Widows & Orphans (11 page)

‘We each of us play to our strengths,’ Duncan said, surprised to find himself defending Derek.

‘I feel disloyal talking to you like this,’ Linda said, ‘but who else is there? My mother wouldn’t understand and my girlfriends would gossip.’

Duncan would have felt happier about keeping a place in her life had it not been that of elder brother. It was clear that neither she nor Derek regarded him as a threat.

‘It was Ellen who gave us the idea for the new pages, one on Rose’s guinea pig and the other on
Shrek
. She’s worked wonders with Rose in just an hour a week. And I gather she’s made her mark elsewhere.’

‘Did she tell you that?’

‘Who else? I’m not your mother with a network of spies that would put MI5 to shame! I think it’s great.’

‘What’s great?’

Duncan looked round to find that Jamie had returned.

‘That Dad has gone out on a couple of dates with Rose’s speech therapist.’

‘Pass the sick bag,’ Jamie said, adding vomiting noises for good measure.

‘They weren’t dates,’ Duncan said, amused by Jamie’s reaction. ‘We walked up to the Old Lighthouse and went to the cinema.’

‘So I heard,’ Linda said.

‘She mentioned the film?’

‘I’m not sure that
Firehawk 2
was top of her list.’

‘Those multiplex schedules are so hard to follow.’

‘I warned her that anyone who went out with you had to double-check all the details. I learnt that on our honeymoon.’

‘You didn’t tell her that!’

‘Tell her what?’ Jamie asked.

‘You know the story: how we got to Heathrow and your father found that his passport had expired. So we ended up going to Penzance instead of Rome.’

‘Still, it worked out all right,’ Duncan said.

‘Yes, it did,’ Linda said, smiling.

‘Ellen’s here tonight, with her son Neil,’ Duncan said. ‘I’m surprised we haven’t bumped into them. I’ve promised to drive them home at the end.’

‘Why?’ Jamie asked.

‘Partly because her car’s being serviced and partly because I want to. Strange as it seems, I miss you when you go back with your mother and Derek.’

‘So you’ll take him instead?’ Jamie asked angrily.

‘Of course not,’ Duncan said. ‘I’m taking his mother. He’s just “along for the ride”.’

His cowboy drawl failed to lighten the mood.

‘He’s a dickhead,’ Jamie said. ‘Good luck to him. I wouldn’t be seen dead in that heap of junk.’

‘Don’t be mean,’ Duncan said, relieved at the return to a routine grievance. ‘I know you’re fond of the old girl really.’

‘It’s a dinosaur, Dad. It’s twenty years old. And it’s an it, not a she!’

‘Don’t let Rocinante hear you say that!’

‘Who names a car after a horse? Who names a car after anything? You’re so lame!’

‘That’s unkind, Jamie,’ Linda interposed.

‘And you’re a hypocrite!’ he replied, leading Duncan to wonder what she had said about the car. ‘Come on then if you’re coming; we’ll be late!’

Jamie strode out of the canteen and down the corridor, checking at intervals that his parents were following.

‘I’m sorry,’ Linda said. ‘He’s tired. We were up half the night with Rose. I tried not to wake him but…’

‘He can always come and stay with me if it helps.’

‘No, that would be even more disruptive. Besides, he’d see it as a punishment. And it’s not his fault.’

Startled, Duncan wondered whether Linda meant what she had said or if lack of sleep had taken its toll on her too. They made their way into the computer room for the regulation ten minutes with the ICT teacher, whose plaudits for Jamie’s first forays into web design led Duncan to quip that they could do with him at the paper, to Jamie’s undisguised disgust. As they walked back to the science lab, this time to see the biology teacher, Duncan waved at a vaguely familiar figure, only to realise that she had featured in the
Mercury
after being sprinkled with her dead husband’s ashes. Watching her trail behind a girl, presumably one of her vengeful daughters, he felt a surge of sympathy for a parent even more beleaguered than himself.

On leaving the science lab, they returned to the main building for their final three appointments, with the geography, history and English teachers. After two hours, the strict time slots had been abandoned, inducing forced smiles and frayed nerves on all sides. There were worse places to wait, however, than the brightly coloured geography room with
its patchwork of flags covering the ceiling and alphabetical posters, from the Arctic to Zanzibar, dotting the walls. After an encouraging session with the geography mistress, who praised Jamie’s start to his ecotourism coursework, and a depressing one with the history master, who lamented his failure to come to grips with the Industrial Revolution, they moved to the English room, where Duncan greeted a lesbian couple whom he had championed in his column when a hate campaign forced them to withdraw as classroom helpers at their younger daughter’s primary school. He nodded to Irma Lewis, one of Linda’s oldest friends, who walked in a few minutes later with her son, a contemporary of Jamie’s. To his surprise, after giving them a guarded smile she crossed to the opposite side of the room.

