Mystical Paths. Susan Howatch
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Wykehamist tie. ‘Welcome to my orgy!’
I smiled at him warily and prowled across the threshold.
IV
There were far more people present than at Marina’s Starbridge party in May. The large drawing-room was filled with cigarette-smoke and screeching voices and raucous laughter and overdressed bodies and (from the record-player) the muffled blaring of a big band, very ’forties, very square. Funny how the vast majority of the human race has to generate a repulsive amount of noise before it can convince itself it’s having a good time.
Some sort of sea-green cocktail was circulating but I didn’t like the look of it so I asked for a Coke. No luck. I settled for a glass of Rose’s lime juice which Perry produced for me from his kitchen. The trouble with alcohol is that it tastes so disgusting, and if you start mixing lime juice with, for example, gin, the result always seems to me to be an affront to the taste-buds. Someone offered me a cigarette but I waved it away. I’ve never been able to see the point of smoking. It smells vile and all that ash makes such a mess. If you’ve got to do something with your mouth and hands between meals, why not sip Coke and chew gum? American civilisation could be pretty weird – all those obese cars – but some of the basic innovations, such as Coke and gum, were genuinely useful … Or so it seemed to me at the age of twenty.
Marina pounced on me within seconds. (‘Nicky darling, heavenly to see you!’) She was wearing a silvery cylinder squashed in the right places to show off her Venus de Milo figure. Her friends Emma-Louise and Holly also pounced. (‘Nicky – super? one shrieked, and: ‘We’ve won our bet that you’d be wearing jeans – even to an orgy at Albany!’ screamed the other.) But there was no sign of my friend Venetia. I was told she was too busy preparing for her wedding. I was just sighing with regret when Dinkie undulated by, entwined with Michael, and gave me a wink as she passed. This enthralled me. I spent some time wondering whether I should have winked back, but I wouldn’t have wanted to offend Michael. Finally Perry ended my reverie by musing to me: ‘Christian and Katie are late – stuck in a traffic jam somewhere, I suppose,’ and I heard myself utter the non sequitur: ‘You never mentioned that you knew my brother Martin.’
‘Something told me,’ said Perry, ‘that you got very, very tired of people droning on about your brother,’ and suddenly I decided to like him.
I said: ‘Do you go to the theatre a lot?’
‘All the time, yes, I’m an addict. Look, come and meet some of my thespian friends …’
I met his thespian friends of both sexes. Perry never mentioned my connection with Martin, but Katie’s brother Simon, a pea-brained product of Eton, eventually let the cat out of the bag and then all the thespians started to gush over me with the result that the party became tedious. I took refuge in the lavatory. Venturing out at last with reluctance I found myself overpowered by the desire for more lime juice but before retiring to the kitchen to find the bottle I moseyed around, putting my nose in the dining-room where a buffet was laid out, casting an eye on Perry’s bedroom where a single bed added weight to the theory that he was undersexed, and taking a peek at the adjoining bathroom where I found a peculiar Picasso-style drawing of a mermaid.
Having noted the complete absence of any item which would have indicated homosexual leanings, I beetled down some stairs into the basement kitchen and came to a halt, mouth gaping and eyes wide, at the splendid sight which confronted me. The kitchen was a historical masterpiece, untouched by the mid-twentieth-century mania for making kitchens look like poor relations of the morgue. I saw a large wooden table, very handsome, a gas stove which could only have been pre-war, and a distinguished porcelain sink. The old range had been left in place for its ornamental value, and beside it there was even a set of brass fire-irons: poker, tongs, shovel and soot-brush. Amazing! Anyone who lived in 1963 and kept fire-irons in his kitchen had to be exceptional, and I saw clearly then that Perry was no run-of-the-mill theatrical hanger-on with homosexual leanings but a highly original celibate who spoke Russian, lived in a palace, devoted his free time to civilised cultural pursuits – and kept Rose’s lime juice in some corner I now had to find.
I opened the door of a gas – gas! – refrigerator that had to be at least thirty years old but no bottle of lime juice stood keeping cool on the shelves. Instead I found caviar from Fortnum’s, a bottle of champagne, half a Melton Mowbray pie and a jar of olives. By this time I was beginning to think that all the kitchen lacked was one of the old-style butlers, complete with white hair, a stoop and corns.
I prowled on, pausing at an antique cupboard which housed some very grand china, and reached a door set in the wall near the back entrance – the tradesmen’s entrance, as it would have been in the old days. Opening the door I discovered a coal-cellar – a coal-cellar! Within spitting distance of Piccadilly! – and inside this astonishing relic of a vanished past was a large load of coal. Surreal. What kind of man kept a cellar full of coal in a designated smokeless zone? A man of infinite wit and style. I decided Perry was probably the one man in England who was worthy of being Christian’s best friend.
But still no Rose’s lime juice. Abandoning the coal-cellar I opened yet another mysterious door and found a larder complete with a cooked pheasant sitting on a plate and a tub of Stilton exuding its famous pong. Nearby I spotted pâté de foie gras, Gentleman’s Relish and – yes, Rose’s lime juice. Grabbing the bottle I helped myself to a spare sliver of Stilton before moving to the table to replenish my glass.
Perry clattered down the stairs just as I was diluting the juice with water. He had an empty jug in his hands and Christian at his heels. ‘… playing with fire,’ he was saying as I tuned in to the conversation in mid-sentence. ‘Marina may be all talk and no action, but –’ He saw me and broke off.
‘Nick!’ exclaimed Christian in delight.
‘Hi!’ I said pleased.
‘Sorry, Nick – I’ve been neglecting you,’ said Perry, setting down the jug on the table and extracting some ice from the bag in the refrigerator. ‘Glad you found the lime juice. Would you like to see my coal-cellar?’
‘It’s a land-mark,’ said Christian, preparing to exhibit it to me. ‘The last full coal-cellar left in London. He shows it to everyone.’
‘Groovy,’ I said, feigning ignorance of the phenomenon and taking a peek. ‘But why all the coal?’
‘I made a mistake with the coal-merchant just before the smokeless zone was declared. Pass that bottle of gin, would you, Christian?’
The doorbell rang in the distance.
‘You answer that,’ said Christian to him. ‘I’ll mix the jungle juice.’
‘It’s probably my neighbours complaining about the noise …’ He clattered back upstairs.
‘How are things going?’ said Christian agreeably to me as he poured a huge slug of gin into the jug.
‘Okay.’ Awkwardly I edged closer to him. ‘Sorry about my father,’ I said, ‘I really busted a gut trying to get him to see you. I hope you didn’t feel I’d let you down.’
‘Of course I didn’t!’ He gave me his warmest smile. ‘He wrote a most helpful letter, so you needn’t think you pleaded my cause in vain … All set for your final year at Cambridge?’
‘Yep.’ I watched with amazement as he added liquid from three other bottles to the gin in the jug and then topped off the poison with Schweppes bitter lemon.
‘I suppose you haven’t been seduced since I last saw you by the current fashion among undergraduates for travelling around America once their finals are finished? I’m told that travel on a Greyhound bus is guaranteed to broaden the mind.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Sounds a bit tame, if you ask me, but then I speak as someone who did two years’ National Service in the army. Now, there was an experience that broadened the mind! I enjoyed