In the Fold

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I first met the Hanburys when Adam Hanbury’s sister Caris invited me to her eighteenth birthday party. The invitation read as follows:

Caris Hanbury

invites you to celebrate her eighteenth birthday

at Egypt

on Saturday 21 July at 8pm

Carriages at Dawn

RSVP

‘Where’s that?’ I asked Adam.

‘What?’

‘Where’s “Egypt”?’

‘It’s where we live,’ he said, after a pause.

‘Why’s it got that name?’

‘I don’t know. Everyone’s always called it that.’

‘Well, how are you meant to find it when it doesn’t say where it is?’

There wasn’t an address or a map or any directions. There wasn’t even a telephone number.

‘Everyone knows where it is,’ said Adam.

Adam Hanbury and I occupied adjacent rooms in the university hall of residence: I had surmised, vaguely, that he was different from me, but such differences I regarded as somehow ornamental; as though, suspended between the involuntary world of childhood and the open road of adult life, our student characteristics were a temporary form of self-adornment. We were like a bank of flowers in their season, a waving mass of contemporaneous heads whose stalks and roots were for the time being obscured. The other two rooms on our floor were occupied by a pair of girls called Fiona and Juliet, who spoke in accents of biting gentility and were generally amiable, except in matters pertaining to the shared bathroom, where they exercised flaying powers of discrimination with which I now see they were biologically equipped and which, as they got older, no doubt unfolded into the visible characteristics of a social type. At the end of the year Fiona and Juliet wrote Adam and me a letter which they pinned to Adam’s door:

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