had been the highlight of their days.
'Mm, I think that was a bit of a wrong turning. He's an outdoor sort of chap, you know, far too confined by office life… Well, it only lasted five minutes; and good on him for giving it a go.'
'Oh, absolutely…'
'It was a bit more than that,' said Nick.
'Mm? Nick's probably right,' said Gerald. 'What was it, six months on the
'Some of Nick's university friends seem to have made their fortunes already,' said Dot. 'Who was it, dear, you said had bought a castle or something?'
'Oh… ' said Nick, regretting having bragged about this. 'Yes, one of them has. It's quite a small castle…! But he's in reinsurance, you know.'
'Ah,' said Dot. Nick hoped she wouldn't ask him what reinsurance was. 'They go so fast these days, don't they!' she said, as if Gerald might be equally breathless at the thought.
'Lord Exmouth's son's doing jolly well,' said Don.
'Ah yes,' said Gerald. 'One of our local blue-bloods!' He had suddenly become a Barwick man at the mention of the indigenous aristocracy.
'That's right,' said Don. 'Well, I look after the clocks at Monksbury, so I've seen young Lord David on and off since he was a little boy.'
'Really…?' Gerald gave him a narrow look over the rim of his glass. 'You don't go to the Noseleys, I suppose?'
'Not since the old lady died,' said Don. 'I did a lot of work out there, ooh, ten years ago now I suppose. Of course they had death-watch beetle at Noseley Abbey. They had a devil of a job getting rid of the little tinkers!'
Nick got up to pass round a dish of stuffed olives and made small waiterly noises to distract his father from saying what he knew was coming next. 'Thanks so much,' said Gerald.
'No, it's a pleasure doing things at these great houses,' Don said. 'Even if they're not very quick at settling their accounts.' He looked round fondly. 'We've got so many of them round here. Nick's tired of hearing this, but I've got two earls, one viscount, one baron and two baronets on my books!'
'Quite a tally,' said Gerald. 'We'll have to see if we can find you a duke.'
'Of course, the fabulous thing,' said Nick, in a rush of shame, 'is the quality of the furniture in all these houses. Things that have been there for centuries.'
'Quite so…' Gerald nodded, as if he took that point very seriously himself. He raised and lowered his eyebrows, in perplexity at his empty glass.
Don said, 'Nick tells me you have some lovely pieces at your London house.'
'Oh…'
'A fair bit of French work, I believe?'
'And some lovely paintings too.'
Gerald gave them a look of thoughtful beneficence, just coloured with impatience, even a kind of disdain-or so it seemed to Nick, who felt for both parties, as though he were witnessing an argument with himself. 'You know you really should come and see us, shouldn't they, Nick?-or come even when we're away. Come when we're in France and make yourselves at home. Have the run of the place. You could have a look at all our stuff, while you're about it, and tell us what's what.'
'Well, that's immensely kind,' said Don, smiling at the seduction of the idea.
'Oh, I don't think we could,' said Dot, whose fear of liberties in general included even those that might be allowed to herself. 'I mean, it's awfully nice of you, of course…' She looked crushed by the offer, and bit her cheek as she peered at Don. Nick thought his mother sometimes obtuse and narrow-minded, he deplored her sillinesses, and at the same time he was so attuned to her moods, to the currents of implication between a mother and an only child, that he could trace the lines of her anxiety without effort. To come to Kensington Park Gardens, to stay in the house and rootle hesitantly around in it, would satisfy a curiosity; but it would also give unforgettable shape and detail to the world in which Nick lived, with its tolerance and its expenditure, its wine cellars and its housekeepers who hardly spoke English, and the Home Secretary ringing up just like that, which Nick said sometimes happened. It would be a flood of knowledge, and in general, as she said, she would rather not know anything more.
'Give it some thought, anyway,' said Gerald; and Nick knew, as his parents murmured and glowed, that it would never be mentioned again.
He drove into the Market Square and slowed down as they approached CLOCKS D. N. GUEST ANTIQUES: 'There's our shop!'-he raised an arm, as if showing him the Doge's Palace or some other great thing he was about to visit.
'Absolutely!' said Gerald. Nick could only glance at it, but it had a presence for him, like a surprise he had prepared for someone else who could never feel it as keenly as he did himself. That side of the square was in shadow now, though the sun still glared on the other side, on the white stucco front of the Crown Hotel. A cloudless sky above the roofs, the shops all shut, emptiness of a country town on a high summer evening; not quite empty, as weekenders strolled before dinner, peering into the locked shops, with a look of hoping to get the best from the place, and some lads, or 'louts,' roamed about under the arches of the market hall. The market hall was the jewel of the town, a cage of glass and stone on a high arcade, still locally claimed, against all the evidence, as a work of Sir Christopher Wren. It had been the pride of Nick's childhood, he had done a project about it at school with measured plans and elevations, at the age of twelve it had ranked with the Taj Mahal and the Parliament Building in Ottawa in his private architectural heaven. The moment of accepting that it was not by Wren had been as bleak and exciting as puberty. Now he revved round it, the lads looked up, and he savoured the triumph of coming home in a throaty little runaround. It was as though the achievements of sex and equities and titles and drugs blew out in a long scarf behind him. No, it was real superiority, it was almost lonely, a world of pleasures and privileges these boys couldn't imagine, and thus beyond their envy. He pulled up in front of the Crown and Gerald sprang out, pushing a hand through his hair, torn between his sporty show-off self and a hint of compromised dignity, even of some worse anomaly in being seen in such a car with a young gay man. Penny was waiting, with her blush and her tight smile, her obedient strictness, and he went gratefully towards her. 'Have fun!' said Nick, and roared off half round the square again, thinking just how much he would like to do so himself.
He pulled into a parking space in the middle, where the market was on a Thursday, and turned off the engine. He would have to go home in a minute for dinner, and a cautious post-mortem on Gerald's visit. There would be a sense, at dinner, of new avenues of worry opened up… the suspicion, now Gerald had gone, that they didn't quite trust him: for all their nerves and good manners they had a sharp ear for bombast, they were more sensitive than they admitted; they would have noticed that Gerald asked them nothing at all about themselves; and they would think about Nick's London life from now on with a degree or two less of reassurance. His eyes ran over the shop again, which looked very shut, empty but purposeful, everything shadowy beyond the chairs in the window. It seemed freshly strange to have his family name there on a shopfront, he felt his schoolboy pride and his Oxford snobbery pinch on it from both directions, on his very own name, N. GUEST, plumb in the middle. He watched a group of boys passing slowly behind him, and moved his head to follow them in the mirror, where they seemed to prance and linger in a tinted distance. There was the clatter of a kicked can, a belch that echoed across the square. He thought, what if he'd stayed here, so far from the essentials of Heaven, the Opera, Ronnie's deliveries…? For a moment he laboured in the fiction of that alternative life-there were cultured people here, of course, with books and gramophones: when he tried to picture them they all took the form of his teachers at Barwick Grammar, Mr Leverton and his Hopkins group. There were one or two school friends he could probably count on. Statistically there ought to be five or six hundred homos in Barwick, hidden away, more or less, behind these shopfronts and unreadable upper windows. The Gents in Abbots' Field would become a wearisome magnet, an awful symbol.
Across the road, half-dazzled by the evening sun, couples were arriving at the Crown for the dinner, the women in long skirts, their hair done, the men in suits, greeting each other with little pats and after-yous,
