have predicted that cold, bright June Lewis and Lucien McBryde, the tousled, coke-snorting lobby hack who had once been thrown off the prime minister’s battle bus, having been caught in the toilet, red-eyed, with crusty nostrils, would experience such an instant and intense mutual attraction? He was dishevelled, she meticulously shevelled. He disreputable, she shinily reputable. He a dark and ragged squiggle of a man, she as beautifully balanced as a complex quadratic equation. That both of them felt the same inside, both having been ruined by a selfish and indifferent parent, was something few people could have guessed. To a friend, Jen had explained: ‘He was the last person on earth I was ever likely to fall for. That’s why it happened.’
The sex, when they eventually got round to it, was intense and revelatory. (The shift from the time when people ‘had’ each other to when they ‘did’ each other had been the subject of a conversation between Ken Cooper and Robson McBryde.) In bed Jen experienced the only area of his life in which Lucien was not selfish. Two bodies became one. Away from bed, their friends said admiringly and jealously, each became more engaging and lovable.
Perhaps the happiest day that either Jen or Lucien would know in their lives centred around a lunch in a chaotic and cheerful Italian restaurant by Victoria station. No wedding, but a wine-and-pasta-fuelled meeting of two writing tribes, it was hosted in their honour by Robson McBryde. Racy literature and fervid political journalism acknowledged each other, and made dignified bows. Jen’s mother performed many of her most successful anecdotes, and was grudgingly admired by the wary elderly journalist, while their two children, both secure and both feeling that they knew who they were at last, looked on.
‘Luce, let’s never ever have a wedding anniversary,’ Jen had said as they teetered back up the street towards their respective offices. ‘Let’s celebrate this date as our special day, and come back here for years and years.’
Lucien had said nothing in reply. For once, he couldn’t speak. He was still trying to come to terms with this strange new feeling – not drunkenness, not ‘a rush’, but something calmer and more delicately coloured: perhaps it was happiness.
But nothing happy ever lasts. Just two months after the pair of them had been bound together, unable to keep their hands off each other, driven to nuzzle in public places and to stifle their conversations with kisses, London began one of her amazing changes of costume. For a few weeks her temperature rose to that of Paris, and even Rome. Magnesium glares splashed across her glass towers. Down in her shaded alleys and half-lit canyons, her citizens shucked off their grey woollens and padded jackets. Torsos, suspiciously tanned or thickly hairy, were openly displayed. Unhappy cats found themselves sharing urban gardens with pot-planters and barbecue-lighters. Damp pavements, now dried, hosted families of chairs and little tables, and brightly-coloured young people sat outside pubs and restaurants. The smells of charcoaling meat and fragrant tobacco filled the air. Dogs gambolled deliriously in the public parks. Annually, the people of London became inmates released from prison into a brighter world of possibilities. And amid all this chirruping and fluttering, Lucien and Jennifer had a terrible, terminal row. Like most of the worst rows, it seemed to blow up out of nothing at all. Yet it ripped their oneness apart forever.
Lucien had casually mentioned that an ex-girlfriend had asked him to supper. For no particular reason, he had never told Jen about this girl before. Jen froze, then snapped at him. Lucien went cold, and sneered at her. In an instant Jen found herself looking at him differently. Who was he, this stranger? Her face zipped shut, her melting eyes turned to ice, and when Lucien finally brought himself to look at her properly after a long silence, he found he barely recognised her either.
In the bitter public argument that followed, both spat out plosives and fricatives like shrapnel. Each, suddenly feeling sick inside, had been in subconscious training for this combat of ugly words, this tournament of misery, for weeks. Never conversationalists, they now discovered in one another a genius for invective. After twenty minutes they were standing silent and stiff-legged, like mannequins, at the Trafalgar Square end of Whitehall, before turning and hobbling off in opposite directions. By the time evening fell Jennifer had taken her things out of Lucien’s Notting Hill basement flat, and gathered a group of sympathetic friends to empty wine bottles and shred his already tattered reputation. His addictive personality had been too much for Jen. It had been slowly pushing the walls of her ordered life apart. Now she tugged them firmly back together again.
Lucien had been damaged the more severely. In the days that followed he realised that the first person who had ever made him feel like a fully functioning adult human being had walked away. He tried to comfort himself with the memories of earlier lovers and the promise of new erotic freedom, but felt nothing stirring at all, except irrepressible self-disgust. He thought about throwing himself off Hammersmith Bridge. But he was not a jumper.
Perhaps the break-up was inevitable, was even for the best. Had Lucien and Jennifer stayed together and had children, they would have passed their self-destructive traits down to the next generation. The French say that the children of lovers are orphans.
A few days later, Lucien’s father was in his local when he noticed that he was pouring his pint of bitter directly down the trouser leg of the man sitting to his left.
‘Oof. Groourrgh,’ protested the man. ‘Hoi, hoi.’ Nor did he say this in a friendly way. Robson tried to right his glass, but there was no strength in his wrist, and the rest of the liquid gurgled onto the man’s crotch. He said ‘Hoi,’ again, sounding as though he meant it. Robson tried to explain and apologise, but no sound came from his mouth. Then he suddenly slid backwards off his bar stool, and landed face-up on the floor.
He was still feeling an overwhelming sense of irritation when the two ambulancemen arrived. One said to the other, ‘Shall we blue this one?’ The other replied, ‘God yes, we’d better blue him.’ Robson rather liked the sound of that – it made him feel important – but the stroke killed him even as the flashing and wailing ambulance pulled away from the pub.
The funeral had taken place at a crematorium in North London, attended by a ragged platoon of newspaper editors, including a stunned and bewildered-looking Ken Cooper, as well as famous foreign correspondents and columnists from the less popular papers. The rain cascaded down on the backs and hats of some two hundred people who could not be fitted into the chapel. Lucien was not there. He spent the day in his flat, emptying a bottle of his father’s favourite malt whisky, and sobbing.
He survived the weeks following his father’s death by drowning himself in the large, wet eyes of a series of sympathetic girls, and managed to keep working by snuffling fashionable stimulants. But his timekeeping, as Cooper noticed morosely, became ever more erratic.
That Saturday, idly admiring the forthright, no-nonsense names of the old shopkeepers on the street – Lobb for boots, Lock for hats, winking, scarlet Berry Bros & Rudd for booze, Hockney for tobacco – Lucien McBryde turned right just before the Economist building, and wavered his way towards the north-west corner of St James’s Square, and a narrow building with tall windows that was the nearest thing he had to a spiritual home. This was the London Library, a private-subscription affair founded by whiskered and idealistic Victorians, lifelong membership of which had been a gift from his father during a brief phase when he’d showed some promise as a writer. Its collection was unsurpassed by that of any other private institution. Its dark reading room, smelling of old books and old men, was as calming a place as could be found in this square half-mile of clubland.
But that was not why Lucien McBryde used the building. Well-versed in the dangers of email, texting and mobile phones, he had made the library, in effect, his private communications hub. By this time on a Saturday it would normally have closed its doors. But tonight
