"Marvellous, isn't it," said Nick, slightly prickly, but glad of the distraction.
"Hang on . . . Paris . . . I'm just looking up Paraquat. I don't believe this book." She studied the page, in her illiterate excitable way.
"I shouldn't think there's much there," said Nick, who had already looked it up and imagined with mingled longing and satire the one disco and the designated park.
"Well, there's a disco, darling. Wed to Sat, 11 to 3. L'An des Roys," she said, in her plonking French accent. "We must go! How hilarious."
"I'm glad you find it so amusing."
"We'll suggest it to Ouradi, and see what he says . . . God, there's everything in here."
"Yes, it's very useful," said Nick.
"Cruising areas, my god! Look at this, rue St Front—we went there with the Tippers yesterday. If only they'd known . . . What does AYOR mean?"
"AYOR? At Your Own Risk."
"Oh . . . right . . . Right . . . And it's the whole world!"
"Look up Afghanistan," said Nick, because there was a famous warning about the roughness of Afghan sex. But she carried on flicking through. Nick disguised his interest, the vague comical rakishness he seemed to admit by having the book, and went and sat on the bed.
"I'm just looking up Lebanon," she said, after a minute.
"Oh yes . . ." said Nick.
"It sounds marvellous. Mediterranean climate, well we knew that, and it says homosexuality is a delight."
"Really," said Nick.
"It does. 'L'homosexualite est un delit,' " she read, sounding like General de Gaulle.
"Yes, delit is a crime, unfortunately."
"Oh, is it?"
"Delight is delice, delit is a misdemeanour."
"Well, it's bloody close . . ."
"Well, they often are," said Nick, and felt rather pleased with himself. Catherine was bored with the book. She held Nick's eye, and said, "So what's he into, old Ouradi?"
"He's into me."
"Well, yes," said Catherine, as if she could see round this.
"OK, he likes to get fucked," said Nick briskly, and got up as if that was really all she was going to get out of him.
"I always thought he must be into some pretty weird sort of gay stuff."
"You didn't even know he was gay till ten minutes ago."
"I knew deep down."
Nick smiled reproachfully. Telling the story for the first time he saw its news value, already wearing off on Catherine, the quick fade of a shock, and felt the old requirement not to disappoint her. It was their original game of talking about men, boasting and mocking, and he knew its compulsion, the quickened pulse of rivalry and the risk of trust. There were phrases about Wani that he'd carried and polished for some occasion like this and he imagined saying them now, and the effect on himself as much as on her, mere reluctant admission melting into the relief of confession. There was nothing, exactly, to confess. The secrecy of the past six months was not to be mistaken for the squeeze of guilt. He thought, I won't tell her about the hotel pom. He sat down again, to mark a wary transition to frankness.
"Well, he's quite into threesomes," he said.
"Mm, not my cup of tea," said Catherine.
"OK, we won't ask you."
She gave a tart smile. "So who do you have threesomes with?"
"Oh, just with strangers. He gets me to pick people up for him. Or we get a rent boy in, you know. A Strieker."
"A what?"
"That's what they call them in Munich."
"I see," said Catherine. "Isn't that a bit risky, if he's so into secrecy?"
"Oh, I think the risk's quite the thing," said Nick. "He likes the danger. And he likes to submit. I don't quite understand it myself, but he likes having a witness. He likes everything that's the opposite of what he seems."
"It all sounds rather pathetic, somehow," said Catherine.
Nick went on, not knowing if it was evidence for the defence or the prosecution, "He's quite a screamer, actually."
"A screaming queen, you mean?"
"I mean he makes a lot of noise." It would probably be better not to tell her about that morning in Munich. "It was hilarious one morning in Munich," he said. "He made so much noise in the room, I don't think he noticed, but the chambermaids were all laughing about us in the corridor outside."
Catherine snuffled. "Russell always liked me to shout a lot," she said.
Again Nick allowed the allusion; he smiled thinly through it, and thought and said with a wince, "He's got this rather awful thing for porn, actually." "Oh ?"
"I mean, nothing wrong with porn, but you sometimes feel it's the real deep template for his life."
Catherine raised her eyebrows and gave a deep sigh. "Oh dear . . ." she said.
