Spring

1

London light in the scuffed, keyed windows of a Piccadilly-line train from Heathrow. London light on the open spaces it hurries past, on the passing spokes of perpendicular suburban streets, on playing fields seen through a perimeter line of faint-shadowed trees. The train stops in outlying stations. Then it enters the howl of the tunnel and there is no more London light until he finds it later on the hotels and plane trees of Russell Square.

He is worried that things are not okay. When he phones her, standing in the stale silence of the flat, it is only because he wants to know that things are okay. On that question he is insatiable. Frustratingly, she does not answer her phone. Probably she is still on the tube.

They finally speak later, in the early evening.

Initially she sounds fine. And when he asks her how she is, she says, ‘I’m fine.’

‘What are you doing tonight?’ he says.

‘Staying in, I think.’

There is a silence, the very quiet hissing of the line, the pittering of the rain on the skylight. She says, ‘I’ve got things to do. I’ve got to unpack, I’ve got to do some washing…’

‘Okay,’ he says. ‘That’s fine.’

‘I just need some time on my own…’

‘Okay,’ he says. ‘It’s fine. What are you doing at the weekend?’

‘The weekend?’ she says. ‘I don’t know.’

This was what he feared. Something like this mysterious evasiveness. Something is not okay, has not been okay since Monday, when he missed the minibus that was supposed to take them to the snowline. At twenty to eleven on Monday morning he was in the Internet place in the medina—they were in Marrakech—in the hiss of frying, the whirring of the juicer, and the histrionic sorrow of a woman wailing an Arabic love song from the old stereo, trying to find out what had happened at Fakenham. It turned out that nothing had happened at Fakenham—the meeting had been abandoned due to waterlogging. Leaving the shop, he had five minutes to get to the Djemaa el Fna. Which would have been fine, if there hadn’t been an accident in one of the narrow lanes of the medina—a moped had smashed into some scaffolding—forcing him to find another way, which in that labyrinth was easier said than done.

He was ten minutes late, and there was no sign of the minibus where she had said it would be. Nor was there any sign of her. He waited for a while, and then made his way through the alleyways of the medina to the hotel, where he went upstairs. She was not there. Nor was she at the pool. Nor on the terrace. When he tried her mobile there was no answer. It seemed she must have left without him and feeling forsaken, feeling forlorn, he went for a lonely walk in the souk. She was still not answering her phone.

To his surprise, he then found her at the pool, on a sun lounger, in the quiet of the sparrow song.

‘I thought you went to the mountains,’ he said.

And surprisingly, she laughed. ‘No, of course not.’

He sat down on the neighbouring lounger, taking his feet out of his flip-flops and trying to get a sense of her mood. This was not easy—they had not known each other long, less than two months. The fact that she was wearing huge inscrutable sunglasses which hid not only her eyes but most of the upper half of her face did not make it any easier. Her nose was pale with factor forty, her Anglo-Swedish skin sensitive even to this spring sun. He stared at her through his own sunglasses, prescription Aviators, the dry wind fiddling with his thinning sandy hair. ‘Where were you?’ he said. ‘I’ve been looking for you for the last two hours.’

‘I went for a walk.’

‘Where?’

‘In the medina.’

‘See anything interesting?’

She just stuck out her lower lip and shook her head. Then she picked up her book.

‘I’m sorry I was late. There was this thing. I…’

‘It’s okay,’ she said, without looking up.

‘Well… I’m sorry.’

It was the siesta hour. The palm trees that stood in a line on one side of the terrace were whispering in the warm wind, their shadows mere stumps. ‘Do you want to go tomorrow?’ he said. ‘To the mountains.’

‘No.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘M-hm.’

A few minutes later she went for a swim and in the small shade of his newspaper he tried to work out what it was about her mood that was so strange. There was something strange about it. She was lying in the pool with her arms stretched out on the side, her shape wavery in the water, her face tilted to the sun. (Her slick wet hair had an almost metallic sheen.) Her eyes were shut. He had expected her to be more upset. There was something strange about it.

He was still wondering what it was later, in the eucalyptus whisper of the steam room.

And he is still wondering now, tonight, in his flat in Mecklenburgh Street. He tries to picture that hour at the poolside, as the hotel’s shadow moved slowly over the water, tries to picture everything that happened.

‘I thought you went to the mountains,’ he says.

Surprisingly, she laughs. ‘No, of course not.’

The strangeness of that moment has been there ever since. It started on Monday at the poolside, and has just not stopped.

2

Once he wanted more than he does now. Once, his idea of his own life, of what it was meant to be, was something magnificent. It seems a sort of insanity now. A sort of megalomania. An impediment to a proper view of the world. That idea of himself was formed when he still knew nothing about life, when he was still at school—and it has taken life twenty years, the last twenty years, to purge him of it. Probably that is an unusually long time.

He is shaving. The mirror is haloed with feeble steam. He isn’t the same as he was even a few years ago. Even a year ago. Is it just tiredness? Is he just tireder than he was?

For quite a few years the space in which he lives has been shrinking. He has never seen the metaphorical force of this until now. Only half a dozen years ago he lived with Thomasina—sweet Thomasina! — in the house on Victoria Road. It was never even properly finished. For tax reasons, it was technically the property of Interspex, his Internet start-up, and Interspex was worth some eye-popping figure at the peak, in the millennial year. Many millions, tens, hundreds of millions. And then nothing, and the liquidators seized the house on Victoria Road while the Milanese artisans were still tiling the single-lane swimming pool…

He stirs the razor in the scummy water. The next spring—après le déluge—found him washed up in Fulham. Then there were other places, each smaller than the last, and finally, Mecklenburgh Street. The ex-local-authority flat is in an unfaced terrace of London brick. The front doors of the houses are painted black—dust-bleared fanlights, massed doorbells. The basement flats have their own entrances. Metal steps, textured like a fire escape, tack down via a square landing. The area is littered with dead brown leaves. The bedroom curtains are permanently closed.

He pulls the plug and the shaving-water noisily sinks away. No more magnificence. Now he just wants things to be okay. He wants somewhere okay to live. An okay job. One or two holidays a year. Perhaps a few modest luxuries. A middle-class life in other words. And a woman. Of course a woman. She is the indispensable ingredient for such a life. Without her it would have quite a sad, lonely look. Yes, without her, there would be something sad, something futile, about those few small luxuries. He towels his face in the forty-watt light of the bathroom—it is an odd stooping space, under someone else’s stairs, the frigid London morning sliding in through a lint-furred vent. There is this Katherine King. This woman he has been seeing for the last month or two. Indeed, it is possible that she is the inspiration for this whole train of thought—that the idea of a middle-class life in London, forever, has its sudden look of enticing plausibility now that it is framed in terms of a middle-class life in London, forever, with her. These days, to imagine other things—new things—leaves him feeling exhausted. (And, he thinks, splashing the sink’s limescaled surface, surely that has as much to do with its sudden look of enticing plausibility as she does.) She is still married to someone else, of course. Not an insurmountable problem. They met at a wedding, a winter wedding in London. Her father was some sort of Swedish financier, and it showed—her straight, sharply parted hair was sawdust. She had her English mother’s voice. They exchanged phone numbers. Met up the following week… (He turns off the tap and tugs the sprung string of the light, snapping on the darkness.) The start was unpromising, to say the least. In fact, things started with a total fiasco. On their first night together he was unable to have sex with her. That wasn’t the fiasco, of course. That was essentially fine. They fell asleep in a loose spoon with the light still on in the hall. No, that was not the fiasco.

The next Tuesday they had supper at the old trattoria near his flat—a place that still offered a prawn-cocktail starter served in a little stainless-steel dish and flaunted the stale-looking desserts in a transparent fridge. There, they were unable to keep their hands off each other and having made a spectacle of themselves for an hour they walked back to Mecklenburgh Street. As soon as the door was shut he started to kiss her. Still standing in the hall, still urgently kissing her, he lifted her short skirt and pulled everything down as far as her mid-thighs. Still kissing him, she seemed to make a weak effort to stop him. Instead he pulled everything further down, past her wavering knees, until she lifted first one foot and then the other to let him tug the things off. They stumbled into the bedroom and ended up on the floor. It seems to him that what happened next has introduced a permanent flaw into everything that followed. He was moving in a fog of fear there on the floor as he started hurriedly to unfasten his trousers. His view of the situation was mechanistic—it seems strange to him now how straightforwardly mechanistic it was. For what had happened last time to happen once, he thought, was okay. If it happened twice it might start to seem like a problem.

‘Please don’t come inside me,’ she said.

Suddenly still, they lay there in silence for a few seconds. Then she said, ‘Did you come inside me?’

He was not even sure. He had been so preoccupied with other things… ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

She laughed and sat up straight, pulling her skirt into place. ‘What do you mean you don’t know?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe…’

‘You don’t know whether you came?’

‘No.’

She laughed again and said, ‘I can’t believe this.’

‘What?’

‘Is that just normal for you?’

‘No…’

She was shaking her head. ‘I… I never let anyone come inside me. I’ve only ever let one person do that. Someone I was totally in love with.’

For a moment he wondered who this man was. Then he stood up, stumbling in his lowered trousers. ‘Look, I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘You don’t know whether you came?’ She sounded shocked, on the verge of tears.

‘I’m not sure. I think so.’

‘That’s just weird.’

‘I’m sorry…’

‘What if I get pregnant?’

‘You’re not likely to get pregnant…’

‘Why not?’ she said. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean you’re not likely to get pregnant. It’s not likely. From one… you know…’

She seemed to be looking at something on the floor, though outside the shape of light that spilled in from the hall it was too dark to see anything. ‘This isn’t what I expected,’ she said. He put out his hand and touched her. When he tried to hug her she stood stiffly in his embrace. He sighed and sat down on the edge of the bed. Leaving him there, she went to the bathroom, evidently to settle the question of whether or not he had ejaculated inside her. He heard the toilet flush, fistfuls of water splash in the sink. When she unlocked the door, she picked up her things from the floor in the hall and went into the living room.

The standard lamp was on and she was standing next to his desk, inspecting her tights. She did not look at him.

‘I’m sorry…’ he said.

Still without looking at him, and in a more quivering-lipped tone than the first time, she said, ‘This isn’t what I expected.’

The wind howled in the dark shaft over the skylight.

He stood there, wondering what to do.

‘I think I’m going to go,’ she said quietly.

However, she did not put on her tights. She was still standing there next to the desk. She seemed to be waiting for him to say something. ‘Don’t go. Please don’t go,’ he said, shocked into total sincerity. ‘Please. That would be terrible.’

*

In the morning she had a shower and, when she was dressed, he said he would walk her to Russell Square station.

‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s okay.’

‘Are you sure?’

She nodded quickly. ‘M-hm.’

He followed her out into the frigid shade of the area, where the dead leaves were veined with ice, and watched her walk up the metal steps. On the pavement, in a flare of sunlight, she waved to him, but when they spoke on the phone the next day, she sounded strange, and vague, and as if her heart was not in what she was saying. He persuaded her to see him on Sunday—she wasn’t free, she said, until then—and then when they spoke on Sunday afternoon, she said she was tired, that she had been working since eight in the morning, and how about meeting some other time?

There was a longish silence.

He said, ‘Look, I want to see you. Today. Please.’

She sighed. ‘I’m tired, that’s all. I look shit. And I won’t be much fun to be with. I’ve got to do some ironing…’

‘Why don’t we meet at your place then?’

‘Well…’ she laughed. ‘If you don’t mind watching me iron.’

‘I don’t mind watching you iron,’ he said.

On the tube he started to wonder whether he should have forced it like that. She very obviously did not want to see him. For a few minutes he loitered in the foyer of Angel station, wondering what to do. Then he set off up Essex Road in the sleet, and when she opened the door he was soaking wet.

