Capital

thinking about. The sheer unfairness of life.
    He had done his job. He hadn’t been flaky or negligent. If he were to be completely honest – if you were to strap him down and pull out his fingernails – he might admit that there had been a passage of time when he was a tiny bit absent minded, a tiny bit floaty, a tiny bit prone to spending the odd hour here or there thinking about how nice it would be to be bending Matya over his desk and taking her from behind. But that had only been for a while and was in any case no worse than anyone else. It was all as if he was being punished for a crime – and what had he ever done wrong, apart from having a deputy who was a crook and a sociopath? It just wasn’t fair.
    The worst of it was the maths. The Younts’ outgoings were still what they had been. Two houses to run and maintain, neither of them cheap, clothes and holidays, Arabella’s completely out-of-control discretionary spending – he’d given her a semi-lecture on the subject a few days after he was sacked, and the net effect of that was that she went out with Saskia, got drunk and came back in a taxi with four colossal bags of new clothes, to cheer herself up. Talking to Arabella about money was like trying to talk to a child about nuclear physics. There were the cars, the service costs which seemed to bleed out of them – by chance he’d just had the car insurance and travel insurance bills in the last few days, which had caused him to go and look at the house insurance contracts, which were apocalyptically expensive, even given the fact that they’d shelled out for the also - apocalyptically - expensive burglar alarm and home security – laundry and haircuts and taxis and piano lessons for Conrad and swimming lessons ditto, and food and wine and Arabella’s personal trainer and a constant haemorrhage of house bills for carpets and chairs and kitchen equipment and who knew what, and nursery fees for Conrad in the mornings combined with Matya who was lovely, who was the incarnation of loveliness, but who was not cheap, when you drilled down into what she cost the Younts and allowed for the fact that if they let her go they would be saving some serious cash.
    Money coming in, money pouring out had been a source of anxiety to Roger even back in the days when money actually was coming in. This, though, took that to another level. This was Apocalypse Now. The money was still going out – gushing out like a bust tap – but it wasn’t coming in. Zero. Zilch. Nada. The big egg. Zip. Sweet FA.
    The other possibility was going to get a job. Of course that was the first thing Roger had thought of. He wasn’t going to just sit there on his arse, not him. That wasn’t the stuff the Younts were made of. He called an old chum from school who now ran a headhunting company, and tried to put a few feelers out. But that experiment in testing the water had gone badly; very badly. The first warning had been just how hard it was to get Percy on the phone. He’d called five times in two days. Finally he’d rung and the phone had been answered by a different secretary – Percy’s PA must have been away from her desk – and he’d said ‘it’s a personal call’ with just enough negligent public-school authority for her to put him straight through. When he got through, Percy had been reserved. No, strike that: he’d been outright shifty. He had treated Roger like a down-and-out trying to touch him for money.
    ‘Old boy,’ said Percy. ‘Always so good to hear from you.’
    ‘I won’t beat about it, Perce – I’m looking for work. I’ve had a spot of bother with Pinker Lloyd. You might have heard some chat. Somebody stuck his fingers in the till and because he worked in my department, they’re trying to stick it on me. My plan is, get another job and then sue the bollocks off them. I mean, really take them to the cleaners. The advice I’m getting is, we’ll be talking seven figures.’ This was a flat lie. Roger had been so demoralised and taken aback that he hadn’t even spoken to his solicitor about what happened – and the fact was that the bank’s employment contracts were drafted in such a way that he would be unlikely to see any cash at all. Another of life’s lavish unfairnesses, but not one he was about to share with his old school semi-friend. ‘Anyway, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life on my rear end counting out the settlement and living off the interest on the interest, so I