Widows & Orphans (12 page)

They reached Duncan’s Volvo Estate, which proved as obdurate as ever.

‘How old is your car?’ Neil asked.

‘I bought her in 1992. You do the maths.’

‘You’re kidding me! My dad drives a Porsche Panamera.’

‘I’m impressed,’ Duncan replied, eliciting a grateful look from Ellen. The image of her former husband in his Porsche turned his own struggle to start up Rocinante into precisely the kind of virility test that he found ludicrous in others, the comparison growing more pronounced as he pumped the accelerator so hard that it risked flooding the engine. Finally, the car juddered into action and they headed for the Front.

‘Are there a lot of blind people in Francombe?’ Neil asked.

‘Not that I know of,’ Duncan said. ‘Though there are certainly plenty who don’t read newspapers. Why?’

‘Look!’ Duncan glanced in the mirror to see where Neil was
pointing. ‘That’s the second man today I’ve passed walking with his hands out like that.’

‘They’re drunks. You’ll come across many more if you’re in town on a Saturday night – which I don’t recommend. They stretch their arms out in front of them to protect themselves when they fall.’

‘So this is the kind of dump you’ve brought us to,’ Neil said to Ellen.

‘It’s not that bad,’ Duncan said. For all its tawdriness, he retained an affection for his home town. Yet, as they drove along the Front, past the rows of Victorian villas that had been converted into DSS hostels, their once elegant façades as run-down as their residents, he pictured how it must look to a newcomer. Unemployment, bankruptcy and drug use in Francombe were among the highest in Britain. Moreover, the influx of refugees and asylum seekers had created a host of social problems in a town where, previously, the only black faces had been in the minstrel shows on the pier.

‘It’s no wonder the kids lose hope,’ he said, speaking his thoughts aloud. ‘With youth clubs and other facilities cut, they gather out here with bottles of cheap supermarket booze, waiting for trouble. There’s a group of them now.’

‘Stop the car!’ Ellen screamed.

‘Is something wrong?’

‘Just pull over, please.’ Duncan did as she asked. ‘Look, Neil! Isn’t that your sister?’ Duncan followed her gaze. He had not met Sue but if he had identified the right girl, the boy with whom – or rather round whom – she was entwined was Craig. She could not have picked a more inauspicious introduction to the youth of Francombe. Although too loyal to admit it, Linda clearly mistrusted her stepson. She had once let slip that she never left him alone with Rose after he expressed an unhealthy interest in her toilet arrangements. Duncan wondered if he had targeted Sue as the one girl who was ignorant of his reputation. He must have moved fast since he had
known her only a few weeks. He winced as he realised that this was as long as he himself had known her mother.

Ellen leapt out of the car and Duncan followed a few steps behind, uncertain whether she would view his presence as an intrusion or as a support.

‘You should be at home,’ she said to the dark-haired girl wearing overemphatic eye make-up and lime-green leggings.

‘Well, I’m not,’ Sue said, emphasising her defiance by swigging from a bottle.

‘Is that beer?’ Ellen asked.

‘No, it’s Fanta,’ Sue replied, to general mirth.

‘Get in the car at once, please.’

‘I’m with my friends, Mum!’

‘You were supposed to be doing your homework.’

‘I’m with my friends!’ She took another swig from the bottle and swung on the balustrade.

‘You’re making a spectacle of yourself.’

‘Look who’s talking!’

As mother and daughter glared at one another, Craig greeted Duncan. ‘Evening, Mr N.’

‘You two know each other?’ Ellen asked.

‘Craig’s Jamie’s stepbrother; Linda’s stepson; Rose’s half-brother.’

‘Don’t worry, it’s not as pervy as it sounds,’ Craig said, grinning.

‘Then perhaps you’ll tell my daughter to come home since she’s taking no notice of me.’

‘Mum! I can make my own decisions.’

‘You heard the little lady,’ Craig said to Ellen. ‘No can do.’

‘I’m sixteen. Old enough to appear in porn.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t think that’s true, actually,’ Duncan interposed.

‘Who are you?’ Sue asked.

‘He’s Mr N. Aren’t you, Mr N?’

‘What porn?’ Ellen asked, her voice ringing with alarm.

‘I didn’t say I’d done it. See what she thinks of me!’ Sue appealed to her friends who, bored with the altercation, were staring out to sea. ‘What kind of sicko are you?’

Ellen stood stock still, as if wondering how she had come to be the one under attack. ‘Well, now you’re here, you may as well enjoy it,’ she said, sounding strained. ‘Just so long as you promise to be back by ten and not to drink any more alcohol.’

