John Lanchester - Capital

Patrick cut across the King’s Road, which was a place Freddy had liked to come to and walk along, before he got so famous that it had become difficult. Freddy’s distinctive walk was part of the problem: he could change his profile with a hat and baggy clothes, but no one had an athletically ungainly walk quite like Freddy, bouncing high on his toes, looking as if he might trip over himself but never missing a step. His son, who had been breathed on by the gods. No similar grace had ever rained down on Patrick – or rather, his son was that grace – and he had to accept that he was an accessory to that grace, that luck, that blessing. But Patrick, being honest with himself, had to admit that he didn’t find it easy. He walked along this famous road, looking in the windows of the expensive shops selling things which he could not imagine anyone wanting or needing or using: lamps which did not look as if they would emit any light, shoes no woman could stand in, coats which would not keep anyone warm, chairs which had no obvious way to sit on them. People wanted these things, they must do, or the shops wouldn’t be selling them – and yet Patrick was so far from wanting any of them for himself that he felt that it wasn’t the things for sale which were useless, but he himself. Either the things or the person looking at them were in the wrong place; but the things so clearly belonged here that it must be the person who was lost and redundant. The trim middle-aged African man whose hair was beginning to grey, smartly but inconspicuously dressed in a camel-hair coat and scarf and shined shoes, upright – he was the thing which was in the wrong place.

‘You make me feel so young… you make me feel as though spring has sprung,’ sang Roger, to himself, in the privacy of his own head. It would not have been appropriate to sing it out loud, because he was sitting in a meeting with his deputy Mark and some guy from accounts whose name he had already forgotten once, then got Mark to remind him of when the man stepped out of the room to take a call, then had forgotten again. The guy from accounts had a standard English name, but on the long side, Roger could remember that much. Jonathan was a possibility. Alexander also. Several syllables were involved. But for the moment Roger was having to stick to ‘you’.

The purpose of the meeting: to prepare monthly figures matching the department’s performance against budget – which was done daily and weekly too, but was done monthly for submission to Accounts. So Accounts helped prepare the figures which were then formally submitted to Accounts and then sent back to the department. Roger was barely listening, he was barely there. He felt so young, he felt that spring had sprung. In point of fact it was a grey day, with the low sky much in evidence from Roger’s office, and a bleak and biting Easter wind moving the clouds along briskly, like an irritated policeman – but Roger didn’t care about that. If pressed for the reason why he was in such good humour, he wouldn’t have been able to give it.

He had been in a good mood more or less without interruption since the arrival of their new nanny on 27 December. With Matya downstairs, having apparently fallen in love with the boys at first sight and vice versa, Roger was free to go up to his study and work on his revenge. He put a Clash compilation CD in his fancy stereo and took out a notepad. At the top he wrote ‘Economies’. Below that he wrote:

Reality: £1,000,000 shortfall.

Necessity: cut outgoings.

Actions: cut shopping bill by 70 per cent.

(This meant that Arabella’s spending would have to be dramatically, spectacularly curtailed. No more buying whatever she wanted whenever she wanted. In fact:)

All purchases, expenditure over specific figure to be mutually discussed and agreed. Suggest initial limit of £100.

(Arabella loved spending money, but she hated, hated having to ask for it. The joint account, as currently constituted, meant that she never had to, and Roger couldn’t be bothered to go through the bank statement every month. He would be bothering now, though. As for a £100 limit, Roger knew that Arabella would be incredulous.)

Either Minchinhampton or Ibiza/Verbier/

Tuscany not both.

(This was a definitive, below-the-waterline strike on Arabella’s stated wish to have both a house in the country and two foreign holidays a year.)

No additional work on the house.

(It was the ‘additional’ there that made it so good.)

No weekend/additional nannies.

(Here, Roger felt, Arabella had made her greatest tactical error. Now that Roger had had the children on his own over Christmas, he was a childcare expert. He knew what they needed and did not need. They needed their new nanny, Matya, but they didn’t need any more help that Arabella couldn’t provide herself.)

It was this last point that cheered Roger the most. She had inadvertently given him control over a piece of her territory; Roger had stepped in and taken charge of the nanny question. Arabella had never hired an attractive nanny, a fact about which he had heard her semi-joking with female friends; so now Roger had hired one for her. He would dig in on this issue.

Roger turned up the music – ‘Guns of Brixton’, one of his favourites – put his arms behind his head and leaned back in his chair. He began working on dialogue for when Arabella got home, which he assumed would be that evening or the following morning.

‘Did you have a lovely time, darling? I hope so. We did. I hope you weren’t too worried about the boys, they hardly seemed to notice you weren’t there. They’re so resilient, aren’t they, children?’

It would be difficult to deliver that line with a straight face – without letting his rage and male hysteria show. But it would be worth the effort.

At lunchtime, Roger wandered downstairs to see Joshua in his high chair and Conrad next to him, both contentedly eating omelettes. A large drawing took up most of the rest of the table. It was in two very different styles and it was difficult to say what it depicted; given that there was a lot of red and orange, and given the identity of the artists, the likely subject was some sort of explosion.

‘Wow!’ said Roger, fully restored to his affable normal self. ‘Great painting!’

‘I did the top half,’ said Conrad. ‘It’s Autobots fighting Decepticons.’

‘Did bottub,’ said Joshua.

‘I like both halves!’ said Roger.

‘There is some more omelette, left over,’ said Matya from the stove. Roger, who was very hungry indeed – as he now realised – felt that it would be bad tactics to say yes and risk being dragged back into having to be with the children again, just when the new nanny had ridden to the rescue. So he declined with regret.

‘Think I’ll just go stretch my legs,’ said Roger. He took his keys, coat and phone and wandered out to get a sandwich, full of a delicious sense of freedom and moral superiority.

The brilliant thing about the moment when Arabella came home, at about four o’clock, was that the boys were so happily engaged in playing with the new love of their life. Roger, who was upstairs in his study reading the Economist , heard the door open and shut and felt his heart rate rise. Then he heard Arabella go down the corridor into the sitting room; then he heard her come out and walk slowly up the stairs. Arabella was carrying a bag, no doubt her suitcase. Something about the noises she was making had the tang of defeat. She turned past his study – she would be able to tell he was in there from the light under the door – and went into the bedroom. About ten minutes after that, she came out of the bedroom to his study and knocked on the door.

‘Hi!’ said Roger. ‘Nice break?’