Capital

ordinary human decency. He thought they might have had the common humanity to treat the case on its merits and pony up. The insurance was for a rainy day, and Freddy’s knee was that rainy day. It was as rainy as it fucking well got.
    Well, you might have thought that, but if you did, you were dead wrong. It had become clear that the insurers had no intention of simply paying up. Every letter was answered with the maximum possible delay, every phone call was bounced around between the various senior executives who were ‘handling’ the case, and every opportunity was taken for pissiness or evasiveness or stalling. They sought to explore the possibility of a legal challenge against the player who had tackled Freddy; that was a whole series of meetings between them and their lawyers and Freddy’s lawyers and the club. They then sought to look into the possibility that Freddy himself had been reckless, that his own behaviour – which meant reaching for the ball after he’d turned and spun and flicked it on – was a piece of contributory recklessness. Then they tried to look into the possibility that the first piece of surgery after the tackle, done by Mr Anterior Cruciate himself, had been botched, and had made things worse, and therefore that it was the surgeon – or rather his insurer – who was legally responsible for paying for the damage to Freddy’s knee. They did anything and everything they could to stall, frustrate, delay, and block any resolution of Freddy’s case. The fact that Freddy’s case wasn’t a case, it was Freddy, his whole life, seemed to weigh on them not at all.

78
     
     
    Roger was sitting in his office, not thinking about anything much, which these days meant he was half-entertaining a half-fantasy about what it would be like to go off with Matya and live somewhere else, Hungary even, her home town, him the exotic sexy British man who had thrown it all up to go and live with his hot sexy Hungarian, eating goulash and making love all morning . . . or somewhere warm perhaps, yes, that was better, somewhere with palm trees and a hammock, he’d run a little restaurant out of a shack serving nothing but grilled fish, everyone had always said his barbecues were brilliant, yes, that was the one, serving his lovely grilled fish, living in a bungalow near the beach, the shutters open, Matya not wearing anything much except a T-shirt and a bikini and maybe a grass skirt, which was a cliché but what the hell it was his fantasy, and making love all morning, and then a nap in the hammock after the lunchtime rush . . . and then his deputy Mark appeared framed in the doorway of Roger’s office. This was no mean feat, given Roger’s field of view over the rest of the open-plan trading floor, but Mark seemed to pride himself on his ability to creep up on Roger when he wasn’t expecting it. Roger’s attention came back to the day and the place he was actually in: a set of figures needing to be prepared, a Wednesday morning in the City of London, of course raining, every built and living thing in sight a different shade of grey.
    Mark tapped the door frame with his knuckle, a gesture he made into a kind of fidget, and asked, ‘Am I disturbing you?’ This was something he always asked at the start of any conversation at work, and its ritual nature was borne out by the fact that he did not wait for an answer and came straight into Roger’s office.
    ‘The figures,’ said Roger, not meaning to make it sound like a sigh but finding that he had.
    ‘The figures,’ said Mark, who came round to Roger’s side of the workstation – this was their routine – and laid out a spread of papers. He began to talk and to go through the numbers, which were neither good nor bad, pointing things out with his red marker pen. Roger grunted and let Mark talk through the data. His attention faded in and out and he kept his end of the analysis up with grunting, nodding, and occasionally pointing at some numbers. He was more and more like this at work these days. It wasn’t a desperate need to be somewhere else, or someone else, it was more a mild longing, a gentle absence; he was partly not there, more or less all the time. After Mark had talked and crunched numbers and made points for about twenty minutes, Roger looked at his watch and said, ‘Time for the show.’ The two men collected their papers and left for the conference room. Roger knew that if there were any difficult points at the meeting, he could