Godstone

The phone was ringing. I didn’t know how long it had been ringing, but I knew that I would have to answer it. He wouldn’t give up. I tried to focus on the bedside clock. The orange glow showed “4:00.” It was Friday night/Saturday morning. I pulled myself out of bed and had an instant urge to vomit.

From the taste in my mouth, I knew that I had been to Nikita’s Restaurant and drunk Bison herb vodka; they served it in small glass carafes embedded in individual blocks of ice. I tried to remember who had been there. We had been three or four: Terry, Bob, and someone else—maybe Kevin.

A Russian at the next table had tried to show us how to drink vodka “the Russian way.” He had said we had to hold our breaths as we downed each shot, preventing the fumes from going directly to our brains. He then taught us to breathe out through our mouths after each shot in an exaggerated whoosh to clear the fumes from our mouths and then to eat pickled herring and hard bread immediately. I told him that I hated pickled herring.

Music was playing in my head.

Please allow me to introduce myself,

I am a man of wealth and taste.

I had read somewhere that four in the morning was called the devil’s hour.

I staggered out of the bedroom and half fell down the three stairs that led to the sitting room. Again I had a strong urge to vomit. I cursed myself for not getting a phone upstairs as well as downstairs. When I had moved in, I thought I had ordered one, but somehow it never happened. I could never be bothered to get the phone company to come back again.

I reached the sitting room and picked up the telephone.

“You miss her, don’t you?” the voice said in my ear. The accent was Middle Eastern.

“Listen, mate. I don’t know who you are, and I don’t know how you got this number. And I don’t know why you keep calling me, but please just leave me alone.”

I spoke as firmly as I could. It wasn’t the first time he had called; we had had this conversation many times before, always the same conversation—always the same conclusion, always at four in the morning.

“She would be alive if it wasn’t for you,” the voice said accusingly.

“Maybe she would,” I replied. “But I didn’t know that there would be a bomb. How could I have known?” There was silence on the other end of the line. “I don’t know who you are,” I continued, “and I don’t know how you knew her, but you need to know that I loved her.”

“She’s dead because of you.”

“Mate, you have got to stop calling.” I hung up.

The Rolling Stones were still playing in my head.

But what’s puzzling you is the nature of my game.

I reached down behind the table and unplugged the telephone. Sometimes he called twice in one night, but most times he didn’t. The nausea hit me again, and I just made it to the loo in time. The quantity of vomit was impressive. I must have eaten something at Nikita’s, or maybe it was just the sandwich I had had at lunch, along with the three pints of beer and the bottle of wine.

Feeling a little better, I went back into the sitting room and stupidly plugged the phone back in. The room had no curtains, and it was filled with an orange glow from the street lamps outside: the same orange as my alarm clock. I guessed that it was about 4:30 a.m., but I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep. A man walked past the house on the opposite side of the road. He looked towards me, almost by instinct, but I doubt he saw me in the shadows of my own orange room.

The phone rang again. I picked it up and shouted, “Fuck off!” into the receiver before slamming it down again.

I went into the kitchen. I had had new cabinets and appliances fitted when I had moved in earlier that year; the oven had never been used, nor had the stove. I opened the fridge door. The light inside shone blue across the room. I loved the light from the fridge at night. I opened the icebox and took out an ice tray, dropping four ice cubes into a glass. The sound was delicious. I refilled the tray with water from the tap and put it carefully back into the icebox. Then I hesitated: Scotch or vodka?

My head felt a little fuzzy, and my mouth was dry and disgusting from the vomit. I could almost feel those ice cubes on my tongue. I had had enough vodka. Today was Saturday—and Saturday was always a Scotch day. I took a bottle of J&B from the cupboard and filled the glass, not to the brim—just half full so that the end of the drink would be perfectly timed with the melting ice. I took a large sip and held an ice cube in my mouth. The music in my head stopped. I could feel my brain clearing; the flock of birds had left, migrated south. Everything was going to be fine.

I took my drink back to the sitting room and drank it slowly, looking out at the empty, orange street. My flatmate’s tabby cat followed me into the sitting room and curled up on the floor by my feet.

I must have fallen asleep with the empty glass in my lap, because when the phone rang again, my glass fell onto the carpeted floor. It didn’t break, but it frightened the cat. My head was again clogged and confused, and my brain took a long time to react. I knocked the phone to the floor as I answered it, and it took me a moment to pick it up.

“She died because of you,” the voice said as I put the receiver to my ear. I hung up and reached down to unplug the telephone for a second time. As I did so, I lost my balance and fell. It was comfortable on the floor. My back was straight and flat. I knew that I couldn’t fall any farther. It felt good.

There was something curious about the way Cynthia smiled at me the following Monday morning; her cheery hello was not as cheery as usual. She seemed surprised to see me. Her eyes drifted back to her desk. She was evidently not only surprised to see me—she was embarrassed.

I gave her my habitual mock-military salute. I was feeling good; my day had started with a double-shot Bloody Mary, and I had a hip flask in my jacket pocket, full to the brim with single-malt Scotch. As I had been climbing the stairs from Tower Hill Tube station, a young black girl had asked me if I was Mick Jagger. I told her that I wasn’t, but it had put me in an excellent mood. I felt ready for everything that the day was going to throw at me.