‘Whatever,’ Sue said and, swaying perilously on the rail, flung her arms round a startled Craig.

Duncan and Ellen returned to the car, where Neil was slumped in the back seat.

‘Would you drive us straight home, please,’ Ellen said, shaking.

‘What about the fish and chips?’ Neil asked.

‘You didn’t really want them.’

‘Yes I did.’

‘Another time. We’ll have a pizza at home.’

‘Just great!’ Neil said, kicking the back of Duncan’s seat.

‘Don’t worry,’ Duncan said to Ellen. ‘She’ll be fine.’

‘How can you be sure? Did you see her clothes? I didn’t buy them. Where did she get the money? Has she said anything to you?’ She turned to face Neil.

‘She never tells me anything. She hates me. They all do.’

‘If your sister’s in trouble, I’m relying on you to let me know. You’re the man of the house now.’ Duncan questioned the wisdom of placing such a burden on a thirteen-year-old boy but he knew better than to interfere.

‘I don’t want to be. It’s supposed to be Dad.’

‘You know that’s not possible.’

‘It’s your fault.’

‘How? I didn’t commit a multimillion-pound fraud.’

‘He did it for you. So you’d have money to buy things. You wanted a new kitchen.’

‘Maybe, but only when I thought he’d earned it. If I’d had my way, I’d have torn out every piece of granite.’

‘You’re a bitch!’

‘You’ve no right to speak to your mother like that,’ Duncan said, unable to hold back any longer.

‘And you’ve no right to speak to me at all. You’re not my father. Just because you’re fucking her.’

He stumbled over the word as if it were as hard for him to say as for them to hear. After a shocked silence, Ellen asked him where he had learnt to talk like that and ordered him to apologise to Duncan. Duncan, insisting that no apology was needed, experienced a welter of emotions: sympathy for Ellen and her two disturbed children; fear that Neil’s misreading of their relationship would seal its fate; doubt that he could help with her adolescent son given his problems with his own.

No sooner had they turned into Ellen’s drive than Neil flung open the car door, ran into the house and up the stairs.

‘Come in,’ Ellen said wearily, as she led him into a sitting room dominated by a biscuit-coloured sofa designed for a far larger space. ‘Can I get you anything? A glass of wine?’

‘If it’s no trouble.’

‘There’s a bottle open in the fridge.’

They were distracted by heavy footfall overhead. ‘Don’t worry. He’ll run out of steam. He’s not as strong as his rage.’

‘Is there anything I can do?’

‘Other than turning back the clock? I won’t be a moment.’

As she went into the kitchen, Duncan surveyed the room, trying to glean as much about her as he could. He glanced at the brass firedogs and antique bellows beside the log effect fire, the pewter mugs and Capodimonte figurines lining the windowsill, and the illustrated books in the alcoves, as decorative as the knick-knacks that held them in place, before resting his gaze on the framed Magritte exhibition posters from Vienna and New York, intrigued to know whether she had bought them there or here.

‘Chateau Sainsbury, I’m afraid,’ Ellen said, returning with two glasses.

‘Fine by me. I’m the opposite of a connoisseur. I was traumatised by my father who regularly sent wine back, even at my great-aunt’s funeral.’

‘I swore to myself that when I had kids, I’d do things differently from my mother. But they’ve turned against me just the same,’ Ellen said, to the echo of Neil’s clomping. ‘I’m sorry you had to witness that.’

‘Don’t worry. She’ll be home soon. A sore head in the morning should teach her a valuable lesson.’

‘I meant Neil. Such ugliness.’

‘The sad thing is that it’s not even true,’ Duncan said warily.

‘That’s the story of my life.’

‘Stories change. New chapters and so forth.’

‘Well, we have moved to Francombe.’

‘That’s just a change of setting; I was referring to characters. The tall, sandy-haired divorcee, slightly frayed at the edges, who’s been introduced as the love interest. Ring any bells?’

‘It might if it weren’t for the “frayed”. He seems in remarkably good shape to me.’

‘Thank you.’ Duncan felt dizzy. ‘I assure you that the feeling’s mutual.’

‘Even so, I’d hate to rush things. Believe me, it has nothing to do with Neil. We’ve known each other such a short time. Are you sure we’re ready?’

‘I’m one hundred per cent sure, but I’m sure enough to wait. Take as much time as you need. Well, as long as there’s still an “r” in the month.’

‘We have to be honest with everyone: Linda … the kids. After Matthew, I couldn’t bear to do anything furtive.’

