The Bone Clocks

December 13

“BOOMIER FROM THE TENORS,” commands the choirmaster. “Get our firm diaphragms wobbling, boys! Wibble-wobble, wibble-wobble. Trebles, lesss sssybilanccce on the esss—we aren’t a troupe of Gollums, now, are we? — and tap out those ts. Adrian B — if you can nail the top C in ‘Weep You No More Sad Fountains,’ you can nail it here. Once more with more welly! A-one, a-two, and a—” King’s College Choir’s sixteen bat-eared choristers, bereft of hairstyles, and fourteen choral scholars exhale in unison …

Of one that is so fair and bright,

Velut maris stella …

Benjamin Britten’s “Hymn to the Virgin” launches, chasing its echoey tail around the sumptuous ceiling before dive-bombing the scattering of winter tourists and students sitting there in the chancel in our damp coats. For me, Britten’s a hit-and-miss composer; prolix on occasion but, when pumped and primed, the old queen binds your quivering soul to the mast and lashes it with fiery sublimity …

Brighter than the day is light,

Parens et puella …

In my idler moments, I do wonder what music I’ll hear as I lie dying, surrounded by a bevy of hot nurses. Nothing more exultant than “Hymn to the Virgin” occurs to me, but I worry that when the big moment arrives DJ Unconscious will launch me off on the back of that “Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight)” and for once in my life I’ll have no redress. World, shut yer mouth, for one of the canon’s most glorious musical orgasms, on the “Cry”:

I cry to thee, thou see to me,

Lady pray thy Son for me …

The hairs on my neck prickle, as if blown on. By her, for example, sitting across the aisle. She wasn’t there when I last looked. Her eyes are closed to drink in the music so I drink her in. Late thirties … vanilla hair, creamy-skinned, beaujolais lips, cheekbones you’d slice your thumb on. Slim beneath a midnight-blue winter coat. A defected Russian opera singer, waiting to meet her handler. You never know, this is Cambridge. A true, rare ten …

Tam pia,

That I might come to thee …

Maria.

Let her stay put after the choir troop out. Let her turn to the young man across the aisle and murmur, “Wasn’t that the very breath of heaven?” Let us discuss the Peter Grimes Interludes, and Bruckner’s Ninth. Let us avoid talk of her domestic arrangements as we drink coffee at the County Hotel. Let coffee turn into trout and red wine, and to hell with my last pint of the Michaelmas term with the boys at the Buried Bishop. Let us climb the carpeted stairs to that snug suite where Fitzsimmons’s mother and I frolicked during fresher’s week. Ouch. The Kraken in my boxer shorts wakes. I’m male, twenty-one, it’s been ten days since I last got laid, what do you expect? But I can hardly adjust myself with a lady watching. Oh? Well well well, if she isn’t discreetly studying me. I watch Rubens’s Adoration of the Magi above the altar, and wait for her to make a move.

• • •

THE CHOIR TROOPS out but the woman stays put. A tourist aims his fat camera at the Rubens before Security Goblin snarls, “No flash!” The chancel empties, the goblin returns to his booth by the organ, and minutes trickle by. My Rolex says three-thirty. I’ve an essay to polish on Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy, but an eerie goddess is sitting six feet away, waiting for me to make a move. “I always think,” I tell her, “that seeing the choir’s blood, sweat, and tears as they work on a piece deepens the mystery of music, not lessens it. Does that make sense?”

She tells me, “In an undergraduate way, yes.”

Oh, you sultry minx. “Post-grad? Staff?”

Ghost of a smile. “Do I dress like an academic?”

“Definitely not.” There are Francophone curves in her soft voice. “Though I’m guessing you can sting like one.”

No acknowledgment. “I just feel at home here.”

“Almost true for me — my rooms are at Humber College, only a few minutes away. Most third-years live off campus, but I can drop in to hear the choir most days, supervisions allowing.”

A droll look, saying, Someone’s a quick worker, isn’t he?

I shrug cutely. I might get hit by a bus tomorrow.

She says, “Cambridge has met your expectations?”

“If you don’t use Cambridge well, you don’t deserve to be here. Erasmus, Peter the Great, and Lord Byron all lodged in my rooms. It’s a fact.” Bullshit, but I love to act. “I think of them, lying on my bed, staring up at the very same ceiling, in our respective centuries. That, for me, is Cambridge.” And that’s one tried-and-tested pick-up line. “My name’s Hugo, by the way. Hugo Lamb.”

Instinct warns me off attempting a handshake.

Her lips say, “Immaculée Constantin.”

My, oh, my. A seven-syllable hand grenade. “French?”

“I was born in Zürich, as a matter of fact.”

“I’m fond of Switzerland. I go skiing in La Fontaine Sainte-Agnès most years; one of my friends has a chalet there. Do you know it?”

“Once upon a time.” She places a suede-gloved hand on her knee. “You major in politics, Hugo Lamb.”

That’s impressive. “How could you tell?”

“Speak to me about power. What is it?”

I do believe I’m being out-Cambridged. “You want me to discuss power? Right here and now?”

Her shapely head tilts. “No time except the present.”

“Okay.” Only for a ten. “Power is the ability to make someone do what they otherwise wouldn’t, or deter them from doing what they otherwise would.”

Immaculée Constantin is unreadable. “How?”

“By coercion and reward. Carrots and sticks, though in bad light one looks much like the other. Coercion is predicated upon the fear of violence or suffering. ‘Obey, or you’ll regret it.’ Tenth-century Danes exacted tribute by it; the cohesion of the Warsaw Pact rested upon it; and playground bullies rule by it. Law and order relies upon it. That’s why we bang up criminals and why even democracies seek to monopolize force.” Immaculée Constantin watches my face as I talk; it’s thrilling and distracting. “Reward works by promising ‘Obey and feel the benefit.’ This dynamic is at work in, let’s say, the positioning of NATO bases in nonmember states, dog training, and putting up with a shitty job for your working life. How am I doing?”

Security Goblin’s sneeze booms through the chapel.

“You scratch the surface,” says Immaculée Constantin.

I feel lust and annoyance. “Scratch deeper, then.”

She brushes a tuft of fluff off her glove and appears to address her hand: “Power is lost or won, never created or destroyed. Power is a visitor to, not a possession of, those it empowers. The mad tend to crave it, many of the sane crave it, but the wise worry about its long-term side effects. Power is crack cocaine for your ego and battery acid for your soul. Power’s comings and goings, from host to host, via war, marriage, ballot box, diktat, and accident of birth, are the plot of history. The empowered may serve justice, remodel the Earth, transform lush nations into smoking battlefields, and bring down skyscrapers, but power itself is amoral.” Immaculée Constantin now looks up at me. “Power will notice you. Power is watching you now. Carry on as you are, and power will favor you. But power will also laugh at you, mercilessly, as you lie dying in a private clinic, a few fleeting decades from now. Power mocks all its illustrious favorites as they lie dying. ‘Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay, might stop a hole to keep the wind away.’ That thought sickens me, Hugo Lamb, like nothing else. Doesn’t it sicken you?”

Immaculée Constantin’s voice lulls like rain at night.

The silence in King’s College Chapel has a mind all its own.

“What do you expect?” I say eventually. “We all have to die one day. End of. But in the meantime, doing unto others is a damn sight more attractive than being done to by others.”

“What is born must one day die. So says the contract of life, yes? I am here to tell you, however, that in rare instances this iron clause may be … rewritten.”

I look at her calm and serious face. “What level of nuts are we talking here? Fitness regimes? Vegan diets? Organ transplants?”

“A form of power that allows one to defer death in perpetuity.”

Yes, she’s a ten, but if she’s Scientologically slash cryogenically oriented, Ms. Constantin needs to understand that I don’t eat bullshit. “Did you just cross the border into the Land of the Crazy People?”

“The lie of the land has no notion of borders.”

“But you’re talking about immortality as if it’s real.”

“No. I’m talking about the perpetual deferral of death.”

“Hang on, did Fitzsimmons send you? Or Richard Cheeseman? Is this a setup?”

“No. This is a seed.”

This is too creative to be a Fitzsimmons prank. “A seed that grows into what, exactly?”

“Into your cure.”

Her sobriety is unsettling. “But I’m not ill.”

“Mortality is inscribed in your cellular structure, and you say you’re not ill? Look at the painting. Look at it.” She nods towards The Adoration of the Magi. I obey. I always will. “Thirteen subjects, if you count them, like the Last Supper. Shepherds, the Magi, the relatives. Study their faces, one by one. Who believes this newborn manikin can one day conquer death? Who wants proof? Who suspects the Messiah is a false prophet? Who knows that he is in a painting, being watched? Who is watching you back?”

THE SECURITY GOBLIN is waving his palm in front of my face. “Wakey-wakey! So sorry if I’m disturbin’ you, but would you an’ the Almighty resume your business tomorrer?”

My first thought is, How dare he? There isn’t a second thought because his Gorgonzola-and-paint-thinner breath makes me gag.

“It’s closin’ time,” he says.

“The chapel’s open until six,” I tell him tersely.

“Uh—yeah. Exactly. And what’s the time now?”

Then I notice the windows; they’re shiny dark.

17:58, insists my watch. It can’t be. It’s only just gone four. I peer around my tormentor’s belly to find Immaculée Constantin, but she’s gone. Long gone, I feel. But no no no no no; she told me to look at the Rubens, just a few seconds ago. I did, and …

… I frown up at Security Goblin for an answer.

“Out at six,” he says. “Closing time’s closing time.”

He taps his watch in front of my face and, even upside-down, its cheap and nasty digital face is quite clear: 17:59. I mutter, “But …” But what? Two whole hours do not vanish in the space of two minutes. “Was there …” my voice is thin, “… was there a woman here? Sitting there?”

He looks where I point. “Earlier? This year? Ever?”

“About … half three, I think. Dark blue coat. A real looker.”

Security Goblin folds his stumpy arms. “If you’d kindly get your herbally enhanced arse into gear, I’ve got a home to go to.”

• • •

ME, RICHARD CHEESEMAN, Dominic Fitzsimmons, Olly Quinn, and Jonny Penhaligon clunk our glasses and bottles in the roar and slosh of the Buried Bishop, across the cobbled lane behind Humber College’s west gate. The place is heaving: Tomorrow the Christmas exodus begins, and we’re lucky to have found a table in the furthest nook. I hole-in-one my Kilmagoon Special Reserve, and the fat Scotch slug scorches a trail from tonsils to stomach. Here, it gets to work on the knot of gut-worry I’ve been suffering from since my zone-out in the chapel earlier. I’ve been rationalizing. It’s been a tiring month with essays and deadlines; Mariângela keeps leaving those nagging messages; and I’ve endured two all-nighters at Toad’s in the last week to tenderize Jonny Penhaligon. Losing track of time isn’t proof of a brain tumor; it’s hardly as if I keeled over, or found myself wandering among the chimneys of the college, naked. I lost track of time while sitting in the finest Late Gothic church in the country, meditating upon a Rubens masterpiece — surroundings designed to transport you. Olly Quinn puts down his half-drunk pint and suppresses a belch. “So, did you solve the mystery of How Ronald Reagan Accidentally Won the Cold War, Lamb?”

I can barely hear him: The Humber College Young Conservatives in the next room are howling along to Cliff Richard’s probably immortal Christmas hit “Mistletoe and Wine.” “Done, dusted, and slipped under Professor Dewey’s door.”

“Don’t know how you’ve stuck at politics for three years.” Richard Cheeseman wipes Guinness foam from his Young Hemingway beard. “I’d rather circumcize myself with a cheese grater.”

“Too bad you missed dinner,” Fitzsimmons tells me. “Pudding was the last of Jonny’s Narnian weed. We couldn’t very well let Mrs. Mop find it during her end-of-term clean-up, assume it was a turd nugget, and chuck it out with Jonny’s gluey copies of Scouting Ahoy!” Jonny Penhaligon, still draining his bitter, gives Fitzsimmons the finger; his knobbly Adam’s apple bobs up and down. Idly, I imagine slicing it with a razor. Fitzsimmons sniffs and asks Cheeseman, “Where’s your leather-trousered friend from the Mysterious Orient?”

Cheeseman glances at his watch. “Thirty thousand feet over Siberia, turning back into an upstanding Confucian eldest son. Why would I risk my reputation on being seen with a gang of notorious heterosexuals if Sek was still in town? I’m a fully converted rice queen. Crash us a cancer-stick, Fitz; I could bloody murder a fag, as I delight in telling Americans.”

“You don’t need to light up in here.” Olly Quinn is our pet nonsmoker. “Just breathe in.”

“Weren’t you giving up?” Fitzsimmons passes Cheeseman his box of Dunhills; Penhaligon and I take one too.

“Tomorrow, tomorrow,” says Cheeseman. “Your Hermann Göring lighter, Jonny, if you’d be so kind? I adore its frisson of evil.”

Penhaligon produces his Third Reich lighter. It’s genuine, obtained by his uncle in Dresden, and these fat boys fetch three thousand pounds at auction. “Where’s RCP tonight?”

“The future Lord Rufus Chetwynd-Pitt,” answers Fitzsimmons, “is scoring drugs. Pity for him it’s not an academic discipline.”

“It’s a recession-proof sector of the economy,” I note.

“This time next year,” Olly Quinn picks at the label of his nonalcoholic lager, “we’ll all be out in the real world, earning a living.”

“Can’t bloody wait,” says Fitzsimmons, stroking his chin cleft. “I despise being poor.”

“My heart bleeds.” Richard Cheeseman holds his ciggie in the corner of his mouth à la Serge Gainsbourg. “People see your parents’ twenty-roomed mansion in the Cotswolds, your Porsche, your Versace gear and jump to all the wrong conclusions.”

“It’s my parents’ loot,” says Fitzsimmons. “It’s only fair that I have my own obscene bonus to squander.”

“Daddy’s still sorting you a job in the City?” asks Cheeseman, then frowns as Fitzsimmons brushes the shoulders of Cheeseman’s tweed jacket. “What are you doing?”

“Flicking the chips off your shoulders, our Richard.”

“They’re superglued on,” I tell Fitzsimmons. “And don’t knock nepotism, Cheeseman; my well-connected uncles all agree, nepotism made this country what it is today.”

Cheeseman blows smoke my way. “When you’re a burned-out ex-Citibank analyst having your Lamborghini repossessed and your third wife’s lawyer’s got your nuts under a judge’s gavel, you’ll be sorry.”

“Right,” I say, “and the Ghost of Christmas Future sees Richard Cheeseman working on a charity project for Bogotá street-children.”

Cheeseman ponders Bogotá street-children, purrs, and desists. “Charity breeds fecklessness. No, it’s the way of the hack for me. A column here, a novel there, bit of broadcasting now and then. Speaking of which …” He fishes in his jacket pocket and retrieves a book: Desiccated Embryos by Crispin Hershey. REVIEW COPY ONLY is emblazoned in red across the cover. “My first paid review for Felix Finch at The Piccadilly Review. Twenty-five pence a word, twelve hundred words, three hundred quid for two hours’ work. Result.”

“Fleet Street beware,” says Penhaligon. “Who’s Crispin Hershey?”

Cheeseman sighs. “The son of Anthony Hershey?”

Penhaligon blinks at him, none the wiser.

“Oh, c’mon, Jonny! Anthony Hershey! Filmmaker! Oscar for Box Hill in 1964, made Ganymede 5 in the seventies, the best British SF film ever made.”

“That film robbed me of the will to live,” remarks Fitzsimmons.

“Well, I’m impressed by your commission, our Richard,” I say. “Crispin Hershey’s last novel was superb. I picked it up in a hostel in Ladakh on my gap year. Is this one as good?”

“Almost.” Monsieur Le Critic places his fingertips together. “Hershey Junior is a gifted stylist, and Felix — Felix Finch, to you plebs — Felix puts him up there with McEwan, Rushdie, Ishiguro, et al. Felix’s praise is premature, but in a few books’ time, he’ll ripen nicely.”

Penhaligon asks, “How’s your own novel going, Richard?” Fitzsimmons and I do hanged-men faces at each other.

“Evolving.” Cheeseman gazes into his glorious literary future and likes what he sees. “My hero is a Cambridge student called Richard Cheeseman, working on a novel about a Cambridge student called Richard Cheeseman, working on a novel about a Cambridge student called Richard Cheeseman. No one’s ever tried anything like it.”

“Cool,” says Jonny Penhaligon. “That’s sounds like—”

“A frothy pint of piss,” I announce, and Cheeseman looks at me with death in his eyes until I add, “is what’s in my bladder right now. The book sounds incredible, Richard. Excuse me.”

THE GENTS SMELLS well fermented and the only free urinal is blocked and ready to brim over with the amber liquid so I have to queue, like a girl. Finally a grizzly bear of a man ambles away and I fill the vacancy. Just as I’m coaxing my urethra open, a voice at the next urinal says, “Hugo Lamb, as I live and breathe.”

It’s a stocky, swarthy man in a fisherman’s sweater with wiry dark hair, whose “Lamb” sounds like “Limb”—a New Zealander’s vowels. He’s older than me, around thirty, and I can’t place him. “We met back in your first year. The Cambridge Sharpshooters. Sorry, it’s appalling men’s-room etiquette to put a guy off his stride like this.” He’s pissing no-handedly into the gurgling urinal. “Elijah D’Arnoq, postgrad in biochemistry, Corpus Christi.”

A memory flickers: that unique surname. “The rifle club, yes. You’re from those islands, east of New Zealand?”

“The Chathams, that’s right. Now, I remember you because you’re a natural bloody marksman. Still room at the inn, you know.”

Now I know there’s no cottagey thing going on, I start pissing. “You’re overestimating my potential, I’m afraid.”

“Mate, you could be a contender. I’m serious.”

“I was spreading myself a bit thin, extracurricular-wise.”

He nods. “Life’s too short to do everything, right?”

“Something like that. So … you’ve enjoyed Cambridge?”

“Bloody love it. The lab’s good, got a great prof. You’re economics and politics, right? Must be your final year.”

“It is. It’s flown by. Do you still shoot?”

“Religiously. I’m an Anchorite now.”

I wonder if “Anchorite” means “anchorman,” or if it’s a Kiwi-ism or a rifle club — ism. Cambridge is full of insiders’ words to keep outsiders out. “Cool,” I tell him. “I enjoyed my few visits to the range.”

“Never too late. Shooting is prayer. And when civilization shuts up shop, a gun’ll be worth any number of university degrees. Happy Christmas.” He zips his fly. “See you around.”

PENHALIGON ASKS, “SO where’s this mystery woman of yours, Olly?”

Olly Quinn frowns. “She said she’d be here by half seven.”

“Only ninety minutes late,” offers Cheeseman. “Doesn’t prove she’s dumped you for a gym rat with the face of Keanu Reeves, the anatomy of King Dong, and the charisma of moi. Not necessarily.”

“I’m driving her home to London tonight,” says Olly. “She lives in Greenwich — so she’s bound to be along by and by …”

“Confide in us, Olly,” says Cheeseman. “We’re your friends. Is she a real girlfriend, or have you … y’know … made her up?”

“I can vouch for her existence,” says Fitzsimmons, enigmatically.

“Oh?” I glower at Olly. “Since when did this cuckolding crim take precedence over your stairs neighbor?”

“Chance encounter.” Fitzsimmons tips his roasted-nut crumbs into his mouth. “I espied Olly-plus-companion at the drama section in Heffer’s.”

“And speaking as a reformed postfeminist new man,” I ask Fitzsimmons, “where would you position Queen Ness on the Scale?”

“She’s hot. I presume an escort agency is involved, Olly?”

“Screw you.” Olly smiles like the cat who got the cream. “Ness!” He jumps up as a girl squeezes through the crush of student bodies. “Talk of the devil! Glad you got here.”

“So sorry I’m late, Olly,” she says, and they kiss on the lips. “The bus took about eight hundred years to arrive.”

I know her, or knew her, but only in the biblical sense. Her surname escapes me, but other parts I remember very well. An afterparty in my first year, though she was “Vanessa” back then; potty-mouthed Cheltenham Ladies College, if memory serves; a big shared house down the arse-end of Trumpington Road. We necked a bottle of Château Latour ’76, which she’d nicked from the cellar in the pre-party house. We’ve sighted each other around town since and nodded to avoid the crassness of ignoring each other. She’s a craftier operator than Olly, but even as I wonder what’s in him for her, I recall a drunk-driving offense and a suspended license — and Olly’s warm, dry Astra. All’s fair in love and war, and although I’m many things, I’m not a hypocrite. Ness has seen me and a fifth of a second is enough to agree upon a policy of cordial amnesia.

“Have my seat,” Olly’s saying, removing her coat like a gentle-twat, “and I’ll … er, kneel. Fitz, you’ve met. And this is Richard.”

“Charmed.” Cheeseman offers her a four-fingered handshake. “I’m the malicious queer. Are you Nessie the Monster or Ness the Loch?”

“And I’m as charmed as you are.” I remember her voice, too: slumming-it posh. “My friends have no trouble with just ‘Ness’ but you can call me Vanessa.”

“I’m Jonny, Jonny Penhaligon.” Jonny jumps up to shake her hand. “A pleasure. Olly’s told us shedloads about you.”

“All of it good.” I hold up my palm to say hi. “Hugo.”

Ness misses no beat: “Hugo, Jonny, the malicious queer, and Fitz. Got it.” She turns to Olly. “And sorry — who are you again?”

Olly’s laugh is a notch too loud. His pupils have morphed into love-hearts and, for the nth time squared, I wonder what love feels like on the inside because externally it turns you into the King of Tit Mountain.

“Richard was about to buy a round,” says Fitzsimmons. “Right, Richard? Aerate your wallet?”

Cheeseman feigns confusion. “Isn’t it your turn, Penhaligon?”

“Nope. I bought the round before this one. Nice try.”

“But you own half of Cornwall!” says Cheeseman. “You should see Jonny’s manor, Ness — gardens, peacocks, deer, stables, portraits of three centuries’ worth of Captain Penhaligons up the main staircase.”

Penhaligon snorts. “Tredavoe House is why we’ve got no bloody money. The upkeep’s crippling. And the peacocks are utter bastards.”

“Oh, don’t be a Scrooge, Jonny, the poll tax must be saving you a king’s ransom. I’m going to have to pimp myself later just to get a National Express ticket home to my Leeds pigeon-loft.”

Cheeseman is a fine misdirector — he still has ten thousand pounds from the money his grandfather left him — but I want no ruffled feathers tonight. “I’ll get the next round in,” I volunteer. “Olly, you’ll need to stay sober if you’re driving, so how about a tomato juice with Tabasco to warm the heart of your cockles? Cheeseman’s on the Guinness; Fitz, fizzy Australian wee; and Ness, your poison is … what?”

“The house red isn’t bad.” Olly wants a drunk girlfriend.

“Then a glass of red would hit the spot, Hugo,” she tells me.

I recall that quirky lilt. “Wouldn’t risk it, unless you carry a spare trachea in your handbag. It’s hardly a Château Latour.”

“An Archers with ice, then,” says Ness. “Better safe than sorry.”

“Wise choice. Mr. Penhaligon, would you help me bring these six drinks back alive? The bar will not be pretty, I fear.”

THE BURIED BISHOP’S a gridlocked scrum, an all-you-can-eat of youth: “Stephen Hawking and the Dalai Lama, right; they posit a unified truth”; short denim skirts, Gap and Next shirts, Kurt Cobain cardigans, black Levi’s; “Did you see that oversexed pig by the loos, undressing me with his eyes?”; that song by the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl booms in my diaphragm and knees; “Like, my only charity shop bargains were headlice, scabies, and fleas”; a fug of hairspray, sweat and Lynx, Chanel No. 5, and smoke; well-tended teeth with zero fillings, revealed by the so-so joke—“Have you heard the news about Schrödinger’s Cat? It died today; wait — it didn’t, did, didn’t, did …”; high-volume discourse on who’s the best Bond; on Gilmour and Waters and Syd; on hyperreality; dollar-pound parity; Sartre, Bart Simpson, Barthes’s myths; “Make mine a double”; George Michael’s stubble; “Like, music expired with the Smiths”; urbane and entitled, for the most part, my peers; their eyes, hopes, and futures all starry; fetal think-tankers, judges, and bankers in statu pupillari; they’re sprung from the loins of the global elite (or they damn well soon will be); power and money, like Pooh Bear and honey, stick fast — I don’t knock it, it’s me; and speaking of loins, “Has anyone told you you look like Demi Moore from Ghost?”; roses are red and violets are blue, I’ve a surplus of butter and Ness is warm toast.

“Hugo? You okay?” Penhaligon’s smile is uncertain.

We’re still logjammed two bodies back from the bar.

