Capital: A Novel

by John Lanchester

  ‘We might do it up, or might leave it for the buyer. A rough quote is all we’re asking for. But then there’s the hassle, the permissions . . . the council . . .’

  Mrs Leatherby seemed to fade in and out. She was not always listening to herself. Zbigniew wondered what it was . . . wondered about the room he wasn’t supposed to be going into . . . wondered why it was she who was selling when it wasn’t her house. Then he got it. She was selling her mother’s house, and her mother was still alive. Not for long, obviously, or she wouldn’t be selling the house. But what it boiled down to, after all the rationalisations and justifications, was that she was getting builders’ quotations to renovate her mother’s house, in order to sell it after her mother’s death, while her mother was still in the house, dying. A feeling of wrongness grew in Zbigniew; a feeling that he was, by participating in this, doing something that he should not be doing.

  ‘I’m getting a few other people in,’ she said. ‘A few quotes. You were recommended . . . I told you that. Rough figures to start with then something more specific. I’ll have more idea later when . . . Well, anyway, thank you for coming. Look around a bit more if you like. I’ll be in the kitchen.’

  Moving much quicker than before, she half-ran downstairs. Her heels made a skidding, skittering noise over the floor. It was too much for her, Zbigniew saw; she wasn’t a bad person doing a bad thing, she was just lost, didn’t know what to do.

  As he thought: she doesn’t know what to do, Zbigniew came back from his holiday. It had been short but he had enjoyed it. Now he was thinking about Davina again; or not thinking about her, just remembering how it was. Her way of pretending that nothing had happened, while the fact of what had happened sat in the room between them like a rotting corpse. The complete lack of any way out, that he could see or imagine; her expression sometimes, when he caught her looking at him with a look that was like the look a dog gave its master, needy, abject, beaten, eager. The way all talk between them had taken on a falsity, so that even the smallest of small talk was like a perfumed fart.

  Zbigniew, standing on the landing, heard Mrs Leatherby go all the way downstairs into the kitchen, then heard another door close. She had gone out into the garden. He was alone in the house, except for whatever or whoever was behind the bedroom door. It was like a horror film: the creature behind the door . . . And then for no reason he could name, Zbigniew went to the door and put his hand on the handle. It was wood, and warm to the touch. Very slightly loose, too; not fitted quite correctly; another piece of work. He took out his notebook, made a note, and then folded the book shut and slipped it into his jacket pocket. He turned the door handle for the moment, telling himself that he was checking the condition of the handle, seeing how smooth it was, how well the door had been fitted, but knowing that what he would do next was what he actually did do, turn the handle past the point of release, and then gently push the door so that it moved, with a faint creak. The door swung open. There was a smell of alcohol-based disinfectant.

  An old woman was lying in the bed. She was lying against the wall with the wooden bedstead against the window, looking towards him. He was on the point of apologising, and then he realised that although the woman’s eyes were open and she was apparently looking straight in his direction, she could not see him. It was as if he was invisible to her. Zbigniew had seen that look in the eyes of animals: a cow could look at you with a depth and intensity that was explained only by its absence of mind. That was the look in the old woman’s eyes. The power of presence combined with the power of absence. He realised that she must be Mrs Leatherby’s mother, and also that she must be dying.

  She looked at Zbigniew – if she was really looking at him, and not just lying with her eyes open in his direction – for about a minute. Then she slowly closed her eyes. Zbigniew felt his breath catch: perhaps she had just died, right here, right now! What could he do? What should he do? What was his responsibility? But no; that wasn’t what happened; dying people didn’t close their eyes like that, as if they were going to sleep. She hadn’t just died. She would soon, though, that was clear.

