'Concierge,' said Francis, disgusted. 'They don't have a concierge at the Coachlight Inn.'

I studied this woman with new interest. 'That's Bunny's mother?'

'That's right,' said Henry. 'I keep forgetting. You haven't met her.'

She was a slight woman, corded and freckled around the neck the way women of that age and disposition often are; she bore little resemblance to Bunny but her hair and eyes were the same color as his and she had his nose: a tiny, sharp, inquisitive nose which harmonized perfectly with the rest of her features but had always looked slightly incongruous on Bunny, stuck as it was like an afterthought in the middle of his large, blunt face. Her manner was haughty and distracted. 'Oh,' she said, twisting a ring on her finger, 'we've had a deluge, indeed, from all over the country.

Cards, calls, the most glorious flowers -'

'Do they have her doped up or something?' I said.

'What do you mean?'

'Well, she doesn't seem very upset, does she?'

'Of course,' said Mrs Corcoran reflectively, 'of course, we're all just out of our minds, really. And I certainly hope that no mother will ever have to endure what I have for the past few nights. But the weather does seem to be breaking, and we've met so many lovely people, and the local merchants have all been generous in so many little ways…'

'Actually,' said Henry, when the station cut to a commercial, 'she photographs rather well, doesn't she?'

'She looks like a tough customer.'

'She's from Hell,' Charles said drunkenly.

'Oh, she's not that bad,' said Francis.

'You just say that because she kisses up to you all the time,'

Charles said. 'Because of your mother and stuff.'

'Kiss up? What are you talking about? Mrs Corcoran doesn't Wc. f up to me.'

'She's awful,' Charles said. 'It's a horrible thing to tell your kids that money's the only thing in the world, but it's a disgrace to work for it. Then toss 'em out without a penny. She never gave Bunny one red -'

'That's Mr Corcoran's fault, too,' said Camilla.

'Well, yeah, maybe. I don't know. I just never met such a bunch of greedy, shallow people. You look at them and think, oh, what a tasteful, attractive family but they're just a bunch of zeros, like something from an ad. They've got this room in their house,' Charles said, turning to me, 'called the Gucci Room.'

'What?'

'Well, they painted it with a dado, sort of, those awful Gucci stripes. It was in all kinds of magazines. Rouse Beautiful had it in some ridiculous article they did on Whimsy in Decorating or some absurd idea – you know, where they tell you to paint a giant lobster or something on your bedroom ceiling and it's supposed to be very witty and attractive.' He lit a cigarette. 'I mean, that's exactly the kind of people they are,' he said. 'All surface. Bunny was the best of them by a long shot but even he '

'I hate Gucci,' said Francis.

'Do you?' said Henry, glancing up from his reverie. 'Really? I think it's rather grand.'

'Come on, Henry.'

'Well, it's so expensive, but it's so ugly too, isn't it? I think they make it ugly on purpose. And yet people buy it out of sheer perversity.'

'I don't see what you think is grand about that.'

'Anything is grand if it's done on a large enough scale,' said Henry.

I was walking home that night, paying no attention to where I was going, when a large, sulky fellow approached me near the apple trees in front of Putnam House. He said: 'Are you Richard Papen?'

I stopped, looked at him, said that I was.

To my astonishment, he punched me in the face, and I fell backwards in the snow with a thump that knocked me breathless.

'Stay away from Mona!' he shouted at me. 'If you go near her again, I'll kill you. You understand me?'

Too stunned to reply, I stared up at him. He kicked me in the ribs, hard, and then trudged sullenly away – footsteps crunching through the snow, a slamming door.

I looked up at the stars. They seemed very far away. Finally, I struggled to my feet – there was a sharp pain in my ribs, but nothing seemed broken – and limped home in the dark.

I woke late the next morning. My eye hurt when I rolled on my cheek. I lay there for a while, blinking in the bright sun, as confused details of the previous night floated back to me like a dream; then I reached for my watch on the night table and saw that it was late, almost noon, and why had no one been by to get me?

I got up, and as I did my reflection rose to meet me, head-on in the opposite mirror; it stopped and stared – hair on end, mouth agog in idiotic astonishment – like a comic book character konked on the head with an anvil, chaplet of stars and birdies twittering about the brow. Most startling of all, a splendid dark cartoon of a black eye was stamped in a ring on my eye socket, in the richest inks of Tyrian, chartreuse, and plum.

I brushed my teeth, dressed, and hurried outside, where the first familiar person I spotted was Julian on his way up to the Lyceum.

He drew back from me in innocent, Chaplinesque surprise.

'Goodness,' he said, 'what happened to you?'

'Have you heard anything this morning?'

'Why, no,' he said, looking at me curiously. 'That eye. You look as if you were in a barroom brawl.'

Any other time I would have been too embarrassed to tell him the truth, but The was so sick of lying that I had an urge to come clean, on this small matter at least. So I told him what had happened.

I was surprised at his reaction. 'So it was a brawl,' he said, with childish delight. 'How thrilling. Are you in love with her?'

'I'm afraid I don't know her too well.'

He laughed. 'Dear me, you are being truthful today,' he said, with remarkable perspicuity. 'Life has got awfully dramatic all of a sudden, hasn't it? Just like a fiction… By the way, did I tell you that some men came round to see me yesterday afternoon?'

'Who were they?'

'There were two of them. At first I was rather anxious – I thought they were from the State Department, or worse. You've heard of my problems with the Isrami government?'

I am not sure what Julian thought the Isrami government terrorist state though it is – should want to do with him, but his fear of it came from his having taught its exiled crown princess about ten years before. After the revolution she'd been forced into hiding, had ended up somehow at Hampden College; Julian taught her for four years, in private tutorials supervised by the former Isrami minister of education, who would occasionally fly in from Switzerland, with gifts of caviar and chocolates, to make sure that the curriculum was suitable for the heir apparent to his country's throne.

The princess was fabulously rich. (Henry had caught a glimpse of her once – dark glasses, full-length marten coat – clicking rapidly down the stairs of the Lyceum with her bodyguards at her heels.) The dynasty to which she belonged traced its origins to the Tower of Babel, and had accumulated a monstrous amount of wealth since then, a good deal of which her surviving relatives and associates had managed to smuggle out of the country.

But there was a price on her head, as a result of which she'd been isolated, overprotected, and largely friendless, even while a I teenager at Hampden. Subsequent years had made her a recluse. «She moved from place to place, terrified of assassins; her whole ™ family – except for a cousin or two and a little half-wit brother who was in an institution – had been picked off one by one over the years and even the old Minister of Education, six months after the princess was graduated from college, had died of a sniper's bullet, sitting in the garden of his own little red-roofed house in Montreux.

Julian was uninvolved in Isrami politics despite his fondness for the princess and his sympathy – on principle – with royalists instead of revolutionaries. But he refused to travel by airplane or accept packages COD, lived in fear of unexpected visitors, and had not been abroad in eight or nine years. Whether these were reasonable precautions or excessive ones I do not know, but his connection with the princess did not seem a particularly strong one and I, for one, suspected that the Isramic jihad had better things to do than hunting down Classics tutors in New England.