Spring

1

Friday morning the wind was screaming and yelling, screaming and yelling at him to shake a leg. He pressed out his Silk Cut and flung off the duvet. Today was the day. Today was the day he had been waiting for for more than a year. In the white nook of the kitchen, where the wind was fighting the unsnug window, he took the Tropicana from the fridgelet. The fact was, they were destined to be together, in spite of everything that had happened. It was pretty simple. He loved her, she loved him, and it had been like that from the very first moment. The moment when she looked up from the front desk, her manner as intimidatingly poised and together as always, and saw him there…

Pow!

A coup de foudre. (Or Cupid’s twang.) Love at first sight. That never happened to some people. Some people never had that. Then last year he had nearly fucked it up—no, he had fucked it up—and now fate was offering him a second chance. So do not fuck it up again, Fraser, he instructed himself, pissing noisily in the wind-hammered suntrap of the bathroom.

He took a shower.

They were just so wonderfully easy, those long talks they had on the phone practically every night now. It was as if nothing had happened. Everything forgiven and forgotten. Amor vincit omnia. They still laughed at the same things. The same things made them happy. The same things made them sad. They understood each other. Soulmates. That was so obvious there was no fighting it. There was just no fighting it.

‘Let’s try again, Katie,’ he had said last week, when they had just laughed at something together.

And then, ‘Hello? You still there?’

‘Yes, I’m still here.’ Her lovely English voice.

‘So,’ he said, ‘are we gonna try again?’

And she said. ‘What exactly would that entail?’

‘What would it entail?’… He said, ‘Why don’t we go away somewhere. Why don’t we go away for a weekend somewhere. No pressure. Just see where things stand.’

He did not expect her to say yes straight away, and she didn’t.

First she just laughed as if the whole thing was a joke.

Then she made him wait a few days.

She was stronger than he was. He knew that. Smarter and stronger. (Some men would find that hard to take—a smarter, stronger woman.) Strong as she was, though, she was suffering too. And she was doing all sorts of things to try and numb that suffering. That was her way. She wouldn’t just suffer passively, like he sometimes did. She would never do that.

Towelling his furred solidity, his thoughts touched with a new twinge of shame on the incident that had provoked all this suffering. It was an incident that had preoccupied him much since last fall—sleepless nights and such—and specially the last few months. It was tough for a man like him to be married and do that sort of work. You know the sort of work. The model taking off one set of underwear and putting on another on the other side of the screen, talking merrily. Only the two of them in the windowless studio with the stainless-steel sink in the corner. And then she steps out from behind the screen and he tells her to lie down on the furskin and look sexy, or strike a Christine Keeler pose and look sexy, or use some prop and look sexy… Part of the trouble was he found women like that—women like Felicity, for instance—very easy to engage with. They liked him. They liked his energy; they liked his playfulness. It’s fair to say there were typically a lot of warm feelings in that studio. And a lot of flirting—which was part of the job. The job was to make them look sexy, and to make them look sexy he had to make them feel sexy, so he had his professional patter. The thing is, when you say stuff like that, even if you don’t mean it, even if you’re just saying it, it has its effect. There is no such thing as a purely professional situation. That was something he had learned. He knew that all too well.

So they were alone in the warm studio, him and Felicity, a man and a woman, and it was late at night. And it was her idea to do the artistic shots. She was the one who said, as she stepped out of one set of transparent panties and into another, ‘When we’ve finished these, I want to do a few arty ones for my portfolio. Is that okay?’ And what was he gonna say? No, it’s not okay? I don’t think that’s a very sensible idea? Listen, this was his job. He and Felicity were working together. A household name on the UK high street was paying him for those shots. Those shots were paying the mortgage. (Though they were just test shots. Felicity and the other models were just on try-out. Only one of them would feature in the pictures which would be on the side of every bus in the country next year. And it’s possible that some of them, Felicity included, mistakenly thought that Fraser would have some say in deciding which of them it would be.)

They had just started the artistic shots—i.e. the nudes—i.e. he was in an isolated studio late at night with a naked underwear model—and she was making various pouts and swoony faces at the lens, and he was sort of squatting there over her, almost sitting on her legs, near enough to feel the warmth of her peachy skin, and telling her how sexy she looked, and how hot she was making him feel… No, there is no such thing as a purely professional situation.

When she started to undo his trousers he said, ‘Oh no,’ as if something terrible had happened. ‘No,’ he said, frowning tragically as she lowered the zip. ‘No…’ He was pleading with her, and she ignored him.

An hour later he drove her home.

And she invited him in.

And he sat at the wheel with a look of terrible pain on his face. Why did it have to happen when she was out of town? Why did this have to happen when she was in Madrid, for Chrissakes?

Well, he went in. And he has suffered for it ever since. Even when he was living with Felicity last summer, he was suffering. (And she threw him out as soon as she realised he wouldn’t be useful to her professionally, that was the sort of person she was.) Yes, he has suffered for it, and he needed to suffer. That’s the way he sees it now. To make himself worthy of her again, he needed to suffer. He needed to spend a year in purgatory. And now he had.

The VW Golf parked in the street out front was extremely old. It had the fully depreciated feel of its two hundred thousand miles, a semi-organic hothouse smell. Some sort of shy plant life seamed the window-seals. The top of the steering wheel and the head of the stick-shift looked like they had mange. He snapped his seatbelt on and started the engine—he had had some work done on it and it fired first time.

*

Fraser was late. From the living-room window, she saw him park a scrofulous Volkswagen Golf, silver, liver-spotted with rust, in front of the house. Instead of trying the doorbell, he took out his phone.

‘Hello?’ she said neutrally.

‘Hi, it’s me. I’m outside.’

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll be down in a minute.’

She was still watching him as he produced his pack of Silk Cut and lit one. And he still didn’t look like a proper smoker; the cigarette still looked silly in his ursine hand. It had been his idea to spend a weekend together, somewhere out of London. ‘Why don’t we, uh… Why don’t we see how things stand?’ he had said. (Whatever that meant.) There was a long silence. Then she said she would think about it. She said it flippantly, without meaning it. It took her two days to see what some part of her had known all along—she would do it. It was the thing in the whole world that she most wanted to do. There was something hopeless about that. And also, she thought, staring sleeplessly out at the lobby the next morning, something uniquely hopeful.

She seemed tetchy as she slammed the front door and descended the four asphalted steps to the street with the handle of a shabby sports holdall in her fists. Smiling, he stepped forward and took it. ‘New car?’ she said.

‘Newish.’ He stowed the holdall. ‘I’ve had it six months or so. I mean, it’s not new new, of course.’

‘You’re smoking again.’

‘ ’Fraid so. Want one?’

She shook her head.

He took off his leather jacket and settled in at the wheel with enthusiasm. He seemed very pleased with himself as he turned the key.

The Golf was indeed not new new. He was talking about some work he had had done to the engine. (He knew about these things. She liked that about him. In Senegal, at Zebra Bar, he had been the unofficial onsite mechanic, spending most mornings hidden under the latest jalopy to limp into the stockade, helping hapless travellers, homme de la situation…)

The traffic was fairly light, and she did not say much as they negotiated their way out of London—Swiss Cottage, Finchley, signs for ‘the North’. She just sat strapped into the tattered passenger seat, flicking looks his way every now and then. Sometimes she would ask a simple question, and he would answer at length. For instance, ‘What sort of work are you doing at the moment?’ (A question that had its own particular intensity.)

‘Oh, this and that…’ It was mostly parties these days, he said. He would show up in his old leather jacket and jeans and spend several underdressed hours wandering around with a Nikon D70 shelved on his paunch, looking faintly seedy as he snuck canapés into his mouth and asked trios and quartets of party-goers to smile…

She was experiencing his presence as something pungently strange. It was true that they had spoken several times on the phone. Long meandering talks, mostly late at night. He would phone at eleven, midnight—she liked that. She liked the intimacy of it. She liked lying in bed, listening to his voice.

‘I miss you, Katie,’ he had said one night.

To that, she said nothing for a long time. She stared at the wicker fan.

So they had spoken a lot on the phone. To be sitting there next to him as they zoomed north, however, was a very different proposition. (He was pushing the Golf hard up the M1, squinting out intently at the motorway.) His eyes, his long jutting jaw, his hands holding the mangy wheel, his substantial forearms, his jeans—it was a very different proposition from the telephonic spirit she had been tentatively engaging with for the past week. For one thing, the telephonic spirit had no smell. His smell. His own smell, and the smell of the Davidoff scent he always used.

She had spent the night with James on Tuesday, and she had worried that that might interfere with how she felt, that it might interfere with her perception of how she felt. (An interesting idea, when she thought about it—her perception of how she felt. What was the difference between her perception of how she felt, and how she did feel? In what sense did her feelings exist when she wasn’t perceiving them—when she wasn’t feeling them?) It was not something she had planned, that last night with James. Toby had invited them for a drink, and somehow they had ended up sleeping together, and she had worried that she would find it harder to know what she felt about Fraser—and that was why she was there, on the M1 near Luton, torpedoing through a heavy squall, to work out what she felt about Fraser—so soon after spending the night with someone else.

She need not have worried. James was not in her mind at all as they tore north, water scrambling to the edges of the windscreen and peeling from the windows in long, nervous trails. What was in her mind was something else. The trouble was, this entire escapade was predicated on the idea that she had forgiven Fraser for that. The nocturnal talks might have misled her here. Somehow they seemed to have taken place in a parallel world, a world in which it had simply not happened. A world in which she had never phoned him from Madrid.

‘Where are you?’ she says, as soon as he answers.

‘I’m at home,’ he says.

‘Why haven’t you been answering the phone?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’ve been phoning you all morning. You haven’t been answering the phone.’

‘I didn’t hear it.’

‘I’ve been phoning you all morning…’

‘I was out.’

‘Where?’

‘The shops. Shopping…’

‘When? What time?’

‘Uh… I’m not sure. Why? What is it?’

‘Listen. You’re at home, yeah?’

‘Yeah…’

‘I’m going to call you on the landline. Okay?’ Silence. ‘Okay?’

‘I’m not at home.’

She is in Madrid—a ‘training week’—staying at her employer’s Madrid hotel. It is supposed to be a sort of prize as well as training, and there is all sorts of free pampering on offer. Now she feels light-headed and shuts her eyes. ‘You’re not at home?’ she says, without emotion.

‘No.’

‘Where are you?’ Another simple, unemotional question.

‘I’m at Nick’s place.’

‘Why are you at Nick’s place?’

‘We were out late,’ he says. ‘So I just slept on the sofa.’

‘Why did you lie to me then?’

‘I’m sorry. I don’t know. I’m sorry. It was stupid.’

‘Does Nick have a landline number?’ she says.

‘I guess.’

‘What is it?’

‘I don’t know it.’

‘Well… will you ask him?’

He hesitates. ‘Are you serious?’ When she says nothing, he sighs. ‘Okay.’

He is off the line for a minute, then he tells her the number, and she writes it down, hangs up on him, and dials it.

He picks up immediately. ‘Hello?’ he says. ‘Is that you?’

‘It’s me.’

‘Okay? Satisfied now?’

‘Why did you lie to me?’ she says, suddenly distraught. ‘Why did you do that? Don’t you understand that I want to trust you? Don’t you see that if you lie to me that’s just not going to be possible?’

‘I’m sorry. It was stupid. I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t lie to me! Just don’t!’

‘It was stupid. I’m sorry.’

‘Where are you?’

There is a momentary silence. ‘I’m at Nick’s.’

She thinks of asking to speak to Nick. Then she says, ‘I’ll be home tomorrow night.’

She had not asked for the number in order to prove, by phoning him on it from Madrid, that he was at Nick’s. It proved no such thing, though he seemed to think she thought it did. He was quite stupid sometimes. (She had always worried—it was one of the things she worried about—that he just wasn’t intelligent enough for her.) Perhaps he wasn’t so stupid, though. Perhaps, in his instinctive way, he understood that she did not want to know the truth. That she probably wouldn’t phone the number because she did not want to know that it was not Nick’s number. Which she didn’t. And since she didn’t, why do it? Why phone it?

‘Hello?’ A woman’s voice. ‘Hello?’ the woman says again. ‘Who is this?’

‘Is Nick there? Please.’

‘Nick?’ It is obvious from the way she says it that there is no Nick there, ever. And then she says, ‘I think you’ve got the wrong number.’

She wrote it all down. In writing, Fraser was obviously a shit. And she, poor little thing, still loved him. What was so terrible was that she still loved him. She did not want to throw him out. It was something she had to force herself to do, in the knowledge that she should, like putting her fingers down her throat. And when she did, it was he who shed most of the tears.

What was so terrible was that she still loved him. She did not want to. She wanted to love someone else, and within a few weeks she tried. She was just about to tell him, this prospective lover, that she didn’t fancy him at all, that she had no interest in him whatsoever, when he was kissing her. She slept with him that very night. He was sweet, intelligent, had a BMW. Within two weeks it was a sad failure—and then there was someone else fighting his little trickle of tears, his wobbly mouth, and only just losing. There was someone else earnestly wanting to know what everyone always wants to know.

Why?

*

They stopped to fill up and have something to eat at a service station somewhere near the heart of England. The sky was mild. The sky was neutral. Neutral like the system of slip roads and parking spaces, like the sharp white arrows stencilled on the tarmac, like the lines of stationary HGVs, the surrounding flat land, the inveterate soughing of the motorway. A place of horizontals. A non-place. Fraser was paying for the petrol.