“Yeah,” I have to half shout. “Sorry, I was light-years away. While I have you to myself, Jonny, Toad asked me to invite you to his last all-nighter tomorrow, before we all jet off home. You, me, Eusebio, Bryce Clegg, Rinty, and one or two others. All cool.”

Penhaligon makes a not-sure face. “My mother’s half-expecting me back at Tredavoe tomorrow night …”

“No pressure. I’m just passing the invitation on. Toad says the ambience is classier when you’re there.”

Penhaligon sniffs the cheese. “Toad said that?”

“Yes, he said you’ve got gravitas. Rinty’s even christened you ‘the Pirate of Penzance’ because you always leave with the loot.”

Jonny Penhaligon grins. “You’ll be there too?”

“Me? God, yeah. Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

“You took quite a clobbering last week.”

“I never lose more than I can afford. ‘Scared money is lost money.’ You said that. Wise words for card players and economists.”

My partner in recreational gambling does not deny authorship of my freshly minted epigram. “I could drive home on Sunday …”

“Look, I won’t try to sway you one way or the other.”

He hums. “I could tell my parents I’ve a supervision …”

“Which would not be untrue — a supervision on probability theory, psychology, applied mathematics. All valid business skills, as your family will appreciate when you get the green light for the golf course at Tredavoe House. Toad’s proposing we raise the pot limit to a hundred pounds per game: a nice round figure, and quite a dollop of holiday nectar for you, sir, if your luck holds. Not that the Pirate of Penzance seems to need luck.”

Jonny Penhaligon admits: “I do seem to have a certain knack.”

I mirror his chuckle. Who’s a pretty turkey, then?

FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER we’re bringing our drinks back to our nook to find that trouble has beaten us to it. Richard Cheeseman, The Piccadilly Review’s rising star, has been cornered by Come Up to the Lab, Cambridge’s premier Goth-metal trio, whose concert at the Cornmarket was acidly ridiculed in Varsity last month — by Richard Cheeseman. The bassist guy’s a Frankenstein, lipless and lumbering; but She-Goth One has mad-dog eyes, a sharky chin, and knuckles of spiky rings; She-Goth Two has a Clockwork Orange bowler hat, exploding fuchsia-pink hair, a fake diamond hatpin, and the same eyes as She-Goth One. Amphetamines, I do believe. “Never done anything yourself, have yer?” Number Two is prodding Cheeseman’s chest with jet-black fingernails to italicize key words. “Never performed live to a real audience, have yer?”

“Nor have I fucked a donkey, destabilized a Central American state, or played Dungeons & Dragons,” retorts Cheeseman, “but I reserve the right to hold opinions on those who do. Your show was a bobbing turd and I don’t take a word back.”

She-Goth One takes over: “Scribble scribble scribble with your faggoty pen in your faggoty notebook and snipe and bitch and slag off real artists, you hairy lump of dick cheese.”

“ ‘Dick Cheese,’ ” says Cheeseman, “from ‘Richard Cheeseman,’ yeah, that’s really clever. Original, too. Never once heard it.”

“What d’you expect,” She-Goth One snatches up Desiccated Embryos, “from a Crispin Hershey fan? He’s a prick, too.”

“Don’t pretend you read books.” Cheeseman gropes for his review copy in vain and I catch a distant glimpse of a tortured gay child having his satchel emptied off a sooty bridge over the Leeds — Bradford railway line. She-Goth Two rips the book down its spine and tosses the halves away. The male Goth goes gur-hur-hur.

Olly retrieves one half, Cheeseman the other. He’s riled now. “Crispin Hershey’s last crap has more artistic merit than your lifetime’s output. Your music’s derivative wank. It’s parasitic. It’s a hatpin through the eardrum, darling, and not in a good way.”

He was doing quite well until the last sentence, but if you bare your arse to a vengeful unicorn, the number of possible outcomes dwindles to one. By the time I’ve put the drinks on a handy shelf, She-Goth Two has indeed extracted her hatpin and flown at Monsieur Le Critic, who topples operatically; the table upends and glasses slide off; female spectators gasp and shriek and go, “Oh, my God!”; She-Goth Two pounces on the fallen one and stabs downwards; I grab the hatpin (glistening?) and Penhaligon pulls her off Cheeseman by her hair; the bassist’s fist misses Penhaligon’s nose by a whisker; Penhaligon staggers onto Olly and Ness; and She-Goth One’s screeching becomes audible to the human ear—“Get your hands off her!” Fitzsimmons is kneeling down, with Cheeseman’s head on his lap. Cheeseman looks like a guy in a comedy seeing stars and birdies, but the ear dribbling blood is more worrying; I examine it closely. Good: Only the lobe’s torn, but the attackers don’t need to know that. I arise and shout at Come Up to the Lab in a fisticuff-quelling roar: “A monsoon of piss and shit is headed straight at you for this.”

“The wanker was asking for it,” states She-Goth Two.

“He started it,” insists her friend. “He provoked us!”

“Multiple witnesses,” I indicate the scandal-hungry onlookers, “know exactly who was attacked by whom. If you think ‘verbal provocation’ is an admissible defense for grievous bodily harm, then you’re even stupider than you look. See that hatpin there?” She-Goth Two sees the blood on the tip and drops it; two seconds later it’s in my pocket. “Lethal weapon used with intent. Got your DNA all over it. Custodial term, four years. Yes, girls: four years. If you’ve punctured the ear canal, make it seven, and by the time I’ve finished in court, seven years will mean seven. So. Reckon I’m bluffing?”

“Who,” the bassist’s aggression is shaky, “the fuck are you?”

I perform my craziest L. Ron Hubbard laugh. “Postgrad in law, genius. What’s more interesting is who you are — an accomplice. Do you know what that means, in nice plain English? It means you get sentenced too.”

She-Goth Two’s braggadocio is wilting. “But I …”

The bassist’s pulling her by the arm. “C’mon, Andrea.”

“Run, Andrea!” I jeer. “Melt into the crowd — oh, but wait! You’ve glued posters of your mugshots all over Cambridge, haven’t you? Well, you are fucked. Well and truly.” Come Up to the Lab decide it’s time to vacate the building. I yell after them, “See you at the hearing! Bring phone cards for the detention wing — you’ll need them!”

Penhaligon rights the table and Olly gathers the glasses. Fitzsimmons hauls Cheeseman onto the bench, and I ask him how many fingers I’m holding up. He winces a bit, and wipes his mouth. “It was my ear she went for, not my sodding eye.”

A very pissed-off landlord appears. “What’s going on?”

I turn on him. “Our friend was just assaulted by three drunken sixth-formers and needs medical attention. As regulars, we’d hate to see your license revoked, so at A and E Richard and Olly here will imply the assault happened off your premises. Unless I’ve read the situation wrongly, and you’d prefer to involve the authorities?”

The landlord susses the state of play. “Nah. ’Preciated.”

“You’re welcome. Olly: Is the Magic Astra parked nearby?”

“In the car park at the college, yes, but Ness here—”

“Um, my car’s available too,” says helpful Penhaligon.

“Jonny, you’re over the limit and your father’s a magistrate.”

“The breathalyzers’ll be out tonight,” warns the landlord.

“You’re the only sober party, Olly. And if we phone for an ambulance from Addenbrookes, the cops will come along too, and—”

“Questions, statements, and all sorts of how’s-yer-father,” says the landlord, “and then your college’d get involved, too.”

Olly looks at Ness, like a boy who’s lost his finger of fudge.

“Go on,” Ness tells him. “I’d join you, but the sight of blood …” She makes a yuck face. “Help your friend.”

“I’m supposed to be driving you to Greenwich tonight.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll get home by train — I’m a big girl, remember? Call me on Sunday and we’ll talk Christmas plans, okay? Go.”

MY RADIO ALARM is glowing 01:08 when I hear footsteps on the stairs, the pause, the timid tap-tap-tap on my outer door. I put on my dressing gown, close my bedroom door, cross my parlor, and open up, leaving the chain on. I squint out: “Olly? Wassa time?”

Olly looks Caravaggian in the dim light. “Half twelve-ish.”

“Shit. Poor you. How’s the bearded one?”

“If he survives the self-pity, he’ll be fine. Antitetanus booster and a glorified Elastoplast. A and E was the Night of the Living Dead. I only just dropped Cheeseman off at his flat. Did Ness get to the station?”

“For sure. Penhaligon and I escorted her to the taxi rank at Drummer Street, Friday night being Friday night. Fitz met Chetwynd-Pitt and Yasmina after you left and went off clubbing. Then, once Ness was safely off, Penhaligon followed on. I wussed out, spent a sexy hour here with I.F.R. Coates’s Bushonomics and the New Monetarism, then called it a night. Look, I’d”—I do a whale-sized yawn—“invite you in, but I’m bushed.”

“She didn’t …” Olly thinks, and Connect 4 counters drop, “… stick around for a drink or — or anything? At the Buried Bishop?”

“I.F.R. Coates is a bloke, Olly. He teaches at Blithewood College in upstate New York.”

“I meant,” how Olly aches to believe me, “Ness, actually.”

“Ness? Ness just wanted to get to Greenwich.” I’m mildly hurt; Olly ought to trust me not to hit on his girlfriend. “She’d have made the nine fifty-seven to King’s Cross, thence to Greenwich, where she’s no doubt tucked up and dreaming of Olly Quinn, Esquire. Lovely girl, by the way, from the little I saw of her. Obviously besotted with you, too.”

“You reckon? This week she’s been a bit, I don’t know, ratty. I’ve been half afraid she might be …”

I continue to act dumb. Olly lets his sentence fizzle out.

“What?” I say. “Thinking of dumping you? Hardly the impression I got. When these huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ types really fall for a guy they go all headmistressy to hide it. But don’t discount the more obvious cause of female crankiness, either; Lucille used to turn into a scorn-flobbing psychopath every twenty-eight days.”

Olly looks cheerful. “Well. Yeah. Maybe.”

“You’ll be meeting up over Christmas, right?”

“The idea was to sort out our plans tonight.”

“Too bad our Richard needed a Good Samaritan. Mind you, the way you took charge of things back at the pub impressed her to pieces. She said it showed how self-possessed you are when a crisis strikes.”

“She said that? Actually said it?”

“Pretty much verbatim, yes. At the taxi rank.”

Olly’s glowing; if he was six inches tall and fluffy, Toys R Us would ship him by the thousands.

“Olly, mate, I’ll bid thee a fair repose.”

“Sorry, Hugo, sure. Thanks. G’night.”

BACK IN MY bed of woman-smelling warmth, Ness hooks a leg across my thighs: “ ‘Headmistressy’? I should kick you out of bed now.”

“Try it.” I run my hands over her pleasing contours. “You’d better leave at the crack of dawn. I sent you to Greenwich just now.”

“That’s hours away, yet. Anything could happen.”

I draw twirls around her navel with my finger, but I find myself thinking about Immaculée Constantin. I didn’t mention her to the boys earlier; turning her into an anecdote felt unwise. Not unwise: prohibited. When I zoned out on her, she must have thought … What? That I’d entered a sort of seated coma, and left me to it. Pity.

Ness folds back the coverlet for air. “The problem with the Ollies of the world is—”

“Glad you’re so focused on me,” I tell her.

“—is their niceness. Niceness drives me mental.”

“Isn’t a nice boy what every girl is looking for?”

“To marry, sure. But Olly makes me feel trapped inside a Radio 4 play about … frightfully earnest young men in the nineteen fifties.”

“He did mention you’d been out of sorts lately. Ratty.”

“If I’m ratty, he’s an overgrown wobbly puppy.”

“Well, the course of true love never did—”

“Shut up. He’s so embarrassing socially. I’d already decided to dump him on Sunday. Tonight just seals the deal.”

“If poor doomed Olly’s a Radio 4 play, what am I?”

“You, Hugo,” she kisses my earlobe, “are a sordid, low-budget French film. The sort you’d stumble across on TV at night. You know you’ll regret it in the morning, but you keep watching anyway.”

A lost tune is whistled in the quad below.

December 20

“A ROBIN.” Mum points through the patio windows at the garden, clogged with frozen slush. “There, on the handle of the spade.”

“He looks freshly arrived off a Christmas card,” says Nigel.

Dad munches broccoli. “What’s my spade doing out of the shed?”

“My fault,” I say. “I was filling the coal scuttle. I’ll put it back after. Though, first, I’ll put Alex’s plate to keep warm: Hot gossip and true love shouldn’t mean cold lunches.” I take my older brother’s plate to the new wood-burning oven and put it inside with a pan lid over it. “Hell’s bells, Mum. You could fit a witch in here.”

“If it had wheels,” says Nigel, “it’d be an Austin Metro.”

“Now that,” crap cars are one of Dad’s loves, “was a pile of.”

“What a pity you’ll miss Aunt Helena at New Year,” Mum tells me.

“It is.” I sit back down and resume my lunch. “Give her my love.”

“Right,” says Nigel. “Like you’d rather be stuck in Richmond over New Year than skiing in Switzerland. You’re mega-jammy, Hugo.”

“How many times have I told you?” says Dad. “It’s not—”

“What you know but who you know,” says Nigel. “Nine thousand, six hundred, and eight, including just now.”

“That’s why getting to a brand-name university matters,” says Dad. “To network with future big fish and not future small-fry.”

“I forgot to mention,” remembers Mum. “Julia’s covered herself in glory — again. She’s won a scholarship to study human-rights law, in Montreal.”

I’ve always had a thing for my cousin Julia, and the thought of covering her in anything is Byronically diverting.

“Lucky she takes after your side of the family, Alice,” says Dad, a dour reference to my ex-uncle Michael’s divorce ten years ago, complete with secretary and love child. “What’s Jason studying again?”

“Something psycho-linguisticky,” says Mum, “at Lancaster.”

Dad frowns. “Why do I associate him with forestry?”

“He wanted to be a forester when he was a kid,” I say.

“But now he’s settled on being a speech therapist,” says Mum.

“A st-st-stuttering sp-sp-speech therapist,” says Nigel.

I grind peppercorns over my mashed pumpkin. “Not grown-up and not clever, Nige. A stammer has to be the best possible qualification for a speech therapist. Don’t you think?”

Nigel does a guess-so face in lieu of admitting I’m right.

Mum sips her wine. “This wine is divine, Hugo.”

“Divine’s the word for Montrachet seventy-eight,” says Dad. “You shouldn’t be spending your money on us, Hugo. Really.”

“I budget carefully, Dad. The office-drone work I do at the solicitor’s adds up. And after everything you’ve done for me down the years, I ought to be able to stand you a bottle of decent plonk.”

“But we’d hate to think of you going short,” says Mum.

“Or your studies suffering,” adds Dad, “because of your job.”

“So just let us know,” says Mum, “if money’s tight. Promise?”

“I’ll come cap in hand, if that ever looks likely. Promise.”

“My money’s tight,” says Nigel, hopefully.

“You’re not living out in the big bad world.” Dad frowns at the clock. “Speaking of which, I only hope Alex’s fräulein’s parents know she’s calling England. It’s the middle of the day.”

“They’re Germans, Dad,” says Nigel. “Big fat Deutschmarks.”

“You say that, but reunification is going to cost the earth. My clients in Frankfurt are very jumpy about the fallout.”

Mum slices a roasted potato. “What’s Alex told you about Suzanne, Hugo?”

“Not a word.” With my knife and fork I slide trout flesh off its bones. “Sibling rivalry, remember.”

“But you and Alex are the firmest of friends, these days.”

“As long as,” says Nigel, “no one utters those six deadly words, ‘Anyone fancy a game of Monopoly?’ ”

I look hurt. “Is it my fault if I can’t seem to lose?”

Nigel snorts. “Just ’cause no one knows how you cheat—”

“Mum, Dad, you heard that hurtful, baseless aspersion.”

“—isn’t proof you don’t cheat.” Nigel wags his knife. My baby brother lost his virginity this autumn: chess magazines and Atari console out, the KLF and grooming products in. “Anyway, I know three things about Suzanne, using my powers of deduction. If she finds Alex attractive, then (a) she’s blind as a bat, (b) she’s used to dealing with toddlers, and (c) she has no sense of smell.”

Enter the Alex: “Who’s got no sense of smell?”

“Fetch Firstborn’s dinner from the oven,” I order Nigel, “or I’ll rat you out and you’ll deserve it.” Nigel obeys, sheepishly enough.

“So how’s Suzanne?” asks Mum. “All well in Hamburg?”

“Yeah, fine.” Alex sits down. He’s a brother of few words.

“She’s a pharmacology student, you said?” states Mum.

Alex spears a brain of cauliflower from the dish. “Uh-huh.”

“And will we be meeting her at some point, do you think?”

“Hard to say,” says Alex, and I think of my own poor dear Mariângela’s vain hopes.

Nigel puts Alex’s lunch in front of our elder brother.

“What I can’t get over,” says Dad, “is how distances have shrunk. Girlfriends in Germany, ski trips to the Alps, courses in Montreal: This is all normal nowadays. The first time I left England was to go to Rome, when I was about your age, Hugo. None of my mates had ever gone so far. A pal and I got the Dover-Calais ferry, hitched a ride down to Marseille, then across to Turin, then Rome. Took us six days. It felt like the edge of the known world.”

Nigel asks, “Did the wheels come off the mail coach, Dad?”

“Funny. I didn’t go back to Rome until two years ago, when New York decided to hold the European AGM there. Off we all jetted in time for a late lunch, a few supervisions, schmoozing until midnight, then the next day we were back in London in time for—”

We hear the phone ring, back in the living room. “It’s for one of you boys,” Mum declares. “Bound to be.”

Nigel skids down the hall and into the living room; my trout gazes up with a disappointed eye. A few moments later, Nigel’s back. “Hugo, that was a Diana on the phone for you — Diana Spinster, Spankser, Spencer, didn’t quite catch it. She said you could pop over to the palace while her husband’s touring the Commonwealth … Something about Tantric plumbing? She said you’d understand.”

“There’s this operation, little brother. It would help that one-track mind of yours. Vets do it cheaply.”

“Who was on the phone, Nigel?” asks Mum. “Before you forget.”

“Mrs. Purvis at the Riverside Villas. She said to tell Hugo that the brigadier’s feeling better today, and if he’d still like to visit this afternoon, he’d be welcome to call between three and five o’clock.”

“Great. If you’re sure you can spare me, Dad …”

“Go go go. Your mother and I are very proud of how you still go to read to the brigadier, aren’t we, Alice?”

Mum says, “Very.”

“Thanks,” I shrug awkwardly, “but Brigadier Philby was so brilliant when I went to see him for my civics class at Dulwich, and so full of stories. It’s the least I can do.”

“Oh, God.” Nigel groans. “Someone’s locked me up inside an episode of Little House on the Prairie.”

“Then let me offer you a way out,” says Dad. “If Hugo’s visiting the brigadier, you can help me collect the tree.”

Nigel looks aghast. “But Jasper Farley and I are going to Tottenham Court Road this afternoon!”

“What for?” Alex loads his fork. “All you do is slobber over hi-fi gear and synthesizers you can’t afford.”

We hear a small crash out on the patio. From the corner of my eye I see a flash of black. A toppled flower pot skitters across the patio, the spade tips over, and the black flash turns into a cat with a robin in its mouth. The bird’s wings are flapping. “Oh.” Mum recoils. “That’s horrible. Can’t we do something? The cat looks so pleased with itself.”

“It’s called survival of the fittest,” says Alex.

“Why don’t I lower the blinds?” asks Nigel.

“Better let nature take its course, darling,” says Dad.

I get up and go out through the back door. The cold air shocks my skin as I go, “Shoo, shoo!” to the cat. The feline hunter leaps onto the garden shed. It watches me. Its tail sashays. The mangled bird is twitching in the black cat’s mouth.

I hear the boomy scrape of an airplane.

A twig snaps. I am intensely alive.

“ACCORDING TO MY husband,” Nurse Purvis steams along moppable carpet to the library of Riverside Villas, “the youth of today are either scroungers-on-benefits, queers, or I’m-all-right-Jacks.” The smell of pine-scented disinfectant stings my nostrils. “But as long as Great Britain breeds fine young men of your cut, Hugo, I for one say we shan’t be collapsing into barbarism any time soon, mmm?”

“Please, Nurse Purvis, my head won’t fit through the library door.” We turn the corner and find a resident clinging to the handrail. She’s frowning at the wintry garden, as if she’s left something out there. A string of drool connects her lower lip to her spearmint-green cardigan.

“Standards, Mrs. Bolitho,” says the nurse, hipping out a tissue from her sleeve. “What do we watch? Our standards, mmm?” She scoops up the saliva stalactite and deposits the tissue in the bin. “You’ll remember Hugo, Mrs. Bolitho — the brigadier’s young friend.”

Mrs. Bolitho turns her head; I think of my trout at lunch.

“Great to see you again, Mrs. Bolitho,” I say cheerfully.

“Say hello to Hugo, Mrs. Bolitho. Hugo’s a guest.”

She looks from me to Nurse Purvis and whimpers.

“What’s that? Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is on the television, in the lounge. The flying car. Why don’t we go and join them, mmm?”

A fox’s head watches us from the wall with a faint smile.

“Stay here,” Nurse Purvis tells Mrs. Bolitho, “while I take Hugo to the library. Then we’ll go to the residents’ room together.”

I wish Mrs. Bolitho a Merry Christmas but the chances are low.

“She has four sons,” Nurse Purvis leads me on, “all with a London post code, but they never visit. You’d think old age was a criminal offense, not a destination we’re all heading to.”

I consider airing my theory that our culture’s coping strategy towards death is to bury it under consumerism and Sansara, that the Riverside Villas of the world are screens that enable this self-deception, and that the elderly are guilty: guilty of proving to us that our willful myopia about death is exactly that.

But, no, let’s not complicate Nurse Purvis’s opinion of me. We reach the library where my guide continues sotto voce: “I know you won’t be put out, Hugo, if the brigadier doesn’t recognize you.”

“Not at all. Does he still suffer from the postage stamp … delusion?”

“It rears its head from time to time, yes. Oh, here’s Mariângela — Mariângela!”

Mariângela approaches with a stack of neatly folded bed linen. “Yugo! Nurse Purvis, she told me you visit today. How is Norwitch?”

“Hugo is at Cambridge University, Mariângela.” Nurse Purvis shivers. “Cambridge. Not Norwich. Quite different.”

“Pardon, Yugo.” Mariângela’s puckish Brazilian eyes arouse not only my hopes. “My geography of England, still a bit rubbish.”

“Mariângela, perhaps you’d bring some coffee to the library for Hugo and the brigadier. I ought to be getting back to Mrs. Bolitho.”

“Of course. It’s been wonderful catching up, Nurse Purvis.”

“Be sure to say goodbye before you leave.” Off she marches.

I ask Mariângela, “What’s she actually like to work for?”

“We are accustomed to dictators in my continent.”

“Does she sleep at night or plug herself into the mains?”

“Is not a bad boss, if you agree with her always. At the least, she is dependable. At the least, she says what she is thinking, honestly.”

I’d describe Mariângela as pouty but not vitriolic. “Look, Angel, we both needed some space.”

“Eight weeks, Yugo. Two letters, two calls, two messages on my answer machine. I need contact, not space.” Okay, so she’s between pouty and wronged woman. “You not an expert on what I need.”

Tell her it’s over, Hugo the Wise advises, but Hugo the Horny loves a uniform. “I’m not an expert on you, Mariângela. Or any other woman. Or myself, even. I had two or three girlfriends before you — but … you’re different. By the end of last summer, the inside of my eyelids was a TV station showing Mariângela Pinto-Pereira, all day, all night. It freaked me out. The only way I could handle it was space. So often, I nearly phoned … but … but … I was an inexperienced boy, Angel, not a malicious one.” I open the library door. “Thanks for some great memories, I’m sorry my insensitivity hurt you. Really.”

Her foot’s in the door. Pouty and sultry. “Nurse Purvis ask I bring you and the brigadier coffee. Is still dark, with one sugar?”

“Yes, please. But no Amazonian voodoo stuff that shrivels up testicles, if that’s okay.”

“Sharp knife is better than voodoo.” She scowls. “Milk or Coffee-mate in your coffee, like you drink it at Came-bridge University?”

“White coffee brings me out in a nasty rash.”

“So if—if—I find you real Brazilian coffee, you drink?”

“Mariângela. Once you’ve tasted the real thing, everything else is a cheap imitation.”

