Widows & Orphans (25 page)

Despite the shampoo dripping down his forehead and stinging his eyes, Duncan leapt out of the shower to silence the radio the moment that Elvis Presley at his most lachrymose launched into ‘If Every Day Was Like Christmas'. Even in such an overcrowded field, it must win the prize for the most fraudulent lyric of all time. The festive season was gruelling enough on an annual basis. With neither a strong faith nor a young family to give it meaning, he felt secret sympathy for Scrooge.

This year there would at least be the compensation of spending his first Christmas since his divorce with Jamie and his first ever with Ellen. In the meantime he had to endure various official functions, starting with the staff Christmas dinner in two hours' time. The three-course set meal at the Metropole, complete with selected wines, was a far cry from the Christmas parties of his youth: dinner dances in the Pier Pavilion, which his mother allowed him to attend on condition that he stand behind her in the conga line to shield her from the printers' wandering hands.

Even without the financial considerations, he would have balked at holding a dance for a staff of eight, or rather six since Trevor was going to his newly divorced brother's freedom party and Mary had been kept at home by Bob. While shedding few tears over Trevor, who routinely confused drunkenness with conviviality, he would miss Mary, who was fighting to save her marriage. Bob's response to the mural had been chilling. Far from celebrating his wife's portrayal, he had railed against the public humiliation, giving her the biggest black eye Duncan had ever seen outside a comic strip. When she turned up for work three days later claiming to have ‘walked into a door', with no ‘it's my own silly fault for drinking too much/not looking where I was going/not buying new glasses' to corroborate her story, she seemed to be daring him to challenge her. But when he did, reminding her of her plan to move in with Jordan, she described it as a menopausal
fantasy, adding that she deserved whatever Bob gave her after destroying the one thing that he had left: his pride.

In a further setback, Henry rang the next morning with the news that the figures of Adam and Eve in the mural had been defaced, purportedly by Jordan himself, who was found with two empty cans of acrylic paint beside a graffiti-daubed fishermen's memorial. Whatever his motives for the attack, Duncan refused to believe that he had acted of his own volition. He must have been intimidated either by Bob or Norman, who had lately been released from Ford, with one or other of them driving him into town and forcing him to vandalise the monument, before tipping off the police. Jordan himself gave nothing away. In court he spoke only to confirm his name and address, and plead guilty, whereupon the magistrates activated his suspended sentence, jailing him for six months. No doubt all those readers who had complained of his being mollycoddled after the front-page photograph of him shaking hands with the bishop would feel vindicated.

All else being equal, Duncan would have preferred to hold the meal at Vivien's but he feared that some of the staff would feel cheated. So, after calling in at the café to drop off a present for Connor, his four-year-old godson, he proceeded up the Parade, where the annual orgy of consumption lacked even a fig leaf of festivity since the major retailers, citing the Recession, had refused to pay for Christmas lights. Several of his correspondents, together with Brian and Jake, who confounding expectations took the Elvis Presley view of Christmas, proposed that the
Mercury
should initiate a boycott of the offending stores. But, mindful of the outrage provoked by the recent ‘Tide of Filth' story on the state of Francombe beaches, he was reluctant to alienate any more powerful interests (or, as Trevor put it, potential advertisers), not least when he would need their support to stem the tsunami of filth that Weedon's was preparing to unleash on the town.

Further evidence of the Recession was to be found in the
half-empty Crystal Room. The sweep of white linen, unrelieved by the gleam of silverware, cast a pall over proceedings as Duncan led in his guests, all except Ken having observed the smart-casual dress code that Stewart described as the only oxymoron he would ever let pass. They had scarcely sat down when Sheila insisted that they pull their crackers, at which Brian, ignorant of the history, declared that Stewart was ‘firing blanks' after his failed to pop. Exhorting everyone to put on paper hats, Sheila made Rowena swap, first with Jake and then with Ken, to find the one that best matched her cardigan and Duncan relinquish his mitre for her own ‘more appropriate' crown. ‘Ever the office manager,' Ken said, defusing the tension, which rapidly built up again when Jake read out the jokes.

Duncan, whose sense of social obligation was not shared by the rest of the table, struggled to keep the party flowing. The veto on talking about work left them painfully aware of how little they had in common. In a welcome distraction, Jake, announcing that soup made him sweat, removed his jacket to reveal a knitted woollen waistcoat with a border of pigs. Sheila, already on her third glass of wine, stretched across Ken to stroke what she declared to be the prettiest pussies she had ever seen, whereupon Brian snorted so hard that his nose began to bleed. As the scarlet stain spread across his napkin, Rowena and Ken bickered over whether he should bend his neck backwards or forwards; Stewart suggested dropping car keys down his shirt; and Jake claimed that his mother used to swear by running a butter knife along the spine. Sheila, professing to have such poor circulation that her hands were like ice, offered to rub his back, at which the bleeding abruptly stopped.

Brian's choice of main course kept him at the centre of attention since, while everyone else had ordered crown of turkey with herb stuffing, cranberry compote and sprout puree, he had chosen venison. Ken, moved more by antipathy
than tradition, compared it to asking for shellfish at a bar mitzvah, whereupon Sheila, telling him not to be such a bully, assured Brian that if he wanted stuffing he could have some of hers. ‘Next she'll be asking if he's a leg or a breast man,' Rowena hissed in Duncan's ear.

