Trespass by Rose Tremain Page A

universe’, he’d previously been happy enough with his own role in that universe as the prime arbiter of Lloyd and Benita’s taste in furniture and pictures. But now, tonight, when he saw Lloyd, at sixty-five, still sailing triumphantly through his life, despite the economic downturn, about which he complained very loudly (‘I’ve taken hideous losses, Anthony, absolutely bloody hideous!’), but to which his lifestyle seemed strangely immune, with his large but still handsome wife like a sequined spinnaker beside him, whooshing along in the vanguard of all that was most desirable in rich British society, Anthony felt a wounding stab of envy.
    The Palmers were a ravishingly fortunate pair. This vast and magnificent ship of theirs, ballasted by numerous children and grandchildren, was unthreatened by storm or by calm or even by corrosion – or so it appeared. Anthony had to express it baldly to himself this evening: Lloyd had always been ahead of him and always would be. He was so far ahead, in fact, his lead so manifestly unassailable, that there was no point in Anthony imagining he could ever catch up. And the worst thing was, he could see Lloyd thinking these same thoughts. Even Benita may have been thinking them: Poor Anthony; things are difficult everywhere, but for Anthony Verey Antiques it has to be the end of the road. Thank God we aren’t trying to make a living, in the anarchic 21st century, out of trying to sell what our American friend Mary-Jane refers to as ‘dead people’s furniture’ . . .
    These sombre considerations had led Anthony to drink a great deal of Lloyd’s excellent wine. Lloyd had matched him, sip for sip, and the two of them now sat face to face, across a choppy lake of glassware, coughing on cigars, slugging cognac and determined, as Lloyd had touchingly put it, ‘to get to the heart of the whole ruddy thing’.
    Benita had gone to bed. She knew – perhaps because she was more cultured than Lloyd and had read and understood both Ibsen and Lewis Carroll – that there was no ‘heart of the whole ruddy thing’ and that when men talked about searching for it what they often wound up talking about was cars. Occasionally, she’d noticed, they reminisced in a sentimental way about their past lives, elevating university pranks into myths of universal significance or exaggerating the traumas caused to them by public school beatings. Tonight, as she closed her bedroom door, she heard Anthony say: ‘The only time, Lloyd, that I was happy . . . the only fucking time that I was happy in my life was in a tree-house!’
    Lloyd’s explosion of laughter was loud. Lloyd adored laughing (and people tended to adore Lloyd partly because he laughed so much), but now, tonight, Lloyd discovered that the side-effect of this particular collapse into mirth was a slight wetting of his underpants and this, he thought, as he continued to giggle, was something surprising, something that happened to old men, but not (yet) to him.
    ‘Yes,’ Anthony was going on, ‘that’s the honest truth, old man. In a tree-house.’
    ‘Oh God!’ said Lloyd, recovering from his laugh and putting one of his meaty hands on his groin, to see if the wet had come through to his trousers, which it had. He thrust a crumpled linen table napkin down there and said: ‘So go on, tell me, where was the fucking tree?’
    Anthony poured himself more cognac from the William Yeowood decanter. ‘In the hols’, he said, ‘when V and I were kids, I once made a tree-house in the spinney behind the house . . .’
    ‘Barton House, or whatever it was called?’
    ‘Yes. Bartle. Ma’s house. Our house. Before you knew me.’
    ‘Well before I knew you, old man. I mean, well before . Unless you were still building tree-houses when you were at Cambridge?’
    ‘Shut up and listen, Lloyd. We’re meant to be getting to the heart of things.’
    ‘Are you saying . . . are you saying, at the heart of everything . . . at the heart