'So who's down here now?' asked Wani.
'Just us at the moment, I'm afraid,' said Toby: 'Ma and Pa, me and Catherine-oh, and Jasper.'
'Oh, is that her little boyfriend…'
'Yeah, have you met him, he's an estate agent.'
'I think I know who you mean,' said Wani.
'Jasper and Pa seem to have become best friends. I think he'll have the house on the market by the time we leave.'
Nick gave a snuffly laugh from the back seat, and thought what a terrible little operator Jasper was, oiling his way into the family with his forelock and his dodgy voice; and Wani too-how flawless he was, making his quick social reconnaissance, everything hidden from Toby, his old friend. He looked at the backs of their heads, Wani's black curls, Toby's cropped and sunburned nape, and felt for an eerie moment what strangers they were to him, and perhaps to each other. They were only boys, but the height and territorial presumption of the Range Rover threw them into relief as men of the world, Toby sporting and unimaginative, Wani languid, with the softness and vigilance of money about him. Perhaps being old friends didn't mean very much, they shared assumptions rather than lives.
Wani said, 'Oh, I bought the Clerkenwell building by the way.'
'Oh, you did,' said Toby, 'good.'
'Four hundred K. I thought, really…'
'Yah…' said Toby, setting his face, looking bored. There was something stiff but acceptably adult to them both about this, about saying so little. Wani hadn't even mentioned the deal to Nick. It was typical of his secrecy, both grand and petty, since he had given Nick the five thousand: he made him feel how that sum was eclipsed by the unnamed sublimities of his own transactions.
Nick said, 'Oh, that's great, I can't wait to see it.' He found he tried to keep up, as if to show that he had money, for the first time in his life; but having some money, and sitting in a car behind Toby and Wani, only made him realize how little money he had-he felt self-conscious with them now in a way that he never had when he was penniless.
'So no chance of Martine joining us?' Toby said.
'I don't think my mother can spare her,' said Wani, in a tone of imponderable irony.
'She'll have to one day,' said Toby, and gave a big laugh.
'I know… ' said Wani; 'anyway, what about you, you fucker, are you seeing anyone?'
'Nah… ' said Toby, with a sour grin of independence, and then gratefully, as if the joke could never fade, 'Ah! Here's our wrinkled retainer.' An old man was riding a bicycle towards them over the patchy road surface, his slowly rising and falling knees jutting out sideways-he stopped and tottered into the grass verge as Toby pulled up. 'Bonjour, Dede… Et comment va Liliane aujourd'hui?'
The old man held on to the car and looked in at them cautiously and with a hint of cunning. 'Pas bien,' he said.
'Ah, je suis desole,' said Toby-insincerely it seemed to Nick, but it was only the play-acting, the capable new persona that came with speaking in a foreign language. A longish conversation followed, Toby fluent but with little attempt at a French accent, a sense of heightened goodwill and simplicity between them, and the old man's laconic answers coming like stamps of authenticity to the new arrivals, trying to hear and follow what was being said. Wani of course was a native French-speaker, but for Nick there was a warm sense of success when he could make out Dede's words. Jokes understood in a foreign language became amusing in a further, exemplary way: he was storing them already as the coinage, the argot, of their ten-day visit. He sat back, smiling tolerantly, loving the heat and the sunlight through the huge old roadside oaks and chestnuts, and the sense of a prepared surprise, of being led through screened back ways towards a view. There was that tingle in the air that you got in even modestly mountainous country, the imminence of a drop, of space instead of mass.
Toby wound up the conversation, they all nodded solicitously at Dede, and the car crept on again. Nick said, 'I hope your grandmother's still coming down.'
'Don't worry,' said Toby, 'she's coming on Tuesday. And the Tippers are coming too, I'm sorry about that.'
'That's fine,' said Wani.
'It's bloody good to have you guys here,' Toby said, and looked affectionately for Nick again in the mirror.
'It's fabulous to be here,' said Nick, with just a shiver, as they turned ill between urn-crowned gate-piers, of the old feeling, from the first day at Oxford, the first morning at Kensington Park Gardens, of innocence and longing.
A three-sided courtyard was made by the sombre entrance front of the house, creeper-covered and small- windowed, a lower wing to the left, and an old barn and stable on the right. The house itself hid the view, and it was only through the open front door and the shadowy hallway that Nick caught a hint of the dazzle beyond, a further small doorway of light. He picked his bags out from the car, and watched Wani gesturing belatedly as Toby plucked up his cases and strode indoors with them, his sandalled feet thwacking on the stone flags and his calf muscles square and brown. He seemed to tread there for a moment, framed and silhouetted, as he had at the Worcester lodge, all those years ago, in the archway that led from the outside world to the inner garden: Toby, who was born to use the gateway, the loggia, the stairs without looking at them or thinking about them. And something else came back, from that later first morning at Kensington Park Gardens: a sense that the house was not only an enhancement of Toby's interest but a compensation for his lack of it.
From the hall they caught a glimpse through a series of rooms curtained against the steep sunlight, but stabbed across by it here and there. There were china bowls, oak tables, books and newspapers, straw hats, the remotely threatening mood of holiday routines, of other people's leisure, of games to be inducted into, things the Feddens had already said and done lingering in the shadows among the squashy old armchairs. The rooms were tall, deep-raftered, stone-walled, so that you would have a sense of living in the depths of them, like rooms in a castle or an old school. But for now they were deserted, the party were all elsewhere.
Toby led them on up the wide shallow stairs. On the upper floor an ochre-tiled passageway ran the length of the house, with bedrooms opening off it like prettily appointed cells. Nick and Wani were at the far end. 'Mum's put you in opposite rooms,' said Toby, 'so I hope you're not fed up with each other.' Wani raised his eyebrows, puffed and shrugged like a Frenchman: they did their double act. It was hard for a moment to believe this wasn't the usual discreet arrangement for an unmarried couple, that Toby wasn't in on the secret, hadn't the first suspicion. Nick was used to deceiving adults but he felt sad about tricking Toby. He saw the wound it would be to his childish good nature if he found out. But Wani presumably was hardened against such anxieties. Nick looked at him, and had a brief cold intuition of their different shades of relief about the rooms-his own that they were close, and Wani's that they were apart. Wani was on the front, and Nick, as family perhaps, had the smaller, darker room looking out at the end of the house into the branches of an ancient plane tree. 'Fantastic!' he said. He got on with unpacking, and hung up the suits he had brought-always wary of what rich people meant by 'informal.' His laundry had all been done by the hotel in Munich, and was rustlingly interleaved with tissue paper. He noticed that a tap in his bathroom dripped and was leaving a rusty stain. By the bed there was a bookcase with old French novels, left-behind Frederick Forsyths, odd leather-bound volumes of history and memoirs with the coroneted Kessler bookplate. There was a pair of strange little paintings on glass in varnished pearwood frames. He took possession of the room, and talked himself out of a tiny sense of disappointment with it.
Toby was still chatting in Wani's doorway, his hands in his shorts pockets, the undeniable bulge above the waistband these days, something comfy about him, as well as something passive and perplexed. Nick loved him with that fondness of an old friendship that accepts a degree of boredom, and is soothed and even sustained by it. What he felt was distilled affection, undemanding but principled. 'Ah, he can tell us,' Toby said.
'Yah, what was the name of the brothel we went to in Venice?' said Wani. He was unpacking too, though as coyly and delayingly as he had undressed that day at the Highgate Ponds.
'Oh, the
'There you are,' said Wani.
'It's been done up by the American branch of Venice in Peril. You ring the bell and the lady shows it to you.'
'OK…' said Toby. 'So it's not a functioning brothel…'
