Canarino

David liked to size people up precisely; now that he’d noticed Francine, he was curious as to exactly who she was. He concluded that the slip was a mark of her conservative background and her status as a mother; it commanded his respect. Maybe that was just what Francine had intended it to do, he thought.

‘How does Puck get to Virginia, Francine?’

‘Mrs Judd has made arrangements, sir. For the end of the summer.’ Francine glanced behind her, as if she wanted to leave. Then she smiled at David.

‘I think Mrs Judd wants to settle the children first. Excuse me, sir, but the water is maybe boiling now. I’ll lay your place in the dining-room?’

David grunted, and she was gone. It made sense, settling the children, he decided. But if the damned dog could stay, why the hell couldn’t he have his desk and his files? Was there a TV in the house? Had she taken the bed?

He took off his jacket and laid it over the computer screen, then picked up his beer again and collapsed into the little pink-and-green chair. It was a snug fit. He slopped beer over his lap as both elbows struck hard against the arms of the chair.

‘Well this sucks!’

He craned forward, laughing, fishing about with his tie to see if it was wet. He could feel the beer running between his thighs. Francine, he thought, you’re going back to Peter Jones tomorrow to buy me a real chair. He pictured a huge leather recliner on sale; Elizabeth would be horrified, but he couldn’t stop the thought. She’d never know anyway. Maybe Francine would like to take the chair home in August when he left. She deserved some booty if she was going to be unemployed.

As he stood up to shake the wet off his trouser legs, the telephone rang. He ignored it. It went on ringing and he patted his hips and his chest, where his jacket pockets might have been, thinking about his cell phone. Anybody who seriously wanted to reach him called him on his cell phone. He looked at his jacket hanging over the computer screen and thought, I left the phone downstairs in my bag. Still, he picked the jacket up, felt the weight of it, shook it a little, batted at the pockets. Then suddenly he reached for the phone on the floor, thinking, Maybe it’s Elizabeth. They must have arrived.

His voice was just a flat bark. ‘Yup?’

‘Is that David?’ It was a man.

Nailed by the office; guess I’m a sucker. ‘Yup, it’s David. What is it?’

‘Do you mean who is it?’

‘Oh, Christ.’ But David’s blood was already rising; he was always ready to spar. He knew the voice, a big, deep American voice. Teasing, basically friendly. Who the hell was it?

‘David! It’s Leon!’

‘Jesus! Leon? How’d you find me here?’

‘It’s just your house, isn’t it? This number?’

‘Yeah—barely! I’m about to sell the house and move home!’

‘Home?’

‘Well—Virginia.’

‘Virginia?’

‘Jesus, Leon, where the hell are you? Are you in London?’

‘Of course I’m in London. I live here. I’ve lived here for nearly a year!’

‘You’re joking! What are you doing?’

‘Calling you.’

‘Asshole! Come over and have a beer with me. I’m all alone in Belgravia. Ditched by Elizabeth and the kids till the end of the summer. A quivering wreck!’

‘I’m there. I’m staring at your address. Give me twenty minutes.’

How could Leon spend a whole year in London and not call until tonight? It was unbelievable.

In college, David had seen Leon every day, twice a day, all day long and half the night. And afterwards, those strident, crazy years starting out in New York. Twenty-five-hour days at the office, it had seemed like. The towering, gut-boiling canyons of steel and glass. The sweaty shock of competing full-out with everyone in the whole world all the time; bosses and colleagues who didn’t necessarily want you to win and who didn’t necessarily even look upon you as a team-mate; results that made the real newspapers. We went into that life full-bore, David thought, busting for action action action. Everything so fast-forward that pretty soon nothing else would do. Speed-addicting days, with the occasional split second of wrung-out leisure in that airless walk-up on East 12th Street, drifts of dirty clothes on the floor, tin-foil-and-white-paper packaging from the Chinese carry-out erupting from the kitchen trash can. David could just about smell sesame noodles, pizza, stale beer. He thought of their slapstick antics trying to clean the place up and make it seem like a real apartment when one of them wanted to bring a girl back.

Time was nothing. Gone.

Are we that old already? That duty-ridden? What are we doing with our lives, that we move further and further forward without holding on to anything from the past? How did I lose touch with Leon of all people? My best friend, among a lot of good friends.