While they ate—toasted paninis that looked like they had been flattened by a truck tyre—he talked about various people she half-knew, friends of his. Filling her in on what they were up to. There was something fairly lugubrious about this. Probably it was the thorough, systematic way he was working through them. He was talking about Ed O’Keefe, the veteran pap who was also well known in the soft-focus world of ‘erotica’, and some tax difficulties he was having with the Inland Revenue—or was it the VAT man? — when she interrupted him with what immediately seemed like obvious hostility. ‘Should I drive for a while?’ she said.

He stopped speaking. He looked hurt.

‘Do you want me to drive for a while?’ she said.

‘If you want.’

They walked across the tarmac in silence and took their seats in the old Golf’s muffling interior, and she drove them through Yorkshire, as neutral Midlands afternoon sloped into northern evening. Until they stopped, Fraser had done most of the talking, and now that he had shut up they travelled predominantly in silence. It was to be expected, she thought—noticeably more philosophical now that she was occupied with wheel and pedals—that it would be like this. It would have been naïve to expect anything else. Except that she did seem to have expected something else—she looked quickly over her shoulder as she moved out to overtake—which presumably made her naïve… What had she expected? Just something… Something less painful. It was painful, that was the thing. Though the pain was low-level, it had been there since the morning, and she just wasn’t used to it any more. Since the end of last year, she seemed to have had the manage of it. She had filled up her time. She had left none of it vacant for pain to squat in, and in the process, she seemed to have forgotten the most obvious thing about pain—it was painful.

He was asleep now, in the passenger seat, with his head fallen and his hands in his lap. He had nodded off somewhere near Sheffield. He didn’t say anything for ten minutes, then there was a single short snore. Though her first instinct was to wake him, she did not. With him asleep, she was able to imagine, staring out at the motorway’s soothingly neutral space, that she was on her own, which had the effect of lessening the pain. When she did pick him up in her peripheral vision, though, it was stranger in a way to be there with him asleep than it was with him awake—with him just sleeping there, it was spookily as if the whole year of separation simply hadn’t happened.

She flicked on the headlights.

The traffic streamed north in slate-blue twilight. On the other side, the traffic streamed south. That would be them, she thought, in forty-eight hours…

Since this morning, he had been trying very hard to be light. Unfortunately he wasn’t light. He was heavy. It had been more and more obvious as the hours wore on. He just didn’t have the energy to keep up the jolly-jolly act. When she thought about it, it was not surprising that he seemed depressed. The facts were quite depressing. He was forty-eight and lived on his own in a studio flat, scraping a living from menial photographic work. He saw his daughters once a fortnight or less. Physically, he seemed to be losing it swiftly now—his hair, his shape, his je ne sais quoi… He still smoked. He had no savings. No prospects. She took her eyes off the surging motorway for a second and, suddenly feeling sorry for him—the feeling pierced her shockingly, made tears spring into her eyes—she placed her hand for a moment on his sleeping thigh.

A little while later he woke up.

‘Where are we?’ he said.

‘Nearly at Newcastle.’

‘Do you want me to drive?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s okay.’ The driving was therapeutic, analgesic.

He moved in his seat. Yawned. Lit a Silk Cut. ‘Maybe we should have picked somewhere nearer London,’ he said, snapping open the ashtray.

‘Yeah, or taken a plane.’

He yawned again.

‘Anyway…’ she said. ‘It was your idea.’

*

The hotel was one of the most famous and expensive in Edinburgh. At about eight thirty—the last stretch, from Tyneside, had been surprisingly long—they strayed scruffily into the lobby with their sports holdalls. The lobby. A huge open fire. Stags’ heads.

‘I, uh… I got a reservation,’ Fraser said.

‘Okay, sir,’ said the man in the tartan tie. ‘What’s the nim?’

‘It’s uh… King.’

‘How much are you paying for this?’ she whispered frantically, while the tartan tie fussed with formalities.

Fraser shushed her with a hand on the shoulder. ‘Don’t worry about it. To tell you the truth, I got a special deal. So don’t worry.’

A second tartan tie had been summoned and to this man—a Lithuanian—they handed their pitiful luggage.

‘Should we eat first,’ Fraser said, ‘or do you want to have a shower first?’

She said she wanted to eat first, and they went upstairs for a few minutes to freshen up. The Lithuanian, having shown them how to turn on the TV, waited for twenty seconds then withdrew untipped. She was feeling strange—she stood there in the air of plush expectancy (Fraser was in the wetroom) wishing she was at home. Or at least that home was nearby, escapable to at any time. She felt trapped there, standing next to the troubling question of the tartan-festooned four-poster. This, she thought, was the inevitable bed. This was what the weekend was all about. It was what they had been speeding up the M1 towards—he had had his foot to the floor the whole way, while he was driving—and what troubled her as she stood there was a sense that she might not want to sleep with him in it. She did not know whether she wanted to. Where once it was the most important, the most essential thing in her life, she felt, standing there, that she would need to think about it. She was just not sure what it would mean. What would it mean?

In a polo neck now, and extravagantly scented, Fraser emerged smiling from the wetroom. Something about her posture prevented him from putting his arms around her and taking it from there, as he had intended. ‘So, should we eat?’ he said. They took the lift downstairs—the hallways of the hotel were woollen in their windowless hush, with pools of halogen light on the floor—and were warmly welcomed into the dining room, where there was another spectacular open fire, another expanse of sombre tartan. They were shown to a table. She was suddenly feeling very depressed. She put down the menu and said, ‘I think this whole thing might have been a mistake, Fraser.’

He looked up from his own menu with a notch of worry in his forehead.

‘What are we doing here?’ she said. ‘This is just weird.’

‘What are we doing here?’ He put his hand over hers. ‘I’ll tell you what we’re doing here…’

She pulled her hand away.

He had started to say something else—something about falling in love again—when she interrupted him. ‘Should we order? I’m starving.’

He sighed. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Sure, let’s order.’

They sat in silence until the waiter had taken their order. Then they sat in silence some more. Fraser was looking at her. She was looking everywhere except at Fraser. The Monarch of the Glen-style paintings on the walls. The waiting staff in their long white aprons, their standard-issue tartan ties. The man in the tailcoat—presumably the whisky sommelier—squeaking from table to table with his wheeled tantalus of single malts. The whole tree flaming in the fireplace…

‘You’re very angry with me,’ Fraser said finally.

She looked at him.

Sitting opposite her, he looked somehow implausible in his auteur’s polo neck. His shoulders were still powerful. His head—the dimpled imperial jaw—was still fairly splendid. So what was it? It was his eyes. His squinting eyes, with whose joyously sexual merriment she had once fallen thuddingly in love, were polluted with sadness. They were polluted with sadness and fear.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I am.’

‘Of course,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I understand. This will take time. It won’t be easy…’

‘What will take time?’ she said in a louder voice. ‘What do you think is going on here?’

‘I don’t know. You tell me. What is going on here?’

‘Fraser…’ she said, sighing exasperatedly. ‘Alright.’ She seemed to marshal her thoughts. She seemed to focus herself. ‘You made my life absolute fucking hell,’ she said. Then, in a very much less matter-of-fact tone, ‘Do you understand that? I sometimes wonder if you even understand that.’

‘I do…’

‘Do you? I’m not sure that you do…’

‘Of course I do…’

‘You made my life absolute fucking hell, and now you seem to think you can just take me to a posh hotel and everything will be fine. That we can just sit here and have a lovely time…’

‘No,’ he protested.

‘There’s something insulting about this. There’s something insulting about the way I’m supposed to be swept off my feet by all this…’

‘You’re not—’

‘It’s a fucking luxury hotel! Wonderful! I spend all my time in a luxury hotel. Didn’t it occur to you that I might not want to spend the weekend in a luxury hotel?’

‘Katie…’

‘No, of course it didn’t…’

‘Katie…’

‘What is the point of this? What are we doing here? What do you think this is? A nice romantic weekend? Is that your understanding of emotions? Is that how you think emotions are?’

‘I said it will take time…’

‘Your understanding of emotions is just so fucking limited, Fraser. You trample on other people and then all you feel is self-pity. You’re just so fucking selfish. I seriously sometimes wonder whether you’ve got some sort of problem. Otherwise how can you not see what you’re doing? How can you not see how you’re hurting people…?’

She put her hand over her eyes to hide all the water that was suddenly there as the waiter solemnly put the starters on the table. Fraser looked on helplessly as he did. As soon as he had moved away, still hiding her face with her hand, she stood up and hurried out.

A few minutes later she sat down again.

‘Okay. I’m fine now,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’

And she seemed fine in her new face. She started to eat.

‘Katie,’ Fraser said. ‘I understand what I put you through…’

‘Let’s not talk about it,’ she said. ‘Not now.’

Looking shattered, he said, ‘We need to talk about it.’

She nodded. ‘M-hm. How’s yours?’

‘I, uh… I haven’t tried it yet.’ He looked down at the slice of venison terrine, the redcurrant sprig, the four perfect triangles of toast. He wasn’t hungry.

She, on the other hand, seemed starving. She finished what was on her own plate and then ate most of what was on his.

He insisted, when they had finished the meal, on ordering two stupendously expensive whiskies from the tailcoated sommelier, and then—it was not even ten—they went for a short walk along Princes Street, as far as the floodlit Sir Walter Scott memorial.

When she stepped out of the wetroom in her silk pyjamas—and she had spent a long time in there—Fraser was lying nonchalantly propped on an elbow on the four-poster. He had taken off his shoes and socks.

‘Hey, nice PJs,’ he smiled.

‘They were a present.’

His smile wavered. It went out altogether in his pale eyes. ‘What—from…?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Not from him. From someone else.’

‘So…’ Fraser started tentatively. ‘Who, uh… who was he?’

She was able to see him in the mirror, staring at his own heavy-duty toenails. And then, when she said nothing, lifting his eyes warily towards hers. ‘Just… a person,’ she said. ‘Why? What difference does it make?’

‘None.’

‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘Okay.’

They had yet to touch each other in any significant way. It was one of the things that made the situation feel so strange. However, it felt no less strange—it felt stranger—when he stood up and perched his hands on the suave silk of her shoulders. ‘Fraser…’ He kissed her exposed neck. She shrugged him off. ‘Nothing’s going to happen tonight,’ she said. ‘Okay?’

‘Okay,’ he said, smiling at her in the mirror, trying to keep it light, his eyes all over the shining ivory silk.

‘Now I’m going to sleep,’ she said. ‘I’m very tired.’

‘Me too.’

She lay on the far side of the four-poster, on the luxurious solidity of the mattress, on the edge of its precipice, listening to him splashing and spitting in the wetroom. It went quiet for a while. Then he emerged and she felt him slide into the huge bed, sending a wave through the stiff linen. The lights went off. She was tense, expecting some sort of overture, an inquisitive hand…

‘Goodnight, Katie,’ he whispered, from quite far away.

Then stillness, silence.

Which made her feel that she had treated him unfairly, and she turned over and stretched out her own hand, stretched it out into the empty space of the sheets, until finally it found his flexed, naked knee. ‘Night, night,’ she said.

*

In the morning there was some smooching. He wanted more than that, of course. He was sharply desirous of more. There was something urgent about the way he started to unpick her pyjamas. He had undone half the iridescent little buttons of the silk jacket when she stopped him, seeing with sudden force as his eyes found the waxy scoop of her sternum how the situation would be transformed into something she did not want it to be if she let him undo them all, if she let him tug the silken trousers down. Fastening the jacket to her throat, she hurried into the wetroom and had a long shower.

When she emerged, wrapped in a towel, she squatted down next to her nylon holdall with her knees together and patiently extracted some things from it. She withdrew to the wetroom to put them on.

Fraser, when it was his turn, took a markedly different approach. He left the four-poster in an unhurried state of flagrant nudity and had a shower with the door open. Still provocatively naked, he stood in front of the sink shaving.

‘I’ll see you downstairs,’ she shouted from the far side of the room.

And he stood there full-frontally, his face foolishly white-foamed—in a way that tended to emphasise his otherwise total nakedness—and said, ‘You’re not going to wait for me?’

‘I’m starving,’ she said, looking him specifically in the face. His torso was flaccid and his stomach was pendulous. However, his penis, she had not failed to notice, had in full measure its old solidity and weight, its statesmanlike presence.

‘You can’t just wait a few minutes?’ he said, his eyebrows frowning over the white mask.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll wait a few minutes.’

‘Thank you.’

She took off her shoes and sat on the bed.

When he finally put something on, they went down to the dining room, where he ate heartily of the terrific spread. Arbroath smokies and poached eggs, whisky marmalade on toasted muffins. The fire quietly informed the morning of its pinesmoke smell—the same tree as last night probably, now falling apart in a mass of white ash. Walking the length of tartan to the table, she felt underdressed in her jeans and zippered fleece. A sadness was stealing over her—worse, in its quiet way, than anything she had felt since they left London. And she had felt okay upstairs just now. She had even said to herself, as she sat there hugging her knees, ‘It’s okay. I feel okay.’

‘So,’ Fraser said. (What was he so jovial about?) ‘What’re we gonna do this morning?’

‘What do you want to do?’ she said plainly.

‘I want to do,’ he said, using a napkin to wipe his fingers individually, ‘whatever you want to do.’

She shrugged. ‘I dunno. What is there?’

‘There’s the whole fair city of Edinburgh to explore.’ He smiled, tossing the napkin onto the table.

