"Wa.s.sat, luv?" the driver squawked through the intercom.

"The window!" Meredith was shouting and it felt good. Felt right. "Please open the window before my friend pukes all over your cab."

Both windows lowered completely and the cab was filled with rush-hour fog. Meredith was relieved to see the blood rushing back into Mish's cheeks. They waited a few moments before picking up the conversation they had cut off.

"She was nice enough, I guess," said Mish, "but in a dangerous way. Like she was just waiting for something to lose it over. You can tell all the rumours are true-I bet she can be a total c.u.n.t."

"Mish!"

"What? People say that here. It's no big deal."

"How do you know?"

"I saw it in a movie."

"What movie?"

"Trainspotting."

"h.e.l.lo? That was about heroin addicts, and besides, it was set in Scotland."

"Same difference." Mish rolled her eyes like an exasperated teenager. "The point is, I wouldn't want to catch the woman in the wrong mood."

Meredith hadn't bothered to tell Mish about the incident involving Swain's last stylist and the curling iron.

"And you can immediately tell she's one of those women who's super touchy about her age," Mish went on, "not to mention her weight. One of the wardrobe a.s.sistants was telling me they had to rip all the size-eight labels out of her dresses and sew on new ones that said size six."

"No."

"Supposedly."

Somehow the driver had managed to maneuver the car out of the clogged roundabout, and they were now moving over a bridge with the rest of the traffic flow at the pace of corn syrup being poured from a pitcher. Meredith looked out the window at the river and Westminster Abbey. She marvelled at how truly enormous the clock tower was. Unlike most things in life, Meredith thought, Big Ben actually lived up to the promise of its name. The thought of that comforted her.

"You know she's desperate to have a baby," said Mish.

"She told you that?"

"I can smell it."

"Really." Meredith was suddenly uncomfortable. Not just with this conversation but with the whole topic of babies in general. She thought about pregnancy so much these days that talking about it had become embarra.s.sing. Funny how the things that obsessed you privately became a matter of public shame. She felt like a person carrying a secret torch so large she could hardly bear to mention the name of her crush out loud.

"Good luck to her, I guess."

"Yeah." Meredith nodded, looking straight ahead. "Good luck."

"It's been ages!" cried the barman.

To Irma he looked as tasty as sardines on toast.

In fact it had been only a couple of weeks, but usually Irma had dinner in the club at least two-if not three-times a week.

"You know my heart, darling," she said, giving him a wink. She searched for his name but could not find it in the clutter of her brain. Perhaps she was starting to lose her marbles. Then again, it was possible she had never known the name in the first place.

Without a pause, the young man reached under the counter and produced a bottle of Strega-the one with the label written in fancy curlicue Italian-which they kept at the club just for her. She had developed a taste for Italian liqueurs one summer while visiting her old friend Osmond Crouch at his villa near Florence. That was years ago (decades, possibly), but since then she had been religious about taking it before and after her evening meal as both aperitif and digestif. She looked at the bartender's forearms as he poured. They were smooth but textured with fine blond hair, the veins visible just below the skin. Coursing with blood, Irma thought, and felt a pang in her navel. Even now. Amazing.

She looked around the half-full barroom and nodded at several acquaintances. There was silly old Lady Viola in her dirty dungarees. Apparently she had once spent a summer in Spain s.h.a.gging Pica.s.so. That's what she told anyone who would listen, but Irma didn't believe it. Anyone who knew Pica.s.so knew he wasn't keen on redheads. Across the bar was young Barnaby Shakespeare, lost in thought and looking carelessly handsome, if second-son-ish. Poor boy, thought Irma, though she wasn't sure why.

While not the most fashionable destination in town, Irma's club was still considered one of the most venerable and exclusive in all of London. This was largely due to the reputation it had established for being a hub of creativity and scandal between the wars, when a group of semi-insane, semi-famous sculptors had hung out here and made the place known by hosting a series of parties in which all the guests stripped off their clothing and molested one another with plaster. Since then, occasional nudity had become a tradition. Once or twice a year, toward closing time, some member or other would get drunk enough to take off their kit and end up posing for impromptu life-drawing sessions on the billiards table. In recent years it had become a halfhearted exercise-to tell the truth, no one much enjoyed getting naked anymore-but it was a point of pride at the club, definitive proof of its status as a bohemian inst.i.tution, and so the members dutifully kept up the tradition.

