‘Best stay with me. Or go downstairs and see what Daddy is doing.’
Fatima nodded, her expression serious: she had a mission. She moved around to her father’s side of the bed and got in.
An hour and a half later and they were all in the kitchen, good to go. Even Shahid, who under the circumstances could be forgiven for lying in and giving the occasion a miss, was there. He had been out of custody for three days and was still giddily happy – the main symptom being that he couldn’t stop talking. He had lost weight in jail, five or six kilos, and what with the fresh shave and haircut he’d had on getting out, was suddenly much more handsome. In fact he now looked like someone out of a film, a lean dark good-looking stranger with a past. If it had been him going to Lahore, Rohinka would be willing to bet that he wouldn’t come back single. Now he was sitting next to Fatima, coaxing her to eat her breakfast cereal by pretending to take huge mouthfuls of it himself, then flying it to her mouth making aeroplane noises. Mrs Kamal was sitting next to him, arranging her passport and plane ticket and other documentation on the table in front of her. On the other side of her was Mohammed in his high chair, barely awake. He was not cranky, but he was also not fully conscious, and he was making no attempt to eat or to interact with anyone: sitting there slumped sideways, chubby and skimpy-haired, he had the air of a Sultan recovering from a heavy lunch. Next to him his father too looked tired, and the coincidence made them look very alike; the resemblance, which Rohinka sometimes could and sometimes couldn’t see, was unmistakable. They looked like twins with a thirty-five-year age gap.
Mrs Kamal snapped her handbag closed.
‘It’s time,’ she said.
‘Usman’s brought the car round,’ said Ahmed. The two brothers would take their mother to the airport; Shahid had an appointment with Mrs Strauss the solicitor. They went into their farewells, and then came out in front of the shop, where Usman sat at the wheel of the Sharan with its hazard lights blinking. Ahmed loaded Mrs Kamal’s bag into the back of the people carrier. She had two suitcases and the biggest wheelie carry-on bag Rohinka had ever seen: with its handle extended, it was almost as tall as she was.
Standing in front of her mother-in-law, Rohinka felt a wave of the very last thing she had expected: affection. She had seen what Mrs Kamal had been like when Shahid was locked up, and would never forget it. She hoped Fatima and Mohammed would never be in trouble of that scale; if they ever were, she hoped she could live up to her mother-in-law’s example. But this wasn’t easy to put into words, and she made no attempt to begin. Perhaps she didn’t have to. Mrs Kamal stood in front of her, gripped her arm and said with an amused, knowing look, like a character actor taking applause at a curtain call:
‘Daughter. It has been eventful.’ And then Mrs Kamal turned to get into the car, saying, ‘And now time to see about that upgrade.’
Part Four
November 2008
92
What’s the worst that can happen? Roger had always thought that was a stupid question. If you had difficulty imagining how bad things could become, all that meant was that you didn’t have much imagination.
There was no need to ask Roger’s former colleagues at Pinker Lloyd what was the worst that could happen. It was fantastic: the entire bank had gone under. The scandal about the rogue trader in Roger’s department had not been huge, but it had been just big enough to start rumours about the bank, which had caused people to take a sceptical look at the books just at the moment when capital markets were freaking out after the implosion of Lehman Brothers. People began to wonder about Pinker Lloyd’s exposure to short-term loans and its reliance on borrowing money cheaply, easily and quickly on the international money market. Credit dried up overnight: lenders withdrew their loans, clients withdrew their money, they had to ask the Bank of England for help, the Bank dithered and bingo, Pinker Lloyd was out of business. The bank had gone into receivership; its assets were being parcelled out and sold off; and everybody lost their jobs. Lothar had been publicly humiliated. Roger was thrilled. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer group of people.
So he ought to have been in a good mood, but now 51 Pepys Road was on the market. The asking price was £3.5 million. The estate agent, Travis, had told him that the price was a little ‘toppy’, but that ‘they might as well go for it’, on the basis that ‘what’s the worst that can happen?’
Roger found that he hated everything about selling the house. He hated Travis, especially his voice – not his accent, he was used to all sorts of accents in the City, but his voice, which was flat, scratchy, affectless but wheedling. Most of all, he hated him for the fact that he felt entitled to have opinions and give advice – he announced that he was loving the way you’ve done the kitchen, praised the clever use of natural light in the sitting room, said there was something a little bit tired about Roger’s study but that that wasn’t such a bad thing given how nice the rest of the house was – it left them something to improve and gave it a bit of a blank canvas feeling. Travis was an avid fan of TV property programmes and felt at ease with the culture of wandering around other people’s houses and passing judgement on them.
As did most of the people who came to look at 51 Pepys Road – not that people said things out loud, except in the most egregious cases, but Roger could tell that they were thinking them, and that was bad enough. They looked, they snooped, they ogled, they judged. Roger could hear their little brains whirring. Why are they selling? Wonder why the husband’s around the house. Wonder where they’re moving to. Wonder what price they’ll accept. Wonder whether those pots are Lucie Rie. Snoop snoop whirr, went their little brains. Many, a significant minority, perhaps even a majority, were blatantly there to do nothing except sniff around the house out of vulgar curiosity. Travis claimed that he ‘weeded out the time-wasters’, but this was clearly not true, and when the obvious non-starters came to peek into his life, Roger struggled with the temptation to tell them right there on the doorstep to just fuck off. There was even a couple from down the street who came one day to poke around. They clearly hadn’t been expecting to be recognised by the owners. Travis was showing them around, but just to freak them out, Roger followed behind them, glaring, arms crossed, while the estate agent did his spiel. They were in and out of there in ten minutes flat.
