Widows & Orphans

by Michael Arditti

  ‘What about you?’ he asked. ‘How are you going to fight off all the men?’ It was then that, having sworn there was no one else involved, she told him about Derek.

  He may have lost her love but he was determined to retain her affection. Against both his solicitor’s and his accountant’s advice he made her an unduly generous settlement. It was not until he realised that this was the same policy he had adopted with his redundant printers that he felt the full force of his self-disgust.

  When his mother reproached him with profligacy, he insisted on the need to maintain good relations with Linda for Jamie’s sake, but privately he knew that it was for his own. As they made their way down the drive, looking every inch the established couple, he comforted himself with the thought of the many occasions on which they would meet as parents: sports days and speech days, wedding day and christenings; breaking off abruptly when he remembered that the failure to live in the present had been one of Linda’s recurrent charges against him. They walked into the entrance hall, its drab plasterwork relieved by a huge collage of brightly painted inner soles. He stepped up to inspect it more closely when Linda pointed to Jamie, who was lurking behind a frosted-glass partition.

  From his expression it was clear that he did not entertain any sentimental notion that his parents would get back together. On the contrary, his life seemed to be predicated on keeping its disparate elements apart. Duncan gazed at his son and wondered how it was that so surly a face and clenched a body could unleash such a torrent of love in him. He longed to hug him but knew that the contact, barely tolerated in private, was utterly taboo in public. So he contented himself with reaching out to squeeze the nape of his neck, but Jamie’s simultaneous recoil meant that, instead, he clipped his ear.

  ‘What was that for?’ Jamie asked indignantly.

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean … I was just trying to squeeze your neck.’

  ‘Why?’ Jamie asked, staring at him with even more than the usual dismay.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t worry, darling,’ Linda said. ‘You know your father’s all thumbs. Come on, we’re due at the science lab in five minutes.’

  They made their way down a battleship-grey corridor and into a large concrete yard surrounded by assorted classrooms and subject blocks. Spotting a couple peering forlornly at a rudimentary plan, Duncan considered asking Jamie to direct them, but the absence of their own child, combined with Jamie’s protest that only ‘nerds and dweebs’ accompanied their parents to these evenings, dissuaded him. They entered the lab where the chemistry, physics and biology teachers sat at adjacent desks like rival politicians at the hustings. As they headed for Mr Lawson, the chemistry teacher, they passed a couple being led away by a boy whose pustular face and gangling demeanour seemed to bear out Jamie’s claim.

  ‘Isn’t this ghastly?’ the woman said gaily. ‘Almost like being back at school yourself.’

  ‘I know,’ Linda replied. ‘I feel as if I’m the one being judged.’

  Duncan wondered whether he were alone in welcoming these events, which offered some acknowledgement of his role in his son’s life. He still bridled at the memory of having to beg the Headmistress for a copy of Jamie’s report. Francis Preston held two parents’ evenings a year, the first in October to discuss how the children were settling in and the second in March to review their progress. Tonight, he and Linda were to see eight of Jamie’s teachers, all for the first time.

  ‘It’s quite different from my own school,’ Duncan said. ‘Parents were actively discouraged from participating in their sons’ education. They had to make do with a skimpy report at the end of term where academic results jostled with height, weight and general behaviour. Each subject master was allotted a single line, but some confined themselves to a single word. The classics master wrote his in Greek!’

  ‘Let’s go, Dad!’ Jamie hissed. ‘We’re next.’ With a nod to his fellow parents, Duncan followed his son past a row of sinks, as pristine as those in a kitchen showroom. ‘Why do you have to do that?’

  ‘Do what? I was just making conversation.’

  ‘Yeah, about how you went to public school.’

  ‘I never mentioned Lancing.’ He turned to Linda. ‘Did I mention it?’

  ‘Hurry up,’ she said. ‘Mr Lawson’s waiting.’

  Lawson, a genial Scot whose soft burr might have been designed to reassure anxious parents, lavished praise on Jamie’s work and the meeting went well, or so Duncan thought until they were back in the yard and Jamie upbraided him for once again speaking out of turn.