As I passed the reception desk, Cynthia picked up the phone and dialled someone. There was a long corridor between the reception hall and the trading room. On the left-hand side of the corridor were the executive offices; on the right-hand side, there was what was left of a derelict roof garden. The company’s office was on the fifth and top floor of London’s World Trade Centre in St. Katherine Docks. It was a shabby, early 1970s concrete slab of a building; it bore no resemblance to the magnificent World Trade Center in New York.

A few months after Mary’s death in December 1983, the company had sent me to the United States for a year, almost certainly on my uncle’s suggestion. I went there on a one-year trainee visa that they managed to extend to two years. But after that, they couldn’t renew it again, and I had had to come back to London.

While I had been in the United States, I had begun trading for myself on the commodity markets. My uncle had lent me a small amount of money to get started, and by the time I got back to London, I had more than enough in my account to buy a two-story apartment in Onslow Square.

When I lived in Manhattan, I had often gone up to the Windows on the World restaurant at the top of one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. I would drink dry vodka martinis and watch the helicopters and light planes flying past beneath me. Once I had had dinner in the restaurant with a broker. He had shown me hundreds of photos of his wife giving birth to their new baby. I hadn’t been able to finish my steak.

I had found it difficult to settle back into London after the excitement and novelty of New York. I had been back for six months, but apart from Alex, I hadn’t really picked up with any of my old friends. And Alex wasn’t even my friend; she was Mary’s friend. Instead I had fallen in with a good crowd of fellow drinkers: work colleagues, brokers, and traders.

Rajiv was waiting for me at the end of the corridor that led into the trading room. “I am surprised to see you,” he said without a smile. “Step into my office, please.”

Rajiv was the company’s chief operating officer. For some reason the company didn’t have a CEO, just a COO. Or if it did, I had never met him or her. So Rajiv did the job as best he could, which wasn’t easy given the strong personalities that he had to manage.

I stepped into his office. It usually smelled of stale farts and cold tobacco, but this morning, there was a sharper odour that I couldn’t quite work out. Also, his desk, which was habitually covered with papers, was this morning perfectly clear. I wondered for a moment if he had been sacked and was cleaning out his office. But there were no telltale half-filled cardboard boxes on the floor; something else was going on.

“How are you?” he asked. He seemed genuinely concerned. It made me feel uncomfortable.

“Great,” I replied. “In great form…top of the world…like ten men. You wouldn’t believe it, but some chick stopped me to ask if I was Mick Jagger. As if Mick Jagger would be taking the Tube on a Monday morning, silly bint. But, anyway, I am ready to have a great day. I am wearing my lucky trading tie and am set to go.”

Rajiv looked at me sceptically, almost quizzically. I might have overdone the enthusiasm a little.

“Do you remember anything about last Friday?” he asked. Again it seemed a genuine question. Something intrigued him, and I didn’t know what.

“Last Friday? What about last Friday?” I replied, stalling while I tried to remember something that might have happened last Friday that warranted this early morning interrogation. I came up with a blank.

“You really don’t remember anything?” he asked.

The strange, rather-acrid smell in Rajiv’s office was beginning to get to me. I shook my head.

“Well, let me fill you in,” he continued. “Or rather let me try to jog your memory. Do you remember having lunch with anyone on Friday?”

I thought for a while before replying. I smelled a trap, but I didn’t know what sort of trap. “I had lunch with Terry and Bob at El Vino’s,” I replied. El Vino’s was a wine bar on Eastcheap. There had been the usual crowd there, and I guess we had had a few too many bottles of wine. But it was Friday, and the markets had been quiet. I remembered leaving the wine bar and going straight to the pub. After that, I guessed that we had gone to eat something, probably at Nikita’s, judging by the taste of vodka that I had had in my mouth when that idiot woke me up at 4:00 a.m.

“So you don’t remember coming back to the office in the afternoon?” Rajiv asked.

His question sent a shiver of fear down my spine. This company, as did most companies in the City, had an unwritten rule that if you had too much to drink at lunchtime, you didn’t go back to the office. You just went home.

A trader had once come drunk into our office on a Friday afternoon and started calling all his clients, insulting each one in turn. It had actually been quite funny because he had been so drunk that he had forgotten that he had changed jobs a few weeks before and had come back to the wrong office.

“I didn’t come back to the office,” I replied, suddenly less sure of myself. If Rajiv was right and I had come back to the office, then I didn’t remember anything about it. And that would have been bad.

“You did come back,” Rajiv said softly. “I headed you off before you got to the trading room and brought you into my office, just like this morning. But you were drunker then than you are now.”

“I am not drunk now,” I protested.

Rajiv looked at me for a few moments without speaking, unsure perhaps of what to say next.

“You have had, what, two vodkas already this morning?” he asked. “And you have your usual hip flask with you that will last you through to eleven a.m. Then you will pop out for a snack, or at least that is what you will tell your colleagues. Your snack will be a quick couple of pints downstairs. Then back up again to your desk, another hour’s work, and then lunch. After lunch, we will be lucky—or rather unlucky—to see you.”

“Oh, come on,” I replied. “I’m not that bad.”

“You know you’re the best trader we have,” Rajiv continued. “Even when you are drunk—and that is pretty much the whole time—you seem to have a feel for the markets that no one else has. You seem to have an instinct as to what is going to happen next. And you make more money for the firm in the few hours that you are in the office than any of the so-called stars we have here.”

