reasons he had fallen for and married Arabella was that she had a gift for making life seem easy. That, to Roger, was an important talent.
He wanted to do well and to be seen as doing well; and he did very much want his million-pound bonus. He wanted a million pounds because he had never earned it before and he felt it was his due and it was a proof of his masculine worth. But he also wanted it because he needed the money. The figure of ?1,000,000 had started as a vague, semi-comic aspiration and had become an actual necessity, something he needed to pay the bills and set his finances on the square. His basic pay of ?150,000 was nice as what Arabella called ‘frock money’, but it did not pay even for his two mortgages. The house in Pepys Road was double-fronted and had cost ?2,500,000, which at the time had felt like the top of the market, even though prices had risen a great deal since then. They had converted the loft, dug out the basement, redone all the wiring and plumbing because there was no point in not doing it, knocked through the downstairs, added a conservatory, built out the side extension, redecorated from top to bottom (Joshua’s room had a cowboy theme, Conrad’s a spaceman motif, though he had started to express a preference for all things Viking, and Arabella was thinking about a redesign). They had added two bathrooms and changed the main bathroom into an en suite, then changed it into a wet room because they were all the rage, then changed it back into a normal (though very de luxe) bathroom because there was something vulgar about the wet room and also the humidity seeped into the bedroom and made Arabella feel chesty. Arabella had a dressing room and Roger had a study. The kitchen had been initially from Smallbone of Devizes but Arabella had gone off that and got a new German one with an amazing smoke extractor and a colossal American fridge. The nanny flat had been done up with a separate pair of rooms and kitchen, because in Arabella’s view it was important to have that feeling of cut- offness when she, whoever she was, had boyfriends over to stay; the nanny’s quarters had a smoke alarm so sensitive that it would go off in response to someone lighting a cigarette. But in the event they didn’t like having a live-in nanny, that sense of someone under their feet, and there was something naff and seventies about the idea of having a lodger, so the flat was empty. The sitting room was underwired (Cat 5 cabling, obviously, as all through the house) and the Bang & Olufsen system could stream music all through the adult rooms of the house. The television was a sixty-inch plasma. On the opposite wall was a Damien Hirst spot painting, bought by Arabella after a decent bonus season. Considering the Hirst from aesthetic, art-historical, interior-design, and psychological points of view, Roger’s considered judgement about the painting was that it had cost ?47,000, plus VAT. Leaving out the furnishings but including architects’, surveyors’ and builders’ fees, the Younts’ work on their house had cost about ?650,000.
The Old Parsonage in Minchinhampton, Gloucestershire, had also not been cheap. It was a lovely building from 1780, though the outside impression of Georgian airiness and proportion was undermined by the fact that the rooms were smallish and the windows admitted less light than one might expect. Still. Their offer of ?900,000 had been accepted and then gazumped for ?975,000 so they had had to regazump and it had become theirs for a cool ?1,000,000. Renovation and general tarting up had cost ?250,000, some of it in lawyers’ fees fighting the utterly pointless minutiae of the listing restrictions (it was Grade Two). The tiny subsidiary cottage at the end of the garden had come up for sale and they felt it was essential to buy that, given that as things stood it was a little too cosy when friends came to stay. The vendors, a surveyor and his boyfriend who were second-homers themselves, knew they had the Younts over a barrel, and with prices surging everywhere had gouged ?400,000 for the tiny cottage, which turned out to need another ?100,000 of work for structural issues.
