sign of some shared expertise. And then Nick found himself bitterly jealous at the idea of Polly getting Tristao, and knew that he had to stay. 'Yeah, he got a lot of friends, this Mr Toby… I like him. He's like a hactor, no?'-and Tristao made a gesture, long fingers spread like a fan beside his face to indicate the general eclat of Toby's features, bone structure, complexion.
'Yes, he is,' said Nick, with a chuckle and a puff of smoke. Toby's face seemed to hover for a moment in front of the waiter's, which was less beautiful in each respect… But wasn't the fact that he didn't admire Tristao so much a part of the lesson, what he thought of as the homosexual second-best solution? This backstairs visit was all about sex, not nonsensical longings: he wasn't going to get what he wanted elsewhere. There was a challenge in the boy's deep-set eyes and something coded in his foreignness-were Madeirans in fact susceptible to casual sex? Nick couldn't see why they shouldn't be…
'So how much you had to drink?' Tristao said.
'Oh, masses,' said Nick.
'Yeah?' said Tristao.
'Well, not as much as some people,' said Nick. He smoked, and held his cigarette by his lapel, and felt that his smoking was unpractised and revealing. Of course the wonderful thing about his date with Leo had been that it was a date-they both knew what they were there for. Whereas the Tristao thing might well be all in his own head. He wasn't sure if the thinness of their conversation showed how futile it was, or if it was a sign of its authenticity. He suspected chat-ups should be more colourful and provocative. He said, 'So you're from
Tristao narrowed his eyes and gave his first little smile. 'How you know that?' he said. Nick took the moment to hold his gaze. 'Oh, I know, the big guy tell you.'
'Huge,' said Nick-'well, round the middle anyway!'
Tristao looked inside his packet of cigarettes, where he'd stowed Polly's card. 'That him?' he said. Nick glanced dismissively at the card but felt he'd been taught a lesson by it.
'Oh, he's a very busy man,' said Nick, and feeling it was the moment he made a sudden movement forwards, two steps, his arms out, and a smirk of ineffable irony about Polly on his lips.
'Sorry, mate -': a red-faced man looked in at the door, then tucked in his chin and gave a confident dry laugh. 'Wondered what was going on there for a moment!' Nick reddened and Tristao had the proper provoking presence of mind to snort quietly and say, 'Bob, how's things?'
Bob gave him some instructions about the different rooms, 'his lordship' was referred to a couple of times, with servants' irony as well as pitying respect, and Nick swayed from side to side with a tolerant smile, to convey to the men that he knew Lord Kessler personally, they'd had lunch together and he'd shown him the Moroni. When Bob had gone, Tristao said, 'What am I going to do with you?' without much warmth or sense of teasing.
'I don't know,' said Nick, chirpily, half numbed by drink to the looming new failure.
'I got to go.' Tristao tugged his bow tie out of his pocket, and fiddled with the elastic and the clip. Nick waited for him to take his apron off. 'Look, OK, I see you, by the main stairs, three o'clock.'
'Oh… OK, great!' said Nick, and found a happy relief in both the arrangement and the delay. 'Three o'clock…'
'Sharp,' said Tristao, with a scowl.
