Capital

sceptical look at the books just at the moment when capital markets were freaking out after the implosion of Lehman Brothers. People began to wonder about Pinker Lloyd’s exposure to short-term loans and its reliance on borrowing money cheaply, easily and quickly on the international money market. Credit dried up overnight: lenders withdrew their loans, clients withdrew their money, they had to ask the Bank of England for help, the Bank dithered and bingo, Pinker Lloyd was out of business. The bank had gone into receivership; its assets were being parcelled out and sold off; and everybody lost their jobs. Lothar had been publicly humiliated. Roger was thrilled. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer group of people.
    So he ought to have been in a good mood, but now 51 Pepys Road was on the market. The asking price was £3.5 million. The estate agent, Travis, had told him that the price was a little ‘toppy’, but that ‘they might as well go for it’, on the basis that ‘what’s the worst that can happen?’
    Roger found that he hated everything about selling the house. He hated Travis, especially his voice – not his accent, he was used to all sorts of accents in the City, but his voice, which was flat, scratchy, affectless but wheedling. Most of all, he hated him for the fact that he felt entitled to have opinions and give advice – he announced that he was loving the way you’ve done the kitchen, praised the clever use of natural light in the sitting room, said there was something a little bit tired about Roger’s study but that that wasn’t such a bad thing given how nice the rest of the house was – it left them something to improve and gave it a bit of a blank canvas feeling. Travis was an avid fan of TV property programmes and felt at ease with the culture of wandering around other people’s houses and passing judgement on them.
    As did most of the people who came to look at 51 Pepys Road – not that people said things out loud, except in the most egregious cases, but Roger could tell that they were thinking them, and that was bad enough. They looked, they snooped, they ogled, they judged. Roger could hear their little brains whirring. Why are they selling? Wonder why the husband’s around the house. Wonder where they’re moving to. Wonder what price they’ll accept. Wonder whether those pots are Lucie Rie. Snoop snoop whirr, went their little brains. Many, a significant minority, perhaps even a majority, were blatantly there to do nothing except sniff around the house out of vulgar curiosity. Travis claimed that he ‘weeded out the time-wasters’, but this was clearly not true, and when the obvious non-starters came to peek into his life, Roger struggled with the temptation to tell them right there on the doorstep to just fuck off. There was even a couple from down the street who came one day to poke around. They clearly hadn’t been expecting to be recognised by the owners. Travis was showing them around, but just to freak them out, Roger followed behind them, glaring, arms crossed, while the estate agent did his spiel. They were in and out of there in ten minutes flat.
    ‘Travis, those people already live in this street,’ Roger said, biting back something much ruder.
    ‘Oops, my bad,’ said Travis, clearly not thinking it any fault of his. ‘Some people, eh? Still, got a couple of good ’uns for you this afternoon.’
    It was not that the house did not get offers. It did, immediately – meaning on the first day, from the very first people to look at it. Not that the offer was real, of course. Or rather it was real in the sense that its intention was sincere, but the money simply wasn’t there. These were people who would a. have to sell their own house for a lot more than they’d paid for it and b. have to arrange a gigantic mortgage before they were in a position to even think about offering for 51 Pepys Road – in fact they shouldn’t, given the realities of the situation, even have been looking. Travis, full of nonsense as he was in almost every respect, turned out to be surprisingly tough about the question of what offers to take seriously. No doubt because it bore on the question of whether he’d actually get paid his commission. ‘Don’t even think about them,’ he’d told Roger. ‘Unless the money’s real, it’s not worth it.’
    Maybe they could actually afford it though . . . and that truly was a galling thought. Roger’s earlier,