The joviality did not last long. The weather may have had something to do with that—a travelling mist of drizzle that hid the surrounding hills and filled the Nor’ Loch with an obscurity pierced only by the weakly echoing voice of the Waverley tannoy. They spent the morning sightseeing. The streets of the old town, tangled like wet string. Holyrood House. The elegant, unexcitable probity of the headquarters of the Bank of Scotland. The National Gallery.

Towards lunchtime it did stop raining. The sky went white, with a soft luminance that suggested the sun was up there somewhere. They had a pizza. Pizza Express. It was profoundly uninspired—might as well have been in London—but then the whole morning had felt uninspired. Fraser just seemed sad, with nothing interesting to say. When he did speak, she found him tedious. She found him irritating. He had said things in the National Gallery that made her want to tell him to shut up. Once, as he struggled to say something impressive in front of Veronese’s Mars, Venus and Cupid (in the past he would have made a joke; now he seemed to feel a simpering need to impress her), she laughed at him—she just laughed in his face, and then went on to the next painting. It had not been a nice thing to do, and she wondered shamefully why she had done it as she sliced up her pizza. He had said less after that. He had followed her in silence, in fact, only nodding when she tried, in a spirit of penitence, to solicit his views about this or that picture, about da Vinci’s dog paws or Botticelli’s Madonna.

*

After lunch she wanted a ‘proper walk’, a two-hour tramp up to Arthur’s Seat or something like that. He did not, which was in keeping with his increasing listlessness, if not his willingness until then to do whatever she wanted. So they went for a walk in Princes Street Gardens instead, and it was there that he said it. The station tannoy started to quack, the sound floating through the treetops, and when it was finished she heard the rain—it was so quiet that you had to stop and listen for it. It sounded like soap suds subsiding. It was as quiet as that. ‘You don’t love me anymore.’ That was Fraser’s sudden insight, and he said it as if it was a sudden insight, pulling up on the tarmac path. She herself said nothing. She was so struck that she just stood there as he started to sob, and once he had started there was no stopping him.

Some hours later she lay in the long tub listening to the same sound—the sound of soap suds subsiding. The wetroom was luxurious and well equipped. It was warmly lit and windowless. Except for the sound of the suds, and the womby hum of the extractor, and the occasional watery statement when she stirred, there was silence. There was silence in her heart as well.

She had just stood there on the path with her hands in the pockets of her fleece—it was not warm, there was a face-numbing, hand-hurting wind—and watched him sitting sideways on the bench, shaking like a diesel engine, with his fingers wrapped over his eyes. She was thinking, How like him, how like everything that was unworthy about him to see the situation in those terms: You don’t love me anymore. How like him to be so surprised by that! There was something almost solipsistic about it. The strange thing was, she was surprised by it too.

Finally she did sit down next to him and pat his shaking back. She did quietly suggest that they find somewhere warmer. It took a while to shift him. Eventually they stood up and walked out of the park. He had stopped sobbing, though he started again on the pavement of Princes Street, wandering among the shoppers. She did not know what to do with him. It was two o’clock on Saturday afternoon.

Lying in the tub two hours later—four o’clock on Saturday afternoon, time was passing slowly—she wished she was at home. It was one of those situations where the obvious thing to do—drive to London, immediately—had not occurred to her until it was too late; until they had had too much to drink, sitting in a pub in the New Town. Instead, while he lay in a foetal position on the four-poster (he had not even taken his jacket off), she locked herself in the otherworldly silence of the wetroom, and submerged her frigid extremities in the thickly steaming tub. She had not said that she didn’t love him any more. That she had not said. She had said nothing. With languid hands she stirred the water in the vicinity of her sunken stomach. She had seen written somewhere—probably in some leaflet she had looked at while she was waiting for him that morning—that among the many other luxuries offered by the suite was the fact that it was equipped with ‘anti-steam mirrors’. Now, with her head lolling on the edge of the tub, hair neatly piled on top, she saw through the warm fog that the mirrors were indeed mysteriously untouched by it, and wondered how it was done. Heated somehow, was the most obvious explanation. Or perhaps they used some sort of special substance…

She stood up, and stepped out, and towelled her flushed self while the tub slowly emptied. She stood in front of the unsullied mirror, kneading moisturiser into her face with her two middle fingers. She tidied up one of her eyebrows. She would have liked to stay there in the warmth of the halogen lights, in the humming silence, until it was time to leave for London the next morning. She felt safe there. Insulated from something. She lingered for a few unnecessary minutes, then she pulled on one of the white towelling robes that the hotel had so thoughtfully provided and stepped out in a whirl of steam.

The late daylight had the quality of wet slate. She sat down on one of the tartan tub chairs. Fraser was still lying there. He seemed to be in a less tight position, and in fact he must have moved—he had taken his jacket off. Nor was he asleep. His eyes were open. The tired light picked them out like marbles, staring at nothing.

There was one small mercy. On Sunday morning the clocks went forward, shortening the weekend by an hour.

2

He woke up with a strange feeling. Sunlight like a shivered mirror in the area, and his watch an hour slow.

In the afternoon he took Omar to the zoo. James has no memory of ever having been to London Zoo. Omar, however, seemed to know the place well. The first things they saw were some lizards. The lizards were in a darkened hall, walled up in waterless fishtanks full of rubber foliage. Omar stood on tiptoe to peer into the tanks or James lifted him. Mostly the lizards just lay there, looking sad. Probably they weren’t actually sad, probably it was just something about the shape of their scaly mouths. Probably that’s how they would look in the wild. Though in the wild, James thought, the ever-present fear, the need to fend for themselves, might make them less lethargic, might pep them up a bit. Nothing was about to happen to them in those fishtanks; they had probably worked that out by now. They were just waiting for their next meal—and they only ate once or twice a week. It was muggy in the lizard house. For a while Omar was enthusiastic, pointing and whispering as if they might overhear him. Then he lost interest—they had not even looked at the most impressive specimens, in a sort of shop-window of jungle—and wanted to leave.

They wandered around in the sunshine. The animals were strangely elusive. You had to seek them out down winding paths. They saw some medium-sized monkeys, making a stink like the inmates of a prison staging a no-wash protest. They were screeching, making a lot of noise—in spite of which they were just not that interesting. Omar seemed to find them shrugworthy. The silverbacks had more mystique. Sitting very still, they looked at the world through startlingly human eyes, scratched their necks with startlingly human fingernails. More or less extinct in the wild—a few score in their shrinking jungle, waiting for the end—they and their kind were now, James thought, in effect a species of high-maintenance pets. Wards of the state. There was something surreal about the sight of them, just sitting there surrounded by toys (a tyre, for instance) while twenty twittering children pressed their faces to the perspex.

They left the primates and found a neglected-looking structure that ponged very strongly of manure. It was not unlike the stink of Miller’s stables. Ostentatiously holding his nose, Omar wanted to leave. He wasn’t joking—the overripe stench of sweet manure was too much for him. There were tears in his eyes as James ushered him out.

It was quite a warm day—the warmest of the year so far—and Omar took off his parka. He was dressed exactly as Steve would be—Converse trainers, soft jeans, lambswool jumper, parka with polyester-furred hood. Essentially, James thought, taking the parka, the inmates of the zoo lived like the poorer human members of prosperous Western societies. Like them, they had to put up with miserable housing, monotonous food, persistent minor indignities. On the other hand, they wouldn’t die of starvation, or exposure, or waterborne diseases. If they were ill, medical professionals would take a look at them. No, it wasn’t perfect, but if you were eking out a terrifyingly insecure existence on a savannah somewhere, or in some jungle, you might take a second look at the zoo if offered a swap. The point was, he thought—perhaps trying to persuade himself—it was too simple just to pity the zoo animals. In many ways they were the lucky ones.

Omar was now talking about some fish he had once seen—they were odourless, perhaps that was their appeal—but James did not know where to find them. They passed the insect house, which neither of them wanted to investigate. They had an ice cream. They saw a serval cat with ears like radio telescopes, staring with psychotic intensity at a pigeon which had flown into its walled enclosure—there were portholes in the wall, through which the scene was visible.

Then Omar saw the merry-go-round.

As soon as he did, he lost all interest in the animals. James tried to explain that the world was full of merry-go-rounds; there would be time enough for them—the animals were what they were there…

Omar was now in tears. His puce face was like the sad mask of the theatre logo. The ends of his mouth were down by his chin. James had intended to tough it out, to at least make him look at one or two more animals before letting him loose on the merry-go-round. He felt that Omar should be more interested in animals than in merry-go-rounds, more interested in living things, our fellow tenants of time and space, than in tawdry machines. ‘Let’s just…’ he said, squatting to Omar’s level. ‘Let’s just have a look at one more…’

It just wasn’t worth it.

Tears pursuing each other down his empurpled face, Omar was making a lot of noise. People were starting to stare.

‘Okay,’ James said, ‘you can go on the merry-go-round.’

Instantly Omar’s face was like the smiling mask of the theatre logo. He was living in the moment, there was no doubt about that. Holding the fibreglass neck of an undulating unicorn, he smiled at James as he went round. It was a smile which expressed an experiential purity quite elusive in later life—probably that was why it was so lovely to see, why it possessed such an immense vicarious pull. Helplessly smiling himself, James waved. He was worried about what Omar would do when the music stopped and he had to dismount. In the event, he was fine. To, ‘Was that fun?’ he answered with a mature nod. He said he wanted to eat. And when they had eaten, he seemed to tire and said he wanted to leave.

‘But we’ve hardly seen any animals,’ James said, smiling. It was true. They had hardly scratched the surface of the place, zoologically, and James felt they ought to stay longer. Omar had no such feelings of obligation. James managed to tempt him into finding the lions, or rather the lion—only one was visible, in her high-security enclosure—and then into a more immediate and much smellier encounter with the giraffes. The giraffes. Seeing them just standing there, being giraffes in the middle of London, James had an unprecedented sense of the strangeness of the world. As he and Omar left the giraffe house they were swept up in a stream of noisy, foul-mouthed French schoolchildren whose intention it obviously was to terrify the animals in any way they could. They were upsetting Omar too. And indeed he was now more and more intensely keen to leave. Even the energetically pointed-out okapi—a strangely neglected creature, it looked like a misunderstanding in a medieval manuscript—only held off the next wave of tears for ten seconds or so, and these tears were more despairing than the merry-go-round tantrum, with its all-too-obvious object, and emerged with long low-pitched wails and howls that it seemed nothing would staunch.

Except sleep.

He fell asleep on James’s shoulders as they made their way out of one teeming zoo and headed towards the other, with its market and its lock, at the far end of Parkway.

Later, sitting in Isabel’s orderly kitchen with a mug (Che Guevara) of Earl Grey while Omar told her what animals they had seen—and he seemed more enthusiastic then, talking about them, than he had when they were there, seeing them—James, for the first time, found himself envying his sister’s life. The tidy, well-lit maisonette (lights on everywhere), Omar’s kindergarten daubs magneted to the fridge, the Volvo in the parking space outside (the Volvo that went to the two-acre Sainsbury’s in Finchley every Saturday), the quietly up-to-the-minute electronics everywhere, the sections of the Observer strewn on the sofa, where Steve had been lying after lunch, the Banksy prints in the hall—it was all just so safe and warm and middle class, and sitting there in the kitchen, he felt an envious tug towards something like that. Yes, even towards its intrinsic predictability. Even its faint smugness.

Omar was just telling Isabel about the merry-go-round when Steve appeared in the French windows, with frayed half-moons trodden out of the heels of his jeans and plump pale little Scheherazade in his arms. They had been out on the Heath—Scheherazade in her Bugaboo, Steve having a perambulatory script meeting with his friend Pete.

‘Alright, mate,’ he said.

‘Hi, Steve.’

‘How’s things?’

James said things were fine.

He phoned Katherine as he walked down the steep street, under the sheared, leafing elms. Voicemail. He left a message.

*

Emerging from the tube half an hour later, his hope was that she had tried him while he was underground. She had not. The disappointment was so surprisingly potent that he wished he had not phoned her in the first place. He had felt okay leaving Isabel’s house and now he didn’t. He felt very alone.

3

Philippa Persson thought it would take two days. First thing on Tuesday morning, the house was totally empty. A freshly painted, four-bedroom void. They headed to Neasden in soiled, low sunlight. Katherine was driving. Philippa did not intend to tackle this on her own. She had enlisted her daughter to help.

Kate seemed surprisingly down. She was wearing sunglasses and torn jeans. On Sunday evening they had spoken on the phone for two hours—the Edinburgh post-mortem. Philippa had been pleased to hear that it had been a failure, and pleased that Kate, on the phone, had sounded okay. She had sounded no more than wistful, the persistent numbness of Saturday having thawed to a tranquil sadness. The eight-hour drive down to London, she said laconically, had not been much fun. The parting in Packington Street even less so. Fraser in tears. Philippa had permitted herself a quiet snort at that. She had never liked her son-in-law, had encouraged Kate to have nothing to do with him from the start, when he was still married to that other woman. Naturally she did not let on how pleased she was that the Scottish weekend had been a failure. She made sympathetic mooing noises while Kate said that in Edinburgh she had found Fraser tired, tedious, frightened, sad… Sad, she said, that was the worst thing. The way he was so sad. For her part, Philippa said things like, ‘Well, maybe it’s for the best…’ She said, ‘You tried, Kate. Now I think it’s probably time to move on…’ Time to move on… She had been saying that for more than a year. And now, thankfully, the whole thing did seem to be over. As Kate herself put it, ‘The love is dead.’ She said it quite simply. ‘The love is dead.’ That was just how it felt. The sense she had was of silence, nullity, non-existence. On Sunday night she was just pleased to be home and she slept well.

