Spring

1

She is half an hour late for work, and striding across the lobby she sees immediately that Carlo is upset. ‘I’m sorry, Carlo,’ she sings, while still out in the open space, under the shimmering spectrums of the two-tonne chandelier. He just shakes his head and skulks into the staff cloakroom. For a few seconds she stands at the front desk, paying down the oxygen debt of her hurry.

Then she follows the small Italian into the staff cloakroom. In the mirror, she sees what a mess her hair is, how pouchy her eyes look.

Carlo is shrugging on his smart blue overcoat.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says flatly, as if it were a final offer.

‘S’okay,’ Carlo says, without looking at her. He straightens his scarf. ‘You owe me though.’

Throughout the morning the huge hotel empties. The lifts ping. Porters push trolleys loaded with luggage. Taxis swarm on the manicured forecourt. The doormen endlessly open the doors, while from the windows of the top floor the waiters have no time to look out over the massed treetops of the park, pushing westwards for over a mile into the indistinct distance.

At about eleven, when things up there have finally quietened down, Ernő—the Hungarian waiter, her silent suitor—steps out of the lift with something in his hands.

‘Is that for me?’ she says, matter-of-factly.

‘Naturally,’ Ernő says, under the innocent impression that this is just an elegant way of saying yes.

‘Thanks. That’s very sweet of you.’

‘Nothing,’ he says.

She puts the coffee under the summit of the desk and stares out at the long perspectives of the lobby. The shimmer of its spaces, of the chandelier—an inverted wedding cake, listlessly iridescent—seems superannuated. Its luxury seems stale. The little shops in the neglected, marble-floored passage seem frumpy, superfluous, survivors from a time when only the shops in luxury hotel lobbies were open on Sunday, or even Saturday afternoon.

She has lunch in the subterranean warren of linoleum passageways the public never sees, and it is sitting there in her sober work clothes that she starts to think properly about what has happened. She feels uneasy. When she said, ‘I don’t think we should see each other for a while,’ that was what she meant, and yet somehow it is not how things seem to have been left. She shouldn’t have had sex with him, of course. Probably she should not have let him stay the night at all. Should not even have let him kiss her. It had been her intention not to let him kiss her. She had felt sorry for him. She had felt sorry for him when he said, in that oddly simple way of his, ‘Why won’t you kiss me?’ There is something about him that tugs at her heart. (‘Why won’t you kiss me?’) So yes, she felt sorry for him. That was not the main thing, though. The main thing was that she seemed to find it impossible not to kiss him when he was there, in front of her. His mouth. The way that kissing it her whole mind seemed to melt… Pondering this phenomenon, she pours herself some water. Her failure to hold to her intentions makes her wonder whether she is wrong to want not to see him for a while. It makes her wonder whether that is in fact what she wants. Does she know what she wants? She does not seem to.

She finds it upsetting to upset people. That is her weakness. That is why she let him leave this morning thinking that everything would just go on as if nothing had happened. That is why the idea that maybe she was wrong to want not to see him for a while so easily tempted her as she sat propped on her skinny elbow in the dark and turned her face slightly away from his halitosis. She had nearly not said anything. Nearly not even said, ‘James! So… What are we going to do?’ And then, oppressed by his silence—standing there like a sullen shadow—and her own sudden uncertainty, ‘Just carry on as before?’ She had not meant the words to convey the sense that that was what she thought they should do. She had meant them more as the sceptical starting point for a conversation on the subject. That was not how they had sounded. They had sounded like a straightforward suggestion, and he was obviously willing to take them as one. So he left, and she lay there for a few minutes, feeling that he had somehow been unpleasantly sly—which made her dislike him—and then she fell asleep.

She was hurt by his lack of emotion when she said she did not think they should see each other for a while. The way he was silent for a few seconds and then just said, ‘Okay.’ When he said that, she suddenly wondered what he felt. He did not seem to feel anything. And if he did, why did he not show it? Why did he not express it in words? Why did he not even try?

She pours herself some more water from the plastic jug and someone sits down at the table, as far away from her as possible. Ernő. When she looks in his direction, he just nods. They do not speak to each other, not even a few pleasantries, which seems odd. He must be ten years younger than her. He might be no more than twenty. Sometimes she thinks that if he simply walked up to her and suggested they take the lift upstairs and have sex in a vacant room—as he presumably wants to—she would just say, ‘Yeah, okay,’ and start setting up a suitable key. The trouble is, if he did that, he would no longer be Ernő, with his shy, lusty innocence. His unspoken, obvious longing. He would be something else.

‘How are things today?’ he says suddenly.

It is a tedious question and his tone is tediously sincere and she just shrugs and says, ‘They’re okay. Fine.’ He has no sense of humour, or does not seem to. ‘I’ll see you later,’ she says, and stands up with her tray.

‘Okay, see you,’ he says.

She smiles at him.

Well, she ‘smiles’ at him. It is a smile she sometimes does—a momentary flexing of her mouth—which does not even pretend to be sincere. To that extent it is, in its way, a sincere expression. It expresses something. She knows this, and wonders as she leaves and wanders up to the lobby, what it does express. She tends to do it when she is nervous, when she does not know what else to do. It is a sort of surrender to the pressure of social niceties, to the pressure of pretending—a sort of helpless shrug.

She starts to walk up the service stairs, with their strip-lit landings. She finds it impossible to pretend. She is not sure why. Other people seem to be able to do it so easily. Once—and they have been together just long enough for there to be ‘once’—James said it was impossible for him to imagine her acting, acting in a play for instance. Impossible to imagine her playing someone else. If she had to, he said, she just wouldn’t take it seriously, she’d turn it into a joke. It was not something she had thought about. He was very pleased with himself for having had what he thought was an insight into her personality—and one which she had not had herself. She is still sometimes astonished that anything much has happened with him at all, after that first—or was it the second? — night at his flat. The fiasco. That was the word she used for that episode of pure sexual misery, which a sort of politeness had led her into. It was a problem, the way she let men polite her into things. And that night, when he was suddenly all over her in the hall of his flat, it was a sort of politeness which pressured her into letting him do what he wanted with her—a feeling that perhaps it would not be polite to stop him, that he might be offended, that there might be a scene, with her somehow in the wrong. When she thought she was pregnant the following week and he seemed unable to understand what she was suffering, she hated him as much as she had ever hated anyone. He was in his own world and seemed to have no understanding of hers—and no interest in having such an understanding. That was what she found so strange. His two-dimensionality. He was, however, the first man she had felt a strong attraction to since Fraser, and she had started to fear that she would never feel very attracted to anyone else again. That was probably what had made the fiasco so painful—it had been surprisingly painful. And that was probably what had made it so hard just to end it, as for a week afterwards she had fully intended to, even when it turned out that she was not pregnant.

She visits the Ladies, and while she is in there she tries to tidy up her hair. She splashes water on her pasty face, and nurses her shot eyes. Then she takes up her post at the front desk and stands there facing the hours of the afternoon. From the heart of the lobby, the huge London outside and the weather, which is increasingly wild, seem like another world. It is difficult not to think of Fraser here. It was here, in this lobby, that she met him. It was this time of day. An afternoon like this one—a dark sky through the distant, attended doors. He had been hanging around for some time, since the morning. First outside. Then, when the downpour arrived, in the lobby. He was not the only photographer; there were a few others, all waiting for someone upstairs—she did not know who. The sort of person they were waiting for never used their own name, so to look at the long list of people staying in the hotel was pointless. She had not been given any special instructions; there were no special security people in evidence.

The photographers were matey with each other, but it was obvious from their eyes—she had plenty of time to watch them in the quiet hours of the early afternoon—that they were plotting against each other too. (As he later explained to her, any edge over the others, however marginal, might make the difference between a massive payday and a total waste of time. The point was—if they all got the same shots, they would all be worthless.) He was the most talkative. He seemed the happiest—he was always smiling, and made the others laugh. He was also the tallest. And also, she noticed, the most determined. It was he who quietly detached himself from the others and tried to slip into the lifts, until he was spotted and held up his hands like a football player. When he tried it a second time the security guards evicted him from the lobby. She found, standing at the desk, that—while she had watched its noisy slapstick progress with a sort of smile—she did not welcome his eviction. The lobby seemed more tedious with him not there. And something had happened as he was being ejected—their eyes had momentarily met and, from the middle of his melee with the security men, he had smiled at her. She was not sure whether she had smiled back. There might not have been time. The other paps did not entertain her. They stood in a little sour-faced huddle, pacing up and down the strip of marble to which they were now limited—the security guards had seemed to want to throw them all out, there had been a long negotiation—and not speaking much.

It was several hours later that she suddenly found herself facing him. She had more or less forgotten about him, though the other paps were still there, on their strip of marble. They had been there for such a long time that she no longer noticed them. And she did not have time to notice them. It was early evening and the lobby hummed with purposefully moving people. She turned to the next person waiting there. ‘Hello,’ she said, and only then saw who it was. To her irritation, she immediately felt nervous. He too seemed nervous, however. When he smiled—and he was smiling nervously at her—his eyes shrank to laughing slits. He was in his mid-forties probably and his face was pleasantly weathered. It was the face of someone who smiled a lot, and who spent a lot of time outside. ‘Look, I’m sorry about this,’ he said. Was he American? ‘And I quite understand if you call security on me straight away.’ She did not move. ‘But I really need this shot and there’s no way I’m going to get it out there.’ No, not American—he had just said what sounded like ‘oot there’. He tilted his head quickly in the direction of the doors, and through them the sodden London evening, still just streaked with light, where a mush of fallen plane seeds and soppy leaves was choking the drains of Park Lane. It was October. ‘So I was wondering,’ he was saying, ‘if I could wait in there for a bit.’ He had noticed the staff cloakroom, a door to the side of the front desk, the wood of which discreetly matched the wood of the section of wall in which it was set, with a sign saying, ‘STAFF ONLY’. Or maybe he knew about it already. He was probably very familiar with the layout of the hotel. This was probably not the first time he had done this. ‘I quite understand if you say no,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to get you in trouble.’

And of course she would get in trouble if he was found in there.

‘Okay,’ she said quietly.

She let him into the cloakroom—‘Thank you so much,’ he said—and went back to her post at the desk.

An hour or two later, she went into the cloakroom herself. It was windowless, and except for a hanging-rail with some wire hangers—one of which held her coat—and a few stained chairs withdrawn from public service, it was empty.

He was on the phone. As soon as he saw her, he said, ‘Listen, can I call ya back? I’ll call ya back. Okay.’ He smiled at her. ‘I don’t know how to thank you for this,’ he said. ‘My name’s Fraser, by the way.’ He stood up and held out his hand.

She shook it and told him her name.

‘Who are you waiting for?’ she asked.

He said the name of a very famous singer, an American. ‘She’s checked in as Jane Green,’ he said. ‘She’s staying until Friday or Saturday. It’s supposed to be a secret that she’s in London. She’s here to see…’ He named a film star, also American. This film star was famously married to someone other than ‘Jane Green’. ‘He’s shooting a film in London. She’s here to see him, and nobody’s supposed to know. A shot of them together would be…’ He laughed. ‘Priceless. Just priceless. I don’t imagine they’ll be seen in public together, though, and just a shot of her in London would do almost as well.’

‘If you’re in here,’ Katherine said, ‘how will you know when she comes down?’

He said he had a spy on the hotel staff who would phone him when she was on her way. Then he smiled and said, ‘I know it’s silly. All this skulduggery.’

‘Who’s your spy?’

‘I shouldn’t say.’

She shrugged and was about to say, ‘Okay,’ when he said, ‘Can you keep a secret?’

‘Sometimes.’

He laughed. ‘Sometimes?’

It was strange—she had never been so aware of her own pulse in her life. ‘If you don’t want to tell me…’ she said.

He did tell her. The spy was a man. She knew his name, knew him by sight—one of the senior security staff, who would presumably be able to see ‘Jane Green’ and her entourage emerge from their suites on his wall of CCTV monitors in the sub-basement.

‘Do you pay him?’ she said.

‘Oh,’ he said, still squinting as he smiled. ‘That is a secret, I’m afraid.’

He said that he wanted to be a landscape photographer. This was the next day—he and the other paps were still there. There had been no sign of ‘Jane Green’. He said that he loved nothing more than to travel to remote places—northern Norway, Kamchatka, Patagonia—and spend a week or two in the wilderness taking shots of nature. That is, Nature. He talked of walking for days, or even weeks, through unpeopled mountains to find the perfect shot; of setting up the equipment and waiting while the sun, in its own sweet time, moved into position. Then the exposure, a fraction of a second. That fraction of a second was the whole point. It was what justified all the waiting, the walking, the weeks of sleeping under nylon. That fraction of a second was all that mattered. It was something, he said, that made you think about the nature of time.

She had not expected this. Now, incredibly, he was saying something about T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. ‘Yes, I know them,’ she said, and smiled imperceptibly as she thought—A philosopher pap! A philosopher King!

‘Do you know Ansel Adams?’ he said. ‘Do you know his work? The stuff he did in Yosemite?’

‘I’ve heard of him,’ she said. Her heart was pounding.

‘I’d like to do stuff like that…’

‘Are you married?’ she said, surprising herself.

The question took him by surprise too. He smiled and looked at the thing on his thick finger. ‘I was,’ he said. ‘Well, strictly speaking I still am. We’re separated. Why?’

She shrugged. ‘Do you live on your own?’

‘Yes, I do,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately. I wish I didn’t.’

He was looking her in the eye when he said that. In the frayed, neglected space, she felt her pulse swell with terrible energy in her throat. For the past twenty-four hours it had been like that.

The next morning she was late into work. She had been to the doctor—the incessant heavy tambour of her heart had started to frighten her. He made her unbutton her shirt and placed the heatless milled-steel head of his stethoscope on the skin where it started to slope into her left breast. He pumped up the sleeve of the sphygmograph until it was fiercely tight on her arm. He said it was nothing serious, and prescribed her some pills.

The paps were still there, on their strip of marble. Fraser was with them now—the security men seemed to have forgiven him—and to her surprise she found herself swerving off her path towards the front desk and walking up to him. She had no idea what she was going to say. Stepping away from the others, he spoke first. ‘Morning,’ he said, smiling. He looked at his watch. ‘Late, aren’t you?’ The other paps eyed her with interest—the shortish skirt, the slightly saucy shoes. She had taken time, that morning, to decide what to wear.

‘I’ve been to the doctor,’ she volunteered.

‘Nothing serious, I hope.’

She shook her head. ‘Any sign of Jane Green?’

‘Not yet,’ Fraser said. He was still smiling.

She stood there for a few seconds.

‘Well…’ she said.

The fact was, now that the security men were willing to have him in the lobby, there was no point him hiding in the staff cloakroom.

‘I’ll see you later,’ she said, and walked the twenty metres, under the twinkling inverted wedding cake, to the front desk.

She wondered whether she would see him later. For the next hour or so her eyes kept sliding towards the posse of paps. He was never looking at her, though two or three times her eyes met those of one of the others—a younger man, with well-gelled hair and pointy sideburns, and white leather shoes that were pointy too. Eventually she stopped looking, fearful of meeting the pointy-shoed man’s eyes again.

Feeling slightly low, she went for lunch and when she got back, she found him—him is Fraser—sitting in the staff cloakroom.

‘I know I shouldn’t be in here,’ he said.

‘That’s okay.’

‘It’s just,’ he went on, ‘if I’m in here, I’ll get a different shot from the others.’

‘Okay,’ she said. She was staring at him. Her heart was walloping again.

‘They’re all going to have the same shot,’ Fraser said.

‘Yes.’

‘If I’m in here, I’ll get something different.’

Yes, you just said that, she thought.

She hoped all this stuff about shots was just a silly excuse to come and see her. However, he was now saying that if his unique shot was somehow superior to their set of very similar shots, his would be the one all the papers would take.

‘I understand,’ she said shortly. She wished he would stop talking about it.

He smiled.

Then she said, ‘What if she gets smuggled out through the kitchens or something?’

‘Oh, she probably will be smuggled out through the kitchens,’ he said.

‘She will?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then why are you all here, in the lobby?’

‘We’re not,’ he said. ‘There are—what? — five of us here? We’re the awkward squad. We’re taking a punt. We’re hoping she’ll try to wrong-foot the pack by just walking straight out through the lobby.’

‘The pack?’

‘Most of the others are outside.’ He smiled. ‘You think I’m making this up, don’t you? Have a look then. Do you want to have a look? Let’s have a look.’

It felt strange to be walking somewhere with him, to be out in the wind and traffic of Park Lane. Turning into the street at the side of the hotel, they passed the sombre entrance of the ‘State Rooms’, and further on some of her fellow employees smoking in a sticky doorway. They traversed the moaning out-vents of the heating system, and a vast expanse of steel shutter. Then they turned into Park Street, and saw several dozen photographers— a hedgehog of telephoto lenses on the pavement opposite the service entrance, marshalled by a lone, tired-looking policeman.

She laughed with surprise.

He made her laugh with stories of the exploits of sweatily desperate paps. He told her the story of a friend of his, Ed O’Keefe, who used to work for a national tabloid and was sent by his editor to doorstep Ian Hislop in the village where he lived. He was told to get a shot of Hislop laughing to illustrate a piece on a natural disaster. He arrived in the village on Friday afternoon. There was no sign of Hislop. Nor was there any sign of him on Saturday. Finally, on Sunday morning, he emerged. He was on his way to church and he said, ‘Who the fuck are you? What do you want?’ Ed O’Keefe explained that he just needed a shot of him smiling. Hislop told him to fuck off, and went on his way. For the next week, Hislop wouldn’t stop scowling, and finally poor Ed—unwashed, unshaved, and sore from sleeping in his car—headed back to London to face the wrath of his editor. Then, just as he was leaving, his engine started spewing smoke and exploded, and Hislop, who was watching him leave, exploded wth laughter, and, ignoring the flames, the quick-thinking pap whipped out his Nikon and got the shot.

‘Sangfroid,’ Fraser said. ‘Should’ve been a war photographer.’

She smiled. She looked at the time. It was twenty past eight. She had finished work well over an hour ago, and she was still there, in the institutional light, listening to him.

‘I suppose I should go,’ she said.

‘Okay.’

She didn’t move, though. ‘How long do you stay here? Do you ever go home?’

