There is a clank, the gate opens and Gretchen appears with a cloth in her hand. Dieter takes it from her and unfolds a large orange stone. “We cut this just last week. It’s 30.4 carats, from a seventy-carat rough. That’s a lot of waste but it’s a beautiful pure orange… a real ‘fancy’. Here take a look… take a seat. Put it against one of these sheets of paper.”
Max knows what to do. Dieter passes him the stone and his magnifying loupe and stands back. Max sits down at a desk that has padded elbow rests and whose surface is covered with sheets of white paper. He puts the loupe to his eye and finds himself being sucked into a kaleidoscopic universe of brilliant orange light so pure that it makes him want to gasp. He doesn’t though because that would be bad for business.
“It’s flawless,” says Dieter, observing with a knowing smile Max’s silent admiration. It is too, as far as Max can see at ten-times magnification. “If there had been any nasty surprises it would have come out in the cutting and polishing,” says Dieter, unfolding the cloth that will soon re-encase the stone.
“Oranges aren’t worth as much as pinks or whites, are they?”
“Oranges as clear and vivid as this one are. One hundred and fifty thousand dollars a carat.”
Max calculates quickly. That’s four and a half million bucks. “One hundred and twenty,” he says. Dieter smiles as if he had been expecting this silly game. “One hundred and forty and that’s my final offer. Isn’t that what they say in films?”
“One hundred and thirty and I’ll send my client round in a jiffy,” says Max, holding the gem up to the loupe once more, as if reluctant to hand it back. It’s true; the orange is utterly lovely.
“In a jiffy? One hundred and forty and I’ll keep it exclusive.”
“One three five and it’s a deal,” says Max. “And I want first dibs at that big pink one when it’s ready. As long as you don’t smash it to pieces in the meantime.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Harry gives it an hour after the key European exchanges have closed and the street’s equity sales bankers have gone home, or off to the gym, bar or wherever they spend their evenings. Fi packed up at five thirty on the dot as she does every evening, yodelling a hearty Goodnight! from the reception area.
He now has the place to himself. Apart from the desks and the screens, the room looks like what it originally was – the drawing room of a Mayfair town house, complete with ornate fire-surround, elaborate cornicing and thick silk curtains. He re-reads Max’s e-mail about the diamond, which sounds promising although he has reservations about the colour. Doesn’t the Arab like pink? ‘Don’t worry – it’s a beauty… a “fancy” as they say in the trade’ Max e-mails back at once. And if he doesn’t like it, we’ll get another one for him. When will Max be back? Tomorrow night… Simon’s invited him up for a day’s skiing and they’re leaving for his chalet in Verbier this evening. James the assistant can cover the portfolio.
Harry calls Rachel’s mobile. She answers on the second ring. “How was the breakfast meeting?” he asks.
“So boring I’ve already forgotten what it was about. How was your day with your playmate away gadding on the ski slopes?”
“I kind of remember having sushi at lunch but apart from that I don’t think I did very much work today,” he says. “Oh, yes, I think I bought a house. Anyway Max has been buying a diamond for us.”
“Aren’t you the lucky one? I’ll be fortunate to get a bottle of duty free.”
“By the way, my tube will be rattling through Baron’s Court in about twenty mins. I could bring a bottle myself… and something to eat.”
“I’m not eating at the moment, but bring the bottle.”
* * *
It’s gone eleven by the time he gets back to his house in W6. The day had been blue and clear and full of early spring but now it is cold and the house feels cold. He switches off the alarm by punching in the four-digit code, and remembers the mouse. He’ll get a trap at the weekend.
He turns up the central heating thermostat and, picking up the remote control from the coffee table, switches on the television. A harassed-looking politician is being grilled on Question Time. “I know how you feel,” Harry says out loud, surprised to see condensation plume with his breath as he does so. He won’t take his coat off just yet. He hasn’t eaten but the fridge doesn’t hold out much promise – although there is a pair of cold sausages that don’t appear to have any mould on them. He sniffs the milk and miraculously it doesn’t smell off, so he pours himself a bowl of Bran Flakes.