  It was something Zbigniew was never to forget: the smell, the feeling of the close, over-warm air of the bedroom, the presence of the old woman who had already gone some distance over to the other side and was partly not-there, and with it the sense of another presence in the room. Zbigniew was no believer, not in anything; but he found himself believing, for the first time, in death. Death was not just an idea, or something that happened to other people. He would die one day, just as this woman was dying, and he would die, as she did, alone. Even if there were people who loved him all around, he would die alone. It is a thought, a realisation, that comes to many people for the first time in the small hours of the morning, but for Zbigniew it came right there in the middle of the afternoon, in the bedroom of 42 Pepys Road.

  That night, Zbigniew broke up with Davina, definitively. He left no room for the possibility that they might get together again. He was as gentle as he could be, and also as final. It was over.

  57

  Mary wasn’t sure what to make of the specialist cancer nurse who came to stay at the house when her mother was dying. It didn’t help that she kept forgetting her name. She was called Joanna but Mary had some sort of mental block about it: she got the Jo but kept landing on Josephine, Joan, Jody, Jo, then realising the name wasn’t quite right and bailing out part of the way through. Every day she told herself at least ten times that Joanna’s name was Joanna, to no effect.

  The nurse was a brisk woman of about forty-five. She had hair which had gone from blonde to white-grey and wore her uniform with conviction. The staff at the hospice had been warmer; this one was all business. She had a faintly Scottish accent which added to the sense of chill. No doubt she saw so many people falling apart so completely that she had to make clear boundaries. I, the nurse, am over here; you, the family of the dying person, are over there. At quiet moments, she would commune with her mobile phone, having very quiet conversations which could be seen but not overheard, and texting at length. When she texted she bent forward to look at the keys. She was old to be such a mad texter.

  One thing you had to say about the nurse, though, was that she did everything. She knew what was happening, which was a big help to Mary, who was lost, especially so since her mother was now not reacting to anything and had all but passed over. This made Mary feel, more than anything else, lonely. She was sad too, but that was beneath the surface; what she was mainly aware of feeling was her complete isolation. She had an overwhelming wish to help her mother, to ease her last moments, and at the same time knew that there was nothing she could do. Except smoking. Smoking seemed to help. She was back up to a pack a day; Alan would kill her, if the fags didn’t. But she was sticking to her rule about not smoking indoors. To smoke indoors would be to have properly taken up smoking again, rather than to have adopted it temporarily as an emergency measure. Also it would stink the place out when they were showing buyers around.

  Afterwards, she knew, there would be plenty to do. The funeral, the probate, the tax bill, selling the house, or more likely fixing up the house then selling it. All that would be a nightmare; but the business of it would be a relief too. For now there was nothing to do. The cancer charity were not shy about saying that their nurses only came during the final days, so she knew it was a matter of hours until her mother died, and yet the time still seemed to stretch.

  In the evening Joanna, in her uniform, came into the sitting room where Mary was sitting in front of – watching would be too strong a word – EastEnders, and fighting the craving for a cigarette. Joanna’s body language was different: she clasped her hands in front of her lap, like a child standing in front of Teacher for a telling-off.

  ‘I think you should come up now,’ she said, and her voice was different too. Mary went upstairs to the bedroom, wishing, as she did so, that the ten seconds it took would last for much longer. When she got to the opened door it was immediately
apparent that her mother was breathing differently. It was a shallower noise but seemed to come from deeper in her chest; it had a note of rasp to it. Mary turned and looked for guidance from the nurse, who moved her head forwards in a gesture which Mary understood: it meant, go to your mother’s bedside and take her hand. This she did.

  Petunia’s hand was warm. That surprised Mary. Her mother’s breathing was unnatural, but it did not sound as if she were struggling for breath; this was some more profound shift than that. She tried to imagine what was happening inside her mother’s mind, inside her being. Was it a succession of images, of recollections from childhood – glimpses of things which had happened to her in this very house, decades ago? Her father and mother, walking to school, the birth of her children, the thousands of meals cooked and eaten? Was it a kind of dream of those things? Or was she immersed in pure feeling, so that there was nothing but fear, or love, or loss, or some other pure state? Or was she given over to pure sensation, warmth or cold or pain or itching or thirst or some terrible combination of all of them? Or was she looking into the light, moving towards it, fading into it, becoming light herself? Or was her mother not there any more, so that this was just her body?

