The new White Jesus was back from the printers, and Jerry’s photos did not seem to document an atrocity. Emily had given in just a little. She wasn’t wearing antlers, or high-waisted PVC hot pants and bikini top, but she’d put a different dress on, and the photo they’d used had caught her turning round to hear something Jerry had said – something ambiguously offensive rather than outright – her facial expression incredulous but amused, at least in that split second, though she might have become angry in the next seconds. But this at least captured something of her brusque charisma.
I followed up the email Emily never replied to by sending her a copy of the magazine in the post with a note, saying I hoped she liked it.
And I asked again if she might like to meet me for a coffee one day, or a Coca-Cola. In the first week after I’d sent it I kept checking my emails, but when I didn’t hear back again I didn’t give much more thought to the matter. And that might have been that.
*
But towards the end of one shift in early spring, when I was digesting some particularly bitter news about my books page, Leo asked me if I wanted to go with him to a public debate about the dangers of Brexit.
‘Are you mad?’ I said. ‘Don’t we breathe in enough of that without having to seek it out?’
‘Your man Lancaster is speaking.’
‘He’s not my man.’
‘You’ve been reading his books.’
He gave me a look and I worried that he suspected me of stealing Lancaster’s short history of the Russian Revolution. ‘All right, I’ll come.’
It was round the corner in Senate House, a building of such imposing grandeur that Hitler was supposed to have earmarked it for his headquarters upon his successful invasion.
‘Yes, I know that,’ I said to Leo.
‘But did you know this?’ he said, and talked some more while I let my thoughts drift elsewhere. Something, something, terrible curators. Something, something, Georgian terraces. Something, something, knock it all down and start again, don’t you think?
‘How do you have so many opinions?’ I asked.
‘I think about things. Have you ever thought of doing the same?’
‘About which buildings to tear down?’
‘Yes.’
‘For aesthetic purposes?’
‘Yes!’
‘No.’
We entered the foyer and I read the poster advertising the event. What the history of British isolationism should teach us about the impact of leaving the EU. Andrew Lancaster was arguing the case for disaster against another historian who was in favour of us leaving. There were wine glasses on a long table but no wine in them yet. You had to do the time to earn the wine. We were five minutes late and a man on the door to the hall beckoned us over, just as a door opened at the other end of the foyer and three late-middle-aged men walked in, one of whom was Andrew Lancaster. I waved in his direction. He gave me a puzzled look and nodded; he hadn’t recognised me.
The seats were nearly all taken, so Leo and I had to sit separately. I squeezed past people’s knees to find an empty chair in the middle of an aisle, and as I did I looked up and caught sight of Emily a few rows behind me. She raised her hand and smiled at me, just as the man who had accompanied the speakers spoke into the microphone on the stage to start proceedings.
*
Lancaster was as impressive as you may have seen from the YouTube clips people post on Facebook. He took ten minutes to neatly sum up his position. British isolationism has always been associated with Continental disintegration. Not to mention the harm we would do to ourselves in terms of trade. Furthermore, its focus on stopping immigrants from the EU will do little to slow the changes to our society that the anti-immigration voters are justified in wanting to be acknowledged, even if they’re wrong about what to do about it, easily manipulated by nostalgic rhetoric. Looking up at him from the front row was the student I suspected he was sleeping with, the one who looked a bit like Emily, the one I had assumed was his daughter. She wrote something every so often in a little notebook, and I kept myself interested by imagining this was a list of all the delicious transgressive fantasies that had occurred to her while watching his commanding performance, which she would later push under his office door along with instructions to come round to her flat in Kentish Town as soon as he was able, so she could submit to the force of his powerful arguments. I was too distracted by thinking about what I was going to say to Emily to fully follow the man arguing against Lancaster, though when I remembered to listen to him I found that what he was saying about the interests of those on low incomes, people who might claim reasonably that the worst thing that could happen to them would be that things stayed the same – all of this sounded plausible enough to be worth further thought, even though Leo, a little to the front and right of me, was screwing his face up while listening to him.
