“Uh-oh. You’ve made a list, haven’t you?”
“Of course I have.” Anna flipped a page and I could see a numbered list in her improbably neat handwriting.
“Oh my God, you really did.”
She blushed a little. “It’s a big opportunity for you, Rob. I’m not going to let you waste it.”
“It’s a big opportunity for us.”
Anna fiddled with the salt shaker and took another sip of her drink. “Seriously, can we go down my list? I’m getting nervous now.”
“We should order some champagne first.”
Anna slowly and demonstrably shook her head.
“What, really? C’mon, let’s celebrate.”
“I’m not being a killjoy, Rob. It’s just that we’ll pay the absolute earth here.”
“Jesus, Anna. I just made one-and-a-half-million pounds.”
“I know and that’s good,” she said, hushing her voice in case anyone was listening. “It also brings me onto my first question.”
“You’re so sexy in your new glasses,” I said, raising an eyebrow.
“Thank you. That’s very kind of you. But Rob. Please.” She wiped some dust off the page. “So will they pay you a salary?”
“What?”
“On top of the money, will they pay you a salary?”
I thought back to the meeting. It was all a bit of a blur, but they did say something about a salary. “They will actually. They want me to run the company for them.”
Anna beamed. “Oh, I’m so glad.”
“Wait, you’re happier about that than what they paid for the software?”
“Yes, I am in a way. You’ll think me strange, but yes, the regular income does mean more to me.”
“Wait, what?”
Anna suddenly looked very solemn, her client face. “Really, it does. Look, the windfall is great, but it’s just a pot that will keep getting smaller. Whereas your regular income is a pot that, over time, keeps getting bigger.”
“That makes sense I suppose.”
“One of the many benefits of having an accountant as a girlfriend,” Anna said, smiling and turning the page of her notebook. “Now, can I get through the rest of my list?”
* * *
There was a strange musty smell in Anna’s parents’ house: it reminded me of Werther’s Butterscotch or the jasmine-scented handkerchiefs old people put in their drawers.
We sat and ate in near silence, just the doom-laden tick of the clock, the scratch of cutlery on bone china. The food was a turgid affair of frozen turkey, mushy overcooked vegetables, and a glass of sherry, which Anna said had been brought out in my honor.
“And how is your father, Robert?” Anna’s father said, putting down his fork. He was wearing a suit, a gray three-piece that was worn and tattered around the edges.
“He’s fine, thanks. Yeah, still driving his cab. Although his health isn’t so good at the moment. Problems with his diabetes.”
Anna’s father didn’t say anything and looked down at his plate.
For the last three Christmases we had been to my dad’s. For proximity, we told Anna’s parents. Romford was much closer and Dad was all on his own. But this year, out of Anna’s sense of duty more than anything else, we decided to stay with them in their little village on the Suffolk coast.
“And will he be spending Christmas alone?”
“Nah, he’s going round his best mate’s...best friend Steven’s for dinner.”
“Is that Little Steve?” Anna said with a slight smirk. It amused her, she said, how I tried to sound refined around her parents.
“Yep, Little Steve. He’ll be fine, though. He treated himself to a big flat-screen TV, and we got him a new Sky Sports subscription so, yeah, he’s like a pig in...” I nearly choked on my sprout. “So yeah, he’s really happy...”
At the other end of the table, Anna stifled a laugh and took a dainty sip of sherry.
“They’re expensive, aren’t they, those new televisions,” Anna’s mother said, wiping her mouth with a napkin. As always, she was dressed in her plaid two-piece, like a stern, passed-over governess. For some reason, she had served the food wearing rubber gloves and her hands underneath were a pale white, as if they had been scrubbed clean with a Brillo pad.
“Oh, he’s paying in installments,” I said. “He got one of those zero percent interest deals for Christmas.”
Silence. We all listened to the ticking clock, the wind and rain hammering on the windowpanes.
“We’ve never been in debt, Janet, have we? Never had a mortgage or bought anything on credit. Africans can teach you a lot, in that regard.”
I smiled politely. Well, I wanted to say, that’s because the church gave you the house and because you haven’t bought as much as a new shirt in thirty years.
He had been brilliant once, Anna said. Mercurial. Daktari they called him in Swahili, the doctor. In the village, he was a priest first and a doctor second, but also an engineer, a judge, a mediator of disputes. In all of the villages they lived in across Kenya, he was treated like nobility.
There had been troubles, though, Anna said. That was the word she used. Troubles. Affairs with the locals, the daughters of God. In the end, the church couldn’t turn a blind eye anymore and, very quietly, they asked the family to come home.
“Well, he’s enjoying watching his football on it and all the movies,” I said, and Anna’s mother mumbled, “that’s nice” and something else I couldn’t hear.
I kept thinking about what Dad would be doing now. Sitting down to dinner with Little Steve and his wife. The queen’s speech and a game of party bingo.
“And how about you, Robert?” Anna’s father said, finally breaking the silence. “Are you working much at the moment?”
I wasn’t really, but I couldn’t tell him that. When I sold the software and was taken on by the company, I had imagined it differently. I thought I would be living off the interest, coming in to a board meeting every now and again, riding around on a little scooter and playing pool with some of the programmers on a break.
It wasn’t anything like that. Simtech didn’t have an office anymore. There was
