by David Szalay
Putting on her pyjamas, she worried that she was too used to living on her own, too self-sufficient, too used to not sharing—not sharing her time, in particular. She wondered whether she should have spent the evening with James, whether she owed it to him to have done that. He wanted her to. His horse had won. She had said she had other plans, a ‘prior engagement,’ which was true. She washed her face. She tied up her hair. She made sure her phone was on the night-table. Then, instead of the poetry anthology, she took down from the shelf where it had stood untouched for years the New Testament and found 1 Corinthians 13.
6
On Friday lunchtime James is standing under a ledge, eating a damp, overpriced pasty with frozen hands. The small lumps of stringy steak in the pasty scald his throat on the way down. The pastry is soft and wet. He throws the floury nub into an overflowing bin, and joins the queue at a stall selling extortionate noggins of steaming whisky. He is at Cheltenham for the last day of the Festival—a long-planned excursion. Freddy is there too, visiting the malodorous piss-slick of the overwhelmed Gents.
Pretty much everyone on the eight o’clock National Express service from Victoria was holding a soggy Racing Post. The coach took its time leaving London, and then stood at Heathrow for half an hour in the faint stink of aviation fuel. When it finally set off again and started down the M4, it was in a miserable drizzle. Towards the middle of the morning, Swindon came and went, unseen in the flurrying Scotch mist. Not long thereafter, they left the motorway, and for a while the coach swung promisingly through hedgy lanes. Then, somewhere near Cirencester, it was suddenly snarled in traffic. An hour later, it was still stuck on the outskirts of Cheltenham, in a world of dowdy Wisteria Drives, and Freddy phoned to say they would be late. They were supposed to be meeting some friends of his there—or at least one of them is a friend of his—or at least he is a ‘friend’ of his. Freddy knows Forrest from the Phene Arms, his local in Chelsea, where he and the young American often drink together on those Sunday afternoons, perhaps half of them, when Forrest isn’t in the office. Forrest and the other members of his party were having lunch in the Panoramic Restaurant when Freddy phoned a second time to say that he and James were there.
Since James and Freddy were not allowed anywhere near the Panoramic Restaurant, which was on the top floor of the newest segment of the stand, Forrest took the lift down and met them at the entrance. They looked pretty miserable, he thought. Weary and wet from the long walk to the track—taxis were not to be had for love nor money—Freddy was sporting a wilted fedora and sucking on a cigarette which he held with two fingers of a worryingly mauve hand.
‘Hi,’ Forrest said, lighting one of his own on the dripping threshold. He himself was stuffed into a green tweed three-piece purchased specially for the occasion. ‘You get here okay?’
‘Fine,’ Freddy lied. ‘You?’
‘Well, you know.’ Forrest seemed slightly embarrassed. ‘We were airlifted in.’ (And they were not the only ones—the air was full of the self-important mutter of helicopters, so many of them that they formed holding patterns over the lost summit of Cleeve Hill while they waited to land.) ‘Tristan’s idea,’ Forrest said. ‘He and Trevor paid for most of it. So… you know… it was kinda…’ He seemed to search for the word. ‘Neat, or something.’
‘Sure,’ Freddy said. He did not seem surprised. He did not seem impressed. Surprised and impressed were things that Freddy never seemed.
‘We’re just having lunch,’ Forrest said. ‘You had something to eat yet?’
‘No, not yet.’
‘Why don’t you get something to eat,’ Forrest suggested, ‘and we’ll meet you later?’
So while they headed for the enclave of steaming food vans near the main entrance, Forrest took the lift up to the fifth floor, where from the table in the warmth of the Panoramic Restaurant the track was a green jumble through the plate glass.
Looking out and down, Tristan watched the people putting up with the weather in front of the stands, and in the economy enclosures on the other side of the track. He was always struck by the social diversity of this event. There was nothing else quite like it. Drunken yobbos of all kinds—from the primordially working class to the most egregiously toffee-nosed, with large numbers from the swollen middle of society, from London and the south-east. There were soft-voiced older men and women from garden suburbs in sensible fleeces. There were farmers and their families. Peers. The Irish… In Tristan’s view it was the horses themselves who made it this way. They were not part of the human situation—their appeal was universal. The waitress was serving the starter. Smoked salmon. What a yawn. Typical of a place like this, he thought. Playing totally safe. He smiled easily at the waitress as she served him. ‘What do you like in the first, Trevor?’ he said.