He looked in at the door of Toby's bedroom. A group of his friends had come up here when the music stopped at two, and they seemed lazily to assess him. 'Come in and close the door, for god's sake,' said Toby, beckoning from the vast bed where he was propped up among sprawling friends. He had been given the King's Room, where Edward VII had slept-the swags of blue silk above the bedhead were gathered into a vaguely comic gilded crown. On the opposite wall hung a comfortable Renoir nude. Nick picked his way between groups sitting on the floor in front of an enormous sofa where fat Lord Shepton was lying with his tie undone and his head on the thigh of an attractive drunk girl. The curtains were parted and a window open to carry the reek of marijuana far away from the nose of the Home Secretary. Somehow they had re-created the mood of a college room late at night, girls' stockinged feet stretched out across boyfriends' knees, smoke in the air, two or three voices dominating. Nick felt the charm as well as the threat of the group. Gareth Lane was holding forth about Hitler and Goebbels, and his lecturing drone and yapping laughs at his own puns brought back something dreary from the Oxford days. He was said to be the 'ablest historian of his year,' but he had failed to get a first, and seemed now to be acting out some endless redemptive viva. The talk went on, but there felt to Nick's tingling drunk ears to be a residual silence in the room, on which his own movements and words were an intrusion… and yet left no trace. Several of his other pals were here, but the two months since term had distanced them more than he could explain. Some simple but strong and long-prepared change had occurred, they had taken up their real lives, and left him alone in his. He came back and perched on the edge of the bed and Toby leaned forward and passed him the joint.
'Thanks… ' Nick smiled at him, and at last some old sweetness of reassurance glowed between them, what he'd been waiting for all night.
'God, darling, you smell like a tart's parlour,' Toby said. Nick carried on gazing at him, paralysed for the moment by the need to hold in the smoke, a tickle in his throat, blushing with shame and pleasure. He was holding in the unprecedented 'darling' and it was making him as warm and giddy as the pot. Then he let out the smoke and saw the baldly hetero claims of the rest of the remark. He said,
'And how would you know?'-wondering primly if Toby really had been to a tart's parlour. It was an image of him lurching up a narrow staircase.
Toby winked. 'Having a good time?'
'Yes, fantastic.' Nick looked around appreciatively, glossing over his inner vision of the night as a long stumbling journey, half chase, half flight, like one of his country-house dreams, his staircase dreams. 'What's happened to Sophie, by the way?'
'She had to go back to London. Yeah. She's got an audition on Monday.'
'Ah… right… ' This was good news to Nick, and Toby himself, drunk, stoned, eyes glistening, seemed happy about it-he liked the adult note of responsibility in sending her home, and he liked being free of her too. He raised his voice and said,
'Oh, do shut up about fucking Goebbels!' But after a brief incredulous whirr Gareth's shock-proof mechanism rattled on.
Toby was king tonight, on his great big bed, and his friends for once were his subjects. He was acting the role with high spirits, in a childishly approximate way. Nick found it very touching and exciting. As the pot took its delayed effect, squeezing and freeing like some psychic massage, he reached back and took Toby's hand, and they lolled there like that for thirty or forty seconds of heaven. It was as if the room had been steeped in a mood of amorous hilarity as sweetly unignorable as 'Je Promets.' He recalled what Polly had said in the garden long before, and thought that maybe, at last, for once, Toby would actually be his.
There was a surrounding murmur of stoned gossip, heads nodding over rolling papers, the figures blurred but glowing in the lamplight. 'But did the Fiihrer license the Final Solution?' Gareth asked himself; and it was clear that the arguments on this famous question were about to be passed in detailed review.
There was a giggling protest from Sam Zeman, curly-headed genius who'd gone straight into Kesslers on twenty thousand a year. 'You're in a house full of Jews here, can you shut up about the fucking Final Solution, it's a party…'-and he reached for his drink with the frown and snuffle of a subtle person obliged to be brusque.
'I can go on to Stalin… ' said Gareth facetiously.
After a minute's reflection Roddy Shepton said robustly, 'Well, I'm not bloody Jewish.'
'Tobias is,' said his girlfriend, 'aren't you, darling?'
'For god's sake, Claire…' said Roddy.
Claire gazed at Toby with eyes of deepening conviction. 'Wasn't someone saying the Home Sectary's Jewish too…?' she said.
'Calm down, Claire!' said Roddy furiously. It was his own conviction that his large placid girlfriend, who had never been known to raise her voice, was dangerously excitable. Perhaps it was his way of implying he had tamed a sexual volcano; which in turn perhaps helped him to explain why he was going out with a strictly middle-class girl, the daughter of his father's estate manager.
