TWELVE

‘Whadda fuck ya doin’ here, ya low-life motherfucker?’ the podgy American yelled across the room.

Vic’s welcoming smile withered away.

‘Cos this is my territory, ya piece of shit!’ he shouted back.

‘Well I’m takin’ it over now, ya sonofabitch.’

‘Latino scum!’ roared Vic, ‘Get back to Puerto Rico with the other cheap whores.’

On a table in the Gilded Hall was a display of weaponry from the Battle of Worcester. Vic grabbed a dagger and the American did the same. They began to circle each other like wrestlers, their blades flashing in the sunlight that spilled through the open front doors. Faisal tried to move between them.

‘Guys please, what on earth?’

‘Back off Paki,’ the American snarled like an alley-cat, ‘it ain’t your fight.’

A small thin man accompanying the American found his voice too.

‘Sir, I believe there’s some awful mistake,’ he called to Vic. ‘Beaumont is from New Orleans but has no Hispanic blood whatsoever.’

‘Stay out of this faggot,’ said Vic, brandishing his knife, ‘or these eight hard inches go right up your Yankee ass.’

The podgy American crumpled into laughter.

‘He’d think Santa had come early. These days, the only thing he gets up there is his colonic irrigation tube,’ he said, dropping the dagger and throwing his arms around Vic. ‘Oh babe, it’s so wonderful to see you.’

‘My dear Beau,’ said Vic, hugging him tightly. ‘Is it really forty years?’

‘Las Vegas seventy-one. West Side Story. I was just a Shark and you were the first Jewish Tony. You still recognized me after all this time?’

‘Of course, though maybe now not so much a Shark as a whale?’

‘Well pardon me,’ replied Beau, ‘but when did you turn into the fucking Hindenburg?’

‘Beaumont, won’t you introduce me to your friend?’ said the small thin man, with a smile so tight you could have plucked it like a violin.

‘Vic, may I present my partner, Professor Curtis Powell?’

Vic looked him up and down like he was on a butcher’s hook. Curtis’s skin was stretched taut across his cheekbones as if he’d not wanted to pay for the amount required to cover them. His slate-grey hair was pulled back into a pigtail which might have been classless in New York but in London marked you down as a mini-cab driver on the verge of retirement. Beau, despite the performance he’d just given, was a big dozy thing with an expression like an anaesthetized cow. A few remaining strands of dyed black hair were draped across his skull in a Jackie Charlton. Both were expensively dressed but with that over-pastelled golf-cart look which most American men eventually adopt.

‘You’re a lucky man, Professor Powell,’ said Vic. ‘I remember when the name Beau Styles made cocks twitch on every chorus-line on Broadway.’

Curtis’s parchment-pale face reddened into a shade vaguely approaching being alive. Beau and Vic couldn’t stop hugging each other. The other introductions were made and Beau apologized for calling Faisal a Paki. He wasn’t a racist he said; he’d once had a small part on The Bill Cosby Show. He’d been the postman.

‘My god, that’s Grinling Gibbons over there,’ said Curtis, his eyes ricocheting round the Gilded Hall.

‘You wanna go say “hi”?’ asked Beau.

‘Grinling Gibbons was England’s greatest wood-carver,’ snapped Curtis. ‘You’ve been taught that already Beaumont. I do apologize, Mr Blaine; I went looking for Gatsby and ended up with Myrtle, the slut from the wrong side of the tracks.’

‘Get a life, Grampa,’ said Beau.

Curtis Powell gazed up at Verrio’s ceiling, almost wetting himself with excitement. According to Vic’s briefing notes, he was a retired history professor who’d written a series of coffee-table books on the great houses of Europe for the posh American market. He’d once dubbed Mount Royal ‘the lost palace’.

‘You must be very proud today, Mr Blaine,’ he said. ‘Your restoration appears highly sympathetic, though I won’t hesitate to criticise if I find fault.’

‘I’d expect nothing less, Professor Powell. After lunch, everyone will be given a tour by the expert from English Heritage in charge of the work.’

Robin Bradbury-Ross had agreed to do this wee favour. The price had been three of my jockstraps, in different colours, recently worn and unwashed.