Lancaster set about explaining why what had sounded plausible was not plausible, and I resisted the urge to turn around again to look at Emily, resisted it again, and again, and wondered if she was looking at me, at the back of my head, and then the audience was applauding and I did look round, curious to observe Emily’s style of clapping, which from where I was sitting seemed only to be delicate and dutiful and not rapturous, unlike the student in the front row, one of a number of people there who had let out a mini-whoop, who was still bashing her hands together and flapping her elbows as if she were trying to take off.
When we had finished applauding we were invited to have a glass of wine and have books signed by the historians. I would have waited in my seat but the man next to me had stood up and was looming, so I stood up and loomed over the woman to my left, who did the same, and we all queued on our feet to be among the first out, as though we were very keen to escape or be first to meet the historians. I turned to Emily again. She was looking past me, to the front of the room, where I turned to see that Andrew’s mistress had approached him and put her hand on his arm. She was speaking quickly and touching her hair with one hand, and he nodded then looked up to the back of the room to see Emily looking back at him. He smiled. I turned back to look at Emily. She was looking at me now. I put an imaginary glass to my lips. She nodded and got up, and we met in the aisle, awkwardly, not knowing if we should shake hands or kiss, doing neither.
‘What did you think?’ she said. ‘That’s, er, Andrew, did you know he was my…?’
‘Uncle. Yes.’
‘Boyfriend.’
‘Yes, I knew.’
‘“Boyfriend” is too childish a word, isn’t it? “Partner” is such a legalistic word. We need something in the middle.’
‘Fucktoy.’
‘That’s not it. Anyway, that was my man on stage, holding forth.’
‘You sound like Tammy Wynette now.’
‘I give up. That was my Andrew.’
‘Holding back the tide of nationalism.’
‘Doing his best. I didn’t have this down as your scene.’
‘I was dragged along by a colleague.’
‘It’s not really my vibe either. Perfectly engaging though, I thought.’
‘Perfectly. Very educational. Like live Radio 4. Here, what colour do you want?’
‘Red.’
I passed her a glass and looked down at the floor. I had never seen her in shoes before, and so I was momentarily fascinated by those she chose to wear, the black patent-leather heels with a delicate strap to fasten across the light-brown nylon that covered her feet.
‘Thanks for sending the magazine, by the way,’ she said. ‘Sorry I didn’t get back. Andrew tells me the interview was good, so thanks for that.’
‘It’s a pleasure.’
‘I didn’t read it myself, I’m sorry to say.’
‘No?’
‘Too embarrassed to. I can’t imagine what stupid things I said.’
‘You weren’t stupid.’
‘Our opinions might differ about that.’
‘Are you saying we have different standards of intelligence?’
‘No!’
‘Liar.’
‘Well, we probably do,’ she said, ‘but that’s not what I meant.’
‘Thanks.’
‘I didn’t mean mine were superior.’
‘Just different.’
‘You probably have a much more intelligent idea of how to live and be happy than I do.’
‘Do you think? Christ, how miserable are you?’
She put her head to one side and seemed to think about this.
‘Do you go to these things with him much?’ I said.
‘No. I’m making an effort to get out more.’
‘For what reason?’
‘I ask myself the same question. The usual reasons, though. Other humans. The hope of stimulation.’
‘Stimulation?’
‘Stop it.’
‘Stop what?’
‘That grin.’
Leo strode towards us. ‘Hello, hello, hello! Aren’t you Emily Nardini?’
‘I am,’ she said.
‘Leo,’ he said. ‘I’m a big fan. I have my own novel coming out next year, actually.’
She shook his hand. ‘What do you mean, actually? Did I imply the contrary?’
‘We’re colleagues,’ I said.
‘I brought him down here, actually,’ said Leo.
