Capital: A Novel

by John Lanchester

  ‘I think it’s time to go and get my nails done,’ said Naima, ‘but I don’t want to move.’

  ‘Moving. Always bad,’ said Arabella.

  ‘Anyway,’ Naima went on, continuing what she had been saying before she lapsed into silence five minutes before, numbed by the heat, ‘I’ve stopped going to Selfridges. It’s just too overwhelming. The personal shoppers are great and I love the range of stock and they have such an eye for brands, when you see a new label there it’s always lovely, but after a couple of hours you’re exhausted, it’s like going round some colossal bazaar. The thing about Liberty’s is . . .’

  Arabella made noises to show that she was listening and in full agreement. Who would have thought that ‘Eric the barbarian’, who according to Roger was simply revolting on the subject of women and sex, would still have been married to his first wife, the cuddly little dumpling from wherever she was from (Arabella didn’t feel she yet knew her well enough to ask, and was also aware that Naima might have told her once already while she wasn’t paying attention). And for all her rabbiting on, you could tell she had very good taste; or the good taste to employ people who had very good taste, which was the same thing. Arabella recognised pieces of serious collectors’ modern furniture. The bathrooms and spa were stocked with expensive cosmetic products. Obviously it was a bit like a boutique hotel but so what? What was not to like about boutique hotels?

  It was particularly delicious to be lying in the wet, saturating heat when you knew it was so cold outside. Bitingly cold; country-air-in-winter cold. Arabella was especially sensitive to cold and found it difficult to relax entirely when she had to be on alert against a draught; but there was no risk of that here, the house was beautifully finished and insulated. She could properly relax and let herself be pampered. Conrad had been a little mutinous at the idea of the weekend in the company of other children he didn’t know, but he and Josh had taken one look at their play barn and instantly been in ecstasy. There was a little whiteboard on which they were allowed to write down what they wanted for their tea (subject of course to parental vetting). Conrad had taken the blue felt tip and in the most adorable way written ‘spegeti + chips’. Arabella had been at least as sceptical as the boys about coming here but she had to admit that Roger had been right that it would be good fun – ‘even if it’s awful in one way, it’ll still be fun’, he had said. Overall this had to be one of his better ideas in a long time. Not that that was high praise.

  Arabella was having moments of feeling, not exactly guilty about the nasty surprise she was planning – because Roger was still a lazy and clueless husband who had no idea what she did, no idea at all – but the faintest stirrings of preliminary unease. This was not to do with Roger, who deserved what he was going to get. Even lying in forty-plus-degree heat, her every pore open to the steam, massaged to the point where she was a giant floppy noodle, sitting on the comfortable seat with her new best friend Naima gossiping about which shops’ perfume counters employed off-duty whores, and bitching about Lothar’s too-skinny wife swimming round and round in the pool like a huge German goldfish of showing-offness – even there, she could feel a toothache-twinge of pure rage at Roger. She was at home all day, coping, stressed out, while he sat in his comfy office, and then when he came home he had the nerve to act like the tired one, like the big hero! And because the children were pleased to see him at weekends, which was based on little more than the fact that they never saw him at any other time, indeed saw as little of him as if he’d been a white-collar criminal in some prison that had a weekend-release scheme – because the children were happy to see the invisible man, he gave himself airs as if that meant he was Banking Father of the Year. While also complaining about how tired he was, of course.

  No, Roger would eat what he was given. He would start to appreciate her, or else. The issue causing Arabella some concern was more to do with the children, who might be upset. Who, let’s face it, would be upset. But if she spoke to them and explained that Mummy was having to go away for a day or two, ‘one or two sleeps’, but would be back very soon, and had left presents for them, and that there would be more presents when she got back – basically, as long as she made a really huge deal about presents – it would be all right. It would be fine. It was all about the presents.

