Percy’s PA must have been away from her desk – and he’d said ‘it’s a personal call’ with just enough negligent public-school authority for her to put him straight through. When he got through, Percy had been reserved. No, strike that: he’d been outright shifty. He had treated Roger like a down-and-out trying to touch him for money.
‘Old boy,’ said Percy. ‘Always so good to hear from you.’
‘I won’t beat about it, Perce – I’m looking for work. I’ve had a spot of bother with Pinker Lloyd. You might have heard some chat. Somebody stuck his fingers in the till and because he worked in my department, they’re trying to stick it on me. My plan is, get another job and then sue the bollocks off them. I mean, really take them to the cleaners. The advice I’m getting is, we’ll be talking seven figures.’ This was a flat lie. Roger had been so demoralised and taken aback that he hadn’t even spoken to his solicitor about what happened – and the fact was that the bank’s employment contracts were drafted in such a way that he would be unlikely to see any cash at all. Another of life’s lavish unfairnesses, but not one he was about to share with his old school semi-friend. ‘Anyway, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life on my rear end counting out the settlement and living off the interest on the interest, so I thought perhaps we’d have a chat, see what’s knocking around out there?’
‘It’s good to have a plan,’ said Percy. ‘Absolutely. Very good.’ Then he paused. He was doing that thing of pretending to have answered Roger’s question, even though he knew perfectly well that he hadn’t.
‘So I was wondering if we might put something in the diary,’ said Roger, advancing over the parapet of his own desperation.
‘Quite so, quite so. Absolutely,’ said Percy. ‘Only – well, I hate to play this card. May I speak to you as an old pro?’
‘That’s why I’ve come to you.’
‘Experience teaches that there are some times when it’s best to let the market come to you. I know you’re a trader at heart, Roger’ – he knew nothing of the sort, not least because it was entirely untrue – ‘and I know you’re a go-and-get-’em type. Like to make your own weather. Create your own reality. A strength, a great strength. Really. In normal times. But – well, there’s a bit of a but knocking around at the moment. Not just the Pinker Lloyd thing but the market in general. Lehmans was a horrible shock. It’s pandemonium out there. People are wondering who’s next. They’re wondering what’s going to jump out of the cupboard and shout Boo! And this doth not for a hiring climate make. Nobody’s taking anybody new on. Nobody feels too sure about being kept on themselves. You follow me? Bad time to go looking for work – don’t want to seem desperate. Very off-putting. I tell my clients, it’s like sex. More desperate you are, more likely you are to have to pay for it! See my point? In your shoes, best course of action is not to act. Not just now. Let it shake down a bit. Dust settles. I tell my client, dust always settles – though it can take longer than you think. Best all round, eh?’
‘I thought that in this case-’ Roger managed.
‘That’s just it, though, Roger,’ said Percy. ‘This is the case. It’s all a question of timing. Long and short of it, speaking both as a pro in the field and as your old mucker, best to lie low for a bit. Trust me.’
And that was that. Percy hadn’t so much given him the brush-off as picked him up bodily by his belt and collar and slammed him head first into a wall. This was made much, much worse by the fact that while Percy was an utterly obnoxious excuse for a human being, exceptionally vile and greed-crazed even by the standards of City headhunters, than which no form of life was generally agreed to be more low – he did know his field. If what he was saying, in effect, was that no one would touch Roger with the nozzle of a septic tank suction hose, then no one would touch Roger with the nozzle of a septic tank suction hose. He wouldn’t be wrong about that.
This meant that Roger would be ill-advised to send out his CV and start touting for work. There was nothing for it except to make massive cuts in expenditure and try and make the cash in their current and savings accounts last as long as possible. Those balances stood at around ?30,000 and Roger knew – was horrified to know it, but knew it nonetheless – that at current rates of expenditure the money wouldn’t last two months. Then they would be into his savings, the various assets wrapped in various tax-free devices over the years, and then into his pension fund. In the City, there was a term for this. It was called ‘being completely fucked’.