‘Never,’ he said, smiling.

She looked at him sceptically. ‘Well, I’m going home,’ she said. She stood up and started to put on her coat. He watched her. ‘You can stay here if you want.’

‘If that’s okay.’

‘M-hm.’ She opened the door, letting in noise from the lobby. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow then.’

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Sleep well.’

‘You too. If you do sleep.’

It was hard to say whether the pills were having any effect on her heart. It was still thumping with unwarranted force as she walked to the tube station. She wondered why he still wore his wedding ring if his marriage was over.

The next day, in the middle of the afternoon, someone phoned him on his mobile. Something short and to the point. ‘Yes, okay,’ Fraser said, and hung up. ‘She’s on her way down,’ he said, starting to prepare his equipment.

‘Through the lobby?’

‘Possibly.’

There was nothing unusual happening in the lobby. The other paps—standing in their notional pen near the entrance—did not seem to know that their long days of waiting were almost at an end. When one of the lifts pinged and the doors parted, Fraser moved urgently forward. It was not ‘Jane Green’. The other paps had noticed him, however, and were themselves now starting to prepare. Though life in the lobby went on as normal, the sudden tension of the paps seemed to be spreading to other people. The security guards sensed that something was afoot—they seemed to be moving into position, in fact—while some of the doormen and porters had stopped what they were doing and were trying to see what it was that had unsettled the paps. This in turn had some of the more perceptive members of the public doing the same thing. She stood at the front desk and watched the numbers over the lift doors slowly descend.

When it happened, it happened quickly. Two lifts pinged simultaneously and some people poured out of each. At first this tightly knit dozen merely walked, quickly and with purpose, towards the doors, where two long silver Mercedes had pulled up outside. When the paps fell on them, however, they started to move faster. There was suddenly a lot of shouting. There was pushing and shoving. The paps had scattered from their pen and were everywhere. As soon as the lifts opened, Fraser had sprung forward and was now where the fighting was fiercest. Other paps were walking backwards towards the doors, firing off flashes as they went. And they walked straight into still more paps, arriving at a sprint from their futile vigil in Park Street. These ones too were snapping as soon as they arrived. Voices were shouting Jane Green’s real name. Shouting, ‘Over here! Here!’ Katherine heard one man shout, ‘Oi! You fucking whore!’ (Fraser would later explain, when she mentioned it, that this man had not meant anything nasty—he had simply been trying to get her attention and perhaps provoke some sort of interesting facial expression.) It had turned into a scrum in the vicinity of the doors. As they poured into the lobby, the influx of sweating, panting paps from Park Street was pushing against the security guards and Jane Green’s now furious entourage. There was even a policeman involved. Some hapless members of the public were knocked over as the scrum wheeled to one side. More security guards arrived at speed, sprinting through the lobby in their blue blazers. A pap was knocked over too—his camera, which may have taken a kick, went skittering over the marble. Immediately he was on his feet shouting threats to sue, but by then the entourage had forced its way out, and moments later the two Mercedes were pulling away, even then being pestered by paps on foot, stumbling through the flower beds in front of the hotel, holding their cameras over their heads to fire off a last flickering fusillade as the mopeds appeared from nowhere and tore off into the traffic in loudly nasal pursuit.

Fraser was triumphant. His face was shining with joy. She loved that. She loved the way his face was shining with joy. It made her feel joy herself. Needless to say, her heart was pumping frenziedly. Flushed with victory, having spontaneously picked her up and spun her around—she shrieked, then laughed—he was showing her the shots he had taken. Throughout the whole mad half-minute—or maybe it was even less—she herself had not seen ‘Jane Green’.

And now, excitably, Fraser was saying something else.

‘What?’ she said. She had not heard. There had been some furious shouting—a pap and a security guard were still having a private feud.

‘I want to buy you a drink,’ he said. ‘What time do you finish work?’ His face was still shining with joy.

‘Eight,’ she said.

‘I’ll meet you here at eight. Okay?’

‘Okay,’ she said, and he jogged off, whooping and waving to some of the others.

He was early. At ten to eight she saw him waiting in the lobby. No longer in his photographer’s fatigues, he was wearing a suit with an open-necked shirt and two-tone shoes. (Those shoes made her smile.) And he looked touchingly nervous. He was nervously pacing.

As soon as they were out of the hotel he surprised her by lighting a cigarette. A Silk Cut. It seemed an effeminate choice of smoke for him. He offered her one and she shook her head. Then she said, ‘Yes, okay.’ He lit it for her—together they made a tulip of their hands in the fresh night wind. She was so intensely aware of the points at which their fingers were touching that for a second she felt slightly faint. The frail flame steadied. They started to walk towards Hyde Park Corner. ‘I don’t really smoke,’ she said.

‘No, me neither.’

He told her that a London tabloid had snapped up his pictures of ‘Jane Green’, and they were selling well in other territories too.

‘How much for?’ she asked.

‘Quite a lot.’

‘How much?’ she insisted.

‘No,’ he said, ‘not that much.’ He was smiling, very pleased with himself. ‘Enough for a drink in one of these places.’

They went to one of the other handsome Park Lane hotels for their drink, and there, in the very first lull, with her poor heart moving into overdrive, she lifted her eyes to his and said—‘I find you very attractive.’ It was not the sort of thing she was in the habit of saying to men she had only just met. It was not the sort of thing she was in the habit of saying at all. That she said it was part of the intense strangeness, the strange intensity of those days. It was what she was thinking, and she felt a sudden vertiginous freedom just to say it. So she did.

For a moment he seemed less sure of himself. There was in his smile for the first time a shadow of self-doubt. It was not what she had said—that or things like it he had heard many times. It was the essentially unflirtatious way that she said it. She said it as if it was something important. She looked very serious. It was very intense. He smiled—the shadow of self-doubt—and seemed to be about to say something himself, he was not sure what, when she leaned through the elegant light and kissed him.

Without saying a word, she then placed herself entirely in his hands, and he seemed happy to take the initiative. The luxurious mojitos finished, and paid for without her noticing when or how, she found herself in a throbbing taxi, then in a street somewhere south of the river—perhaps Battersea—then in a tiny lift, and then in an equally tiny flat, then on a sofa that seemed still to wear the plastic wrapping in which it was shipped, with his tousled head between her white thighs (his hair was thinning on top), and then naked on an enormous bed, and all the time her heart was pounding. He would not let her lift a finger. She loved the way he would not let her lift a finger, the way he let her lose herself again and again in her own passivity. Her fantasies were mostly fantasies of passivity, for instance of medical examinations, of white-smocked professionals straying from their task and starting to touch her in ways they were not supposed to.

‘You’re too smart to work in a hotel lobby,’ he said. He was propped on his side, peering at her in the imperfect darkness of the London night.

‘I know,’ she said, and then laughed—Ha! — at her own immodesty.

‘Of course you are,’ he said. ‘So why do you? You went to university?’

She nodded.

‘Which?’

She told him.

It made him laugh. ‘Jesus!’ His smile shone. ‘That’s quite intimidating!’

‘Is it?’

‘So why do you work in a hotel?’ he said.

She said she wanted to set up a small hotel, somewhere near the sea, and she needed some experience of hotel management. That was why.

‘That’s very sensible,’ he said. ‘Most people would just get on a plane somewhere and fuck it up.’

‘I know,’ she said. This time she did not laugh.

‘How long have you been working there, in the hotel?’

‘A few months.’

‘What did you do before?’

‘I worked in publishing…’

She had taken his flopping penis idly in her hand—or it seemed that she took it idly. In fact, she felt quite self-conscious, and she just held it as in slow pulses it started to stiffen. ‘I worked in publishing,’ she said. He seemed to have no further questions. Still feeling quite self-conscious, she moved on the mattress until her flaxen hair spilled onto his furry stomach.

Some time during the night, when she went to the loo, she opened the fridge in the tiny kitchen. It was entirely empty—not even milk. It had the pristine white look of a display fridge in a department store. It was then that she noticed there were no covers on the duvet or the pillows. In the morning, while he showered, she started to wonder about these things. The flat had a totally unlived-in feel. It seemed to be very new. In the living room there was nothing but the sofa, still in its plastic wrapping, and a TV—its packaging too was still there. The kitchen was equipped with two mugs, one plate, one knife and one spoon. The oven had never been used—it still had pieces of polystyrene and an instruction manual in it. The expanse of built-in storage space in the bedroom was empty. She was looking into this surprising void when he put his arms around her waist and picking her up, spun her once, twice—she squealed, her legs kicked and flailed—and fell with her onto the bed.

‘Why isn’t there anything here?’ she said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean those cupboards are empty. There’s nothing there. Don’t you have any clothes?’

‘Clothes? What do I need clothes for?’

‘And there’s nothing in the kitchen. Not even a kettle.’

‘I’ve just moved in,’ he said, more seriously. ‘That’s obvious, isn’t it?’

‘Where are all your clothes then?’

‘They’re somewhere else. I’m moving my stuff here next week. What’s the matter?’

She did not press him.

Instead, she went and had a shower. There was only one towel and it was already quite wet. While she was using it, and looking at herself in the steamy mirror, he shouted through the door, ‘Do you want to go out for breakfast, or do you want me to go get some stuff?’

‘Go out!’ she shouted back. She brushed her teeth with his toothbrush, and daubed some of his deodorant under her arms.

He was smoking a Silk Cut in the kitchen with the little window open, using the sink as an ashtray. ‘Okay?’ he said, smiling.

As they went down in the tiny lift—the flat was quite high up, had a view over the huge normality of south London—she surprised herself again. She said, ‘I’m in love with you.’

* * *

The past. As if someone had forgotten to lock its cage and it had slipped out, looking for her. It is on the loose now. It is at large in the lobby. It is there with the multilingual louche flâneurs who populate it at this hour of the day. Half past four, p.m. She stands there next to an enormous vase of flowers, staring out at the public luxury.

For a while, months, they met in the flat in Battersea. It soon emerged that he was not in fact separated from his wife—not physically, though he insisted they were ‘emotionally separated’, that when he had told her he lived on his own, it was in a metaphorical sense true. He said he hated his wife. (And she was shocked by his use of that word—she had never hated anyone.) In a strictly literal sense, however, they did still live together, with their two daughters—and for their two daughters—in the house in Sevenoaks. The flat in London was a pied-a-terre, that was all. He was often on jobs—‘stake-outs’—that made it impractical for him to trek all the way to Kent every night. The ‘Jane Green’ job had been such a ‘stake-out’. Mostly they were neither so interesting nor so profitable. Typically they involved loitering outside a fashionable nightclub in Mayfair, hoping to snap a Premier League footballer or someone from TV, or if you were very lucky one of the junior Windsors. Or spending days at Heathrow like a stranded traveller, eating junk food and eyeing up incoming flights from JFK and LAX. That was the sort of thing he mostly did. He said he hated that too. He hated his life, he said—how it had turned out. ‘How did it happen like this? I didn’t want it.’ He meant the marriage, the job. (On the plus side, he did make a lot of money. For the ‘Jane Green’ pictures alone, he eventually told her, he was paid £50,000.) He said, as they lay naked on the mattress in the still unfurnished flat, that he wanted to change everything. He just needed some more time. Then he would leave his wife in Sevenoaks and live with her in London; he would stop papping and start Ansel-Adamsing. Then they would travel together to the wild, pure places he told her about. Then everything would start anew.

She lived for the two nights a week she spent in the flat in Battersea, and the occasional minibreak—there were minibreaks, there were weekends away. When they met in London she would wait in the flat. She had her own key. She would wait in the kitchen smoking, or in the living room with the TV on. He was usually late. It might be midnight, one o’clock. Then he showed up smelling of the kebab he had eaten, sometimes flushed with success. He opened a bottle of wine and she listened while he told her about his evening’s adventures. Then they had sex. The next day, at lunchtime, he took the train to Sevenoaks. It wasn’t always exactly like that. Sometimes he didn’t have a job to do and they would spend the whole evening together.

Finally, on New Year’s Day, she told him she would never see him again unless he left his wife. ‘What are you talking about?’ he said. He was in a windowless hotel bathroom in Florida (a family holiday), whispering into his phone while the extractor fan and the shower made noise. ‘You know that’s what I want. You know that’s what I want to do. It’s just a matter of time. You know that…’

He thought he had talked her down, but in London a few days later—they were walking in Battersea Park—she said the same thing. She said he had until the first of February to make up his mind, and until then she wouldn’t see him. He pleaded. He phoned, he turned up in Caledonian Road, he tried to make her see things from his point of view, the kids, the kids… Though she wouldn’t listen, she did not know what she would do if he said he wouldn’t leave his wife.

He did leave her—in March, a month late—and she must have found Katherine’s number in his phone. She phoned her and swore at her in impeccable RP—she sounded surprisingly posh—for twenty solid minutes.

In April she left her flatshare over the shop on Caledonian Road and moved in with him in Battersea. He was still papping, though he had started to spend a lot of time poring over atlases, trying to work out where to take his first shots of Nature. There would be no more papping for him then. In the end—the fact that they would be travelling in winter effectively excluded the northern latitudes—he settled on Mauritania. She took two months’ unpaid leave and they left London on 2 January in an old unheated Land Rover and headed south through France and Spain. They lingered a few days in Marrakech. Then pressed on through the Atlas Mountains, where they spent two memorably idyllic nights in a stone hotel within earshot of a waterfall—and then south, south, towards the Sahara. There were a few weeks in the Mauritanian desert, a picture-book desert of peach dunes neighbouring the dark blue Atlantic. Fraser took his photos, and then they went further south, over the frontier into Senegal. (Where he almost lost his equipment and plates to some venal khaki officials.) For a while they hung out at a place called Zebra Bar near the city of St Louis—some huts in a national park on a marine lagoon, and a fridge full of beer. A population of intriguing transients. Fraser was popular there. He loved it and for a few weeks he was king of the place and she was his freckled queen.

Then they went on to Dakar and stayed out late in salsa clubs.

And then on.

And on.

They left the Land Rover in Burkina Faso and flew back to London in April.

He had opened a different sort of world to her—it wasn’t anything he did so much as something in what he was—a world of immediate feelings; and with them the sometimes troubling sense that they were the only thing that was of any value, that finally they were what life was.

Later that year they were married. If there was to be a wedding he wanted it low-key, which it was. A London registry office on a Saturday afternoon. His mother, over from Saskatchewan. Her parents. A Swedish aunt. A few friends.

His photos were not a huge success. He had exhibited them over the summer, and sold a few prints, but it was obvious that he was not going to be able to make a living from them, and he had to look for other sorts of photographic work. (As for her, she was still working in the hotel—she had been working there for more than two and a half years, and was now a shift manager.) Fraser was depressed that his attempt to be Ansel Adams had failed. He said he was too worn out for papping. That was a ‘young man’s job’. They didn’t have much money. He sold the place in Battersea and they took out a joint mortgage for a flat on Packington Street in Islington.

She had always imagined a house in some nice white-stuccoed nook of north London. Trees in the street. Family Christmases. What she had was not quite what she had imagined, but Packington Street passed for a white-stuccoed nook, just about. Fraser said it was the worst possible time. They were just scraping along as it was. They needed her income. And there was no hurry—she was only twenty-nine. Every second weekend his daughters stayed with them. He picked them up from school on Friday, and his wife picked them up from Packington Street on Sunday afternoon. She stayed outside, usually sitting in the car—except for that once on the phone, she and Katherine had never spoken.

He started finding more work. He seemed to have found a source of more lucrative product work, high-street fashion stuff. He had shots of posh parties in Tatler—Lord Something So-and-so’s twenty-first, the bar mitzvah of a north-London billionaire’s son. He was often out late on these jobs, and was sometimes away overnight.

She was very strict with herself. He himself had once told her, while he was still living in Sevenoaks, that even if he did leave his wife, she would never trust him. Not the way things had started. She knew from her own experience what he was like. She often thought of those words. Her memory of him saying them, of the self-satisfied melancholy smile on his tremendous face was precise. They had made a powerful impression on her. However, she insisted on trusting him. She had to trust him. What was the point otherwise? To freely enter into this situation and then spend a lot of time not trusting him—that would be insane. She had known what she was doing, and in doing it she had taken a decision to trust him. So she did. She trusted him.

*

When she leaves the hotel at the end of her shift it is nearly dark outside, the western sky over the park still just streaked with wet blue light—she sees it through the trees—as it was on the afternoon that she first spoke to Fraser, over four years ago. She walks quickly to the tube station. When she saw him on Sunday he did not look well. He looked surprisingly old and paunchy. He looked out of shape. Having exchanged a few words with Summer, he stood there waiting, staring at the floor, while she finished her phone call—she was trying to hide the fact that her heart was palpitating from him and also from James on the other end of the line. When she had finished with James she snapped her phone shut and said, ‘Hello.’

‘Hello,’ he said.

She stood up. ‘Do you want to get a drink then?’

‘Okay.’ He shrugged, seemed unenthusiastic.

‘That’s what you said you wanted,’ she said. ‘You said you wanted to have a drink.’ That was what he had said. He smiled—the smile wasn’t quite there. ‘Sure. Let’s do that.’

Watching her put on her coat, he said, ‘You look nice.’

She ignored that—though her heart seemed to hit a pothole—and they left (she shouted up to Summer that she wouldn’t be long) and walked in silence to the Old Queen’s Head, where they often used to go for quiet drinks on Sunday nights…

She stands on a fully freighted escalator at King’s Cross, one of thousands of people in motion, tens of thousands. The formiche di Londra, Carlo calls them. And one of the formiche, lost in her thoughts, she transfers from the Piccadilly line to the Northern for the single stop to Angel.

The flat is empty and unlit. Summer is out. She will probably not be home tonight.

She has a long bath, and opens a pack of supermarket tortellini, and phones her mother and tells her that she has seen Fraser and wishes she hadn’t. Then, in her turquoise kimono, with her hair in a towel, she watches television for an hour.

Lying in bed, she opens the poetry anthology that lives on the night-table and, as she sometimes does last thing at night, takes the first poem she sees. She is pleased that tonight it is a short one.

Ah! Sunflower, weary of time,

Who countest the steps of the sun,

Seeking after that sweet golden clime

Where the traveller’s journey is done;

Where the youth pined away with desire,

And the pale virgin shrouded in snow,

Arise from their graves and aspire;

Where my sunflower wishes to go.

