The Exchange Read Online Free PDF

some sense of where things were in relation to one another, he said – something one remained remarkably ignorant about if one travelled about by Tube, as most people did. And getting one’s bearings, he said, was crucial.
    I agreed – it was a sunny day and it sounded like fun to sit on the open-air top deck and see the sights with minimal effort, especially since he’d offered to pay for the tickets. We could get off, Kyle reminded me, if I wanted to see anything in greater depth.
    We climbed aboard and headed upstairs, his hand at my elbow. I admit I wasn’t wearing the most sensible shoes. In fact, I don’t have any sensible shoes, period. But his gesture seemed a little over-intimate. I remembered his face of a few days before, when he’d suddenly seemed to take interest in me, a girl so ostensibly different from him she could have been from another planet. I wondered if I’d done the right thing in accepting his invitation.
    We sat down, and the bus rumbled along the Bayswater Road towards Oxford Street. It looped around Marble Arch and began to go down Park Lane. I clutched at the side of the bus, staring at the luxury car showrooms but mostly at the hotels. The Dorchester, The Metropolitan, The Four Seasons – all were places of almost mythical significance for me. Within them, I thought to myself, deals were made, marriages began and ended, affairs were committed, and a thousand debaucheries took place. Night after night after night, the beautiful, the bold and sometimes the damned come to this stretch of road to play out their dramas against a background of wealth and glamour. But it was an allure that had a seedy side to it, something grubby, and that was what made it fascinating to me. The rich, I knew from experience, were dirty bastards too – in fact, they could be the dirtiest bastards of all.
    Kyle’s hand on my shoulder startled me from my reverie. He was gesturing over to a pair of elaborate stainless steel and bronze gates giving access into Hyde Park.
    ‘… the Queen Elizabeth Gate,’ he was saying, ‘built in honour of the Queen Mother.’ He gestured in front of him. ‘And now we’re coming up to the Wellington Arch, which was …’
    His words – together with those of the live onboard commentary – faded in the buzz of traffic as I turned back to ogle the hotels. I wanted to be inside them, not sitting next to this well-intentioned but ultimately rather dull violinist, listening to him crap on about London’s history. Who really cared about that? What I wanted to know was what was going on in those hotel rooms and bars, and what exactly I was missing out on.
    As we halted at the bottom of Park Lane, waiting for a break in the traffic before continuing our tour, I looked at Kyle a bit sheepishly. I hoped he didn’t think I was rude. I
was
grateful that he was making time to take me in hand like this, whatever his motive. And perhaps I was just being vain and presumptuous, thinking that he was at all interested in me.
    I smiled at him. ‘So,’ I said. ‘Were you and Rachel an item?’
    He blinked at me, surprised more, I imagine, by my directness than by the question itself.
    ‘We were.’ He stared off into the distance, seemingly unwilling to divulge any more. I didn’t push it, but after a few minutes he spoke again.
    ‘We were together for a few years,’ he said. ‘I did think it would be for good. But then suddenly it was over – pffff’ – he mimicked the action of someone extinguishing a candle with both hands – ‘and she didn’t want to know any more.’
    ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘That must have been hard. Was it long ago, that you split up?’
    He shook his head. ‘Only a couple of months. And we stayed friends – still saw quite a lot of each other. So I was kind of living in hope that she was just going through a weird phase – that before long we’d get back together. But then suddenly, this … this exchange or whatever you want to call it.’
    For