Sometimes, he used to take Queen’s Walk, along the eastern boundary of Green Park, and look up at the buildings whose gardens ran to the edge of the path, thinking that they would constitute an ultimate London address. Now he was on the other side of the wall, on the top floors and, later that day, he would be giving a launch party fifty yards away in Spencer House, which also overlooked the park. And yet, despite this over-attainment of his teenage grandiosity, he still didn’t feel as if he had arrived at his destination. On the contrary, a new destination that he couldn’t yet make out clearly seemed to lie in the opposite direction, and the journey there seemed to begin with this strange feeling of unspecific sadness. It certainly included sadness for the hunger that had driven him to vault over the garden wall and turn himself from a voyeuristic pedestrian into a disappointed resident. He wasn’t trudging his way to double Chemistry, but he did seem to be having some kind of history lesson: the history of how he had seen things at the time when he habitually walked back and forth across this park and the resulting mixture of revulsion and tenderness towards that former version of himself. At that time, he had been boiling with teenage conflicts which, although he would be fifty next year, didn’t seem to have simmered down until quite recently. The temperature had started to rise when he was fourteen, and by the time he was fifteen he had demanded that his parents let him become a weekly boarder at Westminster, so as to get away from their moronic company and their intrusive enquiries. He still often went back home between four and seven to raid the fridge, steal alcohol and money and take his mother’s Valium from the medicine cabinet. His school bedroom in Busby’s gave on to a flat roof that overlooked Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament; a view he still had, in a more remote form, from his roof terrace upstairs. In the summer term, on hot days, when he was in a ‘private study’, supposedly working on his A levels, he would spread blankets out on that terrace, and smoke joints, watching the hands of the world’s most famous clock take a staccato measure of his wasted time. The appearance of idleness was of great importance at Westminster (although an ‘essay crisis’ was allowed, since it issued from a collision between personal laziness and a universally resented authority). In reality, the cult of idleness had to be accompanied by secret bouts of hard work in order to stay in a school determined to keep its place at the top of the league table, delivering more students to the world’s best universities than any other in the country. Sometimes, Matron would stick her head out of his study window and ask, as swirls of hash and tobacco smoke dispersed over the division-bell area, if Hunter had been smoking.