‘Travis, those people already live in this street,’ Roger said, biting back something much ruder.
‘Oops, my bad,’ said Travis, clearly not thinking it any fault of his. ‘Some people, eh? Still, got a couple of good ’uns for you this afternoon.’
It was not that the house did not get offers. It did, immediately – meaning on the first day, from the very first people to look at it. Not that the offer was real, of course. Or rather it was real in the sense that its intention was sincere, but the money simply wasn’t there. These were people who would a. have to sell their own house for a lot more than they’d paid for it and b. have to arrange a gigantic mortgage before they were in a position to even think about offering for 51 Pepys Road – in fact they shouldn’t, given the realities of the situation, even have been looking. Travis, full of nonsense as he was in almost every respect, turned out to be surprisingly tough about the question of what offers to take seriously. No doubt because it bore on the question of whether he’d actually get paid his commission. ‘Don’t even think about them,’ he’d told Roger. ‘Unless the money’s real, it’s not worth it.’
Maybe they could actually afford it though . . . and that truly was a galling thought. Roger’s earlier, pre-Christmas-2006-bonus-fiasco, pre-sacking self was not far from being that person who could unthinkingly afford a £3.5 million house. That person felt as if he had died a long time ago; or rather like Roger’s long-lost and not much missed younger brother.
What Roger hated most about all this house fandango was that it was insane. No one could make a rational judgement about a decision of that size so quickly, after a twenty-minute viewing. But this air of madness seemed to be general. The whole
process had a frenzy to it – everybody seemed in a rush, everybody was somehow heated up. It verged on the sexual. The thoughtful ones – the ones whose caution stood out, who were obviously more deliberate and grown-up – came and looked at the house twice for maybe a total of forty minutes. For the biggest financial decision they were ever likely to make in their lives – forty minutes. It all made Roger think about those postcards that said ‘We Want What You Have’. He’d like to track down whoever it was who sent them, jam the postcard into his mouth, and say, OK, fine, I’ll swap your life for mine, sight unseen – just to see the look on the little shit’s face.
Arabella, on the other hand, was rather enjoying the house being on the market. There was something very satisfying about the business of making the house nice as a way of adding to its value. Doing things to prettify the house was a sensible and practical necessity – it was a way of ‘maximising the value of their most important capital asset’, a phrase Arabella remembered from the time Roger had used it to justify pulling up the floorboards to put in new wiring for his home entertainment system. It went without saying that no house was perfect in and of itself. There were always little things to be done. Arabella bought a new bedside table and took the old one to the dump, and in her opinion made the bedroom much nicer, more saleable, just by doing that. Obviously she did that without telling Roger; equally obviously he didn’t notice. She longed – longed – to get rid of the Christmas sofa, a grey modern piece which looked lovely at the showroom but was just somehow wrong in their drawing room; but Roger would probably spot that change. Nothing could have irritated Roger more than seeing Arabella take a bizarre kind of pleasure in primping and tarting up the house prior to selling it. If her behaviour had been specifically designed to drive him round the bend – which in some moments was what Roger suspected – it couldn’t have been more perfectly calculated.
‘The plan is,’ Arabella said to Saskia over drinks in the bar at a restaurant where the bar was called The Library, ‘flog the house, move to Minchinhampton for a bit. That’s on the market too but it’ll take longer to sell – so we’re told, anyway. Then the plans diverge. Official plan, by which I mean Roger’s plan, is that we sell Minchinhampton too, take the money and go and look for a’ – she made quote marks with her fingers – ‘“small business opportunity” for Roger to set up shop then “do something real” by which he means . . . well, your guess is as good as mine. It has to be somewhere with good schools, primary anyway, and where the transport isn’t too much of a nightmare.’
‘Doesn’t sound too much like you. Green wellies with Chanel, Audi four-by-four on the gravel, flirting with the stable boy – I suppose I can see it, just about.’
‘Well, quite. The real plan, my plan, is, we go to the country, I get Minchinhampton looking nice, and take my time over it, and Roger gets enough of a chance to get the walking through the fields breathing fresh air out of his system, and realises he’s going to die of boredom, and all the guff about somewhere the children can run around is absolute crap because the country’s just as full of dangers as the town, more so, and then he notices that I’m so bored I’m about to run off with the Bikram Yoga teacher in the nearest market town, and he snaps out of it and by then all the Pinker Lloyd fuss has died down, and he sends out his CV and gets another proper job. None of this rubbish about moving to Ludlow to make widgets – a City job. Six-figure basic, seven-figure bonus in a good year. The way it’s supposed to be.’
Saskia gestured for two more lychee martinis. The waiter bowed and glided.
‘That sounds more sensible,’ she said.
