‘No, it’s been cancelled.’
‘Why?’
‘He died.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Frank.
Walter broke into a wide grin. ‘So that proved that bugger wrong, didn’t it?’
9
It was almost midnight. Frank undid his bow tie, took off his dinner jacket and flopped onto the sofa. His head was filled with the static of the evening’s exchanges – scraps of banal conversation, half-hearted banter, empty words that continued to jangle. His face ached from smiling for the camera. G. E. Jones Industrial Solutions had got their money’s worth. The drinks reception was interminable, followed by a dinner of overcooked beef, and he’d thought he’d be able to escape after his speech, but then came the photos. He had posed for at least forty, and at least half of those, it seemed, with men called Derek.
Frank was always amazed by the non sequiturs and bizarre remarks that tipsy managers and board members blurted out whilst posing next to him and waiting for the flash. The close physical presence of someone hitherto seen only through a television screen seemed to have a strange impact on conversational skills. One insisted on saying ‘Penis’ rather than the more traditional ‘Cheese’ as the photo was taken; another asked Frank: ‘Do you piss in a bottle under the desk?’ whilst another muttered inexplicably: ‘The wife won’t like this.’ Frank knew he wouldn’t sleep until the buzzing in his head subsided. He didn’t want to wake Andrea with his tossing and turning and so sat in the cool, dark living room waiting for a calm to descend.
He looked at his cufflinks and cursed Phil Smethway whose gift they were. He felt bad for cursing the dead, but couldn’t help blaming Phil for every PA he did. It was easier to blame Phil than himself. He knew that he could say no, as Julia did. But Phil had said yes to everything and Frank had simply carried on unthinkingly. Phil always said it was part of their job; he emphasized the many charities he supported through appearances. But most of the charity dinners were naked exercises in corporate PR and Phil’s true motive, Frank suspected, was that he simply enjoyed the glitz and glamour even as low level as it often was. It was after all at a launch for a new car showroom where Phil had met his last wife, Michelle, almost forty years his junior.
When Julia had joined the team, she’d made it clear that she wouldn’t be doing any PAs – she considered them a compromise of her neutrality and integrity. At first Frank had dismissed this as more of Julia’s pompous earnestness, but as time had gone on he’d felt more and more uncomfortable cutting ribbons and making speeches. It was a ridiculous way to spend an evening. It was also more time away from Andrea and Mo. He now tried to only accept those invitations that had become annual commitments.
He removed the cufflinks and played with them in his palm. They had a nice weight and surface finish. They were solid silver, made by Hermes, and he was sure they had been horribly expensive. They had been Phil’s farewell gift. It was typical of Phil to not only buy everyone else presents at his own departure, but for those presents to far outstrip in both thought and value the tacky landfill purchased with the proceeds of the office whip-round for him. Inside the box Phil had put a small note saying: ‘Have some class for once in your life.’ And even though Frank knew Phil had bought them to mock his singular lack of panache, he thought they were beautiful.
Phil Smethway’s career had been marked by a combination of good luck, personal charm and an amazing ability to adapt. He had started out in insurance before taking detours through estate agency, concert promotion and pirate radio. He’d suffered setbacks in his career like everyone, but his ability to shed his old skin and move on meant that they were never more than fleeting. His move to national TV came at the age of sixty-three, a time when most men would be considering retirement, but for Phil it was just the start of his greatest work. Phil was born only five years after Frank’s father and yet Frank would never have placed them in the same generation. Phil always seemed entirely of the moment.