She switches off the light. When she is half-asleep, however, she hears her phone, muffled somewhere in the flat. She does not move. Sleepily she wonders whether it is James, or Fraser, or someone else.

2

Simon Miller wakes at four. Though it will not be light for more than two hours, he has things to see to. Leaving Mrs Miller to sleep in—she were a lazy so-and-so—he pulls on his jeans and prowls downstairs. In the kitchen he switches on the overhead light and, still squinting painfully, sets matchflame to Marlboro Red. Then he starts to make his tea. He has five runners entered at Fontwell Park this afternoon, a large number for a small stable like his—he has had to hire an extra horse transport—and there are preparations to see to. He opens the yard door and standing shirtless under the lintel puts on the floodlight. Floodlight were right. The fockin yard is under water. With filthy weather like this down in Sussex, it’s a short odds-on shot, he thinks, that Fontwell will be off. He’ll still have to pay for the horse transport. He’ll still have to see to all the paperwork that sending five horses to the track involves. There’s an inspection scheduled for later, until then he just has to assume the fockin thing is on.

When the light struggles up the rain has stopped and the old farmhouse looks sullen in its hollow. The stand of nettles shivers in the wind. In the tackroom the neon lights are on. The lads and lasses are up and taking out the string.

‘What you reckon, Piers?’ Simon says, sunk up to his ankles in the ooze of the yard mud, so that his thick legs seem to thrust from it like young trees. ‘Will it be on? What do you think?’

And patient, pale Piers does think—he thinks as if he is trying to work it out, as if it was possible to work it out logically. From his vantage point in the high saddle—he is on Mr President, smoking a cigarette while he waits for the others—he looks up at the laden sky. He looks at the flat ploughed fields. ‘Don’t know,’ he says finally.

‘Yeah.’ Simon nods. ‘That’s what I thought.’

‘There’s talk,’ Piers says, still with his eyes focused somewhere near the horizon, ‘about a heavy-ground Festival.’

‘I heard that. I heard that.’

‘What with all this rain.’

‘That’s right.’

The others are filing out into the twilit yard. Among the workriders are several of Simon’s offspring, and Piers’s son is on Absent Oelemberg, her profile looking like a shadow or silhouette in the frigid half-light. Warren Andrews, the stable jockey, is next, slouched over the withers of his mount. Handsome despite the slaloming nose, Indestructible Warren is the veteran of very many nasty falls. Snapped legs, smashed arms, pierced spleen, punctured lung—he knew what it meant to be mashed into hospital fodder by a storm of pummelling hooves. He is a famished, saturnine figure first thing in the morning. He struggles increasingly with his weight, and needing to do ten stone ten at Fontwell today, he spent most of yesterday in the makeshift sauna he has (an oil-drum filled with stones in his shed), eating nothing except a few Ryvita.

Simon smiles at one of the lasses, a plump teenager in jodhpurs on Mistress Of Arts—Kelly, the daughter of the local farmer from whom he rents this land. In spite of being the fattest workrider, she is the only one who wears jodhpurs. Them, and posh boots, and a purple velvet helmet. Proper little madam, Simon thought, when she first walked into the yard. ‘Alright, Piers,’ he says, and the head lad moves his mount into a walk and leads the slopping string down the lane. When they have left, Simon heaves himself into the old Land Rover, into its comfortless smells of cold oil and suffering canvas, and follows them to the new all-weather gallop—you need them nowadays—on the other side of the swollen stream.

*

It is eight when he steps into the hot kitchen. Mrs Miller has made his fry-up—the plate is waiting in the Aga—and the Racing Post has arrived. When he has eaten, he takes the paper and two Marlboros to the lavatory.

He is still in there twenty-five minutes later when James phones. ‘Oh, she’s fine,’ he says, when James asks after Absent Oelemberg. ‘Fit as a flea, she is.’

‘She is fit this time?’

‘She is.’

‘So…’ James says. ‘If she’s fit… How will you stop her winning?’

‘You don’t need to worry about that,’ Miller says, smearing out the second Marlboro in an ashtray stuck on the toilet-roll holder.

‘She’s not going to win then?’

A short silence. ‘I wouldn’t have thought so.’

When James presses him on how he plans to ensure this, however, Miller just says, ‘Look—you let me worry about that.’

‘Okay,’ James says. ‘I’ll let you worry about it. I’ll see you at the track then. About two o’clock.’

James tries Freddy—who does not answer—and walks Hugo.

When he tries Freddy again an hour later on the way to the tube station, and he still does not answer, he starts to suspect that he will have to travel down to Sussex on his own.

Which is indeed what happens.

The train disembogues from London under an empty March sky. In the middle of a weekday the platforms of south-of-the-river stations are quiet. Nor is the train full, though there are a few other people obviously on their way to Fontwell Park—mostly old men with Racing Posts, and soft sandwiches in Tupperwares, and Thermoses. It has been some time since James has seen a Thermos. Watching an old man pour some tea—or whatever it is—into the plastic mug that doubles as a lid, he thinks of the large tartan one they used to take on family outings in the Seventies. Often he thinks of Katherine. His sense, when he left her flat yesterday morning, that everything was essentially okay has lost much of its positive force since then. It is now as faintly evanescent—there one moment, not the next—as the sunlight on the nodding thickets of withered wild lilac on either side of the tracks, so faint sometimes that it is imperceptible. She did have sex with him on Monday night, when all was said and done. After all the palaver, she did do that. On the other hand, he has not heard from her since, which makes him wonder, as the train winds its way through the post-winter, pre-spring landscape, whether perhaps, when she said she did not think they should see each other for a while, that was in fact what she meant.

3

The next morning he still has not heard from her. He walks Hugo. The quarter is full of students. On every street, interrupting the sombre London terraces, stand the structures where they study. More than in the past, he sometimes wonders how his life might have turned out if he had been a student himself, if he had not been so impatient, straight from school, to make some sort of mark on the world, and money. Indeed, while he was still at school he had started a salted-snacks wholesale business. North-London newsagents were his trade. He had his own van and he drove it himself, with special permission of the headmaster, who liked his entrepreneurial spirit, and singled it out on Speech Day as being a source of pride to the school and of value to society at large—the year was 1987. Perhaps encouraged by this head-magisterial shout-out in the humid marquee, the summer after his A-levels, instead of taking the usual path to university, he invested his profits in a takeaway-pizza franchise in Islington. Needless to say, he did not imagine spending his life as the proprietor of a pizza-delivery outfit. He was always on the lookout for something new. And then it turned out that one of his employees needed money to finance a film…

On Friday and Saturday nights, when they were open till two, he drove the staff home himself. Eric Garcia, who lived somewhere up the Holloway Road, was usually the last to be dropped. An introverted young man a few years older than James, he had a wide mouth and skin that was somehow simultaneously pallid and olive. He looked, James thought, not unlike a chameleon. He was about as talkative as a chameleon too, and not wanting to sit in silence while they travelled together in the front of the van, James would prod him with questions. ‘Any plans for tomorrow?’ he said one night.

‘Probably writing,’ Eric said, staring through the windscreen. ‘Yeah, writing.’

The light moved to green. ‘Writing what?’

Eric muttered unintelligibly.

‘Sorry?’

‘Just, um… mn… nm.’ Eric seemed to be looking for something that had fallen down the side of the seat.

‘Sorry, I didn’t hear…’

‘Screenplay I’m working on,’ Eric said. ‘You know, developing… nd… yeah…’ His voice trailed off.

‘A screenplay?’

‘Mm…’ He nodded.

‘What sort of screenplay?’

It was a thriller, Eric eventually said.

When he sat down with it a few nights later, James very much wanted to like Eric’s screenplay. Eric even had a director lined up—Julian Shoe—and the following Sunday they met to discuss the project.

With a smile on his bearded face, Shoe did most of the talking. Garcia studied the froth of his pint and piped up only when he was invited to speak. ‘I met Eric through post-production on my short, The Jokers,’ Shoe said, ‘and he did some special effects, and he had some post-production contacts, and had worked at—was it Harry’s?’

Garcia looked up from his pint. ‘Er—yeah—Harry,’ he said. ‘Paintbox.’

‘Yeh, that’s it.’

‘Harry,’ said Garcia. ‘Harry, yeah.’

‘So I needed special effects and I was introduced to Eric. And he helped finish the special effects, and he had written this wicked script, and you know, when it was time to think about doing a feature we were both of a like mind towards… you know, trying that venture.’

James nodded. Shoe was, he thought, quite impressive. He had presence—sitting next to him, Garcia seemed on the point of disappearing. He seemed faint and substanceless, like a film projected in a sunny room.

They were waiting for James to speak.

Though he let them wait for a minute, though he took a slow pull of his Bloody Mary, his mind was made up. They needed money to make their film; that was the purpose of the meeting. That was why Shoe wouldn’t stop smiling, why Garcia was so nervous. James had told him that he had money to invest, which was not strictly true—he would have to mortgage the pizza place.

Shoe sighed and said, ‘We’ve been to every funding body in England.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah.’ He shrugged. ‘You know.’ He was still smiling, wryly now. ‘It just seems nobody wants to help low-budget film-makers, for some unknown reason.’

Garcia said, more or less to himself, ‘No, I know the reason. It involves money. People just don’t want to give money to inexperienced film-makers.’

‘Look, this is a money-making venture we’re in,’ Shoe said, with fresh impetus, looking James in the eye. ‘You know. Film-making. It’s about making a profit, ultimately. We understand that. I don’t think a lot of people in the British film industry understand that. You find this really snooty attitude in the British film industry, that just because we’re not ashamed of wanting to make money, people don’t take us seriously. And then you look at American films, and the success of them.’ He shrugged exasperatedly. ‘You know.’

The film was made for not much more than £20,000. While James wondered where the money went—it did not seem to be up on the screen—Garcia and Shoe showed every sign of being pleased with what they had made; and probably feeling his inexperience, James was inclined, throughout the long and expensive process of post-production, to doubt his own intimations of mediocrity. And he wanted to doubt them. He very much wanted to doubt them.

In May, they took the film to Cannes, hoping to find a distributor there. It was shown twice in the south of France, in a screening room under the monstrous concrete molar of the Palais du Festival. They were not staying in town, in one of the luxury hotels overlooking the sea. Instead they had a mobile home in the Camping Belle Vue, somewhere miles inland. The place had a pre-season feel. The weather was tepid. The swimming pool was still under wraps, and most of the other mobile homes were unoccupied. A few tattooed pensioners in trunks promenaded under the trees, or sat in folding chairs in front of their mobile homes, or watched television inside them.

On their first evening there, James left the silent, frightened Garcia, the sulky Shoe, and went into town on his own. He parked on a meter near the station, and set out on foot for nowhere in particular, except that through some instinct he seemed to be making for the sea. Other than the ubiquitous posters, the only sign of the film festival were some tired-looking men porting video equipment through the streets. It was early evening. As he neared the seafront there were more people in evidence. Most of these people, however, were walking the other way, and when he stepped onto the windy esplanade, under the tall palms and umbrella pines, it seemed to be emptying. The African hawkers were still there with their trays of watches and lighters, but even they were sitting on the lawns under the trees, smoking. Out on the water the yachts and the superyachts, though starting to fade into the smudge of the horizon, had not yet switched on their lights.

In the mothy twilight of the hôtel de plein air, Garcia and Shoe were finishing off a litre of warm vodka, taking the stuff out of mugs, mixed with warm orange juice. Shoe kept slapping his large white legs—he was wearing shorts—as the invisible mosquitoes went for them. ‘What are we doing for dinner?’ he said when he saw James, though he was inspecting his own legs when he said it. ‘I’m starving.’

‘I’ve eaten, mate,’ James said.

‘Oh. Well what about us?’

‘Take the van. Get something. Whatever.’

‘Can’t take the van.’

‘Why not?’

Shoe held up the Smirnoff. ‘I’m too pissed,’ he said.

‘Well… you should have thought of that.’

‘I thought you’d sort something out.’

‘Why?’ James laughed sourly and went inside.

Shoe had turned out to be a lazy prima donna, always whining about something—he had made a fuss about not staying in a proper hotel, for instance—and leaving all the promotional heavy-lifting to James.

No one showed up to the first screening. The slot was a poor one—two o’clock, when everyone was still lingering over liquid lunches or taking siestas in their seafront hotels. Still, it was a sad moment when they told the indifferent projectionist that he might as well take the film off the spools. And while Garcia and Shoe got morosely smashed, slumped in cane chairs in the British Pavilion, James spent the whole afternoon—it was humid and hazy—schmoozing strangers to ensure that the same thing did not happen the next day.

In that, he succeeded. Half a dozen industry types turned up to the second screening, and all left within ten minutes.

So that was that.

Except, for James, there was a postscript.

On their last night one of the Hollywood studios hosted a junket in the Chateau de la Napoule, to which he had managed to wangle spare invites from someone in the British Pavilion. Still locked into his promotional mindset, he moved through the party, sweating in the dinner jacket he had optimistically packed, and trying to set up an interview for ‘the talent’. The place was full of would-be showbiz journalists, with their microphones and hot little lights, and squinting into one of these lights Garcia and Shoe played for the last time at being in the movies. Their interviewer was a young woman dressed for a party, in figure-hugging black with a peach silk rose on her shoulder. She was not English; her voice had a very slight foreign intonation. Probably she was Scandinavian, though she did not look Nordic. She was short, and her hair, except for some silvery threads, was dark and wiry. Her eyes were topaz. ‘And how did you go about getting actors?’ she said.

‘Just rang up agents,’ Eric answered, drunk. ‘Just rang up agents. Spoke to people. Agents…’

She looked uninterested. James had only just managed to persuade her to interview his men, and they were not making a strong impression. Garcia, in particular, was all over the place.

‘And… And what sort of reaction have you had?’ she said, shifting a lock of hair from over her eye.

Standing off to the side, in the shadows, James looked at his polished shoes. There was a pause. He looked up. Julian was smiling steadily. ‘Well, put it this way,’ he said. ‘We’ve had only one person—of all the people who’ve seen this film here—we’ve only had one person who actually hated it.’

The interviewer laughed tactlessly, and James found himself liking her. ‘What did they say?’ she said.

There was another pause.

‘They weren’t very polite,’ Julian said. ‘Let’s just say they weren’t very polite…’

It had been an American, who stood up no more than ten minutes into the second screening and muttered, ‘Thanks for wasting my time.’

To which Shoe, with hurt British fury—‘Thanks for giving us a fair shot.’

‘I have given you a fair shot,’ the American said, making his way noisily to the exit. ‘This is the worst picture I’ve ever seen here. The worst. Saying something.’ Which elicited some nervous laughter from the other members of the audience. The heavy sound-proof door thudded to—and then, following an interval of perhaps a minute, the whole place emptied out.

‘And,’ said the Scandinavian interviewer, struggling for questions, ‘what would you say about independent production?’

‘It’s excellent.’ Garcia.

‘Why?’

Garcia laughed as if it was a stupid question. ‘Nobody can argue with us. You know, if they tell me I can’t write… There’s the proof. It’s there, on the screen. If they tell Julian he can’t direct… If they tell James he can’t produce… There’s the proof…’

‘James?’

They turned to him.

He smiled warily—and immediately Garcia and Shoe were pulling him into the white light, were holding an arm each, ignoring his modest protests. He no longer wanted to be publicly paraded with them. They embarrassed him now. And the small Scandinavian interviewer was quite attractive, in a pixie-ish way. Garcia’s arm was heavy on his shoulders; Shoe was still holding his left wrist.

‘This is James,’ Garcia said, showing a leery smile. ‘Say hello, James.’

‘James’s the money man,’ put in Shoe.

‘Thanks, Julian,’ James said, freeing his wrist. He wanted to shrug off Garcia’s ponderous embrace too, but decided that any attempt to do this—if it led to a scuffle—might just make things worse. Smiling faintly, the interviewer was looking at him, twisting a strand of her tough hair around a finger. ‘Well I would be the money man,’ he said, trying to make light of the situation. ‘If there was any.’ He noticed that she had exquisite skin, exactly the shade of very weak and milky Nescafé.

He was pleased not to have to spend another night in the mobile home with Garcia and Shoe, who snored so sonorously that the people in the next-door home had insisted on being moved. The hôtel de plein air was a low, humid spot, pleasing to mosquitoes, where the turf was squelchy underfoot and the duckboards in the showers were mildewed and black. Not that Miriam was staying in the belle-époque elegance of the Carlton. She had an overpriced shoebox near the main-line station, within earshot of the platform tannoy, especially in the quiet of the early morning, through open windows. It was at such an hour that James walked through lemony sunlight to where he had left the van, with his silk-lapelled jacket over his arm.

Shoe was sitting on a white plastic chair on the smear of concrete that passed for a terrace in front of the mobile home. He was wrapped in towels, even his hair. Walking down the hill, James was surprised not to stir with irritation at the mere sight of him sitting there, towel-headed, his narrow beard still damp from the shower.

‘Morning,’ he said.

Shoe just nodded. He was on the phone. He spent several hours a day on the phone to his wife. For the last four mornings, James had listened to one side of an ill-tempered and seemingly endless dispute through the negligible partitions of the mobile home. This morning, however, he was pleasingly impervious to the self-importance and monotony of Julian’s voice. He even felt sorry for him, to see him sitting there in his towels, negotiating some tired issue of matrimonial politics. He left him out in the mild morning air, and went inside.

There was no sign of Garcia, and when Julian finally tossed the phone down on the white plastic table, James stuck his head out and said, ‘Where’s Eric?’

Eric, Julian said, had vanished overnight. He had left a note. Initially, Julian had thought it was a suicide note. By the time you read this I will be gone… In fact, Eric had simply taken a train to Paris, and from there another to London. In the note, he said he had had to leave immediately—unable to stand another moment of slow-motion failure—and that he did not want to see either of them ever again.

It was nearly noon when they set out in strong sunlight, leaving the wreck of their hopes on the Côte d’Azur. They stopped for lunch at a motorway service station near Avignon—Julian eating his fill, as always when the production (i.e. James) was paying, loading his tray with starter, steak frites and pudding, wine, while James watched in silence. It was, however, a vacant and not a savage silence. In his pocket he had a piece of paper with Miriam’s London number on it, and while Julian fed he stared out the window, at fleecy flotillas standing still in the shining monochrome sky.

