As the plan fell into place, I began to feel that we were different from everyone else in the world. We looked the same, and we acted the same so as not to arouse suspicion, but in reality, the secret we held between us elevated us above them, as if the knowledge we carried made us immortal. This, I realized, was the feeling I had coveted when I first arrived at Cambridge, which I had been wrongly seeking in the idea of a social elite. I did not merely want to ascend to the top of the social order – I wanted to step outside it, to leave it behind entirely. I felt the way I had on the roof of King’s Chapel, looking down on the tiny people going about their business in the streets. They seemed stupid to me for never knowing that someone hovered above them, and I felt free.

14

WE TOOK THE train down to London that evening, and arrived at King’s Cross at about six o’clock. My prelim exams had finished that day, and I knew I had done badly. For some reason the thought left me oddly elated. Unlike all the other students, I would never need good results to get a good job, to support myself through a good life. We stopped for a drink in one of the platform bars, its transitory population helping to steady our nerves. We sat outside at plastic tables under the great Victorian canopy of steel girders and filthy glass, and kicked at the pigeons who wandered around our feet with idiot persistence. I think we all began to get into character, to prepare ourselves for our secret meeting by slipping into anonymity. We turned what we were doing into a game. We speculated about what Augustus White would look like, we concocted elaborate strategies to be used if things went wrong, and developed secret signals. Lisa, who had spent the day organizing things for us, called and arranged to meet us in the station. She arrived and asserted her authority like the teacher on a school trip, telling us to behave ourselves and giving us details of our reservations. She had taken out a suite in our name at the Baglioni. She checked that each of us had an outfit for the evening, something cool and classy to wear in the club. On Francis’s advice I had packed a blue blazer, my only pair of expensive jeans and a T-shirt he had bought for me with a punk print on the front and swatches of fabric stitched haphazardly over the chest. Lisa was going to stay the night at her mother’s place in Docklands. The air was bitter with diesel fumes and cigarette smoke. I felt excited to be back in London, my body soaked up the undercurrent of tense purpose that ran through the station. I could tell the others felt the same. Our moods were synchronizing, our emotions falling in step, and each of us amplified the other’s anticipation.