He pictured Leon’s huge, bounding limbs that could look so ungainly at first, his scraggly blondish hair, long, thin, never really combed. His colossal, uncontrollable grin that peeled his lips back like an apple, or something bigger, a melon, being sliced open. Leon seemed like an enormous dog, a yellow Lab, but he was so much more collected than that. In sport, his timing was perfect, incredible. And when David pictured Leon, he saw the dirty-blond hair lift slightly over the ears, as if Leon were in motion.

Climbing the stairs to his bedroom, David saw Leon, as he’d seen him for years in his mind’s eye, skating fast, his ice hockey helmet clamped onto his head like a flying ace’s, hair blowing out through the ear pieces, and the pads which made their team-mates into blimps and clowns hanging loose on his giant’s physique, his stick swinging like a pendulum backwards and forwards over the bladescored ice, the puck cradled, babied, protected, then slapped silly into the goal.

His timing was perfect, tonight, too, David realized. When did I ever need Leon’s company more?

He opened his closet door half-expecting his clothes to be gone. But there hung the sober row of dark, handmade suits on heavy wooden hangers, neatly spaced, the elbows ever so slightly bent so that the jackets seemed to be politely offering him their arms. He tugged a pair of khakis off the last hanger and felt around on the shelf above for a pullover. The bedroom, David thought, looked relatively undisturbed by the movers. Some things were missing—the mirror above his chest of drawers, for instance, and his bedside table. Had she left every telephone like that on the floor?

He bent down and pressed the intercom then stood up to buckle his belt.

‘Hey, Francine.’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘I’m expecting a friend. Bring up a couple more of those beers when he gets here.’

‘Yes, sir.’

When he had changed his clothes and splashed water on his face and hands, David went back down to the drawing-room and turned on the lights. It was an absurd choice, the blue silk sofa or the pink and green flowered chair in his study. None of it suits Leon any better than it suits me, he thought. It might as well be made of matchsticks.

He went out onto the balcony in the tawny semi-darkness of the lamp-lit street. His mind was streaming with images from the past, easily, unexpectedly. He felt amazed at all the time that had gone by. He had reached a watershed without meaning to; he might have missed it altogether.

I’m always about the next thing that’s going to happen, David thought to himself. I’ve been poised on the balls of my feet, on the edge of my chair, convinced that there will be nothing more and that I’ll be bored out of my mind.

What if I were not so afraid of being bored? Would life pass more slowly? Could I choose what to do on purpose, shape my destiny a little? Instead of lying like a feeding fish on the current, putting myself in the way of an endless stream of events and just reacting?

He began to wonder whether what had happened so far in his life might be all he should expect. And he thought: A lot of it’s lost, dammit. But if I could go backwards to those lost events, have them all again, it might be enough to carry me for a long time. For ever? Maybe. Nothing was connected up; it had just gone on endlessly happening, with no time for reflection. His experiences seemed disparate, tumultuous, unrelated. Some things, he thought, he might have paid too little attention to, so that he wouldn’t be able to recover them now if he wanted to. But the human mind is deep, he thought to himself. It’s all in there somewhere.

A motorcycle roared at the end of the square, then rocketed around it, blasting the sedate doorways and windows one by one. It stopped practically at David’s feet, on the single yellow line beneath the streetlamp.

Once the engine died and the noise stopped, David paid no attention, but then as the black leather rider made for his own front door, David suddenly called out brazenly on the velvet air.

‘I thought you were a fucking courier! When did you start riding a motorbike?’

Leon took off his helmet and tilted back his head, smiling broadly. Then he put a finger to his lips and whispered loudly and hoarsely, ‘You’ll wake the neighbors!’

David laughed. ‘Fuck ’em! They won’t be my neighbors much longer. Wait, I’ll let you in.’

As he hurried down the stairs, he realized he was thinking about his legs. How quick was he now, really? As if Leon could see him, judge him, from the other side of the front door.

When David opened the door, Leon was standing back from it on the sidewalk. He had one foot on the portico step, one hand on his thigh, slouching. He seemed huge, black, his face in shadow, his hair glinting yellow, lit from behind. David heard the creaking of his biker’s leathers as Leon stood up to his full six feet four inches, and he felt a coolness between them, a sudden sense of uncertainty, then Leon closed the space between them in a stride and wrapped David in his arms.

David slapped Leon on the back, punched him in the biceps.

‘Christ, it’s good to see you!’

‘Look at you, Dave, still a fucking preppy, in your little navyblue sweater and your khakis. You’ll never change!’

