A Week in December Read online

  The boy in Pizza Palace had promised him a ‘massive high’, with no bad effects, but it had been a lie. His hands were shaking as he lay down on the cold grass and curled himself up into a foetal ball. He saw images of Alan the schizophrenic and Terry O’Malley leering down at him. He wrapped his thin arms round his tee shirt and felt the wetness of the grass on his smooth cheek. For once, he wanted his parents to come back – even for his father to be there. But they were out, away, and he was alone, trying with all his childish might to keep a grip on a reality that he could no longer properly inhabit.

  Three

  Tuesday, December 18

  I

  Amanda Malpasse said goodbye to Roger at the front door of their Chilterns farmhouse. She liked Roger well enough, she was truly fond of him, but since he’d been eased out of his job in a City law firm at the age of fifty-one she did see the old fellow pretty much round the clock. Both their children were at university, and there was only so much she could find to say to him about their numerous dogs and neighbours. London, on the other hand, reminded her of being young again, when she had lived in a flat with two girlfriends near the Fulham Road and had been, in the phrase of the time, a bit of a goer.

  ‘Don’t drink too much, darling.’ She always said this when she left him alone.

  ‘Would I ever?’ And he usually said this in return.

  ‘And I’ll be back at teatime tomorrow. We’ve got the Manns coming over.’

  ‘I know. Drive carefully.’

  By eleven, Amanda was in a café in North Park, where she had arranged to meet Sophie Topping, who wanted reassurance about her big dinner party that Saturday. Amanda didn’t know Sophie well, but was happy to do what she could to help if it gave her an excuse to hit town. The café was also a traiteur and deli, where North Park women could buy pre-cooked dishes of astonishing expense and quite edible quality.

  Sophie was in the back room with another woman, whom she introduced as Vanessa Veals. They were in mid-conversation about children and schools.

  ‘Vanessa’s daughter Bella is such a sweetie,’ Sophie explained to Amanda.

  ‘I hardly ever see her,’ said Vanessa. ‘She’s always off with her friends.’

  ‘That’s because she’s so popular!’ said Sophie. ‘She really is a dear.’

  Vanessa looked unconvinced – more than that, thought Amanda: she looked unhappy.

  Sophie prattled on. ‘And Finn’s so clever, isn’t he? I’ll bet he’ll do brilliantly in his GCSEs.’

  ‘He seems to have stopped working lately, though,’ said Vanessa.

  ‘Doesn’t John read him the riot act?’

  ‘He used to push him like mad. He made a terrible scene when Finn didn’t win a race at the sports day a couple of years ago. He was swearing at him, you know, saying, You effing this and effing that. But lately he seems to have lost interest.’

  The waiter brought three milky versions of coffee, but had no takers when he offered them food.

  After half an hour talking about who was coming on Saturday and who would be sitting next to whom, Amanda said: ‘I know Roger’s looking forward to it a lot. He loves parties. Don’t give him too much wine, though, or he gets a bit over-exuberant.’

  ‘You’re lucky,’ said Vanessa. ‘I find it hard to get John to come to anything.’

  ‘He is coming, though, isn’t he?’ said Sophie anxiously.

  ‘Oh, yes. It’s a three-line whip. He just regards social life as a waste of time.’

  ‘What does your husband do?’ said Amanda.

  ‘He works,’ said Vanessa. ‘That’s what he does. Work. He has a hedge fund. Most hedge-fund managers work hard, I know, but most of them have fun as well. They own a boat, they have a glider pilot’s licence. I know one who has a climbing wall in his house. There’s another one who lives near us who plays the piano beautifully and plays chess for a club and goes to the theatre twice a week and takes his wife to the opera. But John ... I don’t know.’

  ‘But he’s very loyal and—’

  ‘I tell you what I would like more than anything in the world.’ Vanessa’s voice suddenly deepened against the chatter of the café, and the effect was odd, as of a sudden key change. Sophie and Amanda leaned forward. ‘I could forget the lack of fun,’ said Vanessa, ‘or his dread of parties or holidays or romance, I could forget everything if I could just once see him laugh.’

