Provender Gleed (7 page)

'I didn't know that, sir,' replied the Columbine. 'How fascinating.' She widened her eyes a fraction more, and a fraction more breast flesh swelled into view just above the level of the salver. 'It must be quite a thing, owning all those vineyards and plantations. I can't even imagine what it must be like.'

'It's... As a matter of fact,' he said, with a shrug, 'it's pretty meaningless.'

'Meaningless, sir?'

'I've no idea why I even brought it up. It doesn't bother me in the slightest where all that booze comes from, and I don't see why you should care either.'

'Because, um, because I might be interested to know what I'm serving you with?' said the Columbine. 'Its provenance?'

'Provenance?'

He grinned at her. Like his smile, his grin was nice too, the Columbine thought. Fresh and sincere, as if it was something he didn't do too often.

'That's a good word,' he said. 'Not one you hear every day. Provenance. I suppose if you hang around auction houses and museums you'd hear it a lot, but... Do you hang around auction houses and museums at all?'

The Columbine wasn't sure how to answer. Definitely, Provender was flirting with her, and that was good, that was the plan, that was the reason behind all her eye-flaring and her bosom-thrusting and her awed-ingénue remarks. His flirting, however, wasn't taking any form she was familiar with. He was attracted to her but showing it in none of the commonly accepted ways, by complimenting her, for example, or showing off. That line about vineyards had sounded sort of boastful but he had undercut it straight away. And now he wanted to talk about
auction houses
? One thing was for sure: Families were not like ordinary folk.

'Museums,' she said. 'Sometimes I'll go to a museum. But not that often, really. I've been meaning to visit the Gleed Gallery, the new one on Millbank, but... But... I haven't had the time.'

'You're busy.'

'I am.'

'Doing jobs like this?'

'No. I mean, yes. Working, generally. Earning a crust. Some of us have to.'

Provender was suddenly unsmiling. 'The implication being some of us don't?'

'No. Oh no, sir.' Idiot! 'It was just a figure of speech. I didn't mean that --'

He waved a hand and laughed. 'I was teasing. Sorry. Unfair of me. I apologise. 'Earning a crust' - I like that, too. You come out with all sorts of interesting conversational wrinkles.'

'So do you, sir.'

'Do I? Thanks.' He sounded genuinely flattered. 'I like to talk with people. Properly. You know, not the standard hello-how-are-you-lovely-weather-we're-having crap, the nonsense that passes for conversation at occasions like these, everyone agreeing with everyone else. I like
discussing
things, the way you and I are doing. Aren't we? I get bored out of my mind if there isn't some kind of depth to a conversation. I'd rather have an argument with someone than listen to them jabber on about mutual acquaintances and the last holiday they went on and isn't so-and-so looking positively radiant this evening? It's an attitude that doesn't make me very popular, but then life isn't a popularity conte--'

'Provender!'

Both he and the Columbine swung round in the direction of the cry. She saw a middle-aged woman striding towards them with another, younger woman in tow. The latter the Columbine did not recognise but the former she knew was Provender's mother. That afternoon, Cynthia Gleed had stood up before an assemblage of all the catering staff and told them what she expected of them at the party tonight (not much, just total dedication and immaculate efficiency). She had struck the Columbine then as a forceful personality, someone not to be messed with. Enviably beautiful, too. Now, resplendent in ballgown and mask, she looked no less beautiful and no less indomitable. She steered her young companion towards her son by the wrist, and it didn't take a genius to intuit what she had in mind for the two of them. The girl was in her twenties, slim, pretty in a vacant posh-girl way, and Provender's mother had a glint in her eye that said she was sure her son and this lissome lass were going to hit it off, and if they didn't, she would want to know the reason why.

'Prov, not interrupting anything, am I.' It was not a question. Cynthia Gleed shot the Columbine a look that was mercilessly - or, depending on your viewpoint, mercifully - brief. It appraised and dismissed in the same instant. 'Only, this is the most amazing coincidence. I was just talking to Gentian here and she, can you believe it, went to the same finishing school in Zurich as Cousin Inez. Isn't that a thing?'

Provender had no alternative but to fix on a smile and hold out his hand to the willowy Gentian. The Columbine, for her part, had no alternative but to shrink away with her salver. Cynthia Gleed's look had made it plain. The Columbine was not wanted there. Superfluous to requirements. She must look for someone else to serve.

