Free Capital by John Lanchester Page B

he had so many bees in his own bonnet, especially about money, and tax, and savings, and the untrustworthiness of banks and insurance companies and credit-card companies and the government and everybody else, and the way that you couldn’t be too careful. He wouldn’t even have a cashpoint card, because he didn’t trust machines or PIN numbers; after his death their daughter Mary had had to teach her how to use one. That was one of the many, many things she had had to learn to do for herself after Albert dropped dead.
    A lot of those things had been to do with money. What it came down to was that Albert, like lots of people, had had a streak of madness running through his character, like a seam running through a rock. He was not, in general, mad; but when the subject was money, he could not be relied on to be sane. For him, money was out of perspective, both all-important (because it at times seemed to be all he thought about) but also completely out of step with reality, so that he wouldn’t do normal things like use a bank or have a pension; he would never pay a bill before, not the reminder, and not the final reminder, but the threat of legal action. It was exhausting; it was mad. But even someone like Albert, obsessively miserly though he became, had to pay gas and electricity bills. He had once mentioned the possibility of getting one or other of these utilities put on a coin-operated meter, and that was one of the few times Petunia had put her foot down with him, telling him no very firmly and then putting up with two weeks’ silence while he sulked. And then after a fortnight’s huff he had got up in the morning perfectly calm and behaving as if none of it had ever happened. One of the effects of this was that she now missed him in particular when she had to do the practical things that he had taken all on himself, the water bills and the rates and checking that her pension had been paid and worrying about the plumbing. All of these were abore and a burden in themselves and they also made Petunia miss the man who was missing.
    It was funny that most of the specific stories she could tell about Albert made him sound awful – the money stuff, the arguments he’d get into with people, his sheer impossibility. He could make a point of principle about absolutely anything. The things that had been good about him, his warmth and kindness and unpredictable sensitivity, the way he’d do good deeds for people and not tell her about them (loans of cash, a lift home, writing letters when people were bereaved), the sense that he was basically a loving man – those translated much less well into stories that you could tell. His good side had been fully on show only to her.
    Petunia was now passing the posh butcher’s in the high street. There was a queue, as there often was – the new people who lived in the area, unthinkingly rich. In the window a turkey had been decorated with a gold ribbon and a crown. At its feet was a sign saying ‘Order Me’.
    Walking past the bright lights and tat of the imminent holiday, Petunia thought about the way that Albert had loved Christmas. You would have expected him to be Scrooge, but he loved every bit of the ritual, from the advent calendar to the hymns to the hats to the Queen’s Speech (which he enjoyed being rude about: ‘the amazing thing about that family is the way every single member of them gets slightly stupider every year’). He loved seeing Mary and her children at Christmas, even though the holiday made their daughter revert to being a stroppy fifteen-year-old again, silent and grumpy and always judging everything. She couldn’t blame Mary for moving away to Essex. She needed to get away. She didn’t have to be quite so far away now that her father was dead and her mother lived alone in a big house, but that was her choice and Petunia understood it without liking it.
    Albert had been a difficult man, there was no denying that. She had spent more time and energy