Near And Dear

by Pamela Evans

  ‘I wasn’t,’ he denied irritably. ‘They were jumping all over me and I stopped them, that’s all there was to it.’

  ‘You’ve always encouraged them to get on your lap. They’re not to know . . .’

  ‘So I’m not in the mood today,’ he cut in heatedly. ‘Why must you make such a big drama out of it?’

  ‘Because you’re becoming impossible to live with, that’s why,’ she told him. ‘Take your frustration out on me if you must, but not on the children.’ Her mouth was dry and she was trembling because she wasn’t used to standing up to him. ‘I know you’ve a lot on your mind at the moment but you really must try not to be so bad-tempered. ’

  ‘Stop moaning, woman, and give me a break, will you?’

  Mick got up and paced over to the french windows where he stood with his back to her, looking into the garden where the children were playing on their tricycles. Seeing the rigid set of his shoulders and guessing he was feeling wretched, she went to him, eager to put things right between them.

  ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’ she asked, slipping her arms around him from behind.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t shut me out, Mick,’ she pleaded. ‘I want to help.’

  ‘I don’t need help.’

  ‘Would you like me to phone the insurance company for you?’ she suggested. ‘Find out what’s causing the delay. Someone different enquiring might encourage them to hurry things along.’

  She was quite unprepared for the violence of his reaction.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, stop babying me,’ he said, swinging round and pushing her away. ‘I’m a grown man, not a child.’

  ‘But I...’

  ‘I’m not Davey or Pip, you know,’ he said grimly. ‘I’m the breadwinner of this family. The head of the house. I run things around here and I know what I’m doing.’

  ‘I’ve never suggested otherwise . . .’

  ‘You stick to cleaning the house and keep out of things that don’t concern you.’

  ‘Mick, I . . . I was only trying to help.’

  His eyes narrowed in accusation.

  ‘What’s the matter? Don’t you trust me to look after my own family?’ he ranted. ‘Is that what’s bothering you?’

  ‘Of course I trust you,’ said Jane, shocked by this outburst.

  ‘Why interfere then?’

  ‘I love you, Mick, and when I see you worried, naturally I want to help . . .’

  ‘Well, you can forget it,’ he said. ‘Because I don’t need it.’

  ‘Perhaps if we made a few economies until everything is sorted out ...’

  ‘No, no, no!’ he bellowed. ‘How many more times must I tell you that nothing is going to change? So far as this family is concerned, everything is exactly the same as it was before the fire. So will you just shut up about it? Shut your big mouth before I do it for you!’

  Shrinking back as though he’d already hit her, hot tears burning beneath her lids, she turned and walked away from him.

  Mick came after her and pulled her to him, holding her close, full of remorse.

  ‘I’m sorry, babe . . . so sorry,’ he said, gently smoothing her hair from her face with his hands and kissing away her tears. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you. All this waiting about and not having a business to run is really getting to me. But you’re absolutely right, I shouldn’t take it out on you and the kids.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear you admit it.’

  ‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ he said, stroking her face. ‘Will you forgive me?’

  ‘Oh, Mick. You know I will.’

  ‘I do have everything under control, you know,’ he told her. ‘There’s nothing for you to worry about at all.’

  ‘I’m not worried about the money, it’s you I’m concerned about.’

  ‘I’ll try to be better tempered in future, I promise.’

  ‘I hope you mean that?’

  ‘I do . . . I really do.’

  ‘You’d better.’

  ‘But you must trust me to take care of everything and leave the insurance company to me.’

  ‘Okay, Mick,’ she said. ‘You won’t hear another word about it from me.’

  Over his shoulder, she could see the children peering in through the french windows at their parents embracing. They looked subdued and uncertain.

  ‘I think you should make your peace with the children too,’ said Jane. ‘Let them know you still love them.’

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ he said. ‘I could slit my own throat for being such a pig.’

