A Ladder to the Sky

1. The Crown, Brewer Street

Although I never exchanged so much as a hello with any of them, I recognized most of the drinkers in the Crown by sight and, over the years, assigned each one a name. Sitting at the end of the bar, endlessly playing games on his iPad, was Spencer Tracy, so called because of an uncanny resemblance he held to the actor. At a table by the window sat Professor Plum, a tall, elderly man in a purple turtleneck who drank pints of cider and worked his way through a succession of newspapers, shaking his head and muttering obscenities under his breath. Mrs Thatcher sat at the table closest to the toilets and appeared to have a bladder condition because she was in and out of the Ladies every twenty minutes. True, she didn’t look anything like the former prime minister, but her name was Maggie – I’d heard the barman call her that – and somehow that transformed itself into Mrs T in my head. She nursed her drinks and generally kept herself to herself although occasionally she showed up with a bespectacled, balding man – Denis, to me – and smooched with him shamelessly. It was a repulsive thing to witness.

There were others, of course, a few regulars and plenty of passing trade. Occasional stagehands from the nearby theatres and a small crew of four or five from a local bookshop. Once in a while I saw a young boy, probably a student, nursing a pint for about two hours while reading one of the Great Works of Literature. I’d seen him make his way through Anna Karenina, Moby-Dick, Crime and Punishment. Cheap paperback editions, usually. A few months earlier, I’d watched as he turned the opening pages of A Sentimental Education, reading from a Penguin Classic for which I’d written the introduction, and he flipped past those six or seven pages without reading a word. I felt offended at first – that introduction had been one of the last things I’d published – but then remembered that I never read introductions either, so I could hardly blame him for ignoring it.

I wondered if any of the patrons of the Crown noticed me too and, if they did, whether they wondered who I was or what had brought me there. I’d had a fantasy for a long time that one of them might ask and I had my answer ready for such a moment, eleven simple words that summed up my past, present and what I believed would be my future:

I used to be a writer but now I’m a drunk.

It might seem embarrassing to make such an admission but there was just no getting around the facts. I didn’t consider myself an alcoholic, although a doctor would probably have disputed this. If I was, however, then I was a functioning alcoholic, which is surely the best kind to be. When I first returned to London four years ago and checked in to the hotel I was staying at until I found a more permanent residence, I couldn’t think of any constructive way to spend the afternoon and so wandered down to the bar, where I got completely pissed, and somehow, I seemed to have stayed that way ever since.

It helped, of course, that I had money. Over the years I’d earned a decent amount from book advances, royalties, speaking engagements and commissioned articles, and when I sold Storī, the magazine I’d set up in New York, it was at the height of its influence. The seven-figure sum that came my way from a liberal media corporation was a wonderful surprise in a world that seemed to value literature less and less. A few months later, exhausted by hotel living, I purchased a comfortable home within walking distance of Hyde Park and planned to live there until the world came to its senses and re-discovered me.

I longed to write a new novel, of course, to get back in the game, but the old problem that had plagued my life since my teenage years reared its head once again. I changed city, social groups and daily routine in the vain hope that this might produce a good idea, but none came. My creative abilities remained in abeyance. I wrote a book that even I could tell was hopeless and it was rejected by my publisher during a highly unpleasant face-to-face encounter, where I may have behaved in a manner ill suited to a man of my accomplishments. Before marching out in a fit of pique, however, I declared that I’d been dropped before and had stormed back with The Tribesman, so all he was doing was replicating Rufus Shawcross’s mistake of twenty years earlier, an imitation that he would surely come to regret one day. I started another book soon after but was only a hundred pages in when I came to realize that it was more of a narcoleptic than a novel and quickly abandoned it. For a time, I feared that I was finished. The greatest writer of his generation, stalled for lack of an original thought. Really, I should have had more self-belief. If I’d learned nothing else since leaving Yorkshire at the end of the 1980s, it was that, like the proverbial cat, I had a habit of landing on my feet.

I developed a routine and stuck to it religiously. Rising every day at around nine o’clock, I made my way towards Bayswater Road, where I entered Hyde Park and walked at a good pace in the direction of Kensington Palace, keeping a wary eye out for one of the lesser Royals, then strolled back towards the Serpentine, around to Speakers’ Corner and finally home again. It was good exercise, ninety minutes or so, and on a fine day it filled my lungs and almost made me feel glad to be alive. I shaved and showered and made sure to dress well as, although I’m perfectly happy to be a drunk, I prefer not to look like a tramp. One never knows, after all, who one might run in to. And then I packed my laptop and the book that I was reading and left for the afternoon.

My week followed a simple but fixed pattern. Although I drank every day, I didn’t like the idea of being considered a ‘regular’ – indeed, during my first year I stopped frequenting two pubs, replacing them with others, on account of the growing over-familiarity of the staff – and so I had seven bars, one for each day of the week, which meant that my visits to each one were rare enough that I didn’t end up on first-name terms with anyone but frequent enough that I felt comfortable there. I chose the West End because I knew that part of London to be so busy with tourists and shoppers that I would never be anything more than another face in the crowd. Also, from where I lived, it was an easy Tube ride into Piccadilly Circus before a quick stroll to that day’s sanctuary.

From the start, I visited the Crown on Brewer Street every Monday. It stands on land once held by the Hickford Rooms, a concert venue where Mozart played the piano at the age of nine. I always preferred the seat in the corner for, although I had no particular reason to believe it so, I liked to think that was where the young Wolfgang sat to perform the minuets and allegros that he composed as a child while his audience listened in astonishment to his precocity and his father, Leopold, watched from the corner, counting his money.

The Crown, in its peaceful way, had become a good friend to me. The staff behind the bar came and went and were far more interested in engaging with strangers through their smartphones than in conversing with an actual human being, which suited me perfectly. I suspected that none of them remembered me from one Monday to the next and, even if they did, that my presence meant nothing to them. I didn’t bother them and they didn’t bother me. The proof of this, surely, was that they never recalled from one week to the next what I drank, which pleased me. The single phrase that would have driven me from any pub for ever would have been ‘The usual, sir?’

While my daily routine never changed, nor did the subtleties that lay at the heart of each drinking schedule. I’ve never been much of a wine drinker, preferring the grain to the grape, and so, beginning at precisely eight minutes past two, I drank four pints of lager and two double whiskies. That usually took about three hours and then, shortly after five o’clock, I enjoyed three more pints, followed by a single malt. At seven, I had a Baileys with three ice cubes and, by seven thirty, I was done for the day, at which point I made my way back towards Piccadilly Circus and took the Tube home, where I ordered some food, ate a little of it, and went to bed. Occasionally, I would suffer from bad dreams but more often than not I slept the sleep of the innocent.

What did I do while I was drinking? I started by opening my laptop and reading through the news sites, followed by the literary pages, keeping up with every book review and author interview that I could find, searching for clues that might answer that most tedious but prolific of questions, Where do you get your ideas? I had bookmarked the culture section of all the major newspapers and made it my business to study every trend, every bestseller and every word of wisdom that was sent my way, trying to understand the secrets of others. And then, when I’d soaked it all up, I read for a while, devoting myself exclusively to contemporary fiction. I visited a bookshop once every few weeks to stock up, and even though the ‘New Titles’ section infuriated me because I had nothing to offer it, there was no question in my mind that I would reclaim my place there soon.

I’d devoted myself exclusively to young writers since my first arrival in New York, when I set up Storī and was attending parties three or four times a week, making sure to be familiar with the work of my peers in order to be part of the conversation. I had an opinion on them all and I was happy to share those opinions freely, delighted when I could cause an occasional controversy with a well-judged put-down, which I would innocently claim had been taken out of context when I next encountered the writer in question.

‘It’s the media, darling,’ I would say, leaning in towards my opponent’s ear. ‘You know what it’s like. You can’t say a word without it being misinterpreted.’

And I was generally believed too, for I knew them and they knew me and, anyway, we were all at it. We drank together, had countless spats, made up, pretended to take pleasure in each other’s successes and to commiserate over each other’s failures. What mattered was that I mattered, that I was taken seriously.

Now, however, sitting in the pub and tired of reading, there would be nothing left for me to do but open a Word document on my laptop and stare at its accusatory blankness while I got drunker and drunker. But to my frustration, not once did my fingers ever touch the keyboard other than to write the words ‘Chapter One’ at the top of the page. The simplest phrase of all, but the most intimidating.

It was on a Monday afternoon in the Crown on the last day of April – coincidentally, my birthday – that I read Theo Field’s letter and saw an opportunity to forsake this rather humdrum existence and return to the one that suited me best. My afternoon was passing in its usual manner and I was enjoying my third pint while staring at an empty screen when I remembered an envelope that had arrived from my literary agent’s office that morning, an all too rare offering those days. I’d thrown it into my bag as I left the house but reached for it now, tearing it open, and I was immediately impressed by the quality of the stationery that the writer had used, not to mention the fact that he’d gone to the trouble of writing instead of sending an email. Old-fashioned, yes, but something I appreciated.

After reading the letter I reached for my pint and noticed that my hand was trembling a little, so I returned the glass to the table and closed my eyes for a moment while breathing slowly and carefully through my nose, using a technique that I’d been taught which often helped at moments like this. I could sense Daniel near me at that moment, could almost feel his hand in mine, his voice whispering in my ear in that accusatory way he developed towards the end. He was telling me to throw the letter away and leave the boy alone, that he was just an innocent student trying to get a start in the world, and I knew that I needed to step away if I were to block him out. And so I made my way into the Gents, where I stood before the sink, my eyes shut, my hands pressed against the cool white porcelain, and waited a minute or two before throwing water on my face and staring at my reflection in the mirror, uncertain whether I even recognized myself any more.

I rarely bothered looking in mirrors at home but there, in that narrow bathroom with its dull neon light flickering, I could see how altered my appearance had become in recent years. All my life I had been handsome. I took no particular pride in the fact, but a fact it was nevertheless, and one that I’d been aware of since the age of thirteen or fourteen. Both women and men had been attracted to me since I was very young and I understood the power that I held over them, a power that had always been very easy to exploit. Several had fallen in love with me. One had married me.

I had long since come to understand, however, that I was different from other men in that I had no particular desire for the bodies of others and that whatever instinct guided people towards the bedroom was somehow lost on me. Whether or not this has been a blessing or a curse is hard to know but I suspect it’s the former. I’ve seen so many people’s lives destroyed by failed love affairs or unrequited passions that I’ve always felt rather fortunate to remain essentially disinterested. Why would anyone want to be part of such calamitous drama, after all? It had been years since I’d enjoyed a romantic encounter or even desired one. During my time in New York, there had been plenty of people who’d expressed an interest, but I’d taken none of them up on their offers.

Staring at my reflection now, however, I wondered whether I would ever have the opportunity to turn someone’s advances down again. My hair was turning grey and my blue eyes, which had once shone so bright, had grown dull. Worst of all, however, was my skin, which appeared grey and was tinged with red capillaries, probably from the excess of alcohol. I glanced down at my hands, which had spent so much of their lives typing away at a keyboard before me. My recollection of them was as smooth collaborators with just the hint of a blue vein running from the wrist to the middle finger, but now, the skin was tight and my fingers appeared bony, the nails pockmarked, with large semicircles spreading outwards from the cuticles, like slowly exploding planets. I was growing old, it was clear, and not gracefully.

There was only so long that I could stay and observe the ruins and eventually I turned my attention away, washed my hands and made my way back outside to my seat, re-reading Theo Field’s letter, several times in fact. Outside the flattery and the oleaginous remarks, there remained the central idea that he wanted to write about me. Only a thesis, yes, but he mentioned that he had ambitions towards literary biography and, indeed, towards publishing a book. And that delicious morsel he had thrown in, mentioning that his father worked at Random House! Of course, the naïf had wanted to impress me with his credentials, and it had worked, for I could surely use his family connections to my advantage in due course. A critical study would undoubtedly revive my drooping reputation and perhaps there would be something in the boy and his questions that would reignite my creative spark. And then a novel. The path back to glory was so wonderfully simple.

After Daniel’s death, there had, quite naturally, been an out-pouring of sympathy towards me within the publishing industry, but it hadn’t provoked quite the interest in my work that I had hoped. It was something that my editor had the gall to bring up when he rejected the book I wrote immediately after the accident.

‘Considering everything that you’ve been through, Maurice,’ he told me that day as we sat in his office, ‘there’s nothing I’d like more than to publish a new novel by you. And certainly, from a publicity standpoint – well, I hope you don’t take this the wrong way but there is an enormous amount of goodwill out there towards you and the media would fall over itself to interview you. But it has to be with the right book and this… well, I hate to say it but this just isn’t it. It’s well written, of course, but the story…’

I could feel the fury building inside me as I recalled that afternoon, the suppression of my pitiless ambition, and returned to Theo’s letter one final time, smiling to myself as I read it.

I opened my laptop and began to type, taking great care with my reply. Indeed, it could be said that I worked harder on this one sentence than I had on anything in years, both in terms of the words that I used and the words that I didn’t.

As I went to bed that night, I tried not to think about my aspiring biographer or my lost son, but they both lingered in my thoughts, two sides of a single coin that could be thrown in the air and land on either side, and I found my emotions torn between excitement and grief, that terrible agony within my soul that lingered regardless of whether I was awake or asleep, sober or drunk, writing or not writing. And thinking of Daniel, I asked myself whether he would approve of what I was about to do but insisted to myself that he would, despite his irritating and adolescent belief in moral absolutes. For he had loved me and I had been a good if imperfect father, almost to the end. What else would he want for me than that I be happy? Otherwise, what had it all been for?

2. The Queen’s Head, Denman Street

The Queen’s Head has always been my favourite of my weekly pubs. I like the dark wood panelling, the ornate chandelier, the mirrors that have reflected the lives of its patrons for so long. It was the perfect place for Theo and me to have our first encounter and, eight days after receiving his letter and having received a positive reply to my own, I sat within its walls, eagerly anticipating the start of the next stage of my writing life.

I left home early that day, wanting to steady myself with a couple of drinks before he arrived. I’d spent much of the last week thinking about the book I would soon begin and felt a sense of excitement that I’d only experienced twice before in my life. The first was on that afternoon in Rome many years earlier when that fool, Erich Ackermann, had begun to tell me the story of his one-sided love affair with the unfortunate Oskar Gött. I knew that there was a story there, if only I could figure out how to drag it from his terrified memory. Ultimately, it hadn’t proved that difficult. All I had to do was smile, stretch back in my seat a few times so he could catch a glimpse of my flat, muscular stomach, and the ridiculous old queer was putty in my hands. Not my finest moment, I know, but it hardly compares in malevolence to the things that he had done.

The second occasion was on that rainy afternoon in Norwich when, out of sheer boredom, I switched on Edith’s computer and opened the file marked ‘BOOK 2’ and began to read the document contained within, sensing immediately that she’d written something extraordinary. It was a novel worthy of me, I knew, not of her. She didn’t care for glory or immortality, which is just as well, as neither was to be her destiny. I remember the horror I felt when she suggested that we stay in Norwich after the publication of her second novel rather than returning to London and re-entering the literary world there. It seemed bizarre to me that she would even suggest such a thing. A strange woman, in retrospect. Still, one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, I suppose. She had many fine qualities, but ambition wasn’t one of them.

Nothing since then, not even the novels I’d cobbled together from rejected work at Storī, had sparked my interest in the same way until the arrival of Theo Field’s letter. All I needed was for him to write about me, to finish his thesis, publish his book, and I would have breathing room for a few more years until I found a story to tell.

He arrived at three o’clock precisely and I wondered whether he’d been pacing up and down the street outside anxiously until his watch struck the hour, not wanting to arrive too early. I’d had these sorts of encounters with young aspirants before, each of whom had their eye on the main chance and didn’t want to say or do anything that might destroy their opportunity.

As soon as I saw him, however – and it was obvious that it was him by his age and the manner in which he looked around the bar before locating me – it was I who felt disconcerted for, to my surprise and alarm, he bore a striking resemblance to Daniel. The same thick blond hair, although his was quite clearly dyed, and the same frameless glasses. Pale skin that looked as if it would bruise easily. Good-looking, certainly. Yes, he was seven or eight years older than my son had been when he died but it was as if I were looking at the boy that Daniel might have become if he hadn’t been such a meddler. As he made his way over to my table, it was all that I could do to drag myself back to the present moment and away from a past that I preferred not to think about.

‘Mr Swift,’ he said, standing before me and extending a hand. ‘I’m Theo. Theo Field.’

I stood up and greeted him uneasily. He wore a ring on the fourth finger of his right hand, a thin silver band, an affectation that my son had taken to as well during the last months of his life. He’d bought it at a street market and, although I thought it looked ridiculous on a boy of his age, I took it as a sign of his incipient development from child to teenager and would never have mocked his first attempt at individuality. After all, I prided myself on being an indulgent father.

‘Theo,’ I said, trying to collect my thoughts. ‘Of course. It’s nice to meet you. And please, there’s no need for such formality. Call me Maurice.’

‘Thank you,’ he replied, sitting down. ‘It’s very generous of you to make the time for me. I really appreciate it.’

