Capital

in the privacy of his own mind, was that he was about as unromantic as it was humanly possible for a person to be. Matter-of-fact, practical, unemotional, temperate, sane. There were few activities which could not be approached as if they had a secret user’s manual. Attraction to the opposite sex and the need to find a mate were practical realities of life and it would be better if they were approached as such. Zbigniew had noticed, however, that this was not the way the world worked. Besides, something about Matya made him feel as if there were perhaps something in this idea of romance after all . . . And he knew for sure – he could detect – that the right way to treat her was as if she were special. She was not like other girls.
    Lurking in this was his memory of Davina. She had been an education in the truth that people did not, in practice, come with a user’s manual. He would not go down that route again; he would not use Matya. He would feel for her what he felt and would not let things get away from him again. He would try to be more like a man. He wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, but he felt that the idea imposed obligations on him.
    The simplest way of treating Matya differently would be to do the things he had never bothered to do with anyone else – the things he had not exerted himself to do. Going to a film would be too easy, not romantic enough, and it was something he had tried before. Restaurants were romantic but also expensive and he did not feel at ease in the kind of places Matya would want to be taken to – French places, Italian places. She would be able to feel his concern about money. Women could sense that kind of thing. A long walk in the park? Too romantic. Too like something out of a film. He would seem desperate, as if he were on the verge of proposing marriage. A trip to the seaside, to Brighton, would be something he had never done before himself, therefore romantic, with the thrill of discovery, but also with much potential to go wrong, and expensive too.
    So he took her for a walk along the South Bank. This was something Zbigniew knew people did but had never done himself and when he suggested it, over the phone, Matya paused for a moment and then said Yes, sounding surprised and pleased. He had won points by coming up with something she had not expected from him. (Polish men – very unromantic. That was what Matya’s friend had told her.)
    The river scene gave Zbigniew, for the first time, a feeling of being in the middle of London. It was like: London? Here it finally is! He had seen heaving pubs and bars, bodies strewn all over the Common during the freak intervals of good weather, packed Tube carriages, the high streets of South London in their full Saturday-night mayhem; but this was different. This was people from all over the world, in the middle of the city, because they had come there to be there, with Parliament across the dark grey river, tourist buses coughing diesel on the access road, the theatres and museums and concert halls, the railway bridge, road bridge and pedestrian bridge, all busy in both directions, the restaurants packed, jugglers and mime artists wasting everybody’s time and taking up space, children running about, a skateboard park for the teens to show off to each other, couples holding hands everywhere, a policewoman walking up and down with a horse with a child protection phone number written on a cover on its back, presumably because this area was riddled with pimps on the lookout for girls to exploit, street stalls selling tourist junk and portable food, musicians, and lots of people not doing anything much, just being there because they wanted to be there. For once it wasn’t raining and there came a time when the clouds even parted.
    ‘What’s that yellow thing in the sky?’ said Zbigniew. ‘I feel as if I have seen it before. Not in London. Somewhere else. It burns!’
    They argued over whether to buy an ice cream or a Dutch waffle and in the end got one of each; except she was right, the waffle tasted as if it was made out of grilled cardboard. Matya giggled at him as he tried to eat it and then had to chuck it away. As for the sight of her eating the ice cream, chocolate with mint chips, Zbigniew didn’t know where to look. They stopped and listened to a man playing the clarinet, a piece Zbigniew recognised as Mozart. He said so and she was, he could see, impressed. Then – his master stroke – he announced that he had