* * *

The very springiness of the still air seems sad to him. Perhaps it is just the way the warming air, on these early spring days, is so sharp with transience. The end of something, the start of something new. Time. It is intrinsically sad. Last night, for instance, James had woken in the dark to hear Hugo lapping at his waterbowl in the kitchen, and for some sleep-fuddled reason he had thought—Many years from now, when Hugo is long dead, I will remember this specific moment, in the middle of the night, and the sound of him lapping innocently at his waterbowl. And with a start of sadness it had seemed to him that Hugo was long dead—how short his life was! — and that he was hearing the sound of his thirsty lapping from a deep well of time. He unleashes him. St George’s Gardens is a little graveyard. Daffodils sprout eagerly between the tombs. Hidden behind the School of Pharmacology, it is usually very quiet—this morning, the only other human presence is a man tidying away last year’s leaves. Hugo trots over to a white stone obelisk, and pisses on its pitted plinth.

Somewhere, in one of the trees, the first tit of spring is singing. He stands there listening to its song—its up-down song. Two notes, starting on the higher one. Up-down up-down up-down up-down up-down. It sings them in sets of five. The sound of spring in London. Up and down. Like the next few days. The next few days are up and down.

When he finally spoke to her, for the first time since leaving her flat on Tuesday morning, she sounded irritable. (That he took to be a positive sign, since it was not him she was irritated with.) She said someone was off sick…

‘What, someone else?’

‘There’s a flu going round.’

… and she had been asked to do two nightshifts, tonight and tomorrow, starting at ten.

Testing the meaning of ‘for a while’—as in, ‘I don’t think we should see each other for a while’—he suggested they meet in the early evening.

‘Maybe,’ she said, as if thinking about it. ‘Phone me later.’ (Up!)

He did phone her later, in the middle of the afternoon, and she seemed to have lost interest in the idea. She said vaguely that she wasn’t sure what time she would be home—she was out somewhere—and that she would phone him.

Hours passed without her doing so. (Down.)

Five fifteen found him in a Spitalfields pub with Mike, a friend from his City days. When they were settled with their pints, James asked after his wife and kids. They were fine, Mike said. He had thickened since James first knew him. His wrists, his neck. Though he wasn’t losing his hair—or not much—somehow his head had an increasingly taut, polished look. He had taken, in the last month or two, to wearing a three-piece suit. (James was in nondescript mufti—designer jeans, a soft zippered top, Adidas.) Night was starting to fall outside on Commercial Street when Mike went to the bar for a second pair of pints and James tried Katherine again. When she did not answer he felt deflated. He started to tell Mike, in outline, what was happening. ‘Yeah?’ Mike said. Though not unsympathetic, the way he said it made the story seem insignificant. It made it seem as if next to his own unmentioned worries—London school fees, the state of the markets, the travails of a long-standing marriage—James’s situation was essentially frivolous.

And though he was in fact a few years younger, James felt that Mike was older than him now, that he had managed the transition to a sort of maturity.

His phone let him know, in the usual way, that he had a text message. The message said—I’m home! Where are you?

‘What is it?’ Mike said.

James was staring at the screen of his phone. ‘I’ve got to go after this pint, mate.’

‘Fair enough.’

He phoned her as he walked under the heatless lights of Spitalfields Market—an empty space after dark, except for the metal frames of the stalls and their multiple pale shadows—and said he was on his way to Moorgate tube.

They met in the Old Queen’s Head. ‘I’m working later,’ she pointed out, when he asked if she wanted a drink. He himself was quite tipsy from the two pints he had had with Mike, and perhaps also from the unexpected pleasure of her presence. (He put out his hand and touched her.) Whatever the reason, he was in fine form. He told her about Fontwell Park yesterday—upmarket pastoral, no shortage of men in green tweed suits and fedoras—and about Miller. Miller was one of the green-tweed-suit wearers. He looked, James said, like an ambitious farmer on about a million quid of EU subsidies a year.

‘And what happened to your horse?’ she said.

‘She fell.’

‘She fell!’

Even later, James felt unable simply to ask Miller if the fall—and the nightmarish ten minutes that followed while the screens were swelling out on the track—was planned, was part of the trainer’s plot, or whether it was just something that happened. He found himself unable even to insinuate that it might have been planned. It just seemed too shocking—that that was the way Miller had planned to stop her. And indeed, while the screens were still up and keeping their terrible secret, and James was standing there waiting for the worst with tears in his eyes, Miller had said, ‘Wasn’t expecting that.’ Unfortunately, the way he said it, working a lighter, was not entirely persuasive. ‘Normally she jumps super,’ he said later, when the suspense was over. ‘She’s schooled super. Don’t know what happened there.’

‘No,’ James said. ‘No.’ He tried to inject some scepticism into his voice. It was the most he felt able to do.

In the Old Queen’s Head, Katherine looked at her watch—a pretty little Swiss thing—and said it was time for her to leave.

‘It’s only half eight!’ he protested.

‘I know. I have to go home, eat something, have a shower.’

‘I’ll walk you home then.’

It was a very short walk.

‘How is she now, your horse?’ she said as they walked.

‘I think she’s okay. I phoned Miller this morning. He said she was okay.’

He sat on a stool in her white kitchen, with its sash window overlooking the street, while she ate something. He seemed to have lost his pizzazz. He sat on the stool watching her spread pâté on toast. He just shook his head when she asked if he wanted some. They had sparkled in the pub. They had sparkled easily, without effort. It had seemed then that everything was okay. Now, in the kitchen, a question which it had been possible to ignore in public seemed to be pressing itself on them insistently. She was nervous and impatient with him, as if he had overstayed his welcome. He should not have lingered, he thought.

‘I should be off,’ he said.

Her mouth was full, and she just said, ‘Okay.’

He went to the hall for his jacket. ‘Okay?’ he said when he had put it on.

‘M-hm.’ She had finished eating and was hurriedly tidying up, wiping surfaces near the toaster. When he went to kiss her, she seemed to spot something that needed seeing to on the floor and, stooping, started to mop the old linoleum. He just stood there, waiting for her to finish, until she laughed, while still mopping, and said, ‘Sorry.’

‘That’s okay,’ he said. ‘When you’re ready.’

Finally she threw the damp sponge into the sink and pushed a stray piece of hair out of her eyes. ‘Bye,’ she said.

Somewhat tentatively, he put his hand on the woolly swoop of her waist. She was wearing a long wool jumper. ‘Will I see you this weekend?’ he said.

‘I don’t know. If you want to.’

‘I do want to.’ To that she said nothing. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘When?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know how I’m going to feel. After the nightshift. Phone me.’

‘Okay.’

He pulled her towards him. She yielded to this pull, though if she was smiling it was the faintest smile he had ever seen—and then, seeming to withdraw even that, she lowered her face. He stroked one of her transparent eyebrows with the tip of his little finger. The neon tube over the sink was humming.

4

She visited him the next morning, straight from the nightshift. She had phoned in the small hours and said she would. For some time she had whispered into the phone while he lay there listening, half asleep. She told him she didn’t know what she wanted or what she felt. That was why she had kissed him in the kitchen last night, kissed him properly just as he was leaving, her tongue in his mouth struggling, it seemed, to obliterate its own intransigent singleness.

He heard her shoes on the metal steps outside his window. For a moment she seemed to pause in the wet area. He sat up and inspected his watch. It was twenty past eight.

‘It’s sweltering in here,’ she said, ignoring his total nudity, and heading straight for the living room.

‘Is it?’

‘Why don’t you put some clothes on? And turn the heating down.’ As she went through the hall she twisted the thermostat herself. He followed, shrugging on his dressing gown. ‘How was it?’ he said. ‘The nightshift.’

She looked very tired as she stepped out of her wet shoes. With a small sigh, she sat down on the old wooden swivel-chair. Under her weight it too emitted a small sigh. It went with the stupidly huge desk. Its back was a padded U on little wood pilasters. Its seat looked as if it had taken the shallow impression of a sitting arse.

She said there were ‘loads of hookers’ in the hotel overnight.

‘Hookers?’

‘Yes, loads of them. I mean, up-market ones. You know, escorts.’

‘There were loads of them?’

She nodded. ‘I mean, I was expecting some.’

‘How did you know they were hookers?’

‘Young women on their own. Tottering out through the lobby in the middle of the night. Without looking at me. In dresses slashed up to the hip. Holding sparkly little handbags.’ She laughed. ‘It’s obvious. I kept thinking of their parents,’ she said. ‘I imagine their parents never know.’

‘No, probably not…’

‘Some of those girls must make loads, seriously loads.’

‘I’m sure…’

‘Supposedly they’re all saving up for something. They look quite sensible, most of them. Like the sort of people who have ISAs and things. I suppose it’s just a way of getting where they want to be in life.’

‘And the hotel doesn’t mind?’

‘There’s nothing we can do about it!’

‘Isn’t there?’

‘What can we do about it? We’d lose masses of business if we tried to stop them! Everyone would just go next door to the—’

‘Everyone?’

‘Most of our best customers.’

‘I’m not surprised…’

‘You would be,’ she said. ‘You think you know, but you don’t.’

‘I don’t think I know,’ he said. ‘I don’t know…’

‘There’s some VIP staying,’ she said. ‘Some African president, with a whole big entourage. Maybe that’s why there were so many of them last night.’

‘Which president?’

‘I’m not supposed to tell you.’

She told him.

‘I’ve never heard of him.’

‘That doesn’t surprise me.’

He laughed. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Honestly,’ she said, ‘I wasn’t supposed to tell you.’

‘Why not?’

‘You mustn’t tell anyone.’

‘Who would I tell?’

‘I don’t know. Your friend.’

‘Who?’

‘The journalist. The one you set up the magazine with.’

‘Freddy? He wouldn’t be interested in that. I’m just going to feed Hugo. Do you want tea?’

‘Yes.’

She examined a hole in the heel of her tights. She had just been saying whatever popped into her head. Just talking. Talking. Just talking. It was nice to talk like that. Drizzle pittered quietly on the skylight. The only light in the living room sank to it past high walls—it seemed to lie in the depths of a well, this subterranean hidey-hole full of heaped-up stuff. Only a few strips and squares of tired carpet, the colour of pale jade, were visible. The largest was in front of the TV, where there was the plastic tangle of a Playstation, one of those men’s toys… She touched the orbit of unfeeling skin on her heel.

‘What’s this?’ she said.

‘What?’ He put the tea on the desk and his hands on her shoulders. ‘It’s a grape stem…’

‘Who’s Izette?’ The grape-stem was in an unsealed envelope, on which James had written Izette.

‘She’s South African,’ he said.

‘And?’

‘And? And I’m selling that to her.’

‘What?’

‘The grape stem.’

‘You’re selling it to her?’

‘Yes.’

He started to massage her shoulders. She shrugged him off and, turning to look up at him, said, ‘What do you mean you’re selling it to her?’

‘I put it on eBay.’

She laughed. ‘What are you talking about? Why does she want to buy it?’

‘The shape, I suppose.’

He had found it one evening while eating grapes, and a few days later, in a spirit of experimentation more than anything else, he had quietly taken some photos and put it on eBay.

‘What do you mean the shape?’ Katherine said. ‘She thinks it’s miraculous or something?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ he said. ‘It’s her mother who’s buying it. She saw it on the Internet in South Africa…’

‘This is absurd!’

‘Why?’

‘Did you say it was miraculous or something?’

‘No…’

‘Did you say it was holy?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I didn’t.’

‘Who did?’

He sighed. ‘I don’t know. People on the Internet. I don’t know who they are. There are various threads…’

‘And how much are you taking from these people, these poor South Africans?’

He shoved his hands into the pockets of his dressing gown. ‘A few hundred dollars…’

‘A few hundred dollars?’ she screeched.

In fact it had sold for more than two thousand. He said, ‘What? I haven’t lied to them. What are you so upset about?’

‘What am I so upset about? It’s immoral.’

‘Why?’

‘You’re taking advantage of these people.’

‘No I’m not…’

‘You are!’

‘I’m not. If they want to buy it—’

‘It’s a worthless… It’s worthless!’

‘They don’t think it is.’

‘You do. You wouldn’t pay for it.’

‘So what? I don’t think it’s holy. If I thought it was holy, I might.’

‘Can’t you see,’ she said, ‘that what you’re doing is wrong?’

With his hands in his pockets, James said, ‘No. I didn’t say it was holy. I never said it was holy. I was totally upfront with these people. What they do with their money is up to them.’

She stared at him with her mouth open.

‘They want it,’ he said. ‘There were hundreds of them.’ That was true. ‘The money’s just a way of deciding who wants it most. Isn’t it quite patronising of you,’ he said, suddenly thinking of something else, ‘to think you know better than they do how they should spend their money? They don’t need you to tell them how to spend their money. Who are you to tell them what to do? They’re free to do what they want with their money.’

‘That’s just a way of excusing your cynicism,’ she said. ‘You know what you’re doing is wrong.’

For a moment the only sound was what was now a downpour drumming on the skylight. She stood up and slipped her feet into her shoes.

‘You’re going?’ He sounded surprised.

‘M-hm.’

‘Why don’t you stay here? You look exhausted. You’re not upset, are you? This hasn’t upset you?’

‘No,’ she said. She was putting on her white puffa jacket. ‘I do think it’s dishonest.’

‘Why?’ he said exasperatedly. ‘It’s not dishonest. Why is it dishonest?’

She thought about this for a while. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘it’s not dishonest. It’s not very nice, though. If they want it so much, and you think it’s worthless, you should just let them have it.’

‘Why don’t you stay?’

She sighed. Then her shoulders slumped and she fell against him. He put his arms around her. ‘Stay,’ he said. ‘You can sleep in my bed. I won’t make any noise. I have to go out and do some things anyway. Okay? Okay?’ She nodded—he felt her head move on his shoulder.

When he had put her to bed, wearing a set of pyjamas that he never wore himself, he took the umbrella and walked Hugo. The lights were on in offices and students hurried through the streets of Bloomsbury in hoods. He had some toast and coffee, and then a shower. All of which took place to the varying sounds of the rain—on the skylight, on the umbrella, pinging on the area steps, splashing in the mineral puddles of the melting area floor.

*

He was lying on the sofa with the TV on—the volume so low that at first the sound seemed to be off—waiting for the two-ten at Sandown, when she appeared in the doorway, wearing his tartan pyjamas and looking extremely muzzy. ‘What time is it?’ she said.

‘Two.’

She moaned and smothered her face with her hands—she had only slept for five hours. Moving slowly, she picked her way through the stuff on the floor and lay down on the sofa with him. Lying there warmly squashed together, he put his hand inside the pyjama jacket and stroked her soft stomach. (Up—very much so.) There was a loud sluicing sound from somewhere in the same vicinity. ‘Are you hungry?’ he said. ‘Do you want something to eat?’ She laughed and said she wanted to have a shower first and stood up shakily, tipping over with a squeal when she was halfway up and poking him with a sharp elbow.

When he heard the shower start—not a very vigorous sound—he stood up himself and took her a towel. She was standing in the stall, the plastic of which—limescaled and wet—was only partially transparent, with her wet hair trailing over her face and stuck to her white shoulders, and water trickling down her long pale body. It was not very warm in there. The only heating was a single electric bar over the door, pathetically amplified by a piece of scorched tinfoil. He tended to turn it on an hour in advance, and feel its just perceptible warmth on his shoulders, like the weakest sort of sunlight, when he stepped out of the stall. Though it was too late now, he pulled the string that turned it on, noticeably soiled where his and other fingers had seized it innumerable times, and said, ‘Here’s a towel.’ She started slightly. With her eyes shut she had not seen or heard that he was there. ‘Thanks,’ she said.

He watched the two-forty from Sandown, the novices’ chase, while she sat naked on his bed drying her hair. When it was over, the winning trainer, Venetia Williams, talked to an interviewer about some Festival hopes of hers. ‘One hopes,’ she said, with a wistful smile, over the whine of the hairdryer. ‘One hopes. Of course, if it doesn’t happen one mustn’t be disappointed. But one hopes.’

When she was dried and dressed, they went out and, holding each other tightly, traversed the windy tray of Brunswick Square. They had a late lunch at an Italian place on Lamb’s Conduit Street. When they left the restaurant it was twilight. On the way home they passed the Renoir and had a look at what was on. All of which made him think, as they stood there looking at the programme, of another day when they had done exactly the same things. That Tuesday in the first week of February, when London was under a hard, dark frost. That February afternoon he had fed her forkfuls of strawberry tart while she looked through his limited selection of DVDs, finally and sentimentally settling on Brief Encounter—which he had never seen; it had been free with a Sunday newspaper. They had not been watching the film long, however, when he noticed that she had surreptitiously undone her jeans and had her hand inside them, and though she went very pink and smiled distractedly, she did not stop what she was doing. He said, ‘I doubt this film has ever had that effect on anyone until now.’ Which elicited a small hiccup of a laugh. Then he pulled the jeans first halfway down her thighs, then over her knees and finally free of her feet. The film plodded stoically on, oblivious to what was happening on the sofa. ‘There’s your train,’ said Celia Johnson. ‘Yes, I know,’ said Trevor Howard.

‘Squeeze my nipples,’ said Katherine. ‘It will make me have an orgasm. Use your teeth…’ she whispered urgently. ‘Your…’ It overtook her in mid-phrase, a sudden open-mouthed expulsion of air from her lungs as she struggled to seize him with all four of her limbs, her shouts quickly subsiding into a series of soblike sounds, quiet sobs. She shuddered as some sort of aftershock seemed to tickle through her, and went limp in his embrace. They lay there for a minute until she sighed and with an exaggerated mwah! kissed him on the mouth. Putting her hand on it, she said she had to decide what word she was going to use for his… Well that was the point. She needed a word for it. All the existing words, she thought, sounded vulgar, were swearwords, or silly, or had a frigid medical neutrality. With such an imperfect vocabulary it was not an easy thing to speak of. She would have to find her own word, she said, with her hand on it. A private word. Of necessity, a private word.

As they had that afternoon in February, they had sex on the sofa, and she left at eightish, to do her second nightshift.