  Petunia took a ragged, broken breath, then made a cracked, fragmented, deep exhalation. Mary felt a change in the way her mother’s hand felt in hers; it did not go limp, because it already was limp, but it no longer felt the same. A charge of presence was no longer there. Her mother was no longer there. Petunia Howe was dead.

  It was frightening and wrong to see her mother’s eyes still open. The nurse, as if she realised – but then she probably did, she had done this many times before, you had to remember that this happened all the time – the nurse reached out and closed them. Strange, Mary had seen that gesture in films, it always looked hard to believe, as if the eyes had little levers in them so you could pull them down just like that, with the palm of your hand, but it must be true because that was just what the nurse had done. Maybe they taught you how to do it. The nurse put her hand on Mary’s shoulder; the first time she had touched her. She didn’t say anything, and nor did Mary, who more than anything else in the world, at this moment, wanted a cigarette. After a minute or two she got up and went downstairs, taking the packet of Marlboro Lights out of her cardigan pocket and opening the garden door. She thought: my poor old mum. Thank God. My poor old dad. One of them suddenly, one of them slowly, the first hard on the survivors, the second hard on everybody. Poor me, she thought also. Orphan Mary. Mary Mary quite contrary look at her parents go. If you had been a better daughter they would still be alive, a voice told her, as another voice immediately contradicted it: rubbish!

  I suppose this is what they call denial, thought Mary. Except it didn’t seem to her that she was denying anything; what she mainly felt was numb. Anaesthetised. She must call Alan. She finished the first cigarette then did something she hardly ever did and lit another from the stub.

  If Mary had been looking outside herself, there still would have been just enough light to see the garden, which had kept growing and growing, untrimmed and unattended to, all through the spring. Now the hollyhocks and delphiniums were flowering, and the lupins had started to bloom. The clematis at the back wall had stretched into the neighbours’ gardens on both sides, and reached over the wall into the flats which fronted onto Mackell Road. The unkempt patch of lawn was a deep, chaotic green. The garden was sheltered, and when the plants were in bloom their perfume hung in the air; today that smell, always more vivid at dusk, was also sharply green. Even through the cigarette smoke, Mary could detect the spearmint that had spread all through the left-hand flower bed like the weed it was. It was a time of day, a time of the year, that Petunia had loved. The honeysuckle which grew around the door had spread, and one or two tendrils of the plant had reached around the window into the kitchen itself. It was as if the garden Petunia had loved was trying to reach towards her, into the home where she had lived and died, as she set out on her final journey.

  58

  ‘I have to do another poo!’ said Joshua. Matya wasn’t sure whether to sigh or laugh, so did a little bit of both. They were in the sitting room downstairs, with the loo mercifully close. It was raining, so they were having an indoors day, though if the weather improved Matya had promised that they would go to the pond on the other side of the Common and feed the ducks. On the way, they would discuss superpowers, an interest Josh had now caught from his older brother: which were their favourite powers, which one they would have if they could only have one, which one they would have if they could make up a new one, and which superhero was best. Joshua’s current favourite was Batman because he liked his cave.

  ‘OK,’ said Matya. She took his hand and steered him towards the toilet. Joshua preferred to go to the toilet on his own, but did not like the door to be closed – it made him feel lonely. He also liked to carry on a conversation while he was in there because he liked the feeling of having company.

  ‘It’s runny,’ said Joshua.

  ‘Poor darling, do you have diarrhoea?’ said Matya.

  ‘No it’s not that runny. It’s poo sauce,’ said Joshua. He had been exposed to over-frank discussions of his own toilet habits, and since they were of great and legitimate interest to him, had acquired a complete confidence that anything which happened to him in the lavatory could and should be gone into in detail, with whoever he was talking to. Poo sauce was a term, invented by him and found very useful at 51 Pepys Road, for a stool which was neither liquid nor firm.