He ordered the same as me, a pint of lager, and I made my way across the room, where, as I waited for the drinks to be poured, I had an opportunity to collect my thoughts. It was stupid, I told myself, to feel so unsettled. After all, his was a standard look among boys his age and, if he put me in mind of my dead son, then perhaps that would help to build a connection between us. Maybe, at the right moment, I would even tell him.

‘Cheers,’ I said, as I sat back down and we clinked glasses.

‘I can’t believe I’m sitting having a beer with Maurice Swift,’ he replied, shaking his head and smiling.

‘I’m just surprised that someone as young as you even knows who I am,’ I said. ‘Or that you’d recognize me. I’ve kept a fairly low profile in recent years.’

‘Of course I’d recognize you,’ he replied. ‘I’m a reader. A voracious reader. I always have been.’

‘Very few people are.’

‘Very few people are interested in art,’ he replied, triggering a memory in me, an almost forgotten conversation from many years before. I had said something like that to Erich once, hadn’t I? Or he had said it to me. The past had begun to grow a little muddled with age and it wasn’t always easy to separate the voices across the years.

‘That’s true,’ I told him, drawing the years back. ‘But the lack of an audience should never be a deterrent to the artist.’

‘Books have been my passion since I was a kid. My father’s uncle used to write a little and my dad has always worked in publishing. I suppose it must be in the blood somewhere.’

‘Yes, you mentioned him in your letter,’ I said. ‘Random House, was it? He’s an editor there?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Fiction or non-fiction?’

‘Fiction.’

I smiled. Perfect.

‘That’s probably why I wanted to study English at university. I discovered your books when I was only thirteen or fourteen and they made a huge impression on me.’

‘That’s quite young to read my work,’ I said.

‘Well, I grew out of children’s books very early,’ he replied. ‘I was reading Dickens at ten. The orphan books, mostly.’

‘Any particular reason?’ I asked.

‘No, I had a very happy childhood. I just enjoyed books about children on their own in the world. I still do.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘And are you enjoying your course?’

‘Very much,’ he replied enthusiastically. ‘I like exploring the lives of writers. Trying to make connections between their work and what was going on in the world at the time. Sometimes there’s very little but more often than not there’s an enormous amount, whether or not they intend there to be. It’s one of the things that’s always fascinated me about your novels.’

‘How so?’ I asked.

‘Well, you’re not present at all in Two Germans but then, of course, that’s pretty much based on Erich Ackermann and—’

‘Only partly,’ I said, the old wound reopening a little. I hated it when people looked at my debut in such basic terms. I had written it, after all. Every word on every page was mine. ‘I simply took what he told me and—’

‘No, I know that,’ he replied, interrupting me. ‘But it takes a lot of skill to take a person’s story and build something from it. What I mean is that there’s nothing in there that reflects your life at all, only his. There is in The Treehouse, I think, but not in The Tribesman. Or either of the subsequent novels.’

‘I’d agree with that,’ I said, impressed by how perceptive he was. After all, The Treehouse was the only novel I’d published that was essentially mine so it made sense that he could see something of the personal in there.

‘And then, with The Breach and The Broken Ones—’

‘You’re writing a thesis?’ I asked, interrupting him. ‘On me? Is that right?’

‘That’s the plan,’ he said, nodding.

‘I’ve been working on it for a while now. Analysing each of the novels and trying to build connections between them.’

‘I’m flattered,’ I said. ‘I didn’t think I’d be on the curriculum at universities quite yet.’

‘Well, you’re not,’ he said, a little sharply, I thought. ‘It’s an area of private study.’

‘Oh,’ I replied, amused by my own egotism. ‘I don’t suppose anyone of my generation is yet.’

‘One or two,’ he said.

I paused and took a long drink of my beer. ‘Oh yes?’ I asked. ‘Who?’

He named a few people, most of whom weren’t that much older or younger than me. Douglas Sherman, who had beaten me to The Prize on the year that The Tribesman was shortlisted, was mentioned and I felt a slight kick at the pit of my stomach.

‘I know her,’ I said, when he mentioned one novelist I particularly despised for making a terrific career over the last decade or so, writing some really interesting novels. ‘Or I knew her, at least.’

‘Really?’ he said, his eyes opening wide.

‘Yes, we’ve read together many times. On the festival circuit, you know.’ Not true. We had read together only once but for some reason I felt an inexplicable desire to impress the boy.

‘What’s she like?’

‘Oh, she’s awful,’ I said, inventing a story on the spot about how she had been rude to some young volunteers at a festival and left one boy, barely out of short pants, in tears after he brought her red wine instead of white.

‘How disappointing,’ said Theo. ‘I used to really like her work.’

‘Well, you still can,’ I pointed out, uncertain why I felt such a need to denigrate a writer who had never said or done anything unkind to me. ‘Just because she’s not a very nice person doesn’t negate the value of her books.’

‘Maybe,’ he said, pulling a face. ‘But when I hear stories like that they just make me never want to read the person again. You shouldn’t meet your heroes, should you? Not that I’ve met her, but you know what I mean. They’ll always let you down.’

‘I hope I won’t,’ I said. ‘And student life suits you?’

‘It does for now,’ he said, nodding as he drank his beer. ‘I like studying. I like the discussions we have. And I get on pretty well with the others on my course.’

‘Do they all want to be writers?’ I asked.

‘Some do,’ he told me. ‘Some are just filling in a few years until they can figure out what to do with their lives.’

‘And you?’ I asked. ‘I know you said that you don’t want to be a novelist, but I suppose I’m a little sceptical.’

‘I really don’t,’ he said. ‘I never have. I love fiction but I don’t have the sort of brain that could create my own. I mean, I can write pretty well, I think. But only essays and things like that. Non-fiction. I could never write a short story or a novel. I wouldn’t be able to think up a plot, you know? It’s just not a gift that I’ve been given.’

‘Well, there are ways around that, of course,’ I said quietly, looking around as the girl behind the bar dropped a glass and it smashed on the floor, leading to the inevitable jeers and rounds of applause from those seated nearby.

‘I mean, it would be great to be a writer,’ he continued, ignoring my comment, and I was surprised that he hadn’t looked towards the bar too. I always thought it was a Pavlovian response to turn one’s head at a loud noise, but no, he seemed more interested in our conversation than in what was going on around him. ‘But if you’ve got no imagination, then there’s no point even trying, is there? And, quite honestly, I’ve never had much of an imagination.’

‘Many modern novels are plotless,’ I told him, not entirely sure as I said this that it was actually the case. ‘In fact, I was in a bookshop recently where I saw a shelf-talker that referred to “Plotless Fiction”.’

‘That sort of thing doesn’t interest me,’ he said.

‘You don’t like experimentation?’

‘I suppose I feel that those books don’t age very well,’ he said, considering it. ‘What feels quirky or unusual today can often seem ridiculous, even embarrassing, a few years later. Endless streams of consciousness. Pages and pages of nonsense designed to fool people into thinking you’re some sort of genius because you don’t put words in their proper order or spell them correctly. It’s just not for me. I don’t mind admitting that I like traditional novel-writing. You know, with a plot. And characters. And good writing.’

‘But biography is where you hope to make your career?’

‘It is,’ he replied, grinning. He had a nice smile. Perfectly even white teeth. I imagined there were many girls, and boys, who would like to kiss him.

‘What age are you, anyway?’ I asked.

‘Twenty,’ he said, and then, without asking whether I wanted another, he stood up, went to the bar, purchased two more pints and brought them back to the table. I finished my first quickly and started on the second. It tasted wonderful. My body was waking up as the alcohol entered my bloodstream, a glorious sense of well-being that always kicks in around then.

‘When I was about your age,’ I told him, leaning forward, nearer to him, and no matter how close I got I noticed that he didn’t pull back, ‘there were only two things that I wanted out of life. First, to be a published novelist and, second, to be a father. And, of course, I had to leave home if it was ever going to happen. My parents had no interest in books at all. There was no encouragement there, nothing to excite my imagination.’

‘And where did you go?’ he asked, pulling a notebook from his bag and starting to scribble down some notes. So, you’ve begun, I thought, smiling to myself. Well, so have I.

‘Germany,’ I said. ‘Berlin, to be precise. Well, it was still called West Berlin at the time. This was before the wall came down, of course. I got a job as a waiter at the Savoy Hotel on the Fasanenstraße. And when I wasn’t working, I was writing.’

‘Is that where you wrote Two Germans?’ he asked.

‘Some of it,’ I said. ‘It’s certainly where the novel had its genesis.’

‘It’s such an interesting book.’

‘Thank you.’

‘The love story is heartbreaking. Did someone break your heart when you were that age? Is that where the story came from?’

‘No one has ever broken my heart,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘No one ever could. You must remember, this is what a writer does. Uses his or her imagination. Tries to understand how it feels to be alive in a moment that never existed with a person who never lived, saying words that were never spoken aloud.’

‘Well, you did it with such empathy,’ he said. ‘The funny thing is, and maybe this is wrong of me, but it always left me feeling a little sorry for Erich Ackermann.’

‘Really?’ I asked. ‘Why so?’

‘Because he was just a boy,’ he replied. ‘And in love for the first time. Not to mention in love with a guy, which only complicated matters. Particularly back then. And no one knew at that time what the Nazis would become. That’s what makes the book so interesting, though. Trying to decide whether he was evil or just young and confused.’

I nodded and tried not to look too bored. I’d spent so much of my life talking about Two Germans that I was justifiably tired of it. It didn’t even seem like something that had come from my pen any more. After publication, it had taken on its own life so quickly. I remained proud of the book, of course, but it seemed to exist at a certain distance from me these days. I barely recognized myself in it any more, even though it had given me the life I’d always wanted.

‘Although there must be a part of you that wonders whether he deserved what you did to him,’ he said. It took a few moments for the line to hit me as I had been barely listening while he yapped on and on. Instead I had just been staring at him, taking that familiar but not quite recognizable face in. True, he didn’t have the cheekbones that Daniel had, his face was a little too full for that kind of definition, but other than that the resemblance between my son and this boy was uncanny.

‘What was that?’ I asked, snapping back to the moment, unsure whether I’d heard him right. He couldn’t possibly have said something so impertinent, could he?

‘I asked whether you’d like another drink? It’s just such a pleasure to sit here and talk with you.’

‘It’s my round,’ I said, standing up and telling myself not to invent things. After all, I had never been able to before, so this was hardly the time to start. I made my way to the bar, where I ordered two more pints and focussed my gaze on the girl behind the counter as she poured them. ‘You missed a bit,’ I told her when she placed the drinks on the counter before me.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘In the corner there,’ I said, pointing to a space behind her where a thick and sharp chunk of glass lay on its side, broken side up. ‘From when you let the glass fall earlier.’

‘Oh, thanks,’ she said, turning to look at it as I paid for the beers and returned to the table. Theo had disappeared while I’d been away and I looked around, catching his shadow through the window to where he stood outside, smoking a cigarette. I watched him for a few moments, then reached forward and ran my finger around the rim of his empty pint several times before lifting that same finger to my lips and sucking on it slowly. I closed my eyes and when I opened them again I had a sense that I was being watched. I was right, for the girl behind the bar was staring at me with an expression of disgust on her face. She turned away when I caught her eye and busied herself with sweeping up the broken glass. I didn’t care. I knew what she thought, that I was either trying to seduce the boy or already had, but it didn’t matter to me. Not in the slightest. I had a job to do and I would do it.

He came back a few moments later and we clinked glasses once again.

‘I’m enjoying our conversation,’ I told him.

‘I am too,’ he said.

‘I hope it won’t be our last.’

He smiled. He seemed so happy, so innocent. So like my dead son that it was all I could do not to take him in my arms and hold him tight, to beg for his forgiveness.

‘I hope so too,’ he said.

3. The Coach and Horses, Greek Street

It was just over a week before I saw Theo again. After leaving the Queen’s Head that afternoon, we exchanged numbers and I planned on texting him by the weekend at the latest, but, due to an unfortunate accident that took place as I was leaving my Thursday pub, I had to wait a little longer to get in touch.

Brooding over the events of earlier in the week, I felt as if Daniel’s ghost were standing behind me at every minute of the day, whispering in my ear in that accusatory way of his. He was on my mind more than he had been in recent times and I was uncertain whether this had something to do with Theo’s appearance in my life or my plans for rebuilding my career. And so, as I stepped out on to the street a few days later, perhaps I wasn’t paying as close attention to my surroundings as I should have been and I stumbled, losing my footing, and fell heavily to the ground, where my face crashed into the pavement with such force that I was momentarily stunned. When I managed to gather myself together, I sat upright and could feel something wet running down my face. When I put my hand to my forehead, it came away bloody and, when I spat, a tooth fell from my mouth. I looked up at the people who were walking quickly past me, rushing to the Tube at the end of a day’s work, and each one was doing their best to ignore me. It was only when a policewoman approached me that my real humiliation began.

‘Now, what’s happened here, sir?’ she asked, crouching down to my level as if I were a lost child. She looked almost like a child herself; she couldn’t have been more than twenty-three years old and wore a gentle expression on her face that probably belied her seriousness.

‘I fell,’ I told her, my words slurring a little from a mixture of inebriation and shock. It embarrassed me to sound so pathetic.

‘I can see that,’ she said. ‘Had a little too much to drink today, have we?’

I narrowed my eyes at her. If there is one thing I’ve always despised, it’s when people – figures of authority, generally – speak in the first-person plural, as if whatever mishap has occurred has somehow been a shared concern.

‘We haven’t been doing anything together,’ I said. ‘We have only just met. And no, I haven’t been drinking, if that’s what you’re asking.’

‘I think we have, sir,’ she replied, smiling at me. ‘We smell like a brewery, don’t we? We smell as if we’ve been dunked into a keg of beer, head first!’

‘Oh, fuck off,’ I muttered, but I suppose she was accustomed to such abuse for she didn’t so much as flutter an eyelid. Instead she stood up, then took my arm in hers as she attempted to pull me to my feet.

‘That’s a nasty cut we’ve got there, isn’t it?’ she said, reaching for the walkie-talkie by her hip and muttering some strange, indecipherable commands into it, a series of numbers followed by our location. ‘We’ll need to get that looked at, won’t we?’

I could see the pedestrians watching us now, each one silently judging me. They thought I was nothing more than a tragic old alcoholic, drunk in the middle of the day. A hopeless middle-aged man who needed the assistance of a policewoman young enough to be his daughter to get himself home.

‘I was shortlisted for The Prize once, you know!’ I shouted at the top of my voice. ‘Which is more than any of you fuckers have ever done.’

‘Of course you were, sir,’ said the policewoman, obviously having no clue what I was talking about. ‘I won a prize too when I was a girl. Came first in the hundred-metres dash at school. But we don’t need to broadcast it to all and sundry, now, do we? Let’s keep our manners about us and not cause any fuss.’

Before I could speak again, I heard the siren of an approaching ambulance and looked down the street to where the traffic was parting to let it through, at which point I glanced back at my benefactress in annoyance.

‘That better not be for me,’ I said.

‘It is, sir,’ she said. ‘We can’t let ourselves walk around London with blood pouring down our faces, can we? It might scare the horses! We gave ourselves a nasty bang.’

‘Oh, you stupid bitch,’ I replied quietly, with a sigh.

‘Now now, sir,’ she said, squeezing my arm a little now. ‘There’s no need for any unpleasantness, is there? We’re just doing our jobs.’

‘Can you stop talking like that, please?’ I said. ‘You’re making my brain hurt.’

‘We’ll tell the ambulance men that, shall we?’ she replied. ‘Best to be honest with them about everything. We’ve cut our forehead and our brain is hurting. What’s our name, sir? Can we remember?’

‘Of course I can fucking remember,’ I said. ‘I’m not a complete imbecile. It’s Maurice Swift.’

‘And do we have a home to go to tonight?’

I stared at her in bewilderment. She surely didn’t think that I was homeless? I looked down at my clothes and, true, I might have looked a little ragged that day, and the blood pouring down my face probably didn’t help, but still. This was a degradation that was almost intolerable.

‘Of course I have a home,’ I said. ‘I live near Hyde Park. I’m not some sort of vagrant, you know.’

‘Oh, very nice, I’m sure. Can I call someone for you there? Is your wife at home?’

‘My wife is dead.’

‘A son or daughter perhaps?’

‘Only a son. But he’s dead too.’

‘Oh dear,’ she said, looking a little uncomfortable at last. Still, I thought about it. If I did need someone, if I needed help at some point in the future, who would I call? My parents were long dead and I hadn’t spoken to my siblings in decades. My son was gone. I had no friends. My publisher and I were no longer on speaking terms. For a moment, I thought of handing her my phone, where one of the only numbers listed was Theo’s, but I had enough sense not to do that.

‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I don’t need anyone. I just want to go home.’

‘Well then, we shouldn’t be drinking in the middle of the day, sir, should we?’ she said as the ambulance pulled up alongside us. ‘It’s not a good idea at all.’

‘It’s an excellent idea, actually,’ I told her. ‘You should try it sometime. Believe me, it will cure almost every ailment you have.’