“So I’d better get to work then,” I prompted. “It could be a big day.”

“What colour is your urine?” Rajiv asked. Although it might seem an odd question, it was not the first time he had asked me that. “Gandhi used to drink one glass of his urine every day. Would you drink your urine? My urine is clear,” Rajiv continued, without waiting for me to answer. “I, too, drink alcohol, but I also make sure I drink a lot of water. It flushes out the system, particularly the kidneys. I bet your urine is dark yellow. Too much alcohol and not enough water.”

I didn’t reply. He wasn’t expecting a reply. Instead I remembered a one-liner from the comedian Rodney Dangerfield: “I drink too much. Last time I gave a urine sample, it had an olive in it.”

“You were out-of-your-mind drunk last Friday afternoon,” Rajiv continued. “I wouldn’t let you into the trading floor, but you insisted. You said that the copper market was going to fall sharply. You said that you had to sell out your copper position and that you wanted to short it. I tried to persuade you to go home. I called you a cab, but you were getting more and more irate. You said that if I didn’t let you onto the trading floor, you would resign.”

I listened in silence. Now that I thought about it, I did remember something about copper. But I didn’t remember coming back to the office.

“So what happened?” I asked.

“You got very angry with me, and you resigned,” Rajiv replied. “You signed all the papers.”

“I did?”

“Yes. Then you vomited all over my desk. And all over me.”

So that was what the smell was in Rajiv’s office: disinfectant.

“I am sorry about that,” I said, trying not to smile. The mental image of my throwing up all over Rajiv seemed really rather funny. “I do apologise. It won’t happen again.”

Rajiv looked at me, and it seemed a long moment before he replied. “You’re right,” he said eventually. “It won’t happen again.” I looked at him closely, trying to discern how serious he was. “I’ve spoken to your uncle,” he continued. “Twice, in fact: once on Friday and once this morning. He is aware of what happened.”

My uncle, my mother’s elder brother, was the firm’s biggest client. It was also rumoured that he was the firm’s biggest shareholder. He had gotten me the job there when I had left university.

“What did my uncle say when you told him?” I asked, suddenly anxious.

“He said that if you showed up here at the office on Monday morning, I should tell you to meet him for lunch at his usual restaurant.”

“Nothing else?”

“I asked your uncle on Friday what I should do with your copper position. He told me to do nothing with it…to leave it open,” Rajiv continued. “And it is still open now.”

“And what did the copper market do on Friday?” I asked, my voice sounding rather raspy. I ran my finger inside my shirt collar. I was sweating.

“The copper market collapsed,” Rajiv replied. He looked at the screen on the table beside his desk. “The price fell sharply. Your account is in deficit to the tune of some three hundred and fifty-six thousand pounds.”

I had often heard the expression “his heart sank,” but I had never known what that meant until just that moment. It felt as if my heart was falling out of the bottom of my ribcage.

“Of course we wouldn’t have let you run up such a deficit if it hadn’t been for your uncle. But in any case, when I spoke to him this morning, he said your flat in Onslow Gardens was worth more than that.”

“Onslow Square,” I corrected him. “Not Onslow Gardens.”

“Whatever,” Rajiv replied. “Your uncle suggested that you liquidate your copper position before the losses on your trading account exceed the value of your flat.”

“He didn’t say anything else?” I asked.

Rajiv passed over one of the firm’s internal pink order sheets; pink was for sell, and blue was for buy. I looked at it and saw that he had already filled it in with the quantity of copper that I owned.

“Just initial the sell order, and we will liquidate the position,” Rajiv said as if he were talking to a child. He passed me a pen, and I reached over the desk to take it. I was in a daze…a dream…a nightmare. I signed my initials at the bottom of the pink page, and Rajiv passed it through a desktop machine that stamped it with the date and time.

Then he picked up the telephone and passed the order through to the firm’s brokers on the London Metal Exchange. He held on the phone while the order was executed; then he noted down the prices at which the sales were made. I had had a big position, and it wasn’t all sold at the same price. I tried to read the prices, but I was too far away.

“The execution isn’t too bad,” Rajiv said. “You will end up owing us just slightly less than the figure I mentioned earlier. Your uncle has agreed to guarantee the funds, so we won’t press for immediate payment. Let’s say you get us the money within three months. How does that sound? It will give you time to sell your flat—as long as you move quickly.”

There was a moment’s silence. I was having trouble absorbing any of this.

“But there is one thing that I must ask,” Rajiv said thoughtfully. “How did you know that the copper price would collapse last Friday afternoon?”

“I don’t know,” I replied slowly. “Maybe I got a tip from one of my friends. Or maybe I just pieced together all the various bits of the puzzle until I got enough of the picture to make a decision.”

“Since you’ve been with us, I have often had the feeling that you can somehow predict the future,” Rajiv replied. “You seem to know what is going to happen before it happens.”

I began to explain that I couldn’t see the future and that my success on the market was based solely on analysis. When you trade the markets, you never have the full picture; you are always trading on incomplete information. Sometimes you get one piece of the jigsaw that gives you enough of the picture to make a decision. That was probably what happened the previous Friday, even if I couldn’t remember what the missing piece had been.

Rajiv had heard it all before. “Anyway,” he said, “you were certainly right about the copper market last Friday, and my clients and I are grateful for that.”

