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They thought, they knew, a world was coming where money would be meaningless, where nationalism and wars and religion would vanish, where class and rank and every worthless distinction between people would drift away into the ether like untrapped steam, and love would be all. It was a belief, a philosophy, that coloured my generation so strongly that many still ca
Predictably, every paper ran a picture of Joa
However, as things turned out we opened the newspaper on a su
Two days later another card arrived from Mrs Langley. On it was printed the sober but straightforward information: ‘The dance arranged for Miss Joa
TEN
To my surprise, and contrary to my jokey and snobbish expectations, Kieran de Yong turned out to have been a busy boy since last we met. The printout filled me in on what he had been up to, during the intervening years and it was almost alarming. He had been twenty-eight when he ran off with ‘Joa
But de Yong seemingly calmed down during the decades that followed. Later photographs, with assorted models and finally a striking second wife, showed him in clothes that went from first sleek and finally to good. He sold his chain for millions in the Eighties and turned his hand to property, the god of that era, with a huge stake in Docklands, which must have given him sleepless nights at one point before it proved the doubters wrong and came back sevenfold. Other buildings followed, a couple of famous, City landmarks, a resort in Spain, a new town in Cumbria. He had expanded into drug research and manufacture, and his company led the field in work on arthritis and some of the less bewitching forms of cancer, with profits cha
I’d never known Kieran de Yong, really. The one occasion on which we met for any length of time was during that same Portuguese house party that still has a habit of revisiting my dreams, but even then we hardly spoke and after everyone was back at home, most of us never wanted to set eyes on any of the other guests ever again. At least I didn’t, so it was the worst possible start for a friendship. But at the time I had anyway dismissed him as common and uneducated, dull and faintly embarrassing, with his nightmarish outfits and his sad attempts to be cool. Joa
Of his private life there was little information. He had married Joa
Damian’s list gave me a number for Kieran’s business which, when I first read it, I assumed would take me more or less directly to him, but now I understood the scale of what we were dealing with I wasn’t so sure. It seemed rather like telephoning Buckingham Palace and asking to speak to the Queen. But in the event I was put through to his office and eventually to his private secretary with very little fuss, and when I had reached her she was quite polite. I explained I was an old friend from many years before, and, employing a similar device to the one used with Dagmar, I explained that I wanted to come in and talk about a new charity I was involved with that I thought might interest him. She sighed, gently but audibly. I was probably the fiftieth applicant that day. ‘Mr de Yong’s charity work is handled by a different department, ’ she said. ‘Would you like me to put you through to them?’