at the rhythm of the black-and-gilt S-shaped balusters. Then beyond them, and below, he heard the scratch of the front door being unlocked, a voice from the street saying, "Over here, love!" and the jump of the knocker as the door slammed shut again.

Rachel stood where she was, in her own house and her indignation, and Nick edged away from her, still reluctantly holding the thread of her accusation, and went down a few steps to look over the banister. But it wasn't Catherine. It was Eileen, Gerald's "old" secretary. She gazed up into the stairwell. She was wearing a dark overcoat and holding a black handbag. She looked like someone who'd come for a smart party on the wrong night. Nick thought she must have wanted to look good for the press. "Hello, Eileen," he said.

"I thought I'd better come in and see to things."

"Good idea," said Nick.

"I've said I'll keep an eye on things."

"Well, that's marvellous." Nick smiled with the real but finite politeness of someone who's been interrupted; he put a clinching warmth into it. The joke in the family had always been that Eileen had a crush on Gerald, who kept up an unseemly mockery of her efficiency and forethought. She was part of Nick's earliest idea of the house, in that first magic summer of possession which Rachel was now turning over like a stone. She'd been keeping an eye on things then. She came forward and put her hand on the tight bottom curl of the stair rail.

"I've brought the Standard," she said. She'd been gripping it in her other hand, almost behind her, shielding them from it. "I don't know that you'll like it very much." She came up a few steps and Nick came down, with a vague sense of receiving a summons, and took it from her. He felt he should be specially diligent, and take the brunt of it on Rachel's behalf. He stood capably, with one foot on the stair above, and shook the paper flat. He saw the picture of himself, and thought, I'll come back to that in a second, and looked at the headline, which didn't make sense, and looked at the picture again and the one beside it of Wani. There was hardly any room for the article itself. The words and the pictures crowded out any sense of what they might mean. He felt oddly sorry for Bertrand: "Peer's Playboy Son Has AIDS". That was the subheading. "Gay Sex Link to Minister's House." Hard to get all that in. Didn't flow very well. Nick had a strange subliminal sensation that the banister wasn't there, and that the hall floor had hurtled up to meet him, like fainting but remaining fully conscious. He could tell it was very bad news. Then he realized where it had come from, and started to read the article, with a feeling like a thump in the sternum.

"Bloody hell, Nick…!" said Toby next morning.

Nick chewed his cheek. "I know…"

"I had absolutely no idea about this. None of us did." He pushed his copy of Today away from him, across the dining-room table, and fell back in his chair.

"Well, the Cat did, obviously. She twigged when we were all in France last year." He used the family nickname with a sense that his licence to do so had probably expired.

Toby gave him a wounded look which seemed to search and find him back at the manoir, under the awning, or by the pool, where they'd got drunk alone together that long hot afternoon. "You could have told me, you know, you could have trusted me." Toby had told his own secrets that day, his problems with intimacy-he'd entered into Nick's realm of examined feelings, it had been a triumph of intimacy in itself for him. "I mean, two of my best mates, you know? I feel such a blasted idiot."

"I was always longing to tell you, darling." Again Toby's face seemed to close against the endearment. "But Wani just wouldn't hear of it." He looked shyly at his old friend. "I know people take it very personally when they find they've been kept out of a secret. But really secrets are sort of impersonal. They're simply things that can't be told, irrespective of who they can't be told to."

"Hm. And now this." Toby pulled out the Sun from the slew of newsprint on the table. " 'Gay Sex Romp at MP's Holiday Home.'" He threw it away from him, with a look of disdain and a hint of a challenge.

"It's really rather sweet their idea of what constitutes a romp," Nick said, to try and put it in proportion.

"Sweet…?" said Toby, incredulously, but with a flinch of regret as well, that he should be speaking like this to someone he'd always simply trusted. He stood up, and walked awkwardly along to the far end of the table. The mood of an extended morning-after still reigned in the room, with sunshine seeping in over the top of the shutters, and the gilt wall lamps casting a crimson glow. He stood with his back to the Lenbach portrait of-what was he?-his great-grandfather: a stout bourgeois figure in a tightly buttoned black coat. Nick, with his eye for the family line, saw Toby growing into a likeness. Toby himself had on a dark suit, blue shirt, and red tie. He was going to a meeting, and this little chat was a bit like a meeting too. He seemed to share with his ancestor a respect for the obvious importance of business, as well as a dignified failure to anticipate the scandals of this week.

"God, I'm sorry, Toby," said Nick.

"Yah, well," said Toby, with a big sigh that seemed to weigh a burden and hint at a threat. Unexpected intimacies were blowing up all around him. He leant on the table and looked at a paper to hide his discomfort. "First it's Dad and Penny, with this fraud thing going on too, then there's you and Ouradi, with the plague thing…"

"Well, you knew Wani had AIDS."

"Mm, yah… " said Toby uncertainly. He squared up the newspapers in a pile, with distracted firmness. They were the astonishing evidence of his situation. "And my bloody old sis going clean off the rails."

"She has rather landed us in it."

"It's as if she hates Dad."

"It's difficult…"

"And hates you too. I mean, how did she get like this?"

It was the long-ago talk by the lake, the solemn explanation… "I don't think she hates us," said Nick. "Since she crawled out from under the lithium she's just been in a mood to tell the truth. Actually, she always has been, when you think about it. I'm certain she'd never actually want to hurt us. She's been got at by people who do hate Gerald, perhaps; that's the thing."

"Anyway, it's a fuck-up," said Toby, quickly resisting the role-reversal. And Nick caught that startling thing, the stared-out threat of tears, the miserable twitch of the mouth.

"It's a fuck-up," Nick agreed. He winced at his own readiness to explain Toby's story to him. Poor Toby had been tricked, or not trusted, which seemed a form of trickery, by everyone around him: it was awful, and Nick found a smile creeping out of the corners of his mouth in bizarre amusement.

"I must say the Independent has by far the best-quality photographs," Toby said. "They've achieved consistently high standards."

"Yes, the Telegraph's are very murky in comparison."

"The Mail's somewhat better, though." Toby snapped back the pages. The Mordant Analyst had been given a double spread to explore the whole situation, drawing on his inside knowledge of "the Fedden set." The picture of Toby clasping Sophie on the dance floor at Hawkeswood was one of Russell's. Toby looked away at the floor and still didn't meet Nick's eye when he said, "I don't know quite where this leaves us."

"No," said Nick. "Everything's rather in the air, isn't it."

