'I think Bertrand's rather more deserving than that,' said Polly, successfully resisting and pocketing the cigarettes.
'Anyway, he's not British, is he?' Nick said airily, and rather proud of this objection. It was Polly, after all, who'd once called him a Levantine grocer.
'That's hardly an insuperable problem,' said Polly with a quick pitying smile. 'Well, we must be going. I just wanted to say goodbye. Morgan has an early start tomorrow. She has to fly up to Edinburgh.'
'Well, my dear,' said Nick, 'one never sees you these days. I've given up keeping your place warm for you at the Shaftesbury'-a kindness, a bit of a sentimental gesture at the sort of friendship they had never actually had.
And Polly did a small but extraordinary thing: he looked at Nick and said, 'Not that I remotely concur with what you've just said-about the peerage.' He didn't flush or frown or grimace, but his long fat face seemed to harden in a fixative of threat and denial.
He went in, and Jasper followed him, turning to give Nick a curt little nod, in his own unconscious impression of Polly, so that the mannerism seemed to spread, a note of contempt that was a sign of allegiance.
10
THE SERVICE STAIRS were next to the main stairs, separated only by a wall, but what a difference there was between them: the narrow back stairs, dangerously unrailed, under the bleak gleam of a skylight, each step worn down to a steep hollow, turned tightly in a deep grey shaft; whereas the great main sweep, a miracle of cantilevers, dividing and joining again, was hung with the portraits of prince-bishops, and had ears of corn in its wrought-iron banisters that trembled to the tread. It was glory at last, an escalation of delight, from which small doors, flush with the panelling, moved by levers below the prince-bishops' high-heeled and rosetted shoes, gave access, at every turn, to the back stairs, and their treacherous gloom. How quickly, without noticing, one ran from one to the other, after the proud White Rabbit, a well-known Old Harrovian porn star with a sphincter that winked as bells rang, crowds murmured and pigeons flopped about the dormer window while Nick woke and turned in his own little room again, in the comfortable anticlimax of home.
On his back, in the curtained light, the inveterate habits of home took hold of him without a word… Wani, of course… yes, Wani… in the car… and that time with Ricky, the outrage of it… though home, historically, was a shrine of Toby-longing, almost extinct now, worked up only in moods of vicious nostalgia… still, it seemed possible… Toby of three years ago… at Hawkeswood… morning after the great party… calling him into the King's Room, sweaty with hangover under one roiled sheet… 'Fuck, what a night…!' and then he darted to the bathroom… only time he saw him naked… great innocent rower's arse… did that happen… did what happened next happen… and Wani that night…
met him on the stairs… who would have dreamt… dark green velvet… oh god, Wani in the flat… tied to the posts of the ogee bed…
It must be Mrs Creeley with his mother in the drive. They were talking about the car, Nick's little Mazda, 'a nice little runaround' his father had called it, to minimize their evident anxiety as to how he had come by such a thing. NG 2485: Mrs Creeley was thrilled by the number plate, Mrs Guest perhaps not so sure. ('You must be doing very well, dear,' she had said, in just the tone she would use to say 'You don't look very well, dear.') Wood pigeons in the trees, in the thick spruces at the front, making their broody calls, reproachful, condoning-who knew? The two women moved away, in the slow trawl of gossip, over the gravel: talk about the sale of the field, syllables only, on the faint breeze through the open top window, overlaid by the pigeons, the talk beaded and chiming, rhythmic and nonsensical, the breeze lifting and dropping the curtain in one lazy breath, hushing the voices. The lie-in: time-honoured concession of school holidays, the rare weekend visits. His father would have gone to the shop-he might have woken to the familiar drag of garage door, thump of car door, and then wandered sideways again into staircase dreams. Mrs Creeley went, he didn't hear his mother come inside, she had probably got up in gardening trousers, an old blouse that didn't matter. They had Gerald descending tonight, and the house, inside and out, would be ready for an inspection… A little later came the leisurely clop of a horse, sounds as abstract and calming as other people's exertions on the tennis courts at home-at his other home. He wasn't sure, but he thought it was right that no horse had equal tone or resonance in all four hooves, as it distanced it made an odd sauntering impression, a syncopation, until lastly only one hoof continued faintly to be heard.