The evening with Rachel didn’t unfold in the cheerfully uncomplicated manner he had anticipated. They’d drunk a couple of glasses each of the chilled Veuve Clicquot Champagne he had picked up in Fortnum’s, before Rachel, still in her work clothes, says, “Come on, then,” and started towards the bedroom. It seems so bloodless this exchange that Harry is taken aback. Christ, he thinks, Rachel is being the man and I’m the girl who needs wooing, who requires foreplay.
By the time he’s undressed she’s already naked under the duvet. Harry slips in and she pulls the duvet away and lies flat on her back with an impatient look on her face. There was a time when the sight of her naked would have been enough. The first two or three times the simple act of transgression – of being with his best friend’s wife – had been enough. And Rachel has a great body, he thought. Lithe, a naturally honeyed skin, and long straight dark hair of the type Harry had always liked. He couldn’t quite believe she would want to be fucked by him – she was, as the expression goes, out of his league.
But now, nothing. He dutifully licks her breasts, and runs his fingers down over her stomach and into her pubic hair, and she gives a little moan, but he feels strangely detached, going through the motions. She grabs for his flaccid cock, and he thinks she’s about to say something when from nowhere comes the image of Mary, his friend from the old days – or his sort-of-not-exactly friend from his impoverished I-want-to-be-a-writer days – comes to mind and he starts to stiffen. Strange, he thinks, but goes with it, blocking out the reality of Rachel and thinking instead of Mary. What does she look like naked?
They see each other maybe twice a year – maybe once a year now – and have a drink in Soho. Mary is a freelance journalist, regular on a foreign desk last time he heard. They get on easily together and, as the conversation turns to films, novels and art – stuff that just doesn’t figure in his life now – Harry feels himself sloughing off an alien skin, the one that’s stitched together with equities, stop signals. He feels as if he has somehow come home.
He’s inside Mary now, Rachel starting to writhe beneath his rhythmic pushing. He opens his eyes and sees Rachel watching him, so he locks his mouth on to hers to block out her gaze. He feels himself softening and thinks again of Mary – of Mary taking her clothes off. Where has this all come from? And as he empties himself into Rachel, who has not yet come, he thinks: I must give Mary a ring tomorrow. It’s time we met up for a drink. And with the thought he starts to harden again, which Rachel takes as a signal to continue writhing beneath him, working herself up with moans and yelps to an orgasm. Or so he supposes, not particularly caring either way.
Afterwards they both have a bath – one after the other, Harry dipping into Rachel’s oily water. He notices again all her expensive ointments and creams and candles. Back downstairs it’s only half nine. She’s wrapped in one of Max’s dressing gowns as she pours him a glass of champagne. She doesn’t join him on the sofa but takes the armchair facing him across the coffee table littered with glossy magazines – Vogue, Harpers Bazaar, Tatler – and untroubled books of photography, still in their wrappers.
“Don’t you feel bad screwing your best friend’s wife?” she asks followed quickly by “While the cat’s away the mouse turns into a rat!”
He frowns. He’s about to tell her about the mouse in his house, but it’s not going to be that sort of conversation, he can see that. He’s had countless scenes like this with girlfriends over the years, usually about his
inability to commit. Anyway, there’s an obvious riposte to that but he waits before replying, not entirely sure whether this is heading towards friendly banter or an argument. But then he realises he doesn’t mind either way.
“Don’t you feel bad screwing your husband’s best mate?”
She doesn’t flinch. She wants an argument. “Are you his best mate? Are you his mate at all?”
This takes Harry aback – as does his answer. “I love him like my father,” he says. “I mean my brother… Freudian slip.”
Rachel laughs, and then looks at him more softly than she has all evening. “You lost your father, didn’t you? The Falklands War or something.”