‘But it leaves us with a bloody face and a missing tooth,’ she said, releasing my arm at last as a burly man of about sixty emerged from the ambulance, before giving him a quick rundown of my condition.

‘We’ve been drinking,’ was her first comment. She lowered her voice as if she didn’t want anyone to hear and, before I knew it, I had been thrown into the back of the ambulance and was being whisked off to St Peter’s, where my forehead was stitched and my mouth was cleaned. I think I fell asleep on a trolley and when I woke I felt utterly disoriented and my head ached. No one seemed to be taking any responsibility for my well-being so I dragged myself to my feet and made for the exit, hailed a taxi and went home.

My point being that I didn’t want Theo to see me like that so put off contacting him, waiting instead until early the following week, when the wound was less discoloured, to get in touch again.

Across the eight days until we met again, I felt an unexpected longing for Theo’s company, one that I hadn’t anticipated when I began this project. Finally, after hours of deliberating over the wording, I texted some nonsense about having meetings in town on Wednesday morning, that I would probably be in the Coach and Horses around three o’clock and, if he was interested in joining me, I’d be happy to buy him a drink and answer more of his questions then. To my delight, the message had barely left my phone when he replied with a quick ‘See you there!’ and a smiley face, followed by an image of two beer glasses clinking against each other. It was all that I could do not to sit down and weep in gratitude.

I had said three o’clock because I wanted an hour to myself first to settle my nerves. I sat at the small table in the corner, watching as Londoners walked by the window and, as I had done so often in my professional life, tried to invent stories for them, wondering if they had some quality that could help to populate a novel for me, but failing every time. Finally, a sense of relief. The door opened. He was here. My boy.

‘You made it,’ I said, standing up and awkwardly embracing him. He extended his hand just as I opened my arms and when he put it down, the whole thing became too complicated and embarrassing to pursue. I ordered two pints and brought them over as he took his coat off. I could already tell that he was distracted. He looked tired and had that strange habit Daniel had suffered from when he was anxious of tapping the tip of his index finger against his thumb rapidly, like a woodpecker attacking an oak tree. It was an unusual gesture, one that my son had never seemed conscious of, and here was this boy doing the same thing.

‘Of course,’ he replied, smiling now, his expression lightening a little as we began to drink. ‘I wouldn’t have missed it.’ He leaned forward, peering at my forehead. ‘What happened to your head?’

‘A slight accident,’ I told him, waving his concerns away. ‘I woke in the night to use the bathroom and walked straight into my bedroom door.’

‘Ouch.’

‘Indeed. It needed seven stitches. But I was a brave little soldier. And how was your week?’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘And you? Did you get much work done? On your book, I mean.’

‘Which book?’

‘The book you’re writing.’

‘Oh,’ I said. Of course, he assumed that I was working on a new novel. Why wouldn’t I be, after all? I always had been, since I was not very much older than him, and it had been some years now since my last publication. It would seem strange if there weren’t something in progress.

‘How’s it coming along, anyway?’ he asked. ‘Are you close to the end?’

I smiled and tried to think how best to answer this. Before Daniel died, I had been engaged on a new book, but I had all but abandoned it since then. My working title was Other People’s Stories, but I hadn’t been able to look at it since my son’s death. It was still there, of course, sitting on my computer desktop like an unexploded bomb, but I couldn’t bring myself to open it. The truth was, I was nervous of returning to a manuscript that had effectively cost my son his life.

‘I hope so,’ I told him finally. ‘It’s hard to know. These things can go either way.’

‘Can you tell me anything about it?’

‘I’d rather not,’ I said, shaking my head.

‘Fair enough. I suppose it’s difficult to talk about a work in progress. You never know who might steal your ideas.’

‘It’s not that,’ I said, anxious for him to believe that I trusted him. ‘It’s just—’

‘I’m kidding,’ he said, looking a little abashed. ‘It’s not as if anyone could just take someone else’s story and write it themselves, is it? These things need to form in a writer’s mind over time. After all, a novel is about a lot more than just plot, right?’

‘Right,’ I said, wondering how many of my peers would argue with that notion. ‘So, what you’re saying is that if someone did do that, they’d have to be… what? Actually, what are you saying?’

‘Well, they’d have to be really talented,’ he said. ‘But also a complete psychopath.’

I laughed. ‘Well, yes. But, of course, those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.’

‘Can you at least tell me when you think it might be published?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, wishing he would change the subject, for I didn’t want to talk about any of this. ‘Late next year, perhaps. Or early the following one.’

‘Well, I’ll look forward to reading it whenever it’s ready,’ he said, before making his way up to the bar and ordering some more drinks. When he came back, he reached into his bag and removed a Ventolin, put it to his mouth and took a quick breath. I stared at him in horror. My head began to grow slightly dizzy, as if the earth had shifted a heartbeat quicker on its usual rotation but I had been left a few paces behind.

‘You have asthma,’ I said quietly, more a statement than a question, but he looked across at me and nodded.

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘It’s not too bad, though. The inhaler gets me through.’

‘My son had asthma,’ I said. ‘He suffered from it quite badly.’

He nodded and inhaled again, before returning the familiar blue device to his satchel. ‘Some people get it worse than others. Mine has always been manageable.’

‘It’s how he died.’

Theo sat back in the chair and stared at me. ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize.’

‘There’s no reason why you should have.’

‘Do you mind if I ask what happened?’

I looked away. There was no harm in telling him the truth. Up to a point, at least.

‘It was hay-fever season,’ I told him. ‘And, of course, his asthma was always much worse at that time of year. He was in our apartment, doing some homework on my computer.’ And now time to massage the details. ‘I wasn’t there. I’d gone out to pick up some take-away. It seems that he had a particularly bad bronchospasm attack and couldn’t reach his inhaler in time. He collapsed on the floor. By the time I got back, he was gone.’

‘That’s awful,’ said Theo. ‘How old was he?’

‘Thirteen.’

I looked down at the table, scratching my nails into the woodwork. I could sense him again, a small hand gripping my shoulder, an arm wrapped around my throat. He pressed against my wind-pipe and I tried to push back but he was too strong for me and when I looked up, he was sitting opposite me in Theo’s place, watching me, an expression on his face that broke through my chest and clutched at my heart, squeezing it, cutting off the blood from pumping around my body.

‘It was your own fault,’ I whispered.

‘What?’

I blinked a few times, felt an immediate release from my delusion and shook my head. Daniel was gone; Theo had returned.

‘Nothing,’ I replied. I noticed the cigarette packet on the table and frowned. ‘You know, if you have asthma, you really shouldn’t be smoking.’

‘I’m trying to give up.’

‘Well, try harder,’ I said forcefully.

‘And did Daniel—’

‘That’s enough about him,’ I snapped, more heatedly than I had intended. ‘Let’s talk about something else.’

‘All right, sorry,’ he said. A long pause ensued. The tension that descended on us was almost unbearable but, finally, he spoke again.

‘Actually, before I forget,’ he said. ‘I was talking to a friend of mine the other day – she runs the literary society at UCL – and I told her that you were giving me some help on my thesis. She wondered whether you might come in some day to talk to the writing students?’

I sat back in my chair, lifted my pint and took a long draught from it. It had been a long time since I’d spoken to any students about writing or, for that matter, spoken to anyone about writing. I wasn’t sure if it was something I would feel comfortable doing any more.

‘No pressure, of course,’ he said quickly, when I didn’t answer immediately. ‘I’m sure you’re busy with your work and—’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘I prefer only to do such things when there’s a new book out.’

‘Of course, I understand.’

‘Maybe when the next novel is published.’

‘Whenever works. It’s entirely up to you.’

I nodded and drank some more. A roomful of students intimidated me more now than it would have in the past. And, of course, they would probably want me to speak in the middle of the day, which would be a problem, as it was important that I was in one of my pubs every day by eight minutes past two.

‘I’ll let you know,’ I said.

‘Thanks,’ he replied, and he looked down at his pint, staring at it for a few moments before lifting it to his lips.

‘How’s the thesis coming along, anyway?’ I asked eventually. ‘I hope our meetings are proving helpful to you.’

‘They are,’ he said. ‘But it’s important to me that I create a work of scholarship and not just a lazy trawl through your catalogue.’

‘Of course.’

‘Which means that I might have to be critical as well as complimentary. I hope you can understand that. I just don’t want you to read it one day and feel that I’ve been duplicitous.’

‘I wouldn’t expect anything less,’ I said. ‘I daresay not every word I’ve written over the years has been perfect, after all.’

‘I’ve been doing some work on Two Germans, you see,’ he continued. ‘Reading back over old reviews and some of the subsequent commentary. I suppose you’re aware of the criticisms of the book.’

‘Vaguely,’ I said. ‘Which, in particular?’

‘Well, there are those who feel that you took advantage of Erich Ackermann. Seduced his story from him as a way to build your own career.’

I nodded. I’d heard that one before, of course, many times, and had a stock answer. ‘Erich’s actions were his own to account for,’ I said. ‘For whatever reason, he chose me as his confidant and never once suggested that our conversations were supposed to remain private. I was free to use them in any way I chose. You must remember that when Erich and I originally met I knew nothing about what had happened during the war. I had never even heard the name of Oskar Gött. I simply made the man’s acquaintance and one thing, as they say, led to another. It wasn’t a set-up. I can hardly be blamed if he revealed things to me that, later on, he came to regret saying.’

His trusty notebook was out again and he was scribbling away.

‘So you felt no guilt about what happened to him?’ he asked.

‘Not particularly, no,’ I said, frowning. ‘Why, do you think I should have?’

‘There are those who say that you deliberately targeted Ackermann. And that if it hadn’t been that story, then it would have been another. That he was doomed from the moment he met you. Is that unfair?’

‘Totally unfair,’ I said, feeling a little unsettled by the accusatory tone he was taking. ‘He was a grown man, after all. He could have walked away from me at any time but he chose not to. The fact was, Erich Ackermann was in love with me.’

He stopped writing for a moment and looked up.

‘He told you this?’ he asked.

‘Not in so many words, no,’ I admitted. ‘But it was obvious. He wasn’t very good at hiding it. The poor man had tied himself up in emotional knots over so many decades, cutting off any potential romantic attachments, that when the dam broke, so to speak, he was absolutely incapable of dealing with the subsequent psychological trauma. But I never led him on, if that’s what you’re suggesting.’

‘All right,’ he said.

‘You don’t sound convinced.’

He smiled and shook his head. ‘Sorry, Maurice,’ he said. ‘I’m just trying to get to the heart of the story, that’s all.’

He took off his jacket now, revealing a T-shirt featuring a band that my son Daniel had loved. I stared at the familiar faces that had once adorned a poster in my son’s room.

‘You like them?’ I asked, pointing down at the image.

He glanced down and nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Why, do you?’

‘Not really,’ I said. ‘I’m a little too old for bands like that. But my son did.’

He said nothing for a few moments. ‘How intimate can I be with my questions?’ he asked at last.

‘You can ask me anything you like. I don’t mind.’

‘All right. Do you have a girlfriend?’

‘No,’ I said, surprised that he should be interested in my personal instead of my professional life.

‘Are you gay?’

‘No. Why, have I done something to give you the impression that I am?’

‘It doesn’t matter to me one way or the other, you understand,’ he said. ‘I’m just trying to understand you better as a person so I can more clearly contextualize your work.’

‘Well, I suppose if I’m anything, I’m straight,’ I said. ‘Although I don’t feel an enormous pull in any direction these days. I never really did, if I’m honest. I was never a terribly sexual person, not even when I was your age. Perhaps I’m missing a certain hormone, I don’t know, but it was just something that was never very important to me. Are you driven by sex, Theo?’

He blushed a little and I felt pleased to be able to discombobulate him, for he had been too in control of today’s meeting for my liking.

‘Well, I mean I like it,’ he said. ‘When I can get it, that is.’

‘And do you have a girlfriend?’

‘No.’

‘A boyfriend?’

‘No.’

‘All right.’ I smiled at him, wondering whether he was going to give me anything else, but it seemed that he was determined to stick to his role as interlocutor.

‘Anyway,’ I said finally, ‘I’m pretty certain that that part of my life is behind me. Can I just say,’ I added after a moment, not wanting to scare him away, ‘just so there’s no confusion, I haven’t invited you here in order to seduce you, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

‘What?’ he said, looking at me now with an expression of such surprise on his face that I realized he hadn’t been thinking anything of the sort.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Perhaps I’m misreading things. I was worried that you thought I was agreeing to these meetings for some unsavoury reason. That I’ve only taken an interest in you because I want to form a romantic attachment. I just want to reassure you that nothing could be further from the truth.’

‘I honestly hadn’t even considered it,’ he said. ‘Not for a moment.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘How embarrassing. For me, I mean.’

‘I mean, if you are interested in me in that way—’

‘I’m genuinely not. It’s the furthest thing from my mind, I promise you. I was simply concerned that’s what you thought and wanted to set your mind at rest. I can see that all I’ve achieved is the opposite. Let’s talk about something else. I think I’ve made rather a fool of myself.’

‘It’s okay.’

He looked as if he wanted the ground to open up beneath him and I cursed my own stupidity. Was I going to lose him now? I couldn’t risk anything like that. He needed to finish his thesis and it needed to become a book. For that to happen, I needed to focus. I decided it was time to give him something. A small morsel to stimulate his appetite.

‘Actually,’ I said at last, ‘if you don’t mind, I’d like to confide something in you.’

‘Really?’ he asked, looking up hopefully.

‘Yes. Something for your thesis. Something I’ve never really talked about before.’

He turned another page in his notebook, his pen hovering over the paper. His eagerness was endearing.

‘I want to be honest with you, you see,’ I continued. ‘And I agree with you that it’s important that your thesis is a work of true integrity. Especially if it’s to become the basis of a full book. You’re still planning on that, I hope?’

‘Well, yes. But that’s a long way—’

‘Good. I want to tell you something about Dash Hardy.’

‘The American writer?’

‘Yes.’

‘I think I read somewhere that he was a mentor to you, is that right? When you were starting out, I mean.’

‘I’m not quite sure that I’d describe him in those terms,’ I replied, ‘although he probably would have. But, to be fair, yes, he was very generous towards me. Have you read any of his books, Theo?’

‘No, I’ve never got around to them,’ he replied, shaking his head. ‘Are they worth reading?’

‘Not really,’ I said. ‘I mean, one or two maybe. But there are so many books out there in the world that I wouldn’t bother if I were you. You won’t find anything particularly interesting in them. Not today. They’re very much of their time. I met Dash many years ago, not long after I met Erich Ackermann, as it happens. Our paths crossed in the Prado in Madrid and, like Erich, he was entranced by me. They were both homosexuals, of course, but very different types. Where Erich was content just to stare at me across the dining tables of Europe, fantasizing about a relationship that would never come to fruition, Dash came straight out and told me what he wanted on the day that we met. He wasn’t looking for romance, he said, he didn’t want a lifelong companion or someone to show up on his arm at parties. He just wanted to fuck me. Really, I admired his forthrightness. And so I let him. The very night that we met, in fact, but never again after that. I drifted towards him after I parted from Erich because he had a higher profile in the States but, in retrospect, I think I may have treated him unkindly. You see, when we met, he just desired me, so the sex was probably not that interesting, but after that he fell in love, desperately in love, and the moment he did I made sure to deny him everything he wanted. I would barely let him put his arms around me and certainly never let him in my bed again. The poor man went around in a state of such abject misery that one day, having grown tired of him following me around like a bewildered puppy, I announced that I’d grown bored of him and didn’t want to see him ever again. It was just after we’d spent an evening at Gore Vidal’s house on the Amalfi Coast, in fact. I broke the bad news to him while we were driving back down the mountain. Actually, I waited until we got close to the bottom in case he drove us over a cliff. Gore wasn’t my biggest fan, I should say. He felt that I was just using Dash to get a good American publisher and that, once I had what I wanted, I would walk away.’

‘And was he right?’

I shrugged. ‘He wasn’t entirely wrong. But that was Gore. You couldn’t make a fool of him. Only a fool, in fact, would have tried.’

‘And you did all this consciously?’

‘Yes. What can I say? I was ambitious. I still am.’

He hesitated for a moment. ‘That’s quite an admission,’ he said.

‘It is,’ I said, feigning surprise. ‘Oh, I’m not sure it amounts to very much. Although, are you aware that Dash committed suicide?’

‘No.’

‘Well, he did. Years later, mind you, but not long after he’d run into me again at the Hay Festival. The poor man looked as depressed as ever, and I suppose seeing me again after all that time re-lit the flames that he’d tried so hard to extinguish and he decided to end it all. He contacted me after our brief encounter, you see, and begged me to come back to him. He said that he’d never stopped loving me and that he would do anything if I would simply return. I just laughed, told him I wasn’t even slightly interested. I was seeing Edith at the time, anyway, the woman who would become my wife. I told him I could scarcely imagine anything more tedious than returning to a life with him in New York and he shouldn’t bother me again. Later that evening, he hanged himself in the apartment we’d once shared in Manhattan. I suppose, in some ways, I have his death on my conscience.’

