Separate Beds (4 page)

Annie knew Emily would have trouble digesting this.

Emily fiddled with a fingernail. ‘Dad, what’s going on here? Why didn’t you say all this before?’

Tom avoided Annie’s eyes. ‘Things change.’

Emily directed a suspicious blue gaze at her father. ‘First you support my attempts at the artistic life, now you don’t.’ Her eyes slid towards the shopping bags. ‘I know I’m sponging off you and that’s bad. But … but, OK, I take the point. I’ll think again.’ She grabbed the bags and said, with some dignity, ‘If you could just give me a week or so …’

She shot out of the kitchen, and they listened to her rapid ascent of the stairs.

Annie said, ‘It’s usually my role to be negative.’

Tom ran his fingers through his hair and then, to Annie’s alarm, dropped his face into his hands. ‘Sit down, Annie.’ His voice was muffled.

Annie sat down cautiously. ‘I’m listening.’ A drink problem? Lately, Tom had been hitting the bottle a bit. An affair? She had been expecting it for years. Sadie said (and she
should know) they were always grumpy and unreasonable before they confessed. The guilt trip provoked them to provoke you so that they could accuse you of the bad temper and bad behaviour that had
forced
them to flee into the arms of the secretary/younger model/your best friend. (Again, Sadie should know.)

So it was divorce, the end of her and Tom’s long, flat road … Her mind leaped ahead. Selling the house. A one-bedroom flat into which she would cram her life and entertain friends to lunch (dinners didn’t happen with single divorcees), frantically opening windows to dilute the odours of living and cooking in cramped quarters. Lonely evenings. A fettered spirit.

Annie closed and opened her eyes. ‘Go on.’

He raised his head. ‘I don’t know how to begin.’

She laid her hands flat on the table, ready to grip the edge and hold on hard to the pieces of her disintegrating world. ‘Just say it, Tom.’

‘I’ve lost my job.’

When he thought of how it had happened, a cold sensation crept into his hands and feet. It had been very polite, very low-key, downbeat even. Full of awkward silences like a disastrous radio interview.

I’m sorry, Tom
…

He had smelt it in the air for some time. Since Christmas, at any rate. Any fool would have done. He had lost a bitter turf war over the plundering of the English-language programmes by the regional sections during which he had argued that, since the regional sections were using so much
of his material, it made sense to give him a bigger budget. There was the strategy document that, curiously, had not found its way into his in-tray. A couple of his peers had avoided him. The chatter around the water-cooler had been peculiarly feverish. He rang James to arrange the weekly prop-up bar session at Les Boissons. ‘Hi, usual time, usual place?’

‘No can do, Tom. Another time.’

‘Any particular reason?’

‘Do I have to give a reason?’ James was defensive. ‘Penny’s demanding I go home earlier. She says she never sees me.’

The second Tom put the phone down it rang. It was Neil Bostock, an old foe from Associated Newspapers. He did not waste time in preliminaries. ‘Is it true there’s a cleansing of the Augean stables and you’re being replaced by Matt Piper?’

A mallet smacked into Tom’s head and he saw stars. ‘Couldn’t be less true.’

Neil’s cynical laugh incorporated the phlegmy wheeze of a committed smoker. ‘Not what I’ve heard. Consider this a friendly warning.’

‘Or you’re truffling wildly for a scoop.’

‘Same thing.’ Neil sounded almost affectionate, and a touch regretful at life’s turpitude. ‘You read it here first.’

Tom put down the phone again. Occasionally he wasted energy on the wrong thing and he was aware he did so now. Instead of taking the bull by the horns, instead of demanding to see the Director General and sorting out what was going on, instead of confiding in Annie, he sat miserably in his office. (This he could never confess to her.) Never before in his life, not even with the Mia drama, had he felt
powerless
– gripped by a paralysis of his guts and motor nerves, leaving him unable to move or even think.

Before the axe fell officially he had sufficient wit to book a session with a well-known solicitor who specialized in clear-outs in banking and media. He was known to strike fear into his opponents, and within five minutes Tom understood why.

