Edward St. Aubyn, “At Last”

Once I finished the Patrick Melrose novels, I was absolutely compelled to gulp down At Last. I can’t quite explain the sense of urgency this novel created in me, but at one point yesterday I found myself perched at the kitchen table wearing an apron, reading feverishly on my phone, while a pile of onions sat half-chopped on the cutting board. Believe me, that never happens in my house.

And what was going on to wrench me away from dinner prep? Patrick’s mother Eleanor was being cremated. At last. And Patrick was … well, he was handling it pretty well. Unlike his dreadful aunt Nancy, whose nostalgia for better times she never knew had poisoned every vestige of humanity in her. Or the terrifying Sir Nicholas Pratt, who shared Nancy’s disdain for the contemporary (and the common) but deployed a much larger vocabulary to describe his contempt. In a way, At Last is the funniest of the Melrose novels. Edward St. Aubyn loosens the leash on his satire here while simultaneously digging deeper into Patrick’s psyche and into the horror of his infancy and childhood. In a way, St. Aubyn even turns against his own project, because At Last exposes the “inarticulate” nature of Patrick’s distress. He has to accept that words, his chief defense, are inadequate. Using language to fend off pain is only a delaying mechanism.

Grandiosity avoided: the Victorian-style funeral suggested for Eleanor Melrose by the crematorium

My goodness, this is brilliant. As Patrick slowly gropes his way to recognition of his childhood traumas, his father’s old friend Nicholas spews torrents of eloquent nastiness and the demented Fleur provides manic descants — there’s a great deal of talking at Eleanor’s memorial and what’s not meaningless is cruel. Except that near the end, Patrick’s young children speak up with simplicity and kindness, providing both hope and confirmation that Patrick has managed not to damage them. (Which is a real achievement in this family.)

I tend to forget that one of the qualities we look for in novelists is insight. It’s all very well to invent characters and settings and plots, and to describe them with vigor and charm, as St. Aubyn does. I think what kept me enthralled through the Melrose books, though, was his persistent unflinching investigation into Patrick’s pain and the toxic inheritance of familial horrors. “He was free to imagine how terrified Eleanor must have been, for a woman of such good intentions, to have abandoned her desire to love him, which he did not doubt, and be compelled to pass along so much fear and panic instead.” At Last  provides Patrick with a more complete understanding of his family and a more searching assessment of himself: thinking about his attraction to suicide, he realizes that “he had only ever been superficially in love with easeful death and was much more deeply enthralled by his own personality. Suicide wore the mask of self-rejection; but in reality, nobody took their personality more seriously than the person who was planning to kill himself on its instructions. Nobody was more determined to stay in charge at any cost…”

In this series of novels oozing with irony, of course there’s an irony in the hyperarticulate Patrick Melrose’s discovery of emotions that must be endured without the buffering quality of speech. There’s a greater irony in the whole story being written with the detachment and style of Edward St. Aubyn. But of course it’s his words that give structure and style to the whole messy saga, and make it irresistible.

Edward St. Aubyn, “The Patrick Melrose Novels”

All of the current enthusiasm for Edward St. Aubyn’s latest novel At Last made me curious about the earlier Patrick Melrose books — curious but nervous. On the one hand, they were supposed to be dazzling dissections of emotional disarray in the English upper class. But on the other hand, they featured harrowing episodes like five-year-old Patrick’s rape by his father, or a luridly drug-fueled weekend in New York some years later. Stylish, disturbing, mordantly funny; eventually I had to try them. So I picked up the elegant omnibus edition that contains Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother’s Milk. That was three days ago, and I’ve hardly been separated from the volume since. Some readers have compared St. Aubyn’s work to Evelyn Waugh’s books and superficially, that makes sense. St. Aubyn writes of Waugh’s aristocratic world, but with a kind of despairing rigor, exposing the emotional emptiness and dishonesty that used to pass for upper-class style. He’s angry; he’s funny; he steers clear of self-pity and his authority over the material is complete.

