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.
‘What are you doing? Been sacked?’
‘Don’t be silly, it’s that thing,’ said Roger, who was taking his clothes off and heading for the shower.
‘Thing? What thing? Oh fuck!’ said Arabella, remembering that Roger had, in fact, told her some time in advance that there was a thing; had given it a follow-up mention a week or two ago; and had mentioned yesterday morning, when she had said that she was going out to see Saskia, that she shouldn’t end up too hung-over because there was a thing. It was some bank do for one of the charities Pinker Lloyd supported to advance the social ambitions of its senior partners. Arabella couldn’t quite remember which – it was Spina Bifida or AIDS Orphans or the Soil Association. Something like that. It was a big thing too, she remembered, some sort of ball or banquet or ball-banquet. These occasions were, for Arabella, half fun and half ghastly, depending on the exact social mix much more than on the entertainment or venue. Now and then she would buy something for charity, a frock or cooking lesson or holiday week at somebody’s house. That would be out of the question tonight, of course, for two reasons: one, since the Christmas bonus disaster, they were officially tightening their belts; two, with this hangover, it was out of the question for her to go to the thing. It would literally kill her.
Roger came out of the shower and Arabella broke her news.
‘Well, that’s great. A pair of tickets at two hundred quid each and I’ll be sitting there on my own like a spare prick at a table of my senior colleagues. Still, it’s fair enough, though, I suppose, given that I didn’t give you any warning. Oh wait, hang on a minute – now that I think about it, I’ve been reminding you at regular intervals for three bloody months, up to and including yesterday.’
‘Darling, I said I was sorry.’
‘Actually no, in point of fact, you didn’t. What you said was that you were too ill to come.’
‘Well, I meant that I was sorry.’
‘Oh, fine, so that’s all right then. That’s fantastic. Fabulous. And I only agreed to go in the first place because I knew you wanted to.’
Which wasn’t true, and both of them knew it; Roger liked the firm’s charity dos, where he could show off his good nature and his good manners and his gift for work-related socialising; but Arabella, under the circumstances, allowed it to pass.
‘Take someone else, darling. Take—’ and Arabella, who had been about to suggest Saskia, caught herself just in time, a. because Roger didn’t like Saskia, b. because she didn’t entirely trust her friend with her husband, and c. because Saskia would be just as hung-over as she was, and if Roger called her and she turned him down he would be even more cross than he was already. ‘Take Matya.’
Roger blinked and blushed slightly and stood a tiny bit straighter. Arabella, who was often oblivious to things, had not consciously registered that her husband fancied their nanny; but as she saw Roger’s reaction to her suggestion, she realised that he did. Not to worry. Roger was not the kind of man to sleep with the nanny, he just wasn’t the type; he was too lazy and too vain to make himself ridiculous in that specific way and Matya wasn’t the type either, and besides, if she fancied Roger so much as a tiny bit it would have shown up on Arabella’s radar. No, it was all fine. All it meant was that Roger would be more likely to go along with the suggestion, which was so much the better. Except – shit! – she herself would have to get the children ready for, and then into, bed. Shit. But that was still better than five hours or so given over to clean drinking water for Haitians or whatever it was.
To cover for the fact that he liked the idea, Roger began to make objections.
‘She’ll be bored out of her mind.’
‘It’ll be a nice change for her.’
‘She’ll be out of her depth.’
‘With your colleagues? Don’t be stupid. She won’t have to talk
much, just sit there looking pretty and silent and pretending to listen while they go wanking on about shooting and the congestion charge.’
And then finally something real:
‘They’ll laugh at me if they know I’ve taken the nanny.’
‘So don’t tell them. Just say she’s a friend. We’ll brief her to say the same thing.’
‘They’ll think she’s an escort.’
‘When you’ve got me at home to come back to, I don’t think so.’
So Roger found himself in a good mood, and looking forward to his evening. He began humming show tunes as he opened the wardrobe and flicked through the racks, looking for his Armani dinner suit.
