"Yeah, I've just been talking to the caterers round the back. Apparently Thatcher's not coming."

"Oh, sorry, Russell," Catherine said.

Nick said, "We are getting the Home Secretary, though," in his mock-pompous tone, which Russell, like Leo, failed to pick up on.

"I wanted Thatcher doing the twist, or pissed."

"Yeah, Thatcher pogoing!" said Catherine, and laughed rather madly. Russell didn't look especially amused.

"Well, I wouldn't want her at my twenty-first," he said.

"I don't think Toby really wanted her," Nick put in apologetically. The touching thing was that Catherine had clearly taken her father's fantasy as the truth, and then used it to lure Russell. The dream of the leader's presence seeped through to an unexpected depth.

"Well, Toby would have been perfectly happy with a party at home," she said. She wasn't quite sure whose side she was on, when it came to a difference between her father and her brother; Nick saw that she wanted to impress Russell with the right kind of disaffection. "But then Gerald has to get hold of it and invite the ministers for everything. It's not a party, darling, it's a party conference!"

"Well… " Russell chuckled and dangled his long arms and clapped his hands together loosely a few times, as if ready to take them on.

"We've got an enormous house of our own," Catherine said. "Not that Uncle Lionel's isn't fantastic, of course." They turned and frowned at it across the smooth lawn and the formal scrolls of the parterre. The steep slate roofs were topped with bronze finials so tall and fanciful they looked like drops of liquid sliding down a thread. "I just don't think Uncle Lionel will be all that pleased when Toby's rowing friends start throwing up on the whatsits."

"The whatnots," Nick made a friendly correction.

Russell blinked at him. "He's a fruit, is he, Uncle Lionel?" he said.

"No, no," Catherine said, faltering for a moment at the expression. "Nothing like that."