Читать книгу All at Sea - Decca Aitkenhead, Decca Aitkenhead - Страница 8

My memories of the days before Tony drowned must be unreliable, because in my mind they resemble the opening scenes of a cheap horror film. Every moment now seems so laced with menacing pathos that our oblivion to what was coming feels scarcely plausible. But when we sat side by side on the very spot where Tony would lie dead twenty-four hours later, how could we have known it was our last day together? We thought we had all the time in the world.

‘Do you think,’ Tony had mused idly, ‘our boys will bring their own kids here one day?’ I lay back on the sand, his hand in mine, and smiled up at the sky. ‘I’ve never thought of that, Tone. But now you say it, yeah. I hope they do. What an amazing idea.’

The truth was, I had never imagined we would bring our own kids to Treasure Beach. I hadn’t seriously expected us to make it as a couple, or have children of our own to take anywhere. If someone had told me ten years earlier that one day we would lie on Calabash beach and watch our sons build sandcastles while we speculated about grandchildren, I would have told them they were out of their mind.

When Tony and I first met, I was married to a man I loved very much. Everyone loved Paul. Everyone loved our marriage. We were one of those couples who make people sentimental; the sort that serves as a repository for their faith in the dreamy ideal of happily ever after. I loved being that couple.

Before then the only kind of couple I had ever been involved with was of the strictly comedy variety. Most of my friends had been falling madly in and out of love for years, and appeared to have no difficulty finding partners with whom they could contemplate a future, but the boyfriends I chose would have been impossible to mistake for credible candidates. There was the flatteringly pretty drummer who lived with his parents and wrote terrible poetry, and a morose Irish chef from Derry, whose appeal would have been indiscernible had I not been immature enough to find any whiff of the IRA romantic. He taught me how to say Tiocfaidh ár lá – our day will come – and I was thrilled. There was a postman, a DJ, a sales rep, a bouncer – and I was fond of them all. Falling in love with any of these men, however, would have been demonstrably absurd.

I was reasonably content with the comedy boyfriends, because it felt unrealistic to expect to meet a serious one. I don’t think this assumption was subjected to close analysis at the time, but the problem would have been easy enough to identify. Losing one’s heart to someone requires a degree of recognition – a shared sensibility – and this was hard to find in anyone else when my childhood had left me marooned between all recognisable categories of social class. In the dating game I was a stateless refugee.

My parents had met at Dartington Hall in the 1950s, when it was still a progressive boarding school favoured by middle-class radicals. Black and white photographs show them as teenagers marching to Aldermaston, wearing CND badges, smoking roll-ups. My father’s father had been a conscientious objector; my mother’s father was an Oxford don. They married before she turned twenty-one, and moved to Bristol; he became a teacher, and at twenty-three she gave birth to her first son. After their second arrived they moved to rural Wiltshire, to a broken-down cottage in a tiny hamlet of woodland and old watermills. A third son was born in their bedroom, and my father gave up teaching to become a carpenter. They were still in their twenties when I arrived in 1971.

Because I am reasonably well-spoken, these days people often assume I come from money. When I was a child, however, we would get mistaken for hippies. To Tory Wiltshire in the Seventies, CND car stickers and a subscription to the Guardian were enough to consign a family’s reputation to the outlandish extremes of bohemia, but this was no more accurate than the false impression of wealth. My parents had little patience with the lazy hypocrisies of hippies – nor did they have any money.

We didn’t have a television, either, but this was unrelated to having no money. It was a signifier of the particular social category to which my parents belonged – one that was very much of its time, relying as it did on the possibility of living in a big house in the country without earning very much. In essence, it meant being highly educated, intellectually radical but indifferent to materialism. My father used to half-joke that we were the ‘genteel poor’, meaning we didn’t care about money. We didn’t care about fashion, or cars, or appearances. What we cared about were words. Conversation wasn’t just a worthy substitute for material possessions, such as a television, but a superior currency of limitless value – the supreme, unrivalled expression of love.