‘I see,’ said Theo, thinking about this. I could see his eyes moving back and forth as he wondered how best to use this in his thesis. He waited a long time before speaking again and I determined not to break the silence. ‘Well, you can’t blame yourself for what he chose to do,’ he said eventually, a certain hesitation in his tone. ‘I’m sure you didn’t intentionally hurt him.’

‘Are you?’ I asked, smiling.

‘Well, you didn’t, did you?’

I was still smiling. It was decent of him to think that. Time to pull back a little. I didn’t want to make myself out to be too much of a monster. ‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘I was young, that’s all. And we all take a little help where we can get it when we’re that age. But still, if I could go back in time, perhaps I would have acted a little more kindly towards him.’

‘Towards all of us,’ said Daniel, who had returned to the table now and was once again sitting in Theo’s place. He stared at me before attempting to take a deep breath and failing badly, the sound of congested lungs pouring from his mouth like a cry from a banshee.

‘Are you all right?’ asked Theo. It took only a blink of my eyes for reality to return.

‘I’m fine,’ I said, stepping away from the table carefully. ‘I just need the bathroom, that’s all. I’ll be back in a moment.’

When I returned, he was still scribbling in his notepad and I ordered some more drinks, placing them on the table, but didn’t speak until he’d finished writing.

‘You don’t have to if you don’t want to,’ he said at last, looking up at me, ‘but if you’d like to talk about your son, then I’d be happy to listen. I don’t know if you have anyone in particular who you can discuss him with.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, surprised that he was even interested in a dead child. I had expected that he’d want some information about Dash and whether I treated anyone else with such heartlessness. ‘And perhaps I will at some point. I so rarely do, you see. But not today, I think. I’d need to compose my thoughts. Tomorrow, maybe? I don’t know what you’re doing around two o’clock?’

4. The Lamb and Flag, Rose Street

‘You know, Charles Dickens used to drink here,’ I said the following afternoon as we sat in the window of the Lamb and Flag pub on Rose Street, the rain pouring down outside on another wet London day. ‘And out there,’ I added, pointing to the alleyway beyond, ‘is where the Poet Laureate John Dryden was almost beaten to death by thugs in the service of the Earl of Rochester.’

‘What had he done to deserve that?’ asked Theo, looking out on to the street as if some of the blood might still be visible on the cobblestones. He had arrived wearing a shirt and tie rather than his usual T-shirt and hoodie and looked very smart; when I asked him why such formality, he told me that he’d had a meeting that morning with his thesis adviser and liked to dress more professionally whenever they met, which I thought a rather quaint tradition. I couldn’t remember my son ever wearing a tie in his life, though, so I asked Theo to take it off, which he did without complaint, unbuttoning the top of his shirt as he did so, which set me more at ease. Daniel had always preferred open-necked shirts.

‘It’s hard to know,’ I told him with a shrug. ‘They’d been friends once, of course. Dryden dedicated one of his plays to Rochester, who had something of a hand in the writing of it, and maybe the Earl felt he didn’t get enough credit for his work. Marriage à la Mode, if memory serves. But then you know writers. They can be merciless in how they use each other to get to the top. I’m surprised more of them don’t kill each other, to be honest.’

‘You say “them”,’ said Theo with a half-smile. ‘Not “us”?’

‘All right, us,’ I replied, correcting myself. ‘I’m surprised more of us don’t kill each other. For such an artistic field, there’s an awful lot of people who desperately want to beat someone else and be seen as the very best. Succeeding on one’s own terms just isn’t enough.’

‘Whenever a friend succeeds,’ said Theo, ‘a little something in me dies. That was Truman Capote, wasn’t it?’

‘No, that was Gore,’ I said, recalling the plaintive eyes that had looked up at me from beneath the sheets in the early hours of the morning at the Swallow’s Nest, La Rondinaia, when I had stood before him and removed my robe, preparing to make my greatest conquest yet. But he had simply shaken his head, perhaps in regret that he was longer capable of playing the game, and rolled over on his side, falling back asleep. It had been disappointing, of course, and not a little humiliating, but I’d rather admired him for his resolve.

‘And you’ve heard the old proverb about ambition, haven’t you?’

He shook his head.

‘That it’s like setting a ladder to the sky. A pointless waste of energy. Anyway, where did we leave things yesterday? I was planning on telling you something about Daniel, wasn’t I?’

Something had shifted in my relationship with Theo since the previous afternoon. Although I had been using him all along and was prepared to continue with my plan until I had achieved my goal, I had begun to feel that it might be helpful to me to unburden myself of some of my regrets along the way. Perhaps it would dismiss Daniel’s ghost from shadowing me. Somehow, I felt a kindred spirit in this young naïf and I felt that he might actually understand why I had done some of the things I’d done. And that he might forgive me. But in order to do that, I needed to be honest with him. Obviously, there was only so far I could go without giving myself away entirely, but I wondered whether I could minimize some of my crimes and still command his respect.

‘Only if you want to,’ he said, notebook on the table, pen at the ready. ‘I don’t want to pry.’

‘I don’t mind,’ I replied. ‘I never have much opportunity to talk about him, despite the fact that he’s on my mind almost constantly. But before I do, I suppose I should go back a little further. To my wife.’

He flicked through his notes. ‘Edith Camberley,’ he said, nodding. ‘Actually, I read her novel a few weeks ago. Fury. It was very good.’

‘It was,’ I agreed.

‘She died quite young, didn’t she?’

‘Sadly, yes. We were living in Norwich at the time. She fell down a staircase. I’d been intending to repair the handrail since we’d moved in but, somehow, I’d never quite got around to it. Too busy working on my novel. She ended up in a coma for several months and eventually the decision was made to turn off the life support.’

‘You made that decision?’

‘I did, yes.’

‘That must have been very difficult.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘She was my wife.’

‘And you loved her.’

‘I wouldn’t have married her if I hadn’t loved her.’

‘She was black, wasn’t she?’ asked Theo, and I frowned, surprised by the question.

‘Is that relevant in some way?’ I asked. ‘To your thesis, I mean?’

‘Only that it must have been difficult back then. To be in a mixed-race relationship.’

‘Not especially, no,’ I said, shrugging my shoulders. ‘It wasn’t the 1950s, you know, it was the 1990s. That might seem a long time ago to someone your age but, really, it’s just the blink of an eye. And the circles we moved in would have been the least likely to hold any racist attitudes. Yes, once in a while someone might have given us a sideways glance on the street, and from time to time some uneducated prick might have made an offensive comment as we passed. But it was nothing compared to what previous generations went through.’

‘Can I ask, when her novel became such a success, did you feel any sort of… What’s the word…?’

‘Envy?’ I suggested, trying to keep the smile off my face. ‘A deep and embittered sense of resentment?’

‘I suppose.’

‘Not in the slightest,’ I said. ‘Edith was a brilliant writer. She might have been one of the greats, had she lived. I was pleased for her.’

‘Still, for a time she must have taken some of the spotlight away from you.’

‘I’ve never been much interested in that,’ I lied. ‘And, as I said, I loved her. What kind of man would it make me if I had begrudged her her success?’

He said nothing but scribbled a lot of things down in his notepad. Whenever he went to the bar, to the bathroom or outside for a smoke, he always took his notepad with him. Young Mr Field was diligent in that respect.

‘Your son must have missed her,’ he remarked eventually, looking up again.

I shook my head. ‘No, Edith wasn’t Daniel’s mother. I conceived him with an Italian chambermaid who worked in a London hotel.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘It was a business transaction. Nothing more, nothing less. She wanted money and I wanted a child. The arrangement was mutually beneficial.’

‘Isn’t that…?’ He hesitated for a moment and gave a half-laugh. ‘Isn’t that illegal?’

‘Probably,’ I said. ‘Why, are you going to report me to the police? I assure you, there are worse things that you could tell them.’

‘No, I just—’

‘The law is ridiculous on this point. Why shouldn’t a girl be allowed to sell nine months of her life if she wants to? And why shouldn’t I be able to buy them? We were both entirely happy with the choices we made and, ultimately, it was no one else’s business. I can’t even remember her name, to be honest, if I ever knew it. I expect she’s gone on to live a happy life and never thinks about her first baby.’

‘She probably does,’ he said, and I was surprised that he would contradict me, but perhaps he was right. Wherever she was, there was a good chance that she thought of him a hundred times a day. I know I did.

‘Anyway, it was just Daniel and me all those years,’ I continued. ‘We were a pair, you see. Rarely apart. He didn’t even have his own bedroom until he was three years old because he didn’t want to be separated from me. He never asked about a mother; the absence of a female presence in his life didn’t seem to be an issue for him. We were in New York then, of course. Daniel lived there all his life. You’re aware of Storī?’

‘Of course.’

‘Well, I set that up when we first moved to Manhattan and then I edited it for several years. Before my son started school, he used to come into the office with me every day and sit in the corner at his own desk, colouring, reading or playing with his toys. I think people thought it was rather sweet, a father and a little boy so attached to each other, but it rather annoyed me when they did. I wasn’t doing it for appearances’ sake. We just enjoyed each other’s company.’

‘What was he like?’ asked Theo. ‘Personality-wise, I mean.’

‘He was quiet,’ I said, and I felt a deep pain at the pit of my stomach, remembering his good qualities, of which he had many. ‘Bookish, like me. Shy. Very loving. Very warm. A good cook for such a young boy. It’s something that he might have pursued as a career, had he been given a chance. He was interested in photography too and had started talking about taking dance classes, which I encouraged, as I thought he was rather too introverted.’

‘Did he have many friends?’

I shook my head again. ‘Not many. At least, not many that I knew of.’

‘How old was he when he died?’

‘Thirteen.’

‘Too young to have a girlfriend, I suppose.’

I smiled regretfully. Daniel had never introduced me to a girl, nor had he ever spoken about girls he liked, but I knew that he was beginning to get interested because he’d grown very self-conscious around an attractive young woman who was interning at Storī, and once, when she engaged him in a conversation about a movie she’d just seen, he’d turned bright red, startlingly so, and I’d felt embarrassed for him, being unable to control his emotions like that. I thought it rather sad that the boy had surely died with his innocence intact.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He kept that part of his life very quiet from me. I mean, he was thirteen years old, and boys that age don’t like to discuss such things with their fathers, do they?’

‘I certainly didn’t. Do you have a picture of him? Of Daniel?’

‘Not with me,’ I said.

‘So Edith and he weren’t related,’ he said quietly, more to himself than to me. He glanced out of the window for a moment, tapped his finger against his chin, then turned back, scribbled something down and turned his page.

‘There was something else I wanted to ask you about your wife,’ he said.

‘Feel free.’

‘I hope you won’t take it the wrong way. It might seem rather… audacious on my part.’

‘I’m intrigued now.’

He nodded but took a long time to speak. I decided to do nothing to hurry him along. I was rather enjoying his discomfort.

‘As I mentioned,’ he said eventually, ‘I read Fury recently.’

‘And I’m glad you did. It’s actually rather hard to find a copy these days. It’s been out of print for years.’

‘I tracked it down in the British Library. It wasn’t very difficult.’

I took a sip from my pint but avoided his eye.

‘There were a few stylistic points in it that intrigued me.’

‘Oh yes?’ I said.

‘She was very fond of the ellipsis, wasn’t she? Too fond, I would suggest. And she had a habit of introducing new characters by describing their eyes. I was surprised that an editor didn’t ask her to watch out for that. She does it with almost every character.’

‘That’s true,’ I agreed. ‘It was a habit she fell back on time and again. We all have these little quirks, I suppose.’

‘Also, there was her fondness for giving characters alliterative names. Charles Chorley, for example. Elsie Engels. It’s very noticeable. It actually becomes a little annoying at one point.’

‘Did you think so?’ I asked, for I’d always rather enjoyed this conceit of Edith’s. ‘Well? What of it? Dickens did it all the time too. John Jarndyce in Bleak House. Tommy Traddles in David Copperfield. Nicholas Nickleby.’

He rummaged through his notes again, this time pulling a separate folder from his bag and running his finger down the page. ‘It’s just that I noticed you do the same thing in The Tribesman,’ he said. ‘Six out of the eleven main characters are introduced with descriptions of their eyes, while the protagonist’s name is—’

‘William Walters, yes, I remember.’

‘And the woman he loves is—’

‘Sara Salt.’

Theo gave a half-shrug and looked me in the eye. ‘Can I ask you a direct question?’

‘You can.’

‘Did Edith have anything to do with The Tribesman?’ he asked.

I smiled at him, rather impressed. Maybe the boy wasn’t quite as much a fool as I’d thought. ‘Now why would you ask that,’ I queried, ‘instead of asking whether I had anything to do with Fury? Wouldn’t that be the more obvious conclusion, considering my previous successes?’

‘Because none of these traits is visible in either Two Germans or The Treehouse. Not a single time. But you do it compulsively in The Tribesman. Which, of course, was published the year after your wife died.’

I glanced around to ensure that we couldn’t be overheard, but there was no one seated at any of the tables nearby. I could deny it, of course. Indeed, my first instinct was to deny it. But as I looked at him, the resemblance between my biographer and my son seemed so striking that I believed I might be able to make him understand what Daniel never had.

‘You’re very perceptive,’ I said. ‘Are we off the record now?’

‘I’m not a journalist.’

‘No, but are we off the record?’

He stared at me, then put the top back on his pen and placed it on his closed notebook. ‘Go ahead,’ he said.

‘The thing is,’ I said, feeling a delicious rush of excitement at what I was about to say, ‘I didn’t actually write The Tribesman. Edith did.’

He stared at me for a long time, then burst out laughing. ‘Now you’re just making fun of me,’ he said.

‘No, I’m being entirely serious,’ I replied with a shrug, my expression completely neutral. ‘Oh, she didn’t write every word in the book, don’t get me wrong. A lot of it is mine. In fact, I had to rewrite some sections substantially. The traits you’ve already listed were just some of her flaws as a writer and I was, shall we say, a more experienced hand.’

‘I don’t…’ He shook his head, looking at me as if I had started speaking in a foreign language. ‘I’m sorry, Maurice, I don’t quite understand what you’re telling me here.’

‘It’s quite simple. I’m saying that the original manuscript of the novel was written by Edith. Then Edith fell down the stairs and I took what she had written, worked pretty hard on it, I have to say, and turned it into a Maurice Swift novel. As a sort of… homage to her.’

‘But you’ve never mentioned this before,’ he said.

‘Haven’t I?’

‘No. I’ve read every interview you gave regarding that book and you never said a word about your wife’s contribution.’

‘I suppose it didn’t seem that important at the time. It’s a bit like what happened with Erich, in a way. He told me a story and I adapted it for my own use. Edith had a novel, she died, and I adapted it for my own use too. There’s not a great deal of difference between the two scenarios. It was a perfectly legitimate endeavour.’

As I heard myself say these words aloud, they didn’t sound as terrible to me as I had expected. In fact, my explanation sounded rather reasonable.

‘And you don’t think there’s something dishonest about that?’ asked Theo.

‘Not in the slightest,’ I said, feigning innocence. ‘Why, do you?’

A scene from a novel flashed through my mind. The moment at the end of Howards End when Dolly, the silly girl, reveals that the house had been left to Margaret Schlegel in Ruth’s will but Henry had thrown the offending note in the fire. I didn’t do wrong, did I? he asks in all innocence.

And Margaret, who has been through so much, shakes her head and says, You didn’t, darling. Nothing has been done wrong.

Theo, however, was no Margaret Schlegel.

‘I do, to be honest.’

‘Oh, then I think you’re just being a little uptight. Look, Edith was dead. Or she was in a coma, anyway. And a manuscript existed. It was obvious that it was going to be a major success if it was knocked into shape. So, of course, I used what she’d left behind. I owed that to her. If you’d been in my position, wouldn’t you have done the same thing? Out of love?’

‘No!’ he said, leaning forward, and the look of astonishment on his face rather frightened me. Had I underestimated how seriously he would take this? ‘It wouldn’t even have occurred to me!’

‘Hm,’ I said, considering this. ‘Then perhaps I do have an imagination after all.’

‘Maurice, I don’t know how—’

‘Look, I did what I did and I stand by it, all right? What else should I have done? Publish it posthumously under her name? What good would that have done? There would have been no writer to publicize it. No one to read from it at the festivals. The book probably would have died a death. No, it made far more sense to claim it as my own and accept the garlands that came in its wake. If anything, it was a tribute to Edith that it was so well received.’

‘Fuck me,’ said Theo quietly, shaking his head and burying himself in his pint for a few minutes. From time to time he scribbled a few notes on the pad which I couldn’t make out from where I was sitting, and I didn’t enquire as to what they were. I waited until he was ready, sitting quietly, enjoying my drink, until he finally looked up at me, and I smiled at him.

‘Another drink?’ I asked.

