Mark and Cara drove down to Greenwich to see me in R&J, and came round afterwards, with a disorienting scent of money and privilege about them as they chatted with my friends in the small hot dressing room I shared with the Romeo, Johnny Dingali. Capulet flung open the door with a whoop, half-naked men with faces still purple and ginger in make-up squeezed past them like satyrs, there was only a third of a glass of Veuve du Vernay each. Mark and Cara were patrons of the arts, Cara herself was an artist, and they couldn’t have been nicer. But none of the cast had met them before, and their name, when they learned it, caused a certain awkwardness, and inhibition. Only Johnny, determined not to grovel, went straight into first names, ‘So, Mark, do you see much theatre?’ – aiming for an argument Mark was far too clever to get caught in. ‘Lord Hadlow,’ said Johnny, ‘in our humble dressing room . . .’ and Mark did say, quietly but firmly, ‘I’m not a lord, actually,’ while the others looked unsure about baiting a man so friendly and so rich. Cara tapped her card into my shirt pocket and told me to get in touch, and as soon as the door had closed behind them Johnny almost shouted, ‘Right! Where’s that other bottle?’ and a laugh of guilty relief filled the dressing room.
Later that night, over curries round the corner, Raymond showed a certain sarky fascination with the Hadlows, once he learned that they’d been in. ‘I’m sorry you didn’t meet them,’ I said.
‘I don’t mix much with plutocrats,’ Ray said, and raised a hand to stay my objection. ‘No doubt you will argue that plutocrats don’t as a rule seek out radical work such as ours.’
‘They’re not your usual plutocrats,’ I said. ‘They’re quite left-wing.’ Ray chuckled at this idea, and I felt that the question of my own status, as the one member of the company who’d been to public school, was looming yet again – it didn’t need to be mentioned, it was a presence, conjured up noiselessly in Ray’s thin smile. ‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘Mark isn’t a plutocrat. Plutocrat means someone who rules through wealth.’
‘Your innocence never ceases to amuse me,’ Ray said. ‘Though it strikes me this very rare and special kind of left-wing plutocrat you’ve identified might be worth your prompting.’
‘Prompting?’
‘Into an act of generosity, negligible to him, life-saving to us. You might care to have a word?’
This made obvious and exciting sense and at the same time, as I wiped my plate with the last cold corner of naan, I shrank from the prospect of having to ask Mark for money.
I rang Cara the next day, and began with an apology which she talked straight over. ‘We were excited by the play,’ she said, ‘by the whole approach.’
‘That’s wonderful to hear,’ I said.
‘Delighted, of course’ – with her remembered effect, that was almost a stammer, of drawing on a cigarette in mid-sentence – ‘mm . . . to see you doing so well.’
‘Thank you very much, Cara. It meant a lot to me that you came,’ consciously moving to first-name terms myself.
‘And you looked marvellous, by the way. A star, we both thought so.’
‘Ah . . .! I wish you’d been reviewing us for the Nottingham Post.’
‘I’ve not seen that,’ she said drily. ‘But you’ve read this morning’s Guardian?’
‘Oh, no . . .’ I said. In fact I’d only just got out of bed. ‘Is it all right?’
‘Hold on.’ She put down the phone, and from my fixed position I seemed to follow – with the opening of a door, the whining of a dog, Cara calling, ‘I’m on the phone . . . I’m talking to Dave . . . Dave Win,’ and another voice like a far echo – her movement through the rich perspective of the Holland Park house which I had never visited. I caught a sense of its atmosphere, in the busy but unsocial morning, as I heard her come back, nearly with me again, then, ‘Right, here we are . . . It’s their new man Billington, who we think’s rather great. Shall I just read it to you?’
‘If it’s good,’ I said; ‘and, obviously, if you don’t mind.’