The Head of Structured Products and Securitisation was squeezing lemon onto the thick slice of salmon on his plate. He put it down and wiped his fingers on a napkin. ‘Mister Hight,’ he said, in his unhurried, thinking-man’s Estuary English.
‘Yeah?’
‘Irish raider,’ Trevor said. ‘Should be too good for our lot.’ He said something about a juvenile hurdle he had seen at Naas in January. Trevor’s first visit to Prestbury Park was in 1973, when as an eighteen-year-old he hitch-hiked from London with a few quid in his pocket and won £100. One hundred pounds was a lot of money in 1973, for a tube driver’s son, and the win inspired him to start out as a professional punter. However, he soon worked out that the sums of money to be made from horse racing—even by a hard-working pro—were minuscule next to what was on offer in the financial markets, while the essential principle was the same: not winners, prices. He made the switch from track to trading room in 1980, working first for old Etonians (Tristan’s uncle was one of them), and then for a variety of foreigners.
‘The best of ours is probably Hobbs’s horse,’ he is saying. ‘Detroit City…’ He puts the stress on the first syllable—Dee-troit.
‘Detroit City?’ interrupts Forrest.
Trevor ignores him. ‘… and he might win, but he’ll be fav, and at the prices it’s got to be the Mullins horse. For me anyway.’
‘Detroit City?’ Forrest says again.
Trevor just nods, has a sip of wine, pats his mouth with his napkin, and starts to eat.
‘Well, you guys know I’m from Michigan?’ Forrest says, smiling.
Without looking at him, Trevor says, ‘You should back Dee-troit City then, shouldn’t you.’
They finally meet—James and Freddy, and Forrest and his party—in the lead-up to the main event. They meet on the windswept apron in front of the stands, now a jostling sea of punters. Forrest makes the introductions—and stumbles embarrassingly when he finds he has forgotten James’s name. There is a momentary pause, and then, with what seem for a second to be literally supernatural social skills, Tristan smoothly supplies it. ‘James,’ he says with a warm smile, putting out his white trowel of a hand. ‘Tristan Elphinstone. Lovely to see you again.’
Of course! James thinks.
That tall man with the long pale face and the grey-blue eyes—not unlike James himself, in fact—had looked ominously familiar. He knew he had met him somewhere. The green tweed suit had thrown him. And Tristan was older now… It was suddenly all there. Tristan Elphinstone. He had worked for Lazard in those days, and Lazard was involved, with various others, in the floatation of Interspex. He and James had seen quite a lot of each other for a few months. Lunches, meetings in the offices near Moorgate, taxis. (In the taxis there was a strict etiquette, Tristan always sitting on James’s left, facing the direction of travel, with their suited flunkies perched on the flip-seats opposite.) Lazard had invited him to Wimbledon that summer, the Men’s Final—it was the last year that Sampras won. Tristan was host that day. They even went to New York together, had suites on the same floor of the Plaza. The next morning, the presentation on the umpteenth floor, with the snow swir
ling outside… Tristan Elphinstone. Wife an Italian aristocrat. Stunning, elegant, sexy. What was her name? Dorabella? Fiordiligi? James met her that Sunday in SW19…
‘Tristan,’ he says. ‘How are you, mate?’
Tristan laughs confidentially and leans closer to James (who is able to smell the Acqua di Parma emanating subtly from his tweed suit) to lower his voice and say, ‘I’m not doing too well this afternoon, actually. What about you?’
‘Me? I’m doing okay…’
‘Had a winner?’
‘Had the first two.’
‘Fucking bastard,’ Tristan says, still laughing quietly. ‘Typical. What are you on in the next? I’ll make sure I am too.’
‘Forget The Past.’
‘Nice one.’