On Monday morning she felt shockingly worse. There was a serious faltering of the idea that this was not something massively significant. She struggled through the day at work. In the evening she was supposed to meet some people, but the idea of pretending to be okay, of pretending to be interested in other things, was impossible. She went straight home.

Tuesday. Still on a frighteningly steep downward trajectory. A terrible sense of futility. What was the point? The love was dead. In a way she was thankful that she had something mindless to do. Drive to Neasden. Push the obese trolley through Ikea wearing shades. Smoke in the car park under the huge suburban sky, the massing chrome-fendered clouds. Whenever Philippa asked for her opinion, though—These hand towels or those hand towels? Darling, which hand towels do you think…? — she just shrugged. She just muttered, ‘I don’t know.’

She snapped, ‘Mum, I don’t know.’

‘Whatever,’ she said.

She was thirty-two. She felt half that.

On Tuesday morning, they did Ikea. They did it. The long Peugeot estate was overloaded as it waddled onto the North Circular. And Philippa wasn’t just taking the first thing she saw. She would spend twenty minutes on the towels, ten on the toilet seats, half an hour on the light fittings. There were the soap dishes, the mirrors, the laundry hampers. The list of necessities seemed endless. Not everything was from Ikea. Over the next two days, many other shops were involved—mostly in their vast, out-of-town interpretations, skirted with acres of parking space. John Lewis weighed in heavily, for instance. It was there that Katherine’s head started to throb as she was asked to look at forty different irons and make a decision. Two dozen toasters—which was it to be? Do we need a pizza slicer?

At two o’clock on Tuesday afternoon they unloaded the morning’s shopping at the house, where Katherine’s younger brother, Marc, an MBA student at the London Business School, was waiting for the various deliveries—the fridge-freezer, the washing machine, the sofas. The house was in West Kensington, past Olympia, the wrong side of the tracks. Nevertheless, Philippa was hoping for two thousand a week. That was why all the stuff had to be ‘nice’. Even the hoover had to be ‘nice’. (They found a nice one in John Lewis.) ‘Have you been smoking pot in here?’ she said to Marc, as she started down the stairs to the kitchen.

‘No…’

‘What’s been delivered?’

‘Nothing yet.’

‘Nothing? I’d better phone them.’

While she made some sharp enquiries into the whereabouts of her things—‘Yes, you said between eight and two. It’s now twenty past and there’s no sign of them…’—Marc had found the Waitrose bag and was eating a lobster sandwich. Katherine was out on the patio smoking a Marlboro Light.

That afternoon they spent mainly in John Lewis (an hour among the lamps, two among the linens), and it was dark—in spite of Sunday’s shift to summer time—when Philippa dropped her in Packington Street. ‘See you nice and early tomorrow,’ she said. ‘We haven’t even started on the living room yet.’ Kate waved at the parting Peugeot and unlocked the door. We haven’t even started on the living room yet… There was something depressing about those words. How much stuff was there in a house? And in every house. To imagine the same mass of stuff they had just spent the day so expensively and systematically marshalling in every house in London, in England, in Europe, in the world… It made her feel queasy and depressed.

On Wednesday morning it was suddenly all too much. She had just parked the Peugeot in the John Lewis lot—they were there again, with much to do—when she found herself in tears.

‘Darling?’ Philippa said. ‘What is it?’ Philippa was not at her most assured in these situations. She put out a hand. ‘What is it?’

Katherine shook her head.

She had shed a few tears the previous night when, having let herself into the flat, she opened her mail. Among various other mailshots were two appeals for money. (Her small portfolio of monthly direct debits—a sponsored orphan in Sri Lanka, the RSPB, Shelter—meant that she was flooded with further appeals. The hungry, the persecuted, the terminally ill—every day she hurried them into the plastic tub on the kitchen floor.) One was something to do with polar bears, whose unique and pathetic plight was well known. The other, orang-utans. They were shamelessly sentimental. The polar-bear one featured a picture of a sad-looking mother and her young. The other was about an orang-utan orphaned at only a few months old—and thus presumably doomed—in some sort of logging incident. They tried to make the point, those well-meaning flyers, that while things were terrible, they were not yet hopeless. Weren’t they though? They seemed hopeless to her as she stood next to the table in the living room, shedding her few surprising tears. What was the point of even pretending? The straight line that led from how she had just spent the day to what was happening in the Arctic, in the Indonesian jungle—what was left of it—was too obvious to overlook, whether she wanted to or not. And it was equally obvious which was the stronger force, the stronger by many orders of magnitude—those sentimental leaflets or the force they were up against. Her. Katherine Persson. She was the stronger force, and there was simply no way it was going to be stopped.

She filled in the forms and set up two new direct debits—a total of £10 a month. And just that day she and her mother had added a thousand times that to the strong force. (And what was that, if not a mammalian mother single-mindedly providing for her young? The house in West Kensington, with its hundred and ten per cent mortgage, its wealthy tenants, was intended as a sort of trust fund for Katherine and Marc.) Yes, it was hopeless. Nevertheless, she went to the pillar box on Essex Road and posted the forms. She did not do it thinking it would make a difference. It was just her way of saying that she knew what she was doing, she understood, she felt terrible. But she wouldn’t stop doing it. She just didn’t want to enough.

Setting off the very next morning to add another £10,000 to the strong force was, however, too much. As she switched off the engine, she lowered her head. Tears fell onto the steering wheel.

‘Darling?’ Philippa said. ‘What is it?’

And of course it wasn’t just the poor, puzzled species being steadily shunted into oblivion, being shunted out of existence without ever understanding what was happening or why. (And they would do the same to us. We were just doing what any animal would.) It wasn’t just the hopelessness of that situation. That was there all the time. It was a much more personal hopelessness, of which that was nothing more than an echo. The love was dead. It was dead. She did not love him any more. The terrible thing was she did not love him any more.

*

It was still those memories. The hotel that week in October. The tambour of her heart. The flat in Battersea that first night. The lift in the morning—‘I’m in love with you.’ The experience had acquired a definitive quality. It had turned into a definition of what love was. She had thought, that October—Yes, this is what people mean when they talk about love. She had previously been in love once or twice. Fraser was not the first. And those experiences were not nothing. They were still important to her. In some significant way, though, they were lesser. With them, she had not felt with the same heart-walloping surety that this was what people meant when they talked about love. There were moments there which seemed qualitatively different from everything else in her life. They would be the moments she thought of at the end. They would be the things she thought of at the end of her life. In a sense, they were her life. Specific moments, mostly from that first week, or the first few weeks, or the first few months. When she tried to write them down, however, they had none of their force. Writing them down, trying to transcribe them, made them seem mundane, normal. Nothing special. She stopped trying. What was the point anyway? Only that she wrote down everything else, so it seemed strange that the most important, the most significant things were not there.

It was still those memories. It seemed impossible that any other man would ever be able to lessen their importance. Even if she were to have a similar experience with someone else in the future, which was not impossible, what it would lack would be the feeling that it was unique, that it was the final word. It would be hard to have that kind of faith in any feeling in the future. When she said, ‘The love is dead,’ she had a terrible sense that what she was in fact saying was, ‘For me, love is dead.’ She wondered whether her experience of this was unusual, or whether it had just happened to her unusually late in life. (She had started sleeping with men unusually late in life, after all, not until she was twenty.) Did most people have an experience like this, she wondered, when they were much younger—in their early twenties, even in their teens?

Those memories.

She was unable to escape the sense that the most intense love of her life was now in the past. The love was in the past. The love itself was in the past—she no longer felt it, not even in a lesser, hugely watered-down form. She no longer felt it. It no longer existed. In Edinburgh she had wondered why she had once loved Fraser. It didn’t even seem to make sense any more.

The love is dead…

For me, love is dead…

She had perhaps known, the whole time she thought she wanted to stop loving Fraser, that this was the situation she would find herself in if she ever did. It seemed she had staked everything on him, and now she had nothing left for anyone else. Perhaps that was why she never truly did want to stop loving Fraser. And it had been easy—it had been easy not to stop loving him—when he wasn’t there. She thought of the words of that poem—

In the mind ever burning;

Never sick, never old, never dead,

From itself never turning…

Yes, something like that. Except it does have to turn from itself when its object finally is sitting there with sad eyes in a silly polo neck that misguidedly flaunts his paunch…

Thoughts like that tended to make her question everything. Tended to undermine the very idea of things. That was indeed the whole problem perhaps.

More words, more poetry—Never such innocence again…

And still more—After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

4

Freddy at school was an out-and-out weirdo. An insolently effortless top-setter, a heavy smoker, a purveyor of particularly extreme pornography—those tattered scraps of flesh-toned images—he was, with his halo of frizzy hair and plump putto’s face, a frightening outsider to many of the others. To many of the teachers too. A hand up in the middle of the French lesson. Mr Ellis is the terrified herbivore at the front near the whiteboard. ‘Sir?’ ‘Yes, Munt?’ (With a weak smile.) ‘Does wanking make you weak, sir?’ Little explosions of laughter from all over the room. Ellis obviously mortified, lady-faced, fully unable to deal with the situation. Does wanking make you weak, sir? Ostensibly—and this was very much the tone in which it was asked—it was an innocent appeal for information from an older, more experienced man. That, however, would be to miss the merciless overtone, enormously present that morning in the language school—You, Mr Ellis, does wanking make you weak? Is it wanking that makes you so weak, sir? Are you so weak, sir, because of all the wanking you do?

James was there for that incident, quietly reading a newspaper at a sunny desk near the windows. He was in the top set in French, and only in French. His father lived in France and he spent four months of the year there.

Mr Ellis might have stammered something.

More probably he just froze for a few seconds, and then with unseeing eyes kept murmuring the prepared text of the lesson as if nothing had happened.

Freddy was neither popular nor unpopular. For one thing, he didn’t do sport, which in itself placed him so far out of the mainstream as to be practically invisible. (James did do sport. He was in the second XV, which had a certain slackerish cachet, and was one of the stars of the hockey first XI, and on the tennis team too.) As for Freddy, he had once fannied about with the other anaemic four-eyed specimens on their twig-like legs, milky white thighs signally failing to fill shorts—and there was absolutely nothing to be said, in terms of social status, for the fourth XI, the fifth XV. They were for malcos and flids. They were for spastics. The slackerish cachet, such as it was, ended with the second team.

Freddy’s liberation from sport was the piano. While this was not particularly helpful for his image either, it was infinitely preferable to stumbling around in the mud on that polder of playing fields west of Hammersmith with someone like Mr Ellis timidly peeping the whistle on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday afternoons. (The staff room had its own sports hierarchy, which, while it exerted itself more subtly in social terms, more or less exactly mirrored that of the pupils.) So, the piano. The long, polished Steinway in the main hall of the music school. Mr Harris, the head of music, said Freddy was a ‘wunderkind’, and finally he persuaded the other Mr Harris—this one was head of sport, a far more exalted figure, a figure of papal mystique—to let Freddy off sport totally and permanently, so long as he instead spent the time practising the piano. This indulgence—which was unprecedented—massively enhanced Freddy’s status as a louchely unusual outsider. Indeed, with no further involvement in sport, he no longer seemed to be fully or properly part of the school. He spent most of his time in the music school—it looked like a small rococo theatre in an isolated part of the grounds—playing the piano and smoking. Mr Harris let him smoke in the music school; it was his own little kingdom, where all sorts of strange practices obtained. For instance, Freddy was on first-name terms with him—‘Morning, Mike’—as he was with most of the other tweed jackets and bluestockings of the music staff. At the age of fourteen, he took Grade Eight, and started to work his way through the semi-professional qualifications that followed it. The life of a professional musician—even some sort of star—seemed there for the taking.

The September of his final year. Mid-morning in the music school. Miserable autumn weather. (There is a pail out in the middle of the parquet, slowly filling from a weeping fissure in the moulding overhead.) The multicoloured application forms for the Royal College of Music are there on the table, waiting to be filled in—and in Mike’s opinion the application is no more than a formality. Freddy is of a much higher standard than is necessary to win a place most years…

When Freddy interrupts to say that he has no intention of applying to the Royal College, Mike looks as if he has just been told his Yorkshire terrier, Lulu, has died in a lawnmowing accident.

‘Why?’ he says finally.

Freddy says that as a professional pianist—and he seems to have no doubt that that is what he would be if he persevered with the piano—he would simply be performing the work of other men. They were the artists. The musicians were mere performers. Monkeys…

Anticipating Mike’s next point with a lifted finger, he says that it just isn’t possible to write music now. Not serious music. Serious music was fucked. (He did use the word ‘fucked’.) No serious music of any value was being written. As a medium it was quite possibly finished. He did not intend to waste his time on it. (Thus, incidentally, he flushed Mike’s life’s work—numerous suites and sonatas, one of which, the ‘West London Sonata’, had had an outing at the Norwich Music Festival—down the toilet of history.) No, what Freddy intended to do, he told the now misty-eyed Mike, was write. He would be a novelist, and he would start by taking an English degree at Oxford.

When he had said his piece, he lit a Gauloise filterless. He waved out the match and placed it neatly on the unused application forms. He looked up at the ornate plafond.

Though he would never admit it, he has, in the years since, spent much time pondering that miserable morning in the music school.

He went to Oxford, but there was no degree. He was sent down in his second year for doing no—no—work.