  There was an embarrassed pause. Although Sophie and her friends talked about little other than their families when they met, they were seldom indiscreet and never raw.

  Sophie said, ‘He must sometimes laugh. I’m sure I’ve seen—’

  ‘Never,’ said Vanessa. ‘When we were going out together, at first, in New York, I thought it was charming in an odd way. I could make him smile back then, and I think I was the only person who could. But laugh? Never. It has never been seen.’

  ‘Well,’ said Amanda, ‘I’ll make that my special task on Saturday. To make your husband laugh.’

  ‘Good luck,’ said Vanessa, a more normal tone returning to her voice. ‘But I should warn you, that road is paved with the bodies of those who tried and failed.’

  When she got back to Holland Park, Vanessa found Bella on a rare visit home. She was making pasta in the kitchen.

  ‘Hello, darling. How was Katie’s?’

  ‘Great, thanks. Would you like some pasta?’

  ‘Is it lunchtime?’

  ‘Yes, it’s nearly one o’clock.’

  ‘No, thanks. I’ll have ...’ Vanessa poured herself a glass of white burgundy from the fridge. ‘I had an apple earlier.’

  Bella took her bowl to the table and opened a carton of orange juice.

  ‘What are you doing this afternoon?’ said Vanessa.

  ‘Going to a movie with Zoë. At Whiteleys. I can’t wait till the new shopping centre opens up. You know. Westfield.’

  From the kitchen window they could see the top of one of the giant red cranes that lowered over the site.

  ‘Where I grew up in Wiltshire,’ said Vanessa, ‘there was only one cinema within a twenty-mile radius and it had only one screen.’

  ‘But that was in the Dark Ages, Mum.’

  ‘I suppose that’s why I was always bolting up to London. Do you ever wish you’d been brought up in the country?’

  ‘No,’ said Bella. ‘I like animals. I wouldn’t have minded a pony. But that’s about it.’

  ‘Don’t you sometimes feel all the people you meet in London are a bit the same?’

  ‘Yeah, but I like that. Gotta go now. See you later.’

  ‘Yes, darling. Have fun.’

  All of Vanessa’s family were mysterious to her, though none more than her husband. She often wondered at the way John seemed so exactly suited to the modern world. It was something to do with tunnel vision, she thought, of being unaware of contingency.

  She herself had read psychology at university, trained as a lawyer in London, then worked for a petroleum company in New York, before finding a position with a charitable foundation; this was what she had been doing when she met John Veals with his then colleague Nicky Barbieri on Long Island. So for a time in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Vanessa Whiteway had been on the edge of the financial world and had seen how it transformed itself.

  The essential change seemed to her quite simple: bankers had detached their activities from the real world. Instead of being a ‘service’ industry – helping companies who had a function in the life of their society – banking became a closed system. Profit was no longer related to growth or increase, but became self-sustaining; and in this semi-virtual world, the amount of money to be made by financiers also became unhitched from normal logic.

  It followed, Vanessa thought, that the people who could flourish here must themselves be, in some profound and personal way, detached. They could have no qualms about the effects of what they did; no cares for the collateral impact – although, to do them justice, they did take precautions to minimise the possibility o
f any contact with reality; indeed the joy of the new products was exactly their magical self-sufficiency, the way they appeared to eliminate the risk of any final reckoning. However, it remained necessary for these people to have – or to develop very quickly – a very limited sense of ‘the other’; a kind of functional autism was the ideal state of mind.

  And in addition to this, there must be a passionate faith: they had to believe that theirs was the true system and that earlier beliefs had been heretical. Where there were doubts, they had to be excised; where there were qualifications, they needed to be cauterised. A breed of fanatic was born, and Vanessa saw them with her own blue eyes. She met them at off-site bonding sessions in Florida, at charity dinners and – dog-tired and wind-burned – at the end of golfing weekends in Scotland. Although she wasn’t there for the lectures or the golf or the drinking, and glimpsed them only at the lobby or the airport, she could tell that these loners had reinforced one another’s beliefs over the three days away; that by the end of their exhausting rituals they were reinvigorated in their faith – convinced they needed nothing and nobody beyond their own fantastic circuitry.

