Capital

of things. He could do an impersonation of Mrs Yount changing her mind about the colour of the bathroom which made Matya cry with laughter.
    And yet there were still things which added up to reasons for not fancying him. She had a vivid memory of what it felt like to consider Zbigniew unthinkable. This remembered Zbigniew would intermittently rise up and blot out her feelings for the Zbigniew who was in front of her at that moment. If he had known, he would have been very taken aback to learn that his biggest obstacle with Matya was her memory of the time when she had found him ridiculous. Because she had seen him first in a menial capacity, doing jobs for the Younts, a trace of that hung around him – he was in some sense, like her, servant-class. The fact that she was too made it worse, not better. Also, he was not good-looking: he had a broad flat blank Slavic face and hair a shade of brown that you couldn’t quite remember, so next time you saw him it was either a shade darker or a shade lighter than you expected. He wasn’t ugly, but he wasn’t good-looking. You just didn’t notice his looks.

97
     
     
    Zbigniew had no idea that his deadliest rival was Matya’s former impression of him. He might have been relieved to hear it. As he saw it, his deadliest rival was the suitcase which, before going out on their date, he had taken out and dumped on his mattress at number 42 Pepys Road. The case had flipped open, and he was now sitting beside it. By some trick of memory, the amount of money in the suitcase looked bigger every time.
    Perhaps the notes were expanding. Or perhaps it was because he was willing the money to be less of a problem. He was trying to squeeze it down in his mind. As a mental device this had some success, and he was able to go for stretches of time without thinking about what to do – except the actual money could not be compressed so easily, and looked bigger every time he checked on it.
    Zbigniew was not prone to irrational fears, and he felt there was nothing irrational about his anxiety. He had held on to the money for far too long and now, whatever he did, he felt he had compromised himself. Not giving the money to Mrs Howe straight away had been a form of fault. At 5 per cent interest, £500,000 invested for three months was more than £6,000: that was how much money he had cost her in cash by not acting. By not doing anything he had stolen from her. He sold all the stocks in his modest portfolio, as a way of . . . as a way of . . . he wasn’t sure what it was a way of. The money he had invested in the course of his time in London had, thanks to the turbulent market conditions, shrunk by about 15 per cent.
    He should give the stolen money back. And yet . . . and yet what? There was the cottage, his father’s cottage, his parents’ golden years of retirement, the thing in all the world he most wanted for them, bought with stolen money. That was the problem. He would never be able to tell his father what he’d done; which meant that what he’d done would never seem right. It would be a lie, it would poison everything. He couldn’t do it. Yes, he should definitely give the money back. But he felt he couldn’t do that without telling someone. It must be the residual imprint of Catholicism. He had to confess. He had to have absolution. The weight of the secret was just too great to bear. And also there was a glimmering, flickering thought that he was reluctant to admit too directly, but which was certainly there. If he confessed to someone about the suitcase with half a million pounds in it, the suitcase which had never been missed, the suitcase whose owner had died long ago and which now belonged to someone who knew nothing about it and whose life would not be affected by its absence in any way, someone whose house was worth millions already, so someone (just to get this crystal clear) who was already rich, who didn’t need or know about or miss or suspect the existence of this money; and in the mean time the money was in the possession of him, Zbigniew, whose life it would transform utterly, whose many ambitions would be immediately fulfilled just by taking ownership of this cash – the years of ease and comfort for his parents, the chance to set himself up in life, the sudden access of capital which would let him move on, employ people, create wealth, share happiness, give his father one rose-covered cottage and give Matya another one, and a bed with a good firm mattress