“You were long of copper too?” I said, looking at Rajiv in disbelief. “You sold out your position last Friday…on my advice, but you left my position open?”

“Yep,” he replied. “That’s about it.”

“You bastard,” I told him.

He didn’t respond.

“So what happens now?” I asked.

“You leave.”

“I leave?”

“You leave,” Rajiv replied, standing up from behind his desk. “I have already emptied out your desk. There was nothing personal in it: no photos, no letters. There were a couple of empty bottles and an old pair of black shoes. I wondered about the shoes but guess that you must have bought a new pair and left the old ones at the office. Either that or you walked home in your socks. With you, anything is possible.”

“Listen,” I said. “I can make that money back; you know I can. Just give me a second chance. I will make it back in two months. I can do that.”

“I am afraid not,” Rajiv replied. “No second chance.” His tone softened, and for a moment I thought he felt sorry for me. “Listen, William. I know this may sound harsh, but for the past few years, the UK financial world has been building up to twenty-seventh October 1986. The Big Bang is finally upon us.

“In a couple of months, London’s financial markets will be deregulated, fixed commission charges will be abolished, and the whole thing will be liberalised. The City will no longer be an old-fashioned club where a few old boys get together and trade over a glass of port. Liberalisation will mean professionalism. The big banks will move into the markets. They will take over the old brokerage houses, and they will bring with them their regulators and their accountants.

“There will be no place in this brave new world for long boardroom lunches or shared tips in the City’s wine bars. It won’t work like that anymore. You are what, twenty-five?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Well, in a way—and I am sorry to say this—you are already a dinosaur. You just can’t go out and get drunk every day at lunch and expect to keep your job. It’s not going to be like that anymore.”

I listened in silence to what he was saying. My colleagues had been talking for months about what the Big Bang might mean for the old City firms. I had never suspected that it would result in my losing my job.

“But you will give me a good reference,” I asked, “for another job?”

“I’m sorry, William,” Rajiv replied with a sigh. “You’re not understanding what I am saying. I can’t give you a reference for a job while you continue to drink. Sober up, and I will give you an excellent reference. But if you continue to drink as you do, well…you won’t get another job in the City.”

My heart finally fell out from the bottom of my ribcage. I sat in a daze, staring at Rajiv. For someone who was supposed to be able to read the future, I hadn’t seen this coming.

“So you’re sacking me?” I asked again.

“I’m not ‘sacking’ you,” he replied. “How can I sack you when you’ve already resigned? Your stuff is at the front desk. Perhaps in a few months, we can meet up again for a…” He was going to say “drink” but decided that it wasn’t appropriate.

“Was it the Tati bombing?” Rajiv asked me after a moment of reflection. I looked at him in surprise. “The Paris bombing, Rue de Rennes…is that what bought this on, this final collapse?”

Rajiv was right. I had underestimated him. The previous week, the Lebanese branch of Hezbollah had placed a bomb in a litterbin just outside the Tati department store on La Rue de Rennes in Paris. The bomb had exploded as the store was closing, killing seven people and wounding fifty-five others. It was a similar death toll to the Harrods bombing nearly three years earlier.

The Iranian-backed Hezbollah wanted to pressure the French government into releasing three terrorists—an Iranian, a Lebanese, and an Armenian—whom the French had accused of orchestrating earlier attacks in the capital. The Hezbollah also wanted France to stop supporting Iraq in their war against Iran.

It seemed to me that someone always wanted something—and that they were willing to kill innocent bystanders to try to get what they wanted.

The Paris attack was so similar to the bombing at Harrods that it had brought back painful memories. I mumbled something incoherent to Rajiv and stood up. I had to get out of there.

“In any case,” Rajiv told me as I left, “sort yourself out. Dry out. Get help.”

2

I took the Tube to Green Park and arrived there at 10:00 a.m., not sure how I was to fill in the two hours until I had to meet my uncle. I walked up Clarges Street and into Trumpers Hairdressers, next door to MI5’s administrative offices on Curzon Street.

Luigi, my uncle’s barber, seemed pleased to see me and took me straight downstairs for a haircut. I tried asking him questions about my uncle, but as usual, he delicately sidestepped them. Frustrated by his discretion, I tried to wind him up by asking if he knew which of his clients were spies and which weren’t.

“I wouldn’t know anything about that, young sir,” he replied with a half-smile.

“And my uncle? Is he a spy?” I asked with a laugh.

“There, sir, all finished now,” he replied. “Enjoy your lunch.”

I went back with him upstairs and paid. It was still too early to go to the restaurant, so I wandered around a bit before going into Ye Grapes, a pub in Shepherds’ Market. I hadn’t been there before, but their beer wasn’t too bad. I hadn’t intended to, but I had three pints and was late for lunch.

The Mirabelle Restaurant on Curzon Street was first opened in 1936 and was popular with politicians and celebrities in the 1950s and 1960s. Winston Churchill had been a regular, as had Orson Welles. My uncle was a regular there now.

The place was also a government favourite for entertaining foreign guests. Once when I had been there, invited by my uncle, the only other diners had been King Hussein of Jordan and Indira Gandhi of India, plus their bodyguards.

