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By Root 996 0

a bench by the lake. "She's pretty volatile, you know," he said, quietly impressed by his own choice of word. "Yah, she has these moods." To Nick the whole house, as yet only imagined, took on the light and shade of moods, the life that was lived there as steeped in emotion as the Oxford air was with the smell of the lake water. "She used to, you know, cut her arms, with a razor blade." Toby winced and nodded. "Thank god she's grown out of all that now." This sounded more challenging than mere moods, and when Nick first met her he found himself glancing tensely at her arms. On one forearm there were neat parallel lines, a couple of inches long, and on the other a pattern of right-angled scars that you couldn't help trying to read as letters; it might have been an attempt at the word ELLE. But they were long healed over, evidence of something that would otherwise be forgotten; sometimes she traced them abstractedly with a finger.

"Looking after the Cat" was how Gerald had put it before they went away, with the suggestion that the task was as simple as that, and as responsible. It was Catherine's house but it was Nick who was in charge. She camped nervously in the place, as though she and not Nick was the lodger. She was puzzled by his love of its pompous spaces, and mocked his knowledgeable attachment to the paintings and furniture. "You're such a snob," she said, with a provoking laugh; coming from the family he was thought to be snobbish about, this was a bit of a facer. "I'm not really," said Nick, as if a small admission was the best kind of denial, "I just love beautiful things." Catherine peered around comically, as though at so much junk. In her parents' absence her instincts were humbly transgressive, and mainly involved smoking and asking strangers home. Nick came back one evening to find her drinking in the kitchen with an old black minicab driver and telling him what the contents of the house were insured for.

At nineteen she already had a catalogue of failed boyfriends, each with a damning epithet, which was sometimes all Nick knew them by: "Crabs" or "Drip-Dry" or "Quantity Surveyor." A lot of them seemed almost consciously chosen for their unacceptability at Kensington Park Gardens: a tramplike Welshman in his forties whom she'd met in the Notting Hill Record Exchange; a beautiful punk with FUCK tattooed on his neck; a Rastafarian from round the corner who moaned prophetically about Babylon and the downfall of Thatcher. Others were public schoolboys and sleek young professionals on the make in the Thatcher slump. Catherine was slight but physically reckless; what drew boys to her often frightened them away. Nick, in his secret innocence, felt a certain respect for her experience with men: to have so many failures required a high rate of preliminary success. He could never judge how attractive she was. In her case the genetic mixture of two good-looking parents had produced something different from Toby's sleepy beauty: Gerald's large confidence-winning mouth had been awkwardly squashed into the slender ellipse of Rachel's face. Catherine's emotions always rushed to her mouth.

She loved anything satirical, and was a clever vocal mimic. When she and Nick got drunk she did funny imitations of her family, so that oddly they seemed not to have gone away. There was Gerald, with his facetious boom, his taste for the splendid, his favourite tags from the Alice books. "Really, Catherine," protested Catherine, "you would try the patience of an oyster." Or, "You recall the branches of arithmetic, Nick? Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision . . . ?" Nick joined in, with a sense of treacherously bad manners. It was Rachel's style that attracted him more, as a code both aristocratic and distantly foreign. Her group sounded nearly Germanic, and the sort of thing she would never belong to; her philistine, pronounced as a French word, seemed to cover, by implication, anyone who said it differently. Nick tried this out on Catherine, who laughed but perhaps wasn't much impressed. Toby she couldn't be bothered to