‘It is good’ – she laughed lightly and I pictured the quick overridden distraction of stubbing out her cigarette before she began. I wanted to know what this man had said about my own performance, but I hummed appreciatively as Cara went rather slowly through the first paragraph – about the political acuteness of Ray’s vision, and the physical excitement of the action, the unusual violence of Tybalt’s death. ‘Now here we are, “The boyish Mercutio, David Win, has great presence, and an instinct for verse-speaking undeniably at odds with the roughed-up delivery prevailing elsewhere; his technically dazzling Queen Mab speech stands out. He is of mixed Burmese heritage, and an interesting foil to the half-Indian Romeo, Jonathan Dingali, hinting that the dynastic purity obsessing the Capulets is threatened also by larger historical processes of empire and race. Ray Fairfield’s Terra is one of several new companies making politically disruptive readings of the classics, with performances evolved through collective decision-making in long rehearsals. More than other such innovative directors he presents an unusual range of races on stage. With young actors of the calibre of Dingali, Samson and Win they are among the best hopes for a new British theatre of the left.”’
‘You’re right, it’s not bad,’ I said – with a levitating feeling of pleasure, relief and vindication. It needed to be dwelt on, but I couldn’t ask her to read it again; I almost wanted to get her off the phone so that I could dash out and buy a copy myself.
‘Mark was saying something similar last night – it would be good to see you tackle something more explicitly political next, he thought perhaps Julius Caesar. Well, I don’t know what you are doing, of course. J.C., I suppose you’d call it – though that could be confusing!’
‘Well, we’ve got some ideas,’ I said, ‘and more political, yes. Really we’d like to do a brand-new play.’ The point, both obvious and extremely delicate, was the money. I wanted to tell her, without sounding pathetic or reproachful, that we were a touring company, paid a mere subsistence, sleeping on floors and sofas or in cheap bed-and-breakfasts. Our old Bedford van, with its hand-painted lettering, broke down quite often, costumes and props and the minimal abstract sets marooned in a lay-by hours from the hall we were due to open in that very evening. Our ‘present-day’ aesthetic at least let us act in our jeans, if the van didn’t make it. We were desperate for cash, and I sensed, as I smiled at my image of Cara in her house, that the future of Terra might lie, much more promptly than I had expected, in my hands. Too promptly for me to be able to start begging. I said, hesitantly, ‘Well, I’d love to talk to Mark about it, you know, and hear his ideas.’
Her pause made me wonder if even this was too pushy. I had an embarrassed sense of them bothered by people for money all year round. But I also thought if they showed an interest it meant they expected it and might in fact be tacitly opening the way for a request. Patrons needed something to patronize, after all . . . Then, ‘Tuesday next week?’ she said. ‘Or will you have left town?’
‘Tuesday . . . I’ll be here, I may have rehearsals, but I’ll certainly be free by five or so.’
‘Have dinner with us. I mean, if you wanted’ – and again I pictured her way of squaring up to things – ‘you could come to a drinks party with us first, it would mean you could see Giles, if you’d like that, it’s given by his new boss.’
‘Well, thank you, Cara, um . . .’ Her tone left me guessing at her feelings about this party, and indeed about Giles’s new boss, but I could hardly say I didn’t want to see Giles.
‘He’s working for Norman Upshaw . . . do you know?’
‘I know the name,’ I said. I saw myself painfully out of place at Upshaw’s party, and also curiously, mischievously, enjoying it – such was my mood these days. ‘It will be an experience,’ I said.
‘I’m afraid it will,’ said Cara. ‘But a much nicer one for us if you’re there too.’
I remembered Mark as a risk-taking driver, ten years earlier, on the blind brows and dips of the road under the Downs, but when they picked me up outside Notting Hill Gate station they were seated together in the back of a grey Mercedes. I ducked my head to smile in at them and nipped round to sit in the front; a young Indian man was driving, and reached across to shake my hand before looking in the mirror and moving off. ‘Ashok . . . Dave,’ said Cara, ‘good friend’ – which seemed to apply to both of us. I was turning round sideways to chat to Mark and Cara, and observed Ashok’s half-smiling way of attending to the conversation without taking part in it. He was soft-faced, darker than me, in a blue suit and tie with a red pullover under the jacket. I thought he had that watchful desire to please that I’d had myself in the Woolpeck days.
‘It’s wonderful to see you again,’ I said.
‘And you, Dave,’ said Mark. I felt the friendship was resumed, without fuss or reproach, after a gap which had quite naturally happened – my guilt slithered for a minute, seeking for a purchase, a chance to apologize for being out of touch for so long, but by the time the car was circling Marble Arch I knew it wasn’t necessary.
