Capital

garden in which her father grew vegetables.
    When Matya was ten, her father and brother were killed in a car accident. Her mother began drinking and her health declined quickly. She died two years later. Matya went to live with her grandparents, who had looked after her when she was a baby and her mother was working. She did well in school, and went to university to study mechanical engineering. After she graduated she worked as a secretary in a dentist’s office while raising the money to come to London to pursue a dream of expansiveness, of a bigger life, a better-off life, a life not overshadowed by her own early losses. She wanted to be happy and loved and she also wanted to marry a rich man and she thought she would be more likely to find one in London than anywhere else.
    Matya was prepared to do most kinds of work. She found a receptionist’s job at minimum wage, but in order to do so had had to bluff about the level of her English, and as a result the work, which ought to have been so far beneath her abilities that it was relaxingly easy, was a constant strain. It made her worry, and because she was worrying her English did not improve as fast as it should. Then she found a job as a translator on a building site with Hungarian workers. It was black-economy work, but the pay was good, £500 a week cash. The difficulty was that the overseer and his employer spent a lot of time complaining and abusing the workers, and because the complaints were passed through her, they tended to be directed at her. ‘Tell the stupid fucker I don’t want to hear his excuses’ – that counted as a pleasantry. Matya had been brought up strictly and carefully by her parents and then grandparents, and put a great emphasis on people behaving to each other with courtesy and restraint. At first she found the swearing, the bad temper, all that to be funny, and then it began to wear her down. She quit the job after three months.
    By then she had some friends, Hungarian friends; she would see them only one night a week because it was bad for her English to speak too much Hungarian. But they were good friends and two of them had found work as nannies and childminders, and they knew an agency in South London, so Matya went for an interview. That was three years ago, and here she was, still a nanny.
    Matya found the initial stretch working at the Younts’ to be hard going. She liked the children very much, liked the house and the area. It was an OK commute over from Earlsfield, about half an hour by bus or fifteen minutes when she was in the mood to cycle. The money was good, not least because the Younts were her first employer for three years to pay her legally, including her National Insurance contributions. That might have been because it was the husband who hired her, and he didn’t know that however rich English people were, they usually didn’t bother paying their nannies legally.
    What made the initial month or so difficult was that there was something going on between the husband and wife. It had been strange that Mrs Yount wasn’t there on 27 December, and never fully explained, and Matya could sense the heavy atmospheric pressure around the subject of her absence. Also, the fact that the husband had hired her clearly made the wife feel uneasy, and she had been difficult at the start – watchful, resentful, and insisting on a four-week trial period, something he hadn’t mentioned. The way she said it was a clear warning that if there were a reason to get rid of Matya, she would take it.
    But more than three months had gone by, and all that was now in the past. Arabella did not object to the idea of holding a grudge, being difficult, giving people a hard time; but in practice, her fundamental laziness wouldn’t let her. Anger and spikiness were, over a sustained period, just too tiring, not worth the effort. Matya, who had had a difficult childhood and had come to London to get away from things, and who was very good at holding grudges and keeping score, found this refreshing. She sensed that Arabella would have quite liked not to like her as a way of getting at her husband, but found that she did like her, so let the feeling go. Also, Matya made her life easier, by being so good with the children, and it was clear that Arabella felt a deep, sincere affection for anyone who made her life easier. When the delivery men carried boxes of groceries into the house, Arabella would tell them, ‘You’re an angel ,’ and in