Capital (18 page)

Memory could not compete against hope. It was no contest. Even a small amount of hope would do.

‘
cn i c u?’

the text had read. Shahid had no idea whose mobile this message was from, so he texted back:

‘ok bt hu r u?’

Shahid had to admit, he thought it might be a girl, a forgotten girl he had tried to pick up somewhere, or an old flame, who must be a bit keen on him because why otherwise would she have kept his number? There was a girl at Clapham South once, she’d dropped a whole bunch of papers on the platform as she got off the train, the rude commuters had just shoved past, of course, Shahid had picked them up, they’d got chatting, she was a law student, they’d gone for a coffee right there across the road, they’d swapped numbers, then about a week later he’d lost his mobile and he’d always wondered if she might have been the one … that was six months or so ago now. It might be her, it just might. He’d put a thing in ‘Lost Connections’ in
Metro
but had come up blank. But even if it wasn’t the law student, basically, if it was a girl, it was good news.

The reply was disappointing.

‘Iqbal hr When?’

Great. Just what I need, thought Shahid. Reminiscences about Chechnya from a Belgian-Algerian semi-weirdo jihadi I haven’t seen for over a decade. He texted back:

‘Tuesday at 6 ok 13 Pelham Rd’

Which was where he now was, on Christmas Eve, watching
The Simpsons
with one eye while trying to work out just how it was Iqbal seemed to have manoeuvred him into agreeing to put him up for a few days.

‘I mean I’ve been let down,’ Iqbal was saying. ‘My friend let me down. If it were not for that I would not be having to turn to you.’

He was angry and ingratiating at the same time, and seemed keen to convince, as if his anger were something he was selling. Iqbal had come to London to stay with a friend, but the friend had kicked him out, offering a complicated alibi to do with relations who might be visiting and for whom he needed to keep the spare room free, plus he had a big work thing coming up, etc. etc. It was coming back to Shahid, a little too late: in Chechnya they hadn’t got on all that well. Iqbal had been angry all the time about not just large issues and global injustices but about the fact that the hot water had run out or the only part of the bread left was the crust and he didn’t like the crust. He was quick to connect the two, as well: if a petrol station in Austria had a lavatory that was closed because the flush didn’t work, this was part of a planet-wide conspiracy to disrespect Muslims.

In Shahid’s view, the best way through difficult times, as through life in general, was just to go along with things. It was a rare problem that couldn’t be solved by being ignored. Iqbal would be difficult to ignore but if he put him up for a few days he would surely go away and things would return to normal.

‘Brothers should not treat each other like that. And we are brothers, aren’t we? Brothers should not behave in this way.’ Iqbal was pacing.

‘I’ve said you can stay,’ said Shahid.

Iqbal seemed to collect himself.

‘And I am grateful. I feel all appropriate gratitude. Forgive me if my anger got the better of me.’

‘It’s cool. I’m just going to watch the end of this and then I’ll show you where stuff is, how to set up the sofa bed and all that.’

‘You are a good man.’

‘No, it’s cool, really.’

Insistently, Iqbal said: ‘You are a good man. Perhaps you have forgotten this truth about yourself. Perhaps it is something other people do not see or encourage you not to see. But you are a good man.’

Well, put like that, it was hard not to think there might be something in this Shahid-as-good-man theory. Shahid gave a modest aw-shucks shrug just as Mr Burns did his steepled-fingers thing and said ‘Excellent.’

H
anging from a strap on the Jubilee line as he went home on Christmas Eve, Roger thought about when might be the best time to tell Arabella about his non-existent bonus. Arabella was good at making life seem easy, except when she suddenly and dramatically wasn’t. Roger had an intuition this might be one of those times.

