Capital

been taking coke, one ecstasy, and one had been smoking dope – and it was the last guy who worried Roger, since in his opinion marijuana was a loser’s drug.) The four had been given final warnings and their boss had been fired. Roger could have told him what was going on if he had asked, but he hadn’t, and his way of letting Roger do all the work for him had been so arrogant, so old-school, that Roger, who was too lazy in interpersonal relations to be a nasty or scheming man, was not sorry to see him go.
    Roger was not personally ambitious; he mainly wanted life not to make too many demands on him. One of the reasons he had fallen for and married Arabella was that she had a gift for making life seem easy. That, to Roger, was an important talent.
    He wanted to do well and to be seen as doing well; and he did very much want his million-pound bonus. He wanted a million pounds because he had never earned it before and he felt it was his due and it was a proof of his masculine worth. But he also wanted it because he needed the money. The figure of £1,000,000 had started as a vague, semi-comic aspiration and had become an actual necessity, something he needed to pay the bills and set his finances on the square. His basic pay of £150,000 was nice as what Arabella called ‘frock money’, but it did not pay even for his two mortgages. The house in Pepys Road was double-fronted and had cost £2,500,000, which at the time had felt like the top of the market, even though prices had risen a great deal since then. They had converted the loft, dug out the basement, redone all the wiring and plumbing because there was no point in not doing it, knocked through the downstairs, added a conservatory, built out the side extension, redecorated from top to bottom (Joshua’s room had a cowboy theme, Conrad’s a spaceman motif, though he had started to express a preference for all things Viking, and Arabella was thinking about a redesign). They had added two bathrooms and changed the main bathroom into an en suite, then changed it into a wet room because they were all the rage, then changed it back into a normal (though very de luxe) bathroom because there was something vulgar about the wet room and also the humidity seeped into the bedroom and made Arabella feel chesty. Arabella had a dressing room and Roger had a study. The kitchen had been initially from Smallbone of Devizes but Arabella had gone off that and got a new German one with an amazing smoke extractor and a colossal American fridge. The nanny flat had been done up with a separate pair of rooms and kitchen, because in Arabella’s view it was important to have that feeling of cut-offness when she, whoever she was, had boyfriends over to stay; the nanny’s quarters had a smoke alarm so sensitive that it would go off in response to someone lighting a cigarette. But in the event they didn’t like having a live-in nanny, that sense of someone under their feet, and there was something naff and seventies about the idea of having a lodger, so the flat was empty. The sitting room was underwired (Cat 5 cabling, obviously, as all through the house) and the Bang & Olufsen system could stream music all through the adult rooms of the house. The television was a sixty-inch plasma. On the opposite wall was a Damien Hirst spot painting, bought by Arabella after a decent bonus season. Considering the Hirst from aesthetic, art-historical, interior-design, and psychological points of view, Roger’s considered judgement about the painting was that it had cost £47,000, plus VAT. Leaving out the furnishings but including architects’, surveyors’ and builders’ fees, the Younts’ work on their house had cost about £650,000.
    The Old Parsonage in Minchinhampton, Gloucestershire, had also not been cheap. It was a lovely building from 1780, though the outside impression of Georgian airiness and proportion was undermined by the fact that the rooms were smallish and the windows admitted less light than one might expect. Still. Their offer of £900,000 had been accepted and then gazumped for £975,000 so they had had to regazump and it had become theirs for a cool £1,000,000. Renovation and general tarting up had cost £250,000, some of it in lawyers’ fees fighting the utterly pointless minutiae of the listing restrictions (it was Grade Two). The tiny subsidiary cottage at the end of the garden had come up for sale and they felt it was essential to buy that, given that as things