Chapter Two Our Hero
To understand James Ashworth-Pemberton, you must first understand that he is not, in any conventional sense, a stupid man.
No, James is not stupid, he is simply, magnificently, catastrophically trusting.
He trusts that the world is essentially benign, that people mean what they say.
He trusts that the best way to cross a busy road is to step out confidently and assume traffic will stop, which it generally does, though not without a certain amount of horn-blaring and Anglo-Saxon vocabulary from the drivers involved.
He once walked directly into the path of a London bus on the Strand because, as he explained to the apoplectic driver, ‘I thought you’d seen me.
’ The bus had, in fact, seen him, but it also assumed that a grown man in a three-piece suit would possess basic self-preservation instincts. The bus had been wrong.
James trusts like a golden retriever trusts: completely, unconditionally and with a tail-wagging enthusiasm that makes cynics like myself want to wrap him in cotton wool and keep him away from sharp objects and predatory humans.
I met James in our first week at uni, when he knocked on my door at 2 a.m. to ask if I had any milk, he was making cocoa and had run out and didn’t see the problem with knocking.
We ended up talking until dawn about nothing in particular.
Or rather, he talked and I listened, which is a dynamic that has more or less defined our friendship ever since.
His father left when he was seven, slipping out one morning with a suitcase and never coming back.
No explanation, no goodbye, no forwarding address.
James’s mother had remarried within three years and James never speaks of his father now.
But he keeps a bedroom ready for him in his flat, just in case, though everyone pretends it’s just a spare room.
James lives in Chelsea, in a flat on a quiet street between the King’s Road and the river.
It occupies the upper two floors of a Georgian townhouse and if he was renting it, rather than being its owner, would cost more per month than most people earn in a year, though James seems genuinely unaware of this disparity.
When I mentioned that the rent would exceed a junior teacher’s annual salary, he looked puzzled and said, ‘Is that a lot?’
He wasn’t being cruel, he was just being James.
The flat came with the family, as did the membership at Boodle’s, the boat in Cap Ferrat, the chateau in the Jura and the standing invitation to every society event in the home counties.
His mother, Elizabeth, controls most of the family money through a series of trusts and holding companies that even the lawyers don’t fully understand.
James receives an allowance from one of the trusts, by any normal standard, it is a ridiculous sum.
By the standards of his mother’s world, it is barely enough to maintain appearances.
His stepfather, Gerald, made his fortune in oil services during the murky years of the 1980s Middle East boom.
What exactly Gerald did during those years remains unclear; he deflects questions with war stories that may or may not be true and a cavalry officer’s talent for changing the subject.
He now spends his time collecting vintage motorcycles, losing bets on horses and occupying space in Elizabeth’s various properties with the comfortable air of a man who has achieved everything he set out to achieve and has no specific ambitions beyond lunch.
I once asked James if he had buckets of money and James said: ‘Just one. He won it in a bet, it’s a fire bucket full of Lira and he uses it as a doorstop. ’ Classic James.
James’s job, insofar as he has one, is in insurance.
He works for a firm in the City called Harrington & Associates.
No one knows who the Associates are and there hasn’t been a Harrington since 1957.
They insure things too expensive or peculiar for normal companies: racing yachts, recovered stolen paintings, the legs of prima ballerinas, a Fabergé egg collection or the hands of a concert pianist. If you can afford them, they will insure it.
James’s actual duties at this firm remain unclear to me and I suspect to him as well.
He attends meetings in which he says very little.
He takes clients to lunch at restaurants where the bill looks more like a telephone number than an acceptable amount for lunch.
He occasionally signs things that other people place in front of him.
He has, as far as I can tell, never actually sold a policy or adjusted a claim.
It is, in other words, the perfect job for a man like James: important-sounding, undemanding and paid well enough to support the lifestyle to which he has always been accustomed.
He is, in short, the sort of person who should be easy to dislike: privileged, oblivious and cushioned from consequence by money and class.
And yet.
James Ashworth-Pemberton is also the man who once spent four hours helping a lost Japanese tourist find their hotel, walking them personally across half of central London because ‘they seemed worried and my afternoon was free anyway.’
He is the man who remembers the names of waiters, doormen, taxi drivers, the barista at his regular coffee shop and the woman who cleans his flat once a week.
He tips extravagantly and, more importantly, sincerely, not with the careless largesse of a man buying goodwill, but with the genuine appreciation of someone who understands that service is work and work deserves recognition.
Another time, he gave his coat to a homeless man outside Victoria Station on a December evening and then caught a chill that lasted three weeks because he refused to admit he’d done anything unusual.
When I asked why he hadn’t simply bought the man a coat, something he could have done a hundred times over without noticing it, he looked at me blankly and said, ‘But he was cold now. And I had a coat. So...’
That ‘so’ contained, I think, everything you need to know about James’s moral philosophy.
He does not theorise about ethics, he does not calculate consequences.
When he sees a problem he fixes it, then moves on.
The simplicity is either deeply profound or profoundly stupid and after eight years, I am still not certain which.
He is the man who, when Freddie’s father died suddenly two years ago, dropped everything and flew to Scotland and sat with Freddie for a week.
He didn’t say much, according to Freddie, just sat there, offering whisky when it was needed and silence when it wasn’t, a solid presence in a world that had suddenly become uncertain.
When I asked James about it later, he seemed puzzled that I’d even mention it. ‘Well, he’s my friend,’ he said, as if this explained everything. As if flying to Scotland at a moment’s notice to comfort a grieving man was the obvious thing to do.
That’s the thing about him. For all his obliviousness, for all his trust in a world that doesn’t deserve it, he has a quality that I can only describe as goodness.
Not virtue: virtue implies effort, struggle, the conscious choice to do right over wrong.
James doesn’t struggle, he simply is good, in the way that water is wet or the sun is warm.
This is why I have spent eight years looking out for him. I have, on occasion, made enquiries about his girlfriends: a parade of socialites and fortune hunters and one genuinely dangerous woman who turned out to have a prior conviction for fraud.
And this is why, when James met Anastasia Kovalenko at a yacht party in Cap Ferrat and fell instantly, hopelessly, completely in love, I found myself watching her carefully. Call it instinct, call it cynicism, but beautiful women at yacht parties are rarely there by accident.
I was right to watch. But I was wrong about what I was watching for.