It would have been better to have done it already, obviously. But on Friday he had just been too numb, too freaked, too incredulous, too sick. He was in no condition to have a long talk about his missing million pounds … And anyway, by the end of the day the impulse to blurt everything out had long since faded. A lesser man, Roger felt, would have gone home straight after being sick. Roger was made of sterner stuff, and anyway what would he do if he went home? Sit there blubbing and moping and waiting for Arabella to get back from the shops? No, he sucked it up, took it like a man, and spent the day hiding in his office and pretending to work.

Not that much work got done on 21 December at Pinker Lloyd, as the Compensation Committee broke its news. Every now and then he would peek through the window and survey the scene in the trading room. The noise was about a quarter of its usual level. People were just sitting there. One or two of them had their heads in their hands. Some others were just standing around in a demoralised little group. They looked like refugees or something. Sad, so sad. It was like … 
Roger stretched to find some metaphor for the scale of the grief, the comprehensiveness of the disaster. Being in some shithole in Iraq or somewhere, where some Yank pilot has dropped a bomb on you by mistake. Everybody’s blown into pieces, bits everywhere, limbs, blood, everything. And it’s not your fault. That was the key thing – not your fault. He hadn’t done anything wrong. But they went and dropped the bomb anyway. Those bloody Yanks …

Anyway: Friday had been too soon, and there hadn’t really been an opportunity over the weekend. It was the sort of news you had to steel yourself to break, you had to create a pause around the moment, and there hadn’t been an opportunity. Arabella had been out on Saturday, and he’d had a lie-in and then pottered about while the weekend nanny took Joshua and Conrad, then he’d gone to the gym in the afternoon and they’d had a takeaway after the kids were in bed, but things had by then felt too chilled out to spoil the mood, and then on Sunday they had a brunch date at the country club, and it had slid into the afternoon, and Roger had first been buzzed from a couple or even three Bloody Marys and then had been coming down from the buzz, and the day had somehow gone, and now it was Monday, Christmas Eve, and there was no way this could possibly be the right time, could it? To tell your wife you’d underperformed your own expectations – which Roger had mentioned to Arabella, one night a couple of months ago, a mistake he couldn’t resist making to see the glint come into her eye, at some point when his marital stock had otherwise been rather low – but to tell your wife you’d underperformed by a cool £970,000, that wasn’t the sort of gift you gave on Christmas Eve. Roger wasn’t a monster.

What with all the whatever, he’d barely had time to think about its being Christmas. At least he had sorted out Arabella’s present, some fancy sofa she’d had her eye on, which would be (this was the punchline) delivered
on Christmas Day itself
. The people at the furniture company, the delivery people anyway, worked on Christmas so you could have your present right there when you wanted it with none of that rubbish about waiting two weeks for the delivery. Fair enough, if you were spending ten grand on a sofa you could at least get the arsing thing delivered when you actually wanted it even if it was Christmas.

The thing was, to let Christmas be Christmas. Not to turn it into
something out of a depressing film,
It’s a Wonderful Life
without the happy ending.
It’s a Shit Life and We’re Suddenly Poor
. No. Don’t tell her on Boxing Day, obviously. The plan was to go down to Minchinhampton on the 27th and stay into the new year, have a few chums down for a party and sleepover on New Year’s Eve. That might be the time to do it, in Wiltshire. Have a bit more perspective out of London. Arabella would be knackered from looking after the children – she’d already warned him that it would be ‘just the two of them’ doing childcare over the holiday – which would mean she would be grumpy but on the other hand she’d also be busy with the boys and that would keep her distracted. OK, that was the plan. Tell her on the 27th, in the country. Maybe go for a walk and tell her. He’d be carrying Joshua in a papoose on his back, which would make it hard for her to yell at him. As always when he’d made a plan, Roger felt better.

He trotted up the stairs at the Tube station and came out into the dark of Christmas Eve. The high street was mayhem: half the people there doing last-minute Christmas shopping, the other half determined to start the first evening of the holiday pissed. The bars were heaving. Roger dodged drunks and shoppers. Church bells were ringing: for a moment Roger thought about rounding everybody up and dragging them to the service of lessons and carols. But that wasn’t really them, was it? Plus Josh would already be in bed. No: shower, change, glass of champagne. They might even have sex. When it was a holiday Arabella sometimes let him.

