Everyone rocks with laughter at this admission. He can see them, all down the table, leaning forward over their plates, then back in their chairs, an irregular series of nodding heads like a shop window full of sipping chicken toys. He grins at the effect he has produced, and picks up more cheese crumbs on his finger.
“Isn’t that just like Howard,” says Barratt Kessell, “to blurt out that sort of confession? If any of the rest of us realized we’d improved a story we’d been telling, we’d just keep quiet about it.”
With a shock Howard now suddenly sees another shortcoming in his story. They don’t have tutors in this place; it’s not that kind of place at all. He must have made the whole thing up from start to finish. He now recalls seeing a painter on his knees in a shop doorway and thinking, wouldn’t it be funny if I, as a newcomer to this city, misunderstood the situation, and, anxious to please, knelt beside him …? What he has done is to supply himself with a ridiculous experience by the telling of which he could entertain several hundred people, without having to undergo the dispiriting strain of suffering it first. For a moment he feels worried about the ethics of this. But then he asks himself if people would have enjoyed the story any more had it been true, and if they would have achieved any greater insight into themselves and their destinies. Of course not. In any case, they don’t know it wasn’t true. Howard realizes that he has hit upon a radical solution to one of the main problems in enjoying a satisfactory life-style. He has discovered how to enjoy his life without being seen to.
He stands up and taps on the table for silence, intending to announce this new discovery, in the hope that it will cause yet more laughter, and increase his reputation for honesty still further.
Everyone round the table falls silent and looks at him, poised to laugh again.
“Why don’t we have coffee next door?” he says, and leads the way, amidst laughter and applause.
For he has realized something else, in the moment of inspiration between standing up and beginning to speak: that the aesthetic effect of honesty depends upon restraint in its application.
“Barratt was just telling us the other night at the Goodys’,” says Prue, as she pours coffee in the living-room, “about how he had lunch with God the other day.”
“Oh, really?” says Howard, intrigued.
“Do tell Howard about it,” Prue urges.
“There’s honestly nothing to tell,” says Barratt Kessel, embarrassed. “You make it sound as if there was just me. There were ten of us, altogether. I was sitting between the principal of a college for policewomen and a rather saucy lady novelist.”
“This was at the Palace?”
“Yes. It was just one of these regular lunch-parties he has so that he can keep in touch with people he wouldn’t otherwise meet. It wasn’t anything special.”
“I thought he didn’t in fact live in the Palace?” objects Francis Fairlie. “Someone in television told me he lived in an ordinary flat by the Park, with nothing but a secret-service man lurking in the lobby.”
“Oh, nonsense, Francis,” says Charles Aught. “He lives on the sixteenth floor of the RCA building. He’s got the whole floor. He gives terrible parties up there — I know a girl who’s been to them. All white sofas and Kokoschkas and rather smart young men who write rock shows.”
“Well, I don’t know,” says Barratt. “This lunch thing was at the Palace.”
They all wait for him to go on, while appearing as if they do not care whether he goes on or not.
“Well, go on,” says Howard. “What was he like?”
Barratt sighs.
“I know you’re all going to take the piss out of me if I tell you what I honestly thought.”
“Don’t be silly,” says everyone.
“Well,” says Barratt heavily, “I thought he was very nice.”
Everyone at once begins to take the piss out of him.
“Well, I’m sorry,” says Barratt irritably, “but he was.”
“Of course he was,” says Charles Aught soothingly. “That’s his job. But what else was he? This girl I know thinks he’s rather camp.”
Barratt makes a helpless gesture, as if trying to catch a word out of the air.
“I don’t know,” he says. “He was very relaxed and friendly. He told some quite funny stories. He was … well, he was nice.”
They all burst out laughing.
“For a start he got my name right.”
Applause.
“Well, plenty of people don’t,” says Barratt. “Also he knew all about the work I was doing. And all about my row with Fred Hattersley.”
“And whose side was he on?” asks Bill Goody. “Yours or Fred’s?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake! He wasn’t on anyone’s side. He just looked at me and said something like, ‘How’s my friend Mr. Hattersley, then?’ sort of thing. And he had a kind of little smile on his face as he said it.”
They all have little smiles on their faces.
“Barratt,” says Bill Goody, “you’re a pushover. Here you are, the great founder of housing trusts, the great battler for the homeless, the great righter of wrongs, the only humanist saint we know. We send you in to do battle with the enemy, and what happens? You come out with a moist look in your eyes, saying, ‘He knew my name!’ ”
Barratt jiggles his foot, looking anywhere but at Bill.
“It hasn’t changed my opinions,” he says. “I’m still a humanist.”
“At this rate,” says Bill, grinning, “we’re still going to have a theocracy here a hundred years from now.”
“Well,” insists Barratt stiffly, “I can’t help admiring someone who really does his homework. If we all did our jobs as well as that perhaps it wouldn’t matter about it’s being a theocracy.”
They all look down into their brandy, embarrassed at the turn the conversation has taken.
“This girl I know,” says Charles Aught, trying to be cheerful, “thinks it’s really a woman dressed up.”
~ ~ ~
“You should have been there,” Howard tells his wife next morning, as they sit over their second cup of coffee on one of the upper terraces. Their house, Carceri, is a complex world of ancient stone galleries and courtyards, with weird (and scheduled) spiral staircases that you go up only to find yourself on the floor below the one you started on — an old dungeon perched among the treetops on a hillside overlooking the city, which they found by a miracle, and had converted. The sun is shining. Felicity is lying back with her eyes closed, and her face lifted to the light. Her long legs and bare feet are brown; her eyebrows and the down on her arms shine pale gold. Pigeons are purling in the trees. Beyond the branches, the traffic of the city flows endlessly; complex, remote, silent. The children are at school. The school is many-windowed, relaxed, colourful, with a good social mix and high academic standards. It’s reached by a pedestrian walkway through the treetops, well away from all roads. They got their children into it by a miracle.
“Barratt was there,” says Howard, “making sure everyone knew he’d just had lunch with God.”
Felicity’s lips bend into a smile.
“Everyone was sending him up,” says Howard. “It was terrible. You really should have been there. The Waylands were there — of course. Bill Goody asked Michael if he’d ever met God himself. ‘I think so,’ said Michael. ‘I think the name rings a bell.’”
Felicity laughs quietly, without opening her eyes. Then she compresses her lips doubtfully.
“All right,” says Howard, smiling to himself, on the side of his face away from her, in case she opens her eyes, “I made that bit up. But he did ask after you. ‘Where’s the lovely Lady Catherine?’ he said when I arrived. The last thing he said when I left was, ‘Tell Jean I’m still as much in love with her as ever.’”