After Everything

by Suellen Dainty

  Random acts of kindness, that phrase coined by that American writer whose name he couldn’t remember. He’d employed a sixty-year-old secretary because he knew she needed the job more than a perky twenty-five-year-old. He’d taken time with a shy young man and promoted him ahead of a more confident, bullying colleague.

  He’d decided to be kind again and show young Hudson the subtle manoeuvres of the city that Jeremy knew, so well. In return, Hudson could push some younger business his way. New media, tweeting, streaming, all that. But he wasn’t interested and Jeremy hadn’t realised. It was a slip and he didn’t like it.

  He fretted he might be losing some of the finesse and confidence that had contributed so much to his success. The entire point of Jambhala Investments was to imbue the person sitting opposite with Jeremy’s own gold standard of bravura, to make them inhale it down to the last penny in their bank account. Even the name of his company had been carefully calculated. He didn’t want any of the predictable references to Greek mythology or the movement of planets. He’d decided on the Buddhist god of prosperity not because he was a follower of the Dalai Lama, but because it was different and it might attract Asian investors.

  It was his particular gift to demystify global economics into domestic common sense and that was the reason he’d decided on his own boutique operation instead of joining one of the big dick swingers. He was better with people. Jeremy liked being good at whatever he did.

  Bananas, coffee, cocoa, wheat: he could make dietary staples sing with the prospect of profit, even in the middle of a double-dip recession. Collapsing Eurozones, hurricanes, floods and earthquakes were not just economic or ecological disasters but new opportunities for growth. Aristotle had the right idea. Nature does abhor a vacuum.

  Brand-name toothpastes and washing powders? Perfect for emerging Asian markets; whole towns and villages, millions, even billions, of people wanting to convince themselves of their new middle class status, to brush off third world poverty by stacking Persil or Palmolive in their cupboards and brushing their teeth with Colgate.

  The ten million pounds that got away was a blip. It was a reminder to keep alert, not an omen of impending failure. The important thing was to make a decision, even if it turned out to be wrong. You could always make another decision. To be tentative, or even to appear to be tentative, was the beginning of the end. He’d seen it happen too many times. What began as a reflective moment became an occasional pause and then a permanent faltering, eventually picked up by the person sitting opposite. No one wanted that. It sniffed of doubt and doubt stank of failure.

  What he needed was a quick injection of confidence. So he returned Amy’s call and asked her to dinner at the new restaurant off Sloane Square. Even if the dinner went badly, at least he could say he’d been there.

  The restaurant was in a street behind the Royal Court, with fiery red walls and banks of orchids everywhere. The maître d’ showed him to a table next to a giant aquarium stretching across the whole of one wall. A scarlet-coloured fish with a hideous protuberance on its head gaped against the glass as they inspected their menus. Their waitress told them the fish was a manmade hybrid called flowerhorn cichlid.

  ‘Who’d pay five thousand pounds for one fish that you can’t even eat?’ she said in a broad Australian accent. ‘No worries for some people, hey. Ready to order?’

  Jeremy had already decided on the grain-fed beef, but Amy shook her head.

  ‘I’ll come back in five minutes.’

  The waitress smiled, displaying perfect dentistry, and turned away. Jeremy admired her bottom. As Amy dithered between fish and steak, he wondered where all the waitress’s countrymen and women had gone. Only a minute ago, London restaurants were teeming with strong-backed Amazonian Australians full of delightful insouciance. Suddenly, lemming-like, they had disappeared. He and Sandy once speculated where they’d gone. Surfing in Morocco? Trekking in Bhutan? Or back to their motherland? They’d been replaced by nervous Eastern Europeans with sallow complexions who rarely smiled. When they did, their dental work was not as impressive, but he and Sandy had agreed their waiting skills were marginally better. Amy finally decided on halibut. Jeremy caught the waitress’s eye. She took their order and disappeared again.

  ‘You’re not much fun tonight.’ Amy pouted. ‘I like you better after a few drinks.’

  ‘Ah, but who’s the one who really is better after a few drinks? You or me?’ he asked, annoyed by her slouching across the table because she was young and could get away with it.