  What intrigued Vanessa about John was how easily he had fitted into the required psychological profile. To hear him talk of his North London childhood, you would have foreseen nothing so extraordinary; his school performance was unremarkable and his family had neither ‘spoiled’ nor bullied him. There were no ‘formative’ incidents that made him set his face against the world, no early loss or trauma for which he needed to compensate.

  In fact, when she thought about John, Vanessa found the whole toolbox of her undergraduate psychology classes to be useless. There was no ‘compensation’, no subliminal desires or re-enactments. What there was, in her view, was a simple and unmotivated collision of two things: the way these new financiers were by nature, and the way the world, for the first time ever, had indulged them.

  Some people thought the crux of it was the invention of some credit derivative products by a few people at J. P. Morgan; but in fact, in Vanessa’s mind, the key was that society as a whole in London and New York had so lost its bearings that it was prepared to believe, with these analysts, that cause and effect could be uncoupled. To her, this social change, the result of decades of assault on long-accepted norms, was far more interesting than the quasi-autistic intellects of the people, like John, who worked in the new finance.

  Very occasionally, these individuals were compelled to interact with society – most notably when it looked as though politicians might regulate them; then for a moment they were required to leave their cloister and dirty their hands in the world. The largest cheque that John Veals had ever written was to a political lobbying firm in Washington when he, and the bank for whom he was then working, feared that credit derivatives might be the subject of government regulation. They had contributed $3 million to the fees of the key lobbyist on Capitol Hill.

  One other moment came to Vanessa’s mind, one other instance when her husband had collided with the old world of obligation and debt that he had outgrown. It came when she accompanied him to a function addressed, quite recently, by the British Prime Minister. What had it been? A Lord Mayor’s dinner? The opening of a bank’s offices in Canary Wharf? She could no longer remember. What she could recall clearly was the way the Prime Minister lowered his voice with the stagey vibrato that politicians used to convey ‘sincerity’ and, congratulating the assembled financiers, had said words to the effect that: ‘What you have done for the City of London, we now intend to do for the entire British economy.’

  She looked at John and thought he was going to faint. All colour had left his face and he was holding hard to the edge of the table. She put her hand on his. At first, she thought he was appalled at the idea that his own circle’s understanding of the world was about to be stolen and made public by a man who was not really of their faith. Later, she understood that the loss of blood was, paradoxically, his way of blushing: of betraying shame.

  She had never seen a trace of it again – of shame, or doubt, or the embarrassment of reconnection with the world; it was all over in that moment.

  And when little Sophie Topping asked her if she still ‘loved’ her husband, it was not a question that Vanessa felt she could answer. How could you ‘love’ such a man? ‘What makes him tick?’ ‘What does he enjoy?’ ‘When you’re alone, what does he ...?’ None of these were questions to which Vanessa could give an answer, because her husband had long ago migrated to a place where such matters had no meaning.

  II

  Growing up in Glasgow, Hassan al-Rashid was aware from an early age of the differences between people. His family was richer than average and he had things other children didn’t – better toys, more pocket money, newer clothes. He went to the mosque and prayed, while few of the ‘Christians’ bothered with religion, unless you counted a week-long alcohol binge at Christmas. Hassan felt lucky to be well off, anxious about being different, and angry that his family didn’t seem to have the respect it deserved. Surely his father, such a good man and so hard-working, should at least have been the Mayor of Renfrew.

  At home, his father sang him traditional songs and read to him from the Koran. Knocker’s version of Islam was musical and poetical. Although he had never actually read the Koran, he was a fair scholar of the parts that appealed to him – the nice bit in ‘The Bee’, for instance, which suggested that in emergency you could even eat pork, and, so long as you meant no harm, God would turn a blind eye; and as a motto for daily life, Knocker thought, you couldn’t do much better than the verse in ‘The Night Journey’: ‘Do not walk proudly on the earth. You cannot split the earth, nor can you rival the mountains in stature.’