As a consequence, we were an extremely noisy family. When I think about family mealtimes now, in my head I hear something like a cross between The Moral Maze and Question Time. Even The Moral Maze’s smug undertones are faintly audible, for while we were all shouting away about God or Denis Healey, I think we shared an unspoken understanding that this was a dialogue from which other children expected to be excluded. Other children didn’t know about the Labour party, had no idea religion was man-made, and were not typically solicited for their opinions on the monarchy. How we knew this I could not say, but I am sure we did.

We called our parents by their names instead of Mum and Dad. Prefixes for relatives – uncle this or aunt that – were considered infra dig, as were the euphemisms conventionally deployed for bodily parts and functions. ‘Waterworks’ or ‘down below’ made us squirm with laughter. Swear words, on the other hand, were entirely acceptable; we swore like troopers as soon as we could talk, and had to be coached in the delicate diplomacy of who would and would not find this offensive. The distinction was surprisingly easy to grasp, though occasionally its subtleties would fox us. ‘It’s alright!’ we would bellow across a crowded room at our mother. ‘I was going to say fuck – but I didn’t.’

This hybrid identity our parents fashioned for us was probably recognisable to their Sixties generation. By the Eighties, however, its combination of entitlement, coarseness, penury and privilege made no sense at all to the other kids at our local comprehensive. When I Tippexed my Remembrance Sunday poppy white, the pacifist protest was widely interpreted to signify lesbianism. My refusal to accept the school maths cup was intended as a winning egalitarian gesture, but received as further evidence that I was ‘up ’erself’ and weird. Our father’s Scottishness only made matters worse. Although born and bred in England, we were indoctrinated to regard England – and worst of all, London – with deep suspicion, and our contempt for every national occasion of patriotic unity – a royal wedding, the world cup, Tim Henman doing quite well at Wimbledon – only exiled us further. The only other people I knew who occupied our peculiarly niche substratum of the British class system were members of my extended family.

My teenage self was pragmatic enough to take pride in our failure to fit in. When I left home, the wilful isolation still did not present an immediate problem. Or rather, a solution presented itself before it had begun to dawn on me that I might need one. Very early on as an undergraduate in Manchester, I stumbled upon the city’s gay village, and spent the entirety of my student years blissfully within its confines. Given that I am straight, I did sometimes wonder why. Looking back, it is obvious. Gay culture represented a social universe in which class had been trumped by sexuality, and everyone shared my own sense of being an outsider.

But when I graduated and moved to London to begin a career in journalism, class identity became an unavoidable issue. I thought it highly unlikely that I would fall in love with a man who did not read books or watch Newsnight, but could not see myself getting into bed with anyone called Hugo – and was seldom invited to anyway. The Hugos found me puzzling, and were understandably put off by my unaccountable prejudice against perfectly nice things like rugby and good wine. Sometimes I would find myself at a Notting Hill house party full of privately educated young professionals, and wonder how they could tell each other apart. As far as I could see, at the end of the night they could couple up and go home with anyone, and it would probably work out fine. Part of me pitied their interchangeability. Another part coveted the clarity of identity, because it seemed to make falling in love so enviably straightforward.

Paul was photographing Tony Blair at the 1997 Labour party conference when a mutual friend introduced us. A few hours later we met up in a bar to watch Celtic play football, and by the time I went to bed that night I was in love. It was as easy as that.

A working-class Glaswegian, Paul had joined the Labour party at fifteen, and credited politics with firing up an ambition to escape his Glasgow tenement and defy his alcoholic father’s order to quit education and train as a glazier. He went to college, became a photographer, moved south, joined Reuters, won awards, and by the time we met was an established member of the London media scene.

