It was all the wife’s, Mrs Noyce’s, really. She was something double-barrelled and a proper Lady with a capital L and had married Mr N and they’d inherited the place. There were at least twenty guests that weekend. I’m still not sure I saw all of them all together in the one place at any one time. Mrs N was a lovely old grey-haired girl, not stuck-up but seriously posh and she tried to get everybody to dinner and breakfast at the same time but what with one couple needing to stay the Friday night in London, somebody having a cold, a couple of children to be got ready for bed early and all that sort of stuff, I don’t think we were ever totally quorate, know what I mean?
Plus I wasn’t even that far off with the meant-to-be-facetious question to Barney about there being kings there, as one minor royal and his lady friend were present.
I’d left my own current main girl back at the flat. She was lovely, a dancer called Lysanne and all legs and gorgeous long real blonde hair but she had a Scouse accent you could have etched steel with. Plus she’d have been a distraction, frankly. And also Lysanne was one of those girls who never really managed to hide the fact she was always on the lookout to trade up. I was definitely a catch compared to her earlier boyfriend, another dealer a level or two down the chain of demand, but I never fooled myself that she thought I was the best she could do. Bringing her somewhere like Spetley Hall when it was full of our richers and betters would be too tempting for her, no matter what she might tell me about how much she really loved me and how she was mine for ever. She’d have made a nuisance of herself. Probably a fool of herself too, and me, and ended up getting hurt.
Worst of all, of course, she just might have succeeded, skipping off with some doolally trustafarian and leaving me ditched, looking like a wanker. Couldn’t have that either, could I?
It was through touching on this sort of stuff over a game of billiards late on the Saturday night that I got to know Mr Noyce. It was just us two by this time. Everybody else had gone off to bed. All done without chemical aid on my part, too. Billiards is what the toffs play instead of snooker.
“You really see it so coldly, do you, Adrian?” he asked, sketching the tip of his cue with green chalk. He blew the excess off and smiled at me. Mr N was a biggish, twinkly sort of guy, light on his feet for a portly gent. He had greying straw-coloured hair and bushy black eyebrows. He wore the big-framed glasses that were still just about fashionable at the time. Give him a cigar and he’d have looked like Groucho Marx. We’d both hung our proper dinner jackets over chairs. He’d loosened his bow tie. I’d unclipped mine. I’d made a mental note to buy a proper bow tie. Even if I couldn’t be bothered going through the whole rigmarole of tying it up at the start of the evening I could keep it in my pocket, wear the clip-on and just replace the fake one with the untied real one at the end of the evening, leave it hanging. Looked much classier. Like Mrs N, Barney’s dad had that way of looking perfectly relaxed in the sort of ultra-formal gear most of us feel dead awkward in.
The rich love dressing up, I’d realised that weekend. It has to be within a strict sort of framework, though. They have specialist clothes for morning, afternoon, eating dinner, riding, hunting (actually different sets of clothes for different sorts of hunting, not to mention fishing), boating, general tramping around the country, popping into the local town and for going up to London. They always went up to London, even if they’d started far north of it. Something to do with trains, apparently. Seen in this light, even their casual clothes became like Casual Clothes rather than just stuff you liked knocking about in or that made you feel comfortable.
“What, relationships, Mr N?”
“Please, call me Edward. Yes, relationships.” He had a soft, deep voice. Posh but not fruity. “That’s a terribly unromantic outlook, don’t you think?”
I grinned at him, cued up, whacked a white ball around a bit. I’d picked up the rules of billiards easily enough, though it still seemed a pretty pointless game to me. “Well, they say everything’s a market, don’t they, Edward?”
“Hmm. Some people do.”
“Didn’t think you’d disagree, in your position,” I told him. Mr N was senior partner in one of the City’s best-known stockbroking firms and allegedly worth a mint.
“I treat the market like a market,” he agreed. He took a shot, stood admiring it for a moment. “Perverse to do otherwise.” He smiled at me. “Probably expensive as well, I imagine.”
“Yeah, but life’s like that too, isn’t it?” I said. “Don’t you think? I mean, people tell themselves all these fairy stories about true love and stuff, but when it comes right down to it, people have a pretty good idea of their own value on the marriage market or relationship market or whatever you want to call it, know what I mean? Ugly people know better than to go up to beautiful ones and expect anything else but a knock-back. Beautiful people can grade themselves and other people, spot the pecking order. Like a squash ladder.” I grinned. “You know where you are and you can challenge somebody a bit above you or be challenged by somebody a bit below, but it’s going to end in embarrassment if you outreach yourself. Bit like that.”
“A squash ladder,” Mr N said. He sighed, took his shot.
“Point is,” I said, “people start from whatever social level they get born into but they can trade up with looks, can’t they? Or a bit of looks and a lot of face, a lot of self-confidence. Or some sort of talent. Footballers do that. Film stars. Rock stars. Superstar DJs, whatever. Gets you money and fame. But the point is that looks are liquid, know what I mean? Specially for girls. Looks can take you anywhere. But only if you use them. A girl like my Lysanne, she’s very aware of her looks. She knows how to use them, and she does use them, bless her. She thinks she can do better than me. Better than where I am at the moment, anyway. So she’ll take any chance she can to trade up, do a bit better for herself. Well, fair play to her. Though there are risks, obviously. It’s a bit like mountaineering. The trick for somebody like her is checking out the next hold’s firm before you leave the security of the one you’ve been depending on until now.”
“That is a lot of face, indeed.”
I grinned, to show I’d got the joke, obscure though it might have been. “Can’t blame her for it, though, can I? I mean, if I found somebody better-looking or as good-looking but better educated, a bit more sophisticated than Lysanne, I suppose I’d ditch her for them.” I shrugged, gave him my cheeky-chappie grin. “Fair’s fair.”
“And ‘up’ always means up to more money, I take it?”
“Course, Edward. Money’s what it’s all about in the end, isn’t it? Life’s a game and whoever dies with the most toys wins. Don’t ask me who said that, but it’s true, don’t you think?”
“Well,” Mr N said, drawing the word out. “You have to be careful. One of the wisest things anybody ever said to me was that if all you ever care about is money, money is all that will ever care for you.” He looked at me. I smiled back. He sighed as he surveyed the table. “Meaning, I suppose, that if you care nothing for people, then, when you’re old and fading, only hired carers, and maybe what we used to call gold-diggers, will still be around to look after you.”