Spring (6 page)

‘Not yet.’

‘I suppose it’s all totally fixed like you hear. How come you have a horse anyway? You didn’t used to be interested in horses, did you?’

‘No.’

‘So?’

‘Last year,’ he says, pouring them both some wine, ‘I had a sort of tipping service.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean I sold tips on the Internet.’

‘What, horse-­racing tips?’

‘Yes.’

She stares at him for a few seconds. Her eyes narrow nicely. ‘I can’t believe you were involved in something like that,’ she says. ‘And you look so nice and honest.’

‘Of course I do. I
am
nice. I am honest…’

‘Ha!’

‘It’s not dishonest,’ he protests.

‘Where did these tips come from? You?’

‘No. I employed someone.’

‘Who?’

‘A pro,’ he says innocently.

‘A pro? And did his tips make a profit? If his tips made a profit, why did he have to be employed by you? Did they make a profit?’

‘Sometimes.’

She laughs. ‘Sometimes? So much for being nice and honest!’ she says. Her eyes narrow smilingly again. ‘You really are quite louche, aren’t you?’

‘Not at all,’ he says, smiling also.

‘And then what happened?’

‘To the tipping service?’

‘Yes. Was it shut down?’

‘Not exactly. My tipster was arrested…’

Her loud laugh turns Mark’s head. For the last twenty minutes, he has struggled to seem interested in what some pregnant woman is saying to him while his peripheral vision was teasingly filled with Miranda talking and laughing and hitting James playfully on the other side of the table… What
they
were saying—­though he wasn’t sure what it was—­seemed infinitely more interesting than what was being said to him, though he wasn’t sure what that was either. Though he is still smiling fixedly in her direction, he has no idea what the pregnant woman is talking about, and when she finally stops—­she may have asked him a question—­he just says, ‘Yes, yes,’ and then turns to James and says, ‘Did I hear you say you’re a horseman?’

‘No,’ James says.

‘Oh. I thought I heard you say you were a horseman.’

‘I do own a horse. Or part-­own it.’

‘Oh, I see.’ Mark turns to Miranda. ‘Your parents live in Newbury then?’

‘No,’ she says, ‘they don’t.’

‘Oh they don’t? I know Newbury quite well.’

She laughs. ‘Well they don’t live there.’

‘Where do they live?’

James leaves him to it and looks down the long table. At intervals there are vases of white flowers, and at the far end French windows into the garden. Most of the suits are up that end, and he sees Ted being introduced to Omar, while Mrs Staedtler looks on through an uninterested smile. Suddenly he hears Steve saying vehemently, ‘Now James was fucking loaded. I mean seriously fucking loaded.’

He turns and Steve says, ‘Do you remember the weekend we went to Sussex or wherever, and you were looking at those houses? Like manor houses and stuff. Me and Isabel and you and your girlfriend at the time—­what was her name?’

‘Thomasina.’

‘Yeah, that’s right. How much were you worth then?’

‘I don’t know,’ James says. He is embarrassed to find people staring at him. ‘Honestly.’

‘It was hundreds of millions, wasn’t it?’

‘It was nothing in the end.’

‘Yeah, but for a while it was hundreds of millions. You were in the
Sunday Times
Rich List, weren’t you?’

‘Was I?’ James says. ‘Maybe. I don’t know.’

Steve nods. ‘You were.’

Slowly the long table loses its hold on the party. The French windows are opened and some smokers step outside. Then other people start to wander upstairs. Eventually there are only a few left, too intensely into whatever it is they are talking about to notice that they are laggards. Finally they too stand up and leave, and the uniformed waitresses move in to finish their work, speaking Polish to each other over the silently smoking wicks.

James does not want to be the first to leave and for a while he waits outside on the oval lawn. It is a mild afternoon. Some friends of Steve’s are there, smoking what seems to be a spliff next to a small magnolia tree, its sticky-­looking buds just starting to break open. Soft-­focused with wine, James watches them pass the spliff from hand to hand. They make him think of people he used to see on Brick Lane…

He hears a woman’s voice shout his name.

It is Miranda, walking towards him from the French windows, tottering slightly in her heels on the soft turf of the lawn. She is, he thinks, a nice-­looking woman. The white dress she is wearing honeys her skin and her smile is an orthodontist’s masterpiece. ‘James,’ she says, ‘you didn’t finish telling me about… your horse. What’s her name again?’

‘Absent Oelemberg.’

