Capital by Lanchester John

Author:Lanchester, John [Lanchester, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Faber
Published: 2012-02-19T23:00:00+00:00

51

That went well, Zbigniew thought, on his way to work the next morning. In fact he could hardly believe how well it had gone.

The thing about breaking up with someone, Zbigniew now realised, was that it was a type of job, a specific task, and like other specific tasks was best accomplished by being broken down into its component parts, analysed, and then put back together in the correct sequence, accompanied by a plan of action. That was what he had done. So the break-up needed to be 1. unequivocal, 2. as gentle as possible while still consistent with 1, and 3. executed with the minimum possibility of public disruption and fuss.

It was not that different from plastering a wall or rewiring a socket. A practical-minded man did not flinch from such tasks. Piotr was an idiot.

He had told her that he could not see her any more; that she was a lovely girl but that he knew she deserved more; that he was not ready to settle down, it was not the reason he had come to London, that his real life was in Poland and that he would be going back there one day (he implied that it would be soon) and that he could not act on the basis of a lie, and that he felt he was lying to her by acting as if he was ready to be in a stable relationship. Zbigniew was proud of that line, the implicit claim that the reason he was breaking up with her was that he thought so highly of her. She was so important to him that he was chucking her. What woman could resist that?

Not Davina, evidently. She had been quiet, head down, not saying much, no tears, no rage, no public explosion. She had been as untheatrical and self-contained as Zbigniew had ever seen her. He had run through his reasons and she had listened to them and accepted them.

‘So that’s it, then,’ she said. Her tone was sad and resigned and in no way crazy.

‘I am sorry,’ said Zbigniew, reaching the climax of his talk. ‘It’s not you, it’s me.’

‘I’m going to go now,’ Davina had said. And she had got up and left. It was starting to become a pattern, Zbigniew thought, people getting up and leaving him in bars. He had stayed for a beer and gone home and had been in such a good mood that he had come close to speaking to Piotr.

Zbigniew let himself into the crazy divorced lady’s house – she had given him a key the previous day, explaining that she might be out with her personal trainer when he arrived. He went to get the papers to cover the patch of floor where he was working. One thing he had learned to do, part of the way in which he distinguished himself from British workmen, was to be meticulous about cleaning up at the end of the day, so there were no traces of work-in-progress, apart from the work itself.

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