Lord Kessler said, "Well, there are umpteen bedrooms ready here, and Fales has made bookings at the Fox and Hounds and the Horse and Groom, both perfectly decent, I'm told. As to the precise arrangements, I avert my eyes." Kessler had never married, but there was nothing perceptibly homosexual about him. Towards any young people in his social orbit he maintained a strategy of enlightened avoidance. "And we're not getting the PM," he added.

"We're not getting the PM," Gerald said, as if for a while it had really been likely.

"A relief, I must say."

"It is rather a relief," said Rachel.

Gerald murmured in humorous protest, and retorted that various ministers, including the Home Secretary, very much were still expected.

"Them we can handle," Lord Kessler said, and shook the little bell to call in the servant.

After lunch they strolled through several large rooms that had the residual hush, the rich refined dry smell of a country house on a hot summer day. The sensations were familiar to Nick from visits he made with his father to wind the clocks in several of the great houses round Barwick-they went back to childhood, though in those much older and remoter houses the smells were generally mixed up with dogs and damp. Here there was a High Victorian wealth of everything, pictures, tapestries, ceramics, furniture-it made Kensington Park Gardens look rather bare. The furniture was mostly French, and of astonishing quality. Nick straggled behind to gaze at it and found his heart beating with knowledge and suspicion. He said, "That Louis Quinze escritoire… is an amazing thing, sir, surely?" His father had taught him to address all lords as sir-bumping into one had been a constant thrilling hazard on their clock-winding visits, and now he took pleasure in the tone of smooth submission.