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his way out of the house to go to a tutorial when I told him the news, but he hurriedly offered me his congratulations, before adding that maybe he, George and I should all live together in London.
    ‘I thought your regiment was based in Colchester,’ I said.
    ‘There has been a slight change of plan,’ he replied.
    I learnt the full story later that evening whilst I helped Max unload fertiliser bags from his Land Rover into the garage beneath our flat in Bristol. Like all our gardening supplies, the fertiliser had come from the people Max went shooting with. They were mostly gamekeepers, tenant farmers and rural odd-job men, some of whom had worked for Max’s father in Scotland, or at least knew people who had. It was a part of Max’s life that I had little contact with. All I knew was that when we bought anything from these people, the price was much lower than it would have been in any garden centre, we always paid in cash, no receipts were ever issued and Max usually took possession of our goods after dusk.
    As we faced each other across a fifty-kilogram fertiliser bag, Max revealed that he was going to work for a Japanese bank.
    I was genuinely surprised. ‘I didn’t know they even had a graduate recruitment scheme.’
    ‘They don’t,’ Max said, ‘not in this country anyway. One of my maths tutors knew someone on their derivatives trading desk. We had a few chats, then they suggested we meet, and now they’ve made me an offer.’
    ‘How much?’
    He named a sum that was twice my starting salary.
    I whistled. ‘Have you told the army?’
    ‘I sent them a letter,’ Max said, turning away from me, ‘George helped me draft it.’
    The Officer Commissions Board’s initial response was to threaten him with a court martial. But Max stood his ground and the army did not want a scandal. Only once did I see the strain get to Max. It was during the Easter holidays. I was staying with him at the Lodge in Glen Avon, and one morning his father made it very clear that he felt Max should honour his schoolboy promises. But by then it was too late, for Max had effectively purchased his freedom by promising to repay all the money he had taken from the army, plus interest, within three years.
    The following summer, for the first time in two years, I did not go up to Glen Avon for a part of the holidays. Before I had even finished my exams, Max had left Bristol, joining his Japanese bank’s derivatives trading team in New York for a three month induction. In contrast, the merchant bank that had hired me made it very clear that it virtually closed down until September. With time on my hands, I flew out to Australia to stay with my mother and Pete, and catch up with my sister who I had not seen for three years, and who had suddenly morphed into a teenager.
    There was a postcard waiting for me at my mother’s house. It was from Max and had the address and telephone number of a three bedroom terraced house in Battersea that he and George had rented for a reduced price because of its rising damp.
    It was George who let me into the house, and I soon discovered that Max only notionally lived with us. The bank was his real home, until another bank, this time an American one, poached him and the rest of his derivatives trading team, doubling all their salaries and giving Max a sign-on bonus that allowed him to repay the army the money he owed it two years ahead of schedule. From then on Max spent more time in New York than in London. He flew back once a month, normally arriving jetlagged on a Saturday morning. If it was winter, he would immediately set off to shoot pheasants with a smart syndicate he had joined, where everyone else was at least ten years older than him. In summer, he would go sailing off the South Coast in a yacht he leased with two other bankers. If we were lucky, George and I would see him briefly on Sunday nights before he flew back to America.
    I lived a far more humdrum existence. Although officially working