  ‘Why did you have to tell him chemistry was my favourite subject?’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ Duncan asked, recalling their various experiments in Adele’s garage when even she played a part, feigning terror at the thermite-and-ice explosion.

  ‘Maybe, two years ago.’

  ‘So what is it now?’

  ‘Why should I have one? I’m not a kid.’

  ‘Don’t be rude, Jamie,’ Linda said. ‘Your father’s only asking.’

  While appreciating her support, Duncan resented the intervention, which made him feel even more of an encumbrance, like an elderly uncle whose whisky breath and whiskery kisses Jamie had been ordered to endure. He had heard, not from Jamie himself but from Ellen, whose son Neil was in the same class, that they had been assigned a local history project. He had offered Jamie the run of the Mercury, proposing that they explore the archives together, only to learn that he had already spoken to Derek, who had agreed to help him with the evolution of the wheel park. Every attempt that he made to bond with his son was similarly thwarted. Sometimes, to ease the pain, he pretended that he had, after all, sent him to boarding school and that his truculence was emotional reserve. It rarely worked.

  They headed for the language lab where two French teachers sat at either end of an airy room flanking a German colleague. Duncan’s disappointment that Jamie was not being taught by the glamorous young woman, whose looks and smile would inspire diligence in even the most indolent teenage boy, was compounded by the discovery that his actual teacher, Mr Berwick, had a heavy lisp, which did not bode well for his pupils’ pronunciation. He declared Jamie’s grammar and comprehension to be satisfactory but his vocabulary deficient, at which Linda remarked that, while hopeless at languages herself, Jamie’s father was bilingual and she had suggested that they speak French to each other. For once, Duncan shared Jamie’s horror. They found it hard enough to communicate in English without venturing into French.

  The session was cut short by Mr Berwick’s alarm, which, while ensuring that he stuck to his schedule, seemed to convey his contempt for the entire exercise.

  ‘So who’s next on our dance card?’ Duncan asked, as they hurried past the German teacher, who was loudly berating an inept pupil in front of her hapless parents and several onlookers.

  ‘Maths,’ Jamie replied.

  ‘That was always my worst subject,’ Duncan said.

  ‘That doesn’t mean it has to be mine! Isn’t it bad enough that I’ve got your ears – and other things?’

  Duncan sat through the meeting with the maths mistress in a state of creeping anxiety. Jamie looked both surprised and grateful that he failed to object when Linda questioned the need for him to be set so much homework. All he could hear was that ominous coda echoing in his ears. His earlier irritation that Jamie had bungled the arrangements, leaving them with a twenty-minute gap between maths and ICT, was replaced by relief that it afforded him a chance to talk to Linda. So, asking Jamie to give them a moment in private (a request that was accepted with predictable alacrity), he joined her at a scuffed Formica table in the canteen.

  ‘So he knows about the KS?’ he said.

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘That “and other things” he slipped into the conversation. Or do I have more characteristics that he finds repugnant?’

  ‘No,’ she replied quietly. ‘It’s the KS.’

  ‘He does know that it’s not be
en passed on? He does know that we took the tests? He does know that he’s in the clear?’

  ‘Yes, he knows all that.’

  ‘Then why did he say it?’

  ‘Just to be hurtful. You know what he’s like.’

  ‘No, not really. That’s the trouble; I don’t.’

  ‘I sometimes think he makes himself as obnoxious as possible in order to challenge us.’

  ‘Well it works. So who told him: you or Derek?’

  ‘It wasn’t like that. We were having a discussion about Rose and genetics, and why you and I had no other children.’

  ‘Then it was you?’

  ‘No, it was Derek.’

  ‘Of course. Any opportunity to emasculate me in the eyes of my son.’

  ‘That’s not true! He’s not like that. Besides, if anyone feels emasculated, it’s him. By Rose.’

  ‘You’ve always told me how good he is with her.’

  ‘He is. He’d do anything for her. He spent all last weekend making two new pages for her chart.’

  ‘There you are then.’

  ‘Though it’s not the same as doing things with her. He’ll do everything he can to help her communicate, but he communicates so little with her himself.’