While I was standing at the bar, I felt a curious mixture of relief and anxiety. I had told the truth, or a version of it, anyway, and had done so in such a way that I’d made it clear I didn’t believe it was anything to get too worked up over. Theo might have been surprised by what I’d said, but it wasn’t as if he could hold me to account for it. Edith’s original manuscript had long since been shredded and, if he chose to write about this in his thesis, I could either deny it or stand by every word and say that yes, my late wife had been working on a vague idea, or we had been working on it together, but it was in its very early stages when she died. And I had simply continued with the book.

The barmaid poured the drinks and I happened to glance over to the other side of the pub and a familiar face – two familiar faces, in fact – caught my eye. I turned away quickly, hoping they hadn’t spotted me, but perhaps my sudden movement alerted them for they looked in my direction and recognized me immediately. An awkward moment followed before they raised their hands in greeting and I nodded in return, attempting a smile, before carrying the drinks back to our table. I wanted to sit down and see whether things felt different between Theo and me now, but there was simply no way around it. I wouldn’t be able to concentrate until I’d gone over.

‘Will you excuse me for a moment, Daniel?’ I asked him. ‘I just spotted a couple of old friends in the corner and I should probably go over and say hello.’

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘And it’s Theo.’

‘What?’

He shook his head and reached into the pocket of his coat for his phone as I walked across the room, hoping that I looked reasonably healthy and not too much like the tragic old drunk I had turned into.

‘Hello, Garrett. Hello, Rufus,’ I said, shaking their hands in turn. Garrett Colby, my late wife’s former student, and Rufus Shawcross, my erstwhile editor. The man who’d dropped me after the failure of The Treehouse and come to regret that when I was shortlisted for The Prize with The Tribesman a few years later.

‘Hello, Maurice,’ said Rufus, standing up and shaking my hand as if we were close friends. ‘It’s been such a long time! How are you keeping these days?’

‘Very well, thank you,’ I said.

‘You know Garrett Colby, don’t you?’ he asked, turning to his companion.

‘We were friends back in my UEA days,’ said Garrett, not standing but offering his hand too. ‘Hello, Maurice, it’s nice to see you again.’

‘Well, we were acquainted,’ I said, correcting him. ‘“Friends” might be pushing it a little. I almost didn’t recognize you. What happened to all that lovely blond hair of yours? It used to be rather a signature piece, didn’t it? Drove all the boys crazy, as I recall.’

‘I got older,’ he said with a shrug. ‘And it fell out. Are you growing a beard? I didn’t realize they were back in vogue for men on the wrong side of fifty.’

‘No, I just haven’t shaved in a few days,’ I said.

‘Actually, we’re celebrating,’ said Rufus, and I noticed now that they had a bottle of champagne standing between them in a silver ice bucket. That wasn’t something you saw in the Lamb and Flag very often. ‘You’ve heard the wonderful news, I presume?’

‘No. Has Mr Trump died?’

‘Even better. The shortlist for The Prize came out this morning and Garrett is on it.’

‘Garrett who?’ I asked.

‘Garrett,’ repeated Rufus, looking a little baffled by my question. ‘This Garrett.’

‘Oh, right,’ I said, turning back to the buffoon next to him, who was grinning like the cat that got the cream. Of course, I knew only too well that he’d made the shortlist. It had made me scream aloud in my flat earlier that day when the news was revealed. I had thrown four dinner plates, two cups and a vase at the wall and they had all smashed into pieces that I would have to clear up later. ‘I didn’t even know that you were still writing.’

‘Apparently, I am.’

‘Well, congratulations you.’

‘Thanks, but it’s not really all that important,’ he said with the insouciant air of a man who was beside himself with happiness but didn’t want to make it too obvious in case he came across as gauche. ‘Prizes are rather ridiculous, don’t you think? Writers of my generation make such a fuss about them. It’s an unedifying sight. I mean, you ask someone how their book is doing and they reply by telling you that it didn’t make this shortlist or that longlist and it just makes one roll one’s eyes in despair.’

‘So you won’t be going on the night then?’ I asked. ‘You’ll be making a stand, on principle?’

‘Oh, well, I have to go,’ he said, colouring slightly. ‘I mean, I owe it to Rufus and to everyone at the publishing house who’s put so much work into my book. But whether I win or not is neither here nor there. I’ll just get drunk and enjoy the silliness of it all. I daresay it will make for a good scene in a later novel.’

‘Of course you’re going to win,’ said Rufus, reaching across and gripping Garrett by his pathetic little biceps, around which a small child could have comfortably wrapped his thumb and middle finger. ‘It’s your year. It has to be.’

‘Do you really think so?’ he asked hopefully.

‘I’m sure of it. The reviews for Garrett’s book have been extraordinary,’ he added, turning to me. ‘Have you read them?’

‘I was neither aware of the reviews nor of the book,’ I lied. ‘But I’m delighted to hear it’s gone down so well. Edith would be proud of you.’

‘We’ll be adding your name to the list of all those great writers whose names have been associated with The Prize,’ he said, turning back to Garrett. ‘Including, of course, our friend Maurice here.’

‘Well, that was all a long time ago,’ I said.

‘Oh, that’s right, you were shortlisted once, weren’t you?’ said Garrett. ‘I’d completely forgotten that. When was it? Sometime back in the nineties?’

‘Who can recall? My memory isn’t what it was. I am, as you say, on the wrong side of fifty.’

‘Well, if you will spend your afternoons in a pub, you can expect a little diminishment of your powers.’

‘You’re in a pub too,’ I pointed out. ‘And look at you! Enjoying your fifteen minutes of fame.’

‘Yes, but I’m celebrating. I’ve been shortlisted.’

I smiled and felt an unexpected rush of affection for the boy, who’d always been able to give as good as he got. I’d rather missed his cuntish behaviour.

‘Who’s that you’re with over there, anyway?’ he continued, looking back towards my table. ‘He looks like something you’d pick up at King’s Cross Station in the men’s toilets on a Thursday night.’

‘That’s my son, actually,’ I said, the words out of my mouth before I could even consider the wisdom of the lie. I glanced at Rufus, whose expression hadn’t changed, and I assumed that he knew nothing about what had happened to Daniel. Or perhaps he did and thought that I had two sons.

‘Oh right, sorry,’ said Garrett, who at least had the good grace to look embarrassed at his faux-pas. ‘My mistake.’

‘No, it’s fine,’ I said. ‘Anyway, I daresay you’re more familiar with that type of fellow than I am. Thursday night, you say? Why Thursday night? Is that a particularly good time to catch some rough trade?’

‘I said sorry. It was just a joke.’

‘A hilarious one,’ I muttered.

‘And are you working on anything at the moment, Maurice?’ asked Rufus, who was blushing scarlet for some inexplicable reason, and I turned back to him with a shrug.

‘Oh, I’m sure you’re not that interested,’ I said. ‘You were never a great fan of my work, after all.’

‘Well, I did publish Two Germans,’ he said, pushing his glasses up his nose and looking a little wounded by that remark. ‘So, to be fair, I was the first person to spot your talent.’

‘Erich Ackermann was the first person to spot my talent,’ I pointed out.

‘And look what happened to him,’ said Garrett.

‘But you’re right. You did publish me. Twice, in fact. Before you dropped me.’

‘In retrospect, that whole situation was handled rather badly,’ Rufus replied, looking down at the floor. ‘I was fairly new to the game myself and I listened to the bean counters upstairs when I should have followed my gut. I always knew that you were the real deal.’

‘It would have been nice to have heard that at the time,’ I said. ‘It was quite a blow when you showed me the door. It led to some pretty dark years.’

No one said anything for a few moments. I’d only been at their table a few minutes but had already managed to insult them both and make them each feel like shit, so I was beginning to feel that my work there was done. Suddenly I longed for the days before I’d met Theo, when I was just a solo drinker and rarely spoke to anyone. Life was simpler then.

‘Anyway,’ I said at last, placing a hand on both their shoulders simultaneously and squeezing them just enough to leave a bruise, ‘I’ve probably taken up enough of your time. It was nice to see you both. And congratulations again, Garrett, on your longlisting.’

‘Shortlisting,’ he said, but the word was thrown at my back for I’d already walked away and was heading back to our table.

‘Sorry about that,’ I said as I sat down, and Theo shook his head as if to say, No problem, while he put his phone away. ‘A couple of old friends. You probably know one of them. Garrett Colby?’

‘The writer?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve heard of him. I’ve never read him.’

‘You’re better off. He’s an idiot. And his work is infantile. His first book had something to do with talking animals, if I recall correctly.’

‘Like Animal Farm.’

‘Yes, just without the wit, the politics, the style or the genius.’

Theo laughed and took a long drink from his pint. He still seemed distracted by the revelation I had made but I was determined not to talk about that any more. I didn’t want to make a bigger issue of it than it needed to be.

‘Anyway,’ I said. ‘Where were we?’

‘You were telling me about The Tribesman and how you—’

‘No, we’ve covered that. Something else.’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Well, you were going to talk to me about Daniel, but instead we—’

My good humour melted away instantly. ‘Yes, that’s right,’ I said. ‘Well, what else would you like to know?’

‘Anything you want to tell me. Was he a writer?’

‘No. A good reader but not a writer.’

‘Did he see much of the world?’

‘Some. A little of Europe, with me, when we travelled to festivals. But not enough.’

‘And when he died—’

‘I don’t want to talk about the day itself, if you don’t mind,’ I said.

‘Of course. That’s fine.’

‘Another time, maybe,’ I said, looking away. ‘It’s not an afternoon that I like to revisit.’

‘Time for a smoke then, if you don’t mind,’ he said, standing up, and I nodded as he made his way out of the door, glancing at Garrett and Rufus as he went. I put the beermats on top of our pints and made my way into the toilet, where I pressed one hand against the wall as I pissed. When I went back outside I ordered more drinks and sat waiting for him. Upon his return, he sat down, brushed the hair out of his eyes, and the smell of nicotine from his jacket made me sit back a little. I’ve never liked the smell of cigarettes. I had caught Daniel with them once and we’d had a rare argument when I’d pointed out how damaging it could be to him, given his asthma.

‘By the way,’ he said, finishing his pint and starting on the next one. ‘I have some good news.’

‘Oh yes?’ I asked. ‘What’s that?’

‘I got a commission to write a couple of book reviews for Time Out. I sent them a sample of my work and they offered me two novels for next month’s issues. If they’re happy with what I produce, then there’s a good chance I’ll get some more.’

‘That’s excellent news,’ I said, pleased for him. ‘Congratulations.’

‘Thanks, yeah. I’m really happy about it. It doesn’t pay much but it gets my name into print.’

‘And what have they asked you to review?’

He named a couple of authors and their new books and I nodded. ‘They’re good writers,’ I said. ‘I like both their work.’

‘So do I,’ he said. ‘That’s what worries me.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Well, it would be much better if I got some bad novels to review. Preferably bad novels by famous writers. Then I could, you know, write some killer reviews. Really take them down.’

‘Make a name for yourself, you mean.’

‘Exactly.’

‘I suppose there’s nothing to stop you doing that, anyway,’ I said. ‘You don’t owe them anything.’

‘Problem is, if they get good reviews everywhere else and I write a negative one, I might just be seen as someone who didn’t fully understand the work.’

‘Or as someone with an independent mind.’

‘Perhaps. Anyway, I’m going to start reading the first one later tonight. Hopefully it will be terrible.’

‘Fingers crossed,’ I said.

I looked up as a shadow fell across our table and was alarmed to see Rufus and Garrett standing there, dreading the idea that they might want to join us.

‘Just wanted to say goodbye,’ said Rufus, setting my mind at rest. ‘We’re meeting some people for drinks at the Charlotte Street Hotel. To celebrate Garrett’s shortlisting. You’re welcome to join us if you like.’

‘Oh Lord, no,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘I can scarcely think of anything I’d enjoy less.’

He reared back in surprise, as if I’d just made an unkind remark about his mother. He pushed his glasses up his nose again – really, he ought to get them tightened – and turned to Theo, and, in a heartbeat, the smile vanished from my face when I remembered my earlier lie.

‘Rufus Shawcross,’ he said, extending a hand. ‘I published your father’s first two novels.’

Theo stared at the hand for a moment, then shook it. ‘I’m sorry?’ he asked, frowning.

‘You’re… Danny, is that right?’

Theo looked at me for a moment, but I was lost for words. There was simply nothing I could say that would not make me look ridiculous.

‘Daniel,’ said Theo, turning back to Rufus. ‘No one ever calls me Danny. At least not since I was a little boy.’

‘Daniel, then,’ he said. ‘You have a very talented father. We need him to write another book, it’s been far too long. Well, it was nice to meet you, anyway. Goodbye, Maurice.’

‘Goodbye,’ I said, watching the pair of them as they walked away and dreading the moment I would have to turn back to Theo.

‘I’m sorry about that,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what made him say such a thing. He mustn’t know… he must have just assumed…’

‘It’s fine,’ he replied. ‘When you didn’t say anything, I thought it was easier just to go with it. I wasn’t sure what you wanted me to do.’

‘I don’t think I knew myself,’ I said. ‘But thank you, anyway. It made an awkward moment almost bearable.’

‘He seemed like a bit of a twat, anyway,’ said Theo.

‘No,’ I replied quietly, shaking my head. ‘No, he’s a very decent man, really. I shouldn’t have spoken to him in the way that I did.’

At home that night, I tried to put the events of the afternoon behind me, uncertain why I had passed Theo off as my son. The more I thought about it, however, the more I felt that I hadn’t lied, at least not intentionally. When Garrett had made his vulgar assertion, I had simply said what had felt real to me in the moment.

My routine had become completely destroyed since I’d met this boy and, unusually for me, I’d picked up a bottle of whisky on my way home and sat alone in my living room, drinking glass after glass. I wanted that sensation of release, of complete surrender to the alcohol. I wanted to fall into bed and have the empty dreams that I used to enjoy. I wanted to escape my life. But drinking alone at home held little appeal and I only managed a third of the bottle before I put it away and stumbled to my bedroom.

The days ahead would be peaceful, at least. Theo had essays to write, two novels to read and the Time Out reviews to draft and, having spent two consecutive afternoons together, I knew that I couldn’t ask him to join me on Friday too, even though I longed for his company now. I’d suggested the following Monday but he’d said no, that it was his father’s birthday, and before I could suggest Tuesday, he’d said the following Friday, which was just over a week away. I wasn’t sure that I could be without him until then, but I could hardly fall on my knees and beg him to reconsider so I had simply smiled, said that sounded good and that I would text him with a place at some point next week, even though I already knew where, because Fridays meant the Dog and Duck on Bateman Street.

I struggled to sleep that night and, shortly after midnight, returned to my whisky, this time managing to finish the bottle. It sat in my stomach, burning me from the inside out, and I stumbled several times as I made my way back to bed. When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed of Edith. She was standing in the bar of the Charlotte Street Hotel, surrounded by dead writers, drinking champagne. William Golding was sitting in a corner with Anthony Trollope, smoking a pipe. John McGahern was trying to catch the barman’s attention while Kingsley Amis emerged from the Gents, buttoning up his trousers. They were all offering congratulations. Something wonderful had happened to her and she was proud and excited. I looked around in search of myself among the party, but I was nowhere to be seen.

‘Has anyone seen Maurice?’ asked Edith, looking directly at me but failing to recognize me. ‘He should be here with me. Has anyone seen my husband? I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him.’

5. The Dog and Duck, Bateman Street

It was the first time that Theo was already waiting for me in the pub when I arrived.

‘Your bruise has healed,’ he said, nodding at my forehead.

‘It has, yes,’ I said. Although I’d been drinking steadily every afternoon and evening since our last encounter the previous Thursday, returning to my daily routine with a mixture of relief and dismay that he wasn’t there to join me, I had made sure to be extra careful when leaving each pub to make my way home. I couldn’t risk another accident. ‘And how was your week?’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘I read the first of those books that I agreed to review.’

‘And?’

‘Unfortunately, it was really good,’ he said.

‘Oh, well. Can’t be helped.’

‘I know. But I’ve started the second one and, so far, it’s a bit slow. So things are looking up.’

‘Excellent. You might find something to criticize there.’

‘Hopefully, yes.’

I smiled at him, but he didn’t smile back. I wondered whether he’d spent our time apart thinking about what I’d told him the previous week concerning Edith’s novel and how poorly I’d treated Dash.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked. ‘You seem a little quiet.’

‘I’m fine,’ he said, shaking his head but still failing to smile. I didn’t care for the fact that he seemed to be growing less deferential to me and more like an irritated friend. ‘How’s your work going?’

‘What work?’ I asked.

‘Your novel.’

‘Oh, you know,’ I said with a shrug. ‘Good days and bad days.’

‘Which are there more of?’

‘The latter,’ I said. ‘Definitely the latter.’

He nodded and seemed as if he wanted to ask me something else but was nervous of how it might come out.

‘What?’ I said, not wanting to sit there all afternoon with an awkward silence hanging over us. ‘Just spit it out, whatever it is.’

‘I don’t want to sound rude.’

‘I don’t much care if you do.’

‘It’s just… well, I’ve been thinking of how we meet. Of where we meet. Of what we do together.’

‘You make it sound like we’re having an affair behind our wives’ backs.’