We begin, in Never Mind, at the beautiful Melrose house in the south of France, watching the magnetic and dashing David Melrose torturing ants with a hose on the terrace. Oh, great — an idle sadist. We meet his drunken and wealthy wife Eleanor, her purse clanking with liquor bottles. And little Patrick, whose wariness betrays the damage that’s already been done. It’s only 132 pages, but I couldn’t have taken any more. St. Aubyn drifts adeptly from one point of view to another, managing to elicit both sympathy and horror. Patrick’s parents are monsters, but you can sort of see why. (From Some Hope: “Perhaps he would have to settle for the idea that it must have been even worse being his father than being someone his father had attempted to destroy.”)

Bad News was the hardest of the four to get through; David Melrose is now dead and Patrick, a 22-year-old heroin addict with too much money, has to go to New York to pick up his father’s ashes. We’re in Patrick’s sorry consciousness for every moment of a vile weekend. Yet somehow St. Aubyn has built enough sympathy for his character that you feel you need to stay with Patrick. He shows his hand at one point: “… he again wondered what kept him from suicide. Was it something as contemptible as sentimentality, or hope, or narcissism? No. It was really the desire to know what would happen next, despite the conviction that it was bound to be horrible: the narrative suspense of it all.” (What happens next:  his heroin dealer telephones.)

The Great Barrier Reef: "vulgar."

Some Hope is an interlude of sorts: Patrick is now thirty, and the narrative circles around a big country-house party. The social comedy is broader (if no less dark), and Patrick has managed to kick the drugs and attract a genuine friend, Johnny Hall, to whom he actually reveals the story of his father’s abuse. By Mother’s Milk, he’s taken the daring step of marrying and having children. It’s not going particularly well:

He had made it out of Zone One, where a parent was doomed to make his child experience what he had hated most about his life, but he was still stuck in Zone Two, where the painstaking avoidance of Zone One blinded him to fresh mistakes. In Zone Two giving was based on what the giver lacked. Nothing was more exhausting than this deficiency-driven, overcompensating zeal. He dreamed of Zone Three. He sensed that it was there, just over the hill, like the rumor of a fertile valley.”

His mother has given away the French house to a “Transpersonal Foundation,” has had a pair of strokes, and wants him to help her commit suicide. He loves his children, cheats on his wife, drinks way too much. He sees, already, the damage he’s doing to his older son. He tries to do better.

And sown throughout these books are throwaway bits of brilliance like a horrid woman at the party in Some Hope, talking about incest carelessly, confessing that she never sees her son in Australia:

Fergus took me to the coast and forced me to go snorkeling. All I can say is that the Great Barrier Reef is the most vulgar thing I’ve ever seen. It’s one’s worst nightmare, full of frightful loud colors, peacock blues, and impossible oranges all higgledy-piggledy while one’s mask floods.’”

Metaphor? Reality? Funny? Tragic? Brilliant, really.

Michael Gilbert, “He Didn’t Mind Danger”

I hope Michael Gilbert is better-known than I think he is. I used to buy his books second-hand in the 1980s — so somebody else must have owned them, right? — but I’ve never heard anyone mention reading them and I’ve never seen them on anybody else’s book shelves. Yet he’s reliably diverting in a no-fuss no-muss English way, and there are thirty of these novels, so allow me to proselytize.

He Didn’t Mind Danger is one of Gilbert’s procedural mysteries, involving the oracular Inspector Hazlerigg of Scotland Yard. The tale, written in 1947, is contemporary. The protagonist is a recently demobilized Scot, Major Angus McCann; tough as nails, at loose ends, and, as per the title, he doesn’t mind danger. Hazlerigg turns to McCann when a “crime-wave” (you get the sense this is a new term) overtaking London seems to involve ex-military personnel. McCann is all too eager to help.

London bomb damage from World War II. Cleaned up but not forgotten by the time this book was written.

Gilbert writes complex but tidy plots and I’ll only say that this book involves a colorful ring of criminals and that they get nabbed after suitable adventures for everyone. Challenging material this isn’t. However it is both witty and heart-felt. On one page, Hazlerigg explains to McCann what’s at stake:

‘At the moment England is living on credit… We’re getting business from outsiders because they trust us. I don’t only mean trade orders but insurance, banking, international selection trusts, the sort of thing we’ve been living on for years because we represent absolute stability in a world of shifting currencies and repudiated debts. This is only a little thing so far but — the British insurance rate for movables went up ninepence in the pound this month.’

Suddenly we’re back in a world where England has to claw back to stability after years at war, and where no help can be expected from a Europe still emerging from the wreckage. The casual references to military service and war damage are striking because Gilbert takes them so much for granted.