  Peeling the potatoes in the kitchen a few minutes later, Jane heard shrieks of laughter coming from the garden as Mick and the children became friends again. That was more like it, she thought, smiling. But a niggling knot of tension remained because she had a horrible suspicion that this period of calm was only temporary.

  Davey’s fourth birthday party was in full swing. Tea was over and there was a boisterous game of musical chairs in progress in the Parkers’ lounge.

  There had been the usual catalogue of disasters among the under-fives: squabbles, screaming, spillages - none of which was helped by the rain which kept everybody indoors. But things had calmed down after tea and now it was going well.

  It was a real family occasion. Mick was in charge of the record player while Jane, Marie and Eddie were removing the chairs and organising the children. Mick’s mother and Jane’s father were washing the dishes in the kitchen. Wilf Parker was busy with his round and hadn’t come.

  The music stopped, and after the scramble for seats a row erupted.

  ‘It isn’t fair!’ wailed a golden-haired little girl called Jemima. ‘Roy pushed me out of the way so he could get the chair.’

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ denied Roy, his bottom safely planted on the chair.

  ‘You did, you did!’ she yelled, and thumped him in the back.

  ‘Now then, Jemima,’ intervened Marie, patience stretched, ‘that’s not very nice, is it? Not very nice at all.’

  ‘He cheated,’ she said, sobs gathering momentum. ‘I’m still in the game.’

  ‘You’re not,’ said Roy.

  ‘I am,’ screamed Jemima.

  Jane finally ended the dispute by putting another chair in the line and asking Mick to start the music again.

  ‘Is it nearly time for party bags and home to Mummy?’ Marie whispered to Jane with a chuckle.

  ‘Judging by the state of my nerves, I should think it must be!’

  When the music stopped and Jemima failed to get a seat again, all hell broke loose. The child argued with anyone who would listen and finally proceeded to scream her head off. Jane was still trying to pacify her when Mick put the music back on.

  ‘Hey, hang on a minute, Mick,’ she shouted to make herself heard above the shrieking child. ‘We’re not quite ready yet.’

  The music stopped and the room resounded to Mick’s booming voice as he embarked upon the second outburst of the week.

  ‘Get this bloody lot out of here!’ he shouted to his wife.

  ‘Mick . . . shush!’

  ‘Bugger off, the lot of you,’ he barked to the children, who stared at him, horror-struck.

  ‘Stop it, Mick . . .’ Jane tried again.

  ‘You’re like a lot of wild animals.’ He moved towards the centre of the room and flapped his hands at the children as though shooing away a flock of pigeons. ‘Get out of my house, the lot of you. Out, out, out! You horrible little tykes.’

  ‘Daddy!’ gasped Davey, mortified as his friends huddled together, pale with fright, not sure what they were supposed to do next. Jemima had stopped crying and was looking at Mick with a bemused expression.

  ‘Don’t be so ridiculous, Mick,’ said Jane, moving closer to him and speaking in a hushed voice. She could have strangled him for embarrassing their son in this way. ‘These children are only four years old. They can’t go home until their parents come to collect them - not unless we take them. Anyway, they’re our guests and they aren’t going
anywhere until the end of the party.’

  ‘In that case, I’ll go,’ roared Mick before the stunned gathering. ‘I’m not staying in this bear garden a moment longer.’

  Without another word, he marched from the room. The front door slammed, followed by the sound of a car driving away at high speed.

  Some of the children were giggling, others crying. Davey had disappeared. Leaving the other adults in charge, Jane found her son in his room, sitting on his bed. He was near to tears.

  ‘Hey, come on now, love,’ she said, sitting down beside him. ‘Cheer up. We’ll finish the party without Daddy.’

  ‘It’s all spoiled,’ said Davey tearfully.

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ she reassured him, slipping her arm around him. ‘We’ll soon put everything right. Just you wait and see.’

  ‘I want them all to go home.’

  ‘It isn’t time for their parents to come for them yet,’ Jane explained gently. ‘So we have to carry on entertaining them until then.’

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘We have to, love. It would be very rude of us not to finish the party properly.’

