So when I recognised him, and saw that he was not wearing any horrifying headgear (at least that was something), I felt only disbelief in my martyred bosom, that is, I managed to think the following thoughts in the midst of my frenzied dancing: 'My God, it's not possible. The attache De la Garza hangs out in London discotheques dressed like a dandified black rapper, or perhaps like the black proxy of a black boxer. At this hour, he himself may well believe he's black.' And I added to myself: 'What a dickhead, and white to boot.' He was clearly a man who had no time for good taste, or in whom bad taste was so pervasive that it crossed all frontiers, the clear and the blurred; more than that, he was someone capable of taking a lascivious interest in almost any female being – a rather smutty interest, verging on the merely evacuative – at Sir Peter Wheeler's party, he had been capable of taking a fancy, and quite a large fancy at that, to the not-quite-venerable reverend widow or Deaness Wadman, with her soft, straining decolletage and her precious stone necklace of orange segments. (I mean, of course, an interest any female human being, I would not like to insinuate things I know nothing about and of which I have no proof.) Flavia Manoia, who was of a similar age, but with considerably more style and dash (a dash of her former beauty, I mean), could easily turn his head after the couple of drinks he already had inside him or was planning to drink in the next few minutes. Instantaneous associative memory made me glance around, quite illogically, for the not-quite-ancient Lord Rymer, the famous and maleficent Flask of Oxford with whom De la Garza had shared so many toasts at the buffet supper and who infallibly incited anyone who placed themselves within reach of his bottle (or flask, it comes to the same thing) to drink like the proverbial fish. But his fame and his clumsy manoeuvrings were now confined to strictly Oxonian territory since his retirement from the House and the consequent abandonment of his legendary intrigues in the cities of Strasbourg, Brussels, Geneva and, of course, London (perhaps he wasn't a life peer, but it was rumoured that the increasingly intoxicated wisdom of his interventions in the Lords – a never-satisfied wisdom – made it advisable, in the end, for him to give up his seat prematurely); and with his convex silhouette and his unpredictable feet he would never have ventured into the brutal world of discos, not even if chaired there by De la Garza and one other person.
I trusted that Rafita de la Garza would be accompanied by that other person or by several, by someone at any rate, or so I thought with a modicum of relief (again, at least it was something) when I saw that he was also waving or, rather, making gestures calling for patience and forbearance from a group of four or five people sitting at a table not far from that occupied by Tupra and Manoia, all, or most, of them self-evidently Spanish, given their shrill voices and their loud, attention-seeking laughter (besides, one of them – a complete idiot – was apparently so moved by the idiotic music that he was wearing the incongruous expression of someone listening to the purest and most painful of flamenco songs, of the kind that would never be played there in a million years, not even in an adulterated, jazzed-up version): it was a very exclusive place of din and deafening clamour, the most idiotically chic place of the season for those who, while not so very young, were nevertheless extremely wealthy, a place chosen by Tupra perhaps to please Flavia Manoia, or so that the only ear that could hear what he said would be that to which his lips were pressed.