  15

  ‘. . . which is why it was so sodding fantastic,’ said Roger’s host. ‘They just got straight in there. Kit off in two seconds flat. I thought Tony was going to have a heart attack. I thought I was going to have a heart attack. No doubt they were sixteen or eighteen or whatever you have to be in Korea but anyway they looked about twelve, except with tits. It was mental.’

  Roger was walking a short distance across a field in Norfolk, carrying his Purdey shotgun with the barrel cracked open, with a bag of shells over his shoulder. He was wearing all the gear: a flat cap, Barbour jacket, Burberry corduroys, and green Hunter wellies. In his opinion he would have fit in very well at Balmoral. He’d been shooting a few times before, always on work freebies, and that was when he’d bought all this gear. Roger had the habit, one he wanted to grow out of but was well aware that he hadn’t, of buying lots of expensive gear when he thought of taking up a new hobby. This had happened with photography, when he’d bought an immensely, unusably advanced camera and set of lenses, then taken about ten pictures before getting bored with its complexity. He had taken up exercise and bought a bike, treadmill and home gym, and then a debenture to a London ‘country club’ which they hardly ever used because it was so laborious to get there. He’d taken up wine, and had a high-tech fridge-cum-cellar in the converted basement, full of expensive bottles that he’d bought on recommendation, but the trouble was you weren’t supposed to drink the bloody stuff for years. He’d bought a timeshare on a boat in Cowes, which they had used once. He had bought this hunting gear about twenty-four months ago, along with the Purdey which he had ordered when he got his first proper bonus fifteen years before, but by the time it came he’d more or less lost interest in shooting. It was a beautiful gun, though, the aged walnut stock thrillingly textured, and there was something almost pornographic about the thought that it had been made specifically for him, for his body, his eyesight, even the aiming of the gun weighted to allow for his personal shooting technique. Thirty thousand pounds well spent, was how it felt today.

  He was also glad about his footwear. His host, Eric – ‘Eric the barbarian’, as he tended to introduce himself – was wearing Gucci trainers, because wellies made his feet smell. Eric was worth several hundred million pounds and was one of Pinker Lloyd’s best clients. At the moment, with things in the City a little edgy and credit getting more expensive, Eric was particularly good news, because he seemed constitutionally incapable of being bearish. He was a born optimist and bull; a perma-bull. Pinker Lloyd loved him. Eric was lavished with corporate hospitality all year round, and once a year paid some of it back in the form of an invitation to his ‘shooting lodge’ in Norfolk. His motives in inviting them were less to do with generosity and more to do with showing off. The guests this year were Roger and Lothar and four of their colleagues. They had come to this field in three matching Range Rovers, which had then gone back to Eric’s place to collect their picnic lunch and the staff to serve it. Roger was betting that the ‘picnic’ would be pretty spectacular.

  The short winter day had begun wet, but it had stopped raining at about nine, and by now – ten o’clock – was starting to clear. Lothar had gone for a ten-kilometre run before breakfast and was making his usual fuss about how much he liked being out of doors in the fresh air. Eric had not, as far as Roger could tell, stopped boasting for a single moment, except when he was eating or drinking, and even then he would pause only long enough to clear his airways.

  ‘. . . and then he said afterwards, shaking my hand at the airport and bowing and doing all that shit they do – then he says, “What happens in Seoul stays in Seoul.” I almost shat myself laughing.’

  Eric was the most trem
endous yob, no question. He had that absolute certainty of being right about everything which often came with having made a lot of money in the City. Because every trade involved a winner and a loser, making a great deal of money through trading involved being proved repeatedly right, time after time. That had an effect on people who for the most part had not been shy or unconfident in the first place. They tended to think, genuinely and sincerely, that they were the next-best thing to God. Given that, it was interesting the way people with new money copied the people with old money; interesting that Eric, instead of thinking of things he might like to do for himself, or nicer versions of the things he had used to do before he had money, now did all the things other people with money did, like go shooting and own yachts. He even sponsored charities, not out of charitable feeling – Roger was well placed to know that he had not an atom of charitable feeling of any kind, not for anybody – but because it was what you did if you were that rich. It was as if there was a rule book. Still, Roger didn’t care. It was nice to get out of London and before long Eric would tire of boasting at him and go off to boast at somebody else.

