Inspired by a morning of unheralded autumn sunshine, prompted, too, by the memory that Alison had begged for contributions to a big jumble sale in aid of the helpline, Jamie and Sam purged the flat. To mark the end of Jamie’s life as an office animal, ‘and to celebrate the beginning of the rest of it’ as he put it, they went through cupboards and drawers. Jamie began by hurling all his striped cotton office shirts into a heap in the middle of the floor and after them, with only a moment’s hesitation, his pinstriped suit. Sam tossed several books on reinsurance and economics after it, a tax guide, a bouquet of silk ties, which he pronounced ‘poncey’ and, ignoring Jamie’s protests, the matt black calculator. Then the purge expanded into a total clear-out, filling bags and boxes with records, books, CDs, jerseys, mugs, a joke tea pot, a sickly African violet, three bottles of untouched cologne, assorted pornography, a hair dryer, a rolodex whose cards Jamie had never finished filling with addresses, a travel iron, an electronic phrasebook and an asparagus steamer. One by one they had snatched objects from shelves and out of corners, held them up to one another and, with Jamie laughing at their daring, condemned them before consigning them to oblivion. Jamie wondered if Sam felt he was expunging traces of predecessors. He stopped for a moment or two, watching Sam throw open a cupboard door revealing, with a kind of relish, another hoard of redundant items. It struck him that he had never had a boyfriend before, that his first would probably prove his last, and that some might find this sad.
‘What?’ Sam asked, catching him staring.
‘Nothing.’
‘You don’t use telephone directories. Nobody does. Why do you keep them?’
‘Security?’ Jamie suggested, heaving up the first bag of things for the jumble sale to carry out to the car. Half-way downstairs a ripple of self-pity acute as a dizzy spell threatened to make him break down and cry, and he had to lean against the staircase wall to wait for it to pass.
He returned from the car to find Sam had cleared the mantelshelf of its clutter of postcards, announcements and invitations and put Sally’s idol there instead. Jamie stopped in the doorway, looking at how the squat goddess now seemed to preside over the newly purified room. Sam paused in the act of tossing the cards one by one into the kitchen bin, briefly following Jamie’s gaze.
‘She looks better there,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ Jamie agreed. ‘It’s more like her place now.’
‘Jesus! Do you know him?’ Sam exclaimed. Jamie looked over and found him holding out the gilt-edged invitation to Nick Godfreys’s engagement ball.
‘Of course,’ he muttered darkly. ‘He was the one that sacked me, wasn’t he? Bin it.’
‘No.’ Sam fingered the piece of card. ‘When you told me I never realised he was the Godfreys they’re always writing about in the papers.’
‘Bin it, Sam. All that’s over and done with now.’
‘Are you kidding?’ Sam was incredulous.
‘What’s wrong?’
Sam laughed.
‘I want to go.’
‘You’re not invited, berk. Anyway, he expected me to take a woman; the bastard actually said so. In front of everybody. I wouldn’t be seen dead there. Even with both Liz Taylor and Myra Toye on my arms. Bin it.’ He tried to take the card but Sam held it out of reach, smiling mischievously.
‘Look,’ he said, swinging away from Jamie’s clutching hands. ‘It says James Pepper and Friend. I’m your Friend. Let’s go.’
‘Now you’re kidding.’
‘No I’m not.’
Once again Jamie lunged after the offensive card but Sam slipped it down inside his tee-shirt and grinned. Jamie had noticed he was always more playful at weekends, less remorselessly macho when freed from the dead weight of exhaustion and his workmates’ potential ridicule. Out on the streets he became more guarded again, as though on the watch for people who might recognise him. He thrust a hand up inside Sam’s shirt for the card but was tugged down onto the sofa instead. Sam gave him a brusque, toothpasty kiss.
‘I do love you,’ Jamie said, the statement still sufficiently unfamiliar on his lips to give him a piquant sense of risk.
‘But I love you more,’ Sam said simply, then held up the card to examine it again. ‘I’ve never been to a posh git do before. I don’t know any famous people. It’d be a laugh.’
‘It’d be hell in a basket.’