Her flat was on the upper floor of a modest terraced house on Packington Street. The downstairs entrance hall was a narrow moth-eaten space full of unloved objects, from where severely straitened steps went up to a landing under a light bulb and the plain front door of the flat.

‘Do you want a towel?’ was the first thing she said.

He said he did, and while she went for one he waited in the hall, and then followed her into the living room.

‘How are you?’ she asked.

‘I’m okay. Wet.’

‘Do you want some wine?’

She had already started on the wine. He took off his jacket and towelled his soaking hair. He had a sense, handing her the towel, exchanging it for wine, that things were not quite as hopeless as he had thought. It had started with the way she looked at him when she opened the door, the way she took a moment to let him fill her eyes. And she was not ironing; there was no sign of the ironing board. Still, when the wine was finished he expected to be encouraged to leave—so he was surprised when instead she said, ‘Do you want to get something to eat?’

‘Sure.’

‘There’s this Indian,’ she said. ‘It’s okay.’

‘Fine.’

Leaving the house he wondered whether this was the moment to touch her, whether even to try and kiss her. Something about her posture—hands shoved in pockets, shoulders hunched—prevented him. The pavements shone wetly as they walked. They stopped in front of the Taste of India on Essex Road, under the sopping green awning, and he touched her for the first time as they went in. It was not much of a touch—letting her precede him through the plate-glass door, he placed his hand lightly on her back for a moment. She might not even have felt it through the substantial white puffa jacket she was wearing. Inside, in the tired velvet shadows and quiet, seemingly formless sitar music, they studied takeaway menus. There was a palpable Sunday-night atmosphere. Standing there, poised to take their order, the waiter yawned.

While they were waiting, he touched her a second time. Sitting side by side at a table near the entrance—a stained tablecloth, plastic flowers—they had lapsed into silence and he put his hand on her thin jeaned thigh and stroked the fabric a few times with his thumb. She did not seem surprised. She did not tense up or move her leg. She just lifted her eyes from the Taste of India carpet and looked at him steadily for a minute with no particular expression on her face—or an expression, at most, of tolerant indulgence. Then the smiling waiter approached with their supper.

They ate it with the television on. Her flatmate, Summer, was there—she had been away for the weekend with some man; her suitcase was still in the hall. He had not even known of her existence until they found her sitting on the sofa with her small stockinged feet on the old leather pouf, watching TV. Her presence had the effect of taking most of the interesting tension from the situation—things seemed flat now that she was there—and when Katherine went to do the washing-up, leaving them to talk amongst themselves, he felt that it was probably time for him to leave.

He found her standing at the sink in the kitchen. She may not have noticed he was there until, stepping up to her, he put his hands on her waist. When she did not move even then, he went a step further and, tucking down the tag of her sweater, kissed her exposed neck.

‘Do you want to stay the night?’ she said, still sloshing things in the sink.

‘Do you want me to?’

‘It’s up to you.’

He seemed to think for a moment. ‘Yes, I’d like to.’

‘Okay.’

‘Are you sure?’ he said.

‘Am I sure?’

‘Are you sure it’s okay? I don’t want to stay if you don’t want me to.’

‘It’s okay,’ she said, freeing herself from his hands, which had stolen onto her stomach, and taking a dishcloth.

Her pale hair was tied up severely, showing the high pallor of her forehead, and her face had a freshly scrubbed look. She was wearing a loose T-shirt and old-fashioned pyjama trousers. ‘I’ve still got my period,’ she announced, turning down the duvet.

‘Okay.’

Sitting there, he found it slightly difficult to see what the point of his presence was—she was under the duvet now, and did not seem to pay him any attention as he slowly undressed and joined her. She was lying on her side, facing away from him, and she did not move when he put out his hand and sent it down the shallow slope of her side and up the steeper hill of her hip, feeling under his fingertips the filled, homely fabric of the pyjama trousers.

‘Are you sure you want me to stay?’ he said.

A sudden susurration of the sheets—she turned. In such proximity her face looked different. His perusal of it, and his silence, seemed to unnerve her and shaking her head on the pillow, she said, ‘What?’

‘Nothing… I like looking at you.’

She smiled very slightly and he kissed her. She let him. She let him kiss her unparted lips, once, twice, and even then it seemed no more than a sort of tolerant indulgence, until her mouth melted open and for a few seconds seemed to be searching urgently for something inside his. His hands were inside her T-shirt. ‘I don’t want to have sex,’ she said. ‘I told you, I have my period. And even if I didn’t, I wouldn’t want to have sex.’

They lay still for a while.

She put her hand on his face and said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m pleased you insisted on staying.’

‘Insisted? I didn’t insist…’

She smiled. ‘Okay, you didn’t insist…’

Taking it from his face, he kissed the palm of her hand—plump and mild and slightly damp—and that was the start of a tortuously slow exploration, an exploration sub specie aeternitatis, of the sense of touch.

Towards morning—they were naked on the mattress, their senses painfully peeled in the warmth of the storage heater—she muttered, ‘I don’t think I can not have an orgasm,’ and letting her knees fall open, quietly started to play with herself.

*

Suddenly, unexpectedly, no longer even seriously hoped for, there were a few lovely days. Sun-fire on frozen ponds. Everything seemed okay then.

Then on Saturday afternoon, towards the end of the afternoon, when the winter daylight was starting to fail, he met her at Angel tube station, and there was something wrong. He had sensed it earlier in the day when they had spoken on the phone, and when he met her at the station and tried to kiss her she just turned and started to walk away.

They had walked some way up Essex Road—past Packington Street, were in front of the open facade of Steve Hatt the fishmonger, standing on the stained pavement in a faint sea smell—when she stopped and said, ‘What are we doing? Where are we going?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Where are we going?’

‘I thought you wanted to get a drink,’ she said.

‘Is that what you want to do?’

‘Isn’t that what you want to do?’… ‘Do you want to get a drink?’ she said.

‘I don’t mind. What do you want to do?’

If it was a drink he wanted, she insisted on returning to Angel, and they were nearing Islington Green, still in silence, when he stopped and said, ‘Look, if you’re not going to say anything, maybe I should just go.’

She went very still.

‘You’re not saying anything either,’ she said half-heartedly. Then she said, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know…’

‘What?’

‘I’m sorry.’ She put a hand on his arm. ‘I feel a bit weird.’

‘What do you mean you feel a bit weird?’

‘I’ve been feeling a bit weird this afternoon, since earlier.’

‘I don’t know what you mean when you say a bit weird.’

‘Let’s just get a drink,’ she said. ‘Let’s just get a drink and see how it goes.’

‘See how it goes?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

He followed her into the nearest pub. Not a particularly nice pub. The Nag’s Head. And she still seemed to be feeling quite weird. While they stood at the bar waiting to be served, surrounded by screens shouting about sport, she started to laugh. Perhaps it was just the fact that they had ended up there, in the Nag’s Head, a straightforward pub with a passion for sport, and a sour smell of lager soaked into wood. They sat down at a long table which they had to share with some other people. She seemed strangely exhilarated. There was a strong flush in her pale skin.

He was wary. He pressed her on what she had meant outside when she said she was feeling a bit weird.

She stopped smiling. ‘I just… didn’t… feel anything,’ she said.

‘You didn’t feel anything?’

‘No.’

‘What do you mean? When?’

‘This afternoon.’ Seeing the expression on his face, she took his hands in hers and said, ‘It was just something weird. I don’t know what happened. I’m sorry.’

‘This isn’t just what you’re like, is it?’ he suggested, smiling sceptically.

She laughed and shook her head. ‘No.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘I’m sure.’

Over the second pint they started to talk about other things— he told her how he had once owned a pizza-delivery franchise nearby, and how he had mortgaged it to produce a film (directed by Julian Shoe—the name made her laugh, he swore he wasn’t making it up), which had never found a distributor, forcing him to sell the pizza franchise and work instead as an estate agent at one of the snootier Upper Street outfits—Windlesham Fielding, pinstriped suits moving in the shop window. Though she knew by then that he had old links with the postcode, this was the first time they had been mapped out for her. He told her how—after a stint in the City which ended in minor scandal—he had set up on his own as an Islington estate agent. For a while he was successful. He owned up to having owned a Porsche—to having been a Porsche-owning estate agent. (She laughed at that.) He said he had lived in several thousand square feet of warehouse flat overlooking the canal. He had not seen the place for years and he suggested they walk over there tomorrow.

‘Okay,’ she said.

It was dark when they left the Nag’s Head. Under towering streetlights, the junction at Angel pumped people and vehicles like an exposed heart.

He was sufficiently upset by what had happened to seek a meeting on Monday with Toby, at whose wedding they had met. Toby had known her since university; they had been at Cambridge together, had shared history tutorials as undergraduates at Trinity. And Toby had something to tell him. She was married. Separated for a year or so, but still, so far as he knew, married. Her husband—he had left her, was Toby’s feeling—was some sort of photographer. Fraser King.

‘He’s some sort of pap. She hasn’t told you this?’ he said, surprised.

‘No.’

‘She’s not mentioned him?’

‘No.’

James thought, and then said that the only hint he had had of it was that nestling in the mess on the little night-table next to her bed—among the tumblers of stale water and screwed-up tissues—he had noticed a watch. A man’s watch. It looked like a pilot’s watch or something. A very macho watch. He had of course wondered who its owner was.

‘Probably Fraser’s,’ Toby offered. An overweight City lawyer, tanned from his Indian Ocean honeymoon and still in the suit he wore to the office, he was jiggling his portly knees and looking wistfully towards the door. They were in a pub and he wanted to smoke. ‘Sounds like the sort of watch he would have.’

‘Did you ever meet him?’

‘A few times.’

‘What was he like?’

Toby shrugged. ‘He was okay,’ he said, putting the emphasis on okay so as to make it vaguely praiseful.

‘She’s said some things…’ James said, thinking aloud.

‘What?’

‘Things about the past. I don’t know. That she still has ties to the past or something. Nothing specific. That must be what she meant…’

‘Probably. Mind if I step outside for a minute?’

They went and stood in front of the pub. It was on a quiet, pristine Chelsea street—Toby’s local. In summer it looked like it was made of flowers, and even now it was festooned with elegant wintergreens. Toby sucked hungrily on a duty-free Marlboro Light in the sharp, smoke-blue evening air. ‘So how’s it going, generally?’ he said.

James told him it was going fine.

What he did not tell him was how on Saturday night after supper, though she had with some solemnity invited his hand into her unbuttoned jeans to feel how wet she was—very wet—she would not let him fuck her. He was left pleading there, literally kneeling on her living-room floor (Summer was away for the weekend again) while he unknowingly paraphrased Marvell.

Had we but World enough, and Time,

This Coyness, Lady, were no Crime…

He had not in fact actually fucked her since the night of the fiasco. She had not let him. In that sense the fiasco was very much ongoing—the latest thing was that she had started to talk of wanting to get him looked over by a doctor. ‘I don’t know where you’ve been,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what you’ve been doing.’ He promised her that he had no diseases. They were at that point in bed and he finally turned over and sulked.

No, he did not tell Toby these things.

‘Are you married?’ he said.

What followed—they were having a late supper in the trattoria with the plastic plants next to Russell Square tube—was surprisingly short and simple.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Separated.’

She was obviously prepared for this.

‘Were you planning to tell me?’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I know I should have told you already. It doesn’t make any difference, though. I haven’t seen him for more than a year.’

He was full of questions he wanted to ask her. He had imagined that they would spend the whole evening on the subject. In the end, however—it was obvious that she did not want to talk about it—he just said, ‘Is that his watch by your bed?’

And she said—‘Yes.’

(And the next time he looked, the watch was no longer there.)