But I have to admit it’s Gilbert’s sense of humor I enjoy above all. He has a detached and tolerant view of human nature, which allows him to toss around passages like this one, summing up McCann’s opinion of the English secret service:

On one occasion, previous to the Sicily Landing, he and other officers in his Battalion had listened to a security lecture from a stout major from M.I.5. He had been very impressed by the major’s manner, and had surmised that his rather stupid façade must conceal a brilliant and ruthless intellect. Later, on the same day, in Mess, he had played poker with the gentleman in question, and doubts had crept in.”

“Doubts had crept in.” No doubt in my mind, though, about Michael Gilbert’s value as an entertainer.

Honore de Balzac, “Pere Goriot”

Wouldn’t it be fun to know how many library books circulate without ever getting read? I haven’t had a library card in 25 years so I’m just getting used to the new freedom of choice that lets me bring books home and dip into them for free. Last week’s haul was eclectic: a Tracy Chevalier novel, a volume of Chekhov novellas, and Pere Goriot. I only finished one of the Chekhov tales but the Balzac was lots of fun, in a literature-geek way. Which is to say that I enjoyed reading it, but a great deal of my pleasure involved books connected to Pere Goriot rather than the book actually in my hand. What I did cherish was the detail of the settings and atmosphere. Balzac is generous with descriptions of the world his characters live in, from the squalor of certain neighborhoods in 1819 Paris to the enameled monogram on a gold Bréguet watch.

Ingres portrait of Francois-Marius Granet, at Nat'l Gallery London. Corresponds to my mental image of Eugene.

It turns out that Pere Goriot was published in the mid-1830s and was one of the first full-length novels that falls into Balzac’s immense series called la Comédie humaine. It has a number of important features that narrative culture still takes advantage of. One is the prototypical French character of the young-man-from-the-provinces who arrives in Paris eager to make the city its own. In this case, he’s Eugene de Rastignac, from minor nobility, poor, handsome and charming but above all, ambitious. Balzac retooled him as Lucien de Rubempré in Lost Illusions and Dumas gave him a rapier and called him d’Artagnan in The Three Musketeers. Zola uses the trope over and over again, as does Maupassant.

Of course you know what they say: that there are only two stories, “A man goes on a voyage” or “A stranger comes to town,” and this is the former.  Eugene is all potential — he has no present when the book begins. Just his restrained provincial past and the future which he must choose. Balzac sets out two paths for him, embodied in the two older men living at the shabby Maison Vauquer, a Left Bank boarding house. In one corner is our titular Pere Goriot, a retired manufacturer of vermicelli, who has sacrificed everything for his two beautiful daughters. (The specificity of “vermicelli” is typical of Balzac.) In the other is Monsieur Vautrin, a mysterious figure of titanic energy who tries to lure Eugene into a profitable arranged marriage. Yes, actually, he probably is the devil: Balzac gives him great lines like, “… there are no principles, just things that happen; there are no laws, either,  just circumstances.”  When another character calls him a prophet, he answers, ”I am anything and everything.”  Oh, that Balzac, what a cynic!

The narrative tension hovers around Eugene’s choice, and Balzac leaves the outcome open. Only in later books do we meet Eugene de Rastignac as a powerful and worldly Parisian figure. Vautrin comes back, too, to reprise his role of tempter and fixer. This trick of working with recurring characters over an extended narrative was another Balzacian innovation. Actually, I think that means “Downton Abbey” is directly descended from  Pere Goriot.

Back by Popular Demand: To Marry an English Lord

Yes, indeed: The People have spoken and the world of commerce has heeded their word. (Actually I give my New Best Friend Julian Fellowes  a lot of credit for this.) Workman Publishing has swiftly produced a reprint of To Marry an English Lord which I co-wrote with the brilliant Gail MacColl. Official publication date is March 15 but your local bookstore may have it sooner. And of course you can order from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or IndieBound. It will also be available as an e-book. And in case you don’t have this info at your fingertips, the lady on the cover is not Elizabeth McGovern as “Downton Abbey’s” Lady Grantham, but the Duchess of Marlborough, née Consuelo Vanderbilt. An American heiress who married an English Lord and… well, you’ll have to read it to find out, won’t you?