I arrived at the restaurant at twelve thirty and went downstairs to the dining room. The restaurant had two private dining rooms, the Pine Room and the Chinese Room. Uncle Charles was at his usual table at the side of the main dining area. He was dressed in a grey double-breasted suit, a blue shirt with a white collar, and an orange Hermes tie. He was always impeccably dressed.

Charles was my mother’s elder brother, about two years older than she was. Brother and sister were very different: one a town mouse and the other a country one.

My uncle was happy in Mayfair; my mother was happy on the family farm in Cornwall. Well, it wasn’t really a farm; it was more an orchard. My father and my brothers grew apples that they sold to a big local cider maker. My mother grew all her own vegetables and kept chickens that supplied the family—and the neighbours—with eggs. She also had a couple of goats for the milk, and she made her own yoghurt. She refused to keep cows; she said that they tore up the land. She also said that cows gave off too much carbon dioxide and methane and that they were bad for the environment.

My mother also kept a few pigs that she fed with waste food and apples. She was into organic farming and worked hard to make the farm self-sufficient. She smoked her own bacon and ham that, apart from the occasional chicken, was the only meat we ate.

Purely to upset her mother, Mary had once told her that my father was a pig farmer. There is nothing wrong with pig farmers, but Joanna was such a snob that she hated the idea of her only daughter going out with a pig farmer’s son. In that sense, she and Uncle Charles were similar. My uncle was a hardened snob who thought his sister had married beneath her; perhaps she had.

My uncle had never married, and I had sometimes wondered if he was gay. But if he was, he was very discreet about it. And to be honest, I didn’t care either way.

Although I liked and respected Charles, I preferred to think that I had little in common with him, except for his eyes. We had the same eyes: one green and one blue.

Charles had taken the small inheritance my grandfather had left him and turned it into a fortune. He had started in property development and built a chain of hotels. He also owned the casino farther along Curzon Street. But he never gambled. Well, that is not quite true. He traded heavily in the commodity markets, and he had gotten me my job at the brokerage firm he used.

Although no one ever talked about it, there was a slight sniff of scandal about him. Back in 1967, Harold Wilson devalued the British pound by 16 percent against the dollar. My uncle had bought huge amounts of cocoa futures expressed in sterling prior to the devaluation. When the pound devalued, the price of cocoa in sterling had risen dramatically, and my uncle had made a fortune. It might have been luck, but it was more likely that he had had warning of the impending devaluation. And insider knowledge was a crime, even in 1967.

I once asked him about it, when we had been sharing cognac and cigars after dinner in this same restaurant. He denied that the story was true; he called it a myth. But then he had added enigmatically, “Balzac once said that at the base of a great fortune lies a crime.”

Today, I took my seat opposite my uncle. An open bottle of Romanée-Conti wine stood on a side table. He didn’t offer me any. The waiter poured me some sparkling water—evidently following my uncle’s instructions.

“How are your parents?” my uncle asked. “Are they well?”

“Yes, very well,” I replied, even though I hadn’t seen or spoken to them for at least three months.

“Perhaps now that you have some more time on your hands, you can go and see them,” my uncle suggested. He looked at me with the judgmental look that I knew and hated. I also didn’t like the way he had put the emphasis on “now that you have more time on your hands.” I started to say something, but he interrupted me.

“Because you were late, I have already ordered for you,” he said. “Potted shrimp and lamb chops.”

I nodded and eyed the bottle of wine. He followed my gaze.

“How is Chelsea doing?” he asked.

It was his attempt at casual conversation. When I was a dayboy at junior school, my best friend at the time had been a boarder. He lived in Chelsea in London. Chelsea was incredibly exotic for someone like me brought up on a farm in Cornwall; it was everything I aspired to. I started supporting the Chelsea football club as a way of maintaining a connection.

“They finished sixth in the First Division last season but were defeated two to one by Liverpool in the FA Cup final,” I replied. “I am not sure that they will do so well this season.”

“So who do you think will win the league this season?” My uncle was making polite conversation; he wasn’t the slightest bit interested in who I thought would win the league.

“My money is on Liverpool,” I replied.

Polite conversation exhausted, we sat in awkward silence until the potted shrimps arrived.

“I have to ask you,” I said, taking my courage in both hands. “Why did you tell Rajiv not to liquidate my copper position when you spoke to him last Friday?”

“I don’t trade your account,” Charles replied sharply. “Your account is your responsibility. In any case, I am not authorised to make decisions on your behalf. I have no power of attorney.”

“But you knew what was happening,” I retorted. “You knew that I was drunk. You knew that I had resigned. And you knew that I thought the copper price was going to fall sharply. Rajiv would have liquidated the position if you had asked him to. No one would have sued you or anyone else, for that matter.”

“William,” Charles replied, a little more sternly than I would have liked, “I cannot lead your life for you. If you want to destroy yourself, then that is your affair, but don’t expect me to condone or support your actions.”

“I am not destroying myself,” I protested. “I just had a little too much to drink.”

“William,” he replied just as sternly, “you are an alcoholic. Once you have faced up to that, then you can start to do something about it. Perhaps losing your job and your house will prompt you into doing that. Perhaps it will finally make you face up to the truth.”

There was nothing much I could say to that. I didn’t think I was an alcoholic. And if I was, I enjoyed being one. I ate my potted shrimps in silence.

“Have you been following the disarmament talks?” my uncle asked after a while. He was changing the subject; there was nothing more to be said about either my drinking or my losses on the copper market.

