Gerald pulled up in front of the porte cochere and they got out and went in, Nick coming last and looking at everything, while Fales, a real butler in striped morning trousers, materialized to meet them. There they were, already, in the central hall, the great feature of the house, two storeys high, with an arcaded gallery on the upper level, and a giant chimneypiece made from bits of a baroque tomb. Nick felt he'd stepped into the strange and seductive fusion of an art museum and a luxury hotel.

Pot luck turned out to be an exquisite light lunch served at a round table in a room lined with rococo boiseries that had been removed wholesale from some grand Parisian town house, and painted pale blue. On the ceiling, in a flowered ellipse, two naked females held a wreath of roses. Nick saw at once that the landscape over the fireplace was a Cezanne. It gave him a hilarious sense of his own social displacement. It was one of those moments that only the rich could create, and which came for Nick all wrapped up in its own description, so that he was already recounting it to some impressionable other person-a person, that is, as impressionable as himself. He didn't know whether he should refer to it, but Lord Kessler said as he sat down, "You see I've moved that Cezanne."

Rachel peered at it briefly and said, "Oh yes." Her whole manner was comfortable, almost sleepy; she made a charming shrug of welcome, of dissolved formality, gesturing Nick to his place. Gerald looked at the painting more critically, with a sharp way he had of scanning any document which might come in useful later on.

Nick thought he could say, "It's very beautiful." And Lord Kessler said, "Yes, isn't it a nice one."

Kessler was perhaps sixty, shorter and stouter than Rachel, bald, with an alert, not quite symmetrical face.