"I mean, I don't see how you can stay here." Then he did look at Nick for several seconds, and the lovely brown gaze, which had always softened or faltered, didn't do so.

"No, no, of course," said Nick, with a scowl as if Toby was insulting him to suggest he thought he could.

Toby pursed his lips, stood up straight and buttoned his jacket. There was a sense that, though it could have been done better, he'd performed a bit of business, and his uneasy satisfaction carried him quickly to the door. "I'm going to have a word with Ma," he said. "Sorry."

Nick sat for a while, feeling that Toby's anger was the worst part of it, the one utterly unprecedented thing; and looking over the papers in which his own image appeared. He was letting himself in at the front door of this house, and also, four years younger, in a bow tie and his Uncle Archie's dinner jacket, looking very drunk. It was fascinating, if you thought about it, that they hadn't got hold of the picture of him and the PM. Still, they had all the rest, sex, money, power: it was everything they wanted. And it was everything Gerald wanted too. There was a strange concurrence about that.

Nick felt his life horribly and needlessly broken open, but with a tiny hard part of himself he observed what was happening with detachment as well as contempt. He cringed with dismay at the shame he had brought on his parents, but he felt he himself had learned nothing new. His long talk on the phone with his father, and then with his mother, had been all the harder for his lack of surprise; to them it was "a bit of a bombshell," it called for close explanation, almost for some countering offensive. He had found himself sounding flippant, and wounded them more, since of course, when it came to it, all their deep instincts were for him, for his safety, and protection. They took it utterly seriously, but rattled him with their clear admissions that they'd expected trouble of some kind, they'd known something wasn't quite right. Nick resisted that, he wasn't shocked, and couldn't capture at all the shock that was fuelling the press. He'd known about Penny, and he'd known about himself and Wani. The real horror was the press itself. "Greed drives out Prudence," wrote Peter Crowther, as if nobody'd ever thought of that before. He saw the romance of his years with the Feddens, deep, evolving, and profoundly private, framed and explained to the world by this treacherous hack.

The doorbell rang, and since no one answered it Nick went out and peered through the new spyhole: in which the furious, conceited features of Barry Groom loomed and then fled sideways as he rang the bell again. Nick opened the door; and glanced out past the MP at the now almost deserted street. "Hello, Barry, come in… Yes, they've virtually all gone now."

"No thanks to you," said Barry, stepping past him and frowning his eyebrows and mouth into two thin parallel lines. "I've come to see Gerald."

"Yes, of course." It wasn't clear if Barry was treating him as a servant or an obstacle. "Come this way," he said, and went on gracefully, as he turned back down the hall, "I'm so sorry about all this ghastly business." There was a strange smooth relish in saying that. For a second Barry seemed to take it as his due, then his face soured again. He said,

"Shut up, you stupid little pansy!" It was a quaint sentence, and somehow the more expressive for that.

"Oh…!"-Nick darted a look in the big hall mirror, as though for witnesses. "That's hardly-"

"Shut up, you little cuntl" said Barry, with a biting clench of the jaw, and pushed past him and down the passage towards Gerald's study.

"Oh, fuck off," said Nick, in fact he only mouthed the words, because he thought Barry might turn back and punch him in the face. Gerald opened his door and looked out like a headmaster.

"Ah, Barry, good of you to come," he said, and gave Nick a momentary stare of reproach.

"You ignorant, humourless, greedy, ugly cunt… " Nick went on to himself, in the shocked hilarity of having been insulted. He wandered in the hall, blinking in astonishment at the black-and-white marble squares of the floor. He couldn't quite tell, when he went into the kitchen, if Elena had heard this outburst. She always protested, dimly but sincerely, at Gerald's unguarded fucks-she was serious about all that.

"Hello, Elena!" said Nick.

"So, Mr Barry Groom come," said Elena. She was a little woman but she occupied the kitchen from wall to wall. She patrolled it. "He want coffee?"

"Come to think of it, he never said. But I rather think not."

"He don't want?"

"No… " He looked at Elena with cautious tenderness, uncertain what credit remained from his years of diligent niceness to her. "By the way, I won't be here for dinner tonight." Elena raised her eyebrows and pinched her lips. The new revelations about Nick and Wani must be amazing to her. It wasn't clear if she'd even taken in that Nick was gay. He said, "It's all a bit of a mess, isn't it? Un pasticcio… un imbroglio"

"Pasticcio, si," she said, with a hard laugh. They'd had a certain amount of fun over the years with each other's Italian. She went into the pantry, and spoke to him without turning round, so that he had to follow her.

"I'm sorry?"

"How long you been here now?" She peered up at the shelved tins.

"In Kensington Park Gardens?-Oh, four years last summer, four and… a quarter years."

"Four years. A good time."

"Yes, it has been a good time"-he grunted at the little blur of idiom. She was reaching up, and Nick, not that much taller, stretched past her. "The borlotti?" He put the can into her hands, so that she had at least to nod in thanks; then he followed her out again, as if hoping for another task. She jammed the beans under the tin opener and cranked round the handle, something Nick felt he'd seen her do scores, hundreds of times, with her tomato puree and her fagioli and all the things she preferred canned to fresh. And suddenly it was obvious to him. He said, "Elena, I've decided it's time to hand in my resignation."

She looked at him sharply, to make sure she'd understood him; then she nodded again, in acknowledgement. She might almost have smiled at his apt phrasing. She moved back to the table, and her busyness expressed her purpose but also perhaps hid some sort of regret at the news. Nick was very shaken by it himself. He glanced at her hopefully. Behind her on the wall were all the family photos, and she seemed to stand, stooped and efficient, in an angled but intimate relation to them-indeed she appeared in one of them, displaying a lordly Toby in his pram: she'd been there from the beginning, in the legendary Highgate days… She started chopping some onions, but looked up again and said, "You remember when you first come here?"

"Yes, of course," said Nick.

"The first time we meet…"

"Yes, I do," and he chuckled fondly and went a little pink, because of course they'd never been over that minute of confusion in the hall. He saw he was pleased she'd mentioned it. It was hardly even an embarrassment, since all he had done was be charming to her; he'd treated her not as an equal but as a superior.

"You thought I was Miz Fed."

"Yes, I know I did… Well, I'd never met either of you. I thought, a good-looking woman…"

Elena squeezed her eyes shut over the onions-it seemed for a moment like a slide into another emotion. Then she said, "I think to myself that day, this one's… sciocco, you know, he don't know anything, oh, he's all very nice, lady, but he's you know… " she tapped her forehead with a finger.

"Pazzo…?" said Nick, taking a last sick chance.

