or so Father had written — and gaiters, which Audrey supposed he would’ve had either from Feydeau or the cuckold, and were probably the only things of real utility they had ever bequeathed my poor little brother. Poor Stanley! Compelled to go a’crawling with Rothschild up and down the High Street and then back to the mess at the camp, where the beer was atrocious, although it cost only a ha’penny a pint. It wasn’t Rothschild who had to do jankers the following greydawn or go out to clod-hop on the sodden plain — it wasn’t him, or Gilbert Cook, or Doctor Trevelyan for that matter, who would have to fight the war to end all . . — I dunno, ma’am — the cockney rises up, brackish and broken — I ain’t ever been at no meetin’ savin’ the Church Army, an’ vat wuzz oanlee fer a cup an’ slyces. . Doctor Trevelyan stands looking at Audrey for longer than is acceptable for any reasonable intercourse — am I scuppered? Audrey listens to the burring of breath in the older woman’s nostrils, smells the coal tar from her hands — she looks not at Audrey’s face but my hair — so distinctive, a flare of Phillips’s Lucifer as he pauses on the rich, Burgundy-red carpeting of the stairs, his hair still glossy and shellacked to his round head, although in the huge expanse of mirror that opposes them Albert can see that his benefactor’s face is sickly with fatigue . . or worse? You still won’t? Phillips asks, ladling fresh greenish smoke with the cigar in question. No, Albert sighs, and never will, sir. . For fear of his own facereddening and his becoming, quite literally, Rothschild — he knows some German, he knows a lot of things . .but he has taken a glass of Hock with the Dover sole and he regrets even this small impairment of his faculties, faculties he assesses by calculating the number of tiles on the hall floor, the number of crystals in the chandelier, and multiplying them together as they descend. Phillips kicks spat out from under spat, until he stands too big a piece on the chequer-work of the hall and listing. A club servant comes from a door swinging soundless, a ribbon of tickertape in his hand that he pins to the bundle already on the baize-covered board. There are fires lit at either end of the immense and shadowy space: sea coal laid with such care that it forms two glowing pyramids, while up above there are four thousand, three hundred and eighteen shards arrested at the point of explosion. Phillips says, Not many around this evening, Fulton, and the servant replies chirpily, They’ll be hanging up their holly and suchlike, sir. Phillips grimaces. That, he says emphatically, I very much doubt — d’you mind, Death? — he has lifted a hank of the tickertape — I forgot my spectacles in my rooms. Albert takes the bundle and unravels it carefully so as not to detach any strand from the board. He knows his benefactor will enjoy this demonstration as evidence of his own foresight and sagacity. At dinner, as he sawed wearily through his cutlet, Phillips spoke of how utterly fagged out he was with his committee work, and how he had half a mind to abandon it all to the upstart jobbers. Albert, scanning six of the tapes at once, announces: Cotton three per cents dearer on the Bourse than in Berlin, and the London Exchange closed four per cents dearer still. . As he had observed the flesh-coloured mole under Phillips’s lip and sipped his own glass of the thin Rhenish wine, Albert mused, What precisely do I owe him? Now,Phillips says: Can it bally-well be countenanced. . his is a voice pleased with its own enunciation. . that they will. . will, what? I mean what conceivable methods are at their disposal? Albert clears his throat, er-hem, then goes on: They — that is to say the mill owners, sir — may consider their interests better served by putting a stop to all manufacture, reasoning that by such a demonstration of what yet lies within their control they may bring the weavers to their senses. He paid for me initially, certainly . .although once Albert was at Bancroft’s he was quickly awarded a bursary — and then won a scholarship. Phillips says, Come — and soon enough they are in the library, sunk in armchairs so deep that intimacy should be easier than imposture. Phillips has known me, Albert thinks, since I was a boy — will he always smell the Foulham on my clothes? Will he always look at me and see clotheslines, chimneypots, tu’penny Eccles cakes? As it is, while Albert’s coat may be comme il faut for the Second Division — well cut by a tailor in Swallow Street — the cuffs of his trousers are a long way off on the rug, and fraying, something probably seen plainly enough by the grandees who peer down from the library walls with soon-to-be-cashiered eyes. The grandees lean on marmoreal pillars, ignoring open tomes and laughing their Harrovian laughs, A-ho-ho! A-ho-ho! at the upstart. Phillips must have rung the bell because here comes anotherretainer, moving