‘Actually?’ she said.
‘Literally,’ I said.
Leo scratched his bald spot. ‘Did you enjoy the debate?’ he asked Emily, not me.
‘Yes, I did. But do you mind giving us a moment? I was just discussing something personal with Paul.’
‘Oh! Yes, of course. Ha ha! I’ll just join the queue to talk to the speakers.’
‘See you later,’ she said.
He went and stood in the queue and tried not to look at us.
‘I can’t stand men like that,’ she said.
‘I love you,’ I said.
‘Thank you.’
‘I really do.’
‘That’s your prerogative.’
‘You can do what I want to do,’ I sang.
‘That’s your prerogative,’ she sang back.
We looked at each other and grinned. We were from the same era with the same bad songs clogging up our memory.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t get back to your note,’ she said.
‘What note?’
‘The one you sent with the magazine.’
‘I’d forgotten I even sent one,’ I lied.
‘The photo came out well. I was too vain not to look at that. I couldn’t go any further but, like I say, Andrew says it was fine.’
‘Do you trust him to be honest about things like that?’ I said, and looked over to the table where his admirer was watching him sign books and talk to his fans.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said, following my eyes. ‘He’s very articulate about the things he considers stupid. It’s what I like most about him.’
‘Well, that’s reassuring. What are you doing now?’
‘I don’t know. Something. Drinks, dinner. His publisher Susannah is here; they’re old friends; we’re going on somewhere. Why? Do you want to come?’
‘I’m, er—’
‘You could come. It would be nice to have someone to talk to who isn’t here to worship Andrew. I’ll introduce you to him in a bit.’
We waited for the queue to run down and found a sofa to sit on. ‘This is my first glass of wine this year,’ she said to me.
‘It’s nearly not your first glass of wine any more. I’m going to get another.’
‘Go on then,’ she said, holding out her glass to me.
We’d drunk two by the time the queue had died down. The historians were keeping up an amicable disagreement throughout the signing, as those queuing directed further questions at them. Leo had reached the front and was opinionating about something, and while Andrew’s attention was occupied his student mistress had retreated a few paces to talk to a younger man I took for a fellow PhD student, or a disgruntled boyfriend. She was doing most of the talking, gesticulating and constantly twitching back to face the signing tables; he nodded, covered his mouth with his hand when he spoke.
‘It looks like she enjoyed Andrew’s performance.’
‘Chloe. Yes, she would have. His brightest student, apparently.’
‘I think that boy she’s with is worried she’s in love with him.’
‘With Andrew? Hmm.’
‘How’s the wine?’
‘Vicious.’
‘If you ever want to drink wine with me again, I can tell you that I’m pretty much always available.’
She had been watching Andrew but now turned to me. ‘Why is that, Paul?’
‘Are you asking what’s wrong with me?’
‘Precisely.’
‘I have stringent taste in other humans.’
‘I don’t believe that at all.’
‘Why?’
‘I imagine you’d knock about with just about anyone.’
‘Well, you’re insulting yourself there as well as me. Here, give me your number.’
I passed her my notebook and she studied it for a second before writing in it. She’d just finished and handed it back to me when we became aware of Andrew Lancaster standing over us.
‘Oh!’ she said, and stood up. ‘Andrew, this is Paul.’
He held out his hand, which I took after putting my book in my bag and standing up.
‘How do you do?’ he said.
‘Hi, Andrew.’
‘Did you just take my beloved’s phone number?’
‘He did,’ said Emily.
‘I shall keep my eye on you.’
‘You’ll remember: Paul came to interview me.’
‘White Jesus! You know, you’re very familiar-looking. I haven’t taught you?’
‘No, no. I wish. I went to the London College of Calligraphy. But Emily says you thought the profile was OK. Was she being polite?’
‘Not at all. If it was shit, I’d happily tell you. You asked some interesting questions. And printed a nice photo too. She looks as beautiful in it as she does in real life.’
