“Oh, I always have a few little projects on the go. There’s a more cultural-historical sort of book I’m thinking of calling The Last Taboo, about money-how it affects the consciousness of people who have it, or work with it.”
“Like my cousin Charlie?” Matthew said, lighting the paper under the charcoal.
Hugh nodded. “I was certainly curious to meet him.”
“Not that he’s your average money person, though,” Matthew put in, a little defensively. He’d formed the idea that Hugh must be some kind of rearguard Marxist. He had a vague sense of the glamour socialism still possessed among the more cultured of his former compatriots; that it was far from being a dirty word, as it was in America.
“In fact he sees himself pretty much in opposition to the archetype.”
Hugh smiled-amiably enough:
“That’s good.”
“Where does the taboo part come in?”
Hugh thought for a moment.
“Put it this way, it’s the only subject left that celebrities don’t talk about in their memoirs. Their own money, I mean. They’ll come clean about all the things that used to be taboo-sexual proclivities, drug habits, petty crime-brag about them, in fact. But they don’t talk about their money and we don’t expect it of them. It’s the one subject that’s still off-limits. Probably because unlike sex and drugs it’s inextricably connected to the one source of guilt and shame that actually has some objective validity, namely the sense that you’ve stolen another person’s labor-cheated them out of their own bodily and mental exertions. All those other forms of shame are basically just masks for this one, in my view: ways of not thinking about the one thing we all know in our hearts to be unequivocally wrong.”
Matthew nodded, fanning the chimney with an old copy of the Aurelia Gazette. He wasn’t sure he understood what Hugh was getting at, but he was enjoying the sensation, rare these days, of being taken for an educated man of the world. It wasn’t how he thought of himself, exactly. His shambles of an education had seen to that, and he tended to be on his guard whenever the talk took an intellectual turn. But this thoughtful compatriot, with his worn old jacket and out-of-season shoes, put him at his ease.
They chatted on until the others came over from the pool, and for the next hour Matthew was in and out of the kitchen, busy with the dinner. Charlie and Chloe had made it clear they wanted a casual, no-frills barbecue, which was fine with him, but he was damned if he was going to serve up store-bought hamburger buns or ketchup, so there was all that to see to as well as getting the grill rack brushed and oiled and heated to the right temperature. As he was taking the brioche dough out of the fridge, George appeared in the kitchen.
“So what exactly is your gig here, then?” She perched tipsily on a stool. “Are you the English butler or something?”
Matthew explained that he was here as Charlie’s cousin and old friend but also happened to be the designated chef.
She chuckled.
“So democratic, the American class system. Right?”
He made a noncommittal sound and began shaping the brioche buns.
“No, but seriously, what is your racket?”
“You mean in general?”
“Yeah, whatever…”
“Not much right now,” Matthew said. Then, not wanting to come off as a complete nonentity, he told her about his plan for a gourmet food truck.
“How Brooklyn! What would you make?”
“I’m thinking maybe pupusas.”
“What the fuck is a pupusa?”
Matthew explained, adding, “It probably wouldn’t work in England.”
“You’d have to call it a pupusa buttie…”
He smiled. “Anyway, it’s strictly a pipe dream till I figure out how to get my hands on a truck.”
“And how much would that set you back?”
“Forty, fifty grand, for anything halfway decent.”
“Fuck!”
“Right.”
“Better hit up your cousin Charlie! Or have a dig around in one of those sofas; probably a few grand in change right there.” She lowered her voice: “What’s he make all his dosh from anyway?”
“Banking.”
“Oh, right, Jana said.”
“Plus he inherited a few million.”
She snorted. “I inherited my mum’s microwave.”
“That’s more than I got.”
“Really? You sound posh.”
“No more than you, I’ll bet.”
“Ooh! I’ll have you know that behind this mockney is a genuine cockney. My Auntie Becca was known as the Pearly Queen of Bethnal Green.”
Matthew laughed, warming to her despite her jagged manner. She slid off her stool, waving magenta-nailed fingers at him and swaying a little as she clopped away.
At dinner, after he’d served up the burgers, he found himself seated next to her at the stone table. She was vehemently disagreeing with Bill about an opinion he’d just offered concerning a well-known TV host.
“Rubbish! He’s a prat, Bill. He’s a talking colostomy bag, not a journalist. And definitely not ‘evenhanded.’ ”
“Oh, I think he’s pretty evenhanded,” Bill retorted with a bland smile. He didn’t seem terribly enamored of his houseguest.
“Crap! He’s about as evenhanded as a fucking… lobster.”
“A lobster. That’s good, George.”
After they’d finished eating, Matthew slipped away and did some cleaning up in the kitchen. When he went back outside the atmosphere had changed. George was talking loudly while the others sat listening in various attitudes of discomfort. She’d flagged a little during dinner, but now she was blazing away again. Apparently she’d just remembered, again, that Charlie was a banker, and found that she was compelled by her conscience to go on the attack.
“I’m having a go at you, Charlie,” she was saying with a grin. “But face it, you’re no different, really, from some Mafia boss or Mexican drug lord up here on your mountaintop, are you? Actually, you’re worse-”
Bill cleared his throat.
“It’s okay, Bill” she said, “I’m just having a go at our host. It’s very English of me, I know, but Charlie doesn’t mind, do you, Charlie?”
“Be my guest.”
“Ha. No, but seriously, you actually are worse than a Mafia boss or a Mexican drug lord, Charlie, because they at least risk getting killed or locked up for robbing defenseless people of their life’s savings and stealing their houses, whereas you’re not only allowed to rob people of their life’s savings and steal their houses, you are positively encouraged to rob people of their life’s savings and steal their houses. In fact, the more you rob people of their life’s savings and steal their houses, the bigger your year-end bonus, right? And of course if it all goes pear-shaped, you and your chums in your six-thousand-dollar power suits can just get together with your other chums at the Treasury Department in their six-thousand-dollar power suits and arrange for an eighty-billion-dollar bailout, paid for of course by the very people you’ve spent the last decade robbing and stealing from. Right, Charlie?”
Charlie took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. Chloe was looking at him, as if waiting for him to defend himself. But he said nothing.
Jana, who’d been darting glances at her hosts, said, “That’s kind of a not very nuanced way of looking at the situation, don’t you think, George?”
“We’ve been watching a lot of Occupy footage,” Bill put in, more dryly.
“Charlie’s totally a supporter of Occupy,” Chloe said. “Tell them, Charlie…”
Charlie frowned. Catching the look, Bill continued:
“Well, no, that wasn’t my point. I mean, I give credit to Occupy for bringing their issues into the mainstream, but at this juncture I also think they need to leave off what basically amounts to little more than tomfoolery and let the grown-ups deal with what happens to be-”