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By Root 1021 0

back at them as if they were always in and out. Catherine, in her dark coat, made up, evangelical, had the confidence to pass anywhere; the sense of getting away with something was all Nick's. The wait by the lift was a reasonable but finite chance to turn back: Catherine smiled and quivered, hands thrust into pockets flashing her coat open. "Are you sure about this?" said Nick. He knew he ought to be restraining her and at the same time he was trying to live up to her. Her conviction was a challenge to someone reasonably cowardly. He felt a vague intellectual awe of her insights, however mad. He thought her state might be like the capable elation of coke, but more psychic. There was a warning plink, the doors opened, and Penny came tearing out.

"Penny!" said Nick. He dawdled for a moment with a shrug and a helpful half smile. Catherine was already in the lift, narrow-eyed, breathing audibly. Nick, feeling like a silly ass and then also feeling the loose smugness of having discovered something without knowing what it was, grinned, and said considerately, "How are you?"

Penny had stopped and turned round, with a look both peevish and frightened. She went very white; and then a rich hot pink started up in her round cheeks and spread (in the three or four seconds while Catherine stamped and said, "Nick, come on!") into her neck and throat and ears. "Um, Nick," she said, in bossy defiance of her blush, "actually, I shouldn't, um . . .

Nick, confused, reluctant to be rude, but enjoying Penny's blush, in itself and for not being one of his own, had a foot in the lift, and blocked the thrust of the door with his arm—it kept stolidly reasserting itself. "How's

Gerald?" he said.

"Nick, come on!" Catherine said again.

He stood back into the lift and Penny, shaking her head and stepping forward, said, "He's not here, Nick, he's not here —" as the doors closed.

"Well. . . !" said Nick. He glanced at Catherine, then at the mirror wall, where they seemed to stand like self-conscious strangers. Even in a stuffy old mansion block like this a slanting FUCK had been scratched on the brushed-steel door. He thought of Badger flirting relentlessly with Penny, years ago now, when Gerald had first taken her on. It was that awful, rivalrous straight thing, taking the girl not only from Nick, who didn't care, but from his best friend, who clearly would. He found himself smirking, looked in the mirror, and said, "God, darling, Badger's going to be furious. We're obviously not supposed to know." But the lift stopped and Catherine slipped out past him with a mocking frown, as if surely she couldn't have anyone so dim or so chicken as a friend.

He followed her along a red-carpeted hallway past brown-varnished doors with bells and nameplates; on one side brown-and-yellow leaded windows gave on to inner light wells, lit now only by the dim back windows of other flats. A telly could be heard from one flat, but otherwise sound was dampened as by the gravest discretion. The subliminal sense of gaslight, of stepping back through time into the depths of this monstrous building, was oppressive but also, for Nick at least, beguiling: his mind ran away for a moment along the panelled dado, the swan's-neck curves of the light fittings. The last door on the left was slightly ajar, waiting perhaps for Penny's return. Catherine pinged the bell, and they stood looking at the card in the brass frame that said "D. S. Brogan Esq." A deeply familiar voice shouted, "It's open," and Catherine stared into Nick's face with a gleam of vindication before she put her arm through his. It was much worse than Nick had thought. He didn't want to go in, and would have run away fast if he hadn't been tightly held there. There was a loud sigh, a soft thump of footsteps, and Gerald plucked open the door. He wasn't wearing shoes or a jacket and tie, and his front stud was undone, so that the white collar stood up skew-whiff. In his left hand he held a cigarette. Nick said, "Oh, hello, Gerald!" and Catherine, gleaming with indignation, said, "Dad! You said you'd given up!"