LITMIR.BIZ

      “THERE’S LYCHFONT HOUSE,” said Jack.

      “Remember it?”

      Ossian peered up the drive, where half a dozen Jacobean chimneys were showing just clear of the trees.

      “Never thought we’d get here in one piece,” he said.

      “Humph. Do I detect some slight criticism of my driving technique? Be honest.”

      Ossian looked at his father steadily, remembering that heart-stopping skid back near the Corn Stone. “How long have you got?”

      Lychfont House was large, but Ossian did not feel as if he were entering a stately home, despite the marble stallions rearing at the gates. It was simply an old house with more bedrooms than people, and a driveway long enough for a change up to second gear. Catherine Frazer was just lucky to have inherited something she could never have earned honestly. Luck didn’t make her stately.

      Ossian might not have bothered with these thoughts had it not been for his father’s edginess. Something about Catherine had the power to make Jack nervous. Was it only the dangling prospect of future commissions that unsettled him?

      Here came Catherine now, glancing across the forecourt in a sky-blue sun dress, a hat of Van Gogh straw.

      “So you made it!” she exclaimed, as though that were a wonder. “How marvellous. Are these for me?”

      Jack presented her with the bunch of inadequate carnations he had bought at the service station. Ossian prepared to wince, but Catherine – such good manners! – managed to look as if he had handed her the Golden Fleece. “I’ll put these in water right away. Ossian! You’ve grown up, of course. I wouldn’t have known you!”

      Ossian got through the introductions. Catherine offered her cheek, taking him lightly by the wrist. The smell of peaches and apples engulfed him for a moment, and with it something else that he had forgotten about Catherine, though now he saw it had always been there, and he rather thought it was whisky.

      Colin Frazer was standing at the door. Colin had grown too and his hair (which Ossian remembered as golden and curly) was cut short. He loped down the drive to meet them, with a lazy, bouncing stride. Jack was listening hard to Catherine’s advice about the roadworks on the way down and how he could have avoided them. “But you’re here now,” she concluded, “and I can’t imagine better weather for it. Where’s Sue got to, Colin? She ought to be here.”

      “She’ll appear when she feels like it, I expect. Why are you all standing out here like garden gnomes? It’s cooler inside, and there are jugs of juice and Pimms. Coming, Ossian?”

      Ossian followed. The sun was bright and Colin became all but invisible as he passed into the porch. Ossian did not remember the heraldic lions on either side of the door, nor their mossy yellow tongues, though they must have been standing guard for decades. But the odd smell of must and polish in the hall itself was instantly recognisable. There was the long gilt mirror and Stubbs bay, and the hanging tiger rug that had always looked at him with such fierce resentment.

      Colin led him into the saloon. This was just as Ossian remembered it: the mah-jongg set, the Cluny cushions sewn with unicorns and maidens. Each shelf, sill and tabletop was given over to roses, to irises and orchids, and everywhere hung sprays of fragrant mock orange. Ossian cringed again at the thought of Jack’s carnations. Here too were the paintings Catherine’s family had gathered on their travels: eighteenth-century mythological oils mostly, with a preference for forests, fountains and plump Arcadians.

      “All breasts and blushes,” said Colin in a worldly way, following Ossian’s gaze to a picture of Venus and Adonis. “Have you ever seen so much blubber?”

      “I was just thinking,” said Ossian, “about the painting Dad’s going to do. You know that’s why we’re here?”

      “God!” Colin clapped his hand to his forehead. “Don’t tell me she wants him to produce something like this?”

      “Kind of. It’s supposed to be a picture of a shepherd tending his flock. Green hills and blue skies, but with jet planes and tractors in the background. Old-fashioned but updated, see? A sort of joke. They’re calling it The Golden Age.”

      “I should have guessed,” groaned Colin.

      “I’m going to be the shepherd, actually. Dad’s asked me to model.”

      Colin shook his head. “I hope he’s paying you well.”

      “Not bad,” said Ossian. “He’s quite generous like that.”

      The pay can be very good, he thought. He had been modelling in the life class at the college in Philadelphia when he’d first spotted Lizzy. She’d been wearing a loose shirt knotted at the front and an expression of concentration which made her freckled nose wrinkle. He’d known right away she would be special. She’d caught him frighteningly well.

      “I’m only there to make the scenery look good.”

      “Bloody artists, eh?” said Colin cordially. “You hungry, by the way?”

      Ossian followed Colin to the kitchen, wondering where the other guests might be. “I saw several cars in the drive.”

      “Yes, it’s a party,” said Colin, helping himself to an olive. “My mother’s got some of her horsey friends down – she wants advice on a roan she’s had her eye on. There’s you and Jack, of course. Oh, and a bunch of money-men Dad had to invite. Something to do with his marina project, I think.”

      Colin was already on his way out to the lawn. He was carrying too much weight, Ossian noted. His chin barely existed. Was this really the boy he had idolised that summer – the sacrificer-in-chief? At eighteen he seemed virtually middle-aged.

      Once, these grounds had boasted peacocks. Ossian remembered being frightened of their strangulated cries, the locust-dry rustling of their fans. Now the lawn was bare, except for the pedestals with their Greek statues that arced to the lake. Things had slipped a bit at Lychfont, he concluded. Zeus and the Olympians were mildewed and rather sombre: Athena in her helmet, Hermes alert as a deer, Pan fluting. Silenus had lost half his grapes in the storms the previous autumn. Yet still they hung on in the alien northern air.

      He found Catherine and the other guests listening attentively to Jack.

      “It’s good to be back,” he was telling them. “You can be as cosmopolitan

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