Or at least not until now.
Kate shivered. ‘It’s freezing in here. Can’t you put the heating on?’
‘Er, no,’ I said. ‘It’s OK. The old woman upstairs keeps her flat at eighty degrees. Some of that seeps down.’
‘Heat rises,’ said Jamie drily.
Kate paused a moment, looking embarrassed. I found there were often moments like this with my more affluent friends. Paying bills, to them, was an administrative inconvenience rather than a financial problem that never quite got solved, only postponed. Then she brightened. ‘Oh, come on. You can afford it now. You can make this a tropical paradise all summer, if you want.’
‘That’s true,’ I said. The real problem was that the boiler had broken in February. I could still get hot water, but no heating. It would cost eight hundred pounds to fix it. It had been a cold winter, and was still a chilly spring. But Kate was right, I could get a new boiler now. And sort out the damp patch in the kitchen. And maybe buy some new shoes.
I was fed up with my life of near-poverty. Being a poor undergraduate was fine. Being a poor postgraduate was OK. But I was approaching thirty and I still couldn’t afford to go on a decent holiday, buy a car, or even fix the bloody boiler. Hell, one of my students who had scraped a poor second last year, had landed himself a job for eighteen thousand a year as a consultant, five thousand more than I earned. And he was only twenty-two!
Jamie was obviously following my thoughts. ‘Life’s going to change, you know,’ he said.
‘That was the general idea.’
‘It’s hard work at Dekker. I wouldn’t say that Ricardo wants you twenty-four hours a day. He just settles for that part of the day when you’re awake.’
‘Huh!’ Kate snorted.
I glanced at her, just long enough to acknowledge what she had said. At least I was single. There would be no one to miss me. ‘I can work hard, you know that.’
‘Mmm. But we’ll see what you’re like at seven in the morning.’
I laughed. ‘I’ve often wondered what the world looks like that early. Now I suppose I’ll find out.’
‘And you’ll have to give up rugby,’ said Jamie.
‘Do you think so? Surely I’ll be able to manage something. I might miss a few training sessions, but the team needs me.’ I was the star number eight of the School of Russian Studies rugby team. They’d be in big trouble without me.
‘No way,’ said Jamie. ‘I used to play a bit when I was at Gurney Kroheim, but when I went to Dekker I had to give it all up. It’s the travelling that kills it. You have to leave at weekends with next to no notice. No team will put up with that for long.’
I caught Kate’s eye. It wasn’t just rugby teams that suffered. ‘That’s a pity,’ I said. ‘I’ll miss it.’
‘I do,’ said Jamie. ‘I still manage to keep fit, but it’s not the same. I suppose I just have to get rid of my aggression in other ways.’
Jamie had been a very good player, better than me. He had played behind me in the Magdalen College team as scrum half. He was short and stocky with broad shoulders, and strong legs, and he would shrug off tackles from men twice his size. He was a fearless tackler, too. I’ll never forget the time I saw him up-end the All Blacks’ number eight as he came charging round the side of the scrum. He had played some games for the university team, and if he hadn’t been so distracted by the other temptations of university life, he could have earned his blue. Now, as he said, all that aggression was harnessed in the service of Dekker Ward.
He drained his glass, and picked up the champagne bottle. ‘Empty. Shall I nip out and get another? There’s an off-licence just round the corner, isn’t there? The table’s booked for eight thirty, so we’ve got another half-hour.’
‘I’ll get it,’ I said.
‘No. It’s on me. I’ll be back in a minute.’ With that he put on his coat and let himself out.
Kate and I sat in silence for a moment. She smiled at me. She’s definitely getting more attractive as she gets older, I thought. She had always been pretty, rather than beautiful, with short brown hair, a bright smile, and those big eyes. But as she had grown from a girl into a woman and a mother, she had changed. There was a softness and roundness to her and, since her son had been born, an inner serenity that I could not help but find appealing.
I had liked Kate from when I had first met her, jammed half-way up a staircase at a crowded party in the Cowley Road. We had bumped into each other occasionally after that, and I had introduced her to Jamie in our last term at Oxford. He had moved swiftly and decisively, and unusually for him the relationship had stuck. Three years later they had married, and a year after that Kate had had a son, my godchild. She had given up her job in a big City firm of solicitors to look after him.
‘How’s Oliver?’ I asked.
‘Oh, he’s great. He keeps on asking when you’re going to come and play Captain Avenger again with him.’
I smiled. ‘I was rather hoping the Captain would be out of fashion by now.’
‘Not yet, I’m afraid.’
Kate took another sip of her champagne.
‘Are you sure you’re doing the right thing, Nick?’ she asked quietly.
There was genuine concern in her voice. It alarmed me. Kate had common sense, lots of it. And she knew me well.
‘Yes,’ I said, with more confidence than I felt. ‘After all, Jamie’s having a great time at Dekker, isn’t he?’
‘Yes,’ she said flatly. ‘He is.’
2
The air bit fresh and cold into my face as I coasted down the streets of Islington. It was so much better pedalling through London at six thirty in the morning than at midday, although I was surprised at the number of cars on the streets even this early.
The sun hung low to the east, a pale fuzzy orb behind the remnants of the early-morning mist. Young trees thrust bravely up out of the cracked pavements, brandishing their budding branches at the tall lines of buildings frowning down upon them. Daffodils added splashes of colour to the scraps of green which occasionally fought their way into the urban landscape. Sometimes, during a rare lull in traffic noise, I could even hear a bird shrilly proclaiming his ownership of a scruffy bush or tree.
I tried not to go too fast, although it was difficult when faced with the unaccustomed sight of a hundred yards of clear road. My bike, although it looked as if it had fallen one too many times off the back of a lorry, could reach a healthy speed. I had bought it at a police auction a couple of years before, and had selected it for its combination of appearance and performance: it would be the last bicycle in any rack to be stolen. But this morning I wanted to take it easy, to avoid getting up too much of a sweat.
I was wearing one of the three new suits I had bought with Ricardo’s money. I had found it impossible to conceive of spending more than three hundred pounds on each one, and even that had been difficult. Two pairs of smart black shoes had cost sixty quid each, but I still had most of the five thousand pounds left, and I looked smarter than I had ever looked before in my life. I had even had my hair cut.
I swung through the City, and on to Commercial Road. To the right and above me, I caught glimpses of the tall white tower of Canary Wharf. It rose up above the textile outlets and curry-houses of Limehouse, a solid white block reaching into the mist. A single light seemed to be suspended several feet above it, blinking through the haze from the invisible roof. I would be up there soon, looking down on the rest of London. I wondered if I would be able to see the School of Russian Studies.