Capital

‘Think I’ll just go stretch my legs,’ said Roger. He took his keys, coat and phone and wandered out to get a sandwich, full of a delicious sense of freedom and moral superiority.

The brilliant thing about the moment when Arabella came home, at about four o’clock, was that the boys were so happily engaged in playing with the new love of their life. Roger, who was upstairs in his study reading the Economist, heard the door open and shut and felt his heart rate rise. Then he heard Arabella go down the corridor into the sitting room; then he heard her come out and walk slowly up the stairs. Arabella was carrying a bag, no doubt her suitcase. Something about the noises she was making had the tang of defeat. She turned past his study – she would be able to tell he was in there from the light under the door – and went into the bedroom. About ten minutes after that, she came out of the bedroom to his study and knocked on the door.

‘Hi!’ said Roger. ‘Nice break?’

‘Yes, thank you,’ said Arabella. She was about to say something else, but Roger was able to cut her off with:

‘You’ve met Matya. I’ve hired her.’

‘Well-’ said Arabella.

And then at that point, providentially, wonderfully, the telephone rang. It was one of Arabella’s closest friends from university, now a big shot in publishing. Roger passed the phone handset to his wife and flipped the magazine back up over his face. He had a thrilling sense that a fundamental shift in his marriage had taken place. It was a destructive shift, and he knew that; but that was part of the thrill. There was a hole in their relationship which he was consciously and deliberately not going to make any attempt to repair. And that was why he now sat in his office, humming ‘You Make Me Feel So Young’ to himself, while his energetic but weird deputy ran through figures and reeled off management-speak, and Roger nodded and grunted and said ‘Good point’ and thought about other things. You make me feel so young, you make me feel as though spring has sprung…

42

Matya Balatu grew up in a Hungarian town called Kecskemet. Her father was a teacher and so was her mother, though she had given up work when Matya’s little brother was born. They lived in a small house with a garden in which her father grew vegetables.

When Matya was ten, her father and brother were killed in a car accident. Her mother began drinking and her health declined quickly. She died two years later. Matya went to live with her grandparents, who had looked after her when she was a baby and her mother was working. She did well in school, and went to university to study mechanical engineering. After she graduated she worked as a secretary in a dentist’s office while raising the money to come to London to pursue a dream of expansiveness, of a bigger life, a better-off life, a life not overshadowed by her own early losses. She wanted to be happy and loved and she also wanted to marry a rich man and she thought she would be more likely to find one in London than anywhere else.

Matya was prepared to do most kinds of work. She found a receptionist’s job at minimum wage, but in order to do so had had to bluff about the level of her English, and as a result the work, which ought to have been so far beneath her abilities that it was relaxingly easy, was a constant strain. It made her worry, and because she was worrying her English did not improve as fast as it should. Then she found a job as a translator on a building site with Hungarian workers. It was black-economy work, but the pay was good, ?500 a week cash. The difficulty was that the overseer and his employer spent a lot of time complaining and abusing the workers, and because the complaints were passed through her, they tended to be directed at her. ‘Tell the stupid fucker I don’t want to hear his excuses’ – that counted as a pleasantry. Matya had been brought up strictly and carefully by her parents and then grandparents, and put a great emphasis on people behaving to each other with courtesy and restraint. At first she found the swearing, the bad temper, all that to be funny, and then it began to wear her down. She quit the job after three months.

By then she had some friends, Hungarian friends; she would see them only one night a week because it was bad for her English to speak too much Hungarian. But they were good friends and two of them had found work as nannies and childminders, and they knew an agency in South London, so Matya went for an interview. That was three years ago, and here she was, still a nanny.

Matya found the initial stretch working at the Younts’ to be hard going. She liked the children very much, liked the house and the area. It was an OK commute over from Earlsfield, about half an hour by bus or fifteen minutes when she was in the mood to cycle. The money was good, not least because the Younts were her first employer for three years to pay her legally, including her National Insurance contributions. That might have been because it was the husband who hired her, and he didn’t know that however rich English people were, they usually didn’t bother paying their nannies legally.

What made the initial month or so difficult was that there was something going on between the husband and wife. It had been strange that Mrs Yount wasn’t there on 27 December, and never fully explained, and Matya could sense the heavy atmospheric pressure around the subject of her absence. Also, the fact that the husband had hired her clearly made the wife feel uneasy, and she had been difficult at the start – watchful, resentful, and insisting on a four-week trial period, something he hadn’t mentioned. The way she said it was a clear warning that if there were a reason to get rid of Matya, she would take it.

But more than three months had gone by, and all that was now in the past. Arabella did not object to the idea of holding a grudge, being difficult, giving people a hard time; but in practice, her fundamental laziness wouldn’t let her. Anger and spikiness were, over a sustained period, just too tiring, not worth the effort. Matya, who had had a difficult childhood and had come to London to get away from things, and who was very good at holding grudges and keeping score, found this refreshing. She sensed that Arabella would have quite liked not to like her as a way of getting at her husband, but found that she did like her, so let the feeling go. Also, Matya made her life easier, by being so good with the children, and it was clear that Arabella felt a deep, sincere affection for anyone who made her life easier. When the delivery men carried boxes of groceries into the house, Arabella would tell them, ‘You’re an angel,’ and in such a way that it seemed she really meant it – as indeed, in a small way, she did.

The great thing about Arabella was that she wanted things to be fun, to be easy, and acted as if they were – which went a long way to making them so. It was catching. One morning, handing over the boys to Matya when she arrived at nine o’clock and heading upstairs, as she said herself, for ‘a long soak’, she caught sight of Matya’s shoes. They were a pair of flat tennis shoes with a grey and white check pattern.

‘My God! They’re fantastic! Must have! Where where where?! I can tell, you’re going to tell me it’s some mad little boutique tucked away in some souk in Budapest!’

‘Tooting,’ said Matya.

‘More exotic still! Right – we’re going there this minute.’

‘This minute’ was a flexible concept for Arabella. She still had to have her bath and do her face and make a few phone calls, but when that was done, by about eleven, sure enough she bundled Matya and Conrad and Joshua into her BMW and insisted on Matya’s directing her to the shoe shop, with her energy and excitement about the outing carrying all four of them along, giggling and shrieking. Arabella had bought, as she herself put it, ‘half the shop’, and insisted on buying two pairs of shoes for Matya in the process, with generosity so unthinking and instinctive it was almost as if it were not generosity at all – it was as if it were something else, an overflow of energy; or as if there were no such thing as money, as if things did not cost anything, so it was perfectly natural to give them to other people, because they were free to start with. Matya had never met anyone like that; she had had a few employers who were rich, but they tended to be very careful about money, vigilantly checking change and receipts and making small mistakes always in their own favour when they totted up hours worked. It was hard not to like Arabella’s open-handedness.

The best thing about the job, however, was Joshua. Conrad was back at school now, so she only saw him from 3.45 or on his holidays and days off. He was a good-hearted boy, though with a short temper and not used to being denied things, so he was not always easy to manage. At the moment Conrad was mainly interested in superpowers and his conversation tended to turn on them. He would announce that he could fly, or ask Matya whether she could shoot heat-vision rays out of her eyes, and if she couldn’t, why not? Or he would announce that he had ‘power of