When Frank joined Heart of England Reports as a reporter in 1989, Phil had been on the show for fifteen years, the last nine of those as the main anchor. Frank had grown up watching Phil, and the easy charm he had on screen made Frank suspicious of how he might be in person. Frank had come to recognize a certain strain of presenter in local radio. Some of those who possessed a greater fluency, who were able to communicate a smile through the microphone and achieve a close rapport with listeners, developed a strangely exaggerated view of the rarity and specialness of their gifts. They had seen too often how others groped and stumbled at something they found effortless and this knowledge worked on them. They began to see their personalities as the commodities they were and to ration and exchange them only for hard currency. Off air they aspired to be as charmless as plastic forks. This combined with a suspicion of newcomers and a generalized paranoia that one day someone would come along with all the natural, easy, unmeasured grace they had once possessed. Perhaps luckily for him, Frank had presented no such threat and so suffered nothing more from them than mild contempt.
Frank learned quickly that Phil was not of this school. His on-screen warmth was a contained and diluted version of his off-screen self. Away from the camera Phil had a wicked sense of humour, dry and relentless, a constant jabbing. He found something to needle everyone around him and kept at it, and yet no one got angry or found it tiresome, but reacted instead like puppies having their stomachs tickled. Phil was a lover of the finer things in life and he never ceased to get comic mileage out of Frank’s lack of discrimination. Frank would enter the office and Phil would look genuinely concerned and ask if he was happy with the tie he was wearing. On the occasions when they grabbed a bite together he was both amazed and appalled at Frank’s utter indifference to food.
His greatest skill, though, was in capsizing co-presenters and correspondents, something he would do only very occasionally and which he swore was unintentional. In the last few seconds of a video package, as the action was about to return to the studio, he would say some small thing, his face a deadpan mask. They called them ‘grenades’ as there was always a small delay before detonation. The co-presenter would launch into the next item, successfully holding it together for five or maybe ten seconds before issuing an abrupt bark of laughter, and Phil would frown and apologize to the viewer and take over the link. The baffling thing was that the lines were never that funny, at times even made no sense at all, but some combination of delivery and context was devastating. Often their humour lay simply in the glimpse they offered of Phil’s internal mental landscape, which seemed always at a far remove from whatever report was running. He’d done it to Frank just once, back when Frank was the sports correspondent. They sat and waited in the studio whilst a report ran about a fatal stabbing outside a fish-and-chip shop. Their crime reporter was at the scene speaking to overexcited eye-witnesses and speculating as to the motive for the attack.
As the reporter was about to hand back to the studio, Phil turned to Frank and said as if in response to something he’d said, ‘The problem is that saveloys turn your piss red.’
Frank could only remember one occasion on which someone had taken offence at something Phil had said. A floor manager once told him to fuck off for a fairly innocuous crack. Frank was amazed at Phil’s reaction.
‘Oh God, Frank, he thinks I’m a complete dick.’
‘Don’t be daft. He’s just having a bad day.’
‘No, you didn’t see the way he looked at me. Like he really hated me. He said it with real venom.’
‘I was there! There was no venom – he just snapped. It was nothing.’
‘I don’t like the thought of him hating me.’
Frank was laughing. ‘He doesn’t hate you, and even if he did – so what? What do you care about his opinion? Everyone thinks I’m a dick and it doesn’t bother me.’
Phil gave a small smile. ‘Yes, but it’s factually accurate in your case.’
Frank nodded in acknowledgement of the open goal. After the conversation, th
ough, he felt he’d glimpsed another side of Phil. Not the effortless charm on the surface, but a hint of the frantic paddling underneath. It would never have occurred to him that someone so assured and confident felt such a need to be liked.
He put the cufflinks on the coffee table and finished his drink. The whiskey had worked to smooth out the edges of the evening. He looked in on Mo, pushing some strands of hair from her face, before gratefully climbing into bed and drifting off to sleep.
10
Maureen had never been like other mothers. As a general rule, the kinds of things that made other mothers happy tended to have the opposite effect on Maureen. Frank had known this since he was a little boy. He remembered visiting the homes of classmates and being shocked and puzzled to see their finger-daubed paintings stuck on walls and fridges. Whenever he took a picture home from school to his mother, she’d ask: ‘What am I supposed to do with this? Why do they make you bring these things home?’
