Capital

weren’t raging) and had liked the parents (what little she saw of them) she had left, and had only short-stay jobs, a couple of weeks at a time, until she came to work for the Younts.
    What it boiled down to was, the chemistry hadn’t been right. But with Joshua, right from the start, it clicked. There was nothing she could explain about it, it was just that they fitted each other – and it was not that he was unlike the other spoilt-and-neglected rich children, and not that he didn’t get angry. It was just that he was Josh, and she loved him and he loved her.

43
     
     
    Mary was going for a night out in London. She didn’t particularly want that night out, but Alan thought it would be good for her, and because Alan was good at keeping his advice and interference to a minimum, when he did suggest she do something, it had extra force. That was how, without ever feeling keen on the idea, Mary had found herself enlisted to go for a ‘Big Night Out’ with two friends who were coming down from Essex for the night. They were booked into a hotel near Leicester Square and seemed much more excited about the whole thing than Mary did on her own account. The plan was to go and have a drink at their hotel, then go and see a musical, then go and have dinner afterwards.
    ‘We’ll be starving,’ said Mary. ‘Our tummies will rumble, it’ll be embarrassing.’
    ‘If you eat before,’ said Alan, ‘you’ll fall asleep. Have some nuts or something when you have a drink. Canapés. Whatever. Better that than snoring your head off.’
    Alan, bless him, had done the booking and bought the tickets. Mary suspected he might even have paid for the hotel, but didn’t want to ask. All she had to do was put on her frock, go out and enjoy herself – and perhaps because that was all she had to do, it felt oppressive. Mary had always had a problem with holidays, with the idea that it was compulsory to be having fun. On holiday, having fun became a job. As the children got older, then Graham left home and Alice went to university, they had gradually stopped having a proper holiday, and Alan had just taken a run of days off at home in the summer. Mary preferred that; she found it less stressful.
    So now she was standing in front of a full-length mirror in what had been her childhood bedroom and was now a sort of spare room, even though no visitor had ever stayed there. She hadn’t brought any dressing-up clothes to London and was having to make do with the nicest floral dress she’d packed; it wasn’t ideal, and it might not be warm enough, but she would take along a cashmere cardy and it would have to do. Alan had suggested she bought herself something new but she drew the line at that. The fact that her mother was dying was no reason to go on a spending spree.
    The doorbell rang. This too was part of what Alan had arranged. He knew that Mary wouldn’t go out unless someone she could trust was looking after Petunia, and knew too that there was no stranger who Mary would trust, so he had asked Graham to come and grandma-sit. Again, because Alan never asked anything of Graham – Mary was the one who did the worrying and fussing and checking-up and advice-giving – when he did, it was treated as a direct order. That was annoying, given what Graham was like with her. Anyway, here her son was. She went downstairs and opened the door.
    It took a lot of effort and discipline not to exclaim in alarm at his clothes. Graham was wearing a no-longer-white white T-shirt with paint stains, a pair of torn, ragged, saggy jeans, and trainers. He could look so smart and handsome when he bothered to make an effort, Mary thought it was a real shame that three-quarters of the time he went around looking like a tramp.
    ‘Hi, Mum,’ said Smitty. ‘Sorry, I’ve been sitting in the car for ten minutes waiting for it to be six o’clock so that the wardens didn’t get me. One of those African ones was eyeing me up. Walking past pretending not to have seen me. I swear, it’s like the nicer your car, the more likely you are to get a ticket. Is that capitalism?’
    ‘Your grandmother’s asleep. She might go straight through the night from here but she also might wake up. You know what to do, yes?’
    Mary had gone over this, at length, twice. The instructions were simple, since all Graham had to do was go and help his grandmother if she called for him. They had now installed a baby monitor so that the person downstairs could hear Petunia if