I had by then established a successful routine, and that made me feel confident about being able to adapt to a social situation. I rose every day at 5 a.m., ran for forty minutes along the same route, which was an acceptable 9K, came home, showered and dressed and left the house at 6.10 a.m., in order to be at my desk by 6.45 a.m. The office had its own gym, as all those offices do, and so I also worked out during my lunch hour on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I would have done it every day, but I knew there would soon be client lunches to attend and times when it was necessary to look as if I was so busy I was working through lunch. This set-up meant I had a bit of flexibility and could switch my days around if need be. I also bought a bench press and weights for home. For now they were in the bare library, but I knew V would never agree to this arrangement so I had already looked into the costs and feasibility of excavating the basement to make way for a gym. V always loved the heat, so I thought a sauna would work down there as well.
There were eleven of us out that evening, although only two are worth mentioning: George and Kaitlyn. George was loud and good-looking, but he drank too much and wasn’t very bright. His godfather ran the firm or something and his father was a lord, so he never had to worry about things like performance. You’d be amazed how many people there are like that in the City. How hard the rest of us have to work to carry them. And you could hate them, but what’s the point? The world, as I learnt at a young age, is hardly fair and there’s nothing anyone can do about that.
Kaitlyn worked in another office along my corridor, so we’d waved and said hello before. She was thin and tall and always dressed in some sort of dark-coloured suit, with amazingly high heels. I would watch her stride past my windows and wonder how on earth she didn’t trip and break her ankle. And yet she moved so effortlessly in them I concluded that she must have been wearing them for so long they had become an extension of her leg. Kaitlyn was very pale, with the lankest, blondest hair I’d ever seen. She was so blonde the shade extended to her eyelashes and eyebrows, which gave her an otherworldly quality. And her eyes were very blue, almost like looking at ice. I thought she’d be stern and severe, but in fact she was the exact opposite.
‘So, how are you finding us all?’ she asked when we found ourselves at the bar together, her accent a beautiful, soft Irish.
‘So far, so good.’
‘I hear you made a killing at Schwarz. I’d love to work there one day. My dream is to live in an apartment overlooking Central Park.’
‘My apartment overlooked Central Park.’ I glanced back at the rest of our table as I spoke, wondering when I could leave. We had been there for two hours and they were all already sweaty and red-faced, with a few of them making frequent trips to the toilets.
‘Oh wow,’ she said. ‘Why did you come back?’
‘I did my two years. London’s my home. The plan was never to go for more than two years.’
‘Yes, but New York. And Schwarz.’
Neither of us seemed to want to go back to our table, so I sipped at my drink at the bar. ‘My girlfriend has a job here she couldn’t leave.’
‘Oh, right. It must be impressive if it tops Schwarz.’
‘She’s not a banker. She works in Artificial Intelligence.’
Kaitlyn whistled through her teeth, an odd sound, not unlike one you’d use to call a dog. ‘Wow, what a power couple.’
‘Not really.’ I noticed that Kaitlyn wasn’t drinking her wine and the glass was tilting over the bar. ‘Careful, you might spill that.’
She looked down and laughed, taking a small sip. ‘So, where do you live now?’
‘Clapham.’
‘Oh, near me then. Are you by the common?’
I nodded. ‘Yes, Verity was very particular about being near the common. She’s a runner.’
‘I’m a walker,’ Kaitlyn said. ‘I’ve got a little dog and I walk him there every weekend. It’s the closest I get to home.’
‘Where’s home?’
‘A tiny village in the south of Ireland. You won’t have heard of it.’
‘Is your family still there?’
She nodded and I was struck suddenly by the thought of her flying across the sea to this harsh London life, away from the coast and the hills.
‘What brought you here?’
She shrugged. ‘Oh, you know, life. Ireland’s beautiful but it’s not the easiest place.’ For a terrible moment I thought she was going to cry, but she laughed instead. ‘I bet you have one of those gorgeous double-fronted houses on Windsor Terrace.’
‘How on earth did you know that?’ I asked too quickly, wondering if she’d been looking through my personnel file or something.
But she laughed again. ‘Because that road is just one long line of bankers, that’s why!’
I tried to picture some of my neighbours, but realised I couldn’t. I hoped she was exaggerating. Because if there is one thing V hates it’s unoriginality. And what could be more unoriginal than working in the City and living on a road of bankers? I could feel Kaitlyn looking at me but I refused to return her stare, feeling my cheeks colour under her scrutiny. I hated her at that moment, with a deep, horrible passion. Because how dare she come along and piss on my bonfire? My beautifully laid, perfectly proportioned bonfire.
It took me all the evening until my walk home from the Tube to realise that what Kaitlyn had said didn’t matter anyway. V wasn’t a banker, so she wouldn’t know if all her neighbours were bankers. I breathed more easily as I walked, but still I peered into all the windows without their curtains drawn. And it didn’t make me feel much better, because I saw a lot of similar rooms, not just to each other, but to my own. A lot of dark walls, industrial lighting, expensive modern art, sleek corner sofas, state-of-the-art media systems, stripped floors. I also saw a lot of bloated middle-aged men in half-discarded suits and thin blonde women in pale cashmere, holding glasses full of what would undoubtedly be the finest red wine.
I poured myself a glass of my own fine red when I got in, loosening my tie and throwing my jacket over a chair, kicking my shoes into the corner. I knew V would hate that, but she wasn’t there to see it and I also knew I would never behave like that once she moved in. I wandered into the drawing room and put Oasis on the media system. Oasis are V’s favourite band; mine too. Before I met her I only listened to bands like the Clash and Nirvana and Hole. I liked to lock myself away with music and let it thunder in my ears while I beat a frantic imaginary drum on my bed. V said I should listen more to the lyrics because that was where the beauty lay. She allowed Nirvana, but she couldn’t believe I didn’t own any Beatles or Bowie, any Lloyd Cole or Prince, any Joni Mitchell or the Carpenters. But mostly she couldn’t believe I didn’t own any Oasis. Noel Gallagher writes the best love songs in the world, she said, which made me feel jealous of him, that he could make her feel something I couldn’t.
V’s wedding invitation taunted me from the mantelpiece and I felt an overwhelming urge to break the rules and contact her. I got my laptop out of the cupboard and sat with it on the sofa. First I googled her name, but as usual nothing came up. Her Facebook profile was still deleted and she had never been on public social media sites like Twitter or LinkedIn. She had, of course, changed her phone number after the American incident and I didn’t even know her address. The only access I still had to her was by email. Between January and February I had emailed her every day, sometimes more than once a day, but she never replied, not until the one I’d sent about coming home. Which meant that my breaking off contact had been the right thing to do.