Capital

of it four at a time. His shoulders and arms stretched out sideways as he lifted the bags: it made him look enormous, like a body-building polar bear.
    Petunia did not go in much for being embarrassed about things being out of date, but even she was a little self-conscious about her kitchen. Linoleum, once it started to look tatty, somehow looked extra-tatty, even when it was clean. But the man didn’t seem to notice. He was very polite. If he had been the kind of workman you tipped, Petunia would have given him a nice tip, but Mary, when she set up the delivery, had told her – irritatedly, as if knowing her mother well enough to be annoyed at what she was thinking – that you didn’t tip supermarket delivery men.
    ‘Thank you,’ Petunia said. As she closed the door behind the man she saw there was a postcard on the doormat. She bent over, again carefully, and picked it up. The card was a photograph of 42 Pepys Road, her own house. She turned it over. There was no signature on the card, only a typed message. It said, ‘We Want What You Have’. That made Petunia smile. Why on earth would anybody want what she had?

2
     
     
    The proprietor of 51 Pepys Road, the house across the road from Petunia Howe’s, was at work in the City of London. Roger Yount sat at his office desk at his bank, Pinker Lloyd, doing sums. He was trying to work out if his bonus that year would come to a million pounds.
    At forty, Roger was a man to whom everything in life had come easily. He was six foot three, just short enough to feel no need to conceal his height by stooping – so that even his tallness appeared a form of ease, as if gravity had, when he was growing up, exerted less effect on him than on more ordinary people. The resulting complacency seemed so well-deserved, and came with so little need to emphasise his own good fortune relative to anyone else, that it appeared like a form of charm. It helped that Roger was good-looking, in an anonymous way, and had such good manners. He had been to a good school (Harrow) and a good university (Durham) and got a good job (in the City of London) and been perfect in his timing (just after the Big Bang, just before the City became infatuated by the mathematically gifted and/or barrow boys). He would have fitted seamlessly in the old City of London, where people came in late and left early and had a good lunch in between, and where everything depended on who you were and whom you knew and how well you blended in, and the greatest honour was to be one of us and to ‘play well with others’; but he fit in very well in the new City too, where everything was supposedly meritocratic, where the ideology was to work hard, play hard, and take no prisoners; to be in the office from seven to seven, minimum, and where nobody cared what your accent was or where you came from as long as you showed you were up for it and made money for your employer. Roger had a deep, instinctive understanding of the way in which people in the new City liked reminders of the old City as long as they showed that they also accepted the new City’s way of doing things, and he was very adroit at signalling his status as someone who would have been at home in the old world but who loved the modern one – even his clothes, beautifully made suits from a wide-boy, Flash Harry tailor just off Savile Row, showed that he understood. (His wife Arabella helped him with that.) He was a popular boss, who never lost his temper and was good at letting people get on with things.
    That was an important skill. A skill worth a million quid in a good year, you would have thought . . . But it was not straightforward for Roger to calculate the size of his bonus. His employer, a smallish investment bank, did not make it straightforward, and there were many considerations at work to do with the size of the company’s profits overall, the portion of those profits made by his department, which traded in foreign currency markets, the relative performance of his department when compared with its competitors, and a number of other factors, many of them not at all transparent, and some of them based on subjective judgements of how well he had performed as a manager. There was an element of deliberate mystification about the process, which was in the hands of the compensation committee, sometimes known as the Politburo. What it boiled down to was, there was no way of being confident about what the size of your bonus was going to be.
    Sitting