  Amy ignored him. ‘Anyhow, what happened?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You just stopped calling.’ She flicked her hair from one side to the other and stroked the stem of her glass with her thumb and forefinger. He knew she wanted the gesture to be an erotic reminder, especially when she licked the corners of her mouth at the same time. But it wasn’t working. The only thing he felt was boredom. He’d call Sandy after dinner. He’d seemed almost chipper when they last spoke. Perhaps they could meet back at the houseboat for a quick nightcap.

  ‘We go out for a couple of months and then I don’t hear from you.’

  He reached for his knife. ‘Nothing happened. I got busy. Deals, business, you know.’

  ‘If I did know, I wouldn’t be asking.’

  ‘I’m not one for the long term, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Two marriages, one kid. Okay. Not doing that again. Got it.’

  She fell silent and Jeremy asked about her new job in corporate events. Amy asked about his work. The halibut arrived, with a crop of miniature vegetables strewn around and a gyroscope of fried onion on top. Amy gushed about its appearance. Jeremy thought for a second that she was going to take a photograph of her plate, but her mobile remained in her handbag. His steak was thankfully unadorned and beautifully marbled, but he wouldn’t come here again. The place was too fashionable. They discussed polo, skiing and another new restaurant in an old Mayfair hotel. Jeremy hoped that Amy was on one of her diets and that he wouldn’t have to endure a further half-hour’s conversation during cheese or pudding.

  ‘I couldn’t eat another thing,’ she announced brightly. Jeremy smiled and called for the bill, not bothering to ask if she wanted tea or coffee. Outside, a taxi disgorged a noisy group of late diners. He hailed it and opened the door for her.

  ‘I’ll call you. We’ll have lunch,’ he said, kissing her on one firm plump cheek while paying the driver and waving the taxi away, relieved to be on his own. He walked home along the King’s Road and then down Edith Grove. At some time in the last twenty years it had stopped being a dismal row of shabby terraces and become a desirable place to live with carefully tended window boxes and freshly painted front doors. He hadn’t noticed.

  The lights of Battersea Bridge glittered over the river and a cold wind blew papers and plastic bags against his legs. As he walked down the jetty towards the Jezebel, he remembered Sandy making fun of Amy, roaring with unapologetic laughter when she thought Led Zeppelin was an actual person. Sandy was right. She was stupid. He wouldn’t call her again.

  He looked at his watch. Too late to call Sandy now. He went to sleep much earlier these days. Jeremy would telephone in the morning and arrange something. Sandy was always ready for lunch or dinner at a moment’s notice. He always picked up the telephone and had time to talk. Sandy understood. He was there, the way a wife or a girlfriend rarely was.

  When he got back to the Jezebel, last night’s ashes from the fireplace had drifted over the books and furniture, leaving a fine silt and giving the room a ghostly hue. Domestic disorder unsettled him, so he rummaged in the kitchen cupboard for a cloth and began wiping everything clean: tables, picture frames, bookcases, and books. When he finished, he began re-stacking the books into neat piles, the paperbacks all together, then the larger hardbacks and finally the heavy photograph albums.

  There were twelve of them, all leather bound and engraved with gold Roman numerals on the spine. A decade ago, Sall
y had taken one look at his shoeboxes of random photographs and swept them off to be chronologically organised into albums as a birthday present. Second wives took things like that seriously. Perhaps they wanted to edit a past that didn’t feature them.

  There were holiday albums of the two of them, diving off boats and grinning happily in Turkish restaurants, strolling around Capri, and lounging back on a gondola in Venice. Because Sally was a generous and kind woman, there were complete albums of his childhood and his first marriage, featuring the doughty Isobel and Rosie.

  He ran his fingers over the armchair nearest the fireplace, checking for dust before he sat down. Some of the pictures in the early albums were yellowing and curled up at the corners. Others had become unstuck and floated from the pages as he turned them. There was Rosie playing tennis with Isobel, dashing to return her serve, then blowing out the candles on her birthday cake. He traced the outline of her pudgy cheek with his finger. How old was she then? He couldn’t remember and half the cake was out of frame, so he couldn’t count the candles.