Out on the edge of town was where they were, where they'd carefully and long-sightedly chosen to be, on Cherry Tree Lane, decent post-war houses with plenty of garden, and only a view of fields at the back, and horses leaning in from time to time to chomp at the delphiniums and the weeping willow. And now the dreaded thing had happened, Sidney Hayes had bought next door, and thus at last got access from the lane to the field where he kept his horses, and got planning permission too, exceedingly quickly, five houses to the acre. Everyone had objected to the plans, and Nick had even been made embarrassingly to bring it up with Gerald, as their MP, who said of course he'd put a stop it, but quickly lost interest since no conditions had been breached, in fact rather the reverse, there was a property boom, home ownership was within the grasp of all, and even with the new development on top of them the value of 'Linnells' was destined to soar. All this cast a muddling running shadow over Don and Dot Guest's lives. They were more comfortable than they'd ever been, business was better, and yet across their treasured view a long-held worry was about to materialize in bricks and slates.
Despite its long mute presence in his life Nick found it hard to care for the house, its pinkish walls and metal- framed windows; it lacked poetry. At Linnells, as Gerald had said of Hawkeswood, the contents were the thing: a ruck of furniture, crowded families of Staffordshire and Chelsea figures, three clocks ticking competitively in one room, where the real family sat, supervised and even a little oppressed by their own possessions. Which changed, unpredictably, when something came into the shop that Don wanted to live with, or when a buyer was suddenly found for something in the house. So the market squeezed on them, acceptably, amusingly, and they would let a chest or a grandfather clock go, which in Nick's young life had the status of an heirloom already. For years he had had a nice wide walnut bed, a snug double of imagined couplings-the whorls and fans in the grain of the walnut were the underwater blooms of adolescent thought, pale pond-life of a hundred lie-ins. But one Christmas, in fact the one after he had come out, he arrived home to find it had been sold from under him, and replaced by something plain, modem, single and inhibitingly squeaky. In the past year or so, as business boomed, Don had started asking 'London prices,' which had always been family code for extortion. Meanwhile London prices themselves had climbed, so Guest's was still cheaper and worth a day trip from town. Yesterday, after the big uneasy surprise of the car, Nick had had his own surprise, the missing bureau. 'You'll never guess what I got for it,' his father said-with a look of unaccustomed and still embarrassed greed.
Nick came downstairs and glanced out coyly at the car. He liked to give himself that little prepared surprise, it was new enough for the thrill of its first arrival to flare up beautifully again each morning. Like a child's new present it lit up a dull day, and made it worth getting up and going out, just to sit in the simmer of London traffic and feel the throb of possession. If it had shocked his parents, then it had shocked him too, the colour, the grin of it, the number plate, all things he wouldn't have chosen for himself. But the burden of choice and discretion had been taken off him, it was what Wani wanted him to have, and he let himself go. The car was his lower nature, wrapped in a gift ribbon, and he came to a quick accommodation with it, and found it not so bad or so low after all. A first car was a big day for a boy, and he wished his parents could just have clapped their hands at the fun of it; but that wasn't their way. He explained, as he smiled anxiously, that it was all to do with work, it was a tax write-off, it was nonsense he didn't understand himself. He tried to entertain them with the mechanism of the roof, and opened the bonnet for his father to look at the cylinders and things, which he did with a nod and a hum; clocks, not engines, were his oily interest. Nick wondered why they couldn't share in his excitement; but had to admit, after ten minutes, that he'd somehow known they wouldn't-the hilarity of his arrival had been a self- delusion. He thought of an obscure childhood incident when he'd stolen ten shillings from his mother to buy her a present of a little china hen; he'd denied it through such storms of tears that he wasn't sure now if he'd stolen the money or not; he'd almost convinced himself of his innocence. The episode still darkened his mind as a failed, an obscurely guilty, attempt to please. It was the same with the car, they couldn't see where it came from, and they were right in a way, since they knew him so well: there was something very important he wasn't telling them. In Rachel's terms the Mazda was certainly vulgar and potentially unsafe; but for Don and Dot its shiny red snout in
