We're talking five minutes, Jonathan, Burr had said. What's five minutes for a kid of eight?
A lifetime, Jonathan thought, remembering a few minutes of his own.
Meanwhile Daniel is in grave discourse with Jed, whose raggedy chestnut hair divides into two roughly equal parts as she leans downward to address him. The flame of the candle sets a gold fringe on their two faces. Daniel pulls at her arm. She rises, glances at the band above her and calls to somebody she seems to know. Sweeping up her flimsy skirts, she swings one leg then the other over the stone bench, as if she were a teenager vaulting a garden gate. Jed and Daniel scamper hand in hand down the stone staircase.
* * *
Time stops. The band is playing a slow samba. Daniel clutches Jed's hips as if he were about to enter her. The grace of Jed's movements is near-criminal. A flurry interrupts Jonathan's reverie. Something dire has happened to Daniel's trousers. Jed is holding them at the waistband, laughing away his embarrassment. Daniel's top button has broken loose, but Jed in an inspired act of improvisation pins him together with a six-inch safety pin borrowed from Melanie Rose's apron. Roper is standing on the parapet, gazing down on them like a proud admiral inspecting his fleet. Catching his eye, Daniel releases Jed long enough to give a child's wave, sawing the air from side to side. Roper responds with a thumbs-up. Jed blows Roper a kiss, then takes Daniel's hands and leans back, mouthing the rhythm for him to follow. The samba quickens. Daniel relaxes, getting the hang of it. The liquidity of Jed's hip movements becomes an outrage against public order. The worst man in the world is too much blessed.
* * *
Returning his gaze to the terrace, Jonathan makes a perfunctory inspection of the rest of the Roper party. Frisky and Tabby sit at opposite sides of the table, Frisky favouring the left draw, Tabby covering the diners and the dance floor. Both men appear larger than Jonathan remembers them. The Lord Langbourne, blond hair still bundled in a ponytail, converses with a pretty English rose while his gloomy wife scowls at the dancers. Across the table from them sits Major Corkoran, lately of the Life Guards, sporting a battered Panama hat with an old Etonian hatband. He is making gallant conversation with an awkward girl in a high-necked dress. She frowns, then blushes and giggles, then corrects herself and takes a stern mouthful of ice cream.
From the top of the tower, Henry the impotent singer breaks into a calypso about a-very-sleepy-girl-who-couldn't-get-to-sleep. On the dance floor, Daniel's chest is cuddled against Jed's mound and his head against her breast, while his hands clutch her hips. Jed lets him rock against her in peace.
"Girl on table six got tits like l'il warm puppy dogs," O'Toole announced, prodding Jonathan in the spine with a tray of Mama's punch.
Jonathan took a last long look at Roper. He had turned his face toward the sea, where a moon path led from his fairy-lit yacht to the horizon.
"Mass' Lamont, sound the Allelujah, sir!" cried Mama Low, majestically sweeping O'Toole aside. He had donned a pair of ancient jodhpurs and a pith topee, and he was armed with his famous black basket and riding crop. Jonathan followed Mama Low onto the balcony and, white as a target in his chef's tunic and hat, tolled the brass tocsin. The echoes were still booming out to sea as the children of the Roper party came pelting down the path from the terrace, followed at a more becoming pace by the adults, led by Langbourne and a pair of wispy young men of the polo-playing classes. The band played a roll of drums, the perimeter torches were doused, coloured spotlights made the dance floor glisten like an ice rink. As Mama Low moved centre stage and cracked his whip. Roper and his entourage began taking their reserved places in the front row. Jonathan glanced out to sea. The white motorboat that might have been a Cigarette had vanished. Must have rounded the headland to the south, he thought.
"Right where I'm standin' heah is the startin' gate! Any nigger crab tries to beat the startin' pistol, that's ten lashes cold!"
His pith helmet tipped to the back of his head, Mama Low is giving his celebrated rendering of a British colonial administrator.
"This historic ring right
