“Yes, most likely. But unless you want to be an academic—”
I made a strangled noise.
“—which it seems you don’t, your degree classification will be as relevant to your actual life as the number of A’s you got at GCSE.”
“You got a first, didn’t you.” Not really a question.
He cleared his throat. I wondered what he was doing. Where he was. In his office, leaning back in his chair, surrounded by dark glass and a glittering city? “Yes, but how did you know?”
“Because things only don’t matter if you’ve already got them.”
“I got a first, because I did nothing else, had nothing else. Do you understand?” He sounded a little strange, and not for the first time, I wished I could see him. Not that he tended to give much away, but at least I’d have more to go on than an unfamiliar note in his voice. “That’s all ambition is. A fire that burns in empty places.”
“That’s an odd thing for a super-successful billionaire to be telling me.”
“Not one who has some understanding of your capacity for happiness.”
Capacity for happiness? There was something at once alienating and fascinating in getting glimpses of yourself through someone else’s eyes. Nobody had ever said that about me before. Or if they had, they’d put it less kindly. Shallow, for example, had come my way more than once. Fickle too. “I’m not sure that’s a very useful characteristic,” I mumbled. “Job descriptions aren’t like ‘the ideal candidate will be a good team player, show good attention to detail, and have a deep capacity for happiness.’”
His soft laugh. “Probably not. But that isn’t the only indicator of value. And there’s no point worrying about whether you’re suited to something until you’ve decided if it suits you.”
“Except I don’t know what I want to do.” God, it was depressing, talking to someone who had probably never failed at anything his entire life. I abandoned the insouciant pose he couldn’t see anyway and huddled up at the top my bed, knees tucked under my chin. “I always thought I’d be a journalist, I mean a magazine journalist not a reporter for the Financial Times. But apparently I was supposed to have sorted this out in October and now I’ll have to live in a cardboard box under a bridge. Or go back to Kinlochbervie.”
“Sorry, where?”
“Kinlochbervie. Where my family is. It’s the last bit of Scotland before you fall into the sea.”
“Must be quite a view.”
He surprised a giggle out of me. “Yeah, it really is, if you don’t mind living without shops or a cinema or mobile phone coverage.”
“I wouldn’t last ten minutes.”
“Well, then you could scenically drown yourself in the Loch.”
There was a brief pause, and then he went on. “I didn’t realize you were from Scotland. You don’t have an accent.”
“I’m not Scottish. We moved there when I was eight.”
I nearly told him about that long drive. The dreamy caterpillar of the motorway in the dark taking me from one world to another. And that was when I remembered how fucking weird it was that we were having this conversation at all. Why the hell did he care where I came from? But then he’d also managed to calm me down. Somehow made things…normal again. For a little while, anyway. An odd sort of power for the most remarkable man I’d ever met to possess.
“Look,” I said quickly, “I get it, but you don’t have to do this. Thanks for…thinking of me, or whatever.”
“Are you going to be all right?”
“Are you aware that you ask a lot of questions?”
“Yes.”
Damn him. I wasn’t sure whether I was amused or annoyed. “Well, will you answer one for me?”
A moment of hesitation. “You mean another one?”
“Hah.” A pause of my own, preparing for the taste of his name in my mouth. “Caspian, why did you call me? Really?”
I tried to imagine his expression. Stern, most likely, his eyes betraying his secrets. “I…oh I don’t know. I don’t make sensible decisions as far as you’re concerned. I was…I wanted to hear your voice again.”
Complicated way of putting it but I wriggled with pleasure anyway. “I missed you too.”