So here they were at last, coming through the door in ones and twos; the men Vic insisted on calling Rory’s Boys.

So far, I’d not exactly have claimed Preview Day was in full swing; there was too much nervousness in the air for that. But maybe that wasn’t so surprising; about forty people, mostly strangers, at a party that might never end. If they decided to live here, these were the faces they’d see day in, day out, perhaps for years to come. In the Saloon, where drinks were being served, they were pacing round each other in a shy gavotte, making brief, gracious contact before wheeling away again into a different space. In this they were accompanied by the musicians of Strings Attached, a quartet of hunky gay boys on violins and cellos whose website promised that ‘When we fiddle, you’ll burn’.

But Curtis Powell was correct. I did feel proud. Today you could stand in the Gilded Hall and look right through the Saloon out onto the terrace where the tip of the water plume from the Great Fountain was thrusting itself into a clear blue sky. In spite of Robin’s hysterical protests, I’d ordered the blinds raised on every single window and summer light was pouring into the house in a way it hadn’t done for years. The bad smells lingering on its reputation could be blown away at last.

Today’s guests were a mixture of those on Vic’s original list who’d not fled after the publicity and the most promising of those who’d contacted us because of it. There had been no time to interview any of the latter group in person, only to check their credit-worthiness and, thanks to an old shag of mine at New Scotland Yard, their absence from the police computer. But today was critical. Maybe that was why, after his obsessive vetting of the original candidates, Vic was surprisingly relaxed about these unknown quantities. If they could hold a basic conversation about the works of Christopher Wren or the music of Perry Como, we’d not go far wrong, he said.

When each punter arrived, he was announced by a waiter. This turned out to be none other than Dapper Stephen from the London Eye, who’d failed to get back into EasyJet and was now working freelance. As they approached one by one it felt like some bizarre beauty pageant. I should be holding a mike and declaring their vital statistics to the waiters and the string quartet. They would shyly tell me that their ambition was to travel or work with kiddies in Botswana. But I watched the parade with growing unease. These were the people I might be glimpsing daily as they passed the windows of the flat. They’d be sitting in my Red Damask Drawing-Room, reading in my Library, strolling in my Italian Garden. They’d be living under my roof. I began to wonder, really for the first time, just who they all might be.

Marcus Leigh had arrived first, on the dot of twelve. We’d suggested smart-casual on the invitation, but Marcus was wearing a tie. He’d been highly useful with some last minute financial issues, refusing any fee, perhaps trying to make up for having wobbled in the wind of the tabloids.

‘The Lord Chancellor’s already here, Marcus,’ I said. ‘He’s saving you a cocktail sausage.’

Marcus’s ruddy smile froze.

‘He’s just come out. Hadn’t you heard?

‘Most amusing, Mr Blaine.’

After a while, the attributes of the grey-haired lovelies began to blur, but they all had the faint but unmistakeable sheen of material wealth. Not one would have known the price of a pint of milk, the route of the 29 bus or how his washing-machine worked. It did my heart good to see that.

A slight Chinese man in pebble glasses, announced simply as Mr Lim, shook my hand, peering up at me intently. I remembered he was some posh orthodontist.

‘That’s Roland Snape, isn’t it?’ he asked. ‘Your upper bridgework?’

‘Wow, how did you know that?’

‘I’d recognize Snape’s work anywhere,’ said Mr Lim. ‘He drinks, you know. That’s the problem. You really can’t go around looking like that.’

He reached up taking my chin in one hand and pushing up my top lip with the other.

‘The mouth is like a magic garden from which spring the fruits of civilized thought, the words of poetry and passion, the sound of sweet music. What a shame if the garden gates are grubby, uneven or coming off their hinges. We’ll talk later.’

To illustrate his point, Mr Lim gave me a broad smile. Not like Vic’s at all, it was slightly mechanical and bypassed the eyes altogether but in terms of wattage it was right up there with Marti Pellow’s.

There was a sudden ripple of commotion at the front doors. Standing beside Dapper Stephen, who was failing hopelessly to suppress laughter, were two tiny identical old men. From a distance they seemed interchangeable; round as thimbles, Persil-white goatees, light brown suits and hardly more than five feet off the floor. But as I hurried over, I could see that the expressions were chalk and cheese. One of them was shy and benign, the other wasn’t. It was the latter who rounded on me.