‘Is she embarrassed to see us together?’ Duncan asked Linda.

‘No. Why should she be?’

‘I wondered if she’d bitched about me after the divorce and now she’s worried you’ll say something.’

‘She bitched about you when we were married and I told you at the time. In fact she’s just a prize bitch,’ Linda said in a stage whisper. The two English teachers looked up and two of the parents looked round. Irma stared intently at a wall chart of tricky plurals.

‘I thought she was one of your closest friends.’

‘She was, until Rose.’

‘I see.’

‘Do you? Yes, of course you do. You’d have seen straight away. It took me a little longer. She had Kate at about the same time. She was terrified I might want them to play together. I don’t suppose even she could have thought that cerebral palsy was catching. So it must have been a fear that she’d cramp her style.’

Distressed by the pain in Linda’s voice, he reached for her hand, heedless of what Irma or anyone else might think. They
sat in silence until called up by Mr Brighouse, who introduced himself while stirring his tea with a marker pen. The session started badly when he referred to Jamie, whom he had been teaching for the past six weeks, as Jeremy, and grew worse when he dismissed Duncan’s concerns about Jamie’s grammar with the claim that apostrophes, prepositions, double negatives and the like might be left to the computer style check. Conflict was narrowly averted when Linda, well versed in Duncan’s views, hustled him away. As they walked back to the school gates, where she had arranged to meet Derek and he to meet Ellen, he inveighed against the decline of standards.

‘You get what you pay for,’ Jamie said. ‘If you wanted me to have a decent education, you should have sent me to Lancing.’

‘Where’s that coming from?’ Duncan asked, astonished. ‘I thought you wouldn’t be seen dead in a public school.’

‘I’m just saying … Tim and Graham went to Wellington.’

‘Aunt Alison and Uncle Malcolm have much more money than I do. Besides, it’s against my principles.’

‘Right. Just don’t blame me when I fail my GCSEs.’

‘Now you’re being childish.’

‘Here we are,’ Linda said, as they arrived at the gate to find Derek shouting into his mobile. Without drawing breath he kissed Linda and high-fived Jamie. Then, removing his headset, he held out his hand to Duncan. ‘How’s it hanging, young man?’ he asked, a question that Duncan at first assumed was addressed to Jamie.

‘Fine, thanks,’ he replied. ‘And you?’

‘Can’t complain. So how did it go, Jamie? Straight As, I hope.’

‘The teachers were very pleased with him,’ Linda said.

‘Though there’s room for improvement,’ Duncan added, to his instant regret.

‘Well, we can’t all be as brainy as our dads. I remember when I used to take home my end-of-term report (none of this
touchy-feely-meet-the-teachers stuff in those days). I’d always try to find ways to get rid of it. One time I told my mum that the dog had eaten it. Which would have been fine except that we had a cat.’

Duncan was unsure whether to be more depressed by Derek’s joke or Jamie’s laughter. He longed for them to leave him in peace to wait for Ellen, but Derek seemed to sense his discomfort and spin it out.

‘It’s been a busy day at the office,’ he said. ‘Geoff showed me the plans for the pier, hot off the drawing board. I know I shouldn’t say anything in front of the press –’

‘Oh, I switch off sometimes,’ Duncan said.

‘But they’ll cause quite a stir. I can see my man here is already getting ready to pounce. Don’t worry, we won’t take it personally.’

‘I hope not.’

Even as he voiced the hope, Duncan knew that it was in vain. However hard he tried to separate his personal and professional dealings with the Weedons, Geoffrey made it impossible. It was not Linda’s affair with Derek that had set them at odds, but his own alleged betrayal of their boyhood friendship when he went away to school. For all Geoffrey’s claims that he was just a businessman, Duncan sometimes suspected that his whole career had been driven by a desire for revenge on the social and cultural values that Lancing represented, and from which he felt excluded. A true child of the Eighties, for whom price was the only measure of worth and free enterprise of free choice, he had bought a series of ailing companies and tumbledown properties and, through a mixture of shrewd deals and sharp practice, turned himself into Francombe’s leading entrepreneur. Whenever Duncan condemned a world in which cops no longer chased robbers through the woods and shot them with pointed fingers but, instead, sat in a video arcade and zapped them with heavy weaponry, or families no longer splashed and swam in the
Olympic pool but gorged themselves on junk food while watching BMX races in the wheel park, Geoffrey launched a counterattack, accusing him of being out of touch, narrow-minded and, most damning of all, elitist.