The place itself was a sprawling and shabby white-brick cottage just off King's Road. Since Irma had first joined in the sixties, the club had expanded to include a large new bar, skylights and French doors leading out onto the back garden. The barroom atmosphere was more pub than posh-plywood floor covered in squashed cigarette b.u.t.ts, cheap chrome-and-vinyl chairs of the sort you might find in any legion hall, ashtrays bearing the logo of the local football team.

Dinner was served every night at nine at a great oval table in the older, grander part. The walls of the communal dining room were hung exclusively with paintings of past members dining in the same room, creating a ghostly, reflective effect that Irma approved of. If ever you forgot where and who you were, you could just look at the walls and be reminded-without having to look in a mirror.

"Well, if it isn't our fair Irish poetess."

Irma offered up her cheek to be kissed by a fat man upholstered in navy blue pinstripes.

"Henry. How goes public life?"

"Dull as ever," he said, grinning in a way that suggested he thought it was anything but. "What about you? Still mad as a hatter?"

Irma bit the inside of her lip and forced a smile. She hated jokes at her own expense but had always pretended the opposite. "I prefer to think of it as a form of alternative sanity," she said.

Henry roared and slapped her so heartily on the shoulder that her drink sloshed onto her shoe. Irma wished Meredith would get here so she could fob Henry off on her. He was the man she had in mind for her daughter's purposes. A prime candidate, she thought: he was handsome enough, and charming in a boorish sort of way. Not her type at all, of course-far too earnest, even though he tried to pretend to be jaded (Irma could see through it). A Tory MP, for heaven's sake. Not to mention the author of several historical biographies and father to countless illegitimate children. He was one of those men who seemed able to do the work of six, without ever appearing any the worse for wear. Yes, Irma thought, Henry would almost certainly be up for a romp with her daughter. He didn't have a reputation for being terribly picky, and there was no question about his fertility. He would do.

"Mother, you'll have a heart attack!"

"Oh, don't be such a prude, darling."

Irma held the straw up to her nose and sniffed a line of fine white powder off her pocket mirror before handing it over. Meredith took it gingerly and frowned. Irma didn't wait for her daughter's reaction. She turned around and beetled across the room to get the attention of the barman.

"Fantastic," Mish said with the kind of hysterical admiration that people often showed after experiencing Irma for the first time. "Aren't you going to do some?"

"I don't know." Meredith stared at the row of tiny ridges in her palm. The outside of the mirror, she knew, was inlaid with Irma's initials in mother-of-pearl. She had an early childhood flashback of watching her mother use it to reapply her lipstick in a restaurant.

Once again, she was shocked. How could she possibly be the offspring of this reckless cougar? Irma had taken one look at Mish and Meredith when they arrived at the club (under-slept, cranky and still reeling from the cab fare) and pulled them over to the corner table for what she called "a little pick-me-up." Now Meredith was trying to contend with two things: a) the realization that her elderly mother was quite possibly a c.o.kehead, as well as b) the fact that she had never in her life encountered the stuff up close.

"What does it do?" Meredith wrinkled her nose, feigning disgust to mask her fear. She had been offered c.o.ke exactly twice before. Once at the fateful Felsted wrap party and another time by a rocker boyfriend of Mish's. Both times she had refused it on the grounds that she had a tendency toward nosebleeds. The truth was, as did all drugs that you couldn't grow in a clay pot in the backyard, c.o.ke scared the wits out of her. What if she had a heart attack? Or a stroke? Or got one of those bubbles in her vein that traveled through your arteries and then exploded in your cerebral cortex? Or did that only come from needles?

Mish glanced around to see if anyone was watching. Then she extended her hand. "Give it here," she said. "I don't know about you, but I'm wiped."

"So am I!" Meredith jerked the mirror away and nearly dropped the whole thing on the floor, her hands were quivering so badly.

"Careful," Mish hissed. "Now, are you going to do one or not? It'll perk you up. It's like the best cup of coffee you've ever had. Hold the straw like this."

Mish mimed the action and Meredith copied it, hoovering up a thin line. She immediately felt like a morally bankrupt teenager in a movie. If anything, her mouth felt sort of numb, like after a dentist's freezing. A funny Clorox taste dripped down the back of her throat.

"I don't think it works." She shrugged. "I mean, I don't feel any different."

"Just wait," Mish said, reapplying her lipstick in the mirror and brushing off her upper lip.

She closed the compact. Taking Meredith's chin in one hand, Mish a.s.sessed her friend's face like the fussy mother of a toddler. Meredith was afraid Mish was going to lick a thumb and start wiping the corners of her mouth. Instead she fluffed Meredith's bangs and smiled.