Leon seemed to fill the hallway. His hair was cropped now, and as he smoothed it, David saw how sleek, how sharp he looked. The massive square jaw shaved clean, shining, and underneath the husky black leather jacket was a tight-fitting dark green turtleneck made of something stretchy, a Mr Spock job without the insignia of the Starship Enterprise on the chest. The padded leather trousers fit snugly up to the rib cage.

‘Aren’t you hot in that gear?’

‘England’s never hot. Come on!’

They looked at each other, smiling. David crossed his arms, nodding at the floor, then gripped his elbows hard, kneading them.

‘You look just a little older, Dave, and a little wiser maybe where the flesh has worn away. You are definitely thinner, man. Not a lot of gray, though. How are you?’ Leon put a hand on either side of David’s chest and shoved him backwards ever so slightly.

David went on smiling. ‘Well, I don’t know. Fine, I guess. Or maybe you’re going to tell me how I am. You never looked better, Leon, that’s for sure.’

Leon danced his hips from side to side and laughed. ‘You should try wearing leather, man; what are you waiting for?’

As he closed the door, David saw Francine hanging around in the back of the hall with her loaded tray.

‘Beer?’ he said to Leon. ‘I have nothing else to offer, at least I don’t think I do. I don’t even have chairs.’

Francine’s hands trembled ever so slightly as Leon lifted his mug from the tray.

‘Cheers, David! It’s been too long.’ He swallowed half the mug on the spot. ‘So let’s go out. Let’s go somewhere and eat, or drink anyway. We can take the bike.’

David felt a little surge of adrenalin. He studied his beer, waiting for Francine to start down the stairs. ‘I haven’t been on a motorcycle in twenty years,’ he said, smiling, ‘and hardly ever then.’

‘Nothing to it if you’re the passenger. I won’t dump you in the road, Dave. It’s a gorgeous night. If we get wasted, you can take a cab home.’

‘Let me shut the doors upstairs.’ His heart was leaping at it. ‘It’ll just take a second.’

Leon followed him up to the drawing-room. When the French doors were bolted, Leon said, ‘Would you look at that fucking picture of Lizzie. When did you have that done for her?’

‘She had it done for me. She and the kids. For our last wedding anniversary.’ David felt embarrassed explaining, and, sure enough, Leon threw back his head and roared.

Then he raised an eyebrow at David. ‘Elizabeth Ruel had that done for you? No way, man! Elizabeth Ruel had that done for Elizabeth Ruel!’

David felt even more embarrassed. Not so much about the picture, and all it seemed to represent, but at the fact that, even after so many years, Leon knew everything about him. There was no escaping it. You couldn’t bullshit Leon. He could look like a thug, act like a fool if he felt like it, but Leon was a chameleon and he knew all the moves—his own, and everybody else’s, too. That was why David loved him. It came over him now in a wave, that he had always trusted Leon completely because there was no alternative. You couldn’t hide from him and you couldn’t run from him either. And for all his strength—of mind and body—Leon had never done David any harm.

There and then, as if reading David’s mood and his thoughts, Leon pulled a classic stunt. He put his arm around David and hugged him warmly to his side.

‘It’s an amazing picture, Dave, seriously. Beats the hell out of all her magazine covers.’ He raised his free hand toward the picture. ‘This takes her right out of time; shows her as the beauty of the ages. Forget Helen of Troy. Lizzie knows exactly what she’s up to with visual effects, doesn’t she?’ He dropped both arms. ‘So how old are your kids now?’

‘Gordon is seven; Hope is four.’

‘They look pretty happy. A little stir-crazy, maybe. You think they belong in America?’

David shrugged. ‘Elizabeth thinks so.’

‘How can she? If she’s having them painted like that? That’s nothing to do with America, that painting!’

‘Well, maybe that’s why she left it behind. Or maybe it just marks the end of something. A souvenir.’

‘That’s a huge painting, Dave! They’re lost in it, the three of them—as if they didn’t belong anywhere at all. I mean not anywhere real.’

David just looked for a while. The figures were about life-sized, he thought, but the drawing-room around them had no distinct edge to it. The blue and red oriental carpet flowed away over an endless floor, the walls soared out of sight as if to the sky. There was the great swag of dove-colored silk at the back, curtaining one of the French doors, but none of the other furniture that used to be in the room was shown.

