After a minute Nick said, 'Feeling a bit better?' and Catherine nodded and pressed against him as they walked. The sense of responsibility came back to him, a grey weight in his chest, and he saw them from the point of view of the picnickers or an approaching jogger: not a dear old couple at all but a pair of kids, a skinny girl with a large nervous mouth and a solemn little blond boy pretending he wasn't out of his depth. Of course he must ring France, and hope that he got Rachel, since Gerald wasn't always good with these things. He wished he knew more about what had happened and why, but he was squeamish too. 'You'll be all right,' he said. He thought that asking her about it might only reopen the horror, and added, 'I wonder what it was all about,' as if referring to a mystery of long ago. She gave him a look of painful uncertainty, but didn't answer. 'Can't really say?' Nick said, and heard, as he sometimes did, his own father's note of evasive sympathy. It was how his family sidled round its various crises; nothing was named, and you never knew for sure if the tone was subtly comprehensive, or just a form of cowardice.
'No, not really.'
'Well, you know you always can tell me,' he said.
At the end of the path there was the gardener's cottage, huddled quaintly and servilely under the cream cliff of the terrace. Beyond it a gate gave on to the street and they stood and looked out through its iron scrolls at the sporadic evening traffic. Nick waited, and thought despairingly of Leo at large in the same summer evening. Catherine said, 'It's when everything goes black and glittering.'
'Mm.'
'It's not like when you're down in the dumps, which is brown.'
'Right…'
'Oh, you wouldn't understand.'
'No, please go on.'
'It's like that car,' she said, nodding at a black Daimler that had stopped across the road to let out a distinguished-looking old man. The yellow of the early street lights was reflected in its roof, and as it pulled away reflections streamed and glittered in its dark curved sides and windows.
'It sounds almost beautiful.'
'It is beautiful, in a sense. But that isn't the point.'
Nick felt he had been given an explanation which he was too stupid, or unimaginative, to follow. 'It must be horrible as well,' hesaid, 'obviously…'
'Well, it's poisonous, you see. It's glittering but it's deadly at the same time. It doesn't want you to survive it. That's what it makes you realize.' She stepped away from Nick, so as to use her hands. 'It's the whole world just as it is,' she said, stretching out to frame it or hold it off: 'everything exactly the same. And it's totally negative. You can't survive in it. It's like being on Mars or something.' Her eyes were fixed but blurred. 'There you are, that's the best I can do,' she said, and turned her back.
He followed her. 'But then it changes back again…' he said.
'Yes, Nick, it does,' she said, with the offended tone that sometimes follows a moment of self-exposure.
'I'm only trying to understand.' He thought her tears might be a sign of recovery, and put an arm round her shoulder-though after a few seconds she made another gesture that meant freeing herself. Nick felt a hint of sexual repudiation, as if she thought he was taking advantage of her.
Later on, in the drawing room, she said, 'Oh, god, this was your night with Leo.'
Nick couldn't believe that she'd only just thought of that. But he said, 'It's all right. I've put him off till next week.'
Catherine smiled ruefully. 'Well, he wasn't really your type,' she said.
Schumann had given way to The Clash, who in turn had yielded to a tired but busy silence between them. Nick prayed that she wouldn't put on any more music-most of the stuff she liked had him clenched in resistance. He looked at his watch. They were an hour later in France, it was too late to ring them now, and he welcomed this rational and thoughtful postponement with a sense of cloudy relief. He went over to the much-neglected piano, its black lid the podium for various old art folios and a small bronze bust of Liszt-which seemed to give a rather pained glance at his sight-reading from the Mozart album on the stand. To Nick himself the faltering notes were like raindrops on a sandy path, and he was filled with a sense of what his evening could have been. The simple Andante became a vivid dialogue in his mind between optimism and recurrent pain; in fact it heightened both feelings to an unnecessary degree. It wasn't long until Catherine stood up and said, 'For god's sake, darling, it's not a fucking funeral.'
'Sorry, darling,' said Nick, and vamped through a few seconds of what they called Waldorf music before getting up and wandering out on to the balcony. They had only just started calling each other darling, and it seemed a nice part of the larger conspiracy of life at Kensington Park Gardens; but outside in the cool of the night Nick felt he was play-acting, and that Catherine was frighteningly strange to him. Her mirage of the beautiful poisonous universe shimmered before him again for a moment, but he couldn't hold it, and it slipped quickly away.
There was a supper party in a nearby back garden, and the talk and light clatter carried on the still air. A man called Geoffrey was making everyone laugh, and the women kept calling out his name in excited protest between the semi-audible paragraphs of his story. Out in the communal gardens someone was walking a small white dog, which looked almost luminous as it bobbed and scampered in the late dusk. Above the trees and rooftops the dingy glare of the London sky faded upwards into weak violet heights. In summer, when windows everywhere were open, night seemed made of sound as much as shadow, the whisper of the leaves, the unsleeping traffic rumble, far-off car horns and squeals of brakes; voices, faint shouts, a waveband twiddle of unconnected music. Nick yearned for Leo, away to the north, three miles up the long straight roads, but possibly anywhere, moving with invisible speed on his silver bike. He wondered again in which park the photo of him had been taken; and of course what person, routinely intimate with Leo, had taken it. He felt hollow with frustration and delay. The girl with the white dog came back along the gravel path, and he thought how he might appear to her, if she glanced up, as an enviable figure, poised against the shining accomplished background of the lamplit room. Whereas, looking out, leaning out over the iron railing, Nick felt he had been swept to the brink of some new promise, a scented vista or vision of the night, and then held there.
2
'SOMETHING FOR EVERYBODY!' Gerald Fedden said, striding into the kitchen with a rattling brown-paper carrier bag. 'All must have prizes!' He was tanned and tireless, and a lost energy came back into the house with him, the flash of his vanity and confidence-it was almost as though the words of the returning officer were fresh in his ears and he were responding to applause with these high-spirited promises. On the side of the bag was the emblem of a famous Perigueux delicatessen, a blue goose with its head through what looked like a life-saving ring, its beak curling Disney-wise in a complacent smile.
'Yuk, not foie gras,' Catherine said.
'In fact this quince jelly is for the Purring One,' said Gerald, taking out a jar in a gingham cap and bow and sliding it across the kitchen table.
Catherine said, 'Thanks,' but left it there and wandered away to the window.
'And what was it for Tobias?'
'The… um… ' Rachel gestured. 'The
'Of course.' Gerald rummaged discreetly before passing his son a small notebook, bound in odorous green suede.
'Thanks, Pa,' said Toby, who was sprawling in shorts on the long banquette and obliquely reading the paper while he listened to his mother's news. Behind him, the wall was a great hilarious page of family history, with numerous framed photographs of holidays and handshakes with the famous, as well as two wicked caricatures of Gerald, which he had made a point of buying from the cartoonists. When Gerald was in the kitchen, guests always found themselves contrasting him with his grinning, hawk-nosed cartoon image; the comparison was obviously to his advantage, though it couldn't help stirring the suspicion that under his handsome everyday mask this predatory goon might indeed be lurking.
