It had been very hot all the trip, the hottest Nick had ever known; in Venice, for all its dazzlements, they had moved in a heatwave stink of decay; in Munich, in the glaring avenues, the temperature reached a hundred and four. The heat put a strain on them which they didn't acknowledge to each other. They went to the Asamkirche, which had Nick beaming and sighing with delight; Wani strolled about with an air of provisional goodwill, as if waiting for an explanation. Nick longed to share the beauty with him, to communicate with him through it, but Wani, out of shyness or pride, was lightly mocking of what Nick said. You could really only tell Wani one useful thing at a time-too much information was an affront to his self-esteem. Nick stayed on in the church, and the loneliness heightened his pleasure and his pride in his own responsiveness. At the Nymphenburg Palace, among surging coachloads, the pleasure was harder won, but he felt he took in these marvels of the rococo by right-they might have been make-believe for rich people when they were built, but now they were more than that, they were celebrations in and of themselves.
On their first afternoon there Nick went into a gay shop called Follow Me-something Wani did at last with a deprecating snigger. Surrounded by harnesses and startlingly juvenile pornography they bought the
He woke again and took a long distracted moment to see that this hadn't happened. He'd been lying in the richly coloured recall of the minutes before sleep and the holiday story had slipped and run with its own fast current into an anecdote odder than the afternoon they had lived through, Wani's bright fixated attempt to pick up the boy who roamed through the gardens with a bucket shouting 'Pepsi!'-his astonishment that he couldn't be bought. Nick turned his pillow, and coughed and settled again. He sank through backlit clouds, pink and grey, the landing at Bordeaux airport that morning. There had been a storm, but it was turning aside, and they saw suddenly how close the ground was, the sunlight passing in a crawling wink across ponds, glasshouses and canals, seams of gold flashing through the vapour in fiery collusion.
On Monday morning Wani asked if he could make some phone calls. Rachel said, 'Absolutely!' and Gerald said, 'Please… my dear fellow!' with a gesture towards the cupboard-like room where the phone and the expectant new fax machine were.
'It's just these business things I've got to deal with,' Wani sighed, cleverly apologizing for what Gerald liked best about him. He went into the room and rather awkwardly, since everyone was watching him, closed the door. He had told them last night about the property he'd just bought in Clerkenwell, and had asked for Gerald's advice on aspects of the sale and the planned redevelopment: a wall had come down, and they'd suddenly seen how they might get on. When Wani emerged from the phone room he asked him if he could borrow the Range Rover to go into Perigueux, and this time it was vaguer magazine 'business' that he mentioned. Nick knew that frown of pretended vexation, the bold contempt for obstacles on the path to pleasure, and it made him nervous. But Gerald, clearing his throat and as it were waking up to his own kindness and reasonableness, said, 'Well yes… why not!- feel free… ' And then added, 'Anything for business!'
'It's just that I can meet a very good photographer there, and after the fascinating things you were saying about the cathedral…'
'Oh, St Front,' said Gerald, warily flattered. 'Yes indeed…'
Nick almost said, 'Oh, but you know it's all a nineteenth-century rehash…'
'Will you be back for lunch?' said Rachel. Wani promised he would. He didn't suggest taking Nick, and Nick felt both jealous and relieved. They stood at the front door and watched the car disappear from the forecourt. It was the sort of moment when in London they would have begun a bold and funny family inquest into the absent person; but today that didn't feel right.
They went out onto the terrace, and Gerald nodded several times at Nick and said, 'Charming fellow, your friend.'
'He certainly is,' said Nick, seeing that Gerald wanted reassurance, and noting that Wani was now properly his friend rather than Toby's.
'One doesn't quite know whether to mention the fiancee,' Gerald said.
'Oh, well I did,' said Rachel. 'And it's all right. He told me all about it. Apparently they're getting married next spring.'
'Ah, fine,' said Gerald, while Nick turned away with a protesting thump of the heart to look at the view.
The morning post brought several thick packets of papers for Gerald and he took them off to the end room, sighing petulantly. It was clear that without Penny he felt he couldn't tackle work, and clear too, presumably, that he couldn't invite Penny here. He had taken over the end room as an office; Nick wasn't sure what he did in it, but he always emerged with a watchful smile, even tiptoeing a little, like someone about to break a piece of news. The Penny question weighed on Nick, and then appeared so remote and unsubstantiated that he might have imagined it. Gerald was being thoroughly affectionate to Rachel, and when they lay side by side in the sun they seemed soaked in their own intimate history, as well as disconcertingly sexy and young. Even so there was something difficult and self-indulgent about Gerald, as if the holiday was both a licence and a penance.
Nick wandered off to explore the hidden corners of the little estate. He found the morning, and the freedom to use it, weighed rather heavily on him now Wani had gone. He went down the crumbling steps from terrace to terrace, like a descent into his own melancholy. The lower levels dropped more steeply, they were hidden from the house and had a neglected air: the parched stony soil showed through the thin grass. Clearly Dede and his son hardly bothered with these bits-perhaps it was only guests, in their appreciative aimlessness, who ever climbed down here. There was a look of disused agricultural terraces as much as garden; a distant whine of farm machinery, and the scurry of lizards running over dead leaves. On each level there were walnut trees thick with half-hidden green fruit. Nick went through a gap in a hedge and found some old stone sheds, a grassy woodpile, a rusty tractor. He was doing what he always did, poking and memorizing, possessing the place by knowing it better than his hosts. If Rachel had said, 'If only we still had that pogo stick!' Nick could have cried, like a painfully eager child, 'But we do, it's in the old shed with the broken butter churn and the prize rosettes for onions nailed to the beams.' It struck him that a sign of real possession was a sort of negligence, was to have an old wood-yard you'd virtually forgotten about.
He fetched his book and went down to the pool. The heat was climbing and a high-up lid of thin cloud had soon expired into the blue. Jasper and Catherine were already in the water, and Jasper looked pleased to be discovered struggling with her, almost fucking her; he winked at Nick as he went into the pool-house to change. The wink seemed to follow him in. There was a bare suggestive atmosphere in the pool-house, which always felt cool and secret after the dazzle of the pool-side, and seemed to carry some coded memory or promise of a meeting. Nick would have had Wani there last night if Gerald hadn't been hanging, even snooping about. There was the first room, with a sink and a fridge and bright plastic pool toys, lilos and rings, an old rowing machine standing on end; and the changing room beyond, with a slatted bench and clothes hooks, and the shower opening straight off it, behind a blue curtain. Only the rather smelly lavatory had a door that could be locked.
Nick came out in his new little Speedos and walked along the pool's edge. The water was the clear bright