*

Saturday was Sunderland’s Imperial Cup day at Sandown Park. The one o’clock train from Waterloo to Esher was full and most of the people on it were on their way to the track. There were loudmouths in office suits and tubby young women in tiny dresses despite the frost still lingering in the shadows of the trackside playing fields of south-west London. James spent the journey squashed in next to a man in his twenties, one of a party of men in suits and the only one of them to have a seat. His hair, plastered to his forehead at the front, was otherwise massively mussed up and stiffened with mousse. The tips of his tan winkle-pickers were medieval in their elongated pointiness. He might have had a hangover—his pale-lashed eyes were pink, and he was telling the others, in a strong hoarse voice, how much he had drunk last night.

It was a cold, sunny day at Sandown Park. From the stand, London was visible in the distance. It filled the whole horizon. James took the escalator down to the paddock to inspect the horses in the first, the novices’ handicap hurdle. He was passing through the Esher Hall when he saw someone who looked familiar. It was J. P. McManus, the legendary punter, the patron saint of the winter game, standing there in the tatty hangar of the hall like any impoverished mug holding a plastic pint pot. Telling himself that if this man had the humility to hang out in the Esher Hall wearing a shapeless middle-management overcoat, then the least he deserved was to be left alone, James did not introduce himself or ask J. P. what he was on. (Probably nothing. His approach to punting was well known. It was a matter of price. Everybody knew that. They knew that serious pros did not look for winners, they looked for prices.) He just watched him for a minute talking shyly to some people he seemed to know, and then took the escalator upstairs.

Later, Dusky Warbler, a horse he had been following all winter, very nearly won the Imperial Cup. He was sent off at twenty to one, and James had £10 each way with one of the scarfed and hatted bookmakers in the huge shadow of the stand. It was a photo finish. The shrieking peaked as the two horses passed the line together. ‘Pho-dagraph, pho-dagraph,’ intoned an unflappable voice over the PA system. When a minute later the other horse was named the winner, there was some tattered shouting and the stand started to empty. Trooping downstairs to the winner’s enclosure on the far side of the paddock, James was still in a sweat of exhilaration.

She thought he was in London. She wanted to meet now. He explained that that wasn’t possible—he was in Surrey—and she sounded frustrated when she said, ‘Well when can you meet?’

They met at eight—or quarter past, he was late—in Mecklenburgh Street. She was waiting at the top of the area steps. She was, he thought, surprisingly smartly dressed. She was perfumy. Her shoes had a nice height of heel. The question was: where were they going to eat? As they walked through Mecklenburgh Square she put it to him. ‘Where are we going to eat?’ she said. The plan, it had been his idea, was to make an evening of it. (Hence the nice dress, the earrings, the heels.) However, he was tired—all that wintry fresh air and movement—and he didn’t mind where they ate, as long as it was nearby. For some time he didn’t say anything. Her heels ticked off the seconds. ‘What do you feel like?’ he said eventually.

‘I don’t want to have to decide,’ she said. ‘I want you to take me somewhere.’

‘Okay.’ They walked on in silence for a few steps. ‘What do you feel like, though?’

‘I don’t want to have to decide!’ she said heatedly. ‘That’s the point. I want you to decide.’

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I’ll decide.’

They ended up nowhere more imaginative than Carluccio’s. He suggested it when she started to show obvious signs of fed-upness. Her shoes were hurting her—she had not dressed to wander around for half an hour. And she was tired too, of course. They were installed at a table, furnished with wine and antipasti. He told her that he had seen J. P. McManus at Sandown. ‘Who’s J. P. McManus?’ she said, eating a succulent olive, dripping spots of oil on the tablecloth.

She was talking about something else when he lost the thread of what she was saying. He was looking expressionlessly over her shoulder, out through the front of the restaurant—opposite was a line of terraced houses with fanlights and plain facades, like the ones on Mecklenburgh Street. Student flats, probably…

‘What is it?’ she said, turning in her seat to see what he was looking at.

‘Oh…’ he murmured. ‘Nothing.’

‘What?’ she insisted, still looking over her shoulder.

‘No, I was just looking at those houses on the other side of the street.’

‘Why?’

‘I once looked at a flat in one of them.’

‘Oh. Did you take it?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

He shrugged. ‘It wasn’t very nice.’

She waited for him to say more.

He didn’t.

Then the waiter floated up to them and they ordered some dessert. She suggested they take it home and have it there. So he asked the waiter to pack it up for them, and also to pay. This seemed to take a long time, and while they were waiting, he yawned, shielding his mouth with his hand.

When he had finished yawning, he smiled at her. She looked desolate. There were dark indents under her eyes. ‘What is it?’

‘We’re just not having fun,’ she said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, we’re not having fun.’

‘Aren’t we?’

‘We’re like them,’ she said. He turned and saw a man and a woman just sitting at a table, looking off in different directions. ‘They haven’t said a word to each other since they got here.’

‘Then we’re not like them.’

However, they started to walk home in silence.

‘What is it?’ he said. ‘What’s the matter?’

And she said the same thing—‘We’re just not having fun! You yawned. That’s not fun.’

‘I yawned…?’

‘When we were waiting for the bill. How fun is that?’ she said, upset. ‘That’s not exciting.’

‘So what if I yawned? I’m tired.’

‘You’re tired. Oh,’ she said sarcastically, ‘that’s good.’ She laughed in dismay.

‘Yes, I’m tired.’

‘Well…’ She shrugged. ‘Okay. You’re tired.’ They had slowed to a dawdle. Now they stopped. ‘What do you want me to say to that?’

‘You don’t have to say anything.’

‘Well…’ She seemed at a loss.

‘I’m tired,’ he said. ‘Why is that such a problem?’

She sighed.

She was stiff and aloof in his arms.

She said, ‘It’s a problem because… we’re not having fun.’

‘No, we’re not. Not now.’ Their foreheads touching, they were looking down at her shoes. ‘Don’t put so much pressure on things. You put so much pressure on things,’ he said. She seemed to nod and they started to walk again, slowly. ‘We’re tired. That’s all.’

Leaving her shoes in the hall, she went into the living room while he unpacked the dessert.

When he joined her, she was looking at something on the Internet. Whatever it was, she seemed very interested in it. ‘You have some first,’ she said, without taking her eyes off the screen. He did, and then passed it to her. ‘What are you doing?’ he said.

‘Just…’

‘What?’

He looked at the screen—it was nothing in particular, just news. He started to massage her shoulders. She moused a link and he unzipped her dress, first having to lift her hair to find the zipper’s little tug. Then, while she muttered something about the news story she was perusing, he fiddled with the fasteners of her bra. Seemingly oblivious to this, she leaned forward to scroll down as he tried to pull the dress off her shoulder. That was physically impossible—it was supposed to go over her head. She still had her eyes on the screen when he swivelled her away from it, lifted her up—she squealed—and staggered next door, where they toppled onto the bed. For a few minutes they snogged and tussled in the mess of sheets.

He had just peeled off her tights when she sat up and smoothed her hair. ‘I was looking at something on the Internet,’ she said. Weltering there, half undressed, with a hard-on, he made a token effort to hold on to her. When that failed, he lay there for a minute or two staring into space and thoughtfully stroking himself through his trousers.

‘I’m just taking Hugo for a walk,’ he said. She was still on the Internet.

‘M-hm.’

‘I’ll be back in a few minutes.’

‘Okay.’

He did a slow lap of Mecklenburgh Square and found her at work with a toothbrush. (She was always fiercely energetic with a toothbrush in her hand, the head of her own was terrifyingly splayed and flattened.) She had tied her hair up. Her dress was still unzipped and the exposed skin, a wide tapering swathe the length of her spine, looked like old ivory in the forty-watt light. He kissed it while she washed her mouth out.

Her mouth was wet and minty. They were standing next to the bed, trying to kiss and undress at the same time, his jeans and shorts fettering his ankles. It turned out she wasn’t wearing any knickers. Then he was supine on the bed with her astraddle him. She still had the dress on, though he was already inside her. From where his head lay he was able to peer in a haze of pleasure over the hairless plain of his torso, over the low hillock of his stomach with its one winding path of hair, to the site of that impossibly exquisite prehension. ‘Is this nice? Is this nice?’ she said. In a single movement she pulled the dress over her head and was naked. At the sight of her whole skin the pleasure intensified terminally. He put his hands on her working hips and swung her off him. And then he was over her, looking down at her, at her streaming tears, her oscillating midriff, the square prow into which he was…

His weight on her seemed to double from one second to the next. She felt the slippery warmth on her stomach and lower down. She smelled its white, polleny scent. His head sagged.

‘I’m sorry.’ The words emerged as a single exhalation.

‘It’s okay.’ She stroked his hair. ‘I’m sure you’ll… have a second wind.’

He nodded, and kissed her soft nipple—which happened to be next to his mouth—though he was fairly sure he would not. He felt unimaginably tired. He felt as if he would be able to fall asleep instantly and sleep for twelve hours. However, she was waiting for him to do something, and the longer he just lay there, slobbering on her tit, the more utterly exhausted he would feel. He struggled to sit up. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again.

‘That’s okay.’ She was still lying there, her legs parallel to each other. Heatless semen slid down from the smooth shadow of her navel and matted the russet stubble of her pubic hair.

‘Have you got something to wipe that up?’ she said.

Leaning over the edge of the bed, he picked up his shorts.

His lack of desire, as he wiped her—wiped her stomach and the seam of her pussy like an exhausted waiter wiping a table—was extraordinary. He felt like he would never want to fuck another woman in his life. In the last minute, the way he saw her had undergone a profound metamorphosis. He noticed the sanded soreness around her mouth, the zones of irritation—little livid spots—where she had shaved part of her pubic hair, the twofold meatiness of her sex… When he had finished wiping her he threw the smeared shorts onto the floor. Then he stepped into the bathroom and, holding his shrivelled prick, made water in the dark. When he had done that, he filled a glass from the kitchen tap.

She had pulled the duvet over her and was lying on her side with her face away from the light. It was with a sort of sad, shameful relief that he saw she had put on his pyjamas while he was away. ‘Do you want some water?’ he said quietly, and she sat up and took the glass.

*

The sound of rain splashing and trickling in the area. It was lovely to lie there in the warmth, still half asleep, holding her small body and listening to the rain. He would have liked to lie there for hours. For years. He listened to it intermittently pinging on the metal steps—sometimes it pinged several times in quick succession, sometimes there were long intervals—and whingeing quietly in the drain. She was wearing his pyjamas. He squeezed her and she whispered something. He stroked her instep with his foot.

She said, ‘What time is it?’

He did not want to move but he leaned over and looked at his watch. He had to stare at it for a few seconds in the semi-darkness. It was surprisingly late. It was nearly ten.

‘Will you make some coffee?’ she said.

He mumbled something and a minute later swung his long white legs out from under the duvet. He was pulling on his shorts when he said, ‘Oh.’

‘What?’ she said.

‘They’re…’ He stopped.

‘… stiff with spunk.’

‘Yeah.’

It was at this point, pulling on the spunk-stiff shorts, that he remembered the wash he had put on yesterday morning, and that it was still sitting wet in the machine.

The music of the rain was less lovely now that he was no longer in bed. It seemed to lay siege to the flat’s ill-lit interiors. Hugo greeted him in the hall, in the grey light that leaked through the small pane of glass over the front door. His white tail waved like a shredded flag. When he yawned the sound was like something moving on unoiled hinges. James patted his head, and scratched his ears, and in the windowless vault of the kitchenette put on the kettle. While it was heating up he opened a kilogram tin of offal and fish-meal and forked the pinkish paste into the St Bernard-sized feed-bowl. He washed the fork while Hugo set to without finesse.

‘Do you want something to eat?’ he said to her.

She shook her head.

He told her about the stuff in the washing machine. ‘I think I’ll have to wash it again.’

She didn’t seem terribly interested.

‘I might as well do that now.’

The old washing machine was in the kitchen, the hard plastic hook of the outflow pipe still secured on the edge of the sink. When he had started it, he went back to the bedroom. She was moving about, picking up her things from the floor, putting them on. ‘Are you leaving?’ he said.

‘M-hm.’

‘Why?’

‘I want to go home.’

‘Why don’t you stay?’ he said. ‘For a while.’

‘I want to have a bath,’ she said. His tiny bathroom had only the mouldy shower stall.

‘Stay for a while. It’s pissing down out there.’

‘I know,’ she said, sorting her tights out. ‘Have you got an umbrella?’

For a few seconds he said nothing.

‘Have you got one?’ she said, looking up.

‘Yes.’

‘Is it okay if I borrow it?’

‘Of course.’

He fetched it from the living room, where the rain was thrumming noisily on the skylight.

‘Why don’t you stay?’ he said, even though she was now dressed and looking for her shoes.

‘I want to go home. I want a bath.’

They were standing in the hall. He switched on the overhead light and she put her shoes on. ‘Is everything okay?’

Without hesitation, she shook her head and said, ‘No.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. When he hugged her she just stood there. He handed her the umbrella. Then he opened the front door and she stepped out into the puddled area.

‘I’ll phone you later,’ he said, as she shoved the umbrella open.

‘Okay.’

‘See you.’

Without turning as she started up the metal steps, she kissed her fingers and waggled them in the air.

*

In the early evening he took the Number 19 to Highbury and Islington. From his seat at the front of the top deck as it plied its way through the wet twilight, he tried Freddy again. He needed to pass on what Miller had said. Miller had said, first of all, that the mare had been assigned a mark of eighty by the handicapper, which he thought was a touch on the high side. ‘Shouldn’t stop her, though,’ he said. (And James was worried by that shouldn’t— he would very much have preferred won’t. He was planning to wager every penny he had left on her, and was attached to the fantasy that it was impossible that she would lose.) And then Miller said, ‘Listen, I don’t think you should be at Huntingdon tomorrow. Not your mate either.’

‘Oh?’ James said. ‘Why not?’

‘Looks like you weren’t expecting it to win that way.’

‘I see,’ James said. He wanted to be there when she won, however, so he said, ‘Is that necessary?’

There was a stubborn silence.

Then Miller said, ‘I think it is.’

‘You’re sure?’ James said.

‘I’m sure. So give Huntingdon a miss tomorrow. Okay?’

James needed to pass this on to Freddy. He also wanted to emphasise to him, not for the first time, the importance of putting the money on properly—meaning in small quantities throughout the London area. Not all in one place. And not on the Internet, that was very important. Freddy said he understood. When he had finished speaking to him, James pocketed his phone and stared at the blue perspective of Theobald’s Road.

He was on his way to a dinner party in Highbury Fields. It was in a small first-floor flat that had been done up like a large house, so that it felt like a doll’s house, a very expensive one, obsessive in its attention to detail. The hostess—an ex of his from long ago—was trying to live, and entertain, like her parents. Thus the ten diners were squeezed into the little living room, in which there was also—somehow—a table set for ten. When they sat down to eat, it was extremely hot. Faces shone with sweat in the candlelight, and people kept apologising for elbowing each other. Shoehorned in next to a man who used to be in the army and was now in insurance, and a woman whose face was vaguely familiar from somewhere, he was not properly engaged with the situation. He talked a lot without any interest in what he was saying or in what was being said to him. While the main course was being served, he manoeuvred his way out of his place and withdrew to the minuscule loo. On his own, it struck him that he was quite drunk. He made some excuse and left straight after dessert, and it was like a liberation to walk out into the fresh night air and unurban quiet of Highbury Fields. The old street lamps made pools of pale light in the wide darkness. And now that the day was done, now that all the last preparations for the ‘touch’ were in place, his mind was empty except for one insistent thing—

Is everything okay?

No.

Everything is not okay. Standing in Highbury Fields—he has stopped walking and is just standing there, listening unsoberly to the wind in the trees—he feels a terrible need for things to be okay. From where he is, he would be able to walk to her flat in twenty minutes. Less.

‘I’m in Highbury,’ he says. ‘I’ve just been to a dinner party. Is it okay if I come over?’

‘Of course,’ she says.

And now he is walking quickly towards Essex Road. The way she said Of course—that on its own has helped immensely. He is practically jogging towards Essex Road now, through the Islington streets and squares he used to know so well.

He finds her watching television with Summer. They watch television for an hour. Later, when they are in bed, he starts to talk about last night. She says, ‘I was upset because you didn’t say anything. That’s why I was upset.’

He says, ‘I didn’t say anything because I felt so bad.’

‘Well…’ She seems exasperated. ‘Say something! Maybe if you said something you wouldn’t feel so bad.’ He just stares at her. She touches his face. ‘I don’t care about what happened. I don’t care about that! If you don’t talk to me, though, if you don’t say anything, if you just go to sleep… How do you think that makes me feel?’

‘I’m sorry,’ he says.

‘You’ve been feeling bad about it all day, haven’t you?’ He nods and she strokes his hair. ‘I’m sorry I was mean with you this morning. That wasn’t very nice of me.’

‘It’s okay. We had such a lovely time on Friday,’ he says.

‘Yes.’

‘Why was that so lovely and yesterday such a fucking disaster?’

She laughs. ‘I don’t know. Why?’

‘I don’t know either.’

‘You see, I didn’t even know that you thought that!’

‘Thought what?’

‘That yesterday was a fucking disaster.’

‘Of course it was.’

She shoves him playfully. ‘Well, how do I know you think that if you don’t say anything? I thought you thought everything was okay.’

‘No…’

‘That was the worst thing for me.’

‘I didn’t think that…’

‘Say something!’ She sits up and has a drink of water. Then she says, ‘Do you want some water?’

The way she says words like ‘water’. The way she meticulously enunciates the Ts in the middle of those words—it makes him want to kiss her. Why that? he wonders, shaking his head—he does not want any water. Why does that make me want to kiss her? Why does it matter why? Whatever. It just does. He pulls her towards him and kisses her.

5

Four o’clock on Monday morning and Simon Miller is up in the washed-out light of the laptop monitor. His face looks puffier in that light—his eyes peer out from over a whole series of seamed, sleepless pouches. Two-fingeredly he types in a password, thinking of last Wednesday night in the horse transport, pulled over in a shuttered Sussex lane with the hazards flashing. Then he had little Kelly Nicholls out of them poncey jodhpurs at last, though it weren’t easy, they were that tight… Logged in, he mouses his way towards the two o’clock at Huntingdon. And horses kept fartin of course. That’s one problem, having it off in a horse transport… The market for the two o’clock is now on the screen and still sleepily savouring the memory of Wednesday—precious memories! — he scrolls down looking for his horse.

