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By Root 1006 0

white-and-gold jacket, amazingly embroidered, like a Ruritanian uniform, and cut low at the front to display a magnificent pearl necklace. Nick peered at the necklace, and the large square bosom, and the motherly fatness of the neck. "Isn't she beautiful," said Trudi Titchfield, in unselfconscious reverie. Nick was briskly presented, elided almost, in the rhythm of the long social sentence, but with a surprising detail, or fib, "Nick Guest . . . a great friend of our children . . . a young don," so that he saw himself enhanced and also compromised, since dons were not the PM's favourite people. He nodded and smiled and felt her blue eyes briefly but unconfidently focus on him before she seized the initiative and called out, "John, hullo . . . !" to John Timms, who was suddenly right next to him. "Prime Minister . . ." said John Timms, not shaking her hand but clasping her somehow with the fervour and humour of his tone. At the end of the row were the children themselves, a goggling unmatched pair, Toby still marvellously cheerful and Catherine, who could have sulked or asked an awkward question, shaking hands with a bright "Hello!" and gazing at the PM like a child at a conjuror. "Oh, and this is my boyfriend," she said, producing Jasper but forgetting to name him. "Hello," said the Prime Minister, in a tone just dry enough to suggest that by now she deserved a drink: which Tristao, with his doe eyes and nerveless smile, was at hand to provide.

Nick trotted downstairs from a quick refresher and caught Wani coming out of Gerald and Rachel's bedroom. "God, careful, darling," he said.

"I was just using the lav," said Wani.

"Mm," said Nick. He was too drunk and high himself to take the danger at all seriously. "Do use my lav if you need to."

"The stairs," said Wani.

Nick loved the way the coke took off the blur of champagne, claret, Sautemes, and more champagne. It totted up the points and carried them over as credit in a new account of pleasure. It brought clarity, like a cure—almost, at first, like sobriety. He put an arm round Wani's shoulders, and asked him if he was having a good time. "We see so little of each other," he said. They started to go downstairs and something caught Nick's eye at the third or fourth step, someone else moving in the great white bedroom that Wani had come out of. His instinct as guardian of the house, preventer of trouble, quickened. Jasper came out, businesslike, as if he had the keys and was showing the place to a buyer. He gave Nick a nod and a wink. "Just going up to Cat's room," he said.

"So," said Nick, as he and Wani went on down, with a pensive hesitation each step or two, as though they might stop completely in the charm of a shared thought, "you've been running the house tart up the hill . . . "

"It's got to be climbed, old chap, it's got to be climbed."

"Yeah," said Nick, with a sniff and a sour turning down of the mouth. He looked for guilt in Wani's oddly rosy face; he glimpsed, like shuffled cards, the two of them together in the bathroom, Wani's love of corruption, all the licence that went with the latest line. "So it's not our secret any more," he said. Wani gave him a look that was scornful but not aggressive. Nick might be in the clear, clever phase, but Wani was much further on, in the phase where high spirits reel and stall and blink at a barely recognized room or friend. Nick let him go, and the high heartbeat of the coke became a short sprint of panic. He smiled defensively, and the smile seemed to search and find a happier subject, in the opening bloom of the drug. It was hard to know what mattered. There was certainly no point in thinking about it now. Out in the marquee the music had started, and everything had the air of an escapade.

He found Catherine in a corner of the drawing room being chatted up by toothy old Jonty Stafford, the retired ambassador, who stooped over her like a convivial Jabberwock. "No, I think you'd like Dubrovnik," he was saying, with a suggestive hooding of the eyes. "The Hotel Diocletian, enormous charm."

"Oh," said Catherine.

"They