Scandalous

Chapter 9

The address Daniel had texted him was on Mulholland Drive.

Nathan typed it into his phone, set it on the dash mount, and pulled out of the Altadena driveway at ten to seven with the bottle of Scotch riding in the passenger seat like a very expensive and silent travelling companion. The bottle was a fifteen-year Glenfarclas he'd found at a specialist off Colorado Boulevard on Thursday afternoon — not the kind of thing you brought to a gathering where nobody would appreciate it, but Daniel had told him to bring something to drink, and Nathan was constitutionally incapable of bringing something mediocre.

The drive took just under forty minutes. He took the 110 to the 10 to La Cienega and then up into the hills, the city falling away below him in its Saturday-night sprawl — a grid of light that went in every direction without apparent end, interrupted by darkness in the east where the mountains sat. He drove with the windows down, the September air warm and carrying the particular smell of Southern California at night, dry and faintly floral, jasmine and bougainvillea and something underneath it that might have been the Pacific, if you had a good enough nose and the wind was right.

He thought, as he drove, about the kind of gathering this was likely to be.

He had been to enough of these events in Cambridge — the faculty dinner parties, the literary salons, the gatherings of interested minds that had been written up in university newsletters with that phrase or something indistinguishable from it — to have a reasonable sense of what he was walking into. Daniel had described it as a place where people talked about things worth talking about, which was either accurate or the most optimistic framing available. The fact that the address was in Beverly Hills was not an encouraging data point.

If the Hills had taught the world anything, it was that the possession of significant money and the possession of significant ideas were not, as a rule, the same achievement. He suspected there would be champagne he hadn't been asked to bring and opinions delivered with the weight of convictions and at least one person who wanted to talk about a book they hadn't quite finished but had very strong feelings about. He had survived that before. He would survive it again.

He turned onto the indicated street and the satnav told him he'd arrived.

He leaned forward slightly to look through the windscreen and sat there for a moment, processing what he was looking at.

The mansion sat behind a low limestone wall and a row of Italian cypress trees that stood like a formal announcement of what was behind them — tall, precise, unnecessary in scale and entirely aware of it. The driveway was a wide, immaculate semicircle of pale aggregate stone that swept from the street gate to the front entrance and back again, laid out with the kind of geometric confidence that said the architect had not been asked to worry about cost at any stage of the project. Two black-jacketed valet attendants stood at intervals along the curve.

Nathan pulled in, cut the engine, and sat in the car for one moment.

Then he picked up the Glenfarclas, got out, and handed his keys to the young man who appeared immediately at his elbow. "Thank you," he said, in a tone that meant it.

The front of the house was lit from below — recessed uplights in the stone path that turned the façade gold in the dark, illuminating a portico of pale marble columns and, beyond them, a set of French doors so large they made the people passing through them look briefly, proportionally, like children. The marble steps leading up to them were broad and shallow, the kind of steps designed to be descended slowly and to effect, and Nathan climbed them with the bottle at his side and pushed through the open doors into the foyer.

The foyer alone was the size of a respectable apartment.

He stopped for a moment to take it in. The floor was white marble with dark veining, the ceiling was high enough that the chandelier hanging from its center — an elaborate, cascading thing in brass and crystal — looked correct rather than excessive. A double staircase swept up from either side of the room and met at a landing above where a large painting hung that Nathan did not get close enough to identify but suspected might be genuine. The walls were panelled in cream, hung with more art at intervals, lit by sconces that gave the space a warm, honeyed quality. Through the archway ahead, the gathering had spilled into what appeared to be a drawing room roughly the size of a tennis court.

"You made it."

Nathan turned. Daniel Holt was moving across the foyer toward him with a glass of something pale in one hand and the easy, expansive energy of a man who had been there long enough to be comfortable — which, knowing Daniel, had been precisely one drink's worth of time. He raised the glass in Nathan's direction.

"Barely," Nathan said, and shook his hand. He looked around the foyer again. "Daniel. Is this Mike Delaney's house?"

