‘Right, everyone ready to eat?’ demanded Topaz as she sailed towards the table. ‘We’ll have to rearrange ourselves a little bit. Libby, why don’t you go there, Gavin here, Sibby there, and Johnathan over there?’ Topaz issued directions with the assurance of a born hostess. People obediently moved into their designated positions. Johnathan sat next to Kibby. Gavin huffily moved to the other end of the table. Wine glasses were filled. A large pepper grinder was plonked on the table. It was at least two feet high. Gavin lit the candles in the middle of the table with Libby’s lighter as Topaz staggered over with an enormous orange dish.
‘Here we are,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Only lasagne, but at least it’ll be edible. Riddled with shredded tofu, as usual. Not so much as a whiff of cow.’
Oh hooray, thought Johnathan.
Topaz began doling out portions on to the elegant plates which blended seamlessly with the kitchen’s colour scheme. The plates were passed around the table. As Johnathan handed Kibby hers she smiled. ‘So Mr Lawyer,’ she said. ‘You buy and sell companies.’
Johnathan nodded. ‘Afraid so.’
‘Sounds interesting.’
‘Well. It can be. Sometimes.’
‘Do you have interesting clients?’
Johnathan considered. ‘Not especially. They’re all large corporations. Individuals couldn’t ever afford the fees.’
‘I see,’ said Kibby, prodding her lasagne with her fork. ‘No juicy divorces, stuff like that?’
‘God no. The partners decided a long time ago that human misery wasn’t nearly lucrative enough.’
‘Well, human misery is what some of us specialize in.’ Kibby nodded up the table towards Gavin. ‘Welcome to the world of the insufferably self-righteous.’
Johnathan smiled. ‘I’m used to it. It does rather come with the territory. Although I must say that your friend over there was less backward in coming forward than most.’
‘Oh, you can always rely on Gavin to call a spade a spade. Or a bimanual broad-bladed gardening implement. I’m sure “spade” is quite unacceptable nowadays.’
‘I wish I could be so frank,’ mused Johnathan.
‘I’m not so sure,’ said Kibby. ‘People like Gavin regard frankness as a huge virtue. They see it as a means of avoiding accusations of hypocrisy. They believe that if they spend all their lives facing the truth head-on, and then confronting everyone else with it, the world is somehow going to be a better place.’
‘And you don’t think it will?’
‘Why should it? Discretion has its merits. Apart from anything else, Gavin has a highly idiosyncratic idea of what constitutes truth. All it means is what he happens to think this week. Gavin just cannot shut up, and all that really illustrates is his unshakeable belief in his own convictions. And his inability to listen to anyone else’s opinion without butting in halfway through.’ Kibby sipped her wine. ‘Believe me, Gavin talks an awful lot of self-justifying, narrow-minded bollocks.’ At the other end of the table Gavin was leaning towards Topaz, talking urgently in a low voice. Topaz looked bored.
‘What does he do?’ asked Johnathan.
‘Not much,’ said Kibby. ‘Doesn’t need to. He’s fantastically rich. His father owns an extremely successful detergent manufacturing business.’
‘Very nice.’
Kibby leaned towards Johnathan, a small heap of lasagne balanced on her fork. ‘What we tend not to mention is that Daddy’s business has recently been castigated in the national press for committing some of the worst ecological industrial abuse in the country, despite repeated fines and warnings from the authorities. Daddy has taken the view that it is more economical to pay the fines than to change the manufacturing process and institute a clean-up operation to rectify the damage he’s already caused.’
‘But he can’t do that,’ said Johnathan.
‘You can,’ said Kibby, ‘if you indulge in a little “greasing of the palms of corrupt officials”.’
‘Oh,’ said Johnathan. He looked up the table at Gavin. ‘Presumably he’s turned his back on his father’s business in disgust.’
‘Not exactly. Gavin’s dad wouldn’t give him the sort of job that he felt he deserved. Gavin thought that three years of doing absolutely nothing at university qualified him for a position on the main board. When his father offered him a position as production supervisor in the Coventry factory, Gavin had a bit of a tantrum. Hence the railing against the evils of capitalism.’
‘Sour grapes.’
‘As sour as they come.’
‘So has he severed paternal links in his pursuit of the life of the righteous?’ asked Johnathan. He poured some more wine into Kibby’s glass, and then his own. He noticed that the bottle he had brought was not on the table.
Kibby snorted. ‘Of course not. The detergent business might be morally reprehensible and it might serve to perpetuate the interests of the rich over those of the under-privileged, but it comes in handy to pay for the flat in Chelsea and the insurance premiums on the Porsche.’
Johnathan’s eyebrows shot up. Kibby burst out laughing.
Her laugh was extraordinary. It was not remotely what Johnathan had expected. He had imagined a light, crustless cucumber sandwich of a laugh. What he heard was more a pie and gravy with dollops of mash laugh. It wouldn’t have been out of place in a working men’s club in Macclesfield on cabaret night. It ripped through everyone else’s conversations like a cyclone. It was wonderful.
‘And you,’ said Johnathan, after the cyclone had died away. ‘Are you one of us or one of them?’
‘Not sure,’ said Kibby. ‘Gavin would doubtless say I was one of you.’
‘What do you do? The suspense is killing me.’
‘I work for a film production company.’
‘Sounds glamorous.’
‘Ha. Not really. I make the trailers you see in the cinemas.’
‘The trailers for the films?’
‘Yup. I get presented with two hours of dross and have to cut it down to two minutes of interesting and exciting footage which is going to fool people into spending their hard-earned cash to go and see it.’
‘Sounds quite a job,’ said Johnathan sincerely. It sounded a lot more fun than drafting legal agreements. ‘To capture the essence of a film in that amount of time must be a challenge. Presumably you really need to understand the film, get under its skin and live its, sort of, quiddity.’
‘Not really,’ said Kibby. ‘You just take the best jokes and the most violent bits, and stick them together. And if there’s any nudity, you put it all in. Tits sell.’
‘Oh,’ said Johnathan.
‘Basically, it’s incredibly rare that there’s anything worth watching in a film which wasn’t in the trailer. I get to act as a sort of crap filter, if you like. Of course on occasions the films are so awful that I have to stick crap in the trailers too. Would you mind reaching over and passing me that enormous phallic thing, please?’
Johnathan reached for the pepper grinder. ‘What do you think, Libby,’ he said, turning to his right. ‘Do you like films?’ Libby had been staring vacuously into space having demolished her walnut-sized portion of lasagne in a matter of seconds.
‘I don’t go for films much,’ said Libby.
‘Christ, what a monstrosity,’ said Kibby, as she struggled to control the pepper grinder.
‘That sort of thing makes men feel terribly inadequate,’