So that was that. Except that that night, for the first time since the fiasco, she took the erection which was pressing fervently into the small of her back and pulled it into her. She immediately started to sob. In the very faint light that leaked in from the street he saw her scrumpled face, the shine in the tiny valleys to the sides of her eyes. ‘It’s okay,’ she whispered, worried that he might not understand her tears. ‘It’s okay.’ She smiled tearfully. ‘It’s okay.’

*

Things must have been okay then, in mid-February—there was a minibreak. In the monochrome interior of the Eurostar as it flew through the Kentish twilight, she laid out the key facts—a medieval port, the largest in northern Europe, a sort of doublet-and-hose Hong Kong or Singapore. Then the Scheldt silted up and stopped the opening to the sea (a poor fate for a port), leaving it, for the last four hundred years, an exquisite fossil.

She had a list of things she wanted to see, and he tried to keep her warm—they would have needed a polar explorer’s microfibres to do the job properly—as she led them to grey-skinned emaciated Christs, and many quiet vistas of narrow little houses with their feet in the water. It was the water that made the strongest impression on him. The very sight of it, its black viscosity, made him shudder. In the morning, seen from the hotel window, steam stood thickly on its still, house-edged surface. At the end of each afternoon the sun shone on it, a strange cold yellow. It was heavy and heatless. He pitied the fish in it, and wondered why it wasn’t frozen. The streets were frost-scoured, and the tourist-trade horses—he pitied them too—steamed with their dung in the stone squares.

There was something almost hallucinatory about the place. The tangle of streets, squares and waterways. Everything was extremely small in the Middle Ages—that was very evident. For instance, the tavern they stooped into one twilight. It occupied the lower floor of a tiny house which teetered forward into its alley. There were only two tables, space for no more than a dozen people. The whole interior was made of wood, and smelled of warm smoke from the fireplace. They stayed there for an hour or two, the evening thickening in the quarrels of the windows, while she told him about John of Gaunt—that is, John of Ghent—son of Edward III and Chaucer’s friend and patron, who was born in the Flemish city in 1340 while his parents attended a summit meeting that went on for more than a year. Time, she thought, was different then. Partly for technological reasons. Partly because of the presence of a living idea of eternity. Look at Jan van Eyck’s The Madonna and Joris van der Paele. (They did look at it, in the Groeninge Museum.) The living presence of eternity—a painter striving to paint it. Who would try to paint such a thing now? And why?

Later they hurried through silent streets laughing at the sheer shocking lowness of the temperature, every last joule having seemingly evaporated into the yawning interstellar spaces overhead. For a moment she stopped and looked up at the mess of stars and thought tipsily—The living presence of eternity… Tight-jawed, he hurried her on through the stinging air, towards the lobby of the hotel.

He has often wondered how small birds, stuck outside in them, survive nights like that. Walking Hugo on winter mornings when the puddles are ice and hearing, in the leafless park, their pathetically subdued tweeting always touches him with pity, and a sort of wonder that they are able to survive the subzero night, to make it through to the morning to whistle with such touching fortitude—though weakly—as he walks by swaddled and scarfed up to the eyeballs, and still shivering, still stamping his feet in a struggle to keep the numbness from them. How do they survive?

She shrugged. ‘Don’t know,’ she said.

The question did not seem to interest her.

‘You’ve never thought about it?’

She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said.

They were on the train to Ghent. Outside the windows the Netherlandish banality of the landscape was mitigated by a frost so thick it looked like snow and sparkled in the flooding sunlight.

He said, ‘Am I just being sentimental?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe anthropo… whatever.’

‘What?’

‘Anthropocentric? Is that the word?’

There was something about the way she said, Is that the word? Without the slightest fear of seeming stupid or ignorant. She just knew she wasn’t stupid or ignorant. It was something that secretly impressed and intimidated him, which took him uneasily back to the times he used to sit with Miriam and her friends on his Islington terrace. In the presence of those men—and they were invariably men—James the estate agent would tend not to have much to say for himself, especially when the talk turned intellectual. And the talk was often oppressively intellectual when Miriam’s visitors were there, sitting on his terrace, with the faint odour of vegetation floating up from the water, supping his champagne. Magnus. Karlheinz. And Linhardt. Linhardt. He was the worst. That French twat, with his high forehead and serial killer’s blue eyes…

‘The famous are part of us,’ he is saying, when James steps onto the terrace with the second bottle of Veuve Clicquot, ‘of our identity. That is why they are so fascinating to us, why we feel strange when we see them, why we have even a sense of awe. You can say they are half-abstract beings, ideas, belonging to the world of the mind…’

‘Who’s your favourite celebrity?’ Miriam says.

Linhardt ignores her. ‘I make visible these ideas,’ he says, looking at James, ‘which I think is completely consistent with the definition of art…’

James nods, pours…

Linhardt. The thought of him still makes James want to kick something. Then, he took it out on the towpath—pounding it all the way to Victoria Park, under the low bridges, through the spaces laced with moving light when the sun was shining on the water.

Katherine’s lack of interest in the travails of little birds should not have surprised him. A week or so earlier, he had told her the story of the hatchling thrush—another one set on the terrace of his old Islington flat. One spring morning he had looked out through the French windows and seen a dead hatchling thrush on the decking. It must have fallen from a nest somewhere higher up. That in itself was sad, but what made it so memorably so—what in fact pierced him with a sorrow he has never been able to forget—was the way its parents spent the whole morning offering it worms. With worms in their beaks, its mother and father would frequently land next to it, where it lay lifelessly still on the decking, and wait there for a few moments, turning their heads in the way birds do, unable to understand why it wasn’t taking them.

She said, ‘Aaww.’

Though she was trying to sound sad, she didn’t. It was obvious, anyway, that she was not being pierced by a sorrow she would never be able to forget.

He was irritated that the story had flopped. He wondered, in his irritation, if this meant that she was just not a very nice person. Was she just not a very nice person? Was that it?

No, she was just not as sentimental as he was. He was sentimental. She made him feel sentimental.

The train pulled into Ghent station at noon. They had lunch, then walked to Sint Baaf’s cathedral to see van Eyck’s altarpiece. That was why they were in Ghent. That was what she wanted to see. One of the Masterpieces of Western Art. It was a strange image. In the middle, an important-looking sheep stood on a table with blood flowing in a neat stream from a hole in its front into a metal cup. The sheep did not seem to be in pain, or even to have noticed what was happening. There was a subtly painted suggestion, too, that it was shining with light. In the field around it were lots of expensively dressed people, mostly men, some with wings… Yes, it was very strange. He knew that the sheep was a symbol of Jesus Christ—he knew about the angels and saints. He was familiar with the iconography. What made it seem strange, and this was what she was explaining to him as they perambulated around the altarpiece in its perspex house, was the way it was painted. The familiar symbols of medieval art had been painted as if they were real things. That was what made them seem strange. The sheep looked like a real sheep, like a photo of a sheep. That was what was strange. And she drew his attention to the swallows or swifts flitting about in the luminous evening sky near some palm trees—very small, to indicate their distance from the spectator—and not one of them the same as the others, each painted in a specific position in flight, obviously observed from nature—one swooping, another soaring, another spiralling—escapees from a world of symbolic and stylised art.

When they had seen the masterpiece she said, ‘Should we get totally pissed?’ They were leaving Sint Baaf’s. It was not something he normally did. Pensively, he stroked his jaw. Then he said, ‘Yeah, okay,’ and they went and drank a lot of Duvel, and Westmalle Tripel, and Piraat, and Sint Bernardus Abt 12, with its laughing monk on the label. It was still just about light when they stumbled out into the Grote Markt several hours later, and presumably freezing though they were insensible to it now. Looking for the station, they quickly found themselves lost in the streets of a disappointingly twenty-first-century town—plastic trams, ATMs… A taxi… A stiflingly overheated Merc. When James addressed the driver in slurred French, the man answered in unfriendly English. The fare for the two-minute drive was €6. At the station, they struggled with the question of which platform to wait on. A well-insulated local told them to take the next train to Zeebrugge.

And Zeebrugge, very tediously, was where they woke up. They spent two whole minutes on the platform there in a knifelike wind that whipped in off the North Sea, then took another taxi—another overheated Merc—all the way to their hotel (the fare was €80), where they went straight upstairs and fell asleep.

The next morning, their final morning in Flanders, hungover and eating hot frites from a paper cone, she snuggled into him as they walked under the frozen copper-sulphate sky and said, ‘I feel nice with you.’ Things seemed okay then.

*

On Friday, towards the end of the afternoon, he takes Hugo for a walk. The St Bernard dislikes the subterranean flat. He usually spends the day lethargically filling the sofa, or when James is sitting on the sofa, the whole vestibule—a huge, sad-eyed harlequin.

Under the sky-scraping London planes of Russell Square, which are just starting to venture forth their leaves, James throws a tennis ball for him; and if he is throwing it with more than usual vigour it may be an effect of what she said to him on the phone as he walked to the square from Mecklenburgh Street. She said she was tired. She did not want to meet tonight. Someone was off sick, she said, and she had to work an extra-long shift. Then, perhaps hearing the disappointment in his voice, she said, ‘Let’s do something tomorrow.’

He perked up slightly, said he’d try to think of something special…

‘No,’ she said, ‘nothing special. Let’s just go to the cinema or something.’

He asked her what she wanted to see.

‘I don’t know. What is there?’

He said he’d have a look.

And then, just when that seemed settled, he said, ‘Are you sure you don’t want to do something tonight?’

And she sighed and said, ‘I’m tired. Let’s do something tomorrow.’

He slings the tennis ball in the twilight under the trees, slings it with all his strength, twisting his torso and whipping into the throw, trying to find the trajectory that will send Hugo furthest over the still-wintery lawns. His excitable voice as he pursues it punctures the low moan of the traffic endlessly orbiting the square. Something is not okay. He is thinking again of that strange moment on Monday afternoon at the poolside. Something happened in Marrakech, something he does not know about. When they leave the square it is evening and the signs on the hotel fronts are illuminated.

3

On Sunday there is this lunch at Isabel and Steve’s. ‘No Katherine?’ is the first thing Isabel says, opening the door to see her brother standing there on his own. He wishes she hadn’t mentioned her. Everything is pretty fucking far from okay.

He spent Saturday morning under the skylight in the living room, seeing what films were on, interrogating the Internet in his seldom-used spectacles. Surveying the listings he felt lost, ill-equipped to find something that she would like. He does not yet have any sort of instinct for her taste. It is not easily predictable. Miriam, for instance, only touched unimpeachably art-house films, made him sit through the plotless offerings of French and Russian men, whose names still affect him the way memories of lessons at school do—a trapped mind-numbing feeling, a surly sense of personal insufficiency, and a quiet thankfulness that he is not in the experience now. Though Katherine sometimes shows an interest in such films too—he has noticed some DVDs lying around her flat with titles like Andrei Rublev and Tokyo Story—she is more omnivorous, more promiscuous in what she enjoys. This does not make working out what she will enjoy any easier. Quite the opposite.

He had just finished making an eclectic shortlist when she phoned. Almost as soon as he started talking about what films were on and where, she interrupted him. ‘James…’

‘Yes?’

‘Um.’ She seemed stuck. She said, ‘I don’t…’ then stopped again.

‘What?’

‘You’re not going to like this,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘I don’t want to see you today.’ Silence. ‘I just… I need to spend some time on my own. Is that alright?’

‘If that’s what you want,’ he heard himself say.

‘Phew,’ she said. She sounded less nervous. ‘I was worried you’d be angry.’

‘I’m not angry. I’m…’

‘Disappointed?’

‘I wanted to see you.’

‘I know. I’m sorry.’

‘Why…?’ he said. ‘Why don’t you want…?’

