Capital

the requested measurements of height, age, weight and collar size. There was something depressing – or maybe it was liberating? – about the fact that your physique boiled down to just these four measurements. That was all it took to sum you up: 41, 96 kg, 1.90 m, size 17 collar = Roger Yount.
    The internet was, in these days when he was getting used to the numb shock of being sacked, unemployable and on the way to broke, Roger’s salvation; or if not his salvation, exactly, it was what he did with most of his time. His favourite thing was reading pieces about the implosion of Lehman Brothers – the amazing idiots, the total fuckwits – and his second-favourite was playing poker online. When he had been in work, supervising a room full of traders all week and therefore responsible for tens of millions of pounds of, in effect, bets, this had had no appeal. Now, though, it was as if the gambling side of his personality needed an outlet, and found it here. He had put £1,000 from his credit card into his Poker Stars account, and was already up by £500. He was loose and aggressive against a lot of amateurs who played tight-weak. It was fun.
    Then, five days after talking to Percy, Roger pulled himself together. He went for a walk on the Common, had a double espresso, got his spreadsheet and reran the numbers. Then he called Arabella on the house phone and asked her to come into his study to see him. That, they both knew, meant a Money Talk. It helped that the room had two leather armchairs and a (largely token) cigar humidor, and a vintage nude print of a Parisian whore kneeling on a chair facing away from the viewer, exposing her temptingly large, temptingly white behind. Once his wife came in, Roger simply gave her a sheet of paper with a list of things on it – all her discretionary spending, from shoes to Botox to one-on-one home-visit Pilates instruction.
    ‘These are all the things which are going to have to go,’ said Roger. It was satisfying. Arabella went pale.
    ‘We’re broke,’ she said.
    ‘No. Or yes. As good as, in some respects.’
    In a deep dark part of Roger’s brain, one he was reluctant to admit to himself, this felt great. Felt fantastic. It was payback – hard to work out exactly why, but it definitely felt as if it was – for what she had done at Christmas.
    And then a thought came to Arabella.
    ‘What about Matya?’ she said. Roger had known this was coming and had prepared for it. His countess, his lost countess. A masochism strategy, but one that would hurt Arabella more than it would hurt him.
    ‘We’re going to have to let her go,’ said Roger. ‘It’s clear from the numbers. Matya is a luxury’ – a voluptuous, silky, heart- lifting luxury, a sexier woman and a better mother to our children than you will ever be and the woman I would happily have made love to twice a day for the rest of my natural life – ‘… a luxury we can’t afford.’
    ‘Oh,’ said Arabella.
    ‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Roger. ‘So you’re going to have to be mummy. All night, all day. The whole deal. It’s in the numbers – we have no choice.’
    ‘Oh,’ said Arabella again. In his head Roger was dancing a gloating, jeering tarantella of victory.

89
     
     
    It happened very quickly. The Younts gave Matya her notice. The agreed period was a month; Matya said she was sad, but understood. So in a few weeks’ time she would stop working for them, and Arabella would be a 24/7 solo mother for the first time.
    When she heard the news – Roger and Arabella sitting across from her at the kitchen table with cups of tea that she had made, while the boys sat in the media room watching a DVD of Shaun the Sheep – Matya felt nothing at all. She had known that Roger had lost his job. It would have been impossible not to know: from one day to the next he had gone from being invisible at home to being omnipresent. Roger’s size made him hard to ignore: in the most basic way, he took up a lot of space. His noise footprint was large. The house seemed immediately smaller. He was constantly in the kitchen, crashing up the stairs to his study to listen to his punk compilation CD at a too-high volume. From wearing, in the week, nothing but classic suits, he was now never to be found in anything except a dressing gown or horrible knee-length khaki shorts with huge sagging pockets. He was always offering to help, and, Matya could not fail to notice, never missed an opportunity to check her out,