So there was nothing for it except massive cutbacks in expenditure, starting right now. Action this day! Right now meant today, meant this very hour. Preferably this minute. Showdown with Arabella and then full-scale lockdown on expenditure. The thing was, though, that Roger felt that he didn’t want to do that; couldn’t face it. What he wanted to do, it turned out, was to log on to something called the White Shirt Specialists, which had a new offer where you could order three gorgeous white shirts for ?400, a considerable saving from the normal price of nearer ?500. Roger had been thinking about this saving, holding it back for a rainy day, and now here was the rainy day and Roger felt himself browsing a range of subtly different collar and sleeve and button and cuff designs, and also the question of monograms, which often struck him as vulgar but which in this case could be made delightfully understated, white on white. He found himself wondering if it were really true that the shirts could be made to fit perfectly with only the requested measurements of height, age, weight and collar size. There was something depressing – or maybe it was liberating? – about the fact that your physique boiled down to just these four measurements. That was all it took to sum you up: 41, 96 kg, 1.90 m, size 17 collar = Roger Yount.
The internet was, in these days when he was getting used to the numb shock of being sacked, unemployable and on the way to broke, Roger’s salvation; or if not his salvation, exactly, it was what he did with most of his time. His favourite thing was reading pieces about the implosion of Lehman Brothers – the amazing idiots, the total fuckwits – and his second-favourite was playing poker online. When he had been in work, supervising a room full of traders all week and therefore responsible for tens of millions of pounds of, in effect, bets, this had had no appeal. Now, though, it was as if the gambling side of his personality needed an outlet, and found it here. He had put ?1,000 from his credit card into his Poker Stars account, and was already up by ?500. He was loose and aggressive against a lot of amateurs who played tight-weak. It was fun.
Then, five days after talking to Percy, Roger pulled himself together. He went for a walk on the Common, had a double espresso, got his spreadsheet and reran the numbers. Then he called Arabella on the house phone and asked her to come into his study to see him. That, they both knew, meant a Money Talk. It helped that the room had two leather armchairs and a (largely token) cigar humidor, and a vintage nude print of a Parisian whore kneeling on a chair facing away from the viewer, exposing her temptingly large, temptingly white behind. Once his wife came in, Roger simply gave her a sheet of paper with a list of things on it – all her discretionary spending, from shoes to Botox to one-on-one home-visit Pilates instruction.
‘These are all the things which are going to have to go,’ said Roger. It was satisfying. Arabella went pale.
‘We’re broke,’ she said.
‘No. Or yes. As good as, in some respects.’
In a deep dark part of Roger’s brain, one he was reluctant to admit to himself, this felt great. Felt fantastic. It was payback – hard to work out exactly why, but it definitely felt as if it was – for what she had done at Christmas.
And then a thought came to Arabella.
‘What about Matya?’ she said. Roger had known this was coming and had prepared for it. His countess, his lost countess. A masochism strategy, but one that would hurt Arabella more than it would hurt him.
‘We’re going to have to let her go,’ said Roger. ‘It’s clear from the numbers. Matya is a luxury’ – a voluptuous, silky, heart-lifting luxury, a sexier woman and a better mother to our children than you will ever be and the woman I would happily have made love to twice a day for the rest of my natural life – ‘… a luxury we can’t afford.’
‘Oh,’ said Arabella.
‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Roger. ‘So you’re going to have to be mummy. All night, all day. The whole deal. It’s in the numbers – we have no choice.’
‘Oh,’ said Arabella again. In his head Roger was dancing a gloating, jeering tarantella of victory.
89
It happened very quickly. The Younts gave Matya her notice. The agreed period was a month; Matya said she was sad, but understood. So in a few weeks’ time she would stop working for them, and Arabella would be a 24/7 solo mother for the first time.
When she heard the news – Roger and Arabella sitting across from her at the kitchen table with cups of tea that she had made, while the boys sat in the media room watching a DVD of Shaun the Sheep – Matya felt nothing