‘I just need some time on my own,’ she said. ‘I need a weekend on my own. I need to get my head together. I haven’t stopped moving since we got back from Marrakech. I haven’t had any time to myself. I still haven’t finished unpacking… I’m sorry.’ Then she said, ‘Thanks for understanding. Thanks for making it easy for me.’

Later he wondered whether he had made it too easy for her. What should he have done though? Made a scene? Tried to force her to see him? Even if he had wanted to do that, he just didn’t seem to feel enough at the moments when it might have been a possibility. He felt only a kind of numbness, and the infantile frustration of not getting what he wanted. And then the moment had passed and she was saying, ‘What are you going to do tonight?’

‘Well… There’s this party. You know—the one I told you about.’

Yes, there was this party.

And now, on Sunday, he is hungover. There is a painful-looking sty, Isabel notices—a vivid purple, like a Beaujolais nouveau—just under the lip of his left eye.

‘No,’ he says, in answer to her question about Katherine. ‘She couldn’t make it.’

‘That’s a shame,’ Isabel says. ‘When are we going to meet her?’

‘I don’t know. Hi.’

She kisses him. ‘Hi.’

He hands her a bottle of wine wrapped in tissue paper and follows her in. She and Steve have the lower half of the house, with their own entrance at the side—97A—and what is by London standards a huge garden with (they are widely envied for this) a wooden door leading directly onto Hampstead Heath.

‘How are you?’ she says.

‘I’m fine.’

He takes off his jacket in the pale grey entrance hall next to the pair of Banksy prints in white maple frames which match the white maple floor. It sounds like there are quite a few people in the living room—more than he expected. The whole event is on a larger scale than he expected. He knows the sort of people they will be. Some lawyers from Isabel’s firm—Quarles, Lingus—and their spouses. A selection of her university friends, mostly media types now. A few friends of Steve’s perhaps, smoking in the garden in jeans and trainers. Probably that vegetarian architect who always seems to be at things like this. There will be some pregnant women. A smattering of noisy toddlers. A shocked-looking, marble-eyed baby.

Entering the living room—long and high-ceilinged, with a large sash window at each end—he wishes he had stayed at home. He feels like he has only just woken up and, in spite of the Nurofen, he has a nagging headache. He has not even surveyed the room to see who is there when he finds himself face to face with Steve.

‘Alright, mate,’ Steve says. ‘How’s things?’ Though he is smiling, Steve seems nervous. He is wearing a brown T-shirt with a technical-looking drawing of an open-reel tape player on it and holding a glass of prosecco. Without waiting for James to answer his question, he says, ‘I hear you got a new lady-friend.’

‘Yeah…’

‘That’s fantastic. How’s it going? I hear you took her to Morocco.’

‘Yeah…’

‘That must have been brilliant. I love Morocco. Do you want a drink? What do you want? Prosecco?’

‘Uh, just a glass of water actually…’

‘Sure.’

James follows him through the talking people towards a table on the other side of the room. Halfway there, he squeezes past the vegetarian architect, whose name he has forgotten, and who is earnestly listening while a middle-aged woman lectures him about something. ‘Oh alright, mate,’ the architect says, with a sudden smile.

‘Alright, mate,’ James says, also momentarily smiling.

Steve is pouring him a glass of Perrier. When he has poured it he looks up and hands it to him. James thanks him. Steve smiles. He is a head shorter than James and wears glasses with heavy oblong frames. ‘So,’ he says. ‘You took the lucky lady to Morocco.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Where… where was that exactly?’

James is about to tell him when Steve, whose eyes immediately wandered, sees his four-year-old son, Omar, looking lost in the forest of legs. ‘Sorry mate, just a sec,’ he says, and leaves James standing there while he sweeps Omar up and takes him out of the room.

While he waits, James turns to the sash window overlooking the street and has a sip of prickling Perrier. It is a quiet, tree-lined street, on a steep slope—and he sees, walking up the slope, looking slightly lost, just as Omar had a few moments earlier, a smartly dressed man, probably in his seventies. At the sight of this man, James wishes, even more than before, that he had stayed at home. The man is obviously looking for a specific house. Finding number ninety-seven, he first walks up the steps at the front. The door there, however, is only for the two flats on the upper floors, and after peering puzzledly at the nameplates for a few moments, he looks around—as if hoping to see someone who will be able to help him—and then returns to the pavement. He looks up at the house. Then he notices the sign saying 97A, and pointing to the path at the side.

Though the sharp trill of the doorbell is hardly audible over the hubbub of voices, James’s pulse quickens at the sound of it and he looks for someone to talk to. There, standing near the fireplace, is Miranda, an old friend of Isabel’s. Isabel once tried to set them up in fact. They went out once or twice. Without hesitation he walks over to her, interrupting the man she is talking to. Though he tries not to show it, this man—Mark, a singleton from Quarles, Lingus—is obviously put out by the way Miranda seems positively to welcome James’s interruption. He was just telling her about his planned skiing holiday to Norway with ‘some mates’, hoping to work around to suggesting that she might like to join them, when she turns away from him while he is in mid-sentence—‘Most people don’t know how fantastic the skiing is up…’—and says, ‘James! Izzy promised me you’d be here.’ She puts her hand on James’s shoulder and kisses him. She has to stand on tiptoe. He leans forward to help her. ‘Did she?’

‘Yes.’

‘And how are you?’

‘I’m okay. You?’

‘Fine,’ James says. He is about to say something else when Mark stops looking impatiently off to the side and thrusts out a hand. ‘Mark!’

‘Hello.’

‘I was just telling Miranda about…’ He starts on Norway and skiing again, and James’s eyes move to the door, where, smiling nervously, the smartly dressed older man has just entered with Isabel. She is entirely focused on him. From the way she is treating him, he seems to be some sort of VIP. With his eyes on them, James is not listening to what Mark is saying—‘And they all speak English, which is—’

Following James’s stare, Miranda says, ‘Who’s that?’

‘Oh, he’s—’

‘They all speak English,’ Mark insists, ‘which is—’

‘He’s my uncle.’

Isabel has ushered him to the drinks table, and is pouring him a glass of prosecco—with his thumb and forefinger he indicates that he does not want much. Then, with a slightly worried look, she scans the room. James knows she is scanning it for him. She sees him, and says something to their uncle, and they start to move towards him.

Miranda has just turned distractedly back to Mark, who says, ‘So, yes, they all speak English, which is—’

‘Sorry to interrupt,’ says Isabel. ‘I need to steal James for a minute. Is that okay? James, look who’s here,’ she says, with her hand on the old man’s shoulder.

‘Hello, Ted,’ James says, smiling pleasantly. ‘It’s been a long time. A very long time. How are you?’ As they step towards an empty patch of white maple, he hears Mark say, with a sort of wearinesss now, ‘So, yes, um, they all speak English, which is…’

Ted is tall—the same height as James, more or less—and has the same high forehead, the same long face and squarish jaw. These are all things that flow to James from Ted’s side of the family, his mother’s side. Ted, though, is losing his white hair. The tightening skin is turning transparent on the prominences of his skull, while the skin of his neck has lost its hold entirely. Isabel has left the two of them to talk, and the first thing Ted says is, ‘The last time I saw you, you were doing very well.’

James smiles. ‘Was I?’ This was one of the things he had feared having to talk about when he saw Ted in the street.

‘You had some sort of Internet firm.’

‘Yes.’

‘What happened to that?’

When James tells him, Ted seems sincerely surprised. ‘Oh?’ he says. ‘Did it? That’s a shame. Um… I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘Don’t worry. It wasn’t the only one.’

‘No. No, I suppose not. There were lots of them, weren’t there? What happened with all that? I never really understood what that was all about.’

‘I don’t know,’ James says. ‘I’m probably the wrong person to ask.’ Then, seeing that his uncle is hoping for a proper answer, he stops smiling and says, ‘There was massive over-investment, essentially. I suppose there was this idea that whole sections of the economy were about to move en masse onto the Internet. I thought so at the time myself. Lots of people did. That’s why there was so much over-investment, which pushed up share prices so much. Then there was the herd mentality too. That took over. These things have their own momentum. Nobody wants to be left out.’

‘Of course not!’ Ted says emphatically.

‘Even if you think it’s all nonsense, if you see people doubling and tripling their money in a few months, even if you think they’re total fools—maybe especially if you think they’re total fools—you might be tempted to get involved. Ideas of value go out the window. Then it’s not even speculation. It’s just… a sort of pyramid scheme. Alan Greenspan called it “irrational exuberance”, I think.’

‘Alan Greenspan? Wasn’t he…’

‘The Federal Reserve.’

Ted nods. ‘That’s right.’

‘In a sense I didn’t lose anything,’ James says with a smile. ‘I had nothing at the start, and nothing at the end.’

Ted does not smile at this. He just peers at his nephew thoughtfully, and mainly to forestall any follow-up questions, James says, ‘You still live in Wimbledon?’

‘Yes. Yes, I do.’

‘The same…?’

‘The same house, yes.’

On that, they simultaneously turn their heads and look out into the living room, at one end of which they are standing. For a moment, as clouds manoeuvre somewhere out of sight in the sky, pale sunlight pours in from the street end, then fades. Not entirely. Though the shadows lose their sharpness, they stay. They know they are thinking of the same thing—the Victorian vicarage in Wimbledon, the weeks that James and Isabel spent there in 1974. James remembers surprisingly little about those weeks. Not even how many weeks it was. How many was it? Though it seemed like a long time then—and seems like a long time now—it might only have been two, or even one. One or two weeks at the very end. That would make sense. He remembers the thick ivory shagpile in the vestibule and on the stairs. It was unlike any carpet he had ever seen.

Ted does not seem aware of the fact that his hand is fiddling nervously with one of the buttons of his suit jacket.

‘How’s Jean?’ James says.

‘She’s fine. Well…’ Ted’s voice takes on a more serious tone. ‘She’s okay. She’s having trouble with her hip. That’s why she’s not here today.’

‘It would have been nice to see her.’

‘She very much wanted to be here.’

‘Do send her my love,’ James says.

‘I will. And she sends you hers.’

They smile sadly at each other.

‘And how’s your father?’ Ted says.

‘He’s fine. He lives in France now. You probably know.’

‘Yes, he’s lived there for a while, hasn’t he? In Paris, or…?’

‘No, in the south. He used to live in Paris. He lives in the south now.’

‘Lovely,’ Ted says. ‘Do you visit him much?’

‘Sometimes. Not for a while actually.’

‘No?’

‘I was there last spring. I may go next month.’

‘It must be lovely down there.’

It was a damp spring in the south of France. The light was milky, the sky a passionless mother-of-pearl. The palm trees looked flustered in the wind. From Nice, he took the train along the sea—watched the white manes tossing far out on the water—and then a taxi inland from Antibes. He arrived at the house in time for lunch. The question was whether to eat outside, where the awning was flapping fitfully. There was a feeling that James, fresh from the fumes and interiors of London, would want to, and they set up on the terrace. Four places. Isabel was there. Unexpectedly. On her own. She had been there, it seemed, for a few days. The light was hard and grey. Under the awning it was quite dark.

No explanation of Isabel’s presence was immediately forthcoming. Over lunch there was at first small talk. How was James’s flight? (Fine—flights are always fine.) How was London? What was happening in the village? How much longer would the local shops hold out against the new Carrefour…

They were talking in a superficial way about Alexander’s work, something he was writing, when he and Isabel slipped into one of the intellectual play-fights they enjoyed so much. From then on Esmeralda said little, and James less. The question of the day was—Is the world changing more or less quickly than it was? Alexander said LESS quickly. The world was changing less quickly now than at any point in the twentieth century. Think, he said, of the fact that in 1900 there was no powered flight at all. The Wright brothers and their experiment on the sands at Kitty Hawk were still some years in the future. And not much more than half a century after that, there were supersonic airliners, spy planes photographing from the edge of space and men on the moon—while in the almost half a century since then we have essentially not moved past that point. We are still using, he exclaimed, as if it were an outrage, except that he was smiling, essentially the same equipment to fly around in as we were in 1970!