“NEAR THE END now, Brigadier,” I tell the old man, and turn the page. “ ‘But for me all the East is contained in that vision of my youth. It is all on that moment when I opened my young eyes on it. I came upon it from a tussle with the sea — and I was young — and I saw it looking at me. And this is all that is left of it! Only a moment; a moment of strength, of romance, of glamour — of youth!.. A flick of sunshine upon a strange shore, the time to remember, the time for a sigh, and — goodbye! — Night — Goodbye …’ ” I slurp lukewarm coffee: Brigadier Philby’s cup remains untouched. The vital, witty man I knew five years ago is one and the same as the wheelchair-bound husk. Back in 1986 he was seventy going on fifty, living in a big old place in Kew with his devoted widowed sister, Mrs. Hatter. The brigadier was an old friend of my headmaster, and although I was supposed to be mowing his lawn while his broken leg recovered, he recognized a kindred spirit and we ended up spending my civics-class hours on poker, cribbage, and blackjack. Even after his leg had healed I’d go round most Thursday evenings. Mrs. Hatter would “fatten me up” and we’d retire to the card table, where he taught me ways to “Entice Lady Luck to drop her bloomers” that not even Toad guesses at. A dapper dresser and quite the ladies’ man in his day, an obsessive philatelist, linguist, and raconteur. After a glass of port he would talk about days in the Special Boat Section in wartime Norway, and later in the Korean War. He insisted I read Conrad and Chekhov, and taught me how to get a fake passport by finding a name in a graveyard and writing off to Somerset House for a birth certificate. I knew this but pretended I didn’t.

Brigadier Philby hardly stirs nowadays. His head sways now and then, like Stevie Wonder’s at the piano, and dandruff gathers in the furrows of his jacket. His shave was done by a male nurse with a mind on other matters and the old man wears an incontinence nappy. A few malformed words escape the brigadier’s mouth from time to time, but he’s otherwise nonverbal. I’ve no idea whether Conrad’s Youth is bringing him the pleasure it used to, or whether it’s a torment to be reminded of happier days. Or perhaps he has no idea what I’m saying, or even who I am.

Still. Mariângela says that the best way to work with dementia is to act as if the person you knew is still inside the wreckage. If you’re wrong, and the person you knew is gone, then no damage is done but the standards of care stay high; if you’re right, and the person you knew is still bricked up inside, then you are the lifeline. “On to the final page, now, Brigadier. ‘By all that’s wonderful it is the sea, I believe, the sea itself — or is it youth alone? Who can tell? But you here — you all had something out of life: money, love — whatever one gets on shore — and, tell me, wasn’t that the best time, that time we were young at sea; young and had nothing, on the sea that gives nothing, except hard knocks — and sometimes a chance to feel your strength — that only — what you all regret?’ ”

Something flutters in the brigadier’s throat.

A sigh? Or just air, strumming vocal cords?

Through a gap in the trees at the end of the garden I see the Thames, silver and gunmetal.

A five-man boat flits from left to right. Blink and you miss it.

The flat-capped gardener gathers leaves with a rake.

Last paragraph in the dying light: “ ‘And we all nodded at him: the man of finance, the man of accounts, the man of law, we all nodded at him over the polished table that like a still sheet of brown water reflected our faces, lined, wrinkled; our faces marked by toil, by deceptions, by success, by love. Our weary eyes looking still, looking always, looking anxiously for something out of life, that while it is expected is already gone — has passed unseen, in a sigh, in a flash — together with the youth, with the strength, with the romance of illusions.’ ”

I shut the book, and put on the lamp. My watch says 4:15. I rise, and draw the curtains. “Well, sir.” It feels like I’m addressing an empty room. “I shouldn’t tire you out too much, I guess.”

Unexpectedly, the brigadier’s face tautens with alertness and his mouth opens, and although his voice is ghostly and stroke-slurred, I can discern his words: “My … bloody … stamps …”

“Brigadier Philby — it’s Hugo, sir. Hugo Lamb.”

His shaky hand tries to clutch my sleeve. “Police …”

“Which stamps, Brigadier? Which do you mean?”

“Small … fortune …” Intelligence enters his eyes and, for a moment, I think he’s ready to fire off an accusation, but the moment goes. In the corridor outside, a trolley squeaks by. The brigadier I knew has left his bombed-out face, leaving me alone with the clock, shelves of handsome books nobody ever reads, and one certainty: that whatever I do with my life, however much power, wealth, experience, knowledge, or beauty I’ll accrue, I, too, will end up like this vulnerable old man. When I look at Brigadier Reginald Philby, I’m looking down time’s telescope at myself.

MARIÂNGELA’S DREAM-CATCHER SWINGS when I biff it, and I find my lover’s crucifix among her boingy curls. I hold the Son of God in my mouth, and imagine him dissolving on my tongue. Sex may be the antidote to death but it offers life everlasting only to the species, not the individual. On the CD player, Ella Fitzgerald forgets the words to “Mac the Knife” one broiling night in Berlin over forty summers ago. A District Line train rumbles down below. Mariângela kisses the fleshy underside of my forearm, then bites, hard. “Ow,” I complain, enjoying the pain. “Is that Portuguese for ‘the Earth moved for me, my lord and master, how was it for you?’ ”

“Is Portuguese for ‘I hate you, you liar, you cheat, you monster, psycho, pervert, go to rot in the hell, you son of the bitch.’ ”

My erect bishop is unburying itself; the anticipation makes us both laugh, which squishes me out prematurely. I rescue the condom before its gluey viscera stains her purple sheets, and wrap it in a tissue shroud. Coupling is frenzy; decoupling is farce. Mariângela squirms around to face me and I wonder why women are uglier once they’re unpeeled, encrusted, and had. She sits up and sips some water from the glass guarded by Jesus of Rio. “You want?” She brings the glass to my lips. Mariângela guides my hand over her heart: Love love love love love love love, it beats.

Ah, I should have listened to Hugo the Wise …

• • •

“YUGO, WHEN CAN I meet your family?”

I’m putting on my boxers. I’d like a shower, but the Aston Martin dealership is closing soon so I need to hurry. “Why do you want to meet my family?”

“Is normal I want. We see each other six months now. June twenty-first, when you come here first. Tomorrow is December twenty-first.”

God, an anniversary counter. “Let’s go for a meal to celebrate, Angel, but let’s leave my family out of it, hey?”

“I want meet your parents, your brothers …”

Right: Mum, Dad, Nigel, Alex; may I present Mariângela. She hails from a nondescript suburb of Rio, works at Riverside House as a geriatric nurse, and after visiting Brigadier Philby, I shag her scarlet. So: What’s for dinner? I find my T-shirt down the side of her bed. “I don’t really take girlfriends home, to be honest.”

“So, I will be number one. Is very nice.”

“Separate areas of my life”—jeans, zip, belt—“I keep separate.”

“I am your girlfriend, not an ‘area.’ You shamed of me?”

What a sweet stab at emotional blackmail. “You know I’m not.”

Mariângela’s brain knows she should let this drop, but her heart has seized the wheel. “So, you shamed of your family?”

“No more than an average middle son of three.”

“Then … you shamed I am too older than you?”

“You’re twenty-six, Angel. That’s hardly old.”

“So … I am not white enough for your parents?”

I button up my Paul Smith shirt. “Not a factor.”

“So for why I cannot meet my boyfriend’s family?”

Sock one, sock two. “We’re just … not at that stage.”

“Is bool-shit, Yugo. In relationships, you share more than just bodies, yes? When you in Cambridge, drinking shit coffee with all the PhD white girls, I don’t sit here, praying you call, waiting for letters. No. One guy is consultant at private clinic, he ask for date at Japanese restaurant in Mayfair. My friends say, ‘You crazy to say no!’ But I say no — for you.”

I try not to smile at her amateurishness.

“So what am I for? Just for sex when you on vacation?”

Okay, my coat’s over by the door, ditto cowboy boots; she’s still naked as a snowman and no weapons within easy reach. “You’re a friend, Mariângela. Today you’re an intimate friend. But do I want to introduce you to my parents? No. Move in with you? No. Plan a future, fold laundry with you, get a cat? No.”

Another train passes below the window and cue crying scene: a scene as old as hominids and tear glands. It’s happening all over Planet Earth, right now, in all the languages there are. Mariângela wipes her face and looks away, and the Olly Quinns of the world sink to their knees, promising to make things right. I put on my coat and boots. She notices and the tears stop. “You are leaving? Now?”

“If this is our big goodbye, Angel, why prolong the agony?”

Hurt to hatred in five seconds. “Sai da minha frente! Vai pra puta que pariu!”

Good. It’s a cleaner ending if she hates me. With one foot over her threshold, I tell her, “If that consultant of yours wants lessons on Mariângela Pinto-Pereira, tell him I’ll give him a few pointers.”

One murderous scowl, one flash of muscular arm, and one glimpse of prime Brazilian breast later, Jesus of Rio is hurtling my way at meteor velocity; I react with a tenth of a second to spare, and Jesus hits the door and turns into a thousand plaster hailstones.

THE SIX O’CLOCK gloom promises snow. I put on my possum-hair hat. All’s well in Richmond’s prosperous backstreets. House owners draw curtains on middle-class rooms lined with books, hung with art, lit by Christmas trees. I make my short detour via Red Lion Street. The girl at reception in the Aston Martin dealership has curves as pert as the cars’ but facially she’s an out-and-out ET. She’s gossiping on the phone as I stroll by — I give her a curt your-boss-is-expecting-me nod and cross the showroom floor to the open door of VINCENT COSTELLO, SALES TEAM. The occupant looks to be in his early thirties, has a gelled mullet, an off-the-peg suit from a mid-range high-street outfitter, and is making a dog’s dinner of wrapping a big box of Scalextric. “Hi,” he says to me. “Can I help you?” Jack-the-lad accent, east London; a photo of him and a little boy on his desk, but no mummy and no wedding ring.

“Vincent Costello, I presume?”

“Yes. Like it says on the door.”

“I’d like to inquire about the resale value of an Aston Martin Coda. But first,” I peer at the half-wrapped box, “you need an extra thumb.”

“No, no, really, you’re fine.”

“I am, yes, but you are not. Let me help.”

“Okay, cheers. It’s for my five-year-old.”

“Formula One fan, then, is he?”

“Crazy about cars, motorbikes, anything with engines. His mother does the wrapping normally but …” A tongue of Sellotape tears off a strip of paper, and Costello refines an “Oh, shit” into “Oh, sugar.”

“Wrap boxes diagonally.” Before he can argue, I nudge him away. “Get the little squares of Sellotape ready beforehand, persuade the paper to fold, and …” A few seconds later, a perfectly gift-wrapped box sits on his desk. “Good to go.”

Vincent Costello’s duly impressed. “Where d’you learn that?”

“My aunt runs a small chain of upmarket gift shops. It has been known for her wayward nephew to lend a hand.”

“Lucky her. So. Aston Martin Coda, you say?”

“1969, hundred and ten on the clock, one careful owner.”

“Very low mileage for such a mature specimen.” He takes out an A4 sheet of numbers from a drawer in his desk. “May I ask who this careful owner is? ’Cause you haven’t been driving since 1969.”

“No, a friend inherited from his father. I’m Hugo, by the way, Hugo Lamb, and my friend’s one of the Penzance Penhaligons.” We shake hands. “When my friend’s father passed away, he left his family one ungodly financial mess and a humongous bill for inheritance tax.”

Vincent Costello makes a sympathetic grimace. “Right.”

“My friend’s mother’s a lovely woman, but hasn’t got a financial bone in her body. And, to cap it all, their family solicitor cum financial adviser’s just been banged up for fraud.”

“Blimey, it’s one thing after another, isn’t it?”

“Just so. Now, when I last spoke with Jonny, I offered to mention his Aston Martin to our local dealer — you. My parents live on Chislehurst Road. Cowboys outnumber sheriffs in the vintage motor business and I’m guessing a London dealer like yourself could offer a degree of discretion that my friend wouldn’t enjoy if he went to someone in Devon or Cornwall.”

“Your instinct is bang-on, Hugo. Let me consult an up-to-date price list …” Costello opens a file. “Is your own father a client here?”

“Dad’s a BMW man at present, but he may be in the market for something niftier. Beamers are such a yuppie cliché. I’ll mention how helpful you’ve been.”

“I’d appreciate that. Rightio, Hugo. Tell your friend that the ballpark figure for a 1969 Aston Martin Coda with around a hundred K on the clock, all things being equal, is …” Vincent Costello runs his finger down a column, “… in the region of twenty-two thousand. However, London weighting’d work in his favor — I’m thinking of an Arab collector on my client list, a gentleman who’ll pay a bit extra, knowing we sell a sound vehicle, so I could stretch to twenty-five K. We’d need to have our in-house mechanic inspect the vehicle, and Mr. Penhaligon’d need to bring in the paperwork himself.”

“Naturally, we want everything to be aboveboard.”

“Here’s my card, then — I’ll be ready if he calls.”

“Excellent.” I put it in my snakeskin wallet and we shake hands as I leave. “Merry Christmas, Mr. Costello.”

December 23

BERNARD KRIEBEL PHILATELY of Cecil Court, off Charing Cross Road, envelops me with pipe-tobacco fug as the bell jingles. It’s a long, narrow shop with a central stand where sets of midprice stamps are displayed, like LPs. Pricier items live in locked cabinets along the walls. I unwind my scarf, but my old satchel stays around my neck. The radio is warbling Don Giovanni, Act 2. Bernard Kriebel, clad in green tweed and a navy cravat, glances around the customer at the desk to ensure I come in peace; I send him a take-your-time face and stay at a tactful distance, perusing the mint condition Penny Blacks in their humidity-controlled display cabinets. It soon becomes clear, however, that the customer ahead of me is not a happy bunny: “What do you mean, fake?”

“This specimen is closer to a hundred days old,” the proprietor removes his delicate glasses to rub a watery eye, “than a hundred years.”

The customer pinches the air like a comedy Italian: “What about the faded dye? The browned paper? That paper’s not contemporary!”

“Period paper isn’t hard to obtain — although the crosshatch fibers suggest the 1920s more than the 1890s.” Bernard Kriebel’s unhurried English has a Slavonic burr: He’s Yugoslav, I happen to know. “Dunking the paper in weak tea is an old gambit. The blocks must have taken many a night to craft, I’ll admit — though with a list price of twenty-five thousand pounds, the prize justifies the labor. The ink itself is modern — Windsor and Newton Burnt Sienna? — diluted, slightly. Not an inept forgery.”

Appalled falsetto huff: “You accuse me of forgery?”

“I accused someone, not you. Interestingly.”

“You’re trying to beat the price down. Admit it.”

Kriebel grimaces with distaste. “A part-timer at Portobello may bite, or one of the traveling stamp and coin fairs. Now, if you’d excuse me, Mr. Budd, a genuine customer is waiting.”

Mr. Budd snarls a gaaagh and storms out. He tries to slam the door — but it’s not slammable — and he’s gone. Kriebel shakes his head at the ways of the world.

I ask, “Do many forgers bring you their handiwork?”

Kriebel sucks in his cheeks to show he’ll ignore the question. “I know your face …” he searches for me in his mental Rolodex, “… Mr. Anyder. You sold me a Pitcairn Island set of eight in August. A good clean set.”

“I hope you’re well, Mr. Kriebel.”

“Passably. How are your studies? Law at UCL, wasn’t it?”

I think he’s trying to catch me out. “Astrophysics at Imperial.”

“So it was. And have you found any sentient life up there?”

“At least as much as there is down here, Mr. Kriebel.”

He smiles at the old joke and looks at my satchel. “Are you buying or selling this afternoon?”

I bring out the black folder and remove a strip of four stamps.

A Biro in Kriebel’s hand goes tap-tap-tap on the benchtop.

The philatelist and his Anglepoise lamp peer closer.

The Biro falls silent. Bernard Kriebel’s old eyes look my way inquisitorially, so I recite: “Four Indian Half-Anna Deep Blues; 1854 or 1855; from the right of sheet, with part marginal inscription; fresh condition; unused. How am I doing so far?”

“Well enough.” He renews his inspection under a Sherlock-sized magnifying glass. “I won’t pretend that a plethora of these pass through my hands. Did you have any … price in mind?”

“A single franked specimen sold at Sotheby’s last June for two thousand one hundred pounds. Times four, gives us eight thousand four hundred. Add fifty percent for the pristine set, and we’re in the neighborhood of thirteen grand. However. You have Central London overheads, you pay on the nail, and I have high hopes for a long-term relationship, Mr. Kriebel.”

“Oh, I think we are on ‘Bernard’ terms from now on.”

“Then call me Marcus, and my price is ten thousand.”

Kriebel’s already decided to accept, but pretends to agonize out of courtesy: “Commonwealth stamps are underperforming at present.” He lights his pipe and the aria ends. “The highest I can go is eight and a half, alas.”

“It’s an icy day for chasing me to Trafalgar Square, Bernard.”

He sighs through hairy nostrils. “My wife will pull me limb from limb for my softness, but young philatelists should be encouraged. We can agree to split the difference: nine thousand two hundred and fifty?”

“Ten is a simpler, rounder number.” I put on my scarf.

A final sigh. “Ten it is.” We shake. “You’ll take a check?”

“Yes, but, Bernard …” he turns in the doorway to his cubbyhole, “… would you let your sweet Half-Annas out of sight prior to getting your hands on the payment?”

Bernard Kriebel tilts his head at my professionalism. He returns my stamps and goes to prepare my check. A terminally ill bus hauls itself up Charing Cross Road. Demons drag Don Giovanni down into the underworld: The fate of all amateurs who neglect their homework.

I WEAVE THROUGH Christmassy Soho, blaring, steamy, and hazardous with icy slush, cross the glacial stampede of traffic on Regent Street, and arrive at Suisse Integrité Banc’s discreet London office, tucked away behind Berkeley Square. Security Ape holds the bulletproof door open with a nod of recognition; I have an appointment. Once within its airy, mahogany and cream interior, I deposit my check with the petite female teller across the polished desk, who asks no questions beyond, “How are you today, Mr. Anyder?” There’s a little Swiss flag by her computer terminal, and as she fills out my deposit slip, I wonder if Madam Constantin, as a Swiss expatriate of understated means, ever graces this same plush chair. That odd encounter in King’s College Chapel keeps returning to me, even if I’ve experienced no more time-slips. “Until next time, Mr. Anyder,” the teller says, and I agree, Yes, until next time. The money is only the side product of my art, but I still leave feeling armed and flak-jacketed; when Kriebel’s check clears, my account will cross the fifty K mark. This is, of course, a tadpole-sized account for Integrité’s sheets, but it’s a tidy enough stash for an undergraduate paying his own way in the world. And it will multiply. Half of my fellow Humberites — unless their parents are good and willing milkers — are so up to their nostrils in debt and denial that for their first five working years they’ll have to take whatever shit gets flung their way and act like it’s caviar. Not I. I’ll throw it back. Harder.

IN A SHELTERED walkway off Piccadilly Circus, two men in suits and raincoats are blocking off a doorway and haranguing someone, hidden from view. The bright windows of Tower Records shine out through the feeble sleet, and early commuters are pouring into Piccadilly Circus Tube, but my curiosity is piqued. Between the men’s backs I glimpse a shrunken Yeti huddled in an entrance. “Nice business strategy you’ve got worked out,” says one. “You watch people buy flowers there and collar them for money here so they can’t walk off without feeling like callous bastards.” The tormentor sounds drunk. “We’re in marketing, too, see. So what’s your hit rate?”

“I”—the Yeti’s blinking and scared—“I don’t hit no one.”

The tormentors laugh in each other’s face: not a nice sound.

“All — all I’m askin’ for’s a bit of change. The hostel’s thirteen quid a night.”

“Then get yourself a shave and get a job stacking shelves!”

“Nobody’ll give me a job without I’ve got a perm’nent address.”

“Get a permanent address, then. Duh.”

“Nobody’ll rent me a room without I’ve got a job.”

“This one’s got excuses for everything, hasn’t he, Gaz?”

“Hey. Hey. Want a job? I’ll give you a job. Want it?”

The burliest one leans down: “My colleague’s asking you very nicely if you want a job.”

The Yeti swallows and nods. “What’s the job?”

“Hear that, Gaz? Beggars can be choosers, after all.”

“Money collector,” says Gaz. “Ten quid a minute, guaranteed.”

The Yeti has a facial tic. “What do I have to do?”

“The clue’s in the job title.” The guy turns and lobs a pocketful of coins into a gap in the traffic roaring into Piccadilly Circus. “Collect the fucking money, Einstein!” Coins roll between tires and under cars, scattering in ruts of dirty ice. “Look at that, the streets of London are paved with gold.” The two tormentors shuffle off, delighted with themselves, leaving the shrunken Yeti calculating the odds of picking up coins without getting whacked by a bus. “Don’t,” I tell the homeless guy.

He glares at me. “You try sleepin’ in a skip.”

I take out my wallet and offer him two twenties.

He looks at the money and looks at me.

I say, “Three nights in the hostel, right?”

He takes the notes and slips them inside his dirty coat. “Obliged.”

My sacrifice to the gods duly performed, I let Piccadilly Circus Tube Station suck me down into its vortex of body odor and bad breath.

THE LINES ARE simple enough: “Men have imagined republics and principalities that never really existed at all. Yet the way men live is so far removed from the way they ought to live that anyone who abandons what ‘is’ for what ‘should be’ pursues his downfall rather than his preservation; for a man who strives after goodness in all his acts is sure to come to ruin, since there are so many men who are not good.” For this plainspoken pragmatism, Cardinal Pole denounced Niccolò Machiavelli as the devil’s apostle. After Earl’s Court my carriage lurches into the dying light. Gasworks and Edwardian roofs, chimneys and aerials, a supermarket car park, Premises for Rental. Commuters sway like sides of beef and slump like corpses: red-eyed office slaves plugged into Discmans; their podgier selves in their forties buried in the Evening Standard; and nearly retired versions gazing over West London wondering where their lives went. I am the System you have to beat, clacks the carriage. I am the System you have to beat. But what does “beating the system” mean? Becoming rich enough to buy one’s manumission from the daily humiliation of employment? Another train on a parallel track overtakes us slowly enough for me to glimpse the young City worker I’ll have turned into this time next year, squashed against the window, only a meter away. Good skin, good clothes, drained eyes. How to Get Seriously Rich by Thirty reads the cover of his magazine. The guy looks up and sees me. He squints at my Penguin Classic to make out the title, but his train swings away down a different track.

If I have doubts that you beat the system by moving up, I damn well know you don’t beat it by dropping out. Remember Rivendell? The summer before I went up to Cambridge a few of us went clubbing at the Floating World in Camden Town. I took Ecstasy and got off with a waifish girl wearing dried-blood lipstick and clothes made of black cobwebs. Spidergirl and I got a taxi back to her place: a commune called Rivendell, which turned out to be a condemned end-of-terrace squat next to a paper recycling plant. Spidergirl and I frolicked to an early Joni Mitchell LP about seagulls and drowsed until noon, when I was shown downstairs to the Elrond Room, where I ate lentil curry and the squat’s “pioneers” told me how their commune was an outpost of the postcapitalist, postoil, postmoney future. For them everything was “inside the system”—bad — or “outside the system”—good. When one asked me how I wanted to spend my sojourn on Earth, I said something about the media and was bombarded with a collective diatribe about how the system’s media divides people, not connects them. Spidergirl told me that “here in Rivendell, we actually talk to each other, and share tales from wiser cultures, like the Inuit. Wisdom’s the ultimate currency.” As I left, she asked for a “loan” of twenty pounds to buy a few things from Sainsbury’s. I suggested she recite an Inuit folktale at the checkout, because wisdom is the ultimate currency. Some of her response was radical feminist, most was just Anglo-Saxon. What I took from Rivendell, apart from pubic lice and an allergy to Joni Mitchell that continues to the present day, was the insight that “outside the system” means poverty.

Ask the Yeti how free he feels.

AS I TAKE off my hat and boots on the porch, I hear Mum in the front room: “Hold on a moment. That may be him now.” She appears, holding the phone with its cord stretched to the max. “Oh, it is! Superb timing. I’ll put him on. Wonderful to put a voice to the name, as it were, Jonny — season’s greetings and all that.”

I go in after her and mouth, “Jonny Penhaligon?” and Mum nods and leaves, closing the door behind her. The dark front room is lit by the fairy lights on the Christmas tree, pulsing on and off. The receiver lies on the wicker chair; I hold it against my ear, taking in the sound of Penhaligon’s nervous breathing, and the trancey Twin Peaks theme wafting from another room in Tredavoe House. I count from ten to zero, slowly … “Jonny! What a surprise! So sorry to keep you.”

“Hugo, hi, yeah, it’s Jonny. Hi. How are things?”

“Great. All revved up for Christmas. Yourself?”

“Not so great, to be brutally honest, Hugo.”

“Sorry to hear that. Anything I can help with?”

“Um … I don’t know. It’s a bit … awkward.”

“O-kay. Speak.”

“You know the other night, at Toad’s? You remember I was four thousand up when you called it a night?”