“Maybe Max is a father to me,” he says, ignoring the question.
“How old were you?”
“I was three. I don’t remember him and I don’t remember him being killed.”
“What can that be like?” Rachel asks herself, pouring champagne into her flute, ignoring Harry’s glass and wrapping Max’s dressing gown tighter around her. “I’m incredibly close to my father.”
“I guess I’m incredibly close to my mother.”
“She lives in Norfolk doesn’t she?” says Rachel, imagining a Georgian rectory with a long gravel drive instead of the reality – a terrace of former farmworkers’ houses on a main road. “I’ll tell you what I think,” she says. “And everybody thinks the same… Max’s family, his other friends… the abominable Simon… they think you are a substitute for Max’s dead younger brother…”
“Nicky? Nonsense…” The thought had crossed his mind.
“Wait a minute… listen.” Her voice is thick with drink, and he can see her making an effort to arrange her thoughts. “Listen. They think that… they think that he thinks that if he can save you, then somehow he’s making up for not saving Nicky.”
“There may be a bit of that, I suppose.”
“There’s a bloody lot of that.”
“What about you?” asks Harry, eager to change the subject. And then the question that he has always assumed he knew the answer to – the reason why he would have ever even considered having an affair with Rachel.
“Do you love Max?”
“Sometimes,” she replies at once; it was a question she had obviously asked herself too. “He’s a good man. And he used to be fun. You weren’t around when we got married, were you?”
This is true. Harry and Max had been at school together, although not great friends. Not friends at all, if truth be told. They had different interests and they hung out with different groups of boys, although to be honest Harry could hardly remember Max at all. Biggish bloke who ran with the hearties – not particularly sporting himself but definitely not an intellectual. Still he’d gone to university, the same one as Harry – and with their shared schooldays it seemed inevitable that they would become acquaintances at least.
“No. You got married during my lost years,” he says, using his favoured description of his early twenties, as if he were some sort of heroic alcoholic author, or a rock star with a heroin habit instead of a rather clueless young man sleeping on friends’ floors in London, trying to get a foothold in journalism, spouting too much left-wing politics and smoking too much gear.
By the time they bumped into each other again in that pub in Fulham, Max was married. And obviously doing well for himself. Harry himself was hanging out with some underachieving druggie types from university, who were now all starting jobs in London with little or no enthusiasm.
“Fuck, for me those years were great,” says Rachel, her voice thick, her eyes absent. “We fucking flew. High above the clouds… like gods, you know? Max was the best fucking trader, worked harder, played harder… we lived like gods, spending, spending, spending…”
“Masters of the universe,” says Harry, trying to remember exactly what Rachel did for a living. Something high up in shopping, was the best he could come up with – some sort of buyer for a chain of luxury shops. He could imagine her and Max on an endless round of parties, holidays and nightclubs, their noses never far from a wrapper of cocaine.
“That’s such a cliché, but yeah…” Rachel laughs. “We had the best fucking wedding – the reception was in the Lanesborough… everyone came… everybody… I think we were drunk for three days solid. Never out of bed for two of them.”
She helps herself to the last of the champagne.
“Then we bought this place and just carried on as before. We worked hard, we got richer, we… but we weren’t gods any more. Something changed. We’d come down from the clouds somehow… do you understand?”
“Married life, I guess; it’s supposed to change you,” says Harry. “I wouldn’t know. Don’t you want children?”
She looks at him for a moment. “Yes, I really do, now.”
A thought crosses Harry’s mind that Rachel is quick to read. “Don’t worry, when I have babies it will be with Max.”
“Better breeding stock, I suppose,” says Harry. It was meant as a joke but sounds a bit pathetic, he thinks.
“Much better breeding stock.” She’s smiling. “What about you? Do you want children?”
“No,” says Harry emphatically.
“That was strong. Why not?”