‘We are Jasper and Jacob Trevelyan,’ he said, in an unexpectedly deep West Country voice. ‘A fact which this pansy here seems unable to announce. We’re not impressed so far, are we Jacob?’

‘Jeez, no need for any announcement of who you are,’ cried Vic with his hand outstretched. ‘Jasper & Jacob’s Fowey Fudge has been clogging my arteries for years. At least that’s what the quacks reckoned when I had my little stroke.’

‘The policy of Trevelyan’s Toffees has always been to promote the occasional confectionery treat as part of a balanced diet,’ the little shy one recited. ‘We are committed to supporting a healthy lifestyle, which should include twenty minutes of aerobic exercise three times a week.’

Jasper and Jacob Trevelyan, widely known as The Toffee Twins, appeared in dire but iconic TV commercials in which they sat in wing-chairs by roaring fires giving sweeties to the cherubic kiddies perched on their laps. In a country hysterical about paedophilia, the Toffee Twins went on year in, year out presenting a child molester’s fantasy and nobody said a word.

‘I’d been afraid,’ Vic was saying, sotto voce, ‘that, as treasured national figures, you might have been put off by our recent publicity.’

‘I’ve been discreet for the last fifty years,’ snorted Jasper. ‘But we’ve just sold out to Nestlé and pissed ourselves laughing all the way to the bank. Now I don’t give a toss who knows I like a lad’s arse from time to time. That right, Jacob?’

Jacob blushed and smiled again, shaking his wee silvery head.

‘They’re both gay?’ Faisal murmured.

‘Presumably,’ I replied.

‘I wonder if they’re on Dinkydudes,’ he said. 

We reckoned everyone had arrived and turned to follow Vic and the Toffee Twins into the Saloon. Then an extraordinary voice, light, fluting but with surprising power stopped us in our tracks.

‘I am Lord Vale.’

Framed in the front doors was what looked like an exotic bird that had lost its way over the Tropic of Cancer and taken a wrong turn northwards. Tall and spindly, it wore a white Moroccan djellabah, the neck and sleeves ornately embroidered with gold thread. There were rings on its fingers and jewelled sandals on its feet. Its skin was light brown and corrugated by the sun; above a large hook nose sat a candy-floss of dyed gold hair, whipped up to conceal its sparseness.

‘I am Lord Vale,’ the voice repeated, lobbing the perfectly-formed syllables the length of the Gilded Hall, like one of those old actors who could hit the upper circle without breaking sweat. We’d almost forgotten the man Vic had described as our biggest catch, the one who’d give Mount Royal a cachet that the nouveau-riche bank accounts of Curtis and Beau, Mr Lim, the Toffee Twins and even Vic himself could never deliver.

Lord William Vale, second son of the Marquis of Matcham, known to the international jet-set as Lord Billy and, for forty years, also bearer of the title Queen of Marrakesh, where he’d ruled the expatriate community of artists, writers and Eurotrash with an iron-fist holding a cocktail-shaker. He’d returned to England just recently and was living in flat in Bryanston Square. He glided towards us, the djellabah billowing behind him in the breeze from the open doors.

Vic reminded him that they’d last met at the Windsors’ in the Bois de Boulogne, when Vic and Nancy Mitford had duetted on Buddy Can You Spare A Dime? while sipping Puligny-Montrachet.

‘I remember it well, my dear,’ said Lord Billy. ‘Wallis said, “Oh look, two Nancies.” She had more wit than she was given credit for.’

We led Lord Billy into the Saloon. It was strange to see it full of people again, smelling of their breath, their flesh and the slightly dated fragrances of Jermyn Street. It had come alive in other ways too. William and Mary armchairs now had to rub snooty shoulders with modern sofas in crisp white covers and table lamps with soft silk shades. Papers and magazines lay on the lacquered tables, prominent among them, at his insistence, Vic and his hairy man-boobs on the front cover of Gay Times. Elspeth directed the waiters like they were an especially irritating bunch of juniors at Glenlyon, while keeping a beady eye on the cleanliness of Dapper Stephen’s glassware. Alma the cat worked the room, weaving her way among the forest of ankles, lubricating the conversation. We’d not be allowing pets so she might be a selling-point. I must remember to mention she came from Harrods. They’d like that.