  ‘Why is Dad so grumpy?’

  ‘He has things on his mind. He doesn’t mean it.’

  ‘My friends will think he’s horrid now. They’ll say I’ve got a horrible dad.’

  ‘Of course they won’t,’ Jane soothed. ‘All daddies have bad moods.’

  ‘Not like that.’

  ‘I bet they do.’

  ‘Honestly?’

  ‘Yes, honestly,’ she reassured him. ‘Anyway, your pals will forget all about it once we get another game going. How about pass the parcel? Everyone likes that.’

  ‘I don’t want to go down there.’

  ‘But you’re the birthday boy. You can’t hide away up here.’

  ‘I’m not going down.’

  Jane went down on her haunches, looking into his face and wiping his nose.

  ‘Come on, Davey, you’re the guest of honour. The party’s nothing without you.’

  ‘I don’t wanna go down there.’

  ‘Better you come down and face your friends now,’ she said. ‘Or you might feel silly about it when you see them tomorrow.’

  He thought about this.

  ‘Please, Davey . . . I’m relying on you to help me make the party end with a swing.’

  ‘Oh, all right then,’ he said reluctantly.

  ‘Good boy.’

  He looked her directly in the eyes and said vehemently, ‘But I hate Daddy . . . I really, really hate him.’

  At that precise moment, Jane was having similar thoughts about Mick herself. But she said, ‘I’m sure you don’t mean that? Not after all the things he does for you.’

  ‘He used to be nice,’ said the boy solemnly. ‘But not any more.’

  Jane’s nerves were so taut, even the ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece registered with painful clarity as she waited for Mick to come home that night. All the guests had gone and the children were asleep in bed. Eddie and Marie had taken Rita Parker and Jane’s father home in their Ford Cortina. Everyone had been very supportive towards Jane, doing their best to cheer Davey up and make the party end on a happier note. They had all been shocked by Mick’s behaviour, though.

  ‘I shall have a few strong words to say to him when I next see him, I can promise you that,’ declared his mother.

  ‘It was disgraceful behaviour,’ exclaimed Jane’s father.

  ‘He’s got a lot on his mind at the moment,’ said Marie, who had always been very close to her brother and tended to make excuses for him.

  ‘Trust you to stick up for him,’ said her husband Eddie. ‘I could murder him for spoiling Davey’s party.’

  And now Jane was sitting in the armchair in the lounge, wrestling with her own confused emotions. She was furious about the contretemps, worried about her husband’s state of mind that had caused it, and filled with dread that he would confirm the suspicions with which she now knew she must confront him.

  As the time passed and he didn’t come home, she wondered what sort of a state he’d be in to be driving a car, because he was sure to be in a pub or drinking club somewhere. And it wouldn’t occur to him not to drive home. Mick had never been responsible about that.

  At ten o’clock she watched the news but about the only thing that registered, albeit vaguely, was the fashion designer Mary Quant getting an OBE.

  When Mick did appear soon after that, it wasn’t booze he was full of but contrition.

  ‘That’s all very well, Mick,’ said Jane after he’d apologised and begged her to forgive him. ‘But this is the second time this week you’ve blown your top and upset the children, and not in a minor way, either.’

  Had there been another such incident earlier in the week? He couldn’t remember. He was becoming alarmingly forgetful lately. This afternoon he’d found himself at a club in Hammersmith with no knowledge at all of getting there or why he’d gone. It had scared him half to death. Eventually he’d remembered storming out of Davey’s party but the images were very muddled and vague.

  ‘All right, don’t go on about it,’ he said, because he wasn’t prepared to admit his memory lapses to Jane and have her think he was losing his marbles. ‘I know I’ve done wrong.’

  ‘What you did to Davey this afternoon was unforgivable. ’

  ‘I’ve said I’m sorry and I meant it,’ he said, looking very ashamed. ‘I’ll make it up to him, don’t worry.’