Daniel's expression did the thing it did when he was about to qualify something. "It's his mother's. Foster mother. Technically."

Nathan looked at the chandelier. The painting. The staircase. "Right," he said.

"Come on." Daniel clapped him on the shoulder and steered him through the archway.

The drawing room was full.

Forty people, perhaps — it was difficult to count in a room that size, where forty people barely constituted a suggestion of occupancy. They moved and clustered and reconfigured in the way that people do at gatherings where the nominal purpose is intellectual but the actual mechanics are social, which is to say they drifted toward the people they already knew and conducted conversations that only occasionally touched the stated agenda. The women wore dresses in the kind of understated, expensive palette — cream, smoke grey, deep navy — that announces money without specifying the amount. The men were in blazers, open collars, the studied casualness of people who had spent money on looking like they hadn't spent money. The champagne was Billecart-Salmon and was being distributed from the trays of uniformed staff who moved through the room with the practiced invisibility of professionals.

Nathan surveyed it over Daniel's shoulder as they wove through.

He caught, in the space of three minutes, fragments of four separate conversations: a heated disagreement about whether the mayor's infrastructure proposal was cynical or merely inadequate; a woman explaining at considerable length why her experience at a restaurant in Malibu had constituted a genuine affront; two men in matching tan blazers agreeing with each other about property values in the Palisades with an enthusiasm that suggested they found the topic genuinely thrilling; a fourth conversation that might have been about something worth following but was blocked from his hearing by the second woman and her ongoing restaurant grievance.

He thought: yes, exactly as expected.

"Drinks are through there," Daniel said, nodding toward a set of open glass doors that led to a terrace where a bar had been set up. "Let me grab you a—"

"Mr. Holt."

The voice came from his left and stopped them both.

She was moving through the room in their direction with the particular quality of motion that belongs to people who are accustomed to rooms organizing themselves around their presence rather than the other way around — not hurrying, not performing, simply moving through a space she owned as though ownership were an uninteresting fact that required no acknowledgment. She was tall and slim for a woman in her mid-sixties, dressed in a dark green gown that was elegant without attempting anything — the kind of dress that worked because the person wearing it would have made sackcloth work equally well. Her dark hair, silvered at the temples in a way she had clearly never thought to apologize for, was swept back with a few loose pieces framing a face of extraordinary precision: high, defined cheekbones, dark eyes with a depth that suggested they had been assessing things accurately for a very long time, and a quality about the mouth that was simultaneously amused and unapologetic. She wore her age the way old money wears itself — without decoration, without effort, without the slightest apparent awareness that anyone might expect otherwise.

"Mrs. Delaney," Daniel said, with genuine warmth. "Wonderful as always. Thank you for having us."

"Every time, darling." Her accent was unmistakably British — not the softened transatlantic hybrid you sometimes encountered after years abroad, but the real thing, the received, unhurried vowels of someone who had learned to speak in England and had seen no subsequent reason to change. She turned to Nathan and the dark eyes moved over him with the swift efficiency of a woman who takes in information quickly and discards very little of it.

"And this," she said, with a slight incline of her head, "is not someone I've met."

"Nathan Kingston," Daniel said. "He's at Crestwood with me. English."

"Obviously," Gwendolyn Delaney said, and extended her hand.

Nathan shook it. "Mr. Kingston," she said. "Welcome to wherever this has gotten to this evening."

He lifted the Glenfarclas and offered it to her. "I was told to bring something to drink. I hope this is acceptable."

She took the bottle, turned it, read the label, and her expression shifted — not dramatically, but with the precision of genuine pleasure, which is an entirely different thing from performed pleasure and she, clearly, had no patience for the latter. "Fifteen-year Glenfarclas." She looked at him. "Where on earth did you find this in Los Angeles?"

"Little place off Colorado."