Roger was home. The front door bumped against Pilar’s bag – that’s right, she was off to whichever Latin country it was she was from, Colombia or something. At the other end of the open-plan ground floor the television was showing one of Conrad’s Japanese-looking cartoon series. He would be sitting in front of the screen with his thumb in his mouth.

Pilar materialised by the door. She seemed in something of a rush.

‘Mr Yount, thank you, I go now,’ she said. ‘Josh he upstairs. Already in bed.’

‘Great, fabulous, thank you so much.’

‘Happy Christmas,’ said Pilar. ‘Goodbye!’ And she was gone. That was, as Roger’s conversations with her went, on the long side: weeks
went by without his seeing Pilar at all. Roger went through into the sitting room. Sure enough, Conrad was sucking his thumb and watching people fighting on rocket-power sky-cycles. Arabella wasn’t with him so she must be upstairs, perhaps settling Josh or on the phone making plans for New Year’s.

‘Daddy’s just going to have a quick shower,’ said Roger. His son made no sign of having heard him. From the noise and the general sense of dramatic urgency, Roger gathered that it was a crucial moment in the story. He went upstairs, undressed, ran the shower until it was hot and the room was half-f of steam, and then got in. He felt his muscles unknot and some of the horror of the bonus question melt away. It was Christmas: family time: quality time: the thing was to enjoy it. Yes. Roger always felt better when he was completely clean so he shampooed his hair and shaved, both for the second time that day, then dressed in his non-going-out slouchy trousers and went downstairs. Conrad was now watching a different but extremely similar mock-Japanese cartoon. Time for a glass of Bollinger.

There was an envelope on the table in Arabella’s large looping very feminine handwriting. Roger picked it up.

I
t wouldn’t be true to say that Roger saw the funny side, or had glimpses of perspective, or anything like that; but there were one or two moments on Christmas morning when he was able to remember that things hadn’t always been like this. At about quarter to seven, for instance, he was downstairs on the sitting-room carpet trying to assemble a plastic robot which turned into a car and also into a gun and uttered set phrases through a speaker-box and could also be operated by remote control. The problem was that it was a very complicated toy: not only was it highly fiddly, with hundreds of small parts, but it came with instructions which seemed designed with the conscious intention to confuse and mislead. Beside and around and beneath Roger, the floor was covered in pieces of infant Lego from several different kits, which Conrad had torn open and thrown around the room while his back was turned. Joshua had upended the gigantic box of Brio he’d been given, so a substrate of wooden train tracks and engines lay mixed in with the plastic, paper, torn boxes, and various other toys which had been briefly experimented with and discarded. Conrad had already broken one of his main toys, a racing car with green stripes and a driver who was supposed to beep when you pressed down on his head, but who had been jammed down so firmly that he didn’t stop ringing, like an alarm. Roger hadn’t been able to find either an off switch or a battery hatch to open so he had smashed the toy with a hammer. Conrad was still sniffling about that, while fiddling with one of his new lightsabers.

No, Roger had not seen the funny side. But there had been a moment when, after looking at his watch, he had thought: I can remember when Christmas morning would start at about half past ten with a glass of Buck’s Fizz in bed. Now it begins at half past five, with a test of my fine motor skills and ability to read Korean.

There was no sense in which Roger had taken things lying down. The previous night, straight away on getting Arabella’s note, he had bundled a protesting Conrad off to bed, then hit Google and looked up nanny agencies (not forbearing to try things like ‘emergency nannies’, ‘last-minute nannies’ and ‘crisis nannies’). He had left messages on the answering machines of seven different agencies and knew that he was going to hire the very first person who was available. So help was at hand. But help being at hand was no help, not right in the here and now, with his wife away wherever the hell it was she was, and his parents a. in Majorca and b. useless.