Capital

before and knew the sounds of the house, so he could interpret the noises when Arabella called out her farewells, then went upstairs to shower and get dressed, then went out with more farewells, then came back in again a minute later to collect her car keys, then went out again. It was about nine o’clock. Zbigniew could hear the crashing, scuttling, and laughing noises which meant that Matya and the children were downstairs. There was no evidence that they were about to head out – that took a good twenty minutes, so there would be warning. Excellent. Finally. Today was the day. He would give her a few minutes, then go down and initiate . . . whatever there was to be initiated. He would make no special preparations for what he should say – something natural, spontaneous, perhaps something based on whatever it was the children were doing. Yes – the children. Ah! Such energy! Something like that. One day, I hope to have children of my own, and hope that they have a nanny just as beautiful, who would bend over the kitchen table and – no, that probably wasn’t the way to go. Small talk about the children, a joke, a drink after work. Yes. And then just as Zbigniew was about to act on his audaciously brilliant plan, disaster. There was a car horn from outside, the doorbell rang, the door was opened, two women’s voices were speaking a loud foreign language at each other – from its unrecognisability, Zbigniew recognised it as Hungarian – there was the noise of a loud car engine, probably an SUV, there were rapid orders, a rapid gathering of coats and toys, and in an unprecedentedly brief time, less than two minutes at most, Matya and the children had been swept out. As for where, Zbigniew didn’t know and didn’t care. It had been a stupid idea taking on this job. Mrs Yount would change her mind about the colour again in a matter of weeks. Matya was out all day every day, she obviously couldn’t stand to be in the house. By the time he left she still hadn’t come back.
    By day four, Zbigniew had more or less given up. It had been a moronic idea and he didn’t fancy her that much anyway. The real reason he had taken on the work was that he felt he owed it to Mrs Yount. He felt responsible because it was his paint job that he was redoing. No other reason. Matya, who he didn’t want to speak to anyway, was out all day, just for a change. He heard her and the children leave the house at about nine o’clock, the usual drama with clothes and shoes and last-minute trips to the toilet, and then they were gone. He made steady progress with his painting, finished the dado rails by late morning, then went on to the final details and was done by five o’clock. The Hungarian nanny, who he hadn’t liked much anyway, and her charges still weren’t back. Zbigniew cleared up the paper and cloths he had used to protect surfaces, and wrote a note for Mrs Yount saying that he was done, that he would be round in a day or two to see if everything was all right (and to collect his cheque, though he didn’t say that). He took his brushes and paints downstairs, then went back up to get the note and the coffee mug, and as he did so heard the door open and a stampede of children and nannies come into the house, the nannies issuing orders, the children voicing protests. Zbigniew came down into the mayhem with his note for Mrs Yount and his dirty mug.
    ‘Aha!’ said the second nanny, another Hungarian from her accent, shorter than Matya, with short hair cut to curve under her chin and bright flirting happy eyes. ‘A man! Perhaps he will eat pizza!’
    ‘Pizza is horrible!’ said the younger of the two Yount boys, who, like the other three children, was hiding under the dining-room table.
    ‘They said they wanted pizza. Now they say they don’t want it,’ said Matya, addressing herself to Zbigniew, the first time she had spoken to him. Zbigniew put his set of house keys and the note for Mrs Yount on the table by the telephone, where messages and letters were left, and saw, sitting next to the lamp, a set of car keys and Matya’s phone, a Nokia N60. He had the same model phone. They were meant for each other. Zbigniew had an idea.
    ‘We want baked beans,’ said a voice from under the table.
    ‘Perhaps you can help us eat all this pizza?’ said Matya’s friend.
    He made gestures to indicate polite refusal and then, since both the girls were eating, said, ‘Just a slice.’ Then he introduced himself.
    ‘I thought