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animal.’
    â€˜I hope you find a good burrow, then.’
    He laughed, and then saw that laughing was wrong. Julie was crying. Tears dripped down her face and on to her T-shirt.
    â€˜I’ll get the tissues,’ said Amanda wearily, heaving herself off her lounger and traipsing back towards the house. Martagon didn’t know whether it would be better for Julie if he followed Amanda into the house, or if he stayed.
    â€˜What is it?’ he said. ‘Please don’t cry.’
    The silent tears became choking sobs. She was trying to say something to him. She raised her head and her wet, candid eyes met his. ‘All I wanted, all I want, is to be a good person.’
    Martagon was on the grass on his knees beside her, his arms around her, rocking her. He could feel her bones through her clothes. ‘You are a good person.’
    â€˜No, I’m not.’
    â€˜You are. I can tell you are. I want to be a good person too.’
    â€˜And are you?’
    â€˜I don’t know. I don’t think so.’
    Amanda came back with a box of tissues. She raised an eyebrow at Martagon over Julie’s bent head. He released Julie and sat on his chair again.
    *   *   *
    What Julie had said was a trigger for Martagon. ‘I want to be a good person’ is a childish formulation. There is no sophisticated, grown-up way of expressing it.
    Martagon went for a swim. When he was in London, he swam at the Kensington and Chelsea public pool. He hated going to the gym. He hadn’t inherited his parents’ love for mountain walks. Swimming was what he did. It was his exercise and his drug. For forty minutes or an hour, he swam lengths.
    After three or four lengths he relaxed into a rhythm, mind and body functioning slower and smoother. His swimming instructor had told him that skills are perfected by performing the correct movement a thousand times, until a new pathway is carved through the tangled thickets of the brain, and the old bad-habit pathways are overgrown and obliterated. He saw himself slashing through jungles of weed with a curved sickle, which was the one his mother used to attack bramble patches. Then he was racing downhill through a forest on the mountain bike he was given when he went away to school, zigzagging between trees, bouncing off rocks, making for the track of brightness that led into the green valley.
    Martagon swam lengths. I want to be a good person. Adults want to be successful, even if being a good person is what they want to succeed at. Even if being a good person is something they try to hold on to while becoming successful – so as not to become a bad person. But Julie wasn’t thinking about success in the world’s terms, that was for sure. For her, it was about something else.
    Martagon came out of the pool and assumed, with his clothes, his normal self.
    *   *   *
    Martagon wanted the adventure of forming a new company and working with Giles. He felt reasonably confident that the merger would be good for Cox & Co. as well. It was a risk worth taking. It was, as Giles said, an opportunity.
    Early on, sitting in Giles’s Jaguar with him after a Caprice lunch, Martagon made two stipulations. The first was that if the merger went through, the name ‘Cox’ must be preserved in the newly constituted firm’s name. The second was that Arthur Cox must be titular chairman of the new company for at least a year.
    â€˜Of course,’ said Giles, throwing up his lighter and catching it. ‘Not a problem.’
    Martagon, back in the Cox offices in Caxton Street, embarked on a series of discussions with Arthur about the pros and cons. They took the other board members into their confidence. Martagon felt sure they would all come round to his way of thinking, which he did not at this stage make explicit. His only doubts were about Tom Scree, and perhaps Mirabel Plunket – the bright young water-engineer, who now