Only a few hours earlier, Vanessa Veals had put five cubes of ice into a Victorian rummer, poured in vodka till it almost reached the brim, and added some fresh mint, a slice of lime and a dribble of grenadine cordial. It was her second “proper” drink of the evening, and after it she would stick to what she called “just wine”. She took it into the sitting room, kicked off her shoes and sat on the sofa, where she fired up the television.

She lit a cigarette, an American classic with a toasted-wheat aroma, and pushed her hand back through her hair, which had been professionally washed and dried that afternoon on Holland Park Avenue. Before abandoning herself to the evening, she ran a check over everyone and everything for which she felt responsible.

Max, the West Highland White, had had his walk and a solid two hours’ barking at the end of the garden under the neighbours’ window. Bella, her 14-year-old daughter, was having a sleepover at Chloë or Zoë’s house. She had a sleepover most nights, Vanessa had noticed, but it was probably good for her social skills. Bella’s school reports were not particularly good, but then she was not a particularly clever child. She was a mystery to Vanessa. She didn’t seem to be interested in fashion, for a start. Perhaps that was because she was plump, but Vanessa didn’t think so. She didn’t seem interested in discos or parties or boys or shoes or money or music or whatever they were meant to be interested in. God knows what they did at these “sleepovers”, apart from eat fattening food and wear fleecy pyjamas in their sleeping bags. Bella seemed to have come from a different decade; Vanessa had once found her reading about ponies, for heaven’s sake.

Then Finbar. Well, he was up in his room and she no longer dared go up there. He could make her politest inquiry look like a gross breach of his privacy. Presumably he was masturbating or something, but he was 16 and therefore legally an adult — or near as made no difference anyway — so there was nothing she could do about it. He looked very pale, it was true, and was as thin as Bella was plump, but what was his mother meant to do: make him go to the gym, eat more potatoes? It was best to leave him to find his own way forward in life, up there, on his own. It really was a nice room in any event; the best room in the house, John always said.

And John? Well, guess what, John was working late. And when he came home, he’d work even later. Vanessa knew he had a big trade on. She could tell, because instead of coming to bed at one and lying awake most of the night worrying, he didn’t come to bed until some oriental market had opened or closed — and sometimes not even then: she’d find him at seven, haggard and unshaven with the morning papers in the kitchen, still in last night’s clothes.

Vanessa lit another cigarette and sighed. She’d married John because he was rich and because she felt he’d make few demands on her. He had happily given up trading on the floor of Nymex and taken what she considered a more respectable job on the energy desk in the bank’s main building in Wall Street; he told her he’d done it for her, though she already knew him too well to think he would do anything unless there was a financial advantage in it. However, it was a useful fiction for them both: she’d taken the rough trader and made him into a suave creature of charity evenings; he had transformed himself out of pure gallantry and a desire to please his wife.

What Vanessa hadn’t foreseen was either the narrowness of her husband’s life or the peripheral sliver of it that would be set aside for her. He treated her politely and remembered her birthday and their wedding anniversary with small jewellers’ boxes and silent dinners à deux in places of terrible expense from which she could barely wait to get home. She had believed that she’d like being left to herself, being independent, but had discovered that it made her brutally lonely. Although she did read books and did have friends, her inner resources weren’t great enough to withstand the relentless, remorseless pounding of solitude. It was like the sea: it never stopped.

John Veals had no interests outside the acquisition of money. He didn’t play golf or tennis. He didn’t support a football team. He threw all colour magazines in the bin. He went to the theatre or the opera once a year if there was a certain and measurable financial advantage in doing so. He never went to the cinema and he thought tele-vision was a waste of time. A personal shopper bought his clothes. His idea of dinner was sausages and frozen peas, though he was prepared to sit it out over foie gras and Japanese beef if there was a purpose to the tedium. He disliked alcohol, though kept the cellar well stocked for Vanessa; he had an arrangement with a wine merchant in St James’s to make an automatic fortnightly delivery to the house.

He hated holidays because they kept him from the markets and he had nothing to do beside the pool because he didn’t read and had never learnt to swim. He disliked travelling and claimed he’d done more than enough of it in the course of his job. The culture, languages, art and buildings of other countries were of no concern to him. Vanessa had once forced him into a weekend in Venice where the only thing that piq-ued his interest was the thought that Jewish usurers had first begun to trade beside the Rialto; he declined to enter the Scuola San Rocco to see the Tintorettos because he had to take a call on his cellphone. In any case, he was allergic to anything that smacked of the religious.

His family was Jewish, but he had no interest in their God or their traditions; in fact, he was himself consistently anti-Semitic in what he presumably imagined was an inoffensive way, talking freely of “Hooray Hymies” — Jews who in his view tried to ingratiate themselves with upper-class Gentiles — or referring to his chief trader as “O’Bagel”, and even once dismissing a cautiously dull investor as “bog standard Hendon Ikey”. “My granddad came from Lithuania,” Vanessa once heard him say at dinner. “So f***ing what? Vanessa’s grandfather came from Pittsburgh PA!”

It amused him colossally that Stephen Godley, a Surrey Protestant, had at one point found his progress barred at the Jewish-owned bank for which he worked. Veals claimed that before the partners’ golf day at Pebble Beach, Godley had been circumcised at the age of 39 and walked naked up and down the changing room for half an hour after finishing his round.

The only thing that made him laugh more was the thought of Bob Cowan, who had been promoted to the main board because people thought he was Jewish. He wasn’t, but the Americans weren’t allowed to ask — on the grounds that even to pose the question was in some way “racist”. John Veals loved that joke; it somehow really spoke to him.

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