Anyway, here he was. Pepys Road. Smitty had taken the Tube, because although he could easily have driven, and deeply loved his Beemer, he found he got more ideas when he took the Tube and spent the trip looking at people and wondering about how to get into their heads. That was a big part of what art was about – getting into people’s heads.
Before Smitty rang the doorbell, he could hear his nan pottering about inside. One of her signature moves was to put the kettle on before coming to the door, so it would be boiling within seconds of the guest sitting down. Then the door opened and there she was.
‘Nan!’ said Smitty.
‘Graham!’ said his nan, because that was Smitty’s real name. He
handed over a box of chocolates – a fantastically expensive box of chocolates that his soon-to-be-ex-assistant had ‘sourced’ (the soon-to-be-ex-assistant’s word) from a poncy shop in West London. His nan would not notice that the chocolates were incredibly fancy, which is why Smitty felt free to give them to her. If he’d given them to his mum, she would have subjected him to Abu Ghraib–style interrogation about how much they had cost and whether he could afford it.
‘I’ve put the kettle on,’ said his nan. They went through to the kitchen, Smitty’s favourite room in the house and possibly in the whole world, because it was exactly like time travel to 1958. Linoleum – Smitty loved lino. A Coronation biscuit tin. A proper kettle, one you put on the stove, none of that electric rubbish. The world’s most knackered fridge. No dishwasher. His granddad had been too tight to buy one, and then after he’d died and his nan was living on her own there wasn’t enough washing-up to justify the expense.
His nan wasn’t moving quite as well as she might have been. She was what, eighty-three next year? Nan had never taken up much space, but she had always seemed pretty robust, physically. That ran on both sides of the family. But she seemed thinner, frailer, and now that he was looking closely, slightly less steady on her pins. Probably just age, pure and simple. You heard people say forty was the new thirty and fifty was the new forty and sixty was the new forty-five, but you never heard anybody say eighty was the new anything. Eighty was just eighty.
Smitty was tempted to put out an arm to help her down the single step into the kitchen but resisted the impulse. Nan was talking about how she got most of her shopping done over the internet now, how his mother had set it up for her, and what a blessing it was, though she didn’t like the fact that they used up so many plastic bags, sometimes a whole plastic bag for a single item, but his mother had told her that they took away the bags too and she had asked and it was true and that was a blessing. Smitty semi-listened to all this.
‘You can get anything over the internet now, Nan. Friend of mine moved to Los Angeles. In America, six thousand miles away. Before he goes he sells his flat, sells his car, and dumps his girlfriend. Then he goes online and rents a flat, rents a car, and gets a new girlfriend, all over the internet and all before he’s set a foot in the place. True story.’
‘It’s a different world,’ said his nan. She was fussing about with the teapot and cups. His nan was a bit of a tea snob and liked the whole ritual, warming the pot, doing it with leaves and not tea bags, proper cups. While she was doing that, Smitty picked a postcard up off the table. It was a black and white photograph which he took a couple of seconds to realise was the front door of 42 Pepys Road, shot in an arty style with a camera held low and tilted upwards so the top of the door frame loomed over the rest and the angles looked funny. The kind of photo which would be crap if it were a normal photo but would be OK if it were consciously artistic. Smitty turned the photo over. On the back it said, in printed black ink, ‘We Want What You Have’. There was no signature and the postmark was indecipherable.
‘You seen this, Nan?’ Smitty asked.
‘I’ve gone back to English Breakfast. It’s a bit stronger. Oh, that! It’s one of these postcards I’ve been getting. One every fortnight or so for a couple of months. All pictures of the house with the same thing written on them. I’ve kept them. They’re all over there by the dresser.’
Smitty went over to the dresser. Sure enough, beside photos of his nan with Albadadda, and of his mum and himself and his brother and sister at various phases of development, there was a stack of postcards, all of them pictures of 42 Pepys Road. All of the pictures were different. One of the photos was an extreme close-up of the door number, another was shot from right down the street, as far away as you could go and still pick out the front of number 42. Another was shot from head height, looking straight down at the front doorsteps. Another, from more or less the same angle, looked sideways across the front bay window. One of them had four different pictures cropped into quadrants. Underneath the postcards was a jiffy bag addressed in the same handwriting. Smitty opened it and took out a DVD, with a label which also said ‘We Want What You Have’.
‘Have you had a look at this, Nan?’ he asked, knowing what the answer would be. No point sending a DVD to Mrs Howe.
‘No, of course not, darling, I don’t have one of those thingies.’ She put the cup down in front of him. ‘I always think English Breakfast is nicer with milk, but I’ve got some sliced lemon here if you need it.’
‘Sure. Thanks. Listen, Nan, can I borrow this? Do you mind if I borrow all these cards?’
‘Of course you can, darling. Drink up, it’s much less nice when it goes cold.’ She put a plate of biscuits beside Smitty, and began unwrapping the posh chocolates so she could offer them back to him.
T
he Younts had gone away for the weekend. It was ten days before Christmas and seven days before Roger was due to find out about his bonus. Their host was a client of Roger’s at the bank, a man called Eric Fletcher, who owned a house in Norfolk. This is where the Younts were.
Eric’s house had a barn, which he had had converted into a spa, for the use of his wife Naima – he liked to joke that building her a spa was the only way he was able to get her out of London. Opposite it he had built another barn, so that the house was now framed on both sides with a courtyard in the middle. The second barn was given over to the business of entertaining children: the downstairs was full of toys and games for small boys and girls, Lego and Barbie and Bratz and Nintendo Wii and Action Men and Brio; the upstairs was equipped for older ones, PS3 and Xbox 360 and pool table. Both rooms had flat-screen televisions and DVD libraries. There were two nannies. ‘The whole point of this place,’ Eric would say, solemnly, ‘is that it’s supposed to be playtime for
everybody
.’
All this had come as a very welcome surprise for Arabella. She had not met Eric before and had not known what to expect. Roger had said that he was a yob but that the house would be lovely, and to give Roger his credit, which she was not especially in the mood to do, he had been right. This was a treat; and Arabella had a deep and sincere love of
treats. You could not have too many treats. It was perfectly all right to live from treat to treat. Also, Mrs Eric was simply heaven. She was a shortish, plumpish, very chatty half-Asian woman of about forty who at this precise moment was sitting back on the marble seat next to Arabella in the hammam, stark naked except for a towel wrapped around her head to protect her hair from the steam. Arabella, feeling a little shy, had gone into the hammam with her dressing gown but had now joined in by casting it off. Of the other wives, two were now getting massages, one was still in bed, and one was showing off by swimming laps in the pool. Arabella and Naima had already bonded over their shared obsession with
The X Factor
and their mutual determination to watch all the weekend’s episodes.
‘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 collector’s modern furniture. The bathrooms and spa were stocked with expensive cosmetic products. Obviously it was a little 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 heaven. 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.
‘
… 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.