Capital

the very very unlikely event the police caught him. Mill wanted to catch this kid, but he didn’t particularly want him to go to jail, which is why his heart sank when he heard the whispered words,
    ‘Just me.’

107
     
     
    The gigantic red removal lorry of the Younts’ possessions had left at about eleven o’clock, heading down the M4 to Minchinhampton. Arabella and the children had gone down to the country the day before, and now only Roger was left in the empty house, with nothing left to do but drop the keys off at his solicitor’s. Then he too would drive down to the country and their Pepys Road years would be over and their new life would begin.
    Roger was looking forward to it. That was what he told himself. The new new thing. He was done with the city and with the City. He was done with the commute to work, with pinstriped suits, with City boy subordinates and Eurotrash bosses and clients like Eric the barbarian; done with earning twenty or thirty times the average family’s annual income for doing things with money rather than with people or things. He was done with London and money and all that. It was time to do or make something. Roger was completely sincere in this conviction, even though he wasn’t quite sure what he meant – wasn’t quite sure what he meant to make or do. But, something.
    In his last fifteen minutes in Pepys Road, Roger went right to the top of what was still legally his house, to the loft which had been converted, after discussion, into a ‘spare room’. Arabella had wanted a study, but been forced eventually to admit that she never actually did any studying so didn’t need one, and while Roger had been tempted to claim it as his den in the end he’d settled on a smaller, snugger room on the second floor, one which by taking up less space was likely to be easier to defend as his territory (‘But the boys need another room’). Then down through the boys’ bedrooms, the only evidence of their former presence the bright wallpaper, cowboy (Josh) and spaceman (Conrad) – and also, for the observant, the scratched pencil marks indicating how the boys were growing. Their bathroom was bright orange. Then down, Roger’s den, the fitted bookshelves still there and the space where his Howard Hodgkin had sat (a present from Arabella when she was trying to make him seem more cultivated), Arabella’s dressing room with her little built-in writing table and the fitted cupboards, the small second spare room with marks on the carpet from the bed frame, the loo, then their master bedroom, where, Roger had estimated, he and Arabella had made love about sixty times, once a month for five years, not that high a figure really, but a nice room for all that, the brightest in the house, painted cream, and empty now except for yet more cupboards, and lighter than it had ever been because the blinds and curtains were gone.
    Going to the window, he looked down into the front garden, where the Sold sign was nailed next to the front gate. Roger sat on the floor for a moment to drink in the feeling that all this was no longer his. Let it sink in. It was strange being in the house when it was completely empty. It made it obvious that a house was a stage set, a place where life went on, more than it was a thing in itself. The emptiness wasn’t creepy; there was no Mary Celeste vibe here that Roger could detect. More as if they had finished with the house, and the house had also finished with them. They had moved out and now the house was expecting the new people to move in. The house too was waiting for the new thing; waiting to stage a new production.
    The change to their life had sunk in with him. It was sinking in with people everywhere, as it gradually dawned on them that hard times were moving in like a band of rain. He wished it had sunk in with Arabella. Roger had been waiting for a moment when she got it: when she looked around and realised what was happening. He had been hoping that a giant penny would drop, a light bulb would go on, Arabella would have a ‘moment of clarity’ and see that this just couldn’t go on. Not only for economic reasons – for them of course but not only for them – but because this just wasn’t enough to live by. You could not spend your entire span of life in thrall to the code of stuff. There was no code of stuff. Stuff was just stuff. You couldn’t live by it or for it. Roger’s new motto: stuff is not enough. For some months now his deepest wish