  He used to creep into her bedroom at night and listen to the steady rhythm of her breathing as she lay with her arms flung out in an attitude of flight, almost weeping with love for her. For a time she had made him good. She had almost, but not quite, saved him from himself.

  It was different now. Rosie was wild and single, living in Dubai and selling exorbitantly expensive apartments off plan. Despite the recession, she was doing just fine. Although she sighed at his procession of young women and urban slang, she understood about the houseboat, how it suited him in a way a Notting Hill or Kensington stucco mansion never would. He missed her. Perhaps he would fly to Dubai this summer. He’d tried last year, and the year before, but she’d postponed both times. Isobel, however, was always welcome.

  A tug passed under the bridge. Its wake slapped against the side of the houseboat. The wind had picked up. Too cold now to sit outside wrapped in a blanket and smoke his Montecristo. He opened the earliest album. Here he was in his short trousers with a brutal haircut, running free in the regimented garden in Cumbria, his stern mother glowering in the background. There he was clutching that obese black rabbit, playing cricket for the local under 11s side and then in the ridiculous school uniform of boater and tailcoat; Sandy beside him, tall and skinny with a thatch of blond hair, clutching his music prize on speech day.

  Sandy was eligible for bullying in so many ways. Transported to Wiltshire from the centre of Ewell, he would never have survived without Jeremy’s patronage. He was credulous right from the start, clambering out of the family Humber, gawping at the statues and pictures in the main hall. His parents didn’t help, with the mother dressed in some Ascot race day ensemble and that drunken father of his bringing up the rear. On that first night in the common room, Sandy had been so pleased to be included, to be considered worthy of conversation.

  ‘Where do you live?’ one of them asked. His name was Jamie Robinson. He used to trap mice in the school kitchens and dissect them alive. He was also prone to pulling down his trousers and igniting his farts with a cigarette lighter. But he was popular and the others followed him.

  Jeremy saw Sandy’s Adam’s apple jiggle in his neck and knew, even at thirteen years old, that this was one of the scissor points of public school life in which Sandy’s reply indicated he was going to belong or be excluded for the next five years.

  ‘Six Newlands Road,’ Sandy replied, just that bit too eagerly. Jeremy watched and waited.

  ‘Ah, a number not a name,’ said Robinson. ‘Now where might that be?’

  ‘Just near the station, in Ewell,’ replied Sandy in that same eager way.

  ‘Of course,’ said Robinson. ‘Of course it is. Tell me,’ he went on, after a pause and a glance around at his circle of smirking friends, ‘I come from up north myself. How’s the shooting down there, in Newlands Road?’

  Jeremy saw the Adam’s apple working double time as Sandy tried to work out a suitable reply. He knew that any minute Sandy was about to blush scarlet and would then start to blub.

  ‘I tell you what,’ continued Robinson. ‘A few of us are going down to the range in a bit, let off a few rounds. Why don’t you join us?’

  ‘Actually,’ said Jeremy, walking across to Sandy, ‘he can’t. Ibstock needs to see us now in his study, something about the house tennis.’

  He turned to Robinson. ‘Watch out for his serve,’ Jeremy said. ‘It’s lethal.’

  Sandy got up and followed Jeremy out of the room.

  ‘But I’m not very good at tennis,’ he said as they clattered down the wooden staircase.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Jeremy. ‘Ibstock doesn’t need to see us either.’

  Jeremy stopped on the landing. Under the dim fly-speckled wall light, Sandy appeared bewildered and grateful in equal parts. ‘Stay away from Robinson and mind your own business for a bit until you get the hang of things. Okay?’

  Sandy nodded, a pathetically grateful nod. More than forty years later, Jeremy knew it wasn’t pure kindness that made him save Sandy. It was also an innate sense of the balance of power. Robinson, whom he’d known at prep school, was gathering his troops and Jeremy needed to increase his own ranks of supporters. You could control people through kindness as well as cruelty.