“Do I remember? Cleaned out in the first hour, I was. Not so the Pirate of Penzance, eh?”

“Yeah, it was … one of those charmed runs.”

“ ‘Charmed’? Four thousand quid is more than the basic student grant.”

“Well, yeah. It went to my head a bit, a lot, that and the mulled wine, and I thought how fantastic it’d be not to go groveling to Mum for funds every time the account goes low … So, anyway, you’d left, Eusebio was dealing, and I got a flush, spades, jack high. I played it flawlessly — acted like I was bluffing over a pot of crap — till over two thousand quid was on the table.”

“Shitting hell, Jonny. That’s quite a bucketful.”

“I know. We’d agreed to scrap the pot limit, and there were three of us bidding up and up, and nobody was backing down. Rinty only had two pairs, and Bryce Clegg looked at my flush and said, ‘Shafted by the Pirate again,’ but as I scooped up the pot he added, ‘Unless I’ve got — oh, what is this? A full house.’ And he had. Three queens, two aces. I should have gone then, wish to Christ I had. I was still two grand up. But I’d lost two grand and I thought it was just a blip, that if I kept my nerve I’d win it all back. Fortune favors the brave, I thought. One more hand, it’ll turn around … Toad asked me if I wanted to drop out a couple of times, but … by then I was … I was …” Penhaligon’s voice wobbles, “… ten thousand down.”

“Wow, Jonny. Them’s grown-up numbers.”

“So, yeah, we carried on, and my losses piled up, and I didn’t know why the King’s College bells were ringing in the middle of the night, but Toad opened up the curtains and it was daylight. Toad said his casino was closing for the holidays. He offered to scramble eggs for us, but I wasn’t hungry …”

“You win a few,” I console him, “you lose a few. That’s poker.”

“No, Hugo, you don’t get it. Eusebio took a hammering, but I took a … a pulverizing, and when Toad wrote down what I owe, it’s”—a strangled whisper—“fifteen thousand, two hundred. Toad said he’ll round it down to fifteen in the interest of nice round numbers, but …”

“Your sense of honor brings out the best in Toad,” I assure him, peering through the blue velvet curtain. It’s a cold, dark indigo, streetlight-amber night out. “He knows he’s not dealing with an underclass scuzzball with a can’t-pay-won’t-pay attitude.”

Penhaligon sighs. “That’s the awkward thing, you see.”

I act puzzled. “To be honest, I don’t quite see, no.”

“Fifteen thousand pounds is … is quite a lot. A shit of a lot.”

“For a financial mortal like myself, sure — but not for old Cornish aristocracy, surely?”

“I don’t actually have that much in … my main account.”

“Oh. Right. Right! Look, I’ve known Toad since I got to Cambridge and, I promise you, there’s nothing to worry about.”

Penhaligon croaks a hope-tortured “Really?”

“Toad’s cool. Tell him that, with the banks closed over Christmas, you can’t transfer what you owe until the New Year. He knows that a Penhaligon’s word is his bond.”

Here it comes: “But I don’t have fifteen thousand pounds.”

Take a dramatic pause, add a dollop of confusion and a pinch of disbelief. “You mean … you don’t have the money … anywhere?”

“Well … no. Not at present. If I could, I would, but—”

“Jonny. Stop. Jonny, these are your debts. I vouched for you. To Toad. I said, ‘He’s a Penhaligon,’ and that was that. Enough said.”

“Just because your ancestors were admirals and you live in a listed building, that doesn’t make you a billionaire! Courtard’s Bank owns Trevadoe House, not us!”

“Okay, okay. Just ask your mother to write you out a check.”

“For a poker debt? Are you mad? She’d refuse point-blank. Look, what could Toad actually do if, y’know … that fifteen thousand …”

“No no no no no. Toad’s a friendly chap but he’s a businessman, and business trumps friendly chap — ness. Please. Pay.”

“But it’s only a poker game. It’s not like … a legal contract.”

“Debt’s debt, Jonny. Toad believes you owe him this money, and I’m afraid I do too, and if you refuse to honor your debt, I’m afraid the gloves would come off. He wouldn’t put a horse’s head in your bed, but he’d involve your family and Humber College, which, by the by, would take a dim view of its good name being dragged through the gutter press.”

Penhaligon hears his future, and it sounds like a bottle-bank heaved off the roof of a multistory car park. “Oh, shit. Shit. Shit.”

“One possibility does occur to me — but, no, forget it.”

“Right now, I’d consider anything. Anything.”

“No, forget it. I already know what the answer would be.”

“Spit it out, Hugo.”

Persuasion is not about force; it’s about showing a person a door, and making him or her desperate to open it. “That old sports car of yours, Jonny. An Alfa Romeo, is it?”

“It’s a 1969 vintage Aston Martin Coda, but — sell it?”

“Unthinkable, I know. Better just to grovel at your mother’s feet.”

“But … the car was Dad’s. He left it to me. I love it. How could I explain away a missing Aston Martin?”

“You’re an inventive man, Jonny. Tell your family you’d prefer to liquidate your assets and put them in a steady offshore bond issue than tear up and down Devon and Cornwall in a sports car, even if it was your father’s. Look — this just occurs to me now — there’s a dealer in vintage cars here in Richmond. Very discreet. I could pop round before he closes for Christmas, and ask what sort of numbers we’re talking.”

A shuddered sigh from the chilblained toe of England.

“I guess that’s a no,” I say. “Sorry, Jonny, I wish I could—”

“No, okay. Okay. Go and see him. Please.”

“And do you want to tell Toad what’s happening or—”

“Could you call him? I–I don’t think I … I don’t …”

“Leave everything to me. A friend in need.”

I DIAL TOAD’S number from memory. His answering machine clicks on after a single ring. “Pirate’s selling. I’m off to the Alps after Boxing Day, but see you in Cambridge in January. Merry Christmas.” I hang up and let my eye travel over the bespoke bookshelves, the TV, Dad’s drinks cabinet, Mum’s blown-glass light fittings, the old map of Richmond-upon-Thames, the photographs of Brian, Alice, Alex, Hugo, and Nigel Lamb at a range of ages and stages. Their chatter reaches me like voices echoing down speaking tubes from another world.

“All fine and dandy, Hugo?” Dad appears in the doorway. “Welcome back, by the way.”

“Hi, Dad. That was Jonny, a friend from Humber. Wanted to check next term’s reading list for economics.”

“Commendably organized. Well, I left a bottle of cognac in the boot of the car, so I’m just popping out to—”

“Don’t, Dad — it’s freezing out and you’ve still got a bit of a cold. My coat’s there on the peg, let me fetch it.”

“HERE WE ARE again,” says a man, who appears as I shut the rear door of Dad’s BMW, “in the bleak midwinter.” I damn nearly drop the cognac. He’s bundled in an anorak, and shadow from his hood, thrown by the streetlight, is covering his face. He’s only a few paces from the pavement, but definitely on our drive.

“Can I help you?” I’d meant to sound firmer.

“We wonder.” He lowers his hood and when I recognize the begging Yeti from Piccadilly Circus, the bottle of cognac slips from my grip and thumps onto my foot.

All I say is, “You? I …” My breath hangs white.

All he says is, “So it seems.”

My voice is a croak. “Why — why did you follow me?”

He looks up at my parents’ house, like a potential buyer. The Yeti’s hands are in his pockets. There’s room for a knife.

“I’ve got no more money to give you, if that’s what—”

“I didn’t come all this way for banknotes, Hugo.”

I think back; I’m sure I didn’t tell him my name. Why would I have done? “How do you know my name?”

“We’ve known it for a couple of years, now.” His underclass accent’s vanished without trace, I notice, and his diction’s clear.

I peer at his face. An ex-classmate? “Who are you?”

The Yeti scratches his greasy head; he’s got gloves with the fingerends snipped off. “If you mean ‘Who is the owner of this body?’ then, frankly, who cares? He grew up near Gloucester, has head lice, a heroin addiction, and a topical autoimmune virus. If you mean, ‘With whom am I speaking?’ then the answer is Immaculée Constantin, with whom you discussed the nature of power not very long ago. I know you remember me.”

I take a step back; Dad’s BMW’s exhaust pipe pokes my calf. The Yeti of Piccadilly couldn’t have even pronounced “Immaculée Constantin.” “A setup. She prepped you, what to say, but how …”

“How could she have known which homeless beggar you would pay your alms to today? Impossible. And how could she know about Marcus Anyder? Think larger. Redraw what is possible.”

In the next street along a car alarm goes off. “The security services. You’re both — both part of … of …”

“Of a government conspiracy? Well, I suppose it’s larger, but where does paranoia stop? Perhaps Brian and Alice Lamb are agents. Might Mariângela and Nurse Purvis be in on it? Maybe Brigadier Philby isn’t as gaga as he appears. Paranoia is so all-consuming.”

This is real. Look at the Yeti’s footprints in the crusty snow. Smell his mulchy odor of sick and alcohol. Feel the cold biting my lips. You can’t hallucinate these things. “What do you want?”

“To germinate the seed.”

We stare at each other. He smells of greasy biscuit. “Look,” I say, “I don’t know what’s happening here, or why she sent you, or why you’d pretend to be her … But Ms. Constantin needs to know she’s made a mistake.”

“What species of mistake have I made, exactly?” asks the Yeti.

“I don’t want this. I’m not what you think I am. I just want a quiet Christmas and a quiet life with—”

“We know you better than that, Hugo Lamb. We know you better than you do.” The Yeti makes a final amused grunt, turns, and walks down the drive. He tosses a “Merry Christmas” over his shoulder, and then he’s gone.

December 29

HERE AN ALP, THERE AN ALP, everywhere an Alp-Alp. Torn, castellated, blue-white, lilac-white, white-white, scarred by rock faces, fuzzed by snowy woods … I’ve visited Chetwynd-Pitt’s chalet often enough now to know the peaks’ names: the fanglike Grande Dent de Veisivi; across the valley, Sasseneire, La Pointe du Tsaté, and Pointe de Bricola; and behind me, Palanche de la Cretta, taking up most of the sky. I drink in two lungfuls of iced atmosphere and airbrush modernity from all I survey. That airplane in the evening sunlight: gone. The lights of La Fontaine Sainte-Agnès, six hundred meters below: off. The chalets, bell tower, steep-roofed houses, not unlike a little wooden village I had as a kid: erased. The hulking Chemeville station — a seventies concrete turd — with its rip-off coffee shop and its discus-shaped platform where we four Humberites stand: demolished. The télécabines bringing up us skiers and the chair lifts going on up to the summit of Palanche de la Cretta: gone in a pfff! The forty or fifty or sixty skiers skiing downhill on the meandering blue run or the far steeper black route: What skiers? I see no skiers. Rufus Chetwynd-Pitt, Olly Quinn, and Dominic Fitzsimmons, nice knowing you. Up to a point. There. Now that’s what I call medieval. Did La Fontaine Sainte-Agnès exist back then? That skinny girl in the mint-green ski suit leaning on the railing, smoking like all French girls smoke — is it on the school curriculum? — let her stay. Every Adam needs an Eve.

• • •

“WHAT SAY WE add a dash of glory to this run?” Rufus Chetwynd-Pitt lifts his £180 Sno-Fox ski goggles. “The three losers can pick up the winner’s bar tab, from dawn till dusk. Takers?”

“Count me out,” says Olly Quinn. “I’m taking the blue run down. I don’t want to end my first day in the clinic.”

“Hardly a fair contest,” says Dominic Fitzsimmons. “You’ve skied here more often than you’ve siphoned your python.”

“Grannies Quinn and Fitz have made their excuses.” Chetwynd-Pitt turns to me. “What about the Lamb of Doom?”

Chetwynd-Pitt is a better skier than the rest of us, here or anywhere else, and at Sainte-Agnès nightlife prices the “dash of glory” will cost me dearly, but I mime spitting on my palms. “May the best man win, Rufus.” My logic is sound. If he wins the race, he’ll bet more rashly at pool later, but if he takes a tumble and loses, he’ll bet even more rashly later to restore his alpha-male credentials.

Chetwynd-Pitt grins and pulls down his Sno-Foxes. “Glad someone has his balls stitched on. Fitz, you’re our starter.” We go to the top of the run, where Chetwynd-Pitt draws a notional starting line in the dirty snow with his pole. “First to the giant fluffy snowman at the end of the black run is the winner. No griping, no ifs, a direct race to the bottom, as one Etonian said to the other. We’ll see you pair of delicate woollens”—he looks at Fitzsimmons and Quinn—“back at chez moi.”

“Under starter’s orders, then …” declares Fitzsimmons.

Me and Chetwynd-Pitt crouch like Winter Olympians.

“Ready, steady—bang!”

BY THE TIME I’ve settled into my crouch Chetwynd-Pitt is a snowball lob ahead. We barrel it down the first stretch, passing a wedge of Spanish kids who have chosen the middle of the run for a group photo. The run divides into two — blue to the right, black over a sharp lip to the left. Chetwynd-Pitt takes the latter and I follow, grunting at my poor landing a few meters later, but at least I stay upright. The old snow here is glassy but fast and my skis sound like knives being sharpened. I’m accelerating, but so is my opponent’s black-and-orange-Lycra-clad arse as it passes the télécabine pylon. The run curves into the upper wood and the gradient steepens. At thirty, thirty-five, forty klicks an hour, the air scours my cheeks. The four of us zigzagged down this section this morning, but now Chetwynd-Pitt’s taking it straight as a javelin — up to forty-five, fifty kph — as fast as I’ve ever gone on skis, my calves and thighs are aching, and the rushing air’s howling in my ear canals. An unseen but vicious bump launches me for three, five, eight meters … I nearly lose it on landing, but just maintain my balance. Fall at this speed and your only protection against multiple breakages is blind luck. Chetwynd-Pitt disappears around a deep bend up ahead, fifteen seconds before I hit it, misjudging its sharpness and whipping through the overhanging claws of fir trees before wrenching myself back onto the piste. Here come the slalomlike snake-curves: I watch Chetwynd-Pitt weaving in and out of eyeshot; try to follow his angles of incidence; duck on reflex as crows bowl up the tunnel of branches. Suddenly out of the woods, I shoot onto the slower strip between a sheer flank of rock and a neck-breaking drop. Yellow diamond signs with skulls and crossbones warn you away from the edge. My rival slows down a little and glances back … He’s stick-man-distant now, passing the Lonesome Pine on its finger of rock — the halfway point. Four or five minutes in now, surely. I straighten up to rest my stomach muscles and glimpse the town in its hollow below — see the Christmas-tree lights, in the plaza? My bastard goggles are starting to fog up, even though the salesgirl swore they wouldn’t. Chetwynd-Pitt is already entering the lower woods, so I thrust with my poles as far as the Lonesome Pine, then settle back into my racing crouch. Soon I’m up to forty-five, fifty kph again, and I should ease off but the wind in my ears will speak if I dare to go faster, and the lower woods smother me and the tunnel’s a blur and it’s fifty-five, sixty, and I’m flying over a ridge with a savage dip beyond, and the ground’s fallen away … And I soar like a stoner archangel … This freedom is eternal for as long as it lasts … Why are my feet level with my chin?

MY RIGHT FOOT hits the ground first, but my left one’s gone AWOL, and I’m cartwheeling, my body mapped by local explosions of pain — ankle, knee, elbow—shit, my left ski’s gone, whipped off, vamoosed — ground-woods-sky, ground-woods-sky, ground-woods-sky, a faceful of gravelly snow; dice in a tumbler; apples in a tumble dryer; a grunt, a groan, a plea, a shiiiiiiiiit … Gravity, velocity, and the ground; stopping is going to cost a fortune and the only acceptable currency is pain—

OUCH. WRIST, SHIN, rib, butt, ankle, earlobe … Sore, walloped, sure … but unless I’m too doped on natural painkillers to notice, nothing’s broken. Flat on my back in a crash-mat of snow, pine needles, and mossy, stalky mulch. I sit up. My spine still works. That’s always useful. My watch is still working, and it’s 16:10, just as it should be. Tiny silver needles of birdsong. Can I stand? I have an ache instead of a right buttock; and my coccyx feels staved in by a geologist’s hammer … But, yes, I can stand, which makes this one of my luckiest escapes. I lift my goggles, brush the snow off my jacket, unclip the ski I still have and use it as a staff to hobble uphill, searching for its partner. One minute, two minutes, still no joy. Chetwynd-Pitt will be giving the fluffy snowman a victory punch down in the village just about now. I backtrack, searching through the undergrowth along the side of the piste. There’s no dishonor in taking a fall on a black run — it’s not as if I’m a professional or a ski instructor — but returning to chez Chetwynd-Pitt forty minutes after Fitzsimmons and Quinn with one ski missing would be, frankly, crap.

Here comes a whooshing sound — another skier — and I stand well back. It’s the French girl from the viewing platform — who else wears mint green this season? She takes the rise as gracefully as I was elephantine, lands like a pro, sees me, takes in what’s happened, straightens up, and stops a few meters away on the far side of the piste. She bends down to retrieve what turns out to be my ski and brings it over to me. I muster my mediocre French: “Merci … Je ne cherchais pas du bon côté.”

“Rien de cassé?”

I think she’s asking if I’ve broken anything. “Non. À part ma fierté, mais bon, ça ne se soigne pas.”

She hasn’t removed her goggles so, apart from a few loose strings of wavy black hair and an unsmiling mouth, my Good Samaritaness’s face stays unseen. “Tu en as eu, de la veine.”

I’m a jammy bugger? “Tu peux …” “Bloody well say that again,” I’d like to say. “C’est vrai.”

“Ça ne rate jamais: chaque année, il y a toujours un couillon qu’on vient ramasser à la petite cuillère sur cette piste. Il restera toute sa vie en fauteuil roulant, tout ça parce qu’il s’est pris pour un champion olympique. La prochaine fois, reste sur la piste bleu.”

Jesus, my French is rustier than I thought: “Every year someone breaks their spine and I ought to stick to the blue piste”? Something like that? Whatever it was, she launches herself without a goodbye and she’s gone, swooping through the curves.

BACK AT CHETWYND-PITT’S chalet, floating in the tub, Nirvana’s Nevermind thumping through the walls, I smoke a joint among the steam serpents and peruse the Case of the Body-Hopping Mind for the thousandth time. The facts are deceptively simple: Six nights ago, outside my parents’ home, I encountered one mind in possession of someone else’s body. Weird shit needs theories and I have three.

Theory 1: I hallucinated both the second coming of the Yeti and his secondary proofs, like his footprints and those statements that only Miss Constantin — or I — could have known about.

Theory 2: I am the victim of a stunningly complex hoax, involving Miss Constantin and an accomplice who poses as a homeless man.

Theory 3: Things are exactly as they appear to be, and “mind-walking”—what else to call it? — is a real phenomenon.

The Hallucination Theory: “I don’t feel insane” is a feeble retort, but I really don’t. If I was hallucinating a character so vividly, surely I’d be hallucinating other things too? Like hearing, I don’t know, Sting singing “An Englishman in New York” from inside lightbulbs.

The Complex Hoax Theory: “Why me?” Some people may hold a grudge against Marcus Anyder, if certain fictions were known. But why seek revenge via some wacky plot to loosen my grip on sanity? Why not just kick the living shit out of me?

The Mind-walking Theory: Plausible, if you live in a fantasy novel. Here, in the real world, souls stay inside the body. The paranormal is always, always a hoax.

Water drops go plink, plink, plink from the tap. My palms and fingers are pink and wrinkly. Someone’s thumping upstairs.

So what do I do about Immaculée Constantin, the Yeti, and the weird shit? The only possible answer is “Nothing, for now.” Perhaps I’ll be served another slice tonight, or perhaps it’s waiting for me back in London or Cambridge, or perhaps this will just be one of life’s dangly plot lines that one never revisits. “Hugo?” It’s Olly Quinn, bless him, knocking on the door. “You still alive in there?”

“Yes, the last time I checked,” I shout, over Kurt Cobain.

“Rufus says we should get going before Le Croc fills up.”

“You three go on ahead and get a table. I’ll be along soon.”

LE CROC — A.K.A. LE Croc of Shit to its regulars — is a badger’s set of a drinking hole down an alley off the three-sided plaza in Sainte-Agnès. Günter, the owner, gives me a mock salute and points to the Eagle’s Nest — a tiny mezzanine cubbyhole occupied by my three fellow Richmondians. It’s gone ten, the place is chocka, and Günter’s two saisonniers—one skinny girl in Hamlet black, the other plumper, frillier, and blonder — are busy with orders. Back in the 1970s Günter was ranked the 298th best tennis player in the world (for a week) and has a framed clipping to prove it. Now he supplies cocaine to wealthy Eurotrash, including Lord Chetwynd-Pitt’s eldest scion. His Andy Warhol flop of bleached hair is stylistic self-immolation, but a Swiss-German drug dealer in his fifties does not welcome fashion advice from an Englishman. I order a hot red wine and climb to the Nest, past a copse of seven-foot Dutchmen. Chetwynd-Pitt, Quinn, and Fitzsimmons have eaten — Günter’s daube, a beef stew, and a wedge of apple pie with cinnamon sauce — and have started on the cocktails which, thanks to my lost bet, I have the honor of buying for Chetwynd-Pitt. Olly Quinn’s tanked and glassy-eyed. “Can’t get my head round it,” he’s saying morosely. The boy’s a crap drunk.

“Can’t get your head round what?” I take off my scarf.

Fitzsimmons mouths, “Ness.”

I mime hanging myself with my scarf, but Quinn doesn’t notice: “We’d planned it. I’d drive her to Greenwich, she’d introduce me to Mater and Pater. I’d see her over Christmas, we’d go to Harrods for the sales, skate on the rink at Hyde Park Corner … It was all planned. Then that Saturday, after I took Cheeseman to hospital for his stitches, she calls me up and it’s ‘We’ve come to the end of the road, Olly.’ ” Quinn swallows. “I’m like … huh? She was all, ‘Oh, it’s not your fault, it’s mine.’ She said she’s feeling conflicted, tied-down, and—”

“I know a Portuguese tart who enjoys that tying-down stuff, if that oils your rooster,” says Chetwynd-Pitt.

“Misogynist and unfunny,” says Fitzsimmons, inhaling vapors from his vin chaud. “Splitting up’s an utter bitch.”

Chetwynd-Pitt sucks a cherry. “Specially if you buy an opal necklace Christmas prezzie and get dumped before you can turn the gift into sex. Was it from Ratners Jewellers, Olly? They issue gift tokens for returned items, but not cash. Our groundsman had a wedding called off, that’s how I know.”

“No, it wasn’t from bloody Ratners,” growls Quinn.

Chetwynd-Pitt lets the cherry stone drop into the ashtray. “Oh cheer up, for shitsake. Sainte-Agnès plus New Year equals more Europussy than the Schleswig-Holstein Feline Rescue Society would know what to do with. And I’ll bet you a thousand quid that the feeling-conflicted line means she’s got another boyfriend.”

“Not Ness, no way,” I reassure poor Quinn. “She respects you — and herself — way too much. Trust me. And when Lou dumped you,” this is for Chetwynd-Pitt, “you were a train wreck for months.”

“Lou and I were serious. Olly ’n’ Ness lasted what, all of five weeks? And Lou didn’t dump me. It was mutual.”

“Six weeks, four days.” Quinn looks tortured. “But it’s not time that matters. It felt … like a secret place just us two knew about.” He drinks his obscure Maltese beer. “She fitted me. I don’t know what love is, whether it’s mystical or chemical or what. But when you have it, and it goes, it’s like a … it’s like … it’s …”

“Cold turkey,” says Rufus Chetwynd-Pitt. “Roxy Music were right about love being the drug, and when your supply’s used up, no dealer on earth can help you. Well: There is one — the girl. But she’s gone and won’t see you. See? I do know what poor Olly’s suffering. What I’d prescribe is”—he waggles his empty cocktail glass—“an Angel’s Tit. Crème de cacao,” he tells me, “and maraschino. Pile au bon moment, Monique, tu as des pouvoirs télépathiques.” The plumper waitress arrives with my hot wine, and Chetwynd-Pitt deploys his smart-arse French: “Je prendrai une Alien Urine, et ce sera mon ami ici présent”—he nods at me—“qui réglera l’ardoise.”

“Bien,” says Monique, acting bubbly. “J’aimerais bien moi aussi avoir des amis comme lui. Et pour ces messieurs? Ils m’ont l’air d’avoir encore soif.” Fitzsimmons orders a cassis, and Olly says, “Just another beer.” Monique gathers the used dishes and glasses and off she’s gone.