“A little,” I replied. “But only what’s been in the newspapers.” It was a half-truth. I had been following the talks closely. I felt that I owed it to Mary—or at least to her memory. She had so wanted to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

“The disarmament talks are building up a certain momentum,” my uncle explained. “About five years ago, in November 1981, US President Reagan proposed the total elimination of all intermediate-range ballistic missiles. Four years ago, he proposed reducing strategic nuclear warheads by a third. Those are big steps…big intentions.”

“I don’t believe him,” I replied. “It’s a question of ‘Watch what I do, not what I say.’ Reagan says he wants to reduce the number of nuclear warheads, but at the same time, he is presiding over a massive nuclear build-up.”

“Reagan doesn’t see any contradiction in this,” my uncle argued. “He believes he can negotiate better from strength. And the UK government agrees with him,” he added. My uncle always liked to hint that he was well connected.

“It is becoming clear to the UK government that Reagan wants to get rid of nuclear weapons completely,” Uncle Charles continued. “His Strategic Defence Initiative, Star Wars, will make nuclear weapons, in his own words, ‘impotent and obsolete.’ It will build a shield that will protect America from a nuclear attack. And who knows? Maybe it will even work.

“The Soviets have their backs against the wall on this,” he continued. “If Star Wars works, then the policy of mutually assured destruction that has kept the world safe for the past forty years will no longer hold. The Soviets will either have to build their own shield or invest heavily in new weapons that get through the shield.”

“Or they can negotiate for the total elimination of nuclear weapons,” I prompted.

My uncle took a sip of Romanée-Conti. “Gorbachev met with Reagan last December, and they issued a joint declaration that said, ‘A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.’ Now Gorbachev has written a letter to Reagan asking for a quick one-on-one meeting either in Iceland or in London.”

“And?” I prompted.

“The Americans are in favour of the meeting. They think that the Russians are going to propose the total elimination of all ballistic missiles held by both countries and eventually a total ban on all nuclear weapons.”

Without meaning to, I let out a gasp of surprise. Mary’s impossible dream might actually be coming true. “What do you think of that?” I asked.

“I am generally in favour,” my uncle said firmly. “This MAD policy…this mutually assured destruction is just—well, it is madness. The world has enough nuclear weapons to destroy the earth many times over. But on the other hand, this standoff, this stalemate, has probably prevented the Third World War.”

“Having nuclear weapons hasn’t stopped the Americans and the Russians from fighting the Third World War elsewhere,” I argued. “In Vietnam, in Afghanistan, in Africa, and in Central America.”

My uncle put his wine glass back on the table. “Personally,” he said, “I think we need to maintain a deterrent, even if only to discourage a rogue nation from launching a nuclear attack. Imagine, for example, if Iran or Iraq had nuclear weapons. The war between them began, what, in September 1980? It has been going on for more than six years already, and they have used every type of weapon, including poison gas. If they had had nuclear weapons, they would almost certainly have used them by now.

“It’s Chernobyl, you know, that has brought this all on,” he added thoughtfully. “It has made the Russians realise that they can’t keep up with the expense and the technology. It has also bought home to them the dangers of an accident.”

The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine had melted down the previous April, releasing two hundred times more nuclear radiation than the combination of the atomic bombs that had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“You know,” my uncle continued, “I always thought there would be an accident with a nuclear weapon, one of the tens of thousands of them that are stockpiled and rotting in military bases around the world. It is ironic that the accident happened in a civilian electricity-generating plant.”

It was also ironic, I thought, that Mary had campaigned so hard against nuclear weapons but had been killed by a small conventional bomb fabricated in someone’s garage. But I didn’t say it. “May I have some wine?” I asked, my thoughts still on Mary. My uncle nodded. As if from nowhere, the wine waiter came to half fill my glass. The Romanée-Conti tasted like heaven, even after my three pints of London Pride—and my two-vodka breakfast.

A different waiter came to clear away our plates, and my uncle and I chatted a little more about the nuclear issue. I wished Mary had been there; she was so much smarter than I and so much more involved, so much more committed.

The waiter came back with the rack of lamb, and once he had left, my uncle reached down to take something from his briefcase. He placed a small brown-leather box on the white tablecloth. It looked old and was about six inches square and two inches deep. I couldn’t keep my eyes off it.

“Do you know what this is?” my uncle asked, inclining his head slightly towards the box. I had no idea what it was, but he obviously knew that.

With his left hand, Uncle Charles pushed the box towards me across the table. For some reason, the whole restaurant seemed to have gone dark, the only light coming from the white cloth on our table.

I shook my head to clear it of the hallucination and reached down to open the box. My uncle put his hand on mine. His hand was icy cold and seemed to be trembling.

“I want you to do something for me,” he said, keeping his icy hand on mine. “But you can’t fuck it up.” There was menace to his words. I waited for him to smile, to show that he was joking. He didn’t smile.

“I want you to deliver this box and its contents to a friend of mine,” he continued. I looked at him, at his blue and green eyes, at his lined, grey face.

“What is it?” I asked. He didn’t answer but took his hand off mine. I lifted the lid off the box. There was something inside, wrapped in soft fabric, probably silk. I lifted it out and unwrapped it. As I did so, I had the impression that I was sliding forwards on my chair. I grabbed the table to steady myself.