He looked like a young Paul Newman, but his car was knee-deep in empty cheese and onion crisp packets, the back seats buried beneath a mountain of unpaid parking tickets. On assignment he would not always bother to pack clothes. When the ones he was wearing became too filthy to work in, he would nip into the nearest branch of Next, undress in a cubicle, ask an assistant to fetch a new outfit, put it on, leave the old one behind and go on his way without pausing to glance in a mirror. He could recite Robert Burns poetry, but swore so liberally that even cunt could be deployed by Paul as a casual term of affection. ‘He’s a lovely cunt,’ he would often say fondly of a friend. Nice London girlfriends found all of this bewildering. But I had found a fellow refugee, and the rush of recognition was electrifying.

On our first proper date I took him home to meet my father. In retrospect I can see this was odd, but at the time it felt perfectly natural. When I picture myself presenting Paul to him now, I’m reminded of our old childhood cat trotting down the drive with a rabbit swinging from her jaws. She would drop her kill on the doormat, sit beside it triumphantly, and yowl for one of us to come and admire how clever she had been. From the sofa in my father’s living room, glowing, I watched my new boyfriend enchant him. They talked about football and politics. The framed Declaration of Arbroath which hung in the hallway, asserting Scotland’s independence in 1320, was not something Paul had ever expected to find in a country house in Wiltshire, and he was spellbound. Within a week he had moved in with me.

We were happy beyond our wildest dreams. We bought a flat together in Hackney, and threw fabulous parties; he took me to the Highlands, I took him to Treasure Beach. After just eighteen months we got married on my grandmother’s farm in Scotland. He wore a kilt, I wore bunches; it was, by universal consent, a magical wedding. Six months later we set off around the world.

Our working lives in London had been leaving us with only the scrag end of each day to ourselves, and we wanted more time together, so I cooked up an idea to write a travel book which would take us around the globe, ending up in Treasure Beach, where we lived for nine months while I wrote it. The return home to real life was a little bumpy, but everyone said that was only to be expected. In 2003 we moved to a beautiful big Victorian house on Ainsworth Road in Hackney, where we would in theory begin the next chapter of our charmed life and start a family. The only downside in it all was that by then we were both miserable.

The disintegration of a marriage is so excruciatingly complicated that to extract any definitive cause from the carnage would be trite – and yet it is what we all do. The most commonly cited explanation for the breakdown of a relationship is the terrible realisation, on both sides, that each person is not whom the other had thought. In our case, if I had to name one reason, it would not be that. It was more that Paul and I had been wrong about who we ourselves were.

I had been intoxicated by Paul’s indifference to traditional middle-class preferences for domestic order, financial prudence, responsible drinking. Over time it became increasingly apparent that, actually, these mattered more to me than I had liked to think. In Paul they triggered such primal hostility that the only way he could see to remain loyal to his roots was to systematically sabotage the very life his ambition had longed for and led him to. For him, self-preservation was English and prissy; integrity and honour lay in self-destruction. He could never quite decide where he belonged. Was it in professional London’s high-ceilinged kitchens eating fettuccine, or on a park bench in Glasgow drinking Special Brew? I wanted the fantasy of a husband who would observe the conventions of a comfortable life, without in any way acting like every other middle-class bore. We could see it was hopeless. We did not know what to do. So we struggled on, trapped in the hell of loving someone who filled us with dismay and despair.

If Ainsworth Road had been a typical London street where no one knows their neighbours, we might never have met Tony. But traffic controls at one end of the road made it feel more like a cul de sac, and within a few months of moving in we became friendly with the tall, gregarious, good-looking mixed-race man with dreadlocks who was always out on the pavement and seemed to know everyone. He was so loud you could hardly miss him. He lived with his wife and their ten-year-old daughter, and in the interests of appearances owned a property development company. He had a geezerish air of mischief about him, but came across as such a happy-go-lucky family man that you would never have guessed he wholesaled cocaine for a living and was addicted to crack.

At first we would just say hello in passing on the street. As we got to know him better, he would sometimes drop in. He was always smiley, and invariably had an anecdote, which he would tell at breakneck speed in his booming gravelly baritone, the accent a curious combination of flat Yorkshire vowels and cockney glottal stops. When animated – as he usually was – he had an endearing tendency to tumble his words together into a flurried blur, and sentences would frequently end with ‘Know wha’ I mean?’ The question was rhetorical, but quite often I didn’t.