Swiftly changing the subject, Duncan enquired about everyone's Christmas plans, but even that was not without risk since only Stewart, who was taking Laura to Lanzarote, was looking forward to the break. Ken would be entertaining his widowed sister-in-law, whom he had loathed for forty years but whose presence he tolerated since it gave him the necessary excuse to escape from his wife for a few hours. Brian would be with his family, his primacy threatened by the return of his younger brother from London. Jake would be at his lodgings, although banished upstairs in deference to his landlady's children. Rowena would be paying her annual visit to her sister in Canterbury, where the solicitude of her three nieces would underline her daughter's disaffection.

Duncan's greatest concern was Sheila, so much so that despite an already crowded table he had resolved to invite her to Ridgemount for Christmas lunch when she forestalled him by announcing that she had volunteered to help out at Castlemaine. Jean Davison, the manager, whom she knew from a folklore class, had seized on the offer of an extra pair of hands and she herself was glad to have found a way to spend Christmas with her mother. Moreover, it would allow her to assess the deterioration in her behaviour that the staff had ascribed to Dragon's arrival at the home. Defying hopes that he would interact with the other residents, he had remained as reclusive as in his hut, even shunning a belly-dancing display by the cook's daughter. The problem was that the acute gender imbalance put his presence at a premium. According to Jean, on some unconscious level (the only one on which most of them still functioned), the women interpreted his indifference as rejection. Egged on by Sheila's mother, they had
ganged up on him: mocking and mimicking him like feral five-year-olds. Witnessing it for herself, Sheila would have a chance to reason with – or, at any rate, constrain – her mother before things spun out of control.

‘I hope you'll give yourself a little Sheila time as well,' Duncan had said when she outlined her arrangements.

‘Why? What would I do with it?' she replied, extending his concern beyond Christmas.

The meal ended with brandy for everyone except Sheila, who with rare self-awareness announced that she was ‘already a bit squiffy', and Jake, who had offered to drive her, Rowena and Brian home. Advising them with deceptive flippancy to cash the cheques before they bounced, Duncan handed out their Christmas bonuses. Sheila then gave him a present from the staff, which custom obliged him to open on the spot.

‘A plant!' he said, his relief after last year's James Bond cufflinks tinged with fear that he would let it die.

‘Not just any plant, a money plant,' Sheila said. ‘Your office needs cheering up. And we all know that finances are tight. I've read up on the feng shui, so I can show you exactly where to put it. In the left-hand corner opposite the door.'

‘It's very kind of you all. Thank you,' Duncan said, struggling to conceal the leaf that he had ripped off with the wrapping paper. ‘When I was a boy, my mother used to tell me that money doesn't grow on trees. Let's hope this proves her wrong.'

Holding the pot at arm's length like a baby with a full nappy, he returned to Mercury House. He knew that he should be grateful not just for the gift but for the coded acknowledgement of his plight. Instead he felt pained that they should suppose, even jokingly, that it might be relieved by recourse to an ancient superstition. The bank loan was due for repayment in less than a month. With no white knight on the horizon, he and Dudley Williams were engaged in detailed discussions with executives, lawyers and accountants from both Newscom and Provident. He was no longer in any doubt that
he would have to sell the company to one of these two local media giants, and that he and his family would receive next to nothing for their shares. His principal objective was to reach a deal that would preserve the title, protect the staff and, above all, guarantee their pensions.

At half past twelve it was too late for his nightly call to Ellen, so he rang her as soon as he woke up. Busily packing for Sue's Caribbean trip, she did little more than confirm that she and Neil would come round at seven for dinner with him and Jamie. It was a meal that filled him with a mixture of excitement and dread. After dithering over the menu, he had opted for pizza as both adolescent-friendly (he would even let them eat out of the box if it helped) and cheap. The need for frugality depressed him. He promised himself that as soon as Christmas was over, he would reveal the full extent of his debts to Ellen. If there were the slightest chance of their sharing a future, he had to warn her that it might not be as rosy as she had supposed. His fear was not that she would leave him – she had experienced the emptiness of colour-supplement living during her marriage – but that she might feel duty-bound to stay.

Struggling to stave off the gloom, he set out to collect Jamie, although ten minutes of scraping the frost from Rocinante's windscreen and another five of coaxing her temperamental engine to start did little to relieve his apprehension. It was not only their first Christmas together since the divorce but their longest period under one roof since Alison had turned her house in Umbria into holiday lets three years earlier. Although he and Linda had agreed to alternate custody at Christmas, it had seemed churlish to force the issue when Jamie might be staying with his mother, stepfather and Rose (not to mention the all-important Craig) at Geoffrey's villa in Antigua. This year, however, things were different. If his relationship with Ellen were to succeed, it was essential that their sons become friends and Christmas offered the perfect opportunity.

Jamie, of course, had rebelled: threatening to run away, go on hunger strike and even phone Childline. When that failed, he printed out evidence from the web on the importance of sunlight for children's bone development, melatonin balance and mental well-being, to which Duncan replied that the first would be achieved by a healthy diet and the second and third by regular sleep and exercise. Changing tack, Jamie outlined the educational benefits of immersing himself in a Third World culture. When Duncan wryly assured him that he would learn more by spending one day helping out at the Morley Road refugee centre than ten issuing instructions to Geoffrey's housemaids and pool boy, Jamie accused him of being a sad loser and ruining his life.