‘I have something over here that might interest you,’ he said, reminded now by these thoughts of a particular treasure and strolling over to a wall where two piles of books were separated by a small Picasso that took pride of place in the centre. It took him only a moment to find the one he wanted. ‘It’s a first edition. You’ve probably read it.’
‘Maurice,’ said Maurice, flipping it from front cover to back and running his finger along the lettering before opening it to the frontispiece. ‘Yes, I’ve read it. I love Forster. It’s signed and dedicated to you,’ he added, a look of wonderment spreading across his face now as he looked up. ‘You met him, then?’
‘Several times,’ replied Gore, retrieving both the book and his authority as he opened the volume at a random page, reading aloud the first lines upon which his eyes felclass="underline" ‘With the crudity of youth he drew his mother apart and said that he should always respect her religious prejudices and those of the girls, but that his own conscience permitted him to attend church no longer. She said it was a great misfortune. Mothers,’ he added. ‘My own mother, Nina, started off as an actress, you know. But then she forswore that career to become an alcoholic, a slut and a certifiable lunatic. I don’t know why she couldn’t have done both. Historically, the two careers have not proved mutually exclusive.’
‘You’ve said that before, haven’t you?’ asked Maurice, smiling. ‘It sounds rehearsed.’
‘No,’ said Gore, shocked by such a brazen remark. Who on earth did this boy think he was?
‘What was he like, anyway?’ asked Maurice.
‘What was who like?’
‘Forster.’
Gore hesitated before answering. He felt a sudden desire to anger-fuck the boy, then toss him over the cliffs into the sea below, to watch as his body bounced off the rocks and his bones smashed into a thousand pieces. ‘Prissy,’ he said finally, somehow managing to quell his growing temper and sense of discombobulation. ‘Mannered. Officious. If the gods had descended from Mount Olympus and used a pitiless blend of blood, bone and skin to craft a creature best suited for spending its days cloistered behind the walls of King’s College, Cambridge, then that creature would surely have gone by the name of Morgan. He could barely function in the real world. I daresay he started to tremble and perspire whenever he popped down to his local supermarket to buy toilet paper. Actually, it’s rather hard to imagine Morgan using toilet paper, isn’t it? One rather suspects that he was too prudish to engage in such a human act as excretion. Where’s Morgan? Oh, he went off to take his morning shit. No, I can’t imagine it at all. Anyway.’
He looked over at Maurice, hoping for a laugh, but the boy simply nodded, which irritated him. He’d thought all of that was rather good and deserved a little more appreciation. It was good form, after all, to laugh at the jokes of one’s betters. The Queen’s eldest boy, that otter-like cuckold breathlessly longing for his own ascension, had come to dinner one evening the previous year and Gore had laughed at all his jokes, despite the fact that the man was about as humorous as a member of the Sonderkommando. He’d barely eaten, he remembered that about him too, pushing a very good piece of fish around his plate as if he were searching for a piece of broccoli under which to hide it.
‘I don’t suppose your parents named you for him, did they?’ he asked, returning the book to its allotted place on the shelf.
‘No,’ replied Maurice, shaking his head. ‘No, they weren’t readers. I doubt they’d ever even heard of Forster.’
‘That’s a Yorkshire tone to your voice, isn’t it?’ he asked. ‘But you’re trying to shake it off by doing a poor impression of an announcer from the BBC World Service.’
‘I’m not trying to shake anything off,’ said Maurice. ‘But yes, I’m from Harrogate. Although I’ve spoken this way since I was a child.’
‘You’ve wanted it that long, then?’ said Gore quietly, and the question might have been a rhetorical one.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘It doesn’t matter. I wonder what else I can show you that you might appreciate.’
He turned and walked around the library, looking for something appropriately impressive. ‘What were you reading on your journey here, by the way?’ he asked.
‘Dash’s new novel. He gave it to me when we met at Heathrow. I already had something in my bag that I’d been looking forward to but I had to set it aside.’
‘How incredibly crass. Do you mean to tell me that you sat on a flight next to each other – I’m assuming you sat next to each other – and were forced to read his book while he watched you turn the pages? And then on the train from Rome too?’
‘Yes,’ said Maurice.
‘Pathetic behaviour,’ said Gore dismissively. ‘It reminds me of an occasion when I agreed to meet another novelist for dinner in Cologne, a mediocre hack if I’m honest. He deliberately kept me waiting in the lobby of his hotel, possibly to assert some sort of dominance over me, and when he finally deigned to appear he was carrying a book with him, one of his own, and he claimed he’d been re-reading it on the flight. What an ass, I thought. Still, I suppose someone had to read the damned thing. It’s not as if the general public took to it.’
He waited for Maurice to ask who the novelist had been and, when the question didn’t arrive, he felt a mixture of disappointment and frustration.
‘What did you think of it, anyway?’ he asked. ‘Dash’s book, I mean.’
‘It’s not one of his better ones,’ replied Maurice quickly. ‘I still have three hundred pages to go too. I’d give up if it weren’t for the fact that he’ll want a full report later.’
Gore smiled and tapped his finger on the desk. Interesting, he thought. How easily the boy mocks his benefactor.
‘I should have asked,’ he said. ‘What was the book you were intending to read?’
‘Myra Breckinridge,’ said Maurice, and Gore couldn’t help himself. He burst out laughing.
‘Oh, my dear boy,’ he said. ‘You are good at this, aren’t you? I can see you’re going to be a tremendous success.’
Over dinner, the discussion turned to Maurice’s novel. Gore had avoided making any direct reference to it all afternoon but Howard, who had returned home in disarray, having had his wallet stolen in a café before unsuccessfully chasing the thief through the streets of Ravello, asked when it would be published.
‘Oh, but it’s already out,’ said Dash, delighted that the conversation was turning to his protégé at last, which was far more appealing to him than the lecture on the Emperor Galba that Gore had been delivering for almost forty minutes. ‘The British edition, that is. And some of the European ones. But the Americans don’t publish until September. That’s where you come in, Gore.’
‘Me?’ asked Gore, lifting a prawn from his plate and shelling it in a trio of expert movements before dipping the crustacean in Cassiopeia’s excellent chilli dressing and popping it into his mouth. There were hundreds of reasons for spending the autumn of one’s life on the Amalfi Coast but the quality of the seafood was near the top of that list. ‘What have I got to do with anything?’