“Don’t worry! I will bring him back! Goodbye to you!” Blowing a kiss. Then to me, in my ear, as we walked away: “She is lovely. God, but I love a redhead.”
“So do I, but she’s not the one I’m marrying.”
“No?” He looked surprised. “But she greeted me! By my name! Ah,” he said, looking at me more closely, “are you blushing! Yes you are, Potter!” he crowed. “Blushing! Like a little girl!”
“Shut up,” I hissed, glancing back for fear she’d heard.
“Not her then? Not Little Red? Too bad, huh.” He was looking round the room. “Which one, then?”
I pointed her out. “There.”
“Ah! In the sky-blue?” He pinched me affectionately on the arm. “My God, Potter! Her? Loveliest woman in the room! Divine! A goddess!” making as if to prostrate himself on the floor.
“No, no—” grabbing him by the arm, hastily pulling him up.
“An angel! Straight from paradise! Pure as a baby’s tear! Much too good for the likes of you—”
“Yes, I think that’s the general opinion.”
“—although—” he reached for my vodka glass and took a big slug before handing it back to me—“a bit icy to look at, no? I like the warmer ones myself. She—she is a lily, a snowflake! Less frosty in private, I hope?”
“You’d be surprised.”
His eyebrows went up. “Ah. And… she is the one.…”
“Yes.”
“She admitted it?”
“Yes.”
“And so you are not standing with her. You are annoyed.”
“More or less.”
“Well”—Boris ran his hand through his hair—“you must go and speak to her now.”
“Why?”
“Because we have to leave.”
“Leave? Why?”
“Because I need you to take a walk with me.”
“Why?” I said, looking around the room, wishing he hadn’t dragged me away from Pippa, desperate to find her again. The candles, the orange gleam of firelight where she’d been standing made me think of the warmth of the wine bar, as if the light itself might be a passageway back to the night before and the little wooden table where we had sat knee to knee, her face washed with the same orange-tinged light. There had to be some way I could walk across the room and grab her hand and pull her back to that moment.
Boris threw the hair out of his eyes. “Come on. You will feel fantastic when you hear what I have to say! But you will need to go home. Get your passport. And there is a question of cash, too.”
Over Boris’s shoulder: imperturbable faces of strange, cold women. Mrs. Barbour in profile, slightly turned to the wall, clutching the hand of the jolly cleric who didn’t look quite so jolly any more.
“What? Are you listening to me?” Shaking my arm. The same voice that had pulled me back to earth many times, from fractal glue-sniffing skies where I laid open-eyed and insensate on the bed, gazing at the impressive blue-white explosions on the ceiling.
“Come on! Talk in the car. Let’s go. I have a ticket for you—”
Go? I looked at him. It was all I heard.
“I will explain. Don’t look at me like that! Everything is good. No worries. But—first off—you must arrange to be gone for a couple of days. Three days. Tops. So”—flicking a hand—“go, go arrange with Snowflake and let’s get out of here. I can’t smoke in here, can I?” he said, looking around. “No one is smoking?”
Get out of here. They were the only words anyone had said to me all night that made sense.
“Because you must go home immediately.” He was endeavoring to catch my eye in a familiar way. “Get your passport. And—money. How much cash do you have on hand?”
“Well, in the bank,” I said, pushing my glasses up on the bridge of my nose, oddly sobered by his tone.
“I am not talking about the bank. Or tomorrow. I am talking about on hand. Now.”
“But—”
“I can get it back, I’m telling you. But we can’t stand around here any longer. We must go now. Right away. Off with you, go,” he said, with a friendly little kick in the shin.
xxxv.
“THERE YOU ARE DARLING,” said Kitsey, slipping her arm through my elbow and stretching on tiptoe to kiss me on the cheek—a kiss caught, simultaneously, by the photographers circling her: one from the social pages, the other hired for the evening by Anne. “Isn’t this glorious? Are you exhausted? I hope my family hasn’t been too overwhelming! Annie dear”—extending a hand to Anne de Larmessin, stiff blonde hair, stiff taffeta dress, wrinkled neckline that did not match the tautness of her chiseled face—“listen, it’s been absolute heaven… do you suppose we can get a family snap? Just you, me and Theo? We three?”