  In truth he would have preferred it had the book carried fewer angry assurances about the eternal punishment that awaited every non-believer, but he tended not to listen when the most spiteful of these were recited in the mosque. At the end of every such recital, he would happily intone the words: ‘In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful.’ These were the qualities of Allah that Knocker al-Rashid was interested in. He was like a Church of England Christian who paid lip service to the Bible as a whole, but only believed in the New Testament because the Old, while full of good stories, was ancient Judaic stuff, of chiefly anthropological interest.

  The pith of Islam was likewise to be found selectively, Knocker thought, not so much in the hellfire-for-infidel Koran as in the gentle teachings of many generations of wise and kind old men. Knocker’s spiritual belief was secure: he had trust in the omnipotence of Allah and no doubt that a place in paradise awaited him, so long as he remained strong in his devotions and pure in his behaviour. His faith enabled him to ride over financial turbulence and local hostility, because he knew there was a truth that lay beyond cash flow and VAT, deeper than the prejudices of some of the people he dealt with. He could always detach himself from them; and most business associates found that his soft answers turned away their suspicions.

  As a child, Hassan had songs and verses, stories and prayers embedded in his memory, and perhaps because they were offered to him in an atmosphere of affection and calm, they lodged there like the first marks in wet concrete, never to be erased. He had a pure voice, and under an imam’s guidance became adept at tajwid, the art of Koranic recital. This could be emotional and competitive, with the reciters wanting to see who could produce the biggest reaction, but when at the end of the service the congregation would stand and sing greetings to the Prophet, Hassan felt secure enough in who he was.

  The world outside his home, however, was more troubling. He was made aware that his skin was of a different colour from that of his pasty classmates. By the age of eleven – a slight, black-haired child with wide brown eyes in a Dundee-woven school blazer – he knew a fair amount about the planets and the solar system, but almost nothing of the earth. He was astounded when a prematurely developed Scottish classmate punched him in the solar plexus at break time. As he lay gasping in t
he corridor, the pain that seeped from him seemed to crystallise into a small certainty. It was a moment he never forgot. The world was not fair, or reasonable, or loving. You could therefore either fight within it like the others, or you could look for a better explanation and a superior way of life.

  There were prayer groups and special trips up to the Highlands or down to the Lake District with others of his faith, but while Hassan was thrilled by the stories of Noah, Joseph and others in the Koran, he didn’t want to be a special case, in a gaudy coach with wailing music and a devout driver. He watched the same programmes on television as the rest of the children in his class; he went to the same films at the ABC and even supported a football team (Kilmarnock: choosing between Rangers and Celtic had been too fraught). While his father’s Punjabi accent was overlaid with a West Riding inflection, Hassan spoke Glaswegian-English like the native he was. Much as he liked his parents, he didn’t want to make a fetish of them and their culture; he didn’t want to be singled out and stared at, in the way he and his friends gawped at the Jewish children who left early on a Friday in order to be home in Giffnock before dark.

  Hassan tried on different disguises. At fourteen he was all Scottish and atheistic: he exaggerated his interest in football and girls; he drank cider and beer from the off-licence and was sick in the park. He derided the women in hijab, calling out insults after them: ‘Bloody penguins!’; ‘Daleks!’

  He enjoyed the sense of release and belonging, but the specific boys that he was obliged to spend his time with all repelled him. At least he was putting on a front, he thought; he was being perverse with the knowledge that a solid cliff of learning and culture lay behind him. But for these boys, the swearing, the bravado and the sex talk was everything: the foul-mouthed emptiness was all they had. By the time he was seventeen, Hassan had come to despise these friends and was looking for another cloak to wear.

  It was at this time that his father announced that the family was heading south. He had opened a new factory, in Dagenham, and wanted to supervise its early days himself. The Renfrew operation no longer required his presence and he had installed reliable men in Leicester and Luton, where he had smaller units producing a range of pickles and sauces. He had hired a culinary scientist at Cambridge to try to develop what he viewed as the holy grail: a microwaveable poppadom. The ready-cooked ones in sealed packs lacked flavour, while the old-fashioned sort, which needed deep-frying, tended either to burn or to collect fat in their folds. Either way, they were too much work for the modern person.