‘No it wouldn’t.’ Sam ruffled the hair at the nape of Jamie’s neck with the stiff card, tickling him. ‘Go on,’ he murmured. ‘You can hire me a suit. After all. Think of all those lovely people you didn’t say a proper goodbye to.’
‘Huh.’
‘Are you ashamed of me?’
‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘But I haven’t met any of your friends.’
‘I don’t have any friends.’
‘What about all those names and addresses we just threw out?’
‘Exactly. We threw them out. If they were proper friends, I’d have kept them. I mean, I do know people. I could pick up the phone and get us asked out to dinner with a load of people but, well, I don’t see the point when I can be with you.’
‘You mean like instead?’
‘Yes. No. Listen. Would you really like to go?’
Sam considered the invitation, sensing a serious proposition.
‘Yeah,’ he said at last, smiling to himself. ‘Yeah.’
So they took Jamie’s dinner suit to the dry cleaners and hired a second, longer-legged one for Sam. Unexpectedly he didn’t look like a bouncer in it, but like some gaunt, dissident poet instead.
Sam drove them out towards Westmarket. Jamie had only recently discovered that Sam, though earless, had a driving licence and enjoyed indulging him at the wheel. Sam drove much as he made love; with an almost indignant concentration on the matter in hand. He manoeuvred with fast assurance and delighted in the car’s speedy acceleration which allowed him to pull away from traffic lights before anyone else. When Jamie called him a ‘Boy Racer’ he merely grinned, taking the mockery as acknowledgement of something of which he was proud. He changed gear by making rapid swipes at the gear stick with the flat of his hand and soon became quite rapt in the business of driving. Conversations died on his lips as he concentrated on a piece of risky overtaking or enjoyed a sweep of steady acceleration up a hill. Jamie lay back in the passenger seat, sucking peppermints, discreetly watching the aggressive flicking of Sam’s eyes across the road before them, and nursing a comforting hard-on. Occasionally Sam would swear at another driver under his breath and Jamie would smile to himself.
Nick Godfrey’s house perched like a creamy wedding cake in a few acres of tidy parkland. There were big gates with octagonal lodges, a lake, old cedar trees, clean and fluffy sheep and a watchful family of horses. Some crucial element seemed to be missing, however, so the scene felt oddly two-dimensional, even temporary, like an elaborate film set. After showing their invitation to the security guards at a gatehouse, who handed it back with a yellow card to be placed inside the windscreen, Sam drove them through the park and Jamie found himself picturing the gigantic props and weights that held such extravagant scenery in position.
‘Those sheep are probably rented for the evening,’ he laughed.
They left the car to be parked in a field, and joined the throng that was mounting the shallow flight of steps into the Palladian portico. A few press photographers, carefully vetted, had been allowed this far. They jockeyed for position at the foot of the steps, calling out with bogus familiarity the first names of celebrities they recognised as their cameras flashed and whirred.
‘Unreal,’ Sam murmured.
‘That’s the whole idea,’ said Jamie. ‘They’re probably hired along with the sheep.’
There were stylized braziers between the pillars, flaming from a cunningly concealed gas supply and the open doors had been lushly framed with a construction of foliage, fruit, flowers and gold silk swags.
Had Godfreys been standing in the hall to greet his guests, with his politically astute choice of fiancée at his side, there might have been some sense that this was his party, his house. But he was nowhere in sight. The crush of dark-suited men and glossily turned-out women allowed their coats to be taken by one lot of staff and accepted flutes of champagne from trays held by another. They then fanned out across the hall and into the sequence of grandiose, high-walled rooms, taking possession of the place as effortlessly as if it were a new nightclub just opened for their informed critique.
For all his bluster, Sam’s frequent questions over the previous few days had revealed his nervousness at the prospect of a doorstep introduction, and he visibly relaxed as the two of them moved away from the phalanx of attentive staff. Jamie felt calmer too. Since Godfreys had not been at the door, and had invited such a mob, it was perfectly possible for them now to pass the entire evening without encountering him. His only concern was that, despite having already condemned it as ‘rat’s piss’, Sam was putting away the champagne as though it were sweet and innocuous water.
