Capital

for Matya to work out, and it was by no means a stable arrangement – he seemed to like baked potatoes, rice and chips, but not steamed potatoes; he sometimes did and sometimes did not like mash, he loved broccoli but hated cabbage, he liked cheese on some days but not on others, but always liked parmesan so long as it was grated, he liked meat but not burnt bits, dark bits, bits which had the appearance of potentially containing gristle even if they contained no gristle, bits which looked bloody or underdone; he disliked green flecks such as herbs, under all circumstances; he disliked the sight of dark spots which might be pepper; he disliked fizzy drinks but liked sweet ones; he liked fish fingers; he would not eat any kind of sausage except a hot dog; he liked pasta and pesto but not pasta with any other kind of sauce; it was impossible for anyone including Joshua to tell in advance of the food being put before him whether this would be one of the days on which he loved or hated bacon. A useful rule of thumb was that Joshua liked anything to which he could add tomato ketchup or soy sauce.
    It was strange for Matya, finding herself so deeply in love. At the start of her time in London three years before, she had had fantasies of meeting a perfect man, and of finding children to look after who she really liked. Neither thing had happened. With her looks, attracting men had not been a problem; attracting men who she actually felt something in common with, who treated her respectfully, who were employed and responsible and good fun, was much less straightforward, and the one man who had seemed to be those things, and who she had begun to properly go out with, had turned out to be half-mad with control-freakery, much of it linked to the question of money. He wanted to treat her to things and then act as if she were his property. He had rages, he would go silent, then she would look out the window of her flat at four in the morning, woken by who knew what, and see him sitting outside in his car looking up at her, looking angry and lost, like a little boy trying to reclaim his dignity after recovering from a tantrum. When she finally, irrevocably broke with him – by putting it so plainly that he actually understood she didn’t want to see him any more – he did something which, even by the standards of men and their irrationality and unreasonableness, was amazing. He sent her a bill for the holiday they had taken together, the holiday whose whole point, according to him, had been that he wanted to treat her to a week in Ayia Napa, clubbing and swimming and having sex. When she opened the letter she had laughed with rage – and also with delight, because this gave her the chance of definitively finishing things. She wrote him a cheque, which cleaned out her bank account, but left her feeling free of him, for good. She knew he would have one more go at getting back with her, as indeed he did, sitting in his car outside her flat one morning. But she had no difficulty in telling him to go away and leave her alone, and this time even he could tell that she meant it. Since that, six months ago, no men.
    With children it hadn’t been quite so bad, but still disappointing. She had had five jobs in her three years’ childcare, the longest for ten months, with a family in Clerkenwell. Both the husband and the wife were lawyers. They had two girls and a boy, aged ten and eight and four, and as with quite a few of the people she had worked for, the children were angry all the time. Matya had no theories about children, she took them as she found them, but it seemed to her that many of the children she had looked after were both spoilt and neglected. It wasn’t something she knew from Kecskemét in Hungary, so it took some time to figure this out. The other thing was that while they were used to being ignored, and to going to almost any lengths to get attention as a result, they were not at all used to hearing the word ‘no’, especially not when it meant what it said. So they would be angry to get attention, and then angry when they didn’t get their way, and taken together, that was quite a lot of anger. It was tiring and also, even when she knew that the anger wasn’t about her, it was demoralising. If anger is directed at you, it feels as if it is about you, even though another part of your brain knows that it isn’t. The lawyers’ children had been like that, so that although Matya had liked them (when they