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in the same industry as Max, my job no more resembled his than the dark Victorian office building in which I was based, with framed pre-war bond certificates lining its endless corridors, resembled his Manhattan skyscraper. After being rotated around all the various departments of the merchant bank, I had been assigned to the equities research department, a semi-academic backwater, which was in many ways the perfect place inside a bank for someone who had never really wanted to be a banker. There I wrote reports that labelled shares as ‘Strong Buys’, ‘Buys’ or merely ‘Holds’ – we were forbidden to write ‘Sell’, in case it damaged the interests of our Corporate Finance team. I probably earned a fifth of what Max did, but to someone whose mother had worked as a shop assistant in Durham, and whose only previous job had been as gardener, it seemed reasonable. My only disappointment was that rather than being attached to the Mining research team – which would have left open some connection to the life my father had led – I was seconded to the Media desk, simply because they were a man short.
    Two days a week I was allowed to go home early. I was supposed to study for my Financial Analyst exams but usually I would sit and chat to George, who would return at about the same time from drama school. George often seemed more interested in my job than I was. Although acting was his passion, there was a definite entrepreneurial streak running through his character, and he was forever asking whether I had heard any hot stock market rumours. On the few occasions when I did, he immediately telephoned his family’s stockbroker, whilst I sat squirming on the sofa, praying that we were not breaking any insider trading laws. George was never worried. ‘A man’s got to eat,’ he’d say. I once joked that he was an aristocratic Arthur Daly – referring to the genial conman in the TV series Minder – and he took that as a compliment.
    In return I learnt about George’s life, which seemed to be a mix of acting lessons and unsuccessful auditions. Casting agents rarely needed a short, skinny, balding, twenty-something with a cut-glass accent. He played an aristocratic heroin addict in a play that never quite made it to the West End, and he once appeared in a TV movie as an extra in a Concentration Camp scene, but that was it. Eventually, at a loose end, he rang up his family’s stockbroker not to buy a share but to ask if his firm might have a temporary job for him. The firm didn’t, but they were smart enough to realise that quickly inventing one might guarantee his family account for another generation. So George became a stockbroker, advising private clients with similar backgrounds to his own, on where to invest their family wealth. Soon afterwards he moved out of the house to a one bedroom flat in South Kensington which he bought with money from a family trust, saying that only a fool rents when he could buy instead.
    A few months afterwards Max too announced he was leaving. As he spent so little time inside the house, the only surprise was where he was moving to. I had guessed it would be to a penthouse in Belgravia, but he laughed and told me he was going to live on the estate he had just purchased.
    ‘You mean in Scotland?’ I said, trying to make sense of it all.
    ‘No, Docklands.’
    Gradually I extracted the details. He had resigned from his job, but on sufficiently good terms to have received some funding from his ex-employer, which had allowed him to create his own property company and buy a building site near Canary Wharf that was being converted into a luxury apartment block.
    ‘Where will you sleep?’ I asked.
    ‘There’s a prefab office. I can kip in there. Builders always work faster when the owner’s around.’
    ‘And where will you wash – The Thames?’
    ‘It’s too polluted,’ he said. ‘There’s a YMCA less than a mile away.’
    I looked at him. ‘Didn’t you enjoy derivatives