Drawn by the sound of a jazz band, Sam led the way to the ballroom and seemed quite prepared to take to the floor on his own. Few people were dancing, the bulk of the guests forming a still sober, inhibited audience. Among those who were attempting to invent appropriate steps for the music’s hectic pace, however, Jamie made out their host and his tall, blonde intended – the health minister’s daughter. He managed to persuade Sam just in time that it might be wiser to watch from the candle-spotted shadows for a while.
Although the house was huge, the party took only a short while to fill the available space. The upper floors were barred to the curious by a discreet silk rope in Tory blue. A sequence of large lower rooms with interconnecting double doors led from the ball-room at one corner of the building, to a dining room at another. The dining room boasted a vast buffet – glistening salmon, roast hams aglow with honey and mustard, daunting pies, cauldrons of salad, unapproachably perfect rafts of asparagus. Guests were free to serve themselves and eat at tables dotted around the room. In the saloons in between, guests talked, smoked, lolled carefully on sofas and gazed about them with nervous, hunted expressions. For those not yet hungry enough to raid the buffet, or too vain to be seen loading a plate, staff circulated with trays of tempting one-mouthful morsels. Whenever Sam found something he liked, he took several at once. Somebody somewhere was washing up constantly – glasses of champagne were not topped up, they were simply replaced. Flickering braziers like the ones in the portico marked the way across a lawn from some French windows to a silk-lined tent where more up-to-date dance music throbbed. Several men, any one of whom could have been a Government minister, boogied with sweaty ineptitude around younger women, who danced too well and were dressed too daringly to be their wives.
Jamie and Sam danced briefly, at the more crowded end of the tent, then returned to the house, disillusioned now that the party held no unexplored corners. They raided the buffet and sat, munching, at one end of a long sofa where a very young couple were strenuously kissing. Pausing mid-supper, Sam eyed the pair; the boy, pink-cheeked, neck straining in his formal collar, the girl, all red crushed velvet and tumbling, black hair, her lit cigarette held carefully out of singeing range. He snorted, gazed at the numerous pairs milling about them, then turned back to Jamie.
‘When you get down to it, it’s like bleeding Noah’s Ark, isn’t it? Boy girl. Girl boy. Boy girl. It’s no different from a Friday night disco. If this lot had handbags, they’d be dancing round them.’
‘Well he was hardly going to lay on lesbian soul,’ Jamie said.
‘That old guy’s staring at us.’
‘Which?’
‘The one with the … Oh I don’t know. Him.’
Sam pointed and Jamie tried to see who he meant.
‘Which?’
‘The only guy in the room with a woman his own age,’ Sam said, exasperated. ‘He’s coming over now.’
Jamie saw a man slightly younger than his grandfather. He had short silver hair and his old-fashioned white tie and tails had been tailored for a younger man who had since shrunk. The woman with him was tall, unmade-up and, in her dingy floor length tent dress, looked priestly and aloof. The old man paused and quizzically stared with his head on one side, trying to place Jamie, who hesitantly lurched to his feet out of the sofa’s depths. Suddenly the old man was smiling broadly.
‘Hello?’ Jamie asked.
‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ The accent was German or Jewish, or both.
‘Your face is familiar but …’ Jamie shrugged in apology. ‘I’m sorry. I’m lousy at faces.’
‘Don’t worry. It’s the little stroke I had. Nobody recognises me any more. Heini Liebermann. Your grandfather used to work at my father’s studios. We met at Teddy’s sixtieth birthday party. Now, you remember that, I think.’
‘But of course,’ said Jamie, still uncertain, and shook the cold little hand that was proffered.
‘You’ve grown up a lot since then. I hardly recognised you!’
‘Really?’ Jamie laughed. ‘It seems like yesterday.’ He had a recollection of The Roundel abuzz with merrier, less conventional guests than the ones around them now, its garden decked with Japanese lanterns, its riverbank rendered astonishingly dramatic by a few cheap barbecue flares. It seemed months since he had last seen or even spoken to his grandfather. He felt a pang of remorse and a sudden, sweet homesickness for the house of his boyhood.