James smiled too, palely, when his father’s excited eyes met his own.

Then Isabel threw the Internet at him. Alexander waved that away. It was, he said, merely the latest step in the development of a technology that started with the telegraph (invented 1837), and then flowered into the telephone (1876). Electronic computers, the other necessary ingredient, were invented in the 1940s. What’s more, their period of exponential increase in speed and power seemed to be plateauing. This was his point, he said. Following an historically extraordinary period of invention from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, a sort of technological Russian spring, there was then a further period of working through the practical applications of many of these inventions, a period which in the last few decades had produced things like the Internet and the mobile phone. This period, he said, was now ending—that was his point. Fluently, initially marking them off on his fingers, he listed some of the inventions that had made the hundred years from 1850 to 1950 so extraordinary—the sewing machine, the fridge, the washing machine, the internal combustion engine, the typewriter (1867), the phonograph, the microphone, electric light, the pneumatic tyre, the zipper (1893), wireless communications, the submarine, the electron (1897—i.e. during the reign of Queen Victoria), the tape recorder (also a Victorian invention), television (1925), the jet engine, penicillin, nuclear weapons, the helicopter, the now ubiquitous electronic computer (1946), the transistor, the contraceptive pill—even, more than half a century ago now, the structure of DNA, which was obviously the fundamental step that has made all subsequent efforts in the life sciences possible. And that was hardly something new, it was hardly of our time. ‘Hardly,’ he said to James and Isabel, ‘of your time.’ (And then to Esmeralda, with a smile, ‘Or yours, my love.’) It was a discovery made the year that Stalin died. That was its era. His own era just about. (He was a man of the mid-century, a political journalist of Cold War years, witness of événements in Paris and anti-Vietnam protests in Grosvenor Square.) And since then, he stated provocatively, since the 1950s, there had not been a single invention on a par with the major items on his list.

In spite of the provocative tone in which he said this, Isabel seemed to have lost interest. She seemed to lack the energy to keep up her end of the debate. She just said, ‘Well, maybe,’ and—as if tidying it up—trimmed a sliver from the Pont l’Evêque with a silver knife. The awning flapped. Underneath the vigour of his speech, underneath the sense of excited engagement, his father seemed tired, James thought. His keen, mobile eyes were moist on the exposed terrace. His hair, still thick in his mid-seventies, was slightly unkempt. His hand, however, was steady as he poured the last of the wine, a Provençal rosé. He was making an effort not to seem put out by their presence—that was perhaps what all this energetic talk was about. This did not necessarily mean that he was put out, only that he was worried that he might seem to be. This sort of thing James was used to. His father was not an easy man to interpret, in spite of the wary expressiveness of his hazel eyes.

Now he was saying that scientific, technological and social change had for a long time in themselves provided us with a sense of purpose, of progress—‘and this sense was definitive, in its way’. It was an important part of our self-definition as a society. It was what we were about. It was what we did. We progressed. (Think of avant-gardism in art, how seriously—on the model of scientific progress—that was once taken! All those ‘experiments’. Think of Marxism. Think of our fixation with the ‘modern’, with ‘modernity’.) All of which in turn profoundly shaped our sense of what time was—we thought of time as a vector of progress. The slow erosion of that idea would have all sorts of implications—political, social, ‘even spiritual’.

*

When they had finished lunch, Alexander said that he had to work for a few hours, and went down to his study, and for the first time since his arrival James found himself alone with his sister, in the long salon. The old house was not designed for those thunderheads sagging over the valley. There was something almost Romanesque about its spaces. It had a vaguely ecclesiastical atmosphere. The furniture, the objets, the knick-knacks, the paintings, the small windows punched through the formidable walls, with their seatlike wooden ledges… These were things so familiar that they did not normally notice them. Their father had owned the house—it was in one of those troubadour villages—since the Sixties. It had always been there.

Isabel was sitting very low on a sofa, looking through a wide, flat book.

‘How long are you staying?’ James said.

‘I don’t know, a few days.’

He did not ask her why she was there. There were, he had heard from Esmeralda when they were alone in the kitchen for a minute, ‘problems’. That is, problems with Steve. He was not sure what sort of problems exactly. Perching in one of the window nooks, he looked out at the wet olive trees, the miserable blue shape of the swimming pool. ‘How’re things?’ he said.

‘They’re okay.’

‘Yeah?’

They sat in silence for a minute. The pages of the book creaked as she turned them. Looking out the window, he heard the whisper of her hand smoothing the tissue paper that screened the plates.

‘Oh I like that one,’ she said.

‘Which?’ He stood up to look.

It was the sort of day, he thought, still standing there as she turned the page, when it would be nice to have a fire. Only a fire would be able to deal with the sad damp that, in this sort of weather, permeated the whole house.

Isabel looked up questioningly—he was still just standing there. ‘What?’ she said.

‘What’s up?’

‘What’s up?’ she echoed, as if she didn’t understand the question. ‘Nothing.’ And then, perhaps feeling that that wasn’t plausible—‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘Okay…’

‘I’m going downstairs for a bit,’ she said. It was a peculiarity of the old hillside house that the street entrance was on the top floor, so that what you would normally expect to find upstairs, you found downstairs.

On his own, he wondered why he was there. Only out of habit, it seemed. He had spent so much time in that house. The memories merged together. Memories of school holidays. People from different epochs of his life mingled there as they never had in time. He listened to the sound of the rain intensifying on the olive trees, of thunder fraying like acoustic distortion down the valley. The house itself had little or no sense of memory. It was always the same. This dim ecclesiastical light in the stillness of the salon. No photographs on public display, except, as if they had been forgotten there, a few in an unlit whitewashed alcove where the hall turned, including one of his mother. It was a snapshot from the early Seventies in which she was flanked by Isabel and himself. Somehow the setting does not seem to be London. Paris? He does not think he properly understood, at the time, what was happening. She was ill. However, even that he did not understand—it was just an explanation—some words that he himself would offer in his husky voice to explain the situation—he did not understand what they meant. He has no memories of the hospital, nothing like that. All there is is the thick ivory shagpile in the vestibule of the Wimbledon vicarage. In his own flat there are several framed photographs of her, this person of whom he has no actual memories, this utterly mysterious, utterly numinous person. What he finds painful now is imagining it all—that is, those months in 1974—from her point of view. Imagining himself from her point of view. Thus he sees himself as if from the outside, through her eyes. Thus he fumbles towards some estimate of what he might have lost. Well.

The temper he had in the years that followed… They lived in a four-storey house in Kensington. Today it would be a multimillionaire’s house. Kensington was not the same in the late Seventies. Except for the light. The light was the same then—the London light, flat and plain on London streets. The green electric typewriter muttering in the study on Sunday afternoons.

In the seating plan, Isabel has put Ted between herself and Kevin Staedtler’s wife. Kevin is the senior partner at Quarles, Lingus, and he and his wife, being in their fifties, are nearest to Ted in age—that was presumably the thinking there. James is down the other end, Steve’s end, where topics in the early part of the meal include the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini—someone whose name James associates with Miriam. Yes, she once made him sit through The Canterbury Tales… Even so, he knows little or nothing about his films and does not feel able to participate. Nor does he particularly want to, though Miranda, who is sitting on his left, keeps making efforts to include him. He is touched by these efforts but he finds it hard to live up to them—every time she asks him what he thinks, he just shrugs and says some variant of I don’t know.

Eventually she tries a new line of approach. She turns to him and says, ‘So what are you up to these days?’

The main course is just being served—two waitresses are doing the serving. Isabel has pulled out all the stops for this one, he thinks. Probably to impress Ted, to show him how well she’s doing…

‘The last time I saw you,’ Miranda says, ‘you had a magazine. I even remember the name. Plush.’

‘That’s right…’

‘Do you remember the last time I saw you?’

He thinks. ‘No,’ he says finally, laughing. ‘No, I don’t. I’m sorry.’

She hits him. ‘It was at the magazine launch party!’

‘At least I invited you to the launch party…’

‘No, you didn’t. I went with Izzy. I told you I thought Plush was a ludicrous name. You didn’t think that was very funny. Sorry if it upset you.’

He has no memory of the incident. Not even of speaking to her, not even of seeing her at the launch party. ‘That’s okay,’ he says. ‘And anyway, you were right. It was a ludicrous name.’

‘Of course it was. The magazine failed, I hear.’

‘It did.’

‘So what are you up to now? Izzy says you’re always up to something. When she told me the magazine had failed I said, “Poor James, is he okay?” And she laughed…’

‘She laughed?’

‘She laughed,’ Miranda says, smiling, with a secretive inclination of her head, ‘and said, “Oh don’t worry about James. He always finds something new.”’

‘She said that?’

‘And now she says you own a horse. You know my parents are members at Newbury racecourse?’

‘No, I didn’t know that…’

‘I’ve been there loads of times. You should come one day.’

‘I’d love to.’

‘What’s his name? Your horse.’

‘Her name. Absent Oelemberg.’

When he says the name, she says, ‘Sorry?’

‘Absent Oelemberg.’

‘What sort of name is that?’

He shrugs. ‘A horse’s name.’

‘What does it mean?’

‘I asked the trainer—he said he had no idea.’

‘Has she won?’

‘Not yet.’

‘I suppose it’s all totally fixed like you hear. How come you have a horse anyway? You didn’t used to be interested in horses, did you?’

‘No.’

‘So?’

‘Last year,’ he says, pouring them both some wine, ‘I had a sort of tipping service.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean I sold tips on the Internet.’

‘What, horse-racing tips?’

‘Yes.’

She stares at him for a few seconds. Her eyes narrow nicely. ‘I can’t believe you were involved in something like that,’ she says. ‘And you look so nice and honest.’

‘Of course I do. I am nice. I am honest…’

‘Ha!’

‘It’s not dishonest,’ he protests.

‘Where did these tips come from? You?’

‘No. I employed someone.’

‘Who?’

‘A pro,’ he says innocently.

‘A pro? And did his tips make a profit? If his tips made a profit, why did he have to be employed by you? Did they make a profit?’

‘Sometimes.’

She laughs. ‘Sometimes? So much for being nice and honest!’ she says. Her eyes narrow smilingly again. ‘You really are quite louche, aren’t you?’

‘Not at all,’ he says, smiling also.

‘And then what happened?’

‘To the tipping service?’

‘Yes. Was it shut down?’

‘Not exactly. My tipster was arrested…’

Her loud laugh turns Mark’s head. For the last twenty minutes, he has struggled to seem interested in what some pregnant woman is saying to him while his peripheral vision was teasingly filled with Miranda talking and laughing and hitting James playfully on the other side of the table… What they were saying—though he wasn’t sure what it was—seemed infinitely more interesting than what was being said to him, though he wasn’t sure what that was either. Though he is still smiling fixedly in her direction, he has no idea what the pregnant woman is talking about, and when she finally stops—she may have asked him a question—he just says, ‘Yes, yes,’ and then turns to James and says, ‘Did I hear you say you’re a horseman?’

‘No,’ James says.

‘Oh. I thought I heard you say you were a horseman.’

‘I do own a horse. Or part-own it.’

‘Oh, I see.’ Mark turns to Miranda. ‘Your parents live in Newbury then?’

‘No,’ she says, ‘they don’t.’

‘Oh they don’t? I know Newbury quite well.’

She laughs. ‘Well they don’t live there.’

