Capital

cupboards, and lighter than it had ever been because the blinds and curtains were gone.

Going to the window, he looked down into the front garden, where the Sold sign was nailed next to the front gate. Roger sat on the floor for a moment to drink in the feeling that all this was no longer his. Let it sink in. It was strange being in the house when it was completely empty. It made it obvious that a house was a stage set, a place where life went on, more than it was a thing in itself. The emptiness wasn’t creepy; there was no Mary Celeste vibe here that Roger could detect. More as if they had finished with the house, and the house had also finished with them. They had moved out and now the house was expecting the new people to move in. The house too was waiting for the new thing; waiting to stage a new production.

The change to their life had sunk in with him. It was sinking in with people everywhere, as it gradually dawned on them that hard times were moving in like a band of rain. He wished it had sunk in with Arabella. Roger had been waiting for a moment when she got it: when she looked around and realised what was happening. He had been hoping that a giant penny would drop, a light bulb would go on, Arabella would have a ‘moment of clarity’ and see that this just couldn’t go on. Not only for economic reasons – for them of course but not only for them – but because this just wasn’t enough to live by. You could not spend your entire span of life in thrall to the code of stuff. There was no code of stuff. Stuff was just stuff. You couldn’t live by it or for it. Roger’s new motto: stuff is not enough. For some months now his deepest wish had been for Arabella to look in the mirror and realise that she had to change. He wanted this more than he wanted his bosses at Pinker Lloyd to be publicly humiliated, more than he wanted his deputy Mark to go to prison, more than he wanted to win the lottery. She couldn’t go on like this.

But it hadn’t happened. Arabella showed no sign of thinking that she couldn’t go on like this. On the contrary, she showed every intention of going on as she was for ever. No Plan B. It was labels, logos and conspicuous consumption all the way. If anything, looking after the children so much of the time seemed to have made it worse. It gave an edge of longing to her dreams of labels and holidays and treats, where before there had been a more straightforward greed. It was a mystery to Roger how someone he knew so well could be such an impervious, impenetrable stranger. Roger wasn’t quite clear whether she had always been the way she was now, or whether what had happened was that he had moved in one direction and she had gone in another. Whatever the reason for the shift, it was real, and he now, and increasingly, found her crushingly shallow and wearingly, suffocatingly materialistic. He had worked in the City, among the biggest breadheads on planet Earth – and he was married to a bigger breadhead than any of them.

Now Roger was downstairs. First he went down further to the children’s playroom. If his nose were super- sensitive, if he were a dog, he could probably just get a last whiff of Matya, her perfume, her hair, the way she’d come in from walking around with the boys smelling of the cold, the winter air, the outside, smelling of freedom, of other lives… Roger hadn’t come down much when she was here; he hadn’t trusted himself. But now this was just an empty room.

He went back up to the ground floor. The last time he would ever stand in the sitting room, the last time he’d ever flick off and on the lights in the kitchen, the last time he’d stretch out his arms in the dining room and twirl around, his last look at the garden, his last time in the corridor, the last time he would close the front door and then lock it. They say the best thing to do is walk away quickly and not look back, but instead he leaned his head against the door for a moment, a last few seconds of physical contact with the biggest and most expensive and most significant thing he had ever owned.

The car was parked immediately outside. He got in, started the engine, pulled out into Pepys Road, and then stopped. He turned and stared at what was now no longer his front door. Time for goodbye. Roger had deliberately not found out anything about the buyers. He’d been out the first afternoon they viewed the place, and then had chosen to be out the second time they looked, because he’d been worn out by all the time-wasters, idiots, fantasists and ne’er-do-wells who came and made offers and then melted away. But these people were serious, cash buyers, whose offer came in at full price, was accepted and went straight through, all without Roger knowing or wanting to know a single thing about them. Now as he took his last look at his old house, Roger allowed himself a moment to wonder who they were. Then he pulled out into the road. At the end of the street he turned and caught one last glimpse of his old front door, and as he did so all he could find himself thinking was: I can change, I can change, I promise I can change change change.

About The Author

John Lanchester was born in Hamburg in 1962. He has worked as a football reporter, obituary writer, book editor, restaurant critic, and deputy editor of the London Review of Books, where his pieces still appear. He is a regular contributor to the New Yorker. He has written three novels, The Debt to Pleasure, Mr Phillips and Fragrant Harbour, and two works of non-fiction: Family Romance, a memoir; and Whoops!: Why everyone owes everyone and no one can pay, a book about the global financial crisis. His books have won the Hawthornden Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Prize, E.M Forster Award, and the Premi Llibreter, been longlisted for the Booker Prize, and been translated into twenty-five languages. He is married, has two children and lives in London.

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