It never occurred to Frank to be upset by this, in fact he agreed. His paintings were rubbish; he could see that. They were rushed things, done under duress, and never looked remotely as he had intended.
Maureen couldn’t stand boasting. She tried to compensate for her husband’s professional confidence by deprecating herself to a brutal degree. Similarly Frank’s modest achievements, such as they were, were not the source of joy they might be to other mothers, but a cause of real anguish to Maureen. She was mortified to discover that Frank had done better than many of his classmates in his O levels.
‘Don’t tell anyone what grades you got! Oh, how can I face the other mothers?’
Frank could see definite advantages in this. His mother never fussed in the way that other mothers did. She never embarrassed him in public by singing his praises and ruffling his hair. She rarely turned up to watch the dreadful school plays he was forced to participate in. She didn’t stand on the touchline and shout silly things that the other boys could tease him about. She hated any acknowledgement of Mother’s Day, which she considered artificial and American. She had no interest in boxes of chocolate or bath salts or cookery books.
She was not an easy mother to make happy, but Frank used to think he might prefer that to a mother who was indiscriminately delighted by everything. The few things that did please her seemed to count for more. She loved books and if Frank managed to buy her one she liked her happiness and gratitude were sincere. She enjoyed watching old films on television. She passed this love on to Frank, along with a wide knowledge of British B-list actors of the fifties. In latter years Frank would buy her videos and then DVDs of films she’d seen at the cinema as a girl and she would gasp in delight and amazement as she unwrapped them and saw the title, always saying: ‘Now that was a film.’
But as she grew older the short list of things that made her happy diminished. Since her move to Evergreen Frank had been at a loss to find anything to lift her gloom. She said she no longer had the concentration to read books or watch films. As had always been the case, she made no effort to appear happy for the sake of Frank or anyone else. She was quick to pour scorn on any ideas aimed at improving her lot, and either didn’t notice, or pretended not to notice, how upsetting this could be for others. Frank would often leave Evergreen furious with her refusal to acknowledge how hard both Andrea and Mo had tried to make her happy, and her lack of grace in even pretending the occasional success.
Frank frequently found himself now wondering why she couldn’t be more like other mothers. The other women in the home were delighted to see their families and took evident pleasure in their grandchildren. Frank developed an almost bloody-minded insistence on making his mother do things that other mothers and grandmothers would enjoy. Chief among these was his determination that she should take occasional trips out from Evergreen.
Once a month he took her out for a drive, and every time she put up the usual objections: ‘Where is there to go?’ ‘What is there to see?’ ‘I don’t want to go out in that heat/rain/fog etc.’ None of which moved Frank. He and Andrea would come close to physically dragging her from her wingback armchair and Maureen would give every impression of being kidnapped. ‘Where are you taking me?’ Calling out to other residents: ‘I don’t know when I’ll be back.’ The other residents smiling and calling: ‘Have a lovely time, Maureen.’ And Frank wondering why he couldn’t have a parent that said and felt things as straightforward as that.
On their trips out Frank and Mo would sit together in the back, Andrea would drive and Maureen would be wedged into the front seat, tucked in with a blanket that she insisted on and was pure theatrical prop.
They tried quaint market towns, grand stately homes and charming woodland walks, all of which Maureen endured like so many visits to the dentist. She would generally soften at the inevitable stop-off at a tea shop, which gave her the rare opportunity to take tea as weak as she liked it and to make catty comments about the other customers. What anyone else might consider heart-warming, the sight of an elderly couple enjoying each other’s company and a slice of fruit cake, would incite scorn from Maureen.
‘Look at them. Bored out of their minds. Nothing to say and nothing to do, just trying to get through another bloody day.’ Or the inevitable. ‘Why aren’t they screaming?’
Although she rarely enjoyed the destination, Frank noticed that Maureen seemed quite placated by the drive. In particular she appeared to enjoy driving along residential streets and looking at the suburban houses.
