That was a year ago, and now everything was rich with association. He picked up the notebook, which had barely been looked at, and stroked the soft pile of its cover, to make up for Toby's lack of appreciation and remotely, too, as if he were thumbing some warm and hairy part of Toby himself. Toby was talking of becoming a journalist, so the gift was vaguely insulting, a lazy attempt at aptness, the sense of mere duty in the givers disguised by the stinking costliness of the production. The notebook wouldn't open flat, and a few addresses or "ideas" would have filled it. It was certainly hard to imagine Toby using it as he visited a picket line or jostled for an answer from a camera-mobbed minister.

"You heard about Maltby, of course," said Toby.

Immediately Nick felt the air in the room begin to tingle, as if at the onset of an allergic reaction. Hector Maltby, a junior minister in the Foreign Office, had been caught with a rent boy in his Jaguar at Jack Straw's Castle, and had rapidly resigned from his post and, it seemed, from his marriage. The story had been all over the papers last week, and it was silly of Nick to feel as self-conscious as he suddenly did, blushing as if he'd been caught in a Jaguar himself. It was often like this when the homosexual subject came up, and even in the Feddens' tolerant kitchen he stiffened in apprehension about what might carelessly be said-some indirect insult to swallow, a joke to be weakly smiled at. Even the case of the absurd fat Maltby, a real-life cartoon of the greedy "new" Tory, seemed to Nick to allude to his own quiet case and, in a brief twinge of paranoia, to raise a question about his closeness to Toby's beautiful brown leg.

"Silly old Hector," said Gerald.

"I don't think we were terribly surprised," Rachel said, with her characteristic tremor of irony.

"You must have known him?" Toby asked, in a ponderous new "interview" style he had.