similar moustache all his adult life. Then he, Gordon, had remembered being secretly rather taken by how he had looked with just such a pencilled-in facial addition in a newspaper photograph. And he had since found it a useful talking point. Anyhow, there it was, establishing itself more firmly every day.
That morning Louise had come to his flat because it was a good point from which to set out for the Fanes’ place near the river. She knew that the lodging across the landing from his own was occupied by a West Indian sound engineer called Emmet Berry, and mentioned him conversationally to Gordon as the two were leaving.
‘What’s he like to have in the same house?’ she asked.
‘I hardly see him. He and I keep ourselves pretty much to ourselves.’
‘Doesn’t he make a lot of noise?’
‘Nothing out of the way.’
‘For a boogie, don’t you mean? For a jig?’
‘If you’re telling me I believe in my heart or somewhere that black people make more than their fair share of noise, I’d have to say some of them probably do. But then some white people probably –’
‘Yes, yes, yes. Christ, Gordon, why have you got to be so bloody balanced about everything under the sun? In your world it’s always on the one hand this, but on the other hand that. I’m sorry, but the effect is most uncool.’
‘You don’t sound very sorry,’ said Gordon mildly, ‘I don’t care that much what the effect is, and whatever it may be I thought everybody had stopped saying things were cool or uncool.’
‘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