‘If they’re making you redundant,’ he said, ‘there has to be prior consultation. Has there been?’ Tom related the conversations so far, and they were noted. ‘It would be prudent if you record all your dealings so that we have them at our fingertips. If, on the other hand, they’re sacking you, you must demand chapter and verse as to why. If you wish, you can call me while you’re talking this through. I find it often clarifies things quite quickly.’ He gave a complacent little smile. ‘This is not just about money, although I’m not averse to wringing as much out of them as possible. This is about planning the architecture of your future and it’s important we get it right.’

Tom forced himself not to flinch.

‘We’ll go for a confidentiality agreement, a mutually agreed statement as to why you left the organization and mutually agreed reference. OK?’ The solicitor expertly assessed how much the shell-shocked Tom could absorb. ‘That will do for starters.’

Even then he hadn’t told Annie, which he should have done. Quite apart from the practical considerations, he was wrestling with humiliation, which was the heaviest cross to bear. Soon everyone would know that his reputation and achievements had been found wanting.

When, finally, Tom was summoned to the DG, he looked
bad and, furthermore, like a bad proposition. Dark-ringed eyes and a pasty complexion accosted him in the mirror and he was forced to conclude: this was a man carrying the loser’s plague bacillus.

As he packed up his office with the help of Maddie, his tearful assistant, there was a knock on the door.

‘Come in.’ Tom turned to confront a troubled-looking James.

Tactfully, Maddie vanished and Tom turned back to the papers he was packing into a box. Of course, James could not be blamed for what had happened but, in the way of the workplace, it was a pretty sure thing that he had known.

‘Tom,’ James addressed his back, ‘does Annie know?’

‘Not sure why that should concern you.’

‘
Have
you told her?’

‘As it happens, not yet.’ He was aware that this did not read well, which made him marginally more conciliatory and he looked round. ‘You could, at least, have made the last drink.’

James looked mightily discomfited, which confirmed to Tom what he had suspected. Who was he kidding? Tom had known when it had happened to others. Witnessing the mini-slaughters over the years, he had often reflected on what made an office friendship. Now he knew for sure it had limits.

‘Yes,’ admitted James. ‘Are we still friends?’

Tom shrugged. At this particular moment he couldn’t bring himself to comment. He and James exchanged a glance, packed with memories of shared highs and lows, and the burden of looking after number one in a highly political workplace while remaining halfway decent.

James kicked a filled box on the floor. ‘You would have done the same.’ The box rocked, and he kicked it a second time. ‘They’ve got their eye on someone younger who has an “in” with the government.’

‘Matt Piper. The press very kindly told me.’

James looked truly distressed. ‘Did you really want me to tell you before it happened? No, don’t answer. I know how you loved this job and the organization. More than anyone.’ He shuffled his feet in an embarrassed way. ‘You were the inspiring one, Tom. Some of your programmes were brilliant. You were a fantastic director. We all feel that. Look, I’ll keep an eye on the India and HIV one. I know it was your particular baby.’ He held out a hand. ‘Keep in touch.
Please
.’

‘No,’ said Tom, from the depth of his rage and anguish. ‘Best not.’

Half an hour later, accompanied by Security, Tom walked out of the office for the final time, carrying a cardboard box. Only a few raised their eyes from their screens. There were one or two murmurs, ‘Goodbye’, to break the queasy hush but others shrank back as he passed their desks on the way to unemployment.

He had no one to turn to, and his stomach hurt like hell.

Telling Annie was every bit as bad as he had imagined. He watched her groping to understand. He winced as she looked at him in a completely different way. From the first he had relied on her support and approval. Not entirely, of course, but significantly. He had liked to cup his hand around her delicately shaped head, stare into her eyes and see in them a validation, her loving approval, their sense
of shared purpose. ‘I wish I knew what you were thinking,’ he had once confessed, saddened and maddened because it was impossible.

Her lids had snapped shut, masking a wicked, teasing, delighted gleam. ‘Try me, Tom.’

Time … proximity … work had dulled all that and he couldn’t remember when he had last fitted his hand around the frail, stubborn skull and pinched a (despised) curl, as soft and glossy as a baby animal’s. Sometimes, during restless nights, his longing for the past was as sharp as a butcher’s knife. But even that passed.

Annie pulled back her hair so hard with both hands that her features appeared scraped clean of flesh. ‘Tom, we’ll have to think what to do …’ His spirits plunged into blackness.

