The Party: The thrilling Richard & Judy Book Club Pick 2018

The Party: The thrilling Richard & Judy Book Club Pick 2018 Elizabeth Day ‘As the train pressed on, I realised that my life was in the process of taking a different direction, plotted according to a new constellation. Because, although I didn't know it yet, I was about to meet Ben and nothing would ever be the same again.’Martin Gilmour is an outsider. When he wins a scholarship to Burtonbury School, he doesn’t wear the right clothes or speak with the right kind of accent. But then he meets the dazzling, popular and wealthy Ben Fitzmaurice, and gains admission to an exclusive world. Soon Martin is enjoying tennis parties and Easter egg hunts at the Fitzmaurice family’s estate, as Ben becomes the brother he never had.But Martin has a secret. He knows something about Ben, something he will never tell. It is a secret that will bind the two of them together for the best part of 25 years.At Ben’s 40th birthday party, the great and the good of British society are gathering to celebrate in a haze of champagne, drugs and glamour. Amid the hundreds of guests – the politicians, the celebrities, the old-money and newly rich – Martin once again feels that disturbing pang of not-quite belonging. His wife, Lucy, has her reservations too. There is disquiet in the air. But Ben wouldn’t do anything to damage their friendship.Would he? (#udb1ee16b-168a-5c80-b4d2-4d8a6dd58263) Copyright (#udb1ee16b-168a-5c80-b4d2-4d8a6dd58263) 4th Estate An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.4thEstate.co.uk (http://www.4thEstate.co.uk) This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2017 Copyright © Elizabeth Day 2017 Cover photograph © Willie Maldonado/The Image Bank/Getty Images Cover designed by Anna Morrison Elizabeth Day asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books. Source ISBN: 9780008194307 Ebook edition: July 2017 ISBN: 9780008194284 Version: 2018-03-09 Dedication (#udb1ee16b-168a-5c80-b4d2-4d8a6dd58263) For my friends party (#udb1ee16b-168a-5c80-b4d2-4d8a6dd58263) noun 1. a social gathering of invited guests, typically involving eating, drinking and entertainment. 2. a formally constituted political group that contests elections and attempts to form or take part in a government, e.g. ‘faction’, e.g. ‘the party’s election manifesto’. 3. a person or people forming one side in an agreement or dispute, e.g. ‘the guilty party’. Contents Cover (#uec6feefc-0143-5b96-be10-9864760079f9) Title Page (#u1534854f-fdff-5d31-bc40-71598ecd863b) Copyright (#uf806b378-53e7-52e8-a403-706ceaace9a3) Dedication (#u4a7e04a2-6ab3-549f-8bfb-73c72ad84eae) I. (#uea9c9797-5d3f-5042-8058-3d46a3a54411) II. (#ud0169f2f-4510-5573-b2e5-cd7374467190) III. (#litres_trial_promo) IV. (#litres_trial_promo) V. (#litres_trial_promo) VI. (#litres_trial_promo) VII. (#litres_trial_promo) VIII. (#litres_trial_promo) IX. (#litres_trial_promo) X. (#litres_trial_promo) XI. (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) I. (#udb1ee16b-168a-5c80-b4d2-4d8a6dd58263) THE INTERVIEW ROOM IS SMALL AND SQUARE. A table, three plastic chairs, a high frosted window, the glass grimy with dust, strip lighting; our faces cast in dingy yellow shadow. Two cups of tea: one for the female police officer, one for me. White with two sugars. Too much milk, but I’m not in a position to complain. The rim of my cup is patterned with indentations where, a few minutes previously, I bit into the polystyrene. The walls are off-white. They remind me of the squash courts at the RAC on Pall Mall where, just a few days ago, I demolished an opponent who was several positions ahead of me in the club rankings. He was a banker. Florid face. Baggy shorts. Surprisingly lean thigh muscles. I dispatched him fairly swiftly: serve, slice, smash. The rubber thwack of the ball as it pinged into concrete, a dark green full stop at the end of each rally. Grunting. Swearing. Eventual defeat. Aggression contained within four walls. The police station has a similar feel: a sort of bristling masculinity even though only one of the two officers interviewing me is male. The woman has clearly been designated ‘good cop’. It was she who offered me the tea, said it would be beneficial. She also suggested two sugars. ‘You know,’ she added, meeting my gaze, ‘after the shock.’ It’s true, I hadn’t expected the police to turn up on my doorstep this morning. It’s only the second time in my thirty-nine years that I have found myself interviewed by the authorities. On both occasions, it has been because of Ben. Which is odd, really, given that he’s my best friend. You’d expect best friends to take better care of each other. The female police officer is short with rounded shoulders and a pleasant, freckled face. Her hair has been dyed that indeterminate colour inexplicably beloved of middle-aged women, which is neither brown nor blonde but somewhere in between. A kind of beige. Brittle at the ends. Her colleague is tall. One of those men whose height is his defining feature. He stooped when he walked through the door, holding a sheaf of papers in hands the colour of supermarket ham. Grey suit with a white mark on the lapel. Toothpaste, perhaps. Or the left-behind smear of a baby’s breakfast. He is, I’d guess, in his early thirties. The two of them sit across the table from me, backs to the door. The chairs have moulded seats with letterbox apertures in the back. We used to stack these chairs for school assemblies and end-of-term concerts at Burtonbury. A lifetime ago, and yet no time at all. Sometimes it seems as close as the next minute. Pencil shavings and plimsoll rubber, the scuffed mark of a trainer against the classroom skirting board. Dormitories with sagging beds. The creak of a spring as a boy shifted in his sleep. That constant feeling of unease. That was before I met Ben, of course. Before he saved me from myself. We’ve been saving each other ever since. On the table, to one side, is a large tape-recording machine. Too big, really. I find myself wondering why it has to be so big. Or why, indeed, the police still insist on using cassette tapes in this digitised era of sound-clouds and podcasts and iTunes. I’ve declined a lawyer. Partly because I don’t want to fork out the necessary funds for a good one and I know, given the circumstances, Ben won’t pay and I refuse to get stuck with some snivel-nosed legal aid type who can’t distinguish his arse from his elbow. I don’t think Lucy’s parents will stump up either. After everything that’s happened, I suspect my in-laws might also be disinclined to help. ‘Right then,’ says the woman, hands clasped in front of her. Short nails, varnished with clear polish. A tiny ink stain on the fleshy part between thumb and index finger. ‘Shall we get started?’ ‘By all means.’ Beige Hair presses a button on the giant recording machine. There is a long, loud bleep. ‘This interview is being tape-recorded at Tipworth Police Station, Eden Street, Tipworth. The date is 26 May 2015. The time is 2.20 p.m. I am Detective Constable Nicky Bridge.’ She glances at her colleague, who then identifies himself for the tape. ‘I am Detective Constable Kevin McPherson.’ ‘Mr Gilmour,’ she says, looking at me, ‘would you introduce yourself with your full name and date of birth please?’ ‘Martin Gilmour, 3 June 1975.’ ‘Is it OK to call you Martin?’ ‘Yes.’ She clears her throat. ‘You’ve been offered the services of a duty lawyer and declined – is that right, Martin?’ I nod. ‘For the tape, please.’ ‘Yes.’ There is a pause. Grey Suit shuffles his papers. His head is lowered. He does not look at me. I find this curiously disconcerting, the notion of not being worth his attention. ‘So, Martin,’ Beige Hair says. ‘Let’s begin at the beginning. Talk us through the events of the evening of 2 May. The party. You arrived before the other guests, is that right?’ ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Yes, we did.’ And then I start to tell them. It begins with a door that wouldn’t open at the Tipworth Premier Inn. 2 May Tipworth Premier Inn, 5.30 p.m. ‘I DON’T KNOW WHY they couldn’t have put us up in the house,’ Lucy said, slipping the plastic card key into place. ‘Not like they don’t have enough rooms.’ The light beneath the door handle flashed obstinately red. Lucy tried again, impatiently shoving the key into the slot and taking it out too quickly. I could see her getting annoyed but trying not to show it – that tell-tale flush across the back of her neck; the square set of her shoulders; a triangle of concentrated tongue just visible between her lips. I watched as she made several more clumsy attempts, my irritation rising. Who was it who said the definition of madness was doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results? Aristotle? Rousseau? ‘Here,’ I said, finally able to bear it no longer. ‘Let me.’ I took the plastic card, still sweaty from her fingers, and slid it into place, leaving it for a few seconds before smoothly removing it. The light went green. The door clicked open. ‘That’s exactly what I was doing,’ Lucy protested. I smiled, patting her on the arm. There was a minute retraction in her pupils. Almost imperceptible. ‘Here we are, then,’ she said, too brightly. We rolled our suitcases into the standard suite. Calling it a suite was optimistic. The floor space was almost entirely swallowed by twin beds. A reproduction of a bad watercolour depicting ladies on a beach hung skewed above the headboards. By the television, there was an electric kettle and a jam jar filled with teabags. Plastic packets of UHT creamer lay scattered around its base, as though some invisible milky tide had swept up and left them there like pebbles on a seashore. Lucy immediately unwound the cable and took the kettle to the bathroom to fill it from the basin tap. It is the first thing she does on arriving anywhere. When we travel abroad, she will take a foil packet of English teabags with her. I sat on the edge of the bed, feeling the friction of man-made fibres against my chinos, and slipped off my loafers. I checked my watch: 5.37 p.m. Ben wanted us at the house by 7 p.m. for pre-party drinks, so we had a little over an hour. I eased myself back onto the pillows and closed my eyes, hearing Lucy bustling around as she put on the kettle and unzipped her case, unfolding the swishy evening dress she had brought to wear and hanging it in the bathroom where, soon, I knew she would draw a hot bath in the hope that the creasing would magically erase itself in the steam. These are the things you learn over the course of a marriage: other people’s habits. Those incrementally acquired ways of being: a gradual evolution from attractive quirk to something pointless, stupid, illogical, obsessive and finally maddening. It takes someone else to pick up on them, to be driven to the edge of sanity by their repeated appearance. ‘I mean, how many rooms do you think they have in their new mansion exactly?’ I ignored the question for a few seconds, hoping to fool her into thinking I was asleep. ‘I know you’re awake, Martin. I can tell. Your eyelids are flickering.’ For fuck’s sake. ‘Sorry,’ I said, and sat up. ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Well I bet it’s plenty. And you’re his oldest friend, after all.’ ‘Mmm.’ The kettle boiled, sending a bloom of condensation halfway up the mirror. ‘Has something happened between you two?’ ‘God no.’ This was not strictly true but, at that stage, I didn’t feel she needed to know the particulars. It would have involved too much explanation and, to be honest, I didn’t have the energy. There were things my wife – my pliant, adoring little wife – would never understand about the bond between two men. ‘They’ve got loads of family staying,’ I said, unbuckling my trousers in preparation for getting changed. ‘Not just Ben’s but Serena’s lot too. I don’t think Ben wanted to inflict that on us.’ Lucy, a mug of tea in one hand, came over to me. She tilted her head. Moist brown eyes looked at me expectantly. A pulse beat in the purplish semi-circle beneath her left socket, as it always did when she was nervous. She placed her free hand tentatively on the small of my back. I could smell her tea-rose perfume. I used to find that fragrance deeply charming. It was, like Lucy, modest and unshowy. That night, it caught in my throat. Too sweet. Too soapy. ‘I’m sorry, I’m—’ Lucy dropped her head and withdrew her hand. ‘Of course,’ she said. She turned away. ‘Only …’ I could see her weighing up whether to say what was on her mind. ‘It’s been months.’ Not this again. ‘Has it?’ She nodded. ‘I’ve had a lot on my mind. The new book.’ I had just delivered a lengthy manuscript on post-Impressionism to my publishers. They hadn’t been especially enthused by the idea but my agent had talked them round. Pointed out that there was a major Manet retrospective coming up at the Tate and who better to write the definitive work on it than esteemed newspaper art critic Martin Gilmour? I had something of a reputation. My first book, Art: Who Gives a F**k?, published five years previously, had established me as an enfant terrible of the art world, the critic who dared to call out bullshit and say things as he truly saw them. In truth, the contents were not particularly explosive. The title had been my agent’s idea. Credit where it’s due: it sold by the truckload. It became the kind of book people give their trendy friends at Christmas. I’ve seen it in the downstairs loo of some fantastically fashionable, architect-designed house (curtain walls and basement studies). I’m pretty sure no one actually read it from cover to cover. Apart from Lucy, that is. Lucy is loyal to a fault. Always has been. We met thirteen years ago when I was working on the Bugle, London’s pre-eminent evening newspaper (although, admittedly, there was no competition at that stage. The free-sheets and the morning Metro only came along later). I had wangled myself a position as maternity leave cover for the deputy arts editor and Lucy was the desk secretary. In those days, you could still smoke in the office, something I did regularly and self-consciously, only too aware that when I took a drag on a cigarette my twenty-something cheekbones were highlighted becomingly to anyone who might be looking. I didn’t notice Lucy for several weeks. She existed as a pleasant blur on the periphery of my vision. She was a plump, prettyish girl with owlish spectacles and shoulder-length brown hair that was neither straight nor curly but instead manifested itself unsatisfactorily in the liminal space between. Her hair, I would subsequently find out, was a source of constant frustration. The rain had only to glower threateningly from an unbroken grey cloud for it to start frizzing at the ends. On wet days, Lucy wore her hair up in a velvet scrunchie as the Duchess of York used to do. There always was something delightfully out of step about Lucy. She was in floaty florals when everyone else was in figure-hugging pencil skirts. She wore men’s brogues and had thick, sluggish eyebrows. She was of a different time. Part of her still is. I have never worked out which time, exactly. It could be that the one she belongs to hasn’t been invented yet. Anyway, back then, Lucy hadn’t made much of an impression other than of being someone who answered the phone and said ‘hello’ when one walked into the office. Did the odd tea round. Once, I saw her return from her lunch break with her fingernails painted a glossy black and this had momentarily sparked my interest. More going on there than meets the eye, I thought. But then I forgot about it, turning back to my keyboard to bash out five hundred words of guff on the latest insufferably pretentious graduate show from Central Saint Martins or a Hollywood actress of negligible talent who had some hold over the newspaper’s proprietor. It wasn’t until my second, or even third, month there that Lucy made any sort of lasting impact. I had been asked by Ian, the section editor, to knock up a piece on the return of the ‘Great American Novelist’. There was some tenuous peg, I seem to recall – a debut by a muscular young author who had been hailed as the new Tom Wolfe. I had tried to farm out the writing of the piece to a willing freelancer, but it was just before Christmas and none of my regulars had been available so I’d decided to have a go myself. I was sitting at my desk, discussing who should be included with Ian. ‘There’s an argument to be made for Jay McInerney,’ he said. I nodded, as if I were already across that. ‘And DeLillo, of course,’ I added. ‘Wolfe. Can we get away with Franzen?’ ‘Definitely.’ Ian leaned back in his chair, folding his arms across his rumpled shirt. ‘You’ve got Philip Roth, I’m guessing?’ ‘Sure, sure,’ I said, even though I hadn’t thought of Philip Roth and hadn’t, at that point in my life, read a single one of his books. There was an audible tsk-ing sound from the other side of the desk. ‘I mean, if we’re going back a bit further, we could look at Salinger …’ I continued. The tsk-ing turned into a loud, impatient grunt. Ian’s lips twitched at the corners. ‘Do you have something to say, Lucy?’ he asked, amused. ‘No,’ she said, face flushed. ‘Actually, I mean, sorry, yes, yes I do.’ She coughed and a pink dot appeared in the centre of each cheek. ‘Please …’ Ian said, motioning with one hand that the floor was hers. ‘Well, have you thought of, you know, including any women in your list?’ she asked, her voice gathering momentum and volume as she spoke. ‘It’s just always the same boring, old, white, men. I mean, soon you’ll be citing John bloody Updike.’ I scoffed, while mentally reminding myself to include John Updike. How could I have overlooked John Updike? It was those kind of mistakes that made me stand out. That made me look like a boy who didn’t have a home full of packed bookshelves but who instead relied on his mother’s Reader’s Digest for reading material. ‘… who basically write everything with their dicks out and who all congratulate each other on being so fantastic,’ Lucy was saying, ‘when really their “state of the nation” novels are just family dramas repackaged with extra testosterone. You know, there are incredible female authors in America who, just because they write about families and have these … f-f … awful covers with close-up photographs of children and sandcastles, they just get ignored all the damn time.’ She dropped her head. Hair fell loose across her pale forehead. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I just …’ I smiled at her. How sweet it was, I thought, to feel so impassioned about something. She caught my eye and smiled back, lips parting just enough for me to see her precise, straight and entirely sensible teeth. ‘Blimey,’ Ian said. ‘Didn’t realise we had Emmeline sodding Pankhurst sitting here. So who would you suggest, then?’ ‘Anne Tyler, Joan Didion, Donna Tartt,’ Lucy said without looking up. ‘And that’s just for starters. That’s if you even agree with the fundamental premise of there being something that is “The Great American Novel”. Which I don’t, by the way.’ Ian chortled. ‘Thanks, Luce. Remind me, what did you study at Bristol again?’ ‘English,’ she mumbled. ‘And it was Durham.’ ‘Thought so.’ ‘I actually think it’s a good idea,’ I said, surprising myself at the sound of my own voice. ‘We should include some women.’ Lucy grinned. Her glasses had slid down her nose and she pushed them back up with a single nail-chewed forefinger and I noticed, as she did so, that her hand was shaking. ‘Thanks, Martin,’ she said and she looked at me with shining eyes. The more I got to know her after that, the more I was charmed in spite of myself. She was so respectful, so admiring of me, so fundamentally grateful that I would pay her any attention. And I, in turn, found her intelligent and interesting company. She knew a lot. We started taking lunch together. At first, it was just a hurried sandwich in the staff canteen but soon we graduated to the restaurant across the road from the office where we sat in wooden booths and drank wine from a magnum that the waiter would mark off at the end of the meal, charging us according to how many inches we had drunk. It was only a matter of time before lunch turned into an after-work drink in the pub – me: a pint of Guinness; Lucy: a gin and tonic. (I never liked Guinness. I only drank it when I was trying to give the impression of blokeishness.) After six months, we were having dinner. We both had a penchant for Persian food and would seek out the best places for a night-time meal of aubergine stew and lamb with barberries at the wrong end of Kensington. And then she kissed me and I didn’t know how to say no. It was on the pavement outside a brightly painted eatery called Tas or Yaz or Fez or something similar. We were standing under a streetlamp, dank drizzle coating our faces like wet muslin and I found myself looking at her face, at the speckles of moisture on her unfashionably large glasses, at the discreet jiggle of extra flesh just underneath her chin, at the double freckle on the lobe of one ear so that it looked as if she had got them pierced even though she was one of the few women of my acquaintance who hadn’t. ‘Too scared of infection,’ she had said, explaining it to me once. ‘Too scared of everything.’ She isn’t stupid, Lucy. It was as I was looking at her that Lucy’s expression changed. Her eyes – brown, lively – acquired a liquid quality, as though their brownness could seep out if left unguarded. I realised, too late, that what I was seeing in those darkened pupils, was lust. She leaned in, clasping her hands behind my neck and I succumbed because it was easier than anything else. And would it do so very much harm? Her lips were soft and doughy. The kiss became moister and more enthused. I could hear a faint moaning sound coming from Lucy’s throat and then I pulled away, hands on her shoulders, a firm, paternal, ‘We shouldn’t be doing this.’ She looked at me sadly. ‘Why not?’ ‘I … well, look …’ ‘We get on well, don’t we? I mean, I like you.’ A meaningful little lacuna. ‘I really like you. Can’t we just … see where it goes? I’m lonely. I know you’re lonely …’ This came as news to me. The truth was, I did feel alone but I thought I had masked it sufficiently well from prying eyes in the office. At that stage, Ben was getting more serious with Serena and I was increasingly at a loose end in the evenings. Whereas, previously, the two of us had frequently gone drinking in Soho, starting off in a private members’ club before graduating to dinner at Quo Vadis and a nightcap at the Atlantic, these days Ben was more likely to stay in cooking pasta and watching films with Serena. He had asked me to find my own place so that she could move into the mews house I had shared with him since we graduated. ‘Time to grow up, mate,’ he had said, slapping me on the back. Touch came so easily to Ben. It was something I both hated and loved about him. So perhaps I was particularly vulnerable to attention when Lucy came along. I realise now that is not an excuse. I walked her home that evening. She lived in a surprisingly nice flat off the North End Road. I say surprisingly because I had assumed, from the dowdiness of her clothing and her penchant for buying men’s jackets from charity shops, that money was tight. It turned out I was wrong about that. Lucy’s parents were quite well off, in a hearty, middle-class kind of way. They had sent their children to private school and lived in a red-brick farmhouse in Gloucestershire. At Christmas-time, they attended the carol concert at Tewkesbury Cathedral. I deposited her at the door. ‘Come up,’ Lucy said, tugging at the sleeve of my coat. I shook my head, feigning regret. ‘No,’ I said, trailing my fingers down her cheek. ‘That wouldn’t be right. Next time.’ I kissed the top of her head, inhaling Timotei and light sweat, and walked away, raising one arm aloft as I went. ‘See you tomorrow,’ she called out to my retreating form. For whatever reason, the evening with Lucy had left me experiencing an uncomfortable surge of different emotions. I thought of my mother, of the way she looked at me when I told her, when I was back from school one Easter holiday, that she shouldn’t say ‘settee’ but ‘sofa’ and that the way she pronounced ‘cinema’ without elongating the final ‘a’ was embarrassing. I found myself walking towards Brompton Cemetery and although it was late and I knew the main gates would be closed, I also knew from previous visits that there was a point in the wall on the Lillie Road where the stones had come loose and you could crawl through quite easily on your hands and knees. This I did, the palms of my hands gathering up bits of twig and pine cone and leaving a latticed indentation of dirt across my skin. I stood, brushing myself clean. A piece of lichen had lodged itself in my hair. I shook it out. The cemetery stood in the gloom of night, half lit here and there by a weak streetlamp. Gravestones and silhouetted stone angels loomed out of the shadows. Some notable historical figures were buried nearby although I’d never tried to seek out their graves. My favourite gravestone (if one can have such a thing) was to mark the passing of a young man called Horace Brass who died at the age of sixteen in 1910. His name was carved in looped art nouveau cursive. I started walking towards it, hands in my pockets. A man fell into step beside me. I glanced to one side and saw that, no, this was not a man but a boy. A teenage boy, like Horace Brass, pale and thin as a silver birch. He had greasy hair and spots around his mouth. ‘Looking for company?’ he said. ‘No,’ I said too loudly. ‘No I don’t … I mean, I’m not.’ A fizz of anger in my solar plexus. I doubled up my pace and walked swiftly back the way I had come. The next day, I was late into the office. I had a migraine, I recall, and with every step I took, the ground felt too far away for my feet to make contact with it. I sat at my desk, shading my eyes from the sunlight spooling through the windows, and flicked through the latest issue of the Art Newspaper, pretending to concentrate on the words. When Lucy came in, she smiled at me and I remember this internal surge of relief that she still liked me. In Lucy’s mind, I was still the man she had kissed outside her front door, the man she had wanted to come upstairs, the man she respected and liked and enjoyed spending time with. In her mind, I was the nice Martin Gilmour. I was the Martin Gilmour I wanted to be. I smiled back at her. That day, we went again for lunch together, taking our supermarket sandwiches to sit on our coats in Kensington Gardens. I kissed her, taking her face in both my hands, conveying a tenderness I almost felt. She tasted of prawns and mayonnaise. I felt no stirring, no passion, no love. But there was affection there, and fondness too. And there was an understanding of sorts. I am sure of that. I did not pull the wool over her eyes, as my mother might have said. Lucy knew what I was. Really, she can’t complain. Of course, nothing is as easy as it first appears. I used to like Lucy so much, truly I did. Over the years, that like has been dulled: brass left unpolished. The same qualities that drew me to her: an uncomplicated view of the world, her mild eccentricity, her un-groomed refusal to make the best of herself and above all, her adoration of me, now set me on edge. And then there’s the children thing, naturally. I’d always told her I didn’t want any of my own and she accepted it in the beginning. But that was before her friends started popping them out with alacrity, posting twelve-week scans and pictures of bleary-eyed newborns on Facebook with humdrum frequency. Our socialising changed – it was no longer nights in the pub but picnics in the park surrounded by screaming toddlers, or early-evening barbecues, the timing of everything defined by when babysitters could be relied upon to arrive and leave or when Isadora or Humphrey or Matilda could be put down for their naps. Oh, and isn’t Lucy wonderful with kids? Look at how she plays with them! Forever kneeling down to meet their eyes; taking them by the hand; running after them in a game of tag, her floral dress breezing round her knees. She had six godchildren. But every time she went to Tiffany to buy a silver charm bracelet or engraved tankard for yet another christening, something within her hardened. She lost that yielding softness she once had. I suppose it didn’t help that Ben and I were so close. Difficult for any woman to come into that situation and hope to get my undivided attention. But, as I often told her, that’s the way it had always been. Ben and I went way back. Best friends from school. So close we had, at one stage, been informally christened by his mother as ‘Starsky and Hutch’. Later, Ben’s wife Serena had coined a different phrase. ‘You’re always there, aren’t you, Martin?’ she had said. ‘Ben’s little shadow.’ For whatever reason, the moniker had stuck. Little shadow. Even Ben calls me it now. I’m in his phone under ‘LS’. The real reason we weren’t staying at the house on the night of the party was that Ben hadn’t asked. Lucy was right: there were more than enough rooms to accommodate a small army of guests even on the night of his fortieth birthday. And, yes, I had been offended by this omission. I’d left it too late to book anywhere decent. Their new house was in Tipworth, a bucolic Cotswold village overburdened with twee shops selling novelty oven gloves and packets of fudge, but severely under-served by decent hotels. All the nice boutique places were fully booked when I tried, by other guests, most of whom, presumably, would have got their PAs to do it for them. Ben’s fortieth was going to be a grand affair. Le tout W11 in attendance. In the end, the only place available was a Premier Inn just off the motorway roundabout. The room cost ?59.99, which seemed absurd. ‘Are you sure?’ I had asked on the phone when the receptionist recited the price list. ‘Yeah. Breakfast not included. But there’s a Little Chef across the road.’ The glamour! And now, here we were. Lucy upset in the bathroom. Kettle boiled. Me standing trouserless on scratchy carpet. As I unpacked my dress shirt and bow-tie, I didn’t explain why Ben hadn’t asked us to stay. It unsettled me to have to stare it in the face. Although it would have taken us less than ten minutes to walk to the party, Lucy insisted on a taxi. ‘Shoes!’ she said, pointing down to a pair of bright red, sparkling, strappy heels. ‘Very nice,’ I lied. ‘Are they new?’ She flushed with pleasure. ‘Yes. I got them off eBay.’ She twirled her right ankle, the better to show off how truly garish they were. Like every conventional woman, Lucy likes to pretend she is unconventional by buying attention-seeking shoes. In all other respects, she was playing according to type: a long A-line dress in a stiff, dark green material with two thin straps, her shoulders covered by a pale red pashmina. She held a tiny evening bag in one hand. I knew, without it being opened, that it would contain a folded tissue, a lipstick worn down to the nub, a pen, a compact mirror and our hotel room key. She would always insist on carrying a hotel room key. ‘Have you left the key at reception?’ I asked, by way of a test. She shook her head. ‘You know I never like to do that. What if they go in and steal something?’ ‘You do realise they have a master key?’ ‘Well,’ she said, climbing indecorously into the taxi. ‘Still.’ The cab driver turned back to look at us. ‘Tipworth Priory?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘How did you know?’ He chuckled. ‘The way you’re dressed sort of gives it away, mate. Not normally that much call for black tie around these parts.’ Ben and Serena Fitzmaurice were famous for their parties. It was a point of pride for them. This one was ostensibly Ben’s fortieth but was doubling up as a housewarming. They had bought the seventeenth-century Tipworth Priory a few months previously. It was their second home. During the week, they lived in a white, stucco-fronted house in the expensive part of Notting Hill. At the weekends, or so they had told me, they needed ‘more space’ for the children. ‘We just want to get away,’ they had said, as they pored over glossy brochures from estate agents with three names and no ampersand. It baffled me as to quite what they were getting away from. Still, it wasn’t for me to try and fathom the desires of the super-rich. I had nodded and murmured sympathetically when they talked in this way and soon enough they’d stumbled across Tipworth Priory in a picturesque part of Oxfordshire that had fields and sheep and all the requisite trappings of the countryside, while also comprising cafes that served soya lattes and organic mackerel salads in light-filled converted chapels. An outpost of a Soho private members’ club had just opened up nearby, doing wonders for the local economy, if not the local inhabitants, who promptly complained to the reporters at the Tipworth Echo that they were being priced out of their own villages. In fact, Ben and Serena had had their own run-in with the local press at the time contracts were exchanged, involving a kerfuffle over the eviction of a handful of elderly monks who still lived in the Priory. The Fitzmaurices confided that they felt it had all been terribly overblown and the monks became, in their retelling, a light-hearted dinner-party anecdote designed to highlight the amusing narrow-mindedness of benighted country folk. (I read subsequently in the Echo that a new location was found for the monks in a nondescript Oxford suburb. They are now housed in a purpose-built block sandwiched between a multi-storey car park and one of those discount stores that sells value packs of pickled onion crisps and more plastic clothes pegs than anyone could reasonably need over the course of an average lifetime.) With the monks out of the way, Serena and Ben were able to set to work on the interior. They did a lot of things involving faux-rococo marble fireplaces, built from monumental stone veined with grey like the bloodshot white of a wide-open eye. The chandelier in the main drawing room was imported from Italy – a splintering waterfall of glassy splendour, which, on closer inspection, revealed itself to be constructed entirely from upended wine glasses. It was, Serena and Ben thought, a humorous accent; a sign that although they recognised beautiful design, they were not ones to take themselves too seriously. But I knew that the chandelier had cost ?250,000. More, if you count the packaging and transport costs. I couldn’t help but admire the grandiosity of it. The sheer, unthinking excess. I hadn’t seen it since the renovations had been completed, over three weeks ago. In spite of myself, I was intrigued to look at what they’d done to the place. I wondered whether Serena’s somewhat d?class? penchant for white lilies and plush carpets and luxury hotel fixtures and fittings would have denuded the building of all its character. As we approached Tipworth Priory that evening, the taxi indicating into the long sweep of driveway, the overall effect was impressive. Our route was lined with spherically trimmed box hedges, each one encircled by a purple halo of light. The Priory exterior was Grade-I listed so, much to my relief, Serena hadn’t been able to get her paws on it. The resplendent Cotswold stone was intact, emitting a warm buttery glow in the dusky sunshine. There was still stained glass in the windows. On the front lawn was a large marquee, bedecked with flowers in purple and white. A fountain featuring a stone boy with an urn tilted forwards on his shoulder had purple and white petals floating in the water. As the taxi came to a halt, we heard the electric whir of a generator and the facade of the house became sharply illuminated. I got out of the car and noticed that a giant ‘B’ and ‘S’ in the same shade of virulent purple were now being projected from some unseen source of light onto the wall. Typical Serena. ‘Yes,’ said Lucy. ‘They don’t like to do things by halves, do they?’ The taxi driver snorted. ‘You can say that again, love.’ I shot her a look. She started to pick at the tender flakes of skin edging her thumbnail. The fare was ?6.60. I handed over a ten-pound note and waited for the precise change. ‘You should have given him a tip,’ Lucy said, as we walked up the steps and tugged on an ornate pulley system to ring the ancient bell. ‘At that price? Not likely.’ I could hear footsteps echoing on flagstones and then the door opened and Ben was there, arms flung wide, shirt untucked, bow-tie undone round his neck, hair a wild mess of curls, broad smile on his face. ‘Hello, my dears!’ He ushered us in, embracing Lucy and giving her a kiss on each cheek, then crushing me into a bear hug and slapping me on the back. ‘So pleased you could come early,’ he continued, leading us through a hallway strewn with Moroccan rugs which occasionally parted to reveal a series of gravestones. Lucy’s heels click-clacked against a ‘Dearly Departed’ and when I looked down, I realised I was standing on ‘Emily, beloved wife of …’ How strange, I thought, to end your life like this. Buried in a priory graveyard and now merely flooring for a rich man’s party. ‘Forgive the chaos,’ Ben said. ‘Pre-party madness, you know how it is.’ We passed a group of girls in black skirts and white shirts with their hair pulled back in ponytails of varying degrees of severity. One of them smiled as we went. Another one bobbed, almost a curtsey. ‘I’m just so glad I get to see you guys before it all kicks off,’ he was saying. ‘We both are. There’s never enough of a chance to chat at these things, is there? Not to the people you really want to talk to, anyway.’ He was breathless in his chatter. Charming, as ever, but underneath there was an accent of nervousness. It was unlike Ben to be nervous. Probably anxious about the guests arriving, I thought. ‘This place is spectacular, Ben,’ I said. ‘Yes,’ Lucy added. ‘Really …’ Ben paused for a second and raised his head, as though sniffing the air. ‘It is, isn’t it? We got super lucky. It’s going to take months to do up properly though. Months. We haven’t even started on the chapel. I’ll show it to you, LS. I know you love your architectural history.’ He clutched Lucy’s arm conspiratorially. ‘Such an old fuddy-duddy, isn’t he, Luce? That’s why we love him.’ It was a source of amusement to Ben that whenever the two of us went anywhere together, I would seek out the local church and find a point of interest: an unexpected fresco of St Peter holding the keys to heaven; a war memorial erected to an only son called Arthur; and once a pew cushion embroidered with ‘This Too Shall Pass’. We followed Ben to the end of a wide corridor, the walls adorned with black and white family photographs in uniform clear perspex frames. This led into the kitchen, where Serena stood, surrounded by half-unwrapped bouquets of flowers, the stems a tangle of bloom and pollen. Around her stood a group of waiters and one man wearing a floppy khaki hat and a safari jacket with countless pockets. ‘Serena,’ Ben purred. ‘LS and Lucy have arrived.’ She looked up, her face vague. It took a moment for her gaze to click into place. ‘Of course! Of course! Sorry, sweeties, totally slipped my mind. Hang on a sec.’ She turned to the man in the jacket. ‘Tom, these are great, thanks. Much better than the other flowers.’ ‘We’ll have to re-plant,’ he said gruffly. ‘Mm-mm. I know, darling. We will.’ Tom exited the kitchen, his boots leaving a speckled trail of mud as he went. All at once, Serena was a flurry of insincere compliments. ‘So gorgeous to see you! Martin’ – she had a way of saying my name which stretched all the vowels to the point of snapping – ‘you look very smart. Oh, and Lucy, what a … what a …’ She gave a tiny pause. ‘Pretty dress. Where’s it from? Is it Donna Karan?’ ‘No,’ Lucy said. ‘Monsoon.’ ‘So sorry we couldn’t have you to stay. Just. You know how it is. Family. Extended family. Friends flying in from abroad.’ ‘Of course we do,’ I said. ‘It’s no problem. We’re just delighted to be here. And to see this, this …’ I made a great show of looking around in an awestruck manner, ‘palace. Truly, Serena, you do have the most impeccable taste.’ She didn’t reply but gave another dazzling smile. Serena hadn’t yet dressed for the party and still managed to look more glamorous than any of us. She was wearing cut-off jeans and a loose white blouse that somehow managed to be both shapeless and sexy. Around her neck, a silver chain, the heart pendant fitting snugly in the gap between her clavicles. Her hair was in rollers and her eye make-up heavily done – black-brown smudges the colour of a bruised nail – but she wore no lipstick and, as a result, her face had an untethered quality, like one of those children’s picture books with different panels to flick through for amusing variations on face, torso and legs. ‘I said I’d show LS the chapel,’ Ben said. ‘You girls will be able to make your own fun for a bit, won’t you?’ I glanced at Lucy, who was standing in the corner next to an enormous Smeg fridge, holding her pashmina tightly, her mouth set in a mutinous line. ‘Of course, sweetie,’ Serena said. ‘But at least get them a drink first!’ She laughed – a tinkling sound like teaspoon against saucer – and poured us all a glass of Veuve Clicquot that was already chilling in an ice bucket by the industrial-sized sink. Ben took our glasses and led me back the way we’d come. ‘We’re still waiting for some of the furniture,’ he said as we came to a halt in front of a stone fireplace. The mantelpiece was the same height as our heads. The central recess had been filled by dozens of altar candles, waxen wicks pulled straight and ready to be lit. ‘Stuff Serena picked up in France. Some bigger pieces from a friend she has in Bali.’ ‘Not tempted to light a real fire?’ I asked. ‘Ha! No. Serena wanted it all to be candlelit tonight. Adds to the—’ He broke off, lowered his voice and assumed a cod French accent, ‘ambience. So I’m told.’ He put his arm round my shoulders and drew me to him. He was still grinning. Still determined to show what a jolly time he was having and how relaxed this all was and wasn’t it all just good clean fun between friends. Perhaps he forgot how well I knew him. I had, after all, made a lifetime’s study of the planes of his face. Tonight, there was a twitching light to his eyes, a kind of fevered alacrity that meant his gaze kept shifting over surfaces and people, never once steadying to meet my own. He dropped his arm, took a gulp of his champagne and waved me into a narrow corridor, darker than the others, which led off from the main aspect of the house. ‘I think you’ll like this,’ Ben said. He pushed open a door, the hinges blackened and creaking. There was a lingering smell of incense. In the half-gloom, I could make out the hulking form of an altar and a font. ‘Sorry guys, don’t mind us,’ Ben said, stepping across a cable. Two men in black T-shirts bearing the words ‘Sono-Vision Inc.’ above a logo of three interlinked circles were applying miniature screwdrivers to a series of speakers. ‘Quite a production,’ I said. ‘Ha!’ The chapel looked almost entirely as it must have been when the monks had left. There were open hymn books on the shelves, the pages fluttering in the draught of a closing door. It was as if the former residents had been forced to leave halfway through a service, abandoning all their possessions in their rush to escape. It reminded me of Victor Hugo’s house in the Place des Vosges in Paris: untouched since his death, everything still in its rightful place. But then you saw Hugo’s death-mask, placed casually in a box on top of the desk, and you realised how macabre it all was, how strange the human impulse to keep everything stagnant, frozen in aspic. When my mother died, I couldn’t wait to be rid of her. I arranged for a swift cremation and when the notice came from the funeral directors that her ashes were ready for collection, I ignored it. What do they do with uncollected ashes? I never found out. ‘Spooky,’ I said. ‘You have no idea, LS. No idea. There’s a ghost, you know.’ He went on to say that the ghost was said to hang about the medieval graveyard, just by the ornamental maze they had planted to entertain their four children – Cosima, Cressida, Hector and Wilf (known to the family as Bear). The ghost was referred to locally as ‘The Brown Monk’. He was believed to walk through the walls of the house making a soft, low, moaning sound. ‘You don’t believe in all that though, do you?’ I asked. Ben shook his head. ‘No, but … Serena. You know how she is …’ Yes. Yes, I did. The first time I met her, at a restaurant situated at the top of one of London’s newest skyscrapers, Serena had leaned across the table and clasped my forearm. She did it so quickly, I had no chance to remove my cuff from her grasp and so we sat there, uncomfortably, while she looked at me earnestly with those chlorine-blue eyes and said ‘Ben’s told me so much about you. I already know we’re going to be kindred spirits.’ I gave a non-committal smile. The non-committal smile is one of my specialities. ‘I can see the child in you,’ she said and as she spoke, a strand of blonde hair stuck to her lip gloss and stayed there, bisecting the lower half of her distant, beautiful face. Behind her, I could see the dark sweep of the city: the carcass of recently erected scaffolding illuminated by a foggy moon and the red twinkling lights of Canary Wharf, sequenced like the LED display of an unreadable digital watch. ‘It’s so important, isn’t it?’ she said as the first course arrived. ‘To keep that childlike wonder about the world.’ She removed her hand, pleased with herself. There was a single wrinkle on her smooth forehead and it seemed to have been placed there expressly to denote concern and empathy. Serena was the latest in a long line of girlfriends. But even I had to acknowledge she was different. Prior to this, Ben had had a type. He was handsome and came from money. His life had been almost too easy – public school, Cambridge, hedge fund manager – and as a consequence, he sought out difficulty in his personal attachments. He liked neurotic girls with ripped jeans who smoked too much and cut their own hair. They never lasted for more than a few months and Ben had always been the one to end the liaison. Often, I would have to mop them up afterwards. They would come to me, these girls, a muddied mess of tears and eyeliner, and I would always tell them the same thing: that Ben just wasn’t ready to settle down and who knew if he ever would be and it wasn’t them, it was him, and he adored them in his own way but he couldn’t help it, he just wasn’t ready. And they would nod and bite their lips and then, after a cup of sugary tea and a few crumbs of cake (they would never eat the whole slice), they left my flat, never to be seen again. I liked these girls, probably because I never felt threatened by them. They had no designs on my friendship with Ben. They respected our unbreakable bond. We knew each other better than anyone else in the world, you see. No woman could compete with that. Like I told them: not their fault. Until Serena. Serena, with her casual confidence, bowled him over. They met on a skiing holiday. Of course they did. That’s where people like that meet. It’s either Verbier or St Tropez. She was blonde and tall and striking. Lean muscles. A sugary scent. Hair that swung from side to side as if advertising itself. She worked in an art gallery, although as soon as they got engaged, she gave up the job. She was the kind of person I had always assumed Ben would find boring. We used to laugh about the dull Sloanes with their made-up careers and their reliance on Daddy’s trust fund and their weekends in the country in Hunter wellingtons and padded body-warmers. But I underestimated Serena. Because although she looked boring (beautiful, yes, but undeniably boring) she possessed this unspoilt quality. She was deeply naive. It wasn’t stupidity, not exactly, but rather a sense of other-worldliness, as if she had never quite found her place on the planet. A more unkind word might be ‘ditzy’. For whatever reason, Ben was smitten. I realised, that night, when I looked across the table at him, desperately wanting him to look back, that Serena was there to stay. Ben turned to her and, with the pad of his thumb, stroked the stray strand of hair away from her mouth, then kissed her with excruciating tenderness. And I knew things were going to change. It wasn’t a perfect marriage. They had the requisite children, each one precocious and adorable in a slightly different way from the one that had come before, and as Ben broke away from the company he had worked for since graduation to build up his own business, they spent more and more time apart. Serena, ever vague, never understood the pressures of his work. Ben, increasingly preoccupied, had no time left over to devote to the emotional maintenance of his wife. She grew harder. The naivety I had once noticed became polluted by a certain world-weary assessment of things and people – of their value; their cost. Ben loved her still, of that I was sure. He just wasn’t in love with her. I don’t think either of them really cared. They put on a good show. Serena had aged well, thanks to the judicious use of fillers administered by a discreet plastic surgeon and the unparalleled youth-preserving tactic of having very little to do. She became one of those glamorous, wealthy women who don’t have enough to occupy their time and who attempt to fill it with charity luncheons and a nebulous search for meaning. She went on Ayurvedic retreats and meditation weekends, leaving the children in the care of two full-time nannies and a dedicated housekeeper who wore a dark uniform designed to look not too like a uniform. She spoke a lot about ‘connections’ and ‘auras’. Ben was kind to her. In public, they made a good pair. But she still had her ‘ideas’. And one of these, Ben told me as we stood in the chapel, was to do with the ghost at Tipworth. He said she had arranged for a local exorcist to come and perform some charade that would ‘release the negative energy’. ‘How does one find a local exorcist?’ I asked. ‘Do they advertise in the Yellow Pages?’ Ben laughed. ‘Fuck knows. I mean, does the Yellow Pages even still exist?’ ‘Trust Serena …’ I let the thought dwindle, unanswered. We stood side by side for a few seconds, as the light outside slid into paleness. The coloured panels in the windows sent rhombuses of pink, green and blue across the worn stone floor. ‘You’re not drinking,’ Ben said, accusingly. I looked at my champagne flute. It was true. I hadn’t taken a single sip. My fingertips were clammy from the accumulated moisture on the side of the glass. ‘Sorry.’ I smiled, then raised the glass. ‘Here’s to you, Ben. Your new home. And, happy birthday.’ ‘Thanks LS.’ We clinked. But I felt again, looking at the studied vacancy of his face, that something was amiss. ‘My oldest friend,’ I said, trying once more to elicit some sort of spark of recognition. But he shuffled uncomfortably and still couldn’t look at me. ‘Listen, LS. We need to talk.’ His voice was dry and reedy. ‘About …’ He gesticulated broadly with his free hand, as if painting treble clefs in imaginary sand. I waited. One beat. Two. Blood pumping. Muscles clenched. ‘I’ve got a business opportunity I want to discuss with you.’ Relief. The flush of it almost physical. ‘Oh,’ I said, trying not to think of all the things he might have said. ‘Interesting. Tell me more.’ I made an effort to keep the pleasure out of my voice. Ben had never asked me to join him in any kind of business venture before. I’d always been a little offended at his failure to do so. Of course, in the early days, I didn’t have the necessary funds. But since the publication of Art: Who Gives a F**k?, my bank balance had been conspicuously healthier. Published in twenty-one languages. In the Sunday Times bestseller list for twelve solid weeks. The royalties kept rolling in. Now that he was offering me an in, I was delighted. It meant he trusted me. It meant I was just as good as any of his trustafarian friends. ‘It’s a little investment idea I have. A new casino-style resort in Montenegro.’ ‘Ah. Montenegro: the new Monte Carlo.’ ‘Ha!’ he said again. ‘Very good, LS. Yes. Should use that as a slogan, really.’ I took a sip of champagne. The bubbles pricked my tongue. ‘Of course. When do you want to have this chat? Not now, surely?’ He shook his head, the curls in spasm. ‘No, mate, no. We’ll find a quiet time after the party. With the wives.’ I raised my eyebrows. ‘I mean … it will involve them too.’ ‘How intriguing.’ ‘We can do it once the guests have gone.’ ‘I suppose it would have made even more sense for us to stay the night then. I mean, the Premier Inn has its charms, but …’ As soon as I spoke, I realised I sounded defensive. Ben groaned. ‘I knew you’d be pissed off. I said as much to Serena.’ ‘I’m not pissed off.’ ‘You are, LS. I can tell. Listen, it’s a family thing. We’ve got all these aunts and uncles and in-laws. You know what it’s like.’ I walked up the aisle of the chapel, trailing my hand along the edge of the hymn-book rails. When I got to the altar, I noticed dust on one fingernail. You know what it’s like. One of his phrases. ‘No, Ben,’ I said, turning back to him, my voice reverberating off the vaulted ceiling. ‘No, I don’t. You seem to forget I have no family.’ In the failing light, I could no longer see his expression. His glass, empty now, hung lazily from his hand. ‘You’re it,’ I said, but too quietly for him to hear. Notebook of Lucy Gilmour WHAT WAS IT ABOUT HIM I LIKED? When I first saw him he just stood apart. It was the way he was dressed. Martin always wore impeccable clothes. He was in well-tailored suits when everyone else at the newspaper was in jeans and loafers. Even when he tried to be casual, he couldn’t quite manage it. Corduroy and cashmere was about as relaxed as he got. I remember seeing him in the staff canteen, sitting by himself, a copy of the Financial Times folded with precision into a rectangle, comfortably sized so that it could be held easily in one hand. I noticed his fingers: elegant, long, the nails freshly cut and clean. He was eating a salad from one of those clear plastic containers. I watched as he forked limp rocket leaves to his mouth and ate them in small, delicate bites. He looked up occasionally, as if he wanted to be noticed and, at the same time, his demeanour suggested he didn’t care what anyone else thought. I admired this. I was twenty-two, just out of university, and I questioned everything about myself. I had no faith in my instincts. I needed constant affirmation just to prove I existed. I liked to lose myself in the company of others, hoping that if I found safety in a big enough group, no one would expect me to talk. The idea of sitting on my own in the middle of the canteen and not minding who saw me was completely alien. I would rather have walked naked down Kensington High Street. Later, when I got to know him a bit, I realised Martin was the most original person I’d ever met. I asked him so much and yet, by the end of each conversation, I would have learned nothing new about him. He had no back-story. He didn’t talk about his family. Unlike most men, he didn’t particularly seem to want to talk about himself. The only person he mentioned with any regularity was his best friend, Ben, and he would refer to him in just that way: ‘my best friend Ben’, as if the label were part of his official title. I found the mystery interesting. I had just come out of a two-year relationship with a boy I’d known from university and the whole thing had been suffocatingly intense. My ex wanted to share everything. He wanted to hold hands in the street. He wanted to kiss me in public. He wanted to tell me how he imagined us growing old together. Once, he had cried in the cinema at a film about an elderly woman with dementia whose husband struggles to care for her. I was embarrassed for him. ‘It’s just,’ he said afterwards, handkerchief moist, ‘it made me think of us and what would happen if …’ He never finished his sentence but I knew what he meant and although I took his hand, although I told myself how lovely this was and how lucky I was to be loved this way, part of me felt uneasy. An internal voice that said: what a fool he is to feel so deeply for you. You’re not worth it and soon he’ll find out and then where will you be? Martin never sought to know me, not really. He was interested in my opinions and I think he enjoyed talking to me on an intellectual level, unwrapping the layers of my brain like a Christmas present. But otherwise, it was all surface – at least, to begin with. And this appealed to me. I liked being made to feel smart without having to commit to anything else. Martin took pleasure in the present tense of my company, without needing it to have a future or a past conjugation. Do you know how rare that is? Very. I’ve never met anyone else with that capacity. He wasn’t my type, physically. I’d always gone for stockier men with strong arms and big hands and shoulders that looked as if they could lift a car but then, look at where that had got me. I told myself it was time to try something different. Martin was slender, his chest almost concave. He was tall, with fine brown hair parted to one side in an old-fashioned way. He wore glasses and his face was long, the planes of it delicate and handsome. When he smiled, it managed to be both impish and vague. He had narrow hips and the cheekbones of a teenage model. Later, I would discover Martin had an ability to change his appearance to fit whatever social setting he found himself in. It was never anything I could put my finger on. It was simply as if his surface changed colour to melt into the environment. A chameleon. At the start, it was a friendship between work colleagues. We went for lunch together. Once, at Maggie Jones, we ordered two globe artichokes and the house white, which came in a huge bottle. The waitress marked it off with a pen to show how much we’d drunk. Martin kept filling my glass slightly more than he filled his. ‘You should do something different with your hair,’ he said, tearing off a crust of bread and popping it in his mouth. It was the first time he had ever mentioned my physical appearance. I reddened under the scrutiny, immediately self-conscious. ‘Well!’ I tried to make light of it. ‘That’s very forward.’ ‘Those velvet scrunchie things …’ Martin waved his hand as if ridding the room of a smell. ‘Why do you put it up all the time? Let it fall to your shoulders and frame your face.’ I was flattered that he had put such thought into it. That, by extension, it meant he had been studying my face. It was Martin’s form of a compliment, I realised, and I seized on it gratefully, immediately sliding the scrunchie from my ponytail and shaking my hair out, tucking it behind my ears. He reached across the table, untucking it. A breadcrumb from his finger stuck to my cheek. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Much better.’ I didn’t like my hair down because it was neither straight nor curly. It was frizzy and never looked intentional. But under the warm glow of Martin’s approbation, I started seeing myself differently. At his desk, he had a postcard of a Lord Leighton painting propped up against a pile of books. Perhaps, I thought, he saw me as one of those pre-Raphaelite heroines whose hair (now that I brought it to mind) was wavy too. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Pleasure.’ When I got home that evening, I studied myself in the mirror. My eyebrows were too thick. My cheeks too full. I tried sucking them in and squinted, attempting to make myself look thinner. I played with my hair. It fell on my shoulders and I wished it were longer and glossier and easier to manage. I had a small scar on the side of my nose from a bicycle accident when I was a child and I worried that it looked like a spot. I sighed. I put my hair back up in a scrunchie and, even though I wasn’t seeing anyone but was just going to spend the evening watching television, I dabbed some concealer on my scar. It made me feel better not to see it. The next day, I put concealer on in exactly the same place. I left my hair down. I passed the mascara wand over my lashes. I never normally wore make-up in the office. When Martin came in, he had headphones on. Not the in-ear ones that most people wore, but the old-fashioned kind that used to come with Walkmans. I tried to catch his eye but he didn’t notice me. At lunch, he left without asking me along. It was only in the afternoon, when I handed him a page proof of an interview he’d done with a young actress, that we spoke. ‘You look nice,’ he said. I flushed. ‘Hair,’ I replied, stupidly. He smiled. ‘A marked improvement.’ That day, we went for a drink after work. He ordered Guinness, I remember, which sat oddly with his slightly fey aestheticism. I thought of him like a languorous cat: elegant but distant. He had these tortoiseshell glasses with round rims that reminded me of a writer from a different era. He took them off and rubbed the bridge of his nose, leaving them folded by a soggy beer mat on the table between us. When he got up to go to the loo, I picked up the glasses. I don’t know why but I tried them on. They sat tightly around my skull and I was surprised to notice they weren’t prescription lenses, just plain perspex. Before Martin, my own personal appearance wasn’t something that ever bothered me, partly because my parents never cared that much. They were lovely people and I had a lovely upbringing. Lovely. I remember an American friend of mine once saying ‘lovely’ was such an English word – ‘Like you’re describing a picnic,’ she said. But it was lovely. My older brother took up most of my parents’ time and pride. He was the brainy one, the sporty one, the popular one. I was happy to sit on the sidelines of his success. I’d always been the not-quite child. I got Bs in exams, not quite As. I didn’t quite get into Oxford so went to Durham instead. I wasn’t quite pretty, but I was pleasant-looking and I was taught that those kinds of things didn’t much matter. It was what was inside that counted. I made myself pliable and easy and nice to be around. I was helpful. ‘You see what needs doing before it has to be pointed out to you,’ my mother once told me as she heaved a roast chicken out of the oven. ‘You anticipate.’ That was my thing. Lucy: she looks after people. And it was true. All through my teens, I anticipated what others wanted from me and then I shaped myself accordingly. I was shy and quiet and never a threat. They liked me for it. Except for Martin. Martin was a tougher nut to crack. I used to do the tea round for my desk at the Bugle. I knew everyone’s orders: milk and two sugars, no milk but a slice of lemon, Earl Grey not English Breakfast. Martin never wanted one, no matter how many times I offered. Eventually, I plucked up the courage to ask why. He pursed his lips. He had pale lips that always made his face look cold. ‘That stuff they serve in the canteen?’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Please. It’s hardly worthy of the name.’ ‘I can get coffee if you’d rather.’ ‘Even worse,’ he said, returning to his computer screen. It wasn’t rude, the way he did it. He delivered his opinions as statements of fact: not aggressively, just as if they were indisputable. Every time he dismissed me, I simply wanted him to notice me more. That evening, after work, I got the bus to Knightsbridge. I went to Harvey Nichols and I bought a specially packaged box of expensive teas. I left them on Martin’s desk the next morning. He never mentioned it in person. Instead, he sent an email. It read simply: ‘Thank you for the tea.’ And then the box disappeared and he returned to refusing all hot drinks. How intriguing, I thought. How different. My friend Neesha at work couldn’t understand it. ‘What do you see in him?’ she asked. We were standing outside the building, shivering in the wind as we took a fag break. They had just declared we were no longer allowed to smoke inside the office. Neesha smoked more than I did. She was secretary to the editor and had the most stressful job in the building. Mostly, I came outside just to keep her company. ‘Who?’ ‘Martin, dummy.’ Neesha passed me her cigarette. Her red lipstick circled the butt. I took a drag. ‘He’s interesting.’ ‘You can say that again.’ Neesha chuckled. ‘There’s something not right with him, Luce.’ ‘Don’t be mean.’ ‘I’m not. You must have noticed, love. The other day Ian had to say his name eight times before he showed any signs of life.’ ‘He’s just in his own world,’ I said, surprised at how defensive I felt. Neesha sniffed. ‘Thinks he’s better than us, more like.’ ‘It’s not that.’ ‘Oh please, Luce. I know his type. Public school, Oxbridge, acts like his shit doesn’t stink. Cares more about … I don’t know … his fucking gold cufflinks than about actual people.’ I laughed. ‘You’re too nice, Luce. You always think the best.’ This wasn’t strictly true. I was good at appearing nice on the surface but my special skill was getting people to like me whether I liked them or not. With Martin, it was different. Because I wasn’t sure where I stood with him. It was the unavailability that lured me in. I flattered myself that it was simply a disguise worn by a scared little boy who needed looking after and I was the one he would let in. Neesha finished her cigarette and ground the butt into the pavement with the edge of her spiky high heel. ‘Just be careful, that’s all I’m saying. He doesn’t care about you the way you care about him.’ ‘I think—’ ‘He’s never said a word to me, you know. Even though he’s in and out of the editor’s office every week, he’s never once said hello.’ Neesha loosened her coat. ‘You can tell a lot about someone by looking at how they treat secretaries.’ I didn’t listen. I kept seeing Martin. Our lunch appointments turned into dinner dates. The tea run became after-work drinks. The days turned into weeks which turned into months and soon I found I looked forward to each day more if I knew I was going to see him. The weekends dragged because they were devoid of his company. I concede, looking back, that I was the one who made most of the running. Martin seemed either too polite or too shy to initiate a kiss, so I was the one who lunged one night after we’d been out for dinner at a Persian restaurant in Kensington. I didn’t much care for Persian food – too many fragrances and the crispy rice stuck in my teeth – but Martin loved it, so I went for him. The kiss was dry and chaste. I tried to wriggle the tip of my tongue into his mouth but he resisted. I drew back and looked at him. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked. ‘Don’t you like me?’ He held his head back. ‘Of course I like you, Lucy.’ ‘Well then.’ I kissed him again and this time he responded, but cautiously, as though evaluating each reflex and twist. I clasped the back of his head, running my hands through his hair, and gradually he relaxed. I was moved by his nervousness. Martin, who was so particular in every other respect, so certain of the right way to wear a tie, so unquestioningly sure of what constituted good taste, seemed to have no parameters for this. I wondered how many times he had been kissed before me. It crossed my mind that he might be a virgin. And instead of repelling me, his unworldliness was appealing. In this one area, I thought, I was superior. He could teach me about art and beauty and the best way to do my hair, but I was the one who would take the lead physically, who would show him how it was done. Under the light of the streetlamp, I reached down and slid my hand under the waistband of his trousers. He was limp. I brushed against it gently with my fingers and then, rhythmically slid my palm up and down until I could feel him stirring. ‘No,’ he said. I ignored him. ‘No, Lucy, don’t.’ He stepped away from me, removing my hand. ‘Sorry,’ I said. Martin held his breath for a moment. I wondered what he was thinking. He seemed to be wrestling with some inexpressible thought and then I saw his face relax and he smiled. ‘It’s just …’ He bent forward and kissed the top of my head. ‘Too fast.’ I nodded, relieved. ‘Yes, yes, of course.’ I drew back. He went home and I returned to my flat. Over the next few weeks, I was careful not to crowd him. We continued going for dinner but I didn’t try to kiss him again. We held hands, his palm cool and smooth. Once, he came back to my flat and we slept next to each other without touching. I told myself it was an old-fashioned courtship and when, at the end of six months of this, we did finally have sex, it required some subtle manoeuvring. It took a while for Martin to get hard. He needed me to be in a certain position. Again, I told myself it was sweet to be with someone so inexperienced, so needful of my help. I’d had enough of men who took me as if I were their due, who woke me up with an erection and grunted their way to a satisfactory orgasm. I found Martin’s tentativeness delicate and respectful. He treated me like a piece of fragile china. I was sure, once he got used to me – to us – the sex would become more relaxed, less mechanical. I was beginning to love him, not for his physical prowess but for his mind. I wanted to hear what he thought about everything. By the end of the year, we were engaged. I felt proud. I had won him over. Me. Lucy. The not-quite. And I was happy, too. Very happy. He saw something in me I failed to see in myself. How lucky that was. How I loved him for it. And how I loved thinking I could be the one to protect him. Neesha stopped asking me to go outside for fags. We still said hello and goodbye and smiled at each other warmly but I knew it wasn’t the same. It didn’t matter to me as much as I thought it would. I told myself: she doesn’t see the Martin I see. She can’t understand what he’s like away from the office, in those quiet moments where I catch him on the sofa looking sad and lonely and I wonder what’s going on in his head and I reach out and stroke the soft hair at the back of his neck and slowly, he comes back to me, and we kiss and I know there is no one else who can do this for him. Only me. Martin Epsom, 1985 MY MOTHER’S NAME WAS SYLVIA. You don’t get many Sylvias nowadays, do you? A shimmery, slippery name for such a big-boned woman. Recently, one of Ben’s children introduced me to a fuzzy-faced toy and told me with pride that it was part of his collection of ‘Sylvanian Families’. I’m not sure whether the animal in my hand was meant to be a rabbit or a mouse or a non-specific mutation of both and although it looked soft to the touch, when I pressed it between my fingers I realised that underneath the thin coating of fur, it was hard plastic. That tallied more with my notion of my mother. My mother was a perpetually disappointed woman. Her husband – my father – proved the ultimate in unreliability by having the temerity to die before I was born. The worst of it was that his death was entirely unexceptional, thereby denying my mother the one pleasurable thing she might have got out of it – namely, a good story. It was December and my father had been dispatched to post a clutch of Christmas cards in the letterbox at the end of the road. The weather in Epsom had been bitterly cold, falling below zero the night before, and as he turned left out of the house, my father’s foot made contact with a patch of ice and he slipped, falling over onto his back and hitting his head against the kerb, triggering a cerebral haemorrhage. A neighbour found him, dead in a spreading pool of his own blood, and alerted my mother who was two months pregnant and in the process of making a fish pie for supper. I don’t know what my mother’s reaction would have been and, not having been a witness to my parents’ marriage, I have no idea as to the extent of her affection or otherwise for her husband. From what I know of her now, I can’t imagine her being in love, but perhaps she was and perhaps it was my father’s death that made her into the bitter woman she became. Allow me to give her the benefit of the doubt on that. She never spoke to me of my father, of the kind of man he was. There were no pictures of him around the house. He existed in my head as a gap: a burnt hole in a non-existent family photograph which I could not fill with any kind of recognisable physical detail, no matter how hard I tried. My mother told me the story of my father’s death only once, when I was old enough to have found the words to ask her. I must have been eight or nine. For all of my childhood up to that point, my father’s absence had been explained away by two simple syllables: ‘He died’. This would usually be followed by a sigh and a sense that this had made things very difficult for her and that was all I needed to be aware of. It had taken me a while to pluck up the courage to ask for further elaboration. I remember I chose my occasion carefully. It was at the end of the day, when my mother had come back from her much-despised job at the local cafeteria and she was sitting by the gas fire, sipping from a mug of Horlicks that I had warmed for her in the microwave. ‘How did my dad die?’ I asked. She wrinkled her nose. ‘I was wondering what took you so long,’ she said. And then she relayed the whole episode with a sturdy matter-of-factness. I remember not looking at her as she was talking, but instead focusing on the fire’s fake flames sending leaping shadows up the flock wallpaper and the overripe-pear smell of gas as it seeped into the room. One detail of Sylvia’s story stuck in my mind (she was always Sylvia to me, never ‘mother’). I still think of it now, some thirty years later. My mother told me that after she had called the ambulance, she had gone outside, wrapped up in her outdoors coat, and she had bent down by my father’s lifeless form and she had gathered up the scattered Christmas cards from the pavement and put them in her pocket to send the next day. ‘But …’ I said. ‘Did they have blood on them?’ ‘What kind of a question is that?’ She took a slurp of Horlicks and looked away. ‘I wasn’t going to waste my time writing a whole new set, was I now?’ I wonder what they thought, those people who received those blood-spattered cards. My father’s death meant that it was just the two of us from the start. There is a peculiar kind of claustrophobia that comes from being the only child of a single mother. You learn, quite quickly, that nothing you do will ever be enough to fill your parent’s yawning need for filial devotion. What starts off as love rapidly turns into a sort of inescapable hatred and the hatred is even more needy, even more trapping than the love was. It sucks you dry from the inside. I think my mother’s obsessive love for me co-existed with contempt for her own vulnerability. She was dependent on me for affection and yet she denied that she needed it. I never met her standards because I never knew what they were. They seemed to shift and change on a whim. All I knew was that I was a source of near-constant disappointment. I could read this disappointment in the wrinkles at the corner of her mouth, bracketing her lips downward. I could sense it in the way she looked at me sometimes, sideways on as I was doing the washing-up or watching The Generation Game on the television or sitting naked in the bath, a trail of goosebumps down my spine because the water was never hot enough. When she looked at me in this way, she seemed to be analysing me, trying to work me out, like a sceptic attempting to understand another person’s faith. There was some oddness. There always is in that kind of relationship. For instance, she insisted on dressing me each morning, long after I was old enough to do it myself. She would hold open my underpants so that I could clamber into them, kneeling on my bedroom carpet so that I was uncomfortably aware that my penis was at her eye level. She would brush my hair brusquely and tie my shoelaces and prepare my packed lunch: Mother’s Pride triangles with Marmite and cucumber (which I disliked but never told her I disliked) and then she would walk me to the bus stop on her way to work, waving me off as I took my regular window seat and made the short journey to the local primary school. I returned from school earlier than she got off work, so I would let myself in. She expected me to make my own supper and then to prepare something simple for her, a chicken kiev or a can of baked beans on toast. When she came back through the front door, I could evaluate her mood from the tread of her feet on the kitchen lino. If it had been a bad day at the cafe, she would find fault with everything. ‘Why are you wearing that stupid old jumper? Why have you made me green beans when you know I hate them? What are you, a bloody retard? I haven’t raised you to be a simpleton, have I?’ She would never hit me, but she would nitpick and carp until I felt physically assaulted. Only once did she pinch the tender flesh on my forearm, twisting it anti-clockwise between her fingers until I yelped with the burning pain of it. There was a mark there for days. You might have thought school was my refuge. My mother, the beneficiary of a generous life insurance policy after my father’s death, had decided to send me to a fee-paying preparatory and it was true that, for a time, I enjoyed the rough and tumble of playtime, the rambunctious whoops of the other children as they scampered around the sandpit. But, fairly quickly, I began to stand out. I was never sure why. Perhaps it was something to do with my face. I have been told I have a tendency to look disapproving or unhappy when I think my features are simply expressionless and relaxed. Perhaps it was that I ran out of patience fairly quickly with the other children. I began to feel detached from them, older somehow. I’ve always felt older. After a few weeks of watching them sift sand through a red plastic square with holes in the bottom and shriek with displeasure when said red plastic square was removed so that someone else could play with it, I found that I couldn’t understand what it was about the red plastic square that was so appealing. I tried to evaluate it logically. Was it the physical sensation of the sand siphoned through the small apertures? Was it the idea of having achieved something, of having transmuted a seemingly solid substance into a liquid river of grains? And, even assuming it was either of these fundamentally trivial motivations, why was that so completely absorbing? Why did the red plastic square assume such proportions in these children’s heads, the idea of it expanding to fill all available space, all their angsty desire, their desperate need to play and experiment … how could all of it be subsumed into a single unexceptional item with ‘Made in Taiwan’ stamped on its underside? The red plastic square tormented me for weeks. I felt there must be a piece of me lacking, a talent for childishness that I didn’t possess. I just didn’t get it. It annoyed me that I didn’t. Believe me, I wanted more than anything to be an unthinking, easy child. I wanted to belong. And at the same time, I knew that I didn’t. So maybe that goes some way towards explaining what happened next. It was the incident that was to change the course of my life although, naturally, I didn’t realise it at the time. It was to do with the bird. A sparrow. A defenceless sparrow who had fallen from the sky onto the bricked surface of the playground. Wing broken. Mewling from its beak. Flapping senselessly. Heart pitter-pattering frantically inside its feathered chest. A girl called Jennifer was the first to find it. Jennifer was blonde and tall, with ungainly limbs and a clumsy way of running which, she confessed to me once in an unguarded moment, was modelled on the way Bobbie ran in the film of The Railway Children. She was one of those children forever destined to be mildly despised for her inelegance and, indeed, when I looked her up on Facebook a few years ago, she still had those unfortunate broad shoulders and a pitifully small number of online friends despite her emoticon-strewn status updates. Jennifer found the bird as she was playing tag. She stopped, almost tripping over her own shoes, and tears sprung to her eyes. It just so happened that I was sitting on a nearby bench with a book in my hand, and when I saw her standing there, whimpering, I got up to see what was going on. ‘What is it?’ I asked. Jennifer was breathing heavily, a half-asthmatic wheeze in the back of her throat. ‘It’s … it’s …’ She pointed at the bird’s prone form. ‘I think it’s dying.’ I knelt down and peered closer at the sparrow. It looked at me, moist eye swivelling in its socket. I extended one finger and prodded it, feeling the silky feathers part with the pressure. ‘Don’t touch it, Martin!’ Jennifer was saying. ‘We need to tell the teacher.’ The teacher was duly told and the bird was scooped up by adult hands and placed in a makeshift nest of cotton-wool and pipe-cleaners. This was then put on a high ledge in the hallway, just above a radiator and next to a window overlooking the street outside. The ledge ran parallel to a flight of stairs which led up to our classroom. For the next few days, when the bell went for morning lessons, an excitable gaggle of schoolchildren would file up the staircase and peer into the cotton-wool nest to see how the sparrow was faring. The teachers seized upon this set of circumstances as a way of educating us about ‘nature’. (They were a bovine lot, those primary school teachers, with barely an original thought between them.) So it was that some time after that, there was a competition to come up with a name for the ‘school sparrow’. I forget who won it now or what the eventual name was – let’s say it was ‘Sammy’ – but by christening the bird, I noticed everyone felt closer to it, as though it were a form of mascot. Then, we were encouraged to draw pictures of the blessed thing – coloured pencil doodles which were Blu Tacked on the walls like sacrificial offerings. More than once, our homework consisted of finding out ‘facts’ about Sammy. This being the pre-internet era, I had to waste more time than I would have liked poring over The Observer Book of Birds in the local library. We had been told not to touch the sparrow and not to disturb it with our gawping. But each time I passed Sammy while walking up the stairs, I wanted to reach out and squeeze him in my cupped hands. He was such a small, insignificant thing – barely bigger than a tennis ball. The more the other children stared and whispered, the more they monitored every tiny movement of Sammy’s body for signs of recovery, the more angry I became. It was so stupid to attach such importance to a brainless creature. But what really made me snap was overhearing Jennifer one morning. Ever since the discovery of the sparrow, she had assumed a possessiveness over it. She appeared to think that her self-appointed guardianship gave her an insight into what the bird was feeling and how long its recovery might be expected to take and she would treat us all to smug reports on its progress. Her father was a vet, as I recall – a fact she took every opportunity to mention. On this particular morning, she had been invited to the front of the class by the teacher to tell us how the sparrow was faring. ‘I think Sammy might be flying again soon. His wing is almost healed.’ Jennifer looked pleased with herself. The teacher, a woman appropriately called Mrs Love, was smiling benignly, nodding her head in agreement. I think it was this that finally sent me over the edge. Because it was all so bogus. The sparrow hadn’t shown any signs of recovery. Its wing was still as uselessly snapped as ever. Its eyes had acquired a dull patina. The kindest thing would have been to break its neck in the playground. ‘It’s probably going to die,’ I said. I spoke without putting my hand up first and when the words tripped out of my mouth they were louder than I had anticipated. Jennifer took a surprised step backwards. Her lower lip wobbled. The teacher glared at me. ‘Martin. What a terrible thing to say.’ ‘It’s not,’ I protested. ‘It’s true.’ ‘That’s enough, Martin.’ I felt a hot bullet of anger lodge itself in my throat. I think it might have been the first time I’d ever been told off by a teacher and I felt it keenly. I vowed to myself I would never, ever forget this moment, the indignity of it, the unfairness and the dumb, unquestioning way in which the teacher sided with ignorance over truth simply because it was easier. Who cared about imparting actual knowledge when you could keep everyone quiet by making them draw pictures of a bloody bird? (I’ve never liked animals. I find it sickening how we fetishise them with tartan dog coats and velvet cat collars and special tins of food with jellied rabbit chunks and how we invite them into our homes, these wild, unthinking things, and expect them to reflect all the human characteristics we most wish to see in ourselves.) The morning after the teacher had publicly slapped me down, I told my mother I needed to go in to school early to help with the completion of a class project. She dropped me off at the bus stop an hour before my usual time. The school was dark, apart from one light coming from the headmistress’s office. The front door was on the latch. I walked in, taking care to tread lightly so that my plimsolls did not squeak against the floor. To one side of the hallway were the cloakroom stalls, their pegs empty apart from a single, discarded art-class overall. Beyond, I could make out the receding outline of Doris, the cleaner, who was pushing an industrial hoover along the corridor, swinging the flex from side to side as she went. She was listening to her Walkman, as I had known she would be, humming along to the indistinct tune piping through her headphones and swaying her arthritic hips as best she could in time with the silent beat. I left my coat and my bag in the cloakroom, not by my normal peg but in a corner, stuffed behind one of the benches, where I could retrieve it later. I slid off my shoes, nudging them into the same cubby-hole. Then I tiptoed back into the corridor and up the stairs, carrying under my arm two volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica borrowed from the local library for just this purpose (you couldn’t check out reference books, I seem to recall, so I must have temporarily stolen them). I took the steps slowly, one by one, clutching the weight of the encyclopaedias to my waist, feeling reassurance in their solid bulk. I gazed up at the ledge, allowing my eyes to acclimatise to the early-morning gloom and then to focus on the blurry outline of the bird’s man-made nest. Pipe-cleaners and twigs and strands of mismatched wool and cotton-wool. When I got to the top step, I placed the two encyclopaedias on the floor and climbed on top. I wasn’t a very tall boy and I had known I wouldn’t be able to reach the ledge without some help. Looking back, I can’t help but feel a bit proud of my foresight. I think it shows a degree of maturity to be able to make such a plan and enact it under my own steam. I stood on sock-covered tiptoe, leaning forwards with one hand placed flat against the wall to keep my balance but I still couldn’t quite reach the nest. It was agonisingly close. I could brush the tips of my fingers against a protruding bit of twig, but I couldn’t get the purchase I needed to remove it. I didn’t dare use two hands in case I lost my balance and fell with a clatter down the stairs. I stretched, pushing at the single millimetre of twig I could reach until I could feel a trickle of sweat running down my back, the moisture attaching itself to my school shirt so that the material stuck to my skin and made me even hotter. A bead of sweat fell from my forehead onto the grey stone floor and left a dark circle there. I began to get frustrated and then panicked and then angry and I knew I was running out of time and that the other children would soon start arriving in dribs and drabs and then in a stream of maroon and blue before the first bell sounded at 8.50 a.m. I tried one final lunge, jumping as high as I could, both feet springing off the encyclopaedias, and as I leaped, I took my balancing arm away from the wall and grabbed at the nest with both hands. I crumpled back to the ground, the books skittering to one side, my leg twisting under my weight. There was a thudding pain in my left ankle. But when I looked at the bounty in my hands, all this was forgotten. There it was: the nest and, inside, a startled, twitching Sammy. The rest of it happened quickly. I put the encyclopaedias back under my arm, balanced the nest in my free hand, and crept back downstairs. I knew Sammy couldn’t fly because of his broken wing. No escape. The bird’s eye pulsated blackly: a squelching dot of terror. I stared at it, cupped in the nest in my hands, and although I had a vague instinct to talk to it in order to make it feel better, although I knew that’s what other, more normal children would do, I remained silent. And I remember thinking: let it suffer. Let it learn what life is like. And that in thinking this, I felt less alone. Because there was something else, some other living thing, that was enduring an experience worse than my own. I went back to the cloakroom, put the nest on the bench, deposited the books on the floor by my peg, slipped on my shoes and, picking up Sammy again (‘Sammy’ in my mind now: a thing worthy of a name), walked swiftly outside. I made my way towards the playground, but instead of going through the gates as usual, I tacked to the right and followed the fence around the perimeter. I could see the swings. The looming, inverted ‘v’ of the slide. In the distance, a lone car, its engine puttering as the passenger door opened and disgorged a child. The school had been built in the middle of what must once have been rather a nice patch of greenery. Behind the playground was a copse of trees. We weren’t allowed to wander here, but the naughtier children always did in order to experiment with cigarettes and kissing, so I knew it existed. By the time I reached the field in question, I was panting. I walked towards the central grouping of trees. The grass was wet from overnight rainfall and my plimsolls became stained with claggy brown mud. I would have to clean them later, I thought, before my mother got home. At the centre of the trees was a small clearing, lined with discarded fag butts and empty crisp packets. At one edge were the ashy remnants of a fire, scraps of newsprint stuck to the underside of stones. I put Sammy in his nest on the ground. The bird was shivering now, straining to move its useless wing to no avail. Stupid thing, I thought. I picked up a medium-sized rock from the undergrowth. I played with it in my hand, feeling the heft of it. And then, I slammed the sharp end of the rock down into the nest. The bird made no sound but when I withdrew my hand, I saw that its eye was still flickering, still sentient. Again, I punched it with the rock, throwing all my might into that single action. Again. Again. And again, this time emitting a scream for what I knew would be the final blow. I felt the crack of slender bones beneath my fist. A noise like the slow release of air from a flattening tyre. When I removed my hand, one knuckle was bleeding. The bird lay there, cracked and lifeless, the tremble of its eye finally stilled. I told myself it had been a mercy, that only I, out of my cohort of classmates, could see the bird was suffering and needed to be put out of its misery as swiftly as possible. How frustrating it must have been for that creature, sitting