but otherwise stays immobile.
I place the tea back on the table. They have given it to me without a spoon or a stirrer and the sugar has sunk to the bottom like sediment.
‘I thought he seemed entirely himself,’ I say.
Obviously, I am lying.
2 May
Kitchen, Tipworth Priory, 7.30 p.m.
WE DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING as we walked back through to the kitchen. Our champagne flutes were empty. There was a distance between us, solid as concrete. I regretted my comment about not staying over. Stupid of me to say it. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
‘So here, LS, we need your advice,’ Ben said, pointing towards a blank wall at the bottom of a narrow staircase in the back of the house. It must have once been used by servants, I thought, staring at the stripped wooden steps. Although did monks have servants? I wasn’t sure. It didn’t seem a particularly monkish thing to have.
‘Oh. How so?’
‘We want a big piece of art. To lift it a bit, y’know.’
A few years ago, Ben started saying y’know, eliding the two words to form a seamless whole. It was around the time certain politicians started eschewing the glottal stop in order to demonstrate their man-of-the-people credentials. I suppose it was intended to denote a certain informality, a lightness of touch, a sense that, in spite of Ben’s enormous pile of inherited wealth and his aggressively successful hedge fund, he was in truth just an easy-going guy. Someone you could talk to. Someone you could kick a ball around with. Someone of whom one could say, ‘Oh Ben, he’s great. One of us. No airs and graces.’
This reputation was important to Ben. At school, it came to him naturally. Later in life, it was one he cultivated, and I found it less convincing. As a teenager, he had been touchingly sincere. These days, he saw sincerity as a valuable asset and it wasn’t quite the same thing. Admittedly, people who didn’t know him as well as I did gobbled it up. Ben acquired friends with ease. He had never liked being alone. And now, in this vast house, surrounded by sound engineers and gardeners and waiting staff, anticipating the arrival of some three hundred and fifty guests to celebrate his fortieth birthday, he should have been in his element.
‘What kind of thing were you thinking?’ I asked, knowing Ben wouldn’t have a clue.
‘Oh, fuck knows. Something … modern. And big.’ He laughed, rubbing his nose. ‘What’s the name of that guy Serena likes so much? The guy who does the graffiti?’
So fucking predictable.
‘Banksy.’
‘Yeah. Him.’
‘Mmm. Possibly a bit passé now.’
‘Ha! I knew you’d know.’
‘I’ll have a think,’ I said, knowing that I would do no such thing. It was clear no one would ever see this part of the house. Serena wouldn’t dream of asking for my advice anywhere that actually counted.
‘Thanks, mate.’ He squeezed my arm. ‘Let’s get back to the girls.’
Always ‘girls’, never ‘women’. It drove Lucy mad.
In the kitchen, Serena and my wife were perched awkwardly on high stools on opposite sides of a free-standing unit. The unit’s surface appeared to be constructed out of four-inch-thick white marble but as I approached, I realised it was a sort of galvanised rubber. When I touched it, it had a texture like a fireman’s hose. A lemon squeezer constructed out of chrome and resembling a rocket launcher stood ostentatiously in the centre.
‘… nightmare, you can’t imagine,’ Serena was saying. She raised her head at the sound of our footsteps, giving a short smile that quickly dissolved.
‘What are you two gossiping about?’ Ben bent and started rubbing Serena’s shoulders. She made a show of stretching her neck, moving her head from side to side.
‘I’m soooo knotted up,’ she said.
‘I know, sweetie. You’ve been working too hard.’
‘Has there been a lot to do?’ Lucy asked. I caught her eye. We shared a flash of amusement. Neither of us can take Serena seriously when she talks about being busy.
‘Don’t get me started,’ she replied. ‘You just cannot rely on people doing what they’re meant to do. And then there’s all the added security we’ve had to—’ She broke off. A warning look from Ben.
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘Oh, it’s only … well, we weren’t really meant to say anything …’
‘No, darling. We were sworn to secrecy.’
‘Oh come on, babe, it’s only Martin and Lucy.’
I noted the ‘only’.
‘What security?’ Lucy asked.
‘There’s a notion,’ Ben started, ‘but I can’t stress enough, it really is only a notion, that we might be expecting a very important guest.’
He paused, full of self-importance. I refused to encourage him and turned to look out of the window at the kitchen garden, filled with terracotta pots of herbs and flowering jasmine.
‘The Prime Minister,’ Serena squealed, unable to contain herself.
‘Darling.’ His hand came to a stop on her shoulder, the fingers pressing down next to her collarbone so that the crescent moons of his nails turned white. ‘We don’t know whether—’
‘No, no, I know. But he said he’d make every effort.’
‘Wow,’ Lucy said, with no enthusiasm.
‘She didn’t vote for him,’ I explained.
‘Did you?’ Ben asked me. ‘Or are you still pretending to be left-wing?’
‘I’d say that was none of your business, Ben,’ Lucy said, sharply.
He laughed.
‘Sorry, Luce, sorry. You’re right. No more political talk.’
The Prime Minister was an old family friend of Ben’s. His name was Edward but as soon as he’d been elected leader, he had started asking everyone to call him Ed in the vain hope that everyone would forget about his Etonian background. His and Ben’s mothers had known each other way back when. I had met him twice at Ben’s dinner parties, long before he became smooth and polished and airbrushed, one of those public men incapable of shaking a hand without clasping it. I didn’t have much time for him, truth be told. But Serena had always been pathetically impressed. She enjoyed proximity to power. I sipped my champagne. ‘It’ll be nice to see Ed again.’
‘Oh, have you met him?’
‘Yes, several times. At yours. For dinner.’
He nodded vaguely.
‘Of