These days, twenty years in a job was good going. Thirty was exceptional. Twenty years was sufficient to become expert in surviving management putsches and strategic rethinks, to keep the head down and to trade through upheavals. Thirty saw one beating them at their own game. And when you’d managed that, somehow it seemed unthinkable that the unthinkable would happen.

Annie caught her breath. ‘I’m so sorry, Tom.’

He directed a shattered countenance at her. ‘Not as sorry as I am.’

The drinking … She knew she should have asked sooner. ‘You’ve known about this …’

He looked as though he might deny it, but decided against it. ‘I knew something was going on.’

‘For how long?’

‘A week or so.’

‘Why didn’t you say?’

‘Is it important?’

She absorbed the rebuff. ‘OK, tell me what happened.’

He sighed wearily. ‘One is summoned. One is told. There’s a package waiting in Human Resources. I’ll get the lawyer to look over it.’

He looked beaten, badly beaten, and she told herself to get up and hold him close. But she didn’t.

He was saying, ‘I take it your job is OK?’

‘As far as I know.’

‘The sick are always with us.’ He grimaced. ‘Sorry. I mean, at least one of us will bring home the bacon.’ Then he muttered, ‘I never thought I’d end up relying on my wife.’

The words Tom was using were all wrong. So was the flicker of sexism, which tended to show up for duty in the least sexist of men (which Tom was) when the chips were down. ‘Brandy, I think.’ She went over to the cupboard, extracted it and found two glasses. She poured liberal fingers, then slid one over to him. ‘But why?’

‘“Economies and synergy”.’ He drank some brandy. ‘What stupid words they are.’

‘When do you go?’

‘Now. You don’t keep the head of a division hanging around if you’ve synergized him.’

‘And what’s happening to the job?’

‘Well, now, that’s where it gets interesting. They say it’s to be melted down and dispersed around, but I have a hunch that’s not quite right …’

‘Oh.’ Pity shot through Annie. It was all too clear: it wasn’t
the job that was redundant but Tom. She braced herself to stop up the holes in the dam and help him. ‘Ridiculous. They can’t do without you. The place will fall apart.’

‘I gave them the best years of my life.’

But that’s it, she thought. Tom had loved his job more than anything, having tended it, considered it, paid it homage, spent time with it. He revered what the World Service stood for: to communicate, and to communicate well. He believed in these things. And, as any impersonal organization inevitably did, it was repaying him with a lesson in dispensability.

She said gently, ‘Now we know for sure that institutions don’t do loyalty.’

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Double right.’

‘How do you feel?’ she asked.

‘Skinned.’ He finished the brandy. ‘Flayed.’

Annie thought of the practical implications and her insides lurched. Money. Mortgage. Bills. ‘We’d better plan what to do.’

He looked at her wearily. ‘Let’s discuss it in the morning.’

Each of them stared into their separate glasses of brandy and was silent.

Chapter Four

The bedroom was Annie’s sanctuary. This was contrary to all her expectations. It was supposed to be a
shared
wellspring from which Tom and she would draw strength … a place of comfort and safety where they could talk and find peace in each other’s company. But not so long after Mia had left the family and the gulf was the widest it had ever been, Tom had opted to occupy his daughter’s empty bedroom opposite. He maintained it was because he slept badly – which none of the family believed. Annie never contradicted him.

‘What happens if she comes back?’ she once asked.

‘If she does, then I’ll move back,’ was Tom’s reply.

Neither she nor Tom had meant to end up in separate beds and in their separate territories. Yet both had retreated into them as a relief. With each little additional touch that Annie made to the room they had shared – new curtains, hanging the painting of fourteenth-century Pienza, which she loved, the antique American quilt – it had become more hers.

Bits of Tom were still
in situ
. He kept some of his clothes in the wardrobe and things in drawers. From time to time, Annie was jerked awake by the sound of him rattling in the medicine cupboard in the en-suite bathroom or searching in a drawer. Half asleep, half awake, those were the moments when, at the sight of her shadowy, rummaging husband, she experienced their estrangement most sharply.

Still reeling from his news, she kicked off her shoes, padded to the window and drew the curtains. Their weave (and extra interlining) was satisfyingly heavy to handle, and their tea-rose ashy pink suggested peace, erotic sensuousness and goodness: all the positive and beautiful aspirations with which Annie currently had a tricky relationship.