  ‘Oh well, that’s not so bad,’ said Matya. ‘Do you need me to wipe your bottom?’

  ‘Not yet!’ said Joshua. ‘Hmm. I wonder.’

  This was a new expression which he had picked up from who knew where, and which made Matya’s heart do a little flip every time he used it. He went on:

  ‘Matty, you know the ducks?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What if there are no ducks? What if they’ve all gone away?’

  ‘Well, then we won’t be able to see them.’

  ‘Yes, but what if they don’t come back?’

  ‘They always come back. They live there.’

  But Matya was being deliberately obtuse, and Joshua started to become annoyed.

  ‘Yes, but one day.’

  ‘I don’t think that could ever happen, Joshua. I don’t think the ducks would ever go away for ever.’

  That brought reassurance. It made sense that the ducks would not go away for ever if they had not gone away for ever before. ‘Could you please wipe my bottom please?’ said Joshua. It would have been untrue to say that this was Matya’s favourite part of her job, but she did her duty. Joshua climbed down from the loo seat and then climbed up on the step by the sink to wash his hands. He liked washing his hands but needed to be supervised or he would use up the entire soap dispenser to make bubbles.

  ‘All clean now,’ he said, holding his hands up for inspection.

  ‘All clean now,’ agreed Matya. ‘Shall we go up and see Mummy?’

  ‘Hmm. I wonder. All right!’ said Joshua. He held out his hand for Matya to help him get down from the step, and then kept holding her hand as they went upstairs together.

  ‘Then we can go and feed the ducks,’ she said.

  ‘Afterwards.’

  ‘Yes, afterwards.’

  They knocked on the Younts’ bedroom door and were greeted by a faint, brave call of ‘Come in, darlings.’ Matya pushed the door open. Arabella lay propped up on a throne of pillows, watching a black and white film; the sound went off but the picture stayed on.

  ‘Hello, Mummy,’ said Joshua. ‘Are you better yet?’

  ‘A little bit, I think, darling,’ said Arabella. She had been out late the night before with her friend Saskia, and they had ended up at two in the morning at Saskia’s club drinking what the man they ended up talking to insisted on calling ‘post-ironic’ Brandy Alexanders. The alcohol and late night had brought on a bug that Arabella had been fighting off for a
few days, and now she was ill. It had to be admitted that she did not look well: she was pink-eyed and red-nosed and pale.

  ‘How is my lovely boy?’ she asked.

  ‘I did poo sauce.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Not very runny though. Not dia, dia, diary. Just poo sauce.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Now we’re going to feed the ducks. As long as you’re not going to die?’

  ‘No, I don’t think I will die, darling. It’s just a little coldy thing.’

  Joshua climbed onto the bed, gave his mother a brief powerful hug, then climbed back off it again and said ‘Goodbye, Mummy!’ as he headed for the door.

  ‘Can I get you anything?’ asked Matya.

  ‘You are an angel. No, thank you.’ And then, as she heard the front door being opened with a key, she said, ‘What the hell’s that?’

  It was her husband. Roger made bag-and-coat noises downstairs, then came bounding up to the bedroom, greeting his son with a ‘What’s up, matey?’ on the way.

  ‘I did poo sauce,’ said Joshua.

  ‘That’ll show ’em,’ said Roger. ‘Hello, darling! How’s the dreaded hangovirus?’

  Arabella knew how tall her husband was; and yet about once every two weeks she was surprised by it. Here, as he filled the door frame while she lay in bed, was one of those moments.

  ‘Bastard. I’m dying.’

  ‘You said you weren’t dying, Mummy,’ Joshua said from the hallway.

  ‘Not really, darling. I’m just saying so to Daddy. What about that lovely walk now, darling? The ducks?’

  ‘They’ll still be there,’ said Joshua. ‘Matya said.’

  Arabella waited while her son and his nanny went out. There was a struggle with shoes and clothes and a paper bag of breadcrumbs, and then the door shut.