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By Root 1000 0

but with a flinch of regret as well, that he should be speaking like this to someone he'd always simply trusted. He stood up, and walked awkwardly along to the far end of the table. The mood of an extended morning-after still reigned in the room, with sunshine seeping in over the top of the shutters, and the gilt wall lamps casting a crimson glow. He stood with his back to the Lenbach portrait of—what was he?—his great-grandfather: a stout bourgeois figure in a tightly buttoned black coat. Nick, with his eye for the family line, saw Toby growing into a likeness. Toby himself had on a dark suit, blue shirt, and red tie. He was going to a meeting, and this little chat was a bit like a meeting too. He seemed to share with his ancestor a respect for the obvious importance of business, as well as a dignified failure to anticipate the scandals of this week.

"God, I'm sorry, Toby," said Nick.

"Yah, well," said Toby, with a big sigh that seemed to weigh a burden and hint at a threat. Unexpected intimacies were blowing up all around him. He leant on the table and looked at a paper to hide his discomfort. "First it's Dad and Penny, with this fraud thing going on too, then there's you and Ouradi, with the plague thing . . ."

"Well, you knew Wani had AIDS."

"Mm, yah . . . " said Toby uncertainly. He squared up the newspapers in a pile, with distracted firmness. They were the astonishing evidence of his situation. "And my bloody old sis going clean off the rails."

"She has rather landed us in it."

"It's as if she hates Dad."

"It's difficult . . ."

"And hates you too. I mean, how did she get like this?"

It was the long-ago talk by the lake, the solemn explanation . . . "I don't think she hates us," said Nick. "Since she crawled out from under the lithium she's just been in a mood to tell the truth. Actually, she always has been, when you think about it. I'm certain she'd never actually want to hurt us. She's been got at by people who do hate Gerald, perhaps; that's the thing."

"Anyway, it's a fuck-up," said Toby, quickly resisting the role-reversal. And Nick caught that startling thing, the stared-out threat of tears, the miserable twitch of the mouth.

"It's a fuck-up," Nick agreed. He winced at his own readiness to explain Toby's story to him. Poor Toby had been tricked, or not trusted, which seemed a form of trickery, by everyone around him: it was awful, and Nick found a smile creeping out of the corners of his mouth in bizarre amusement.

"I must say the Independent has by far the best-quality photographs," Toby said. "They've achieved consistently high standards."

"Yes, the Telegraph's are very murky in comparison."

"The Mail's somewhat better, though." Toby snapped back the pages. The Mordant Analyst had been given a double spread to explore the whole situation, drawing on his inside knowledge of "the Fedden set." The picture of Toby clasping Sophie on the dance floor at Hawkeswood was one of Russell's. Toby looked away at the floor and still didn't meet Nick's eye when he said, "I don't know quite where this leaves us."

"No," said Nick. "Everything's rather in the air, isn't it."

"I mean, I don't see how you can stay here." Then he did look at Nick for several seconds, and the lovely brown gaze, which had always softened or faltered, didn't do so.

"No, no, of course," said Nick, with a scowl as if Toby was insulting him to suggest he thought he could.

Toby pursed his lips, stood up straight and buttoned his jacket. There was a sense that, though it could have been done better, he'd performed a bit of business, and his uneasy satisfaction carried him quickly to the door. "I'm going to have a word with Ma," he said. "Sorry."

Nick sat for a while, feeling that Toby's anger was the worst part of it, the one utterly unprecedented thing; and looking over the papers in which his own image appeared. He was letting himself in at the front door of this house, and also, four years younger, in a bow tie and his Uncle Archie's dinner jacket, looking very drunk. It was fascinating, if you thought about it, that they