Yes, I am calling you a snob, he thought. You’ve always been a snob and so have all your friends. I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to work it out. She was, however, also the adored daughter of the chairman of the bank he was about to join. He took a deep breath.
‘Of course you’re not a snob,’ he said, downing the vodka in two gulps.
‘So why are you so angry about the flat?’ she said, reaching up to adjust his bow tie.
‘I’m not angry,’ he lied. ‘Just surprised. Especially as you’ve spent the last six months planning your trip to Thailand. Aren’t you and Sophie leaving in two weeks?’
Annabel shook her head. ‘Sophie’s mother’s taken a turn for the worse, and anyway, Thailand’s much too hot. I’d rather be with you in London.’ She gave him a suggestive smile. ‘Just the two of us, in our own flat, no one to disturb us.’
David turned back to the barman and gestured for a refill.
‘But Bel, I won’t be there,’ he said. ‘That was why it was such a good plan you going away. I’m going to be working stupid hours from day one. Hopefully by the autumn it will have settled down a little, but I have to make a good impression from the start.’
She gave a little giggle. ‘My businessman,’ she smiled. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll have a word with Daddy.’
‘NO!’
She flinched as if he had slapped her.
‘No, Annabel, you will not have a word with Daddy,’ said David. ‘I don’t want any favours. I want to make my own way on my own merit. Is that too hard to understand?’
She jutted her chin out like a chastened child. ‘Excuse me for helping you ge
t started in one of the top banks in the City.’
‘I appreciate it, Bel, of course I do, but I won’t have you telling me where to live and how to run my life.’
‘Is that what you think I’m doing?’
David just snorted.
Annabel’s eyes narrowed. ‘Well if you don’t want my help, you know there are plenty of men who would be glad to date me.’ She turned and stalked back to the dining hall, her shiny dark hair flashing in the light.
David took a half-step forward. His instinct – no, his conditioning – was to follow her, to apologise, his first thought for her feelings and not wanting Bruce and Camilla to think badly of him.
He coughed out a laugh. Seriously? Did he really care what those brain-dead stiffs thought of him? He watched Annabel disappear through the doorway, her back ramrod straight, head held defiantly high.
Yeah? Screw you too, thought David, and headed into the party.
By midnight, David was drunk. After his bust-up with Annabel, he’d headed over to the crowded fug of the main bar, where he’d bumped into Dorian, a prep school friend. Dorian was going out to Stanford to begin a postgrad in something innovative and exciting – information technology, whatever that was – which had done nothing to lighten David’s mood. Instead he sought out Max, who he found snogging a ginger girl with braces and a gigantic pink meringue of a dress. Seeing David’s face, Max immediately dismissed the girl and ordered a round of tequilas, then led David in an arms-around-the-shoulders chorus of that song about living for ever, followed by the one about being common people, which obviously he found hilarious. David had then made the mistake of going on the waltzer with a couple of blondes from Wadham, feeling both dizzy and vaguely unclean as he stumbled back towards the bar. He stopped in a doorway, feeling the heat of bodies and the pulse of bass in his chest. Perhaps more booze wasn’t the answer, he thought. Not right now, anyway. It was a long time until dawn, and he was determined to make it to the traditional survivors’ photo at sunrise.
Pulling his cigarettes from his jacket pocket, he turned away from the beer tent, skirting around the side until he found the college cloisters. He lit up and took a grateful drag, the red tip dancing in front of him. Just another of the things Annabel disapproved of. Smoking, drinking anything but champagne, work, poor people, cars with four seats, and using the word ‘toilet’. For all her eyelash-batting, she wasn’t exactly keen on sex either. But David knew he had painted himself into a corner with his placement at the bank. Harvey and Keyne was as good as it got if you wanted to be in investments – and David did, badly. That was where the glamour was in banking, the high-risk, high-reward engine that powered the finance industry. It was where the real money was made. Not that David wanted to splash the cash on yachts and Rolexes and Lamborghinis; what he wanted was what money could give you: independence, the ability to make your own choices, run your own life. Since the age of four, on his first day at pre-prep, he had been told what to wear, who to talk to, what to say. He’d been through the class machine and come out the other side, shiny and fully formed, ready for a life of luxury and leadership. Ready to make money.
He gave a gentle snort and blew smoke at the sky. The irony was that while a job at H&K might give him financial independence, it came with golden handcuffs: the expectation that he would follow the rest of the script and marry Annabel. The flat in Chelsea would be followed by the house in Gloucester, then two angelic children named Ollie and Lottie. Couple of dogs, a horse or two. A social life that revolved around the local hunt. Did he want that? It wasn’t the worst thing in the world, obviously. It was just so predictable. Regimented. Expected. And that was what had turned him off the whole gilded Oxford existence: you had to do what was expected.
He looked up as he heard soft footsteps on the grass, saw a dark figure silhouetted against the sky. ‘Got a light for a lady?’
He smiled, recognising Amy’s voice and feeling his mood lift immediately. She moved into the light and he could see she had changed out of her waitress uniform and into a ball gown, a slinky black number that clung to her curves.
‘Wow,’ he said.
‘Yeah, shut up,’ said Amy, sitting next to him and using his cigarette to light her own. ‘The best I could do in the Portaloos.’
David stole a sideways glance. Her hair was pinned up, exposing her neck, and he was seized with the crazy impulse to kiss it. It unsettled him. He knew Amy was fit, of course; he wasn’t an idiot. You only had to see the reactions of other men when they walked into a bar; but David had never really thought of her like that. They had always been too close as friends, as equals. God, what did that say about him?
‘Seriously,’ he stammered. ‘You look amazing.’
Amy laughed and nudged his shoulder with hers.