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it on the bread and then cut the bread, or do you eat the salmon with a knife and fork and have bits of bread in between mouthfuls?”
“I always put the smoked salmon on the bread,” said Caroline. “Then I cut it into squares. But they’re not going to pay any attention to that sort of thing. They’ll just want to make sure that you don’t talk with your mouth full or burp.”
James thought for a moment. “What if I do burp?” he asked. “What do I say?”
Caroline laughed. “My parents always told me not to say ‘pardon.’ They said you should say ‘excuse me.’ But they’re such snobs.”
“Could you just say ‘oops’?” asked James.
“Maybe.”
“And if I need to go to the loo,” James went on. “What then? Do I call it ‘the gents’ or ‘the loo’? Or what?”
“My father calls it the lavatory,” said Caroline. “I think that’s the approved word in really smart circles. Not the lav, but the lavatory. I don’t like that word much, I’m afraid.”
“What about ‘the little boys’ room’?” asked James.
“Definitely not. Extremely twee.”
“‘The washroom’?”
“American. They’re very keen on euphemisms.”
James nodded. “‘Letting go’ means sacking someone. ‘I’m going to have to let you go’ means ‘you’re sacked.’”
Caroline thought: I let Tom go. But then maybe he wanted to go. And at that point, she stopped her reverie, which had been a prolonged one, drifting from James to Tom, to home, to her parents; now the lecture on Venetian painting had ended and she found that all she had written in her Moleskine notebook was: “The boundaries of what we call the Venetian School …”
She snapped the Moleskine shut and followed her fellow students out of the room. She felt at a bit of a loose end; there was an essay to write but she felt disinclined to start on it. If only James had been here, she would have taken him for lunch at that bistro where they had met Tim Something. Poor James—it was lunchtime now and he would be under inspection by his prospective employers, his handling of smoked salmon being judged according to some arcane precepts of the proper way to tackle such things. Yes, poor James.
She decided on the spur of the moment: she would go for lunch at the bistro—she would treat herself. Why not? There was no rule against having lunch by yourself.
She walked round Bedford Square and into Great Russell Street. She liked this part of London, which was such a contrast to the garishness of Oxford Street, not far away. The shops here were small and had character, and even if she was not in the market for antiquities or first editions, she liked to see them in the windows. She paused outside the headquarters of a bookshop that was also a press. A selection of titles was displayed in the window and her eye was drawn to Sociobiology: The Whisperings Within. She liked that. There were whisperings within all of us; whisperings that prompted us to do one thing rather than another, whisperings that made us what we were.
“The whisperings within,” said a voice at her side. “Interesting! Should we listen to them?”
She spun round. Tim Something was smiling at her.
“You don’t fancy a bit of lunch, do you?” asked the photographer.
Caroline hesitated. She had a feeling that the answer that she gave to this question might determine a great deal for her; it was not just lunch at stake.
“Yes,” she said. “Why not?”
It was as if the answer came from someone else; not from the cautious self which she thought ran her life, but from another self, a self of more instinctive stamp, a self that beckoned from altogether wilder, more exciting shores. And she could tell, just by looking at him, that Tim’s invitation, as spontaneous as was her acceptance, came from the equivalent quarter within him.
93. Crop Circles
TERENCE MOONGROVE drove Berthea back from the sacred dance in his newly acquired Porsche.
“This is a very noisy car,” Berthea observed. “And it is also rather low. It would be very difficult to get into it if one had arthritis.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Terence. “The engine is deliberately noisy. Mr. Marchbanks told me that it is something they do on purpose. And as for its being low, that is just the way it is. It has something to do with making it possible to creep up behind people on the road and give them a fright when you overtake them.”
Berthea gave her brother a