‘I mean how we always meet in pubs,’ he said. ‘And how we drink all afternoon.’

‘But what else would one do in a pub?’

‘It’s just that you seem to spend a lot of time in places like this, that’s all.’

‘Oh, I see.’

‘And I wondered when you get your writing done? Surely you don’t go home and work in the evening after six or seven pints?’

‘If you didn’t want to meet in a pub,’ I said, ignoring his question, ‘then you didn’t have to. You could always have suggested somewhere else.’

‘It’s not that.’

‘Then what’s the problem?’

‘Can I be really honest with you?’

I sighed. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, stop pissing about, Daniel,’ I said.

‘Theo.’

‘What?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘It’s just… I was doing some more online research this week.’

‘Why do online research when I’m right here with you? You can ask me anything you want. I’ve been incredibly honest with you so far, wouldn’t you agree?’

‘I was looking at old photos,’ he continued. ‘From when you were younger. I even found one of you and Erich Ackermann together.’

‘Really?’ I said, surprised, for at first I couldn’t recall us ever having our picture taken.

‘Yes, you’re sitting outside a bar, having a drink, and your arm is around his shoulders. You’re looking into the camera. He’s looking at you.’

I threw my mind back almost thirty years and had a vague recollection of us sitting in Montmartre while a young waitress took our photo. Had Erich held on to that for years afterwards, I wondered, and it had somehow found its way into a newspaper obituary or a critical work? How utterly tragic, I thought.

‘Yes? And? What of it?’

‘Well, you must know. You were very handsome.’

‘I suppose I was.’

‘I don’t mean to be rude.’

‘If anything, that was a compliment.’

‘It’s just that you don’t look like that any more,’ he said.

‘Well, of course I don’t,’ I said, growing irritated by his obfuscation. ‘It’s been over twenty-five years since Two Germans was published. I’m hardly going to look the same as I did when I was little more than a boy.’

‘And I was thinking about a neighbour of mine,’ he said.

‘A what?’ I asked. ‘A neighbour, did you say? Well, what about him?’

‘He drank himself to death.’

I sighed. I could see where this was going now. ‘Did he indeed?’ I said quietly.

‘It wasn’t his fault. He was an alcoholic. But in those last years, his skin looked just like yours. Very grey, I mean. And he had the same dark bags under his eyes that you have and red lines across his cheeks and nose. I was just a kid, but he always frightened me when he came too close.’

‘You’re really making me feel very good about myself,’ I said.

‘I’m not trying to upset you.’

‘And yet I feel upset.’

‘I just wondered whether, you know, you might have a problem. And, if so, whether you should do something about it.’

I sat back in the chair and found myself, quite unexpectedly, laughing. I was aware that I was coming across as a little hysterical so it was no great surprise when he began to look at me nervously and shift uncomfortably in his seat.

‘Oh, Theo,’ I said, reaching across and patting his hand a few times. ‘Bless you. But of course I have a problem. Do you think that’s news to me? I drink a minimum of seven pints of beer, two double whiskies, a single malt and a glass of Baileys every day, seven days a week. Does that seem like the actions of a rational, uncomplicated, sober man to you?’

‘No, but…’ He frowned. ‘I mean, if you know you have a problem, then why don’t you look for help?’

‘Because I don’t want any.’

‘Everybody needs some—’

‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘I’m not trying to be funny, but let me get another drink first. I feel like I’m going to need it. And I’m sure you need a cigarette if you’re going to keep impersonating the Archbishop of Canterbury on the first day of Lent.’

I stood up and he looked annoyed that I was interrupting this particular conversation to return to the bar and, a moment later, he marched past me towards the door, his cigarette pack and lighter in hand, his notepad sticking reliably out of his pocket. I watched him go and couldn’t help but laugh. There was something adorably guileless about the poor boy, I thought. He’d always been like that, of course, ever since he was a child. He’d believed in the tooth fairy a lot longer than other children.

‘I’ll take a whisky too,’ I told the barman when he took my usual order and when it arrived I knocked it back in one go, leaving the empty glass on the counter as I carried the beers to the table.

‘We’ve talked about Dash, about Edith and about The Tribesman,’ said Theo, when he returned. ‘And I think I’ve got everything I need on them. Since his name has come up, perhaps we should finally talk about Erich.’

‘There’s nothing I’d enjoy more,’ I said with a wide smile.

‘You told me that you felt badly about how you treated Dash Hardy but, of course, he doesn’t figure in your work very much. Erich Ackermann does, though. He’s where everything begins for you.’

‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘But it was all such a long time ago. Quite honestly, I barely think of him at all any more.’

‘But you must on occasion. And he’s a central part of my thesis, obviously.’

‘On occasion,’ I agreed. ‘What would you like to know?’

‘I’d like to know,’ he said, laying an unexpected stress on the verb, ‘what you feel when you look back at those days. And whether you feel that you treated him fairly?’

‘Well,’ I replied, taking a draught of my pint and considering this, ‘I suppose if you want the absolute truth, I can see that I didn’t treat him quite as well as I might have. I’ll admit that I cultivated his friendship from the start, but I don’t think there’s any great harm in that. Artists have been doing that since the dawn of time. And, let’s face it, you’ve cultivated mine, after all, haven’t you? To get ahead.’

‘Well,’ he replied, blushing a little, and it seemed as if he was about to say something to justify himself, but I didn’t let him.

‘Look, on the night that we met I could see how drawn he was to me. It was so obvious it was almost pitiable. Erich had shut down that part of his soul for decades after the death of Oskar Gött and, for whatever reason, I had reawoken him. He was utterly reinvigorated by my presence, as if he’d taken a deep breath after staying underwater for too long. That’s why he invited me to visit all those cities with him; it wasn’t to help him, it wasn’t to be an assistant, it was because he fancied me. And why not? I was a good-looking boy and I brought him back to life. I may have taken advantage of his good nature, but why not? I flirted with him, made sure that I remained sexually ambiguous at all times. Always a possibility but never a certainty. I led him on to the point where he was so overwhelmed with desire that I think there was literally nothing he wouldn’t have done for me, had I asked. And then, when I got everything I needed from him, I wrote Two Germans.’

‘And your friendship ended there?’

‘This might seem callous to you, Daniel,’ I said. ‘Theo, I mean. But once I had what I needed, why would I have stuck around? Are you planning a lifelong relationship with me after you complete your thesis?’

‘No, but—’

‘I didn’t consider him a friend, anyway, and it’s impossible to define how he saw me. He was paying me, remember, and you don’t pay your friends to travel with you, do you? You pay an assistant. And also, other than a love of books, we had very little in common. Think about it: he was old; I was young. He wanted a lover; I didn’t. His career was almost behind him; mine was yet to begin. You could say that I actually did him a favour when I severed the umbilical cord that connected us, even if the cut did produce more blood than either of us had anticipated. No, the time had come to say goodbye. Anything else would have just made Erich look foolish. If he could only have seen that, then he might have thanked me.’

‘So you dropped him.’

I shrugged. ‘If you want to put it that way, yes.’

‘Would it be fair to say that you took his friendship, his mentoring, and all his belief in you and simply threw it back in his face?’

I considered this for a moment. ‘Try to look at it from my point of view,’ I said. ‘What you’re describing is a young man utterly calculating and dishonest in his actions. But was Erich honest with me? Let’s face it, if I had been two hundred pounds overweight and looked like something that had been washed in on the tides after a particularly brutal storm, do you think he would have asked me to join him for a drink that night in West Berlin? I wasn’t the only waiter working that night, you know, but I was the one he chose. It’s easy to look at me as the villain of the piece but, really, Erich’s actions weren’t entirely honourable either.’

‘I suppose it comes down to motivation,’ said Theo. ‘Whatever Erich did was done out of love. And confusion. And regret for a wasted life. While you were just using him. And, really, did he deserve it? An elderly man who, many decades before, while he was still a teenager, had made a single terrible mistake, one that he’d had to live with ever since. How many young men in Germany at that time did something to send people to their death? Oh, it doesn’t make it right, of course it doesn’t, but he wasn’t a monster. Just a bewildered boy who acted without thinking. He spent his entire life punishing himself for that. Did he need that extra suffering at the end?’

I lowered my head, closed my eyes and tried to control my temper. It seemed a little rich to me that, with all the help I was giving this boy, he had the audacity to be so judgemental towards me. I looked up again, ready to say as much, but he was doing that thing again, tapping his index finger quickly against his thumb, just as Daniel had done, and I softened. I needed his forgiveness, not his condemnation.

‘Like I said,’ I continued quietly, ‘it’s all a long time ago. And if you don’t mind, I’d prefer not to talk about Erich any more. Sometimes it feels as if I’ve spent half of my life discussing that man and, sooner or later, it has to stop.’

‘But—’

‘No, Daniel,’ I said, placing a hand flat on the table. ‘It has to stop.’

He nodded. ‘All right.’

The notepad reappeared and he turned to a blank page and started scribbling away, a curious smile on his face. He didn’t talk for a long time and I found myself fixated on his hands.

‘Do you remember when Miss Willow tried to get you to write with your right hand?’ I asked, smiling at the memory.

‘I’m sorry?’ he said, looking up.

‘When you were seven or eight. And Miss Willow said that it would be better if you stopped writing with your left hand. She tried to force you to write with your right and I had to go in to the head, Mrs Lane, and lodge a complaint.’

He said nothing, shook his head, and began scribbling in his notebook again. I ordered some more drinks and drank another neat whisky at the bar, which wasn’t like me. I had my strict drinking routine and preferred not to alter it. Somehow, though, I just felt like I needed more. I wanted to fade away.

‘Let’s move on to something else,’ he said, when I sat back down again. He moved his beer to one side, barely glancing at it, while I took a long draught from mine. ‘I’d like to ask you about your time in New York. You wrote two books there, am I right?’

‘That’s right. The Breach and The Broken Ones. Will they play a big part in your thesis?’

‘Of course, but I’m more interested in how you developed the ideas for those books. I’ve established how you worked on the first three.’

‘You’re not still angry at what I told you about The Tribesman, are you?’ I asked with a sigh. ‘Really, I think you’re making a mountain out of a molehill.’

‘You were working for Storī at the time?’ he asked, ignoring my question.

‘Not working for, no. I owned Storī. I founded the magazine from scratch. I was the editor. The whole operation was under my control.’

‘Of course. Sorry. And what made you set it up in the first place?’

‘Well, when I left England I had an idea that it would be worthwhile to do something to help further the careers of new writers. I liked the idea of literary philanthropy. No one had ever helped me, after all, and—’

‘Except Erich.’

‘Well, yes.’

‘And Dash.’

‘And Dash, that’s true.’

‘And Edith.’

‘Yes, of course. You see, I wanted the magazine to become a place where writers longed to see their work in print, which is why I only published four editions a year, each with a dozen or so stories. It kept the quality very high. To be published in Storī, I felt, should be an honour. An aspiration. Like being published in the New Yorker.’

‘I’ve gone through all the old issues.’

‘Of the New Yorker?’

‘No, of course not,’ he said, rolling his eyes, and I sat back, astonished that he could behave so disrespectfully towards me. Perhaps he’d had too much to drink. ‘Of Storī.’

‘Oh, of course. What, all of them?’

‘Yes. It’s important for my thesis to identify where your tastes lay.’

‘You’re very diligent. You really do want to be a biographer, don’t you?’

‘There’s some pretty brilliant writing in there. Some really wonderful work.’

‘Thank you.’

‘And you discovered some great talents. Henry Etta James, for one.’

‘Oh yes,’ I said, laughing a little. ‘Not that she ever gives me any credit for launching her career. You know, when she won the Pulitzer for I Am Dissatisfied with My Boyfriend, My Body and My Career, I sent her a floral bouquet and she didn’t even have the good manners to thank me. She’s held a grudge against me for a ridiculously long time.’

‘Over that story you refused to publish?’

I stared at him in astonishment.

‘How on earth do you know about that?’ I asked, trying to control the slight quiver in my voice.

‘She told me.’

‘Who did?’

‘Henry Etta.’

‘Henrietta James?’

‘Yes.’

I couldn’t have been more surprised if he had pulled his face away to reveal hers lying beneath. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘You’ll have to explain. Are you… How on earth do you know Henrietta? She can’t be a friend of yours, surely?’

‘Oh no,’ he replied. ‘We’re not friends as such. I wouldn’t even presume. But I went to New York earlier in the year, while I was doing some research for my thesis. I thought it was important to get some idea of where Storī fitted into your life. You were there for a long time, after all.’

‘All right,’ I said doubtfully. ‘But how on earth did you find yourself crossing paths with her?’

‘I contacted a few of the writers who had begun their careers by being published in your magazine. It wasn’t difficult; they’re all on social media. Most of them didn’t reply, but she did. She was very generous with her time, actually. She took me out for cocktails at the Russian Tea Rooms, which was pretty exciting. She even introduced me to her editor.’

‘Did she indeed?’ I asked, raising an eyebrow in surprise. ‘That was good of her.’

‘She was very encouraging.’

‘And I suppose she had nothing but bad things to say about me?’

‘Not at all. She was very complimentary. She did say that you’d had a small dispute about a story that the Atlantic had gone on to publish—’

‘She’d completely rewritten it by then,’ I protested. ‘It wasn’t even remotely the same story that she gave me.’

‘She wasn’t negative, Maurice,’ he insisted. ‘Settle down.’

‘Please don’t…’ I breathed in through my nose again, trying to control my temper. ‘Please don’t tell me to settle down, all right?’

‘Okay. But I promise she wasn’t rude about you in any way.’

‘Well, all right,’ I said, feeling disgruntled anyway.

‘I’m sorry if I’ve upset you.’

‘Oh, please,’ I said, waving away his concern. ‘I have about as much interest in Henrietta’s opinion of me as I do the Queen’s.’

‘Would you like another drink? You look like you could use one.’

‘But you’ve barely touched yours,’ I said, seeing how his glass was still three-quarters full while mine was almost empty. ‘Have I been drinking quickly or are you drinking slowly?’

‘Does it matter? Anyway, I’ll get you one if you like.’

‘Yes, please,’ I said, and he made his way to the bar. It was hard not to feel a little under siege but, when I analysed everything he’d said so far, there seemed no reason for me to feel so.

‘She got married last year,’ he said when he returned, placing a fresh pint on the table for me, and I took a long draught from it. It irritated me to see that he’d got himself a glass of water. I didn’t like drinking alone any more.

‘Who did?’ I asked.

‘Henrietta.’

‘Oh,’ I said, not caring very much. ‘Good for her.’

‘I think you know her husband.’

‘He’s not another writer, is he?’ I asked, rolling my eyes. ‘What is it with these New Yorkers and their—’

‘No, an editor, actually,’ said Theo. ‘Jarrod Swanson.’

I thought about it, but the name meant nothing to me. ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t ring a bell.’

‘He was an assistant at Storī for a time. He was your assistant.’

‘Jarrod Swanson,’ I repeated, racking my memory to recall him and, eventually, I remembered. Jarrod had been classmates with Henrietta at the New School but they’d broken up and, angry with her, he’d rejected one of her stories, the very story that I discovered and went on to publish as her first work. So they’d got back together in the end? And now they were married! Well, good for them, I supposed. It was no skin off my nose.

‘Jarrod is actually back working at Storī these days,’ said Theo. ‘He’s no longer interested in being a writer, though. He says he got to the point where he realized that he just wasn’t good enough and that his calling lay in working with other writers. He has your old job there. Editor. He’s making a go of it too. I’m surprised you didn’t know any of this.’

I shrugged. ‘I haven’t paid any attention to the magazine since I sold it,’ I said. ‘I knew it was still in existence, of course, but other than that…’ I turned away and checked my watch. The afternoon was turning into a cross-examination and I wasn’t enjoying it.

‘I’m going to make it a central chapter in my thesis,’ said Theo. ‘I’m calling it Storītime.’

‘How inventive.’

‘Yes, I thought so. And, if you don’t mind, I’d like to ask you about something I discovered while I was over there.’

‘Fire away,’ I said. ‘I get the sense that our foreplay is over at last and, finally, you’re about to fuck me.’

‘I’m sorry?’ he said, sitting back but looking utterly nonplussed by my choice of words.

‘Just ask what you want to ask,’ I said with a sigh. ‘I can see you’re itching to do so.’

‘All right then,’ he said, flicking through his notes. ‘The thing is, when Jarrod heard that you were to be the subject of my thesis, he asked whether I’d like to have a look through the Storī archives.’

‘I sincerely hope that you found more interesting things to do in New York than read through all of them.’

‘Actually, I jumped at the opportunity. The magazine’s been going a long time now. I thought there was a chance that I might stumble across a lost story by someone who went on to be famous.’

‘Famous!’ I said, bursting out laughing. ‘These are writers we’re talking about, Daniel, not movie stars.’

‘Maurice, you keep—’

‘I keep what?’

He shook his head. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘Anyway, of course I couldn’t possibly have read everything there. There are thousands of stories in that room.’

‘I think you’d abandon reading for ever if you even tried.’

‘So instead I decided to focus my attention on two particular periods.’

