London Calling - James Craig [8]
Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond, David Runciman
Good Manners and Bad Behaviour: The Unofficial Rules of Diplomacy, Candida Slater
Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness, Richard H Thaler and Cass R Sunstein
Decline to Fall: The Making of British Macro-Economic Policy and the 1976 IMF Crisis, Douglas Wass
Mr Lincoln’s T-Mails: The Untold Story of How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War, Tom Wheeler
The Post-American World, Fareed Zakaria
Xavier reached over and picked the book from the very top of the pile. He would ask his wife to drop the rest of them off at the local Oxfam shop. Lilli wouldn’t be too happy about it, having to mix with the hoi polloi, but they had more than enough clutter here in the house already and it was better than just dumping them in the rubbish bin. Safer too. Their rubbish was regularly sifted by journalists and other cranks, looking for things to embarrass them with. The binning of Edgar’s selected books would be a serious gaffe.
The book he’d picked up was substantial, about half the size of a shoebox. It felt surprisingly good in his hand. He felt more thoughtful already, if not more energetic. Still lacking the energy to rouse himself from the table, he sat back and closed his eyes. The house was empty and the peace was luxurious.
Lilli had left for ‘work’ about an hour ago. For several years now, his wife had enjoyed a sinecure as ‘senior creative director’ for a luxury goods retailer, the kind of place that charged £200 for a cufflink box, £250 for an iPod case, and £1,000 for a handbag. Xavier had no idea what a ‘creative director’, senior or otherwise, actually did. The job had been secured for her by her father in Milan, in return for various, unspecified, favours done for the retailer’s chief executive. Privately, after a few drinks late one night, Walter Sarfatti had told his son-in-law that these ‘favours’ had helped keep the CEO out of prison. Xavier didn’t really believe that, though. As far as he could see, no one went to jail in Italy for white-collar crime. And if the slammer had beckoned, Walter would surely have got much more for his services than just a job for his daughter.
Whatever the ‘job’, however she got it, Xavier didn’t see the point of his wife going out to work. They certainly didn’t need the money. The net gain to the family finances, once you factored in the childcare costs and the amount Lilli spent on clothes and networking and so forth, was negligible. For all Xavier knew, it could easily be costing him money to send her out to work. He personally would rather let the kids have their mother around more often. But the job kept Lilli happy and that was the most important thing. An unhappy Lilli was not good. Not good indeed.
One problem created by their domestic arrangements was the constant turnover in the hired help. Full of enthusiasm and brio, they came from around the world, from China, from Turkey, from South Africa, from various places that Xavier had never even heard of, only to slink off months if not weeks later, crushed by the reality of trying to deal with the Sarfatti-Carlton brood. If anything, the rate of churn was accelerating. They had gone through three au pairs in the last nine months alone.
The current nanny was from Venezuela. She was called Yulexis, so Xavier had nicknamed her ‘Christmas’. She was almost two months into her stint and he hoped that she would last longer than the others, not least because she was only twenty-two, extremely hot (she had been a semi-finalist in the Miss Venezuela pageant, the year before coming