‘I haven’t.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I haven’t ever watched porn on a work computer.’
He swallows. I watch his Adam’s apple slide under his skin.
‘Well, I don’t know … maybe you aren’t governed by the same – ah – urges as the rest of us.’
I understand his implication. He sees me understanding it and starts making his excuses.
‘Good to meet you, Martin. I must go and pay my respects to Lady Katherine, now that I see her over there. What a loss. I can’t even imagine …’
He leaves, spouting platitudes and I am alone again, thank God. I leave my empty champagne flute on the grass and decide to go on a wander, for old times’ sake. I retrace my steps through the gardens and I see Lady Katherine, now cornered by Richard Take near the rose bushes. She is physically stepping back from him. He is still talking with outstretched hands and as I pass near them, I catch him saying, ‘… what red-blooded man …’
I have no intention of saving her. Frosty old bitch.
The side entrance is exactly how I remember it: hidden by fronds of ivy and easy to miss if you don’t know it’s there. The door has been left on the latch. I slip inside. The hallway is cool and smells ofsynthetic floral floor cleaner. I walk past the service kitchen on the left, and the boot room on the right. I keep going into the heart of the house until the flagstones become carpet and the walls gradually fill with ancestral portraits. Just outside the dining room, where I sat through many stilted meals as a boy (tepid soup; overcooked lamb), there is a series of still-life studies of dead pheasants and blocks of cheese, all of them brownish in tone, the original colours trapped underneath centuries of dirt and ageing varnish. They were like this when I used to visit and have got filthier in the intervening years. The Fitzmaurices never thought to get them cleaned, I suppose, or are simply too cheap to do so. On a console table, there is a nice silver flower bowl, scallop-edged and probably worth more than my annual salary, but it has been filled with artificial flowers, plastic petals edged with dust.
I hear voices coming from the study. I approach more cautiously, taking care not to tread on the floorboards I know will creak. I can make out Ben’s low tones – I would know his cadence anywhere.
‘No, no, I quite understand,’ he is saying. ‘Please, you don’t need to explain. I know how it is.’
I gather, from the ensuing silence, that he is on the phone.
‘You can imagine. Very emotional, yes.’
He coughs, then there’s a thudding sound, as if a glass has been placed back on a coaster.
‘Look, I’m just relieved the press coverage has been fairly respectful, all things considered … Mm … Quite … No, that’s quite right.’
He’s talking as though he’s giving a speech or a witness statement. There is none of the relaxed joshing that I recall from years past. In the late 90s, at the height of our friendship, Ben attempted to reinvent himself, dropping his glottal stops to sound like a man of the people. He started wearing trainers, and T-shirts under suit jackets with rolled-up sleeves. That particular pose lasted well into his late thirties, until he began nurturing his political ambition in earnest and we stopped being friends.
This version of Ben is new to me: more grown-up, more suited tothe times. The country survived the pandemic and is now in the grip of a cost-of-living crisis, created by Edward Buller and his acolytes. Ben has remoulded himself to appear serious, statesmanlike and reassuring, although he’s been as guilty as the rest of them. It’s very convincing to the untrained observer, but I know – because surely I do still, at some level, know him? – that this sheen has been nicely buffed up for his own self-advancement.
‘That’s very kind, Ed,’ I can hear Ben saying now. Of course. He’s talking to the Prime Minister. So one presumes Buller didn’t turn up after all. Come to think of it, I didn’t see his corpulent form or unruly mop of hair anywhere.
‘I will,’ Ben is saying. ‘Yes, it’s in the diary and I’m looking forward to strategising.’ There is another thud of a glass on a desk and then he laughs. ‘Righto. Until then.’
I begin to retrace my steps back down the hallway, but in my haste, I bump into the console table. The marble countertop slams into my hip-bone and I cry out. The silver bowl of artificial flowers wobbles, then rights itself.
‘What the—?’ Ben’s voice comes from the study, followed by his footsteps. I sense him approaching. I look around, pointlessly wondering if there is any escape. But no – he is next to me now, reaching out to help and then, seemingly thinking better of it, he retracts his arm. His hand hangs for a moment, suspended in mid-air: Michelangelo’s God creating Adam. Then he drops it entirely.
‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I was looking for the loo.’
In my first week at Burtonbury School, someone savaged me for asking where the toilet was. I have never forgotten it and have not spoken the offending word out loud since. I remember, one bleak school holiday, I told my mother I was ‘off to the loo’ and she laughed at me. ‘Oooh, Lord Hoity-toity,’ she jeered, ‘I suppose you’re too good for the likes of me,’ and she refused to speak to me for the rest of the day. My life was a constant criss-crossing over different classes and cultures. They have a word for it these days (of course they do – they have words for everything). They call it code-switching.
Ben looks at me, his expression caught somewhere between fondness and annoyance. Maybe I’m imagining the fondness.
‘Come on now, Martin, you’re not going to tell me you don’t remember where the loo in my parents’ house is! It’s the first left, before the stairs.’
‘Ah. Yes. Of course. I confess, I don’t recall the exact layout of this enormous house given it’s been – what would you say? – twenty-five, almost thirty years?’
He grins, in a way that doesn’t reach his eyes.
‘Gosh, is it that long since you’ve been at Denby? Is it really? Well.’ He clasps his hands behind his back. ‘Well,’ he says again. ‘I won’t keep you …’
‘Oh yes.’