M
atya had an ambivalent relationship with the currents of money on which much of London seemed to float. It was part of the reason she was here: she had come to this big city, this world city, to try her luck, and she would be lying if she said that the idea of making money was no part of that luck. She wasn’t sure how to make money, exactly, but anyone with eyes could see that it was everywhere in London, in the cars, the clothes, the shops, the talk, the very air. People got it and spent it and thought about it and talked about it all the time. It was brash and horrible and vulgar, but also exciting and energetic and shameless and new and not like Kecskemét in Hungary which had seemed, as the place we grow up in always seems, timeless and static. On the other hand, none of the money sloshing around London belonged to her. Things were happening, but not to her. If the city was one huge shop window, she was outside on the pavement, looking in. Getting on for four years after moving to London, at the age of twenty-seven, she was still waiting for her life to begin.
She was in a receptive mood when Roger and Arabella asked if she would go to the charity do. She might not have been as amenable if she’d known that Roger was worried about her being taken for an escort; but the idea of playing an international woman of mystery was one that she immediately understood. There was no time to get home and back and changed, and in any case Matya had nothing she could
confidently wear to a ball-banquet. This sort of thing brought out the best in Arabella. Once Matya had picked up Conrad from his play date, Roger was banished downstairs to look after the children for an hour. Arabella lay on her pillows and gave orders and a running commentary as Matya tried on various of her outfits. Though Matya was an inch taller, with smaller boobs and a bigger bum, they had established in the past that some clothes fitted both of them. ‘It’s proof that there is a God,’ said Arabella. Now, as Matya tried on dresses, she lay propped up on the pillows and passed judgement.
‘Not that, darling. You’re going to have to wear something open-toed and with that it’ll just look weird. Try the Dries van Noten. The one with the print … Twirl … No, makes you look a bit hippy. Try the black one again … No, you need the push-up bra. Damn … OK, try the green one.’ And so on. Eventually they settled on a bias-cut emerald-coloured vintage dress Arabella had bought in Brighton, worn with a twenties necklace which had belonged to Roger’s mother. Arabella did something to her hair, then stood back and said, ‘There.’ Matya checked herself in the full-length mirror. She looked, even to herself, like a movie star.
Roger came galumphing up the stairs, knocked and called ‘Are you decent?’ and then crashed into the room. ‘Time to be – wow,’ he said.
Then they were off in the taxi. For Matya, black cabs, which she could not afford, were part of the glamour and romance of London. She had thought her employer would be heavy going, on his own – she had hardly spent any time with Roger, since their intense first thirty-six hours or so back at Christmas – so his ease and nice manners and ability to talk about not very much came as a happy surprise.
Heading into town, they were for the first part of the journey travelling against the flow of traffic. Matya realised that she didn’t know exactly where they were going, and didn’t care. Roger sprawled over the back seat of the cab like what he was, a man to whom a thirty-pound taxi fare was nothing. The day was fading so the headlights of cars and the interiors of buildings were beginning to shine more brightly; she felt both snug in the taxi, and a little bit on show. A cyclist at a traffic light, from the bag slung over his shoulder a messenger
rider, gave her a long look. As well he might, thought Matya, as well he might …
The do was at Fishmongers’ Hall. It was a spectacular old livery company building, high-ceilinged, deliberately imposing, with both the solidity of old London and the moneyed gloss of the new City. Outside was the sort of stone staircase up which visitors could sweep or trot or prance. There was a team of waiters holding flutes of champagne, and a reception line shaking hands, at which Matya momentarily panicked, but Roger, reading that, whispered, ‘Just say your name,’ which she did, and the man turned and announced:
‘Matya Balatu’
at top volume, as if it were the name of a celebrity or aristocrat. And she went on Roger’s arm into the main ballroom, lit with huge chandeliers, and full of dressed-up City types. Matya could see that this was a routine thing for many of the people present, a charity do like all the other charity dos they had been to and would go to again, nothing special. She also knew that she could decide what to make of it, so she decided that there was something magical about it, and that she would enjoy her evening; she decided to be an international woman of mystery and to like the strangers looking at her and wondering who she was, and to like the champagne, and the feeling that this life could with only one or two small accidents be happening to her. Because as Arabella said – one of her favourite pieces of life-wisdom – ‘When it happens, it can happen very fast.’
