(Arabella loved spending money, but she hated, hated having to ask for it. The joint account, as currently constituted, meant that she never had to, and Roger couldn’t be bothered to go through the bank statement every month. He would be bothering now, though. As for a £100 limit, Roger knew that Arabella would be incredulous.)
Either Minchinhampton or Ibiza/Verbier/
Tuscany not both.
(This was a definitive, below-the-waterline strike on Arabella’s stated wish to have both a house in the country and two foreign holidays a year.)
No additional work on the house.
(It was the ‘additional’ there that made it so good.)
No weekend/additional nannies.
(Here, Roger felt, Arabella had made her greatest tactical error. Now that Roger had had the children on his own over Christmas, he was a childcare expert. He knew what they needed and did not need. They needed their new nanny, Matya, but they didn’t need any more help that Arabella couldn’t provide herself.)
It was this last point that cheered Roger the most. She had inadvertently given him control over a piece of her territory; Roger had stepped in and taken charge of the nanny question. Arabella had never hired an attractive nanny, a fact about which he had heard her semi-joking with female friends; so now Roger had hired one for her. He would dig in on this issue.
Roger turned up the music – ‘Guns of Brixton’, one of his favourites – put his arms behind his head and leaned back in his chair. He began working on dialogue for when Arabella got home, which he assumed would be that evening or the following morning.
‘Did you have a lovely time, darling? I hope so. We did. I hope you weren’t too worried about the boys, they hardly seemed to notice you weren’t there. They’re so resilient, aren’t they, children?’
It would be difficult to deliver that line with a straight face – without letting his rage and male hysteria show. But it would be worth the effort.
At lunchtime, Roger wandered downstairs to see Joshua in his high chair and Conrad next to him, both contentedly eating omelettes. A large drawing took up most of the rest of the table. It was in two very different styles and it was difficult to say what it depicted; given that there was a lot of red and orange, and given the identity of the artists, the likely subject was some sort of explosion.
‘Wow!’ said Roger, fully restored to his affable normal self. ‘Great painting!’
‘I did the top half,’ said Conrad. ‘It’s Autobots fighting Decepticons.’
‘Did bottub,’ said Joshua.
‘I like both halves!’ said Roger.
‘There is some more omelette, left over,’ said Matya from the stove. Roger, who was very hungry indeed – as he now realised – felt that it would be bad tactics to say yes and risk being dragged back into having to be with the children again, just when the new nanny had ridden to the rescue. So he declined with regret.
‘Think I’ll just go stretch my legs,’ said Roger. He took his keys, coat and phone and wandered out to get a sandwich, full of a delicious sense of freedom and moral superiority.
The brilliant thing about the moment when Arabella came home, at about four o’clock, was that the boys were so happily engaged in playing with the new love of their life. Roger, who was upstairs in his study reading the Economist, heard the door open and shut and felt his heart rate rise. Then he heard Arabella go down the corridor into the sitting room; then he heard her come out and walk slowly up the stairs. Arabella was carrying a bag, no doubt her suitcase. Something about the noises she was making had the tang of defeat. She turned past his study – she would be able to tell he was in there from the light under the door – and went into the bedroom. About ten minutes after that, she came out of the bedroom to his study and knocked on the door.
‘Hi!’ said Roger. ‘Nice break?’
‘Yes, thank you,’ said Arabella. She was about to say something else, but Roger was able to cut her off with:
‘You’ve met Matya. I’ve hired her.’
‘Well-’ said Arabella.
And then at that point, providentially, wonderfully, the telephone rang. It was one of Arabella’s closest friends from university, now a big shot in publishing. Roger passed the phone handset to his wife and flipped the magazine back up over his face. He had a thrilling sense that a fundamental shift in his marriage had taken place. It was a destructive shift, and he knew that; but that was part of the thrill. There was a hole in their relationship which he was consciously and deliberately not going to make any attempt to repair. And that was why he now sat in his office, humming ‘You Make Me Feel So Young’ to himself, while his energetic but weird deputy ran through figures and reeled off management-speak, and Roger nodded and grunted and said ‘Good point’ and thought about other things. You make me feel so young, you make me feel as though spring has sprung…
42
Matya Balatu grew up in a Hungarian town called Kecskemét. Her father was a teacher and so was her mother, though she had given up work when Matya’s little brother was born. They lived in a small house with a garden in which her father grew vegetables.
When Matya was ten, her father and brother were killed in a car accident. Her mother began drinking and her health declined quickly. She died two years later. Matya went to live with her grandparents, who had looked after her when she was a baby and her mother was working. She did well in school, and went to university to study mechanical engineering. After she graduated she worked as a secretary in a dentist’s office while raising the money to come to London to pursue a dream of expansiveness, of a bigger life, a better-off life, a life not overshadowed by her own early losses. She wanted to be happy and loved and she also wanted to marry a rich man and she thought she would be more likely to find one in London than anywhere else.
Matya was prepared to do most kinds of work. She found a receptionist’s job at minimum wage, but in order to do so had had to bluff about the level of her English, and as a result the work, which ought to have been so far beneath her abilities that it was relaxingly easy, was a constant strain. It made her worry, and because she was worrying her English did not improve as fast as it should. Then she found a job as a translator on a building site with Hungarian workers. It was black-economy work, but the pay was good, £500 a week cash. The difficulty was that the overseer and his employer spent a lot of time complaining and abusing the workers, and because the complaints were passed through her, they tended to be directed at her. ‘Tell the stupid fucker I don’t want to hear his excuses’ – that counted as a pleasantry. Matya had been brought up strictly and carefully by her parents and then grandparents, and put a great emphasis on people behaving to each other with courtesy and restraint. At first she found the swearing, the bad temper, all that to be funny, and then it began to wear her down. She quit the job after three months.
By then she had some friends, Hungarian friends; she would see them only one night a week because it was bad for her English to speak too much Hungarian. But they were good friends and two of them had found work as nannies and childminders, and they knew an agency in South London, so Matya went for an interview. That was three years ago, and here she was, still a nanny.
Matya found the initial stretch working at the Younts’ to be hard going. She liked the children very much, liked the house and the area. It was an OK commute over from Earlsfield, about half an hour by bus or fifteen minutes when she was in the mood to cycle. The money was good, not least because the Younts were her first employer for three years to pay her legally, including her National Insurance contributions. That might have been because it was the husband who hired her, and he didn’t know that however rich English people were, they usually didn’t bother paying their nannies legally.