me!’ she would sob melodramatically to Theo, who was trying to download Match of the Day on his PC and wished to God Dita would find somebody else to emote to. Bringing the whole family to Tokyo had been Dita’s idea, part of her drive to ‘deepen my bond’ with Fran.
‘You can spend some time with Milo-pooks too. He’s hardly seen you all year.’
‘Come on, Deets. It’s not my fault the boy’s been in and out of hospital like an asthmatic boomerang. It’s not me he wants when he’s sick, it’s you.’ He didn’t add, and all the rest of the bloody time too, but he felt like it. He knew it was ridiculous to be jealous of a five-year-old, but he couldn’t help himself. ‘Japan will be a nightmare. The jet lag, the paps, the kids going stir crazy in the hotel room. I’ll be back in a few weeks.’
It was no good. Dita had insisted. Theo had had no choice but to call Cassie, his latest twenty-one-year-old bit on the side, and tell her their romantic trip was off. ‘I’ll make it up to you, angel, I promise. We’ll sneak off to the Post Ranch as soon as I’m back.’ Fuming, he’d climbed the stairs into the private jet with Dita and the kids feeling as if he was walking up to the guillotine. This is going to be a nightmare.
Then they got to Tokyo.
And it was much, much worse.
First, Milo picked up some bug on the plane and had to be rushed to the Hachioji children’s hospital. Then Dita was photographed looking haggard and exhausted the day they discharged him, and the picture ran in Star magazine back in the States, alongside an airbrushed photo of Theo looking preposterously handsome, taken from his aftershave campaign. That evening Dita had screamed and screamed in their suite at the Hyatt until Theo had had to call a doctor to sedate her. She was so bad, the nannies had moved with the children to a different floor, as Milo particularly was getting very distressed. The next morning, Dita had refused to let Theo go to work until he’d made love to her, then afterwards sobbed in his arms for an hour. Despite his having come twice, Dita insisted he was ‘faking it’ and didn’t really want her any more. It was mid afternoon before Theo got to the set. As ever, the Japanese crew were unwaveringly polite. But Ed Gilliam had ripped him a new arsehole.
‘For fuck’s sake, Theo! You’re under contract. You can’t just turn up when you feel like it. You realize there’ll be a penalty, a big one. That fuck with Dita probably cost you two million dollars. I hope it was bloody worth it.’
‘It wasn’t,’ said Theo grimly. On days like today, his mind sometimes wandered back to his first marriage. Theresa had been weak, and of course she did let herself go dreadfully towards the end. But she was also funny, and supportive, and never in the least part a drama queen. Even when the scandal with Sasha Miller had been all over the papers, when any rational wife would have had a good excuse to throw her toys out of the pram, Theresa had been so cool, calm and collected, it was almost regal.
Sasha Miller had been on Theo’s mind too lately, for the first time in years. Bizarrely, his former student and paramour seemed to have reinvented herself as some sort of business mogul. Her property company, Ceres, had gone public a month ago, its shares floated at some astronomically inflated price, and suddenly Sasha’s face was all over the business pages. Physically, she’d changed surprisingly little over the years. She still had that youthful, moonlight-white complexion, and of course those incredible pale green eyes that had once gazed into his with such trust and passion. In her early thirties now, she wore her hair shorter than she had as a student, but it still gleamed the same lustrous tar black. Her body, if anything, looked better than it had back then, or at least more to Theo’s taste, leaner, with less puppy fat. But if Sasha looked unchanged, appearances were obviously deceptive. You didn’t get to that sort of position in business or in life without being a tough cookie. When Theo knew Sasha she’d been as soft and malleable as dough, but the intervening years must have baked her hard.
Theo’s first reaction to Sasha’s success was nervousness. The last thing he wanted was for some overenthusiastic journalist to start digging into Sasha’s past and unearthing the stolen-theory scandal all over again. He raised his concerns with Ed Gilliam, but Ed was reassuringly sanguine.
‘It’s very unlikely. That was aeons ago. More importantly, it happened in England. Americans don’t care about scandals in other countries.’
‘Hmmm.’ Theo wasn’t convinced.
‘Look, there’s nothing you can do about it so you may as well stop worrying. What’s the worst that can happen? Someone leaks the story, you and Sasha both make statements about bygones being bygones. If anyone’s reputation’s in danger here it’s hers, not yours, right?’
‘Right,’ said Theo uneasily.
In the years since the scandal, Dexter’s Universe and the theory that launched it had become so much a part of Theo’s self-image, he’d almost forgotten its murky origins. Seeing Sasha Miller’s face again stirred emotions buried deep in his subconscious – an uneasy concoction of guilt and fear that had begun to further sour Theo’s mood. Combined with the increasing strain of dealing with Dita’s meltdowns, and now this horrendous trip to Japan, he was feeling more restless and dissatisfied than he had in years. Ed Gilliam inadvertently made things worse by filling Theo in on the latest gossip amongst the Cambridge physics faculty. Apparently one of Theo’s former students, Mike Green (now Emeritus Professor Michael Green) was sending shockwaves across the scientific world with his ground-breaking research into optical quantum computer chips.
‘He’s quite the new big thing,’ Ed told Theo. ‘I’ve got four publishers in a bidding war for his book. Of course Oxford, Harvard and MIT are all desperate to lure him.’
Theo consoled himself that Mike Green would never have a career like his. For one thing he was so shy he bordered on autistic, and for another he looked like a three-hundred-pound version of Daniel Radcliffe. No one wanted to switch on their television and be mumbled at by a morbidly obese nerd. Even so, Mike’s success rankled. The public might never love him, but his fellow physicists clearly did. Much as he hated to admit it, there was a part of Theo Dexter that still craved approval from his peers. Grinning inanely at the camera today for three hours straight with a giant bottle of aftershave in his hands, Theo felt more nostalgic for Cambridge than he had in years.
One day I’ll go back. I’ll get back to my research, prove to all those envious bastards that I’ve still got what it takes. He turned on his phone. Six missed calls, all of them from Dita.
One day.
Horatio Hollander looked at himself in the bathroom mirror.
Not bad. Not George Clooney, perhaps. Not Theo Dexter, either. But not bad.
At twenty-two years of age, Horatio had finally (thank God) grown out of the acne that had plagued him as a teenager. Tall and skinny, with a shock of thick hair that had never been able to decide if it was red or blond, merry blue eyes and wide nose smattered with freckles, Horatio was generally referred to by girls as ‘sweet’. In his first year at Cambridge, one of the prettier fresher girls had described him as looking a bit like a baby giraffe, and the phrase had stuck. A talented rower with a regular place in Jesus College’s First Eight, Horatio’s crewmates knew him only as ‘Giraffe’. Horatio rolled his eyes, but secretly he rather liked the nickname. After six years of being called ‘pizza face’ and getting the shit kicked out of him at school (what sort of sadists named their son ‘Horatio’ then sent him to the toughest comprehensive in Leeds?), Giraffe was a refreshing change.
This morning, unusually for him, Horatio had made a titanic effort with his appearance. He wore his best tweed jacket, which only had a couple of tiny moth holes, a clean, ironed blue shirt and a pair of French Connection jeans that his friend Mary had assured him made his bum look great. ‘More beefcake, less beanpole,’ had been her exact words. That’s good enough for me.
Of course the real question was whether they’d be good enough for Professor O’Connor. He’d waited long enough. It was time to screw his courage to the sticking place and ask her out before … before what? What am I so scared