Alan Hollinghurst, “The Stranger’s Child”

Only a really good writer could have pulled off The Stranger’s Child. And only a really good writer could have given it the subtle depth charge that I still find blooming in my memory, 24 hours after I put the book down. Alan Hollinghurst deserves all the credit he’s been given for this poignant meditation on the merciless advance of time.

The erasure of the face is a clever reference to the novel's central notion.

Mind you, this is a quiet book. My friend the Discerning Reader (who characterized it as “wistful”) said he rather longed for a car chase by 3/4 of the way through, but, folks, it’s not that kind of book. We have instead to do with the brief life and subsequent reputation of an aristocratic English poet named Cecil Valance. Subsequent, that is to say, over the course of 100 years. Hollinghurst’s achievement is to present Cecil to us as a young man full of promise, and then, in later chapters, explore how he — and those who knew him — are remembered.

This requires some patience from the reader. With each new section we’re introduced to new characters and Hollinghurst is in no hurry to connect the dots. The first part, called “Two Acres,” introduces Cecil as the flamboyant and sexually omnivorous guest of the Sawle family at their house called “Two Acres.” Cecil writes a poem by that name in sixteen-year-old Daphne Sawle’s autograph book — a poem that later becomes a cornerstone of English poetry anthologies — but it’s her elder brother George who’s in love with Cecil.

Then we jump forward to a different era but Hollinghurst takes his time identifying the time, the place, the players, and their connections with the previous section. This happens three more times, for five sections, and each time the reader must grope his way along to find the links among the chapters. By the end, Cecil’s reputation, the house he lived in, the letters he wrote to George, have all faded or disappeared.

It’s the way Hollinghurst guides us through this inevitable process that matters. He’s discerning about social standing, slyly funny, generous with setting and detail, and all of that’s very enjoyable. But he also makes a discomfiting point about emotions and relationships. The “Two Acres” chapter crackles with youthful energy and infatuation, but by the next section Daphne (now nearly forty) ruminates that “What she felt then; and what she felt now; and what she felt now about what she felt then: it wasn’t remotely easy to say.” Yet people keep on pressing her to opine. Documents move from one generation to another; books are written, letters are burned, the vivid emotions that Hollinghurst opens with are kept secret, elided, speculated about. And, finally, no longer matter, except to a small handful of people — and to them, only at second hand.

Benjamin Black, “A Death in Summer”

This, my friends, is a very classy entertainment. Dark, certainly: Benjamin Black is no cheerful read. On the final page of the novel our wounded protagonist Dr. Quirke sums up the previous 300 pages to Detective Inspector Hackett:

‘It isn’t much, is it,’  he said. ‘Costigan, and a couple of thugs, and a rotten priest transferred?’

‘It’s the times, Dr. Quirke, and the place. We haven’t grown up yet, here on this tight little island. But we do what we can, you and I. That’s all we can do.’”

You won’t find that much of a comfort, but if you’re looking for sweetness and light you shouldn’t be visiting Black’s mid-twentieth century Dublin, as seen through the jaundiced eye of pathologist Dr. Quirke and his complicated network of friends, enemies, and family. (Often all the same in one body.) He’s almost as depressing as those ghoulish Swedes. But for me the redemption is in the faint sliver of light provided by Quirke’s mostly good intentions and, to a much greater extent, in the writing.

Black's Ireland is deeply Catholic

Benjamin Black is, of course, John Banville moonlighting, and having what appears to be a perfectly wonderful time. He can’t seem to help it: he tosses off local color like, “Far out, a pallid sun broke through the clouds and set two burly pillars of light standing astride the sea.” Or our first view of Quirke: “Teetering along on those absurdly dainty feet of his the big man seemed not so much to walk as to stumble forward heavily, limping slightly; it was as if he had tripped over something a long way back and were still trying to regain his balance.” Happily, these flights of color don’t interfere with the story telling, though this is a novel where the atmosphere and characters dominate the plot. Yes, there is a murder; newspaper magnate Richard Jewell’s head is blown off with his own shotgun, and made to look like a suicide. Yes, there are suspects: Jewell’s wife, his disturbed sister Dannie, his chief business rival. I suppose the book could be classed as a procedural since the crime is ultimately survived by the efforts of Quirke and the froglike Inspector Hackett. But the plot developments aren’t startling. You can see them coming a mile away. Heavens, if I say “orphanage” and “priest,” you’ve pretty well got it. Nevertheless, Black’s imagined Dublin and its ruined citizens kept me turning the pages. Along with passages like this, in which Quirke falls hard for the French widow of the murder victim:

