just a darling little village.… where do you ski, Theo? Do you ski? Why then, definitely you and Kitsey must come out with us to our house in the…
Though I had an eye out for Hobie and Pippa, I scarcely saw them. Playfully, Kitsey dragged people over to introduce to me and then vanished as quickly as a bird flying from a windowsill. Havistock, thankfully, was nowhere in evidence. At last things began to clear out, but not much; people had started moving toward the coat check and the waiters were starting to remove the cake and the dessert dishes from the buffet when—trapped in conversation with a group of Kitsey’s cousins—I glanced across the room for Pippa (as I’d been doing, compulsively, all night long, trying to catch sight of her red head, the only interesting or important thing in the room)—and, much to my surprise, espied her with Boris. Conversing with animation. He was all over her, loosely draped arm, unlit cigarette dangling from his fingers. Whispering. Laughing. Was he biting her ear?
“Excuse me,” I said, and made my way quickly across the room to them by the fireplace—where, in perfect unison, they turned and held their arms out to me.
“Hello!” said Pippa. “We were just talking about you!”
“Potter!” said Boris, throwing his arm around me. Though he was dressed for the occasion, in a blue chalk-stripe suit (it had often struck me, the hordes of rich Russians in the Ralph Lauren shop on Madison), there was somehow no cleaning him up: his smudged eyes made him look stormy and disreputable, and though his hair wasn’t technically dirty it gave the impression of dirtiness. “Am happy to see you!”
“Same here.” I’d asked Boris never dreaming he would show—it not being in the nature of Boris to remember pesky things like dates, or addresses, or to turn up on time if he did. “You know who this is, don’t you?” I said, turning to Pippa.
“Of course she knows me! Knows all about me! We are now dearest of friends! Now—” to me, with a mock show of officiousness—“small word in private. You’ll excuse us please?” he said to Pippa.
“More private conversations?” Kicking my shoe playfully with her ballet slipper.
“Don’t worry! I will bring him back! Goodbye to you!” Blowing a kiss. Then to me, in my ear, as we walked away: “She is lovely. God, but I love a redhead.”
“So do I, but she’s not the one I’m marrying.”
“No?” He looked surprised. “But she greeted me! By my name! Ah,” he said, looking at me more closely, “are you blushing! Yes you are, Potter!” he crowed. “Blushing! Like a little girl!”
“Shut up,” I hissed, glancing back for fear she’d heard.
“Not her then? Not Little Red? Too bad, huh.” He was looking round the room. “Which one, then?”
I pointed her out. “There.”
“Ah! In the sky-blue?” He pinched me affectionately on the arm. “My God, Potter! Her? Loveliest woman in the room! Divine! A goddess!” making as if to prostrate himself on the floor.
“No, no—” grabbing him by the arm, hastily pulling him up.
“An angel! Straight from paradise! Pure as a baby’s tear! Much too good for the likes of you—”
“Yes, I think that’s the general opinion.”
“—although—” he reached for my vodka glass and took a big slug before handing it back to me—“a bit icy to look at, no? I like the warmer ones myself. She—she is a lily, a snowflake! Less frosty in private, I hope?”
“You’d be surprised.”
His eyebrows went up. “Ah. And… she is the one.…”
“Yes.”
“She admitted it?”
“Yes.”
“And so you are not standing with her. You are annoyed.”
“More or less.”
“Well”—Boris ran his hand through his hair—“you must go and speak to her now.”
“Why?”
“Because we have to leave.”
“Leave? Why?”
“Because I need you to take a walk with me.”
“Why?” I said, looking around the room, wishing he hadn’t dragged me away from Pippa, desperate to find her again. The candles, the orange gleam of firelight where she’d been standing made me think of the warmth of the wine bar, as if the light itself might be a passageway back to the night before and the little wooden table where we had sat knee to knee, her face washed with the same orange-tinged light. There had to be some way I could walk across the room and grab her hand and pull her back to that moment.
Boris threw the hair out of his eyes. “Come on. You will feel fantastic when you hear what I have to say! But you will