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little boy, rather undersized, brown-haired, eversmiling, the cossett of the house staff, the darling of the village, and shyly in love with the gardener's eldest son, who takes him fishing most afternoons and to the local cinema every Saturday and on alternate Wednesdays. Giles is accurately described by the cook as "such a sunny little thing"; he has moments of foreboding, brief but intense, only when his mother wheels herself into his room at night and when he visits the dentist.
It is being a glorious summer also for Andy Adorno, who is no less enjoyably whiling away his vac as an assistant sorter in the Notting Hill post office. By law, Andy is too young for the job, but he looks older than he is and the people at the post office like him as much as most people seem to. They have agreed to pay him £22 per week, cash, with the consequence that Andy is buying a fair amount of cocaine on Friday evenings. Despite his experiments with this and any other drug he can get his hands on, he remains cheerful, rowdy and energetic. Furthermore, at what he calls "the vague commune in Earl's Court" where he has always lived, Andy encounters lots to eat and drink, plenty of friendly guys with all sorts of amazing musical instruments, and a continuous stream of girls who keep on successfully trying to go to bed with him.
As usual, Celia Evanston is being toted round Europe by Aramintha Leitch, her stepmother, who is, as usual, between
divorces. They are at this moment checking out of La Traviata
in Monte Carlo and waiting for the Mercedes that will shortly take them to the Cannes Hilton. Lady Leitch, a small, athletic blonde, is being importuned variously and without sue- cess by the hotel manager, two hotel waiters, the janitor of the hotel swimming pool, and the maitre de of the hotel dining room. The first wants Lady Leitch to settle her bill; the other four want to know when Lady Leitch will return so that they can all sleep with her again: to each the noblewoman gives her Hebridean address. Celia can be made out in the corner of the foyer sitting amid a pile of luggage and hatboxes. A hideous bellboy crouches beside her; their conversation is in French and has the cadences of recrimination and denial. Finally, the girl stands—small, fat, shock-haired, but with a certain assurance—glances at her stepmother, and says, "Dix minutes." The hideous bellboy spreads his hands, as if this is all he had asked, all anyone could ask. The couple disappears arm in arm.
Celia's future husband, Quentin Villiers, is thirty miles away, by the side of the Italy road. He is on a walkabout-hitchhike tour of Europe and this is his first real holiday without elderly chaperones of one sort or another. Thus, although he has little money and few contacts, his green eyes are perpetually bright with pure hedonistic anticipation. He stands in a lay-by with his duffelbag, dressed only in faded Rob-Crusoe jeans cut off well up the thigh. Quentin is already six-foot, tanned and aquiline; the traffic practically concertinas when he sticks out his thumb.
Diana, Diana Parry, is a mere shadow of her future self, a tall-for-her-age, severe-looking, badly coordinated girl with a narrow orange mouth and a sheet of black hair that hangs on her head like a paper-thin cowl. At present she is on her way from her mother's flat in London to her father's flat in Amsterdam. Her demeanor at Heathrow Airport is characteristic: she fumbles with her documents, drops her handbag, splinters fingernails on the suitcase handles, and is painfully conscious of the men's malevolent stares. Diana is particularly on edge today, having received a letter from her best friend Emily containing the ebullient postscript that Emily has just that minute begun to menstruate; this intelligence establishes Diana as not only the smallest-breasted but also the one nonpubescent girl in her coterie. While Diana is not at all sorry to leave her mother she is not especially anxious to see her father. She