‘What’s furtive?’ He moved towards her. ‘The lights are on; the curtains are open.’ He put his arms on her shoulders and, giving her every chance to break away, kissed her full on the lips. He felt her whole body tremble before she relaxed into the embrace. After a while he withdrew and, holding her face
in his hands, gazed deeply into her eyes. All at once they both burst into laughter, which he silenced with a second, more confident kiss.

‘Where’s my pizza?’ Neil’s voice rang through the house, forcing them apart.

‘Duty calls,’ Ellen said.

‘I know the feeling. Do you want me to leave?’

‘Yes … no … yes … no. Why not stay for some pizza?’

‘Do you have enough?’

‘It’s a twenty incher. Don’t laugh!’

From everything Ellen had told him, Duncan expected to see a woman in a tie-dye shirt, silk bandana and patchwork pantaloons but, as he strained to glimpse her through the windscreen, he saw a statuesque sexagenarian soberly dressed in a grey-and-white Fair Isle sweater and black ankle-length skirt, her one concession to hippiedom the tangle of chains round her neck. Ellen had asked him to remain in the car to avoid awkward introductions, but her mother, who seemed to be as intrigued by him as he was by her, had followed her to the front door.

Prior to her arrival earlier in the week, Ellen had given him a detailed account of Barbara, whose insistence that she call her by her first (never Christian) name had distressed her as a girl but was now a blessing, since it freed her from any undue filial sentiment. She was born in Dorking, the only child of a chartered surveyor and a school secretary, and one of the many grievances that Ellen bore her mother was that she had cut her off from her grandparents. With no sense of inconsistency, she heaped scorn on their conformism while expecting Ellen to respect her own less orthodox but equally predictable lifestyle. From an early age she possessed a talent for painting, which her parents encouraged until, at the age of eighteen, she announced that she wanted to go to art school rather than university. Her father proposed a compromise whereby he would support her to study commercial art at St Martin’s. Her disenchantment at having to design beer mats, cereal packets and railway posters, while her contemporaries on the fine art course were taught painting by Gillian Ayres and sculpture by Anthony Caro, vanished after graduation when the training that her father had viewed as the passport to a job at J. Walter Thompson thrust her into the heart of late-1960s counter-culture.

At a happening in the basement of Better Books, a radical bookshop a few steps from St Martin’s, she met two young Americans who were setting up
Black Eagle
, an underground
magazine whose objectives of cultural subversion, anti-capitalism and social and sexual liberation were not then seen as incompatible. Discovering her grasp of Letraset and lithography, they asked her to join them and she quickly became an integral member of the team. Although she later admitted to Ellen that she never understood why her design expertise was a better foundation for washing dishes and making tea than the literary background of her male colleagues, she flourished at the magazine.
Black Eagle
ran for seventeen issues before being shut down by the police in 1971 after it published the names and addresses of twenty-five Tory MPs whom it deemed to be justified targets for the Angry Brigade’s bombing campaign. Meanwhile, she had moved into a squat in Hyde Park Mansions among an ever-shifting population of musicians, actors, buskers, anarchists and impoverished aristocrats.

While roundly scorning the bourgeois notion of coupledom, she fell in love with Richard Houseman, an Old Etonian performance poet who was given a six-month jail sentence for burning a copy of
Burke’s Peerage
in the House of Lords public gallery during a debate on the Misuse of Drugs Act. On his release, she persuaded him to move with her to Wiltshire where Olivia Meridew, the bubble-wrap heiress, had set up a commune in a derelict stately home. Although she subsequently told her daughter that her sole aim had been to rescue Richard from the hard drugs scene to which he was increasingly drawn, Ellen suspected that a secondary one had been to distance him from the hordes of female admirers for whom his good looks and poetic flair were now enhanced by public notoriety. They stayed in the commune for seven years, although they never moved into the house but lived in one of the caravans dotted around the lake, largely because Olivia’s belief that the restoration should be carried out by the residents themselves in order to maximise the flow of chi meant that it was left unfinished. Ellen was born during their first
year and while, with a few exceptions, Barbara kept Richard away from other women, she failed to keep him off the drugs. Whereas the rest of the commune smoked pot, took LSD and ate home-grown magic mushrooms, Richard, convinced that it was the way to revive his waning creativity, consumed ever greater quantities of amphetamines, barbiturates and cocaine. He suffered a massive stroke, and one of Ellen’s earliest memories – certainly her most vivid – was of returning to the caravan to find him slumped on the floor, his right cheek collapsed into his chin.

