Widows & Orphans (2 page)

In this last capacity she entered the room, bringing the two bottles of wine that Duncan had requested to thank the staff for their efforts in covering the fire. ‘Three for two,’ she whispered to him. ‘I’ve hidden the other one in your desk.’

‘I think we can rise to a third on this occasion,’ he replied, ignoring her frown. ‘Does anyone have a corkscrew? Oh, it’s a screw-top,’ he said, abashed. He poured the South African Shiraz into seven plastic cups, dismissing Jake’s protests that sport had been unaffected by the last-minute page changes. ‘Cheers, one and all! You’ve done the paper proud. For once we’re about more than offloading someone’s old car.’

‘Should shift a few copies,’ Ken said. ‘Your father used to say that readers loved big disasters; it was small ones that bored them.’

‘Cheery chap, your old man!’ Brian said.

‘He was,’ Ken said sharply. ‘A real gent!’

‘Just be grateful that it happened last night,’ Stewart said. ‘Think if it was tonight or tomorrow and we couldn’t cover it till next week!’

‘We’d look more out of touch than ever,’ Rowena said, swilling her wine so rapidly that Duncan felt aggrieved.

‘Don’t forget the website,’ Brian said. ‘I’m updating it every couple of hours. Not that there’s much new. Just a load of hot air from the usual suspects. “This is a sad day for Francombe” and all that!’

‘Well, isn’t it?’ Duncan asked mildly.

‘Yeah, but you know as well as me that none of them have set foot on the pier for years.’

‘No one has,’ Ken said. ‘In case it’s escaped your notice, it’s been closed for the past five.’

‘Any word yet on a possible cause?’ Sheila asked.

‘At last time of asking, the firemen still hadn’t been given the green light to go in,’ Ken said.

‘It’s obviously arson,’ Rowena said.

‘Why
obviously
?’ Sheila asked.

‘Who stands to benefit? Weedon, of course.’

Duncan was glad to hear Rowena voice suspicions that, given his personal connections, he was wary of voicing himself.

‘I don’t see why,’ Jake said, as ever favouring natural causes. ‘It only means they’ll have to rebuild – or at any rate underpin – the structure.’

‘They were doing that anyway. That is, if the sale went ahead. Who’s going to fight it now? Who else has the cash? Not you and your Trust, Duncan?’

‘Empty pockets, I’m afraid. We’ve come to the end of the road.’

‘No offence,’ Brian said. ‘But why all this fuss about a pile of crumbling masonry? No one I know would be seen dead on it, except to laugh at the grockles.’

‘It’s those grockles, as you so graciously put it, who keep Francombe afloat,’ Duncan said. ‘Our business plan showed that since the pier’s been out of action the town’s lost 600,000 visitors a year and millions of pounds of income.’

‘All the more reason to support the Weedon bid!’    

‘Maybe, if it were anyone but Weedon. It’ll be the Olympic
pool saga all over again; the pier turned into another wheel park or extreme sports arena.’

‘Motorcycle jumping over the parapet?’ Brian asked.

‘Piers are about families,’ Duncan said. ‘They’re the ultimate seaside entertainment. All the excitement of being above water combined with the security of being on land.’ He broke off at the realisation that none of his six colleagues fitted the standard family mould any more than he did himself. Was it the result of their particular working environment or of a broader social collapse?

‘I hear that he plans to turn it into a gated community full of luxury flats,’ Ken said.

‘Why?’ Brian asked. ‘Would it count as an offshore tax haven?’

‘How could it support the weight?’ Jake asked. ‘The structure’s wobbly enough already.’

‘By shoring it up,’ Brian said. ‘They have this remarkable new invention called concrete.’

‘He’ll never get permission,’ Jake said, ignoring Brian’s tone.

‘Says who?’ Rowena asked. ‘Geoffrey Weedon has the Planning Committee in his pocket.’

‘That’s libel! Wouldn’t you agree, Ken?’ Brian asked, switching targets. ‘You being such an expert and all that?’

Ken drained his cup, as if to drown the memory of the most humiliating episode of his career, and wordlessly held it out to Duncan to refill.

‘Surely it’s better that he takes it off our hands,’ Brian added, his slurred ‘s’s suggesting that his bumptiousness might be fuelled by alcohol. ‘Does no one here read the
Mercury
? Thought not. But there was a piece last summer – I think it was one of Ken’s – about the Council spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on insurance and scaffolding for the boarded-up pier. Meanwhile, it’s cutting back on facilities for kids.’