Minchinhampton was lovely – you can’t beat the English countryside. Everyone agreed. But going there for your year’s major summer holiday was a little bit dowdy, Arabella felt. It was more of a weekend place. So they also went away for two weeks in the summer, taking a few friends and, on alternate years, inviting either Roger’s or Arabella’s parents for one week out of the two. The going rate for the sort of villa they had in mind seemed to be ?10,000 a week. Any flights would be taken business class, since Roger thought that the whole point of having money, if it had to be summed up in a single point, which it couldn’t, but if you had to, the whole point of having a bit of money was not to have to fly scum class. They had on two separate occasions, on good bonus years, hired a private jet, which was an experience from which it was hard to go back to queuing for your luggage… Then they would go away again, sometimes at Christmas – though not this year, mercifully, Roger felt – but more often either in the middle of February or for the Easter holidays. The exact dates depended on the timing of Conrad’s break at Westminster Under School, who were ferocious about only taking breaks during approved times – a little too ferocious, Roger thought, about a five-year-old boy, but that was what you paid your ?20,000 a year for.
The other costs, when you began to think about them, added up too. Pilar the nanny was ?20,000 a year out of net income – more like ?35,000 gross once all the pissy employment taxes were allowed for. Sheila the weekend nanny was another ?200 a time, adding up to about ?9,000 (though they paid her in cash and they didn’t pay her for holidays, unless she came with them, which she often did; or they would get another nanny from an agency). Arabella’s BMW M3 ‘for the shops’ had been ?55,000 and the Lexus S400, the principal family car, which was used in practice by the nanny on the school run and play dates, was ?75,000. Roger also had a Mercedes E500 given him by the office, and on which he paid only the tax of about ten grand per annum; though he hardly ever used it and made a point of preferring the Tube, which, leaving the house at 6.45 a.m. and returning at about 8 p.m., was bearable. Other things: ?2,000 a month on clothes, about the same on house stuff (shared between the two homes, obviously), tax bill of about ?250,000 from last year, a need to make a pension contribution ‘well into six figures’, as his accountant put it, ?10,000 for their annual summer party, and then the general hard-to-believe expensiveness of everything in London, restaurants and shoes and parking fines and cinema tickets and gardeners and the feeling that every time you went anywhere or did anything money just started melting off you. Roger didn’t mind that, he was completely up for it, but it did mean that if he didn’t get his million-pound bonus this year he was at genuine risk of going broke.
3
It was late afternoon. Roger sat on one of the sofas in his office, opposite the man who more than any other was going to help him earn his million-quid bonus, and the man who was going to play the single biggest role in deciding whether or not he was paid it.
The first man was his deputy, Mark. He was not quite thirty, a full ten years younger than Roger and pale from all his time indoors sitting in front of a screen. Mark had the habit of constantly, and almost invisibly, shifting: he moved his weight from foot to foot, touched his watch, checked that something was in his pocket, or made small twitching facial movements, as if to adjust the way that his glasses were sitting on his nose. The effect was a little like that produced by people who in conversation constantly use the first name of the person they are speaking to: you can go years without noticing this but once you do it is hard not to become distracted by it – hard, in fact, not to feel that it is specifically intended to drive you mad. That was how Roger felt about Mark’s fidgeting. At that very moment he was fiddling with a Montblanc ballpoint pen.
In many respects Mark was a perfect deputy. He worked hard, never made a mistake, was not too obvious about wanting Roger’s job, and if you left aside the question of his non-stop fidgeting, never seemed flustered. There was a slight sense that he kept things too tightly under control, and he was the kind of person who might turn out to have a secret vice: if he turned out to be a paedo or bondage freak or to have a chopped-up body under his floorboards or something, Roger would be surprised, but he wouldn’t be all
Roger’s discomfort with Mark was based on the fact that he, Roger, had come to work at Pinker Lloyd in the time when the City was more about relationships and less about maths. He had prospered, thrived, in the intervening decades but it was no longer true that he had kept up entirely with the changes in the underlying nature of the work. Foreign exchange trading was based on the manipulation of immensely complicated mathematical formulae, which allowed the bank to take subtle, lucrative positions that amounted to betting on both sides of the trade at the same time. As long as anything not too wildly untoward happened – anything outside the parameters and predictions built into your bets – and as long as your algorithms were correct, you were guaranteed to make