The Upshaws lived in Old Queen Street, in a huge Georgian house overlooking St James’s Park as if it were its own garden. In the car I toyed with a joke about the address, not sure if Mark and Cara would think it funny, or if I thought it was funny myself. It was doubtless a very old joke, and Mark had the look of someone so used to the name of the street that a joke about it would be almost bewildering. Still, as we got out of the car, I said quietly, ‘Who was the old queen, I wonder?’ ‘Mmm?’ said Mark. ‘Old Queen Street,’ I said, with a smirk. Mark looked about as if for inspiration. ‘Is it Queen Anne, I suppose?’ he said. We went in to the party.
The hour we spent there, escaping now and then into a further room, urged upstairs to an almost empty drawing room where we peered obediently at the pictures for three minutes before creeping back down again, only made me fonder of the Hadlows. They had been my benefactors, not only mine, but I felt their goodness tonight almost intimately; I stuck with them, and with Cara when Mark was taken aside, and saw how their decency glowed in this setting steeped in values we could never share. I’d put on a suit and tie, the only suit I owned, which was the one I’d taken and walked out of my Finals in, but I felt my dissidence showed. The quick look away when I caught someone staring was familiar to me since Bampton days – the suspicion that I shouldn’t be here, and the subtler suspicion that since I was here I might be someone important: a question they probably wouldn’t have time to sort out. By now I was quite at home being out of my element, I even enjoyed it, in small doses, and the element here was bracingly alien and unconstrained. Did I escort Cara or did she protect me? At her elbow I leaned in as she spoke to another guest but my eyes slid aside to take in the exact weight and angle of a Telegraph columnist’s head or the furious frown with which his wife refused the canapés offered by a beautiful black waitress. It was a useful education, for the actor, in the language of disdain. Quite soon, a heavyish drizzle set in, so no one could go out onto the terrace overlooking the Park, and the downstairs rooms grew roaringly noisy.
There was no sign of Giles at first, though I was keeping an eye out for him over Cara’s shoulder, and Cara herself glanced round now and then as she talked. I hadn’t seen him in the three years since Oxford, I hardly thought of him from year to year, although I dreamt of him sometimes, which showed he was still in my system. In dreams he was certainly Giles, though he didn’t look much like the teenager I’d known or the man he must now have turned into; we were roughly intimate, sometimes in bed together, with hugging and even kissing which in the dream seemed like a revelation about him, but on waking of course could only be a small and unwelcome revelation about me. Now a grand old woman in diamonds had got stuck to Cara, in an impasse of good manners, discussing sponsorship for young artists – Cara torn between impatience at wasting her own time and a principled need to talk up the Hadlows’ work. The old woman’s good manners stopped short of acknowledging me, so I was free to analyse her desiccated accent, her flawless hair and clothes, the little nods and recoils with which she mimed thought – she had a mistrust of Cara and more so of Mark that she couldn’t quite conceal, and a confused sense, even so, of kinship, money recognizing money, however gained or spent. ‘Yes, well, we give out twenty scholarships a year, to children from deprived backgrounds,’ Cara said.
‘And have you had any luck with them, I wonder?’
‘Sometimes, yes,’ said Cara, ‘we have. But it’s not all about backing winners – it’s about giving them chances they wouldn’t have had otherwise. It’s really up to them what they do with it.’
I felt I could testify to this, but the old woman gaped at the madness and waste of philanthropy. A white-aproned waiter refilled our glasses, and as he did so I saw a small door in the panelling open and Giles slipped in – a glimpse of an office beyond him as he pulled the door to. He buttoned his suit jacket and looked round, I saw him nod and smile at someone – not as a prelude to joining them but as a sign he wasn’t going to; he peered blankly into the room, his gaze settled on us for three seconds, on his mother’s back and then on my face: so that I caught the instant of shock, immediately disguised, before he looked down and pushed through the crowd towards us.
‘Hallo, Winny! This is a surprise’ – a balance in his cheerful tone between comradely pleasure and a clear hint that I was a gate-crasher. ‘Mother, hallo.’
‘Mother is it now?’ said Cara, as he kissed her on the cheek. ‘And do you know Lady Harwell—’ but Lady Harwell had seized her moment and swivelled, and was being kissed herself by a red-faced old brute in a kilt.
