AS HE emerged from Esther Goldstone's office and crossed the road, clearing clouds released the afternoon sun, gilding the terraced buildings of Floral Street in brassy light. Vince knew he could not spend the rest of his life studying. He had taken night courses in photography, advanced English, history and journalism, with varying degrees of success. He had written and published sixteen poorly-paid articles on London, its history and people in a variety of fringe newspapers and desktop-produced magazines. Now at the age of twenty-five, he felt himself in danger of becoming a permanent student. He did not have enough cash saved to go travelling, and he was too tired to consider the prospect of backpacking across the campsites of Europe in search of sensation.

His mother wanted him to find a regular job, start a family and settle down, or at least stay in one place long enough to save some money. He wanted to work at a single project instead of half a dozen, to pick a direction and stick with it, but so far writing had earned him nothing, and the spectre of hitting forty in a ratty cardigan and a damp flat surrounded by thousands of press clippings filled him with depression. He did not want to fight his way into the media world determined to produce award-winning documentaries, only to wind up writing video links for cable kids' shows. He was more ambitious than that.

His brother Paul had screwed up royally, telling everyone he was holding down a highly-paid job at London Weekend Television as a technician. Far from being gainfully employed, he was caught breaking into a stereo component factory in Southend, and served four years of a six-year sentence for inflicting damage to one of the security guards. He was now working on an army base in Southampton. Vince was determined to do better than that, just to convince his mother that she hadn't raised her children in vain.

He rubbed a hand through his cropped black hair and looked back at the tourist-trammelled Piazza, at the gritty haze above it caused by street-cooking and car exhausts, then at the quiet curving street ahead. It was his afternoon off from the store, and he planned to visit Camden Library to raid their reference section. Now that he had set aside his misgivings and accepted the commission, he needed to develop a working method that would allow him to deliver the assignment on time. More than that, he needed a human subject to interview, but had no clue about how to find one.

As he passed a newsagent's shop in Charing Cross Road, he glanced in the window and idly studied the incongruous array of magazines. Between copies of Cable TV Guide and Loaded were a number of sun-faded society magazines, including a copy of The Tatler. On its cover was a laughing couple in evening dress, attending some kind of hunting event.

It made sense to purchase the field-guide to his chosen subject. As he thumbed through the pages, checking the captioned photographs, he felt as though he was facing an enemy for the first time. His knowledge of the class system's upper reaches was minimal and, he knew, reactionary, but studying a display of guffawing nitwits tipping champagne over each other in a marquee – 'The Honourable Rodney Waite-Gibbs and his girlfriend Letitia Colfe-Burgess, raising money for Needy Children' – filled him with an irrational fury that deepened with each page he turned. There were photographs of silky, bored debutantes seated beside improbable floral arrangements in Kensington apartments, drunk young gentlemen collapsed over wine-stained tablecloths, elderly landowners awkwardly posed at their country seats, their slight smiles hinting at perception of their immortality.

They struck Vince not as sons and daughters and brothers and sisters, but as dwindling continuations of lines buried deep in the past, barely connected to his world. Their forefathers' determination to civilise others had certainly earned them a place in history. Thumbing through The Tatler though, he could only assume that their children had collectively decided to abandon themselves to less altruistic pursuits.

One series of photographs particularly intrigued. They showed a handsome, haunted man with a contrite look on his face shying from cameras as he entered a grime-covered granite building. The caption read: 'The Honourable Sebastian Wells puts his troubled past to rest over a conciliatory dinner with his estranged father, Sir Nicholas Wells, at the Garrick Club.' In the entire magazine, this was the only hint that something was wrong in the upper echelons. He found himself wondering what sort of trouble the honourable Sebastian Wells had got himself into. He planned to write about London from the view of his own working-class background, but it needed someone like this to provide his ideas with contrast. What were the chances of getting a member of the aristocracy to talk to him? How did he even set about obtaining a telephone number? Wells's father belonged to the House of Lords, which at least made him easier to track down.

Vince closed the magazine and headed off towards the library at a renewed pace. He had found his human subject. And his method of choosing Sebastian Wells could not have been more constitutional if he had simply stuck a pin in an open telephone directory.

'AND YOU must be Vincent Reynolds.'

Vince squinted up into the sun, raised a hand to his brow and saw a slim-shouldered man with floppy chestnut hair and green eyes smiling down at him. He knew at once that this was the person he had arranged to meet, and smiled back. He thought later that it had been the preposition in that introductory sentence which had given the stranger away, turning Vince's name into the postscript of some deeper thought.

'Sorry, I was nearly asleep,' he explained, nervously closing his book.

Sebastian Wells held out a manicured hand. The skin was pale and traversed with bulging veins. 'Nice to meet you at last. All those messages going back and forth, all that modern technology and we still couldn't connect.' He looked around at the gardens, the sloping lawn. 'I've not been over here before.'

'I'm sorry, I picked it because I understood you lived nearby.'

'My father has several houses in the area, that's correct, but I spend very little time here.' He didn't pronounce the r in very.

The late summer afternoon had begun warm, but its lengthening shadows were chill. For the last half-hour Vince had been sitting on a wooden bench just below the cream wedding-cake façade of Kenwood House, in front of a gnarled and ancient magnolia tree. He had vaguely registered the man walking up from the dank green lake at the bottom of the slope. Sebastian Wells was styled in that self-consciously English manner Americans sometimes affect when they move to London. The navy-blue cable-knit sweater over his bespoke blue and white striped shirt was almost parody-Brit, and had the effect of setting Vince at a disadvantage in his Mambo sweatshirt, jeans and filthy sneakers.

'You're reading about the Jews?' Sebastian tapped Vince's book cover. 'Fascinating stuff. The great majority of English Jews are Ashkenazim.' He joined Vince on the bench. His clipped enunciation suggested the speech of an elderly member of the aristocracy, and seemed false in one so young. 'From Germany, Holland and Poland. Edward the First banished them from England in 1290. Oliver Cromwell let them back in three and a half centuries later. What exactly are you researching?'

'How do you know I'm not just reading this for pleasure?'

Sebastian tilted the cover of the book and narrowed his eyes. 'Societal Group Structures In Nineteenth-Century European Culture. What, you thought you'd get through it before the movie version came out?'