"Your mother is exactly the way you described her."

"How so?"

"Completely bonkers."

Meredith sighed, and Mish jumped up from the table and led her over to where Irma was standing, talking to a fattish, middle-aged man in a suit with a mop of dark hair.

"Girls! I want you to meet Henry Cazalet. Henry, this is my daughter, Meredith, and her charming friend from Toronto."

"Mish."

"Right. So sorry. I'm awful with names. And faces. But in all my years, I've never forgotten an a.r.s.e!"

Everyone roared.

"So what exactly brings you two to London?" Henry asked, taking a sip of his whisky and looking around the room, probably to see if any of his colleagues had arrived for dinner.

"Work, actually," said Meredith. "We're both on the new Osmond Crouch film."

"Right, Crouch. How is the old b.u.g.g.e.r? I haven't seen him in years. Is he still collecting vintage Fiats?"

"I wouldn't know, I've never met him. And he never comes to set."

"We hear stories, though," Mish said, rolling her feathered shoulder and angling her head in a coy way.

"Like what?" Cazalet leaned in.

This was the first Meredith had heard of any "story."

"Well, I shouldn't be telling tales out of school, but..." Mish paused and looked around like a secret agent in a spy movie. "I was talking to one of the stars in the wardrobe trailer today, and she was telling me that apparently Crouch has completely lost his mind. He hasn't left his villa in Italy for years and the place is completely falling apart around him, and all the while he's making this strange film..."

"You mean the one you're working on?"

"Oh no, that's just a money project. Supposedly he's been directing his own thing. Some sort of monolithic art movie. No one actually knows anything about it. He's been shooting it for years and it never gets anywhere closer to being finished. It must be costing him a fortune. Once a year he has a dinner party and invites people to watch some of the rushes. But that could be just a rumour. I wasn't exactly hearing it firsthand, if you know what I mean."

"Really." Cazalet's eyes were wide with interest. He held up a finger indicating they should wait a moment and then turned to the bar for another round of drinks.

Meredith was continually amazed at Mish's ability to wander into any social or professional situation and come away with the most scintillating gossip in record time. It was, she thought, one of the great things about having Mish for a best friend.

"So what do you think?" Irma was upon them.

"It's good," said Meredith, who had just begun to realize she felt much more awake and hopeful about the evening than she had as recently as ten minutes ago. "My chest feels sort of fluttery."

"Not that, silly goose." Irma waved her hand in front of her face irritably. "What do you think of Henry? He's very bright and successful. A Tory MP, you know."

Meredith shrugged. "Yes, but isn't he married?" She had noticed the gold band strangling one of his fat fingers when he handed her a drink.

"Yes, exactly." Irma smiled, nodded with satisfaction and tossed her silk scarf over her shoulder.

"Exactly...what?"

"Exactly the sort of man you ought to be looking for, darling. I should think a married man would offer far fewer complications in your situation than an unmarried one."

"And why is that?" Meredith raised an eyebrow at Mish, who gave a theatrical cough. The drugs made her mother seem amusing. She wasn't sure whether this was an actuality or just a perception, but for once she felt she could see what everybody else saw.

"Well, it just seems quite obvious if you want total independence," said Irma.

Meredith began to tell her mother that she had absolutely no intention whatsoever of giving birth to the unloved b.a.s.t.a.r.d of a philandering politician, but before she could, a bell was ringing and Henry Cazalet was herding them all toward the dining room for dinner. It was unfortunate, because suddenly Meredith didn't feel the least bit hungry, but she supposed it would be nice to sit down anyway. Her appet.i.te had been replaced by a lot of things to say, and a dinner table was a much better venue for conversation, all things considered.

Dinner was a choice between salmon or pheasant, although the bird, they were informed by a maid in a floppy white lace cap, had "a fair bit of lead shot in it." Everyone except Meredith ordered the salmon. She figured it would give her a good excuse not to eat, and besides, she was curious to see what lead shot actually looked like.

There were just over two dozen people at the dinner table including Mish, Meredith and Irma. Meredith, of course, was made to sit beside Henry Cazalet, who bored her all through the soup with his theory on how the Tories could take the country if they were able to grab the inner-city single-mother vote. Meredith thought this sounded about as likely as Labour taking the rural retired-colonel vote. She was feeling restless and full of mischief and in order to amuse herself, she began asking Cazalet all about his wife. What was her name? (Margaret.) How had he met her? (At a cricket luncheon in Chichester.) How old were they when they married? (Twenty-five and nineteen, respectively.) How many children did they have? (Four: two girls and two boys.) Was she beautiful? (She had been very pretty, but people do change, you know.) Were they still in love? (In what sense of the word?) And on and on until Cazalet, after the soup bowls were cleared, announced he was "terribly sorry," but one of his const.i.tuents was at the other end of the table and he must go over and say h.e.l.lo. And off he b.u.g.g.e.red, to Meredith's considerable relief.