‘Isn’t Dad with you?’ said Giles.
‘Of course he is – we were wondering where you were.’
‘Oh, yes, I had various things to finish up for Norman.’
‘Ah, I see . . . of course,’ said Cara, rather drolly. Giles was junior in this world, which meant mimicking the senior attitude. ‘Anyway, we thought you might like to see Dave again.’
Giles put his head on one side as he thought what to say, and I had no idea myself what the terms were – new maturity and sympathy, the erasure of silly old squabbles, or reinforced suspicion, with fresh chances for mockery. ‘Well, how are things with you, Winny?’ he said, but with a faintly anxious look, as if now remembering my famous meltdown.
‘Really terrific, thanks,’ I said.
‘Dave’s been having a great success in a play at Greenwich,’ said Cara. ‘Your father and I went to see it last week.’
‘Greenwich . . . ah,’ said Giles. ‘Yes, I think I heard you were doing a bit of acting.’
‘And you’re working . . . here?’ I said, sounding almost as supercilious.
‘I’m here some of the time,’ said Giles. ‘The main office, obviously, is in Mayfair.’ And he turned, his face clarified, he almost forgot us as Jasmine Upshaw herself came near, greeting Lady Harwell and the kilted brute. ‘Just a moment,’ Giles said.
The Upshaws were undeniably impressive. They’d come in a few minutes after the start, and I’d watched the way they carved up the crowd, as efficiently as royalty. They were very much a couple, but with no glimpse of Mark and Cara’s obvious fondness for each other – they seemed to suggest that at their speed and pitch little time was left over for shows of affection. Norman Upshaw was tall, pale and sleek, in a chalk-striped dark suit and large black-framed glasses that seemed meant to signal both money and genius. He sniffed smugly if something he said raised a laugh, but grew restless if the answer prevented his going on. Jasmine’s manner made no claims to his intellectual standing, but her brisk smile and firm little nods, as she came through the room, suggested a greater fund of common sense. She questioned, she advised, and she moved on, in a way that left people unsure what she really felt. I thought they took from her what they wanted, like consulters of an oracle. When our own moment came, Cara introduced me, ‘David Win, the actor’ – Jasmine narrowed her eyes, as if not to be taken in, and then tapped my wrist: ‘I know,’ she said, ‘The Yellow Flower – Norman thought you were awfully good,’ and turned away before I could say, for the umpteenth time, ‘That wasn’t me, it was Ken Danby, the Chinese actor who is much shorter than me and five years older.’
A man at the edge of a group that was breaking up in a mutual hunger for new faces caught my eye for the second time, and suddenly alone turned doubtingly but pleasantly towards me. He was aquiline, handsome, perhaps twenty years older than me. ‘I think we met at Brighton?’ he said.
‘Oh, did we . . . .?’ I said, shaking hands slowly, as if doing so might help me remember. Brighton had been over a month ago, with good houses and a surge in confidence among the cast. ‘David Win.’
‘Yes . . .’ he said, narrowing his eyes: ‘Martin Causley.’ The Sunday after the final performance we were down on the shingle beach beyond the pier in a late-summer heatwave, a blur of drinking and nakedness all afternoon. I thought I might remember Martin better if he’d had nothing on. ‘It was a pretty good show, wasn’t it,’ he said.
I grinned. ‘Yes, I thought it went well. Everyone was on great form. And of course a great audience!’
He laughed modestly. ‘Put like that,’ he said. ‘The mood of the whole party was very good, I thought.’
‘I certainly had a wild time, I don’t know about you.’
‘Well . . .’ he said. ‘We may have been at different meetings.’
‘Oh . . .’ I said.
‘I know some of the Scottish groups got quite rowdy.’
‘Oh . . .!’ I said more emphatically.
‘And Norman himself of course gave a very good speech to the business committee.’
I said, ‘You’re talking about the Conservative Party Conference, aren’t you?’
‘Aren’t you?’ And I couldn’t help laughing as I explained.
‘How funny!’ he said, not wholly pleased, looking away and then back at me – we chuckled guardedly, unsure if we were enemies, revealed in our true colours, or if in fact we were enjoying the unexpected intimacy of two strangers caught up in a mutual muddle. I saw how he regretted blushing, and yet perhaps the blush was a shortcut, a skipping over pages of preamble to other rosy possibilities. Now his handsomeness was sexy, it was as if he’d been switched on.