"He's no good," said Elena.

Nick went up to his room, and stood looking at the window sill. Late-morning, late-October sunlight dimmed and brightened indifferently over it. He was lost in thought, but it was thought without words, pure abstraction, luminous and sad. Then a simple form of words appeared, almost as if written. It would have been best in a letter, where it could have been done beautifully, with complete control. Spoken, it risked tremors and deflections. He went downstairs to see Gerald.

The study door was ajar, and he could hear him talking to Barry Groom. He stood in the passage, as he felt he had often done in this house, as an accidental eavesdropper. Decisions were being made all the time, in an adjacent room, in a phone call half-curiously overheard. He liked the noise of business and politics, it was an adult reassurance, like the chatter of parents on a night journey, meaningless, fragmentary, and consoling to the sleepy child on the back seat. Sometimes of course he did pick up on a secret, a surprise still being contrived, and his pleasure was a very private one, the boosted glow of his own trustworthiness. Barry was saying, "I can't think how you let it happen." Gerald made a gloomy rumble and single hard cough but said nothing. "I mean, what's the little pansy doing here? Why have you got a little ponce hanging round your house the whole fucking time?"

The last words were louder and louder, and Nick's pulse thumped as he waited, four or five seconds, for Gerald to put him right. He was warm with indignation, and a new combative excitement. Barry Groom had no idea of the life they led in this house. "I suppose I'd have to say," said Gerald, "that it was an error of judgement. Untypical-I'm a pretty sharp judge of character as a rule. But yes… an error."

"It's an error you've paid a very high price for," said Barry Groom unrelentingly.

"He was a friend of the children, you know. We've always had an open-door policy towards the children's friends."

"Hmm," said Barry, who had publicly disinherited his son Quentin "on principle," to make him learn about money from scratch. "Well, I never trusted him. I can tell you that, unequivocally. I know the type. Never says anything-always nursing his little criticisms. I remember sitting next to him after dinner here, years ago, and thinking, you don't fit in here, do you, you little cocksucker, you're out of your depth. And I'll tell you something else: he knew that. I could see he wished he was upstairs with the women."

"Oh…" said Gerald, in wan protest. "We always got along all right, you know."

"So fucking superior." Barry Groom swore harshly and humourlessly, as if swearing were the guarantee of any unpalatable truth. It was just what he'd done that night, after dinner, with an effect Nick could still remember, of having absolutely no style. "They hate us, you know, they can't breed themselves, they're parasites on generous fools who can. Crawling to you, crawling to the fucking Ouradis. I'm not remotely surprised he led your poor lovely daughter astray like this, exploited her, there's no other word for it. A typical homo trick, of course."

Gerald murmured something, with an effect of grumpy submission. Nick stood clenched by the door, leaning forward slightly, as if about to knock, in a novel confusion of feelings, anger at Gerald's failure to support him, and a strange delighted hatred of Barry Groom. Barry was a multiple adulterer and ex-bankrupt-to be hated by him was surely a mark of probity. But Gerald… well, Gerald, for all his failings, was a friend.

"Dolly Kimbolton's completely furious about all this, I need hardly say," Barry said. "Ouradi's just given another half-million to the Party."

Nick trod quietly away and sat down at his old place in the dining room. He looked again at the picture of "Banger" Fedden and Penny Kent embracing, taken from hundreds of feet away and so blown up that the lovers broke down into a pattern of meaningless dots.

Gerald let Barry out and a minute later Nick went back to the study, knocked, and put his head round the door. He looked about quickly, as though checking Gerald was alone, and drawing on some humorous shared relief that Barry had gone. Gerald was standing at his desk, surveying various documents, and glanced up over his half-moon glasses. "Is this a good moment?" Nick said. Gerald grunted, a loudish dense sound made up of "what?," "no," "yes," and a furious sigh. Nick came in and shut the door, not wanting to be overheard by anyone. The room still seemed to tingle with what had recently been said in it. The low leather armchair still showed where the visitor had sat. A process went on here, there were meetings and decisions, a sense of importance as seasoned and stifling as the odour of leather, stale cigar smoke and polish.

"A good moment," said Gerald, plucking off his glasses and giving Nick a quick cold smile.

"Yes, well…" said Nick, hearing the words bleakly dilate. "I mean I won't be more than a moment."

"Oh…" said Gerald snootily, as if to say it would take more than a moment to get through the business he had in mind. He threw his glasses onto the desk, and walked over to the window. He was wearing cavalry twill trousers and a buff crew-neck sweater. The effect was of symbolic abasement mixed with military resolve-the strategy for a comeback must already be in hand. Nick had a silly sense of privilege in seeing him in private and in trouble; and at the same time, which was more of a shock, he felt almost oppressively bored by him. Gerald gazed into the garden, but really into his own sense of grievance. Nick wasn't sure whether to speak, it was as hard as he expected, and he stood holding the back of a chair, tensed against what he thought Gerald was preparing to say. "How's Wani?" Gerald said.

"Oh…" The question showed a kind of chilly decency. "He's terribly ill, as you know. It doesn't look at all hopeful…"

Gerald nodded slightly, to show it was therefore typical of a lot of things. "Bloody tough on the parents." He turned to stare at Nick, as if challenging him to sympathize. "Poor old Bertrand and Monique!"

"I know…"

"To lose one child… " They both heard a touch of Lady Bracknell in this, and Gerald turned promptly away from the danger of a joke. "Well, one can only imagine." He shook his head slowly and came back to the desk. He had the heavy-faced look, indeed like someone resisting a laugh, that was his attempt at solemn sympathy. Though there was a mawkish hint too that he had somehow "lost" a child himself: he absorbed the Ouradis' crisis into his own. "And ghastly for the girl too."

For a moment Nick couldn't think what he meant. "Oh, Martine, do you mean?"

"The fiancee."

"Oh… yes, but she wasn't actually his girlfriend."

"No, no, they were going to get married."

"They might have got married, but it was just a front, Gerald. She was only a paid companion."

Gerald pondered this and then flicked up his eyebrows in sour resignation. The facts of gay life had always been taboo with him: he and Nick had never shared a frank word or knowing joke about them, and this was an odd place to start. With a nervous laugh Nick went on, "I'll miss him, of course."

Gerald busied himself with some papers, shuffled them into a box-folder and snapped down the spring. He glanced, as if for approval, at the two framed photos, of Rachel and the Prime Minister, and said, "Remind me how you came to be here."

Nick wasn't sure if courtesy really required him to do so. He shrugged, "Well, as you know, I came here as a friend of Toby's."

