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By Root 1192 0

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 the drive was more than that, it was the shock of who Nick was, and the disappointment.

Gerald was in Barwick on various duties, first the Summer Fete, which he was opening at two o'clock, and later a dinner at the Crown to mark the retirement of the agent; in between he was due to look in at Cherry Tree Lane for a drink. It was the last weekend before their departure to France, and his usual bad temper about anything to do with Barwick was only soothed by the prospect of making speeches at at least two of these events. Rachel had stayed at home, and Penny had come up with Gerald to write down people's names on bits of paper and prevent those muddles which had