I started to say, ‘But I wonder who you thought I was’ – the usual dull thing of being taken for some other brown person (a keen Asian Tory, well, there were plenty of them) seemed for once to have fun in it.
‘Ah!’ he said, ‘excuse me, I see my wife’s signalling,’ and he slipped past me with a hand raised to part the crowd. I didn’t bother turning round to see him go.
At just the right moment Cara announced we were leaving in ten minutes. The promise of imminent freedom broke the spell and I saw us already as winners, escaping a house where a hundred others were condemned to sink deeper in drink and claptrap long into the night. ‘Can you see Giles?’ she said. I craned round for her and spotted him near the window, in fawning conversation with a tall white-haired man who stared over his head as he spoke to him. ‘Oh god,’ said Cara, ‘he’s sucking up to Inglewood.’ She sagged and sighed. ‘Do you think we’ve bred a monster, Dave? And if so, how did it happen? Feel free to tell me!’
I laughed and looked over at Giles as she made her way towards him, his face half in shadow but gleaming and revealed in the rainy light from the window, thick chestnut hair longer and swept back, a surly new heaviness to the student jaw. I felt he was caught, like someone starting a beard, in the awkward middle of a transformation into a new impressive self that he had imagined but we hadn’t thought of at all – not that growing a beard was itself something Giles would ever do. I could tell from his smile he was pleased by his own thoughts and plans, and barely listening – he must have been forty years younger than George Inglewood, but he thrust himself forward even as he nodded his head in apparent submission to the scrawny old monster. But if Giles was a monster too . . . What happened when monster met monster? Did they fight it out like stags, one insisting on dominance, or might they come, sooner or later, to some wary accommodation? A man pressing on me as if trying to get past spoke in my ear: ‘I hope we’re going to see you on telly again soon.’
‘Oh, thank you . . .’ I said, and leant back a little to take in his face, but he was confidential, chin almost on my shoulder as he went on,
‘I thought you were the best thing in Hibiscus Hotel.’
‘Oh, it wasn’t a bad show,’ I said.
‘Very naughty, I didn’t say it was, far from it.’
I laughed, ‘Well, thank you.’
Now I looked at him. ‘Chris Canvey,’ he said, offering a firm hand, which held on to mine for five seconds or more till I said,
‘Canvey. Like the Island . . .’
‘Flat, polluted, prone to flooding . . .’ I laughed and pulled back, took in curly grey hair cut short, grey eyes behind large brown-framed glasses, a tight double-breasted suit in which he seemed to wriggle with unspoken intent. Then for a moment we both looked half-seriously into our drinks.
‘And what brings you here?’ I said, with a little wince at the whole thing.
He gave me a quizzical look, and I thought perhaps he was another insider, Upshaw’s personal assistant, say, one of those ambitious younger men who adapt themselves to the ethos of a useful employer. ‘I work for Westminster Council,’ he said. ‘God knows why they asked me.’
‘You must have an idea,’ I said. The buzz of connection in a setting like this felt all the more wicked. He looked in my eyes and when he looked away I was already awkwardly hard. I saw Cara signal with a tilt of her head towards the door. She and Mark would have been staggered if I’d told them I wanted to stay at the party after all, or at least to leave it with Chris Canvey instead of them. But they were taking me on to supper, and whatever was suddenly happening would have to hang fire till another time.
‘Your friends?’ said Chris.
‘Yes,’ I said, not sure if he knew who they were. I leant against him. ‘Well, I hope we’ll meet again.’
‘Me too,’ he said, with a quick smile at Cara.
‘I’m in London till Monday. A drink on Saturday, perhaps?’
‘Could do,’ he said, ‘yes, could do. Or how about later tonight?’
Ashok was there at once when Cara and I came out of the house into the still aftergleam of the drizzle. Mark had been snagged by someone in the hall, and we stood by the Mercedes waiting. Cara lit a cigarette. ‘You don’t, I think,’ she said, slipping the packet and lighter into her bag.