It was hard to judge his self-assurance. He was a physically arresting presence, six foot two and muscular with a purposeful stride, his broad shoulders accentuated by good posture. He carried his head unusually high, and stood square. The dreadlocks weren’t braided but left to form naturally, and fell shoulder-length; he wore them tied back in a scrunchie, and would toss the fringe out of his eyes with a faint shake. Always holding a spliff, he smelt of designer cologne and cannabis. He dressed casually but expensively – Armani jeans, Phat Farm sweatshirts, white trainers – and although in his late thirties would sometimes be mistaken for a professional footballer. The initial impression was of lively confidence, but as we got to know him better I began to wonder. There was something in his expression to suggest bashful uncertainty about his place, and the loudness might be camouflage for doubt.

Tony and his family moved out of Ainsworth Road the following year, to a house further east. He still appeared on the street regularly, though, and when our rental flat needed to be redecorated we asked him to put his property company’s team on the job. Paul was away working in Afghanistan while the work was being done. Tony would pop in with progress reports, or a query about a detail, and when he appeared one evening with a bottle of wine we sat up late talking.

By now I was curious about his life, because he had dropped enough hints to suggest it might contain something of a story. Like any career criminal, Tony had been dissembling and obfuscating for most of it, and was adept at deflecting direct inquiry – but I am equally adept at being nosey. At first my questions made him so uncomfortable that he would literally squirm in his chair. Before long the tenacity of my interest disarmed and then enthralled him. ‘Are you trying to interview me?’ he would tease, and in a way I suppose I was. His visits became more frequent, and over the course of late-night conversations at my kitchen table I learnt the story of his life – or at least, the one he chose to tell.

Tony was born in Leeds in 1965, to a white fifteen-year-old mother. He had a hazy memory of being told that her father was a policeman, but whether this was true he did not know. Of his own father he knew nothing. When Tony was a toddler there had been some speculation that he might be half-Persian, but as he grew older it became evident that his ethnic origins were African or Caribbean. He liked to think his father had been visiting the UK from Africa as a student – even a Nigerian prince, possibly – but conceded that a black man in Leeds in 1965 was more likely to have belonged to the post-war Windrush generation of West Indian immigrants. Whether the man had ever been made aware of his son’s existence was unknown. Tony preferred to hope he had not, and could be absolved of blame for abandoning him.

The first eighteen months of his life were a mystery. He did not know for how long he remained with his mother, and thought he might at one stage have been a Barnardo’s baby. All he knew was that at the age of 18 months he was fostered by a white family who lived in a suburb on the outskirts of Leeds. His earliest memory was of rocking frantically in bed at night to soothe himself.

The Wilkinsons already had three older children of their own, two boys and a girl. They were in most respects a conventional upper working-class white couple – he was an engineer, she a housewife who later worked in Debenhams – but they had fostered more than 100 children before Tony arrived, many of them troubled or abused, and several black. Tony never fully understood why he was the one they decided to adopt, but within a few years he was Tony Wilkinson.

Tony had two versions of his childhood. Sometimes he was the unaccountably deviant cuckoo in the nest of a decent and law-abiding family, undeserving of their love for an adoptive son hell-bent on causing trouble. More often he was the damaged victim of racism so institutionalised in Yorkshire in the Seventies that his only option for survival was violence and crime. In either account, the youth criminal justice system subjected Tony to every punishment it could think of – borstal, secure children’s homes, youth detention, the short sharp shock.

He always maintained that he burgled his first house at the age of four. It sounded impossible, but he was adamant. He stole everything he could get his hands on, and his father had to fit a lock on every bedroom door except his. His mother, he said with a smile, was a terrific snob, and forbade him to walk through the local council estate, unaware that he had already been barred from almost every house. Expelled from four primary schools, he became an accomplished truant, and had more or less aborted his education before reaching secondary school. He said he bunked off to make more time to burgle houses. Sometimes I wondered if he exaggerated the audacity of his delinquency, for it seemed too extravagant for even the most precocious of juvenile offenders, and could sound almost boastful. But the suggestion of pride was, I suspected, deliberately misleading.

