Capital

the money but for the chance to see that sexy, distant Hungarian girl again. It was the revelation of his cut-offness, his isolation in his London life, which made him act. Poland was real in a way that Britain was not, but he had to live here for now, so while he was living here, he might as well try to have a life. That was the idea.
    ‘Bogdan, I’m thrilled to bits,’ said Mrs Yount. He told her he would start work the following week – it was, he estimated, about a four-day job. It would be a break from his work at number 42, but he would stop in there at the start and finish of each day, just to keep an eye on things, and also to keep his conscience clear. So he would have four days to make an impact on the Hungarian. After that he could leave a couple of tools and brushes there and he would have other opportunities to make contact – but his best chance would be in those four full days.
    Day one was a disaster. Zbigniew had not allowed for the fact that because it was summer, Matya and the children spent most of their time outside. Add to that the fact that his painting job was at the top of the house – the third time he had painted these particular walls – and it was a perfect recipe for spending an entire day failing to speak to her. He could hear movement in and out of the front door downstairs, and there was one time when Matya and the children seemed to have come back from their lunch date. Aha! thought Zbigniew. This is my chance! I’ll go down to the kitchen for a glass of water! But by the time he had checked himself in the bathroom mirror and wiped some paint off his face and straightened his hair, and started downstairs, he heard the front door close again. It was unfair. Weren’t these children allowed any rest?
    Some builders and painters he knew would have got depressed at going over work they had already done, effectively undoing their own labour, but Zbigniew didn’t allow himself those sorts of feelings. If he wasn’t doing this work, someone else would be; if someone was going to be paid for it, it might as well be him. So he got on with the job and waited for his opportunity. Matya got back at five and Zbigniew recklessly went downstairs to try and start a conversation – only to find that the boys had friends over, and she was cooking tea. She was making what seemed to be an entire restaurant service’s worth of meals: a baked potato with beans (one of the Yount children had baked beans at least once a day), another baked potato with cheese, a carton of chicken and sweetcorn soup to be divided between the visiting children, a portion of spaghetti and pesto which she had planned to share with the other nanny until it emerged that she couldn’t eat anything containing flour, so Matya was eating the pasta herself and had made an omelette for her guest. At the same time, two of the boys were making mess with finger-paints. Matya, doing ten or eleven things at the same time, had the look of a woman who did not want to be courted; who would regard any flirting as somewhere between an irritation and an outright provocation. He got a good view of her bum as she bent over the table to mop up some spilled food, J-cloth in right hand, mobile phone in left. The effect on him was such that Zbigniew forgot to get the glass of water he had come downstairs pretending to want. At six, she left. He heard the door close. At five past six, he left too.
    Day two was very similar. Matya and the boys were out, briefly in, then out again. Zbigniew felt he had to be careful – if he did the same accidentally-popping-downstairs manoeuvre, she might see through him and he might begin to seem desperate. The outcome of this sensible strategy was that he didn’t see or speak to her all day. He spent it painting and – since he’d brought his laptop, which still had the Younts’ wireless password on it – intermittently checking on his stocks. He stopped at five thirty, wrote an email to his brother back in Warsaw, and went back to the house.
    Day three began promisingly. Zbigniew arrived at eight, while the children and their nanny and their mother were all still at breakfast, so he went straight upstairs and got on with the work. He was ahead of schedule and if this had been a different kind of job might have contemplated a flat-out fourteen-hour day to get it all finished – but that would disrupt his nanny plan, so instead Zbigniew was budgeting for two days of steady progress. He had worked here