‘Flatterer. I invited Paul to dinner with us,’ said Emily. ‘Is that OK?’
‘More than! Will you come?’
Leo was standing in earshot on his own, and looked up hopefully at me. I turned away from him and said, ‘Yes, thank you, I’d like to.’
*
There were eight of us. Emily, Andrew, his publisher Susannah, the event organiser and his wife, and Chloe and her grumpy companion. Emily and I took one end of the table, with Emily sitting next to Andrew and Susannah sitting next to me. Chloe got in next to Andrew on his other side, and her companion was wedged out on the end, talking to the event organiser’s wife, whose husband spent the meal facing in Andrew’s direction.
I watched Andrew, trying to get the measure of him. He cared about his appearance, that was clear – you’d have to if you had a girlfriend more than twenty years your junior. You wondered how the pontificating old Jeremies of this world could bear the photos that were taken with them and their young women. The contrast was too great to be explained by charm and intelligence, even if you didn’t already know that the men concerned had been punished by the moral universe with exactly the faces they deserved. Did they revel in the contrast or look away from the snapshots? The photos of these older men and younger women together looked like they belonged in plastic evidence bags, documents of the continuing crimes against women. It disappointed me that I could see no similar crime when I framed Emily and Andrew together. The suit and tie he was wearing for the occasion sat well on him, and if it made him look a bit formal, I imagined how that itself could be cool in the world of academia, adopting style and convention against a culture of sloppy iconoclasm. It irritated me that I could see what she saw in him. What they all saw in him.
I found myself talking a lot to Susannah, who ran a division of one of the big publishing houses. She interrogated me about which books were selling in the shop; which I thought were good and which were awful, telling me which she’d been involved with or had tried to buy and lost out on. She had published Andrew for years, and been friends with him for even longer.
Emily left at one point to use the toilet, and during this time Andrew turned his attention towards me.
‘Emily says you showed up drunk to interview her. Is this true?’
‘It was the magazine’s annual party the night before. It can’t be done sober.’
‘Oh, you write for a magazine! Which one?’ said Susannah.
I told her.
‘Isn’t that a fashion magazine?’
‘He does the books page,’ said Andrew. ‘That’s how he met Emily.’
‘Oh, that’s over now. The books page.’ I explained to them that they had axed the page last week, replaced it with a legal highs column, and tried to persuade me to write it.
‘It’s not that funny, you know,’ I said when faced with their amused reaction.
‘Are you sure you couldn’t have written the drugs column?’ Susannah asked me. ‘It might be great fun.’
‘I’m quite sure,’ I said. ‘I did some research into the matter.’
*
On the day I conducted this research I had been summoned for an emergency meeting at the office. The magazine was not doing well, of course it wasn’t doing well, no one bought style magazines any more apart from hairdressers, and it was only a matter of time before we worked out how to stick our head in a machine and download our haircuts.
I have always avoided the offices of White Jesus as much as possible. They’re just off Broadway Market on the edge of London Fields, the epicentre of newly rich Hackney, the street with the highest percentage of beautiful young people in all of London. The receptionist is a thirteen-year-old boy with the face of a torturer who we all call Macaulay Culkin. He was wearing a baseball cap backwards, an XS vest that was baggy on him and a thick gold chain that was either a joke or not a joke, either gold or fake gold, just like he was either a teenage rent boy or a diminutive adult journalist – blurred lines were the magazine’s aesthetic and the modus operandi with which it conducted its crimes. He gave me a complicated handshake and sent me off through the messy arrangements of desks to my meeting.
Jonathan shares an office in the basement of the building, the ‘bunker’, with Stev’n. I took the steps down and they both looked up from the table they were sitting round.
Stev’n is a mournful-looking man, with a shaved head and glasses, who looks like he has never seen sunlight. He was wearing one of his expensive shirts with intricate patterns involving skulls and bones. Jonathan, in contrast, has the year-round look of a man at a summer wedding in Italy; he is comfortable in the casual smartness of the wealthy class – he has mimicked their gestures to perfection.
