converge by car. The al-Rashids' chutney-coloured limousine drew up outside the front door and double-parked, hazard lights blinking, while Joe held the door for his employers. The Vealses' four-wheel-drive off-roader just beat Spike Borowski to the best remaining parking place on the other side of the street. Impoverished Clare Darnley had arrived half an hour early by one of the six articulated buses she'd found waiting empty, throbbing, pumping fumes into the air of Shepherd's Bush.
On the hall table inside, Gabriel saw the pile of unwanted offerings that would be recycled through Sophiee's compendious 'present drawer'. Spike Borowski had brought the only thing that would be used: a football signed by his teammates for Jake, the Toppings' eleven-year-old son.
Gabriel followed a caterer upstairs to the sitting room. To his relief, he remembered Sophie Topping when she greeted him with a kiss on the cheek. Her skin snagged a fraction on his as she withdrew, and he wished he hadn't economised on razor blades.
A tray of fizzing flutes was offered to him and he took one, holding it by the base.
'Now then,' said Sophie. 'You're not to talk to Nasim because you're sitting next to her at dinner. Clare Darnley's on your other side, so you're not to talk to her either ...'
Allowing himself to be led by the arm, Gabriel caught the elbow of a waiter and hungrily took a classy-looking canape; only as he swallowed did he recognise it as raw fish. Something about Gabriel's appearance made other people talkative. He had never understood what it was, but women stood close and confided in him; men prodded him in the chest as they explained their triumphs. Both sexes seemed anxious to inform him, to keep him in some all-important loop. Perhaps there was something in his eyes, he thought misanthropically, that they mistook for sympathy.
He overheard, at that moment, a man with a face like a fox terrier and a reedy voice: 'It's hard to know which is more baffling, the sales or the critical acclaim.'
A pace or two away from him was an exuberant, paunchy fellow in his forties, saying: 'In six months Digitime is going to offer you the complete service - television, broadband - the whole kit and caboodle. We won't just be a programme maker but a full service provider. We've gone into business with an ISP and one of the old franchise holders. You'll be able to tailor-make your own package through opt-ins, then vary it online each month at no extra cost ...'
Despite the nature of what he was saying, Gabriel thought, the man sounded like a wing commander from an old war film.
A demure woman in a grey woollen dress squared up to him: 'So, will I still get the BBC?'
'Of course, if you opt in,' said the wing co. 'But not as a default.'
A regal, brown-skinned woman, Indian probably, interrupted: 'What Simon isn't telling you - are you, darling? - is that the only free programmes, the only defaults in his packages, are pornography he's bought from Richard Branson.'
The demure woman: 'So if I don't upgrade my package, I can only get pornography?'
The wing co: 'Public service broadcasting - all those gorillas, heritage and news analysis stuff - that's increasingly niche. So you would expect to pay for that, yes.'
'So it's a porn package,' said the woman, growing steely, 'with respectable add-ons as options?'
'We already have a ten per cent market share,' said the wing co - or the television magnate Simon Porterfield, as Gabriel now deduced him to be. 'A la carte viewing is the future of tele--'
'But it's just a porn package,' said the woman, 'which I--'
'Not just that. The starter pack, which is only a few pennies a month, includes all our big hit shows for Channel 7. It's Madness, for instance, which is pulling six million viewers on 7 even as we speak ...'
'But that's a catastrophe,' said the woman. 'It's a disgusting programme and somebody took his life on it two days ago.'
'It's far from catastrophic,' said Simon Porterfield. 'It's more or less single-handedly kept Channel 7 afloat.'
'Better to have let it sink. And what about this poor man who killed himself?'
'It was very unfortunate, I admit. But I think in the long term, in the history of television it'll be remembered as ...' Simon Porterfield looked round for a moment, as though searching for the perfect word, then beamed in triumph, like a retriever dropping a prized bird at its master's feet. 'Iconic,' he said.
Gabriel