She is hardly a proper outsider at all. The top price on offer is less than twenty to one. He scratches his head and wonders who has been forcing the price in. Officially only five people know about the touch. Himself. The owners. Piers. And Tom. Word will be out though. Owners always talk, or take young Tom. He were shaggin that scrawny thing, the vet’s assistant. He woulder told her. Probably fockin desperate to impress her, what with her being taller and intelligenter and posher than him. (None of which is that hard, mind.) He lights his second Marlboro of the day. He knows the markets. There is pressure on the price already. He’d be surprised if she was more than twelves with the firms in the morning.

As soon as it is light, leaving Piers to supervise the work session, he takes the Range Rover and drives to Trumpington. The sky is overcast except for in the east where it seems to have been torn open and a flame-blue pallor is sinking through like pigment into water, flooding the landscape with soft cold light. The wet meadows. The ploughed fields. He pulls up outside the Londis in Trumpington and switches off the engine. Kelly is not there yet, and he stands in the nippy morning air, smoking. There is no-one else in the street. Still, it is not quiet, exactly. The mumble of the M11 is faintly audible, and then a substantial plane passes quite low overhead, moaning, on its way in to land at Cambridge airport. Maybe a load of Sheikh Mo’s horses, Simon thinks, watching it from his hunched shoulders, home from their winter in Dubai… Lucky for some. When Kelly turns up in her little Fiat—she only got her licence last year—he is back in the Range Rover with the heating on.

She sits on the toasty leather of the passenger seat and when he has finished feeling and kissing her—he has not shaved, his stubble is sharp—he produces an envelope. ‘Thousand quid,’ he says. His voice smells of smoke. ‘I’m trusting you with it.’ He tells her to drive to Northampton and then Milton Keynes and Luton and visit twenty betting shops putting some of the money on in each, not the same amount in all of them, and never more than £100 in one place. She takes the envelope and looks inside it. Then she zips it into the pocket of her fleece. He says, ‘Our little secret, okay?’ She nods. ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘And one other thing. You’re not to phone me or send me any messages today—not about this or anything else. Understood?’

‘I understand,’ she says, looking at herself in the wing mirror.

He stares at her with undisguised hunger. He was once handsome. Now his strong chin, halved like an arse, is submerged in a wall of wanton obesity. Years as an unusually tall jockey, starving himself to do the weight, the fingers down the throat, the tears, the fockin eating disorders—since all that ended (1990, a horrendous fall at Uttoxeter) he hasn’t had the heart to deny himself much. His jawline went long ago.

His eyes are still fixed on her.

When he starts the deep-voiced engine, she says, ‘Where are we going?’

And he says, ‘Somewhere we’ll not be seen.’

On the way home he meets another vehicle in the lane near the yard. The lane is only just wide enough for them to pass each other, and in fact they stop, and electric windows hum down. The driver of the other vehicle is Jeremy Nicholls, Simon’s landlord. Nicholls sticks his blonde, wide-jawed head out the window and in his posh voice says, ‘Morning, Simon. Not on the gallops this morning?’

‘No, not this morning,’ Simon says.

‘Had other things to do, eh?’

‘That’s right.’

‘How’s Kelly doing?’ Nicholls says. ‘Pleasing you, I hope.’

‘Very much so.’

‘That’s excellent. Excellent. So she knows what she’s doing?’

‘She does. And if there’s anything she doesn’t know, she picks it up soon enough. She’s a quick learner.’

Nicholls is smiling proudly. ‘She is,’ he says. ‘She is. Wonderful. I’ll see you later, Simon.’

‘See you, Jeremy.’

The windows have started to hum up when Nicholls shouts, ‘Oh, Simon!’

‘Yeh?’

He is still smiling. ‘You don’t have a tip for me, do you?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t, Jeremy.’

‘You must have something at Huntingdon today?’

‘None of em’s got much of a chance.’

‘No? Okay then. See you.’

Simon tilts his head for a moment in a sort of mock-salute, then powers his window up and drives on. He parks the Range Rover in the yard. There is nothing picturesque about the place. Even the old house is a morose-looking thing—small-windowed, white-washed, with its inevitable satellite-dish. Next to it is a warehouse-like structure with mossy fibreglass walls where the haylage and Vixen nuts are stored and the tractor and various other pieces of sourly oily machinery live.

He finds Mrs Miller in the overheated kitchen looking through a surgical enhancement prospectus. ‘Where’ve you been?’ she says. He puts two packs of Marlboro Reds on the table and pats her terrycloth haunch. ‘Just fillin up the Range Rover.’

‘Oh?’ It hardly explains why he has been away for an hour and a half.

‘Yeah,’ he says, taking a seat with a tiny smirk on his face, ‘just fillin her up…’

‘Please don’t pat me like I’m a horse, Simon.’

‘Alright, alright…’ he mutters, and starts to read the UKIP Members’ Newsletter while she serves him his breakfast. He is quite involved politically.

He is still eating—trying to pick up a slick of yolk with a mushy triangle of fried bread—when his phone starts to sing ‘You’re Just Too Good To Be True.’

You’re just too good to be true

Can’t take my eyes off of you

You’d be like heaven to touch

I wanna hold you so much…

Shoving his plate away, he answers it. It is Francis Moss, a well-known horseracing journalist, media personality, fellow UKIP member, and friend.

‘Alright, Mossy,’ Simon says. ‘How are you? Alright?’

Mossy says something.

‘Yeah alright,’ Simon says.

Then he says, ‘Oh, did you?’ He frowns and using only his free hand unwraps one of the packs of Marlboro Reds. Then he says, ‘Well as it happens, yes.’

Mossy speaks again.

‘No, Huntingdon.’

And then—‘The two o’clock.’

And finally—‘That’s just for you Mossy. Not for the service. I mean it.’ As one of his many sidelines Mossy operates a tipping service, his familiar face smiling out of ads in the Racing Post. ‘Nice one,’ Simon says. ‘Yeah, I’m going to be there. Okay, see you there. Oh, did you get the newsletter? Just got it in the post this morning.’ For a few minutes they talk UKIP politics—who’s in, who’s out (of the EU). Mossy is a fairly senior tin-rattler for the party, on friendly terms with the national leadership.

Simon says, ‘Listen, I’ve got to go, mate. Yeah, I’ll see you at the track. Smashing. Yeah. Ta. See you there.’

Leaving his plate on the table, he lights a Marlboro, pulls on his Hunters and pushes his way through a fierce wet wind towards the stables, where Piers is supervising the loading of the horse transport.

*

In the first betting shop James enters, near Russell Square tube, the price is so short he thinks there’s been some mistake. There had not. And then, as he watches, it shortens still further. With the price unstoppably shortening, he spends the morning lowering his estimate of how much he will win if the touch is landed, until at about noon, from somewhere next to a motorway in Neasden, he phones Freddy. ‘Have you seen the fucking price?’ he shouts.

‘It’s fucking short,’ Freddy agrees.

‘Do you think Miller’s stiffing us? Do you think him and his mates got all the fancy prices?’

‘There was some twelve to one first thing,’ Freddy says. ‘Didn’t you have any of that?’

‘No, I didn’t…’

‘Last night on Betfair,’ Freddy says, ‘there were some silly prices. I hoovered up everything down to twenty to one. There was even a few quid of hundred to one.’

‘You didn’t use your own account?’

‘For some.’

‘You used your own account?’

‘For some of it. Why not? It’s normal. I part-own the fucking horse…’

James says, ‘If we get in shit for this I’m going to fucking kill you.’

‘Stop worrying,’ Freddy says. ‘Everything’s going to be okay. What’s that noise? Where are you?’

‘Neasden.’

‘What the fuck are you doing there?’

‘Trying to be subtle about it,’ James says. ‘I shouldn’t have fucking bothered. I’ll talk to you later.’ There is little more than an hour to post time, and he still has nearly a thousand unwagered pounds in his pocket.

*

The scene of his triumph is a quiet William Hill’s in Hendon.

Standing in the threadbare Hill’s, his heart pumping, with two old men he watches his horse win easily on one of the screens. When she wins he experiences several seconds of pure satisfaction and pleasure. The pure stuff. Unmixed with anything else. Medical quality feelings. And then there is Miller on the screen, unmistakably flushed with triumph. From the way he is flushed, from the way he is windily speaking, it is obvious that he is euphoric. ‘Wasn’t expecting that!’ he says with a laugh.

‘Weren’t you?’ the interviewer asks him.

‘No, not at all!’

‘Well the market got it right.’

‘Yeah. Wasn’t my money though.’

‘You didn’t have a few quid on?’

‘Not a penny. Unfortunately!’

While Miller is still speaking, James takes the first of his winnings from the teller and walks out into the traffic noise, the London light—sun smearing pigeon-hued pavements and striking the modest parade of shops of which the Hill’s forms a part. In the end he won very much less than he hoped—not much more than £10,000 is his first estimate, which will last him only a few months, five at the most—and once the euphoria wears off a sort of disappointment sets in. He takes a taxi from Kilburn High Street in the late afternoon, and dusk is falling when he lets himself into the flat and hides his winnings, well wrapped in plastic, in the soil of a house-plant, a hibiscus, that he acquired especially for the purpose. If the stewards are suspicious, they or the police might look for the money, for some money—they were unlikely to find it there. Then he has a shower and dresses for an evening out.

*

When word got round that Simon had landed a nice little touch and was sharing the wealth in the usual way, the villagers packed the Plough like it were New Year’s Eve. As for the karaoke it were like this— Simon sang a song, then somebody else sang a song, then Simon sang two songs, then somebody else sang a song, then Simon sang three songs… He did all his favourites. ‘New York, New York’. Start spreadinnn the noooze… (Very flat on that last word.) I’m leavinn terdaaay… (Even flatter.) He did ‘Let Me Entertain You’. And obviously ‘You’re Just Too Good To Be True’— soft-soaping the opening section with his eyes shut, and then absolutely yelling out I LOVE YOU BAY-BEE!! He was looking straight at Kelly Nicholls when he sang those words. That was unwise. Especially since her father is in. Jeremy is sitting as far as possible from the temporary little stage in its puddle of coloured light, smoking a Hamlet— the law on smoking in public places was not always observed in the Plough— and drinking a double Scotch. When Simon passes him on his way to the Gents, his face varnished with sweat and his voice hoarse, Jeremy says, with a smile, ‘None of em’s got much of a chance, eh, Simon?’ It takes Simon a second to work out what he is talking about— their meeting in the lane. When he does, he just winks at him, without stopping, and proceeds to take his piss.

That double Scotch is not, of course, the only imbursement the Nicholls family has taken from the touch. Earlier in the evening—the karaoke hadn’t started yet—he met with Kelly on the empty expanse of tarmac at the side of the pub. There he took from her the same envelope she had pocketed in the morning, only now it was very much fatter. It would hardly shut. He sat in the Range Rover with the vanity light on leafing through the immense wad and quickly worked out there was the thick end of £10,000 there. Moistening his index finger at his small mouth, he extracted £200 from the envelope, and then—experiencing a unexpected surge of feeling for his young mistress—supplemented it with a further hundred. She was still waiting on the wet tarmac when he lowered himself from the Range Rover and slammed the door. ‘Here,’ he said. Then he tenderly lifted her fleece, popped the button of her jeans and pushed the folded money down the front of her pants.

He had started his speech when she sat down in the pub. (He told her to wait outside for a few minutes, then follow him in.) He had a mic in his hand. The music had been turned off. There was a tolerant silence. The first words she heard were—‘… but it wouldn’t be nothing without you lot. I mean that. Every last one of you. Some might be more important than others, but every job matters. Even yours Piers.’ Laughter. And in the short turbulence of the merriment did he wink at her? The moment passed so quickly. And then he was saying, ‘I’m a sentimental old bugger…’ When he said that, she smiled secretly at the floor, thinking of the extra £100 she had found when she transferred the money from her pants to her pocket.

The speech went on for some time—the thick end of half an hour. And it was hard to say when it happened, but at some point it seemed to metamorphose from a speech of thanks and welcome—thanks for the support and welcome to the party—into something else. The phrase ‘European superstate’ made the first of several appearances. He said something about ‘as long as we live in an independent nation.’ He said, ‘I’ve nothing against foreigners, as most of you know last summer we had a French lad in the stables…’ Towards the end there was some light-hearted heckling.

When it was finally over and the music was on again, Frank Moss, who had had a lift from Huntingdon in the front of the horse transport, took him aside. ‘Top speech,’ he said.

‘Yeah, ta, Mossy…’

‘We have got to introduce you to Nigel. Listen, there’s a meeting in Eastbourne in a few weeks—how about then? And what about being on the platform? You’ll have to say a few words. Alright?’

‘What do you mean a few words?’ Simon said, watching suspiciously as Dermot, one of the lads from the yard, went over to where Kelly was sitting and started to talk to her.

‘If we’re serious about this,’ Mossy said, ‘you need more profile. They love you here. That’s obvious. You’d be a shoo-in here…’

‘Well most of em work for me…’

‘This is where you start from,’ Mossy whispered excitedly. ‘This is your heartland. Everyone in politics needs a heartland, Si. It’s step by step. You start small, then you take the next step. Eastbourne, Sunday second of April. Put it in the diary.’ Then he said quietly, ‘Everything okay with the stewards?’

‘Yeah I think so,’ Simon muttered. ‘I hope so.’

The Huntingdon stewards had had him in. They had had some questions for him about the mare. Standing there with young Tom, he had said that yes, she had shown striking improvement on previous form, he did not know why—perhaps it was the onset of spring? — and he wanted to be as helpful as possible with their inquiries. When the stewards said they wanted to speak to the owners, he said that since they weren’t expecting her to win, unfortunately they weren’t there. Then Francis Moss stepped in to testify that that very morning Mr Miller had told him he didn’t think the horse had any hope of winning. The stewards said they would look into the matter. ‘Okay,’ Simon said. ‘And if you have any questions just…’ With his thumb and little finger he mimed a phone.

There is a lock-in, obviously. The Plough, with its horse-brasses and low beams, is still quite full at two.

*

In the early evening, with unprecedented promptness, Freddy had paid James the £5,000 he owed him for his share in the mare in the form of a novel-sized wad of £20 notes, which they proceeded to leave in a thick trail through the West End, finally picking up a flock of skimpily dressed Norwegian girls in a Mayfair nightclub. Two taxis whisked them all to Chelsea, where Freddy was their host.

The tall eighteenth century townhouse in which Freddy lives is not, of course, his own. Impressive from the outside—spilling out of the taxis onto Cheyne Walk the Norwegian ladies were palpably excited by its size and splendour—it is less promising once you step through the front door. Freddy’s landlord Anselm inherited it in the Eighties in a leaky, mouldering state, and has since done absolutely nothing to it. The whole place smells mustily of dust and wet plaster. Inside, Freddy starts showing off at the piano, and while the others surround him or slip off to explore the house—naughty laughter in the unlit stairwells—James finds himself on the smaller of the sofas with twenty-two-year-old Maia, who had been taking a touchingly obvious interest in him from the start. (At one point she had placed his hands on her sparrowy diaphragm—what had that been about?) He is very drunk. Things have started sliding around, not least his voice, and she is sitting on his knee and kissing him. Her strong little tongue is moving in his mouth as they slide down onto the seat of the sofa. There, out of sight of the others, she whispers, ‘I have a fiancé. Hic! In Norway. So we’ll just have a one night stand. Okay?’ In spite of the hiccups, she starts kissing him again, more forcefully, holding his head with her hands.

There is no shortage of empty rooms in the huge house. There are rooms overlooking the Thames. There are rooms overlooking the tops of mature trees. There are rooms full of antique furniture. There are rooms with four-poster beds…

‘No,’ he says, prising her off him. ‘No, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’ He touches her nose and smiles. ‘I’m sorry.’ She says nothing, and for a few minutes they just lie there on the sofa. Then she stands up and joins the others at the piano. She seems sad, and watching her he wonders whether he should have taken her upstairs and fucked her in one of the four-poster beds. He wonders whether he wants to do that—does he want to do that?

He is still watching her and wondering when the door opens and Anselm is there in a satin duvet of a dressing-gown, his soft white hair askew, squinting in the light.

‘Fréderic,’ pronounced the French way, ‘would you mind keeping it down?’ he says petulantly from the threshold. ‘Please.’

He seems overwhelmed and flustered by the sight of all those Nordic limbs, those laughing aquamarine eyes, those white-blonde heads. (Though Maia and one or two of the others are dark.) Immediately playing a kind of fanfare—tan-tada-tan-tada-TA—Freddy says, ‘Ladies, this is my landlord. Won’t you join us, Anselm?’

Though the massed ladies are making him shy, one thing Anselm does not seem is surprised. This is the sort of thing he expects from Fréderic; indeed it is the sort of thing that Fréderic encourages him to expect. Anselm is under the impression that his tenant is an international playboy of princely lineage, and though he would never admit it, he is flattered just to be involved in the life of such a person, and to be thought of as a friend by him. He loves telling his other friends about ‘the prince.’ To them, he patronises him. ‘He’s a drunken sod,’ he says, showing off. ‘On the other hand, he is quite a laugh to have around.’ Except at times like this—perhaps twice a week. ‘Just keep it down, please,’ he mutters. ‘It is four o’clock.’

*

Slumped over the wheel of the Range Rover, Simon has to shut one eye to see anything at all. He sang the last number— ‘I did it myyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyaway’— to the empty pub. Then, still mumbling the words of ‘My Way,’ he stumbled out into oodles of moonlight. The moon was queasily full. In the kitchen he tries to work out how much money there is in the envelope. The problem is he has to hold each note at arm’s length to see what it is and even then they are just fuzzy oblongs. It was his intention to watch the video of the two o’clock at Huntingdon a few times. When he has a winner he tends to watch the video a few times. There was… something very nice… about watching the video… when you knew… when you knew you were… If only, he sometimes thought… If only… If only…

*

James wakes up on a musty four-poster with early morning light pouring in through the windows. He is fully dressed. He looks at his watch— it is eight o’clock and he has not slept more than a few hours. For a minute or two he just sits on the edge of the bed, feeling like a Victorian ghost in the tall, thickly ivied house. The sound of trees swishing in the wind, otherwise total silence. He has things to do. He has to walk Hugo for one thing. It is turning into a habit, spending the night away from home and leaving poor Hugo to tough it out. He must stop doing that. In his jacket pocket he finds his wallet. Sitting on the edge of the four-poster, listening to the swishing trees, he opens it. There is less than £4,000 in there. Ergo yesterday he spent more than £1,000 on a night out. Under the circumstances, that was perhaps unwise. Oh well. He pulls on his hard leather shoes.