Through an intricate mechanism of interlocking nepotisms, he eventually found himself working first as a stringer and then as a staffer on a Fleet Street newspaper. These were the John Major years. He managed to spin out a decade or so of journalism— he was supremely plausible when he wanted to be—all the time incubating his masterpiece; wallowing in the tired sleaze of the times, and always planning to start it soon. In truth he started it on numerous occasions. Secretly, cigarette in mouth, he would type a few pages of a Sunday morning, and then, with a sneer on his face, scrumple them up and throw them away. They were never good enough to justify that morning in the music school. They were never anywhere near good enough. The futile, putrid soap opera of Tory politics circa 1995 was what he was in fact writing about. Malicious diary stuff mostly. For a while in the mid-Nineties he was a well-known quidnunc schmoozing the Commons bars.

Towards the end of the decade things started to go wrong. He was drinking too much. Of course, he had always been drinking too much from a medical standpoint; now he was drinking too much even to hold down his job as a political hack and diarist, with its semi-nocturnal hours and intense professional interest in watering holes. Stories went unfiled. He missed important things. (Was not answering his phone, for instance, on the afternoon of 11 September, 2001—he was passed out on the sofa.) There was an AIDS scare. In the office for a while, the story was, erroneously as it turned out, that Freddy was HIV positive. Still, his hair and teeth were starting to fall out, and he couldn’t afford a proper dentist. (Someone said that ended his dreams of television-pundit stardom. Freddy said, ‘What about John fucking Sergeant?’) And his old school-friend James, for a year or so, looked likely to find himself quite high up the Sunday Times Rich List. That didn’t help Freddy’s mood in the late Nineties. He had always looked down on James slightly—an unusually subtle jock perhaps, but fundamentally a philistine—and he found it hard to stomach the fact that, in the eyes of the world, he might ultimately prove more successful than him. Much more successful. Freddy was freelancing now, living hand to mouth—or mouth to hand—off his ability to winkle information out of people in pubs. The first New Labour landslide hadn’t helped. The immense shuffling of seats it entailed—the sudden and violent swings of status—were mirrored in the world of journalism. And to the extent that he was in with anybody, Freddy was mostly in with Tories. He had of course tried, too late—his self-interest was by then painfully transparent—to start making friends with some Labour people, but his main sources were still Tories, and no one was very interested in what they said or thought any more. Loose ends from schooldays—he hadn’t even tried to start his magnum opus for several years. Nor, for several years, did he see James. He was just unable to stomach the success of Interspex. When he saw in the papers that it had failed, he was pleased.

In many ways they were unlikely friends. Though they were in the same French lessons, they were in different houses and did not speak to each other until they shared a taxi to Heathrow at the end of their first term. They both had parents living overseas. Freddy’s parents—he was the sort of person it was hard to imagine having parents—lived in Dar es Salaam, where his father was a diplomat. There was a fellowship among the expat students. They were like orphans on the last day of term. Sometimes they had to spend an extra night in the empty school. Even if they didn’t, they were usually the last to leave. They seemed more worldly than the others, which in itself made them to some extent outsiders at the school. If Freddy’s mode of outsiderdom was obvious, however, James’s was more subtle. A tall, manly teenager—the infrequent spots looked out of place on his face and neck—a sportsman and in terms of schoolwork middling at most, he was in many ways a model lad. Perhaps he lacked some of the jocular oomph of the mainstream lad, and though he sat at the lads’ table in the dining hall—the loudest table, a mass of egregiously fashionable haircuts (flat-tops) and shoes (Doc Martens)—though his place there was entirely secure, the others might have felt at times that there was something semi-detached about him. Sometimes he seemed, in a mysterious way, to be several years—i.e. significantly—older than they were. There was that sense of worldliness. There was a lurking seriousness. To the younger pupils, he seemed like a proper man among them, someone their parents might know. That was one thing. His friendship with Munt was another. (And it was a measure of James’s status that he was able to be friends with Munt at all without significantly impairing his own standing.) Most of James’s other friends thought Freddy was a fucking weirdo. A fucking sicko. Most of his other friends were the sort of people who soberly tried to ignite their own farts. They were locker-room types. They were pack animals par excellence. The self-selecting school elite. A loner like Freddy made no sense to them. And most of Freddy’s other friends… Well, Freddy had no other friends.

In 1984, he spent the ten-day Michaelmas half-term with James in Paris. They stayed out very late every night, loitering hopefully in Pigalle, and drinking Pernod (the advert in the cinema with the naked woman under water), and walking into the skanks of Maghrebi drug dealers in the vicinity of the Gare du Nord. The following summer the same station was their jumping-off point for a month’s inter-railing—the zenith of their early friendship.

When they left school two years later, in spite of widely divergent paths, they still saw each other sometimes. James has unpleasant memories, for instance, of the time he visited Freddy up at Oxford. He was not in his element there. The students, even Freddy, did not seem to speak the same language as him; he literally did not understand quite a lot of what they said. He himself was just starting out as an estate agent at Windlesham Fielding—something he instinctively hushed up—and had moved into a place in Islington with Miriam. The pizza franchise, the film—such things filled the last few years for him. In one way or another, he spent much of his time thinking about money. The squalor of the house in which Freddy lived with various other people shocked him—he had been prepared for something squalid and it still managed to shock him. It had been the plan for him to stay there on the sofa. When he saw the sofa—dank in the spliffsmoke—he opted for a hotel. Which didn’t make him any more popular. Freddy’s squeeze, Isolde, who was something in the student union, subjected him to an irritating interrogation—she kept insisting that he tell them what he thought of ‘Thatcher’—as he tried to feel at home sitting on the ashy floor with a can of Carlsberg in his hand. The extraordinary thing was, these people were his own age—twenty, twenty-one. The places where they went out at night were just depressing. Hitting London in the Audi on Sunday evening, looking forward to dinner with Miriam, he promised himself he would never visit that freezing, foggy shithole again. And he didn’t. Freddy was sent down a month later anyway.

The latest phase of their friendship—following the hibernal period around the turn of the millennium—started in 2003. The post-Interspex phase. Plush magazine. The magazine was Freddy’s idea. Not having spoken to him for years, he phoned James to suggest he might like to invest in a magazine he was planning to set up. It seemed at the time that any idiot could set up a ‘lifestyle’ magazine—sex and shopping—and make a fortune. James no longer had any money to invest, though he knew how to find some, and he liked the idea. It was a potent formula—his own entrepreneurial know-how and experience, Freddy’s journalistic flair, and other people’s money. Unfortunately several dozen similar magazines were launched at about the same time, and two years later the few outstanding assets were still being digested in the intestine of the legal system, dissolved in the enzymes of the law. In the end there were just two issues, January and February 2005. The March issue had in fact been written and laid out—it was little more than a load of naked ladies; under financial pressure, the whole project was quickly simplifying into straightforward soft porn. It was never printed on account of the printers insisting on payment in advance.

One of the wiped-out investors was Freddy’s landlord, Anselm. His £50,000 was the only money Freddy himself had managed to raise. It helped that Anselm was under the impression that Freddy was the last surviving heir of Tsar Nicholas II, and that he was involved in a legal struggle over a vast fortune held in Switzerland since the First World War. (Freddy’s Dostoyevskian appearance helped with this—his low brow and sunken eyes, and the way that on hungover days, when he wore a long winter coat, his skin had a mortal yellow tinge.) He insisted that the Russian trove in Zurich was legally his, and Anselm had lent him significant sums to pay ‘legal fees’ and other expenses—fact-finding missions to Switzerland during the skiing season, for instance—in the expectation of a share of the spoils. (Freddy had promised him, in writing, first ten and then twenty per cent.) Nor, while living in Anselm’s house for the past few years, had he ever paid him a penny of rent—the idea was that that too would come out of the Swiss money in time.

The investment in Plush would not. That was an investment, not a loan, and Anselm demonstrated his faith in the existence of the Tsarina’s diamonds by making the distinction. The loss made him dyspeptic and unhappy. He hated losing money. Still, when the end was nigh, Freddy did ask him for another £50,000, to put towards the printing costs of the pornographic March issue. Which was perhaps to push him too far. Sitting in front of the terminals on which for more than twenty years he had tried, with a startling lack of success, to play the stockmarket, Anselm turned on his swivel-seat and looked at Freddy strictly over the top of his spectacles. He said, ‘Fréderic. Do you think I’m a fool?’

Freddy laughed as if the idea was ludicrous.

In fact there was, in Freddy’s opinion, something medieval about Anselm’s foolishness—it was scarcely believable, off the scale, like something out of Chaucer or Boccaccio. So naturally he had slept with his wife, Alison, a former airline stewardess with a sort of saucy appeal. He had been sleeping with her since the first week he lived there. Sometimes he told her that he was passionately in love with her, that he wanted to take her away from that miserable house, where the viscid leaves of the overgrown trees in the garden shut out the light and the hot water trickled from a tubercular Ascot. He told her that he wanted to take her to Zanzibar—Zanzibaaah—where he had spent his sun-kissed youth.

*

Why he did it, he still doesn’t know. It was madness. Its only possible end was disaster. Maybe, he thinks now, on the tube with his haversack, that was what he wanted—to push Anselm to the point of disaster; maybe he was just no longer able to take the foolishness, which had acquired a kind of ear-splitting dissonance. Maybe it wasn’t even that. Maybe it was just the hangover.

Whatever it was, two Saturdays ago he woke up and found Alison—she was watching TV and having her first G & T of the day—and told her to pack a suitcase. They were finally going to do it. They were going to leave, and start new lives. She downed her drink and hurried upstairs to pack. And even then, waiting for her in the hall, leaning tiredly on the paint-thickened, time-stained anaglypta, with the keys of Anselm’s Rolls-Royce in his hand, Freddy knew that this was likely to end in disaster. And he did not even particularly want to do it. That was the strange thing. He knew it was likely to end in disaster, and he didn’t even particularly want to do it, and he still did it. There was a self-destructive element, no question. There was a self-destructive ennui at work. He watched her tiptoe downstairs—Anselm was snoring up there somewhere under his Times—in what she may have thought was some sort of old-school elopement scenario. Except she was already married. She stumbled and fell down the last two steps—perhaps it wasn’t her first G & T of the day after all. He took her suitcase and they slipped quietly out onto Cheyne Walk. It was one of those old Seventies Rolls-Royces, its paintwork—chocolate with a cupreous gleam—sticky with substances that had fallen from the tree under which it was parked.

Two hours later they were still in London, stuck in traffic not far from Shooter’s Hill.

‘Where we going?’ Alison said—she had expected Heathrow and Zanzibar.

‘Dover.’

She laughed. ‘We going to drive to Zanzibar then?’

To drive to Zanzibar in an old brown Rolls—as an idea, it was not without style. However, Freddy said, ‘I thought we’d… spend a few days in Paris first.’

‘Oh. Alright.’

She lit her tenth cigarette of the journey with the car’s chunky cigar lighter. They were both smoking. Smoke poured from the lowered windows. Inasmuch as he had had any sort of plan, it had probably been to spend a few days somewhere—a hotel somewhere. Yes, perhaps Paris. As they finally merged onto the motorway and picked up speed, however, he found that spending a few days with Alison was the last thing he wanted to do. He was already sick of her. She was talking quite a lot now and he wished she would just shut the fuck up. When he put on Radio 3 and found, to his joy—it was exactly what he wanted—Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen, she listened with a frown for a minute or two. Then she said, ‘Do we need to listen to this? It’s really depressing.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We do.’

In his peripheral vision he could see her fat knees, her stomach straining in her short skirt… She was wearing a short skirt, sheer tights, tall leather boots. Proper mutton-dressed-as-lamb stuff. Freddy was never embarrassed. Nevertheless, he wasn’t particularly looking forward to stepping out with her.

Dover ferry port on an overcast Saturday afternoon in March. As someone once said—Sad like work. The indifferent sea. The stony embrace of the breakwater.

Jouncing on its sluttish suspension the old Rolls freewheeled down the slope, and squeaked to a stop in front of the P & O ticket office. It was while he was in there that Freddy settled on what to do.

With seagull outriders the ugly ship moved slowly away from the pieces of off-white cliff. They spent the two-hour voyage entirely in the on-board pub, the screwed-to-the-floor table pitching and tossing. Somewhere a huge engine was thrumming. It elicited a steady tinkling from the bar. Outside the salt-blurred windows drizzle slicked the green iron decks. The question of who was going to drive when they made landfall in France, since they were now both totally pissed, was not asked. For Freddy it was not pertinent. As the ship entered Calais harbour, he said he had to visit the Gents. And he did visit the Gents—the doors of the stalls swinging and slamming—then he made his way quietly to the foot passengers’ disembarkation point, disembarked, walked to the station and took a train to Paris. He hadn’t had any luggage anyway. He had nothing except his passport and a scrumpled, folded envelope with £10,000 in it—the proceeds of the ‘touch’. He spent the last of it a week or so later on a first-class Eurostar ticket, and a taxi from Waterloo to Cheyne Walk.

He knew that Alison would be there. He knew that she would have had to account for her absence that Saturday. He expected her to have done so without involving him in the story. He expected, essentially, everything to be okay. What he did not know—though he should probably have thought of this—was that the ferrymen had not allowed Alison, who was hardly able to stand up, who was tearful and incoherent, to drive the Rolls off the ship. One of them had parked it on the quayside tarmac for her, warned her in pidgin English not to try to drive anywhere that day herself, and left her there in the whipping salt-spray. She would have phoned Anselm straight away, except for one thing. This Freddy did not know about, and had no way of knowing about. Sentimentally, unsoberly, she had left a note for her husband saying that she and Freddy were going to start a new life in another part of the world, and that she was sorry, and that she would always think of him with love, and that she thanked him for everything he had done for her, and that she was sorry, and… Please please forgive me, Alison.