‘I look forward to seeing the plans,’ Duncan said.

‘You do that,’ Derek replied. ‘But a word to the wise. This is Geoff’s biggest project to date. He won’t take kindly to interference.’

‘Say goodbye to your father, Jamie,’ Linda said. ‘We’re late picking Rose up from Granny.’

‘I’m hungry,’ Jamie said.

‘Then say goodbye … Look, there’s Ellen.’ Linda waved at Ellen, who walked towards them with Neil.

‘I work with teachers every day,’ Ellen said, after a brief exchange of greetings. ‘But the moment I come here as a parent, I feel like a little girl again.’

‘I’m the same with nuns,’ Linda said, ‘and I’m not even Catholic.’

‘Still, the important thing is that they’re happy with this one,’ Ellen said, stroking Neil’s hair.

‘Leave it out, Mum!’

‘Well done, Neil,’ Duncan said. ‘It can’t be easy moving to a new school where they all know each other. Still, they’re a friendly lot here, aren’t they, Jamie?’

‘You said we were going home, Mum,’ Jamie said, his slighting of Duncan almost as marked as his coldness to Neil. ‘I’m starving.’

‘Of course. Growing boy alert! ’Bye, all.’

‘’Bye, Jamie,’ Duncan called out as his son rushed into the street. ‘See you on Sunday.’

‘You said you’d speak to him!’ Jamie stopped short and turned to Linda.

‘It’s your father’s day,’ she replied.

‘But me and Craig are going cycling.’

‘It’s your father’s day.’

‘Your grandmother’s looking forward to seeing you,’ Duncan said.

‘Oh great!’

Jamie stalked off, followed by Linda, who remonstrated with him, and Derek, who answered his phone.

‘Boys,’ Duncan said, shrugging. ‘Not you,’ he added quickly to Neil, who failed to respond. ‘Shall we go? I’m afraid the car’s a couple of streets away. I can drive it round.’

‘I’m happy to walk,’ Ellen said. ‘How about you, Neil?’

‘Not bothered.’

‘We’re all agreed then,’ Ellen said brightly.

They made their way out of the yard, past the patchy lawn lined with pollarded trees, and into the ill-lit street.

‘Good day?’ Duncan asked, as he steered Ellen clear of a pothole.

‘So-so. The family of one of my clients on the Edmund Hillary estate are being harassed by neighbours because two of the kids have learning difficulties. I spent all morning with their case worker and the Health and Housing team trying to get them moved.’

‘Any luck?’ Duncan asked.

‘In principle. The problem is finding them somewhere safer. But this afternoon was great: my regular Thursday drop-in for kids and their parents. We had a real breakthrough with one little girl who managed to brush her teddy’s teeth.’

‘Big deal,’ Neil said.

‘It was for her. Now I’m shattered. I’d no idea that coming back to work would be so intense. It’s not just that I’m older (which of course I am), but the job’s changed. There’s a whole lot more to fit in: home visits; conferences; reporting … We never used to write up so much. Plus there are the new health regulations. You can’t just chuck toys in a drawer at the end of a session. Everything has to be carefully wiped.’

‘The last thing you need is to go home and start cooking.
What do you say to some fish and chips? Do you like fish and chips, Neil?’

‘Everyone likes fish and chips.’

‘But Francombe fish and chips are special. The fish is freshly caught and the chips: well, they’re special too. And the Mr Wu Fish Bar is the best in town.’

‘Sounds good to me,’ Ellen said. ‘We must get a portion for Sue.’

‘
Andiamo
…! Oh, just a sec.’ Duncan stopped to inspect a flyer tacked to a lamp post.

‘Is it an appeal for witnesses?’

‘No, for a missing dog. Sorry, old habits die hard. My father taught me never to pass a lost pet notice without jotting down the details. Nine times out of ten it’ll come to nothing, but you may get a decent human interest story – you know, the little kid who’s lost the kitten she was given for Christmas, or even a bona fide scoop, like when we spotted that several Staffordshire bull terriers had disappeared and helped the police to break up a dog-fighting ring.’