‘Not just kids,’ Sheila said. ‘Old people’s homes too, as I’ve found to my cost.’

‘Aren’t you still a year or two away from that?’ Jake asked innocently.

‘Not me, my mother!’ Sheila replied with such vehemence that Jake crushed his cup, splashing wine on his shirt.

‘What about tonight’s exhibition, Duncan?’ Rowena interpolated quickly. ‘Is it still going ahead?’

‘Most definitely. I’ve spoken to Glynis and the Chief Librarian. The children have been working their socks off over the summer. It would be monstrous to disappoint them.’

‘Is it true that there used to be two piers in the town?’ Brian asked Duncan. ‘That’s what your Battle of Britain pilot told me, but I didn’t want to press him in case he’d lost it.’

‘No, perfectly lucid. Just old,’ Duncan said.

‘And a hero,’ Jake added.

‘The second pier was at Salter,’ Duncan said, ‘but it was torn down in 1940 in case the Germans used it as a landing stage.’

‘But they left Francombe’s?’

‘Yes. I think the seabed had silted up so that boats wouldn’t have been able to reach it.’

‘There‘s an old joke,’ said Jake, who was notorious for his lack of humour, ‘that Churchill believed if the Nazis landed at Francombe, they’d lose heart and turn back.’

‘Right!’ Stewart stood up abruptly. ‘If that’s all, chief, I’m off. Some of us have homes to go to.’ His departure provoked a general exodus, leaving Duncan alone with Sheila, who gathered up the cups.

‘Don’t worry about those,’ Duncan said, ‘you go. Mary’ll be here any minute.’

‘Are you sure? As long as I’m not leaving them for you. I promised Mother I’d look in on her.’

Duncan bit back the automatic enquiry, anxious to avoid another tortuous conversation in which he struggled to assuage Sheila’s guilt at having put her severely demented
mother in a home. A succession of painful incidents, culminating in her burying Sheila’s collection of porcelain dolls in the back garden, had brought about the rupture that a lifetime of bullying and put-downs rendered long overdue. Yet every night after work Sheila visited her mother who, on the rare occasions that she recognised her, either sat in steely silence or vented a stream of abuse.

‘I’ll be off then,’ Sheila said, taking out one of the extra strong mints to which she had become addicted after reading a magazine article claiming that bitterness caused bad breath.

Inspired by his secretary, Duncan returned to his office and rang his mother. As always, she answered on the fifth ring, which she judged to be the proper balance between eagerness and indifference.

‘Darling, how lovely to hear your voice!’ she said, launching straight into an account of how the smoke from the blaze had triggered her asthma.

‘But, Mother, that’s impossible,’ Duncan interjected. ‘The wind was in the opposite direction. It’s in our report.’

‘You of all people should know better than to believe what you read in the papers,’ she replied coldly. ‘I don’t see why you bother to ring when you just want to quarrel.’

Scorning his spinelessness, he conceded that there might have been a crosswind. ‘Exactly,’ she said, mollified. ‘I knew that the pier was heading for trouble when the Winter Garden tea room started serving ketchup in plastic tomatoes.’

Mention of the tea room made him long to speak to Jamie. He wondered how many of his son’s memories of the pier chimed with his own. Did he, for instance, recall how he posed for a photograph with his parents, their heads poking through the holes in a seabed tableau, a photograph that Duncan still treasured even if the split between the octopus and the crab prevented his keeping it on display, or how he wet himself laughing when the stone god in the Jungle Playground spat water in his father’s face? And if he did, would he give him the
satisfaction of admitting it or retreat into his usual silence, as though both question and questioner bored him? In the event, Duncan had no way of knowing since, when he finally steeled himself to ring, he was sent straight to voicemail, leaving him with the vision of Jamie out with friends, having dinner with Linda and Derek, or, worse, checking his caller ID.

Preferring to sit alone in his office, which passed for dedication, than in his flat, which felt like failure, Duncan switched the television on to
South East Today
. The lead story concerned a young man who had thrown himself off the ruins of Francombe Castle. The police efforts to talk him down had been thwarted by bystanders egging him on and taking pictures on their phones. ‘What’s the world coming to? Are we just items for each other’s Facebook pages?’ a stunned sergeant asked the reporter, before warning that the CCTV footage would be carefully studied and charges of aiding and abetting a suicide could not be ruled out. Duncan, spotting a possible splash for next week’s issue, emailed Ken to look into it. The second item concerned the pier, with the Mayor, the Chairman of the Francombe Chamber of Commerce, and a spokesman for the Hoteliers Association all making sombre comments in front of the smouldering structure. They were followed by a dauntingly bullish Geoffrey Weedon, who promised that the
tragedy
(a word that made the purist in Duncan bristle) would cause only a slight delay to the refurbishment plans. Then, in a startling non sequitur, he turned his practised smile to the camera. ‘Given the rumours sweeping through town,’ he said, ‘I’d like to state quite categorically that I played no part in starting the fire.’