Jonathan stood to shake my hand, the gesture of someone interviewing me rather than a man who currently lived on my sofa. ‘How are you, Paul? Thanks so much for coming in.’
Stev’n was still looking at the papers on the table. He spoke quietly. ‘We’ve got customer surveys, traffic figures from the site, feedback from advertisers. I’m annoyed with you, Paul. Why on earth do we have a books page? No one reads the thing. People who read books don’t know it exists. People who read the magazine don’t read books. Oh, it’s not even that. Some of them do read books. But every fucking magazine under the sun that doesn’t know how to fill a back page sticks a few book reviews on it, some cunt who aspires to be a literary critic. No offence, Paul.’
‘You can’t just say something really offensive and then take it back with three words at the end of the sentence.’
‘Now, Jonathan, didn’t I say? I worried he would be like this,’ said Stev’n.
‘We need to focus on what makes us original is what Stev’n’s saying,’ said Jonathan. ‘We need clickbait. The hair reviews, everyone loves the hair reviews. They’re funny. People want to be in them. That’s what we do that no one else does. But you on Norwegian literature? Get real, mate.’
‘If you feel so strongly about it, write a review on Amazon,’ said Stev’n.
‘Or don’t,’ said Jonathan.
‘We had an idea.’
‘We think you might like it.’
‘I doubt it.’
‘Paul,’ said Jonathan. ‘I know you’re upset about losing your book column. But let’s make something clear. This isn’t a negotiation. This isn’t your chance to win us over with a passionate speech. The books page has only lasted as long as it has because half of us didn’t even know it was there.’
‘It’s like the human eye has evolved not to register short reviews of literary fiction,’ drawled Stev’n.
‘If there’s a teenage girl with her legs open on the facing page.’
‘Exactly,’ said Stev’n. ‘We could have a teenage girl with her legs open on both pages. When you shut the magazine, it’s like they’re scissoring each other. And right underneath them, a big fuck-off advert for Uniqlo.’
‘So you see,’ said Jonathan, ‘that you will need to find another venue for your literary criticism. Or alternatively, you may decide to write something else for us instead. We’d even give you a small raise.’ Jonathan reached under his desk and slid a large Jiffy bag across the table towards me. ‘These might be the last days of legal highs,’ he said. ‘Don’t you think we need to document that? We can be the first mainstream publication to regularly review them, you know, with a bit of gonzo humour, the stuff you’re good at.’
‘We have a great respect for your ability to consume narcotics,’ said Stev’n.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to tell either of you your job. But aren’t the people who travel to work every day on the Tube more interesting to advertisers than nerds who stay at home inhaling Chinese chemicals?’
‘They don’t read the magazine, they don’t go on the site,’ said Jonathan. ‘Anyway, the brands aren’t targeting the people who take the Chinese chemicals, they’re targeting the people who get a thrill from reading about you taking the Chinese chemicals. It’s edginess that attracts the brands we want.’
‘Exactly,’ said Stev’n. ‘Now, we don’t want to tell you your job. But you’re the guy who takes the Chinese chemicals.’
I didn’t even argue. I had suddenly realised that all I had been doing for the last few years was writing an expensively produced blog. A blog might have had more readers.
‘Think about it,’ said Stev’n. ‘For five minutes. You’ll still have your haircut review, whether you take it or not.’
‘I don’t need to think about it,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you later, Jonathan, will I? Or has your wife taken you back?’
Jonathan looked away from me and said nothing. I turned around and started to walk back up the stairs.
‘Paul?’ said Stev’n. I turned back and caught the Jiffy bag he underarmed towards me. ‘Take it away and think about it.’ It was as heavy as an average-sized human’s ashes. I put it in my satchel and left.
