The Facts of Life (49 page)

‘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.