"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 occupie
d 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 busi
ness 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."
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