At the kitchen table he’d turned a page of Time Out and there was her face. He’d been so shocked that he’d started to laugh. She was still beautiful – though squinting slightly as if she’d just removed a pair of glasses. Did she need glasses now too? He snipped out the inch-long update with nail scissors, folded it and filed it in his wallet. The exhibition, ‘Us and the US’, featured several British and American female artists, and it opened in three days.

When he reached the drinks table and lifted a plastic tumbler of wine, he noticed, with unexpected anger, how the suits had real champagne glasses. Money grants its owners a kind of armour, and this crowd shone with it. They were delighted and loud, and somewhere among them was Ruth. He headed towards her work and hovered.

There.

She did look good; older, of course, and the hair now unnaturally blonde. Her nose was still a little pointed, oddly fleshless, and its bridge as straight and thin as the ridge of a sand dune; one lit slope, the other shaded. A tall man in a chalk-stripe suit held forth as she twisted the stem of her empty glass between forefinger and thumb. Her unhappy glance slid round the group. As one of the men whispered into her ear she turned away, and her eyes had the same cast as in the lecture hall, when she would gaze longingly over the heads of the students towards the exit.

‘Hello, oh excuse me, I’m sorry, Ruth, hi.’

David used one elbow to open a gap between the speaker and Ruth, and then slotted himself neatly into it.

‘Hello.’ The voice was lower than David would have guessed but instantly familiar. She still dressed in black but the materials had been upgraded. A pilous cashmere wrap, a fitted silk blouse.

‘You taught me at Goldsmiths, a long time ago now.’ He was staring too intently and looked down at her glass.

‘Oh, sorry. Of course, yes. What’s your name again?’

She presented her hand and David shook it firmly. He said there was no reason she’d remember him, but she repeated the name, making an American performance of the syllables: Dav-id Pin-ner. The three men had regrouped, and Chalk-stripe was still mid-anecdote. Ruth touched David’s hand for the second time.

‘Shall we find a drink?’

The queue was five-deep around the table. David knew he should stand in line for both of them, letting Ruth wait at some distance from the ungentle shoving, but to do so would be to lose her immediately to some suit or fan or journalist. Then Ruth stopped a waitress walking past, a black girl with a lip ring carrying a tray of prawns on Communion wafers.

‘Can I be really brazen and ask you for some wine? Would that be okay?’

She appraised them: David left her unconvinced, but Ruth, five foot five of effortless poise, carried them both easily. The wealthy expect and expect, and are not disappointed. When the waitress smiled in confirmation, her lip ring tightened disagreeably against her lower lip and David had to look away.

‘If you just let me get rid of these . . .’

He was nervous, and kept pushing prawn hors d’oeuvres into his mouth before the present incumbents were swallowed. Ruth picked a white thread from her shawl and said, ‘But what do you do now? Oh, I’ve lost your name again. I’m just terrible with names. I forget my daughter’s sometimes.’

David, chewing furiously, pointed at his mouth.

‘Of course . . . God, Goldsmiths.’

She said it dramatically, naming a battle they’d fought in together. After swallowing, David repeated his name and said he was a writer. This was not particularly true, at least not outside his private feeling.

‘Huh. So I managed to put you off art. Or maybe you write about it? Is this research?’

David thought she was very gently making fun of him. ‘No, I teach mainly, though I have reviewed—’

She shifted register and dipped her head towards him. ‘Look, I’m sorry for sweeping you off back there. The baby brother of my ex-husband had decided to explain to me how exactly I’d fucked up his life.’

‘God, I’m sure you could do without that.’

The immediacy, the easy intimacy, was surprising, and it had startled him to hear himself repeating God in the same dramatic way she’d said it. Did she mean she’d fucked up the ex-husband’s life or the ex-husband’s brother’s? He could imagine how she might unmoor a man’s existence.

‘You don’t have a cigarette, do you?’

‘Oh, I don’t think you’re allowed to smoke in here.’

‘They won’t mind. They’re all very . . . Ah, here we are. Darling, you’re an angel. A punk-rock angel.’

The ‘punk-rock’, David thought, showed Ruth’s age.

‘It was kind of you to come and see the exhibition, you know. I managed to lose touch with everyone I knew at Goldsmiths.’ Her dark eyes cast about the room.David waited for them to settle on him and they did. ‘It was a very difficult time for me . . . coming out of one thing, moving into another . . . Maybe you heard about it.’ David pursed his lips and nodded. He had no idea what she was talking about. Her tongue was very pink and pointed. ‘For so many years London was somewhere I just couldn’t come to, and now I’ve taken this residency here for a whole . . . Oh, stand there for a second. I don’t want to have to deal with Walter yet.’