“Well, I’d fire my unsawn-off shotgun up that,” says Chetwynd-Pitt. “A cuddly six and a half. Yummier than that Wednesday Adams lookalike Günter’s also taken on. Frightmare or what?” I follow his gaze down to the skinnier bargirl. She’s filling a schooner of cognac. I ask if she’s French, but Chetwynd-Pitt’s asking Fitzsimmons, “You’re the answer man tonight, Fitz. What’s this love malarkey all about?”

Fitzsimmons lights a cigarette and passes us the box. “Love is the anesthetic applied by Nature to extract babies.”

I’ve heard that line elsewhere. Chetwynd-Pitt flicks ash into the tray. “Can you do better than that, Lamb?”

I’m watching the skinny barmaid making what must be Chetwynd-Pitt’s Alien Urine. “Don’t ask me. I’ve never been in love.”

“Oh, listen to the poor lamb,” mocks Chetwynd-Pitt.

“That’s crap,” says Quinn. “You’ve had lots of girls.”

Memory hands me a photo of Fitzsimmons’s yummy mummy. “Anatomically, I have some knowledge, sure — but emotionally they’re the Bermuda Triangle. Love, that drug Rufus referred to, that state of grace Olly pines for, that great theme … I’m immune to it. I have not once felt love for any girl. Or boy, for that matter.”

“That’s a pile of steaming bollocks,” says Chetwynd-Pitt.

“It’s the truth. I’ve never been in love. And that’s okay. The colorblind get by just fine not knowing blue from purple.”

“You can’t have met the right girl,” decides Quinn the idiot.

“Or met too many right girls,” suggests Fitzsimmons.

“Human beings,” I inhale my wine’s nutmeggy steam, “are walking bundles of cravings. Cravings for food, water, shelter, warmth; sex and companionship; status, a tribe to belong to; kicks, control, purpose; and so on, all the way down to chocolate-brown bathroom suites. Love is one way to satisfy some of these cravings. But love’s not just the drug; it’s also the dealer. Love wants love in return, am I right, Olly? Like drugs, the highs look divine, and I envy the users. But when the side effects kick in — jealousy, the rages, grief, I think, Count me out. Elizabethans equated romantic love with insanity. Buddhists view it as a brat throwing a tantrum at the picnic of the calm mind. I—”

“I spy an Alien Urine.” Chetwynd-Pitt smirks at the skinny barmaid and the tall glass of melon-green gloop on her tray. “J’espère que ce sera aussi bon que vos Angel’s Tits.”

“Les boissons de ces messieurs.” Lips thin and unlipsticked, with a “messieurs” that came sheathed in irony. She’s gone already.

Chetwynd-Pitt sniffs. “There goes Miss Charisma 1991.”

The others clink their glasses while I hide one of my gloves behind a pot-plant. “Maybe she just doesn’t think you’re as witty as you think you are,” I tell Chetwynd-Pitt. “How does your Alien Urine taste?”

He sips the pale green gloop. “Exactly like its name.”

THE TOURIST SHOPS in Sainte-Agnès’s town square — ski gear, art galleries, jewelers, chocolatiers — are still open at eleven, the giant Christmas tree’s still bright, and a crêpier, dressed as a gorilla, is doing a brisk trade. Despite the bag of coke Chetwynd-Pitt just scored off Günter, we decide to put off Club Walpurgis until tomorrow night. It’s beginning to snow. “Damn,” I say, turning back. “I left a glove at Le Croc. You guys get Quinn home, I’ll catch you up …”

I hurry back down the alley and get to the bar as a large party of He-Norses and She-Norses leaves. Le Croc has a round window; through it I can see the skinny barmaid preparing a jug of Sangria without being seen. She’s very watchable, like the motionless bass player in a hyperactive rock band. She combines a fuck-you punkishness with a precision about even her smallest actions. Her will would be absolutely unswayable, I sense. As Günter takes the jug away into Le Croc’s interior she turns to look at me so I enter the smoky clamor and make my way between clusters of drinkers to the bar. After she’s wiped the frothy head off a glass of beer with the flat of a knife and handed it to a customer, I’m there with my forgotten glove gambit. “Désolé de vous embêter, mais j’étais installé là-haut”—I point to the Eagle’s Nest, but she doesn’t yet give away whether or not she remembers me—“il y a dix minutes et j’ai oublié mon gant. Est-ce que vous l’auriez trouvé?”

Cool as Ivan Lendl slotting in a lob above an irate hobbit, she reaches down and produces it. “Bizarre, cette manie que les gens comme vous ont d’oublier leurs gants dans les bars.”

Fine, so she’s seen through me. “C’est surtout ce gant; ça lui arrive souvent.” I hold up my glove like a naughty puppet and ask it scoldingly, “Qu’est-ce qu’on dit à la dame?” Her stare kills my joke. “En tout cas, merci. Je m’appelle Hugo. Hugo Lamb. Et si pour vous, ça fait”—shit, what’s “posh” in French? — “chic, eh bien le type qui ne prend que des cocktails s’appelle Rufus Chetwynd-Pitt. Je ne plaisante pas.” Nope, not a flicker. Günter reappears with a tray of empty glasses. “Why do you speak French with Holly, Hugo?”

I look puzzled. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“He seemed keen to practice his French,” says the girl, in London English. “And the customer is always right, Günter.”

“Hey, Günter!” An Australian calls over from the bar football. “This bastard machine’s playing funny buggers! I fed it my francs but it’s not giving me the goods.” Günter heads over, Holly loads up the dishwasher, and I work out what’s happened. When she returned my ski on the black run earlier, she used French, but she said nothing when my accent gave me away because if you’re female and working in a ski resort you must get hit on five times a day, and speaking French with Anglophones strengthens the force field. “I just wanted to say thanks for returning my ski earlier.”

“You already did.” Working-class background; unintimidated by rich kids; very good French.

“This is true, but I’d be dying of hypothermia in a lonely Swiss forest if you hadn’t rescued me. Could I buy you dinner?”

“I’m working in a bar while tourists are eating their dinner.”

“Then could I buy you breakfast?”

“By the time you’re having breakfast, I’ll have been mucking out this place for two hours, with two more hours to go.” Holly slams shut the glass-washer. “Then I go skiing. Every minute spoken for. Sorry.”

Patience is the hunter’s ally. “Understood. Anyway, I wouldn’t want your boyfriend to misinterpret my motives.”

She pretends to fiddle with something under the counter. “Won’t your friends be waiting for you?”

Odds of four to one there’s no boyfriend. “I’ll be in town for ten days or so. See you around. Good night, Holly.”

“G’night,” and piss off, add her spooky blue eyes.

December 30

THE BAYING OF THE PARISIAN MOB drains into the drone of a snowplow, and my search through French orphanages for the Cyclops-eyed child ends with Immaculée Constantin in my tiny room at the family Chetwynd-Pitt’s Swiss chalet telling me gravely, You haven’t lived until you’ve sipped Black Wine, Hugo. Then I’m waking up in the very same garret groinally attached to a mystifying dawn horn as big as a cruise missile. A bookshelf, a globe, a Turkish gown hanging from the door, a thick curtain. “This is where we put the scholarship boys,” Chetwynd-Pitt only half joked when I first stayed here. The old pipe lunks and clanks. Dope + Altitude = Screwy Dreams. I lie in my warm womb, thinking about Holly the barmaid. I find I’ve forgotten Mariângela’s face, if not other areas of her anatomy, but Holly’s face I remember in photographic detail. I should have asked Günter for her surname. A little later, the bells of Sainte-Agnès’s church chime eight times. There were bells in my dream. My mouth is as dry as lunar dust and I drink the glass of water on the bedside table, pleased by the sight of the wedge of francs by the lamp — my winnings from last night’s pool session with Chetwynd-Pitt. Ha. He’ll be eager to win the money back, and an eager player is a sloppy player.

I pee in my garret’s minuscule en suite; hold my face in a sinkful of icy water for the count of ten; open the curtains and slatted shutters to let in the retina-drilling white light; hide last night’s winnings under a floorboard I loosened two visits ago; perform a hundred push-ups; put on the Turkish gown and venture down the steep wooden stairs to the first landing, holding the rope banister. Chetwynd-Pitt’s snoring in his room. The lower stairs take me to the sunken lounge, where I find Fitzsimmons and Quinn buried under tumuli of blankets on leather sofas. The VHS player has spat out The Wizard of Oz, but Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon is still playing on repeat. Hashish perfumes the air and last night’s embers glow in the fireplace. I tiptoe between two teams of Subbuteo soccer players, crunching crisps into the rug, and feed the fire a big log and crumbs of fire lighter. Tongues of flame lick and lap. A Dutch rifle from the Boer War hangs over the mantelpiece, whereon sits a silver-framed photograph of Chetwynd-Pitt’s father shaking hands with Henry Kissinger in Washington, circa 1984. I’m pouring myself a grapefruit juice in the kitchen when the phone there discreetly trills: “Good morning,” I say cutely. “Lord Chetwynd-Pitt the Younger’s residence.”

A male voice states, “Hugo Lamb. Got to be.”

I know this voice. “And you are?”

“Richard Cheeseman, from Humber, you dolt.”

“Bugger me. Not literally. How’s your earlobe?”

“Fine fine fine, but listen, I’ve got serious news. I met—”

“Hang on, where are you? Not Switzerland?”

“Sheffield, at my sister’s, but shut up and listen, this call’s costing me a bollock a minute. I was speaking with Dale Gow last night, and he told me that Jonny Penhaligon’s dead.”

I didn’t mishear. “Our Jonny Penhaligon? No fucking way.”

“Dale Gow heard from Cottia Benboe, who saw it on the local news, News South-West. Suicide. He drove off a cliff, near Truro. Fifty yards from the road, through a fence, three-hundred-foot drop onto rocks. I mean … he wouldn’t have suffered. Apart from whatever it was that drove him to do it, of course, and the … final drop.”

I could weep. All that money. Through the kitchen window I watch the snowplow crawl by. A well-timed young priest follows, his cheeks pink and breath white. “That’s … I don’t know what to say, Cheeseman. Tragic. Unbelievable. Jonny! Of all people …”

“Same here. Really. The last person you’d expect …”

“Did he … Was he driving his Aston Martin?”

A pause. “Yeah, he was. How did you know?”

Be more careful. “I didn’t, but that last night in Cambridge, at the Buried Bishop, he was saying how much he loved that car. When’s the funeral?”

“This afternoon. I can’t go — Felix Finch has got me tickets for an opera and I could never get to Cornwall in time — but maybe it’s for the best. Jonny’s family could do without an influx of strangers arriving at … at … wherever it is.”

“Tredavoe. Did Penhaligon leave a note?”

“Dale Gow didn’t mention one. Why?”

“Just thought it might shed a little light.”

“More details will emerge at the inquest, I suppose.”

Inquest? Details? Sweet shit. “Let’s hope so.”

“Tell Fitz and the others, will you?”

“God, yes. And thanks for phoning, Cheeseman.”

“Sorry for putting a downer on your holiday, but I thought you’d prefer to know. Happy New Year in advance.”

TWO P.M. THE passengers from the cable car pass through the waiting room of the Chemeville station, chattering in most of the major European languages, but she’s not among them, so I direct my mind back to The Art of War. My mind has ideas of its own, however, and directs itself towards a Cornish graveyard where the skin-sack of toxic waste recently known as Jonny Penhaligon is joining its ancestors in the muddy ground. Like as not it’s howling with rain, with an east wind clawing at the mourners’ umbrellas and dissolving the words of “For Those in Peril on the Sea” Xeroxed yesterday onto sheets of A4. Nothing throws the chasm between me and normals into starker relief than grief and bereavement. Even at the tender age of seven, I was embarrassed by — and for — my own family when our dog Twix died. Nigel wept himself sore, Alex was more upset than he had been the time his Sinclair ZX Spectrum arrived minus its transformer, and my parents were morose for days. Why? Twix was out of pain. We no longer had to endure the farts of a dog with colon cancer. Same story when my grandfather died: a tearing-out of hair, gnashing of teeth, revisionism about what a Messiah the tight-arsed old sod had been. Everyone said I’d handled myself manfully at his funeral, but if they could have read my mind, they would have called me a sociopath.

Here’s the truth: Who is spared love is spared grief.

GONE THREE P.M. Holly the barmaid sees me, frowns, and slows: a promising start. I close The Art of War. “Fancy meeting you here.”

Skiers stream by, behind her and between us. She looks around. “Where are your highly amusing friends?”

“Chetwynd-Pitt, which rhymes with Angel’s Tit, I notice—”

“As well as ‘piece of shit’ and ‘sexist git,’ I notice.”

“I’ll file that away. Chetwynd-Pitt’s hungover, and the other two passed through about an hour ago, but I slipped on my ring of invisibility, knowing that my chances of sharing your ski lift up to the top”—I twirl my index finger towards Palanche de la Cretta’s summit—“would be a big fat zero if they were here too. I was embarrassed by Chetwynd-Pitt last night. He was crass. But I’m not.”

Holly considers this and shrugs. “None of it matters.”

“It does to me. I was hoping to go skiing with you.”

“And that’s why you’ve been sitting here since …”

“Since eleven-thirty. Three and a half hours. But don’t feel obligated.”

“I don’t. I just think you’re a bit of a plonker, Hugo Lamb.”

So my name has sunk in. “We’re all of us different things at different times. A plonker now, something nobler at other times. Don’t you agree?”

“Right now I’d describe you as a borderline stalker.”

“Tell me to sod off and off I will duly sod.”

“What girl could resist? Sod off.”

I do an urbane as-you-wish bow, stand, and slip The Art of War into my ski jacket. “Sorry for embarrassing you.” I head out.

“Oy.” It’s a lightening more than a softening. “Who says you’re capable of embarrassing me?”

I knock-knock my forehead. “Would ‘Sorry for finding you interesting’ go down any better?”

“A certain type of girl after a holiday romance would lap it up. Those of us who work here get a bit jaded.”

Machinery clanks and a big engine whines as the down-bound cable-car begins its journey. “I understand that you need armor, working in a bar where Europe’s Chetwynd-Pitts come to play. But jadedness runs through you, Holly, like a second nervous system.”

An incredulous little laugh. “You don’t know me.”

“That’s the weird part: I know I don’t know you. So how come I feel like I do?”

She does an exasperated grunt. “There’s rules … You don’t talk to someone you’ve known five minutes like you’ve known them for years. Bloody stop it.”

I hold up my palms. “Holly, if I am an arrogant twat, I’m a harmless arrogant twat.” I think of Penhaligon. “Virtually harmless. Look, would you let me share your ski lift up to the next station? It’s, what, seven, eight minutes? If I turn into a date from hell, it’ll soon be over — no no no, I know, not a date, it’s a shared ski chair. Then we’ll arrive and, with one expert thrust of your ski poles, I’m history. Please. Please?”

THE SKI LIFT guy clicks our rail into place, and I resist a joke about being swept off my feet as Holly and I are swept off our feet. December 30 has lost its earlier clarity and the summit of the Palanche de la Cretta is hidden in cloud. I follow the ski lift cable from pylon to pylon up the mountainside. The ravine opens up below us and, as I’m mugged by vertigo and grip the bar, my testicles run and hide next to my liver. Forcing myself to look down at the distant ground, I wonder about Penhaligon’s final seconds. Regret? Relief? Blank terror? Or did his head suddenly fill with “Babooshka” by Kate Bush? Two crows fly beneath our feet. They mate for life, my cousin Jason once told me. I ask Holly, “Do you ever have flying dreams?”

Holly looks dead ahead. Her goggles hide her eyes. “No.”

We’ve cleared the ravine again and pass sedately over a wide swath of the piste we’ll be skiing down later. Skiers curve, speed, and amble downhill to Chemeville station.

“Conditions look better after last night’s snow,” I say.

“Yeah. This mist’s getting thicker by the minute, though.”

That is true; the mountain peak is blurry and gray now. “Do you work at Sainte-Agnès every winter?”

“What is this? A job interview?”

“No, but my telepathy’s a bit rusty.”

Holly explains: “I used to work at Méribel over in the French Alps for a guy who knew Günter from his tennis days. When Günter needed a discreet employee, I got offered a transfer, a pay hike, and a ski pass.”

“Why ever would Günter need a discreet employee?”

“Not a clue — and, no, I don’t touch drugs. The world’s unstable enough without scrambling your brain for kicks.”

I think of Madam Constantin. “You’re not wrong.”

Empty ski chairs migrate from the mist ahead. Behind us, Chemeville is fading from view, and nobody’s following us up. “Wouldn’t it be freaky,” I think aloud, “if we saw the dead in the chairs opposite?”

Holly gives me a weird look. “Not dead as in undead, with bits dropping off,” I hear myself trying to explain. “Dead as in your own dead. People you knew, who mattered to you. Dogs, even.” Or Cornishmen.

The steel-tube-and-plastic chair squeaks. Holly’s chosen to ignore my frankly bizarre question, and to my surprise asks this: “Are you from one of those army-officer families?”

“God, no. My dad’s an accountant and Mum works at Richmond Theatre. Why do you ask?”

“ ’Cause you’re reading a book called The Art of War.”

“Oh, that. I’m reading Sun Tzu because it’s three thousand years old, and every CIA agent since Vietnam has studied it. Do you read?”

“My sister’s the big reader, really, and sends me books.”

“How often do you go back to England?”

“Not so often.” She fiddles with a Velcro glove strap. “I’m not one of those people who’ll spill their guts in the first ten minutes. Okay?”

“Okay. Don’t worry, that just means you’re sane.”

“I know I’m sane, and I wasn’t worried.”

Awkward silence. Something makes me look over my shoulder; five ski chairs behind sits a solo passenger in a silver parka with a black hood. He sits with his arms folded, his skis making a casual X. I look ahead again, and try to think of something intelligent to say, but I seem to have left all my witty insights at the ski-lift station below.

AT THE PALANCHE de la Cretta station, Holly slides off the chairlift like a gymnast, and I slide off like a sack of hammers. The ski-lift guy greets Holly in French, and I slope off out of earshot. I find I’m waiting for the skier in the silver parka to appear from the fast-flowing mist; I count a twenty-second gap between each ski chair, so he’ll be here in a couple of minutes, at most. Odd thing is, he never arrives. With mild but rising alarm, I watch the fifth, sixth, seventh chairs after us arrive without a passenger … By the tenth, I’m worried — not so much that he’s fallen off the ski chair, but that he wasn’t there in the first place. The Yeti and Madam Constantin have shaken my faith in my own senses, and I don’t like it. Finally a pair of jolly bear-sized Americans appear, thumping to earth with gusts of laughter and needing the ski-lift guy’s help. I tell myself the skier behind us was a false memory. Or I dreamt him. Holly joins me at the lip of the run, marked by flags disappearing into cloud. In a perfect world, she’ll say, Look, why don’t we ski down together? “Okay,” she says, “this is where I say goodbye. Take care, stay between the poles, and no heroics.”

“Will do. Thanks for letting me hitch a ride up.”

She shrugs. “You must be disappointed.”

I lift my goggles so she can see my eyes, even if she won’t show me hers. “No. Not in the least. Thank you.” I’m wondering if she’d tell me her surname if I asked. I don’t even know that.

She looks downhill. “I must seem unfriendly.”

“Only guarded. Which is fair enough.”

“Sykes,” she says.

“I’m sorry?”

“Holly Sykes, if you were wondering.”

“It … suits you.”

Her goggles hide her face but I’m guessing she’s puzzled.

“I don’t quite know what I meant by that,” I admit.

She pushes off and is swallowed by the whiteness.

THE PALANCHE DE la Cretta’s middle flank isn’t a notorious descent, but stray more than a hundred meters off-piste to the right and you’ll need near-vertical skiing skills or a parachute, and the fog’s so dense that I take my own sweet time and stop every couple of minutes to wipe my goggles. About fifteen minutes down, a boulder shaped like a melting gnome rears from the freezing fog by the edge of the piste. I huddle in its leeward side to smoke a cigarette. It’s quiet. Very quiet. I consider how you don’t get to choose whom you’re attracted to, you only get to wonder about it, retrospectively. Racial differences I’ve always found to have an aphrodisiac effect on me, but class difference is sexuality’s Berlin Wall. Certainly, I can’t read Holly Sykes as well as I can girls from my own incometax tribe, but you never know. God made the whole Earth in six days, and I’m in Switzerland for nine or ten.

A group of skiers weave past the granite gnome, like a school of fluorescent fish. None notices me. I drop my cigarette butt and follow in their wake. The jolly Texans either decided they’d bitten off more than they could chew and went back down on the ski lift, or they’re following at an even more cautious pace than mine. No skier in a silver parka, either. Soon the fog thins, crags, ridges, and contours sketch and shade themselves in, and by the time I reach Chemeville station I’m under the cloud rafters again. I line my innards with a hot chocolate, then take the gentler blue piste down to La Fontaine Sainte-Agnès.

“WELL WELL WELL, the talented Mr. Lamb.” Chetwynd-Pitt’s making garlic bread in the kitchen, or trying to. It’s gone five o’clock but he’s still in his dressing gown. A cigar is balanced across a wine glass and George Michael’s Listen Without Prejudice is on the CD player. “Olly and Fitz went off in search of you two or three hours ago.”

“It’s a big old massif. Needles, haystacks, and all that.”

“And where did your Alpine foray take you aujourd’hui?”

“Up to Palanche de la Cretta, then cross-country. No more nasty black pistes for me. How’s your hangover?”

“How was Stalingrad in 1943? The hair of the dog: ouzo on ice.” He jiggles a small glass of milky liquid and knocks back half.

“Ouzo always reminds me of sperm.” I wish I had a camera as Chetwynd-Pitt swallows the stuff. “Tactless. Sorry.”

He glares at me, puffs on his cigar, and returns to chopping garlic. I fish in a drawer. “Try this revolutionary device: the ‘garlic-crusher.’ ”

Now Chetwynd-Pitt glares at the implement. “The housekeeper must have bought it before we arrived.”

I used it here last year, but never mind. I wash my hands and turn on the oven, which Chetwynd-Pitt had not. “C’mon, make way.” I squeeze the garlicky pulp into the butter.

Grumpy but glad, Chetwynd-Pitt parks his arse on the counter. “I suppose it’s compensation for fleecing me at pool.”

“You’ll get your revenge.” Pepper, parsley, stir with a fork.

“I’ve been thinking about why he did it.”

“I gather we’re talking about Jonny Penhaligon?”

“There’s more to this than meets the eye, Lamb.”

My fork stops: His gaze is … accusing? A code of omertà operates at Toad’s, but no code can be 100 percent secure. “Go on.” Absurdly, I find myself scanning the kitchen for a murder weapon. “I’m all ears.”

“Jonny Penhaligon was a victim of privilege.”

“Okay.” My fork’s stirring again. “Elaborate.”

“A pleb is someone who thinks privilege is about living off the fat of the land and getting chambermaids to nosh you. Truth is, blue blood’s a serious curse in this day and age. First off, the great unwashed laugh at you for having too many syllables in your name and blame you, personally, for class inequality, the deforestation of the Amazon, and the price of beer going up. The second curse is marriage: How can I know if it’s me my future wife loves — as opposed to my eleven hundred acres of Buckinghamshire and the title Lady Chetwynd-Pitt? Third, my future is shackled to estate management. Now, if you want to be a broker earning gazillions or an Antarctic archaeologist or a zero-gravity vibraphonist, it’s ‘If you’re happy we’re happy, Hugo.’ Me, I’ve tenants to keep afloat, charities to sponsor, and a seat in the House of Lords to fill one day.”

I fork garlic butter into grooves in the bread. “My heart bleeds. You’re, what, sixty-third in line to the throne?”

“Sixty-fourth, now whatsisname’s born. But I’m serious, Hugo, and I haven’t finished: The fourth curse is the county hunt. I bloody hate beagles, and horses are moody quad-bikes that piss on your boot and cost thousands in vets’ fees. And the fifth curse is the kicker: the dread that you’ll be the one who loses it all. Start out in life as a social nobody, like you and Olly — no offense — and the only direction you can go is up. Start off with your name in the Domesday Book, like me and Jonny, and the only direction is down the sodding crapper. It’s like an intergenerational pass-the-parcel with bankruptcy instead of a tube of Rolos, and whoever’s alive when the money dries up gets to be the Chetwynd-Pitt who has to learn how to assemble flat-pack furniture from Argos.”

I wrap the garlic bread in foil. “And you reckon this posy of curses was what made Jonny drive off a cliff?”

“That,” says Rufus Chetwynd-Pitt, “and the fact he had nobody to call in his darkest hour. Nobody to trust.”

I put the tray into the oven and crank up the heat.