‘You’ve lost weight,’ Heini Liebermann said, then, thawing, he added, ‘Not really my sort of thing.’ With an eloquent glance at the people laying waste the buffet, he explained, ‘My famous goddaughter dragged me along. I’ve lost her in the crowd somewhere, she’s such a serious worker-of-rooms, but then I ran into dear Beatrix.’ He tapped the woman’s elbow to attract her lost attention and chuckled. ‘Beatrix is a Name,’ he said. ‘You’ve probably sent her demands for payment. Lost heaps of her husband’s money, but you don’t care, do you Beatrix? This is Edward Pepper’s grandson, Beatrix. James. Beatrix Maxwell.’
‘Good evening.’ The woman extended a heavily ringed hand.
‘Jamie threw away the promise of a singing career to work for bloody Godfreys,’ Heini told her.
‘Very sensible,’ she said. ‘If a little sad.’
‘This is Sam,’ said Jamie, clumsily gesturing to Sam, who was still sprawled on the sofa, watching the introductions.
‘How do you do?’ Heini said, with a slight, ironical bow to spare him the trouble of getting up.
‘All right?’ Sam replied.
‘And what do you do?’ Mrs Maxwell asked. Sam stood.
‘I’m a builder,’ he told her.
‘A contractor?’ asked Heini.
‘No,’ Sam said steadily. ‘A builder.’
Jamie saw Mrs Maxwell’s eyes widen with alarm and Heini’s with interest. Her social training had clearly been long and comprehensive, however.
‘And have you,’ she asked, ‘built anything I’d have visited?’
‘Working on a new hospital,’ Sam said.
‘I think we should be getting some supper, Beatrix,’ Heini cut in. ‘You know how hungry you get. Perhaps, er, Sam would like some more?’
‘Wouldn’t say no.’
‘James?’ Heini turned to Jamie.
‘No thanks.’
Sam winked at Jamie and walked with the curious pair back to the buffet. Jamie’s cheeks burned. He raised his glass automatically to his lips but found it was empty. In a flash, a waitress was at his side with a tray, her deferential efficiency implying that his discomfiture was visible even across a crowded room. Following her murmured directions, he slipped away with his fresh glass to the cloakrooms to recover.
It was the first time his two lives had collided, and the experience left him mortified. He did not count Alison, since she already knew Sam, and he had always kept her squarely in both his lives at once. But he had introduced Sam to no-one. Sam had not even met Miriam or his grandfather. In this brief encounter with Heini Liebermann – who Jamie felt sure was an old closet case, hiding behind a statuesque woman of irreproachable finances – he had suddenly seen how the world would view them, Edward Pepper’s grandson and his ‘bit of rough’. When he was alone with Sam he scarcely noticed their social differences, or rather, he only noticed them so as to celebrate them. They provided, within the two men’s intimacy, an equivalent of gender difference, a necessary friction. He had agreed to bring Sam to the ball in a spirit of impetuous transgression, but once there he had been forced guiltily to recognise his own inverted snobbery. Faced with the potentially disastrous collision between Sam and Beatrix Maxwell, he had frozen, socially incapable, and been shown up by the older, worldlier man’s unflustered, uncalculating good manners.
He peed, splashed his face with cold water and was leaning against the sink to pluck up courage to go back into the fray when the door opened and an elegant blonde woman came in whom he thought he recognised. An actress, perhaps, or a newscaster.
‘Christ, I’m sorry,’ he began, startled. ‘I didn’t think to look at the sign –’
‘No no,’ she said. ‘This is the gents but the ladies has a queue, as always, and I’m desperate.’ She threw him a dazzling smile and he remembered she was on television in a morning programme Sam usually watched on days off work. She touched the thick silver hoops on her wrists.
‘You wouldn’t mind awfully guarding the door for me?’ she pleaded, ruefully bargaining with his recognition and her fame.
‘Of course,’ he promised and, while she shut herself in the loo, he leaned against the cloakroom door to protect her from further awkwardness. She emerged in a cloud of freshly squirted scent that swiftly filled the small room and tickled Jamie’s nose.
‘Thanks,’ she said, washing her hands. ‘Friend of the host?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Not really.’
‘Me neither.’
Rapidly, expertly, she reapplied her lipstick then unscrewed a little compartment in one end of her silver lipstick holder and tapped out two tiny shards of dark brown gel.
