Mrs Kamal snapped her handbag closed.
‘It’s time,’ she said.
‘Usman’s brought the car round,’ said Ahmed. The two brothers would take their mother to the airport; Shahid had an appointment with Mrs Strauss the solicitor. They went into their farewells, and then came out in front of the shop, where Usman sat at the wheel of the Sharan with its hazard lights blinking. Ahmed loaded Mrs Kamal’s bag into the back of the people carrier. She had two suitcases and the biggest wheelie carry-on bag Rohinka had ever seen: with its handle extended, it was almost as tall as she was.
Standing in front of her mother-in-law, Rohinka felt a wave of the very last thing she had expected: affection. She had seen what Mrs Kamal had been like when Shahid was locked up, and would never forget it. She hoped Fatima and Mohammed would never be in trouble of that scale; if they ever were, she hoped she could live up to her mother-in-law’s example. But this wasn’t easy to put into words, and she made no attempt to begin. Perhaps she didn’t have to. Mrs Kamal stood in front of her, gripped her arm and said with an amused, knowing look, like a character actor taking applause at a curtain calclass="underline"
‘Daughter. It has been eventful.’ And then Mrs Kamal turned to get into the car, saying, ‘And now time to see about that upgrade.’
Part Four
November 2008
92
What’s the worst that can happen? Roger had always thought that was a stupid question. If you had difficulty imagining how bad things could become, all that meant was that you didn’t have much imagination.
There was no need to ask Roger’s former colleagues at Pinker Lloyd what was the worst that could happen. It was fantastic: the entire bank had gone under. The scandal about the rogue trader in Roger’s department had not been huge, but it had been just big enough to start rumours about the bank, which had caused people to take a sceptical look at the books just at the moment when capital markets were freaking out after the implosion of Lehman Brothers. People began to wonder about Pinker Lloyd’s exposure to short-term loans and its reliance on borrowing money cheaply, easily and quickly on the international money market. Credit dried up overnight: lenders withdrew their loans, clients withdrew their money, they had to ask the Bank of England for help, the Bank dithered and bingo, Pinker Lloyd was out of business. The bank had gone into receivership; its assets were being parcelled out and sold off; and everybody lost their jobs. Lothar had been publicly humiliated. Roger was thrilled. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer group of people.
So he ought to have been in a good mood, but now 51 Pepys Road was on the market. The asking price was £3.5 million. The estate agent, Travis, had told him that the price was a little ‘toppy’, but that ‘they might as well go for it’, on the basis that ‘what’s the worst that can happen?’
Roger found that he hated everything about selling the house. He hated Travis, especially his voice – not his accent, he was used to all sorts of accents in the City, but his voice, which was flat, scratchy, affectless but wheedling. Most of all, he hated him for the fact that he felt entitled to have opinions and give advice – he announced that he was loving the way you’ve done the kitchen, praised the clever use of natural light in the sitting room, said there was something a little bit tired about Roger’s study but that that wasn’t such a bad thing given how nice the rest of the house was – it left them something to improve and gave it a bit of a blank canvas feeling. Travis was an avid fan of TV property programmes and felt at ease with the culture of wandering around other people’s houses and passing judgement on them.
As did most of the people who came to look at 51 Pepys Road – not that people said things out loud, except in the most egregious cases, but Roger could tell that they were thinking them, and that was bad enough. They looked, they snooped, they ogled, they judged. Roger could hear their little brains whirring. Why are they selling? Wonder why the husband’s around the house. Wonder where they’re moving to. Wonder what price they’ll accept. Wonder whether those pots are Lucie Rie. Snoop snoop whirr, went their little brains. Many, a significant minority, perhaps even a majority, were blatantly there to do nothing except sniff around the house out of vulgar curiosity. Travis claimed that he ‘weeded out the time-wasters’, but this was clearly not true, and when the obvious non-starters came to peek into his life, Roger struggled with the temptation to tell them right there on the doorstep to just fuck off. There was even a couple from down the street who came one day to poke around. They clearly hadn’t been expecting to be recognised by the owners. Travis was showing them around, but just to freak them out, Roger followed behind them, glaring, arms crossed, while the estate agent did his spiel. They were in and out of there in ten minutes flat.
‘Travis, those people already live in this street,’ Roger said, biting back something much ruder.
‘Oops, my bad,’ said Travis, clearly not thinking it any fault of his. ‘Some people, eh? Still, got a couple of good ’uns for you this afternoon.’
It was not that the house did not get offers. It did, immediately – meaning on the first day, from the very first people to look at it. Not that the offer was real, of course. Or rather it was real in the sense that its intention was sincere, but the money simply wasn’t there. These were people who would a. have to sell their own house for a lot more than they’d paid for it and b. have to arrange a gigantic mortgage before they were in a position to even think about offering for 51 Pepys Road – in fact they shouldn’t, given the realities of the situation, even have been looking. Travis, full of nonsense as he was in almost every respect, turned out to be surprisingly tough about the question of what offers to take seriously. No doubt because it bore on the question of whether he’d actually get paid his commission. ‘Don’t even think about them,’ he’d told Roger. ‘Unless the money’s real, it’s not worth it.’
Maybe they could actually afford it though… and that truly was a galling thought. Roger’s earlier, pre-Christmas-2006-bonus-fiasco, pre-sacking self was not far from being that person who could unthinkingly afford a £3.5 million house. That person felt as if he had died a long time ago; or rather like Roger’s long-lost and not much missed younger brother.
What Roger hated most about all this house fandango was that it was insane. No one could make a rational judgement about a decision of that size so quickly, after a twenty-minute viewing. But this air of madness seemed to be general. The whole process had a frenzy to it – everybody seemed in a rush, everybody was somehow heated up. It verged on the sexual. The thoughtful ones – the ones whose caution stood out, who were obviously more deliberate and grown-up – came and looked at the house twice for maybe a total of forty minutes. For the biggest financial decision they were ever likely to make in their lives – forty minutes. It all made Roger think about those postcards that said ‘We Want What You Have’. He’d like to track down whoever it was who sent them, jam the postcard into his mouth, and say, OK, fine, I’ll swap your life for mine, sight unseen – just to see the look on the little shit’s face.