to be literary too. A critical study of what I’ve written. I’m not sure he’s up to that. For all I know he may be. I hope he’s been properly educated. He says he’ll send me what he calls his c.v. Fascinating. Do you fancy him?’
‘Darling, please. With that moustache?’
‘I’m sorry, darling, yes. It didn’t look like hair at all.’
‘More like something that’s been turned on a lathe. Anyway he’s about thirty years younger than me. What did you make of little Louise? I saw you firing on all cylinders.’
‘Pretty as a picture but rather stodgy. Filling, like plum duff, you know. Do you think the noble lord enjoyed himself?’
‘I shouldn’t be surprised. He didn’t care for being given wine he didn’t care for.’
‘I hope not. Now he knows how it feels.’
‘I didn’t care for that warm white stuff either.’
‘Yes, I’m sorry, darling. I just couldn’t think of a way of getting a decent drink into your glass.’
After a pause, Joanna said, ‘Lady B sensibly brought her own tipple as usual.’
‘I wonder when those two talked to each other last.’
‘You can’t really expect it of her. She talked to me a bit at one stage but she wasn’t making much sense.’
‘He might as well keep quiet too.’
‘But both of them are positive conversational giants compared with Carlo.’
‘These voluble Italians,’ said Jimmie.
‘Darling, I wish you’d have another go at him about his English. He gets about one word in twenty of what I say to him and one in a hundred of anybody else and apparently he can’t say anything himself.’
‘Not in English. His Italian’s fluent enough.’
‘Why doesn’t he stay in Italy then? There can’t be anything for him here.’
‘Something to do with his tax, as I said. And he likes eating in friends’ houses in London because he hasn’t got to grapple with English as he’d have to in a restaurant.’
‘Can’t he go to an Italian restaurant? There are dozens all over London.’
‘As I told you, he doesn’t like Italian food.’
‘But why do we keep asking him here? Actually I can tell you the answer to that. Because he keeps asking us to that palazzo place of his and we keep going there. After all, he is a count.’
‘Well, if you must hark back to the primordial rudiments of everything,’ said Jimmie in a weary tone.
‘Hard luck on those youngsters, getting let in for two duds and one semi-dud.’
‘Only duds conversationally.’
‘Oh, you mean it’s much more important that they’ve all got handles to their names?’
‘That Scotchman and his bit of stuff would think so.’
‘I can’t see it cutting a single millimetre of ice with either him or her.’
‘Well, what did you really make of that lot at lunch-time?’ Gordon asked Louise.
‘I wasn’t particularly struck by any of them.’
‘Not even by poor old Jimmie? He was doing his best, after all.’
‘Doing his best to what?’
‘Well, to make you feel at home or something of the sort.’
‘If he’d wanted to do that he could have asked us to meet somebody a bit more interesting than his bloody lordship and his piss-artist elephant’s-bum-faced four-eyed boiler of a wife. Oh, and that asshole of an Italian who never opened his mouth except to put food and drink into it. Not that I wanted him to talk. No, poor old Jimmie was showing me and you and Mrs Jimmie and possibly others that there was life in the old dog yet. Some hopes. By the look of him he hasn’t had it up for half a century.’
‘I reckoned he asked those people to impress us with his aristocratic connections.’
‘Fancy that. Well, all I can say is he didn’t impress me.’ Louise spoke sulkily rather than with any heat.
‘Nor me, actually.’
‘If you’re right about him wanting to impress us he’s even more pathetic than I thought.’
‘Yes, I think there is something rather pathetic about poor old Jimmie.’
‘I don’t mean that sort of pathetic. And you must be careful of poor old Jimmie. He’s bad news.’
‘I’m sorry I inflicted him and the rest of them on you.’
‘That’s all right, it was quite an interesting experience considered as an item of social anthropology. A chance to see the British class system in action.’
‘You must mean in inaction. Decline from whatever it may once have been.’
‘Christ, Gordon, after that display?’
‘All … bangs and coloured lights. A hundred years ago, even up to 1939, the thing really had some teeth in it. There was an empire to run and a comparatively barbaric peasantry and proletariat to be kept down. What’s left of either of them today? The, the remnants of that class system operate in the other direction. Dukes and what-not complain that their titles hold them back, get in the way of their careers in banking or photography or whatever it may be. The British class system, as you quaintly call it, is –’
‘I know, it’s dead, which up to a point is a good thing, but beyond that point isn’t so good. Don’t go on about all those dukes who can’t get on in banking because they’ve admitted they’re dukes unless you want me to burst out crying. But anyhow, please don’t lecture at me.’
‘I didn’t mean to. But you must admit things have come to a pretty pass when you get someone like Jimmie Fane hobnobbing with an Italian count who never learnt to speak English. Even fifty years ago one wouldn’t –’
‘Fuck fifty years ago, and it’s time you realized there’s nothing I must do, all right.’ Louise sighed and stretched. ‘Except now I must be going and things like that.’
‘Oh darling, do stay a little longer.’
Gordon got to his feet as Louise had done and grappled with her briefly in an amatory way, at the end of which she disengaged herself without hostility and telephoned for a minicab. Within a few minutes she was being borne away from his flat towards the rather more commodious one she shared with a girl associate. It might have mildly surprised