  ‘You can’t put a thing like that right with just a few kind words,’ she told him. ‘One of the most painful things you can do to a child is to embarrass them in front of their friends.’

  ‘He’s too young to be seriously affected by a thing like that, surely?’

  ‘I’m not so certain. I think he was properly humiliated. The poor kid wanted the floor to open up and swallow him.’

  ‘Oh, Gawd!’

  ‘You’ll have to make a real effort to win back his confidence.’

  ‘I feel such a bastard.’

  ‘And so you should . . .’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Where have you been all this time, anyway?’ Jane wanted to know.

  ‘At a drinking club in Hammersmith with some old mates.’

  ‘So how come you’re not legless?’

  ‘I went on to tomato juice quite early on. Thought I’d better not come home drunk . . . on top of everything else.’

  ‘Well, that’s something in your favour, I suppose.’

  ‘Thank God there’s something!’

  They were sitting to either side of the fireplace, handsomely adorned with a large vase of fresh flowers. Although he longed to make love to his wife, Mick knew better than to make any sort of physical approach to her while things were so delicate between them.

  ‘I’m glad you’re not drunk because I think it’s time we had a proper discussion about the situation,’ said Jane.

  He looked pained.

  ‘Oh, no, not again. I’ve told you, there’s nothing to talk about.’

  ‘Oh, but I think there is, Mick,’ she said firmly. ‘And I want the truth.’

  ‘The truth?’

  ‘There is no insurance money due to you, is there?’ she said.

  The blood drained from Mick’s face, leaving him ashen.

  ‘Of course there’s insurance money due to me,’ he blustered.

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘Oh, that’s nice, that is. My own wife calling me a liar!’

  Her gaze didn’t falter even though her heart was doing somersaults and her chest felt as though it would burst with tension. She didn’t utter a word or move a muscle, just sat where she was, looking at him and waiting.

  ‘Honestly, you don’t half get some weird ideas, Jane.’

  ‘Be man enough to answer me truthfully, please, Mick.’

  Getting up, he took a cigarette from the packet on the mantelpiece and lit it with his gold lighter. Then he paced restlessly about the ro
om, eventually standing with his back to the window across which the curtains were drawn. He experienced a fleeting feeling of unreality, as though the room was unfamiliar to him and he didn’t know who he was.

  ‘I don’t know what gets into you sometimes,’ he prevaricated.

  She didn’t reply, just looked at him, the intensity of her gaze demanding the truth.

  ‘I’ve told you, everything’s fine. You’ve nothing to worry about,’ he said, puffing agitatedly on his cigarette.

  ‘Yes, you have told me that, and I don’t doubt you will continue to look after us all. But there isn’t actually any insurance money to come, is there?’

  He stared at the floor for what seemed a long time. When he raised his head and looked at her, she knew she’d been right.

  ‘No, there isn’t,’ he admitted, sounding very subdued.

  Jane’s heart lurched but she managed to stay calm.

  ‘So, why won’t the insurance company honour your claim?’

  Mick’s shirt looked snow-white against the red velvet curtains; his hair gleamed darkly as he stood, casually smoking, his shirtsleeves rolled up.

  ‘There is no claim,’ he said, eyes not quite meeting hers. ‘I didn’t have any insurance on the business.’

  Biting back recriminations, Jane waited for him to explain.

  ‘I kept meaning to get insurance cover when the business got bigger and I began carrying a large amount of stock,’ he explained. ‘In the early days it didn’t seem worth it. As I only rented the premises, I didn’t need to insure the buildings. Then . . . later on . . . I just never got around to it.’

  ‘But you were carrying thousands of poundsworth of stock?’

  ‘Don’t remind me,’ he said ruefully. ‘I intended to take out insurance eventually. But I was on a winning streak . . . everything I touched was so successful, I thought it would go on forever.’ He exhaled slowly, producing a cloud of smoke, reminding himself to keep to his original story about faulty wiring and not let slip to Jane the real cause of the fire. ‘You know how it is? You never think these things are going to happen to you.’