Widows & Orphans (10 page)

Mr Daniels looked unconvinced.

‘But how much do you get paid?’ the girl insisted.

‘It all depends. Top Fleet Street columnists can earn fortunes. Salary levels at the
Mercury
are more modest. If you start straight from school, it’s around £12,000.’

‘Is that all?’ one of the boys asked. Two of his companions spontaneously edged away from Brian, who stared at his feet.

‘Maybe those of you who are putting together the features page for next month will feel differently. I’m really looking forward to seeing what you come up with. But there are other ways to get involved. I’d encourage you all to send us letters.’

‘On what?’ the girl with the jelly bracelets asked.

‘Anything you feel passionate about.’

‘Then you can write about Bilbo,’ said a boy with a prominent Adam’s apple, before playfully punching his undersized neighbour.

‘Matters you think are of public interest. We get far too few letters from anyone under twenty.’

‘We get far too few from anyone under fifty,’ Brian said, in a vain attempt to restore his standing.

‘How much do you pay for them?’ the deep-voiced girl asked doggedly.

‘We don’t. You get the pleasure of seeing your name in print and knowing that you’re contributing to the community.’

‘Why? We’re not on probation,’ one of the boys said. Duncan forced a laugh, breaking off abruptly when the boy’s affronted expression showed that he was serious.

The visit over, Duncan escorted the pupils to the main entrance where several put on headphones as if needing the security of their self-regulated worlds. As he returned to his office, his fears for the future extended far beyond that of the
Mercury
. Age might have warped his perspective and memory his perceptions, but the children seemed so inert, devoid of the hope and enthusiasm that had marked his own adolescence. Depressed by the encounter, he was determined to do everything he could to motivate Jamie, the occasion presenting itself barely an hour later, when he drove to Francis Preston for the parents’ evening.

On his arrival at the school two years before, Jamie had been horrified to learn about the
Mercury
visits, making him
swear never to invite groups from his year, a vow from which he trusted that he would be released before it was put to the test. Meanwhile, Jamie had even tried to deter him from attending tonight, maintaining that ‘Mum should come on her own, since she’s the one who sees me do my homework’. To Duncan’s relief, Linda had demurred and was waiting for him now at the school gates. Apologising for the traffic, he kissed her cheek, a greeting that seven years after he had lost the right to greater intimacies still felt forced.

A sense of regret enveloped him, as it did for the first few minutes of every meeting with his former wife. He was grateful that Linda, who had once been so attuned to his slightest mood, now seemed oblivious to his distress.

‘You’re looking well,’ he said, with a pang of guilt. It was undeniable that, despite the strain of looking after Rose, she had blossomed since the divorce.

‘You might have made more of an effort,’ she said quietly. ‘That jacket should have gone to Oxfam years ago.’

‘I offered, if you remember.’

‘I’m sorry. Forget I mentioned it.’

It was not just his wardrobe he had offered to change in a last-ditch attempt to keep her from leaving. He had promised to spend less time at the paper and at Ridgemount and even, with a resolve that she had discounted, to enrol on a basic DIY course.

‘We’ve both tried, Duncan,’ she had said. ‘But it’s not working.’

‘I’ve not tried hard enough.’

‘It’s not you that’s the problem. It’s us.’

He knew, of course, that she was right. He had been told as much when they announced their engagement, not only by his mother and sister but by impartial observers like his Cambridge writing partner, Angus Carmichael, who described them as ‘the original odd couple: he’s very
mot juste
and she’s very just a mo’, a jibe that had sounded even more cruel when
he was forced to spell it out to Linda. She, however, shrugged it off with her usual good grace, suggesting that they nickname each other ‘Justin’ and ‘Mo’, a riposte that had even impressed Angus. She was so beautiful and passionate and full of life that he was astounded when she accepted his proposal. Although she refused to admit it, he was convinced that she had been influenced by her mother, for whom marriage to the editor of the
Mercury
promised the prestige and security denied to the owner of a seafront souvenir shop. So the reality of his sixteen-hour days and permanent financial worries, not to mention his Klinefelter Syndrome, must have struck her a severe blow.