On his way out, he looks into Freddy’s room. It is as he thought. There are two people in the bed, two heads on the pillows — Freddy’s half-bald head and a head of dark hair. He heard them. They were so uninhibitedly loud they woke him from his dead drunk sleep. He shuts the door and tiptoes down the stairs. It was a prurient thing for him to do, to look, and he wishes he hadn’t. Somehow, though, it upsets him slightly that Freddy had the one night stand with Maia. He is not jealous. It is not that. (He is pleased that he did not sleep with her himself—he would have felt terrible, terrible, if he had.) No, it is a matter of piqued vanity. He had thought that she liked him, specifically him, when in fact she just wanted to get laid.

Piqued vanity. He walks out into the early morning light. The London light, flat and plain on London streets.

Vanity of vanities, all is vanity

* * *

She has just never been very moved by his love, that was the thing. It left her unmoved. On her way home on Monday night, she had thought of that weekend in February when they went to see his horse.

They left London late on Saturday morning and were at the stables by two. James seemed disappointed that the trainer himself wasn’t there. They were met instead by a tall, lean, middle-aged, innocent-looking man—James introduced him as Piers—who emerged from a Portakabin and hailed them as they stood there under the snowladen sky. The stables were very miserable that Saturday afternoon. Some sort of liquid trickled along a spillway. The smells were intense—the smells of horse-piss, of manure, of mouldy straw. The doors of the stalls were all shut; from some of them came a quiet whickering as they passed. They stopped at one of them and finally taking his hands out of his pockets—he was wearing a husky and fingerless gloves—Piers drew back the bolts. He had a tangle of old tack under his arm. He went in with it and emerged a minute later (the visitors stood shivering outside) with the horse on a halter. She had what looked like a filthy old duvet over her.

‘See, she’s looking super,’ he said.

James patted the solid flank of the horse’s neck and, smiling proudly, encouraged her to do the same.

‘How old is she?’ she asked.

‘Five…?’ James said. ‘She’s five isn’t she?’

Piers just nodded, smoking.

‘Five. Isn’t she lovely?’

Lovely? Yes, okay. ‘M-hm,’ she said. She found it touching, his pride in this horse—and she seemed like a perfectly nice horse, if slightly odd looking. Thickly mottled, with a whiskery lower lip, the liquid hemisphere of her eye fixed on an ice-filmed puddle. The way she stood there so patiently, only her ears moving, made Katherine think of the horses in Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev—those mute, unjudging witnesses of the human scene. Quietists. The perfection of some kind of monastic ideal. Leaving James to stroke the mare’s nose, she looked into the stall. It was a musty, humid hole. She shuddered at the thought of spending a night in there.

The first isolated snowflakes were touching down in the mud and in the horse’s tough mane. James was feeding her an apple. He had had it in his pocket all the way from King’s Cross. He seemed delighted with the way her teeth and lips went at the fruit. They sheared off a whole half of it, sluicing juice everywhere. Then she lowered her huge head to pluck the second half from the unspeakable mud at their feet.

‘Okay?’ Piers said.

They turned down his offer of tea and went for a drink in the pub in the village. The Plough. Seven stars on the sign. The village was not much of a place, especially on a day like that. The pub was nice enough though. There was a fire, and they sat at the inglenook table.

Suddenly it was night-time, and the pub was quite full. James saw someone he seemed to know—a very slight man with skin of translucent whiteness, legs like tongs and some front teeth missing. He went over to speak to him. ‘Jockey,’ he explained. ‘Tom.’

‘Tom?’

‘Piers’s son.’

‘Oh.’

He said impulsively, ‘Why don’t we spend the night somewhere near here?’

For a few seconds she said nothing. She was not sure whether she wanted to do that. With a faint smile, she examined his face, her eyes seeming to move from feature to feature. ‘Like where?’ she said.

An old-fashioned hotel in Cambridge.

And it was in that hotel, lying on a squidgy mattress, with a scalpel of moonlight dissecting the drapes, that he said, ‘I think I’m in love with you.’

And what did she say? First she sighed. She sighed as if she wished he hadn’t said it. Then, when several frozen seconds had elapsed, she said, ‘I can’t say the same, James. I can’t say the same.’ There was a long silence. She knew she had hurt him. It frightened her that he should say he was in love with her—or that he thought he was. It made her wonder worriedly what she was doing there, in that fusty hotel in Cambridge—which was probably why she then whispered, her voice making a plume of vapour in the moonlight…

He just doesn’t understand her, she thought, standing on the mountainous up-escalator at Angel station, her face tiredly empty of expression. He doesn’t understand her. No more than she understands him. She thought of those words of Saint Paul’s, the ones you hear at weddings. They were heard at her own wedding. Then will I know truly, even as I am truly known… She thinks of those words, which unfailingly put a film of emotion on her eyes, as expressing a kind of ideal love. The idea of knowing, of being known. There is just no sense of that here. He does not know her. He does not understand her. He has no instinct for her. That was obvious, she pointed out to herself as she stepped off the escalator, from the start. On one of the first nights they spent together, she found herself lying there lightlessly. ‘Are you awake?’ she said. She had to say it several times, sitting over him. Finally he moved. ‘Are you awake?’ He mumbled something. He sounded as if he was under massive sedation. She sighed and made a sharp movement under the duvet. ‘I don’t feel we’re together,’ she said. ‘I feel very separate from you.’ And then, a few moments later, ‘I feel lonely. Did you hear me?’

He said, ‘I…’

There was a long silence.

‘Please hug me,’ she said.

With what seemed to be a huge effort, he turned over and took her heavy warmth in his arms. He kissed her somewhere on her head. ‘Don’t feel lonely,’ he murmured. He squeezed her. ‘You shouldn’t feel lonely…’

‘We’re just not together,’ she said then, sitting up. ‘I don’t feel I’m really with you. And you don’t know how to make me feel okay.’

He did not seem to know what she was talking about. He said, ‘What do you mean?’ She threw her head onto the pillow. ‘What do you mean?’ he said, sounding more awake. She was staring into the darkness. ‘What do you mean we’re not together? I don’t know what you mean when you say that…’

‘That’s the problem! You don’t understand.’

Sometimes—usually when the sleepy sensation of skin touching skin seems of itself to hold some sort of mute insufficient promise—she still hopes that he might somehow start to understand her. The trouble is, she is unable to help feeling that it just doesn’t work like that—that if he does not understand her instinctively then trying is pointless, even if it were possible. It just makes the whole situation seem so arbitrary—and if it seems arbitrary how is she to have faith in it? Why him, in other words? Why not someone else?

For instance, she had found herself looking at Jonathan tonight and wondering, his status as an ex notwithstanding, whether he might not suit her more than James. She enjoys him. She enjoys his wit, his warmth, his sophisticated friends. He was, and evidently still is, successful. Tonight was the launch party of some novel he is publishing and he treated her like a VIP, spent too much time talking to her, introduced her to some famous people… They were together for several years when she worked in publishing. It might easily have led to marriage, to white-stuccoed nook. She ended it—suddenly, shattering his heart—when she found that she was not sure that she was in love with him. She still sees the shy hope in his eyes, and when she saw it tonight she wondered whether she had been wrong to decline in him the sort of sociable life among the upper London intelligentsia that she had always imagined for herself. It was then, when she ended it with him, that she left publishing to pursue her idea of a small hotel somewhere near the sea. Would that make her happy? That was what it was supposed to do. Letting herself into the flat, she thought of a story Jonathan had told her once. Madame De Gaulle is being interviewed by the BBC shortly after her husband’s death. She is asked what she is looking forward to now, and says what sounds in her French accent unmistakably like, ‘A penis.’

Summer was out. The stripped wood floor of the hall was littered with shoes. Tipsily searching the fridge, she wondered—Jonathan still vaguely in her mind—whether she had just expected too much. Was she just mistaken to have supposed that she had to be sure? That only sure would do? Had she thrown away a perfectly nice and happy life—white-stuccoed nook etc. — for that mistaken idea? And if so, how had she found herself possessed of such an idea? Well, that was obvious, she thought, eating a slice of Parma ham. It was everywhere. It was one of the most pervasive ideas of the society in which she lived, one of its main articles of faith, one of the most obsessively visited subjects of its art. We just wouldn’t leave off it.

Putting on her pyjamas, she worried that she was too used to living on her own, too self-sufficient, too used to not sharing—not sharing her time, in particular. She wondered whether she should have spent the evening with James, whether she owed it to him to have done that. He wanted her to. His horse had won. She had said she had other plans, a ‘prior engagement,’ which was true. She washed her face. She tied up her hair. She made sure her phone was on the night-table. Then, instead of the poetry anthology, she took down from the shelf where it had stood untouched for years the New Testament and found 1 Corinthians 13.

6

On Friday lunchtime James is standing under a ledge, eating a damp, overpriced pasty with frozen hands. The small lumps of stringy steak in the pasty scald his throat on the way down. The pastry is soft and wet. He throws the floury nub into an overflowing bin, and joins the queue at a stall selling extortionate noggins of steaming whisky. He is at Cheltenham for the last day of the Festival—a long-planned excursion. Freddy is there too, visiting the malodorous piss-slick of the overwhelmed Gents.

Pretty much everyone on the eight o’clock National Express service from Victoria was holding a soggy Racing Post. The coach took its time leaving London, and then stood at Heathrow for half an hour in the faint stink of aviation fuel. When it finally set off again and started down the M4, it was in a miserable drizzle. Towards the middle of the morning, Swindon came and went, unseen in the flurrying Scotch mist. Not long thereafter, they left the motorway, and for a while the coach swung promisingly through hedgy lanes. Then, somewhere near Cirencester, it was suddenly snarled in traffic. An hour later, it was still stuck on the outskirts of Cheltenham, in a world of dowdy Wisteria Drives, and Freddy phoned to say they would be late. They were supposed to be meeting some friends of his there—or at least one of them is a friend of his—or at least he is a ‘friend’ of his. Freddy knows Forrest from the Phene Arms, his local in Chelsea, where he and the young American often drink together on those Sunday afternoons, perhaps half of them, when Forrest isn’t in the office. Forrest and the other members of his party were having lunch in the Panoramic Restaurant when Freddy phoned a second time to say that he and James were there.

Since James and Freddy were not allowed anywhere near the Panoramic Restaurant, which was on the top floor of the newest segment of the stand, Forrest took the lift down and met them at the entrance. They looked pretty miserable, he thought. Weary and wet from the long walk to the track—taxis were not to be had for love nor money—Freddy was sporting a wilted fedora and sucking on a cigarette which he held with two fingers of a worryingly mauve hand.

‘Hi,’ Forrest said, lighting one of his own on the dripping threshold. He himself was stuffed into a green tweed three-piece purchased specially for the occasion. ‘You get here okay?’

‘Fine,’ Freddy lied. ‘You?’

‘Well, you know.’ Forrest seemed slightly embarrassed. ‘We were airlifted in.’ (And they were not the only ones—the air was full of the self-important mutter of helicopters, so many of them that they formed holding patterns over the lost summit of Cleeve Hill while they waited to land.) ‘Tristan’s idea,’ Forrest said. ‘He and Trevor paid for most of it. So… you know… it was kinda…’ He seemed to search for the word. ‘Neat, or something.’

‘Sure,’ Freddy said. He did not seem surprised. He did not seem impressed. Surprised and impressed were things that Freddy never seemed.

‘We’re just having lunch,’ Forrest said. ‘You had something to eat yet?’

‘No, not yet.’

‘Why don’t you get something to eat,’ Forrest suggested, ‘and we’ll meet you later?’

So while they headed for the enclave of steaming food vans near the main entrance, Forrest took the lift up to the fifth floor, where from the table in the warmth of the Panoramic Restaurant the track was a green jumble through the plate glass.

Looking out and down, Tristan watched the people putting up with the weather in front of the stands, and in the economy enclosures on the other side of the track. He was always struck by the social diversity of this event. There was nothing else quite like it. Drunken yobbos of all kinds—from the primordially working class to the most egregiously toffee-nosed, with large numbers from the swollen middle of society, from London and the south-east. There were soft-voiced older men and women from garden suburbs in sensible fleeces. There were farmers and their families. Peers. The Irish… In Tristan’s view it was the horses themselves who made it this way. They were not part of the human situation—their appeal was universal. The waitress was serving the starter. Smoked salmon. What a yawn. Typical of a place like this, he thought. Playing totally safe. He smiled easily at the waitress as she served him. ‘What do you like in the first, Trevor?’ he said.

The Head of Structured Products and Securitisation was squeezing lemon onto the thick slice of salmon on his plate. He put it down and wiped his fingers on a napkin. ‘Mister Hight,’ he said, in his unhurried, thinking-man’s Estuary English.

‘Yeah?’

‘Irish raider,’ Trevor said. ‘Should be too good for our lot.’ He said something about a juvenile hurdle he had seen at Naas in January. Trevor’s first visit to Prestbury Park was in 1973, when as an eighteen-year-old he hitch-hiked from London with a few quid in his pocket and won £100. One hundred pounds was a lot of money in 1973, for a tube driver’s son, and the win inspired him to start out as a professional punter. However, he soon worked out that the sums of money to be made from horse racing—even by a hard-working pro—were minuscule next to what was on offer in the financial markets, while the essential principle was the same: not winners, prices. He made the switch from track to trading room in 1980, working first for old Etonians (Tristan’s uncle was one of them), and then for a variety of foreigners.

‘The best of ours is probably Hobbs’s horse,’ he is saying. ‘Detroit City…’ He puts the stress on the first syllable—Dee-troit.

‘Detroit City?’ interrupts Forrest.

Trevor ignores him. ‘… and he might win, but he’ll be fav, and at the prices it’s got to be the Mullins horse. For me anyway.’

‘Detroit City?’ Forrest says again.

Trevor just nods, has a sip of wine, pats his mouth with his napkin, and starts to eat.

‘Well, you guys know I’m from Michigan?’ Forrest says, smiling.

Without looking at him, Trevor says, ‘You should back Dee-troit City then, shouldn’t you.’

They finally meet—James and Freddy, and Forrest and his party—in the lead-up to the main event. They meet on the windswept apron in front of the stands, now a jostling sea of punters. Forrest makes the introductions—and stumbles embarrassingly when he finds he has forgotten James’s name. There is a momentary pause, and then, with what seem for a second to be literally supernatural social skills, Tristan smoothly supplies it. ‘James,’ he says with a warm smile, putting out his white trowel of a hand. ‘Tristan Elphinstone. Lovely to see you again.’

Of course! James thinks.

That tall man with the long pale face and the grey-blue eyes—not unlike James himself, in fact—had looked ominously familiar. He knew he had met him somewhere. The green tweed suit had thrown him. And Tristan was older now… It was suddenly all there. Tristan Elphinstone. He had worked for Lazard in those days, and Lazard was involved, with various others, in the floatation of Interspex. He and James had seen quite a lot of each other for a few months. Lunches, meetings in the offices near Moorgate, taxis. (In the taxis there was a strict etiquette, Tristan always sitting on James’s left, facing the direction of travel, with their suited flunkies perched on the flip-seats opposite.) Lazard had invited him to Wimbledon that summer, the Men’s Final—it was the last year that Sampras won. Tristan was host that day. They even went to New York together, had suites on the same floor of the Plaza. The next morning, the presentation on the umpteenth floor, with the snow swirling outside… Tristan Elphinstone. Wife an Italian aristocrat. Stunning, elegant, sexy. What was her name? Dorabella? Fiordiligi? James met her that Sunday in SW19…

‘Tristan,’ he says. ‘How are you, mate?’

Tristan laughs confidentially and leans closer to James (who is able to smell the Acqua di Parma emanating subtly from his tweed suit) to lower his voice and say, ‘I’m not doing too well this afternoon, actually. What about you?’

‘Me? I’m doing okay…’

‘Had a winner?’

‘Had the first two.’

‘Fucking bastard,’ Tristan says, still laughing quietly. ‘Typical. What are you on in the next? I’ll make sure I am too.’

‘Forget The Past.’

‘Nice one.’

Tristan is, of course, too tactful to ask James what he is ‘up to now’ or anything like that. He knows, obviously, that Interspex is no longer trading (not that it was ever exactly trading)—Lazard had filed a suit for several million pounds in unpaid fees. That was the liquidators’ problem, though. James had nothing to do with that.

There is a lot of talk about who is on what in the main event, most of it about Trevor’s £20,000 on War Of Attrition, a fifteen-to-two shot owned by Michael O’Leary, the Ryanair magnate. The prospect of a £150,000 win has made Trevor pensive, and he just loiters there in the tumultuous sea of people, with his hands in the pockets of his mac.

When War Of Attrition wins, he hurls the Racing Post he is holding into the sky and lets out a long wordless yell that makes the veins on his neck and temples leap out.

*

The apple blossom was out in Victoria Road. The tarmac shone in the unseasonable April sun. For the first time, he had the top down on the Aston. Pure pleasure, to slip through the streets of Knightsbridge and South Kensington with the top down and the washed air swirling and surging in his face, fresh and vigorous as springwater. His skin tingled. His heart tingled. Passing under the lofty young-leafed trees, he saw people on horseback in the park, trotting through the patchwork of the shade.

That morning he had met with Tristan Elphinstone at Lazard. Tristan had told him that everything was okay. He was a nice fellow, Tristan. And sharp too, very sharp. James had been passing through Moorgate anyway, so had suggested popping in for a quick meeting. ‘Always happy to see you,’ Tristan had said. James was passing through Moorgate because he had been out in Mudchute inspecting the new servers. Five hundred thousand pounds’ worth of servers had just been installed in the old warehouse there. Enough to cope with the next twelve to eighteen months of expansion. Then they would need more—the Mudchute installation was just a temporary measure. They were already looking for a much larger space, or rather the site for one. The idea was to build something the size of an airport hangar somewhere on the periphery of London. He was to look at one such site this afternoon. So he inspected the Mudchute servers—and even they were impressive, with their team of technicians and wall of loud ventilators, over which the head technician had had to shout to tell him that everything was okay—and when he had done that, he stopped off in Canary Wharf to have a word with Karl Meisner at Morgan Stanley. Everything was fine, Karl said. They were having no problems placing the shares. They had provisionally placed the first tranche already. They were ahead of schedule. Karl had wanted to take him to lunch but James said he didn’t have time, which he didn’t. In those days he never had time.

