"Oh… what a shame, our first night back…"

He wasn't sure how to put it. Catherine watched his hesitation with a fascinated smile. "No, Nick can't because he's got a date," she said. It was annoying to have her frankness applied to his tender plans, and a treacherous reward for his silence about her affairs. He coloured, and felt a further crackle of social static pass through the room. Everyone seemed to be humming, doubtful, encouraging, embarrassed, he couldn't tell.

Nick had never been on a date with a man before, and was much less experienced than Catherine imagined. In the course of their long conversations about men he had let one or two of his fantasies assume the status of fact, had lied a little, and had left some of Catherine's assumptions about him unchallenged. His confessed but entirely imaginary seductions took on-partly through the special effort required to invent them and repeat them consistently-the quality of real memories. He sometimes had the sense, from a hint of reserve in people he was talking to, that while they didn't believe him they saw he was beginning to believe himself. He had only come out fully in his last year at Oxford, and had used his new licence mainly to flirt with straight boys. His heart was given to Toby, with whom flirting would have been inappropriate, almost sacrilegious. He wasn't quite ready to accept the fact that if he was going to have a lover it wouldn't be Toby, or any other drunk straight boy hopping the fence, it would be a gay lover-that compromised thing that he himself would then become. Proper queens, whom he applauded and feared and hesitantly imitated, seemed often to find something wrong with him, pretty and clever though he was. At any rate they didn't want to go to bed with him, and he was free to wander back, in inseparable relief and discouragement, to his inner theatre of sexual make-believe.