A stronger and more self-confident man or simply a more aggressive one – the KS at work again – would have fought harder to save his marriage, but his overriding desire, as he explained, was that she should be happy.

‘You’re the kindest man in the world,’ she said. ‘You’d better watch out; you’ll be fighting off the women once they know you’re back on the market,’ a prospect that would have alarmed him had he not found it risible.

‘What about you?’ he asked. ‘How are you going to fight off all the men?’ It was then that, having sworn there was no one else involved, she told him about Derek.

He may have lost her love but he was determined to retain her affection. Against both his solicitor’s and his accountant’s advice he made her an unduly generous settlement. It was not until he realised that this was the same policy he had adopted with his redundant printers that he felt the full force of his self-disgust.

When his mother reproached him with profligacy, he insisted on the need to maintain good relations with Linda for Jamie’s sake, but privately he knew that it was for his own. As they made their way down the drive, looking every inch the established couple, he comforted himself with the thought of the many occasions on which they would meet as parents: sports days and speech days, wedding day and christenings;
breaking off abruptly when he remembered that the failure to live in the present had been one of Linda’s recurrent charges against him. They walked into the entrance hall, its drab plasterwork relieved by a huge collage of brightly painted inner soles. He stepped up to inspect it more closely when Linda pointed to Jamie, who was lurking behind a frosted-glass partition.

From his expression it was clear that he did not entertain any sentimental notion that his parents would get back together. On the contrary, his life seemed to be predicated on keeping its disparate elements apart. Duncan gazed at his son and wondered how it was that so surly a face and clenched a body could unleash such a torrent of love in him. He longed to hug him but knew that the contact, barely tolerated in private, was utterly taboo in public. So he contented himself with reaching out to squeeze the nape of his neck, but Jamie’s simultaneous recoil meant that, instead, he clipped his ear.

‘What was that for?’ Jamie asked indignantly.

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean … I was just trying to squeeze your neck.’

‘Why?’ Jamie asked, staring at him with even more than the usual dismay.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t worry, darling,’ Linda said. ‘You know your father’s all thumbs. Come on, we’re due at the science lab in five minutes.’

They made their way down a battleship-grey corridor and into a large concrete yard surrounded by assorted classrooms and subject blocks. Spotting a couple peering forlornly at a rudimentary plan, Duncan considered asking Jamie to direct them, but the absence of their own child, combined with Jamie’s protest that only ‘nerds and dweebs’ accompanied their parents to these evenings, dissuaded him. They entered the lab where the chemistry, physics and biology teachers sat at adjacent desks like rival politicians at the hustings. As they
headed for Mr Lawson, the chemistry teacher, they passed a couple being led away by a boy whose pustular face and gangling demeanour seemed to bear out Jamie’s claim.

‘Isn’t this ghastly?’ the woman said gaily. ‘Almost like being back at school yourself.’

‘I know,’ Linda replied. ‘I feel as if I’m the one being judged.’

Duncan wondered whether he were alone in welcoming these events, which offered some acknowledgement of his role in his son’s life. He still bridled at the memory of having to beg the Headmistress for a copy of Jamie’s report. Francis Preston held two parents’ evenings a year, the first in October to discuss how the children were settling in and the second in March to review their progress. Tonight, he and Linda were to see eight of Jamie’s teachers, all for the first time.

‘It’s quite different from my own school,’ Duncan said. ‘Parents were actively discouraged from participating in their sons’ education. They had to make do with a skimpy report at the end of term where academic results jostled with height, weight and general behaviour. Each subject master was allotted a single line, but some confined themselves to a single word. The classics master wrote his in Greek!’

‘Let’s go, Dad!’ Jamie hissed. ‘We’re next.’ With a nod to his fellow parents, Duncan followed his son past a row of sinks, as pristine as those in a kitchen showroom. ‘Why do you have to do that?’

‘Do what? I was just making conversation.’

‘Yeah, about how you went to public school.’

‘I never mentioned Lancing.’ He turned to Linda. ‘Did I mention it?’

‘Hurry up,’ she said. ‘Mr Lawson’s waiting.’