‘Want some?’ she asked, holding them out in the palm of her hand.
‘What is it?’ she asked, suspiciously.
‘Nothing much,’ she said airily. ‘Helps you dance. Makes the world a little friendlier.’ She smiled again, showing her teeth, and the chunky silver chain at her neck caught the light. He hesitated only a moment. His experience of drugs was limited to dope offered him by various Beards behind Miriam’s back, some speed he had once bought on a New Year’s Eve to help him stay awake for an all-night party, and some Ecstasy Sam’s scaffolder-bouncer friend had sold them recently, which had proved to be little more than overpriced aspirin. On the evidence of these, he did not seem especially susceptible.
‘What the hell,’ he said, loath to appear cowardly in the face of her generosity. ‘Try anything once.’
‘Under your tongue’s the quickest way,’ she said, as he took a piece of the glistening stuff. ‘Like those little pink heart attack pills.’
In unison they opened their mouths and tucked the drug under their tongues, then, with a smile as mischievous as her previous two had been brittle, she opened the door and sailed out into the corridor, leaving Jamie to enjoy the envious stares of the men now queuing outside. He allowed himself to smirk impudently back at them then saw that one of his former colleagues, a dim public-school fraud, was at the back of the queue, adjusting a collapsed black tie.
‘George?’
‘Jamie! Good to see you, my old mate.’ George shook his hand. ‘Glad you could make it. How’s life treating you?’
‘Fine. Just fine,’ Jamie said, hoping he wouldn’t ask where he was working now.
‘Just met your friend Sam, out there, with that old gambler Beatrix Maxwell.’
‘Oh really?’
Jamie braced himself for the worst, expecting sarcasm or clumsy prurience, but was surprised by a look of unguarded amiability on George’s puddingy face.
‘Great bloke,’ George said. ‘Lovely sense of humour.’
Jamie passed on gratefully, charged up now with a desire to find Sam and make amends, introduce him to people. He had been behaving disgustingly, he now saw, by hiding Sam away in shady corners, dodging Godfreys and his friends like a fugitive, counting the hours till he could reasonably suggest they return home. Now his only wish was to show him off, but he could see neither Sam nor Heini Liebermann. He ran into Beatrix Maxwell, who told him, rather stiffly, that she had left them out in the portico and thought perhaps they were now walking in the garden. Jamie searched on but found only a succession of former colleagues and city contacts. The drug had begun to take effect, for these now seemed the most attractive men and women imaginable, sheeny and pantherine. He felt himself overflowing with remorse and affection at their blandly polite enquiries. The fire in the braziers, the golden pyramids of fruit, a dripping ice sculpture of a swan filled with ice cream, all started to glow before his eyes with a glamour they had not held before. He finally found Sam when the music now pounding from the disco tent drew him inexorably back across the lawn. Subject to the same narcotic spell which had transformed the other guests, Sam now loomed out of the dark like a very archangel and, overwhelmed with relief and lust, Jamie could not help but clutch at his chest, his arms, his hands. Sam laughed, pawing him back, assuming he had been drinking.
‘You’ve made up for lost time. I thought you were driving us home, you bastard,’ Sam said. ‘What are you on? Where’s your glass?’
‘I dunno,’ Jamie mumbled, his mouth turning to a pleasing jelly in his jaw and wanting only to kiss the lips that grinned before him and left his own feeling incomplete. ‘Sam, I – I thought I’d lost you.’
‘I went for a piss in the rose garden with old Heini. Lost him now. Did you know he knows Myra Toye as well? She had a fling with his dad too, apparently.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Jamie blurted. ‘I should introduce you to people. I was too embarrassed.’
‘No more than I was by you on the site that time.’
‘Really? Really, Sam?’
Sam looked around them.
‘Really,’ he muttered.
‘Sam I do love you.’
‘Ssh.’ Sam touched his fingertips to Jamie’s lips. ‘Come on and dance.’