The reporter’s response was drowned out by a Hoover, as Mary peered round the door and asked if Duncan wanted her to ‘do’ the room. ‘Thank you,’ he said, welcoming the intrusion, since Mary’s stoicism was an inspiration should he ever feel prone to despair. She lived in a cramped fisherman’s cottage with her husband Bob, twin daughters Jilly and
Janine, son Nick, his wife and their two children. Bob had lost his boat after being fined £25,000 for exceeding his EU cod quota. Nick, who worked with his father, fell behind with his rent and moved his family in with his parents. Both Jilly and Janine had been unemployed since leaving school three years before but scorned to become ‘skivvies’ like their mother. The domestic tensions were exacerbated by what Mary euphemistically called Bob’s temper. ‘He lashes out when he’s had a drop – but only at the furniture. Last week he broke the settee. It’s a good thing our Norman’s still banged up in Ford. With Nick and Tess and the kiddies squeezing in, he’d have nowhere to sleep.’

Duncan had protested in print against the injustice of Bob’s sentence. Even a non-fisherman knew that the autumn seas teemed with cod and that it was impossible to lay down nets without bringing up a bumper haul: in Bob’s case, nearly two tons. His defence was that he had been planning to adjust his future catches to comply with the quota, but the judge upheld the DEFRA inspector’s ruling that the quota should be divided into twelve equal shares. Even the
Mercury
’s front-page story that this was the same boat in which Bob’s grandfather had made three trips across the Channel to rescue soldiers stranded at Dunkirk failed to influence the court. Faced with a fine of more than half his annual turnover, together with legal costs that tripled after an ill-advised appeal, Bob sold his boat. Over the following months he took to drink; Nick to antidepressants; and Norman, his younger son, to crime, selling a mixture of cocaine and baking powder to holidaymakers, students and two undercover policemen. ‘It’s right that our Norman was charged. He’s a bad lad,’ Mary had said. ‘But not our Bob. What good would it have done anyone if he’d thrown the fish back in the sea? It’s just spite!’

The strain of her various cleaning jobs, plus a regular weekend shift on her brother-in-law’s fish stall, had taken its toll on Mary. It was hard to believe that at forty-four she was
only two years older than Linda. Despite his contempt for television makeover shows, Duncan secretly hoped for one to visit Francombe and work its restorative magic on Mary. Meanwhile, he helped her as much as he could, recommending her to Henry Grainger at St Edward’s after he was forced to cut her hours, and giving her both an office computer when Nick’s was repossessed and a set of his mother’s old china when hers was mysteriously smashed.

‘Would you like a glass – that is, a cup – of wine?’ he asked Mary, who looked alarmed. ‘It’s been a tough day. I think we deserve it.’

‘Best not. It goes straight to my head and I have to make them their tea when I finish here.’ With five able-bodied adults living at home, Duncan failed to see why none of them could cook dinner, but Mary insisted that that would be ‘rubbing their noses in it’.

‘Then why not take the bottle? Three for two, so it cost me nothing,’ he added tactfully.

‘Best not,’ she replied after a pause. ‘Too much temptation. Bless you.’ Then she switched on the Hoover, as if afraid of what else she might say.

Duncan went up to his flat. When he built Mercury House in 1922, his great-grandfather had reserved the top floor for his private use. Although he and Duncan’s grandfather had slept there in emergencies, Duncan’s father did so regularly, citing ‘late night meetings’, the true nature of which Duncan only discovered after his death. He himself had moved in on his divorce seven years earlier, a temporary expedient that convenience and thrift had made permanent. Small but serviceable, it comprised a galley kitchen where he ate his meals, having sworn off TV dinners after a shot of a shit-filled bath in a documentary on child neglect; an airy sitting room with a carved oak frieze; and two bedrooms, one of which, as the door plaque announced, was Jamie’s. Shortly after the divorce, they had spent a Saturday morning at Debenhams
where Jamie, exploiting his new licence, chose a red racing-car bed, tiger-print beanbag and
Jungle Book
wallpaper, which was replaced when it gave him nightmares. In recent years he had stayed so seldom that Duncan had appropriated the room for his exercise bike.