"Aha," said Gerald, with a nod, but still not looking at him. He sat down at the desk, in the spaceship black chair. He made an exaggerated moue of puzzlement. "But were you a friend of Toby's?"

"Of course I was," said Nick.

"A funny sort of friendship, wasn't it…?" He glanced up casually.

"I don't think so."

"I don't think he knew anything about you."

"Well, I'm just me, Gerald! I'm not some alien invader. We'd been in the same college for three years."

Gerald didn't concede this point, but swivelled and stared out of the window again. "You've always been comfortable here, haven't you?"

Nick gasped with disappointment at the question. "Of course…"

"I mean, we've always been very kind to you, actually, I think, haven't we? Made you a part of our life-in the widest sense. You've made the acquaintance of many remarkable people through being a friend of ours. Going up indeed to the very highest levels."

"Yes, certainly." Nick took a deep breath. "That's partly why I'm so dreadfully sorry about everything that's happened," and he pushed on, earnestly but slyly, "you know, with Catherine's latest episode."

Gerald looked very affronted by this-he didn't want some defusing apology from Nick, and especially one that turned out not to be an apology but a commiseration about his daughter. He said, as though parenthetically, "I'm afraid you've never understood my daughter."

Nick flattered Gerald by taking this as a subtle point. "I suppose it's difficult for anyone who hasn't suffered from it to understand her kind of illness, isn't it, not only moment by moment, but in its long-term patterns. I know it doesn't mean she loves you and Rachel any the less that she's done all this… damage. When she's manic she lives in a world of total possibility. Though actually you could say that all she's done is tell the truth." He thought he'd perhaps got through to Gerald-who frowned ahead and said nothing; but then, rather as he did in TV interviews, carried on with his own line, as if no answer or objection had been made.

"I mean, didn't it strike you as rather odd, a bit queer, attaching yourself to a family like this?"

Nick thought it was unusual-that was the beauty of it, or had been, but he said, "I'm only the lodger. It was Toby who suggested I live with you." He took a risk and added, "You could just as well say that the family attached itself to me."

Gerald said, "I've been giving it some thought. It's the sort of thing you read about, it's an old homo trick. You can't have a real family, so you attach yourself to someone else's. And I suppose after a while you just couldn't bear it, you must have been very envious I think of everything we have, and coming from your background too perhaps… and you've wreaked some pretty awful revenge on us as a result. And actually, you know…"he raised his hands, "all we asked for was loyalty."

The strange, the marvellous thing was that at no point did Gerald say what he considered Nick actually to have done. It seemed as natural as day to him to dress up the pet lamb as the scapegoat. There was no point in fighting, but Nick said, as if eerily detached from the very young man who was gripping the chair back, tearful with surprise, "I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about, Gerald. But I must say it's a bit steep to talk to me about loyalty, of all things." It struck him he'd never spoken a word of criticism to Gerald before. It clearly struck Gerald too, from his incredulous recoil, and the grappling way he turned Nick's words on him.

"No, actually, you haven't the faintest fucking idea what you're talking about!" He stood up convulsively, and then sat down again, with a sort of sneer. "Do you honestly imagine that your affairs can be talked about in the same terms as mine? I mean-I ask you again, who are you? What the fuck are you doing here?" The slight rephrasing, the sharpening of his position, loosed a flood of anger, which moving visibly through his face seemed almost to bewilder him, like a physical seizure.

Trembling with the contagion of madness Nick said the thing he'd come to say, but in a tone of cheap sarcasm he'd never intended to use: "Well, you'll be devastated to hear that I'm moving out of the house today. I just dropped in to tell you."

And Gerald, furiously pretending not to have heard, said, "I want you out of the house today."

18

THE DUCHESS INSISTED that Gerald and Rachel go to the wedding. Gerald had made a noisily abject phone call: "Really, Sharon, I could never forgive myself if I caused you a moment's embarrassment on so joyous a day," and before Sharon, in her robust way, had finished saying that he shouldn't talk nonsense, he had rapidly said, "Oh good, oh good," in a tone which suggested he hadn't really meant it in the first place. It was a tiny protocol of self-abasement that he had found himself reluctantly obliged to follow. "I just thought I should ask," he said, as if the offer and not its cause might be the social false note. He didn't really believe he could be an embarrassment to anyone. They drove off to Yorkshire on the Friday morning.

Wani had had an exquisite new morning suit and dinner suit made, with narrow trousers and a smaller chest disguised by flyaway lapels. They looked like the formal dress of a little prince, which might only be worn once before he grew out of it. Nick saw them laid out on the ogee bed, with the new Oxfords and evening slippers aligned on the floor beneath. It was as if two people even more insubstantial than Wani were lying back side by side on the covers. He helped Wani pack, and peeked out of habit in his leather stud-box, where there was a flesh-pink paper packet an inch long. He took it out and hid it, with a sense of a new code of honour overriding an old one.

He found Wani lying on the sofa, in front of some heavy-duty video: but his eyes were closed, his mouth open and askew. Nick took a second or two to burn off his horror in the slower flame of his pity. Twice now he had come across Wani dozing and leaned over him not, as he used to, for the private marvel of the view, but to check that he was alive. He sat by him with a sigh and felt the strange tenderness towards himself that came with looking after someone else, the sense of his own prudence and mortality. He thought it might be like parenthood, the capable concealment of one's worries. He hadn't told Wani, but he was having another HIV test in the afternoon: it was another solemn thing, and even more frightening than it need have been for not being talked about. From the corner of his eye, the video seemed to pullulate, like some primitive life form, with abstract determination. It was an orgy, unattributable organs and orifices at work in a spectrum of orange, pink, and purple. He looked more closely for a moment, with a mixture of scorn and regret. It was what they were already calling a "classic," from the days before the antiseptic sheen of rubbers was added to the porn palette-Wani had hated that development, he was an aesthete at least in that. Turned down low, the actors grunted their binary code-yeah… oh yeah, oh yeah… yeah… oh... yeah, yeah… oh yeah...

"Is the car here?" said Wani, still waking, with a look of dread, as if he longed for his word to be challenged and the trip to be cancelled. His father's chauffeur was to drive him to Harrogate in the maroon Silver Shadow. A nurse was travelling with them, a black-haired, blue-eyed Scotsman called Roy, whom Nick felt pleasantly jealous about. "Roy will be here in a moment," he said, ignoring Wani's weak sulk of resentment; and then, to encourage him, "I must say, he's very cute."

Wani sat up slowly, and swung his legs round. "He speaks his mind, young Roy," he said.

