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By Root 1194 0

Wani dozing and leaned over him not, as he used to, for the private marvel of the view, but to check that he was alive. He sat by him with a sigh and felt the strange tenderness towards himself that came with looking after someone else, the sense of his own prudence and mortality. He thought it might be like parenthood, the capable concealment of one's worries. He hadn't told Wani, but he was having another HIV test in the afternoon: it was another solemn thing, and even more frightening than it need have been for not being talked about. From the corner of his eye, the video seemed to pullulate, like some primitive life form, with abstract determination. It was an orgy, unattributable organs and orifices at work in a spectrum of orange, pink, and purple. He looked more closely for a moment, with a mixture of scorn and regret. It was what they were already calling a "classic," from the days before the antiseptic sheen of rubbers was added to the porn palette—Wani had hated that development, he was an aesthete at least in that. Turned down low, the actors grunted their binary code—yeah . . . oh yeah, oh yeah . . . yeah . . . oh . . . yeah, yeah . . . oh yeah . . .

"Is the car here?" said Wani, still waking, with a look of dread, as if he longed for his word to be challenged and the trip to be cancelled. His father's chauffeur was to drive him to Harrogate in the maroon Silver Shadow. A nurse was travelling with them, a black-haired, blue-eyed Scotsman called Roy, whom Nick felt pleasantly jealous about. "Roy will be here in a moment," he said, ignoring Wani's weak sulk of resentment; and then, to encourage him, "I must say, he's very cute."

Wani sat up slowly, and swung his legs round. "He speaks his mind, young Roy," he said.

"And what does he say?"

"He's a bit of a bully."

"Nurses have to be pretty firm, I suppose."

Wani pouted. "Not when I'm paying them a thousand pounds a minute, they don't."

"I thought you liked a bit of rough," said Nick, and heard the creaky condescension of his tone. He helped Wani up. "Anyway, four hours in a Rolls-Royce should smooth him out."

"That's just it," said Wani. "He's madly left-wing." And the ghostly smile of an old perversity gleamed for a moment in his face.

When the bell rang, Nick went down and found Roy talking to the chauffeur. Roy was about his own age, wearing dark blue slacks and an open-neck shirt; Mr Damas wore a dark grey suit and funereal tie and a grey peaked cap. They stood at an angle to each other—Roy candid and practical, fired up by the crisis of AIDS, throwing down his own bravery and commitment like a challenge to Mr Damas, who had driven the Ouradis since Wani was a boy and looked on his illness with respect but also, as a creature of Bertrand's, with an edge of blame. The recent newspaper stories had brought shame on him, and it struggled with the higher claims of loyalty in his square face and leather-gloved hands. He straightened his cap before accepting the two suitcases that Nick had brought down.

"So you're not coming, Nick," said Roy, with sexy reprehension.

"No, I've got a few things to sort out here."

"You won't be there to protect me from all these dukes and ladies and what have you."

The sudden reassurance of being flirted with, over Wani's stooping head, was shadowed by a flicker of caution. He was still getting used to the interest of his own case, something extrinsic to himself, which he registered mainly in the way other people assumed they knew him. "I think I'd need protection from them myself," he said.

Roy gave him a funny smile. "Do you know who's going to be there?"

"Everyone," came a wheezy voice.

Roy looked into the back of the Rolls, where Wani was fidgeting resentfully with a rug and the copious spare cushions. "Just get yourself settled down in there," he said, as though Wani was a regular nuisance in class. There was something useful in his briskness; he seemed to take a bleak view and a hopeful one at the same time.

Mr Damas came round and shut the door with its ineffable chunk—it was the sound of the world he moved