Later that evening Jonathan knocked on my door and asked if I’d thought more about the package, if he could have a look at it. I pulled it out of my bag and tossed it to him, and he poured the contents onto my bed, sachets of capsules and pills, fake cocaine, weird herbs, lurid spice, all with garish packaging, connotations of radiation and supervillains, of the origin stories of mythical monsters.
‘I did consider it,’ I admitted. ‘I was thinking perhaps I don’t need to do the drugs, I could just imagine what they’re like from the packaging and the press release. I mean, drugs can only have so many effects, don’t you think? I can just describe them all in terms of what I’ve done before. I could actually become the great drug critic – I could supply the critical vocabulary by which all drugs are subsequently judged.’
‘You would have to do some first.’
He was shaking out a white powder now, onto my bedside table.
‘Man, if you want to be a lab rat, do it in your own bedroom. The living room, I mean.’
‘This is just a zingy alternative to the Bolivian marching powder.’
‘I bet it’s one molecule away from hillbilly bathtub crank.’
Jonathan rolled up the note he had pulled from his wallet and held the thin tube out to me. ‘You try,’ he said. ‘It’s your job.’
‘No. I am sacrificing my payday for the good of others.’
‘It would only be the people who read the legal high reviews in White Jesus who would suffer. You could argue they were asking for it. It’s not like anyone who really needed to live would die.’
‘You’re not making me feel better about my book column.’
‘Have you written the London Review of Haircuts yet?’
‘No.’
‘Well, why don’t we go out and do it together? Mary’s on at the bar. We can do it gonzo style.’
‘Absolutely not. And anyway, I always do it gonzo style. You don’t think I approach women and ask to take pictures of their hair when I’m sober, do you? I’m not a monster.’
*
The drugs were as bad as I’d imagined. But we were still soberish when we arrived at the bar to surprise Mary.
‘Wow, what a treat,’ she said.
‘You don’t mean that,’ I said.
‘I don’t not mean it yet.’
This was a bar called Catch down at the bottom of Kingsland Road. It’s a pitch-black dive bar with an upstairs room for dance nights and a little dance floor at the back on the ground floor too. Many of my briefest and nicest friendships have been initiated in the roped-off smoking area in the street.
Mary was wearing what looked like a vest of iridescent chain mail.
‘No one’s ever called it that before,’ she said.
‘It doesn’t look like it would provide you much protection,’ said Jonathan.
‘What need have I of protection with you two besides me?’
‘You really are delightfully naive,’ said Jonathan and placed his hand over hers on the counter.
She snatched it away, gave him a look and walked down to the other end of the bar to serve someone else.
‘You and her, you’re not—?’ I said.
‘No, no. Just flirting. Making sure I still know how to do it.’
‘It’s like riding a bike,’ I said. ‘No, it’s not like riding a bike. Yes, actually it is like riding a bike. It’s like riding a bike while you’re really drunk so you keep smashing into lamp posts, and other pedestrians, but not hurting yourself or them badly, just annoying them, and hardly ever killing anyone or yourself, unless you’re really unlucky, that is.’
‘Christ, are the Chinese chemicals taking hold?’
‘The not-drugs are not working.’
‘We better do some more then.’
‘Which ones?’
‘I don’t think it makes a difference. More is the key.’
Five minutes after we did some more the first doses began to work and it became clear we had made a terrible mistake. The rest of the night melted into a garish puddle. There was a visual effect to the combination of drugs I had taken which made me keep turning my head to catch the sun rising behind me, but I could never catch it in time. Women’s faces were lit by morning dawn that quickly turned into night. I felt as if I was in a time-lapse video, watching myself fast-forward through every night I had left on earth. We continued to talk to the faces that appeared before us, but we made less sense than usual, and the shiny green ants that crawled across them were distracting and counterproductive to good repartee. The fake MDMA we had taken had none of the warmth of real MDMA, no feeling of empathy, of love; and at the same time there was none of the devilish humour and euphoria of acid or mushrooms. There was only visual disorder and vicious energy. If I had taken these drugs on my own, they would perhaps have broken me, had me clinging to a lamp post in terror outside, but at least with Jonathan around we could try to make light of them, revel in their awful indignity and pretend the experience was comic. Mary had gone from being amused to being appalled by us, but consented to our request for quadruple gin and tonics for the price of singles; it was the only thing, we said, that might cure us, and she must have hoped we would knock ourselves out before she finished her shift and had to return to the flat.
