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By Root 1081 0

assess him. "Come in and close the door, for god's sake," said Toby, beckoning from the vast bed where he was propped up among sprawling friends. He had been given the King's Room, where Edward VII had slept—the swags of blue silk above the bedhead were gathered into a vaguely comic gilded crown. On the opposite wall hung a comfortable Renoir nude. Nick picked his way between groups sitting on the floor in front of an enormous sofa where fat Lord Shepton was lying with his tie undone and his head on the thigh of an attractive drunk girl. The curtains were parted and a window open to carry the reek of marijuana far away from the nose of the Home Secretary. Somehow they had re-created the mood of a college room late at night, girls' stockinged feet stretched out across boyfriends' knees, smoke in the air, two or three voices dominating. Nick felt the charm as well as the threat of the group. Gareth Lane was holding forth about Hitler and Goebbels, and his lecturing drone and yapping laughs at his own puns brought back something dreary from the Oxford days. He was said to be the "ablest historian of his year," but he had failed to get a first, and seemed now to be acting out some endless redemptive viva. The talk went on, but there felt to Nick's tingling drunk ears to be a residual silence in the room, on which his own movements and words were an intrusion . . . and yet left no trace. Several of his other pals were here, but the two months since term had distanced them more than he could explain. Some simple but strong and long-prepared change had occurred, they had taken up their real lives, and left him alone in his. He came back and perched on the edge of the bed and Toby leaned forward and passed him the joint.

"Thanks . . . " Nick smiled at him, and at last some old sweetness of reassurance glowed between them, what he'd been waiting for all night.

"God, darling, you smell like a tart's parlour," Toby said. Nick carried on gazing at him, paralysed for the moment by the need to hold in the smoke, a tickle in his throat, blushing with shame and pleasure. He was holding in the unprecedented "darling" and it was making him as warm and giddy as the pot. Then he let out the smoke and saw the baldly hetero claims of the rest of the remark. He said,

"And how would you know?"—wondering primly if Toby really had been to a tart's parlour. It was an image of him lurching up a narrow staircase.

Toby winked. "Having a good time?"

"Yes, fantastic." Nick looked around appreciatively, glossing over his inner vision of the night as a long stumbling journey, half chase, half flight, like one of his country-house dreams, his staircase dreams. "What's happened to Sophie, by the way?"

"She had to go back to London. Yeah. She's got an audition on Monday."

"Ah . . . right . . . " This was good news to Nick, and Toby himself, drunk, stoned, eyes glistening, seemed happy about it—he liked the adult note of responsibility in sending her home, and he liked being free of her too. He raised his voice and said,

"Oh, do shut up about fucking Goebbels!" But after a brief incredulous whirr Gareth's shock-proof mechanism rattled on.

Toby was king tonight, on his great big bed, and his friends for once were his subjects. He was acting the role with high spirits, in a childishly approximate way. Nick found it very touching and exciting. As the pot took its delayed effect, squeezing and freeing like some psychic massage, he reached back and took Toby's hand, and they lolled there like that for thirty or forty seconds of heaven. It was as if the room had been steeped in a mood of amorous hilarity as sweetly unignorable as "Je Promets." He recalled what Polly had said in the garden long before, and thought that maybe, at last, for once, Toby would actually be his.

There was a surrounding murmur of stoned gossip, heads nodding over rolling papers, the figures blurred but glowing in the lamplight. "But did the Fiihrer license the Final Solution?" Gareth asked himself; and it was clear that the arguments on this famous question were about to be passed