John Lanchester - Capital

Clumping up the stairs with the tray, Mary went. Her mother was sitting in her usual chair, as usual looking out the window at the garden, as usual saying ‘Thank you, dear’ before Mary had fully come through the door. Even Petunia’s gaze had somehow faded, was not fully there; it wasn’t that she looked straight past you, it was more that when she looked at you it was as if she were looking halfway towards you and then conking out. Her attention didn’t reach the whole way.

‘That’s nice, dear,’ said Petunia. ‘Tea. Thank you.’

‘I’ll just put it here on the side,’ said Mary. She noticed that her mother, having briefly looked at her, was now looking away again.

‘I’ve let it sit already,’ said Mary. ‘I’ll pour it out now.’ She poured tea into the mug. ‘I’ll take the tray back down to keep the space clear,’ she said. Her mother was less likely to spill the mug if she had a whole uncluttered table to land it on. Also, this gave her an excuse to get out of the room. She had been in for less than a minute. When she went downstairs, the post had come. There was something that looked like a bill, and another of those bloody postcards of the front door with the menacing slogan on it. How dare you say you want this? Mary thought.

Mary liked change, movement, colour, walking, sex (with her husband), Ikea, going out to the pub with friends for Sunday lunch, being well-off in a pretty part of the country, being married to a man who had done well for himself (he owned a string of garages). She had always been depressed by her mother. Petunia was one of those people who stay in character, and whose character sets limits around them like metal bars. She wasn’t a depressive, in her daughter’s view, but she acted like one, constantly finding reasons for not doing things, for not acting, not changing, not breaking out. Parents are often a disappointment to their children, and Petunia was a severe disappointment to Mary. While her father had been alive, Mary had thought that he had been the difficult one, the person who set all the limits and restrictions on her parents’ lives; after he died she saw that it was more complicated than that. Petunia never did anything that she didn’t want to do, and what she wanted to do was what she had done the day before. She was a gentle and loving person but a very, very restricted one; restricted by herself. Mary found that lowering.

The punchline was that she was now dying. Petunia’s story was an example of life’s capacity to go on being one thing, to be it more than it was possible to imagine, and then to be more of the same, only more intensely so. It was unbearable. And like so many unbearable things, it had to be borne.

Mary opened the sliding patio door into the garden – which her husband had installed for Petunia after Albert’s death, before they gave up on trying to change her life or improve it for her – and lit a cigarette. After a ten-year gap she had started smoking again while looking after her dying mother. The cravings had begun as soon as she moved in, and with no husband to nag her, she had given in to them. After Petunia died, and before she went home, she would have to give up, because Alan would kill her if she took smoking up again. After giving up himself, he had become a fanatical anti. So she smoked because she needed a fag, and also to have something to think about, something that was about her life and not about her mother’s, a future task to be accomplished – no small task, either, since giving up the first time had been one of the hardest things she’d ever done; it was something to be done in the future, after this other extraordinarily difficult thing was over, her mother’s death.

Mary took a last puff on her cigarette, then stubbed it out on the patio floor. She set off back upstairs to tidy up.

Middle-class mediocrity.

Suburban mediocrity.

A culture that openly worships the average.

A society which allows the idea of the elite to exist only in relation to sport.

A culture of fat people, lazy people, people who watch reality television, people who aren’t interested in anything except celebrity, people who eat in the street, people who betray their ordinariness every time they open their mouths.

The City of London is one of the few places in which this tyranny of the mediocre, the mean, the average, the banal, the ordinary, the complacent, is challenged. The City is one of the few places in which you are allowed to be extraordinary. No – it was better than that. The City is one of the only places in which you are invited to demonstrate that you are extraordinary. It did not matter what you claimed; claiming to be this or that meant nothing. Claiming has no effect. You have to show it.

This is what Roger’s deputy was thinking about as he rode the train, clunketa clunketa, out to his parents’ house in Godalming. The early spring sun was out and it was airless and warm inside the carriage. Mark sat in first class; he didn’t have a first-class ticket, but knew from experience that on this fifty-minute journey on a Sunday, no one would check. His BlackBerry was on the table in front of him; the heath landscape of Surrey, its deceptive wildness and bleakness, was passing the window. It was Sunday, and he was going home for that immersion in mediocrity, convention, and stifling bourgeois horror known as ‘Sunday lunch’. This was something he ‘had to’ do once a month. On these occasions Mark would either dress down or dress up. Last time he had worn ripped jeans and a T-shirt with what he was qualified to know was a semen stain on the lower left side. Today he wore a £1,500 suit with a very expensive shirt and even more expensive trainers. If he was very, very lucky, this might prompt his mother to say ‘You look nice, dear’ in her wavering, uncertain voice.

There was a tumult in Mark; there always had been. There was a panic or emptiness inside him, a too-weak sense of who he actually was. His parents were mild people, not strong, and his father had gone broke in the Tory recession of the early nineties, just as Mark was hitting puberty. His mother had just had another child, a daughter, which did not help. He lost confidence in his parents just as they lost confidence in themselves; he became angry and grew full of the certainty that his mother and father were frauds, were pathetic, were imitating people they were not; were not fully alive, not authentic. So he saw through them just as he was starting to wonder who he was himself, and the net result was that he grew up a typical angry suburban teenager. But with Mark, the confusions and uncertainties of adolescence had never really gone away. He did not let go of his fury at his parents for being nothing-special, and his reaction to that was to cling very firmly on to the idea that he was a special being, cut off from other people. He was so frightened of being ordinary that he had convinced himself he was not the same as anyone else. Mark had never told anyone else this, but Mark knew that he was extraordinary; he felt this knowledge deep within himself.

This for Mark was a certainty: his being had a quality in it which other people did not have in theirs. And he worked in one of the only places in modern Britain in which it was acceptable to demonstrate your superiority; one of the few areas in which doing better than other people was the whole point. Everything should be perfect. And yet – Mark prided himself on never lying to himself – everything was not perfect. He was stuck in a job in which his abilities were not acknowledged, working for a boss who, in Mark’s considered view, was a throwback or hangover from how things used to be, a pointlessly tall, contentlessly smooth public-school twat, a bluffer and chancer and lightweight, doing a job which Mark could do a thousand times better. Roger was good at managing upwards – he must be, because he was head of department, and he hadn’t been sacked, which had to mean that something was going on out of sight. The only aspect of this Mark saw directly was that Roger could kiss Lothar’s arse as if he had a genuine taste for it. Apart from that he was a waste of space, and it was clear to Mark that Roger had only the sketchiest understanding of how the detailed mathematics of their trading worked. He was technically blank in a job that was all about technical things. That was unforgivable.