Capital

such a way that it seemed she really meant it – as indeed, in a small way, she did.
    The great thing about Arabella was that she wanted things to be fun, to be easy, and acted as if they were – which went a long way to making them so. It was catching. One morning, handing over the boys to Matya when she arrived at nine o’clock and heading upstairs, as she said herself, for ‘a long soak’, she caught sight of Matya’s shoes. They were a pair of flat tennis shoes with a grey and white check pattern.
    ‘My God! They’re fantastic! Must have! Where where where?! I can tell, you’re going to tell me it’s some mad little boutique tucked away in some souk in Budapest!’
    ‘Tooting,’ said Matya.
    ‘More exotic still! Right – we’re going there this minute.’
    ‘This minute’ was a flexible concept for Arabella. She still had to have her bath and do her face and make a few phone calls, but when that was done, by about eleven, sure enough she bundled Matya and Conrad and Joshua into her BMW and insisted on Matya’s directing her to the shoe shop, with her energy and excitement about the outing carrying all four of them along, giggling and shrieking. Arabella had bought, as she herself put it, ‘half the shop’, and insisted on buying two pairs of shoes for Matya in the process, with generosity so unthinking and instinctive it was almost as if it were not generosity at all – it was as if it were something else, an overflow of energy; or as if there were no such thing as money, as if things did not cost anything, so it was perfectly natural to give them to other people, because they were free to start with. Matya had never met anyone like that; she had had a few employers who were rich, but they tended to be very careful about money, vigilantly checking change and receipts and making small mistakes always in their own favour when they totted up hours worked. It was hard not to like Arabella’s open-handedness.
    The best thing about the job, however, was Joshua. Conrad was back at school now, so she only saw him from 3.45 or on his holidays and days off. He was a good-hearted boy, though with a short temper and not used to being denied things, so he was not always easy to manage. At the moment Conrad was mainly interested in superpowers and his conversation tended to turn on them. He would announce that he could fly, or ask Matya whether she could shoot heat-vision rays out of her eyes, and if she couldn’t, why not? Or he would announce that he had ‘power of double-punch!’ and shove both his fists out. He liked trying to say ‘invincible’ but was not clear on the difference between that and being invisible, so all three of them played games in which invincibility and invisibility went together. So Conrad was fun. It was different, deeper with Joshua.
    Joshua was hers every day. He and Matya were in love, and made no attempt to conceal the fact from each other. On some days he would be sitting on a chair by the window looking for her as she came in, like a dog waiting for its owner; that made her heart do a little flip. Then he would come running to the door and grab her hand and drag her behind him while she fought to take her coat off with her free arm before he had wrestled her into the sitting room and launched into whatever game, story, or demand was in the front of his mind. He was always, at the start of the day, in mid-thought; he had something he needed to get off his chest, or a plan that demanded immediate action. If Matya came in the room and Joshua was lying or sitting on the sofa, she knew that he was ill, and that it would be a ‘floppy day’, as Arabella called it.
    Other things Josh liked included going to the pond on the far side of the Common to feed the ducks, and stopping for an ice cream at the café by the bandstand on the way back; standing by the edge of the skateboard park and watching the older boys zoom and swoop down the ramps (also up the ramps, on the edges of the ramps, backwards, sideways); riding the bus, anywhere, for any reason; going to the Aquarium, where he was fascinated by the idea of the sharks but also scared of them – in contrast to his attitude to the rays, which he was also a bit scared of but loved to reach into the tank to stroke, and afterwards was thrilled with himself (and with the rays), so the contrast between his attitudes to the two fish precisely drew the line between stimulating excitement and fear. As for food, that took a while