"Keith, you must never talk like that," said Quentin.
The room paled as a cloud passed between it and the sun, then brightened again. Quentin leaned forward and gently tousled Keith's hair: the artfully posed strands scattered beneath his palm to divulge a broad area of unoccupied scalp. Quentin's fingers retreated.
"Don't worry," he said softly. "I'll make sure something unusual happens to you this weekend. Something or other, if not with Lucy."
7: penthouse cloudscape
Lucy Littlejohn lived in a top-floor Knightsbridge maisonette with three other girls. It was not by any means an atypical household and we would do well to look at it closely. On a normal day they rise between one and two in the afternoon either for long Badedas ablutions in the luxury bathroom or scathing showers in the downstairs closet. Then, while the color television flashes and rumbles in the background, they sprawl about the sitting room in nighties and dressing gowns, angelically aglow in the penthouse cloudscape, sipping coffee from French-style bowls and talking about their respective nights out. At four they wander off to shop in Sloane Street and Beauchamp Place, returning at six for glasses of Tio Pepe and further chat before drifting upstairs to change. Between telephone calls they flit in and out of each other's rooms to borrow scent, swap tights, crave advice. Their voices glide out from brightly lit bedrooms to congregate in the
dusky landing; the conversation might lead one to believe
that they are restaurant critics, nightlife pundits, gossip columnists, incognito bailiffs; they are not. At nine, the taxis and limousines start to arrive.
All the girls have what they call "daytime lovers," but only Lucy habitually sacrifices her financial affairs to her amatory ones, a tendency apotheosized and, ironically, terminated by the handsome, insolvent Adorno. They met the summer before. Andy had run up to her in Pont Street and said, brushing the hair out of his eyes and not smiling, "Hey — why don't you let me come home with you now?" "Yes, all right," Lucy had said at once. They walked to her flat in silence, with tight chests and almost equal shares of surprise. "I wouldn't have asked," Andy said diffidently as he entered Lucy's room, "but you looked so nice."
And she was nice. Short brown-and-blond hair, big violet eyes, her innumerable saris, veils, beads, jewels, belts, garters, scarves not entirely obscuring her friendly figure, a forty-tooth smile and a deafening laugh, areas of mild grease showing through her elaborate though hastily applied makeup, worn-thin shiny patched jeans, lucent orange skin visible beneath her stained and holey blouse, immaculate white underwear. For fifty-five consecutive evenings Andy appeared, smudged and steaming from his holiday job in a Westminster timber yard, bearing a bottle of wine, some hash perhaps, and a toothbrush. For eight weeks Andy talked to Lucy about politics and the American novel, played her the derelict guitar he had restrung and unwarped (Lucy found this embarrassing at first but soon got not to mind it), told her about his life, and made high-powered love to her two or three times a night. And for two months Lucy paid no rent.
On the fifty-sixth evening Mitzi and Serena were waiting by the intercom when Andy let himself in. "Who're you seeing tonight — Louis Quinze?" he said, sweeping past them into the sitting room, where he was hushedly informed by Lucy that her flatmates' plans for the evening might well have fallen through and that he wasn't to vex them further, particularly in view of the fact that she was a little bit behind with the rent. But Adorno, biting the screwtop from a double liter of wine as he flicked off the television and picked up the guitar, wasn't listening; he had seen "the plastic trio" (his sobriquet for Lucy's friends) only once or twice and had betrayed no interest in them whatever. Ten minutes later the intercom whined, there was renewed activity in the hall, and Andy peered round to see a tiny Burmese gentleman dressed in gray military uniform. "Fucking with: soldiers now, are they?" he said. The midget relayed to Mitzi and Serena someone's compliments and apologies and held up a huge floral wreath over which the two girls fluttered apathetically.
Swearing and grumbling, the girls staggered in from the hall. Mitzi made for the telephone as Serena flopped down splay-legged in an armchair. "What's with the midge?" Andy asked. "Here, try this wine." Serena shook her head. "Euch," said Mitzi. Andy looked curiously at Lucy before dipping his head in fierce accompaniment to his guitar.
"Look," Mitzi told the telephone, "if you don't want to fuck just say so. It'll be a good fuck. It'll be a very good fuck." The telephone replied but Mitzi, who was in the process of accepting a cigarette and a light from Serena, could respond only with an angry hum of negation. "No — no — no cash! Two good fucks just for something to do. Yeah, Serena's here, so are there any, you know, is that. Heimito, or whatever the hell his name is.? Oh no, oh no — you send a cab. " Mitzi appeared to be on the point of authentic fury when something the telephone said calmed her. "Okay, okay, hon. Come get us. Ciaow." She hung up, spreading her palms at Serena, who shrugged.
"Everything together?" asked Lucy.
Mitzi must have caught irony in Lucy's tone. "Yeah," she said, "and you better get yourself together pretty soon. This place doesn't run on buttons."
A faraway murmur quite suddenly became a roar as the sound of a low-flying helicopter battered against the windows before receding again into the distance.
"Who was that?" snapped Mitzi. "Bob?"
Parting the curtains, Serena consulted her watch. "Uh-uh. Too early. Must be Gary."
"Right. He said he'd be going late this weekend. Christ, that Jap."
"No, he was from Burma, wasn't he?"
"Yeah, well what the fuck difference does it make?" asked Mitzi.
"Not a hell of a lot."
Simultaneously the girls became aware that Andy's strumming had ceased, that Andy was staring at Lucy, that Lucy had curled up on her chair and was swaying from side to side with her arms wrapped tightly round herself. Mitzi and Serena stirred, but Andy directed his gaze at them with such venomous contempt that they were both silenced by a rush of physical fear.
Andy shuddered. Then, with a relaxed, almost negligent wave of his arm, he splintered the guitar on the steel coffee table in front of him. "Lucy," he said, when the silence had quietened, "is this the way you are? Are you like this?" He sighed. "Lucy, go upstairs and pack a bag and come home with me. If you owe these dogs money, I'll pay it. If you're in trouble, I'll take care of it. Pack a bag and let's get the fuck out of here."
Lucy crumpled a bit into her chair, of course, saddened perceptibly and grew smaller and shook her head in token distraction; but she knew she wasn't going anywhere. She shook her head.
Awed as much by his offer as the fact that Lucy had refused it, Andy stood up, toyed momentarily with the idea of kicking Mitzi or raping Serena, looked round for more things to smash, saw nothing, and so contented himself with upending the table, spitting on the carpet, and breaking the lock of the front door as he left.
All this — or very nearly all this — Diana knew. And as she moved about the bedroom methodically assembling and pairing off Andy's drumsticks, stooping to pick up plectrums and harmonicas from the floor, righting the stack of guitars in the corner, restoring flutes and penny whistles to their boxes and records to their sleeves, bundling together his boyishly stained underpants and pleasingly aromatic T-shirts, blinking at moments of surprised emotion when she noticed his gym shoes placed side by side in the wardrobe or his beloved horse-brass saxophone strap laid out on the desk, Diana attempted to organize her responses to the history. Although she had screwed the above information out of Andy in a playful, bantering spirit, and with due reverence for his potent outrage and sexy disgust, it was with genuine and lasting pain that she thought about these early days with Lucy: equally, although she had screwed the following information out of him