Capital

himself, words he wouldn’t use out loud, to brace his intentions. Dumping, not sex. This was the plan.
    Davina saw him. Her face lit up like someone acting out the phrase ‘her face lit up’. She began to walk towards him with her quick stride, swerving to avoid a man who without looking where he was going lurched back from the bar carrying three pints.
    ‘Darling!’ she said. Davina was in a good mood. And then, dropping into one of her stage voices, she repeated a line she often used, from some film Zbigniew had never seen, and which she always seemed to find inexhaustibly funny: she said, ‘You came.’
    Zbigniew cleared his throat and said, ‘Glass of white wine?’

51
     
     
    That went well, Zbigniew thought, on his way to work the next morning. In fact he could hardly believe how well it had gone.
    The thing about breaking up with someone, Zbigniew now realised, was that it was a type of job, a specific task, and like other specific tasks was best accomplished by being broken down into its component parts, analysed, and then put back together in the correct sequence, accompanied by a plan of action. That was what he had done. So the break-up needed to be 1. unequivocal, 2. as gentle as possible while still consistent with 1, and 3. executed with the minimum possibility of public disruption and fuss.
    It was not that different from plastering a wall or rewiring a socket. A practical-minded man did not flinch from such tasks. Piotr was an idiot.
    He had told her that he could not see her any more; that she was a lovely girl but that he knew she deserved more; that he was not ready to settle down, it was not the reason he had come to London, that his real life was in Poland and that he would be going back there one day (he implied that it would be soon) and that he could not act on the basis of a lie, and that he felt he was lying to her by acting as if he was ready to be in a stable relationship. Zbigniew was proud of that line, the implicit claim that the reason he was breaking up with her was that he thought so highly of her. She was so important to him that he was chucking her. What woman could resist that?
    Not Davina, evidently. She had been quiet, head down, not saying much, no tears, no rage, no public explosion. She had been as untheatrical and self-contained as Zbigniew had ever seen her. He had run through his reasons and she had listened to them and accepted them.
    ‘So that’s it, then,’ she said. Her tone was sad and resigned and in no way crazy.
    ‘I am sorry,’ said Zbigniew, reaching the climax of his talk. ‘It’s not you, it’s me.’
    ‘I’m going to go now,’ Davina had said. And she had got up and left. It was starting to become a pattern, Zbigniew thought, people getting up and leaving him in bars. He had stayed for a beer and gone home and had been in such a good mood that he had come close to speaking to Piotr.
    Zbigniew let himself into the crazy divorced lady’s house – she had given him a key the previous day, explaining that she might be out with her personal trainer when he arrived. He went to get the papers to cover the patch of floor where he was working. One thing he had learned to do, part of the way in which he distinguished himself from British workmen, was to be meticulous about cleaning up at the end of the day, so there were no traces of work-in-progress, apart from the work itself. It was a common complaint about British workmen that they behaved as if they were the owners of the property. Zbigniew knew not to make this mistake. It took more time at the beginning and the end of the day, but it was worth it.
    He would finish the painting today, he thought. The divorced lady had mentioned ‘one or two other little jobs’ that there might be for him to do, without being specific, so there either would or would not be extra work. He didn’t mind; he had another job back in Mackell Road, around the corner from Pepys Road, fixing up a kitchen, and work in general was not a problem. If he had nothing lined up immediately after that he would go home to Poland for a few days.
    Painting was one of Zbigniew’s favourite jobs. He liked that it was repetitive but also demanded care; the mix of detailed work on which you had to concentrate, with periods where you could charge ahead and get a lot done quickly. He liked the way new paint could completely transform a space, change even its shape, as in this case, where the purple was making the hallway close in