Nick looked away, at the open window, and the closed door. "It just got a bit out of hand, actually, in Germany. You know, there's endless porn on the hotel TV."
"Oh . . ." said Catherine, to whom porn was a blankly masculine mystery.
"He lay there all evening watching it—straight stuff, of course, which he likes just as much, if not more. One night, I'm afraid, I had to go off to dinner by myself. He just wouldn't turn it off."
Catherine laughed, and so did Nick, though the image was a sad one, was pathetic, as she said: of Wani with his pants round his ankles, too crammed with coke to get an erection, in slavish subjection to the orgy on screen, whilst Nick, in the sitting room of their stuffy little suite, made a bed for himself on the sofa. He could hear Wani, through the door, talking to the people in the film. Catherine said, "He sounds a nightmare, actually, darling."
"He's very exciting too, but . . ."
"I mean, I rather worry about you, if you're loving him so much as you say, and he's treating you like this. Actually, I wonder if you do really love him, you see."
He saw this was her usual hyperbole, and her usual solicitous undermining of his affairs. "No, no," he said, with a disparaging chuckle. It wasn't that she'd shown him the truth of the matter, but that telling her these few amusing details he'd told himself something he couldn't now retract. He had a witness too. "Anyway," he said, "I probably shouldn't have told you all this."
(vi)
The Tippers left the following day. Secret smiles of relief admitted also a dim sense of guilt, and a resultant hardening and defiance. Gerald was gloomily preoccupied, and seemed to carry the blame round with him, not knowing where to put it down. Wani was the only one who expressed real regret and surprise; he'd felt at home with the Tippers, they were the sort of people he'd been brought up to respect. It was Rachel who tried hardest to be diplomatic; her supple good manners struggled to contain the awkward turn of events, which she minded entirely for Gerald's sake.
The departure was handled very briskly. Sir Maurice was offended, active, in a surprising way fulfilled—this was what he looked for, a clarified antipathy, a somehow reassuring trustlessness. "We're not enjoying it much here," he said; and his wife took her usual strange pleasure in his hardness and roughness; they were her animating cause, his feelings were as unanswerable as his ulcers . . . Toby loaded up the luggage, with the straight-faced satisfaction of a porter.
After they'd gone, Wani, watchful and charming, suggested a game of boules to Gerald, and they went out and started playing in the bald space where the Tippers' car had stood. The day for once was overcast, and Nick sat in the drawing room with his book. The tingle of freedom made it a little hard to concentrate: he felt aware of the pleasure, the primacy of reading, but the content seemed to glint from a distance, as if through mist. Then Lady Partridge tottered in in her sundress, clearly pleased, repossessing the place, but also at a loose end without the irritant of Sally at her ear. The Tippers had been a subject for her, they'd annoyed her and they'd excited her with the raw fascination of money. She sat down in an armchair. She didn't say anything, but Nick knew that she was jealous of his book. From outside, through the open front door, came the cracks and clicks and yelps of the boules game.<
br />
"Mm, what are you reading?" said Lady Partridge.
"Oh . . ." said Nick, disowning the book with a shake of the head, "it's just something I'm reviewing." She turned her ear enquiringly. "It's a study of John Berryman."
"Ah . . . !" said Lady Partridge, sitting back with the mocking contentment of the non-reader. "The poet . . . Funny man."
"Oh—um . . . !" Nick gasped. "Yes, he was rather funny, I suppose . . . in a way."
"I always thought."
Nick smiled at her narrowly, and went on, to test the ground, "It's a sad life, of course. He suffered from these terrible depressions."
Lady Partridge smacked her lips illusionlessly, and rolled her eyes back—a more terrible effect than she realized. "Like . . . er, young madam," she said.
"Well, quite," said Nick, "though we hope it won't end the same way! He drank a tremendous lot, you know."
"I wouldn't be at all surprised if he drank a lot," said Lady Partridge, with a hint of solidarity.
"And then, of course," said Nick clinchingly, but with a sad loll of the head, "he jumped off a bridge into the Mississippi."
Lady Partridge reflected on this, as if she thought it unlikely. "I always rather liked him on the telly. Came over awfully well. Perhaps you never saw those . . . He went to the seaside. Or, you know, poking round old churches and what-not. Even those weren't too bad. He had what I'd call an infectious laugh. I think I'm right in saying he became the Poet Laureate."