"And what does he say?"

"He's a bit of a bully."

"Nurses have to be pretty firm, I suppose."

Wani pouted. "Not when I'm paying them a thousand pounds a minute, they don't."

"I thought you liked a bit of rough," said Nick, and heard the creaky condescension of his tone. He helped Wani up. "Anyway, four hours in a Rolls-Royce should smooth him out."

"That's just it," said Wani. "He's madly left-wing." And the ghostly smile of an old perversity gleamed for a moment in his face.

When the bell rang, Nick went down and found Roy talking to the chauffeur. Roy was about his own age, wearing dark blue slacks and an open-neck shirt; Mr Damas wore a dark grey suit and funereal tie and a grey peaked cap. They stood at an angle to each other-Roy candid and practical, fired up by the crisis of AIDS, throwing down his own bravery and commitment like a challenge to Mr Damas, who had driven the Ouradis since Wani was a boy and looked on his illness with respect but also, as a creature of Bertrand's, with an edge of blame. The recent newspaper stories had brought shame on him, and it struggled with the higher claims of loyalty in his square face and leather-gloved hands. He straightened his cap before accepting the two suitcases that Nick had brought down.

"So you're not coming, Nick," said Roy, with sexy reprehension.

"No, I've got a few things to sort out here."

"You won't be there to protect me from all these dukes and ladies and what have you."

The sudden reassurance of being flirted with, over Wani's stooping head, was shadowed by a flicker of caution. He was still getting used to the interest of his own case, something extrinsic to himself, which he registered mainly in the way other people assumed they knew him. "I think I'd need protection from them myself," he said.

Roy gave him a funny smile. "Do you know who's going to be there?"

"Everyone," came a wheezy voice.

Roy looked into the back of the Rolls, where Wani was fidgeting resentfully with a rug and the copious spare cushions. "Just get yourself settled down in there," he said, as though Wani was a regular nuisance in class. There was something useful in his briskness; he seemed to take a bleak view and a hopeful one at the same time.

Mr Damas came round and shut the door with its ineffable chunk-it was the sound of the world he moved in, a mystery in his charge though not his possession, the tuned precision of a closing door. Wani sat, looking forwards, lost in the glinting shadow of the smoked glass. Nick had the feeling he would never see him again, fading from view in the middle of the day. Such premonitions came to him often now. He made a beckoning gesture, and Wani buzzed down the glass two inches. "Give Nat my love," Nick said. Wani gazed, not at him, but just past him, into the middle ground of ironic conjecture, and after a few seconds buzzed the window shut.

Nick went into the deserted office on the ground floor, and started going through his desk. He didn't have to move out of Abingdon Road, in fact he was staying upstairs while he searched for a flat, but he felt the urge to organize and discard. It seemed clear, although Wani wouldn't say so, that the Ogee operation was closing down. Nick was glad he wasn't going to Nat's wedding, and yet his absence, to anyone who noticed, might seem like an admission of guilt, or unworthiness. He saw a clear sequence, like a loop of film, of his friends not noticing his absence, jumping up from gilt chairs to join in the swirl of a ball. On analysis he thought it was probably a scene from a Merchant Ivory film.

The doorbell trilled and Nick saw a van in the street where the Rolls had been. He went out and there was a skinny boy in a baseball cap pacing about, and some very loud music. "Ogee?" he said. "Delivery." He'd left the driver's door open and the radio on-"I Wanna Be Your Drill Instructor" from Full Metal Jacket echoed off the houses while he piled up big square bundles on his trolley and wheeled them into the building. He'd taken over this bit of the street for five minutes-it was an event. It was the magazine. "Thanks very much," said Nick. He stood aside with the ineffectual half smile of the nonworker, longing to be left alone with the product. The boy pounded in and out, breathing sharply: it was as if this delivery was keeping him intolerably from another delivery, as if he'd have liked to have made all his deliveries at once. He stacked up the bundles, a dozen of them, in four squat columns. Each packet was bound both ways with tight blue plastic tape; Nick scratched at it and broke a nail. "Sign, please," said the boy, whisking a manifest and a biro from his jeans pocket. Nick hurried down a loose approximation of his signature, and handed the paper back, to find the boy looking at him with his head tilted and eyes narrowed. Nick coloured but hardened his features at the same time. If the boy was a Mirror reader he might well recognize him-he sensed a latent aggression muddle and swim towards a focus. "Want to see?" said the boy, and before Nick understood he'd whisked out a Stanley knife from his other pocket, thumbed the blade forward, and ripped through the tape on the nearest bundle. He pulled off the loose paper wrapping, slid the first glimpsed shining copy out, turned it in his hands, and presented it to Nick: "Voila!" Nick held it, like the winner of a prize, happy and unable to hide, sharing it courteously with the boy, who stood at his elbow working it out. Nick felt very exposed, and hoped there wouldn't be questions. "Yeah, that's beautiful," said the boy. "That's an angel, is it?"

"That's right," said Nick. Simon had done a wonderful job-clear glossy black, with the white Borromini cherub on the right-hand side, its long wing stretching in a double curve on to the spine, where its tip touched the wing tip of another cherub in the same position on the back, the two wings forming together an exquisitely graceful ogee. No lettering, except at the foot of the spine, OGEE, ISSUE i in plain Roman caps.

Nick thought he'd rather not open it, he was teeming with curiosity and hot-faced reluctance; he needed to be alone. The boy shook his head admiringly. "Yeah, fucking beautiful," he said. "Pardon my French." He stuck his hand out, and Nick shook it. "See you, mate."

"Yes… thanks a lot, by the way!"

"No worries."

Nick smiled, and watched his first critic bound out of the office.

"Right…" he said, when he was alone, and even then he smiled selfconsciously. He sat down at Melanie's empty desk, the magazine squarely in the centre, and turned back the cover with an expression of vacant surmise. And of course what he saw was the wonderland of luxury, for the first three glossy spreads, Bulgari, Dior, BMW, astounding godparents to Nick and Wani's whimsical coke-child. He went quickly to his name under the masthead -"Executive Editor: Antoine Ouradi. Consulting Editor: Nicholas Guest"-and blushed, out of pride and a vague sense of imposture. He thought how relieved his parents would be to see that, to see his name in print as a distinction, not a shameful worry. It fortified him. He went on through, stopping for a moment on each page-he'd read every word of it ten times in proof and passed the pages for the printer but he felt they had undergone a further unaccountable mutation to become a magazine… he blurred his eyes against the impossible late mistake.