Ruth edged David a few inches to the left.

‘Who am I hiding you from?’

‘Oh no, I’m not really hiding. He’s a friend. Walter. The Collector.’

‘Sounds sinister.’

‘Oh, it is.’ She swept her wine glass in a small circle for emphasis.

‘When Walter buys you, you know you’re in demand. And he keeps on buying you until your price is high enough and then he dumps your stock and floods the market. Or’ – the glass stopped in its circuit – ‘until you die, and then he plays the investors, drip-feeding your pieces to the auctioneer.’

‘A bit like a banker.’

‘He used to be. I think he still owns a couple.’

David glanced around the room. He wanted to see him now. He needed to get a good look at the sort of man who owned a bank or two. Instead he noticed the grey-haired man in the chalk-stripe approaching them. Hurriedly he asked, ‘So are you based in New York?’

‘Ah, there you are. Richard Anderson’s looking for you.’

‘Richard Anderson?’

‘He’s doing a special on young new artists.’

‘I’m neither young nor new, Larry . . . this is David, an old student of mine.’

‘Larry, where exactly is the club you were talking about?’

‘Oh, it’s just off St Martin’s Lane. The Blue Door. Do you know it?’

He looked expectantly at David, who rubbed a finger on the tip of one eyebrow and pretended to think. ‘The Blue Door? I’m not sure.’

Ruth placed two fingers on David’s arm – he felt it in his gut – and said, ‘We’re going on there later if you wanted to come. There’ll be a few of us. David’s a writer.’

Chalk-stripe’s interest had already passed. He glanced at his expensive watch and was all business.

‘Hmmmm, what time is it now? Half-eight. We’re probably heading over in, what, half an hour? Forty minutes?’

That night her exhibit was a sheet of black papyrus, four or five metres wide, that hung from floor to ceiling in the last room. Up close, its homogeneous black grew to shades of charcoal and slate and ink and soot, and its smooth appearance resolved into the flecked composition of chipboard. Its surface was wounded in a thousand different ways: minute shapes were pricked and sliced and nicked in it. There were Ordnance Survey symbols – a church, crossed axes – but also a crown, a dagger, a mountain, a star, miniature semaphore flags. And tiny objects – all silver – dangled or poked through it: safety pins, bracelet charms, an earring, a pin, what must be a silver filling. The man beside David pointed to the largest object, low down in the astral canopy, and said he was sure that the St Christopher medal, just there, must represent the Pole Star.

The gallery lights at that end of the room had been dimmed, and the work, Night Sky (Ambiguous Heavens), hung a foot away from the wall. Fluorescent strip lights had been placed behind it and shone through the fissures in the paper. As it wafted gently in the convection currents, breathing, it made a far-off tinkling sound. The conversation with Ruth had left him charged. He wanted to be affected, to give himself up to something, and standing a certain distance from the black, and being a little drunk, he felt engulfed. This was Ptolemaic night, endless celestial depths of which he was the core and the centre. Everyone around him disappeared, and he imagined himself about to step into the dream stupor of outer space.

David watched, he drank, he waited. He spent some time in front of a massive LCD sign that took up an entire wall of the gallery. As he watched, a single number rose astonishingly quickly, in millisecond increments. His heart sped. Death may be hidden in clocks, but this was a kind of murder. After a minute or so he felt hunted and light-headed. Every instant added to the total on the sign came directly from his reckoning. And a certain sequence of those digits was the moment of his death.

He slipped out for a cigarette, but at nine o’clock he was Ruth’s guardian angel, floating a few feet behind her as she said her goodbyes. When they climbed the steps to Waterloo Road, Larry strode energetically to the central island to hail a passing cab. You could tell he was born to hold doors and fill glasses, Larry, to organize, facilitate, enable.

The view from the bridge was spectacular. The restive black river, slicing through the city, granted new perspectives. The buildings on the other side were Lego-sized, those far squiggles trees on the Embankment walk. Even though Larry and the taxi driver were waiting, Ruth stopped for a second to inspect the night, and stood gripping the rail. The normal sense of being in a London street, of trailing along a canyon floor, was replaced by the thrill of horizons. The sky was granted a depth of field by satellites, a few sparse stars, aircraft sinking into Heathrow. Larry and Ruth talked for the length of the journey as David roosted awkwardly on a flip-down seat. Ruth’s piece had been bought before the opening – by Walter – though Larry had retained rights to show it. When the gallery owner opened his notebook to check a date, David noticed that $950k was scrawled by the words Night Sky. He listened to everything very intently.

