Legacy by Alan Judd

you.’
    Roger came out of his room, smiling and sweating, drink and cigarette in one hand. He laid the other on Charles’s shoulder. ‘Sorry about this, old chap. Bit impromptu. Some people I
was at university with pitched up. Wasn’t planned. I’ll clear your room. Have a drink.’
    ‘Don’t worry, I’m going back.’
    ‘Seriously?’
    ‘Just dropped in to get something.’ Charles was annoyed; he liked Roger but resented invasion, although he didn’t really mind driving back to his mother’s. The woman who
had been arguing by the door pushed past them both, pursued by the man. It was the sort of party he had always hated, yet, in his student days, would always have attended. Saying ‘no’
became easier with age. Now, he was more grateful that he had an alternative than concerned to show his annoyance. There was also the consoling secret of what he had to do in the morning.
‘Really, that’s all I came for.’
    Roger’s eyes shone with drink. ‘You’re a rotten liar, Thoroughgood, but thanks. I’ll get it cleaned up tomorrow. You’ll be able to eat off the carpet.
Promise.’
    Darkness crumbled into gloom the next morning and the drizzle felt like a permanent condition of life. It was still not properly light when Charles reached London and sat in the car in
Queensgate. Lack of traffic made him notice how dirty and run-down everything was, from the uncollected rubbish on the pavements to the cracked and peeling paintwork of the buildings and the few,
slouching young men who dragged themselves along in purgatorial gloom. This, too, seemed a permanent condition of life. London was becoming a Third World city. He imagined the flat filled with
post-party detritus. The only good thing about the morning so far had been the pleasure of the uncrowded drive; his father’s old Rover, emblem of a better mannered world, had quietly ushered
him into the city. His mother and sister had been in bed when he returned the night before and were still there when he left.
    As soon as it was properly light he jogged up Queensgate. There was already a surprising number of joggers and runners, many wearing smart tracksuits and grossly over-developed plimsolls called
trainers, which were becoming fashionable. Others wore natty shorts and competition vests. So far from blending with them, his muddy rugby shirt with the number 12 hanging off, baggy shorts and
army boots which looked absurdly large for his legs, made him feel laughably conspicuous.
    ‘You won’t have any surveillance with you,’ Hugo had said. ‘You should be able to find him easily enough in the park. Won’t exactly be teeming with runners at that
time of morning and it’ll be immediately obvious if he’s with a colleague, in which case go home. If we put a team out to help you we’d have to pay overtime.’
    It may not have been teeming but at any one moment there were a dozen runners in view, more as time went on. They ranged from the knock-kneed and wide-elbowed – the two seemed to go
together – to serious-looking people in Olympic-lookalike strip and overweight middle-aged men who ran at a pace somewhat slower than they walked. Viktor – Charles had to make a
positive effort to think of him as that rather than as Lover Boy – generally jogged within Kensington Gardens but sometimes strayed farther into Hyde Park. Charles had to pursue the widely
scattered runners in order to confirm that each was not Viktor, and soon covered a good deal more ground than most. His legs, though not actually stiff from his hard run the day before, felt
heavier than normal. By the time he approached the slight, neat-looking figure with short fair hair and little-used bottle-green tracksuit by the Round Pond, he felt nothing of the desired surge of
energy for the encounter. He yawned, a nervous reaction that used to afflict him before army parachuting and gave a misleading impression of relaxation. Quite suddenly he felt he had barely enough
energy