Tristan is, of course, too tactful to ask James what he is ‘up to now’ or anything like that. He knows, obviously, that Interspex is no longer trading (not that it was ever exactly trading)—Lazard had filed a suit for several million pounds in unpaid fees. That was the liquidators’ problem, though. James had nothing to do with that.
There is a lot of talk about who is on what in the main event, most of it about Trevor’s £20,000 on War Of Attrition, a fifteen-to-two shot owned by Michael O’Leary, the Ryanair magnate. The prospect of a £150,000 win has made Trevor pensive, and he just loiters there in the tumultuous sea of people, with his hands in the pockets of his mac.
When War Of Attrition wins, he hurls the Racing Post he is holding into the sky and lets out a long wordless yell that makes the veins on his neck and temples leap out.
*
The apple blossom was out in Victoria Road. The tarmac shone in the unseasonable April sun. For the first time, he had the top down on the Aston. Pure pleasure, to slip through the streets of Knightsbridge and South Kensington with the top down and the washed air swirling and surging in his face, fresh and vigorous as springwater. His skin tingled. His heart tingled. Passing under the lofty young-leafed trees, he saw people on horseback in the park, trotting through the patchwork of the shade.
That morning he had met with Tristan Elphinstone at Lazard. Tristan had told him that everything was okay. He was a nice fellow, Tristan. And sharp too, very sharp. James had been passing through Moorgate anyway, so had suggested popping in for a quick meeting. ‘Always happy to see you,’ Tristan had said. James was passing through Moorgate because he had been out in Mudchute inspecting the new servers. Five hundred thousand pounds’ worth of servers had just been installed in the old warehouse there. Enough to cope with the next twelve to eighteen months of expansion. Then they would need more—the Mudchute installation was just a temporary measure. They were already looking for a much larger space, or rather the site for one. The idea was to build something the size of an airport hangar somewhere on the periphery of London. He was to look at one such site this afternoon. So he inspected the Mudchute servers—and even they were impressive, with their team of technicians and wall of loud ventilators, over which the head technician had had to shout to tell him that everything was okay—and when he had done that, he stopped off in Canary Wharf to have a word with Karl Meisner at Morgan Stanley. Everything was fine, Karl said. They were having no problems placing the shares. They had provisionally placed the first tranche already. They were ahead of schedule. Karl had wanted to take him to lunch but James said he didn’t have time, which he didn’t. In those days he never had time.
As he slipped through the lanes of Wapping, he phoned the office in Paddington to make sure everything was okay. He loved the office in Paddington. Everything was new there. The shining light-filled offices themselves were startlingly new, sprouting out of dereliction, out of a sad, forgotten, Victorian hinterland. He was proud to be in the vanguard of the new economy—and he was in the vanguard; there were even jungle drums suggesting that he might be invited to one of those parties at Number Ten, the ones where the Prime Minister mingled with envoys of the young and the new. They were the first tenants in the Paddington development, and the offices were still only half-furnished. Trucks full of stuff pulled up outside every day. His own office was still empty except for some essential furniture, a phone, and a specially made neon sign—in the style of Tracey Emin—saying ‘Get Large Or Get Lost’. The lack of seats meant that meetings had to take place with everyone standing up. This worked so well, in terms of keeping everything quick and to the point, that he had decided to institutionalise it. Serendipitous. He was usually in by eight in jeans and open-necked shirt. They had taken two floors, though for the time being they only needed one. Not even one. Even so, within twelve to eighteen months they would probably have to take more. They were hiring people every day.
So he stopped in Moorgate to see Tristan, who ushered him into the plushest meeting room on the premises and told him that everything was fine. Yes, the markets had lurched lower in March, it was true. However, they were now heading strongly north again. Such things were to be expected… Sitting there in his charcoal suit—there was something otherworldly about the quality of the tailoring—Tristan had the softly unshakeable manner of a very expensive doctor, telling you that while he understood what was worrying you, and was pleased that you had mentioned it, you were in fact perfectly fine. The trip to New York in February had been a fantastic success; there was lots of interest from the American institutional investors who had been at the presentation. He said, with his usual winning smile, that he was now looking forward to their forthcoming trip to Frankfurt and Zurich to make similar presentations, and would look into organising something in Singapore. ‘I wanted to see how New York went first,’ he said. ‘I’ll get on to that straight away now.’ He offered to take James to lunch. When James said he didn’t have time, Tristan escorted him down to the lobby, and there, on the smoke-veined white marble, they parted. First, though, smiling mischievously, Tristan put a hand on his arm and said, ‘Do you like tennis?’