"Ah . . . No," said Nick. "No, actually—"
"Fuck!" came a howl from the forecourt, hardly recognizable as Gerald's voice. Lady Partridge's gaze slid uncertainly away. Nick got up with a soft laugh and went out into the hall to see what had happened. Gerald was coming in from outside, his face in a spasm of emotion that might have been rage or glee, and veered away from Nick into the kitchen, where Toby was sitting having coffee with Rachel. Nick glanced out of the front door, and saw Wani collecting up the boules with a dutiful but unrepentant expression.
"Darling . . . ?" said Rachel, with a note of anger, but looking him over quickly, to see if he was hurt.
"Dad," said Toby, and shook his head disappointedly.
Gerald stood staring at them, and then hunched and grinned. He said, "I'm on holiday!"
"Yes, darling, you are," said Rachel. "You ought to calm down." She was solicitous, but firm: her own calm was a reproof. Nick stood in the doorway and looked at them, bright-eyed. There was a collective sense that they could tame Gerald.
"Beaten at boules by a bloody A-rab!" said Gerald, and gasped at his own candour, and as if it might be a joke.
"For god's sake, Dad," said Toby.
"What . . . ?" said Gerald.
"You'll be calling me a bloody Jew-boy next."
"I would never do that," said Gerald. "Don't be monstrous."
"Well, I hope not," said Toby, and coloured at his own emotion. "Wani's my friend," he said, with an effect of simple decency, so that Gerald stared and thought and then went out of the room. They heard him calling out, "Wani! Wani, my apologies! OK . . . ? Yup! So sorry . . . " with improper cheerfulness, and tailing off as he turned indoors, as if it was a mere routine. He came back into the kitchen with a twitch of a smile, since Wani hadn't heard the thing he should really have been apologizing for. He drifted absent-mindedly into the larder and emerged with a dusty bottle of claret.
"Why don't you go and have a swim, Gerald. Or find Jasper, and take him for a walk," recommended Rachel.
"Jasper isn't a cocker spaniel, you know," said Gerald, amusingly but with a bit of a snap.
"Well, no," said Rachel.
Gerald turned the little wooden-handled corkscrew with furtive keenness. "Well, roll on Sunday, and Lionel's visit!" he said, to please Rachel and cover the exuberant pop of the cork.
"It's a bit early for that, isn't it Gerald?" said Rachel.
"For god's sake, Dad," said Toby again.
"He wants to let it breathe," said Nick with an anxious laugh.
Gerald looked at them all, and there was an odd charge of unhappiness, a family instinct, communicated, not quite understood. "I just feel like a fucking drink, OK?" he said, and went off to the end room with the bottle.
Just before lunch, in the shade of the awning, he was more cheerful, but also more freely in touch with his troubles. "The fucking Tippers!" he said, counting carelessly on his mother's deafness. "God knows what the consequences of this little episode will be—for the business, I mean."
"I'm sure you can do brilliantly without him," said Rachel. "You've been doing brilliantly without him so far."
"True," said Gerald. "True." He looked wryly along the table that he ruled. "I'm afraid they didn't fit in here, exactly, did they?"
"They didn't quite get the hang of it," said Rachel.
"Yah, why did they go?" said Jasper.
"Oh, who knows!" said Rachel. "Now, Judy, asparagus!"
Gerald snuffled and seemed to ponder the question, like some undecid-able conflict of loyalties, some inescapable regret. Nick couldn't help noticing that his own remarks were received very coolly that day, and sometimes he was ignored and talked over.
At the end of lunch Gerald took up his grievances again; it was clear that he was in the grip of his own schemes, and living only half attentively, after a bottle and a half of wine, in the chatter and family teasing at the table. There was something rehearsed and implausible in his tone. He went on about work, and the "important papers" he had to deal with. "You don't know what it's like," he said. "It may be vacation for you, it may be the recess for me, but actually the work simply doesn't let up. Well, you've seen the number of faxes coming through. And I'm terribly behind with the diary."
He waited, sighing but vigilant, till Rachel said, "Well, why don't you have some help?"
Gerald puffed and slumped, as if to say that was hardly possible; but then said, "I do rather wonder whether we won't have to send for Penny."
"Not Penny Dreadful," said Catherine. "Anyway, she can't go in the sun.
