Capital (20 page)

By midnight that night, a clip called ‘Freddy’s first touch’ was one of the ten most-viewed items on YouTube.

P
eople sometimes said that stressful or dramatic or unusual circumstances caused time to ‘pass in a blur’. Roger wished that he had found that to be true. The forty-eight hours over Christmas were the most exhausting of his life. After the sofa was wrestled into position and signed for – he couldn’t face having it unwrapped, so it spent the day in its assigned corner of the larger drawing room, still reproachfully in its cardboard container – he made the mistake of turning on the television and letting the boys sit in front of it while they played with their new presents. They both had made spectacular hauls. Conrad had his robot, as well as huge boxes of Transformers, Bionicles, Lego, Action Men, and two lightsabers. Joshua did not understand Christmas yet so the sight of his colossal new Brio train set did not seem to exert much grip; it was as if he did not realise that it now belonged to him. Arabella had also bought him a giant bright orange teddy bear, almost five feet tall – too tall to drag around after him, though he might be able to sit on it. Joshua looked at it carefully, thoughtfully, for about thirty seconds, then burst into tears, and wouldn’t stop crying until the bear had been taken out of the room and hidden and Roger had promised that he would never ever ever see it again ever, not once.

‘Nevertobeseenagain,’ said Josh, when he had calmed down, repeating a phrase he liked from a story Pilar had read him.

‘Never to be seen again,’ agreed Roger. They were now sitting in
front of the television watching a children’s programme with shouting presenters. Roger knew that there were scandals involving children’s TV presenters taking cocaine. To be that lively that early in the morning, it would in Roger’s view have been much more shocking if they hadn’t been taking cocaine. In fact, thinking about it, maybe coke could be the secret of a whole new parenting strategy …

But the television was a terrible mistake. He used it up too soon. Roger didn’t know that his boys eventually tired of television, especially when they were allowed to watch it first thing in the morning; they became febrile and listless. In that condition it was as if they’d had too much sugar, and became unbiddable, unmalleable, prone to tantrums, both manic and exhausted at the same time. Roger should have used TV as a strategy of last resort. After no more than a couple of hours, he was knackered (also panicking, and full of rage, and self-pity); Joshua and Conrad were tired too, and bored, and bouncing on the old sofa, with each boy desperate for their father to play a strenuous game with him alone. With two sons and one father that was impossible, which made it all the more necessary, until Joshua trumped his older brother by flinging himself off the sofa-side table while Roger was distracted, and bumping his head, so Conrad retaliated by smashing his biggest new Transformer – Optimus Prime, his favourite – against a table leg, so hard that it didn’t just break-for-effect (he knew they came apart into pieces and could be reassembled, and this was the outcome he was looking for) but broke-for-real, at which point his tears and tantrum became real too: genuine, inconsolable grief.

At that point, with both his sons screaming and crying, Roger, feeling as tired as he could ever remember feeling – feeling weepy with tiredness, gritty-eyed, furious, heavy, as if lying down on the bed would make him sleep for a month – looked at his watch. As he did so, he framed a wish about what the time might be; half past eleven, perhaps, with Joshua’s nap, which he knew took place at some point in the afternoon, now in sight? Then he could stick Conrad in front of the telly, again, or lock him in his room, or something, and go back to bed himself for a little precious sleep. Sleep – he had never really valued it before. He had taken it for granted. That was not right, because you
should not take sleep for granted, because sleep was the best thing in the world. By far. Much, much better than sex. Much. And he could be having some, soon, oh so very soon, if only the outcome when he looked at his watch was that the time was say eleven, which was likely, or eleven thirty, which was possible, or twelve, or, who knew? time could fly past – or even twelve fifteen?

It was ten. Roger felt his eyes fill with tears. His eyes lit on the card on the mantelpiece, the one which said somebody wanted what he had. Well, what he wanted at that moment, more than anything else, was a cyanide pill.

