Lurking in this was his memory of Davina. She had been an education in the truth that people did not, in practice, come with a user’s manual. He would not go down that route again; he would not use Matya. He would feel for her what he felt and would not let things get away from him again. He would try to be more like a man. He wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, but he felt that the idea imposed obligations on him.
The simplest way of treating Matya differently would be to do the things he had never bothered to do with anyone else – the things he had not exerted himself to do. Going to a film would be too easy, not romantic enough, and it was something he had tried before. Restaurants were romantic but also expensive and he did not feel at ease in the kind of places Matya would want to be taken to – French places, Italian places. She would be able to feel his concern about money. Women could sense that kind of thing. A long walk in the park? Too romantic. Too like something out of a film. He would seem desperate, as if he were on the verge of proposing marriage. A trip to the seaside, to Brighton, would be something he had never done before himself, therefore romantic, with the thrill of discovery, but also with much potential to go wrong, and expensive too.
So he took her for a walk along the South Bank. This was something Zbigniew knew people did but had never done himself and when he suggested it, over the phone, Matya paused for a moment and then said Yes, sounding surprised and pleased. He had won points by coming up with something she had not expected from him. (Polish men – very unromantic. That was what Matya’s friend had told her.)
The river scene gave Zbigniew, for the first time, a feeling of being in the middle of London. It was like: London? Here it finally is! He had seen heaving pubs and bars, bodies strewn all over the Common during the freak intervals of good weather, packed Tube carriages, the high streets of South London in their full Saturday-night mayhem; but this was different. This was people from all over the world, in the middle of the city, because they had come there to be there, with Parliament across the dark grey river, tourist buses coughing diesel on the access road, the theatres and museums and concert halls, the railway bridge, road bridge and pedestrian bridge, all busy in both directions, the restaurants packed, jugglers and mime artists wasting everybody’s time and taking up space, children running about, a skateboard park for the teens to show off to each other, couples holding hands everywhere, a policewoman walking up and down with a horse with a child protection phone number written on a cover on its back, presumably because this area was riddled with pimps on the lookout for girls to exploit, street stalls selling tourist junk and portable food, musicians, and lots of people not doing anything much, just being there because they wanted to be there. For once it wasn’t raining and there came a time when the clouds even parted.
‘What’s that yellow thing in the sky?’ said Zbigniew. ‘I feel as if I have seen it before. Not in London. Somewhere else. It burns!’
They argued over whether to buy an ice cream or a Dutch waffle and in the end got one of each; except she was right, the waffle tasted as if it was made out of grilled cardboard. Matya giggled at him as he tried to eat it and then had to chuck it away. As for the sight of her eating the ice cream, chocolate with mint chips, Zbigniew didn’t know where to look. They stopped and listened to a man playing the clarinet, a piece Zbigniew recognised as Mozart. He said so and she was, he could see, impressed. Then – his master stroke – he announced that he had pre-booked tickets for the London Eye. And here they were.
One of the Japanese girls had come over to Matya and by sign language and mime offered to take a photograph of Matya and Zbigniew on Matya’s mobile phone. So they huddled together and the smiling Japanese girl held her hand above her head to indicate, here it comes, and then took the picture. Then Zbigniew (clever Zbigniew) had the idea of asking her to do the same thing with his phone, so that he and Matya would have near-identical Zbigniew-and-Matya-on-the-London-Eye photos on their phones. Then he took her home, in time for the tea date with a girlfriend that she’d warned him about – a clever way of setting a limit to their date; he wasn’t the only one who’d given some thought to stratagems and how to play it – and he took her back to the Tube, giving her, as they parted, a single kiss on the cheek. Well, Zbigniew thought, how perfect was that? And then it was time to think about something else, but to Zbigniew’s great surprise, he found that he couldn’t.
84
On the morning of Monday 15 September, Roger got the sack. He had no preparation, no build-up, and he did not, not even in the faintest way, see it coming. It had been an ordinary morning, with the only noteworthy thing being the fact that a busker was kicked out of the Underground by two policemen, who had clearly moved beyond the stage of negotiating reasonably by the time Roger arrived, because they had picked the musician up and were carrying him bodily out of the station, their hands under his armpits, his feet wildly pedalling. A third policeman, following behind, carried the man’s violin case. It looked like a piece of slapstick out of a silent film, and Roger was still smiling to himself about it at eleven thirty, when he had a message to say that Lothar would like to see him in his office immediately.
Roger sauntered through the trading room, slaloming around the desks, his crew hard at work, the noise levels satisfactorily high – because a loud trading room is a busy trading room. Mark was nowhere to be seen, as indeed he hadn’t been all morning: that was a good thing also. Roger had long since tired of his efficient but shifty and hard-to-read deputy, with his air of aggrievement or underappreciation, or whatever it was; Roger had never been interested enough to find out.
One of the tricks to managing Lothar – managing upwards, that crucial skill for the modern corporate employee – was to always do what he asked immediately. Even if, especially if, the task had no particular urgency, Lothar liked the idea that his will was always turned into action as soon as he expressed it. So Roger felt that this meeting, or chore, or whatever it was, had already got off to a good start when he arrived in Lothar’s office a mere ninety seconds after his phone had rung. Lothar was sitting at the meeting table rather than behind his desk, and he did not look welclass="underline" he was pale, indeed he was about the same colour as his white shirt. It was as if he’d decided to give up all that skiing-sailing-orienteering-triathlon nonsense and had taken up sitting in libraries, and, over the weekend, he had acquired the complexion to go with it. Next to Lothar was Eva, the head of human resources, an unsmiling Argentinian whose complete devotion to corporate correctness in all forms made Roger nervous. This will be some bullshit thing about a complaint, or a hiring and firing issue. It couldn’t be about Roger discriminating against female colleagues; he hardly had any. Somebody had gone behind his back about something. Such was life.
‘Ah, Roger,’ said Lothar. ‘We seem to have a little problem. When I say “we” I mean Pinker Lloyd. What do you know about the fact that your deputy has been practising criminal embezzlement under your nose?’