‘Oh yes? Which ones?’

‘Spring 2009 and winter 2013.’

‘All right,’ I said, thinking back, trying to remember what was happening in my life then. ‘You were, what, about six years old in 2009 and ten years old in 2013?’

‘No, I would have been…’ He seemed surprised by what I had said. ‘I was born in 1996 so I would have been thirteen and then seventeen.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘My mistake. So what was so special about those particular periods? Are you going to tell me or do I have to guess?’

‘It was when you wrote the first drafts of The Breach and The Broken Ones.’

I lifted my drink, swallowed almost a third of a pint in one go, then set it back on the table.

‘You really are very diligent, aren’t you?’ I said. ‘I feel I may have underestimated you, Theo. And did you find anything good in there? Something that you think I should have published but didn’t?’

He took a second notepad from his satchel, a much larger one, and flicked through it, stopping at a particular page and reading it for a long time before speaking.

‘There was a story by a woman named Marianne Jilson,’ he said finally. ‘Called “When the Bough Broke”.’

‘Awful title,’ I said.

‘True,’ replied Theo. ‘And the story wasn’t much better, to be honest. Well, the writing wasn’t, anyway. Although the plot was sort of interesting.’

‘I don’t remember it.’

‘It was about five brothers living in America in the 1930s, working on their parents’ farm. Four join the army but one is left behind because he has flat feet and they won’t take him.’

‘Flat feet,’ I said, laughing. ‘I’ve never really understood what that means, have you?’

‘The story is built around how difficult he finds it, being the only young man in town when everyone else has gone away to fight. He feels emasculated, of course.’

‘I see,’ I said quietly.

‘And then there was another story, by Ho Kitson. A Chinese-American writer, if I remember correctly from the accompanying letter.’

‘And what did he or she write?’

‘He. A story called “A Statement of Intent”.’

‘Better title.’

‘Agreed.’

‘Oh, I’m so glad.’

‘And Ho Kitson’s story was about a girl who has abandoned her baby in a railway carriage in California, just as it’s about to set off for a cross-country journey.’

I nodded but said nothing.

‘You can see where I’m going on this, I presume?’ he asked after a lengthy pause.

‘The Breach,’ I said.

‘The Breach,’ he agreed. ‘The opening chapter of that novel sees a young woman leaving her unwanted baby in a railway carriage. Another woman boards shortly after, discovers the baby and, being unable to have a child herself, steals him. No one ever knows. She just takes him home and she and her husband raise him as their own. And when the boy turns eighteen, the Vietnam War breaks out and almost all the sons of the families in town go to fight, but when he goes for his medical test—’

‘You don’t need to recount my own novel to me, Theo,’ I said, growing annoyed now by his impertinence. ‘I wrote it. I think I remember what it was about.’

‘And then there’s The Broken Ones,’ he continued, looking down at his notes again. ‘Do I need to go on?’

‘Well, you’re obviously enjoying yourself,’ I said with a shrug. ‘So why not?’

‘Steven Conway. A story called “The Wedding Anniversary”. A husband and wife visit Paris to celebrate twenty years together and, while there, she has a brief affair. And then Anna Smith. A story called “Tuesday”. A comic story about life on a university campus where a professor is trying and failing to seduce his students. And if we look at the plot of The Broken Ones—’

‘All right, Daniel, for fuck’s sake,’ I said, raising my voice.

‘Theo,’ he said calmly.

‘Just tell me what your fucking point is.’

He looked at me with a certain contempt in his eyes and laughed. ‘It’s not obvious?’

‘Not to me,’ I said.

‘The ideas. They weren’t yours.’

‘And?’

‘Maurice, I’m not trying to be obtuse—’

‘Then you’re failing. Tell me this, Theo. Those four stories you read. Were they any good?’

He considered this for a moment and shrugged. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘I mean, they had some good ideas, story-wise, but the writing was weak and the characters were never fully developed.’

‘And if you had been the editor of Storī at the time, would you have published them?’

‘No. Definitely not.’

‘So what’s the problem?’

‘Your novels – those two novels – they weren’t your ideas. They’re a blend of other people’s stories.’

I smiled. Other People’s Stories. My new book. My unfinished book. The book that Daniel, the little snoop, had discovered and got so worked up over.

‘But their stories weren’t any good,’ I protested. ‘And my novels, the two that we’re talking about, were both very well received.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Look, Theo. I’m a writer. And what’s the most irritating question that a writer can be asked?’

‘I don’t know. Do you write by hand or on a computer?’

‘No, it’s Where do you get your ideas? And the answer is that no one knows where they come from and nobody should know. They evolve in thin air, they float down from some mysterious heaven and we reach out to grab one, to grasp it in our imagination, and to make it our own. One writer might overhear a conversation in a café and a whole novel will build from that moment. Another might see an article in a newspaper and a plot will suggest itself immediately. Another might hear about an unpleasant incident that happened to a friend of a friend at a supermarket. So I took ideas from badly written stories that had been sent to me – unsolicited, I might add – and turned them into something that was not only publishable but sold very well. What’s the problem with that?’

‘When you express it like that, nothing,’ said Theo, looking utterly frustrated by my reply. ‘But don’t you think—’

‘I think what I just said, that’s what I think. Are you trying to suggest that no one has ever written a novel about an abandoned child before? For God’s sake, Daniel, how does the story of Moses begin? The Pharaoh has condemned all male Hebrew children to death and Jochebed places the baby in an ark, where’s he discovered by Bithiah. Are you saying that Ho Kitson stole her idea from the Bible? And, what, a college professor who seduces his students? You’ve read Updike, I presume? Mailer? Roth?’

‘But it’s not the same!’ he insisted, shaking his head, clearly discombobulated now. ‘You’re trying to justify your actions and—’

‘I’m not trying to justify anything. And if you have an accusation to make, Theo, then perhaps you should just make it. If not, perhaps you should stop fishing for scandal and focus on the work itself. Be a literary biographer, as you say you want to be, and not a tabloid journalist.’

He hesitated and, finally, shook his head. ‘I just think it’s a little strange that—’

‘My boy, you’re going to write an extraordinary thesis,’ I said. ‘I have to compliment you. The level of research you’re undertaking is exemplary. I presume you’ve talked to your father about this. He’s still interested in developing this book, I mean? A book about me?’

‘Yes,’ said Theo, looking down at the table and tapping it with his fingers. The wind had truly been taken out of his sails and I couldn’t help but feel a little amused. The poor boy looked crestfallen. He’d thought he was doing a Woodward and Bernstein on me but the truth was, he was very new to this game and I’d been playing it for a long time. It was hardly a contest of equals.

‘Are you all right, Theo?’ I asked, reaching forward and taking his hand in mine. ‘If you don’t mind my saying so, you look a little shaken.’

‘I’m fine,’ he said, checking his watch. ‘I should probably go. I have some work I need to do.’

‘All right,’ I replied. ‘But what a great afternoon! If you ask me, I think it’s very impressive the lengths you’re going to in order to write a strong thesis. It’s obvious that you’re going to be a great success one day, I’m certain of it. No one’s secrets will be safe from you. Are you sure you wouldn’t like another drink before you go?’ I asked, reaching into my pocket and removing my wallet. ‘I feel quite thirsty and I’m so enjoying talking to you.’

6. The Cross Keys, Covent Garden

Sometimes you just know that you’ve made a mistake. I had put my faith in Theo, had thought that he would be the one to reintroduce me to the literary world, but after our last encounter it began to dawn on me that I had chosen the wrong person. He was hard-working, certainly, an admirable trait in one so young, but simply too naïve. He’d done his research but had utterly failed to understand the value of the information he’d discovered. He’d allowed me to dismiss his concerns and even to make him feel foolish for voicing them at all. Had I been in his place, I would have tightened the screw and made me reveal all, but the poor boy just didn’t have the killer instinct. I realized, to my disappointment, that it was time to let him go, just as I’d let Erich go, just as I’d let Dash go, and just as I’d let Edith fall. They’d each served a purpose and, while Theo ultimately hadn’t proved as useful to me as I had hoped, at least he’d inspired me to get back to writing and to put the events of the past few years behind me. It was time to stop drinking and begin a novel. If he had done nothing else for me, he had done that.

When I woke that morning, I reached for my phone, intending to text him to say that I would not be available for any further interviews but, just as I lifted it, a message arrived from him, asking whether we could meet later that afternoon in the Cross Keys. I thought, why not? It would be kinder, after all, to tell him face to face that our acquaintance had come to an end and that he would have to finish his thesis without me, than to do so over something so impersonal as a text. And so I replied in the affirmative, saying that I’d meet him there at three o’clock. I hoped there wouldn’t be a scene. I’ve always hated scenes.

It would have been Daniel’s birthday that day and I spent most of the morning, and my journey to Covent Garden, thinking about him. His loss lay heavily on me but, just as I was discarding Theo, it was time to discard him too. I couldn’t write if I felt guilt. The truth was, I had been wrong all those years when I imagined that I would like to be a father. Perhaps it was the idea rather than the reality that appealed to me most for, in the end, much like my marriage to Edith, the experience hadn’t moved me as much as I had expected it to. Certainly, I had formed an attachment to the boy and would have preferred him still to be with me, but a life alone, where I was in control of my own movements and decisions, was my natural state.

Other People’s Stories had begun as a rough idea one evening when I was feeling a little dejected from having discovered nothing interesting in the recent pile of Storī submissions. It had been almost a year since I’d found anything that I could adapt as my own and so I had started to think about my own life and how I had turned an unpromising beginning into a triumphant career. There were the people who really mattered – my parents, Erich, Dash, Edith and Daniel – and it was true that each had contributed something to my success. I started to make a few rough notes. I thought back over my own actions since I’d first left Yorkshire for the Savoy Hotel in West Berlin and realized the story I was searching for had been there all along.

It wasn’t another person’s story at all.

It was my own.

Not that I intended to write a memoir. Certainly not. Fiction was my métier and fiction was my comforting home. Also, it wasn’t as if I could ever write a truthful autobiography. I would be vilified instantly and, one would assume, arrested. No, I couldn’t do anything as theatrical as that, but what I could do was write a novel. All I’d ever needed was a story and, once I had that, I still believed that I was one of the best in the game.

And so I did what I had been doing all my life: I started to write.

I began with a boy growing up in Yorkshire who wanted to make something of himself. I kept separate files, taking the truth and recreating it exactly as I remembered it. I began with my friendship with Henry Rowe, that early conquest of mine and the first person who had made me understand the powerful draw of my beauty. It hadn’t worked out, of course, and I’d never managed to finish the story I was writing, but I’d been young at the time and I wasn’t going to reproach myself for that. I’d still been learning, after all, and Henry had proved an excellent place to start.

Then there was Erich. And Dash. And Edith. All good stories to tell. To make it easier for myself, my first draft was written exactly as I remembered things, using their real names and using my own. The plan was to write about a person with absolutely no conscience, someone who would use anyone to get ahead, an operator on the very highest level. And then, when my first draft was written, I would get down to the real work. Change the names, of course, and draw much wider distinctions between myself and the characters’ real-life counterparts. Also, I had decided that my protagonist would not be an aspiring writer but an actor. Erich and Dash would be great men of the theatre, Edith an ingénue. I had a lovely idea for a section where I and my Dash recreations would spend a night at the home of Laurence Olivier and Joan Plowright, where Olivier, wily old fox that he was, would be the only person who had ever seen through me. I was certain that Gore would appreciate the comparison with perhaps the most handsome and talented actor ever to appear on screen. I had written several drafts of that section and it was my favourite by far because I’d always thought that, if Gore had simply taken the time to get to know me, then we might have got along. It was a shame, I thought, that he was no longer alive to read it.

That day had also been a Saturday, and Daniel had been in a grouchy mood all morning, which I put down to the fact that he was thirteen and was entering puberty. He’d been quite annoying of late and I was starting to dread the two or three years that lay ahead.

I’d gone out that afternoon to the Storī offices to catch up on some work and then, not relishing the idea of returning home to a moody teenager, had gone to the Angelika for a screening of Midnight in Paris. It had left me in a good mood, and when I got off the subway on my way home, I stopped at a local take-away and picked up some food. His favourite restaurant, I might add, not mine.

When I returned home, however, I was surprised to realize that the apartment was empty. It was designed in such a way that Daniel’s bedroom was at one end, near the front door, while mine, and my office, was at the other, the two wings separated by a communal living space and kitchen. I opened the door to his room, but he wasn’t there and, as he wasn’t lying on the sofa reading or watching television, I assumed that he’d gone out. Perhaps one of his friends had called around and they’d gone to the movies or to wherever boys his age went when there were no adults around to tell them no. I generally didn’t ask too many questions. Daniel, after all, was quite responsible and, because of that, I was content to allow him his freedom.

It was only after I put the food in the refrigerator for reheating later and returned to the living room that I heard noises coming from the other end of the apartment. Daniel rarely went down there so I was immediately surprised and a little anxious. I walked down the corridor, opened the door to my office and, to my surprise, discovered my son sitting at my computer. I don’t think I’d ever seen him there before, as he knew that he was expressly forbidden from using it.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

He didn’t reply, nor did he turn around. His attention was entirely fixed on the screen before him and only when I repeated my question did he slowly turn to look at me. His expression was one I had never seen on his face before, a mixture of disillusionment, fear and hatred.

‘I’ve told you before, Daniel,’ I said, slightly disconcerted by this, and I could hear in my voice that I did not sound as stern as I had hoped. ‘My office is out of bounds at all times and no exceptions. You have your own computer. Use it.’

‘It’s broken,’ he said, and his tone was rather flat, as if he could barely bring himself to respond to me. ‘I dropped it earlier and it’s not working.’

‘Then we’ll get it fixed,’ I said. ‘Or we can get you a new one on Monday. But don’t use mine, all right? That’s my work computer. I don’t like people messing with it.’

He stared at me for a long time and, despite the fact that he was only thirteen, I couldn’t help but feel that I was the child in this situation.

‘Was Edith my mother?’ he asked finally, and I hesitated, like a chess player calculating a few steps ahead, wondering how he would respond to any reply of mine, and what I would say to him then, and how he would react to that. I turned my attention to the screen before him. A Word document was open but I couldn’t make out which one.

‘Where did you hear that name?’ I asked, and it crossed my mind that I had never talked to him about my marriage. There seemed no reason to, after all, for Edith was already dead before I even met the Italian chambermaid. All Daniel had ever known was he and I, and there had seemed little point in dragging up the past.

‘I read your book,’ he said. ‘The first section, anyway. Everything you’ve written about your life.’

His voice came in quick gasps; he was obviously upset, and he reached for the Ventolin inhaler on the desk before him and took a quick puff to decongest his lungs.

‘Edith wasn’t your mother,’ I said.

‘But you were married to her. It says so here.’ He pointed in the direction of the open file.

‘She was my wife, yes, but she wasn’t your mother. She died a few years before you were born. She had nothing to do with you at all.’

‘It says here that you killed her,’ he said, his voice filling with emotion, tears starting to fall down his face, and he took another quick puff from his inhaler. His words were coming in staccato rhythm, the syllables broken up between gasps.

‘It’s just a novel, Daniel,’ I said, moving towards him. ‘It’s not the truth. You know the difference between fiction and real life, right?’

‘But you use your name,’ he insisted, raising his voice now. ‘It’s all Maurice this and Maurice that. And you talk about Two Germans. And I looked up Edith Camberley on the Internet and it says that she wrote a book too. And this Erich person,’ he continued. ‘I read that file too. And another man.’ He swallowed, looking half embarrassed and half horrified. ‘Did you have sex with men? Are you gay?’

‘What do you know about sex?’ I asked, trying to laugh it off.

‘You’ve written that you killed her,’ he said, turning and sliding his finger along the top of the mouse, dragging the screen back to the part where I described our year in Norwich, when I had felt like Edith’s eunuch. ‘It says that you pushed her down the stairs.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I said, trying to keep control of my temper. I could see that he was getting more upset now too. His breath was growing even shorter in his throat and I knew from experience that when he got so worked up he needed more and more of his Ventolin. ‘She lost her footing, that’s all. And she fell. It was an accident.’

‘You write that you pushed her. She found out that you’d copied her book and sold it as your own and—’

‘It’s a novel, Daniel,’ I insisted. ‘Nothing more. For Christ’s sake!’

‘It’s not!’ he cried, and the tears were rolling down his face now, his words difficult to understand. ‘I’ve read all of it. I’ve read everything you’ve written here. You didn’t even write any of your own books. You stole them all!’

‘That’s not true,’ I said, starting to feel panicked now, for I’d never seen him so upset, nor had I ever found myself so close to discovery. ‘I wrote every word.’

‘But they weren’t your ideas! You’re a liar!’

‘I’m not,’ I told him. ‘Look, you shouldn’t even be in here. You’ve broken into my private computer and—’

‘Was Edith my mother?’ he asked again, and the words were completely disconnected from each other as he tried to catch his breath. I looked to my right. His blue Ventolin inhaler sat between us. ‘Did you kill my mother?’ he shouted.

‘Of course not,’ I cried. ‘What do you take me for?’

