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.