That established a pattern. A stretch of time would go past, and Roger would know that it was going past, while he, say, lay on the floor pretending to be a baddy Power Ranger, or pushed a train round the Brio track making chuffing noises, or ran very slowly away from the advancing Roboraptor pretending to be a plant-eating dinosaur in the grip of fear. He would do this for some time then expect that time had fulfilled its part of the bargain, and had, somehow, passed: that having been twenty past nine the last time he looked at his watch it would now be significantly later. Instead it would be twenty-five past eleven.

Lunch was interesting. It was demanding to prepare – Conrad couldn’t remember which kind of eggs he liked, so Roger had to fry an egg and throw it away and boil an egg and throw it away and poach an egg and throw it away, before it was found by trial and error that scrambled eggs were the ones Conrad would eat. The confusion came about because he had said he liked the one which was eggy. Even allowing for that, Conrad was much less tricky than Joshua. He angrily refused everything Roger suggested before eventually deigning to eat a single narrow slice of crustless white bread with a thin smear of smooth peanut butter, and that was at the fourth attempt: the first slice was too thick, the second was defiled by the use of crunchy peanut butter, and the third by the use of too much peanut butter. Scraping the spread off and re-serving the slice with a thinner smear was by no means acceptable. There was something about the texture of Joshua’s tantrum, the way he thumped the table with his plastic plate while shouting ‘no! no Daddy no!’: the impersonal severity of his rage made it clear that this
was a question of standards. A smear of peanut butter with some peanut butter taken off the top was not the same thing as a fresh smear of peanut butter.

For dinner they had the identical menu. This was two-thirds laziness, or exhaustion, on Roger’s part, and one-third practicality, since there wasn’t much else to cook: most of the fridge was occupied by a goose, bought by Arabella ‘to eat on Christmas Day’, and delivered on Christmas Eve. Her plan was obviously in place by the time she did this, so the whole goose thing was part of her strategy to first deceive her husband, then taunt him. It was one thing to be abandoned by your wife over Christmas, another to have the enormous American-style, almost walk-in fridge two-thirds-full of goose. Besides, as Arabella knew perfectly well, Roger hated goose. So for Christmas dinner he ate the boys’ leftover eggs and peanut butter, followed by a cheese sandwich, followed by two packets of crisps, and washed down with a bottle of Veuve Clicquot La Grande Dame 1990, which was supposed to be the pre-Christmas-lunch aperitif. That, too, turned out to be a mistake, because Roger then had to cope with the last few hours of the day half-cut. Christmas Day spent alone with his children was, in Roger’s considered view, the longest, hardest, most boring day of his life. The one good thing was that the boys had only once or twice asked after Arabella. It was as if, in the general mayhem of Christmas, they had barely noticed she wasn’t there. Hah! Roger was very much looking forward to telling her that.

Boxing Day was slightly better. It began later, for a start: Josh didn’t come thudding down the stairs until seven o’clock. Roger woke before he came into the room, and felt as if he had been awake already, but still, seven was better than six. Better still, Joshua, instead of immediately launching into demands and complaints, got into bed with Roger and snuggled up against him for a full fifteen minutes. That was a good feeling; it was a long time since Roger had felt himself still against the extraordinary density and heat of his son’s small warm body. Then Joshua began jabbing him with his finger and saying ‘bokfas, bokfas’, which meant breakfast, and they came downstairs for chocolate cereal and the day’s first burst of television.

The children’s TV presenters still seemed to be coked out of their
brains. Roger still envied them. Conrad came down at about eight, and his second day in full solo charge of his boys was in full swing. They went to Starbucks to get a triple-shot espresso (Roger), a cream-based java chip Frappuccino (Conrad) and a steamed-milk babycino (Joshua). Conrad managed to knock the fire extinguisher off the wall outside the disabled toilet while Joshua had distracted Roger by trying to climb up and/or push over a stool, but the extinguisher didn’t go off, which was another good omen for the day. They went for a walk on the Common, which was as empty as Roger had ever seen it. At one point, on their way to the dog-free zone to kick a football about, he walked past a young woman pushing a pram – middle-class, she was, as Roger registered without bothering to examine how he decoded that fact: something about her scarf, or her pram, or her hair – and she gave him a look of unqualified approval. Roger thought for a moment how he must look: dad shoving along a pushchair with one small boy in it, wrapped up in a coat and hugging a football; second small boy trotting alongside. The likely diagnosis would be, thoughtful father taking his sons for a Boxing Day walk while Mum has a well-deserved lie-in. Well, bollocks to that, thought Roger, and before he’d realised it the thought made him scowl at the nice, and distinctly fit-looking, middle-class mum.

