Capital by John Lanchester Page A

showing signs of insufficient respect. He liked Smitty’s fame but didn’t seem to appreciate that Smitty came attached to it. More interested in his own work than in his employer’s – even though he didn’t have any work of his own to speak of. He had come recommended by Smitty’s art dealer and agent, a bright kid related to somebody or other, freshly graduated from St Martin’s or Clerkenwell or wherever it was. The kid was bright and on his better days had a hungry look that Smitty approved of, but theboy also needed to be careful. He had the air of someone who liked to take a few pills of a weekend. Smitty liked to talk about living large and caning it, but his attitude to drugs was, beneath the rhetoric, cautious and epicurean: small amounts, meticulously chosen, at the right time and in the right company. He took as much trouble sourcing his drugs as a different kind of person would take sourcing organic meat. If his assistant was getting off his face Friday-to-Sunday to such an extent that his concentration was wavering at work, he was soon going to find himself being an ex-assistant. An ex-assistant with a watertight confidentiality clause in his contract.
    A beeping noise went off. The boy fished his phone out of his pocket.
    ‘You asked me to tell you when it was half eleven,’ he said.
    ‘Yeah, OK,’ said Smitty. He picked up his mobile and his wallet and his car keys. ‘Got a thing to go to. My nan.’
    ‘Sorry,’ said the boy with a hint of something in his tone Smitty didn’t like, an only just detectable irony of some kind. OK, that’s it, he told himself. You’re fired. He headed out the door to his car in a genuinely shitty mood.

13
    S mitty would have been the first to admit that he was a rubbish grandson. He lived in Hoxton, his nan lived in Lambeth, and he visited her, what, about three times a year? They both stayed with his mum at Christmas. And that was that, out of a typical 365 days.
    Smitty’s mum had been young when she had him – twenty-one – and Petunia had done quite a bit of looking after him when he was small, childminding and babysitting and the rest. He had been very keen on her then. She was good at looking-after, keen on cuddling, and had never once lost her temper – in fact, at the age of twenty-eight, he’d still never seen her angry. He’d got on well with his grandfather too, Albadadda as he was known (Albert plus dadda). His grandfather had been a mixture of grumpy and hilarious, the kind of grown-up who gets on well with small children because he is close to being one himself. When Smitty’s parents moved out to Essex, he saw much less of his grandparents; hardly saw them at all, in fact. He went through the usual teenage thing of thinking his grandparents were smelly and boring and made loud noises when they chewed, and was only starting to come out of that phase when his grandfather suddenly died. That was the year he went to art school. He was at Goldsmiths so it wasn’t far away, and he could easily have made a regular habit of visiting his nan. His intentions were good. It was just that he didn’t do anything about them.
    But Smitty and his grandmother Petunia got on well for all that. When he did see her he was able to be relaxed, his guard down, with none of the wariness he was never quite able to put aside with his mother. That was partly because of his work. His mum would ask questions and he would fend her off with talk about being an artist, deliberately leaving the impression he was some sort of commercial artist, in the sense of a graphic designer or something like that – and she could tell, with her maternal antennae, that he was doing pretty well at it, though not that he was genuinely minted. (Of course, some of Smitty’s art-world mates would have said that he was absolutely a commercial artist in a larger sense. That was OK by him.) His father didn’t know the details of what he did and didn’t particularly care, since he could tell