The temperature in the tent had risen sharply and the air was humid with the odours of bodies, grass and split wine. Lovingly fashioned hairstyles were subsiding in the rhythmic mêlée. Zippers and buttons slipped open unregarded. Wet skin glowed in the dim, coloured lights. Joining in the dance was easy now for, under the influence of whatever Jamie had taken, it seemed as though the music had taken everybody over and even their wildest motions were in harmony. Everyone, he felt sure, joined him in having a little piece of sharp magic gel glowing under their tongues like a jewel; if they all opened their mouths, they would light up the night. It seemed, too, as though a tightly buttoned collection of sexless mannequins were transforming before Jamie’s eyes into a pack of glorious animals in rut. Dancing, he began to feel himself grow more attractive, confident in his body again. He was clean, healthy, untouched by infection. Just as he wanted to reach out and caress Sam and all the men and women around him, so he felt their gazes stroking warm across his body.
All was well until, after a momentary break in the music because of a technical problem which drew brays and jeers from the crowd, something in the atmosphere began subtly to alter. At first Jamie was aware of a few, a very few, questioning glances cast his way. Then the glances came more frequently, and with them an unmistakable tut-tutting. He had quick glimpses of hideous faces, saw, from the corners of his eyes, bodies distorted with fury. The stares were not admiring, he saw that now, but fiercely disapproving. He grew breathless, the more so as Sam was so plainly still enjoying himself. His heart beat savagely in his chest and he saw even Sam turn a look of disgust upon him as though he had wet himself on the dancefloor or begun to bleed from some hideous wound. They knew. They all knew terrible, shameful things about him! Seizing his moment, his heart constricted in the grasp of invisible hands, Jamie staggered towards the tent’s opening and into the relative cool outside. His tie, which had come undone in the dance, fell to the grass and somebody stamped it into the mud before his fingers could rescue it.
‘What is it?’ Sam shouted behind him, catching him up. ‘What’s wrong?’ Even here there were harsh eyes upon him. The famous woman with the silver neck-chain whispered by and visibly recoiled at the sight of him. ‘Jamie. Jamie, it’s okay. I’m here.’
Jamie turned and saw at once the only benevolent figure in the entire crawling hell-scape, and he clung to Sam for dear life.
‘Come on,’ Sam laughed. ‘Get your breath back. It was fun in there. Let’s go back in.’
‘No,’ Jamie almost screamed. ‘I can’t! Please.’
‘What’s got into you, for fuck’s sake? You did take something, didn’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Jamie confessed through chattering teeth. ‘Only a bit, though.’
‘Berk.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Suddenly it seemed that he had ruined everything for everybody. ‘I’m so sorry.’ Sam’s moving back a few inches threw Jamie into a panic. He clutched out wildly, wanting his height and warmth to protect him from the others.
‘Hey!’ Sam laughed, gaining some idea through his drunkenness of the irrational terrors that were besieging him. ‘It’s okay. Come here.’ More openly affectionate than he had ever been in public, he pulled Jamie to him, kissing his forehead and stroking his hair as one might soothe a frightened child. But Jamie’s nightmares were still closing in. Every passing Noah’s Ark pair looked at him in scorn, hissing indignantly at the sorry spectacle. Worse still, a security guard was standing nearby, watching and muttering something about two defectives to be neutralised into his walkie-talkie. Could he really be saying something so appalling for all the crowd to hear? Now the guard was coming over, walkie-talkie whispering maliciously in his grasp. His tone managed to be simultaneously obsequious and threatening.
‘Could I see your invitations, Sirs?’
Sam checked his pockets.
‘Left it in the car, mate,’ he said good-naturedly. Hearing Sam’s accent, the guard’s manner immediately frosted over.
‘If you’d like to come with me quietly,’ he said.
‘Listen. We were properly invited,’ Sam said. ‘I told you. It’s in the car.’
‘Yish,’ Jamie began, and found his mouth unable to work.
‘James Pepper and Friend, it said.’ Sam went on angrily. ‘I’m the friend.’
‘Oh yes sir. I could see that. Very friendly. Come along now.’
People were definitely stopping to stare now. The guard had made the mistake of taking Sam by the upper arm to steer him away. Sam shook furiously clear of him and pushed him away. The guard quickly pressed a button on his walkie-talkie that set a red light flashing, then tried to seize Sam again. Sam spun round and landed a powerful punch in his face, sending him staggering back against one of the marquee ropes.