‘These must be the worst drugs I’ve ever tried,’ I said, or he said, it was hard to tell.
‘They are really, really bad. But do you remember when we went to that weekend party in Cornwall with the Scottish philatelist?’
‘He had a medicine bag full of liquids… and pipettes… and penny farthings.’
‘All his drugs were just numbers. 2ci, 2cb, i c deadpeople.’
‘They’re beckoning to me too.’
When we got back to the flat everything was much harder. Jonathan found a single Valium, took it and conked out. For a long time I leaned out of my bedroom window smoking, looking down on the people below like a vampire about to swoop on them. For a moment I understood what it was like to be truly evil, the loneliness of it, the thrill of exclusion. There was some kind of creature climbing up the wall of the kebab shop across the road, an angel, or something crueller than that. A tower block in the distance had the square jaw of Elvis and the sideburns to match. When he opened his eyes I turned away and took to my bed.
*
‘So you will understand why I decided that opportunity was not for me,’ I concluded, while a waiter in a starched white shirt, bow tie and waistcoat topped up my glass of wine.
Susannah and Andrew were still laughing at me.
‘They’re drugs for feral kids who have been deranged by porn. They’re not for us.’
‘Oh, that’s nice that you said us.’ Susannah reached over and squeezed my arm.
Andrew then began to tell a long story about his time working as an advisor for the Secretary of State for Education. Chloe kept touching his shoulder and throwing her head right back to laugh.
Emily came back from the toilet and yawned. She was drinking water now and refused a refill of her wine glass.
Before Andrew could finish his story his phone began to ring. ‘Sorry, let me just see if this is serious. Hello.’ The person on the other end spoke and Andrew let out a quick breath, stood up and left the table.
The table was quiet for a few seconds as we watched him stride off with his phone pressed to his cheek, stopping at one point to give it a good shake before he put it back to his ear and disappeared round a corner.
‘And how are the signs with your book?’ Susannah asked Emily.
‘Sorry, give me a second,’ said Emily. ‘I’m just going to check what’s happening.’
Emily and Andrew were gone for a while. The food arrived, and Susannah declared that we should all start eating; half my plate was gone by the time they arrived back.
‘I’m very sorry. I’m afraid I have to leave. Something’s come up with my daughter.’
‘Oh, Andrew, nothing serious?’ said Susannah.
‘Nothing very serious, no. Just irritating.’ He looked down at his brill. ‘What a waste. I’ll tell you about it another time. Can I leave something for the bill?’
‘Certainly not,’ said Susannah.
‘I might go too,’ said Emily.
‘Stay,’ I said.
‘Yes, you must,’ said Andrew.
‘You must,’ said everyone.
‘OK,’ she said, and sat down in her old seat, leaving the gap between her and Chloe. Susannah, sensing the awkwardness, turned and began to ask Chloe questions.
‘Is everything all right?’ I asked Emily, quietly. She filled a glass with wine now and took a swig.
‘Oh, that’s nice,’ she said. ‘That really is nice.’
*
I was distracted from Emily for a time by Susannah, who continued to show sympathy for my cancelled column and general despondency, and asked if I might be interested in a career in publishing. There were often entry-level jobs in sales or marketing, she said, where bookselling experience came in very useful. She gave me her card and told me I should come and talk to her. I said I would.
When I turned back, Emily was looking furious. ‘I’m going to go,’ she said.