  ‘We each of us play to our strengths,’ Duncan said, surprised to find himself defending Derek.

  ‘I feel disloyal talking to you like this,’ Linda said, ‘but who else is there? My mother wouldn’t understand and my girlfriends would gossip.’

  Duncan would have felt happier about keeping a place in her life had it not been that of elder brother. It was clear that neither she nor Derek regarded him as a threat.

  ‘It was Ellen who gave us the idea for the new pages, one on Rose’s guinea pig and the other on Shrek. She’s worked wonders with Rose in just an hour a week. And I gather she’s made her mark elsewhere.’

  ‘Did she tell you that?’

  ‘Who else? I’m not your mother with a network of spies that would put MI5 to shame! I think it’s great.’

  ‘What’s great?’

  Duncan looked round to find that Jamie had returned.

  ‘That Dad has gone out on a couple of dates with Rose’s speech therapist.’

  ‘Pass the sick bag,’ Jamie said, adding vomiting noises for good measure.

  ‘They weren’t dates,’ Duncan said, amused by Jamie’s reaction. ‘We walked up to the Old Lighthouse and went to the cinema.’

  ‘So I heard,’ Linda said.

  ‘She mentioned the film?’

  ‘I’m not sure that Firehawk 2 was top of her list.’

  ‘Those multiplex schedules are so hard to follow.’

  ‘I warned her that anyone who went out with you had to double-check all the details. I learnt that on our honeymoon.’

  ‘You didn’t tell her that!’

  ‘Tell her what?’ Jamie asked.

  ‘You know the story: how we got to Heathrow and your father found that his passport had expired. So we ended up going to Penzance instead of Rome.’

  ‘Still, it worked out all right,’ Duncan said.

  ‘Yes, it did,’ Linda said, smiling.

  ‘Ellen’s here tonight, with her son Neil,’ Duncan said. ‘I’m surprised we haven’t bumped into them. I’ve promised to drive them home at the end.’

  ‘Why?’ Jamie asked.

  ‘Partly because her car’s being serviced and partly because I want to. Strange as it seems, I miss you when you go back with your mother and Derek.’

  ‘So you’ll take him instead?’ Jamie asked angrily.

  ‘Of course not,’ Duncan said. ‘I’m taking his mother. He’s just “along for the ride”.’

  His cowboy drawl failed to lighten the mood.

  ‘He’s a dickhead,’ Jamie said. ‘Good luck to him. I wouldn’t be seen dead in that heap of junk.’

  ‘Don’t be mean,’ Duncan said, relieved at the return to a routine grievance. ‘I know you’re fond of the old girl really.’

  ‘It’s a dinosaur, Dad. It’s twenty years old. And it’s an it, not a she!’

  ‘Don’t let Rocinante hear you say that!’

  ‘Who names a car after a horse? Who names a car after anything? You’re so lame!’

  ‘That’s unkind, Jamie,’ Linda interposed.

  ‘And you’re a hypocrite!’ he replied, leading Duncan to wonder what she had said about the car. ‘Come on then if you’re coming; we’ll be late!’

  Jamie strode out of the canteen and down the corridor, checking at intervals that his parents were following.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Linda said. ‘He’s tired. We were up half the night with Rose. I tried not to wake him but…’

  ‘He can always come and stay with me if it helps.’

  ‘No, that would be even more disruptive. Besides, he’d see it as a punishment. And it’s not his fault.’

  Startled, Duncan wondered whether Linda meant what she had said or if lack of sleep had taken its toll on her too. They made their way into the computer room for the regulation ten minutes with the ICT teacher, whose plaudits for Jamie’s first forays into web design led Duncan to quip that they could do with him at the paper, to Jamie’s undisguised disgust. As they walked back to the science lab, this time to see the biology teacher, Duncan waved at a vaguely familiar figure, only to realise that she had featured in the Mercury after being sprinkled with her dead husband’s ashes. Watching her trail behind a girl, presumably one of her vengeful daughters, he felt a surge of sympathy for a parent even more beleaguered than himself.