‘Want to take a moment?’ said Roger, who while not her type, and off-limits for several reasons, did look tall and handsome in his black tie. ‘I can see people I know. We can pitch in or take our time. I know it’s all a bit much.’
Which it was; but Matya nodded and they moved across the room to the already-not-sober crowd of Pinker Lloyd employees and associates and wives and girlfriends, gathered under the room’s central chandelier, the men arguing about football and cars while the women talked in the low fake-confidential tones of people who didn’t much like each other but had to socialise together anyway. In darker moods, Roger would look around gatherings such as this and work out who the
most important men in a group were, just from the body language. It was seldom difficult, and wasn’t difficult here and now: Lothar, looking red-faced in his healthy outdoorsy way as usual, was demonstrating something with the side of his foot, as if showing how to balance or control a ball on it, while various men beneath him in the hierarchy of the bank gave him their full, devoted attention. But Roger didn’t mind. A bank had to have a hierarchy, and a hierarchy had to have a boss, and as bosses went you could do much worse than Lothar. The only person apparently not joining in the general rivetedness was Mark. His weirdo deputy was looking down at his feet and scowling, as if he’d suddenly realised that he was wearing the wrong shoes. Roger thought nothing of it; he had long since given up any effort to work out what was going through Mark’s mind. It was lucky that he didn’t know, since a lot of what was on Mark’s mind was very dark, and was focused on Roger.
‘This is my friend Matya Balatu,’ Roger said to the general company. The moment in which he might have offered an explanation of who she was passed without taking place, and Roger noticed it pass: ha ha, he thought. He could feel his male colleagues rearranging their self-presentation, shifting from joshing-with-males mode to presence-of-unknown-attractive-female-with-potential-to-be-impressed mode.
‘I don’t think we’ve met,’ Lothar began. Matya, looking demurely not-quite-at-him, said, ‘I’m sure we haven’t.’
Good girl, thought Roger. At the same time, the wives counterattacked.
‘Arabella well?’ said Carmen, who was married to Peter in contracts. She was a dumpy woman in her middle forties, less like a Carmen than anyone Roger had ever met, though in fairness not as dumpy as her husband. She hated Arabella, so this was a win-win for her: she got to be bitchy about the presence of a pretty girl on Roger’s arm, and for all she knew, perhaps Arabella was ill or had been dumped, so she could be unpleasant to him and celebrate Arabella’s misfortune at the same time.
‘In cracking form,’ said Roger. Instinct told him that to offer an excuse, even a triumphant one – she had to go to an investiture, she
had to stay in to show the
World of Interiors
people around – would be a tactical mistake, implying that an excuse was called for. Better to be on the offensive. He asked:
‘How’s Heathcote?’
This was Carmen and Peter’s notoriously troublesome son; the previous week, he had been suspended from Rugby for putting what was supposed to be his headmaster’s penis on sale on eBay. The listing was accompanied by a photo. The ‘Buy Now’ price was set at 50p. Roger knew all this because Peter had told a colleague and the colleague had immediately betrayed his confidence by telling Roger. Carmen must assume that Roger was very unlikely to have known that, so he was almost certainly making a genuinely friendly, well-meaning enquiry, which should be taken in good faith, but with the faintly perceptible possibility that he was indulging in an exquisitely calculated piece of malice. In the film
Conan
, the hero, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, is asked what is the greatest happiness in life, and he answers: ‘To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.’ That was Roger’s favourite line in all cinema.
‘He’s well,’ she said, her eyes flicking sideways towards her husband. A waitress arrived with more Taittinger, and they all took refills. Then a gong was sounded, and someone called out, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, dinner is served.’
After the main course, a few things were auctioned. One of the prizes was supposed to be given away by Freddy Kamo, the African footballer who lived in Pepys Road – the charity, it turned out, was to do with Africa and clean drinking water in villages. His club had had a certain amount of tabloid newspaper trouble over players’ sex lives, and as part of a PR counter-offensive was encouraging its players to do token charitable activities. Roger had been keen to see the African boy – his working hours were such that he’d never seen Freddy in the street. But Freddy had been injured a few days before and instead his prize was given away by a weaselly man called Michael Lipton-Miller, representing the club.