‘Where do they live?’

James leaves him to it and looks down the long table. At intervals there are vases of white flowers, and at the far end French windows into the garden. Most of the suits are up that end, and he sees Ted being introduced to Omar, while Mrs Staedtler looks on through an uninterested smile. Suddenly he hears Steve saying vehemently, ‘Now James was fucking loaded. I mean seriously fucking loaded.’

He turns and Steve says, ‘Do you remember the weekend we went to Sussex or wherever, and you were looking at those houses? Like manor houses and stuff. Me and Isabel and you and your girlfriend at the time—what was her name?’

‘Thomasina.’

‘Yeah, that’s right. How much were you worth then?’

‘I don’t know,’ James says. He is embarrassed to find people staring at him. ‘Honestly.’

‘It was hundreds of millions, wasn’t it?’

‘It was nothing in the end.’

‘Yeah, but for a while it was hundreds of millions. You were in the Sunday Times Rich List, weren’t you?’

‘Was I?’ James says. ‘Maybe. I don’t know.’

Steve nods. ‘You were.’

Slowly the long table loses its hold on the party. The French windows are opened and some smokers step outside. Then other people start to wander upstairs. Eventually there are only a few left, too intensely into whatever it is they are talking about to notice that they are laggards. Finally they too stand up and leave, and the uniformed waitresses move in to finish their work, speaking Polish to each other over the silently smoking wicks.

James does not want to be the first to leave and for a while he waits outside on the oval lawn. It is a mild afternoon. Some friends of Steve’s are there, smoking what seems to be a spliff next to a small magnolia tree, its sticky-looking buds just starting to break open. Soft-focused with wine, James watches them pass the spliff from hand to hand. They make him think of people he used to see on Brick Lane…

He hears a woman’s voice shout his name.

It is Miranda, walking towards him from the French windows, tottering slightly in her heels on the soft turf of the lawn. She is, he thinks, a nice-looking woman. The white dress she is wearing honeys her skin and her smile is an orthodontist’s masterpiece. ‘James,’ she says, ‘you didn’t finish telling me about… your horse. What’s her name again?’

‘Absent Oelemberg.’

‘You said she would win this week. Where? When? I need the money!’

He says, ‘I did tell you. It’s next week, not this week. She won’t win this week. A week tomorrow,’ he says, ‘at Huntingdon.’

‘Which race?’

‘I don’t know yet. Whatever race she’s in, she should win it.’

‘A week tomorrow, Huntingdon.’

‘Yes.’

She thinks for a moment. ‘That’s the thirteenth!’

‘Yes.’

‘Is that lucky or unlucky?’

‘This isn’t about luck.’

She laughs. ‘Oh isn’t it!’

James sees Mark wander into the garden. When he sees James talking to Miranda, he stops and with his hands in his trouser pockets looks up at the sky. A minute later he is followed by Isabel. ‘Ted’s just leaving,’ she says.

James looks at his watch. ‘I should be off too.’

And Miranda immediately says, ‘Yes, me too.’

And Mark, suddenly at her shoulder, says, ‘Yeah, I have to head as well.’

*

Hugo meets him in the shadowy vestibule, wagging his tail, and they do a slow lap of Mecklenburgh Square in the quiet, sinking light, stopping frequently for Hugo to sniff and officiously micturate. James lets him precede him into the flat, and from the kitchenette hears him lapping at his water bowl. James waits in the hall—the kitchenette is too small for them to be in there at the same time—until Hugo lifts his streaming muzzle and looks unhurriedly around. His weary eyes meet James’s and he waves his tail once or twice. When he has left the kitchen, James has a draught of tepid London tap water himself.

Then he phones her.

She picks up instantly—he is practically startled—and says, ‘Hello, honey. How are you? How was your sister’s lunch?’

‘Fine,’ he says. ‘How are you? What’s up? What are you doing?’

‘Ironing.’

‘Yeah?’

He is pleased that she is ironing—it seems so safe and stable. He hears that the TV is on, and imagines her half-watching the Sunday evening telly while the warm iron vaporously sighs. They talk for twenty minutes and suddenly everything seems okay. Even more so when he asks her when he will see her and she simply says, ‘Tomorrow?’

‘Tomorrow? Okay.’

‘Okay?’

It is not until a few minutes later, when he has hung up and is feeding Hugo, that he starts to think about something that happened while they were speaking. He thought nothing of it at the time. He just heard what sounded like the front door of her flat slam shut, and Summer’s voice saying something, and then a man’s voice saying something which he didn’t make out. He thought at the time that it must be something to do with Summer.

Now it occurs to him that what he half-heard Summer say was, ‘Hi, I’m Summer.’ In other words, she was talking to someone she had never met before. He starts to think through the implications of this.

It takes him a few minutes to face up to the obvious implication — the man was visiting Katherine. If so, who was he? Katherine has a brother in London. Unfortunately, he knows for a fact that Summer has met him. A male friend then? Possibly. Though it would seem strangely intimate for a male friend to be turning up at her flat on Sunday night. The fact that she was ironing when he arrived—there would be something strangely intimate about that too. He knows of no male friends, heterosexual or otherwise, whom she would see on those sort of intimately informal terms. Most of all, if this was nothing more than an innocent visit from a friend, why did she not mention it to him? That was specifically unlike her. It was her way to end phone calls by saying what it was that was making her end them, even if it was something totally spurious. So for there to be something so obvious—that someone she was waiting for had just arrived—and for her not to mention it…

Her voice tensed up at one point. It was such a tiny thing that he was not even sure, at the time, that it had happened. First, she lost the thread of what they were saying. He had just said something, and she did not seem to hear it. There was a silence on the line. Then she said, ‘What? Sorry?’ This was immediately after he had heard the door slam, and then the voices, Summer’s voice and the wordless rumble of the man’s voice. It seemed obvious that she had been distracted. That in itself was not surprising or suspicious. They then talked for several more minutes.

It is those minutes he is thinking of now. There was something tense about her voice, as if she was talking with someone else there, someone standing there, standing over her, waiting for her to finish.

4

The next afternoon, Monday, he meets Freddy. James and Freddy were at school together, twenty years ago, at a famous school on the fringes of London. On Monday they meet in Earls Court—one of those streets of trucks stampeding past exhaust-fouled terraces, of youth hostels, and veiled, slummy houses full of subletting Australians, and other houses with tarnished nameplates in Arabic on the doors and the paint falling off in stiff pieces. There, under a two-star package-tour hotel, they meet. Freddy is piquey and jaundiced. In one of his down moods. His hair looks like it has slipped off his head—there is none on top, where the skin has the look of a low-quality waxwork, or the prosthetic scalp of a stage Fagin, but plenty further down, where it trails like the fringe of a filthy rug over his collar—the old collar, white-edged with age, of an otherwise blue Jermyn Street shirt stolen from his landlord.

They are meeting today to talk about the horse they part-own, and the ‘touch’ that is planned for next Monday. It is Freddy’s fault, all the horse stuff. It was he who introduced James to Michael—the tipster, the ‘pro’ James mentioned at Sunday lunch. Freddy was ‘seeing’ Michael’s sister, who was still at school at the time—this was nearly two years ago—and he quite often went to the house in Shooter’s Hill when her parents weren’t there. Sometimes, while Melissa was having a shower and Freddy was in the kitchen pilfering food from the fridge, Michael would emerge to pour himself some Coke, and Freddy would talk to him. He asked him, for instance, what he did all day. Michael was in his late twenties, still lived with his parents, and did not seem to have a job.

His answer was—‘Systems testing.’

‘What sort of systems?’ Freddy said.

When he heard what sort of systems, Freddy started to take more interest in Michael. He pressed him for more information about his systems—monosyllabic Michael was not very forthcoming—and finally managed to persuade him to send him their selections by email every morning. For a week, Freddy just monitored these selections. Michael himself had said he did not put money on them, in spite of the fact that he kept a tally of their performance, which showed them to have made a profit over several years. And they made a small profit in the first week that Freddy monitored them. In the second week they made a large profit and Freddy plunged in. Soon he was making several hundred pounds a week. It was then—very full of himself and his several hundred pounds a week—that he told James. It had obviously never occurred to Freddy, as it quickly occurred to James, that there was the potential here to make much more than that by selling the tips on the Internet or through a premium-rate phone line.

One afternoon, they took the train down to Shooter’s Hill to see Michael. He was a large man, putty-pale. There was something odd about him. James explained that he wanted to pay him for his horse-racing tips. He had had in mind to pay Michael a percentage of subscription fees, or winnings, or something like that. However, it was obvious that Michael would prefer a flat fee, so James offered him £200 a week. James also wanted him to work in an office—he wanted the tips, the spreadsheets, whatever there was, on a hard drive he owned, in a space he paid for. Though this Michael was initially less keen on, he was soon spending an enormous amount of time in the office. Most of the time, in fact. The following scene was fairly typical.

Michael is sitting at his desk, working. The door opens. Michael does not look up or say a word. James shuts the door. ‘Morning,’ he says. ‘How’s it going?’ Still Michael says nothing. ‘How’s it going?’ James says again. This time Michael says, ‘Have you got my Coke?’ With a thud James puts the two-litre plastic flagon of Coke on Michael’s desk. Michael does not thank him. Without taking his eyes off the monitor in front of him, he opens the Coke and pours some into a plastic cup. ‘So how’s it going?’ James says again, sitting down at his own desk. When Michael still does not answer, James tries a more specific question. ‘Lots of selections today?’ Purposefully mousing, Michael does not seem to hear.

Michael’s systems, of which there were many, were purely quantitative—for all James knew, Michael had never seen a horse in his life. He seemed to have no idea that horse racing is something that actually happens, that the names of the tracks are the names of actual places, that people and horses and money and mud are involved; to him it seemed to be nothing more than an endless supply of new numbers on a screen—numbers in which to search for patterns, a puzzle that was never finished. For the first two months these numbers—marketed by James under the name of Professional Equine Investments—showed a nice profit, and the service soon had a few dozen subscribers. Unfortunately the first few months turned out to be unusual. More typical was a situation in which one week’s profit was offset by the next week’s loss, and the service just scraped along. Then started a monstrous sequence of losers, and James would sit at his desk while the rain fell outside, waiting for some antediluvian version of Windows to appear on the smouldering monitor and staring with something like hatred at Michael’s slack face, his sensuous mouth hanging open as he worked mechanically through the fiddly statistical analysis of his systems. He did not seem to notice that he was on a monster losing spree. That the subscribers were losing money while he still picked up his £200 a week. At such times, his wanting a flat fee seemed sly and even dishonest to James, who was unable to help feeling that this strange man, this hulking idiot in his nylon jacket and milk-white trainers, had somehow swindled him out of thousands of pounds.

Michael was spending less time in the office too. He was in later—sometimes quite late, and looking like he had not slept—and he left earlier. Indeed, he seemed to have something on his mind. For instance, he had started to stare out the window. That was not something he had ever done in the past, and now he would sit there for minutes at a time, while the Coke hissed in his cup, staring out the window at the East End sky.

‘Michael,’ James would say.

And Michael would not seem to hear.

‘Michael!’

And finally he would turn his oversized, unkempt head—exactly the way that Hugo did—unhurriedly and with a vacant expression in his docile chocolate eyes.

None of this prepared James for the phone call he received one Monday morning in early November.

He was out with Hugo when Freddy phoned. This was surprising in itself—it was not even eight.

‘I thought you might want to know,’ Freddy said, with a smile in his voice, ‘that Michael is in police custody.’

‘What?’

‘I thought you might want to know,’ Freddy said, even more slowly than the first time, ‘that Michael is in police custody. I’m not joking.’ He started to laugh. ‘He’s in a cell in Thamesmead Police Station.’