After a while, we ushered everyone back out to the Gilded Hall. I climbed a short way up one branch of the staircase. Vic and Faisal stood just behind me like a couple of heavies. I’d wanted Vic to do the speech, but he’d refused, saying it was my right. I was atypically nervous. I’d made countless presentations in my career, but this was different. I thought I’d start with a gag so I asked if anybody needed to pee before I began, boasting that we’d installed enough loos for everyone to go simultaneously should the need ever arise. The bathroom suppliers had given me what they called a Prostate Discount. Beau Styles laughed but nobody else did.

‘For fuck’s sake, toots, get on with it,’ hissed Vic at my shoulder.

So I threw my head back, flung my arms wide and flooded my eyes with wonder. I’d seen Charlton Heston do it as Moses parting the Red Sea and felt it worked well. I’d been practising in the mirror.

‘Gentleman, look around you. You now have a unique opportunity to live in one of the great houses of England; to live alongside the genius of Wren, of Gainsborough and Reynolds, of William Kent, of Jeffrey Wyattville. Yet only recently, all this was under threat and might easily have been lost. Mount Royal has been a sleeping beauty. The fact that it now has the chance to wake again is due to all of you. I want to thank you formally now; many others will want to thank you in the centuries to come.’

I wondered if I sounded up my arse, but they seemed to be rapt.

‘As you will all know, Mount Royal has been in the news lately. Our pioneering project has been mocked, condemned even, by some, but applauded by many many more. And when communities like ours are taken for granted, people will perhaps look back and recall that famous phrase in our island story, “never was so much owed by so many to so few”.’

I’d intended that line as another gag, but I noticed Marcus Leigh tighten the knot of his tie and several slightly curved spines perceptibly straighten. Heads grey, dyed, bewigged and bald turned to their neighbours with smiles of tentative camaraderie. I signalled to the waiters to start giving out champagne.

‘Over the top?’ I muttered to Vic.

‘By several battalions,’ he replied, ‘but I think they’re right behind you.’

‘Gentlemen, a toast,’ I said, raising my glass. ‘To Mount Royal.’

The words were boomeranged back to me amid the pinging of crystal. It wasn’t just a polite murmur either; it was loud, gutsy, aggressive even. Beau whooped and punched the air till Curtis grabbed his arm and forced it down.

Just then I caught my grandmother’s eye. She was, as portraits do, staring straight at me. I lost myself in those eyes for a few seconds, till I noticed that everyone had fallen quiet and was waiting for me to speak again. I knew I had to announce lunch, but the sentence wouldn’t come. Luckily it was provided by Elspeth who’d done her Mrs Danvers thing and materialized beside me. She’d made no concessions to the occasion and was wearing something that would’ve looked grim on a wardress in Prisoner Cell Block H.

‘Will you all come away and get your lunch?’ called Elspeth ‘It’ll be spoiling in a minute and there are others less fortunate who’d be grateful for it. However, since I’ve got you assembled, I’ll just say a few quick words about the standards of behaviour we’d be expecting to see at Mount Royal. My name is Miss Wishart and I am matron of this establishment. So if you’d kindly give me your attention …’

Without warning, Elspeth launched into a lecture covering, inter alia, punctuality at meals, the frequency of the changing of sheets, the ban on smoking anywhere in the house and acceptable dress codes for different times of the day. I knew I should stop her, but listening dutifully while Miss Wishart delivered instructions was an ingrained habit and interruption was unthinkable. I was about to wish that I had.

‘Lastly, a wee word about gentlemen callers,’ she said, her face flushing slightly. ‘Respectable visitors, your family or friends, are of course welcome here, though they will be restricted to certain hours and certain parts of the house. It’s a big place to keep clean and I’ll not be wanting too many people under my feet. However, we’re not going to be having any scruffy scallywags of uncertain parentage whom you met five minutes ago coming into Mount Royal and stuffing the silver spoons down their breeks. So let’s get that clear right from the start. I run a tight ship here, lads.’

