‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I am here to see Mrs Yount. I-’ he found that he had temporarily forgotten the English word for painting, so he made an up-and-down motion with an invisible roller brush. Joshua and Conrad were now clinging to Matya’s legs, one to each of them, both of them with their thumbs in their mouths, both of them looking up at Zbigniew as if he were something entirely new.
Joshua took his thumb out of his mouth. ‘I haven’t done a poo today,’ he said, kindly, to help break the ice.
Zbigniew grunted. It was supposed to indicate mild amusement, but came out sounding surly. Joshua put his thumb back in his mouth. Zbigniew wondered what to say. Well done? That’s good? I too have been to the toilet, would you like me to tell you about it? What were you supposed to say to children? And also: I wonder what she thinks of me? If he had known what Matya was thinking he would have been mortified, because what she was thinking was: typical arrogant Pole, can’t be bothered, thinks Warsaw is the capital of the universe, useless with children, vain, conceited, lazy about everything except work. Matya hadn’t yet found what she was looking for in London, but since her evening out with Roger she had a clearer idea of what it was – something to do with money, and space, and a bigger perspective. Something to do with looking out the window of a black cab in the small hours of the morning, and a house with a garden with roses in it, and children of her own. It was not to do with Polish builders who hadn’t grown up yet.
Zbigniew, if he had known, would have thought that very unfair. He thought he had changed a lot; he thought he was a much more mature person than six months ago. The old lady’s death, the horrible thing with Davina, had marked him, he felt. Also, he was spending hours a day wondering what to do about his magic windfall. His thoughts began with the practical – how to launder the cash and get it paid into a bank account, how to put it to use – and then slowly, as if by their own volition, turned to the question of just how morally wrong it would be to take the money. He started with rationalisations for why it was all right: because the Leatherbys didn’t know the money was there, it was in effect already lost, ownerless; because they had no need of it, given that the house was worth millions; because his father was a good man and deserved what the money would bring. But then his grip on the rationalisations would weaken, his self-justification would start to slip through his fingers, and he would, by an act of will, force himself to think about something else. He was struggling with this, every day. So Matya’s thoughts would have seemed a terrible injustice, and even though he didn’t know them, he could tell that first impressions weren’t going well. In his experience with women, it was difficult to recover once things began to go wrong – once they had unreasonably decided that you were a person with whom they were not under any circumstances ever going to have sex.
Arabella came back in the room.
‘Mi dispiace, darlings, I’m racked with guilt, do forgive me Bogdan, I’m now absolutely a hundred per cent all yours. Can I show you my little thingies?’ With that, she ushered him out to the hall, and then up the stairs to the bathroom he had painted for her seven months before. She wanted to change the colour to ‘one of those Swedish types of white, you know, they’ve got sixteen different ones, this is sort of warmish, clean but not antiseptic, like, I don’t know, apple juice or something, only white’.
Zbigniew told Mrs Yount that he would think about it and give her a quote. It made no sense to take the job on, but he hated to turn work down, and a voice in the back of his mind told him that by coming to the house he would have another chance with the sexy nameless nanny.
68
On Sunday morning at his flat, Usman opened up his laptop and took out his 3G mobile to do a bit of net-surfing. This was his preferred way of getting news and entertainment. He did not like or trust the kafr media and for the most part avoided it. The two exceptions were football and The X Factor, which he had first watched when babysitting Fatima and Mohammed one Saturday night. Fatima had heard about the programme from her peers and was able to insist that everybody watched it. Usman wasn’t sufficiently experienced as an uncle to see through the manoeuvre. So the first time he saw the programme was on the TV next to the counter, with Mohammed asleep upstairs and Fatima sitting on the floor, her chin on her fists, utterly rapt. It was rubbish, of course it was, but there had been one or two occasions since when he happened to be near a TV on Saturday night, and there didn’t happen to be anything much else on, and he happened to find himself watching it, not in any concentrated way, obviously, but keeping an interest, staying in touch with the distractions of the masses… Know your enemy…
As for football, Usman loved the fact that Freddy Kamo lived a few houses away – well, a hundred yards away – in the very same street. The first time he’d heard of Freddy he had been incredibly excited for more than one reason, since Freddy was a brother Muslim, and there was something extra-cool about that, even though this was a fact that he’d never seen mentioned anywhere in the press, not once. Nobody seemed to know where Freddy went to mosque. It would be cool to go to the same mosque, to worship next to him at Friday prayers, maybe to fall into conversation afterwards, discover the Pepys Road connection, maybe even become mates… Freddy was Usman’s favourite footballer and he had watched YouTube clips of him dozens, maybe even hundreds of times. He loved the way he looked as if he was crap but then you actually realised he was brilliant. He loved his youth too. As the youngest brother, Usman was always on the side of the youngest person or entity. Islam was the world’s youngest major religion and the only one that told the truth – see?
It was desperately sad about what had happened to Freddy. The game had been televised and Usman had been watching at a mate’s house; an old mate from school, whose lifestyle was unIslamic because he drank alcohol, but he and Usman had known each other for so long that he was, in his mind, partially exempt from the rules. Besides, he had Sky Sports. The tackle which smashed Freddy’s leg was shown, in the usual way, about ten times, and it was something that made you feel sick when you looked at it. Freddy had always seemed vulnerable; that was part of what was so thrilling about him, that he looked vulnerable but never got caught or hurt. Now that he had been, it all felt different.
Usman wouldn’t have minded having a look at some clips of Freddy in his prime, but this particular technique for surfing the net was too slow for that. He had broadband, obviously, but there were some things he didn’t like to do over his own internet connection. Usman was, always had been, careful about stuff like that. A neighbour had until recently had an unencrypted wireless connection which he used for his own surfing when he wanted to do something that couldn’t be traced, but the neighbour – he didn’t know who but he guessed it was the flat in the basement – had wised up and gone to WPA encryption about three months ago. So now Usman used a pay-as-you-go 3G mobile phone which he’d bought for cash and was therefore untraceable, and tethered it to his laptop. He ran the browser with all its privacy settings on, via an anonymising service. An electronic spy or eavesdropper would have no way of knowing who he was.
Not that Usman did anything against the law on the net – nothing illegal, not exactly. Looking at or downloading Al Qaeda training manuals, for instance, was a criminal offence. Usman had no wish to go that far, even in the privacy of his own head. As for whether the people who did go that far were all wrong, well, he would once have said that if you have no other way of getting attention for your grievances, then it may be regrettable but there was sometimes no other way than violence. But now, without fully adopting another position, he had gone a long way to abandoning that one. The bombings of 7/7 had been in large part responsible for that. Seen at close hand in the city where he lived, the violence was too stupid and too random to be a viable course of action. The engineer in him rebelled at the sight of something so ugly and wasteful and so – in his heart he could admit this – wrong.