Today as they drove through Yardley she said: ‘That’s a nice little house, isn’t it, Andrea? A nice pitched roof and a little garden path.’
The house was an unremarkable semi. Andrea glanced at it. ‘It’s nice enough, but you lived in a spectacular house. You featured in style magazines.’
Maureen nodded. ‘It was beautiful I suppose, but I always felt that Douglas thought we ruined it by living in it. We just seemed to upset the clean lines and sharp edges.’
Mo shuffled forward in her seat. ‘Granny.’
‘Yes, dear.’
‘You know Douglas.’
‘Yes, dear.’
‘Grandad.’
Frank sensed his mother’s patience growing thin. ‘Yes, dear. I know who we’re talking about.’
‘I never met him.’
‘I’m aware of that.’
‘But I’ve seen photos.’
‘Yes, I’m sure you have.’
‘He smoked a pipe, didn’t he?’
‘He did.’
‘Why did he do that?’
‘I don’t know. I suppose he must have liked it.’
‘Was he like Sherlock Holmes?’
‘Not really, no.’
Mo slumped back in her seat, disappointed. Maureen turned her head slightly to see Mo and smiled at her.
‘You know you look very much like your grandfather?’
Mo looked at Frank. ‘Is that true?’
Frank shrugged. ‘You do a bit. You just need the pipe. Would you like that? Sitting at home puffing away whilst eating your spaghetti hoops on toast?’
Mo pulled an exaggerated face of disgust. She spoke in a whisper so Maureen wouldn’t hear. ‘How can I look like him? He was a man, and I’m a girl.’
Frank whispered back. ‘Well, you don’t look like a man, you know. You don’t look exactly like him – you just have similar eyes and mouth. You have some of his expressions.’
Mo pulled some strange faces, as if trying to find the expressions she shared with her grandfather. Frank looked at her and tried to imagine his father as a child, but couldn’t. When he thought of his father, he found it hard to think of anything but his work, impossible to separate the man from the buildings. Douglas had been one of Birmingham’s key post-war architects, one of the ground-zero visionaries along with Madin and Roberts, welcomed with open arms by the city engineer Sir Herbert Manzoni.
Frank had once come across a quote from Manzoni: ‘I have never been very certain as to the value of tangible links with the past
. As to Birmingham’s buildings, there is little of real worth in our architecture.’
It seemed to Frank that Manzoni had a particular lack of certainty about the value of the city’s Victorian heritage. Landmark buildings, elegant department stores and elaborately embellished public buildings were torn down and replaced with the kind of stark buildings favoured by Douglas and his contemporaries. Birmingham was where the future would be built.
It hadn’t worked out that way, though. The demolition frenzy of post-war development was now seen as a disaster, the concrete collar of the ring road and other schemes revealed as flawed or obsolete even before they were completed. But the craving to wipe clean and start again wouldn’t die; it was too deeply ingrained in the city’s character. The target had merely shifted. Now it was the turn of the post-war buildings, the clean lines and concrete which had replaced the Victorian ornamentation. The future that Frank’s father had spent his life building was being shown as little sentimentality as the Victorian past he had tried to replace.
Andrea looked at Mo in the rear-view mirror.
‘Maybe you’ll grow up to be an architect like your grandfather.’
Mo shook her head. ‘I don’t want to be an architect.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because after you die they demolish your buildings.’
‘That doesn’t happen to every architect,’ said Frank.
‘No, dear,’ added Maureen, ‘some are still alive when the demolition starts.’
11
He was having to pull over every few minutes to check the A–Z, then with the next few twists and turns committed to memory, he’d set off again, driving slowly through the heavy rain. Despite the downpour the windscreen wipers protested at every sweep, squawking as they dragged themselves with ill grace over the glass, a sound that had a special ability to jab at Frank’s nerves. He realized he was blinking in time to the wipers. He decided to pull over and walk.
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