David Szalay - Spring

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 house 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.

The Italian tilers had started work, and the two women were standing on the edge of the future deep end, watching them mark things out with their spirit levels. James was surprised to see Isabel. She said she was there to talk to Thomasina about the wedding. Her wedding. Isabel’s wedding. Isabel was wedding Steve that summer—finally, they had been together for more than twelve years—in the south of France. Specifically, she wanted to talk about the dress. Thomasina had some sort of fashion diploma from St Martin’s, and still tinkered sporadically with her portfolio. They had been upstairs in the echoey living room, talking about it, when the tilers turned up.

That James and Thomasina now lived in a sort of palace was still something of a novelty. It still felt a bit strange to be standing there next to the single-lane swimming pool. To Isabel it just seemed slightly silly, preposterous. And what was even sillier—what was much sillier—what was almost too silly to think about or understand—was that when the floatation took place in the summer and James sold fifty per cent minus one share of Interspex (which had not even existed two years ago), he would ‘net’—as the papers might put it—or ‘pocket’, or ‘trouser’, £125,000,000. Isabel had made it pretty plain, only half in jest—less than half in jest—not in jest at all, in fact—that when it came to the wedding present she was expecting something quite special. A house in Sardinia. Something like that. What Thomasina made of it, she did not know. She had been trying to work it out just now when they were upstairs drinking Nescafé out of mugs. Thomasina was quite inscrutable, in her way. On the surface, she seemed oblivious to the sheer strangeness of it all. She was probably still in shock. She floated around the huge house—smiling and laughing in her shy sweet vague way—one of the super-rich… Oh insane! Fuck. It was insane!

For a few seconds some howling tool obliterated their small talk. The lower floors of the house were full of tattooed men in eye-shields operating howling power tools; and when the tools fell silent, there was the permanent tinny whiffle of paint-flecked radios—the same ten simple songs, the same ten news stories, ad nauseam. It was not a nice way to live, and James was starting to wish they had stayed in the flat in Islington until the place was totally finished.

They were standing on the edge of the swimming pool watching the Italian artisans at work. Isabel had a swig of Diet Coke to try and fend off the vertiginous feeling that had just wobbled her. Yes, she was jealous. Sure. That was normal. It would be weird if she wasn’t. And she was pleased for him too. She was proud of him. When people at work pointed to something in the paper and said, ‘Isn’t that your brother?’ she was proud of the fact that it was. It was just that this sudden surreal display of wealth seemed to be threatening to upstage the fucking wedding.

‘What do I do with this?’ she said, offering the empty Diet Coke can to no one in particular.

Thomasina took it.

‘I have to go back to work.’

‘And we have things to do as well,’ James said—properly smugly, his sister thought—squeezing Thomasina’s shoulders. ‘Which way are you going? Do you want a lift?’

There was a sapphire-blue Aston Martin parked under the white apple blossom in front of the house. That was a bit vulgar. And when she noticed the number plate she laughed out loud. ‘Don’t you think that’s a bit…’

‘Tacky?’ James suggested.

‘No? Isn’t it?’

Thomasina evidently thought it was.

‘Yeah, it probably is a bit,’ James said, smiling. He didn’t seem worried about it. Why would he be?

Isabel had to fold herself into the minuscule leather slot of the back seat. They dropped her at High Street Ken tube, and went on their way—looking, she thought meanly, like the fucking Beckhams. Except that James did not look much like David Beckham, except for those shades, and Thomasina looked absolutely nothing like Posh.

* * *

Forrest and his party had long since helicoptered back to London and were sitting down to one of those meals that’s so expensive it becomes a minor news story when the eastbound National Express snorted out of Cheltenham in the dark. They almost missed it, James and Freddy, sprinting with their packages of hot starch. Later, the coach spent two unscheduled hours inching towards a pile-up on the M4 that had shut several lanes of the motorway, and when he phoned Katherine, about an hour into that experience, to tell her that he would be late into London, probably too late to see her that night, she informed him that he would not be seeing her tomorrow either—she was going to stay with a friend in Kent. He had just been weighing up the state of his life, with her and the weekend they were about to spend together on one side and more or less everything else on the other. Even so, he sounded no more than slightly petulant when he said, ‘Well… I thought we were spending the weekend together…’

‘Well, I’m just sitting at home now,’ she said with a laugh. ‘You’re the one who isn’t here.’

He said, ‘What about Sunday then?’

‘I won’t be back in London till lunchtime. And I have to see someone in the afternoon anyway.’

‘Who?’

A friend who was moving abroad, she said.

So when they did finally meet, in a pub near his flat, their weekend together had been pared down to the pathetic rind of Sunday evening. He was a few minutes late, and was withdrawing some money when she sent him a text asking what he wanted to drink.