Just before turning to meet Gentian, however, Provender had given the Columbine a wry roll of the eyes, then winked. Suddenly there was complicity between them, and in that complicity, connection. When the Harlequin sidled up to her a few moments later and said he'd spotted her talking to Provender and asked how it had gone, the Columbine was able to tell him, with complete honesty, that it had gone well. When the Harlequin then asked if she and Provender were going to be meeting up again later that night, she was able to say, also with complete honesty, that yes, she was certain they were.

And hearing this, the Harlequin smiled. A broad smile, but a wolfish one too. Not like Provender's. Not nice at all.

8

It wasn't until nearly midnight that Provender was able to speak to the Columbine again.

Dealing with Gentian took half an hour. She was a pleasant enough person, hard to find fault with. They talked about her horses, whom she loved, her parents, about whom she was more ambivalent, and about his cousin Inez, with whom, in Zürich, she had learned deportment, cooking, etiquette, and all the other hunting skills a girl needed in order to bag herself a well-to-do husband. She didn't balk when Provender made a joke about finishing schools being so called because they
finished
any chance their pupils had of becoming independent, free-thinking individuals. She responded by saying, with just the right amount of rancour, that learning how to behave correctly in polite society didn't always mean turning into some kind of mindless social robot. You stayed who you were inside, just a little more polished on the outside. Did he think Inez had turned into a robot?

He didn't, and said, with truth, that he liked Inez a lot and didn't believe her time in Switzerland had inflicted any lasting damage.

'There, then,' said Gentian, her point made.

Briefly, Provender recalled his date with Inez, which their mothers had fixed up. He had flown to Seville in the Gleed dirigible, met Inez for lunch at the Lamas Family hacienda, found her appealing but much too like his mother for comfort, and returned home the same day. His mother was still, a year on, smoothing the Lamas feathers that had been ruffled by his swift departure.

Gentian felt she had to prove that she wasn't as bland and conformist as Provender clearly thought she was, and told him of her three-day-eventing escapades, the nasty tumble she had taken just the other day at Hickstead, and her ambition to run a stud farm once she retired from competitive riding. She could see his interest waning by the second, and her opinion of him, at the same time, coagulated. He really was as stuck-up as everyone said. Not just Family-arrogant - intellectually arrogant. Thought he was smarter than everyone else, and thought that made him better than everyone else.

She was therefore relieved when Cynthia Gleed arrived with another girl for Provender to meet. Provender, likewise, was relieved ... although his relief turned to dismay soon enough, as he was forced to spend the next hour in the company of Blaise Wynne.

Blaise made no bones about it: she wanted to marry into a Family. She didn't care which one and she didn't care whom she married. Provender Gleed would do as well as any.

Within five minutes of being introduced to him she had raised the subject of babies twice
and
offered Provender a blowjob (with the bonus of simultaneous rectal stimulation, if he wished). Smoking incessantly, with quick hard sucks on liquorice-paper cigarillos, she talked of not having to work for the rest of her life, of knowing that men liked their wives to be whores in the bedroom, of injecting a shot of dynamism into a decadent household, and of looking forward to using the speedway circuit at Dashlands so that she could indulge in her favourite pastime, which was driving like a bloody loon. Provender barely got a word in edgeways. As she thundered on, however, he felt panic beginning to rise. Every instinct he had was urging him to get away from this woman. She was a shark - aggressive, relentless, tenacious. If he let her get her teeth into him, she would never let go.

He excused himself - needed to pee. When he emerged from the gents lavatory, in which he had spent an inordinate length of time, there she was, waiting patiently for him outside. Somehow she inveigled him into taking a gondola ride. They looped through the party site, and Provender was glad of the gondolier warbling at the stern, because the man was singing so loudly that Blaise could not make herself heard over him. However, near the end of the journey, Blaise decided to substitute deeds for words and lunged for Provender, her mouth wide. He genuinely thought she was going to bite him with those cigarillo-greyed gnashers of hers, but it turned out to be worse than that: an attempt to kiss him. He ducked his head to the side just in time and her lips mashed the side of his neck, harmlessly. But she wasn't done with him. As the gondola approached the candy-striped mooring posts at the edge of the Piazza San Marco, Provender felt her hand on his thigh, groping towards his crotch. There was still a gap of a few yards between the gondola and the piazza, but he leapt and somehow made it onto dry land. It was possible that in his fright he actually walked on water.