… Quirke’s increasingly agitated spirit led him helplessly on into ever deeper excesses of amorous folly. He felt like a stony hearted old roué embarrassingly shackled to a lovesick youth… France, now, not just France the country but France the idea, suddenly loomed large for him, as if he had been running a magnifying glass idly over a map of the world and had come to a wobbly stop on that big ghost-shaped mass at the western edge of Europe. He had only to take a sip of claret and he was there, in a Midi of the mind, under dappled vine leaves, smelling the dust and the garlic…

The passage goes on, embroidering, picking up momentum like Quirke tripping over his own feet. Then the plot resumes, “excesses of amorous folly and all.”

Elizabeth Taylor, “In a Summer Season”

In a Summer Season opens with Kate Heron waiting on the steps of her mother-in-law’s London house, trying not to be intimidated or annoyed. She has come for lunch; her hostess is apparently not yet out of bed; she disapproves of the all-white drawing room. Yet when Edwina comes downstairs Kate instantly feels like a country bumpkin.

Wrong period but elegant.

Mid-twentieth century, middlebrow, upper-middle-class English characters: I could leave it right there. Elizabeth Taylor’s eleven novels are published by Virago and both Angel and Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont have been made into movies with appealing actors like Romola Garai, Rupert Friend, and Joan Plowright. When I tell  you that Elizabeth Taylor was a great friend of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s, that should complete the context.

But I’d be denying myself considerable fun, because Taylor has a great many quirky gifts. For instance she’s a splendid eavesdropper with excellent comic timing. Listen to sixteen-year-old Louisa, in an awkward farewell to the village curate (who is, yes, going over to Rome!):

‘Are you very short-sighted?’ she asked, for everything about him was important to her.

‘I have unilateral amblyopia,’  he said.

Kind of a conversation-stopper, no? Then there’s the way Louisa says her prayers, “as if dictating to an inexperienced secretary.” Even so, the funny bits sell Taylor short because there’s considerable emotional truth wrapped up here as well. Eventually — Taylor doles out the information gradually — we learn that Kate’s second husband Dermot is some ten years younger than she. The money is Kate’s; Dermot doesn’t actually work. (When the book opens, he is growing mushrooms for a living.) Dermot, it transpires, is an incipient alcoholic, and the chapter that makes this plain is one of the best characterizations of alcoholism I’ve ever read, from the grandiosity to the shame. The household also includes a cook, Kate’s 22-year-old son, and the dread spinster aunt Ethel who plays the cello and writes endless letters to her chum Gertrude, with whom she was imprisoned as a suffragette. There isn’t so much a plot as there are incidents, including one sorting jumble at the parish house.

That last sentence was a test. If you know what “jumble” is, In a Summer Season is for you.

Susan Hill, “The Betrayal of Trust”

Goddesses: Three Graces at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, sculptor unknown

OK, it’s official. Susan Hill enters the contemporary murder mystery pantheon, along with the goddess Tana French and the goddess Fred Vargas. Why, you may wonder, are these women deities in my little firmament? Because they consistently deliver entertainment that is also challenging. Because they work in a traditional genre and make it contemporary. Because they divert and provoke at the same time. And because they write so darn well.

I’ve posted about Susan Hill before and I’ve liked all of her books, but The Betrayal of Trust may be the best yet. A discerning friend theorizes that Hill is working on a series of twelve Simon Serrailler novels and he may be right. There’s something very intentional about the way she plants story lines and leaves them unfinished — it reminds me of the later Patrick O’Brian books. You don’t so much have a sense of the author being obliged to fill you in on the sidekicks and incidental characters (which I felt in Elizabeth George’s Believing the Lie), as a sense of groundwork being laid. Hill trusts us to be patient.

The precipitating factor here is a terrible tempest that floods the moor near Lafferton and exposes a skeleton. It turns out to be the remains of a fifteen-year-old girl who vanished on a sunny day sixteen years earlier — a cold case, in fact.  Serrailler catches the case but this is clearly contemporary Britain, because his struggles have as much to do with budgets as criminals. Budget constraints are also threatening Imogen House, the hospice where Simon’s sister Cat Deerbon works. Cat, in fact, is besieged on all sides; by grief, by overwork, by her children’s reactions to her husband Chris’s death.