  He kept flicking through the dusty album pages of stiff smiles on sports days, half-terms and holidays, until finally the two of them were on the pavement of Broad Street, arms outstretched to embrace the golden life of Balliol. He had never doubted his right to that life and the luminous one he knew would inevitably follow. This was what he’d been bred for, the best club in the world. Sandy may not have been so sure, but by then he knew better than to voice any doubts as he carefully wired his new Marantz speakers to the turntable in his room across the corridor from Jeremy.

  Jeremy turned the page, adjusting his spectacles to look at the blurred polaroid. He and Sandy were standing outside that pub near the Folly Bridge. Tim was between them. Jeremy and Sandy’s hair was long and about to get longer, but still kempt, unlike Tim’s wild shoulder-length curls. Peter wasn’t there. He must have taken the picture. All three of them were drunk and staring across the road. He moved the light closer to the photograph.

  It was more than thirty years ago, but he recognised clearly the stunned dazed state that comes to young men at the first sight of beauty, the physical shock of it that dilates the pupils and makes them giddy. That was why the three of them were staring. They’d just caught sight of the most beautiful girl in Oxford. Tumbling blonde hair, porcelain skin, brown eyes and a wide red mouth with an unusually full lower lip. A worn paperback of Ovid clutched against the jiggling breasts, tiny waist above the lean hips, long legs striding down the road. Polly Beresford, intellectual siren of the early seventies.

  She was almost abreast of them when she slowed and smiled, not at him, or the other two, but at Sandy. ‘Hello,’ she said, strands of hair blowing across her face. Bedazzled by lust, Jeremy wanted to reach across and smooth the strands of hair off her face, anything to make her notice him. But she kept smiling at Sandy.

  ‘Liked your point about Donne yesterday,’ she said in a voice like running water. ‘I’d never thought about it like that.’

  Sandy blushed and shrugged. ‘Thanks,’ he muttered.

  Her eyes roamed across the group and settled again on Sandy. ‘See you next week then.’ With that she was gone. Tim and Peter made the usual elbows in the ribs type of jokes, but Jeremy remained silent, jealous that she had spoken to Sandy and ignored him, the main man, the better bet.

  He shut the album. He wouldn’t think about what had happened to her, to him and Sandy. Not tonight. Not after the failure of the day’s deal, and fobbing off petulant Amy. He had worked hard to forget that time in his life, harder than he’d studied to remember tracts of prose and lists of dates for exams, harder than building his career. Afterwards, he and Sandy never spoke about it. They had chosen to excise it from their minds and they had suc
ceeded.

  But sometimes when it was late, or when he was weak and drank more than one glass of wine, he knew the memory could not metamorphose into anything else. The facts remained, like DNA, carbon dating, the hard drive of an obsolete computer.

  Chapter 11

  The Zoloft that Rupert had prescribed had to be kicking in. Sandy spent his days in a benign fuzz, the kind of mood that usually came over him when he was extremely anxious, when he nodded and answered by rote but didn’t properly listen to what people said. He emptied a savings account to pay next month’s rent and some of the more pressing bills. He cleaned the flat and the next day lugged his collection of bin ends and cut price Rioja to the corner bottle bank, listening as the glass smashed against the metal. An oddly pleasing sound, he thought as he walked home.

  He replied to the get well card sent to him by Carolyn de Farge. He remembered seeing her in the street some time ago. He’d been drinking hard the night before and it had taken some minutes before he remembered who she was: a friendly and unassuming woman from the children’s school days. She must have got his address from Jeremy. He emailed Emily in India to say his accident was just that – an accident. He said the same to Matthew and Penny. He knew they didn’t believe him, but that would have to do.

  Two mornings a week, usually on Monday and Friday, he walked across Battersea Bridge to have coffee with Jeremy. Jeremy made a fantastic cup of coffee with a perfect caramel crema. Sandy sat in the saloon watching the sun play on the colours of the Ziegler carpet while Jeremy fussed in the galley, measuring and grinding his specially roasted single estate organic fairtrade beans in his daily pursuit of the perfect espresso. No quick and convenient coffee pods for Jeremy.

  ‘Emily thinks I should get some counselling,’ he called out.

  Jeremy’s voice was muffled by the noise of the coffee machine. ‘About what?’ he asked.