‘What are you talking about? Why?’

‘You’ll love this. Some sort of sexual assault.’

A long silence. Then James said, ‘You’re joking…’

‘No I’m not! That’s the point. I’m not joking! I just found out myself.’

‘How did you find out?’

‘Melissa. She sent me a text. I just spoke to her…’

‘What did she say?’

‘Just what I told you. Michael’s in a police cell, and it’s some sort of sex offence. I don’t know what he did exactly,’ Freddy said. ‘I just thought it was quite amusing.’ He seemed frustrated that James did not share his amusement.

‘You’re not joking?’ James said.

‘No.’

‘What’s Melissa’s number?’

‘Why?’

‘I need to speak to her. I need to find out what the fuck is going on.’

Melissa was on her way to work.

‘Yeah, that’s right,’ she said. She didn’t sound particularly put out. ‘Michael’s in the nick.’

He was apparently arrested on Sunday morning at the house of a woman who lived a few streets away in Shooter’s Hill.

The facts emerged at the trial the following summer. What seems to have happened is this—some time in September Michael was in a supermarket near his home. As he was paying, something startled him and he dropped his money onto the floor. The woman who was next in the queue had helped him pick it up. She smiled at him. Their hands momentarily touched. That was the first time he saw her.

Starting the next morning, he waited near the supermarket, hoping to see her again. When he did, he followed her home. It was a few days later that she first noticed him. She started seeing him in unexpected places, sometimes far from Shooter’s Hill—on the tube, in shops in the West End—and it was obvious that he was following her. When he followed her home and stood waiting outside, she phoned the police.

The next day they stopped him in the street and issued an informal warning. They told the woman they expected he was ‘scared out of his wits’ by their intervention—he had looked scared out of his wits when they walked up to him—and that he would now leave her alone. And he seemed to, until a week or so later she spotted him outside her office and he followed her onto the Docklands Light Railway. It was typical of Michael that when the police told him he’d be in trouble if he kept hanging around outside her house, he started hanging around outside her office instead. The second warning was more formal than the first. This time they took him to the station and made him sit in an interview room for an hour while they said things like, ‘You don’t want to go to prison, do you, Michael?’ They said that if they had to have him in again they would tell his ‘mum and dad’. ‘And what would they think, Michael, if they knew about this? Eh?’

For a few weeks there was no sign of him.

Slowly she stopped expecting to see him everywhere.

(This was the time of maximum listlessness in the office, of prolonged window-staring through sleepless eyes.)

Then one Sunday morning she was in the bath and thought she heard a noise downstairs. She stayed very still in the water, listening. There was a long, tingling silence. Then there was the sound of something smashing. To the hollow thump of footsteps on the stairs, her wet hands fumbled tremblingly with the lock. There was only one tiny window, which did not even open properly. Terrified, in tears, she was wrapping herself in a towel when someone tried the door. The pathetic flimsy lock had no hope of withstanding his weight. It surrendered at the first meaningful shove.

What was strange was that he did not seem to know what to do—not even what he wanted to do. A shocking male presence in the small pink-tiled space of the bathroom, he had her in his hands and did not seem to know what to do with her. When he started to move his hairy face towards hers—perhaps he was trying to kiss her—without thinking, with a sort of instinct, she sank her teeth into his forearm—he was pinning her shoulders to the wall—and immediately tasted his blood in her mouth like an old iron nail. He yelped and unpinned her, and she pushed past him and locked herself in her bedroom, from where she phoned the police.

She would not leave her room while he was still there—and for some reason he was still there when the police arrived, at speed and with wailing sirens. She threw the keys out the window and they let themselves into the house, where they found him still sitting on the linoleum by the toilet, holding the wound on his arm. (The puncture marks made by her teeth were plainly visible in the meat of his forearm, like a pair of dotted parentheses in a purple bruise.) He did not seem to understand what had happened, or what was happening.

Now, Melissa told James, he was indeed in a cell in Thamesmead Police Station, awaiting trial for a number of quite serious offences. Her parents had been to see him. A solicitor had appeared from somewhere. Michael himself seemed to be in a state of shock—he had not said a word since the police found him sitting next to the toilet, pathetically nursing his hurt arm.

‘He’s got an appointment with the psychiatrist this afternoon,’ Melissa said.

‘The psychiatrist?’ James said, starting to understand that this was probably the end of Professional Equine Investments.

There was however one loose end—Absent Oelemberg. Together, he and Freddy own half the horse. The other half is owned by her trainer, Simon Miller, who Freddy met in a Fenland pub one Saturday last November. Freddy told him he had owned horses in the past (which he hadn’t), and Miller, who was not totally sober, said that one of his owners had just died, an old fellow name of Maurice something. He had owned a half share in an ex-French mare in the stable and, if Freddy was interested, the heirs were looking to sell. When Freddy said he was interested, Miller went further and hinted that he was hoping to land a ‘nice little touch’ with the horse, who had not yet run in the UK.

The next morning, Freddy phoned James. He told him that he, Freddy, had an inexpensive opportunity to own a horse in training with ‘one of the top jumps trainers in the country’.

‘Who’s that then?’ James sounded sceptical.

‘Simon Miller,’ Freddy said. He was using his this-is-serious-now voice. ‘We have to move fast on this, though.’

‘We…?’

‘Miller wants ten grand for a half share.’

‘A half share? Who owns the other half?’

‘Miller does. He says he wants to hold on to half himself. He knows what he’s doing. He’s pretty shrewd,’ Freddy said. ‘And there’s something else. You’ll like this. He’s hoping to land a touch with her early next year.’

Freddy explained what Miller had told him in the pub the night before. Miller had been so drunk that it had taken a long time for Freddy to work out what he was saying. Essentially it was this: Absent Oelemberg was a smart ex-French mare—‘a useful tool’ was the expression Miller had used, slurring it so egregiously—eryoofustoowil—that at first Freddy had not even been able to make out what the words were, let alone what he meant by them. What he seemed to mean was a horse who would win her share of handicaps. Freddy had pretended to know all about the handicapping system, and fortunately Miller was much too drunk to notice that he had had to explain it to him from first principles himself. His plan for Absent Oelemberg was to ensure that she did not show her true ability in her first few races—she would then be assigned a handicap mark which was too low, from which she would therefore be able to win easily. And since she would have performed so poorly until then, the odds available on her in her first handicap would be very long. Thus you would have a horse at very long odds who you knew would win easily.

‘Well?’ Freddy said expectantly.

For some time, James said nothing. Thoroughbred ownership was an interesting prospect. On the other hand, this was Freddy on the phone on a Sunday morning, sounding like he was still drunk, with a proposition put together with a very drunk stranger in a pub the night before. It was not exactly investment grade. Not exactly triple-A. And James would unquestionably have said no, were it not for the embellishment of the touch. What Freddy understood was that James would see the touch as something he would be able to use for Professional Equine Investments.

Still, he slept on it.

Then the next morning he phoned Freddy and said he was prepared to put in his share.

And Freddy said that actually he would have to put in the whole £10,000 because he—Freddy—was skint at the moment. He would pay James back with his winnings, he said, when the touch went in, and since it had been Freddy who found the opportunity in the first place, when he had let him sweat for a few days, James lent him the money.

They went up to Cambridgeshire the following Sunday and stood in the stable yard, trying to look as if they knew what they were doing, Freddy fiddling with a hip flask, while Miller’s ‘head lad’—despite the youthful-sounding moniker, a middle-aged man—led the mare out of the stables and into the middle of the slurry-puddled, straw-strewn yard. She seemed fine—that is, there was nothing obviously wrong with her. She was quite unusual-looking. The visual effect was of a blackish-blue flecked with snow. And she was surprisingly small. She shook her head, tinkling the tack.

It was a frosty morning, and they were tired. Miller had insisted on meeting at eight. He stood there, taciturn, small eyes sly under a tweed peak, watching them while they watched the mare. (Ladylike, she lifted her tail and let fall a small heap of shiny manure.) He had been suspicious of Freddy at first. The morning after their meeting in the pub, up at half five as usual and monstrously hungover, he had sworn at himself for speaking so freely to a stranger—a stranger, what’s more, who had plied him all night with whisky and pints, while finding out more and more about his operation on the pretext of being a potential owner. That was what all the snoopers said. If something seems too good to be true, he told himself, his head throbbing as he watched the lads and lasses take the string out—it was a foul winter morning of horizontal sleet, not properly light yet—it probably is. And that this funny-looking posh fellow from London would just show up and pay £10,000 for a half share in the mare did seem too good to be true. And yet here he was, a week later, with his mate, and the money.

‘What d’you think?’ Simon said, eyeing them.

James stuck out his lower lip and nodded appraisingly. Freddy had a nervous swig from his hip flask.

The transaction transacted, they went into the house and had a heart-stopping fry-up prepared by Mrs Miller. It was an awkward meal. When James asked about the name Absent Oelemberg—what did it mean? — Miller just shook his head and said, ‘No idea.’

‘It’s probably French,’ James suggested politely.

Miller shrugged and went on feeding his smooth, fat face.

In London, Michael was being arrested.

The mare’s first run was in late December, in a novices’ hurdle at Huntingdon. (Though Professional Equine Investments no longer existed, and she would have to be sold, James had decided to land the touch first. Now that the service had failed he needed the money more than ever. He would be staking every penny he had on her, and he hoped to win enough to live on for a year or more, while he worked out what to do next.) Huntingdon was Miller’s local track. He had informed his new owners that it was where the touch would take place in March, and he wanted her to have run poorly there on at least one previous occasion. He also said that they should ‘have a few quid on’. When they looked at him in surprise, he said, ‘She won’t be winning. Not today.’ He said they should put the money on over the Internet, where it would leave indelible traces, so that when it was time to land the touch, if the stewards had any questions, they would be able to prove that they always followed her, win or lose. And in December she did lose. In the leathern privacy of his Range Rover, Miller had told them she wasn’t fit, and she looked unhealthily exhausted as she trailed in last with her tongue lolling out of her smoking head and the jockey standing up in his irons. His name was Tom. He was a stable insider, the son of Miller’s head lad. Later, in the pub—not the nearest pub to the track, an obscure village pub twenty miles away somewhere in the stunning flatness of the Fens—James noticed him whispering something to Miller, who nodded and patted him on the back.

Her next run was two weeks later, also at Huntingdon. She was twenty to one that day (James still had his few quid on) and she finished tenth of twelve. Miller was not keen to talk about what measures he was taking to make sure she performed so ignominiously, and anyway James had other things on his mind, or one other thing—Katherine, who he met at Toby’s wedding. The previous night he had taken her on the lamplit tour of the Sir John Soane Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and then for dinner. It was nearly midnight when he walked her to the tube at Holborn. (She had declined an invitation for a nightcap at his flat.) They stopped on the pavement at the station entrance.

‘Well…’ he said. ‘I hope…’

‘Can I kiss you?’

It was so sudden that he just said, ‘M-hm,’ and she stood on tip-toe and kissed him wetly on the mouth.

A few moments later the Saturday-night hubbub of station and street swam back. ‘I’ll see you next week,’ she said.

‘Okay…’

She went into the lightbox of the station, and he watched her through the snapping ticket barriers.

The next morning he was up early to take the train to Huntingdon.

The mare had not run since that murky January day. There was a scare when the meeting at which her final prep run was supposed to have taken place, at Fakenham, was abandoned due to waterlogging. That was while he was in Marrakech. Miller had said he would enter her for something else.

‘Fontwell, Wednesday,’ Freddy says.

‘Fontwell?’

‘It’s in Sussex.’

‘I know. What race?’

Freddy shrugs. ‘He did tell me,’ he says. ‘Some novices’ hurdle. Do you want to get something to eat? A kebab?’ There is a kebab place on Earls Court Road that Freddy particularly likes. He is on first-name terms with Mehmet and the others there.

