In many ways they were unlikely friends. Though they were in the same French lessons, they were in different houses and did not speak to each other until they shared a taxi to Heathrow at the end of their first term. They both had parents living overseas. Freddy’s parents—he was the sort of person it was hard to imagine having parents—lived in Dar es Salaam, where his father was a diplomat. There was a fellowship among the expat students. They were like orphans on the last day of term. Sometimes they had to spend an extra night in the empty school. Even if they didn’t, they were usually the last to leave. They seemed more worldly than the others, which in itself made them to some extent outsiders at the school. If Freddy’s mode of outsiderdom was obvious, however, James’s was more subtle. A tall, manly teenager—the infrequent spots looked out of place on his face and neck—a sportsman and in terms of schoolwork middling at most, he was in many ways a model lad. Perhaps he lacked some of the jocular oomph of the mainstream lad, and though he sat at the lads’ table in the dining hall—the loudest table, a mass of egregiously fashionable haircuts (flat-tops) and shoes (Doc Martens)—though his place there was entirely secure, the others might have felt at times that there was something semi-detached about him. Sometimes he seemed, in a mysterious way, to be several years—i.e. significantly—older than they were. There was that sense of worldliness. There was a lurking seriousness. To the younger pupils, he seemed like a proper man among them, someone their parents might know. That was one thing. His friendship with Munt was another. (And it was a measure of James’s status that he was able to be friends with Munt at all without significantly impairing his own standing.) Most of James’s other friends thought Freddy was a fucking weirdo. A fucking sicko. Most of his other friends were the sort of people who soberly tried to ignite their own farts. They were locker-room types. They were pack animals par excellence. The self-selecting school elite. A loner like Freddy made no sense to them. And most of Freddy’s other friends… Well, Freddy had no other friends.
In 1984, he spent the ten-day Michaelmas half-term with James in Paris. They stayed out very late every night, loitering hopefully in Pigalle, and drinking Pernod (the advert in the cinema with the naked woman under water), and walking into the skanks of Maghrebi drug dealers in the vicinity of the Gare du Nord. The following summer the same station was their jumping-off point for a month’s inter-railing—the zenith of their early friendship.
When they left school two years later, in spite of widely divergent paths, they still saw each other sometimes. James has unpleasant memories, for instance, of the time he visited Freddy up at Oxford. He was not in his element there. The students, even Freddy, did not seem to speak the same language as him; he literally did not understand quite a lot of what they said. He himself was just starting out as an estate agent at Windlesham Fielding—something he instinctively hushed up—and had moved into a place in Islington with Miriam. The pizza franchise, the film—such things filled the last few years for him. In one way or another, he spent much of his time thinking about money. The squalor of the house in which Freddy lived with various other people shocked him—he had been prepared for something squalid and it still managed to shock him. It had been the plan for him to stay there on the sofa. When he saw the sofa—dank in the spliffsmoke—he opted for a hotel. Which didn’t make him any more popular. Freddy’s squeeze, Isolde, who was something in the student union, subjected him to an irritating interrogation—she kept insisting that he tell them what he thought of ‘Thatcher’—as he tried to feel at home sitting on the ashy floor with a can of Carlsberg in his hand. The extraordinary thing was, these people were his own age—twenty, twenty-one. The places where they went out at night were just depressing. Hitting London in the Audi on Sunday evening, looking forward to dinner with Miriam, he promised himself he would never visit that freezing, foggy shithole again. And he didn’t. Freddy was sent down a month later anyway.
The latest phase of their friendship—following the hibernal period around the turn of the millennium—started in 2003. The post-Interspex phase. Plush magazine. The magazine was Freddy’s idea. Not having spoken to him for years, he phoned James to suggest he might like to invest in a magazine he was planning to set up. It seemed at the time that any idiot could set up a ‘lifestyle’ magazine—sex and shopping—and make a fortune. James no longer had any money to invest, though he knew how to find some, and he liked the idea. It was a potent formula—his own entrepreneurial know-how and experience, Freddy’s journalistic flair, and other people’s money. Unfortunately several dozen similar magazines were launched at about the same time, and two years later the few outstanding assets were still being digested in the intestine of the legal system, dissolved in the enzymes of the law. In the end there were just two issues, January and February 2005. The March issue had in fact been written and laid out—it was little more than a load of naked ladies; under financial pressure, the whole project was quickly simplifying into straightforward soft porn. It was never printed on account of the printers insisting on payment in advance.
One of the wiped-out investors was Freddy’s landlord, Anselm. His £50,000 was the only money Freddy himself had managed to raise. It helped that Anselm was under the impression that Freddy was the last surviving heir of Tsar Nicholas II, and that he was involved in a legal struggle over a vast fortune held in Switzerland since the First World War. (Freddy’s Dostoyevskian appearance helped with this—his low brow and sunken eyes, and the way that on hungover days, when he wore a long winter coat, his skin had a mortal yellow tinge.) He insisted that the Russian trove in Zurich was legally his, and Anselm had lent him significant sums to pay ‘legal fees’ and other expenses—fact-finding missions to Switzerland during the skiing season, for instance—in the expectation of a share of the spoils. (Freddy had promised him, in writing, first ten and then twenty per cent.) Nor, while living in Anselm’s house for the past few years, had he ever paid him a penny of rent—the idea was that that too would come out of the Swiss money in time.
The investment in Plush would not. That was an investment, not a loan, and Anselm demonstrated his faith in the existence of the Tsarina’s diamonds by making the distinction. The loss made him dyspeptic and unhappy. He hated losing money. Still, when the end was nigh, Freddy did ask him for another £50,000, to put towards the printing costs of the pornographic March issue. Which was perhaps to push him too far. Sitting in front of the terminals on which for more than twenty years he had tried, with a startling lack of success, to play the stockmarket, Anselm turned on his swivel-seat and looked at Freddy strictly over the top of his spectacles. He said, ‘Fréderic. Do you think I’m a fool?’