She spent most of Saturday night sobbing in a hotel in Calais, and very early the next morning took a ferry to Dover and thence, at the wheel of the unwieldy Rolls, made her mascara-smudged way to London. There she had a tearful, hour-long negotiation through the intercom before Anselm finally let her into the house. Once inside, she threw herself on his mercy. Speaking through steady tears, she said that yes, something had indeed once passed between Freddy and herself. (Anselm lowered his face.) She said that Freddy was obsessed with her, that he had forced her to write that terrible note and more or less kidnapped her. How he had forced her to write the note she did not say, nor did Anselm ask. He had no interest in picking holes in her story. He sighed, very tight-throated. Then, sensing that he wanted more, she told him that Freddy was not a Russian prince or princeling or anything like that. He was just an out-of-work journalist. This Freddy had told her only a few weeks before—and he wished he hadn’t as soon as the words were out of his mouth. He had told her out of vanity, of course. Vanity. As he well knew, it was his worst weakness.

When he turned up at the house that dreary Wednesday afternoon and found the locks changed, he immediately feared the worst.

‘Yes?’ crackled Anselm’s voice, suspicious over the intercom.

‘Hi. Anselm. It’s me.’

A long, fizzing silence. ‘What do you want?’

‘What do I want?’ Freddy said with a laugh. ‘I live here, don’t I?’

‘No. You don’t.’

Something was obviously very wrong.

Finally he managed to persuade Anselm to let him into the house—he had his own hour-long negotiation through the intercom—saying that he would be able to ‘explain everything’. Though it was far from obvious to him how he would do this as, warily saying, ‘Anselm?’ he mounted the spongy stairs.

He found him in the first-floor drawing room. No lights on. A deathly atmosphere. And worryingly, he was holding an iron poker.

‘You lied to me, Fréderic,’ Anselm said.

Freddy’s intention was of course to deny everything, and the first thing he said was—‘What are you talking about?’

‘You aren’t Russian.’ The only sound was a trickle of plaster dust falling from the ceiling. ‘Your father’s a British diplomat. And his father was a policeman in Swansea.’

That was a shock. Freddy had not expected Anselm ever to find that out. There were two obvious options—deny that his father was Oliver Munt of the FO or…

‘Yes, but my mother—’

‘Your mother’s from St Albans,’ Anselm said, in a strange voice, somehow monotone and sing-song at the same time. He had evidently done his homework—there might even have been a private detective involved, for all Freddy knew—and faced with this he suddenly felt very tired, too tired to pretend. Too tired even to explain. And what was there to explain? It was all fairly obvious. ‘Who told you?’ he said. ‘Alison?’ Perhaps it was a mistake to have left her in Calais. In Calais of all places… Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned in Calais. Though she didn’t know any of the details about his parents—just that he wasn’t a Russian prince.

And then there was another shock.

‘I know that you… you once slept with her,’ Anselm said, hanging his head and looking at the floor. He made a strange little expectorant noise. ‘She told me.’

Now this was very strange. Why on earth had she done that? It just didn’t make sense.

‘I thought you were my friend, Fréderic.’

For a long time Freddy just stood there. Then he shrugged. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ he said.

‘Please just leave.’

‘Anselm…’

The poker twitched.

‘My things?’

Still staring at the floor, Anselm nodded.

Freddy went upstairs and put his things into the khaki haversack. They fitted quite easily—he had few possessions. He wondered whether to try to speak to Alison on his way out; he was puzzled as to why she had told Anselm everything. There must be something he didn’t know about. Some factor he wasn’t taking into account.

He descended the stairs, with their steep mahogany handrail; the series of landings whose scurfy sash windows were filled with mature trees.

On his way out, he looked into the first-floor drawing room. Anselm was nowhere to be seen. The whole house, in fact, was eerily silent.

Outside in the twilight he shifted the haversack onto his shoulder and walked to the tube station. He had just enough money for the ticket to Russell Square.

*

While Freddy, haversack on shoulder, was taking his place in the ululating lift at Russell Square station, James was sprawled unsuspectingly on the sofa in Mecklenburgh Street wondering whether to nip out to the Four Vintners on Gray’s Inn Road for a half-litre of Jack Daniel’s or dark rum. Sitting forward, he stared for a few more seconds at the TV. All-weather racing from Wolverhampton, seedily floodlit. Encased in puffa jackets, the pundits held their microphones in numb hands, exhaling mist into the frore Midlands night. Without switching them off—merely silencing them—he jacketed and scarfed himself, leashed Hugo and went out into the street upstairs.

In spite of the many messages he had left since Sunday, he had still heard nothing from Katherine—a silence that seemed increasingly meaningful—and he was miserable. He had spent the day drifting through London like a wind-blown plastic bag. He had a solitary lunch at one of the Bangladeshi places on Brick Lane—one of the unpretentious ones up near the Bethnal Green Road end. Plastic cups, Formica table-tops. The sound of traffic from the door. When he had eaten, he wandered up to Victoria Park—vacant in the spring sunshine—and from there walked along the towpath. He passed the flat where he had once lived, on the other side of the black, sun-struck water. It was strange to see it now, someone else’s home. There was some unfamiliar outdoor furniture on the terrace—and how strong, as he stood there, was the sense of being shut out of the past! The sense of the evanescence of things, experience, time—no solider than the jellying light on the undersides of the bridges. The sense of time slipping very slowly away.

From the start, it seemed to him now, he had not felt enough. At the important moments, there was just an insufficiency of feeling. When she told him that Fraser had been in touch with her. When she told him, two weeks later, that she wanted to see Fraser. And when she said to him, in the half-light the next morning, ‘What do you think I should do?’ It was not that he thought he had failed, on those occasions and others, to express what he felt. He had just not seemed to feel enough when feeling was most needed. It troubled him, this sense that it was a failure of feeling, and not a failure of expression. A man unable to express his feelings. That was magazine normality, nothing to worry about. A man unable to feel his feelings. Well, that did sound worse.

He thought of the night they spent in that hotel in Cambridge, of how he had said, as they lay there next to each other, ‘I think I’m in love with you.’ She sighed as if she wished he hadn’t said it, and several seconds elapsed, each worse than the last. It was a moment when he wished she was more able to pretend, when he wished she was not so painfully honest, so subject to the tyranny of the truth. She said straight out that she was not in love with him, and suddenly he felt very unsure of everything. What had he meant when he said, ‘I think I’m in love with you’? He did not seem to know. Had it been somehow speculative then? Had he just been seeing how it sounded? And then, while he was still wondering what he had meant, she said, ‘This isn’t what I expected.’ This presumably being the fact that he was in love with her. Or thought he was. Or said he was. Or said he thought he was.

In the morning they went to see her alma mater; she persuaded the porter to let them into the wide quad. When they had done that, they went for a walk. Something had stirred up the weather overnight. The tall trees were swaying. They walked up into a small wood, still in the browns and greys of its winterwear, loudly inhaling the wind on its hill.

There are memories that make his heart yurr-yurr like an engine struggling to start. Their setting is uniformly wintry. A few London afternoons of wintry exiguity. Thinking of them, he wondered why they had not been enough, why they had taken him only as far as that hedged, faint-hearted statement in the old-fashioned hotel in Cambridge, with its squeaky floorboards and its tired dried flowers. Something had failed. That was how he felt. Something had failed in him. (It was quite frightening.) The engine of his heart.

He used to eye the men fishing from the towpath with scepticism when he jogged past them. He never saw them enjoy so much as a twitch on their lines. They just perched on stools, and inspected their seething maggot jars. Were there any fish in that oily water? That was what he had always wondered, as he pounded the path with sweat-fogged eyes.

He took the tube home and tried to interest himself in the televised horse racing. There was a meeting at Taunton, and the last there was quickly followed by the first at Wolverhampton. He had by then been sprawled on the sofa for several hours winning and losing pennies, and was wondering whether to nip out to the Four Vintners—a dusty cage of booze on a bald corner—for a half-litre of Jack Daniel’s or dark rum.

He was starting down the metal steps with the blue plastic off-licence bag when he noticed there was someone in the unlit area. It was not Katherine, as for a fraction of a second he wildly hoped. It was Freddy. And ominously, he seemed to have luggage with him.

‘Freddy,’ James said, unleashing Hugo and following him down the steps. ‘What’s up?’ Freddy was looking suspiciously at the inquisitive St Bernard. ‘Um,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a bit of a problem.’

‘What?’

‘I need to stay for a day or two.’

James stopped on the penultimate step. ‘Why?’

‘Anselm kicked me out.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well…’ James sighed helplessly. ‘Haven’t you got anywhere else to stay?’

‘No.’

‘What about your parents’ flat?’ James knew that Freddy’s parents had a small flat in Bayswater.

‘Tenants in it.’

Freddy’s father was in the final posting of his career—Her Majesty’s ambassador to Surinam. The previous year a sympathetic superior had taken pity on him and, knowing how important it was to him—as it was to all of them—had looked around the world to see if there was a suitable ambassadorship opening up. Thus he was sent to Paramaribo for twenty months, and would sign off as an His Excellency, which was the only thing, in professional terms, that he had ever wanted. That and the K. Sir Oliver and Lady Munt.

Still standing in the freezing area, their son was now explaining to James that he couldn’t stay in a hotel because he didn’t have any money.

‘What about the money from the touch?’ James said sternly.

Freddy was disinclined to say that he had spent the money from the touch on world-renowned hotels and Michelin-starred meals and €1,000-a-night escorts in Paris. Which was what he had spent it on. And yes, it had been foolish to spend it all. He had not intended to. The fact was, there was one particular €1,000-a-night escort, an American—her work name was Lauren—and he had become… possibly slightly obsessed with her? She had had €4,000 of his money anyway. She was tall and sandy-haired, with freckles on her nose. Twentyish. After the second night he had wondered whether she would see him… He forgets how he put it exactly. Essentially he was asking for a freebie. He had made what he knew very well was the innocent’s mistake of thinking she liked him just because she seemed to when he was paying her €1,000 a night. She handled the situation with typical tact. She said she would love to, but she had a fiancé. ‘A fiancé?’ Freddy said, with mild incredulity. ‘M-hm.’ ‘Does he live in Paris?’ ‘M-hm.’ ‘Is he French?’ ‘He’s French.’ ‘Does he know what you do?’ She fudged on that. However, in her mind it seemed quite simple—if she had sex with someone else without being paid for it (even if she took less than her usual fee), she was being unfaithful to him. Though Freddy tried to shift her from this position, she was sweetly immovable. So finally he paid her another €1,000 and they went to eat. Later, in his splendid suite at the Georges Cinq, he said, ‘So you’re not being unfaithful now?’ The question was slightly unfair, in that she was unable to speak—her mouth was full—but she shook her head.

She was there when he fell asleep, never when he woke. She always managed to slip out without waking him, and he never saw her in the frailer morning light.

Of course, it had been his intention to save something, to leave himself a small emergency fund. Then on his final night in Paris he had found himself scraping together his last €1,000 and dialling her familiar number. Yes, he was possibly slightly obsessed with her. He was still thinking about her now.

He told James he had paid the money to Anselm.

‘And he still threw you out?’

‘I owed him much more than that.’

‘So he took ten grand from you, and then threw you out?’

‘Yes.’

James sighed, for about the tenth time, and shook his head.

Freddy laughed and said, ‘Look, can I at least come inside? I’m fucking freezing.’

So they went in.

It was warmish in the living-room, where the electric fire was on. ‘What have you got there?’ Freddy said, unwinding his scarf. ‘Jack Daniel’s?’ He had dumped the haversack in the hall. ‘Yes, please.’

He sat down on the sofa wiping the freezing moisture from his pate. ‘Fuck me it’s cold,’ he said. ‘How are you?’

‘Okay.’ James handed him a Jack Daniel’s and Coke.

‘Thanks very much. Mind if I smoke?’ He lit a Gauloise filterless—he did have eight hundred or so Gauloises filterless squashed into the haversack somewhere. ‘I find it very nostalgic,’ he said, ‘smoking these.’ There were then some phlegmy noises, which went on for quite a while. ‘Fuck me…’

James stood there watching him, swinging his glass slightly, making the ice tinkle. Freddy did look out of sorts—with a suspicious, unfriendly eye on Hugo, he was sucking saliva thoughtfully through his teeth, which made a quiet squeaking sound. For a minute that and the ticking of the fire, and the tinkling of the ice, and Hugo’s quiet panting, were the only sounds. The television was muted, pictures only.

‘What the fuck are you going to do?’ James said, not unsympathetically.

Freddy had enormous faith in his own powers of sorting something out. He had been able to sort something out in the most unlikely situations in the past. His present situation had seemed pretty tricky, however—it had seemed frankly intractable—until, waiting for a Piccadilly-line train at South Kensington, he had thought of something.

‘Looking forward to Sunday?’ he said.

James shrugged. ‘I s’pose.’

Sunday was Plumpton, and Absent Oelemberg’s next outing. (Her final outing under their ownership—they needed to sell her just to pay Miller what they owed him in training fees.) Ten days ago she had won at Towcester under a penalty. The plan had been to turn her out quickly under a double, but she had emerged sore from the Towcester win, so Miller had let her have a fortnight off. On Sunday she would run from her new mark, which was eighteen pounds higher than her old one. Miller said he still thought she would win.