‘You said she would win this week. Where? When? I need the money!’

He says, ‘I did tell you. It’s next week, not this week. She won’t win this week. A week tomorrow,’ he says, ‘at Huntingdon.’

‘Which race?’

‘I don’t know yet. Whatever race she’s in, she should win it.’

‘A week tomorrow, Huntingdon.’

‘Yes.’

She thinks for a moment. ‘That’s the thirteenth!’

‘Yes.’

‘Is that lucky or unlucky?’

‘This isn’t about luck.’

She laughs. ‘Oh isn’t it!’

James sees Mark wander into the garden. When he sees James talking to Miranda, he stops and with his hands in his trouser pockets looks up at the sky. A minute later he is followed by Isabel. ‘Ted’s just leaving,’ she says.

James looks at his watch. ‘I should be off too.’

And Miranda immediately says, ‘Yes, me too.’

And Mark, suddenly at her shoulder, says, ‘Yeah, I have to head as well.’

*

Hugo meets him in the shadowy vestibule, wagging his tail, and they do a slow lap of Mecklenburgh Square in the quiet, sinking light, stopping frequently for Hugo to sniff and officiously micturate. James lets him precede him into the flat, and from the kitchenette hears him lapping at his water bowl. James waits in the hall—­the kitchenette is too small for them to be in there at the same time—­until Hugo lifts his streaming muzzle and looks unhurriedly around. His weary eyes meet James’s and he waves his tail once or twice. When he has left the kitchen, James has a draught of tepid London tap water himself.

Then he phones her.

She picks up instantly—­he is practically startled—­and says, ‘Hello, honey. How are you? How was your sister’s lunch?’

‘Fine,’ he says. ‘How are you? What’s up? What are you doing?’

‘Ironing.’

‘Yeah?’

He is pleased that she is ironing—­it seems so safe and stable. He hears that the
TV
is on, and imagines her half-­watching the Sunday evening telly while the warm iron vaporously sighs. They talk for twenty minutes and suddenly everything seems okay. Even more so when he asks her when he will see her and she simply says, ‘Tomorrow?’

‘Tomorrow? Okay.’

‘Okay?’

It is not until a few minutes later, when he has hung up and is feeding Hugo, that he starts to think about something that happened while they were speaking. He thought nothing of it at the time. He just heard what sounded like the front door of her flat slam shut, and Summer’s voice saying something, and then a man’s voice saying something which he didn’t make out. He thought at the time that it must be something to do with Summer.

Now it occurs to him that what he half-­heard Summer say was, ‘Hi, I’m Summer.’ In other words, she was talking to someone
she had never met before.
He starts to think through the implications of this.

It takes him a few minutes to face up to the obvious implication—the man was visiting Katherine. If so, who was he? Katherine has a brother in London. Unfortunately, he knows for a fact that Summer has met him. A male friend then? Possibly. Though it would seem strangely intimate for a male friend to be turning up at her flat on Sunday night. The fact that she was ironing when he arrived—­there would be something strangely intimate about that too. He knows of no male friends, hetero­sexual or otherwise, whom she would see on those sort of intimately informal terms. Most of all, if this was nothing more than an innocent visit from a friend, why did she not mention it to him? That was specifically unlike her. It was her way to end phone calls by saying what it was that was making her end them, even if it was something totally spurious. So for there to be something so obvious—­that someone she was waiting for had just arrived—­and for her not to mention it…

Her voice tensed up at one point. It was such a tiny thing that he was not even sure, at the time, that it had happened. First, she lost the thread of what they were saying. He had just said something, and she did not seem to hear it. There was a silence on the line. Then she said, ‘What? Sorry?’ This was immediately after he had heard the door slam, and then the voices, Summer’s voice and the wordless rumble of the man’s voice. It seemed obvious that she had been distracted. That in itself was not surprising or suspicious. They then talked for several more minutes.

It is those minutes he is thinking of now. There was something tense about her voice, as if she was talking with someone else there, someone standing there, standing over her, waiting for her to finish.

4

T
he next afternoon, Monday, he meets Freddy. James and Freddy were at school together, twenty years ago, at a famous school on the fringes of London. On Monday they meet in Earls Court—­one of those streets of trucks stampeding past exhaust-fouled terraces, of youth hostels, and veiled, slummy houses full of subletting Australians, and other houses with tarnished nameplates in Arabic on the doors and the paint falling off in stiff pieces. There, under a two-star package-tour hotel, they meet. Freddy is piquey and jaundiced. In one of his down moods. His hair looks like it has slipped off his head—­there is none on top, where the skin has the look of a low-quality waxwork, or the prosthetic scalp of a stage Fagin, but plenty further down, where it trails like the fringe of a filthy rug over his collar—­the old collar, white-edged with age, of an otherwise blue Jermyn Street shirt stolen from his landlord.

