Stephen continued to swirl his glass, inhaling and sipping. ‘Leather and cigars,’ he said, as if I had not spoken, and then, once he had swallowed, ‘I left this open for a week after acquiring it. You would not imagine the difference it makes. I believe some women are like that, Bethan for instance. If allowed to breathe, in the right company, with the right degree of. . openness. . she too might become sublime.’
‘I don’t think I would put it like that, Stephen.’
‘No? You’re so politically correct, Jeremy. I can see how unwilling you are to talk about your women as if they’re anything less than equals.’ So he did know, I thought, he knew exactly what had happened between us, perhaps from Bethan herself. ‘It’s admirable but rather exhausting, don’t you find? Not every person one has sex with need necessarily be one’s equal. It is fine, I would suggest, to seduce one’s social and intellectual inferiors, knowing the act of seduction and resulting congress gives them just as much pleasure as it gives you. Your very superiority is what makes you alluring.’
‘That’s an unpleasant way of seeing it. I don’t remember ever going to bed with a woman I didn’t regard as my equal or better.’
Stephen clicked his tongue. ‘Politically correct and modest. We’ll have to do something about that. I have a young Egyptian friend, Saif, you don’t need to know his surname, who works for the government there, you don’t need to know in what capacity, but he was assigned to me as a minder on a visit I made a couple of years ago and during the course of last year we spent a considerable amount of time together, though you understand that in such societies, and given my own position as well as Saif’s, one has to be very careful.’
I was unsure whether Stephen meant for me to understand that Saif was a lover. It seemed somehow unlikely while also being the only possible conclusion I could reach.
‘We’ve become very close friends. He’s even taken me to meet his mother, French, a lovely woman, very elegant, an excellent family, quite wealthy, to whom I must have appeared something like a doting uncle. The father is impossible, but that is no surprise.’
I must have nodded, or perhaps just took another sip of the whisky, which despite Stephen’s description and grandiloquent claims I found rather acrid, taste so often being subjective, and yet I forced myself to finish the glass he had poured and perhaps because of this I drank it too quickly and then tried to conceal the empty glass in my hand, thinking it was time to go home, back to Divinity Road and the house I had recently bought, which I was still in the process of redecorating and remodeling, turning the dingy old kitchen into a bright airy space with a dining room at the end and doors opening onto the long narrow garden.
‘Of course, Saif works for the Egyptian government and while Egypt is a friend of the West there are, necessarily, some problems we would wish them to improve, in respect of democracy and human rights, although really these are quite minor concerns when measured against the value of a stable and cooperative Egypt, if you see. But of course you see. Anyway, how did I get on to Saif?’ He paused, glanced up to the ceiling, and then fixed me with his odd little smile. ‘I see your glass is empty. Let us move on to something rather more interesting. Poit Dhubh, from the Isle of Skye, twenty-one years old, and thus fully legal,’ he smirked, taking a tall bottle with a black label from his sideboard and pouring a large measure into a new glass. ‘Sweet and soft, only slightly peaty, I saw you grimace at the first one, peat is too strong for some less seasoned palates, I made a mistake with the Ledaig but this you will find sublime, and very drinkable. In fact it’s a vatted malt, various ones mixed together. Aged in sherry casks, which helps neutralize some of the sharper peatiness. This is a little candy bar of a whisky you can chew and suck, nutty and fruity with a tender note of vanilla. Sixty pounds a bottle, so still very, very respectable. Inhale.’
I raised the new glass to my nose but by this time I was beginning to feel quite seriously drunk and impressionable so that the aromas wafting up to my brain suggested some strange combination of fruit and caramel and roasting nuts and wood fires in old houses with stone floors and vanilla puddings cooking in the tops of double boilers. I sipped and although it was not a true single malt Stephen was right, it was sublime and comforting and almost as substantial and pleasing as an entire meal, a whisky as if invented by Willy Wonka for connoisseurs with only enough for a single good bottle that might satisfy them for many a night without ever having to go in search of anything more refined.
‘I knew it, I knew that would be the one, but don’t worry, we won’t stop there,’ he laughed, pouring himself a glass of the same and doing a scurrying jig as he came back across the room, pausing for a moment to glance out the window overlooking the Thames. ‘Oh, please, won’t you excuse me,’ he said, and abruptly left the room.
I took the opportunity to stand and examine his bookshelves. As I was doing so I happened to turn and also looked out the window, across the river, to the island and the tall yellow house upon it, where, on the middle floor, lights were on and the curtains open and a young man and a young woman were having sex on the floor, he on top of her, both of them athletic, almost certainly university students, undergraduates or graduates, perhaps postdoctoral Fellows, but it was clear that whatever their rank they felt no qualms about being watched, or perhaps were so lost in the moment of passion they had forgotten the curtains were open and the lights on and the hour was so late they might have imagined the rest of the city was asleep and assumed they were not being observed.
By instinct I turned away and tried once more to study the bookshelves, but found my head kept turning and the couple were still very much engaged every time I checked over my shoulder. Stephen remained absent, though I had no sense whether he was in one of the bedrooms or in the bathroom, on the side of the flat facing away from the river and the copulating young couple. Fifteen minutes passed, the couple finished, and I heard the flush of the toilet down the hall. Stephen returned, acting as if he had been absent only a moment. ‘How is your drink?’ he asked.
‘I’m fine, thank you, Stephen. I should be heading home. Do you have the number of a taxi?’
‘What’s the rush, my dear? We still have to move on to the thirty-year-old, which, I assure you, is quite unmissable. And in the meantime I think you should have another drop of the Poit Dhubh.’
‘I can’t, really, I’ll never get up in the morning if I do.’
‘But tomorrow is a Saturday, so no need. It would be an insult to refuse what I so generously offer.’
‘Just a drop, then.’
‘A wee dram,’ he smiled, speaking in a broad caricature of a Highland accent. His eyes disappeared into folds of lean skin as he smiled and I noticed he had rolled up his sleeves, exposing his forearms, which were hairless, muscular, and roped with thick blue veins, as if, in his absence from the living room, he had been doing vigorous pull-ups. ‘Are you still having a relationship with Bethan?’
I choked. ‘You’re being very indiscreet, Stephen.’
‘I shall take that as a yes.’
‘No! It’s none of your business, but no, I had a brief fling with her but it’s over. Entirely finished.’
‘And does that mean the two of you have a difficult working relationship?’
All of a sudden I could see Stephen Jahn was heading somewhere, with a specific destination in mind. What he wanted, though, I could never have predicted. Above all, you must understand that whatever has happened subsequently, I was, at least initially, Stephen Jahn’s dupe. ‘It’s a cordial relationship, but we don’t allow ourselves much opportunity to interact.’