A Kennedy - Serious Sweet

Jon didn’t spring to his feet like a well-trained subordinate when Chalice manifested. For one thing, Jon was weary. ‘I’m sorry?’ He was inordinately weary. He didn’t want to shake hands. He didn’t want to interact. He just wanted to sit.

‘Got your eye on our painting there, Jon. Like it? Quite an engagement at the time. Although the regiment gets no credit.’

Chalice playing up how much he was at home here, rising on the balls of his feet, stepping, swivelling.

At least Val left my cock entirely out of it in every sense. I should send her a card and thank her.

‘One does hope to be better appreciated.’ Harry Chalice, former man of action — although what action exactly was hard to ascertain — continued with what he surely imagined was an air of amiable dominance. ‘Unpopular wars — they still have to be fought. In fact, they demand our attention rather more than the easy sells. I think the public understand that better now, don’t you? Efforts to put the military view at the heart of our national conversation — they’re really bearing fruit.’

He only does it to annoy.

‘Hearts and minds,’ Jon told him, not rising to the bait.

Chalice paused overly near Jon, perhaps in an attempt to make him stand.

Or perhaps it was an expression of disrespect. Most likely that.

You can present your crotch to me as often as you like — I’m never going to blow you.

‘Hearts and minds, Jon. That’s right. Although if you’ve got their hearts, you don’t really need their minds, do you?’

Naturally. When you’re in love you’ll do anything you’re asked.

‘Harry, it’s been a long day and I have another appointment …’

Chalice backed away enough to simply be a man standing over his inferior colleague.

He’s going to, isn’t he? He’s going to …

And he did unfasten his nastily tight jacket and spread it apart, set his hands on his hips. ‘One of your many, Jon?’ He was showing Jon the full horror of an old-school pair of close-cut trousers: they hinted at cavalry britches, hugged the just slightly too generous thighs, while maintaining the emphatic line of their creases and deftly holding the neat little parcel where Chalice kept his sex.

An officer blithely at play in the city. The prefect at play in the biggest school on earth, the one he never needs to leave, coat pegs and name tags all the way, from prep school to the House of Lords. All the way in all suitable directions. And nobody gets expelled, not any more, not really.

Although I did hear Sandhurst nearly spat him out. In fact. Not much loved. If we were dealing with facts.

‘I beg your pardon?’ Jon happy to ignore the reference to Sophia, to Lucy — especially to Lucy. Jon delighted to not play along.

‘One of your pen pals, Jon?’

And then, because today was today and because he needed distracting and because he could, because he could, because he could … Jon dropped his head and tried, ‘Well, you know me, Harry.’ He composed the properly knowing expression, the smile that tasted of contempt — the one with which he was always eventually confronted at parties, functions, receptions — the boys’-club sign of membership, the evident assurance of the man who knows women and finds them wanting, renders them wanting. The effort was distasteful enough to make him queasy for a breath. Then he looked up and showed himself to Chalice, hoped his nausea would pass, or at least not show ‘Yes … you know me. A man has to have an interest. If it isn’t the money, well then it’s the honey.’

Absurd bullshit — and the bigger lies are easier, are exhilarating — keep his eyes, let him think this is your true self, the only secret you’ve been hiding.

Jon let his mouth shrug slightly and then added, ‘We play … And they play, too, the ladies. They do know how, always have … They just want the rules skewed in their favour. They want it to be noted they’re unhappy and put-upon. Duly noted. And then they pretend they don’t welcome our attention and haven’t got us on eggshells and taken our jobs.’

Steady, steady, don’t be completely preposterous.

‘It’s all just the usual game, though.’ He nodded to the painting, as if it were a beach scene, a domestic interior evoking only casual nostalgia. ‘Back then — a young chap like yourself, you wouldn’t remember — we operated honestly. Men and women knew what was expected and they had a sense of humour. There was the pill, the girls got that. There was Alex Comfort — she could read the manual, see the pretty drawings, tasteful. Nothing “Readers’ Wives” about it.’

Val thought Comfort was grotesque — no pun intended. Sketches of some hairy European couple being happy and exchanging artisan pleasures … not quite her thing.

Jon continued, the words dizzyingly untrue and therefore thrilling, ‘No one, so to speak, tied anyone down.’

Being Chalice must always feel like this — the exhilaration of deceit.

‘If objections were made, they were just signs of her paranoia — they were her hormones kicking in. What we currently have to put up with …’

It seemed Chalice wasn’t sure about this. He didn’t react.

Come on. You want to believe it. Come on.

And Jon felt the pressing need for a short Scotch, while feeling also as if he had drunk one.

Then a grin emerged. Chalice had decided to be glad.

Flowering like nightshade, like hemlock, like flames.

Chalice sniggered. ‘Well, Jon … I did wonder. We have wondered … What does he get out of it? If anything? Where does Jon’s heart lie? What occupies Jon’s mind? You were a bit of an enigma. Which is never wise.’

‘Now you know, then.’ Jon being as brisk as he could, although he realised that Chalice wouldn’t let things lie without kicking about a little.

‘A man who lets his wife screw around like that, who can’t stop her — that man has no balls. That man is wanking with an empty sack. Is what I thought.’

Jon setting his fingernails into the palm of the fist Chalice can’t quite see. ‘Open marriage. Not what you’d want to make public. Or I chose not to.’ He could feel himself sweating slightly and couldn’t work out how not to. ‘Valerie had other opinions …’

‘You chose the dignified option.’ Chalice nodding with only a trace of irony. ‘Good for you.’ And there was the reptile flicker of a darker smile. ‘Although not good for your career. If you’d talked to us …’ And then another expression, the one Jon had wanted to see.

The one that says, ‘Thank fuck, you’re as dirty as me in your sad, old way. This means we can do business and that’s grand, because doing business is all there can be, or ever will be, world without end …’

Jon modulating his tone to reflect a manly desire for cooperation and common sense: ‘I don’t like to be beholden, Harry. But — if you wouldn’t mind — I’d be very grateful if this went no further …’

I’ll tell you I trust you — when you cannot conceivably be trusted — and so you’ll trust me.

That’s the thing about your kind of man — you lack imagination, so you do great harm. But because you lack imagination, you can be — in the long run — easily and inexorably undone. As ruined as a Lloyd’s name, as a Madoff client — remember what happened to them? There are so many breeds of mug punter. There are so many innocents. They all get screwed.

Jon leaned his legs out ahead of him and pretended to stretch, rejoiced in the fact that Chalice could not possibly know (and wouldn’t, in any case, like) the speech in Pimpernel Smith where the quiet and mild and clever and overlooked professor of archaeology politely lectures the Nazi holding a gun on him.