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because at the time Henry was a local Labour Party activist with a part-time job copy-editing other people’s novels while he worked on his own, a ‘literary’ spy novel called Security Blanket .
    David was the arty member of the gang. In the great Brit Pop battle of ’94 he had been the only firm Blur man. Jimmy, Rupert and Robbo had all been 100 per cent Oasis and Henry had sat on the fence.
    ‘Just like a fucking politician,’ Rupert had sneered.
    Lizzie liked Enya and Clannad.
    Right from the start David had walked the walk. He wore thick Jarvis Cocker glasses and desert boots, drank absinthe, briefly had an Italian girlfriend (an au pair) and had grabbed the attic room in the house that the five boys shared, where he slept on a mattress with a book about Jackson Pollock on the floor beside it. Nearby stood a number of big volumes full of black and white photographs which he got from his parents for Christmas and a stack of Arena magazines. However, he owned (as far as Jimmy could ascertain when he searched the room) no pornography at all. Which Jimmy found truly astonishing, particularly for someone who claimed to be a lover of beauty.
    ‘What’s the point of surrounding yourself with books of photographs if they’re not of naked women?’ Jimmy enquired and it was generally agreed that there was something in what he said.
    During his first year, David had briefly had ambitions to be an artist and had even contributed an exhibit to a university art show, a used condom lying on a blow-up sex doll. The exhibit was picketed by both the Catholic Soc and the Fem Soc, the only occasion on which the two societies ever found common cause.
    In the end, though, David switched his allegiance from Pollock to Corbusier and soon after qualifying as an architect had been taken on by a trendy practice. He had overtaken Henry in terms of annual income with his very first commission.
    A decade after that, when Jimmy met him for beer and curry in order to approach him about taking on his Webb Street development, David was a wealthy man (and although Henry had by this time become an MP he still hadn’t finished his spy novel). In fact, so successful was David by 2005 that, university mate or not, the prospect of heading up a street’s worth of house conversions no longer tickled his fancy in the least.
    ‘I’ll recommend the job to my board as a favour, Jim,’ David said patronizingly while stealing Jimmy’s last poppadom, ‘but there’s no way I’ll be able to take any interest in it myself. Things are looking a bit too exciting these days for me to worry about how to squeeze eleven en suites into a ten-bedroom house.’
    ‘No problem, mate,’ Jimmy assured him as he reached over and shattered the stolen poppadom with the flat of his hand. ‘I don’t need you ballsing things up with a load of pretentious asymmetrical cock wank anyway. Call me mad but I’m not into houses that look like a pile of glass cubes stacked up by an educationally challenged two-year-old. I need houses that look posh. Not hip. Which is why I want your firm’s name , Dave. That I need, because that is posh. That’s stylish, that adds zeros to the price. But as to your firm’s mega-crappy signature style, which makes everything look like it was designed by half a dozen blokes working independently of each other in sealed rooms, you can stuff it.’
    David rubbed his eyes behind his glasses. Glasses with the same thick, black, plastic frames he had worn at university, except of course that being Dolce and Gabbana instead of National Health Service they had cost four hundred pounds (which did not include the price of the light-sensitive lenses).
    ‘You were a philistine arse at uni, Jim, and you’re still a philistine arse,’ David said, managing to capture the remains of the lamb massala on his nan bread with a single superbly executed sweep that left the little metal dish looking as if it had just been washed. ‘And I’m afraid you always