The crimes he described didn’t sound cunning or calculated so much as compulsive. He stole things he neither wanted nor could conceivably hope to get away with, and something else he often said made me guess that if he was exaggerating, it was not to make himself look good but to confirm his fear that he was bad, and corroborate his sense of shame. This one particular anecdote came up time and time again.

Tony had been messing about on the street with a bunch of kids one night when a boy lobbed a rock at a neighbour’s porch lamp. The glass shattered, everyone scarpered, and within half an hour the neighbour was knocking on the Wilkinsons’ door. She was called Mrs Flood. That Tony could remember this detail when he was so terrible with names he called me D for the first year of our acquaintance tells you something about the significance of what happened next. ‘Your son just smashed our lamp,’ Mrs Flood told his mother. Tony was summoned to the door. ‘Did you smash Mrs Flood’s lamp?’ He looked his mother in the face and without hesitation replied, ‘Yes, I did.’

‘Why did I say that?’ he repeatedly puzzled. He wasn’t trying to protect the guilty party, or misappropriate any status the act of random vandalism might confer. All of the other boys knew who had done it, so what was there to gain from a false confession?

The stories he told about adults in authority were almost unbearable to hear. As a boy he used to love cricket, until a coach made a false accusation against him, fully aware it was untrue. When challenged by Tony, the man took the ten-year-old off to a quiet corner and beat him up. On another occasion Tony was walking home from primary school with his sister through their leafy all-white suburb when a passing police car picked him up. Refusing to believe this could be where a black boy lived or had any business to be, the officers drove him to the inner-city Caribbean enclave of Chapeltown, where his parents had to come and collect him from the police station.

Tony was in his teens before he met another black person. On his first day at every new school he would be confronted by a familiar reception committee of kids keen to prove themselves. ‘And what was I going to do? It was either them or me.’ The inevitable reputation for violence was secured again, before the class register had even been taken.

Trans-racial adoption in the early Seventies was uncharted territory, and Tony never blamed his parents for struggling to understand the difficulties he found himself in. Racism was as bafflingly insensible to them as his behaviour. Nobody in their family had ever been in any sort of trouble before; they were out of their depth. But they were fiercely loyal, and that was what Tony remembered. Whenever Tony talked about his parents, he would revisit a memory of the night a middle-aged neighbour painted NIGGER on their gate. What lived with him was not the public humiliation, but the fury on his father’s face in the morning when he saw it.

His father was not by nature combative. He might well have been the meekest man Tony ever knew – and it was a good job he was, Tony said, because he was not married to an easy woman. Tony’s mother could insist the earth was flat – and by his account, her assertions were frequently no less outrageous – and his father would defer and placate and concur. But the couple’s resolve to stand by their son was unassailable. When his father saw NIGGER daubed across the gate he turned pale, and stormed off to confront the neighbour.

Tony thought he had been only seven or eight when he saw a television documentary about street hustlers in Soho, who defrauded gullible punters hoping to buy sex or drugs. That, he decided, looked like the life for him. In early adolescence his court appearances grew more frequent, the periods of detention lengthened, and his hostility to authority hardened. The youth justice system was chaotic and arbitrary; sometimes he would be locked up in secure homes alongside children whose only crime had been to lose both their parents, and he was always particularly indignant on their behalf. If the authorities had imagined he would consider his own punishment legitimate, they were disappointed.

The only good to come of it was the loyalty his parents were called upon to prove, over and over again. If Tony was testing them, they did not fail. Had they given up on their son, I’m not sure that he would ever have been able to love, and might well have become dangerous enough to be capable of anything. As it was, he learned a concept of love that had little to do with intimacy, of which he had no experience, and everything to do with loyalty. But the boy his parents brought home from each incarceration had grown more unreachable, and at fifteen Tony ran away to London to realise his childhood ambition.