December 31

I CICLES ARE DRIPPING all down the alley, catching the slanted sun. There’s a barstool propping open the door of Le Croc, and inside Holly is hoovering, attired in baggy army trousers, a white T-shirt, and a khaki baseball cap, which doubles as a ponytail scrunchie. A droplet from an icicle above finds the gap between my coat and my neck and sizzles between my shoulder blades. Holly senses me and turns. As the Hoover’s groan dies, I say, “Knock-knock.”

She recognizes me. “We’re not open. Come back in nine hours.”

“You say, ‘Who’s there?’ It’s a knock-knock joke.”

“I refuse even to open the door, Hugo Lamb.”

“But it’s already a bit open. And look,” I hold up the paper bags from the patisserie, “breakfast. Surely Günter has to let you eat?”

“Some of us had breakfast two hours ago, Poshboy.”

“If you go to Richmond Boys College you get ridiculed for the crime of not being posh enough. How about a midmorning snackette, then?”

“Le Croc doesn’t clean itself.”

“Don’t Günter and your colleague ever help?”

“Günter’s the owner, Monique’s hired just as bar staff. They’ll be wrapped up in each other until after lunch. Literally, as it happens: Günter left his third wife a few weeks ago. So the privilege of sloshing out the sty falls to the manager.”

I look around. “Where’s the manager?”

“You’re looking at her, y’eejit. Me.”

“Oh. Then if Poshboy does the men’s lavvy, will you take a twenty-minute break?”

Holly hesitates. A part of her wants to say yes. “See that long thing? It’s called a mop. You hold the pointy end.”

“TOLD YOU IT was a sty.” Like a time traveler operating her machine, Holly pulls the handles and swivels the valves of the chrome coffeemaker. It hisses, belches, and gurgles.

I wash my hands and take a couple of barstools off a table. “That was one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever done. Men are pigs. They wipe their arses, then miss the toilet bowl, and just leave the scrunched-up shitty tissue where it fell. And the splattered puke in the last cubicle—nice. Vomit sets if it’s just left there. Like Polyfilla.”

“Switch your nose off. Breathe with your mouth.” She brings over a cappuccino. “And someone had to clean every toilet you’ve ever used. If your dad had run a pub instead of a bank, like mine did, it might’ve been you. Thought for the Day.”

I take out an almond croissant and slide the other bags to Holly. “Why don’t you do the cleaning the night before?”

Holly unravels the edge of an apricot pastry. “Günter’s regulars don’t piss off till three in the morning, if I’m lucky. You try facing the cleaning at that time after nine hours’ worth of serving drinks.”

I concede the point. “Well, the bar’s looking battle-ready now.”

“Sort of. I’ll clean the taps later, then restock.”

“There was I, thinking bars just ran themselves.”

She lights a cigarette. “I’d be out of a job if they did.”

“Do you see yourself in, uh, hospitality long-term?”

Holly’s frown is a warning. “What’s it to you?”

“I just … Dunno. You seem capable of doing anything.”

Her frown is both wary and weary. She taps ash from her cigarette. “The schools the lower orders go to don’t exactly encourage you to think that way. Hairdressing courses or garage apprenticeships were more the thing.”

“You can’t blame a crap school forever, though.”

She taps her cigarette. “You’re clever, obviously. But there are some areas where you really don’t know shit, Mr. Lamb.”

I nod and sip my coffee. “Your French teacher was brilliant.”

“My French teacher was nonexistent. I picked it up on the job. Survival. Fending off Frenchmen.”

I dig a bit of almond from my teeth. “So where’s the pub?”

“What pub?”

“The one your dad works in.”

“Owns. Co-owns, in fact, with my mam. It’s the Captain Marlow, by the Thames at Gravesend.”

“Sounds picturesque. Is that where you grew up?”

“ ‘Gravesend’ and ‘picturesque’ don’t exactly waltz around arm in arm. It’s a lot of closed-down factories, paper mills, Blue Circle cement works, council estates, pawn shops, and bookies.”

“It can’t all be misery and postindustrial decay.”

She searches the bottom of her cup. “The older streets are nice, I s’pose. The Thames is always the Thames, and the Captain Marlow’s three centuries old — apparently there’s a letter by Charles Dickens that proves he used to drink there. How ’bout that, Poshboy? A literary reference.”

My blood’s zinging with coffee. “Is your mum Irish?”

“What leads you to that deduction, Sherlock?”

“You said ‘with my mam,’ not ‘with my mum.’ ”

Holly exhales a fat loop of smoke. “Yeah, she’s from Cork. Don’t your friends get annoyed when you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Sifting what they say for clues instead of listening.”

“I’m a detail nerd, that’s all. Have you started the clock on my twenty minutes, by the way?”

“You’re down to”—she checks—“sixteen.”

“Then I’d like to spend the remainder playing bar football.”

Holly scrunches her face. “Bad idea.”

I never know if she’s serious. “How come?”

“ ’Cause I’ll scalp your arse, Poshboy.”

• • •

THE TOWN SQUARE is patchy with melting snow and busy with shoppers, and a red-cheeked brass band’s playing carols. I buy a fund-raising calendar from some school kids and their teacher at a stall by the statue of St. Agnès, and get a chorus of “Merci, Monsieur!” and “Happy New Year,” because my accent tells them I’m English. Holly Sykes did indeed scalp my arse at bar football; she scored rebound goals off the sides, she can lob, and her left-handed goalie’s a lethal weapon. She didn’t smile but I think she enjoyed her victory. We made no plans, but I said I’d drop by the bar tonight, and instead of answering Eeyore-ishly or sarcastically, she just said I’d know where to find her. Stunning progress, and I almost fail to recognize Olly Quinn in the phone box by the bank. He’s looking agitated. If he’s using a phone box instead of Chetwynd-Pitt’s phone, he doesn’t want to be overheard. Would I be fully human if curiosity didn’t get the better of me occasionally? I hide behind the solid wall of the booth where Olly can’t see me. Thanks to a bad line and his angst, Olly’s voice is loud and every punched-out sentence is pretty clear. “You did, Ness. You did! You said you loved me too! You said—”

Oh dear. Despair is as attractive as cold sores.

“Seven times. The first was in bed. I remember … Maybe it was six, maybe eight, who cares, Ness, I … So what’s that about, Ness? Was it one big lie? … Then was it some — some mind-fucking experiment?”

Too late to slam on the brakes now; we’re over the edge.

“No no no, I’m not getting hysterical, I just … No, I’m not, I don’t get what happened, so … What? What was that last bit? This line’s shit … No, not what you said — I said the phone line’s shit … What’s that? You thought you meant it?”

Olly punches the glass of the phone box, hard. “How can you think you love someone? … No, Ness, no, no — don’t hang up. Look. Just … I want things back to how we were, Ness!.. But if you’d explain, if you’d talk, if you’d … I am calm. I’m calm. No, Ness! No no no—”

A phony peace, then an explosive “Fuck it!”

Quinn hammers his fist on the glass a few times. This attracts attention, so I slip back into the stream of shoppers and loop back around the way I came, sideways as I pass, for long enough to see my lovesick classmate folded over, hiding his face in his hands. Crying — in public! The unedifying sight sobers me a tad with regard to Holly. Remember: What Cupid gives, Cupid takes away.

THE AUSTRIAN-ETHIOPIAN DJ is silent and hooded, won’t take requests, and, in the last hour alone, has loped through remixes of the KLF’s “3 A.M. Eternal,” Phuture’s “Your Only Friend,” and the Norfolklorists’ “Ping Pong Apocalypse.” Club Walpurgis is housed in the basement annex of the vast and elderly Hôtel Le Sud, a six-floor, hundred-room angular labyrinth converted in the 1950s from a sanatorium for the tubercular and very wealthy. A recent refit has stripped Club Walpurgis down to a bare-brick Bowie-in-Berlin look, and expanded the dance floor to the size of a tennis court. Submarine lights are strobing and a decent percentage of the two to three hundred dancing skeletons clad in young flesh and high-end apparel is young and female. A snort or two of devil’s dandruff has reerected the Mighty Quinn from his emotional crash earlier, so all four of us have come clubbing. Unusually, I’m the only one who isn’t in the act of pulling; my three fellow Humberites are sitting on a horseshoe-shaped sofa, each nursing a young, attractive black girl. No doubt Chetwynd-Pitt is playing his nineteenth-in-line-to-the-throne card — the drunker he gets, the bluer his blood — Fitzsimmons is flashing his francs, and presumably Quinn’s squeeze just finds him cute and fluffy. Fair play to them all. Any other night I’d go fishing too, and I won’t pretend my Alpine glow, Rupert Everett sultriness, charcoal Harry Enna shirt, and Makoto Grelsch jeans wrapping my rower’s torso aren’t drawing long-lashed attention, but this New Year’s Eve I’d rather get blown by a dance track. Could I be on to a Temptation of Christ deal whereby an act of continence at Club Walpurgis tonight earns me credit in the Bank of Karma to be redeemed by a certain girl from Gravesend? Only Dr. Coke has the answer, and after this archangelic remix of “Walking on Thin Ice” by somebody or other, I’ll go and consult with the good medicine man …

THE CUBICLES IN the Gents are as commodious as Le Bog du Croc is not, and seemingly designed for the insufflation of cocaine: frequently cleaned, spacious, and sans that incriminating gap between the top of the door and the ceiling so common in British clubs. I seat myself upon the throne and produce my compact mirror — borrowed from an elfin Filipina who was angling for a spouse’s visa — and Foo Foo Dust, won from Chetwynd-Pitt at blackjack this very night and stored in a little plastic wrapper inside a bag of menthol Fisherman’s Friends to confuse any canine investigators in the unlikely event … My tooter is a straw made from coarse paper and Sellotape. With superb precision I deposit the last of my coke in a swirl on the mirror and — kids, don’t try this at home, don’t try it anywhere, Drugs Are Bad — toke it up my left nostril in a powerful snort. For five seconds it stings like a nettle being threaded down my throat via my nose, until …

We have liftoff.

The bass is reverberating in my bones and godalmightythat’sgood. I flush the paper straw away, dampen a sheet of loo paper in the cascade, and wipe my mirror clean. Tiny lights I can’t quite see pinprick the hedges of my field of vision. I emerge from the cubicle like the Son of God rolling away the stone, and inspect myself in the mirror — all good, even if my pupils are more Varanus komodoensis than Homo sapiens. Exiting the bogs, I encounter an Armani-clad stoner known as Dominic Fitzsimmons. He smoked a joint earlier, and his habitual sharp-wittedness has bungee-jumped from the bridge and is yet to return. “Hugo, what’s a shit like you doing in a nice place like this?”

“Powdering my nose, dear Fitz.”

He peers up my nostril. “Looks like a blizzard blew in.” He does a melted grin and I can’t help but think of his mother wearing the same smile and nothing else. “We met girls, Hugo. One for CP, one for Olly, one for moi. Come and say hello.”

“You know how shy I am around women.”

He finds this too funny to laugh at. “Pants — on—fire.”

“Really, Fitz, no one loves a gooseberry. Who are they?”

“This is the best part. Okay. Remember that African pop song “Yé Ké Yé Ké”? Summer of … 1988, I think. Massive hit.”

“Uh … Not well, but yeah. What’s his name — Mory Kanté?”

“We are a-wooing Mory Kanté’s backing singers.”

“Riiiiiight. And doesn’t Mory Kanté need them tonight?”

“They did a big gig last night in Geneva, but tonight they’re free and they’ve never learned to ski — lack of snow in Algeria, I presume — so they’ve all come to Sainte-Agnès for two or three days to learn.”

I find this story semi-plausible, more semi than plausible, but before I can voice my skepticism Chetwynd-Pitt rocks up. “It’s the season of lurrrve back at chez CP. There’s a still a slab of Gruyère in the fridge for you to impregnate, Lamb, so you won’t feel left out.”

Southern Comfort, cocaine, and horniness turns my old friend Chetwynd-Pitt into an A1 shithead and compels me to retaliate: “I don’t want to shit in your baguette, Rufus, but hasn’t it occurred to you you’re pulling a trio of tarts? They have that air of paid sex about them. I’m only asking.”

“You may be better at cheating at cards than us but tonight you’ve failed to pull.” Chetwynd-Pitt pokes my chest and I imagine ripping off the offending index finger. “We’ve got three dusky maidens zero-to-gagging for it in less than sixty minutes, so Lamb decides we’re paying them. Well, actually, no, they’re discerning women, so you’d better put your earplugs in: Shandy’s a screamer, I can tell.”

I can’t let that pass: “I don’t fucking cheat at cards.”

“Oh, I believe you do fucking cheat at cards, Scholarship Boy.”

“Take your finger off my chest, Gaylord Chetwynd-Pitt, and prove it.”

“Oh, you’re too fucking clever to leave proof, but year in, year out, you’ve fleeced your friends for thousands. Intestinal parasite.”

“If you’re so sure I cheat, Rufus, why do you play me?”

“I won’t again, and in-fucking-fact, Lamb, why don’t—”

“Guys, guys,” says Fitz the stoned peacemaker, “this isn’t you; it’s Colombian snort or whatevertheshit it was that Günter sold you. C’mon, c’mon, c’mon! Switzerland! New Year’s Eve! Shandy’s into lovers, not fighters. Kiss and make up.”

“Cheat-boy can kiss my fat one,” mutters Chetwynd-Pitt, pushing past me. “Get our coats, Fitz. Tell the girls it’s afterparty time.”

The door to the Gents swings behind us. “He didn’t mean it,” said Fitzsimmons, apologetically.

I hope not. For several reasons, I hope not.

I STAY ON the dance floor for DJ Aslanski’s remix of Damon MacNish’s mid-eighties anthem “Exocets for Breakfast,” but Chetwynd-Pitt’s parting shot has disfigured my night by shaking my faith in the whole Marcus Anyder project. I created Anyder not only as fake account holder to own and obscure my ill-gotten gains, but to be a better, sharper, truer version of Hugo Lamb. But if a privileged clot like Chetwynd-Pitt can see through me so easily, I’m not as clever and Anyder isn’t as hidden as I’ve believed up until now. And even if I am a master dissembler, so what? So what if I join a City firm in eight months, and stab and bluff my way to a phone-number income within two years? So what if I own a Maserati convertible, a villa in the Cyclades, and a yacht in Poole harbor by the turn of the century? So what if Marcus Anyder builds his own empire of stocks, properties, portfolios? Empires die, like all of us dancers in the strobe-lit dark. See how the light needs shadows. Look: Wrinkles spread like mildew over our peachy sheen; beat-by-beat-by-beat-by-beat-by-beat-by-beat, varicose veins worm through plucked calves; torsos and breasts fatten and sag; behold Brigadier Philby, French kissing with Mrs. Bolitho; as last year’s song hurtles into next year’s song and the year after that, and the dancers’ hairstyles frost, wither, and fall in irradiated tufts; cancer spatters inside this tarry lung, in that aging pancreas, in this aching bollock; DNA frays like wool, and down we tumble; a fall on the stairs, a heart attack, a stroke; not dancing but twitching. This is Club Walpurgis. They knew it in the Middle Ages. Life is a terminal illness.

PAST THE QUEUE for the gorilla-man’s crêperie on the plaza, under lights strung between the spiky pines, through air shimmering with bells and cold as mountain streams, my feet know the way, and it’s not back to family Chetwynd-Pitt’s Swiss chalet. I take off my gloves to light a cigarette. My watch says 23:58. All Praise the God of Perfect Timing. After giving way to a police 4×4—its snow chains clink, sleigh-bell-like — I walk down the narrow alley to Le Croc and peer in through the round window at the scrum of natives, visitors, and shady in-betweeners; Monique’s fixing drinks but Holly’s not in eyeshot. I go in anyway, and ease myself through flesh, jackets, smoke, chatter, clatter, and phrases of Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage. No sooner do I reach the bar than Günter turns down the volume and clambers onto a stool, whirling a soccer rattle for attention. Our host points at the large clock with the handle of a tennis racket: Less than twenty seconds remain of the old year. “Mesdames et messieurs, Herr und Herren, ladies and gentlemen, signore e signori — le countdown, s’il vous-plaît …” I’m allergic to choruses so I abstain, but as the unified clientele reaches five I feel her eyes pulling mine down from the clock and we watch each other like kids playing a game where the first one to smile loses. A lunatic cheering breaks out, and I lose the game. Holly pours a measure of Kilmagoon over a single cube of ice and slides it my way. “What mystery object did you forget this time?”

I tell her, “Happy New Year.”

New Year’s Day, 1992

THIS MORNING I WAKE in my garret at Chetwynd-Pitt’s, knowing that the phone in the lounge, two floors down, will ring in sixty seconds and that the caller will be my father, with bad news. Obviously it won’t; obviously it’s the dregs of a dream — otherwise I’d have powers of precognition, which I don’t. Obviously. What if Dad’s calling about Penhaligon? What if Penhaligon blabbed in his suicide note, and an officer from Truro has spoken to Dad? Obviously this is postcocaine paranoia, but just in case, just in case, I get up, slip into the Turkish dressing gown, and go down to the sunken lounge where the phone sits silent, and will stay silent, obviously. Miles Davis’s In a Silent Way dribbles out of Chetwynd-Pitt’s room, no doubt to beef up his wigga credentials. The lounge is empty of bodies but full of debris: wineglasses, ashtrays, food wrappers, and a pair of silk boxer shorts over the Boer War rifle. When I got home last night, the Three Musketeers and their backing singers were frolicky and high, so I went straight to bed.

Perching on the back of the sofa, I watch the phone.

09:36, says the clock. 08:36 in the U.K.

Dad’s peering over his glasses at the number I left.

+36 for Switzerland; the area code; the chalet’s number …

Yes, I’ll say, Jonny did play cards from time to time.

Just a bunch of friends. Relaxation, after a long week.

Absolute tops was fifty pounds a sitting, though. Beer money.

How much? Thousands? I’ll laugh, once, in disbelief.

That’s not relaxation, Dad. That’s lunacy. I mean …

He must have fallen in with another bunch altogether.

09:37. The molded plastic phone sits innocuously.

If it doesn’t ring by 09:40, I’ve been scaring myself …

09:45 AND ALL’S well. Thank Christ. I’ll lay off the cocaine for a while — maybe longer. Didn’t the Yeti warn me about paranoia? An orange-juice breakfast and a vigorous ski from Pointe les Hlistes will flush last night’s toxins away, so—

The phone rings. I grab it. “Dad?”

“Morning … Hugo? Is that you?”

Damn it, it is Dad. “Dad! How are you?”

“A bit startled. How the Dickens did you know it was me?”

Good question. “There’s a display on Rufus’s phone,” I lie. “So, uh, Happy New Year. Is everything okay?”

“Happy New Year to you too, Hugo. Can we talk?”

I notice Dad’s subdued tone. Something’s up. “Fire away.”

“Well. The damnedest thing happened yesterday. I was watching the business news at lunch when I had a phone call from a police detective — a lady detective, no less — at Scotland Yard.”

“Good God.” Think think think, but nothing joins up.

“One Superintendent Sheila Young from the Art and Antiques Recovery Division. I had no idea such a thing existed, but apparently if Monet’s Water Lilies gets stolen, say, it’s their job to get it back.”

Either Bernard Kriebel’s shopped me or someone’s shopped Kriebel. “A fascinating job, I guess. But why phone you?”

“Well, actually, Hugo, she wanted a word with you.”

“What about? I certainly haven’t nicked a Monet.”

A worried little laugh. “She wouldn’t actually say. I explained you’re in Switzerland, and she said she’d appreciate your calling her when you get back. ‘To assist in an ongoing inquiry.’ ”

“And you’re sure this wasn’t some idiot’s idea of a practical joke?”

“She sounded real. There was a busy office in the background.”

“Then I’ll call Detective Sheila Young the moment I’m home. Some manuscript got nicked from Humber Library, I wonder? They have a few. Or … nope, I’m clueless, but I’m itching with curiosity.”

“Super. I–I must admit, I didn’t tell your mother.”

“Tactful, but feel free to tell her. Hey, if I end up in Wormwood Scrubs, she can do the ‘Free Hugo’ campaign.”

Dad’s laugh is brighter. “I’ll be there, with my placard.”

“Splendiferous. So, apart from Interpol hounding you about your criminal-mastermind son, is everything else okay?”

“Pretty much. I’m back to work on the third, and Mum’s rushed off her feet at the theater, but that’s panto season for you. You’re quite sure you don’t need a lift from the airport when you get home?”

“Thanks, Dad, but the Fitzsimmonses’ driver is dropping me off. See you in eight days or so, when our mystery will be resolved.”

I GO UPSTAIRS with scenarios flashing by at twenty-four frames a second: The brigadier’s died and a legal executor is asking, “What valuable stamps?”; Nurse Purvis is asked about the brigadier’s visitors; Kriebel points the finger at Marcus Anyder; CCTV footage gets reviewed; I’m identified; I conduct a taped interview with Sheila Young; I deny her accusations, but Kriebel appears from behind a one-way mirror—“It’s him.” Formal charges; bail denied, expulsion from Cambridge, four years for theft and fraud, two suspended; if it’s a quiet news day I’ll make the national papers — OLD RICHMONDIAN STEALS STROKE VICTIM’S FORTUNE; out in eighteen months for good behavior, with a criminal record. The only profession open to me will be wheel clamping.

In my garret, I wipe a clear bit on the misted-up window. Snowy roofs, Hôtel Le Sud, sheer peaks. No snow’s falling yet, but the granite sky is full of oaths. January 1.

A compass needle is turning. I feel it.

Pointing to prison? Or somewhere else?

Madam Constantin doesn’t choose people at random.

I hope. Hard rabbitty thumps from below: Quinn.

He comes soon, like a disappointed brontosaurus.

Detective Sheila Young isn’t a trap; she’s a catalyst.

Pack a bag, my instinct says. Be ready. Wait.

I obey, then find my place in The Magic Mountain.

THE CHALET OF Sin is astir. I hear Fitzsimmons on the first landing below: “I’ll have a quick shower …” The boiler wakes, the pipes growl, and the shower spatters; women are speaking an African language; earthy laughter; Chetwynd-Pitt booms, “Good morning, Oliver Quinn! Tell me that wasn’t what the doctor ordered!” One of the women — Shandy? — asks, “Rufus, honey, I call our agent, so he know we are okay?” Footsteps go down to the sunken lounge; in the kitchen, the radio leaks that song “One Night in Bangkok”; Fitzsimmons comes out of the shower; male muttering on the landing: “The scholarship boy’s still up in his holding pen … On the phone earlier … If he wants to sulk, let him sulk …” I’m half tempted to yell down, “I’m not bloody sulking, I’m really happy that you all got your rocks off!” but why should I spend my energy on rectifying their assumption? Someone whistles; the kettle’s boiling; then I hear a half-falsetto half-croak half-shout: “You are shitting me!”

I give my full attention. A quiet few seconds … For the second time on this oddest of mornings I experience an inexplicable certitude that something’s about to happen. As if it’s scripted. For the second time, I obey my instinct, close The Magic Mountain, and stow it in my backpack. One of the singers is talking fast and low so I can’t make out what she’s saying, but it prompts a thud-thud-thud up the stairs to the landing, where Chetwynd-Pitt blurts out, “A thousand dollars! They want a thousand fucking dollars! Each!”

Drop, drop, drop, go the pennies. Or dollars. Like the best songs, you can’t see the next line coming, but once it’s sung, how else could it have gone? Fitzsimmons: “They’ve got to be fucking joking.”

Chetwynd-Pitt: “They’re very very not fucking joking.”

Quinn: “But they … they didn’t say they were hookers!”

Chetwynd-Pitt: “They don’t even look like hookers.”

Fitzsimmons: “I don’t have a thousand dollars. Not here!”

Quinn: “Me neither, and if I did, why should I just hand it over?”

Tempting as it is to emerge from my room, stroll on down with a cheery “Would you Romeos like your eggs scrambled or fried?” Shandy’s call to her “agent” is a klaxon with flashing lights blaring out the word pimp, pimp, pimp. Some would say it’s merely a fluke that I have a new pair of Timberland boots in my room, still in their box, but “fluke” is a lazy word.

Chetwynd-Pitt: “This is extortion. I say, fuck ’em.”

Fitzsimmons: “I agree. They’ve seen we have money, and they’re thinking, How do we get a slice of this?”

Quinn: “But, I mean, if we say no, I mean, won’t they—”

Chetwynd-Pitt: “Club us to death with tampons and lipsticks? No, we establish that piss off means piss off, that this is Europe, not Mombasa or whereverthefuck, and they’ll get the idea. Who’ll the Swiss cops side with? Us, or a trio of sub-Saharan rent-a-gashes?”