‘Come on, for fuck’s sake!’ he shouted, but Jamie couldn’t run, couldn’t cry out. All he could do was stare at the blood pouring from the security guard’s nose and think of Sam behind bars and how this was all his fault, all of it, and that he deserved to be severely punished.
‘Come on!’ Sam urged.
For a moment, Jamie even imagined that the taking of the drug was the punishment, rather than the cause of it, and that everyone here, Sam included, had planned this, had sent the woman into the cloakroom after him, primed and falsely smiling. Then two more guards came running through the crowd and one shoved Sam’s arms behind his back, tightening their hold when he struggled so that he cried out in pain. The other held Jamie by the upper arm. As they began to be led away, Jamie saw Nick Godfreys, white-faced, hurrying the minister’s daughter away from the edge of the crowd. The utter lack of recognition in the glance he threw them was more chilling than any hallucination Jamie had suffered.
‘Say something,’ Sam shouted. ‘For fuck’s sake tell them who we are!’
But Jamie’s mouth had turned so dry that his tongue was glued to his palate, and his teeth were chattering so furiously he feared he would bite into his lips if he even tried to speak.
Salvation came, surprisingly, in the tall, disapproving form of Beatrix Maxwell, who had thrown a dowdy knitted shawl about her gaunt shoulders. Tent dress billowing in the night breeze, she stepped out into their path.
‘Stop,’ she said, patrician as a vestal in the dancing light of a brazier. ‘There’s been some stupid mistake.’
‘No mistake, Madam. Don’t you worry. Just some gatecrashers.’
‘But I know these people! Heini. You tell them.’
Heini caught up with her and his imperious manner, silvery hair and old-fashioned white tie and tails worked like a charm on the guards, who promptly released Sam and Jamie to talk with him. Then the one with the bleeding nose came back to apologise to Sam, a handkerchief clutched to his face.
‘So sorry, Sir. I had no idea. No hard feelings, I hope.’
The three of them melted back into the crowd around the tent.
‘Whatever did you tell them?’ Mrs Maxwell asked.
‘That my tall young friend here is a distinguished, if unconventional ‘cellist.’ She scoffed but Heini insisted, ‘He looks the part. Now, these two are in no state to drive anywhere.’ He turned to Jamie. ‘I assume you came by car?’ Jamie could only nod his head and wipe away the dribble from his lower lip with the back of his hand. Heini turned smartly back to Mrs Maxwell, betraying only a hint of disgust. ‘Perhaps you could explain to Candida, if you see her, Beatrix? She’s wearing green. I’ll drive them to Edward’s place. It isn’t far. He won’t mind.’
Miraculously sober, Heini took control, making Jamie feel more than ever like a disgraced delinquent as he retrieved their coats, then bundled him into the back of the Volkswagen, threw the tartan rug over him and drove them in silence to The Roundel. He seemed as familiar with the building as Jamie was. The studio was all in darkness so he led them straight into the main house, ignoring Sam’s amazed questions and briskly finding Jamie a room with a made-up bed to fall into.
Lying beneath chilly sheets and weighed down by the two eider-downs Heini had thrown over him to stop his teeth chattering, Jamie was slightly soothed by the familiar surroundings and by the sudden withdrawal of stimuli – no more music, no more stares, no more strangers, only soft near-darkness and the clean smell of the sheets. He listened to the distant murmur of voices from the kitchen and waited impatiently for the effects of the drug to wear off. Sam eventually came to bed, too exhausted to do more than mutter, ‘Alison’s here and she says to say you’re a berk. She says you can give me the guided tour in the morning.’
Jamie kept him awake however, nervously fingering Sam’s chest hair and asking again and again, ‘Who am I?’ or ‘Who did you say I was?’ never quite believing Sam’s patient, sleepy replies.
When, once too often, Jamie turned on the bedside light to stare fanatically at his own hands moving in the air before him or to jump up and examine the unfamiliar face in the dressing table mirror, Sam was forced to fling an arm and leg across his restless body, pinning him down until the natural anaesthetic of exhaustion took a hold on them both.