‘You did!’ he roared. ‘You killed my mother! And you stole her book!’

He could barely breathe now, and he reached out for his Ventolin and, without thinking, I reached for it too, grabbing it before he could and wrapping it in my closed fist as I stepped back towards the door.

‘Give it to me,’ he gasped, and I told myself to hand it over but, somehow, I couldn’t. I knew my son, I knew how honest he was, how persistent, and I knew that he would never let this go until he discovered the truth. ‘Give it to me, Dad!’ he cried, standing up, the words like broken syllables in his throat as he wheezed, his entire body doing all it could to clutch at small breaths of air to clear his increasingly clogged lungs.

‘I can’t,’ I said. My eyes flicked to the clock on the wall of my office. It was eight minutes past two when he fell to the floor, his hand on his chest, his body pulsing up and down as it went into shock. And at that moment I understood only too clearly that it was him or me. If I helped him, my career would be over, and I could not – I would not – allow that to happen. I had worked far too long and far too hard to let it go. I was a writer, for fuck’s sake. I was born to be a writer. No one would ever take that away from me.

‘Jesus.’

I looked up, glanced around. I was surrounded by a blur that gradually began to focus. I was in the Cross Keys. How had I got there? I remembered leaving home earlier but couldn’t recall arriving. How long had I been sitting there?

‘Daniel?’ I asked quietly, but it wasn’t Daniel sitting opposite me. It was Theo.

‘Your wife?’ he said. ‘Your own son? I knew you were bad, but this—’

‘What are you talking about?’ I asked. I felt that disoriented sensation one feels when waking from a mid-afternoon nap, confused about the time of day, uncertain of one’s location or whether you’ve been part of a dream or reality.

‘I thought you were just a liar. A manipulator. An operator and a plagiarist. But this? I never even suspected—’

‘Who do you think you’re talking to?’ I said, leaning forward, my entire body shaking now in confusion. ‘You can’t speak to me like that, you little prick.’

He nodded down towards his phone and tapped the screen. A large red button was visible in the centre.

‘You can’t act as if you didn’t say it. I have it all here.’

‘You recorded me?’ I asked, frightened now. I couldn’t recall ever being frightened in my entire life.

‘Of course I did,’ he said. ‘I’ve recorded all our conversations. Right from the start. You said I could, remember? When we met that first day in the Queen’s Head on Denman Street? I wanted to quote you accurately for my so-called thesis.’

I swallowed, trying to recall. That had been almost a month ago now but, yes, he had asked and I had said yes. He’d put the phone in his pocket so that it wouldn’t distract us and I had complimented him on his professionalism. But still, the things he was saying didn’t quite make sense to me. ‘What are you talking about?’ I asked. ‘You are writing a thesis, aren’t you? That’s what you told me.’

‘No,’ he replied. ‘I’m writing a book.’

‘A thesis that will become a book.’

‘No, just a book.’

I shook my head, desperately trying to understand. ‘A book about me, though, yes? For your father? At Random House?’

‘Oh yes,’ he said, nodding. ‘That’s true. It was his idea, actually. And I do want to be a literary biographer. I know I’m young, but what’s wrong with that? You were young when you published your first book. If this works out, and I think it will now, I’d say I have a great career ahead of me.’

‘So there’s no thesis then,’ I said, considering this. ‘Just a book.’ Well, that wasn’t so bad. It cut out the middle man, so to speak. ‘You’ve been writing a book about me all this time.’

He smiled and looked around the bar, the expression on his face suggesting that he couldn’t quite believe how slow I was.

‘You don’t get it, do you?’ he asked. ‘You’re not the subject of the book.’

‘I’m not?’

‘No.’

‘Then who is?’

‘You can’t guess?’

I thought about it but, no, I couldn’t. ‘Who?’ I asked again.

‘Don’t you remember when we first met? I told you that books had been my passion since I was a kid? And that my father worked in publishing but that his uncle used to write a little?’

I looked away. Did I remember this? Yes, I did, but I had focussed only on the fact that his father was an editor.

‘My great-uncle, that would be,’ he said. ‘He’s the subject. I’m writing about him.’

‘And not me?’

‘No.’

‘But I don’t understand,’ I said, placing both hands on the edge of the table before me, for I was beginning to feel faint. ‘I feel like I’m in a daze.’

‘How’s your German, Maurice?’ he asked.

‘Average, I suppose,’ I said. ‘Enough to get by on. Why?’

‘Theo Field,’ he said, very slowly, enunciating each syllable as he smiled at me.

‘I don’t…’ And then, like a door opening beneath my feet and sending me falling to the rocks below, I felt a sensation that I was no longer part of this world. ‘Field,’ I said. ‘Acker.’

‘Acker,’ he agreed with a nod.

‘Ackermann. You’re…’

‘My father is Georg Ackermann’s son. He was killed in a tram crash, remember? You told me so yourself. Erich’s younger brother.’

‘Erich was your uncle.’

‘Well, my great-uncle.’

I leaned forward and peered into his face. Did he look like Erich Ackermann? No, he looked like Daniel. He looked like my son.

‘I thought you would be more willing to confide in me if I shared some things in common with him,’ he said, sensing what I was thinking. ‘It wasn’t very difficult. There’s lots of pictures of him online, so I changed my hair colour to look like his. And he posted pictures on his Instagram account of his bedroom and I saw that band poster on the wall. So I bought a T-shirt to match.’

‘No,’ I said quietly.

‘And he wore a ring on the fourth finger of his right hand. So I got one of those too.’

‘Your glasses?’

‘There’s no prescription,’ he said, taking them off and handing them across to me. ‘Just frames with glass. The same ones that he wore.’

I put them on. I could see through them without any difficulty.

‘He posted videos on Facebook too. That’s where I noticed this.’ He started to tap his index finger against his thumb rapidly. ‘A nervous affliction, was it?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He’d had it all his life. And your asthma?’ I asked.

He burst out laughing, reached into his satchel and removed his blue inhaler, handing it across.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘Try it.’

I put it in my mouth, pushed the button and breathed in quickly. Nothing. Just air. It was empty.

‘I don’t have asthma,’ he said. ‘I’ve never had asthma.’

‘The picture of Erich and me in Montmartre,’ I said. ‘You said that you were looking at old photos. I thought you had found it in a newspaper or a book.’

‘I never said that,’ he replied with a shrug. ‘I simply said that I was looking at it. You know that he was dead a week before they discovered the body?’

‘I heard that, yes,’ I said, looking down at the table. ‘Dash told me.’

‘He was holding the photograph in his hands when he was found. I suppose he still loved you, despite what you did to him. The coroner passed it on to my father.’

I stared at him. I said nothing for a very long time.

‘But why?’ I asked finally, when I found my voice again. ‘Why would you do this?’

‘Why did you do what you did to my great-uncle?’

‘Because I wanted to succeed,’ I replied, beginning to feel the shame of my actions at last.

‘For what it’s worth, you’ve given me more than I ever dreamed of,’ he said. ‘I don’t even know whether the book will be about him now or about you. Or about both of you. But I have a feeling that it’s going to be the best start to a literary career since…’ He broke into a wide smile. ‘Well, since yours, I suppose!’

‘But what have I given you?’ I asked, trying to recall each of the conversations we’d had and all the confidences I’d entrusted him with. Happy to oblige me, he counted them off on his fingers.

‘First, Dash. Then Erich. Storī, of course. The Tribesman, which you didn’t even write.’

‘I tidied it up.’

‘But you didn’t write it! Although all of that pales into insignificance compared to what you did to Edith and Daniel. Two murders, Maurice. Two murders. Four, if you count your responsibility for both Erich’s death and Dash’s.’

‘Edith fell,’ I said.

‘You pushed her.’

‘Daniel had an asthma attack.’

‘And you withheld his inhaler.’ He looked down at his phone, tapped it for a moment, and put it in his pocket before standing up. ‘It’s all here, Maurice. Every word.’

‘No,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘No, wait. Let’s have another drink.’

‘I’ve drunk enough with you. I’ll be happy if I never have another pint in my life.’

‘Please,’ I said, standing up, but he shook his head, lifted his drink from the table and swallowed what was left in one go.

‘I’ll be in touch, Maurice,’ he said.

‘Sit down, let me order you another one. Please.’

‘No.’

‘Surely after everything I’ve done for you—’

‘You haven’t done anything for me,’ he said, laughing. ‘You’ve bought me a few drinks, that’s all. Tried to use me to get what you want. You hoped my father would use his connections to get you a new book deal, right? Well, that’s not going to happen. I don’t owe you anything, Maurice.’

‘No, but—’

‘I’m leaving,’ he said, walking away.

‘Wait!’ I shouted, but he was already halfway towards the door. ‘Daniel!’ I roared at the top of my voice, a desperate cry from the depths of my soul. He stopped as the pub fell silent, every head turning in my direction, eyes staring at me as if I were about to deliver the final monologue in a wonderful tragedy. But it wasn’t me who spoke, for I had nothing left to say.

‘It’s Theo,’ he said, looking at me with a mixture of contempt and boredom. ‘How many times, Maurice? My name is Theo, not Daniel.’

And with that, he turned his back on me and was gone.

7. HM Prison Belmarsh

Many years ago, at the end of our acquaintance, I suggested to Erich Ackermann that perhaps he had seen me as he wanted me to be and not as who I actually was. I was right then, but the truth is that I made a similar mistake with Theo. Was it an absurd mixture of grief, guilt and alcoholism that allowed me to believe I was confessing everything to Daniel and that he would somehow forgive me and make my world clean again? Or had I always planned on telling Theo the truth? It’s difficult to know. I was always in control of everything and it’s a curious sensation when that’s no longer the case.

But, despite my downfall and disgrace, life has actually been a lot happier since my incarceration. For one thing, I’m able to read more than I have in years. Always new fiction, of course. Young writers on their first, second or third books. I’ve been making notes of my favourite ones and would love to publicly comment on their work but, sadly, prisoners are not allowed use of the Internet, which seems a little unfair to me. How else are we to get our online law degrees and convince ourselves that we can argue our way out of this place? I’m being facetious, of course. Prison humour.

Recently, I even tortured myself by trawling through Garrett Colby’s new novel, which was about an unrequited love affair between a man and a raccoon. What is his issue with animals? Did his puppy get run over when he was a child and he’s never got over it since? The whole thing is beyond me. Anyway, the book was awful. True, I’ve made some questionable choices in my life, but I can honestly say that I’ve never written or stolen anything as bad as that book. To my astonishment, however, the reviews were ecstatic, and somehow it soared to victory on the night of The Prize this year. That’s twice now that his name appears on the honour roll while mine is still absent. It’s enough to make one want to throw in the towel, it really is.

Theo finished his book, which he titled Two Writers: Erich & Maurice, and he won the Costa Biography Award. He preceded this with an exposé in the Guardian, which won him several journalism awards. He seems set up for life. I feel quite proud of him. Truly, I do.

Of course, the response from the writing fraternity to the revelations of my crimes were mixed.

Some claimed that they’d always known I was a charlatan, that no one with such little self-awareness could possibly write as well as I did.

Some said that they admired how I’d blurred the lines between my life and my writing and that my career was the embodiment of a new type of fiction. They even wrote editorial pieces for the newspapers suggesting that I should be applauded, not shunned.

Some said that they’d never read me anyway and didn’t care what I did or how I did it because they were the only people worth reading and anyone who spent even a moment on my prose was wasting their life.

One said that literature was more important than human life so what was the problem if a few people had died in the pursuit of excellence?

One declared that he had originally considered The Tribesman to be a masterpiece, but now that he knew it had actually been written by a woman, he was revising that opinion and realized that it was just a tedious piece of domestic trivia, driven by sentimentality.

There were interminable debates and discussions on radio, television and in the newspapers about the way my work had been received over the years. For a brief time, I became the most famous writer in the world, which was enormously pleasing and everything I’d ever hoped for. Erich’s novels were republished in uniform jackets – his poetry collection too, which he always said was ill advised – each one with an introduction by a famous writer. The general feeling was that he’d been unfairly treated, which was a bit rich, I thought, considering he sent five people to their deaths. But revisionism is revisionism and at least it gave me hope that, long after I’m gone, readers will rediscover me and my reputation will be restored.

I wasn’t sure when the original newspaper piece was going to be published and was held in a state of suspense for some time until I received a call one day from someone at the Guardian, who had naturally been suspicious of a twenty-year-old arriving in the lobby with such outrageous claims about a famous writer, but then they listened to the conversations recorded on his phone and the evidence was indisputable. I knew there was no point trying to argue – I was exhausted by my life at this point – and admitted that his piece was wholly accurate.

I returned home from the pub a few nights later to find a crew of television cameras and radio reporters waiting on my doorstep, each of whom had clearly been tipped off about what was going to be published the next day. As I paid my taxi fare and stepped out to a barrage of questions, I recalled that YouTube clip of Doris Lessing returning home from her local Tesco only to discover a dozen reporters standing outside her house, giving her the wonderful news that she had just been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. ‘Oh Christ,’ she said on that occasion, rolling her eyes in exasperation, a priceless reaction. ‘This has been going on for thirty years.’ I said nothing quite as amusing as Doris, simply brushing past them while muttering that they were in my way, and stumbling through my door. I was obviously drunk. I giggled when I got inside. So, this was what self-destruction felt like.

The afternoon that the Guardian article appeared, the police showed up at my door and arrested me on suspicion of murder. I protested that I had never committed such a heinous crime, that the two most obvious deaths on my conscience had been manslaughter, but my claims were rejected by the CPS and I was sent for trial. The jury didn’t believe my story either and sent me down for life. I think that’s highly unfair.

Perhaps I should mention that Edith’s family, whom I hadn’t seen in so long, showed up at the trial. Her mother had died a few years before but Rebecca was there – minus Arjan, who had left her for a much younger actress in Hollywood – along with her sons, Damien and Edward, who had grown into handsome young men and spent every day glaring at me as if they would like to be left alone in a quiet room with me for half an hour. I spotted Robert too, seated in the back row, and wondered how he felt about being back in a courtroom. He’d been released from prison after five years but was forced to be on the sex offenders list, poor man. There was another man sitting near them, one I vaguely recognized from Edith’s and my UEA days, but I couldn’t recall his name. He became very upset when the details of my wife’s death were recounted. I can only assume that they were particularly friendly in some way and I admired him for still caring after all these years.

Of course, my publishers were left in something of a dilemma. What do you do when one of the most famous writers in the world – if not the most famous – is in disgrace but everyone is desperate to read the offending books out of a macabre fascination? This is what you do: you reprint all the books in new editions – except The Tribesman, of course, which is now only printed under Edith’s name – and donate thirty per cent of the royalties to charity. And you pocket the rest.

Now, my health. Naturally, I went through some major withdrawal symptoms from alcohol, and the prison authorities, to their credit, were extremely sympathetic and helpful in this. But the damage had been done. My liver is destroyed and my kidneys are in pretty bad shape too. The doctors say that one more drink would kill me, but that’s obviously nonsense. It would be too much of a coincidence if the moment I was forced to give up was exactly the moment that I would have been teetering on the edge of death. Anyway, I drink regularly in here – although obviously not at the same levels as I did during my later London years – in my cell with King Kong, of whom more in a moment. You’d be surprised – or maybe you wouldn’ t – at how much contraband is available in prison. Everything is banned, of course, but most of the inmates have a phone, a television, cigarettes, drugs, alcohol. There are prostitutes for those who require such services. Men or women. Whenever there’s a big boxing match on television everyone knows whose cell has the subscription services. Honestly, it’s not a bad life.

And I have a job! My first real job since I worked in the Savoy Hotel in West Berlin back in 1988. I teach a creative-writing course and conduct a bi-weekly two-hour session with fourteen inmates of varying ability. They’re a rough bunch, of course – murderers, for the most part, rapists, violent offenders – and they all like to write about crime. All but one, the aforementioned King Kong, who has been given that name because of an uncanny resemblance he bears to that cinematic simian. For almost a year he was working on a novel about an heiress in nineteenth-century Boston and, quite honestly, it would give Henry James a run for his money. He was too nervous to show it to the other classmates, but he gave it to me and I was amazed by his skill with language, his gift for characterization and his witty dialogue. I encouraged him, mentored him, supported him, and he’d just finished his fourth draft when he got into an altercation with another prisoner, leading to a dust-up in the prison yard where he was stabbed in the neck with a toothbrush that had a Stanley blade taped to its end. He bled out in minutes, poor chap.

Which left me with his manuscript. And it was eminently publishable. Really, the kind of thing that wins awards and hits the bestseller lists. So, I did another draft or two, tidied up some of the language, and sent it to a London publisher, being quite clear who I was and admitting that I would never be able to promote the book in person as I’d been committed to Belmarsh for the rest of my natural but that I had found something to fill the time while I was here, the thing that I had always enjoyed most.

Writing.

And, despite the public outcry, they published it. And, against all the odds, it’s been one of the bestselling books of the year. The longlist for this year’s Prize is being announced tomorrow and, quite honestly, I think I’m in with a very strong chance.