‘No, thanks,’ I said, as if it was hopeless of me, looking back at the bright doorway, smiling in courteous submission to their plan for the evening, but distracted by the thought of Chris, and the fear of a missed chance. Mark came out, we all got into the car, and I felt the reassurance of being in their hands. In the dressing room at Greenwich, bouncing with adrenaline, I’d hardly taken them in, though I’d noted that Cara seemed leaner and more lined, and Mark a bit stockier, with new glasses and a shy shot at sideburns. Tonight I was struck by the complementary way they functioned as a couple, as efficient as the Upshaws but very much nicer. Mark always approached you smiling, Cara never did; but this meant little. In Cara’s quick frown and stare a good deal of mere introductory pleasantness could be taken as read; whereas Mark remained with you for ever in the gleam of a preliminary charm, a busy man’s way of making things easy and agreeable. In his smile there was perhaps a promise of getting to know him better, and finding further things in common, if ever time allowed.
Ashok drove us westwards, and it was all an impression of parks, with lamps tracing paths here and there under the vast dark height of the trees. I’d pictured dinner in a restaurant, but it seemed we were going to their house. ‘Now, I hope you like quail,’ said Cara, and I said I’d like to try it. I had a feeling the Upshaws’ party was still being absorbed, analysis postponed until we were alone. I said, ‘They’ve got some impressive paintings, haven’t they?’ ‘No, they have,’ said Cara, and Mark said, ‘Expensive ones, anyway,’ and I laughed at the clarification.
I’d lost my bearings, after the parks, in the sequence of wide streets, white-stucco crescents, white-pillared porches in misty succession, a tree-lined avenue with high walls and houses that stood back – now we waited at a gate that opened slowly by itself on to a shallow paved driveway with a bright glass lantern shining in the porch between its own two white pillars. Ashok sprang out and I was just as quick, so that we opened the rear doors in unison – Cara climbed out with a glancing smile that registered the courtesy and perhaps too my little bit of play-acting. Ashok said something to Mark about the next morning before getting back into the car and driving it away round the side of the house. I had a shadowy sense of hierarchies and at the same time, as I followed Cara up the steps and into the marble-floored hall, a quickly evolving idea of the Hadlows’ wealth. It was at once, almost embarrassingly, clear to me how I had seen them out of their own true element at Woolpeck, which was where I’d always pictured them till now. And time had been at work, over the decade since we’d first met; surely they were very much richer. I laid my old mac on a chair in the hall, and wasn’t sure whether to loosen my tie and relax, or to tighten the knot and shoot my cuffs. I hadn’t thought it through – of course left-wing plutocrats were rolling in money just like the right-wing kind. I was having a sarky little argument with Ray in my head, and torn between my affection for Mark and Cara and taking mild offence at the style they lived in. I really didn’t want to be disillusioned by them, though a small part of me now had a taste for such disruptions.
We went through into a lamp-lit drawing room with large windows, shuttered at the front and at the back looking out on to the blackness of a garden with the lights of other houses glowing some way off through the trees. I felt clumsily disoriented, already half-drunk and half sobered up again, as well as on my best behaviour. We stood looking at the painting over the fireplace, the teasing watchful silence when a host lets a guest take something in, and when I said, ‘This is, er . . .’ Cara said,
‘Yes . . . do you like it? It’s by someone Mark discovered.’
‘Well,’ Mark demurred, ‘we discovered him together.’
‘It’s exciting,’ I said, and it was, a tall furious mess of red and black, like a burning town.
‘A young Trinidadian artist, called John Constable, funnily enough.’
‘Probably not much scope for confusion,’ I said, and the joke was fresh for me, at least. I turned and looked at the room, almost as if congratulating them. There were obvious differences, weren’t there, between the Upshaws and the Hadlows, clashes of belief, about how you spent money, and also about how you made it – though this was always vague to me, in Mark’s case. ‘How long have you been here?’
Cara looked vague, and Mark said, ‘A couple of years, I suppose, now?’ – so that moving house seemed one among many transactions. I smiled at this, and he went on, ‘Yes, the Hampstead house felt a bit too small for us once the children had moved out,’ with a sly smile of his own. I think that was what I gathered, from these first few minutes in the place. This wasn’t a house Giles and Lydia had any part in, or a house in any way adapted for children – it was a new stage in the parents’ own story and a statement of their independent taste and ambition.