What I most admired in this book was the fact that Hill let Simon be an outright jerk. He’s always been complicated, and Hill has sketched in the family background to justify that. But now, whether it’s the onset of middle age or the pressure of work or his always dangerous arrogance, he oversteps the bounds. He’s truly horrible to Cat, callous with his colleagues, inconsiderate at best with his new love-interest. (Gotta say the True Love plot thread did not entirely ring true to me, but maybe it’s there to humble Simon, a book or two down the road.)

There’s also a strong feeling of melancholy. Without dipping into the cynicism of, say, Benjamin Black, Hill has never spared her readers, and in The Betrayal of Trust several of the plot lines are extremely sad. One character suffers motor neuron disease (what we call ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease). Another has a partner with Alzheimer’s, who must be institutionalized; another is nursing a husband with Parkinson’s. It did remind me just a teeny bit of the phrase from the old hymn “Abide with me –” “Age and decay in all around I see…” Redemption? Satisfaction? The murder gets solved. That’s all we’re going to get. It’s enough.

Alan Bennett, “Smut”

I’ll admit I got a little kick out of sitting on the subway reading a book called Smut. But the cover, with its pattern of tea-cups, its genteel blue background and upright type, goes far to undercut the title. And, after all, this is Alan Bennett. So while he delivers what is promised, it’s not what you imagined. Isn’t that why we read him?

The teacups are actually a better indicator of the contents than the title. The first little novella is called “The Greening of Mrs. Donaldson” and it is just awash in tea, for Mrs. Donaldson is a middle-class suburban widow who might have come to us right out of a Barbara Pym novel. Only — no, not really. The Bennett genius is that Mrs. D., to help make ends meet, takes two steps. One is to rent out a room to a pair of young students: the other is to accept a job as a Simulated Patient at the medical school where her lodger Laura studies. Both of these income sources arouse the disapproval of Mrs. Donaldson’s daughter Gwen whose function here is to be unpleasant.

As you may know, if you’ve read the reviews, the source of smut in the first tale is the unconventional payment arrangement arrived at by the lodgers. But the source of giggles for me was Bennett’s deft narrative handling of the medical school shenanigans. In particular, it’s what Bennett as narrator chooses to elucidate or confuse. He often permits the characters — and their assumed characters in the charade of illness and diagnosis — go on at hilarious cross-purposes for quite some time. For instance, let’s have the opening:

‘I gather you’re my wife,’ said the man in the waiting room. ‘I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure. Might one know your name?’

Middle-aged and scrawny, he was bare-legged and underneath his shortie dressing gown Mrs Donaldson thought he might be bare altogether.

‘Donaldson.’

‘Right. Mine’s Terry. I’ve been away.’

He put out his hand and as she shook it briefly the dressing gown fell open to reveal a pair of tangerine Y-fronts with, tucked into the waistband, a mobile phone.

‘Trouble in the back passage,’ he said cheerfully.

‘No,’ said Mrs Donaldson. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Mine, not yours, dear,’ said Terry. ‘You’re just my wife.’

‘I was given to understand,’ said Mrs Donaldson, that it was your waterworks.’

‘No fear.’ Terry hitched up his Y-fronts. ‘No way.’

There’s a dizzy “who’s on first” quality to this exchange that recurs every time the medical charade comes up, and I enjoyed it more each time for the jolly virtuosity. Bennett treats Mrs. Donaldson quite tenderly, despite the potential humiliations she undergoes.

The second story is entitled “The Shielding of Mrs. Forbes” and that formidable lady also gets what she deserves, more or less. Certainly her resistance to some crucial perceptions about her nearest and dearest provides the plot. Here, Bennett is a little less whimsical, a little more graphic, and equally funny. I’ll give you a hint: Graham Forbes is the handsome light of his mother’s life. When he finally marries, “At the reception both Betty and her new mother-in-law were surprised by what good dancers many of Graham’s friends turned out to be …” Oh. I’ve given it away. Never mind, Bennett does, too, and it’s the least of what he has up his sleeve, the sly dog.