His own article, deferentially far back, behind Anthony Burgess on brothels and Marco Cassani on the Gothic revival in Italy, was about the Line of Beauty, illustrated with sumptuous photos of brooches, mirrors, lakes, the legs of rococo saints and sofas. He read it with a beating heart, going back once or twice to ride the slide of an elegant sentence again. Beside him as he read were other admirers… Professor Ettrick, his trust in a little-seen student restored… Anthony Burgess, in Monaco, brought to a marvelling halt as he skimmed his contributor's copy… Lionel Kessler, relaxing perhaps on a Louis Quinze day bed, garlanded all round with lines of beauty, seeing welcome proof that his clever maligned young friend was a mensch. Nick went on, with a confident smile, through the latter pages, the glowing short features on mah-jong sets and toy soldiers of the Raj. The inside back cover, to his satisfaction, was an ad for "Je Promets." And after that the answering angel with its lifted wing. Nick took the highest view of it all, his initial timidity was flooded out by its opposite, a conviction that they'd produced a masterpiece.

Strange teetering mood of culmination. Five minutes later he wished he had it to read through fresh again; but that could never happen. He took a copy upstairs to the flat, and opened it at random several times-to find that its splendour had a glint to it, a glassy malignity. No, it was very good. It was lustrous. The lustre was perfected and intense-it was the shine of marble and varnish. It was the gleam of something that was over.

How he wished Wani could have been here to see it-he'd missed it by five minutes. He could have taken it with him to Yorkshire, given copies to the guests, to Toby, to Sophie, to the Duchess, to Brad and Treat. Nick pictured Roddy Shepton, huge in tails and top hat, casting a wary eye over it as he waited for a drink. He pictured Wani himself, shuffling through the rooms in chilly defiance to show them the one beautiful thing he had managed to make out of his millions-it would confirm or confound their slight expectations that he was or wasn't going to do something. The reflex acclaim for anything published by a child of the fellow-rich would be loud, but tempered by disgust at his illness and remembered unease about his origins. Copies would be left behind in bedrooms and lavatories. Nick sighed over their fate and then thought how silly he was, since Wani hadn't taken the magazine with him; and really there were worse things to imagine. He was afraid, for instance, that he hadn't been careful enough in checking Wani's bags-he could easily have had other wraps of coke in his pockets or in his rolled socks. The crisis in May had forcibly broken his habit, but the reprieve, the return to London and its suddenly finite pleasures, must have pulsed with temptation. Nat himself was clean now, but his friends included half a dozen steady users, who could easily and carelessly offer Wani a line. And his heart was very weak. It would be a kind of suicide. Nick stood at the kitchen window, hardly seeing the house-backs opposite as he lived through the phone call, from Sharon perhaps, or from Gerald himself, tersely dutiful: a massive heart attack. There was nothing they could do.

When he went into the sitting room, there was the magazine on the table. It was a weird sort of launch, when there was never going to be a second issue. It would be good if people knew that, and prized it as itself, not as a portent or pilot of something to come. It was the only Ogee. Lying there, in a room in his house, at noon on a mild autumn day, it might have been Wani's memorial tablet, with the angel's wing sheltering the blank where his name and achievements should go.

Next morning Nick drove up to Kensington Park Gardens to collect his things. There was intermittent drizzle and he wondered if the wedding hats were being spoiled in Yorkshire. The wide street was empty, with that accidental vacancy of a London street, a momentary lull in which the pavements, the house-fronts, the rain-striped windows have the aura of the deja vu. He let himself in at number 48, hasty in the new skills of avoiding notice: which he countered needlessly by slamming the door shut.

Inside, in the hall: the sound… the impassive rumble of London shrunk to a hum, barely noticed, as if the grey light itself were subtly acoustic. Nick felt he'd chanced on the undisturbed atmosphere of the house, larger than this year's troubles, as it had been without him and would be after he'd gone. The gilt lantern burned palely in the stairwell, but in the dining room the ordinary shadows deepened in the corners and hung like smoke in the coving of the ceiling. The boulle clock ticked, with mindless vigilance. He went up the stone stairs and into the drawing room. It was really just a matter of finding his own bits and pieces, the CDs mixed in family-wise with theirs, a book that he'd lent them and watched filter slowly and unread to the bottom of the pile. He stood by the piano and thought about giving the Mozart Andante a final go; but the effect would have been maudlin as well as laughably inept. Toby's portrait looked out at him, an emblem of adolescence in its hormonal glow and expectant frown. It added an urgency to the need to move on. Nick stood in front of the fireplace, holding his possessions against his chest. A lorry passed outside, and the windows throbbed in their frames for a moment, in sympathy with its roar and the rattle of its tailgate, and then the broad quasi-silence disclosed itself again. And something else, what was it?, the smell of the place, tapestry smell, polished wood, lilies, almost churchy-he felt his senses seize and resign the thousand impressions he'd grown used to.

And it all reached back. It spoke of Gerald and Rachel without visible interruption. He went down to the kitchen, where the tidiness and profusion, the jars, the noticeboard, the draped dishcloth, were signs of a wide, deep system. He was already an intruder, glancing up at the photos of these absent celebrities.

He went down again, to the basement, to fetch some cardboard boxes from the trou de gloire. This lumber room under the kitchen was where the gilt ballroom chairs were stacked and interesting old tables and bleary mirrors abandoned; and where Mr Duke kept his paints, ladders, and toolboxes, along with a kettle and a calendar-it was his den, and Nick almost expected to find him there, in the subconscious of the house. He pressed down the light switch and got the shock of the wallpaper, which was purple with a pattern like black wrought iron, only partly hidden by all the junk. It always amazed him. It spoke of a time before Gerald and Rachel, and a different idea from theirs of what was great fun. Like his own parents they seemed to have avoided the '60s, with its novel possibilities and worthwhile mistakes. Perhaps in the Highgate days they'd had a joss stick and a floor cushion, but here the purple room was the junk room. Nick found some old wine boxes, and took them awkwardly upstairs. He wondered who'd lived here before the Feddens. There might well have been only three or four owners in the years since the whole speculation rose up out of the Notting Hill paddocks and slums. It was a house that encouraged the view its inhabitants had of themselves. Nick thought of Gerald's showmanship, the parties, the pathetic climax of the PM's visit. That had been just a year ago, another drizzly autumn wedding…

He stopped on the second-floor landing, set down the boxes and went into Gerald and Rachel's bedroom. From the window there was the view of the gardens, in slanting rain, the large brown leaves of the planes dropping and blowing. It was a grander but closer view than the one he'd grown used to upstairs, the treetop view, with other rooftops and a spire beyond. The gardens grew smaller at this time of year: you saw the far fence and the street outside. He turned and walked softly on the pale carpet towards the bed. Who slept on which side?-Rachel here, clearly, with the novels and the earplugs. The little Gauguin landscape Lionel had given them hung opposite. On the round walnut table, with a bowl of lavender, and china boxes, stood the photographs in silver, ivory, or red-velvet frames.

