None of us talked to Michael after the night of the debate, and he made no attempt to contact us. Although we did not actually speak to him, we still moved in the same social circles, and for a while there was a kind of unacknowledged scramble for turf. Michael took the Pitt Club in the end, as Francis could no longer afford to pay his bill, and we took several of our favourite bars and pubs around the city centre, as Francis was better liked by the barmen, who rightly considered Michael a snob. A similar process of division took place among our peripheral friends. Michael made a good focus for the general feelings of anger and indignation that our deteriorating circumstances had created. We would relish any gossip over his new follies and failures, such as the time a button popped off his waistcoat during his after-dinner address to a politician who had come to speak at the Union, or the time that his tutor caught him copying one of his weekly essays off the internet and fined him fifty pounds. Lisa had cut him off from her service out of support for Francis, and he had been unable either to find another creditable supply or to begin doing the work himself. All the times we had spoken badly of him behind his back, which had previously made us feel guilty for betraying our friend, we now wore as badges of honour, and cited as proof of the fact that we had never really liked him, and that he was not really missed. Francis heard through Jeremy that Lord Soulford had given him a summer job at Conservative Central Office.

I could not go into Francis’s room now without staring at the picture. It had been transformed from a thing of beauty and genius into an asset. I regarded it as a starving man in the street might view a groaning table through the dining-room window. It seemed so obviously unfair that this dry and lifeless sheet of paper should contain the wealth it did. The practical problems with the project remained, as did fear of prison and public shame, but as time went on I began to understand the truth of Francis’s assertion that the biggest barrier was in the imagination. As we found ourselves more and more restricted the pressure of disappointment increased; my attitude slid slowly from one side to the other, and as it tilted on the pivot all the objections that had been weighing it down on the side of caution slid neatly to the other end. I would catch myself thinking not that we might get caught, but that we might get away with it. If we were caught after the fact I pictured us not in prison, but using the money to effect a very comfortable exile, perhaps somewhere with a beach.