Mish, by this point, was deeply entrenched in conversation with Irma. She demanded (between honking fits of laughter) one story after another about Meredith's mother's days as wandering hippie poetess. Meredith listened to the one about the time her mother had snuck into an orgy at a San Francisco men's bathhouse by pretending she'd had a s.e.x-change operation. It was a decent yarn, but one Meredith had heard about five dozen times. She swiveled around and a.s.sessed the room. Across the table was a famous interior designer Meredith recognized from TV. The woman was wearing the most amazing jewelry-dangling diamond chandelier earrings and a great aquamarine dinner ring on her right hand. Meredith remembered (from reading it in the "Wicked Whispers" column of the Daily Mail around the tea trolley on set) that this was the woman who had left her husband on his sickbed for a married Saudi billionaire oil tyc.o.o.n. The husband eventually died of colon cancer and the billionaire ditched his long-suffering wife and three children in favor of shacking up with the interior designer and her twin boys. The designer was now flanked by two pearl-laden blond women friends with identical layered hairstyles that Meredith always thought of as the "mummy-cut." They were hanging on the designer's every word, and kept touching her arms and shoulders in a compet.i.tive show of sisterly support. Although she couldn't hear the words, Meredith could tell from the designer's brow that she was telling a story that centered around her own unjust persecution at the hands of some faceless Goliath.

Just then, the designer arrived at some salient point in her story and looked up at Meredith. The flat, almost challenging expression in her eyes conveyed that the woman had known she was being watched. Meredith looked away, embarra.s.sed at having been caught gawking. Terribly uncool. Fiddling in her handbag, she reflected, as she often had while discreetly observing famous actors on set, how strange it must be for celebrities to go about their lives being recognized by complete strangers-a constant reminder that they existed for people who did not exist for them.

Meredith was lost in this thought when she felt a lukewarm splash across her left shoulder and lap. She jumped up, but too late. Her outfit-a white dress shirt and camel trousers-was completely soaked with red wine.

"Oh G.o.d. How stupid of me. How utterly, unforgivably rude. You must think I'm awful. And here I was, trying to come to your rescue. Not that you needed rescuing, I mean, but just that, what I mean to say is-" The young man searched for a c.o.c.ktail napkin as he spoke. The longer he searched, the more rapid his babbling became. "What I was going to say to you was, well, I hadn't actually thought of an opening chat-up line. I'm afraid I'm rather bad at those. And then I end up spilling a drink on you instead. How typical."

He pulled a napkin out of a gla.s.s from an empty place setting two seats down and, in his fl.u.s.tered state, pressed it against the wet red blotch on Meredith's left breast. She gasped and pulled away. And then laughed.

"Oh G.o.d, I've done it again, haven't I." The man dropped his face into his hands. "You must think I'm such an idiot."

"No, just a klutz and a lech." Meredith smiled to show she wasn't angry, and his face lit up like that of a little boy presented with a puppy.

"Barnaby Shakespeare." He offered his hand and Meredith shook it.

"Meredith Moore."

"More wine?" He had already reached for the bottle of Cotes du Rhone and was refilling his gla.s.s.

Meredith shook her head. She wasn't sure how alcohol mixed with drugs, and besides, she felt so perfectly relaxed and confident, she didn't really crave any. The waiter placed their main courses in front of them. Meredith looked down at her pheasant and saw that it still had a bit of unplucked down sprouting from its tiny breastbone. Barnaby, like everyone else at the table, was having salmon. He picked up his fish knife and began to eat.

"You probably get asked this all the time, but are you any relation to the Shakespeare?"

"I might be," said Barnaby, c.o.c.king his head as though this was the first time he had ever considered such a possibility. "There was a rumour he was a distant cousin on my father's side. Mind you, there are a lot of Shakespeares in Britain, and I suppose we're all related to one another somehow."

"Neat," Meredith said, and elbowed Mish, who failed to turn around. Irma was halfway through the story of how she had given a reading at the original Woodstock.

"The problem of course is that everyone thinks I ought to be a good writer, and the truth is, I don't have a literary bone in my body."

"What do you do instead?"