I was holding a piece of light-blue stone that was so transparent it could have been glass. It appeared to be half a disc; if it had been whole, it would have been about six inches across. At some point, the disc must have been broken in two; I was holding one half of it. I turned it over in my hand, and I had the vague sensation that it was vibrating gently. Perhaps it hadn’t been my uncle’s hand that had been shaking after all.

I turned the stone over again in my hands. It was incredibly light, almost weightless. I looked at my uncle for some kind of an explanation.

“It’s a family heirloom,” he said, his voice shaky. “It has been in the family for generations.” He cleared his throat. “But now it is time. It is time for it to move on.”

“But what is it?” I asked.

“Look into it,” he said without answering my question. “Look into the stone, and tell me what you see.”

I did as he told me to. I looked into the blue of the stone. I saw myself swimming in the sea. The water was cold and invigorating. There was a beach, not a sandy beach but a pebble beach with cliffs rising behind. Mary was walking along the beach, her head bent, searching for shells or stones.

She lifted her head and saw me looking at her. She waved at me, and I treaded water as I waved back. I was happy, incredibly happy; I felt an overwhelming sensation of love. I dropped the stone onto the table in shock.

My uncle reached across the table and picked it up. “What did you see?” he asked.

For a moment, I didn’t know what to tell him. “I saw Mary on a beach,” I replied eventually. “I was swimming; the sea was cold. She waved at me. It was the weirdest sensation.”

“What did you feel?” my uncle asked.

“What do you mean…what did I feel?”

“Were you waving or drowning?” my uncle asked simply.

“Waving,” I replied, taking a bigger gulp of wine than I had intended. “I was waving.”

My uncle seemed happy with my answer and carefully rewrapped the stone in the soft tissue and then put it back in its box.

“What is this thing?” I asked. I was still very shaken by what I had seen. “Where did it come from?”

“As you know, we can date our family tree back to the twelfth century,” my uncle replied. “One of my ancestors—one of your ancestors—brought this piece of stone back from the Holy Land after one of the crusades. It has been in our family ever since.”

“But what is it?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he replied. He saw the look of disbelief on my face. “Truthfully,” he continued, “I don’t know what it is.”

He paused a moment. He was trying to decide what to say next. I was trying to decide if he was lying.

“They—we—call it the Godstone,” my uncle continued.

“But that is the name of your house in Hampshire,” I blurted out. “Godstone Park.”

My uncle nodded his head. “I prefer to call it the Sea Stone,” he said. “The stone often shows you the sea. I don’t know why. I find it rather curious. Do you remember the poem by E. E. Cummings? It goes something like,

A smooth round stone, as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me), it’s always ourselves we find in the sea.

I didn’t know the poem. I had studied Economics at university; Mary had studied English.

“The stone shows you what it wants to show you,” my uncle explained, his voice hardening. “It shows you who you are. But, as I said, it has been in the family a long time. It is now time for it to go back to where it came from.”

“And where is that?” I asked.

“Jerusalem,” he replied.

When I got back home later that afternoon, I was surprised to run into Salim leaving the flat. Salim had been my flatmate for the past few months, ever since I had bought this place in Onslow Square.

Salim was a physicist, and he had just finished his PhD at Imperial College in London. His parents still lived in Islamabad. His father was wealthy and had once been a member of the country’s cabinet.

I hadn’t seen Salim since the previous Saturday when he had discovered me passed out and naked on the floor of our shared sitting room, an empty glass in one hand, the telephone receiver in the other, and the cat curled up against my stomach. Ignoring my nakedness, Salim had woken me up and told me softly to go back to bed.

I liked Salim because he was the complete opposite to me. He didn’t drink and had nothing to do with finance or the City of London. He was an excellent sportsman and had once played for Pakistan’s junior cricket squad. He had given up cricket for squash and now topped the league at his college. In fact, he was good at whatever sport he tried.

Although a little podgy in the waist and face, Salim was handsome in a rugged sort of way. Perhaps it was his smile or just his general charm, but he had tremendous success with girls—many different girls. So much so that I was glad that my room was in the front of the house and his was at the back, separated by a half staircase.

“So, not teaching today?” I asked him.

“No,” he replied. “I have a pain in my left arm. I am worried that it might be a warning sign for a heart attack. I am going to Guy’s Hospital for a check-up.”

Salim was also a hypochondriac. The previous week he had a pain in his ear that he had self-diagnosed as a brain tumour. The week before that he was convinced he had diabetes.

And the previous month, he had convinced himself that he had AIDS. “Do you know that eighteen percent of all condoms fail?” he had asked me. He had been miserable for a week until the results came back as negative. The doctors at Guy’s Hospital were used to his hypochondria, as was I.

“I am sorry about the other morning,” I told him.

“Hey, man, you seriously need to sort out your drinking. I can’t imagine the state of your liver. I would hate to get it as a transplant. Can you imagine that? That would be a real bum deal.”

“You’re only jealous because you can’t drink,” I replied.

“Hey, even if I wasn’t Muslim, I wouldn’t drink. I like sex too much.” He laughed. “But you like alcohol too much and women not enough. Your life is out of balance: a flood of alcohol and a drought of women. What about your friend Alex? You should take that friendship to the next stage.”

