"Ask me no questions," he said, "and I'll tell you no lies."
The second set, like the first, had concluded with a dead net cord. Yellow ball hit the white tape: Richard had already forgotten who sent it there. Which didn't matter. The ball teetered on the high-wire of the net and even spun laterally across it for several suspended centimeters before it fell. In tennis, with the dead net cord, you want the ball to come down on the other side. Not your side. You are always wishing it away. But the ball fell toward him, and died. The ball never liked him. The world of the seamed and fuzzy ball never liked him anyway.
They drove back to Holland Park. Richard's tennis wear fumed softly of detergent and family wash, in opposition to the humid tang of Gwyn's cologne-and Phil's Man-Tan and Right Guard. Demi was out. "She's at Byland," said Gwyn. "Dad's dying." After a brief bonding ritual with his charge, Phil disappeared. Richard was shown into a basement toilet which had a shower in it somewhere, as well as various padded boilers and bouncing clothes-dryers. Then for a while, in his wet hair, he inspected the carpentry corner beneath the staircase. Nothing seemed to be under construction, but there was an antique bookrest whose varnish had been mostly scraped off with sandpaper: Gwyn, evidently, was trying to make it look like his own work. Richard went on up.
"Got your cue? Let's go."
"Won't we be needing Phil?"
In recent months Gwyn's wardrobe had been tending toward the softer and more capacious feminine fabrics, smocklike colored shirts, faux-naif knitwear, windblown scarves: the Will Ladislaw of Wll. Nowhe confronted Richard in a charcoal three-piece suit of tubular severity, plus rigid bow tie. He was adjusting his cufflinks and saying,
"This won't take a second. I want to show you something before we
go."
On the way to the top floor they passed Pamela, who withdrew with valedictory silence into the shadows of a distant doorway.
"You've been up here, haven't you?"
Richard had been up there, conducted by Demi, on a recent Profile-related tour. They were approaching the garden-site attic, which Demi had called the "childhood room." Painfully obviously, it was intended as a nursery: narrative wallpaper, Victorian toys (a rockinghorse with madamic eyelashes), Georgian cuddly animals, a Jacobean crib. Gwyn opened the door and stood aside.
The childhood room was no longer the childhood room. It was the snooker room. Cue trees, scoring rails, and a curved bar in the corner with four steel-and-leather stools for you to roost on.
"Amazing business. That thing weighs a third of a ton. They had to reinforce the floor.They came through the skylight-we had cranes outside. But the real challenge," Gwyn concluded, "was getting Demi to get rid of all her shit."
Richard lost 0-3.
They had a candlelit supper of smoked salmon, quail's eggs, and potted shrimp, prepared, or unwrapped, by Pamela and served to them in the dining room. Incapable of being struck by much, at this stage, Richard was nonetheless struck by her manner. You could not but be struck by it. Richard she served with cordiality; Gwyn, with melodramatic unceremoniousness.
"What's wrong with her? I mean apart from being your girlfriend. Is anything else the matter?"
"Not really. It's just that I'm getting on wonderfully well with Demi these days. And Audra Christenberry's in town." A door slammed somewhere. Gwyn flicked his napkin onto the table. "I suppose I'd better go and sort it out."
This took fifty-five minutes. Richard passed the time smoking and drinking. He had his hands full with that: with drinking and with smoking. When Gwyn reappeared in the doorway and made a gesture with his head, Richard said ordinarily,
"What about this??
He opened his hands over the dining table. He meant the soiled plates, the leftovers, the inevitable decomposition .. .
"Pamela'll get it."
But before she did that she brought them coffee and brandy-in the octagonal library, as they settled over the board-and lingered to plump Gwyn's cushions and assist him in the ignition of his cigar. All this she did with an air both secretive and devout. Richard kept his eyes on the pieces he was assembling. These pieces, with their divine heaviness. Even the pawns responded greedily to gravity; and you could feel their affinity with the center of the earth.
The door closed. They were alone. Gwyn said:
"Adolescence is the best. I'm glad I left it this late. It's the tops. Can you remember-all that sexual loneliness? Lying in a single bed, thinking: there must be a million women out there, feeling like me. Sexually lonely. Nothing really changes. Even Tolstoy thought that. Time happens to your body. But not to your head. You're still looking out of a window watching them all go by. I'm still fifteen. But there are differences. They aren't out there anymore. They're in here. Or they're on the preselect of my mobile phone. Audra Christenberry. Gal Aplanalp. Hey, I've switched. I'm with Mercedes Soroya. You were right. Gal's list is so tacky. Novels by couturiers. Novels by synchronized swimmers. And Mercedes. Man. You could just drown in those eyes. Guess what. Gal had a crush on you, way back. When we were kids. You know, I really lucked out, marrying a Catholic. They can't get away. Ah. E4. Wait.. J'adoube."
"Resign," sighed Richard, for the second time in half an hour.
He went on staring at the board. It wasn't anything Gwyn had done, particularly. The chess just followed from everything else.
This was his last shot. "You remember that weird little sister I brought round to see you-Belladonna?" He waited, with his head down. "What happened?"
"That would be telling now, wouldn't it." "Naturally." He waited. "You didn't fuck her, did you?" "Are you out of your mind? Or do you just think / am? A little spook like that. And someone of my visibility. All she's got to do is drop ten pee into a phone box. And tell Reuter's I raped her or got her pregnant. I need that. Not to mention the risk of disease."
On the whole Richard felt quite impressed by himself. His disappointment was mild.
"Come on" said Gwyn.
"Yeah. Well."
"No. I just let her give me a blow job."
Gwyn's face was open, was declarative: the face of a man keen to transmit information clearly. He said, "After she'd taken her clothes off and done a little dance. She asked me what my favorite was. And I told her. It was pretty amazing actually. You know when they're actually down there-one thing it does is shut them up. For the time being. But not her. She took it out every ten seconds to say something. Me on TV Her on TV. Holding it there, like a mike. It was kind of brilliant because it meant it lasted about two hours. Very skilled she was. Very noisy all round. I bet you think you're going to put all this in your piece. But you won't. You won't."
"Not Belladonna. I'm not sure but I think … Deadly nightshade. I think she's got it."
"It?" Gwyn considered. "I'm not surprised. Going round doing everyone's favorite all day."
… The way the white pieces were configured, like a hairline, and the squares drifting in his milky gaze: the board resembled the image of a face, on TV; the smeared cubes of some wrongdoer, some child-murderer, pixelated-the face of Steve Cousins. As in the first game the position was far from conclusive. But the chess just followed from everything else.
"It's late."
They stood up. Suddenly and startlingly Gwyn turned and seized Richard by the shoulders. What was this? More adolescence? With an expression of primitive alarm, Gwyn said,
"You didn't fuck her, did you?"
"Who? No."
And they sagged together, over the chessboard.