‘Are you OK?’
‘I’m fine. Sorry, I’m not in a good mood.’ She looked up at the grand ceiling of the room we were in, at the waiters gliding past us in their bow ties. ‘This isn’t my sort of place at all.’
‘We could go somewhere else. Let’s go somewhere else.’
‘I’m not sure. Oh, OK. As long as we go right away.’
*
It was hard to find a pub in Mayfair that wasn’t full of loud men in suits sucking the marrow from platefuls of hacked-up bones, and we gave up. I walked Emily home along the top of the park, against her insistence, wheeling my ghastly bike beside her and feeling like a boy talking to one of his friend’s older sisters.
Andrew’s daughter Sophie had been caught shoplifting in Selfridges; that was the crisis. Sophie had called Andrew because she didn’t want her mother to know about it, and she hoped he could help.
‘Can he help?’
‘He has enough lawyers and barristers as friends. One of them will go along with him and throw her weight around.’
‘I imagine Andrew himself can be pretty fierce.’
‘Yes.’
‘To his daughter?’
‘He’s quite indulgent of her. He feels he owes her for leaving home when she was a kid.’
‘What’s she like?’
‘She’s difficult. Young. Superior. Doesn’t smile much, or not when I’m around. She’s just submitted a PhD and has started writing these opinion pieces on being a Marxist activist for the Guardian. Dinner talk with her is what I imagine it was like to have a tutorial at Balliol. Which she knows all about, and perhaps it’s just the style you learn there but she certainly takes on the role of the tutor in our conversations. I sometimes wonder if she believes I wrote my books myself. The egalitarianism she professes is abstract rather than intuitive. She’ll have a book out herself before we know it. It will sell in one week more copies than all my books have ever sold. In interviews she’ll outline utopian plans to end sexism, famine and war. I can see it. It’s the future. I’m sorry, listen to me. I’m ranting. I’m hateable. Fucking kill me, please.’
I made my fingers into the shape of a gun and pressed them against her temple. ‘Bang,’ I said, though I had not yet had a single murderous thought towards her.
‘I didn’t know she was a shoplifter,’ she said, ‘but it’s one of those details that make perfect sense.’
‘Why’s that?’
While she tried to penetrate the remaining mystery of Sophie’s personality, I looked out at all the darkness to our left as we walked down the road. It had rained earlier and the air smelled green. The gates to the park were all locked by now. I wondered how we would get in.
‘Because,’ said Emily, ‘she thinks she’s invincible and fascinating and at the same time worries that she’s not. Worries she might only be well educated, connected and a little boring. For example, she plays the violin very well. I know this because she told me she does. She said, “I play the violin very well.”’
We didn’t say anything for a few seconds.
‘Did you ever go shoplifting?’ I asked her.
‘Make-up. Sweets. Nothing serious. You?’
‘Similar. Only ever on a whim. Just to test my courage.’
‘Sophie wasn’t stealing on a whim. She had lined a bag with tinfoil. Come on,’ she said. ‘This is a nice pub coming up. One for the road.’
*
‘Do you think he’s back?’ I asked.
It was an hour later and we were standing outside her flat.
‘I doubt it.’
The street was so quiet. If I woke to this sort of peace in my place, it could only be because everyone in the city had been massacred. A church spire rose behind the fenced-off square at the end of the road. The English pastoral in the heart of the city. Serious money.
‘Goodnight, Paul,’ she said, and leaned in to kiss me on the cheek. ‘I’ll see you in a couple of weeks at the launch, if you can make it.’
‘Goodnight, Emily.’
She shut the door and I looked up to the top of the building, to where I thought her living room was. I watched the darkened glass and imagined her climbing the stairs and that I was behind her again, following her to the top. After a few moments, I gave up looking for a light to come on. She would be in the kitchen, or in her study, on the other side of the building, or she would be standing upstairs in the darkness, watching me as I turned around and walked away.