He was always rather nostalgic about his years as a hustler. Soho’s seamy warren of alleyways became his teenage playground, and there was a certain daring glamour in his tales of touring the clip joints and late-night illegal drinking dens, promising fictional pornographic beauties to gullible tourists and passing off bags of tea leaves for cannabis, before disappearing into the shadows with pockets crammed full of cash. I said he must have been lonely and frightened, but if he was he had chosen to forget. Dodging the police was all part of the thrill, he said, and by his account an absorbing game of cat and mouse. His only unhappy memory was a surprising one. Having romanticised Caribbean culture for years back in Leeds, he had arrived in London with an Afro flat top and the carefully styled look of a Jamaican rude boy. The first actual black men he met were a shocking disappointment. ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ he said. ‘They just hung around the bookies all week, waiting for their giro. Then they’d get pissed and beat up their missus.’

By seventeen Tony had established himself as a highly proficient hustler, and was going out with a prostitute who worked for a gang of Jamaican pimps. After he helped her to escape their control, they broke into his south London squat at dawn and beat him with iron bars, before carting his girlfriend off to resume her services. Tony got hold of a gun, tracked them down and shot several of them. Nobody died, and he went on the run, until a little over a year later the police found him. He was still in his teens when he stood trial at the Old Bailey and was sentenced to fourteen years.

There was no glamour in his account of prison. Even though the sentence was reduced on appeal to seven years, he still served nearly five, much of it in segregation on account of violent non-compliance with the regime. Pragmatic self-interest was not a strategy with which Tony was psychologically familiar. He would have rather died – literally – than surrender to the authority of prison staff he considered more morally disreputable than most of the inmates, and his back never recovered from the beatings they inflicted. Resistance was a matter of principle. It even extended as far as temporarily turning vegan, simply in order to be a nuisance.

Two weeks after his release he met a young blonde Californian woman on a grand tour of Europe, who invited him to join her. They went travelling, moved to Los Angeles, and married a few years later at a $50 wedding chapel in Las Vegas.

According to Tony, the marriage was essentially expedient and transactional. He became a violent gangster who made a lot of money out of drugs, gunrunning, protection and so forth. She looked good, and liked spending it. It was a stormy relationship. Tony had a large stock of spectacular marital row anecdotes, which had the slightly worn air of many previous outings, and he often said that he should sue the Beach Boys for misleading him about the nature of California girls. Sometimes he claimed his wife had sprung the wedding on him in Vegas while he was drunk; at others he said they only married for immigration purposes. But when they had tried splitting up, he went to pieces. Tony was immensely proud of the fact his parents had both been virgins on their wedding day and remained together until his father’s death some years ago, and it was clear that for all his well-trodden grumbles he maintained a powerful if sentimental attachment to the idea of marriage. He was often out with his daughter, but we very seldom saw his wife – I’d never once seen them together – and I think he liked it when people were surprised to discover he had been married for sixteen years.

As he grew more relaxed, I began to see that Tony enjoyed the idea of being an anomaly. ‘You should write a book about me!’ he was forever exclaiming. ‘Seriously, you should. My life would make a wicked book.’ It was certainly unconventional, I agreed. There had to be a market for a gangster memoir, he persisted; his own bookshelf proved it. At least half the titles on it were bestselling examples of the genre – ‘And mine would be way better than any of them. Come on, D. You know you’re going to write it one day.’ I used to laugh and roll my eyes. Tony’s narrative approach to his criminal adventures was so wildly erratic that I could never be sure what to believe, and didn’t fancy my chances of taming the tangle into anything that might resemble a verifiable story. Besides, I told him, everyone always thinks their life would make a fascinating book.

