A Week in December (35 page)

'I can't bear that!' said Hassan. 'When you think of the glory of the Islamic empire, all different colours and races of people bound together by this great faith. Now everyone just broken up - "atomised", as you say, with their own silly little earpiece and ringtone and text message.'

'I know,' said Shahla. 'There's nothing grand about the modern world, is there? "Consumer choice". It's so small. The Internet just underlines that. It makes the triviality of living instantly available.'

'God, yes,' said Hassan. 'Blogs.'

'YourPlace.'

'Aaaagh.'

'And, really, Hass, it can never happen. A revolution. The best Islamist model that I have read about--'

'In your now very advanced studies.'

'Indeed. My very advanced studies ... Islamism can't generate political systems with inbuilt democratic checks. It relies on good men to rule justly. But it's a vicious circle, because good men can only become good in a society that's already Islamic.'

'I like that idealism, though,' said Hassan. 'Don't you?'

'Yes, I do. But somewhere in the last 1,500 years you guys forgot to get your hands dirty. To invent a polity. And it's too late now.'

Hassan bit his lip. 'Shall we watch that film then?'

Shahla laughed. 'OK. It's what you'd call
kafir
nonsense - some sort of romcom, I'm ashamed to say, with Tom Gritt and Evelina Belle.'

'Perfect in our atomised modern world,' said Hassan. 'We don't even have to go to the cinema. Are you sure you don't mind sharing the sound with me? Wouldn't you rather have your own individual headset?'

'Don't! You'll make me cry.'

Shahla put the disc into the small player behind the television. 'You sure it's not too late? It won't be over till about one o'clock.'

'It's OK. I'll drive back then.'

'Fine.'

Hassan had a moment of embarrassment, as though the idea of his staying had been broached and he had somehow ... 'Of course. If that's OK by you, Shahla. If you don't have an early start tomorrow--'

'No, no. No meetings with the Queen for me. Here we go. Scene selection? No thanks. Play.'

Hassan had not intended to like the film, but after fifteen minutes he could no longer stifle his laughter.

At the start of the evening, Vanessa Veals had put five cubes of ice into a Victorian rummer, poured in vodka till it almost reached the brim and added some fresh mint, a slice of lime and a dribble of grenadine cordial. It was her second 'proper' drink since six, and after it she would stick to what she called 'just wine'. She took it into the sitting room, kicked off her shoes and sat on the sofa, where she fired up the television.

She lit a cigarette, an American classic with a toasted wheat aroma, and pushed her hand back through her hair, which had been professionally washed and dried that afternoon on Holland Park Avenue. Before abandoning herself to the evening, she ran a check over everyone and everything for which she felt responsible.

Max, the West Highland White, had had his walk and a solid two hours' barking at the end of the garden under the neighbours' window. Bella, her fourteen-year-old daughter, was having a sleepover at Chloe's or Zoe's house. She had a sleepover most nights, Vanessa had noticed, but it was probably good for her social skills. Bella's school reports were not encouraging, but then she was not a particularly clever child. She was a mystery to Vanessa. She didn't seem to be interested in fashion, for a start. Perhaps that was because she was plump, but Vanessa didn't think so. She didn't seem to care about discos or parties or boys or shoes or money or music or whatever they were meant to be interested in. God knows what they did at these 'sleepovers', apart from eat fattening food and wear fleecy pyjamas in their sleeping bags. Bella seemed to have come from a different decade; Vanessa had once found her reading about ponies, for heaven's sake.

Then Finbar. Well, he was up in his room and she no longer dared go up there. He could make her politest enquiry look like a gross breach of his privacy. Presumably he was masturbating or something, but he was sixteen and therefore legally an adult - or as near as made no difference anyway - so there was nothing she could do about it. He looked very pale, it was true, and was as thin as Bella was plump, but what was his mother meant to do: make him go to the gym, eat more potatoes? It was best to leave him to find his own way forwards in life, up there, on his own. It really was a nice room in any event; the best room in the house, John always said.