They are meeting today to talk about the horse they part-own, and the ‘touch’ that is planned for next Monday. It is Freddy’s fault, all the horse stuff. It was he who introduced James to Michael—­the tipster, the ‘pro’ James mentioned at Sunday lunch. Freddy was ‘seeing’ Michael’s sister, who was still at school at the time—­this was nearly two years ago—­and he quite often went to the house in Shooter’s Hill when her parents weren’t there. Sometimes, while Melissa was having a shower and Freddy was in the kitchen pilfering food from the fridge, Michael would emerge to pour himself some Coke, and Freddy would talk to him. He asked him, for instance, what he did all day. Michael was in his late twenties, still lived with his parents, and did not seem to have a job.

His answer was—­‘Systems testing.’

‘What sort of systems?’ Freddy said.

When he heard what sort of systems, Freddy started to take more interest in Michael. He pressed him for more information about his systems—­monosyllabic Michael was not very forthcoming—­and finally managed to persuade him to send him their selections by email every morning. For a week, Freddy just monitored these selections. Michael himself had said he did not put money on them, in spite of the fact that he kept a tally of their performance, which showed them to have made a profit over several years. And they made a small profit in the first week that Freddy monitored them. In the second week they made a large profit and Freddy plunged in. Soon he was making several hundred pounds a week. It was then—­very full of himself and his several hundred pounds a week—­that he told James. It had obviously never occurred to Freddy, as it quickly occurred to James, that there was the potential here to make much more than that by selling the tips on the Internet or through a premium-­rate phone line.

One afternoon, they took the train down to Shooter’s Hill to see Michael. He was a large man, putty-pale. There was something odd about him. James explained that he wanted to pay him for his horse-­racing tips. He had had in mind to pay Michael a percentage of subscription fees, or winnings, or something like that. However, it was obvious that Michael would prefer a flat fee, so James offered him £200 a week. James also wanted him to work in an office—­he wanted the tips, the spreadsheets, whatever there was, on a hard drive he owned, in a space he paid for. Though this Michael was initially less keen on, he was soon spending an enormous amount of time in the office. Most of the time, in fact. The following scene was fairly typical.

Michael is sitting at his desk, working. The door opens. Michael does not look up or say a word. James shuts the door. ‘Morning,’ he says. ‘How’s it going?’ Still Michael says nothing. ‘How’s it going?’ James says again. This time Michael says, ‘Have you got my Coke?’ With a thud James puts the two-­litre plastic flagon of Coke on Michael’s desk. Michael does not thank him. Without taking his eyes off the monitor in front of him, he opens the Coke and pours some into a plastic cup. ‘So how’s it going?’ James says again, sitting down at his own desk. When Michael still does not answer, James tries a more specific question. ‘Lots of selections today?’ Purposefully mousing, Michael does not seem to hear.

Michael’s systems, of which there were many, were purely quantitative—­for all James knew, Michael had never seen a horse in his life. He seemed to have no idea that horse racing is something that actually happens, that the names of the tracks are the names of actual places, that people and horses and money and mud are involved; to him it seemed to be nothing more than an endless supply of new numbers on a screen—­numbers in which to search for patterns, a puzzle that was never finished. For the first two months these numbers—­marketed by James under the name of Professional Equine Investments—­showed a nice profit, and the service soon had a few dozen subscribers. Unfortunately the first few months turned out to be unusual. More typical was a situation in which one week’s profit was offset by the next week’s loss, and the service just scraped along. Then started a monstrous sequence of losers, and James would sit at his desk while the rain fell outside, waiting for some antediluvian version of Windows to appear on the smouldering monitor and staring with something like hatred at Michael’s slack face, his sensuous mouth hanging open as he worked mechanically through the fiddly statistical analysis of his systems. He did not seem to notice that he was on a monster losing spree. That the subscribers were losing money while he still picked up his £200 a week. At such times, his wanting a flat fee seemed sly and even dishonest to James, who was unable to help feeling that this strange man, this hulking idiot in his nylon jacket and milk-­white trainers, had somehow swindled him out of thousands of pounds.