‘They had, but they’re starting to again.’
In exchanges like this, he could never quite settle in his mind how far Louise was really ticking him off for being uncool and how far satirically recommending conduct calculated to go down well in a trend-crazed society like the present one. A bit of both, no doubt, unless that was him just being bloody balanced again. It was that kind of uncertainty that kept him and her in their separate establishments instead of moving in together somewhere. That and, he had thought more than once, a certain ambiguity in Louise’s appearance, splendid, radiant, starlet-like at a short distance, slightly chubby, sometimes almost lumpish, when seen close to. Well, perhaps his moustache had a comparably unsettling effect on her.
‘Here’s our bus,’ he said.
Quite soon afterwards, seven persons were gathered in the Fanes’ first-floor sitting-room, a place of thick light-coloured rugs, glass-fronted bookcases and paintings and drawings from earlier in the century. Guests for lunch, or luncheon, consisted of an elderly boring peer of the realm and his elderly drunken wife, a lone man in his fifties who looked like a retired boxer but in fact helped to publish expensive books in Milan, and the relatively unknown Gordon Scott-Thompson and his girlfriend. That was anyway how Jimmie would have described her if left to himself, though he understood the contemporary world well enough to be aware that you were not supposed to call people things like that in it. The young couple, whether or not it was all right to call them that, had turned up not long after peer and wife, whom Jimmie instantly abandoned for the new arrivals.
‘Come in, come in,’ he cried as they were doing so, ‘how absolutely splendid that you’re here,’ and he swept up to the girl and rested his hands on her shoulders. ‘Oh dear, I knew your name as well as I know my own until half a minute ago but now it’s completely vanished.’ He removed his left hand to smooth his hair back, thereby drawing attention to its continuing abundance and distinguished coloration. ‘Do help me out, there’s a darling.’
‘Louise Gardiner.’
‘Louise,’ echoed Jimmie, his right hand still on her shoulder. ‘Does that mean you’re French? If I may say so you don’t look it.’
‘I’m not. English all the way back as far as I know.’
‘Oh I thought so. But the name did make me wonder for an instant.’
At Louise’s side, Gordon admired the assurance of this while privately questioning some of its substance, and hoped he would be in as good shape when his turn to be seventy-six came round. At the same time he did rather wonder at what stage he might be expected to enter the conversation. His moment came after Jimmie had briefly wondered aloud whether there was such a thing as a characteristic English face without shifting his attention from Louise’s.
‘Do forgive me, you are … ?’
Gordon said, ‘Gordon –’
‘We haven’t met, have we?’
‘No, Mr Fane, but having read I think all your –’
‘Come and be introduced.’
A drink, in the shape of a medium-sized glass of champagne, found its way into Gordon’s hand after he had met two people called Lord and Lady Bagshot and just before meeting a latecomer in a high-necked sweater called Count somebody. The champagne tasted rather nasty to Gordon, but then champagne had never been his drink, and besides this sample of it could not in fact be nasty, because Jimmie Fane was known to be quite an authority on wines, had in the 1950s published a couple of books on the subject. Anyway, for the moment there was no alternative to be seen.
The view that Jimmie’s drinks could never be nasty required some modification over lunch, or luncheon. The meal was taken in a room on the ground floor facing the street. Here on a sideboard were ranged three bottles of still wine, two whites and a red, dl three with their labels facing the wall. They stayed where they were until the first course, a properly made vegetable soup, had come and gone. Then Jimmie went round the circular table pouring the white, his large and efficient right hand continuing to hide the label. As Gordon soon discovered, this wine, unchilled, was dry to the point of sharpness and, he thought, not at all good with the well-done roast beef it was perhaps meant to help down. He drank sparingly of it. So did the other guests, except for the sweatered count, who from first to last had nothing to say of it or of anything else, but drained his glass at a swallow. Was he truly a count? It still seemed perfectly possible.
Lord Bagshot spoke up. ‘What is this stuff we’re drinking, Jimmie?’
‘It comes from the prettiest little vineyard you ever saw, twenty miles or so south of the upper Loire.’
‘M’m. It’s only my opinion, I know, but it doesn’t seem to me to go too well with this very nice beef.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘I notice you’re not drinking it.’
‘No,’ agreed Jimmie. Not quite surreptitiously but without attracting much attention, he had helped himself to some of the red wine and replaced the bottle on the sideboard behind him, its label still out of sight. ‘The quack told me to avoid dry white wine with my acidulous stomach. Don’t tell me you’re in the same case, Basil, because if so …’ His voice died away before he could reveal what he might do if so.
‘No, I’m not,’ admitted Lord Bagshot. He forbore from going on to say that, whether acidulous or not, a stomach was apt to welcome what must have been at least a tolerable claret more heartily than a tepid Muscadet with hot roast beef. All he did was push his barely tasted glass away from him, an action perhaps unnoticed by Jimmie, who at that moment was engaged in recharging his own.
Gordon had been placed between Louise and Lady Bagshot. Without trying he could think of plenty he wanted to say to Louise, but little of it seemed sayable then and there, and no amount of trying was ever going to suggest to him anything at all to say to Lady Bagshot, who had one of the largest faces he had ever seen surmounting a human neck and whose spectacles were in proportion. Not that she had the air of someone who wanted to be talked to, being quite satisfied with the companionship of a half-bottle of vodka stowed between times in a beaded woollen bag she kept within her direct reach. Before her stood an untouched bowl of cooling soup and a sparse plate of cooling beef. She was vigorously smoking cigarettes.
On her other side sat the count and beyond him Joanna Fane, who was giving him a full account of a visit to the opera paid perhaps earlier that week, perhaps a decade or two before. As he had been doing, the man nodded and smiled and now and then dilated his eyes sympathetically, drank and had his glass refilled. It might have been that he had had his tongue torn out by an indignant peasantry.
Many things might have been true of him without upsetting Gordon, who got conscientiously on with the task of sorting out impressions. The house, a few doors down from the King’s Road towards the river, was only a room and a passage broad but it ran back some way, and no doubt fell into one or another upper category of posh people’s praise like rather ravishing. Gordon could not have said much about things like lamp fittings and cutlery but he could tell they were expensive here without being either flashy or new. The ceilings had the look of having been the work of somebody in particular and over the sideboard there hung an oil painting of foreign parts that had a distinctly pricey appearance. Yes, but what about the couple who lived here?
A glance in Jimmie’s direction showed him to be looking straight at Gordon. So did a second glance a moment later, with the increment that this time he was frowning slightly and evidently concentrating his attention on Gordon’s moustache, until a great yawn supervened. Gordon could so vividly imagine Jimmie’s high voice asking him to be a good chap and try not to stare in that extraordinary fashion that he lost no time in transferring his gaze to Joanna. She too proved to be looking