‘Yes, and the good thing about this is that it’s made my parents wake up a bit. They always thought that because Roger did what he did and because we live like we do – correction, we lived like we did – we were made of money. They thought we were rich instead of your typical London struggling well-off. So they’ve woken up to the realities a bit, and the fantastic thing is, they’ve offered to pay the boys’ way through school – boarding school – we’re resolved on that. At least I am. So all we have to do is get them through to eleven, and then Mama and Papa will do all the rest – prep school first and then somewhere decent. It’s all a long way off but you do need a plan, don’t you?’
The martinis arrived and the two women toasted each other. Across the room there was someone Arabella thought she recognised from TV. Or did she?
This lunch was a rare moment of luxury for Arabella, a rare glimpse of her old life. Josh was at his nursery, pick-up at 3.30, and Conrad was on a play date with a woman Arabella knew from NCT classes, who she’d reconnected with when bumping into her in the coffee shop. They hadn’t seen each other for years. There was something of an ideological difference, or at least a certain human stickiness, about the fact that Polly had chosen to give up work while her children were young, whereas Arabella didn’t work but also had full-time childcare. The thing about looking after young children was, you had to be cut out for it, and Arabella, quite simply and quite frankly – she said so herself – wasn’t. Her boys were lovely, but they were all-consuming, and Arabella did not want to be all-consumed. And now here they were again, both pushing Bugaboos containing sleeping three-year-olds.
The first play date at Arabella’s house had been a bit of a disaster because little Toby had had an incident in his knickers within ten minutes of being left there, and Arabella hadn’t been able to face the prospect of wiping his bottom – so when Polly got back from the hairdressers two hours later, he was pretty ripe. Arabella said, ‘Oh my God, that only just happened,’ but Polly would, once she saw the evidence first-hand, have reasons to strongly suspect that wasn’t true. Arabella’s next text to Polly had been ignored and she’d thought she’d blown it, but a fortnight later she’d called up and set up this play date. They were, for all the minor differences, from the same tribe. Arabella was due to collect Conrad just before she had to pick Josh up.
It felt like the first treat she’d had in months. The full-time-mother thing was hard.
‘Mrs Yount, so nice to see you again,’ said the head waiter, arriving at the side of their table. He made to pick up the two menus, which neither woman had touched. ‘Two set lunches?’ he asked. Saskia nodded, and then he again bowed and glided.
‘£34.50 for six courses,’ said Saskia. ‘You’re practically stealing from them.’
93
It had got to the point where Patrick could no longer bear to go to any of the meetings concerning Freddy’s future. Freddy’s injury, Freddy’s prognosis, Freddy’s insurance claim, Freddy’s future – they were all the same thing. If there were to be a single meeting which he knew in advance was going to be decisive, that would be different: Patrick could clench his teeth and get through it. But it was never like that. The insurance company’s lawyers were always there, stalling, dodging, and driving up the wall even the other professionals who were supposed to be used to this kind of thing.
The result was that Patrick asked Mickey to go to the meetings on his and Freddy’s behalf. He trusted Mickey. It was the man’s evident upset over what was happening which had caused this. Patrick could see that Mickey felt just as miserable as he did and with that could see the truth, which was that however he might have begun his relationship with the Kamos – seeing Freddy as a club asset to be exploited and milked and cashed in on to the maximum possible extent – he had now come to the point where he loved Freddy. Patrick finally had someone he could be completely open with about his son’s circumstances. So the strangest of things had happened and Patrick and Mickey had become, sort of, friends. They were not fully at ease with each other, and never would be – but on the subject of Freddy, they could be fully honest and open. Their relations had the freedom-within-boundaries of friendship.
‘I have a favour to ask of you,’ Patrick said. The two men were sitting downstairs watching Barcelona play Majorca in La Liga on a Sunday evening, while Freddy was upstairs in the games room. All three of them found it painf
ul to watch football, and all three of them were continuing to do so out of principle and also out of the fear that if they ever gave the habit up, they might not get it back. ‘I must ask if you will represent Freddy alone at these meetings. I find them too difficult. I can’t go any more. Until there is real news.’
Mickey understood straight away what was being asked of him and what it implied.
‘Of course I will do that, Patrick. It would be an honour.’
And so that’s what Mickey had been doing – going to the meetings and soaking up the bullshit. In doing this, he had also been dishing out some stick. The absence of the Kamos allowed him to show just how upset he was, which meant it allowed him to be much angrier and much more explicit.
‘Who the fuck do you think you are?’ he said to the most senior of the four executives from the insurance company present at their last meeting. The senior one was the skinniest, as in corporate affairs these days was often the way. Next to him were two plumpish middle-manager types, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, one of whom was in charge of medical mumbo-jumbo and the other responsible for legal bullshit, and the fourth was a subordinate who, to judge from his contributions to meetings thus far, might have been deaf-mute. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing? You think Freddy Kamo’s some jungle bunny who should piss off back to the bush and still be grateful he’s got one good knee left? Is that it? You think he’s some unfortunate loser who’s so thick he isn’t going to realise he has a valid, legally binding contract with you?’
Capital: A Novel Page 45