KDBookOnline
Share Us
It would have been churlish to refuse. He had done a lot for me, after all. He was the one who was paying for lunch. Who had paid my school fees, even when the business was not going well. I had been given a lot of chances in life that he had not. I did not ever want to seem ungrateful. It probably would not take me more than a couple of hours.
Still, it would have been nice if just once in a while, my dad dropped in on me without warning like this and did not have a favor to ask.
AS I WAS WALKING Dad back to his car, two abreast on a pavement carpeted with wet leaves, he asked if I was excited about that evening.
“This evening?” I asked, as if I did not know what he was referring to.
“Your investiture,” he replied, grinning, practically nudging me in the ribs. “The Osiris Society.”
Ah yes. Two things I had been attempting not to think about, as it happened.
For almost as long as I could remember, Dad had been going on about the Osiris Society. Their famous dinners. Their legendary antics. How important it was, when I went to Cambridge (never if), that I was asked to join. For the seal of social approval. For the ridiculous pinkie ring.
It being the first Thursday of the month, it was also the first dinner of Michaelmas term, when new members were invested. There only ever being thirteen at any one time, this was considered something of an honor. When I had showed Dad the embossed invitation, signed by Harry as society president, it was a little tragic how excited he was.
“I’m not sure,” I told him, “whether it’s really my thing.”
He asked me what I was talking about.
One did not turn down an opportunity like this, he told me. If I really did not understand the potential professional advantages for someone planning a career as an art dealer in making these kinds of contacts, perhaps I should consider a different way of making a living. He probably did have a point.
I had once, as a snotty teenager, made an offhand remark about his never having been made a member, despite his great friend Philip being president when they were students. How that must have stung. How that must have rankled. Because at the end of the day, I observed—coldly, unkindly, annoyed with him about something, aiming to wound—despite all his sucking up, despite all his efforts at self-reinvention, none of those people were ever really going to forget, were they, that he was just a grammar school lad from South London who had grown up in a council flat?
He did not speak to me for a month.
“Are you nervous about the investiture?” he asked.
The truth was, I was dreading it. I had spent my whole time at Cambridge consciously avoiding the kind of boozy, boorish evening I was letting myself in for tonight. To make matters worse, Harry’s cousin Freddie—a practical joker, and like Harry a member of Osiris ever since their very first term at Cambridge—had been trying to make me as anxious as possible. Dropping hints about what it would involve. Like a cross between a rugby club initiation and joining the Masons, was how I had always imagined it. As it turned out, it was going to be far worse than that.
A week earlier Harry had told me what I was expected to procure for the ceremony. He had said to meet him in a pub around the corner from college, and I had arrived to find half the society at a table next to the fireplace, Osiris signet rings glinting as they sank their drinks. Freddie Talbot. Ivo Strang. Benjy Taylor. Arno von Westernhagen. Eric Lam. Handsome Hugo de Hauteville—Hugo de Hotville, some of the girls called him. All of them the sort of boys my father was so keen for me to associate with: rich, ambitious, well-connected. Absurdly so, in some cases. Arno von Westernhagen—tall, tanned, a keen skier, an even more enthusiastic rugby player—was an actual German count. He had gone to school in England but spent summers at his family castle—the schloss—in Bavaria.
I offered to buy a round and, when they all nodded thanks, prayed I had enough cash for eleven pints of lager and a Diet Coke with ice and lemon. This last item was for Arno von Westernhagen, who was not currently drinking, on medical advice, following a rugby head injury a few weeks earlier. “I was out cold for ten minutes,” I could hear him explaining to Hugo and Benjy. “I went out for a few pints with the rest of the team that night and had a fucking seizure. The doctor told me no booze for six months.”
Harry followed me to the bar and handed me an envelope.
“What’s this?” I asked him.
“Instructions,” he said.
I went to open it, but he shook his head and told me to wait until I got home. So I finished my beer, made my excuses, and slipped off to fumble the envelope open. On the piece of paper inside, in Harry’s weirdly childish writing, were three words. Freddie was outside smoking with Eric Lam and Arno von Westernhagen as I left. He glanced down at the note in my hand.
“Bring an animal?” I said incredulously. “What does it mean, bring an animal? A live animal? A dead animal? What kind of animal?”
“That’s up to you, Patrick. We’ve all had to do it. What was yours, Ivo? A pheasant?” Freddie said, smirking.
Ivo nodded. “Got my dad to send it in the post.”
“Arno, you brought a rabbit, if I remember correctly,” said Freddie, clearly enjoying himself.
Arno confirmed this. He seemed to be smoking twice as much as usual now that he could not drink—he stubbed out one cigarette in a shower of orange sparks and immediately lit another.
“Fur and all,” he added. “I had to buy it frozen from a place that does pet food for snakes.”
Everyone seemed to be laughing, but I genuinely couldn’t tell if Freddie was joking.
“We didn’t make this shit up. It’s all in the rules. It’s been the same investiture ceremony since the society was founded.” He shrugged.
I gave him a long, hard look.