I said, ‘My mum sends her best wishes, by the way.’
‘Ah, how is she?’ said Mark. ‘Is she still, um . . .’ – gazing at me as he searched for the proper formulation, and perhaps for a name as well.
‘She’s still with her friend?’ said Cara.
‘Oh, with Esme, yes . . .’ – it was a low, vaguely worrying fence we’d hopped over quite matter-of-factly.
‘And that’s all all right?’ said Mark, with a cheerful shake of the head.
‘No, it’s great,’ I said. ‘Their business is doing very well.’
‘You must tell me more about that,’ said Cara. ‘Shall we go through?’
We went across the hall and into a small dining room, where a dark-haired young woman in a jersey and skirt was lighting the candles. She was introduced as Angela, with the same implication of her being a friend as much as a servant. My own role as we sat down felt subtly ambiguous too. It was related to the role I had played before, as if in far-off episodes of a long-running series to which I had now returned, to find it all imaginatively updated: I felt I was allowed to be myself, but should at least bear in mind the original conception of the part. Their own roles had been expanded, and I saw again how at Woolpeck they had been on holiday from the grandeur of their normal lives.
Angela served a green soup, a white wine was poured. There were somewhat difficult things we seemed likely to talk about, and I sat forward and unfolded my napkin and felt what it might be like to account for myself to parents, to a couple always talking to each other about their own child, rather than edging and skimming things past my single mother and her friend. It was an odder sensation so soon after seeing Giles.
‘I so liked seeing you acting again,’ Mark said.
‘Oh, thank you!’
‘And of course a very striking production.’
‘I don’t think you met Ray Fairfield, did you?’
‘He’s the artistic director?’
‘Yes,’ I said, and smiled at the thought of Ray having that title. I said something about the principles of the company: improvisation as democracy in action, ‘openness and maturity from everyone’ and so forth. Mark was intrigued by the idea of the democratic rehearsal process, and I tried to hint without open disloyalty that the democracy in question was like that of a fascist state. ‘In the end,’ I said, ‘we all do what Ray says, just like any ordinary production.’
‘And what’s he like?’ Mark said.
I could hear myself saying, as Johnny had once, when asked this very question by an awestruck punter in Bristol, ‘He’s an absolute cunt!’ But I was, yet again, an ambassador; I said,
‘He’s rather a genius, I think. As I say, he’s demanding, but he gets results’ – and I let my smile and eyebrows do the work.
‘How long’s he been going?’ Mark said, and I felt an appraisal of Ray as a business prospect was now under way.
‘Terra started last year,’ I said.
‘I see, so you were in at the beginning.’
‘Not quite,’ I said, ‘but early on.’ I hesitated. ‘I was in a thing on telly for a year, before I joined.’
‘I wish we’d seen that, we’re rather hopeless with the telly.’
‘Oh, I saw a couple of episodes,’ said Cara, ‘you were awfully good, but you didn’t have enough to do.’
‘Oh, thank you, Cara,’ I said, ‘I didn’t know you’d seen it.’ I felt my mixed-up pride and embarrassment about Hibiscus Hotel all the more in this grand house.
‘And it was telly,’ she said, ‘you were famous when you joined this new company. He must have been thrilled to get you.’
‘Well, yes . . . I had experience, but I didn’t have training.’
‘No . . .’ said Mark, and the question of my going off the rails seemed to loom for a moment. I felt tipsy again and candid on a further glass of wine, but tense too at the thought of another coming-out. I’d been learning over the past three years that it wasn’t like putting a notice in The Times, it was something you had to keep doing, and awkwardly on occasion, over and over again. ‘Anyway,’ Mark said, ‘acting’s something you can do or you can’t. And the point is, you can. We’re both so glad to see you doing well. And, you know,’ and he held my eye, as he had done that first time we met, ‘triumphing against the odds.’
‘Well, thank you,’ I said once again. I was behind with my soup, and hurried to finish it off.
‘I’d imagined them bigger,’ I said, when the quails were brought in. ‘Sort of pheasant-size.’
