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By Root 1023 0

garden, and the talk and light clatter carried on the still air. A man called Geoffrey was making everyone laugh, and the women kept calling out his name in excited protest between the semi-audible paragraphs of his story. Out in the communal gardens someone was walking a small white dog, which looked almost luminous as it bobbed and scampered in the late dusk. Above the trees and rooftops the dingy glare of the London sky faded upwards into weak violet heights. In summer, when windows everywhere were open, night seemed made of sound as much as shadow, the whisper of the leaves, the unsleeping traffic rumble, far-off car horns and squeals of brakes; voices, faint shouts, a waveband twiddle of unconnected music. Nick yearned for Leo, away to the north, three miles up the long straight roads, but possibly anywhere, moving with invisible speed on his silver bike. He wondered again in which park the photo of him had been taken; and of course what person, routinely intimate with Leo, had taken it. He felt hollow with frustration and delay. The girl with the white dog came back along the gravel path, and he thought how he might appear to her, if she glanced up, as an enviable figure, poised against the shining accomplished background of the lamplit room. Whereas, looking out, leaning out over the iron railing, Nick felt he had been swept to the brink of some new promise, a scented vista or vision of the night, and then held there.

2

"SOMETHING FOR EVERYBODY!" Gerald Fedden said, striding into the kitchen with a rattling brown-paper carrier bag. "All must have prizes!" He was tanned and tireless, and a lost energy came back into the house with him, the flash of his vanity and confidence—it was almost as though the words of the returning officer were fresh in his ears and he were responding to applause with these high-spirited promises. On the side of the bag was the emblem of a famous Perigueux delicatessen, a blue goose with its head through what looked like a life-saving ring, its beak curling Disney-wise in a complacent smile.

"Yuk, not foie gras," Catherine said.

"In fact this quince jelly is for the Purring One," said Gerald, taking out a jar in a gingham cap and bow and sliding it across the kitchen table.

Catherine said, "Thanks," but left it there and wandered away to the window.

"And what was it for Tobias?"

"The . . . um . . . " Rachel gestured. "The carnet."

"Of course." Gerald rummaged discreetly before passing his son a small notebook, bound in odorous green suede.

"Thanks, Pa," said Toby, who was sprawling in shorts on the long banquette and obliquely reading the paper while he listened to his mother's news. Behind him, the wall was a great hilarious page of family history, with numerous framed photographs of holidays and handshakes with the famous, as well as two wicked caricatures of Gerald, which he had made a point of buying from the cartoonists. When Gerald was in the kitchen, guests always found themselves contrasting him with his grinning, hawk-nosed cartoon image; the comparison was obviously to his advantage, though it couldn't help stirring the suspicion that under his handsome everyday mask this predatory goon might indeed be lurking.

Now, in linen shorts and espadrilles, busying back and forth from the car, he was full of anecdotes about life at the manoir, and mentioned particular local characters to stir up amusement and regret in his children. "It's such a shame we couldn't all be there together. And you know, you really should come down one year, Nick."

"Well, I'd love to," said Nick, who had been hovering with an encouraging but modest expression. Of course it would have been grand to summer with the Feddens at the manoir, but less marvellous, he couldn't help feeling, than staying in London without them. How different the room looked now, with all of them noisily and unnoticingly back in it. Their return marked the end of his custodianship, and his real pleasure in seeing them again was stained with a kind of sadness he associated with adolescence, sadness of time flying and missed