As he slipped through the lanes of Wapping, he phoned the office in Paddington to make sure everything was okay. He loved the office in Paddington. Everything was new there. The shining light-filled offices themselves were startlingly new, sprouting out of dereliction, out of a sad, forgotten, Victorian hinterland. He was proud to be in the vanguard of the new economy—and he was in the vanguard; there were even jungle drums suggesting that he might be invited to one of those parties at Number Ten, the ones where the Prime Minister mingled with envoys of the young and the new. They were the first tenants in the Paddington development, and the offices were still only half-furnished. Trucks full of stuff pulled up outside every day. His own office was still empty except for some essential furniture, a phone, and a specially made neon sign—in the style of Tracey Emin—saying ‘Get Large Or Get Lost’. The lack of seats meant that meetings had to take place with everyone standing up. This worked so well, in terms of keeping everything quick and to the point, that he had decided to institutionalise it. Serendipitous. He was usually in by eight in jeans and open-necked shirt. They had taken two floors, though for the time being they only needed one. Not even one. Even so, within twelve to eighteen months they would probably have to take more. They were hiring people every day.

So he stopped in Moorgate to see Tristan, who ushered him into the plushest meeting room on the premises and told him that everything was fine. Yes, the markets had lurched lower in March, it was true. However, they were now heading strongly north again. Such things were to be expected… Sitting there in his charcoal suit—there was something otherworldly about the quality of the tailoring—Tristan had the softly unshakeable manner of a very expensive doctor, telling you that while he understood what was worrying you, and was pleased that you had mentioned it, you were in fact perfectly fine. The trip to New York in February had been a fantastic success; there was lots of interest from the American institutional investors who had been at the presentation. He said, with his usual winning smile, that he was now looking forward to their forthcoming trip to Frankfurt and Zurich to make similar presentations, and would look into organising something in Singapore. ‘I wanted to see how New York went first,’ he said. ‘I’ll get on to that straight away now.’ He offered to take James to lunch. When James said he didn’t have time, Tristan escorted him down to the lobby, and there, on the smoke-veined white marble, they parted. First, though, smiling mischievously, Tristan put a hand on his arm and said, ‘Do you like tennis?’

‘Tennis?’ James said. ‘Sure…’

‘Fancy a day out in SW19 this summer?’

‘SW19…?’

‘Wimbledon.’

‘Oh. Sure, why not…’

‘Men’s Final okay?’

James just laughed.

‘I’ll be in touch,’ Tristan said. ‘We’ll speak soon. Lovely to see you.’ He was still smiling. ‘And don’t worry! Everything’s fine.’

James picked up a prawn sandwich from the Moorgate Pret, and then steered the Aston down Prince’s Street. The Aston was still very new—he still enjoyed just sitting in it, especially in his slightly scruffy clothes and shades, soaking up the lustful looks it sucked in from men and women in equal measure. He passed the solemn ziggurat of the Bank of England, and spurred the sportscar towards the sun-touched dome of St Paul’s. Everything was shining in the warm spring light. He parked in a side street near Ludgate Hill. He wanted to drop in on Chris at InfoWorks, one of the many technical teams they had on the payroll. James did not know exactly what they did. His own technical director, Magnus Petersson, a lugubrious Swede, handled that. Magnus—whose stock options that April had a paper value of £20,000,000 or so—was always meeting Chris, and the various other Chrises they had working for them, scattered contractors who never seemed to want to work with each other. Magnus sometimes said they should just take everything in-house, perhaps by simply acquiring them all—or sack them all and throw the whole thing to IBM or someone. If only it were that simple. Everything was half-made, half-done. No one knew exactly what was happening, or where, not even Magnus, though naturally he insisted that he did. To try and pick it apart at this stage would be impossible. You’d have to start from scratch, and there just wasn’t time.

James liked to pay impromptu visits to the likes of Chris. He didn’t want them to think he wasn’t paying attention. Nor did he want Magnus to think that he never spoke to these people. InfoWorks was up a squeaking, twisting staircase on Ludgate Hill—more like the home of a small mid-twentieth-century publishing house than a hive of futurologists. Chris’s own office was on the top floor, with small oriel windows overlooking the street. He was a short, hyperactive man—steel-rimmed spectacles, vainly shaved head—and he met James at the top of the stairs. He told him that everything was okay. Simon was hastily summoned—he was head nerd on the Interspex ‘project’—and they had a meeting. James nodded, and improvised some questions. There were a lot of technical terms. They used them to fend him off. He was only in there for twenty minutes or so, and turned down Chris’s offer to take him for lunch.

He was just starting the Aston when June phoned. June had been his PA when he was an estate agent in Islington too. She said that someone from the Financial Times had been on the phone, wondering if he would do an interview. James said he didn’t think he had time. ‘That’s what I told them,’ she said. ‘I said you probably wouldn’t have time.’

He parked in front of the house on Victoria Road. Though it still smelled pristinely of solvents, and faintly of sawmill, the upper part of the house was more or less finished. The expansive living room. The five en suite bedrooms. The study. The TV room. The first-floor terrace. Not all of these rooms were properly furnished. Two of the bedrooms had nothing except king-size mattresses in them, still in their plastic wrapping. The lack of stuff in the living room led to a vacant echo when you walked around on the newly laid oak parquet. The study held only a huge leather-topped desk and an early nineteenth-century admiral’s swivel-chair. (Trophies of a sale at Sotheby’s entitled ‘The Age of Napoleon’.) The lower part of the house, however, was still in a much earlier stage of development, the spaces for the most part only sketched in in sharp-edged plaster. The drawing room, the dining room, the kitchen, the utility room, the maid’s flat, the single-lane swimming pool… This last was still just a strange-looking concrete trench with various hoses in it. It was where James found Isabel and Thomasina.

The Italian tilers had started work, and the two women were standing on the edge of the future deep end, watching them mark things out with their spirit levels. James was surprised to see Isabel. She said she was there to talk to Thomasina about the wedding. Her wedding. Isabel’s wedding. Isabel was wedding Steve that summer—finally, they had been together for more than twelve years—in the south of France. Specifically, she wanted to talk about the dress. Thomasina had some sort of fashion diploma from St Martin’s, and still tinkered sporadically with her portfolio. They had been upstairs in the echoey living room, talking about it, when the tilers turned up.

That James and Thomasina now lived in a sort of palace was still something of a novelty. It still felt a bit strange to be standing there next to the single-lane swimming pool. To Isabel it just seemed slightly silly, preposterous. And what was even sillier—what was much sillier—what was almost too silly to think about or understand—was that when the floatation took place in the summer and James sold fifty per cent minus one share of Interspex (which had not even existed two years ago), he would ‘net’—as the papers might put it—or ‘pocket’, or ‘trouser’, £125,000,000. Isabel had made it pretty plain, only half in jest—less than half in jest—not in jest at all, in fact—that when it came to the wedding present she was expecting something quite special. A house in Sardinia. Something like that. What Thomasina made of it, she did not know. She had been trying to work it out just now when they were upstairs drinking Nescafé out of mugs. Thomasina was quite inscrutable, in her way. On the surface, she seemed oblivious to the sheer strangeness of it all. She was probably still in shock. She floated around the huge house—smiling and laughing in her shy sweet vague way—one of the super-rich… Oh insane! Fuck. It was insane!

For a few seconds some howling tool obliterated their small talk. The lower floors of the house were full of tattooed men in eye-shields operating howling power tools; and when the tools fell silent, there was the permanent tinny whiffle of paint-flecked radios—the same ten simple songs, the same ten news stories, ad nauseam. It was not a nice way to live, and James was starting to wish they had stayed in the flat in Islington until the place was totally finished.

They were standing on the edge of the swimming pool watching the Italian artisans at work. Isabel had a swig of Diet Coke to try and fend off the vertiginous feeling that had just wobbled her. Yes, she was jealous. Sure. That was normal. It would be weird if she wasn’t. And she was pleased for him too. She was proud of him. When people at work pointed to something in the paper and said, ‘Isn’t that your brother?’ she was proud of the fact that it was. It was just that this sudden surreal display of wealth seemed to be threatening to upstage the fucking wedding.

‘What do I do with this?’ she said, offering the empty Diet Coke can to no one in particular.

Thomasina took it.

‘I have to go back to work.’

‘And we have things to do as well,’ James said—properly smugly, his sister thought—squeezing Thomasina’s shoulders. ‘Which way are you going? Do you want a lift?’

There was a sapphire-blue Aston Martin parked under the white apple blossom in front of the house. That was a bit vulgar. And when she noticed the number plate she laughed out loud. ‘Don’t you think that’s a bit…’

‘Tacky?’ James suggested.

‘No? Isn’t it?’

Thomasina evidently thought it was.

‘Yeah, it probably is a bit,’ James said, smiling. He didn’t seem worried about it. Why would he be?

Isabel had to fold herself into the minuscule leather slot of the back seat. They dropped her at High Street Ken tube, and went on their way—looking, she thought meanly, like the fucking Beckhams. Except that James did not look much like David Beckham, except for those shades, and Thomasina looked absolutely nothing like Posh.

* * *

Forrest and his party had long since helicoptered back to London and were sitting down to one of those meals that’s so expensive it becomes a minor news story when the eastbound National Express snorted out of Cheltenham in the dark. They almost missed it, James and Freddy, sprinting with their packages of hot starch. Later, the coach spent two unscheduled hours inching towards a pile-up on the M4 that had shut several lanes of the motorway, and when he phoned Katherine, about an hour into that experience, to tell her that he would be late into London, probably too late to see her that night, she informed him that he would not be seeing her tomorrow either—she was going to stay with a friend in Kent. He had just been weighing up the state of his life, with her and the weekend they were about to spend together on one side and more or less everything else on the other. Even so, he sounded no more than slightly petulant when he said, ‘Well… I thought we were spending the weekend together…’

‘Well, I’m just sitting at home now,’ she said with a laugh. ‘You’re the one who isn’t here.’

He said, ‘What about Sunday then?’

‘I won’t be back in London till lunchtime. And I have to see someone in the afternoon anyway.’

‘Who?’

A friend who was moving abroad, she said.

So when they did finally meet, in a pub near his flat, their weekend together had been pared down to the pathetic rind of Sunday evening. He was a few minutes late, and was withdrawing some money when she sent him a text asking what he wanted to drink.

Mysteriously, in the pub there was no sign of her. He did notice two untouched pints—a pint of lager and a pint of Guinness—on an empty table. It was the Guinness that threw him. He had never known her to drink Guinness.

She answered her phone in the Ladies and said that yes, those were their pints, and she would be with him in a minute.

Ten minutes later she sat down opposite him.

‘What’s that?’ he said.

She had put a yellow Selfridges box, wrapped up with black ribbon, on the table. It was not for him, as for a moment he fondly imagined. It was a present from her friend, the one who was moving abroad—a pair of ivory silk pyjamas, neatly folded in tissue paper.

Later, in the forty-watt light of his bathroom, she would put them on. There was a lot that had to happen first, however.

They had to talk. Small talk. The house in Kent woodland where she had spent Saturday night. Her friend Venetia lived there with her fiancé and his eccentric father. She had quit her television job in London and now spent her time working in the woods—kerfing and piling and pollarding. She was not quite as happy there as she had hoped she would be. She had suggested to Katherine that she move into one of the old oast houses on the property—a suggestion that Katherine was apparently not dismissing out of hand. On Saturday there had been some sort of party. There had evidently been single men there, which made James short with jealousy for a minute or two. She wasn’t talking about the men, though, she was talking about the woodland. She was full of praise for that old woodland, which she said was on the point of exploding verdantly in super-super-slow motion. She said he would have loved it there.

He offered to make some supper and they walked slowly home. They walked through Mecklenburgh Square, hooked snugly together at the shoulders, the waist. For a few moments, there, in Mecklenburgh Square, everything seemed okay.

She stepped out of her sopping shoes while he turned on the electric fire in the living room. It was an old-fashioned one, made to look like a hearth of coals. It was ticking and starting to pulse with orange light when she sat down on the sofa and pulled her legs up underneath her. The drizzle whispered on the skylight. The fire ticked. Hugo yawned. There was something nice about it. There was something so nice about it…

‘Do you want a glass of wine?’ he said.

‘Okay.’

He went to the kitchen, and a minute later shouted, ‘I’m going to put the water on for the pasta.’

He had just done so when he turned and saw her standing in the doorway. ‘James,’ she said.

‘Yes?’

‘I don’t want to be your girlfriend.’

When he said nothing, she laughed nervously and said, ‘You probably don’t want to make supper for me now.’

When he still said nothing, she said, more seriously, ‘Do you want me to leave?’

‘No.’

‘I’m sorry, James. I’m sorry I’m so shit at this…’

‘Why?’ he said.

She said, ‘I… I’ll tell you.’ It was a struggle though. She stood there opening her mouth and shutting it. She laughed. ‘I’ll spit it out,’ she said. Even then, it took another minute. She was looking off to the side when she finally said it. ‘I… I want… to see… Fraser.’

She looked at him.

He looked at her.

She said, ‘Should we have a glass of wine?’

The initial shock was subsiding. And it might have been worse. It was just Fraser. Fraser. There had been trouble with him before.

It was true that this did seem more serious. She was sitting there on the sofa saying things like, ‘I know I shouldn’t have started this in the first place. I wasn’t emotionally available. It was selfish of me. She looked very solemn. ‘I haven’t been honest with you, James. I’ve never been honest with you. I’m sorry.’

His most immediate concern was what would happen that night—the prospect of not spending the night with her that night was an utterly terrible one. He needed her more than ever that night, after what she had said. The prospect of spending the night alone… The prospect of her just leaving… He might eventually fall asleep, and then wake a few hours later, in the desolate misery of first light, with the whole day waiting there… He poured more wine.

Now she was talking about the oast houses. There were a few of them on the property in Kent, and she was saying that she wished they could all—he took ‘they’ to mean the two of them plus Fraser—live in their own oast house ‘and just visit each other when we wanted to’. Though why he and Fraser would ever want to visit each other… And what would happen if he wanted to visit her and found Fraser already there, in her oast house? Or if one night together they should be interrupted by Fraser’s heavy knock?

She was quite tipsy now. She stuck out her glass for more wine. ‘I’m sorry, James,’ she said. She smiled wistfully. Then she kissed him, properly and at length, on the mouth. ‘I want to stay the night,’ she whispered. ‘Is that okay?’

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I want you to.’

‘It would be just too sad otherwise.’

Once that was settled, they ate a piece of Parmesan and finished the wine. Then she went and put on her new silk pyjamas. Then he took them off. And what followed was ferociously heightened with the sense that it was now in some way illicit, with the furious, urgent sense that it might be the last time.

*

In the morning everything seemed evanescent. On the point of evaporating. Outside time. They lay there holding each other in the halflight.

She said, ‘What do you think I should do?’

There was a whole minute of silence.

(A minute, he now thinks, in which everything stood still, and everything was still possible, waiting to hear what he would say…)

Finally he sighed with what seemed like frustration or impatience and said—‘I don’t know, Katherine. I don’t know.’

She squeezed him.

‘Will you make some coffee?’

When he had made it he let in some more light, and they had it sitting side by side, propped on pillows.

‘What time is it?’ she said.

He picked up his watch. ‘Eight fifteen.’

‘I have to go.’

He watched her leave the warm sheets and tiptoe out. Heard her exchange a few words with Hugo. Listened to the shower’s feeble sputter. To the quiet when it stopped.

Still wonderfully, luxuriously naked (her nakedness seemed like a wonderful luxury now) she sat down on the edge of the bed, in the soft shaft of London light that seeped down from the street. ‘I might not see you for a while,’ she said. He nodded. With his knuckles he stroked her sternum. She kissed him. Then she went to the living room to dress, and left.

In fact, they saw each other the very next day. Toby invited them for a drink—together, as if they were an item—near his Finsbury Square office. When Toby left, they stayed for another drink. In fact, they stayed until kicking-out time, by which point a tacit understanding seemed to have emerged that they would spend the night at her place.

They had to take two buses to get there. The first was totally empty as it leaped and jittered over the tarmac of the New North Road. They sat on the lower deck, near the door, kissing quietly in the harsh damp light. From Essex Road station they would have walked if it wasn’t pouring so determinedly, if there weren’t streams in the streets and waterfalls plunging into the drains—it was only two short stops on the 38 that emerged from the turbulent opacity of the night, and then a sprint down Packington Street which left them soaked. In the kitchen they stuffed their faces with a pack of saucisson sec. Once upstairs, they spent a lot of time, in various states of undress, looking through some photo albums she had produced from somewhere—earlier versions of Katherine Persson. He was still looking at them when she said (she was far from sober), ‘What happens here?’ and poked his hairy perineum.

‘Nothing,’ he murmured, still looking at the photos.

‘No…’ she mused, leaning over him, tickling it. ‘I suppose not. With me it all happens there…’

‘Mm…’

‘It’s funny to think that nothing happens there with you.’

‘No…’

‘With you I suppose it happens here…’

He left early the next morning—Hugo was in Mecklenburgh Street—with a perfunctory halitosis-laced kiss in the steady headache of first light. Still, so much for not seeing him for a while. The question was—what now?

On Friday he sent her a hopeful text—See you this weekend?

There was silence until Saturday morning, when this popped out of the ether—No honey sorry doing things this weekend x

He wondered what she was doing. It occurred to him, of course, that she might be with Fraser. In a strange way, he hoped she was. Fraser was somehow part of the furniture. He had probably been sharing her with Fraser, without knowing it, for weeks. He was used to that idea. It was the idea that she might be with someone else, someone other than Fraser—or even on her own—that was the heavier thought. And it did weigh on him, as that Saturday wasted away unused. Partly it was just a matter of knowledge. He was very keen to know what she was doing. To know whether she was with Fraser, or with someone else, or on her own. Not knowing was what was hard.