‘Planning to lump on?’ Freddy said, matter-of-factly.

‘I don’t know,’ James said. ‘I haven’t decided yet.’

‘Mm.’ Freddy nodded.

‘Shame you missed her last time.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Where were you?’ Freddy had never properly explained why he couldn’t make it to Towcester that day. (He was in Paris.) He just waved a hand in the air and said, ‘I had some things to do. I was wondering,’ he went on. Then he stopped.

‘What?’

‘If you could lend me some money.’

When they spoke, some seconds later, it was simultaneously. James said, ‘How much?’ And Freddy said, ‘I mean, to bet with.’

‘To bet with?’

‘Yes.’

‘How much?’

‘Five thousand?’

James laughed. ‘Are you out of your mind?’

‘Why do you say that?’ Freddy said, impressively straight-faced.

‘I’m not going to lend you five thousand pounds to bet with.’

‘Why not? I’ll be able to pay you back on Sunday…’

‘You will if she wins. What if she loses? Then what? Then I’ll never see the money again, will I? Why would I do that? Don’t be a fucking idiot, Freddy.’

Freddy looked away. He was sucking his teeth again—it was a habit he had had since school.

* * *

Later he finally spoke to Katherine. She finally answered her phone. He was standing in the living room, in the Gauloise smoke, slightly drunk. Freddy was out procuring more Jack Daniel’s.

‘Hello,’ he said, surprised. He had lost count of how many times he had phoned her since Sunday—he had stopped even hoping that she would answer. ‘How are you?’

‘I’m okay.’ She didn’t sound okay. ‘How are you?’

‘Fine.’

They talked for while. This and that. He did most of the talking. Then he said, in an offhand way, ‘What were you doing last weekend?’

‘I saw Fraser.’

‘Did you?’ There was a silence which started to stretch out. ‘And?’

‘And it’s over,’ she said simply. ‘The love is dead.’

His instinct, since she was obviously in some sense in mourning, was to say, ‘I’m sorry.’ That seemed just too dishonest, though. He was not sorry. He was not sorry at all. The way she put it was so wonderfully absolute. It was dead. Her love for Fraser King was dead. He tried to keep his voice sombre when he said, ‘Well… how are you feeling?’

‘Very sad.’

‘Mm,’ he murmured as sympathetically as he could. ‘What did…? Where did you…?’

‘We went to Scotland.’

‘Oh. Well…’ And then finding himself with nothing else to say, he said, ‘I’m sorry.’

She said nothing, so he went on. ‘And what have you been doing? For the last few days. I’ve been trying to call you…’ He was irritated to hear the querulous note in his own voice.

‘I know you have. I’m sorry.’

‘So what have you been doing?’ he said.

She said she had been shopping with her mother—furnishing the house in West Kensington.

‘And what are you doing for the rest of the week? At the weekend?’

‘I don’t know.’

He heard Freddy unlocking the front door. ‘Will I see you?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said, as if it was something she simply didn’t know.

‘Well,’ he said slightly exasperatedly. ‘Do you want to see me?’

She sighed. ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

‘Maybe?’

‘Do I want to see you?’ she said, as if putting the question to herself out loud would help. ‘I just don’t know. Maybe. Maybe if you think of something fun to do…’

Freddy was there, taking off his overcoat. James waved him away.

‘Do you want to come to Plumpton on Sunday?’

‘No,’ she said without hesitation.

‘That isn’t fun?’

She laughed—a weak laugh, like someone ill. ‘No.’

If he had not managed to feel very sorry when he heard of her sad weekend, he did feel something like joy when he heard her laugh. ‘No,’ he said, smiling. ‘Okay. I’ll try and think of something fun to do. I’ll be in touch. Okay?’

‘Who was that?’ Freddy said, unwinding his long schoolboy’s scarf.

‘Um.’ James seemed to be somewhere else. ‘It was Katherine.’

5

Simon were well aware that he were sweating. He wishes it weren’t so hot in the hall. Staring out at the local membership with an impassive expression on his face, percolating in his tweed three-piece, he slides a hand through his hair. He had it done specially this morning, at the place in Trumpington. While he outstared himself from under the smock, the lass laboured over it for an hour with all the tools of her trade, and now it is a magnificently perfect peruke in silvered sable. The upper part looks like silky racoon fur. It is short at the sides—with flashes of wisdom at the temples, like the president in an American film—and neatly squared off on the pink neck. He knits his fingers in his humid tweed lap and tilts his head thoughtfully. They are on a makeshift stage, himself and the other VIPs, sitting in a line under the important lights, facing the party faithful. Politics.

On his feet at the podium, Nigel has been speaking for some time. Simon long ago lost the thread of what he was saying. From the stuff they send him in the post, he is familiar with Nigel’s positions on more or less everything. On Europe anyway. They are the same as his own positions. That was the point. (Mechanically, he joins in an episode of applause, without having heard the line that set it off.) What’s more, he is nervous about his own speech. He is up next.

For a long time, from his oblique angle of view slightly behind and to the left of him, he had kept his eyes loyally fixed on Nigel. He had noticed, staring at him for minutes on end from only a few yards away, how his dark hair, dense as fungus, tapered into two prongs on his thin neck. He had noticed the organic debris on the shoulders of his suit. The long fleshiness of his inelegant ears. He had noticed the way he kept flexing and straightening his left leg. After a while, however, it was a strain keeping his neckless head turned to two o’clock like that and, hoping that no one would notice and overinterpret the movement, he had let it find a more natural position facing the audience. They’re an elderly lot. (‘Half of this lot’ll be dead at the next election,’ he had whispered out of the side of his mouth to Mossy as the VIPs made their way through the hall and onto the platform, to pleasing applause. Mossy laughed at the impiety. ‘The ones that aren’t will definitely vote, though.’ When Mossy said ‘vote’ it sounded like ‘volt’.) What Simon would have liked to see is a few more people of his own vintage—serious men in their prime, mature and experienced, and deeply worried about the future of their nation. They all seem to be up on the platform, while what he sees in front of him puts him in mind of an old folks’ home. They are not of the present, these blue-veined people. They very obviously have nothing to offer the future. And the future is what is at stake here—the future of this island as an independent nation, and what the fock was more important than that?

An hour ago, out in the foyer, they talked through what would happen. When Nigel was finished, Simon would be introduced by Nick LaRue, the local party secretary, and would then speak for fifteen to twenty minutes. Fifteen to twenty minutes… He feels himself start to sweat more urgently. Even now, just sitting there, he feels exposed on the stage. When they talked last week about what he should say, Mossy told him to keep it light. Keep it personal. ‘Tell some jokes about mad European directives that have affected you personally.’ ‘Like what?’ Simon said, pen in hand. ‘I dunno,’ Mossy said. ‘Maybe something like, “They’ll be telling us we can’t use miles and furlongs next…” Doesn’t matter. You can’t go wrong with that sort of stuff. Just imagine you’re in your local. I’ve seen you in action there. You’ll be fine.’ Simon wishes he was in his local, in the Plough. His face twinkling with sweat, he is staring at the illuminated green exit sign at the far end of the hall. The first speaker of the evening was the party’s local MEP, Pierre Papworth. Still in his twenties and unsettlingly intense, Pierre is on the extreme wing of the party. He sometimes gets into trouble with things he says in the press—they are never ‘meant seriously’—and the members love him. When Pierre had finished, Nigel took a more statesmanlike tone.

He is still speaking. On the platform in the hot sports-hall—Simon notices various lines on the dull green floor—no longer even trying to look interested, he suddenly feels very sleepy. He had a few wines in the foyer to settle his nerves, and it has been a long day. His feet feel sore and smelly in his shiny leather shoes. That morning he’d had to teach young Dermot a lesson. Dermot was one of the lads in the yard—over from Ireland—and he fancied little Kelly. In fact they had some history, those two. They’d had a fling, last summer. Trouble was she weren’t interested now, and when she told him, Dermot started to pick on her. He’d slag her off in front of the other lads and lasses. He’d hide her boots or fill them with warm manure. He’d throw her posh velvet helmet into the pissy mud of the yard. That sort of thing were typical, of course. Went on all the time. Lads will be lads. Whenever a new lad joined there were the usual pranks. Dermot himself had been stripped naked and left tied up in the tackroom overnight, his privates smeared with stinging hoof oil. Piers found him there in the morning. Luckily it were a mild night or he might have died of hypothermia! He shouldn’t have picked on Kelly, though.

Yesterday at evening stables, when she was just finished doing Mistress Of Arts, plaiting her mane and everything, Dermot told her she was wanted in the office and, when she went, he smeared the shining mare with manure and dumped Kelly’s kit all over the floor. When Piers saw that, Kelly got a tongue-lashing. She had to stay on late and do the mare again—Piers weren’t interested in excuses.

That night she told Simon about Dermot and everything that had happened, and this morning Simon was waiting in the stables with a heavy steel spade.

They told the ambulance men that Dermot had fallen off a horse in the outdoor school. That was always happening. The ambulance was there several times a week, its blue lights flashing in silence. Still, it was a stressful start to the day.

And then there was the last meeting of the season at Plumpton, the long drive down to Sussex. No winners unfortunately. He’d hoped for one or two. The little ex-French mare—he thought she’d win. Maybe her new mark was a touch too high. Maybe she wasn’t quite as useful as he’d thought. Maybe she was just tired… And the owner, the tall one—fockin hell, the look on his face. He must have lumped on with everything he had, he looked that sick. ‘You were on then?’ Simon said as they stood on the terrace afterwards. The tall fella just nodded. ‘Well. You win some, you lose some,’ Simon said philosophically. ‘Went to the well once too often, I suppose. Put her away for the summer now, and have another try in the autumn. Okay?’

‘Actually, I’m looking to sell my share.’

Simon took that in. He said, ‘Your mate too?’

‘Yes.’

He lit a Marlboro watchfully. ‘Well, I’ll have a look, see if I can find someone to take it.’

‘How much, do you think?’

Simon let the question hang there for a while in the faintly faecal-smelling spring air. It was a fine spring day. ‘Well,’ he said, enjoyably smoothing the silkiness of his salon-fragrant hair where it met the hard paunch of his neck. ‘She’s done her winning. Or most of it. That’s the thing. That’s the problem. She’s exposed now.’

‘So how much…?’

He sighed. ‘Might be able to get you four or five grand,’ he said. ‘No promises, though.’

‘The thing is, it’s quite urgent.’

‘Well… That doesn’t help.’

‘I know. Of course not. Would you pay five thousand for our share?’

‘Me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Me personally?’

‘Yes.’

‘No, I wouldn’t.’

‘How much would you pay?’

Simon thought for a minute. How much would he pay? He would be able to sell a half-share in the mare for £5,000 tomorrow… ‘Two and a half?’ he suggested, thinking vaguely that this would pay for his two weeks in Barbados with the missus, his end-of-season treat, same as every spring.

‘You just said a half-share was worth…’

‘It’s worth what someone’ll pay for it,’ Simon said, with a laugh. ‘And I don’t want it. I’d need to sell it on. What I’m saying is,’ he went on, ‘if you need to sell urgently, that’s what I’m willing to pay. She doesn’t owe you anything, does she.’ He wasn’t in the mood to haggle. He had more important things on his mind. His speech. Politics. The future of the fockin nation.

He notices that the audience is applauding and feels an icy finger trace the full length of his spine. Nigel has finished his speech. There is some awkward shuffling on the stage as he makes his way back to his seat and Nick LaRue takes the podium. They do that thing where, heading straight towards each other, they simultaneously swerve one way, then the other, then the first way again. The audience laughs. Nigel makes some joke that nobody hears. He sits down, smiling inanely. Towering over the lectern, Nick LaRue is also making a joke about the incident. Then he starts the preamble to introducing Simon. Despite his insanely loud pinstripe—he is wearing a stripy suit, it is as simple as that—he is emceeing the evening with enviable style. Simon’s mouth is suddenly very dry. He hears Nick LaRue say something about ‘one of the leading National Hunt trainers in the country’. At the sound of his own name he feels a hard prickle of adrenalin in his armpits and leaves his moulded plastic seat—prematurely as it turns out. He has to wait there, standing next to the podium and sweating under the lights—he is able to smell himself, his own smells—while LaRue finishes his introduction.

The applause stops sharply. It seems very quiet when he takes his place at the lectern. You could have heard a pin drop. Those words tumble woozily through his mind. There is nothing else there. His mouth is now unprecedentedly dry, and he picks up the jug and pours himself some water. His hand is shaking so much the jug audibly ding-a-ling-a-lings on the lip of the tumbler. He has a tiny sip of water. He puts down the tumbler. He takes the sweat-soft printed sheet from the tweed pocket of his suit. It immediately starts flapping in his hand. He looks up—sees nothing. He starts to make his speech.

*

It is still light when James gets back from Plumpton, when he walks through Mecklenburgh Square and lets himself into the familiar smell of the flat. Still light at seven o’clock. These sudden light evenings. It is spring now. It was spring in Sussex. Petals shook in the sharp wind. In the parade ring, there were speckles of sunlight on the shivering narcissi. Trees were unfurling leaves from blood-red branch tips in suburban gardens the train passed. It was spring.

The mare had lost, though for much of the way she had looked okay. Hard on the steel, she had taken it up half a mile from home. Then she flattened out on the turn, found nothing. Faded up the hill to finish a tired fourth. James only had a few quid on. There was a time when he might have staked everything on her. Now he just wanted to hold on to what he had. He had understood that on the train down to Sussex at lunchtime, when he was still wondering whether to lump on. When he decided not to—silently, staring out at flooded fields—he immediately experienced a flat feeling of peace.