‘No, no,’ said Cara. A small complete bird, browned, legs gaping helplessly, lay on its back on each white plate. ‘There’s another one for everyone, but I always think two birds on a plate looks a little offputting.’ They were good hosts, they let me get on with it but kept half an eye on me.
‘Easiest probably to tackle the legs with your fingers,’ said Mark, when I was stooped like a surgeon winkling the last strands of brown flesh from the bones with my knife, and Cara stood up from the table just as the door opened. ‘Ah – I think finger-bowls, Angela,’ she said, as if they hadn’t been sure how much mess I was going to make.
‘Mm, delicious,’ I said, when I’d finished and cleaned myself up a bit. ‘No, I won’t have another, thank you’ – I held up a hand and sat back with a sense, that perhaps was my own paranoia, of the quails as not only a treat but a test and almost a warning. I shook myself out of it and had another glass of wine. And then, with a spurt of the heart that coloured my face like some other embarrassment, I thought of Chris Canvey and the call that I’d promised to make in an hour or so’s time, that Mark and Cara had no idea of at all.
Nothing so far had been said about Giles, the review of the Upshaws’ party hadn’t happened, and I didn’t know quite what to say, as a guest – they both clearly knew not to think of me and Giles as friends, except in some meaningless nominal way. It was Mark who then said, ‘So, what did you make of Giles? You hadn’t seen him for a bit, I think.’
‘Not since Oxford,’ I said. ‘And actually not much there. We moved in rather different worlds.’
‘They’ve gone off at odd angles, our children,’ said Cara, demonstrating with her arms, ‘Giles one way and Lydia the other.’
‘Giles to the right, evidently?’
‘Just so.’
‘And how is Lydia?’ I said.
‘Oh, I think she’s well,’ said Cara.
‘She’s in New York,’ said Mark, genially, but narrowing his eyes.
‘Oh, yes . . . I remember her talking about going to New York years ago. Is she still with . . . Rory? . . . . Roly?’
‘Oh, lord no, that’s long over,’ said Cara. ‘No, these days she’s very caught up with the whole Andy Warhol scene.’ She brought out the name firmly, though I sensed a tremor of unease.
‘Well, that’s exciting,’ I said.
‘Yes, it is.’
As it happened, I’d seen Heat the previous week, but thought it best not to recommend it. ‘I remember seeing Chelsea Girls years ago,’ I said, ‘at the ICA.’
‘Ah, we rather wanted to see that one,’ said Cara.
I wondered how to put it to them. ‘Three hours,’ I said, ‘on two screens simultaneously. I’m sure I was the only person still conscious at the end.’
Mark laughed and said, ‘I gather things are much more on a business footing there these days – you know, at the famous Factory. It’s really some sort of office job that Lydia has, I gather.’
This sounded like what Lydia probably thought her parents wanted to hear. I’d been kept awake in Chelsea Girls by hoping something sexual might happen, in front of a camera oddly detached from all human agency and interest – it was bizarre now to think of Lydia at the Factory, in that labyrinth of dirty couches and silver-foiled walls.
‘But she comes back to London now and then?’ I said.
‘A bit,’ said Mark.
‘We don’t see a lot of her,’ said Cara.
‘Right . . .’ I said, and looked from one to the other of them, though they were looking ponderingly at each other. The door opened in the white wall and Angela came back in to clear the plates. I sat back with a smile, and gazed up past the paintings murky in the candlelight to the fancy white cornice with white flowers like a daisy-chain all the way round, and slow-wittedly saw how far both their children had got away from Mark and Cara; the magnificent house was the brave face they’d put on the fact.
‘Where do you stay while you’re in town?’ Cara said, when the time came to leave.
‘We’re all staying at a place in Acton.’
‘A hotel?’
‘In a sense. It’s very cheap, anyway.’ I thought she might be going to suggest I stayed with them, but she was wiser than that.
In the hall, Mark shook my hand, and said, ‘You might ask Raymond . . . Ray to come and see me.’
‘I will,’ I said, ‘thank you very much,’ and feared already for the meeting, just from Mark’s tone. Ray, though desperate for money, was too proud to think of coming with a begging bowl. Still, I’d done what he told me to. I put on my coat, and gazed round at the marble-floored hall, and I half felt the Hadlows should be kept from funding us, the gulf between the paupers and the patron seemed so vast.