And John? Well, guess what, John was working late. And when he came home, he'd work even later. Vanessa knew he had a big trade on. She could tell, because instead of coming to bed at one and lying awake most of the night worrying, he didn't come to bed until some oriental market had opened or closed - and sometimes not even then: she'd find him at seven, haggard and un shaven with the morning papers in the kitchen, still in last night's clothes.

Vanessa lit another cigarette and sighed. She'd married John because he was rich and because she felt he'd make few demands on her. He had happily given up trading on the floor of NYMEX and taken what she considered a more respectable job on the energy desk in the bank's main building in Wall Street; he told her he'd done it for her, though she already knew him too well to think he would do anything unless there was a financial advantage in it. However, it was a useful fiction for them both: she'd taken the rough trader and made him into a suave creature of charity evenings; he had transformed himself out of pure gallantry and a desire to please his wife.

What Vanessa hadn't foreseen was either the narrowness of her husband's life or the peripheral sliver of it that would be set aside to her. He treated her politely and remembered her birthday and their wedding anniversary with small jeweller's boxes and silent dinners
a deux
in places of terrible expense from which she could barely wait to get home. She had believed that she'd like being left to herself, being independent, but had discovered that it made her brutally lonely. Although she did read books and did have friends, her inner resources weren't great enough to withstand the relentless, remorseless pounding of solitude. It was like the sea; it never stopped.

John Veals had no interests outside the acquisition of money. He didn't play golf or tennis. He didn't support a football team. He threw all colour magazines in the bin. He went to the theatre or the opera once a year if there was a certain and measurable financial advantage in doing so. He never went to the cinema and he thought television was a waste of time. A personal shopper bought his clothes. His idea of dinner was sausages and frozen peas, though he was prepared to sit it out over foie gras and Japanese beef if there was a purpose to the tedium. He disliked alcohol, though kept the cellar well stocked for Vanessa; he had an arrangement with a wine merchant in St James's to make a fortnightly delivery to the house.

He hated holidays because they kept him from the markets and he had nothing to do beside the pool because he didn't read and had never learned to swim. He disliked travelling and claimed he'd done more than enough of it in the course of his job. The cultures, languages, art and buildings of other countries were of no concern to him. Vanessa had once forced him into a weekend in Venice where the only thing that piqued his interest was the thought that Jewish usurers had first begun to trade beside the Rialto; he declined to enter the Scuola San Rocco to see the Tintorettos because he had to take a call on his cellphone. In any case, he was allergic to anything that smacked of the religious. His family was Jewish, but he had no interest in their God or their traditions; in fact he was himself consistently anti-Semitic in what he presumably imagined was an inoffensive way, talking freely of 'Hooray Hymies' - Jews who in his view tried to ingratiate themselves with upperclass Gentiles - or referring to his chief trader as O'Bagel or O'Shlo and even once dismissing a cautiously dull investor as 'bog-standard Edgware Ikey'. 'My granddad came from Lithuania,' Vanessa once heard him say at dinner. 'So fucking what? Vanessa's grandfather came from Pittsburgh, PA!' It amused him colossally that Steve Godley, a Surrey Protestant, had at one point found his progress barred at the Jewish-owned bank for which he worked. Veals claimed that before the partners' golf day at Pebble Beach Godley had been circumcised at the age of thirty-nine and walked naked up and down the changing room for half an hour after finishing his round. The only thing that tickled him more was the thought of Bob Cowan, who had been promoted to the main board because people thought he
was
Jewish. He wasn't, but the Americans weren't allowed to ask - on the grounds that even to pose the question was in some way 'racist'. John Veals loved that joke; it somehow really spoke to him.

John had never, so far as Vanessa was aware, read a novel. He found all forms of music irritating and immediately instructed cab drivers to turn off their radios. He disliked art galleries, though thought the financial aspect of modern British art to be of minor interest; he admired the way that the collectors had first created the market for an artist such as Liam Hogg, then cornered it; such manipulation would not, he explained, be allowed by the FSA in any other commodity but 'art'. Although he understood horse racing and its odds as well as any man in Britain, he never went racing or placed a bet; he disliked the animals themselves because they gave him asthma. He had no social life outside the office, and Vanessa knew that he privately disliked his closest 'friend', Stephen Godley.

