Richard

Richard is an openly gay host and a friend to Jo whose ease with people makes him a source of comfort during her upheaval. At his weekend gathering, he notices her alone near dawn and draws her back into company; his attentive kindness sits alongside a more difficult trait revealed later, when his impatience with guests and indifference toward local people undercut his ideal of travel as an exercise in curiosity.

Identity and Introduction

Richard appears at his own party, moving through its guests before spotting Jo at a distance and coming over to rejoin her in the weekend. The narration presents him as relaxed and intensely appealing, describing how his flair can engage a woman’s eye without hesitation. His charm is not simply performance: he knows how to put Jo at ease and satisfy his curiosity without making it overbearing. As dawn approaches, he predicts that she will enjoy the coming day, while privately assessing that she does not look depressed.

Friendship with Jo

Richard responds to Jo’s account of a difficult period with recognition rather than judgment. When she says she has not been working and that things at home are going badly, he takes her hand and says, “Oh, Jo, what cases we are!” The gesture makes their exchange intimate, but the scene frames it as shared vulnerability and friendship. He acknowledges that he, too, has periods of depression, and relays a study Dally had told him about: shrimp exposed to Prozac swam in brighter waters, making them easier prey for larger fish. His anecdote gives their conversation a wry turn without erasing its sympathy.

When Jo insists she cannot sleep and feels dangerously awake, Richard does not argue her back toward rest. He proposes that they dance instead. His willingness to meet her energy in the moment extends the same practical care he showed earlier: he offers company rather than a diagnosis or a demand that she explain herself.

Host and Private Habits

Richard’s weekend is carefully planned, but it does not unfold entirely as intended. Near its end, he has gone riding with Lord Swann near Tafnet while the Hennigers reunite. The milder weather and the return of his old love of riding ease his anxieties. He pats his horse’s long, silky, chestnut-colored neck and murmurs the name Britney, explaining to the animal that she was named after a mad, declining pop star. The scene’s small, affectionate ritual contrasts with his meticulous attention to improvements at home, especially upgrading the electrical systems.

The gathering also tests his patience. As his plans unravel and the weekend winds down, Richard looks forward to seeing the guests depart; their questions strike him as unanswerable, and he is disgusted by the fixed ideas they have brought with them. He values travel as “subtle displacement and simple curiosity,” a capacity to imagine oneself where one is rather than carry familiar dissatisfaction everywhere. His impatience is therefore more than a host’s fatigue: it expresses an ideal of travel that he thinks most visitors fail to meet.

Curiosity and Its Limits

Richard’s confidence about David’s excursion rests partly on his belief that impoverished fossil diggers in the ergs fear the Moroccan police too much to attack foreigners. The judgment reassures him, but it also makes local people legible mainly as a risk to be managed. His later thoughts sharpen that contradiction. He criticizes Lord Swann for treating the Berbers as immovable scenery, yet describes them himself as a source of terrorism and dismisses concern for them as fashionable posturing. He can diagnose other visitors’ failure of imagination while reproducing a different form of distance in his own view of the people around him.

That tension gives Richard more than the function of a genial confidant. His generosity toward Jo is immediate and personal, while his social criticism does not guarantee an equally attentive regard for everyone. The contrast connects his kindness in private with the limits of his perspective as a host: he can be perceptive about an individual’s distress and still reduce a community to a backdrop or a threat.