He picked up the one of Toby as a Lord of Tyre-Nick couldn't remember his name. He was the trusty minister who looked after things while Pericles went on his travels; he only came on at the beginning and the end, and spent the middle acts lounging restively around the cricket pavilion, which was used as the green room for these open-air plays. It was June, the smell of the lake and cut grass outside, creosote and linseed in the stuffy pavilion. Toby took off his heavy tunic, and blocked imaginary deliveries with a cricket bat as he waited for Sophie, who was playing Marina, to come off. Someone had photographed him then. He wore dark tights, and his own suede shoes. His naked upper body looked very white against the line round his neck where the make-up ended. His face was feminine, over-beautiful, a dancer's face, his body muscular and jutting enough to cause amusement in others. Nick had the brief but memorable role of Cerimon, the Lord of Ephesus who revives Queen Thaissa when she's washed ashore in her coffin: it was one of the intensest experiences of his life: "I hold it ever / Virtue and cunning were endowments greater / Than nobleness and riches…", his heart slamming, tears in his eyes; and then it was over, he made his dignified exit-a sense of floating and thinness, a forced adaptation to the scene outside the circle of lit stage and dark audience, who were already attending to what came afterwards. He peeled off his grey beard, twirled off his cloak, and had a jealous bottle of Guinness while Toby "unconsciously" flexed his biceps for Sophie-they were preoccupied by each other and by having still to go on. Toby wasn't a very good actor, but the role was only a bit of rhetoric, quite unpsycho-logical, and he was warmly applauded-there was something right about him. He did it as if there was no more to acting than to rowing or passing a rugger ball. He was neither modest nor vain.

Nick knew he would never see the picture again, and found it hard to put it back on the table. It gleamed in the rainy light as an emblem of why he'd come here. It wasn't clear with Toby, any more than with Leo and Wani, if fantasy could hold back time, if this sleek second-year with his sportsman's legs and marvellous arse could still excite him when he knew the fat Toby of five years on. Well, not in the mind, perhaps, but in an image, a photo: it took a certain aesthetic nerve to fly in the face of the facts. He did something silly and solemn, and left on the glass the light, blurred imprint of his lips and the tip of his nose.

Up in his room he pulled handfuls of books from his shelves and thrust them like bricks into the boxes. He hardened himself against his taste for nostalgia-the long-breathed leisure of the old days was over, matters were more urgent and unsure. The week ahead was already shadowed by the wait for his test results. The boost, the premature relief of taking charge and agreeing to learn the worst, waned steeply in the following days; already when he thought of it he felt unreachably alone. It was the third test he'd had, and that fact, and the mysterious number three, seemed by moments to shrink and to swell the chance of a positive result.

The boxes filled immediately, in proof of the ungraspable formula relating shelf-length to box-capacity. He carried one of them down, and as he dumped it in the hall he heard the sound of the back door being unlocked, feet scuffed on the mat, an umbrella shaken. Elena? Or Eileen again? Whoever it was was very unwelcome. He was annoyed by their furtiveness as well as their confidence. He went into the kitchen with a bored look.

"Oh my god!" said Penny in a breathy rush. She held the pink bundle of her umbrella in front of her chest. Then, furious to have been frightened, she said, "Mm, hello, Nick," and went to the sink with a bored look of her own. "I thought you'd gone," she said.

"I think I thought you'd gone," said Nick, quite gently. They'd both been in the wars, and he felt they might finally have found some ground to share. There was an outside chance she might give him some sympathy, which so far he hadn't had a taste of; and to him commiseration was always easy.

She settled the wet brolly, like a blown flower, and came back across the room. "In five minutes I will have. I'm getting my things." He seemed almost to be blocking her way. "You're not at the wedding," she said.

"I thought I'd give it a miss."

"Yes. Well, I don't know them, of course."

"Oh, Nat's awfully nice."

"Uh-huh."

"I don't think anyone really knows Beatriz yet. Hardly even Nat actually!"

"She's Argentinian, isn't she?"

"Yes, she's a rich widow. Her first husband broke his neck playing polo." He hesitated and said, "Apparently she's four months pregnant."

Penny made a grim snuffle. "At least I avoided that," she said, and with this tiny sarcastic self-exposure she edged past him and out of the room.

He hadn't seen her since the night at Badger's flat, and he had to admit she had an interest, a bleak unanticipated glamour. A week ago her name was known only to her family, her school and college friends, and her work contacts; now millions worldwide had heard about her sex life. He watched her march off along the passage; his mocking sense of her as a busily ambitious little person with no sense of humour rather faltered. He stood with a thin smile of remorse, and a minute later went after her into Gerald's study. She was standing reading a yard-long fax, which she clumsily folded and put down. She said, "So where are you going to go?" crisply, almost as though she were despatching him herself.

"Oh, I'm staying at Wani's. Yup." He gave a rueful smile over the ramparts of his own scandal, but no answering wave came from within hers.

"Then I'm going to start looking for a place of my own."

"You're not worried about money."

Nick shrugged. "I've done all right, actually, in the past year or so. With a little help from my friends… How about you?"

"I don't have much."

"No, I mean, where are you staying?"

"Oh, I've gone back home for a bit."

"Right… How's Norman taken all this?"

"Well, how do you imagine? Very badly indeed." She moved some papers on the desk and put them down as if inadvertently on the looped fax. "He detests Gerald, of course, and always has."

Nick shook his head slowly, as if this was beyond his grasp. "I never really believed that. Just because he's a Tory."

"Fiddlesticks. He took Rachel off him-that's what he's never forgiven him for."

"It was an incredibly long time ago," said Nick, turning towards the window to cover his surprise.

"Well, Dad's like that. When he was young he thought he was going to be very happy and very rich. And then Gerald came along."

It was clearly an arrival she could vouch for the force of. Nick laughed for a second and was vaguely touched. He said, "We all know how competitive Gerald is."

Penny searched in a drawer for a while before saying, "Mmm… " It was more than competitive, it was pathological-to steal the girlfriend and then fuck the daughter. Clearly he wasn't called Banger for nothing. He said, with a little whine of incredulity,

"You've heard about his new directorship."

