Dinner was unforgettable, and Richard would remember it for the rest of his life. At the table each place was furnished with a name tag and a silver salver and a drawerful of cutlery; also, in squat crystal (the size and shape of a diner ketchup-squirt), an individual carafe of red wine. Which were not to be replenished. Richard found this out early on, because he was wiggling his decanter over his glass well before the bruised avocados were served. Demi gave him hers, and that helped him through the next five minutes. Then, two hours later, after the women had left the room, he ground it out with the husbands in exchange for two thimbles of port . . . Beaming boys in beaming shirts, the husbands, so far as he could ascertain, were forthright, friendly, loudly clued-up about the workings of the world and by no means agonizingly stupid.

So: intensely sober, in a permanent panic attack of sobriety, Richard now sat on a bed with Demi, in a dark tower: a dark tower that wore a

witch's pointy hat. They had crossed two frosted lawns to get there, and

climbed a curling stone stairway, and had entered this spherical turret by means of a damp and heavy key. The kind of tower from which wronged princesses traditionally craved escape or rescue. One princess whomaway and then went back and it just kept staggering on. This particular dynasty, in any case, awaited cancellation. Although the Earl had sired five daughters, patiently crippling his wife in quest of an heir, and although those daughters had presented their husbands with many a Jeremy and Jasper and Joseph, the estate was of course patrilinear, and would veer off elsewhere soon.

The day cleared. Its roof of cloud began to leak, like a colander, and the poles of refracted fire looked splay-legged, as if their apex lay at airplane height-nineteen thousand yards, perhaps, and not ninety million miles. Without changing his clothes, and using a wooden racket, he played tennis with Demi, Urania, and Callisto on a court so rich in excrescences and asperities that his choice of groundstroke-forehand or backhand-necessarily depended on the ball's right-angled bounce. Then, with his hands on his hips, he admired the swimming pool. Ther-mals of yeasty activity rose from its mantle of peat-thick green. Richard didn't want to swim in it; he wouldn't have minded drinking it, but he didn't want to swim in it. Side by side he and Demi walked down freshly dripping avenues. They visited conservatories and hothouses, grottoes and gazebos, bowers and arbors, follies and wildernesses; Richard's notebook was in and out of his pocket, signaling his professional interest, as Demi told tales of lost kittens, beloved ponies, myxomatotic marmots, rabid rabbits, and so on, and apostasies and conflagrations and wartime commandeerings and royal visits . .. Listening is good, he thought; listening is always good. They approached the kitchen, through the kitchen garden. She lost her footing on the path and he reached out to steady her. Richard was biding his time.

He found a gym-sized library that contained not a single readable book, not even any Trollope. So he went to sleep in it. The room was dark when Demi woke him with a cup of tea, and a biscuit. She remained at his side, on the tasseled sofa, holding her teacup with both hands as if it contained something sacramental like incense or holy warmth; her blue-jeaned thighs were widely and rigidly parted, her feet erectly tensed on their toes. He watched her face in its offered profile, how it wavered and resolved itself-the bitten underlip, the tremors. Of course it seemed obvious enough what the immediate trouble was. Unborn babies were swirling round her head, like flocks of putti.

"You're the middle sister."

"I'm an aunt twelve times over. Gwyn is very worried about the state of the world."

"Well he could have fooled me."

"He's even talked about having that operation.?

They both swallowed. She said,

"Look."

He looked. He looked out through the arrow-slit and its web of churchy glass: the frosted field, the tall fir, the gibbous moon, the slice of cloud, the spire. The spire did indeed look like a thing that had some business pointing heavenward, unlike the berkish bulk of office block, of highrise. It pointed, with its tapered tentativeness .. .

"That's St. Bodolph's in Short Crendon. See? There's a cloud passing over it. I used to take my pony Hester there and back every evening. It was as far as they'd let me go. And I always used to think that if I got there and back before Nanny Smith laid the table for tea …"

"What?"

"Oh. You know. That I'd have a happy life."

This was romance but they were doing it in winter.

Richard said, "You want some coke?"

Just as there are genres of skies, and car alarms, and many other things, so there are genres of the hangover. Tragic treatments, enriched with various amounts and shades of irony. The epic frame, which finds the hero, toward evening on the second day, still sitting there wiping his eyebrows with his fingertips and still saying to himself things like dear oh dear. There are futuristic hangovers, there are chillers and tinglers, there are thrillers. There are bodice-rippers. Probably there are sex-and-shopping hangovers: there are hangovers made of junk and trash. There are hangovers as dull as rain .. . Not all genres, on the other hand, correspond to a hangover. For instance there are no Western hangovers. In life, hangovers usually cleave to a genre which literature finds hard to do and rarely attempts: tragicomedy. Murphys and Metamorphosises, Third Policemans, Handful of Dusts …

At first it seemed that Richard's hangover might find a relatively comfortable generic home: the country-house mystery. Every hangover, after all, is a mystery; every hangover is a whodunit. But as soon as he reared and swiveled from his bed, and placed a plumply quivering white sole on the lino, it was amply and dreadfully clear what genre he was in: horror. This horror was irresponsibly absolute, yet also low-budget: cheaply dubbed, ill-lit and hand-held. Outside, the courtyard, the cold stamp of the hooves' iron. A couple of centuries ago, Richard had raped the director's girlfriend. He was now the cursed painting of a staked viscount,

kept in a secret attic. Or else he was the ruined stableboy, all drained and scorched and peed-on, and left for dead in the owly hovel, under a heap of old straw. Something good had happened and something bad hadRichard had recently read about (sitting there with a twin on either side of him) had fled such a tower by climbing down her own hair: the big-hair princess. In his own fantasies of escape, he often saw himself clambering from that bedsit in Blackfriars-that eyrie of spinst-on the rope ladder of Anstice's crackling rug . .. For some mysterious or even magical reason, their little belfry, as Demi said, was "lovely and warm." It had served as the bedroom of one of the household's fabled nannies, long deceased. They sat side by side on her narrow cot, whose springs, presumably, had never creaked in passion.

"This thing Gwyn does," said Richard, adjusting his notebook, "when he stares at things in that rapt way, like an orange or a pencil. As a child might. When did he start doing that?"

"He used to get very fed up when people said how simple his writing was. He said it was as if he'd written a children's book. Anyway he started doing it around then."

"… This carpentry thing. He doesn't actually do carpentry, does he?"

"Never. Except he did a bit… He told somebody that writing was like carpentry so he thought he'd better get some carpentry stuff in case people asked if he did carpentry, and then he did a bit of carpentry just in case."

Women's foreheads, sometimes, provide the punctuation for their speech: underlinings, accents grave and aigu, the puzzled circumflex, sad umlauts, wistful cedillas.