Lawson, a genial Scot whose soft burr might have been designed to reassure anxious parents, lavished praise on Jamie’s work and the meeting went well, or so Duncan thought until they were back in the yard and Jamie upbraided him for once again speaking out of turn.

‘Why did you have to tell him chemistry was my favourite subject?’

‘Isn’t it?’ Duncan asked, recalling their various experiments in Adele’s garage when even she played a part, feigning terror at the thermite-and-ice explosion.

‘Maybe, two years ago.’

‘So what is it now?’

‘Why should I have one? I’m not a kid.’

‘Don’t be rude, Jamie,’ Linda said. ‘Your father’s only asking.’

While appreciating her support, Duncan resented the intervention, which made him feel even more of an encumbrance, like an elderly uncle whose whisky breath and whiskery kisses Jamie had been ordered to endure. He had heard, not from Jamie himself but from Ellen, whose son Neil was in the same class, that they had been assigned a local history project. He had offered Jamie the run of the
Mercury
, proposing that they explore the archives together, only to learn that he had already spoken to Derek, who had agreed to help him with the evolution of the wheel park. Every attempt that he made to bond with his son was similarly thwarted. Sometimes, to ease the pain, he pretended that he had, after all, sent him to boarding school and that his truculence was emotional reserve. It rarely worked.

They headed for the language lab where two French teachers sat at either end of an airy room flanking a German colleague. Duncan’s disappointment that Jamie was not being taught by the glamorous young woman, whose looks and smile would inspire diligence in even the most indolent teenage boy, was compounded by the discovery that his actual teacher, Mr Berwick, had a heavy lisp, which did not bode well for his pupils’ pronunciation. He declared Jamie’s grammar and comprehension to be satisfactory but his vocabulary deficient, at which Linda remarked that, while hopeless at languages herself, Jamie’s father was bilingual and she had
suggested that they speak French to each other. For once, Duncan shared Jamie’s horror. They found it hard enough to communicate in English without venturing into French.

The session was cut short by Mr Berwick’s alarm, which, while ensuring that he stuck to his schedule, seemed to convey his contempt for the entire exercise.

‘So who’s next on our dance card?’ Duncan asked, as they hurried past the German teacher, who was loudly berating an inept pupil in front of her hapless parents and several onlookers.

‘Maths,’ Jamie replied.

‘That was always my worst subject,’ Duncan said.

‘That doesn’t mean it has to be mine! Isn’t it bad enough that I’ve got your ears – and other things?’

Duncan sat through the meeting with the maths mistress in a state of creeping anxiety. Jamie looked both surprised and grateful that he failed to object when Linda questioned the need for him to be set so much homework. All he could hear was that ominous coda echoing in his ears. His earlier irritation that Jamie had bungled the arrangements, leaving them with a twenty-minute gap between maths and ICT, was replaced by relief that it afforded him a chance to talk to Linda. So, asking Jamie to give them a moment in private (a request that was accepted with predictable alacrity), he joined her at a scuffed Formica table in the canteen.

‘So he knows about the KS?’ he said.

‘Why do you ask?’

‘That “and other things” he slipped into the conversation. Or do I have more characteristics that he finds repugnant?’

‘No,’ she replied quietly. ‘It’s the KS.’

‘He does know that it’s not been passed on? He does know that we took the tests? He does know that he’s in the clear?’

‘Yes, he knows all that.’

‘Then why did he say it?’

‘Just to be hurtful. You know what he’s like.’

‘No, not really. That’s the trouble; I don’t.’

‘I sometimes think he makes himself as obnoxious as possible in order to challenge us.’

‘Well it works. So who told him: you or Derek?’

‘It wasn’t like that. We were having a discussion about Rose and genetics, and why you and I had no other children.’

‘Then it was you?’

‘No, it was Derek.’

‘Of course. Any opportunity to emasculate me in the eyes of my son.’

‘That’s not true! He’s not like that. Besides, if anyone feels emasculated, it’s him. By Rose.’

‘You’ve always told me how good he is with her.’

‘He is. He’d do anything for her. He spent all last weekend making two new pages for her chart.’

‘There you are then.’

‘Though it’s not the same as doing things with her. He’ll do everything he can to help her communicate, but he communicates so little with her himself.’