"Ah, I see. But. " Giles frowned gradually, "what about Jimmy?"
"What about him?"
"Jimmy. The mistress's daughter's boyfriend."
"I know who he is. He ran away from home again on Wednesday."
Giles seemed relieved. "That's right, of course he did. So all that was all right then."
"Why didn't you come down yesterday?"
"Um, sleeping or something, I think. Yesterday. was that Round the House, Chuckadoodledoo, Brumber and Al-phonse, and Tammy?"
"No, that's Tuesday."
Giles cocked his head. "Are you sure?"
"Yes."
"Well, what was on yesterday. Apart, of course, from Imbroglio?"
"Young Scientist, Vespa Newtown, Cooking Without Tears, and Elephant Boy."
"Oh, of course. When does it start today, actually?"
"Know Your Pony's on at ten-thirty," said Keith.
Giles smiled without opening his mouth. "Well, see you down here for that, then?"
"Right you are."
TWO
"How big's his cock, for instance?" inquired Diana, settling herself on the windowseat and placing the tea tray on Celia's crowded dressing table.
Celia winced as she strained to unscrew a jar of face cream. "Pretty big. Well above average. Ah, thank you, Diana. How big's Andy's?"
Diana sighed. "Enormous. When he's not on anything, of course." She sipped her tea, and asked, peering over her cup, "How often does Quentin fuck you?"
With white-plumed fingertips Celia dabbed at her variegated, spot-sprinkled face. The clear fact that Celia's complexion was so much worse than her own slightly mitigated Diana's disgust when Celia said, "Once a night, at least. And usually in the morning.”
: "Even when he's on something?"
"Especially then. That doesn't seem to affect Quentin. Sometimes when he's speeding he can go on for hours."
"Really?"
"Oh yes, hours." Celia stopped kneading her face in order to glance alertly at Diana. Then she resumed. "Once literally all night. How often does Andy?"
"Oh, every night — or in the morning. And sometimes at odd times during the day. How good is Quentin?"
Celia went vacant. Then she said: "Fantastic. And Andy?"
Diana couldn't go vacant so she went knowing. Then she said: "Fantastic."
There was a pause.
"One of the most beautiful things Quentin does," said his wife, "is talk."
"Big deal."
"No, I mean when we're making love."
"Oh," said Diana briskly, "Andy does that too. Tm going to fuck your fucking cunt till—' "
"Oh no. Not like that." Celia shook her head. "Quentin, Quentin says poetry."
"Oh. No." Diana shook her head. "Andy doesn't do that."
three
Quentin and Andy were in fact playing darts in the garage. Between shots, they sipped Irish coffee from pint-sized mugs and passed thin, one-paper joints back and forth. Their tall bodies swayed indolently to the music from Andy's portable tape recorder. Whenever they were alone together there was always a pleasant tang in the air; it was not sexual tension so much as a mutual, agreed narcissism.
"Christ, what's that smell?" said Andy.
"It's the fungus on the boilers," said Quentin, "though no doubt deriving further piquancy from the aroma of little Keith's 'room.'"
"It's like bad chick." Andy accepted the darts Quentin offered him and walked to behind the chalk mark ten feet from the board. "Or like stale come — which figures."
"Why? What could little Keith possibly have to masturbate about?"
"Nothing," said Andy. "Nothing at all. But he's got plenty of visual aids.”
"Oh, really? What's he got in there?"
Andy took his three throws before replying. "Just a great load of cunt magazines."
"What genre?"
"Yeah, he page-fucks the models. Banana shots. Guys with bent rigs being gobbled. Open beavers. One's with the cameraman halfway up the girls' bums."
"Oh. Just straight stuff then?"
"Beat me, beat me," said Andy warmly as one of his favorite LPs wound onto the tape. He strolled to the wall and plucked his darts from the board. "Nice arrows. Yeah, mostly. Diana took a look in there the other night. Says he's got one or two of dogs buggering some old woman."
"That sounds very sexy," said Quentin. "Oh, dear, poor little Keith."
"Yeah, he's a mess, isn't he?"
"Sort of baby's face on a dwarf's body."
"Like a sort of wrecky little doll."
"Breath like a laser beam," mused Quentin.
"Or an oxyacetylene burner."
"Fat as a pig."
"Smells like a compost heap."
"Or a dotard's mattress."
"Be bald as an egg by the time he's twenty-five."
"Or twenty-four."
"Or twenty-three."
"Or twenty-two."
"He's that now."
"At least."
"Yes," said Andy. "It's amazing, when you come to think of it, that he's so cheerful."
"Especially with us handsome bastards about the place."
"Check." Andy nodded, his eyes closed. "Check."
5: appleseed rectorv
Are we presenting characters and scenes that are somehow fanciful, tendentious, supererogatory? Not at all. Quite the contrary. The reverse is the case. By the standards that here obtain Giles and Keith could be dismissed as pathetically introverted, Quentin and Andy as complacent and somewhat: fastidious, and Celia and Diana as sadly, even quaintly, inhibited. The household, indeed, considers itself a fortress for the old pieties, a stout anachronism, a bastion of the values it seems to us so notably to lack.
For we have gone on ahead a small distance in time. Our subjects are now mere adolescents, quite unaware of the shape their lives have begun to take. Let us glimpse them, then, in their transient innocence.
This summer, as we write, Giles Coldstream has just passed his Common Entrance and, following this coup, is holidaying victoriously at Monkenvale, the family seat, whose forty apartments are occupied by Giles, his mother, and a staff of thirteen. Giles is a radiantly unselfconscious little boy, rather undersized, brown-haired, eversmiling, the cossett of the house staff, the darling of the village, and shyly in love with the gardener's eldest son, who takes him fishing most afternoons and to the local cinema every Saturday and on alternate Wednesdays. Giles is accurately described by the cook as "such a sunny little thing"; he has moments of foreboding, brief but intense, only when his mother wheels herself into his room at night and when he visits the dentist.
It is being a glorious summer also for Andy Adorno, who is no less enjoyably whiling away his vac as an assistant sorter in the Notting Hill post office. By law, Andy is too young for the job, but he looks older than he is and the people at the post office like him as much as most people seem to. They have agreed to pay him £22 per week, cash, with the consequence that Andy is buying a fair amount of cocaine on Friday evenings. Despite his experiments with this and any other drug he can get his hands on, he remains cheerful, rowdy and energetic. Furthermore, at what he calls "the vague commune in Earl's Court" where he has always lived, Andy encounters lots to eat and drink, plenty of friendly guys with all sorts of amazing musical instruments, and a continuous stream of girls who keep on successfully trying to go to bed with him.
As usual, Celia Evanston is being toted round Europe by Aramintha Leitch, her stepmother, who is, as usual, between
divorces. They are at this moment checking out of La Traviata
in Monte Carlo and waiting for the Mercedes that will shortly take them to the Cannes Hilton. Lady Leitch, a small, athletic blonde, is being importuned variously and without sue- cess by the hotel manager, two hotel waiters, the janitor of the hotel swimming pool, and the maitre de of the hotel dining room. The first wants Lady Leitch to settle her bill; the other four want to know when Lady Leitch will return so that they can all sleep with her again: to each the noblewoman gives her Hebridean address. Celia can be made out in the corner of the foyer sitting amid a pile of luggage and hatboxes. A hideous bellboy crouches beside her; their conversation is in French and has the cadences of recrimination and denial. Finally, the girl stands — small, fat, shock-haired, but with a certain assurance — glances at her stepmother, and says, "Dix minutes." The hideous bellboy spreads his hands, as if this is all he had asked, all anyone could ask. The couple disappears arm in arm.