I take a drag. “I don’t think Sophie likes me much.”
He shrugs. “She doesn’t like anyone much.”
“And Jacques? Her husband? The one in that massive portrait. What’s he like?”
He screws up his face. “A bit of a cunt, to be honest. And she’s definitely just with him for his money.”
I almost choke on my cigarette smoke. It was so casual; the way he said it. But with a real emphasis on the “cunt.” I wonder what he has against the couple. And if he’s clearly not a fan, what on earth is he doing coming for drinks in their apartment?
“How about that guy from the downstairs flat? Antoine?” I ask. “I can’t believe she’d invite him up here. I’m surprised she even lets him sit on her couch. And when I first arrived he told me to fuck off—talk about hostile.”
Nick shrugs. “Well . . . it’s no excuse but his wife just left him.”
“Yeah?” I say. “If you ask me she had a pretty lucky escape.”
“Look,” he says, pointing beyond me, “you can see the Sacré-Coeur, over there.” Clearly he doesn’t want to talk about his neighbors any more. We gaze together at the cathedral: illuminated, seeming to float above the city like a big white ghost. And in the distance . . . yes—there—I can see the Eiffel Tower. For a few seconds it lights up like a giant Roman candle and a thousand moving lights shimmer up and down its height. I’m suddenly aware of how huge and unknowable this city is. Ben’s out there somewhere, I think, I hope . . . Again, that feeling of despair.
I give myself a mental shake. There must be something else I can learn, some new angle to this I haven’t explored. I turn to Nick. “Ben never mentioned what he was looking into, did he?” I ask. “The thing he was writing? The investigative piece?”
“He didn’t say anything to me about it,” Nick says. “As far as I knew, he was still working on restaurant reviews, that kind of thing. But then that’s typical of him, isn’t it?” I think I hear a note of bitterness.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you have to ask whether anyone really knows the real Benjamin Daniels.” You’re telling me, I think. Still, I wonder exactly what he means by it. “Anyway, it’s what he always wanted to do.” He sounds different now, more wistful. “Investigative stuff. That or write a novel. I remember him saying that he wanted to write something that would have made your mum proud. He talked all about it on the trip.”
“You mean the one you took after uni?” The way he said “the trip” made it sound important. The Trip. I think of that screensaver. Some instinct tells me to press him on it. “What was it like? You went all across Europe, right?”
“Yeah.” His tone is different again: lighter, excited. “We spent a whole summer doing it. Four of us: a couple of other guys, Ben and me. I mean, we were really roughing it. Grotty trains with no air-con, blocked loos. Days, weeks, of sleeping sitting up in hard plastic seats, eating stale bread, hardly washing our clothes. And then when we did we had to use launderettes.”
He sounds thrilled. Babe, I think, if you think that’s roughing it you don’t know you’re born. I think of his minimalist apartment: the Bang & Olufsen speakers, the iMac, all that stealth wealth. I kind of want to hate him for it, but I can’t. There’s something melancholy about the guy. I remember the oxycodone I found in his bathroom.
“Where did you go?” I ask.
“All over,” he says. “We’d be in Prague one day, Vienna the next, Budapest a few days later. Or sometimes we’d just spend a whole week lying on the beach and hitting the clubs every night—like we did in Barcelona. And we lost a whole weekend to food poisoning in Istanbul.”
I nod, like I know what he’s talking about, but I’m not sure I could point to all those places on a map.
“So that’s what Ben was up to,” I say. “Sounds a long way from a one-bed in Haringey.”
“Where’s Haringey?”
I give him a look. He even pronounced it wrong. But of course a rich kid like him wouldn’t have heard of it. “North London? It’s where we come from, Ben and I. Even then he couldn’t wait to escape, to travel. Actually, it reminds me of something—”
“What?”
“My mum, she used to leave us on our own quite a lot, while she went out. She did shift work and she’d lock us in from about six, so we couldn’t get up to any trouble—it can be a rough part of town—and we’d be so bored. But Ben had this old globe . . . you know, one of those light-up ones? He’d spend hours spinning it round, pointing out the places we might go. Describing them to me—spice markets, turquoise seas, cities on mountaintops . . . God knows how he knew any of that. Actually, he probably made it all up.” I pull myself out of the memory. I’m not sure I’ve spoken to anyone else about all of that. “Anyway. It sounds like you had a ball. The photo on your screensaver, that was Amsterdam, right?”