Thereafter, it became hunter and hunted, predator and prey, Provender scurrying through the crowds of merrymakers, Blaise stalking him. He bumped into his father, and Prosper Gleed was puzzled to see his son looking so hounded and harassed.

'What's up, Prov?'

Provender glanced over his shoulder. Prosper followed the direction of the look and saw Blaise Wynne at the other end of it, making her inexorable way towards them. He assessed the situation, grinned, and gave Provender a hearty slap on the arm. 'Attaboy! Hard to get. Sometimes that's the way to play it.'

Provender stumbled off and, not paying attention to where he was going, narrowly avoided a collision with Carver.

He recoiled, appalled that he had nearly touched the manservant. Carver: the bane of Provender's boyhood. Carver: like some ghost that haunted Dashlands. Carver: who, it seemed, had always been just around the corner when Provender accidentally broke a vase or put a scratch on a parquet floor or generally did something he ought not to have done. Carver had not ever scolded Provender - it was not his place - but his eyes had conveyed reproof far more sharply and eloquently than words ever could, and so too, in its way, had that scar of his.

Carver bowed deeply, with just a touch of obsequiousness. Great, beside him, was fast asleep. His chin was lodged on his collarbone, and every vein and tendon in his neck strained against the skin and looked ready to snap. His eyelids were so papery thin, his corneas stood proud through them like two buttons.

Provender backed away, mumbling an apology. He sought refuge in the jovial orbit of Fortune, catching the tail-end of the joke with which his uncle was regaling a small crowd:

'...so the third missionary, he's seen what's happened to the other two, he's watched through the chink in the wall of the mud hut as they've been buggered by every single tribesman and then allowed to stumble off into the jungle, and he thinks to himself,
Well, hold on, I'm a good Victorian gentleman, I'm a servant of the Lord, my body is His temple, I'm not going to allow these heathens to defile it in this ghastly manner
. So when the chief comes to him the next evening and makes the same offer, "Death or ooga-booga", the missionary says, "I choose death." And the chief smiles a great big smile and says, "Very well then. If that is what you wish. Death by ooga-booga!"'

As gales of laughter exploded around Uncle Fort, Provender turned away, and before he knew it he was in Blaise's clutches once more.

Realising that it was hopeless trying to flee from her, he adopted a different tactic, letting her know in no uncertain terms that he was not now or ever likely to be in the market for marrying a woman quite as pushy as she was. Weirdly enough, the blunter and ruder he got, the more, not less, confident Blaise became that he was the one for her.

'I like a man who speaks his mind,' she said. 'I like a bit of fire. There's nothing worse than a man who lacks spunk. In more ways than one.'

Even as she chortled at her own crudity, Provender was forming the impression that Blaise Wynne was, in fact, completely mad. He was all for women who knew what they wanted, but this was a woman who didn't know anything other than what she wanted and who simply could not tell when what she wanted did not want her in return. Perhaps she had been normal once, and sane; if so, her dream of attaining Family status, whatever the cost, had driven her stark staring bonkers since then.

Rare was the occasion that Provender had cause to give thanks for his cousin Arthur, but at that moment, as the diminutive Scaramouche lurched into his eyeline, he could not have been more grateful.

Arthur, it seemed, wished to have words with Provender. Arthur, it also seemed, had recently visited a small room off one of the lesser piazzas where intoxicants of a non-alcoholic nature were available. His nostrils were red-rimmed and his eyes had a vacant, slightly belligerent sheen and did not appear to be focusing on the same thing as each other. Drugs, of course, couldn't
not
be offered at a party like this one, and Cynthia Gleed, as any self-respecting hostess would, had laid on a premium selection - pure uncut Ecuadorian cocaine, some very pungent and potent sensimillia, and a smattering of downers and uppers to counteract the effects of the first two. At her insistence, their supply and ingestion was restricted to one discrete (and discreet) corner of the party site, so as not to offend the sensibilities of the more straight-laced guests. She herself didn't necessarily disapprove of the use of narcotics, but there was no need to rub people's noses in it.