Finally he said, ‘Yeah, well, there’s nothing Elizabeth likes more than empty space, I guess. Big houses, big rooms, open fields, long driveways.’

Leon looked at David. ‘Still trying to get away from everyone, is she?’

They both laughed.

‘Is that a real dog?’ Leon pointed.

David laughed. ‘That’s Puck.’

‘Puck? I hope not! One face-off and his brains would be all over the ice. Jeez, David!’

‘It’s hockey for me; Shakespeare for Elizabeth. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The children thought it was funny. Well, I think it’s funny anyway. Maybe the children don’t even know. I can’t remember.’

The grilled chicken and the rice had grown cold by the time the door slammed behind them and the bike started up. Francine went into the dining-room and looked at the two untouched plates of food she had put out, the bowl of salad, and the bottle of white wine on the little round table. Then she went back into the hall, walked to the front door, opened it, and looked out in the street. She could still hear the bike, maybe half a block away. She shut the door, went back to the dining-room, and sat down in the second chair she had carried up from the kitchen. Quietly, contentedly, she ate Leon’s plateful of dinner; that plateful had been her own to begin with anyway.

David and Leon went to the top of the Oxo Tower because David couldn’t possibly get enough, now, of the London night. The restaurant was noisy and smoky; the city twinkled and floated just out of arm’s reach on the other side of the glass walls, its invisible depths landmarked by the familiar dome of St Paul’s, the carnivalesque Millennium Wheel, the glinting black Thames snaking through it.

There were certain things that had to be established between them; David thought the best way to start was by ordering margaritas. They ordered food, too, scallops, steak. The staring emptiness of David’s house had made them both self-conscious, and they began to recover from it only after their second drink.

Still, they carried on a businesslike series of questions and answers. When was the last time they had seen each other? Why had it been so long? What had each of them been doing during all that time?

‘I remember that place you had in the Village. You sold it?’

Leon shrugged. ‘Sometimes I regret that; I’ve got another place now, much bigger. I’m hardly ever there, though. I was in Boston for a long time. The fund manager thing I went up there for was boring, and at first I thought I should never have quit trading. Fifteen star years I had. Anyhow, I knew right away I shouldn’t have left New York. But I liked lecturing at the Business School. That kept me sane. What kept me in town, though, was the ice hockey team.’

‘What—the Harvard ice hockey team?’ David was surprised.

‘My second youth, man! I went to a few of their home games, and I gave them some cash, and then I wheedled my way into some coaching. Just specialized stuff, you know—mental toughness, into-the-net-not-near-it, winning a man down. It was a blast. Pure boyish fantasy.’

David laughed. ‘You must have felt like a shit when they played Princeton! Who’d you root for?’

‘You root for the team you’re involved with. You can’t help it, can you?’ Leon tried to sound dismissive, but then he grinned. ‘Of course I felt like a shit! And they all knew it—they all knew I had played for Princeton!’

‘So why aren’t you an ice hockey coach now?’ David egged him on.

‘Not enough money. And—’ Leon waved two fingers in the air and called out to a hurrying waiter, ‘Can you bring us two more margaritas, please?’

The waiter fluttered, as if he’d been accosted while daydreaming, then showily collected himself. ‘Of course, sir, two more margaritas.’

‘And?’ said David.

‘And—you’re joking, aren’t you? Hockey is where I came from, man; it’s not where I’m going. It never was.’ Leon sounded impatient.

David looked at Leon, thinking about where he came from—Babbit, Minnesota. David had never been there, but he could remember meeting Leon’s parents the week he and Leon had graduated from college—gray, defiant, taciturn, overwhelmed by Princeton. He remembered his painful sense of obligation to try to like them and draw them into the hectic partying for Leon’s sake and for the sake of some self-conscious idea of social equality, of wanting to come across as an ordinary, unsnobby guy. He also remembered his fear that he would fail and later his certainty that he had failed. It had been impossible, despite vast quantities of alcohol consumed on all sides.

David’s own parents had come down ahead of time for his father’s class reunion, and then they’d gone straight home to New Canaan until the morning of graduation. They preferred their own friends and their own generation. They had barely shaken hands with the Halbergs; nevertheless, David’s mother had quietly observed that people didn’t get to be like Mr and Mrs Halberg without a lot of hardship, struggle, barbarity. It shocked David still, his mother’s remark and his own sense that she was right about the barrenness of their demeanor. The Halbergs appeared to have no conversation, no joy, no desires even. Leon’s father wasn’t even sure that he should have taken a week off from the iron mine to watch his son graduate, to meet Leon’s friends, to see where Leon had spent the last four years.