‘No, I can’t,’ James says, looking at his watch.

‘Why not?’

‘I have to meet someone.’

5

He has been waiting for this moment, the moment when he sees her, for nearly a week now. She is already there, sitting at a small table with a vodka and tonic. And something is up—when he tries to kiss her she moves her head to the side, though not enough to prevent their lips from smudgily touching. She seems unnaturally still, except for her eyes, which are nervously mobile. When he touches her she hardly seems to notice. There is, however, something strangely playful about all this. There is something strangely playful about the impish S-shaped smile which sits in her small lips while he talks. That is probably why he is not worrying, not even about her visitor of yesterday night, whoever he was. Why he is even enjoying it. Why it is even exciting him. There is even something playful about the way that she will not let him kiss her on the mouth. Whenever he tries—and leaning towards her, he tries often—she smiles and turns her face away. They stay in the pub for two drinks—she has another V & T—and then she says she wants to get something to eat and they walk to a noodle place she knows on Upper Street.

There, things are less playful. She seems sadder. She drinks water. They share a platter of fried pastry parcels. They each have a deep bowl of soupy noodles. They still only talk about insignificant things—for some reason, he is explaining to her how the stock market works. Though she lets him take her hands in his, she looks down at her empty soup bowl when he does. He notices her rosy, tattered cuticles—they are even worse than usual. Her hands are usually a fiery pink, weathered by soap and water, wrinkled on the knuckles, the nails snipped very short. So different from her feet, which he has told her more than once are the prettiest he has ever seen—small and smooth, with soft pretty toes, and the same even ivory hue all over.

When he tries to kiss her, she turns her head away again. There is nothing playful about the way she does it now, and for the first time he looks pained and says, ‘What is it?’

Instead of answering, she asks him whether he wants to see the photos she took in Morocco.

‘Of course,’ he says.

Outside he puts up the umbrella. They have to squeeze together to fit under it. They have not been in such proximity all evening and he smells the faded scent of the perfume—so familiar a smell, lingering in woollens—that she put on in the morning when she went to work. It is only a short walk to her flat. They have made this ingress together many times. They know what to do. He shakes out the umbrella and takes off his shoes. She turns on some lights and starts to make mint tea. When he puts his arms around her, however, she looks at him quizzically, as if it is something he has never done until that moment. ‘Why won’t you kiss me?’ he says.

‘I just won’t.’

‘What do you mean you just won’t?’

She leaves the kitchen with the mugs.

‘What do you mean you just won’t?’ he says, sitting down next to her on the sofa. When he tries to, she sucks in her lips and shakes her head. She laughs, and lets herself flop over to the side, so that she is half-lying there. ‘I don’t understand,’ he says, leaning over her. ‘What is it?’

Looking up at him, her eyes move like insects on the surface of a pond, with quick little movements, this way, that way, unable to stay still. ‘Why don’t you ask me some questions?’ she suggests.

‘What sort of questions?’

She shrugs with mock secretiveness and for a moment makes her eyes very wide.

‘What sort of questions?’ he says again.

She sighs, and lets her head loll on the velvet of the sofa. He is looking at her face from a strange perspective, more or less up her nostrils. She is looking up into the tasselled pink lampshade on the table next to the sofa. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘Just…’

‘What?’ he says quietly. ‘What is it? Tell me.’

She does not tell him. She pushes him off her and says, ‘I’m going to get ready for bed.’

‘Okay,’ he says, propped on an elbow. ‘I’ll watch you.’

‘If you want.’

‘I do.’

He follows her upstairs. There, however, she takes her pyjamas from under her pillow and leaves him on his own. Eventually he lies down and stares at the ceiling. That this has something to do with the man who was here last night is obvious—it was obviously a significant visit, and if it was significant, he is pretty sure he knows who it was. In her pyjamas now, she takes a hairbrush from where her things are laid out—her perfumes and make-up, her lacquered pots of junk jewellery—and starts to sweep her hair. She holds it out to the side and sweeps it vigorously. ‘Are you going to stay?’ she says, lifting the duvet on her side.

‘I’ll stay for a while. Hugo’s at home. Otherwise I’d stay the night.’

‘M-hm.’

They lie there for a few minutes in the lamplight—her under the duvet, him fully dressed on top of it. Then he jumps up, takes everything off and joins her underneath. His eagerness, maybe, makes her laugh kindly. ‘You like being naked, don’t you,’ she says. ‘I saw Fraser yesterday.’

To hear her say it is surprisingly painful.

‘I know.’

‘You know?’ she says, sitting up.

‘I heard him. When we were talking on the phone.’

‘You heard him?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did you hear?’

He tells her.

‘Why didn’t you say something?’

‘I didn’t know it was him. I didn’t know who it was.’

He tells her that he noticed the way she lost the thread of what they were saying on the phone, that he heard the tension in her voice. She laughs when he tells her these things. And the way he tells them is meant to be funny—it is meant to turn the whole thing into a harmless farce—and he laughs too. She says, ‘I’m so sorry, James. It was so unlucky he walked in just when I was talking to you. I heard the doorbell and I had this whoosh of adrenalin, and then when I heard him talking to Summer, I wanted to hear what they were saying. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry if I sounded tense. I’m sorry it was so obvious.’

‘That’s okay,’ he says, still quite lightly.

Then, ‘Why was he here? What happened?’

She sighs and flops onto the pillow.

Overhead there is an old-fashioned ceiling fan with wicker blades—like something from a tropical hotel, pre-air conditioning. It was there when she moved into the flat. She never uses it, does not even know if it still works. ‘He phoned me in Morocco. The day we were supposed to go to the mountains. That morning.’ She says they hadn’t spoken for a year, that she was surprised and upset. ‘I mean it was upsetting,’ she says. ‘He said he was just phoning to say hi. I said I was in Morocco. He wanted to know what I was doing there. I said I was with someone and told him to leave me alone. That was it. I was upset, though. I’m sorry if I seemed… upset. Or out of sorts or something.’

Lying on his back with his left arm under his head, he puts his other hand pensively inside her pyjama trousers and strokes her pubic hair. ‘That’s okay,’ he says.

He is trying to remember that day. Exactly a week ago. The hour at the poolside, the warm wind stirring the line of palm trees, the shadow of the hotel on the water…

‘I thought you went to the mountains,’ he says.

Surprisingly, she laughs. ‘No, of course not.’

And that night, the terrace on top of the hotel in the Nouvelle Ville, over the thick smog of the town. The hotel turned out to be a sort of whorehouse. They saw one of the men who worked in their own hotel making for the lift and its full ashtray with two fat whores… Yes, she had been upset. He thought she was upset with him for making them miss the minibus to the mountains, and then taking her to a whorehouse. In fact, it had been something else entirely. Nothing to do with him.

She says, ‘A few days ago he phoned me again. He said he wanted to see me. I told him I didn’t want to see him. He insisted. He said he had something to say. So yesterday we went for a drink.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He said… he wants to try again.’

They lie there in silence.

‘And what did you say?’

‘I said… I said… I said I’d think about it.’

She turns her head on the pillow. He is just lying there, staring straight up. ‘Are you crying?’ she says softly.

He shakes his head.

‘I said I’d tell him within a week,’ she says.

He is seeing the ceiling fan with a strange intensity. It is as if the whole world has shrunk to that old fan—its off-white wicker blades, its thick stalk, the plastic housing of its motor, and the weighted string of tiny stainless-steel spheres that hangs from the housing.

‘I don’t need a week, though. I know what I’m going to tell him.’

‘What are you going to tell him?’ And then, feeling a need to justify himself, such is his sense that Fraser King has some sort of primacy over him in this situation, ‘I think you should tell me if…’

‘Of course.’

Still, she does not speak for a few seconds.

From the start he has frequently had the sense that she is measuring him against Fraser King—measuring him in every way, from the most obviously physical to the most ineffably emotional—measuring him, and finding him wanting. There have been times when seeing her lost in thought—for instance on the Eurostar as it left Lille Europe—he experienced the precise, painful feeling that she would prefer to be there with Fraser King than with him. That she would prefer to be anywhere with Fraser King than with him. And yet now she is telling him, in effect, that this is not true. Hearing her say it, he feels a hint of euphoria. Fraser King is no longer a factor. Everything is now okay.

It is a feeling that lasts only a few seconds, until she says, ‘I don’t think we should see each other for a while.’

And when that elicits a prolonged silence, ‘I’m sorry.’

He turns to her and sighs and they smile wistfully at each other.

She lets him slip his arm under her neck and snuggles up to him. The way she does this makes him improve his prognosis. When she says she does not think they should see each other ‘for a while’, what he now takes her to mean is maybe a week or two—until she has told Fraser that she intends to turn him down. Poor Fraser.

‘I’m sorry, James,’ she says.

‘I understand.’

‘Thanks for being so magnanimous.’

‘That’s okay,’ he says. (She laughs.) Easy to be magnanimous when he is the one in her bed. He says, ‘When you say a while…’

‘Mm.’

‘What do you mean?’

She shakes her head—he feels it move in the hollow of his neck. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I just… I don’t know. Sorry.’ And as if it were part of the apology, she strokes his leg with her foot.

Still studying the ceiling fan, he twists a lock of her hair around his finger. Then he turns onto his side, and studies her face. She submits to this study with a small smile. For the first time that night she does not try to move away when he kisses her on the mouth. Indeed, she even opens her mouth, and there is an immediate surge to heart-hammering intensity. She does not let this last long, however. He encircles her with his arms and squeezes her. She squeezes him too, and for a long time they lie there like that.

‘Should I turn off the light?’ she whispers.

‘If you want.’

With a sudden twisting movement she turns and sits, takes a sip of water—with water in her mouth she offers him the glass, he shakes his head—and switches off the light.

*

It is still dark when he leaves the bed and feels for his things, which are mixed up with hers on the floor. He has a terrible feeling that he is neglecting poor Hugo—who, having spent the night unexpectedly on his own in Mecklenburgh Street, must urgently need a walk. That is why he is standing there in the dark, even though to all intents and purposes it is still night outside and he has not slept much on the thin pillows, frequently waking to look at the time, in spite of the fact that the alarm was set. Then it went off—loud and shrill—and he sat up while she struggled, still essentially asleep, to make it stop.

He is feeling for his things on the floor when she turns on the light. She puts a hand over her eyes. ‘No, it’s okay,’ he says quietly, doing the same. ‘I don’t need the light. Thanks.’ His mouth is thick and faecal-tasting. He is sweating. It is too hot for him here, where the storage heater seems impossible to switch off and leaks nasty heat all night.

When he is dressed he sits on the edge of the bed, wondering whether she has fallen asleep again. She has not—as soon as she feels his weight on the mattress, she sits up, and seems to prop herself on an elbow.

‘Okay, I’m going,’ he whispers.

‘Okay.’

He kisses her, lightly touching her lips with his own. Her lips are sleepily warm. Her whole face, which he can hardly see, is sleepily soft and warm. He kisses her again, and is just standing up to leave when she says, ‘James.’

‘Yes.’

‘So… What are we going to do?’ she says. ‘Just carry on as before?’

For a few seconds he says nothing. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

This time it is she who does not speak for a few seconds. ‘Okay,’ she says eventually. ‘Nothing too intense, though.’

He is not sure what she means by this. ‘No,’ he says. ‘Nothing too intense.’

‘Okay.’

‘Sorry to wake you up.’

‘That’s okay.’

She hears him tiptoe through the squeaking hall. There is a suspenseful silence while he puts on his shoes and jacket, then she hears the front door swing open and shut. Twice. In an effort to be quiet, the first attempt was too tentative.