It was windy on the bare Common, and colder than Roger had expected. There were no other children out today; only one or two addicted joggers. They gave up after about ten minutes and headed for home.

‘Hot chocolate?’ said Roger, realising, as he spoke the words, that he didn’t in fact know how to make hot chocolate. How hard could it be? And maybe the tin would have instructions. But the boys had decided they were too cold to make that sort of decision. Joshua got back in his pushchair and made a token attempt at doing up the buckle before Roger helped him out. Conrad zipped up his own coat and pulled the hood over his head, then put his hands deep in his coat pockets with his shoulders hunched. He looked like a very small mugger.

Walking back across the Common, all three of them now crouching into themselves to keep warm, Conrad said:

‘Witches’ knickers.’

Roger thought he must have misheard.

‘What?’

Conrad pointed towards some trees, twitching in the stiff December wind.

‘Witches’ knickers.’

Roger looked. The clump of trees had three white plastic bin bags in them, thrashing and dervishing in the black branches. Witches’ knickers. He laughed for the first time in two days. Later they all became tired and cross with each other – a typical Boxing Day. But at least it wasn’t as bad as Christmas.

Help arrived the next day. It came as more than a pleasant surprise when the Hungarian nanny, promised by the agency when Roger finally got through at nine, rang on the doorbell at quarter to eleven, and turned out to be a tall, pretty, well-spoken dark-haired girl in her mid-twenties. Matya. According to the agency, she had OK English and good references and a strong rapport with small children. As soon as he looked at her Roger felt ill with relief. He also did what he unconsciously did whenever he was attracted to a woman, and stretched to his full height.

When Matya came in the sitting room, the first thing she did, Roger noticed (after also noticing her startlingly good bum in tight jeans, once she’d taken her coat off), was look for the children. It was interesting, because most people coming in the room looked at the fancy decor and fancy stuff. Joshua and Conrad were having one of their infrequent five-minute episodes of getting on well, while the younger boy passed bits of Duplo to the elder, who was building what seemed to be a zoo.

‘Let me brief you,’ said Roger firmly. He introduced Conrad and Joshua, but Matya barely seemed to need the introduction; she was down on her knees beside the boys, discussing in her soft Hungarian accent the best way of getting the gorilla to stand on the back of the crocodile. All in all, for Roger it was like the moment in an action movie when the helicopter rescue crew gets to the special forces team deep behind enemy lines, and the viewer finally gets the feeling that, just possibly, and against all odds, everything is going to turn out all right for the good guy.

S
pring was coming. At number 42, the crocuses Petunia Howe had planted the previous autumn, before she began to feel peculiar, had come and gone. The hollyhocks and delphiniums which she had planted to come up in the summer weren’t visible yet, so the garden was less colourful than she liked it to be; the lawn was looking scruffy, too. She didn’t like to ask her daughter to mow the lawn and there was no one else to do it. Even so, there was a sense that spring was here: when it was warm enough to have the window open – which at the sheltered back of the house it already was, some of the time – she could feel the distinctive texture of the new season’s air, its fructifying softness. Petunia had always loved that feeling. She didn’t think that you had to divide the world into spring or autumn people, because she loved them both, but if you had to pin her down she would have said she was a spring person. By May or certainly June, the cranesbill would be out, the Queen Anne’s lace would be beginning, and the irises would be in full flower; the lily of the valley would be everywhere; the garden would be vivid and intimate with colour and growth, the way she liked it – with a sense of profusion, generosity, so many different things going on that it verged on being untidy. She liked to sit in her chair by the window in her bedroom and look down into the garden and imagine how it was going to be. It was hard to accept – it was impossible to get her head around – the fact that she was dying and would be dead by high summer. Her consultant had told her so.