Away from the public crowded gallery, a new, personalized part of the evening was actually beginning. Somehow there were only three of them, and he felt nervous. When the cab pulled up he tried to pay for part of the fare, but Larry dismissed him with a rather mean laugh that took the good, David thought, out of his gesture. The club was situated down a narrow alley and behind a blue door that appeared abruptly in the wall. David hurried through as if it might vanish.

Larry flirted with the girl on reception, signed them in. They followed him through a warren of low-ceilinged, wood-panelled rooms. Each had a tangle of flames a-sway in a grate and much too much furniture. And each was full of people in various modes of perch and collapse, laughing and squealing and whispering, demanding ashtrays, olives, cranberry juice with no ice. As he trailed after, David adopted a weary expression: if anyone should look at him they would never know how foreign he felt, how exposed and awkward.

Larry spotted a spare corner table and charitably chose the three-legged stool, leaving David the rustic carver. Ruth settled into the huge winged armchair, arranging her black shawl around her. David realized he’d been unconsciously pushing his nails into his palms, leaving little red falciform marks, and he stopped, forcing his hands flat on his thighs. He normally spent the evenings on the internet, chatting on a forum, but that night he was an urban cultural participant, engaged with the world, abroad in the dark.

‘So what did you guys think of the exhibition?’ Ruth asked. This was his chance and David began talking immediately. He had given it much thought and started listing pieces and their attendant strengths and problems, then discoursing generally on the difficulty of such an undertaking, the element of overlap and competition with other artists, what the curator should have considered doing differently. Ruth was smiling, but the more he talked, the more solid her mask became. When she nodded in

anticipation of saying something, David concluded, snatching his cigarettes with a flourish from the tabletop, ‘But I would say – and I know this sounds a little crawly – but I thought your piece was the most involving. I felt drawn into examining the nature of darkness, how it’s actually composed.’

He found he was sitting forward, almost doubled over, and he straightened up. Ruth smiled and said, ‘Crawly?’ but he could tell he’d talked too much. Larry had a bored, paternal grin on his face, and he waved his hand, dispelling some disagreeable odour. The waitress slouched across.

When Ruth made some slightly barbed reference to pure commercialism, David sensed a chink between them and tried to widen it. He waited ten minutes and then asked about money, about how art could ever really survive it. Larry grimaced, and explained that art and money were conjoined twins, the kind that share too many vital organs ever to be separated. Ruth balanced her chin on her small fist and flicked her gaze from her old friend to the new. David said that sometimes the most private, secretive art is the strongest. It had to relinquish the market to be truly free. Surely Larry wasn’t saying that Cubism started with the rate of interest on Picasso’s mortgage.

Larry frowned, forced to detonate David’s dreams. ‘Well, the fact is, not everyone’s Picasso.’

‘I think Larry’s trying to tell you that minor artists, like me, need to make saleable products. Is that it, darling?’

‘You’re certainly not minor.’

‘I’m certainly not a minor.’

Larry gave a loud guffaw and patted the back of her hand. Ruth ignored him and lifted David’s cigarettes; he passed her the lighter and she drew one out of the packet, pinching it in half to break it in a neat, proficient movement. She noticed David noticing.

‘Can’t stop, can only downsize.’

Watching her, David found himself reminded of the finitude of earthly resources. She expected, and the taking was so heedless she had obviously acclimatized to prosperity at an early age. When the time had come for her to order a drink she’d spoken quickly, astonishingly, in a volley of Italian. The reluctant waitress had beamed, revealing one deep dimple, and replied in the same ribboning cadences. Later, when David leant across and told Ruth how much he liked her charcoal-coloured wrap, she said, ‘Well, that’s really something. It’s a bit Raggedy-Ann now, but you know who used to own it? Audrey Hepburn. She was a great friend of my mother’s.’

Men who own banks and Audrey Hepburn. A sheet of black paper for one million dollars. David lifted the edge of the shawl then, and pressed his thumb in the cashmere. It was soft as baby hair, as kitten fur. He thought of the symbolism of the act, touching the hem of her garment. He had a terrible tendency to think in symbols. He knew it made him unrealistic.