Richard never recovered. After several months in hospital, he was moved to his family home in Berkshire. Barbara took Ellen to visit him every week, thereby acquainting her with her paternal grandparents who had disowned their son after his parliamentary protest. Then, without warning, their visits ceased. While assuring Ellen that her father was not dead, Barbara offered no explanation for the change and it was many years before the truth emerged. Blaming Barbara for Richard’s drug use (which, as they knew full well, had long pre-dated their meeting), his parents claimed that she was an unfit mother and applied to the court for custody of Ellen. Aided by Olivia’s barrister brother and a precipitate move from the caravan to an estate cottage, Barbara won the case. The Housemans retaliated by saying that, if she wanted them to provide the round-the-clock care for Richard that was way beyond her means, she must break off all contact with him. To Ellen’s lasting resentment, Barbara agreed.

Over time, Richard regained sufficient movement in his right arm to reach for the ancient scimitar that hung above his bed and slit his throat. Barbara knew nothing of his death until after the funeral when his sister, defying her parents’ wishes, sent her a small parcel of his personal effects including a silver pentacle necklace that Ellen still treasured. Her father’s most significant legacy, however, was to have ignited her interest in speech therapy. While keen not to overstate the
connection, she was convinced that the sight of someone she loved struggling to communicate had inspired her choice of career.

Soon after Richard’s death Barbara left the commune, taking the six-year-old Ellen to Lyme Regis, where they moved in with Rupert Thring, a middle-aged violin maker, whom Ellen credited with sparking her love of music but who otherwise remained a shadowy presence in her life. After five years Barbara, whose confidence had been restored by the success of her glass paintings, left Rupert to live with a series of unsuitable men, one of whom, Roman, a Polish puppeteer, took an excessive interest in the now pubescent Ellen, although she was quick to point out that this was manifest in nothing more than suggestive remarks, protracted hugs and unwanted mugs of late-night cocoa. Dismissing her daughter’s protests about her affairs, Barbara insisted that every woman had the right to a fulfilling sex life. Eager for Ellen to enjoy that right, which she presented as almost a duty, she took her to have a coil fitted at the age of fifteen. To her chagrin it wasn’t needed for another four years, by which time Ellen had left home to study speech and language therapy in Sheffield.

It was there that she met Matthew while on placement at the Northern General Hospital, working with adults who had feeding problems after surgery. Once a week the consultant led a ward round that he attended. He was intelligent, good-looking, self-possessed and serious, and one of the few junior doctors not to add a U, either mentally or manually, to the SLT notices in the common room. They fell in love, or at least she did (she could no longer be sure of anything about Matthew), and married two years later, after her graduation and his appointment as a senior registrar.

If, as Ellen came to suspect, part of Matthew’s attraction for her was his distance from her mother’s world, then Barbara’s response was unsurprising. With her New Age contempt for allopathic medicine, she failed to share Ellen’s conviction
of his brilliance. Moreover, long before the revelation of his crimes, she detected a ruthlessness behind his reserve. To her credit she stuck to her promise not to interfere in her daughter’s marriage, her antipathy to Matthew, along with the demands of an ever-expanding business (she now employed four painters to execute her designs), restricting her visits to a couple of weekends a year. Her only prolonged stay came in the summer of 2006 when, having failed to cure herself of cancer with a regime of juices, Chinese herbs and chanting, she was recovering from the removal of her left breast. She refused any reconstructive surgery, which, true to form, she turned to her advantage when, on her return to Dorset, she met a retired archaeologist whose predilections had been shaped by his late wife’s mastectomy.

She was as candid with her grandchildren as she had been with her daughter. Matthew had been outraged to come across her showing nine-year-old Sue and six-year-old Neil her postoperative scars. Although she rarely gave them presents, preferring to plant trees in their names for birthdays and Christmas, they both loved her. Sue, who never voiced approval of anyone over thirty who lacked a media profile, even pronounced her ‘cool’. So it was with mixed feelings that Ellen greeted her newfound interest in her family. In the eighteen months since Matthew’s arrest she had visited them as often as in the previous six years. Ever mistrustful of her motives, Ellen suspected that she was driven less by affection than the belief that her daughter would be lost without her help.

‘Why do grandparents and grandchildren get on so well?’ she had asked Duncan when, after profuse – and redundant – apologies for boring him, she concluded the story.

‘Is this a riddle?’

‘No, it’s a joke. At least it’s supposed to be. I was told it by one of our paediatricians.’

‘I don’t know. Why do grandparents and grandchildren get on so well?’