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like I thought she was. She doesn’t want to show you any of her paintings, because she thinks you’ll bullshit her too, the way half a dozen other so-called art experts have. She doesn’t want that. Claims to hate flattery, although I keeping telling her that when people say she’s beautiful, it’s not flattery because it’s the simple truth. So you might not get your treat, unless you can persuade her that it’s worth a go.”
     
    Adrian made an effort to try to look Angelica Jarndyke in the eyes, but she wouldn’t meet his gaze. She had blue eyes, but they were a darker shade than his. She had blonde hair, but it was a lighter shade than his. She and he couldn’t have passed for mother and son, even if she’d been old enough—which she wasn’t, quite.
     
    Adrian considered going through the whole rigmarole that he’d spun for Jarndyke at the Savoy, but he knew that the old man would have repeated all of that to her, accurately enough to get the gist across. He thought it best to go the philosophical route, with a bit of allegory thrown in.
     
    “The thing about the Emperor’s new clothes,” he said, “is that the crowd really might have been unable to see them, even if they were real. Not because the members of the crowd were stupid, or uncultured, but because they simply didn’t have the right neurophysiological equipment. Imagine the predicament of some poor fellow who, when the kid shouted out: ‘The Emperor’s got no clothes,’ wanted to shout out: ‘Yes he has, and they’re beautiful! The tailors are right, and they’re men of genius. That’s the finest suit that any emperor ever had to wear.’ What could he possibly say to convince the crowd, knowing that the majority was bound to be against him? How could he ever convince them that he really could see the suit, in all its glory, and wasn’t simply crazy or—as Mr. Jarndyke would say—bullshitting? He’d be like the sighted man in H. G. Wells’s ‘Country of the Blind,’ impotent to persuade his hosts that he was anything but a deluded fool, impending rockslide or no impending rockslide. And yet...perhaps the crowd should have been prepared to hear him out. They wouldn’t have needed to give him the benefit of the doubt—the admission of doubt would have been something, in itself.”
     
    Angelica Jarndyke did condescend to look at him then, but not with any sympathy. “I’ve always thought that the child in the story was a disgrace to youth,” she said. “What he should have shouted was: ‘Who cares whether the old fool has any clothes on or not? He’s the emperor—roll out the guillotine, strike up the Marseillaise and full speed ahead for democracy.’”
     
    Her husband laughed. Adrian didn’t, although he wasn’t at all sure that it wasn’t a diplomatic error not to go along with the joke and let the whole issue of who could see what be swept under the carpet and forgotten. He hadn’t dared study Angelica Jarndyke as minutely as she’d studied him when they’d first been confronted with one another, and he didn’t dare to now, because he knew that staring at someone as beautiful as her was always a faux pas, but he tried now to take a better measure of her, covertly.
     
    Then he pointed at one of the panels on the wall behind her head. “That one’s wrong, isn’t it?” he said. “The designer did a pretty good job with the rest, but that was a slip. Maybe he couldn’t find one to fit the scheme and improvised—or maybe he did it deliberately, knowing that ninety-nine people in a hundred would only see a sea of brown, and that most of the one per cent wouldn’t know exactly what was wrong, or why, but would just be subtly unsettled by it.”
     
    Angelica Jarndyke turned her head. She didn’t have to ask him which panel he meant. “I’ve always thought that it was a deliberate mistake,” she said, biting her lip slightly, at the risk of disturbing the gloss. “Cocking a snook, so to