Capital

other charity dos they had been to and would go to again, nothing special. She also knew that she could decide what to make of it, so she decided that there was something magical about it, and that she would enjoy her evening; she decided to be an international woman of mystery and to like the strangers looking at her and wondering who she was, and to like the champagne, and the feeling that this life could with only one or two small accidents be happening to her. Because as Arabella said – one of her favourite pieces of life- wisdom – ‘When it happens, it can happen very fast.’
    ‘Want to take a moment?’ said Roger, who while not her type, and off-limits for several reasons, did look tall and handsome in his black tie. ‘I can see people I know. We can pitch in or take our time. I know it’s all a bit much.’
    Which it was; but Matya nodded and they moved across the room to the already-not-sober crowd of Pinker Lloyd employees and associates and wives and girlfriends, gathered under the room’s central chandelier, the men arguing about football and cars while the women talked in the low fake-confidential tones of people who didn’t much like each other but had to socialise together anyway. In darker moods, Roger would look around gatherings such as this and work out who the most important men in a group were, just from the body language. It was seldom difficult, and wasn’t difficult here and now: Lothar, looking red-faced in his healthy outdoorsy way as usual, was demonstrating something with the side of his foot, as if showing how to balance or control a ball on it, while various men beneath him in the hierarchy of the bank gave him their full, devoted attention. But Roger didn’t mind. A bank had to have a hierarchy, and a hierarchy had to have a boss, and as bosses went you could do much worse than Lothar. The only person apparently not joining in the general rivetedness was Mark. His weirdo deputy was looking down at his feet and scowling, as if he’d suddenly realised that he was wearing the wrong shoes. Roger thought nothing of it; he had long since given up any effort to work out what was going through Mark’s mind. It was lucky that he didn’t know, since a lot of what was on Mark’s mind was very dark, and was focused on Roger.
    ‘This is my friend Matya Balatu,’ Roger said to the general company. The moment in which he might have offered an explanation of who she was passed without taking place, and Roger noticed it pass: ha ha, he thought. He could feel his male colleagues rearranging their self-presentation, shifting from joshing-with-males mode to presence-of-unknown-attractive-female-with-potential-to-be-impressed mode.
    ‘I don’t think we’ve met,’ Lothar began. Matya, looking demurely not-quite-at-him, said, ‘I’m sure we haven’t.’
    Good girl, thought Roger. At the same time, the wives counter-attacked.
    ‘Arabella well?’ said Carmen, who was married to Peter in contracts. She was a dumpy woman in her middle forties, less like a Carmen than anyone Roger had ever met, though in fairness not as dumpy as her husband. She hated Arabella, so this was a win-win for her: she got to be bitchy about the presence of a pretty girl on Roger’s arm, and for all she knew, perhaps Arabella was ill or had been dumped, so she could be unpleasant to him and celebrate Arabella’s misfortune at the same time.
    ‘In cracking form,’ said Roger. Instinct told him that to offer an excuse, even a triumphant one – she had to go to an investiture, she had to stay in to show the World of Interiors people around – would be a tactical mistake, implying that an excuse was called for. Better to be on the offensive. He asked:
    ‘How’s Heathcote?’
    This was Carmen and Peter’s notoriously troublesome son; the previous week, he had been suspended from Rugby for putting what was supposed to be his headmaster’s penis on sale on eBay. The listing was accompanied by a photo. The ‘Buy Now’ price was set at 50p. Roger knew all this because Peter had told a colleague and the colleague had immediately betrayed his confidence by telling Roger. Carmen must assume that Roger was very unlikely to have known that, so he was almost certainly making a genuinely friendly, well-meaning enquiry, which should be taken in good faith, but with the faintly perceptible possibility that he was indulging in an exquisitely calculated piece of malice. In the film Conan , the hero, played by Arnold