The only activity, the only aspect of human life, that interested John Veals was money. The odd thing was, Vanessa thought, as she lit another cigarette, that he'd made enough to last a thousand lifetimes - or, with his modest taste in sausages, with no hobbies, booze or entertainment, perhaps two thousand lifetimes, without ever getting out of bed again. Sometimes she pictured her husband's money: the millions, the tens of millions, the hundreds of millions, in neat bundles, in their original bank packaging, the faces of George Washington and Queen Elizabeth II staring into the void, sitting in a vault somewhere in the dark, doing ... Doing nothing, nothing but just being there, promising to pay the bearer on demand ... But what bearer? What demand? And in what life on this planet or one yet to be discovered?

Little Sophie Topping had told Vanessa once in great excitement how Lance, her husband, had been told a banking secret - not 'inside information', Sophie was quick to stress, but a sensitive and deadly secret. Before he could be included, he'd had to swear to the man who told him that he wouldn't mention it to a soul. And Lance had sworn on the lives of his wife and his children. Sophie was flushed with shock and solemn excitement. 'That's what they do,' she said. 'When something's really, really, deadly secret and important. On the lives of their children.'

And Vanessa had laughed. A solemn vow for John would have been for him to make a promise about his children's lives with his wealth the thing on which he swore; that really might have been an oath worth witnessing.

'Why are you laughing, Vanessa?' said Sophie.

'I was thinking about John. I'm sorry. If you lost all your money, Sophie, and you came home in the evening and Lance said, "Look, at least we're all safe, we're all well, we've got each other, we can start again" - well, you wouldn't be very happy, but it would be some consolation, wouldn't it?'

'I suppose so. But why were you laughing?'

'Because with John it wouldn't. Losing all his money would be worse to him than losing all his family. So swearing on them is no big deal to him.'

Vanessa stood up from the sofa and went down to the kitchen. Max was asleep in his basket, Bella was out, Finn was in his room and John was working.
Plus ca change
. She'd eaten salad at lunchtime so didn't need dinner; instead, she took two bottles of Meursault from the fridge, a corkscrew and a clean glass. Up in the sitting room, she closed the floor-length shutters, lit the wood fire, poured some wine and searched the television hard disk for the stored episode of
Shropshire Towers
. Then she lay back and tipped the glass to her lips, feeling the edge of loneliness recede.

Upstairs, in his beautiful room, beneath the ever-watchful eyes of Wireless Boys and Evelina Belle, Finn rolled a three-paper joint of Aurora/Skunk Two and made sure he had everything ready for what looked like being a decisive evening in the Barking Bungalow. He hit the speed-dial button for a pizza delivery and placed his usual order. In a moment of responsibility he also asked for apple slices in sugar-dusted doughnut crust. Fruit, as Ken always said, is for fruits - but you had to think of your health.

As the credits rolled, Finn lit up and inhaled deeply. There was an air of excitement in the studio. It was not the usual set with its celebrity dinner party and damask table linen; for this episode, Terry O'Malley and Barry Levine were, as they put it, 'in the lions' den': on stage in front of a live audience.

'It's Bedlam here tonight,' said Terry. 'This is as edgy as it gets. Ladies and gentlemen, before we go over live to the Barking Bungalow, let's welcome our special guest for tonight, someone who knows more about live TV than just about anyone on the planet, yes, it's the lovely, the irresistible Agneta King!'

It was felt when Lisa was in the bungalow, the studio needed a bit of glamour and Agneta King's CV as weather girl who'd turned presenter qualified her for the job.

'OK, my love,' said Terry, 'who's your money on tonight? Remember, only one contestant can win the prize. And let's just remind you what that prize is - in case you could possibly have forgotten! It's free private treatment for their condition for a whole year in Park View, England's top hospital, plus a fabulous four-by-four Sherman Pathfinder, worth more than PS50,000.'

'Well, I think Alan's got to be the favourite, hasn't he?' said Agneta.

'That's what the bookies are saying,' said Barry Levine. 'But there's been some punters splashing out on Sandra too. And talking of girls that we'd like to splash out on ... Let's go over live now to the Barking Bungalow and join our very own ... Lisa!'