In the early Nineties Tony and his wife moved back to London, and bought a flat on Ainsworth Road. Following the birth of their daughter in 1994, Tony wound up the more ostentatiously lawless aspects of his criminal lifestyle, and confined his business concerns to the discreet wholesale trade of cocaine. For a year he attended church, to get his daughter into the local Church of England primary school, and despite neither believing in God nor having always been to bed the night before, he enjoyed his Sunday mornings with the matrons of the community. I imagine they were rather bowled over by him.

Most people were. Tony made all sorts of friends on Ainsworth Road – West Indian grandmothers, a gay neighbour dying of Aids, the publisher who lived next door to us – and at weekends would round up whoever he could find to go off touring festivals in his old VW camper van. When his daughter started school, and would need to explain how her father made a living, he opened an organic wholefood store, followed later by the property development company. As he saw it, he had practically gone legit.

At times I got the impression he genuinely believed he had. The tendency to mistake one’s own deceptions for the truth is an occupational hazard in his line of work, and indeed may well be a prerequisite for success. Tony could work himself into such a fever of blameless umbrage, he would quite forget he was actually guilty as charged. I saw this for myself once or twice, when he arrived in a great froth of indignation after being stopped by the police on his way. He drove a large white 5-series BMW – not especially flash, for it was several years old, but ferociously high-powered – and Tony liked to put his foot down. He had been driving for ten years, was never without a spliff at the wheel, and had a relaxed attitude to drink-driving laws. What he did not have, however, was a driving licence. How he kept getting away with it – and he always did – was a mystery, but even more baffling was his outrage at the audacity of the police for pulling him over.

There was more to it than merely believing his own lies. At the heart of the confusion, I began to see, lay a deep ambivalence about his criminal career. It is no small achievement to break the law for so long without getting caught, and part of Tony was unapologetically proud of outwitting a system disgraced in his eyes by racism. If the law’s sole purpose was to crush and humiliate him, the only self-respecting response was to break it. But another part of him felt ill at ease with a career that had consigned him to the margins. He loved talking about his old organic shop, and the palpable relish with which he dished out business cards for his property company suggested he rather coveted the casual freedom of legitimacy. What he had really enjoyed in church, I guessed, was the unfamiliar balm of acceptability.

My own ambivalence about his criminal status was similarly unresolved, but slightly different. I had no moral problem with his job. How could I? I had happily enjoyed taking illegal drugs. Besides, if my own experience of the authorities had been anything like Tony’s, my retaliation would probably have made him look like Uncle Tom. So his criminality was not the problem, in itself. What troubled me was whether my attraction to him was in spite or because of it. I very much hoped it was the former, and thus pleasing proof of my good liberal credentials. I worried that it could be the latter, and nothing but the cheap thrill of vicarious transgression.

The one thing of which Tony was unmistakably ashamed was his addiction to crack. I first learned of it from Paul, when he came home one night somewhat unnerved, after an evening with Tony and his friends. ‘Bloody hell, Dec, they smoke crack.’ I was shocked. Like most people who have taken recreational drugs, I had always drawn an important distinction between substances that enliven a night out and ones that ruin lives. Crack belonged firmly in the second category, and was no part of my world. The first time I saw anyone take it was the night Tony took out a small bag from his pocket, emptied the contents into a teaspoon, and began cooking it up over my Aga.

The appropriate response to someone smoking crack in one’s kitchen is an etiquette challenge for which I was unprepared. I couldn’t think what to say. I considered asking him to stop, but did not want to look prim, and the studied casualness with which Tony lit up made me suspect he was equally embarrassed. Unsure how to broach the subject, he had decided the best course would be to say nothing and act as if it were perfectly normal. I went along with the pretence for an hour or so, until curiosity got the better of me.

My questions quickly made him defensive. He first began using crack years ago, he said, but had quit when his daughter was born, and stayed clean for a long time. He blamed strains in his marriage, and the endless rows, for turning him back to it. Then he reeled off a long list of all the crucial differences between himself and the common or garden addict who steals his mother’s pension to blow in a crack den.