“I wouldn’t inflict this world on anyone”.
Harry looks so solemn that Rachel laughs despite herself.
“Has it been that bad? You know what I like about you? Emotional intelligence. It’s like being with one of my girl friends.”
“Thanks.”
“Anyway it’s a compliment. Cats and dogs...”
“Cats and dogs?”
“Yes, cats and dogs,” says Rachel. “Most men are dogs –loyal, brave and a bit needy. But you’re a cat... independent, selfish... you walk alone.”
Harry doesn’t say anything. Rachel just smiles a bit muzzily.
“Yes, you walk alone. But, look, on the baby front, time’s running out, even for a goddess. You know what I think now? I think he was running away all that time, running away from what happened to Nicky. And I think weirdly you kind of saved him.”
“Then we saved each other.”
“Max says he saved you from scribbling for a living.”
“I guess he did that,” says Harry, and thinks again of Mary, who still scribbles for a living, and he felt protective of her.
“Should we stop doing this?” he asks suddenly, surprising himself.
Rachel gives a dry little chuckle and stands up, cocooned in Max’s dressing gown as if it was a mink coat or the sanctity of marriage itself. “Too much baby talk, huh? It’s been a good talk anyway; we should do this more often instead of fucking.”
Harry is thinking: I agree. This is more pleasant.
“Well, I’m going on holiday on Saturday for a week,” she announces, padding off to the kitchen and re-emerging with a fresh bottle of champagne, which she hands to Harry to open “Let’s see what happens when I get back.”
“A holiday?” he says, taking the bottle and planting it on the coffee table. “Where? Who with?”
She gives another dry little laugh. “Don’t worry, it’s with a girl friend from work…”
“I wasn’t worrying…”
“Jess, do you know her? Anyway… Dubai. We’re both dying for some bloody sun.” Dubai sounds about right, thinks Harry, who has never had the desire to go there. Max has been, but from how he describes it – artificial beaches, air-conditioned shopping malls – it sounds dreadful.
“Let’s see what happens,” she says.
He takes this as his cue. Leaving the bottle of champagne unopened, he stands and walks into the hallway and picks up his coat from where he has left it folded over the arm of an antique wooden chair.
“You’re not angry, are you?” she asks, following him into the hall.
“Does Max want children?” he asks, ignoring her question. He does feel a bit angry; perhaps very angry, and he isn’t sure why.
“Yes, I think he does, or he would if…”
“If what?”
“It’s like he’s blocked. I don’t think he’s properly got over Nicky yet. His sister… Tash… she’s surprisingly deep, you know. Do you know what she once said to me?”
“No.”
“She was talking in therapy terms, of course, but she said Max would never get over Nicky until he had killed you.”
* * *
Back at the house in Hammersmith – he can’t bring himself to call it ‘home’ – he finds a letter on his doormat along with the advertising circulars. It’s his mother’s weirdly ornate handwriting on the envelope. De-activating the house alarm and looking around for any sign of small animals, he pulls open the envelope. Inside is a cutting, no more, the typeface he recognises instantly as being that of the only newspaper his mother ever buys: The Eastern Daily Press.
Norfolk businessman charged with child sex offences, reads the headline, before continuing: A businessman from Norwich, Nicholas Mooreland, 63, has been charged with 15 offences of indecency between 1975 and 1987, against five boys aged between 10 and 14. The charges, authorised by the Crown Prosecution Service, result from an investigation by Norfolk Police specialist child protection detectives after information began to be received by Norfolk Constabulary in late 2014.
There’s more, but Harry folds the cutting and places it back into the envelope and places the envelope on the living room mantelpiece. He then picks it up again and slips the letter in between the pages of a road atlas lying on the coffee table.
On the kitchen table he opens his laptop and goes online, tapping the name Nicholas Mooreland into Google. Nothing. When he adds the word Norfolk, he is presented with the online version of the press cutting. He scrolls down.
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