I wince. From the Bank of Floorboards I withdraw my assets and redeposit the wedge of banknotes in my passport bag. This I secure inside my ski jacket, contemplating that, while the wealthy are no more likely to be born stupid than the poor, a wealthy upbringing compounds stupidity while a hardscrabble childhood dilutes it, if only for Darwinian reasons. This is why the elite need a prophylactic barrier of shitty state schools, to prevent clever kids from working-class post codes ousting them from the Enclave of Privilege. Angry voices, British and African, are jostling down below. From the street outside I hear a beep. I look through my window and see a gray Hyundai with a skullcap of snow, crawling thisaway with ill intent. It stops, of course, at the mouth of Château Chetwynd-Pitt, blocking the drive. Out step two burly guys in sheepskin jackets. Then Candy, Shandy, or Mandy appears, beckoning them in …

THE FRACAS IN the lounge falls silent. “You, whoever you are,” shouts Rufus Chetwynd-Pitt, “get off my property now or I call the police!”

Camp-Psycho-German with a nasal voice: “You ate in a fancy restaurant, boys. Now it is the time to pay the bill.”

Chetwynd-Pitt: “They never said they were hookers!”

Camp-Psycho-German: “You did not say you are crafted of penis yogurt, yet you are. You are Rufus, I believe.”

“None of your fucking business what my—”

“Disrespectful language is unbusinesslike, Rufus.”

“Get — out — now!”

“Unfortunately, you owe three thousand dollars.”

Chetwynd-Pitt: “Really? Let’s see what the police—”

That must be the TV expiring in a tinkly boom. The bookcase slams on the stone wall? Smash, clang, wallop: glassware, crockery, pictures, mirrors; surely Henry Kissinger won’t escape unscathed. And there’s Chetwynd-Pitt shrieking, “My hand, my f’ck’n’ hand!”

An inaudible answer to an inaudible question.

Camp-Psycho-German: “I CANNOT HEAR YOU, RUFUS!”

“We’ll pay,” whinnies Chetwynd-Pitt, “we’ll pay …”

“Certainly. However, you obliged Shandy to call us, so the price is higher. This is a ‘call-out fee’ in English, I think. In business, we must cover costs. You. Yes, you. What is your name?”

“O-O-Olly,” says Olly Quinn.

“My second wife owned a Chihuahua named Olly. It bit me. I threw it down a … Scheiss, what is it, for an elevator to go up, to go down? The big hole. Olly — I am asking you the English word.”

“A … an elevator shaft?”

“Precisely. I threw Olly into the elevator shaft. So, Olly, you will not bite me. Correct? So. You will now gather your monies.”

Quinn says, “My — my — my what?”

“Monies. Funds. Assets. Yours, Rufus’s, your friend’s. If there is enough to pay our call-out fee, we leave you to your Happy New Year. If not, we do some lateral thinking about how you pay your debts.”

One of the women speaks, and more mumbling. A few seconds later Camp-Psycho-German calls up the stairway. “Beatle Number Four! Join us. You will not be hurt, if you do no heroic actions.”

Soundlessly, I open the window — it’s cold! — and swing my legs over the window ledge. A Hitchcock Vertigo moment: Alpine roofs you’re planning to slide down look suddenly much steeper than Alpine roofs admired from below. Although the angle of Chetwynd-Pitt’s chalet becomes shallower over the kitchen, there’s a real risk that in fifteen seconds I’ll be the screaming owner of two broken legs.

“Lamb?” It’s Fitzsimmons, up on the stairway. “That money you won off Rufus … He needs it. They have knives, Hugo. Hugo?”

I lower myself onto the tiles, gripping the windowsill.

Five, four, three, two, one …

LE CROC IS locked, dark, and there’s no sign of Holly Sykes. Perhaps the bar’s closed tonight, so Holly won’t be in to clean it until tomorrow morning. Why didn’t I ask for her number? I hobble to the town square but even the hub of La Fontaine Sainte-Agnès is in an end-of-the-world mood: few tourists, fewer vehicles, the gorilla-crêpie’s nowhere to be seen, most shops have Fermé signs up. How come? Last year January 1 had quite a buzz. The sky presses lower, the gray of sodden mattresses. I go into La Pâtisserie Palanche de la Cretta, order a coffee and a carac, and slump in the corner by the window, ignoring my throbbing ankle. Detective Sheila Young won’t be thinking about me today, at least. What now? What next? Activate Marcus Anyder? I have his passport in a safety-deposit box at Euston station. A bus to Geneva, a train to Amsterdam or Paris; across on the hovercraft; flight to Panama; the Caribbean … Job on a yacht.

Really? Do I pack in my old life, just like that?

Never see my family again? It’s so abrupt.

Somehow this isn’t what the script says.

Olly Quinn passes the window, just three feet and a pane of glass away, accompanied by a cheerful-looking man in a sheepskin jacket. Camp-Psycho-German’s right hand, I presume. Quinn looks pale and sick. The duo march past the phone box where our Olly had his Ness-based meltdown only yesterday and into Swissbank’s automated lobby where the cashpoints live. Here Quinn makes three withdrawals with three different cards, before being frog-marched back. I hide behind a conveniently to-hand newspaper. A Normal would feel guilt or vindication; I feel as if I just watched a middle-of-the-road episode of Inspector Morse.

“Morning, Poshboy,” says Holly, holding a hot chocolate. She’s beautiful. She’s utterly herself. She’s got a red beret. She’s perceptive. “So, what sort of trouble are you in?”

I don’t know why I deny it. “Everything’s fine.”

“Can I sit down, or are you expecting company?”

“Yes. No. Please. Sit down. No company.”

She removes her ski jacket, the mint-green one, sits opposite me, places her red beret on the table, unwinds her cream scarf from her neck, rolls it up into a ball, and places it on her beret.

“I just went to the bar,” I admit, “but figured you were skiing.”

“The slopes are shut. Because of the blizzard.”

I glance outside again. “What blizzard?”

“You really should listen to the local radio.”

“There’s only so much ‘One Night in Bangkok’ a man can take.”

She stirs her hot chocolate. “You ought to be getting back — the forecast’s for whiteout conditions, within the hour. You can’t see three yards in a whiteout. It’s like being blinded.” She eats a spoonful of froth and waits for me to confess what sort of trouble I’m in.

“I just checked out of the Hotel Chetwynd-Pitt.”

“I’d check in again, if I were you. Really.”

I do a downed-plane hum. “Problematic.”

“Unhappy families in the House of Rufus Sexist-Git?”

I lean forward. “Their hot totties from Club Walpurgis turned out to be prostitutes. Their pimps are extracting every last centime they can scare out of them as we speak. I exited via an escape hatch.”

Holly shows no surprise at this common ski-resort tale. “So what’s your plan?”

I look into her serious eyes. A dum-dum bullet of happiness tears through my innards. “I don’t know.”

She sips her hot chocolate and I wish I was it. “You don’t look as worried as I would be, if I was in your shoes.”

I sip my own coffee. A pan hisses in the bakery kitchen. “I can’t explain it. It’s … impending metamorphosis.” I can see she doesn’t understand, and I don’t blame her. “Do you ever … know stuff, Holly? Stuff that you cannot possibly know, yet … Or — or lose hours. Not as in, ‘Wow, time flies,’ but as in,” I click my fingers, “there, an hour’s gone. Literally, between one heartbeat and the next. Well, maybe the time thing’s a red herring, but I know my life’s changing. Metamorphosis. That’s the best word I’ve got. You’re doing a good job of not looking freaked, but I must sound utterly, utterly, utterly bonkers.”

“Three too many utterlies. I work in a bar, remember.”

I fight a strong urge to lean over and kiss her. She’d slap me away. I feed my coffee a sugar lump. Then she asks, “Where do you plan to stay during your ‘metamorphosis’?”

I shrug. “It’s happening to me. Not me to it.”

“Which sounds cool, but it hardly answers my question. The buses out aren’t running and the hotels are full.”

“Like I said, it’s a very poorly timed blizzard.”

“There’s other stuff you’re not telling me, isn’t there?”

“Oh, tons of stuff. Stuff I’ll never tell anyone, probably.”

Holly looks away, making a decision …

WHEN WE LEFT the town square there were just a few scratchy snowflakes prowling at roof height, but a hundred yards and a couple of corners later it’s as if the vast nozzle of an Alp-sized pump is blasting godalmighty massive coils of snow up the valley. Snow’s up my nose, snow’s in my eyes, snow’s in my armpits, snow howls after us through a stone archway into a grotty yard with dustbins already half buried under snow, snow, snow. Holly fumbles with the key and then we’re in, snow gusting through the gap and the wind whoo-whooing after us until she slams the door shut, and it’s suddenly very peaceful. A short hallway, a mountain bike, stairs going up. Holly’s cheeks are hazed dark pink. Too skinny; if I were her mum I’d get a few fattening desserts down her. We take off our coats and boots and she gestures me up the carpeted stairs first. Above, there’s a light, airy flat with paper lampshades and varnished floorboards that squeak. Holly’s flat’s plainer than my rooms at Humber, and obviously 1970s, not 1570s, but I envy her it. It’s tidy and very sparsely furnished: The big room has an ancient TV and VHS player, a hand-me-down sofa, a beanbag, a low table, a neat pile of books in a corner, and that’s a near-complete inventory. The kitchenette, too, is minimalist: a single plate, dish, cup, knife, fork, and spoon wait on the drainer. Rosemary and sage grow in pots on a shelf. The top three smells are toast, cigarettes, and coffee. The only nod to ornament is a small oil painting of a pale blue cottage on a green slope over a silver ocean. Holly’s large window must offer an amazing view, but today it’s obscured by a blizzard, like white-noise static on an untuned telly. “It’s unbelievable,” I say. “All that snow.”

“It’s a whiteout.” She fills the kettle. “They happen. What did you do to your ankle? You’re limping.”

“I left my old accommodation à la Spiderman.”

“And landed à la sack-of-Spudsman.”

“My Scout pack did the Leaping from Buildings to Escape Violent Pimps badge the week I was away.”

“I’ve got some stretchy bandages you can borrow. But first …” She opens the door of a box room with one window as big as a shoebox lid. “My sister slept here okay, with the sofa cushions and blankets.”

“It’s warm, it’s dry.” I dump my bag inside. “It’s great.”

“Good. I sleep in my room, you sleep here. Yep?”

“Understood.” When a woman is interested in you, she’ll let you know; if not, there’s no aftershave, gift, or line you can spin to make her change her mind. “I’m grateful, Holly. God only knows what I would have done if you hadn’t taken pity on me.”

“You’d have survived. Your sort always does.”

I look at her. “My sort?”

She huffs through her nose.

“F’CHRISSAKES, LAMB, bandage it, it’s not a tourniquet.” Holly is less than impressed by my first aid skills. “Obviously you missed the Junior Doctor badge too. What badges did you get? No, forget I asked. All right,” she puts down her cigarette, “I’ll do it — but if you make any idiotic nurse jokes, your other ankle gets cracked with a breadboard.”

“Definitely no nurse jokes.”

“Foot on the stool. I’m not kneeling at your feet.”

She unravels my cack-handed attempt, tutting at my ineptitude. My sockless swollen foot looks alien, naked, and unattractive against Holly’s fingers. “Here, rub in some arnica cream first — it’s pretty miraculous for swellings and bruises.” She hands me a tube. I obey, and when my ankle’s shiny she wraps the bandage around my foot with just the right degree of pressure and support. I watch her fingers, her loopable black hair, how her face hides and shows her inner weather. This isn’t lust. Lust wants, does the obvious, and pads back into the forest. Love is greedier. Love wants round-the-clock care; protection; rings, vows, joint accounts; scented candles on birthdays; life insurance. Babies. Love’s a dictator. I know this, yet the blast furnace in my ribcage roars You You You You You You just the same, and there’s bugger-all I can do about it. The wind attacks the window. “It’s not too tight?” asks Holly.

“It feels perfect,” I tell her.

“LIKE SNOW IN a snow globe,” Holly says, watching the blizzard. She tells me about UFO hunters who come to Sainte-Agnès, which somehow leads on to working as a strawberry picker in Kent and a grape-picker in Bordeaux; why the Troubles in Northern Ireland won’t end without desegregated schools; how she once skied through a valley three minutes before an avalanche swept through. I light a cigarette and talk about how a bus I missed in Kashmir skidded off the Ladakh road and fell five hundred feet; why townies in Cambridge hate students; why roulette wheels have a zero; how great it is to row on the Thames at six A.M. in the summer. We discuss the first singles we bought, The Exorcist versus The Shining, planetariums and Madame Tussaud’s. We spout a lot of rubbish, but watching Holly Sykes talk is a fine thing. I empty the ashtray again. She quizzes me about my three months’ study program at Blithewood College in upstate New York. I give her the edited highlights, including getting shot at by a hunter who thought I was a deer. She tells me about her friend Gwyn, who worked last year at a summer camp in Colorado. I tell her about how Bart Simpson phones Marge from his summer camp and declares, “I’m no longer afraid of death,” but Holly asks who Bart Simpson is, so I have to explain. Holly talks about the band Talking Heads, like a Catholic discussing her favorite saints. The morning’s gone, we realize. Using a half bag of flour and bits and pieces from her fridge I make us a pizza, which I can tell impresses her more than she lets on. Aubergine, tomatoes, cheese, pesto, and Dijon mustard. There’s a bottle of wine in the fridge, too, but I serve us water in case she thinks I want to get her drunk. I ask if she’s a vegetarian, having noticed that even the stock cubes are veggie. She is, and she tells me how when she was sixteen she was at her great-aunt Eilísh’s house in Ireland, “and this ewe walked by, bleating, and I realized, ‘Sweet fecking hell, I’m eating its children!’ ” I remark how people are superb at not thinking about awkward truths. After I’ve done the dishes—“to pay my rent”—I discover she’s never played backgammon, so I make us a board using the inside of a Weetabix box and a marker. She finds a pair of dice in a jar in a drawer, and we use silver and copper coins for pieces. By the third game she’s good enough for me to plausibly let her win.

“Congratulations,” I tell her. “You’re a fast learner.”

“Ought I to thank you for letting me beat you?”

“Oh no I didn’t! Seriously, you beat me fair and—”

“And you’re a virtuoso liar, Poshboy.”

LATER, WE TRY the TV but the reception’s affected by the storm and the screen’s as blizzardy as the window. Holly finds a black-and-white film on a videotape inherited from the flat’s last tenant. She stretches out on the sofa, I’m sunk into the beanbag, and the ashtray’s balanced on the arm between us. I try to focus on the film and not her body. The film’s British and made, I guess, in the late 1940s. Its opening minutes are missing so we don’t know the title, but it’s quite compelling, despite the Noël Cowardy diction. The characters are on a cruise liner crossing some foggy expanse, and it takes a while for the passengers, Holly, and me to twig that they’re all dead. Each character gets deepened by a backstory — a good Chaucerian mix — before a magisterial Examiner arrives to decide each passenger’s fate in the afterlife. Ann, the saintly heroine, gets a pass into heaven, but her husband, Henry, the Austrian-pianist-resistance-fighter hero, killed himself — head in a gas cooker — and has to work as a steward aboard a similar ocean liner between the worlds. The wife tells the Examiner she’ll exchange heaven to be with her husband. Holly snorts. “Oh, please!” Ann and Henry then hear the sound of breaking glass and wake up in their flat, saved from the gas by the fresh air flooding in through the broken windows. String crescendo, man and wife embrace each other and a new life. The End.

“What a pile of pants,” says Holly.

“It kept us watching.”

The window’s dim mauve except for snowflakes tumbling near the glass. Holly gets up to draw the curtains but stands there, under the spell of the snow. “What’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever done, Poshboy?”

I fidget in my beanbag. It rustles. “Why?”

“You’re so megaconfident.” She draws the curtains and turns around, almost accusingly. “Rich people are, I s’pose, but you’re up on a different level. Do you never do stupid things that make you cringe with embarrassment — or shame — when you look back?”

“If I worked through the hundreds of stupid things I’ve done, we’d still be here next New Year’s Day.”

“I’m only asking for one.”

“Okay, then …” I guess she wants a flash of vulnerable underbelly — it’s like that witless interview question, “What’s your worst fault?” What have I done that’s stupid enough to qualify as a proper answer, but not so morally repugnant (à la Penhaligon’s Last Plunge) that a Normal would recoil in horror? “Okay. I’ve got this cousin, Jason, who grew up in this village in Worcestershire called Black Swan Green. One time, I’d have been about fifteen, my family was visiting, and Jason’s mum sent Jason and me to the village shop. He was younger than me and, as they say, ‘easily led.’ As his sophisticated London cousin, how did I amuse myself? By stealing a box of cigarettes from his village shop, luring poor Jason into the woods, and telling him that to fix his picked-on, shitty life, he had to learn to smoke. Seriously. Like the villain in some antismoking campaign. My meek cousin said, ‘Okay,’ and fifteen minutes later he was kneeling on the grass at my feet, vomiting up everything he’d eaten in the previous six months. There. One stupid, cruel act. My conscience goes ‘You bastard’ whenever I think of it,” I wince to hide my fib, “and I think, Sorry, Jason.”

Holly asks, “Does he smoke now?”

“I don’t believe he’s ever smoked.”

“Perhaps you inoculated him that day.”

“Perhaps I did. Who got you smoking?”

“OFF I WENT, across the Kent marshes. No plan. Just …” Holly’s hand gestures at the rolling distance. “The first night, I slept in a church in the middle of nowhere and … that was when it happened. That was the night Jacko disappeared. Back at the Captain Marlow he had his bath, Sharon read to him, Mam said good night. Nothing seemed wrong — apart from the fact that I’d gone off. After shutting up the pub, Dad went into Jacko’s room as usual to switch his radio off — that’s how he used to fall asleep, listening to foreign voices chuntering away. But, come Sunday morning, Jacko wasn’t there. He wasn’t in the pub. Like some crappy whodunnit puzzle, the doors were locked from the inside. At first the cops — Mam and Dad, even — thought I’d hatched a plot with Jacko, so it was only when …” Holly pauses to stabilize herself, “… I was tracked down, on the Monday afternoon, on this fruit farm on the Isle of Sheppey where I’d blagged a job as a picker, only then did the police start a proper search. Thirty-six hours later. First it was dogs and a radio appeal …” Holly rubs her palm around her face, “… then chains of locals combing wasteland around Gravesend, and police divers checking the … y’know, the obvious places. They found nothing. No body, no witnesses. Days went by, all the leads fizzled out. My parents shut the pub for weeks, I didn’t go to school, Sharon was crying the whole time …” Holly chokes. “You’d pray for the phone to go, then when it did, you’d be too scared it’d be bad news to pick it up. Mam shriveled up, Dad … He was always joking, before it happened. Afterwards, he was … like … hollow. I didn’t go out for weeks and weeks. Basically I left school. If Ruth, my sister-in-law, hadn’t weighed in, taken over, got Mam to go over to Ireland in the autumn, I honestly don’t think Mam’d still be alive. Even now, six years later, it’s still … Terrible to say, but now when I hear on the news about some murdered kid, I think, That’s hell, that’s your worst nightmare, but at least the parents know. At least they can grieve. We can’t. I mean, I know Jacko would’ve come back if he could’ve done, but unless there’s proof, unless there’s a”—Holly’s voice catches—“a body, your imagination never shuts up. It says, What if this happened? If that happened? What if he’s still alive somewhere in some psycho’s basement praying that today’s the day you find him? But even that’s not the worst part …” She looks away so I can’t see her face. There’s no need to tell her to take her time, even though, unbelievably, her travel clock on the shelf says it’s nine forty-five P.M. I light her a cigarette and put it in her fingers. She fills her lungs and slowly empties them. “If I hadn’t run off that weekend — over some stupid fucking boyfriend — would Jacko’ve let himself out of the Captain Marlow that night?” Still turned away, Holly rubs her face. “No. The answer’s no. Which means it’s my fault. Now my family tell me that’s not true, this counselor I went to told me the same, everybody says it. But they don’t have that question—Was it my fault? — drilling into their heads every hour, every day. Or the answer.”

The wind hammers out mad organist’s chords.

“I don’t know what to say, Holly …”

She finishes her glass of white wine.

“… except ‘Stop it.’ It’s rude.”

She turns to me, her eyes red, her face shocked.

“Yes,” I say. “Rude. It’s rude to Jacko.”

Obviously nobody’s ever said this to her.

“Switch places. Suppose Jacko had stormed off somewhere; suppose you’d gone looking for him, but some … evil overtook you and stopped you ever returning. Would you want Jacko to spend his life as self-blame junkie because once, one day, he committed a thoughtless action and made you worry about him?”

Holly looks as if she can’t quite believe I’m daring to say this. Actually, I can’t either. She’s this far from kicking me out.

“You’d want him to live fully,” I go on. “Wouldn’t you? To live more fully, not less. You’d need him to live your life for you.”

The VCR chooses now to trundle out its videotape. Holly’s voice comes out serrated: “So I’m s’posed to act like it never happened?”

“No. But stop beating yourself up because you failed to see how a seven-year-old kid might respond to your ordinary act of teenage rebellion in 1984. Stop burying yourself alive at Le Croc of Shit. Your penance isn’t helping Jacko. Of course his disappearance has changed your life — how could it not? — but why does that make it right to squander your talents and the bloom of your youth serving cocktails to the likes of Chetwynd-Pitt and for the enrichment of the likes of Günter the employee-shagging drug dealer?”

Holly snaps back, “What am I s’posed to do, then?”

“I don’t know, do I? I haven’t had to survive what you’ve had to survive. Though, since you ask, there are countless other Jackos in London you could help. Runaways, homeless teenagers, victims of God only knows what. You’ve told me a lot today, Holly, and I’m honored, even if you think I’m betraying your trust by talking to you like this. But I haven’t heard one thing that forfeits your right to a useful and, yeah, even a content life.”

Holly stands up, looking angry and hurt and puffy-eyed. “Half of me wants to hit you with something metal.” She sounds serious. “So does the other half. So I’ll go to sleep. You’d better leave in the morning. Switch off the light when you go to bed.”

WHEN I’M WOKEN by the wedge of dim light, my head’s in a fog and my body’s gripped in a tangled sleeping bag. Tiny room, more of a walk-in cupboard; silhouetted girl in a man’s rugby shirt, long, loopy hair … Holly: good. Holly, whom I ordered out of a six-year period of mourning for a missing little brother — presumably dead and skillfully buried — come now to turf me out without breakfast into a very uncertain future … pretty bad. But the little window’s black as night still. My eyes are still gouged with tiredness. My dry, cigarette-and-pinot-blanc-caked mouth croaks, “Is it morning already?”

“No,” says Holly.

THE GIRL’S BREATHING deepens as she drifts off. Her futon’s our raft and sleep is the river. I sift through all the scents. “I’m out of practice,” she told me, in a blur of hair, clothing, and skin. I told her I was out of practice too, and she said, “Bullshit, Poshboy.” A long-dead violinist plays a Bach partita on the clock radio. The crappy speaker buzzes on the upper notes, but I wouldn’t trade this hour for a private concert with Sir Yehudi Menuhin playing his Stradivarius. Neither would I want to travel back to my and the Humberites’ very undergrad discourse on the nature of love at Le Croc the other night, but if I did I’d tell Fitzsimmons et al. that love is fusion in the sun’s core. Love is a blurring of pronouns. Love is subject and object. The difference between its presence and its absence is the difference between life and death. Experimentally, silently, I mouth I love you to Holly, who breathes like the sea. This time I whisper it, at about the violin’s volume: “I love you.” No one hears, no one sees, but the tree falls in the forest just the same.

STILL DARK. THE Alpine hush is miles deep. The skylight over Holly’s bed is covered with snow, but now that the blizzard’s stopped I’m guessing the stars are out. I’d like to buy her a telescope. Could I send her one? From where? My body’s aching and floaty but my mind’s flicking through the last night and day, like a record collector flicking through files of LPs. On the clock radio, a ghostly presenter named Antoine Tanguay is working through Nocturne Hour from three till four A.M. Like all the best DJs, Antoine Tanguay says almost nothing. I kiss Holly’s hair, but to my surprise she’s awake: “When did the wind die down?”

“An hour ago. Like someone unplugged it.”

“You’ve been awake a whole hour?”

“My arm’s dead, but I didn’t want to disturb you.”

“Idiot.” She lifts her body to tell me to slide it out.

I loop a long strand of her hair around my thumb and rub it on my lip. “I spoke out of turn last night. About your brother. Sorry.”

“You’re forgiven.” She twangs my boxer shorts’ elastic. “Obviously. Maybe I needed to hear it.”

I kiss her wound-up hair bundle, then uncoil it. “You wouldn’t have any ciggies left, perchance?”

In the velvet dark, I see her smile: A blade of happiness slips between my ribs. “What?”