on a ledge in a concrete building, gazing out of a window at the sky it could no longer fly through, beholden to these lumpen schoolchildren for scraps of birdseed. How undignified, I thought. How unfair. As a child, I remember so very fiercely wanting to be grown up: to earn the privilege of being in control of my own existence, not by doing anything, but simply by existing for longer. I chafed against the arbitrary restrictions placed on my life. Lights out. Homework hour. Tidy your bedroom. Finish your vegetables. Stop reading. Stop fidgeting. Stop staring. Is that why I felt such a thrill when I killed the bird? We’re not meant to admit to this kind of feeling, but let me tell you honestly: I felt its death with a visceral intent – the violent pleasure of having finally done something. It was the ultimate satisfaction. There is no need to dwell too much on what happened next. You can guess most of it. There was a predictable flurry of activity when the bird was discovered to be missing. It was Doris who raised the alarm; Doris, the cleaner, to whom I had never paid much notice, who had always seemed a bit of a dullard with her vacant expression, her yellow dusting cloths tucked into the elasticated waistband of her jeans. Well, Doris told a teacher, who then told the headmistress, who then informed the entire school at assembly that the bird had disappeared to a general commotion of disbelief. Jennifer, sitting cross-legged on the floor in the row in front of me, started crying. Alan Munro patted her arm with his podgy fingers, fat knuckles blotted with dirt. Next to me, Susan Rankin gasped and pulled the cuff of her school jumper over her hand. I was still, head lowered, eyes fixed at a point just to the right of one of my maroon socks. There was, I reasoned, no point feigning emotion. I was not known for being an expressive child. Besides, I don’t think I really cared about being found out. I think I already knew the game was up. I think I wanted it to be. I was so sick of them all, you see. As the assembly continued, and we shuffled to our feet to sing ‘Morning Has Broken’, I could feel someone looking at me. When I glanced round, my eyes met the heated gaze of Mrs Love, her small features contracting. She waited until the end of assembly to take me aside, grabbing hold of my arm with surprising force, her thin fingers pressing through my jumper. ‘So, Martin,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Do you want to tell me what you did with Sammy?’ ‘All right,’ I said. She looked surprised, then led me off to the staffroom which smelled of instant coffee and fig rolls and had old copies of the Guardian and a single dog-eared issue of Horse and Hound stacked up on one of the bookshelves. I confessed without much trouble. I glossed over the finer details of how I’d dispatched the creature, saying simply that I felt it should be put out of its misery. Mrs Love’s face turned from red to white to shiny as a sweat broke out across her upper lip. I could see that she didn’t know what to make of me. She actually tried, at one point, to reach out and take my hand. The headmistress summoned my mother and said that I was suspended with immediate effect. My mother was not as furious as I had expected her to be. She refused to talk to me for the rest of the day and sent me to bed without any food, but that was pretty much par for the course. The next day, she didn’t go to work but sat waiting for me in glacial silence at the breakfast table. I came down in my pyjamas and dressing gown, having not known what clothes to get dressed in. My school jumper lay wrinkled and empty: a shed skin over the back of my desk chair. I wondered if I would ever wear it again. I was intrigued, more than anything, to know what would happen next. ‘Well, Martin,’ my mother said as I took a seat and poured milk over a bowl of cereal I did not want to eat. ‘I can’t say I’m surprised.’ She looked at me over the rim of her coffee mug. There was a chip on the upper edge of the handle: a white arrowhead against the red. ‘You’ve always been a wrong ’un.’ Her lips pressed together in a tight, crooked line. ‘I’ve tried my best for you, I have, and it hasn’t been easy, all on my own, but I’ve tried to raise you like a normal boy. I’ve given you a roof over your head and everything you could ever want. But you’re not, are you? Normal, I mean.’ She broke off and then added, more to herself than to me: ‘There’s something missing.’ I willed myself not to cry. Until this point, I’d felt powerfully immune from any kind of emotion. But my mother had always possessed the ability to wound me at the most tender point. I nodded. ‘Yes.’ She drained the last of her coffee. ‘Yes,’ she repeated. ‘There we are.’ We lapsed into silence. My cereal became lumpy. I sipped at my orange juice. Outside, it started to rain, droplets of it trailing down the window in a race of their own making. After a while, my mother pushed back her chair and came round to my side of the table and then she did something I could not remember her ever having done before: she reached out and squeezed my shoulder. They let me back into their drab little school. My mother spoke to the headmistress and, I suppose, gave her some guff about my dead father and how hard it had been for me. I returned after a fortnight’s purdah. Jennifer never spoke to me again and the others kept their distance. But, I confess, I found relief in my exile rather than torment. The time passed peaceably enough. Events merged into each other; a soupy fog. Nothing interesting happened. And then, one springtime morning, I found myself sitting the entrance exam for Burtonbury School. I think, from what I can recall, that my mother had been speaking to someone in the cafe about my predicament and they had told her I should try for Burtonbury. The customer in question had a troubled relative who had gone there and prospered. It seemed as good an idea as any. In any case, I liked exams and was good at them, and I knew about boarding school from Enid Blyton books so I was in favour of the idea. I wanted so very much to get out of Epsom. The only exciting memory I have of that place is of once having seen Lester Piggott fall off his horse while competing in the Epsom Derby. I passed the Burtonbury exam, as we had both known I would, and was offered a full scholarship. My mother sewed name tapes into socks for what seemed like weeks. In the welcome pack sent to me before the start of the autumn term, there was a shopping list of necessary items for boarders. I was required to come with one full-size umbrella, one complete rugby kit in the school colours of brown and green (with three changes of Aertex shirts), a shoe-polishing set, a supply of stamps and – most bizarrely – a stiff straw boater with a ribbon which I would be expected to wear for formal occasions. My mother ignored the approved outfitters and uniform suppliers, seeking out instead the cheaper bargains in charity shops. As a result, my school jumpers were always faded and my P.E. shorts were never white enough and the Aertex shirts had immoveable off-yellow stains under each armpit. The smell of other people’s sadness lingered in the threads. To this day, I have a profound aversion to second-hand clothes. I can’t abide the new trend for ‘vintage’ outfits, the nipped-in 50s dresses sported by overweight ladies who live in east London running Scandinavian coffee shops and the rolled-up chinos favoured by bearded hipsters who work in digital marketing. I have a minimal wardrobe but I invest in key, tailored pieces that last. Although I can’t really afford it, I have my suits made to measure by Ben’s tailor, purely for the pleasure of knowing no one else has ever shrugged their shoulders into my jacket. Despite my mother’s obsession with cutting costs, the requisite Burtonbury boater defeated her. There simply wasn’t an available supply of them in Oxfam, which must have been terribly frustrating. In the end, she was forced to go to Ede & Ravenscroft and spend an inordinate sum on a hat I would only wear three times a term, before consigning it forever to a cardboard box shoved in the back of my wardrobe. The evening before the first day of my new school, my mother and I took the bus and then the tube to Paddington, armed with my boater and a suitcase full of clothes. My luggage was so heavy that the only way I could board the train was by mounting the stairs, grabbing hold of the suitcase handle and leaning back as far as I could without falling over. In this way, I managed to leverage my body-weight against its bulk before sliding it up into the carriage. My mother did not wait to see me off. She stood on the platform and watched me take my seat. I glanced at her through the window: a broad woman in a shapeless beige coat buttoned all the way up to her neck. Her face was set. I raised a hand halfway to the window. I was going to wave but then didn’t. I thought it might, for some reason, make her cross. She gave a little nod of acknowledgement, then turned and walked away, the low heel of her shoes sounding dully against the concrete. As she left, I felt a wave of relief, as if a curtain had been lifted from my field of vision. The light flooded in. I blinked and allowed this new sensation to settle. I was on my own, for the first time in my thirteen years on this planet. Entirely, blissfully, permissibly alone. The train pulled out of the station. The carriage filled with the sound of schoolboy voices and the pop of fizzy-drink cans and crisp packets being opened. I kept staring out of the window, unwilling to speak to anyone. The graffiti and bricks and metal of London slid past and gave way to suburban hedges and children’s swings and washing lines which in turn transformed into an unspooling ticker tape of green fields and church spires. As the train pressed on, I was aware of the importance of the moment. I watched myself, squashed in that train seat, with my untouched sandwiches still wrapped in tinfoil on the table in front of me, and I realised that my life was in the process of taking a different direction, plotted according to a new constellation. At the age of thirteen, my boat was setting sail across the beating tides of a different ocean. I would be starting a new school, one more befitting my character. But perhaps I also had some intimation that a more profound shift of fate awaited me. Because, although I didn’t know it yet, I was about to meet Ben and nothing would ever be the same again. II. (#udb1ee16b-168a-5c80-b4d2-4d8a6dd58263) Tipworth Police Station, 2.40 p.m. I REACH ACROSS THE TABLE FOR MY COOLING TEA. My throat is dry from all the talking. My eyes, too, feel scratchy. I wonder if I could ask for some Optrex drops but one look at Grey Suit’s downturned mouth suggests the request wouldn’t be met in a generous spirit. He still hasn’t spoken. While Beige Hair has been looking at me in a frank, friendly fashion and interjecting with the odd murmur as I recount the evening’s events, Grey Suit has been sitting impassively in his chair, arms folded across his stomach. No paunch. A hint of hard muscle beneath the gentle stretching of the shirt buttons. I’m guessing you have to keep fit if you’re in the police. There are probably regular tests where they have to run measured distances as a beeper goes off at shorter and shorter intervals. I can imagine Grey Suit in shorts and a loose T-shirt, perhaps bearing the faded crest of an American university he never attended, sprinting with all his might, his face as void of thought as it is now. I knew people like him at school: boys who excelled at physicality and who never needed to try with anything else. Big, slab-faced boys with no personalities and an understanding of the world wholly predicated on who would win in any given contest. The kind of boy who would always initiate an arm wrestle in a pub. They were popular, these boys. I wonder if it’s because we all have an innate need to be protected. So we seek out the bigger, brawnier specimens and we want to be around them because they will shield us one day when we most need shielding. They will man the lifeboats when we hit the iceberg. And for this, we are willing to overlook their complete lack of conversational guile or intellect. ‘So,’ Beige Hair is saying, ‘you weren’t staying at the big house. At Tipworth Priory, I mean?’ I can’t work out whether this is a tactic or whether she really hasn’t been paying attention. ‘No. As I think I already said.’ Beige Hair nods. ‘Of course you did, Martin. Of course you did.’ Grey Suit shifts in his chair. ‘That didn’t bother you, then?’ he asks. ‘What?’ ‘Not staying at the Priory? With Ben and Serena?’ ‘Not at all.’ In my account of the build-up to the party, I omitted a few of the more trivial details. There was simply no need for the police to know Lucy had been offended. Beige Hair keeps looking at me. ‘They had lots of family members staying,’ I say to fill the silence. ‘It was just a logistics thing.’ ‘Right.’ I exhale more loudly than I intended, not realising I’ve been holding my breath. It’s ridiculous, really, how nervous they make you feel. Even when you haven’t done anything wrong. It’s like those customs officials at American airports, scowling and rude and suspicious of anything you say. Beige Hair is looking at me expectantly. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I didn’t quite catch that?’ ‘Well, Martin, I was only saying that they seem to have a lot of bedrooms at the Priory. It wouldn’t have been too hard for them to find space, would it? And you’re such close friends, it just seems odd …’ ‘I don’t know. You’d have to ask Ben and Serena. Besides, there were security issues.’ ‘Of course. The VIP.’ ‘Exactly.’ I glance upwards to the ceiling, hoping to find something of interest there. In one corner, there is a hairline crack. A childhood memory comes to me unbidden: my mother washing my hair in the bath as I, hating every second, fixed my gaze on a crack in the yellowing ceiling, willing it to be over. ‘Are you all right?’ asks Beige Hair. ‘Perfectly.’ ‘You look a bit upset.’ ‘Not at all,’ I repeat. ‘Just wondering how much longer this will take.’ She turns one sheet of paper over, shifting it to the other side of her folder and revealing another page of foolscap beneath, covered with scrawled black handwriting. ‘So you and your wife arrived at the party before the other guests to have a drink with Ben and Serena,’ she recaps. ‘Did you think Mr Fitzmaurice was acting normally?’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Well, did anything strike you as out of character?’ I shrug. ‘Anything on his mind, perhaps?’ ‘It was three weeks ago. I don’t understand why you’re raking it all up now …’ ‘You must know it takes time to gather together the relevant facts,’ she says. ‘As a journalist, I mean.’ I don’t say anything. She tries a different tack. ‘How did Lucy think Mr Fitzmaurice seemed?’ ‘You’d have to ask her.’ ‘Oh, she’s been very helpful with our enquiries,’ Beige Hair says. ‘But I wondered what you thought, Martin.’ She waits. ‘Tell you what,’ I say. ‘Why don’t you tell me what you’d like me to think was on his mind and I’ll tell you whether you’re right or not?’ For the first time, her expression hardens. ‘We don’t have time for guessing games, Mr Gilmour. In case it had escaped your notice, we’ve got a person lying in a critical condition in hospital.’ Mr Gilmour, now. No longer Martin. She stops. A note of irascibility is creeping into her tone and I can see her struggle internally to keep it in check. ‘We just want to establish the facts,’ she says, more gently. ‘So that we can work out exactly what happened and then we can all go home.’ She smiles. ‘Wouldn’t that be nice?’ Grey Suit sniffs his assent, but otherwise stays immobile. I place the tea back on the table. They have given it to me without a spoon or a stirrer and the sugar has sunk to the bottom like sediment. ‘I thought he seemed entirely himself,’ I say. Obviously, I am lying. 2 May Kitchen, Tipworth Priory, 7.30 p.m. WE DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING as we walked back through to the kitchen. Our champagne flutes were empty. There was a distance between us, solid as concrete. I regretted my comment about not staying over. Stupid of me to say it. Stupid, stupid, stupid. ‘So here, LS, we need your advice,’ Ben said, pointing towards a blank wall at the bottom of a narrow staircase in the back of the house. It must have once been used by servants, I thought, staring at the stripped wooden steps. Although did monks have servants? I wasn’t sure. It didn’t seem a particularly monkish thing to have. ‘Oh. How so?’ ‘We want a big piece of art. To lift it a bit, y’know.’ A few years ago, Ben started saying y’know, eliding the two words to form a seamless whole. It was around the time certain politicians started eschewing the glottal stop in order to demonstrate their man-of-the-people credentials. I suppose it was intended to denote a certain informality, a lightness of touch, a sense that, in spite of Ben’s enormous pile of inherited wealth and his aggressively successful hedge fund, he was in truth just an easy-going guy. Someone you could talk to. Someone you could kick a ball around with. Someone of whom one could say, ‘Oh Ben, he’s great. One of us. No airs and graces.’ This reputation was important to Ben. At school, it came to him naturally. Later in life, it was one he cultivated, and I found it less convincing. As a teenager, he had been touchingly sincere. These days, he saw sincerity as a valuable asset and it wasn’t quite the same thing. Admittedly, people who didn’t know him as well as I did gobbled it up. Ben acquired friends with ease. He had never liked being alone. And now, in this vast house, surrounded by sound engineers and gardeners and waiting staff, anticipating the arrival of some three hundred and fifty guests to celebrate his fortieth birthday, he should have been in his element. ‘What kind of thing were you thinking?’ I asked, knowing Ben wouldn’t have a clue. ‘Oh, fuck knows. Something … modern. And big.’ He laughed, rubbing his nose. ‘What’s the name of that guy Serena likes so much? The guy who does the graffiti?’ So fucking predictable. ‘Banksy.’ ‘Yeah. Him.’ ‘Mmm. Possibly a bit pass? now.’ ‘Ha! I knew you’d know.’ ‘I’ll have a think,’ I said, knowing that I would do no such thing. It was clear no one would ever see this part of the house. Serena wouldn’t dream of asking for my advice anywhere that actually counted. ‘Thanks, mate.’ He squeezed my arm. ‘Let’s get back to the girls.’ Always ‘girls’, never ‘women’. It drove Lucy mad. In the kitchen, Serena and my wife were perched awkwardly on high stools on opposite sides of a free-standing unit. The unit’s surface appeared to be constructed out of four-inch-thick white marble but as I approached, I realised it was a sort of galvanised rubber. When I touched it, it had a texture like a fireman’s hose. A lemon squeezer constructed out of chrome and resembling a rocket launcher stood ostentatiously in the centre. ‘… nightmare, you can’t imagine,’ Serena was saying. She raised her head at the sound of our footsteps, giving a short smile that quickly dissolved. ‘What are you two gossiping about?’ Ben bent and started rubbing Serena’s shoulders. She made a show of stretching her neck, moving her head from side to side. ‘I’m soooo knotted up,’ she said. ‘I know, sweetie. You’ve been working too hard.’ ‘Has there been a lot to do?’ Lucy asked. I caught her eye. We shared a flash of amusement. Neither of us can take Serena seriously when she talks about being busy. ‘Don’t get me started,’ she replied. ‘You just cannot rely on people doing what they’re meant to do. And then there’s all the added security we’ve had to—’ She broke off. A warning look from Ben. ‘What’s that?’ I asked. ‘Oh, it’s only … well, we weren’t really meant to say anything …’ ‘No, darling. We were sworn to secrecy.’ ‘Oh come on, babe, it’s only Martin and Lucy.’ I noted the ‘only’. ‘What security?’ Lucy asked. ‘There’s a notion,’ Ben started, ‘but I can’t stress enough, it really is only a notion, that we might be expecting a very important guest.’ He paused, full of self-importance. I refused to encourage him and turned to look out of the window at the kitchen garden, filled with terracotta pots of herbs and flowering jasmine. ‘The Prime Minister,’ Serena squealed, unable to contain herself. ‘Darling.’ His hand came to a stop on her shoulder, the fingers pressing down next to her collarbone so that the crescent moons of his nails turned white. ‘We don’t know whether—’ ‘No, no, I know. But he said he’d make every effort.’ ‘Wow,’ Lucy said, with no enthusiasm. ‘She didn’t vote for him,’ I explained. ‘Did you?’ Ben asked me. ‘Or are you still pretending to be left-wing?’ ‘I’d say that was none of your business, Ben,’ Lucy said, sharply. He laughed. ‘Sorry, Luce, sorry. You’re right. No more political talk.’ The Prime Minister was an old family friend of Ben’s. His name was Edward but as soon as he’d been elected leader, he had started asking everyone to call him Ed in the vain hope that everyone would forget about his Etonian background. His and Ben’s mothers had known each other way back when. I had met him twice at Ben’s dinner parties, long before he became smooth and polished and airbrushed, one of those public men incapable of shaking a hand without clasping it. I didn’t have much time for him, truth be told. But Serena had always been pathetically impressed. She enjoyed proximity to power. I sipped my champagne. ‘It’ll be nice to see Ed again.’ ‘Oh, have you met him?’ ‘Yes, several times. At yours. For dinner.’ He nodded vaguely. ‘Of course, of course. I’d forgotten.’ Ben poured us all another glass of Veuve. ‘A lot’s changed since then.’ There seemed to be nothing to say in response. I took the stool next to Lucy, resting the soles of my shoes on a ledge that was too close to the seat to be comfortable. Ben stayed standing. ‘Yes, there’ll be plenty of people you know. Mark, Bufty, Fliss, obviously; Arpad and Seb. Oh, and you remember Andrew Jarvis, don’t you, LS?’ I stiffen. ‘From school. And Cambridge.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, feigning nonchalance. ‘Jarvis.’ His name redolent of a smirk of thick muscle beneath a tightly buttoned school shirt. ‘Yes, of course.’ ‘He’s an MP now. One of Ed’s lot. Junior energy minister. He and his wife have just bought a place down the road.’ ‘He found someone willing to marry him, did he? Wonders will never cease.’ ‘Oh come on, he wasn’t that bad.’ ‘His wife’s a sweetie,’ Serena added. ‘She is,’ Ben agreed. ‘She really is.’ I let it go. Ben has a bottomless capacity to reinvent the past. I think it’s a calculated tactic. He rewrites a narrative to suit his needs at any given time and he’s so casual about it, no one seems to care. It’s an admirable skill, really, when one thinks about it. Ben raised his glass. ‘To us,’ he said, one hand still resting on his wife’s neck. ‘To our dear friends,’ I added. ‘Ben and Serena.’ Ben, more at ease now in a familiar pose of bonhomie, gave an expansive grin. His top three shirt buttons were undone, revealing a sprouting of dark hairs. He was tanned. He was always tanned from a recent holiday or golf game or simple genetic good fortune. He smelled of oak and leather – the same aftershave he’d been wearing for years, ever since his father gave him a bottle when he turned sixteen. He was handsome in an unexpected way. His mouth was perhaps too large, a little loose around the lips. His nose was arguably a bit flat. There were wrinkles across his brow. But when you put it all together, it worked. There was a ruggedness to his looks, a worn-in quality that suited the encroaching years. I had to admit: I’d never seen him look so good. ‘Yes,’ Serena said. ‘Friends.’ Lucy tipped the glass back to a forty-five-degree angle and sank most of the champagne in one gulp. I laid my hand on hers. Her skin felt hot. She placed the flute back on the counter, fingers shaking. There was a noisy clatter from the far end of the room and then the sound of childish squawking. ‘Mama!’ A small, rotund shape bowled across the floor and launched himself at Serena’s legs. This was Hector who, at three years old, was the most obstreperous of the Fitzmaurice children. ‘My love,’ Serena cooed. She bent to pick him up, straining the sinews of her yoga-toned arms as she did so. Hector was a barrel-shaped child with a square head and un-charming features. His brow loomed over the sockets of his eyes, giving him the appearance of an elderly ape. ‘Hello, Hector,’ I said. This unprepossessing lump was, I’m sad to say, my godson. To be frank, I was offended they had waited till their third progeny to ask and I’ve never wholly got over the slight. I am, however, punctilious in the observation of all my duties. He got an engraved silver tankard for his christening and has had a bottle of fine wine put aside for him every year since then at Berry Bros. Heaven knows what he will ever do to deserve it. He has none of Cosima’s grace or Cressida’s impishness. (The youngest, Bear, is still at the baby stage, so it’s hard to tell how he’ll turn out.) ‘Gah,’ the child responded. Tucked cosily on his mother’s lap, he looked glumly out at the rest of us, clearly wishing us all to be gone. He started pawing at Serena’s blouse. ‘Mee-ma,’ he said. ‘Mee-ma, mee-ma.’ His voice rose to an un-ignorable pitch. ‘No, darling, not now. Mee-ma for later.’ She removed his chunky, dimpled hand from her breasts. Serena believes in attachment parenting. She breastfed Cosima until she was four and had a full set of teeth. ‘Could I have a top-up, Ben?’ Lucy was reaching out with her empty glass. ‘Sorry, darling. Should have noticed.’ He poured the champagne too quickly so that it bubbled up, almost to the rim, and he had to wait for the foam to slide back down. When her glass was full, Lucy took it and swallowed almost half of it in one go. I had noticed her drinking more over preceding months and I didn’t want her to be drunk tonight. It would be embarrassing and, apart from anything else, I needed an ally. I cocked my head towards hers. ‘Don’t you think—’ ‘No, Martin. No I don’t,’ she said, too loudly. Hector, startled by the sound of her voice, started crying. ‘Oh baby, oh no, oh baby, don’t cry,’ Serena cooed. She stroked his hair with her hand. ‘They didn’t mean to shout, did they? No they didn’t.’ Lucy glared at me. Then she leaned over and tapped the child’s podgy leg with one hand. ‘Hey, Hector.’ Tap tap tap. ‘Hey, hey. I’m sorry. Don’t be a baby.’ Tap tap tap. ‘You’re a big boy now, aren’t you? No need to cry.’ Tap tap tap. When Lucy removed her hand, I could see a red mark on his thigh. Serena turned her back to us, shielding Hector from our sight. ‘Shall I take him?’ Ben offered. Serena stood without answering and walked out of the room with the screaming Hector. The sound of her rubber-soled espadrilles on the tiled floor as she left seemed designed to express her unvoiced fury. Ben exhaled. He shrugged apologetically. ‘Don’t worry about it, Luce.’ ‘I wasn’t,’ she said. Ben laughed. ‘Good. That’s OK then.’ He walked to the fridge, which loomed in one corner of the kitchen, emitting a low-frequency hum. ‘Snacks,’ he announced to no one in particular, sliding out a platter covered in cling film and bringing it over to the table. He took the film off with a flourish. There was a selection of soggy-looking salmon blinis, a few slices of hard cheese that looked like Manchego and some mini-sandwiches cut into triangles. A smear of brown in the centre suggested leftover chutney that someone else had already eaten. Leftovers, I thought. So that’s all we’re worth. ‘You guys want some water?’ I reached for a blini. ‘Yes, please.’ He came back with a bottle in a familiar shade of light blue. I immediately recognised the label: the cursive green writing, the line drawing of those hills I used to see every day when I walked to lessons. It was Burtonbury mineral water, said to be the finest in Britain and drunk by no lesser person than the Queen. Ben twisted the cap, releasing a fizzing jet of air. As he poured, the splash of liquid against glass cracked the ice cubes. Martin Burtonbury, 1989 BURTONBURY WAS SITUATED ON THE OUTSKIRTS of a picturesque Midlands town which had flourished in the late Victorian era thanks to an abundance of natural spring water. The school building had once been a hotel for gentlemen afflicted with rattling coughs or dyspeptic stomachs, and pale-faced women in black lace suffering from attacks of the vapours who travelled up from London with their valises and their maids in order to ‘take the cure’. It was the most fashionable place to be seen: the rehab centre of its day, where faded personalities would disappear for weeks on end in order to drink from the wells and soak in tepid baths with hot flannel compresses strapped to their fevered brows. For a time, a handsome young doctor from Adelboden in Switzerland – called, rather wonderfully, Dr Schnitzel – took up residence as the medical director. When I arrived, there was a sepia photograph of him still hanging in the school’s entrance hall: a bearded man with curlicues of hair framing each ear, his eyes hooded, like a lugubrious Russian novelist. But the water cure, just like the cabbage soup diet, was a transient fad and, after a while, Dr Schnitzel returned to Adelboden, the custom dried up and the red-brick, high Gothic Empire Hotel fell into a state of disrepair. It was requisitioned during the two world wars. In the 1950s, it was bought up by a couple from Birmingham who made it into a care home for the elderly, ripping out all the marble-floored bathrooms and hand-painted cornices and replacing the luscious carpets with a thin, hard-wearing material in institutional green. It became Burtonbury in 1960, a boys’ boarding school designed initially to cater for the children of diplomats posted abroad. Through the years, it cultivated a reputation for middle-ranking academic rigour and some modest sporting success. It was a decent school, but it didn’t belong to the higher echelons of private education. It tried very hard to be Eton or Harrow and yet, like a newly minted millionaire who buys a bright blue Rolls-Royce without realising it should have been a petrol-black Bentley, it never quite outgrew its arriviste status. Burtonbury always languished just outside the top twenty in the annual league tables. The Tatler Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». 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