"You're the first person to walk through that door this evening with something worth drinking." She glanced at the champagne tray moving past them. "The Billecart is for them. Come and find me later, Mr. Kingston, and we'll open this properly." She tucked the bottle against her arm with the satisfied air of someone securing a thing of value.

"I look forward to it," Nathan said, and meant it.

Gwendolyn Delaney smiled at him — a real smile, brief and sharp — and turned to work the rest of the room with the focused efficiency of a woman who had obligations and intended to meet them on her own schedule.

"She's brilliant," Daniel said quietly, beside him. "Terrifying, but brilliant."

"The two are not incompatible," Nathan said.

They moved toward the terrace and the bar, and Nathan was in the middle of deciding between Scotch that wasn't the Glenfarclas and a glass of something red when it happened.

From behind them, cutting cleanly through the ambient noise of forty people with champagne and opinions —

"Shae! Darling, I've missed you—"

Gwendolyn's voice. Changed — still herself, still precise, but warmer than anything Nathan had heard from her in the last ten minutes, a genuine warmth, the kind you cannot manufacture for someone you're only glad to see in theory.

Nathan turned.

Across the room, Gwendolyn was moving — not her managed, room-organizing glide, but something faster, more immediate — toward a young woman who had just come in through the far archway.

He registered her in pieces, the way you register a thing that takes a moment to assemble.

The skirt first — black, mid-length, fitted, skimming the lines of her hips and the tops of her thighs and falling just far enough to be considered appropriate in a room like this, which meant it didn't fall far. Her legs below the hem were long and bare, flawlessly smooth, the kind of legs that don't require the assistance of anything. Then the midriff — a strip of flawless pale skin, exposed where the black top ended and the skirt began, her waist narrow, her stomach flat, the gap between the two pieces of clothing small enough to be incidental and large enough to be impossible to ignore. The top itself was black, ruched across the front in gathered satin that clung to every contour of her figure before cinching at the hem with a delicate drawstring, the sweetheart neckline cutting low enough to leave nothing ambiguous about the shape beneath it. The sleeves were sheer, billowing softly from shoulder to wrist, a deliberate contrast to how precisely the rest of the fabric followed her body. A thin gold chain lay against her collarbone. Her hair was up — a loose, dark bun, the kind that appears effortless and costs considerable effort, with a few strands that had escaped and lay against the back of her neck.

Her neck.

He stopped registering in pieces.

She was stunning. Not in the assembled, curated way of most of the women in this room, who were beautiful in the way that money and time and effort produce beauty — reliably, reproducibly, without surprise. She was stunning in the way of a thing that doesn't know it is, which is the only kind of stunning that actually lands. Classy and effortless and quietly, completely devastating in a room full of people trying very hard.

Gwendolyn reached her, took her hands, kissed her cheek.

Nathan looked at her face.

He looked again.

His hand, holding the glass he'd just been handed by the bartender, stopped midway to his mouth.

Shae Madison.

He stood completely still for one full second. Then he turned back to the bar and set the glass down and looked at the bottles in their arrangement behind the bartender's head and spent a moment doing absolutely nothing but processing the information that his student — the back left corner, the annotated Gatsby, the six words that had silenced a room — was standing twenty feet away from him in a Beverly Hills drawing room in a black ruched top and a skirt and her hair up, looking like that.

"You alright?" Daniel said, beside him.

"Fine," Nathan said. "Yes." He picked up the glass. "Perfectly fine."

He did not look across the room again.

He looked very intently at nothing in particular and drank his Scotch and told himself, in the clipped interior voice he used when he was being short with himself, that this was simply a coincidence. People existed outside of classrooms. Students attended gatherings in large houses in Beverly Hills. It was not remarkable. It was not anything.

He took another drink.

Across the room, Gwendolyn Delaney had her arm around the girl's shoulders and was guiding her into the party with the proprietorial warmth of someone who had known her a long time and was not going to let her stand alone in a doorway.

Nathan looked at the painting on the far wall. He assessed it carefully. He thought about whether it was genuine.

He thought about nothing else at all.