"Yes… yes, I have."

"It's rather amazing, isn't it? With the share thing hanging over him…"

"Oh, they'll want him," said Penny.

"Yes," said Nick. He remembered her when she first came here, with nothing but a good degree behind her, innocent, pliant, a little complacent at the candlelit table; now her eyes looked tired and guarded from the glare of the lights. "It's rather amazing to resign in disgrace one day and be offered a job at eighty thousand a year the next."

He was afraid she resented his word "disgrace." "That's how this world works, Nick. Gerald can't lose. You've got to understand that." She sat down at the desk and looked around it. He had the sense of her clearing it of any scraps of sentiment-it was a secret raid.

"I expect you'd like to be left alone," he said. He came and stood in front of her so as to glance at the fax, which he saw was in Gerald's impossible handwriting: it ended with that breezy ideogram that might have been "Love" or "Yours" or "Hello" and a big "G" and a line of crosses. Then he found Penny was looking at him tensely, with a look that acknowledged the writing and the kisses, and with hurried blinks as she decided.

"I'm not giving him up, Nick."

"Oh…" said Nick.

"I'm not."

"I see."

"I don't care what Dad says, or Madam, or the Editor of the Sun."

Nick stared respectfully, but said, "I thought he'd virtually been given up for you."

"What…? Oh, I see-well, publicly, yes. That's what we want people to think."

"You say ' we. '"

"We're very much in love."

Nick looked at the floor, perhaps impatiently. It seemed everything was going to go stubbornly on: first it was Rachel who wouldn't leave Gerald, and now Penny wouldn't either. He must have something extraordinary, Gerald, something Nick had been incapable of understanding. He saw the story reaching on through an obscure futurity; innumerable articles by the Mordant Analyst. He said, "But how can you bear the secrecy?" with a real curiosity as to how someone else would answer this question.

"Perhaps it won't be a secret."

"Hmm… " Nick's raised eyebrow and dry chuckle made her blush but not apparently change her mind.

"Anyway, I don't care," she said.

"Well…"

"Catherine's always mocked and jeered at Gerald," said Penny, as if not quite able to bear the line of talk she'd started.

Nick said hesitantly, "I think it's pretty mutual." Penny's world seemed only to make sense to her as a forcefield of detestations.

"I know she's always hated me," she said, with a grim laugh that didn't quite spare Nick either; she didn't come out with it, but she seemed to know what he'd thought and said about her over the years.

"You know that's not true," said Nick, in a mutter at the pointlessness of saying it. "I think it's herself that she hates most at the moment."

Penny tucked her chin in, and gave him a very old-fashioned look. "She was revelling in the whole thing, I would say."

"That's not revelling, Penny. At first it seems thrilling, but then it becomes a kind of torment to her, being manic." He realized that Penny's main source of views on Catherine would be Gerald; just as his own, besides a friend's intuition, was the strenuous prose of Dr E. J. Edelman.

"Well, it's nothing to the torment she's caused," said Penny unrepentantly.

Nick shook his head at her in astonishment, and thought he might as well leave her to it. She was too excited to look at him as she said, "I assume it was you that told her, was it?"

"Absolutely not!" said Nick.

"Well, that's certainly what Gerald thinks."

Nick said, "You see it's typical of Gerald to think she couldn't work it out for herself. Actually she's the cleverest one of us all."

"I could tell you suspected something when you were with us in France," Penny said.

"I was very worried about Rachel," Nick said. "She's an old friend."

"Well, I wonder if she feels the same about you." Penny gave him a short sharp smile, and then sat forward, with her elbows on the desk. "And now, if you'll excuse me," she said, "I have things to do," and found a chance after all, in the dullest of formulas, for a further dismissal.

Nick pulled the blue front door shut, double-locked the Yale locks and the Chubb lock, and stood fiddling the keys off his ring. He held open the letterbox and flung them through and heard them tinkle on the marble floor. Then he peered through the letterbox himself and saw them lying there inaccessibly. There was also the back-door key, so in fact he still could get in, but he soon threw that in too. The one he was most reluctant about was the sleek bronze Yale for the communal gardens; it had a look of secrets to it. He could probably keep it, no one would remember; it would be nice to be still in fact, if not by rights, a keyholder. His eyes moved in lazy twitches of indecision. He hardly saw himself coming back, haunting the place, gazing up at the Feddens' windows for glints of the life they were leading without him. Painful and pointless. He pushed up the flap and put his hand through with the key in it, held it for a second before letting it drop onto the mat.

The little car was jammed full of boxes and curled heaps of clothes on hangers. It sat low on its springs, under all these possessions heavy as passengers. Nick stood by it, still thinking, and then drifted unexpectedly down the street. The pavement was dry now in patches, but the sky was threatening and fast-moving. The tall white house-fronts had a muted gleam. It came over him that the test result would be positive. The words that were said every day to others would be said to him, in that quiet consulting room whose desk and carpet and square modern armchair would share indissolubly in the moment. There was a large tranquil photograph in a frame, and a view of the hospital chimney from the window. He was young, without much training in stoicism. What would he do once he left the room? He dawdled on, rather breathless, seeing visions in the middle of the day. He tried to rationalize the fear, but its pull was too strong and original. It was inside himself, but the world around him, the parked cars, the cruising taxi, the church spire among the trees, had also been changed. They had been revealed. It was like a drug sensation, but without the awareness of play. The motorcyclist who lived over the road clumped out in his leathers and attended to his bike. Nick gazed at him and then looked away in a regret that held him and glazed him and kept him apart. There was nothing this man could do to help him. None of his friends could save him. The time came, and they learned the news in the room they were in, at a certain moment in their planned and continuing day. They woke the next morning, and after a while it came back to them. Nick searched their faces as they explored their feelings. He seemed to fade pretty quickly. He found himself yearning to know of their affairs, their successes, the novels and the new ideas that the few who remembered him might say he never knew, he never lived to find out. It was the morning's vision of the empty street, but projected far forward, into afternoons like this one decades hence, in the absent hum of their own business. The emotion was startling. It was a sort of terror, made up of emotions from every stage of his short life, weaning, homesickness, envy and self-pity; but he felt that the self-pity belonged to a larger pity. It was a love of the world that was shockingly unconditional. He stared back at the house, and then turned and drifted on. He looked in bewilderment at number 24, the final house with its regalia of stucco swags and bows. It wasn't just this street corner but the fact of a street corner at all that seemed, in the light of the moment, so beautiful.