‘Tennis?’ James said. ‘Sure…’
‘Fancy a day out in SW19 this summer?’
‘SW19… ?’
‘Wimbledon.’
‘Oh. Sure, why not…’
‘Men’s Final okay?’
James just laughed.
‘I’ll be in touch,’ Tristan said. ‘We’ll speak soon. Lovely to see you.’ He was still smiling. ‘And don’t worry! Everything’s fine.’
James picked up a prawn sandwich from the Moorgate Pret, and then steered the Aston down Prince’s Street. The Aston was still very new—he still enjoyed just sitting in it, especially in his slightly scruffy clothes and shades, soaking up the lustful looks it sucked in from men and women in equal measure. He passed the solemn ziggurat of the Bank of England, and spurred the sportscar towards the sun-touched dome of St Paul’s. Everything was shining in the warm spring light. He parked in a side street near Ludgate Hill. He wanted to drop in on Chris at InfoWorks, one of the many technical teams they had on the payroll. James did not know exactly what they did. His own technical director, Magnus Petersson, a lugubrious Swede, handled that. Magnus—whose stock options that April had a paper value of £20,000,000 or so—was always meeting Chris, and the various other Chrises they had working for them, scattered contractors who never seemed to want to work with each other. Magnus sometimes said they should just take everything in-house, perhaps by simply acquiring them all—or sack them all and throw the whole thing to IBM or someone. If only it were that simple. Everything was half-made, half-done. No one knew exactly what was happening, or where, not even Magnus, though naturally he insisted that he did. To try and pick it apart at this stage would be impossible. You’d have to start from scratch, and there just wasn’t time.
James liked to pay impromptu visits to the likes of Chris. He didn’t want them to think he wasn’t paying attention. Nor did he want Magnus to think that he never spoke to these people. InfoWorks was up a squeaking, twisting staircase on Ludgate Hill—more like the home of a small mid-twentieth-century publishing h
ouse than a hive of futurologists. Chris’s own office was on the top floor, with small oriel windows overlooking the street. He was a short, hyperactive man—steel-rimmed spectacles, vainly shaved head—and he met James at the top of the stairs. He told him that everything was okay. Simon was hastily summoned—he was head nerd on the Interspex ‘project’—and they had a meeting. James nodded, and improvised some questions. There were a lot of technical terms. They used them to fend him off. He was only in there for twenty minutes or so, and turned down Chris’s offer to take him for lunch.
He was just starting the Aston when June phoned. June had been his PA when he was an estate agent in Islington too. She said that someone from the Financial Times had been on the phone, wondering if he would do an interview. James said he didn’t think he had time. ‘That’s what I told them,’ she said. ‘I said you probably wouldn’t have time.’
He parked in front of the house on Victoria Road. Though it still smelled pristinely of solvents, and faintly of sawmill, the upper part of the house was more or less finished. The expansive living room. The five en suite bedrooms. The study. The TV room. The first-floor terrace. Not all of these rooms were properly furnished. Two of the bedrooms had nothing except king-size mattresses in them, still in their plastic wrapping. The lack of stuff in the living room led to a vacant echo when you walked around on the newly laid oak parquet. The study held only a huge leather-topped desk and an early nineteenth-century admiral’s swivel-chair. (Trophies of a sale at Sotheby’s entitled ‘The Age of Napoleon’.) The lower part of the house, however, was still in a much earlier stage of development, the spaces for the most part only sketched in in sharp-edged plaster. The drawing room, the dining room, the kitchen, the utility room, the maid’s flat, the single-lane swimming pool… This last was still just a strange-looking concrete trench with various hoses in it. It was where James found Isabel and Thomasina.