And yet amidst the landslide of seven other children, the Halbergs had produced Leon. They had put him out on the ice in hockey little league by the time he was four. All they had ever seemed to understand about Leon was that year after year he was the best hockey player in his age group that anyone in the town had ever seen. He was the best in any age group by the time he was ten. They couldn’t understand why he wanted to leave Babbit, how he got himself to Hotchkiss, to Princeton, why he didn’t want to play professional hockey. David liked to think that he himself did understand, but for all the comfort of his own upbringing, there was something in David that was just as hard as the Halbergs.

‘So you mean coaching college teams is fine, but not professional hockey, where you could get real money?’ There was a goad in David’s voice, as if he was jealous of what Leon so lightly passed up.

‘Oh, come on, Dave! Get real. It’s no different than when we left college! Hockey’s brutal! We were both out of that years ago. I’m one of the luckiest college ice hockey players ever. I have all my teeth; I never broke my nose; I got a great education basically for free. I have a life no one at home could have dreamed of. Why would I want to coach professional ice hockey? I never even wanted to play professionally. You could have played—why didn’t you play?’ Leon’s voice resounded with some admonition: why are you giving me such a hard time? He was calling David’s bluff.

‘I wasn’t as good as you, Leon.’ It came out quietly; even now, David found it hard to admit.

But Leon took no pity on him. ‘You were plenty good enough! Don’t bullshit me. You would never have dreamed of playing professional hockey! A country-club boy from suburban Connecticut—and wind up in a house like that, with Elizabeth? Give me a break! Why would I want to do it any more than you, David? I may have a rough background, but I left it behind when I was eighteen.’

Now David wanted to change the subject; somehow they had gotten into an ancient rut. They were grating on each other, right down to the bone, and it made him feel tired.

‘So London? What brought you to London?’

‘Well, after Boston I went back to New York and started up a hedge fund two or three years ago. Made a ton of money, bought a new place uptown, on the Park. Then I came over here to find some more clients, basically. Share the wealth. I’m lecturing at LSE a few times a year. Eyeing that new business school in Oxford.’

David resisted making a joke about the new ice hockey rink in Oxford.

Leon went on, ‘And I am seriously planning to pick your investment banking brain for my own benefit and the benefit of my clients, Dave. What are you going to do with all your smarts in Virginia, anyway? How’d she persuade you?’

This elicited a monumental sigh. David wasn’t sure he knew the answer, and the topic seemed endless.

‘She was never happy here. At least that’s what she says. After September Eleventh, this whole American thing got to be such a big deal. She never stopped telling me that the rest of the world doesn’t understand what it means to be American. She got desperate about the children’s education; they had to go back right away. She bills herself as a country girl at heart; just wants to be back in the US of A, riding, walking, whatever. Elizabeth never took to the English countryside, the village life, the county thing. Can’t stand all the competitive socializing. It gives her claustrophobia.’ He shrugged with his eyebrows, half-closing his eyes, giving in. ‘She has a point; it is relentless, the jockeying for position. And the reward for success is having to go on doing it forever. It’d be one thing if you could make money out of it, but it’s all about getting the next invitation.’

Now he gave a sour chuckle, sighed again, smaller, and drained his glass, then fingered the salt still stuck to the rim, tasting it from his fingertip. ‘So she’s found this big place. I guess it’s beautiful—in the sticks, somewhere outside Washington. Well, not in the sticks for her. For her it’s right in the middle of her map of places that matter. She’s got that all figured out—I can tell by the price tag. It’s in Culpeper County, out beyond Middleburg, at the foot of the Blue Ridge mountains, near some little town I’ve never heard of, Rixeyville. Secluded, discreet, private—whatever the real estate agents say. Nobody will be able to see her in the middle of her thousand acres, not unless she drives to town or lets them foxhunt across her land.’

‘But what are you going to do there, Dave?’ Leon looked comically horrified.

‘Well. She put a lot of pressure on me. I let her, I guess, for various reasons. I got what I came to London for; I came for the money. I’ve got so much money I don’t even count it anymore. I’m literally giving it away now. I mean Elizabeth gives it away. So maybe I’ll help her do that—run this foundation she started. And maybe, I don’t know, maybe eventually local politics.’

