Smash hit

John had never, so far as Vanessa was aware, read a novel. He found all forms of music irritating and immediately instructed cab drivers to turn off their radios. He disliked art galleries, though thought the financial aspect of modern British art to be of minor interest; he admired the way that the collectors had first created the market for an artist such as Liam Hogg, then cornered it; such manipulation would not, he explained, be allowed by the FSA in any other commodity but “art”. Although he understood horse-racing and its odds as well as any man in Britain, he never went racing or placed a bet; he disliked the animals themselves because they gave him asthma. He had no social life outside the office, and Vanessa knew that he privately disliked his closest friend, Stephen Godley.

The only activity, the only aspect of human life, that interested John Veals was money. The odd thing was, Vanessa thought, as she lit another cigarette, that he’d made enough to last a thousand lifetimes — or, with his modest taste in sausages, with no hobbies, booze or entertainment, perhaps two thousand lifetimes — without ever getting out of bed again. Sometimes she pictured her husband’s money: the millions, the tens of millions, the hundreds of millions, in neat bundles, in their original bank packaging, the faces of George Washington and Queen Elizabeth II staring into the void, sitting in a vault somewhere in the dark, doing… doing nothing, nothing, but just being there, promising to pay the bearer on demand… But what bearer? What demand? And in what life on this planet or one yet to be discovered?

Little Sophie Topping had informed Vanessa once in great excitement how Lance, her husband, had been told a banking secret — not “inside information”, Sophie was quick to stress, but a sensitive and deadly secret. Before he could be included, he’d had to swear to the man who told him that he wouldn’t mention it to a soul. And Lance had sworn on the lives of his wife and his children. Sophie was flushed with shock and solemn excitement. “That’s what they do,” she said. “When something’s really, really, deadly secret and important. On the lives of their children.”

And Vanessa had laughed. A solemn vow for John would have been for him to make a promise about his children’s lives with his wealth the thing on which he swore; that really might have been an oath worth witnessing.

“Why are you laughing, Vanessa?” said Sophie.

“I was thinking about John. I’m sorry. If you lost all your money, Sophie, and you came home in the evening and Lance said, ‘Look, at least we’re all safe, we’re all well, we’ve got each other, we can start again’ — well, you wouldn’t be very happy, but it would be some consolation, wouldn’t it?”

“I suppose so. But why were you laughing?”

“Because with John it wouldn’t. Losing all his money would be worse to him than losing all his family. So swearing on them is no big deal to him.”

Vanessa stood up from the sofa and went down to the kitchen. Max was asleep in his basket, Bella was out, Finn was in his room and John was working. Plus ça change. She’d eaten salad at lunchtime so didn’t need dinner; instead, she took two bottles of Meursault from the fridge, a corkscrew and a clean glass.

Up in the sitting room, she closed the floor-length shutters, lit the wood fire, poured some wine and searched the television hard disk for the stored episode of Shropshire Towers. Then she lay back and tipped the glass to her lips, feeling the edge of loneliness recede

This story is extracted from Sebastian Faulks’s new novel, A Week in December (Hutchinson), which is out on September 3, and is included in the Fire volume of Ox-Tales, one of four anthologies to be published by Profile Books on July 4, at £5 each

About this author

Sebastian Faulks is the acclaimed author of 10 novels, including Birdsong, Human Traces and Engleby. In 2002 he was appointed CBE. Although he interviewed financiers while researching his novel, John Veals is — happily — a fictional creation

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