Oh dear. Marcus Leigh’s nostrils flared until I thought he might whinny. Little Jacob Trevelyan bit his fingernails and didn’t know where to look. Lord Billy’s high-pitched laughter tinkled up towards the cupola.

‘You just relax babe,’ called Beau. ‘The only gentlemen callers most of us are gonna get will be the paramedics or the morticians.’

As I led the procession towards lunch, Curtis Powell tugged at my sleeve.

‘Congratulations on having a transgender person on the staff,’ he said. ‘I relate to your progressive outlook. She sure could do with some tips on hair and make-up though. I’m sure Beaumont would be pleased to help.’

On the long walnut table in the State Dining-Room, the crystal and silver sparkled in the midday sun streaming in from the gardens. Big Frankie, in full chef’s gear, was waiting with a tits-out buffet. When the old guys filtered in, his mouth gashed into a grin that could have floodlit the Heath.

A few people were already ladling out their lobster bisque when a cadaverous man named Archdeacon Brownlow silenced the chatter by announcing that he would say a grace. Big Frankie sank to his knees. The Archdeacon, with a concave face like an Easter Island statue and halitosis bad enough to fell trees, looked down at him in alarm.

‘Are you an evangelical?’

‘No, Sir, a Roman.’

‘Thank goodness for that.’

The Archdeacon warbled away in that colourless tone copyrighted by clergymen everywhere, his head tilted towards heaven. It was like Birnam Wood up his nose and it was definitely on the move to Dunsinane; much longer and he’d have the beginnings of a moustache. My own gaze drifted upwards too. On the ceiling there was another party going on; a painted feast of gods, nymphs and satyrs draped over clouds, plucking lyres, admiring each other’s perfect pecs and rosebud nipples. As a boy, imprisoned at Granny’s formal dinners, I’d imagined myself up there with them, jumping across the clear blue void from cumulus to cumulus with a basket of shiny red apples. They’d been peering down on the long walnut table for three centuries and I wondered what they were thinking today. Were they laughing even more heartily than usual?

‘I was the first to realize the Snowdons were in trouble,’ I heard Lord Billy telling Curtis and Mr Lim. ‘I said to her mother, “Sorry Ma’am, but you’ve only yourself to blame. Dear Peter would have been perfect for her.” It was ten years before I saw the inside of Clarence House again.’

Curtis was shitting himself because Lord Billy had known the Queen Mother. Mr Lim lamented the terrible decline of Her Majesty’s teeth in later life. He had written to her personally outlining his ideas for improvement, but had only received a brief reply from a secretary.

As I walked past Elspeth and The Toffee Twins, she was telling them how infection rates for syphilis, herpes and chlamydia were going through the roof.

‘So if you’re going to play, play canny,’ she said to the little shy one.

Big Frankie cantered about, making sure that plates were filled and glasses full.

‘You’ve got the loveliest eyes, mister,’ he informed Marcus Leigh. ‘But I expect people tell you that all the time.’ Marcus blushed and muttered something into his meringue glacé.

I watched Vic schmoozing from group to group, giving each person just enough time to make them feel important, then moving on while they still wanted more. He seemed to assume everyone he met was either a fan or about to become one. A nice philosophy really. I might raise it with Ms Prada and see if she felt it was psychologically sound.

I finally managed to corner Elspeth.

‘You were a bit heavy back there, Miss Wishart,’ I said. ‘The sexual health stuff? Where did all that come from?’

‘You’re now looking at a proud member of an organization called Rubber Duckies,’ she said. ‘We go to those places frequented by misguided men and give out the wee condom things. I got in touch with them via that magazine with the awful picture of Mr d’Orsay on the cover.’

‘Is that where you’d been the other night? Out on the Heath?’

‘It was indeed.’

‘Are there many mature ladies in Rubber Duckies?’

‘No just me,’ she said ‘But they’ve got something called an open-door policy so they took me in. They’re mostly peely-wally lads with tattoos and earrings. Dreadful to look at, but not bad boys on the whole.’

‘Please tell me you don’t go alone?’

‘Dearie me, no, I’m buddied with a chap called Shane. He works in Fortnum & Mason. Very nicely spoken.’

‘Well, ok, Miss Wishart,’ I mumbled, at a loss for anything more coherent. ‘Just be careful.’