Rachel didn't contradict this, but gave her enabling shrug. "If you really need Penny, darling, by all means ask her out."
"Do you think . . . ?"
"I mean, she's perfectly pleasant company. If she didn't mind . . ."
"Oh, she's not pleasant company," said Catherine. "She's a humourless white bug."
"Or what about Eileen?" said Toby. "I'm sure she'd come just like that. You know how she adores Dad!"
Gerald gave a short distracted laugh at this absurd alternative. Nick looked at him with a tense smile, an awful feeling of collusion. He'd said nothing, he'd dissimulated much more cleverly than Gerald himself: he felt that he'd been, all passively and peace-lovingly, the real enabler.
"Yes, I'm not so sure about Eileen," said Rachel.
"OK, then . . . " said Gerald, as though conceding to a general wish.
There was a complicated shame-in-triumph which perhaps only Nick could see. The party pushed back their chain, giving hazy thought to the matter of the afternoon, and Gerald went in to the phone room, with a look of tense reluctance, as if about to break bad news.
12
FOR THEIR TWENTY-FIFTH wedding anniversary, Lionel Kessler gave Gerald and Rachel two presents. The first came round in the morning, on the back seat of his Bentley, and the chauffeur himself brought the stout wooden box into the kitchen.
"Darling old Lionel," said Toby, before they knew what was in it.
"Silver, I expect," said Gerald, getting a screwdriver, and sounding both greedy and slightly bored.
Inside, held in a metal brace by foam-rubber collars, was a rococo silver ewer. The body of the thing was in the form of a shell, and the spout was supported by a bearded triton. "Goodness, Nick," said Gerald, so that Nick fell into his role as interpreter—he said he thought it might be by one of the Huguenot silversmiths working in London in the mid-eighteenth century, perhaps by Paul de Lamerie, since the greatest name was also the only one he could think
of, and with Lionel anything seemed possible. "Marvellous," said Gerald: "a work of rare device." He looked in the box to see if there was a note, like the watering instructions that come with some worrying plant, but there wasn't. Nick explained that the tiny scene in relief, of Eros playing with the sword of justice, meant "Omnia Vincit Amor." "Ah, thoroughly apt," said Gerald, with shy pomp, putting his arm briefly round Rachel. He perhaps suspected that it was something Lionel had had knocking round at Hawkeswood anyway. Nick carried on smiling at it, half-conscious of how his father would have stooped and turned it, holding it with a cloth; remembering their long-ago visits to Monksbury, where the silver had a brassy iridescent colour, since the servants were forbidden to clean it and scratch it. "We'll have to get that looked at for the insurance," said Gerald.
Toby and Catherine's present was also a bit of silver, a scollop-edged Georgian salver, on which they had had "Gerald and Rachel ~ 5 November 1986" engraved in a curly script. It couldn't help but look dull, and even vaguely satirical, beside the ewer, and Gerald gazed into it with a falsely modest expression, as though he was retiring, or had won a local golf tournament. "It's perfectly lovely," said Rachel. They both seemed gratified, but not excited, and clearly felt no one could actually want an object of this kind.
A little later they were having a glass of champagne when Nick looked down from the drawing-room window and saw the Bentley pulling up a second time. Now it was Lionel himself who climbed out of it, and who carried across the pavement the small flat packing case. He glanced up and made a shooshing sign, half frown, half kiss. Nick, his champagne working nicely with a first short line of charlie, smiled secretly back. The subtle bachelor sympathy between himself and the little bald peer brought a tear to the corner of his eye—he felt quite silly for a moment at being so "in love" with the family, and with this member of it in particular. A minute later Lionel was shown into the room amid groans of gratitude. He kissed his sister and her children, and shook hands with Gerald and Nick, who felt for the fervour in his briskness. The ewer was on the mantelpiece, crowded today with white lilies and white mop-headed chrysanths. "Well, you had to have silver," Lionel said, "but I wanted you to have this as well. It came up in Paris last week, and since we're all feeling a little light-headed . . ." Something called the Big Bang had just happened, Nick didn't fully understand what it meant, but everyone with money seemed highly exhilarated, and he had a suspicion he was going to benefit from it too. Here was Lord Kessler, with a box under his arm, to give it his own superior licence.
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