  People said that Norfolk was flat, but it didn’t seem at all flat to Roger. The hills were not high, but there were quite a few of them and he had felt distinctly carsick on the drive here. They had walked across a ploughed field and were now walking up the other side towards a copse of trees at the top. It was about ten minutes’ brisk walk on soft ground that sucked at the footsteps and Roger, he was embarrassed to notice, was slightly out of breath. Not as badly as Eric, mind you. He was actually panting; he was pale and fleshy and wobbly.

  ‘. . . didn’t even . . . want to . . . shag her . . . that much . . . to be honest . . .’ Eric was saying, ‘. . . but . . . no choice . . . held to . . . ransom . . . by my . . . own cock.’

  Roger realised half a second too late that he was supposed to laugh. So he made a sort of half-gasping noise on an indrawn breath that was designed to indicate he would be convulsed with merriment if it weren’t for all this manly exertion. It was hard to tell if that placated Eric. He had stopped to catch his breath, with his arms on his hips. With the baseball cap and shooting jacket, his shotgun over the crook of one arm, puffing heavily in mud-caked trainers, he looked like someone who had set out to impersonate a country squire but then about halfway through putting on his costume had suddenly stopped caring.

  ‘. . . don’t wait for me . . . go on up . . . I’ll have a word with the others,’ said Eric. The other Pinker Lloyd men were straggling across the field towards them, with Lothar in the lead. He was wearing advanced-looking outdoor clothes, as if he were going orienteering or the like. His outer garments were brightly coloured Gore-Tex and carried the suggestion that if he felt like it he might jog back to London when they’d finished for the afternoon. They all seemed pretty jolly. Shooting was very much in fashion in the City and this weekend brought bragging rights.

  The beaters, who had gone out in advance, were waiting in the next field. The idea was to stand around near the copse and kill the pheasants which the beaters would drive up into the air. The pheasants were tame for the most part, and it was some work getting them to take off in order for them to be shot; so many of them would then be killed that there was no market for their meat. The majority of the pheasants were simply buried. A tractor would come and plough them under the earth. Roger felt it was hard to feel that that was anything other than a slightly revolting sign of excess, of waste. But the shooting itself was good fun.

  The four Pinker Lloyd men had now caught up with Eric and the group was standing around talking animatedly about something. Eric was waving his arms about, telling a story. The bankers were either enjoying it or doing a good job of pretending to. Roger used the moment to stand and look around, the first time all day he had been entirely on his own. It wasn’t windy where he stood but the winds higher up must be strong, as the clouds were both big and quick-moving, and now they were white: no more rain. In the distance he could see a pattern of light and shade moving across the field, which had been set aside from agricultural use and was knee-deep in grass. The copse, which looked from a distance like a single big tree, was a tight clump of ten oaks and beeches, denuded by the winter. The atmosphere beneath the trees was dark and still. A rabbit stood sniffing at the exposed roots of one of the oaks and then lolloped off into the grassy field where Roger could see the beaters standing about half a mile away, waiting for the signal to begin driving the pheasants.

  The Range Rovers had returned at the far side of the ploughed field, and were now being unpacked by a team of Eric’s people. What looked like two enormous hampers were being lifted out of the backs of the cars, and the last one was disgorging what looked like portable furniture. If the hampers contained food and drink, they would have enough to keep them eating and boozing well into the new year.

  Eric was still talking. Roger found it hard to imagine what the story must involve – two hookers, three Ferraris, ten thousand in cash . . . no, ten hookers, twenty Ferraris, a hundred grand . . . He did not feel sorry to be missing out. Roger, in this break away from work, felt relaxed enough to have a thought about ethics: the thought occurred to him that it was hypocritical to like his host’s hospitality while also letting himself enjoy his dislike of the man. Well, tough. That was how he felt.