‘There’s work to be done out there, Rory Blaine,’ she said ‘I told you that before. Anyway, I’ve not got the Sunday school now and it’s really not that different. Just spreading a message.’

When lunch was over, Robin Bradbury-Ross asked everyone to follow him on his guided tour of the state rooms.

‘I’m wearing one of your jocks,’ he whispered as he led the punters out. ‘And it feels so good.’

‘You’re a very sick boy, Robin,’ I replied.

‘You love it,’ he said, leaving me worried that I actually did.

Elspeth and Big Frankie were down in the kitchens, organizing coffee for later. Faisal had vanished somewhere as soon as he politely could. I went back into the Saloon, planning a catnap on a sofa, but there sat Lord Billy Vale in solitary splendour, his sandals slipped off and his long legs tucked up under him.

‘Not taking the tour then, Lord Billy?’

‘I’ve seen it before, my dear,’ he said, ‘I used to come here as a child with my Mama. She was a friend of your grandmother’s. It’s not exactly Matcham of course, though it’s still quite something.’

He described the family seat in Wiltshire, even grander than Mount Royal. Lord Billy’s nephew was now the Earl. They invited him to christenings, that sort of thing, but he didn’t often visit. He embarrassed them before the good burghers of Salisbury. The pink sheep of the family.

‘The trouble is, these great houses, they’re not like a three-bedroomed semi in Dartford, are they?’ he said, gazing round at the Mogul tapestries. ‘They begin to define who one is. Nowhere else can quite compete. I suppose it’s all the insistent beauty. You are lucky Mr Blaine to be still living in yours.’

I explained that I’d been estranged from my grandmother for most of my life and hadn’t expected to ever return to Mount Royal, let alone inherit it. He peered at me as if I were some rare specimen in a jar.

‘How incredible for you,’ he said. ‘I have never slept a night at Matcham since I left England over fifty years ago. A guardsman in St James’s Park, such a frightful cliché. I just can’t bring myself to do it, even though one longs to. There’s no real affection for me there, so it’s just a house now rather than a home. Oh dear, I sound like one of Vic d’Orsay’s sugary songs, do I not?’

From the folds of the djellabah, he produced a teeny mother-of-pearl box. He carefully counted out a row of four or five tablets and washed them down with water. Then he uncurled his endless legs and asked for the nearest loo. My little joke earlier had been cruelly perceptive, he said. Turning in the doorway, he pointed a long, arthritic finger in my direction. The sun caught on a big fat ruby ring.

‘I was watching you at luncheon, my dear,’ he said. ‘You were perfectly charming to everyone, but you were talking at us like a double-glazing salesman. One realizes this is a commercial venture but unless you trouble to engage with these strangers wandering round your marbled halls, then this house will remain as empty for you as Matcham now is for me. A stage-set, nothing more. Think on’t, I beg you. But if I don’t go now, I shall piss on your Aubusson.’

When Robin’s tour had finished, I herded everyone upstairs to see the apartments, now ready for occupation. Most were still empty shells but we’d furnished and propped one as if it were already in use. The four-poster had been turned back and a fluffy bathrobe spread across it. The scent of expensive soaps filled the ensuite bathroom and freshly-made coffee wafted from the galley kitchen. Chopin played on the sound system, books were piled on the bedside tables and, in absurd defiance of the season, we’d lit the fire. There was a gratifying buzz of approval, though Jasper Trevelyan snorted that at these prices he’d have expected a rent-boy in the bed, already lubed-up.

Then I led them out to the Coach House where they were shown the gym, the small pool and the site of our imminent jacuzzi. Poor Morag Proudie had finally died a few weeks back and bequeathed Elspeth a top of the range installation. Faisal gave a brief, tense presentation of The Lazarus Programme. He talked about diet, nutrition and the incredible benefits of exercise particularly, as he put it, for those on the last lap of life.

‘Can you give me my arse back?’ one man called out. ‘It used to be quite famous in certain parts of Portsmouth, but now there’s a staircase leading down to my thighs.’

Faisal said he felt sure that the staircase could, at the very least, be turned into a ramp. People laughed and Faisal looked perplexed, not understanding why.