For a start, he pointed out, he didn’t smoke it in a pipe like a proper crackhead, but only in a cigarette – an altogether milder and more respectable delivery method. He only smoked at night time, and never until the day’s business had been taken care of. He wasn’t like those addicts who neglect their responsibilities. He did take it every night, but whenever he went abroad on holiday he would go a fortnight or more without it, so he couldn’t really be an addict, could he? Besides, crack would only be a problem if he couldn’t afford it. Given the nature of his profession, there was never any shortage of the raw materials, nor any need for him to associate with unsavoury types who sell rocks on the street. His daughter knew nothing about it, and his wife wanted for nothing. It wasn’t as if he was raiding the family budget.

All of this was factually true, I soon came to see – but I did not believe that Tony really felt what mattered most about crack was its affordability. Nor did the idea that he was not technically an addict ring true. All of his justifications and strenuous protests sounded like the desperate sophistry of denial, and the person he was contriving to deceive was himself. I felt sorry for him. I had never met anyone who cared more about looking indomitable – invincible, even – or invested as much pride in the impression of strength. Crack addiction was a weakness he could not afford to acknowledge, even to himself.

Why I did not find it more off-putting was a puzzle. It was unedifying, certainly, and his transparent self-delusion only made it more disturbing. But there was a magnetism about Tony that eclipsed my reservations, and beneath all the bluster his longing for approval had a charm I found compelling. Then there was, too, the unavoidable fact of his beauty, mesmerising to the point of hypnotic. I noticed that I neglected to mention his visits to anyone. As Paul’s return from Afghanistan drew near, I could no longer carry on pretending to myself that my feelings for Tony were entirely platonic.

Tony and I were struggling to sustain the pretence between ourselves. The increasingly charged atmosphere in my kitchen was never explicitly acknowledged, but a careless brush of a hand on a shoulder would be enough to make us breathless and freeze. One night, as he was about to leave he took my elbows in his hands and we stared at one another in silence. I thought he was about to kiss me. He dropped his hands, murmured ‘You’re not my woman,’ turned and left. When a few nights later he suggested, very casually, that we should maybe go for lunch some time, we both understood what he was saying. ‘Why not?’ I agreed airily, as if nothing could be more mundanely innocent.

But once Paul was home I gave myself a talking-to. What had I been thinking? I must have been out of my mind. It was nothing but a silly schoolgirl crush, and had to be nipped in the bud before it got out of hand. I sent Tony a short text: ‘I think we need to cool this now.’ He texted back: ‘Okay. If that’s what you want.’

We scarcely saw each other for the next two months. When Tony invited us to Christmas drinks at his house, it felt perfectly safe to say yes. By then I had begun to doubt whether we had ever been in any real danger of allowing mild flirtation to escalate into something more significant. Probably not, I decided. Even if we had, the danger had now passed.

I have often wondered if that would have been the end of the matter, had it not been for three separate events in the following days. The evening after Tony’s Christmas party I was shopping in Hackney when he texted me to say he was in a local bar, and did I fancy popping in for a drink? I found him in dejected spirits. There had been another nuclear-grade argument with his wife; he could not take any more, they had agreed to separate. The house was to be sold, and that summer she would be moving to Spain with their daughter. Their marriage was over. The following morning Paul and I drove down to my father’s house in Wiltshire, where we endured one of those relationship-endingly horrific Christmases with which divorce lawyers in January are so famously familiar. And on Boxing Day the tsunami hit Southeast Asia.

Paul and I were barely speaking when he left for the airport to fly to Indonesia. He would be gone for at least a month, and even telephone contact looked unlikely, for the tsunami had wiped out most mobile-phone reception. It was hard to say which of us was more relieved to see the back of the other. Christmas had tipped a precariously unhappy marriage over the edge into free-fall crisis, and we both knew it.

I waited a few days before calling Tony. I think I was pretending not to know what was about to happen, as if ignorance could somehow absolve me of responsibility. It was late afternoon on his fortieth birthday when I sat in a window at the top of the house and dialled his number. He answered at the first ring. I took a deep breath. ‘About that lunch. I’ve changed my mind.’