“Use a word like ‘perchance’ in Gravesend, you’d get crucified on the Ebbsfleet roundabout for being a suspected Conservative voter. No cigarettes left, I’m ’fraid. I went out to buy some yesterday, but found a semiattractive stalker, who’d cleverly made himself homeless forty minutes before a whiteout, so I had to come back without any.”

I trace her cheekbones. “Semiattractive? Cheeky moo.”

She yawns an octave. “Hope we can dig a way out tomorrow.”

“I hope we can’t. I like being snowed in with you.”

“Yeah well, some of us have these job things. Günter’s expecting a full house. Flirty-flirty tourists want to party-party-party.”

I bury my head in the crook of her bare shoulder. “No.”

Her hand explores my shoulder blade. “No what?”

“No, you can’t go to Le Croc tomorrow. Sorry. First, because now I’m your man, I forbid it.”

Her sss-sss is a sort of laugh. “Second?”

“Second, if you went, I’d have to gun down every male between twelve and ninety who dared speak to you, plus any lesbians too. That’s seventy-five percent of Le Croc’s clientele. Tomorrow’s headlines would all be BLOODBATH IN THE ALPS and LAMB THE SLAUGHTERER, and as a vegetarian-pacifist type, I know you wouldn’t want any role in a massacre so you’d better shack up”—I kiss her nose, forehead, and temple—“with me all day.”

She presses her ear to my ribs. “Have you heard your heart? It’s like Keith Moon in there. Seriously. Have I got off with a mutant?”

The blanket’s slipped off her shoulder: I pull it back. We say nothing for a while. Antoine whispers in his radio studio, wherever it is, and plays John Cage’s In a Landscape. It unscrolls, meanderingly. “If time had a pause button,” I tell Holly Sykes, “I’d press it. Right”—I press a spot between her eyebrows and up a bit—“there. Now.”

“But if you did that, the whole universe’d be frozen, even you, so you couldn’t press play to start time again. We’d be stuck forever.”

I kiss her on the mouth and blood’s rushing everywhere.

She murmurs, “You only value something if you know it’ll end.”

NEXT TIME I wake, Holly’s room is gray, like underneath a hole in pack ice. Whispering Antoine is long gone; the radio’s buzzing with French-Algerian rap and the clock says 08:15. She’s showering. Today’s the day I either change my life or I don’t. I locate my clothes, straighten the twisted duvet, and deposit the tissues in a small wicker bin. Then I notice a big round silver pendant, looped over a postcard Blu-Tacked to the wall above the box that serves as a bedside table. The pendant is a labyrinth of grooves and ridges. It’s hand-made, with great care, though it’d be too heavy to wear for long and it’s too big not to attract constant attention. I try to solve it by eye, but get lost once, twice, a third time. Only by holding it in my palm and using my little fingernail to trace a path do I get to the middle. If the maze was real and you were stuck in it, you’d need time and luck. When the moment’s right, I’ll ask Holly about it.

And the postcard? It could be one of a hundred suspension bridges anywhere in the world. Holly’s still in her shower, so I pull the postcard off the wall and turn it over …

Hugo Lamb, meet Sexual Jealousy. Wow. “Ed.” How dare he send Holly a postcard? Or — worse — was it a string of postcards? Was there a follow-up from Athens? Is he a boyfriend? So this is why Normals commit crimes of passion. I want to get Ed’s head fastened into stocks and hurl two-kilo plaster statues of Jesus of Rio at his face until he doesn’t have one. This is what Olly Quinn would want to do to me if he ever found out that I’d poked Ness. Then I notice the 1985 date — deliverance! Hallejulah. But hang on: Why has Holly been carting his postcard around for six years? The cretin doesn’t even know “spinarets” are “minarets.” Unless it’s a private joke. That’d be worse. How dare he share private jokes with Holly? Did Ed give her the maze pendant, too? Makes sense. When she had me inside her, was she imagining I was him? Yes yes yes, I know these snarly thoughts are ridiculous and hypocritical, but they still sting. I want to feed Ed’s postcard to my lighter and watch the Bosphorus Bridge and its sunny day and its sub-sixth-form reportage burn, baby, burn. Then I’d flush its ashes down the sewers, like the Russians did to what was left of Adolf Hitler. No. Deep breath, calm down, keep Hitler out of it, and consider the breezy “Cheers, Ed.” A real boyfriend would write “Love, Ed.” There is the “x,” though. Consider also that if Holly in 1985 was in Gravesend receiving postcards, she wasn’t being gobbled by an Ed on a squeaky European mattress. Ed must’ve been a not-quite-lover-not-quite-friend.

Probably.

“HELP YOURSELF TO the shower,” she says round the door, and I call back, “Thanks,” in a neutral tone to match. Normally I admire uncommitted matter-of-factness the morning after, but with this wooden stake called “Love” whacked through my heart, I want proof of intimacy and have to ignore a strong urge to go and kiss Holly. What if it’s a no? Don’t force it. I have a skin-scalding shower, change into fresh clothes — what do fugitives do for clean laundry? — and go to the kitchenette, where I find a note:

Hugo — I’m a coward about goodbyes, so I’ve gone to Le Croc to start the cleaning. If you want to stay over tonight, bring me breakfast and I’ll find you a feather duster and a frilly apron. If you don’t show up, then such is life, and good luck with your metamorphisis (is that how you spell it?). H.

Not a love letter, but this note of Holly’s is more precious than any piece of correspondence I’ve ever owned, bar none. That Zorro-like three-stroke H is both intimate and runic. Her handwriting’s not girly, it’s a bit of train wreck, really, calligraphically speaking, but it’s legible if you squint and it’s hers. Discoveries. I fold the note into my wallet, grab my coat, clatter down the stairs, and I’m out, treading in Holly’s ten-minutes-old footsteps through knee-deep snow in the courtyard, where the morning cold is a plunging cold; but the blue sky’s blue as Earth from space, and the warmth from the sun’s a lover’s breath; and icicles drip drops of bright in steep-sloped streets from storybooks whose passersby have mountain souls; the kids are glad to be alive and snowballs fly from curb to curb; I raise my hands and say, “Je me rends!” but a snowball scores a direct hit; I turn to find the little shit and clutch my heart — pretend to die—“Il est mort! Il est mort!” the snipers cry, but when I resurrect myself they fly away like fallen leaves; around the corner here’s the square, my favorite square in Switzerland, if not the world; Hôtel Le Sud, the gabled eaves, with Legolandish civic pride, the church clock chimes nine golden times; an Alp rears up on every side; the crêpeman’s setting up his stall across from the patisserie where yesterday this all began; “I’m Not in Love,” claim 10cc but, au contraire, I know I am; the crêpeman looks as if he knows that Holly’s face is all I see on every surface, there transposed; plus nape, lips, jaw, hair, and clothes; I hear her “Sort of,” “Bullshit,” “This is true”; recall her slightly elfish ears; her softnesses; her flattish nose; her guarded eyes of strato-blue; Body Shop tea tree oil shampoo; she’s nearer now with every step; I wonder what she’s thinking … Wondering if I’ll really show? The traffic’s moving pretty slowly, but I’ll wait until the man turns green …

A slush-spattered cream-colored Land Cruiser draws level with where I stand. Before I can feel miffed at having to walk around it, the mirrored window of the driver’s door slides down, and I assume it’ll be a tourist after directions. But, no, I’m wrong. I know this stocky, swarthy driver in a fisherman’s sweater. “G’day, Hugo. You look like a man with a song in his heart.”

His New Zealand accent gives it away. “Elijah D’Arnoq, king of the Cambridge Sharpshooters.” There’s somebody else in the back of the car, but I’m not introduced.

“Your lack of surprise,” I tell D’Arnoq, “suggests this isn’t a chance encounter.”

“Bang on. Miss Constantin sends you her regards.”

I understand. I get to choose between two metamorphoses. One is labeled “Holly Sykes” while the other is … What, exactly?

Elijah D’Arnoq slaps the side of the Land Cruiser. “Hop aboard. Find out what this is all about, or die wondering. Now or never.”

Past the patisserie, down the alley, I can see the crocodile pub sign hanging over Günter’s bar. Fifty paces away? “Get the girl!” counsels the love-drunk, reformed-Scrooge Me. “Imagine her face as you walk in!” The soberer Me folds his arms and looks at D’Arnoq and wonders, “What then?” Well, we’ll eat breakfast; I’ll help Holly clean up the bar; lie low in her place until my fellow Humberites have flown home; we’ll hump like rabbits until we can hardly walk; and while our breaths are coming hard and fast, I’ll blurt out “I love you” and mean it and she’ll blurt out “I love you too, Hugo” and mean it just as much, right then, right there. Then what? I’ll phone the registrar at Humber College to say I’ve suffered a minor breakdown and would like to put my final year on hold. I’ll tell my family — something, no idea what, but I’ll think of something — and buy Holly a telescope. Then what? I find I’m no longer thinking about her every waking moment. Her way of saying “Sort of” or “This is true” begins to grate, and the day comes when we understand that “All You Need Is Love” is rather less than the whole truth. Then what? By now Detective Sheila Young has tracked me down, and her colleagues in Switzerland interview me at the station and only allow me back to Holly’s flat if I surrender my passport. “What’s this about, Poshboy?” Then I’ll have to confess either to stealing an Alzheimer victim’s valuable stamp collection, or luring a fellow student at Humber so deeply into debt that he drove himself off a cliff. Or possibly both, it hardly matters, because Holly will give me back the telescope and get the locks changed. Then what? Agree to go back to London to be interviewed but pick up Marcus Anyder’s passport and book a cheap flight to the Far East or Central America? Such narrative arcs make good movies but shitty existences. Then what? Eke out Anyder’s money until I succumb to the inevitable, open a bar for gap-year kids and turn into Günter. I notice a silver parka on the passenger seat next to D’Arnoq. “Can I just ask for an outline—”

“Doesn’t work like that. You need a leap of faith to leave your old life behind. True metamorphosis doesn’t come with flowcharts.”

All around us life goes on, oblivious to my quandary.

“But I’ll tell you this,” says the New Zealander. “We’ve all been headhunted, except for our founder.” D’Arnoq jerks with his head to the unseen man in the compartment behind. “So I know what you’re feeling right now, Hugo. That space there, between the curb and this car, it’s a chasm. But you’ve been vetted and profiled, and if you cross that chasm, you’ll thrive here. You’ll matter. Whatever you want, now and always, you’ll get.”

I ask him, “Would you make the same choice again?”

“Knowing what I now know, I’d kill to get into this car, if I had to. I’d kill. What you’ve seen Miss Constantin do — that pause button of time at King’s College, or the puppeteering of the homeless guy — that’s just the prelude to lesson one. There’s so much more, Hugo.”

I remember holding Holly in my arms, earlier.

But it’s the feeling of love that we love, not the person.

It’s that giddy exhilaration I just experienced, just now.

The feeling of being chosen and desired and cared about.

It’s pretty pathetic when you examine it clearheadedly.

So. This is a real, live Faustian pact I’m being offered.

I almost smile. Faust tends not to have happy endings.

But a happy ending like whose? Like Brigadier Philby’s?

He passed away peacefully, surrounded by family.

If that’s a happy ending, they’re fucking welcome to it.

When push comes to shove, what’s Faust without his pact?

Nothing. No one. We’d never have heard of him. Quinn.

Dominic Fitzsimmons. Yet another clever postgrad.

Another gray commuter, swaying on the District Line.

The Land Cruiser’s rear door clunks open an inch.

THE MAN — THE FOUNDER — IN the rear of the car acts as if I’m not there, and D’Arnoq says nothing as he drives us away from the town square, so I sit quietly examining my fellow passenger via his reflection in the glass: midforties, frameless glasses, thick if frosted hair; chin cleft, clean-shaven, and a scar over his jawbone, which surely has a story to tell. He has a lean, tough physique. Mittel Europe ex-military? His clothes offer no clues: sturdy ankle-length boots, black moleskin trousers, a leather jacket, once black but battered grayish. If you noticed him in a crowd you might think “architect” or “philosophy lecturer”; but you probably wouldn’t notice him.

There are only two roads out of La Fontaine Sainte-Agnès. One climbs up to the hamlet of La Gouille, but D’Arnoq takes the other, heading down the valley towards Euseigne. We pass a turning for Chetwynd-Pitt’s chalet, and I wonder if the boys are worried about my safety or just pissed off that I abandoned them to their hookers’ pimp. I wonder, but I don’t care. A minute later we’ve passed the town boundary. The road is banked by rising, falling walls of snow, and D’Arnoq drives with caution — the car has snow tires and the road’s been salted, but this is still Switzerland in January. I unzip my coat and think of Holly looking at the clock above the bar, but regret is for the Normals.

“We lost you last night,” states my fellow passenger, in a cultured European accent. “The blizzard hid you from us.”

Now I study him directly. “Yes, I had a disagreement with my host. I’m sorry if it caused you any trouble … sir.”

“Call me Mr. Pfenninger, Mr. Anyder. ‘Anyder.’ A well-chosen name. The principal river on the island of Utopia.” The man watches the monochrome world of valley walls, snow-buried fields, and farm buildings. A river rushes alongside the road, black and very fast.

The interview begins. “May I ask how you know about Anyder?”

“We’ve investigated you. We need to know about everything.”

“Do you work for the security services?”

Pfenninger shakes his head. “Only rarely do our circles overlap.”

“So you have no political agenda?”

“As long as we are left alone, none.”

D’Arnoq slows and drops a gear to take a perilous bend.

Time to be direct: “Who are you, Mr. Pfenninger?”

“We are the Anchorites of the Dusk Chapel of the Blind Cathar of the Thomasite Monastery of Sidelhorn Pass. It’s quite a mouthful, you’ll agree, so we refer to ourselves as the Anchorites.”

“I’d agree it sounds freemasonic. Are you?”

His eyes show a gleam of amusement. “No.”

“Then, Mr. Pfenninger, why does your group exist?”

“To ensure the indefinite survival of the group by inducting its members into the Psychosoterica of the Shaded Way.”

“And you’re the … the founder of this … group?”

Pfenninger looks ahead. Power lines dip and rise from pole to pole. “I am the First Anchorite, yes. Mr. D’Arnoq is now the Fifth Anchorite. Ms. Constantin, whom you met, is the Second.”

Cautiously, D’Arnoq overtakes a salt-spitting truck.

“ ‘Psychosoterica,’ ” I say. “I don’t know the word.”

Pfenninger quotes: “A slumber did my spirit seal, I had no human fears.” He looks like he’s just delivered a subtle punch line, and I realize he just spoke without speaking. His lips were pressed together. Which is not possible. So I must be mistaken. “She seemed a thing that could not feel the touch of earthly years.” Again. His voice sounded in my head, a lush and crisp sound, as if through top-of-the-range earphones. His face defies me to suggest it’s a trick. “No motion has she now, no force; she neither hears nor sees.” No muffled voice, no wobbling throat, no tell-tale gap at the corner of his mouth. A recording? Experimentally, I put my hands over my ears but Pfenninger’s voice is just as clear: “Rolled round in Earth’s diurnal course, with rocks, and stones, and trees.”

I’m gaping. I close my mouth. I ask, “How?”

“There is a word,” Pfenninger says aloud. “Utter it.”

So I manage to mumble, “Telepathy.”

Pfenninger addresses our driver: “Did you hear, Mr. D’Arnoq?”

Elijah D’Arnoq’s peering at us in the rearview mirror. “Yes, Mr. Pfenninger, I heard.”

“Mr. D’Arnoq accused me of ventriloquism, when I inducted him. As if I were a performer on the music-hall circuit.”

D’Arnoq protests: “I didn’t have Mr. Anyder’s education, and if the word ‘telepathy’ was coined back then, it hadn’t reached the Chatham Islands. And I was fried by shell shock. It was 1922.”

“We forgave you decades ago, Mr. D’Arnoq, I and my little wooden puppet with the movable jaw.” Pfenninger glances my way, humor in his eyes, but their banter just makes everything weirder. 1922? Why did D’Arnoq say “1922”? Or did he mean to say 1982? But that doesn’t matter: Telepathy’s real. Telepathy exists. Unless I hallucinated the last sixty seconds. We pass a garage where a mechanic shovels snow. We pass a field where a pale fox stands on a stump, sniffing the air.

“So,” my mouth’s dry, “psychosoterica is telepathy?”

“Telepathy is one of its lesser disciplines,” replies Pfenninger.

“Its lesser disciplines? What else can psychosoterica do?”

A cloud shifts and the fast river’s strafed with light.

Pfenninger asks, “What is today’s date, Mr. Anyder?”

“Uh …” I have to grope for the answer. “January the second.”

“Correct. January the second. Remember.” Mr. Pfenninger looks at me; his pupils shrink and I feel a pinprick in my forehead. I—

• • •

— BLINK, AND THE Land Cruiser is gone, and I find myself on a wide, long rocky shelf on a steep mountainside in high-altitude sunshine. The only reason I don’t fall over is that I’m already sitting on a cold stone block. I huff a few times in panicky shock; my huffs hang there, like vague, blank speech bubbles. How did I get here? Where is here? Around me are the roofless ruins of what might once have been a chapel. Perhaps a monastery — there are more walls farther away. Knee-deep snow covers the ground; the shelf ends at a low wall, a few feet ahead. Behind the ruins a sheer rock face rears up. I’m in my ski jacket, and my face and ears are throbbing and warm, as if I’ve just undergone hard exertion. All these details are nothing alongside this central, gigantic fact: Just now I was in the back of a car with Mr. Pfenninger. D’Arnoq was driving. And now … now …

“Welcome back,” says Elijah D’Arnoq, to my right.

I gasp, “Christ!” and jump up, slip over, jump up, and crouch in fight-or-flight mode.

“Cool it, Lamb! It’s freaky, I know”—he’s seated and unscrewing a Thermos flask—“but you’re safe.” His silver parka gleams in the light. “As long as you don’t run over the edge, like a headless chicken.”

“D’Arnoq, where … What happened and where are we?”

“Where it all began,” says Pfenninger, and I whirl the other way, fending off a second heart attack. He’s wearing a Russian fur hat and snow boots. “The Thomasite Monastery of the Sidelhorn Pass. What’s left of it.” He kicks through the snow to the low wall and gazes out. “You’d believe in the divine if you lived out your life up here …”

They drugged me and lugged me here. But why?

And how? I drank nothing and ate nothing in the Toyota.

Hypnotism? Pfenninger was staring at me as I went under.

No. Hypnotism’s a cheap twist in crap films. Too stupid.

Then I remember Miss Constantin and King’s College Chapel. What if she caused my zone-out — like Pfenninger just did?

“We hiatused you, Mr. Anyder,” says Pfenninger, “to search you for stowaways. It’s intrusive, but we can’t be too careful.”

If that makes sense to him or to D’Arnoq, it makes none to me. “I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”

“I’d be worried if you did, at this stage.”

I touch my head for signs of damage. “How long was I under?”

Pfenninger produces a copy of Die Zeit and hands it to me. On the front page Helmut Kohl is shaking hands with the Sheikh of Saudi Arabia. So what? Don’t tell me the German chancellor is mixed up in this. “The date, Mr. Anyder. Examine the date.”

There, under the masthead: 4. Januar 1992.

Which cannot be right: today is 2 January 1992.

Pfenninger told me to remember it, in the car. Just now.

Just now. Yet still Die Zeit insists today is 4 January 1992.

I feel like I’m falling. Unconscious for two days? No, it’s more likely the newspaper’s a fake. I rustle through its pages, desperate to find evidence that things aren’t what they appear to be.

“It could be a fake,” Pfenninger concedes, “but why construct a falsehood that could be readily demolished?”

I’m head-smashed and, I realize, ravenously hungry. I check my stubble. I shaved this morning, at Holly’s. It’s grown. I stagger back, afraid of Elijah D’Arnoq and this Mr. Pfenninger, these … paranormal … Whateverthefuck they are, I have to get away to — to …

… to where? Our tracks in the snow disappear around a bend. Maybe there’s a car park with a visitor’s center and telephones just out of sight, or maybe it’s thirty kilometers of glacier and crevasses. Back the other way, the narrow mountain shelf on which we stand narrows to a stubborn clump of firs, then it’s near-vertical ice and rock. Pfenninger is studying me, while D’Arnoq is pouring a lumpy liquid into the Thermos cup. I want to scream, “A picnic?” I squeeze the sides of my skull. Get a grip and calm down. It’s late in the afternoon. Clouds are smeared across the sky, beginning to turn metallic. My watch — I left it in Holly’s bathroom. I walk to the low wall, a few paces from Pfenninger, and the ground swoops down fifty meters to a road. There’s an ugly modern bridge over a deep crevasse, and a road sign that I can’t read at this range. The road climbs to the bridge from half a kilometer away, twisting up from slopes dunked in shadow. Beyond the bridge, the road disappears behind a shoulder of the mountain we stand on, near a glassy waterfall that textures the profound silence. Us, the sign, the bridge, and the road surface: there are no other signs of the twentieth century. I ask, “Why did you bring me here?”

“It seems apt,” says Pfenninger, “since we’re in Switzerland, anyway. But first line your stomach: You’ve eaten nothing since Tuesday.” D’Arnoq’s next to me with a steaming cup. I smell chicken and sage and my stomach groans. “Don’t burn your tongue.”

I blow on it and sip it cautiously. It’s good. “Thanks.”

“I’ll let you have the recipe.”

“Being moved under hiatus is a double hand grenade in the brain, but”—Pfenninger clears the snow off the low wall and motions for me to sit down next to him—“a quarantine period was necessary before we let you into our realm. You’ve been in a chalet near Oberwald since noon of the second, not far from here, and we brought you here this morning. This peak is Galmihorn; that one is Leckihorn; over there, we have Sidelhorn.”

I ask him, “Are you from here, Mr. Pfenninger?”

Pfenninger watches me. “The same canton. I was born in Martigny, in 1758. Yes, 1758. I trained as an engineer, and in spring 1799, in the employ of the Helvetica Republic, I came here to oversee repairs to an ancestor of that bridge, spanning the chasm below.”

Now, if Pfenninger believes that, he’s insane. I turn to D’Arnoq, hoping for supportive sanity.

“Born in 1897, me,” says D’Arnoq, drolly, “as a very far-flung subject of Queen Victoria, in a stone-and-turf house out on Pitt Island — three hundred klicks east of New Zealand. Aged eighteen, I went on the sheep boat to Christchurch with my cousin. First time on the mainland, first time in a brothel, and first time in a recruiting office. Signed up for the Anzacs — it was either foreign adventures for king and empire or sixty years of sheep, rain, and incest on Pitt Island. I arrived in Gallipoli, and you know your history, so you’ll know what was waiting for me there. Mr. Pfenninger found me in a hospital outside Lyme Regis, after the war. I became an Anchorite at twenty-eight, hence my eternal boyish good looks. But I’m ninety-four years old next week. So, hey. The lunatics have you surrounded, Lamb.”

I look at Pfenninger. At D’Arnoq. At Pfenninger. The telepathy, the hiatuses, and the Yeti merely ask me to redefine what the mind can do, but this claim violates a more fundamental law. “Are you saying—”

“Yes,” says Pfenninger.

“That Anchorites—”

“Yes,” says D’Arnoq.

“Don’t die?”

“No,” frowns Pfenninger. “Of course we die — if we’re attacked, or in accidents. But what we don’t do is age. Anatomically, anyway.”

I look away at the waterfall. They’re mad, or liars, or — most disturbing of all — neither. My head’s too hot so I remove my hat. Something’s cutting into my wrist — Holly’s thin black hair-band. I take it off. “Gentlemen,” I address the view, “I have no idea what to think or say.”

“Far wiser,” says Pfenninger, “to defer judgement than rush to the wrong one. “Let us show you the Dusk Chapel.”

I look around for another building. “Where is it?”

“Not far,” says Pfenninger. “See that broken archway? Watch.”

Elijah D’Arnoq notices my anxiety. “We won’t put you to sleep again. Scout’s honor.”

The broken archway frames a view of a pine tree, virgin snowy ground, and a steep rock face. Moments hop by, birdlike. The sky’s blue as a high note and the mountains nearly transparent. Hear the waterfall’s skiff, spatter, and rumble. I glance at D’Arnoq, whose eyes are fixed where mine should be. “Watch.” So I obey, and notice an optical illusion. The view through the archway begins to sway, as if it were only printed on a drape, caught by a breeze, and now pulled aside by an elegant white hand in a trim Prussian-blue sleeve. Miss Constantin, bone-white and golden, looks out, flinching at the sudden bright cold. “The Aperture,” murmurs Elijah D’Arnoq. “Ours.”

I surrender. Portals appear in thin air. People have pause buttons. Telepathy is as real as telephones.

The impossible is negotiable.

What is possible is malleable.

Miss Constantin asks me, “Are you joining us, Mr. Anyder?”