Arabella, on the other hand, was rather enjoying the house being on the market. There was something very satisfying about the business of making the house nice as a way of adding to its value. Doing things to prettify the house was a sensible and practical necessity – it was a way of ‘maximising the value of their most important capital asset’, a phrase Arabella remembered from the time Roger had used it to justify pulling up the floorboards to put in new wiring for his home entertainment system. It went without saying that no house was perfect in and of itself. There were always little things to be done. Arabella bought a new bedside table and took the old one to the dump, and in her opinion made the bedroom much nicer, more saleable, just by doing that. Obviously she did that without telling Roger; equally obviously he didn’t notice. She longed – longed – to get rid of the Christmas sofa, a grey modern piece which looked lovely at the showroom but was just somehow wrong in their drawing room; but Roger would probably spot that change. Nothing could have irritated Roger more than seeing Arabella take a bizarre kind of pleasure in primping and tarting up the house prior to selling it. If her behaviour had been specifically designed to drive him round the bend – which in some moments was what Roger suspected – it couldn’t have been more perfectly calculated.
‘The plan is,’ Arabella said to Saskia over drinks in the bar at a restaurant where the bar was called The Library, ‘flog the house, move to Minchinhampton for a bit. That’s on the market too but it’ll take longer to sell – so we’re told, anyway. Then the plans diverge. Official plan, by which I mean Roger’s plan, is that we sell Minchinhampton too, take the money and go and look for a’ – she made quote marks with her fingers – ‘“small business opportunity” for Roger to set up shop then “do something real” by which he means… well, your guess is as good as mine. It has to be somewhere with good schools, primary anyway, and where the transport isn’t too much of a nightmare.’
‘Doesn’t sound too much like you. Green wellies with Chanel, Audi four-by-four on the gravel, flirting with the stable boy – I suppose I can see it, just about.’
‘Well, quite. The real plan, my plan, is, we go to the country, I get Minchinhampton looking nice, and take my time over it, and Roger gets enough of a chance to get the walking through the fields breathing fresh air out of his system, and realises he’s going to die of boredom, and all the guff about somewhere the children can run around is absolute crap because the country’s just as full of dangers as the town, more so, and then he notices that I’m so bored I’m about to run off with the Bikram Yoga teacher in the nearest market town, and he snaps out of it and by then all the Pinker Lloyd fuss has died down, and he sends out his CV and gets another proper job. None of this rubbish about moving to Ludlow to make widgets – a City job. Six-figure basic, seven-figure bonus in a good year. The way it’s supposed to be.’
Saskia gestured for two more lychee martinis. The waiter bowed and glided.
‘That sounds more sensible,’ she said.
‘Yes, and the good thing about this is that it’s made my parents wake up a bit. They always thought that because Roger did what he did and because we live like we do – correction, we lived like we did – we were made of money. They thought we were rich instead of your typical London struggling well-off. So they’ve woken up to the realities a bit, and the fantastic thing is, they’ve offered to pay the boys’ way through school – boarding school – we’re resolved on that. At least I am. So all we have to do is get them through to eleven, and then Mama and Papa will do all the rest – prep school first and then somewhere decent. It’s all a long way off but you do need a plan, don’t you?’
The martinis arrived and the two women toasted each other. Across the room there was someone Arabella thought she recognised from TV. Or did she?
This lunch was a rare moment of luxury for Arabella, a rare glimpse of her old life. Josh was at his nursery, pick-up at 3.30, and Conrad was on a play date with a woman Arabella knew from NCT classes, who she’d reconnected with when bumping into her in the coffee shop. They hadn’t seen each other for years. There was something of an ideological difference, or at least a certain human stickiness, about the fact that Polly had chosen to give up work while her children were young, whereas Arabella didn’t work but also had full-time childcare. The thing about looking after young children was, you had to be cut out for it, and Arabella, quite simply and quite frankly – she said so herself – wasn’t. Her boys were lovely, but they were all-consuming, and Arabella did not want to be all-consumed. And now here they were again, both pushing Bugaboos containing sleeping three-year-olds.
The first play date at Arabella’s house had been a bit of a disaster because little Toby had had an incident in his knickers within ten minutes of being left there, and Arabella hadn’t been able to face the prospect of wiping his bottom – so when Polly got back from the hairdressers two hours later, he was pretty ripe. Arabella said, ‘Oh my God, that only just happened,’ but Polly would, once she saw the evidence first-hand, have reasons to strongly suspect that wasn’t true. Arabella’s next text to Polly had been ignored and she’d thought she’d blown it, but a fortnight later she’d called up and set up this play date. They were, for all the minor differences, from the same tribe. Arabella was due to collect Conrad just before she had to pick Josh up.
It felt like the first treat she’d had in months. The full-time-mother thing was hard.
‘Mrs Yount, so nice to see you again,’ said the head waiter, arriving at the side of their table. He made to pick up the two menus, which neither woman had touched. ‘Two set lunches?’ he asked. Saskia nodded, and then he again bowed and glided.
‘£34.50 for six courses,’ said Saskia. ‘You’re practically stealing from them.’
93
It had got to the point where Patrick could no longer bear to go to any of the meetings concerning Freddy’s future. Freddy’s injury, Freddy’s prognosis, Freddy’s insurance claim, Freddy’s future – they were all the same thing. If there were to be a single meeting which he knew in advance was going to be decisive, that would be different: Patrick could clench his teeth and get through it. But it was never like that. The insurance company’s lawyers were always there, stalling, dodging, and driving up the wall even the other professionals who were supposed to be used to this kind of thing.
The result was that Patrick asked Mickey to go to the meetings on his and Freddy’s behalf. He trusted Mickey. It was the man’s evident upset over what was happening which had caused this. Patrick could see that Mickey felt just as miserable as he did and with that could see the truth, which was that however he might have begun his relationship with the Kamos – seeing Freddy as a club asset to be exploited and milked and cashed in on to the maximum possible extent – he had now come to the point where he loved Freddy. Patrick finally had someone he could be completely open with about his son’s circumstances. So the strangest of things had happened and Patrick and Mickey had become, sort of, friends. They were not fully at ease with each other, and never would be – but on the subject of Freddy, they could be fully honest and open. Their relations had the freedom-within-boundaries of friendship.
‘I have a favour to ask of you,’ Patrick said. The two men were sitting downstairs watching Barcelona play Majorca in La Liga on a Sunday evening, while Freddy was upstairs in the games room. All three of them found it painful to watch football, and all three of them were continuing to do so out of principle and also out of the fear that if they ever gave the habit up, they might not get it back. ‘I must ask if you will represent Freddy alone at these meetings. I find them too difficult. I can’t go any more. Until there is real news.’