  The rabbit, or a different rabbit, came back out of the grass and returned to the copse, where it continued sniffing around the roots of the same oak tree. Roger kept still; he could see its little nose twitching. There must be an interesting smell. The rabbit was moving its head one way and another, as if trying to get into just the right angle to sniff the leaf or nut or seed or pheasant turd or whatever it was. Then it walked over the root and began sniffing from the other side. Roger felt a surge of feeling that he for a moment could not recognise. The sensation was like a shiver. He realised that he was free. He was on his own and in the open air and he was still young enough, strong enough, to do anything he wanted with his life. He could just walk off now, get a lift to Eric’s house, pick up Arabella and the kids, drive back to London and announce that from now on they would all be living a different life, a simpler and economically smaller life, that they would go round the world for a year and then he would retrain as a teacher and they would move out of London, somewhere like this where you could walk and breathe and see the sky, and the kids would go to the local school and Arabella would look after them and they would pick out good-value cuts at the local butcher and he would drink tea from a mug while helping the kids with their homework. And every day he would go for a long walk, even when it was wet and windy, and he would come in smelling of the outside, the way the children sometimes smelled of the outdoors when they’d been playing on the Common, and then one day he would look at himself in the mirror and see a different man. These thoughts belonged to Roger but he also felt that they came from the air around him, from the fact that he was standing next to a copse in a field in Norfolk on his own, watching the grass sway and the clouds race, being ignored by a rabbit.

  The rabbit heard the others coming before he did. It raised its head, twitched its nose, and then with three hops was gone in the long grass. Then Roger heard the voices coming up the hill.

  ‘. . . had her . . . every which way . . . so I said . . . which way . . . is every which way?’

  16

  Freddy Kamo grew up in a two-room shack on the outskirts of the Senegalese town of Linguère. The shack had electricity, sometimes, but not running water. For water, the Kamos would have to take a jug to the well, a hundred metres away. The floor of the shack was made of packed earth and each room had a single bare electric bulb; the beds, thanks to a gift from a relative, had mosquito nets, the family’s sole luxury.

  Freddy was the only son of Shimé and Patrick Kamo. Both Shimé and Patrick were Wolof, members of the largest tribal group in Senegal; they were believing but undevout Muslims; Patrick had done well at the lycée and could both speak and read French. He married
at the age of fourteen and at the same age left school to begin work, first for his father-in-law delivering gas canisters, and then, when he was eighteen, in the police force. Patrick took a second wife, Adede, when Freddy was four, and had three more children with her, and then Shimé died in childbirth, along with a baby who would have grown up to be their second son. Freddy held no resentment towards his stepmother, who was kind to him, impeccably so, but she was very wrapped up in her own daughters, and in the years after Shimé’s death he grew very close to his father.

  Patrick Kamo was two people: a stern and unforgiving man at his work, and a soft, gentle, anxious parent. He was sometimes taken aback by how much he loved Freddy, but did his best to hide it from everyone except the boy himself. He worried about his son, a lot, especially as Freddy seemed to be such a dreamer, such a drifter, lacking the hardness the world demands. He was slow in his lessons and disliked school. All he ever wanted to do was play football. He was admittedly very good at football – or at least that’s what he was, right from the start, at about the age of five. As he got older, things changed. Football became the only thing Freddy ever spoke or thought about, and it became clear that he wasn’t merely good at football, but something else altogether. Patrick realised that Freddy was touched with something a long way beyond mere talent.

  Today, Freddy was seventeen, and even people with no interest in football, even people who had never been to a proper football match, even people who actively disliked the game, could see something special about Freddy Kamo with a ball at his feet. This wasn’t because Freddy looked at his ease with the ball; on the contrary. Even at the best of times Freddy looked awkward, clumsy, and as if he were about to trip over, with the gangly, jangling awkwardness of a teenage boy who has recently had a big growth spurt and hasn’t yet got used to the new disposition of his own limbs. He knocked things over and spilled things. He splashed Coke on himself and bumped into doorways.