Page 56

FIFTY-FOUR TWO YEARS EARLIER

He has no co-directors apart from his wife.

Which means that he has financed his whole micro-operation single-handedly.

I’d hoped there might be a rich daddy in the background feeding him fifty-pound notes, fishing him out of choppy waters, making it easy for him.

But no, he’s a working-class boy from a London Irish family, and his wife appears to have had a similarly unprivileged upbringing.

I think of my own upbringing: the airy, high-ceilinged rooms of the Victorian manor house on the outskirts of the northern market town where I was brought up, the tessellated tiles in the hallway, the ornate cornicing, apple trees in the back garden, an XJ-S in the front driveway, glossy magazines fanned out on tables, fresh flowers in vases everywhere.

I think about my mother’s wardrobe of designer clothes that were fashionable at the time: Cacharel, Liberty, jeans by Sasson.

My father only wore suits, except for holidays, when he wore a selection of extraordinary, now I come to think of it, colorful terry-cloth tops with zips with circular metal pulls.

We had money for European holidays, for musical instruments and pony-riding lessons and good cuts of meat, and for mod cons like vacuum cleaners and microwaves and SodaStream machines.

I was brought up with everything a boy could need.

And I cannot bear that now I have nothing.

I cannot bear that I have to sleep with women to whom I am not attracted simply to keep my bank balance healthy enough to make myself attractive to the woman I love.

I cannot bear that Paddy Swann gets to live with his wife and children in a big house in a desirable location and earn half a million pounds a year and be lauded and loved and have people turn at the sight of him and say, Oh, that must be Paddy himself.

I want to be himself . The one who turns the heads. Who sleeps at night knowing that he has created something, built something. Why does everything I try to build crumble on impact with reality? And is it too late for me to start building something now?

The daughter works for a lifestyle publishing house in Bloomsbury.

She shares a flat with two other young women in a part of London with which I am unfamiliar, somewhere in the Docklands.

She is very slight, has her fine hair tied up, a slick of black liner on the lids of her eyes in a vaguely Parisian style.

She wears cropped jackets with pockets set high so that her elbows stick out like bird wings, and huge headphones and leather boots. She is very pretty and very weird.

How do I know all of this? Well, it’s very easy to find young people on the internet, especially when they have an unusual name like Aisling Swann.

I’ve been all over her social media and I know what coffee she likes, and I know what she looked like when she had sunburn in Zante in 2019, and I know that she is a daddy’s girl and that she bites her fingernails.

I know she likes obscure music from the eighties and nineties, that she’s vegan, and that she loves Timothée Chalamet.

The captions on her posts make no sense half the time and I can’t work out if she is pretentious or has some kind of learning disability.

But her friends respond to her posts as though she has said something normal, so maybe this is just how they talk to each other these days.

I also know what she smells like. Musky and sweet, a scent that reminds me of a perfume from the Body Shop that all the girls wore in the eighties.

I shared a tube carriage with her the other night.

I stood very close, but in a way that was unavoidable due to the rush hour crush.

I tried not to press myself against her as I didn’t want her to notice me, but I did inhale the smell of her, the freshness of her scalp.

I did notice the tiny golden hoop pierced into the top part of her ear, the roots of her hair showing her natural mousy tones.

I sat in the same pub as her the week after.

I had a newspaper and a pint of cold lager and I wore a baseball cap.

I didn’t look in her direction. But I listened in to her conversation with the two girls she lives with, and it transpires that she has a crush on her boss.

His name is Ritchie Lloyd. He’s the publishing director.

In his photo on the company website, he has a sharp face, dark hair that flops heavily to one side, good teeth, a casual white linen shirt, a suntan.

He is in his forties and looks, it occurs to me, like he could be Timothée Chalamet’s father.

He is also, according to his bio, married with two children.

I throw a glance across the pub at Aisling Swann and re-appraise her.

“You wouldn’t do anything, would you?” asks one of her friends, the edge of her lip pinned down by her teeth.

“No,” Aisling replies breathlessly. “No. Of course I wouldn’t. Genuinely. There’s like not one iota of my person that would want anything to happen.”

“You know he has a place in Ibiza? With a pool?”

“Uh,” says the other girl. “Of course he has.”

“Christ,” says Aisling. “Stop it. I need to stop thinking things. You’re not helping.

Tell me he goes kayaking every weekend. Tell me he likes watching trains.

” She groans, almost orgasmically, and then a large group arrives and I can no longer hear the conversation.

I fold up my paper, finish my beer, take the empty glass to the bar, and head home to Martha.