Dolores Potts guided everyone round the gardens. She was impressive; sketching the history of the British garden and Mount Royal’s place in it, explaining the stages of the replanting, painting a picture of how it would all look one day. She knew her stuff all right but then, if her CV was kosher, she’d won every prize going at horticultural college. She’d told me it was the formal garden that turned her on; she loved the tidiness and symmetry because she’d come from a messy family, an English father who was a farmer and a Spanish mother who’d thrown things. The fact that Gertrude Jekyll’s lot had been terribly establishment explained the wild abandon of her borders; That was the way it worked, Dolores thought, parental rebellion in horticultural form. When she’d finished her tour, she’d curtsied deeply to her audience like she was Maria Callas. I watched her enchant them with my eternal feeling of having known her somewhere before.

Preview Day was to end with coffee in the Orangery. A regiment of miniature orange trees in white wooden tubs guarded the tall glass doors, folded back to let in the warmth of the afternoon. The long shallow interior was now decorated with oleanders, camellias and ceiling-high palms. In the centre was a restored Edwardian aviary, newly tenanted by linnets and canaries. I was surprised to see that the Bechstein baby grand, usually in the Red Damask Drawing-Room, had been transported here too. Dapper Stephen and his team swirled around with coffee-pots while the punters cooed at the birds and Big Frankie fluttered around the punters. He’d changed out of his chef’s gear into a pair of silver satin baggies and a T-shirt reading There’s No Tool Like An Old Tool. I’d get him for that later.

Eventually, Vic tapped his cup with his spoon, thanked everyone for coming and expressed the hope that we’d be seeing at least some of them again. We’d agreed this bit in advance, but then he moved to the piano.

‘Gentlemen, it’s not over till the fat man sings. It’s more than forty years since I first performed this lovely song from West Side Story. Today, I’d like to sing it again for all of you but with a special dedication to my old friend Mr Beau Styles.’

‘Oh babe,’ cried Beau.

‘And on keyboards, direct from the parish church on the lovely Isle of Bute, please welcome our very own Miss Elspeth Wishart.’

There was a smattering of applause. Elspeth slid onto the stool, looking as if she wished the earth would swallow her, an emotion I was relating to quite strongly. Vic moulded himself into the curve of the piano.

‘My pal Stevie Sondheim wrote these beautiful lyrics, which encapsulate everything I feel about what’s happened here today.’

Vic segued into that song about there being a place, somewhere, for us all. I felt my shoulders start to heave. Dolores Potts, having a ciggie in the doorway, choked on her smoke and had to slip outside. Shite, what was he like? He had his faults all right, but nobody could say he wasn’t a laugh.

I looked around me, ready to share grins with all and sundry. But nobody else was grinning. Vic wasn’t singing the song for laughs, as an advertising jingle for the attractions of Mount Royal, he was doing it straight, meaning every soppy word, as he’d insisted that he always did. And Elspeth’s playing, hesitant at first as she tried to pin down his rhythm, soon became fluid and assured. Sundays at Glenlyon, when she’d thumped out hymns on an asthmatic organ had shown no sign of any such gift. But every eye was bolted onto Vic, even those of the smooth young waiters, at an age when I’d have thought them inoculated against sentimentality. For once in his career Vic was underplaying. Keeping it simple. No frills. And it worked a treat.

‘Somewhere’. The last long note hovered in the air then evaporated into the highest fronds of the palm trees. Vic lowered his head slowly and contemplated the innards of the piano.

There was silence in the Orangery. Even the birds had stopped chirping, as if in awe of a classier act. Then somebody started the clapping, but it was almost reluctant, the sort you make when it doesn’t seem quite appropriate but is expected of you. Something had moved in the room; I wasn’t quite sure what it was, but there was a presence now which hadn’t been there before. Lord Billy was standing at my elbow.

‘Point made, I think,’ he said.

I could hear gulps and sniffles from several quarters. Beau’s chubby cheeks were flooded by a confluence of sweat and tears. Marcus Leigh’s gaze was fixed on his tiny Sèvres coffee cup. And, for the second time that afternoon, Big Frankie had fallen to his knees in worshipful wonder. But it was Faisal, his features struggling to corset themselves together, who suddenly turned on his heel and vanished out into the gardens.