I tried a door at the far end of the billiards room and found it opened into a small room that was entirely dark, save for the light coming from a television set that was showing Dad’s Army. In the doorway I bumped into Shug, who said, ‘Out on the ran-dan, eh, hen?’ and put his arms around me. He was very drunk and said, ‘So how about it — you and me?’ and I had to push him away and remind him that he was ‘Bob’s pal’ and therefore couldn’t shag me. Where was Bob? Shug shrugged (as he had to do sooner or later). ‘Dunno.’
I lurched on, up a small servants’ staircase to the mysterious upper regions of the house where, in a cold bedroom heated to no effect by an oil-filled radiator, Kara and Jill were sitting cross-legged on the floor. Deposited on the cold candlewick of the double bed was Jill’s child with the unpronounceable name, two more sleeping infants of indeterminate age and — to my extreme relief — Proteus.
‘Welcome to the nursery,’ Kara said, lighting up a joint.
‘You got him back OK, then?’ I said, looking at Proteus’s peaceful sleeping face.
‘Are you all right?’ she said to me. ‘You look a bit pale.’
‘I feel a bit pale.’
Kara reached out and grabbed my wrist and took my pulse in a professional sort of way. ‘I’ve got a St Andrew’s Ambulance Brigade certificate,’ she said, but then she let go of my wrist and said indifferently, ‘You’re dead.’
‘Do you want to stay here and babysit for us?’ Jill asked. Dead Babysitter, now that would be a good title for something. I made a vague mental note to tell Robin.
I moved on, back down another small staircase, and tried other rooms, unsure now whether I was looking for something or not. Perhaps like Professor Cousins I would recognize it when I found it. In a small back room I found a solitary boy, alone with a bong and an overwhelming scent of burning sage that drove me straight out again into a room with another television — an old Philips portable sitting in the middle of the floor. There was no audience for the country being burned on screen and I felt I had a duty to stay and watch for a few minutes but then I started to feel ravenously hungry and wondered if I could find my way back to the kitchen.
Instead, I found what seemed to be a quite separate wing of the house. Forres must have been designed by Borges and constructed by Escher, I had no idea if I was facing north, south, east or west, or even which floor I was now on. I peered cautiously into a room that might once have been a grand upstairs drawing-room but was now a dystopian vision of carnal debauchery as, by the light of several smoky candles, naked bodies writhed in a tapsie-teerie abandonment worthy of Bosch.
‘Do you mind?’ a disembodied voice said. ‘This is a serious massage class.’
I hurried away; nothing would have induced me to stay. I went, instead, into the bathroom, a place of glacial chilliness boasting all its original fittings — complicated brass pipework and florid tiles that would have looked more at home in the Speedwell Bar. An ancient bath, like an ornate catafalque, stood in the centre of the room, its enamel pitted and chipped. Empty of water, it was tenanted by a fully dressed boy wearing a top hat. On the edge of the bath was perched another, very thin, boy in a Black Watch dress jacket. He was clutching a copy of Sgt. Pepper and explaining to the boy in the bath how depressed he felt in a conversation that seemed to have been scripted by Robin: ‘Like really down. I mean what’s the point of it all?’
The boy in the bath nodded sympathetically. ‘I know — the meaning of Liff and everything.’
A girl on her knees, as if in prayer in front of the filthy toilet, was moaning quietly. It was the first-year student I had lately seen in Roger Lake’s arms. She lay down on the floor, her forehead pressed against the cold stained tiles. I put her in the recovery position (maybe this was all I was good for in the world) and told the Sgt. Pepper boy to keep an eye on her, but I doubted that he would.
I had to get some fresh air. By mere accident, I discovered the main staircase of the house, a great wooden mock-Jacobean flight of the imagination, carved with thistles and emblazoned with gryphons and strange armorial devices. The tall banister finials at the foot of the staircase were in the form of aggressive wyverns, poised to leap on the unsuspecting passer-by. I scurried past them rather fearfully and into a square hallway that was large enough to merit its own fireplace — black iron, cast in the shape of a scallop shell, with a padded red velvet fender seat on which I sat down gingerly next to Kevin, who was drinking from a large bottle of Irn-Bru.
‘Parties are such crap,’ he said disconsolately.
‘I really don’t feel well, Kevin. I think I need a doctor.’
‘In Edrakonia,’ he said, ‘the physicians are also alchemists, transmuting base metal into gold and so on. Of course since the Murk fell all kinds of strange diseases have arisen, the fading disease, for example.’
‘The fading disease?’
‘Self-explanatory.’
Maybe that was what happened to The Boy With No Name. Maybe that was what was happening to me. I was relieved when Gilbert joined us, remarkably fresh for one who was unconscious so recently.
‘Good party, isn’t it?’ he said cheerfully.
‘Or the falling disease,’ Kevin continued relentlessly.
‘Have you seen a yellow dog?’ I asked Gilbert, ignoring Kevin.
‘A yellow dog?’ Gilbert repeated. ‘I didn’t know you got yellow dogs. No, sorry.’
I pushed my way outside. A bonfire had been built out on the back lawn and was now blazing fiercely. The air was ringing with frost, sparks rose like tiny barbs of light into the night sky, a sky that was swimming with stars. Some people were dragging old furniture out of the house to keep the conflagration going. I saw one of the ballroom curtains go up in a roar of dust and flame. Other people were dancing round the bonfire like members of a lunatic coven. Andrea was one of them. She spotted me and danced over.
‘It’s like a planetarium,’ a stargazing Andrea said, looking at the heavens in open-mouthed awe, ‘a kind of . . . open-air planetarium.’ I told her Shug was upstairs and she danced off eagerly. I felt suddenly cold and sick. I looked around for Kevin or Gilbert but couldn’t see them any more. A threatening figure suddenly appeared in front of me. It was a nightmarish Archie, dressed in a daring pair of youthful flares that were an uncomfortable size too small for him.
‘You,’ he said, obviously very drunk.
‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘me.’
‘Have you seen Dickhead?’ Archie asked, casting his eyes vaguely around the garden. (I was glad Professor Cousins wasn’t there to witness this.)
‘Who?’
‘Dr Dick,’ Archie said irritably, ‘he’s—’ but just then a tremendous explosion drowned out whatever it was he’d been going to say.
— Is this a denouement?
‘No.’
I thought Forres must have been blown up by a bomb or a gas leak, but the boy with the top hat who had been in the bath ran by and said breathlessly, ‘Elderflower champagne,’ by way of explanation.
‘The protesters are using elderflower champagne? How does that work?’ Archie puzzled to me but I didn’t hang about to explain. I felt claustrophobic, even though I was in the open air, and started trying to find a way out of the garden that didn’t involve going back through the house. I could feel myself falling. Fading and falling — and then a pair of arms encircled my waist from behind and held me up. In my fevered brain I thought I smelt Ferdinand’s masculine scent. ‘Time to get you to bed, young lady,’ a familiar voice said.