He just stood there on the terrace for a while in the uncertain sunshine. ‘You were on then?’ Miller said. He seemed to misunderstand what James was feeling, to misinterpret the expression on his face. James nodded, and Miller started to produce various platitudes. Then he said, ‘Put her away for the summer now, and have another try in the autumn. Okay?’ James told him he was looking to sell, and made his way to the sleepy station at the far end of the track.

He phones Katherine as he walks through Mecklenburgh Square. When she does not answer, he feels a sharp pinch on his heart. They have not spoken since Wednesday. He tried her from the platform of Plumpton station—a tiny thing, lost in the Sussex landscape—while he waited for the London train. Now, when she still does not answer under the leafed planes of the square, the light-filled sadness of the spring evening pierces him—it is just so fucking sad, the way everything is moving on, starting something new.

To his surprise she phones him later. They talk for a long time. He tells her about the last meeting of the season at Plumpton, about how they have to sell the mare. He is lying on the sofa. The vent is open in the skylight.

‘What are you doing tonight?’ he says eventually.

‘Staying in, I think.’

‘You don’t want to meet up?’

‘No,’ she says.

‘How about tomorrow?’

‘I can’t tomorrow.’

‘Why not?’

‘I’m seeing someone else.’

‘Maybe in the week then, or next weekend?’

‘Maybe,’ she says.

6

She is in the National Gallery when he phones. She has looked at Piero della Francesca’s half-finished Nativity and tried, as usual, to put her finger on what it is about the picture that fascinates her. It seems to tease her. There is something wrong with it—the elements do not seem properly integrated—and yet it still fascinates her, still maintains the hold on her imagination that it has had since she was at school and there was a small, pale reproduction of it on the wall. Its modesty was what used to trouble her then, studying it while some teacher spoke—even the singing angels, such a modest little quintet. The whole scene one of hardscrabble poverty. Franciscan. It had disturbed her teenage sense of propriety.

Now she is standing, with a few other people, in front of the equally familiar image of The Arnolfini Portrait. It exerts a similar fascination to the Nativity. It too seems to have something wrong with it. The figures of the fifteenth-century financier and his wife medievally large, the space flat—except for the profound shadows of the mirror—and yet the plain light so true. The light from the window specifying the texture of their few small luxuries. The light was the same then… She answers her phone.

‘Hello?’

‘I’m okay,’ she says.

‘I’m not sure,’ she says a few moments later.

One of the blue-uniformed museum attendants, having left his seat and tiptoed up to her, whispers something.

‘Look,’ she says. ‘I have to go. I’m in the National Gallery and they’re telling me I can’t use my phone in here. I’ll call you back. Okay.’

She spends another minute looking at The Arnolfini Portrait. Strange, she thinks, this practice of looking at pictures, standing there ogling and hoping for some sort of effect—waiting for something like Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ perhaps to pop fully formed into your head. ‘About suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters…’ Slowly she makes her way down the wide stairs and out of the museum into the sunlight of Trafalgar Square. Traffic, tourists, fountains, statues, sky. Four o’clock faintly audible—a fine wind pushing the fountains’ spray. She puts on her sunglasses. She was here last night, or not far from here. She and her mother saw The Marriage of Figaro, at the ENO. It is the sort of thing they do once a month—spend the afternoon shopping, then an early supper and the opera or the theatre or some hirsute intense Slav playing the piano in the Festival Hall. They parted on St Martin’s Lane at twenty to eleven.

Standing on the pavement in front of the Sainsbury Wing, she phones James. They had a tentative plan to see each other today. She is not sure she wants to. She would not have phoned him if he hadn’t phoned her first. In fact he says he has a hangover and suggests they meet tomorrow instead.

‘No,’ she says. ‘I have things to do tomorrow.’ And then, ‘I’m going to Greece on Monday.’

‘Greece?’

‘Yes,’ she says.

She has written a letter to her employer. She has not sent it yet—first she has taken the two weeks’ holiday they owe her, and she will spend those weeks in Greece, looking for somewhere, some idyllic shore, where she might open a small hotel. Then she will work her month’s notice while the people from Windlesham Fielding find tenants for Packington Street. There is plenty of equity in the property, and the loan forms are waiting on the table in the living room. Her father has promised to invest too, if she finds somewhere with potential. This she explains to James.

‘So…’ she says.

‘Well…’ He sounds shocked. ‘Let’s meet tonight then.’

For a second she says nothing. She wishes that he had not phoned her, that he had not put her, just when things were starting to seem simple, in this infuriating position of not knowing what she wants.

*

Last night, drunk, Freddy fessed up. He told James about his ten days in Paris—about that young American, that fantasy of freckled, milk-fed wholesomeness, with her spangled exiguous dresses and eight-inch heels, her thousand-watt smile in the plutocratic settings. The money from the touch all spent. Wondering whether the story furnished an example of utter foolishness or sublime wisdom—he was simultaneously envious and extremely pleased that he was not in Freddy’s position—James said, ‘What the fuck are you going to do now?’

And Freddy said—surprisingly—that he intended to go into posh primary schools and take photos of the pupils in their ties and haircuts and milk teeth, and then send watermarked samples to their parents, offering proper prints for a substantial fee. All he would have to do, he seemed to think, was persuade the school authorities that he was not a paedophile and he would be able to take thousands of pounds per school. ‘The point is,’ he said, smiling, ‘it’s a test of love, isn’t it. For the parents. They won’t want Toby to be the only kid in the playground whose parents don’t love him enough to get a photo of him. That’s why they have to be fucking expensive—if they’re not expensive enough it won’t work, it won’t be a proper test of love.’

Later, somewhere noisy and subterranean in Notting Hill, they found ‘Alan-friend’.

Fey and palely Oriental, Alan-friend stood on his own, occasionally snapping his fingers and shuffling his feet to the music. In the old days, he was there every night, and every night he was on his own, a strange figure of metropolitan loneliness. James and Freddy used to wonder who he was. The insane offspring of a Hong Kong trillionaire was a favoured explanation; the insanity having less to do with the senior naval officer’s uniform he was always wearing—though that was not particularly sane—and more to do with the fact that he spent every night in that one Notting Hill venue and never spoke to a single person there—and if you did speak to him he turned out to be a total fantasist, explaining with quiet seriousness that he was involved in the development of various spaceships and futuristic weapons systems and other top-secret science-fiction nonsense. So last night, for old time’s sake, they talked spaceships with Alan-friend for a while, and Freddy asked him if he wanted to invest in his new business, and Alan—in his vice-admiral’s uniform—said without hesitation, without even knowing what the business was, that he would be happy to, that he was always looking for ‘opportunities’. They agreed to meet and talk about it ‘seriously’ at some point in the near future.

Leaving Alan to his liqueur—he tippled weird liqueurs, though he never seemed even slightly drunk—James and Freddy ended up in some place in South Kensington where Freddy knew the eponymous proprietress, a middle-aged American woman who had had some famous lovers in the past. The photos of these lantern-jawed men—half-familiar faces from the Eighties, politicians, newspaper editors, presidential emissaries—were on the walls.

In the morning James had a stinking hangover, which worsened until he switched off the TV and just lay there on the sofa. Later he took Hugo for a walk. He stared into the empty fridge. He had a shower. He phoned Katherine.

They went to the Old Queen’s Head. She was in a surprisingly talkative mood. She was frolicsome. She was tipsy. He insisted on paying for the food and drink, and produced a huge wad of money from inside his jacket—a market trader’s wad that made her laugh out loud. He was just like the men she saw in Chapel Market, she thought, those sharp-eyed men, forever permutating over their stalls of tat. She smiled and let him hold her hands over the tabletop. He was nicer than that, of course. He had been telling her about starting a business, the things she needed to think about—he himself had been starting businesses since he was seventeen. She liked the way he had done it, without patronising her, or not much. Now he was talking about his friend Freddy, how he had spent thousands of pounds—the money he won on their horse—on a single week in Paris, and about some prostitute he seemed to have fallen in love with… It was a funny story. It made her laugh. Perhaps that was why, looking at her watch, she said, ‘Do you want to watch a film or something?’

Walking down Packington Street in the hook of his arm, however, she started to wish she had not invited him home. She even wondered, unlocking the front door, whether to say to him, Look, I’m sorry, I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to watch a film. I want to be on my own. Instead, she preceded him into the downstairs hall, pressed on the timed light, and started up the thin stairs. She said, ‘What do you feel like watching?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t mind.’

He made himself at home. Took off his shoes. Flopped down on the sofa, feet on the pouf.

‘I don’t have anything to drink,’ she said.

‘That’s okay.’

She turned on the TV. There was some film on TV, and they just started to watch that. Obviously feeling encouraged, he tried to kiss her at various points, tried tentatively to start undressing her. Each time, she went along with it for a minute, then fended him off, and there was another stretch of staring at the television, until he tried again. In fact she was no more interested in the film than he was and in the end she let him undress her. Sometimes she had to augment her lover with her own finger to make herself have an orgasm, and that was obviously easier if he found his way into her from behind, and easier still if he forewent her sex altogether. This she encouraged him to do, awkwardly using her unseeing hand to alter his angle until he understood what she wanted. ‘Please,’ she said. For a while she felt the floor’s nap under her face. Then, starting to hyperventilate, she did not feel it. She felt nothing. There was only light, and pleasure.

Finding her suddenly limp and heavy, he finished with a few hurried movements, immediately toppling over and experiencing a soft occipital tingle as the blood flowed once more into the parts of his head that think.

They were lying on the floor.

The film was just ending. Worried now about stains, she sat up and looked at him, lying there naked, his hairless thorax still heaving.

*

In the morning the light was white. The light was tender, like something unhealed. She woke with the first twinges of period pain and Fraser in her formless thoughts. She lay there, encircled by James’s arms, thinking for a few moments, as the sleepworld faded, of Fraser. He kissed her neck. He said quietly that he had to leave, and finally unsqueezing her, he left the bed and started to dress. There seemed to have been so many mornings like this. Him leaving early, perforce, to walk poor Hugo. It was later than it usually was when he left. It was eight. ‘Do you want some coffee?’ she said. He did and while he was dressing she went to make it.

There was a Sunday-morning quiet. The espresso maker mumbled on the hob and she looked out the window. Packington Street. The weather still making up its mind what to do.

They drank their coffee in the white kitchen. They did so in silence.

When he had finished his coffee he put his arms around her and she put her head on his shoulder.

She said, ‘Don’t you want to know what happened with me and Fraser?’

He shrugged. ‘Okay. If you want to tell me…’

‘It’s not that I want to tell you!’ she said impatiently, almost pushing him away. ‘Do you not want to know? Are you just not interested?’

‘No, tell me,’ he said, holding her. ‘Of course I’m interested. Tell me.’

‘We went to Edinburgh,’ she said, putting her head on his shoulder again. ‘If it makes you feel any better, I didn’t let him have sex with me. I know it’s… important to men.’ He said nothing. ‘Isn’t it? Fraser was jealous when he heard about you.’

‘Was he?’

He felt her head nod on his shoulder.

‘So you went to Edinburgh…’

‘It was depressing,’ she said.

‘Why was it depressing?’

‘I don’t know. Fraser was depressed.’

She put her feet on his—her naked feet on his larger socked feet. He was looking down at them. For a long time he looked down at them.

‘And now?’ he said finally.

‘Now?’

‘M-hm.’

‘I don’t know. I’m going to Greece.’

He sighed. Tired and sad and slightly exasperated. Still looking down at their feet, he said, ‘I just wish it was…’

‘Simpler?’ she suggested.

‘Yeah.’

She nodded.

‘Will I see you later today?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I have loads of things to do.’

‘What time’s your flight tomorrow?’

‘Nine o’clockish. From Stansted.’

‘I wish I could spend the whole day with you…’

‘No.’

He squeezed her firmly for a second or two, then went into the hall to put on his shoes. ‘I’ll phone you when you get back from Greece,’ he said, stooping.

‘Okay.’

‘When is that?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘What do you mean—you’ve only got a one-way ticket?’

She nodded.

His shoes were on. He straightened up and put on his jacket, which was there on an overloaded peg. ‘Okay…’ he said. ‘Well… have fun.’

‘Okay.’

What to do now? They were standing in the hall. There seemed to be no natural way for him to leave, nothing that would do justice to the situation as he saw it, nothing that would not seem hopelessly peremptory. Finally—it was hopelessly peremptory—he just kissed her passionlessly on the mouth and said, ‘Bye.’

‘Bye,’ she said, and opened the door for him.

He was halfway down the stairs, halfway to the narrow hall, where the ownerless sideboard was swamped with letters for people who no longer lived there, when she shouted his name. In the shadowy space halfway down the stairs they kissed properly, for a whole minute perhaps, while the wind fiddled impatiently with the street door.

‘Okay,’ she whispered unentangling herself. ‘See you.’ She scampered up the stairs and went into the flat, leaving him to take the final steps, to pause in the familiar stillness of the hall, and then to pull open the door—even the way it stuck for a moment as he pulled it was familiar, seemed like something he had once loved—and step out into the light.

While he walked to the tube station, she was upstairs leaning over the pummelling tap. With her hair tied up, she stirred the water with her hand. She was thinking of tomorrow morning, of the taxi to Liverpool Street. Of the train through east London and the flat landscape of Essex. Of the light-filled airport.