Now Leon grinned and threw both arms in the air. ‘Or national politics!’ Then he put his hand on his heart and said with tipsy grandeur, ‘I have a dream…’

Politics had been David’s adolescent obsession—his heroes the Kennedys, Martin Luther King; his music Joan Baez, Bob Dylan; his hair down to his shoulders.

‘Now I see the strategy,’ Leon taunted.

‘It’s not that focused, buddy,’ said David. Again, he felt embarrassed by how well Leon knew him, by Leon’s reminding him of ambitions he had hidden even from himself for the last twenty-five years.

‘Somebody needs to come along and save the world. Just do it, man!’ Leon flagged the waiter again and ordered their fourth round of drinks. He had cleaned his plate; David was still playing with his steak.

‘Aren’t you scared you’ll be bored otherwise?’ Leon asked.

‘Petrified.’ David felt as though his whole life was being exposed as a sham. What he had done up until now was not what he had once, in his youth, idealistically intended to do. And what he was getting ready to do next seemed entirely unclear, half-submerged in shallow, domestic anxiety. If he had ever had a sense of what his life was for, he seemed, now, to have lost it.

‘So why are you doing this? You’re going to hate living on a horse farm.’

Leon was leaning across the table now, his face only a few inches from David’s; his eyes were glinting with a mixture of curiosity, sympathy, and something like a promise that he could help fix things. He was intensely soliciting a confidence. David felt as though Leon was saying out loud,You can trust me; we used to be so close. We are still so close.

The two of them just looked at each other for a long time. The waiter hovered, rigid with expectation; they ignored him. He went off in a huff.

At last Leon said, ‘Is everything all right?’

David said, ‘Everything is fine.’

Leon nodded.

Then David said, ‘We’ve been married a long time. Ten years. Stuff happens, as everyone knows. I was never home enough. She put the screws on me, and we have a deal. I think it’ll work. For now, I’m sure Elizabeth is right—because of the children.’

Leon was solemn. ‘So what happened? What stuff?’

This was followed by another long silence. Then the tortured start of a smile on David’s face. His lips trembled, their corners twitched backwards and forwards. He looked at Leon and then felt his face getting hot. Suddenly, the pair of them broke out in shouts of laughter, drunken, relieved, vomiting up tension in convulsions of half-crazy joy.

The waiter turned and stared at them, hands on hips. Leon raised his eyebrows. ‘Get her!’ he said.

David turned to look at the waiter. Then he turned back to Leon.

‘Let’s have one more drink and split,’ he said.

So Leon stuck his arm in the air, two hot-dog-size fingers extended. ‘Two more?’ He said it nicely, politely, and the cross little figure of the waiter melted into action.

‘I feel like we must have already had this whole conversation before I married her, Leon! God, it’s great to see you. You don’t need to hear about my love-life. I’m a married man and that’s all there is to say. Let’s hear about your love-life. That has to be more exciting than mine. Are you still going out with all those gorgeous long-legged things? Those nubile Catholic maidens who play golf and speak five languages? Aren’t some of them heiresses that you should have married by now?’

‘I’m not married, David. Pretty obviously not married.’ There was no emotion in Leon’s voice.

David wondered whether this concealed disappointment, and he wondered how to ask. He felt uneasy and a little afraid, conscious, as he had not been for years, that he was the one who had ended up marrying Elizabeth. That Leon had refused to be his best man because he had already promised Elizabeth he would walk her up the aisle. That there had been something strained about the whole thing. He said, ‘Marriage is not part of the myth you’re making?’

‘Not part of my myth. Nope.’

Was there recrimination in Leon’s voice? Maybe he could kid it out of him. ‘So—what—you remain just permanently slightly unavailable? Is that the everlasting draw for chicks? What if you lose your looks?’

Leon relented. ‘Well, that’s a worry. That happens to everyone no matter what. And I hope Lewis won’t leave me because of that. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to him, though, when I lose my looks.’

David cocked an eyebrow. He dived for his water glass and knocked it across the white tablecloth.

‘Lewis?’ he asked, flopping his napkin at the flood.

‘Lewis,’ Leon said, deadpan, nodding.

David felt himself starting to laugh. This was a hockey player’s joke. But he pressed his lips together hard, then rolled them around his teeth, holding it back. He sensed Leon waiting for his reaction, studying his face.