Alex and I had kept in touch after Mary’s death, and we still met up once or twice a month for dinner or a film. We were close, and I think Alex would have liked us to be closer. Once, she had invited me to spend the weekend at her parents’ house in Wiltshire, ostensibly to dog sit. Her parents were away somewhere. We had slept in the same bed, but we hadn’t done anything.

“I am seeing her tonight,” I said. “We’re having dinner at the Champagne Bar on Draycott Avenue.”

“That’s bad, man,” Salim replied. “You and champagne…that’s a bad mix. Take her somewhere else. Take her somewhere they don’t serve alcohol and then bring her home. I won’t be here. You’ll have the place to yourself.”

“We’ll see,” I replied.

“I’ve heard your ‘we’ll see’ before. Man, you need to take some time off,” he advised. “Get away for a while, and try to dry out.”

“Funny you should say that,” I said. “I have to go to Turkey for a couple of days.”

“That’s great, man. You are one lucky dude. I would love to go to Turkey. I have always wanted to go. The girls there are supposed to be gorgeous. And they are Muslim. My mother would approve.”

“I thought your mother had already chosen your bride?”

“Ah, the princess.” He sighed. “You’re right; she has already picked my bride. But in the meantime, England for me is like my uncle’s orchard in the Kohistan Hills: so many ripe peaches ready to be plucked.”

“Plucked?”

“Well, sort of. But seriously, man, you need a break. Why go away for only a couple of days? Why don’t you go for longer? Turkey should be beautiful this time of the year,” he continued breezily. “The school holidays are over, so there shouldn’t be any crowds, but it will still be warm enough to swim.”

“Actually, I am only going for one night,” I said. “Leaving tomorrow evening for Istanbul. I can’t stay longer. I have to get back.”

I turned to go into the house. I hadn’t told Salim that I had lost my job and that I also had to sell the flat. I didn’t want to tell him yet. I would tell him later, when I got back from Turkey.

“Don’t worry about a thing,” he called after me. “I will look after everything while you are away.”

“But I’m only going to be away for one night,” I insisted. “Anyway, there is nothing for you to look after, except for your damn cat.”

“Man, that’s not my cat—it’s your cat. It hates me. It crapped on my bed again, you know.” Salim’s voice was serious, but his face widened into the broadest grin.

“And pay your rent for last month,” I called out after him. Although his family was rich, Salim was mean. It was a struggle to get the rent out of him each month, like getting blood from a stone. But that, I suppose, is how rich people stay rich.

“Have a great trip!” Salim called back with a laugh.

I went into the kitchen in search of a drink. There wasn’t any orange juice in the fridge, and I had forgotten to buy any on the way back from the Tube station. But there were ice cubes. I poured myself two fingers of vodka and then added another two for good measure.

The conversation with Salim had disorientated me; I didn’t understand why he had thought I needed to go away for longer than one night. But my brain cleared once the vodka hit, and I realised that Salim’s concern probably had something to do with finding me naked on the sitting room floor the previous weekend.

I carried my drink to the patio and tried to remember where I had first met Salim. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember; one moment, he wasn’t there, and then he was.

It was weird being at home on a Monday when everyone else—apart from Salim at least—was working. It was strange not being in the office. I wondered what the copper market was doing, and for a split second, I thought about calling someone to find out.

The sun felt warm on my face, and I was beginning to feel good again. I thought back to my discussion with Rajiv—bloody idiot! He couldn’t trade his way out of a paper bag, and he would be completely lost without me. He had admitted that I was the best trader in the company, and even without a reference, I would easily find another job. Fuck him. I would start calling around next week.

My glass was empty, and I went back into the kitchen to refill it. I emptied the bottle, and I wondered if I should pop down the road to the corner shop to stock up. Then I remembered that I could pick up a couple of bottles of vodka, duty-free, on the way back from Istanbul. In the meantime, I could survive on Scotch and, this evening, champagne.

My uncle’s secretary had booked a flight that left Heathrow at ten thirty the next evening. He had told me to pick up the air tickets—and the stone—from his office in Hammersmith on my way to the airport. His office was next to the Tube station on purpose.

“Halfway between Heathrow and Mayfair,” he had once told me. But my uncle rarely went to his Hammersmith office, preferring to work from his house in Chesterfield Hill, five minutes’ walk from the Mirabelle Restaurant.

My flight was scheduled to get into Istanbul at 4:30 Wednesday morning, and my uncle had bought me a return ticket for the same evening. I wouldn’t even have one night in Istanbul.

He spends hundreds of pounds on Bordeaux wine for himself, I thought, but he won’t spend a couple hundred pounds for a flight at a decent time for his nephew. It suddenly felt like a lack of respect.

As my vodka clarity turned to numbness, the whole thing seemed even more disappointing. At lunch, I had originally understood from my uncle that I would be going to the Middle East, presumably Jerusalem, on a mission that he obviously thought was so important that he could only entrust it to a member of his family.

But as lunch had progressed, I had quickly realised that my uncle’s trust in me was limited. My role was to take a day trip to Istanbul, where I was to give the stone to his business partner’s daughter, Geraldine. She would then take it to Jerusalem.

“Guard that stone with your life,” my uncle had told me as we left the restaurant.

“Don’t worry,” I had replied with a laugh. “You can trust me.” The look on his face had suggested that he didn’t trust me at all.