  On leaving the science lab, they returned to the main building for their final three appointments, with the geography, history and English teachers. After two hours, the strict time slots had been abandoned, inducing forced smiles and frayed nerves on all sides. There were worse places to wait, however, than the brightly coloured geography room with its patchwork of flags covering the ceiling and alphabetical posters, from the Arctic to Zanzibar, dotting the walls. After an encouraging session with the geography mistress, who praised Jamie’s start to his ecotourism coursework, and a depressing one with the history master, who lamented his failure to come to grips with the Industrial Revolution, they moved to the English room, where Duncan greeted a lesbian couple whom he had championed in his column when a hate campaign forced them to withdraw as classroom helpers at their younger daughter’s primary school. He nodded to Irma Lewis, one of Linda’s oldest friends, who walked in a few minutes later with her son, a contemporary of Jamie’s. To his surprise, after giving them a guarded smile she crossed to the opposite side of the room.

  ‘Is she embarrassed to see us together?’ Duncan asked Linda.

  ‘No. Why should she be?’

  ‘I wondered if she’d bitched about me after the divorce and now she’s worried you’ll say something.’

  ‘She bitched about you when we were married and I told you at the time. In fact she’s just a prize bitch,’ Linda said in a stage whisper. The two English teachers looked up and two of the parents looked round. Irma stared intently at a wall chart of tricky plurals.

  ‘I thought she was one of your closest friends.’

  ‘She was, until Rose.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Do you? Yes, of course you do. You’d have seen straight away. It took me a little longer. She had Kate at about the same time. She was terrified I might want them to play together. I don’t suppose even she could have thought that cerebral palsy was catching. So it must have been a fear that she’d cramp her style.’

  Distressed by the pain in Linda’s voice, he reached for her hand, heedless of what Irma or anyone else might think. They sat in silence until called up by Mr Brighouse, who introduced himself while stirring his tea with a marker pen. The session started badly when he referred to Jamie, whom he had been teaching for the past six weeks, as Jeremy, and grew worse when he dismissed Duncan’s concerns about Jamie’s grammar with the claim that apostrophes, prepositions, double negatives and the like might be left to t
he computer style check. Conflict was narrowly averted when Linda, well versed in Duncan’s views, hustled him away. As they walked back to the school gates, where she had arranged to meet Derek and he to meet Ellen, he inveighed against the decline of standards.

  ‘You get what you pay for,’ Jamie said. ‘If you wanted me to have a decent education, you should have sent me to Lancing.’

  ‘Where’s that coming from?’ Duncan asked, astonished. ‘I thought you wouldn’t be seen dead in a public school.’

  ‘I’m just saying … Tim and Graham went to Wellington.’

  ‘Aunt Alison and Uncle Malcolm have much more money than I do. Besides, it’s against my principles.’

  ‘Right. Just don’t blame me when I fail my GCSEs.’

  ‘Now you’re being childish.’

  ‘Here we are,’ Linda said, as they arrived at the gate to find Derek shouting into his mobile. Without drawing breath he kissed Linda and high-fived Jamie. Then, removing his headset, he held out his hand to Duncan. ‘How’s it hanging, young man?’ he asked, a question that Duncan at first assumed was addressed to Jamie.

  ‘Fine, thanks,’ he replied. ‘And you?’

  ‘Can’t complain. So how did it go, Jamie? Straight As, I hope.’

  ‘The teachers were very pleased with him,’ Linda said.

  ‘Though there’s room for improvement,’ Duncan added, to his instant regret.

  ‘Well, we can’t all be as brainy as our dads. I remember when I used to take home my end-of-term report (none of this touchy-feely-meet-the-teachers stuff in those days). I’d always try to find ways to get rid of it. One time I told my mum that the dog had eaten it. Which would have been fine except that we had a cat.’

  Duncan was unsure whether to be more depressed by Derek’s joke or Jamie’s laughter. He longed for them to leave him in peace to wait for Ellen, but Derek seemed to sense his discomfort and spin it out.

  ‘It’s been a busy day at the office,’ he said. ‘Geoff showed me the plans for the pier, hot off the drawing board. I know I shouldn’t say anything in front of the press –’

  ‘Oh, I switch off sometimes,’ Duncan said.