from pool to pool of candlelight — no gas in the library, the hiss disturbs readers and sleepers — the facings of his jacket gilded and then not, a salver with decanter and port glasses trembling in his agèd hands. Yes, yes, put it down there. . Phillips says brusquely, then takes the sting off with a florin. They have a glass, another and a third, Albert wishes I could loosen this damn knot . .meaning all his old ties. This démarche. . Phillips’s affected jargon demands the right sort of rejoinder. . — D’you imagine it’ll —? This is the fourth of their annual quartet of club suppers and by tradition it passes in review the old year, which is what Albert does, delivering pithy reports on Agadir, Stolypin, Pu Yi and Tripoli in turn, dispatches put together out of snippets of gossip, newspaper reports and some of his own methodical analysis. But what say you, Phillips tees me up, to the déjeuner sur l’Afrique? And Albert comes back gamely: It’s rather amusing to think of their funk when, eventually, they qui vive in the jungle. . This Phillips enjoys a great deaclass="underline" he guffaws, he hee-haws — he must be tight! Albert, phlegmatic, not inclined to introspection, nonetheless understands this: the cross-threading of their sensibilities, as, over time, he has been turned on his benefactor’s lathe, a machine that was fully functioning at the time of the retreat from Kabul. An upright Victorian, Phillips cannot be known by me — or anyone, he is an established quantity that over the years has remained the same mixture of the furtive and the brazen. Sitting in the far corner of Anderson’s tea rooms day after day and watching. Swapping the Morning Leader for the Daily Telegraph — but always with a paper of some sort, which, when he came in, would be a tightly rolled umbrella. At the exact point where he becomes repelled by his father’s bogusness — Sam’s beery sweats and horsy high spirits — so Albert is drawn into Mister Phillips’s orbit, which, because it can be foretold, encourages the exercise of his ward’s unusual capacity for calculation — his adding of bills with a single sweep of his bulgy grey eyes, his inability to ever neglect an order, and his capability of performing two, three. . as many as six tasks at once. Albert’s iron grip on detail has ensured this: a meteoric rise at the Ministry, where the lofty ideals of ceilings edged with plaster laurels are belied by coal fires. . dirtier than these and the schoolroom atmosphere, the clerks and computers pelting each other with bent old nibs, dried-out inkwells, chalk dusters — in short, anything to hand. In the Under-Secretary’s rooms, to which he obediently repairs, Albert may gain a little peace, spend a while looking out on the bodies of the elms — lain dormant since the heat wave — and the sago of ice that’s forming on the ornamental lakes, and the Palace newly faced in the distance. Then he must square my shoulders to receive more files: jute statistics from Bengal, the remarks of that asinine White Rajah, Nyasaland’s Border Commission — the minutes thereof. The Empire — to one burdened by its minutiae — presents a paradoxical case, its extremities are vigorous and kicking out, while its heart is as congested as the old King’s, what with its ports blockaded, gunboats on the Mersey. . and the Irish, always the Irish —! We had some of ’em in here. . Phillips says, breaking in, his cigar ash having fallen and lies prettily in a fold of his waistcoat. Right here in the library! One three-parts-gone harpy takes me on, pokin’ me — pokin’ me! — with a wooden spear. I say, who the Devil’re you meant to be? She says, Boadicea, and you’re the Roman oppressor! I say, you’re no such thing — you’re Cecily Gutteridge and I know your mother! Bloody funny, took a while for the peelers to get ’em all out. What I’m trying to say. . Phillips leans forward and Albert worries that he’s forgotten himself and is about to become intrusive. In which eventuality: am I scuppered? Because no more does Albert speak of his people than Phillips of his. — Once there was a call paid to the villa by the river in Mortlake, and Albert, aged sixteen, declaimed at great length: Nor force nor fraud shall sunder us! Oh ye who north or south, on east or western land, Native to noble sounds. . folding his cloth ear to the fact that the least sounds appeared to trouble Missus Phillips excessively, for in the box window she writhed decorously. She wore long white gloves and petted a Persian blue the entire time — years later Phillips vouchsafed that it was altogether absurd, because the creatures gypped her badly. Tacitly, the visit was not deemed a success — by either party. This business of moving the old folk and Olive to Cheriton Bishop Phillips does know of and approve. Of the others, however, Albert remains silent — and so has Phillips, at least until now? —But it’s nothing to do with that.