is like a good wine.'
'I'm rather like a good wine too,' said Adrian.
'You improve with age?'
'No,' said Adrian, 'whenever I'm taken out I get drunk.'
'Except that in your case you get laid down after drinking, not before.'
Adrian blushed.
'Oh dear,' said Trefusis, 'that was not a sexual allusion. Merely frivolous paronomasy on the theme of alcoholically induced unconsciousness. I was particularly pleased with 'in your case'. Are you to be discomfited by the potential for erotic interpretation of every remark I might make?'
'I'm sorry,' said Adrian. 'I've a feeling I'm a bad vintage.'
'That's nonsense, but very graceful. We were talking of drink, I've always believed it right for young people to drink. Not be alcoholic of course, that is a passive state of being, not a positive action. But it is good to drink to excess. That sounds like a toast. To excess.'
'To excess,' said Adrian, bumpering. 'Nothing exceeds like it.'
'Your strenuous tongue is bursting Joy's grape against your palate fine, and that's just as it should be.'
'Keats,' burped Adrian. 'Ode to Melancholy.'
'Keats indeed,' said Trefusis, refilling their glasses. 'Ode
'Bollocks,' said Adrian, who hated being corrected, even kindly.
'Now,' said Trefusis, 'we should talk.
'For the moment,' he said, 'I have nothing to say on the subject of last night. One day, when the world is pinker, I will a tale unfold, whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres, thy knotted and combined locks to part, and each particular hair to stand on end, like quills upon the fretful porpentine, and generally make you go all of a dither. But for the moment, shtum, you can keep all thoughts on the topic to yourself: zip your lip. However I do have a proposition to put to you which I would like you to consider very seriously. You have no fixed plans for next year, I think?'
'That's right.'
Adrian had made up his mind to wait until after his Finals before deciding what to do with himself. If he got a First he still planned to stay at Cambridge, otherwise he supposed he would look for a teaching job somewhere.
'How would it be, I wonder, if you were to spend the summer travelling with me?'
Adrian goggled. 'Well, I . . .'
'As you know, I shall be doing a little research for my book. But I have something else to do. There is a problem that needs sorting out, a noisesome problem but not unchallenging. I believe you will be able to offer me material assistance with it. In return I will naturally take care of all expenses, hotels, flights and so forth. It will, I think, be a tour not wholly devoid of interest and amusement. At journey's end we will both deposit ourselves back in England, you to become Prime Minister or whatever lowly ambition you have set your sights on, me to pick up the threads of a ruined and disappointed career. How does that strike you as a plan?'
It struck Adrian as Roscoe Tanner struck a tennis-ball, but how it struck him as a plan he couldn't say. His mind reeled with questions. Had Trefusis run mad? What would his parents say? Should he tell them? Did Donald expect him to share his bed? Is that what it was all about?
'Well?'
'It's . . . it's unbelievable.'
'You don't like it?'
'Like it? Of course I like it, but '
'Excellent!' Trefusis poured out two more glasses of wine. 'Then you're game?'
If I refused to sleep with him, thought Adrian, would he just kick me out and abandon me in the middle of Europe without a penny? Surely not.
'God yes!' he said. 'I'm game.'
'Wonderful!' said Trefusis. 'Then let us drink to our Grand Tour.'
'Right,' said Adrian draining his glass, 'our Grand Tour.'
Trefusis smiled.
'I'm so very pleased,' he said.
'Me too,' said Adrian, 'but. . .'
'Yes?'
'This problem you mentioned. That I may be able to help you with. What exactly . . .?'
'Ah,' said Donald. 'I'm afraid I am not yet fully at liberty, as they say, to disclose the details.'
'Oh.'
'But I don't suppose there's any harm in my asking you to cast your mind back to last summer. You remember the Salzburg Festival?'
