Dan got out of the car and went around to the passenger door and held it open for his mother. She gave him a little wave but remained on the pavement talking with one of her fellow church slaves, no doubt fixing up the next scintillating meeting of the Scrape-Your-Knuckles-to-the-Bone-for-the-Welfare-of-the-Church Club. A nod and a gentle pat on the arm confirmed the arrangement and Battersea Gran crossed over the road to the car.
“Hullo, dear,” she trilled, offering up her cheek for a kiss. Dan obliged. “My word, hasn’t it got cold all of a sudden? What’s happened to the Indian summer that nice Mr. Fish promised us on the telly?” She reached up and gave the lapel of his leather jacket a shake. “And look at you without a jersey. You may think you look sexy in that thing, but it’s not going to keep out the chill.”
“I’m fine, Mum,” Dan replied, wrestling his jacket from her grip. “In fact, I’m feeling quite hot.” For heaven’s sakes, Dan thought to himself, nearly forty-one years old and you’re still rising to her overprotective quips.
“Oh, well, if you say so,” his mother sighed as she reversed her bottom onto the car seat and pulled her raincoat around her. Shutting the door more carefully than usual, Dan walked around to the other side of the car and got in.
“My word, this is very nice,” his mother cooed as she rubbed a hand along the wood veneer finish of the dashboard. “Very plush indeed. Is it new?”
“Is what new?” Dan asked, clipping in his seat belt.
“The car.”
“Mum, it’s fifteen years old,” Dan replied, wondering how his mother could have possibly missed the fact that the interior of the car looked as if it had been used for carting livestock at some time in its past.
“Well, you wouldn’t think it, would you?” She nosed the fetid air in the car and her mouth pursed with disgust. “Have you been smoking?” she asked tartly.
“No, I haven’t. It must have been the last owner.”
Battersea Gran sucked her teeth. “Probably died of lung cancer. Why else would anyone want to get rid of a nice car like this?”
“Right, Mum. Pull over your seat belt and I’ll do it up for you.”
Dan clipped in the belt and started the car on the third time of asking. He executed a five-point turn in the middle of the narrow street, much to the annoyance of a taxi driver and a motorcyclist who were forced to wait while he carried out the manoeuvre. “Okay, then,” he said, holding up a hand in apology and accelerating the car towards Battersea Park Road, “Clapham next stop.”
“I think that I should go back to the flat first, dear.”
“Do you really need to? It’s just that I’ve left the roast in the oven and the girls won’t have the sense to take a look at it.”
“Nature calls, I’m afraid. I don’t think that I’d make it to Haleridge Road.”
“Wasn’t there a loo in the church?”
“Oh, yes, but I wouldn’t dream of using that one.”
“Why not?”
“Because . . . well, you know . . . going to the toilet in church. Just doesn’t seem right.”
“Mum, even Jesus had to have a pee sometimes.”
“Of course he did, dear, but I’m sure that he would have taken himself off somewhere very discreet to do it.”
Dan suppressed a laugh. “What? Like the desert?”
“Probably.”
“A bit of overkill, though, wasn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Forty days and forty nights.”
Battersea Gran narrowed her eyes at her son, but it was insufficient to mask a sparkle of humour. “No need to be irreverent now, Daniel Porter.”
The block of flats, situated overlooking Battersea Reach Wharf, was typical of uninspired sixties architecture. Originally council flats, it had been bought for a song in the early nineties by some property developer who saw the potential in its riverside location. Having refurbished the building from leaky top to graffitied bottom, he stuck a uniformed concierge in the hallway, gave the block a smart new name, and flogged the flats off as “exclusive residences.” The building had been inhabited in the main by retired gentlefolk, and when Dan had moved his mother there after the death of his father, he had had grave misgivings about whether it would be for the best, taking her away from her simple lifestyle in Tottenham Hale and placing her in this somewhat up-market environment.
But his doubts proved to be unfounded. His mother treated the place as if it were an outpost of her own little street in North London, and single-handedly went about developing a community spirit in the building that had never existed before her arrival. She forced greetings from her reticent fellow residents in the lift and went around knocking on doors and inviting her somewhat surprised and lonely neighbours around to her little flat for cups of tea and mountains of her own homemade scones. Even the grumpy old concierge was soon won over by her open friendliness and hospitality. Flat 10F2 in Cavendish Rise soon became the focal point for residents’ meetings and fund-raising campaigns to pay for pot-plants in the foyer and Christmas parties for the few children who lived in the block. Not that Battersea Gran was much good at constitutional matters, or discussing things like plumbing problems and rent reviews, but she put herself in charge of refreshments, and that proved an excellent rallying call to all those with empty stomachs and infinitely greater discussion skills than her own.
“I’ll only be a moment, dear,” she said as she let herself into the flat and hurried off down the narrow passage to the lavatory. “Just go into the lounge and I’ll be with you in a minute.”
The furniture in the small room was set out exactly as it had been in the front room of the Porters’ little terraced council house in Tottenham Hale. Dan had offered to buy her new furniture from Habitat, but she didn’t want “that rubbish” and insisted on moving everything from the old house. The ducks still flew up the wall, the picture of the Siamese girl with a tear in eye still hung opposite the black-and-white photograph of his mother as an excited young teenager, standing onstage at the Metropole with Bill Haley and the Comets, and the brown velour suite was still set around the fireplace (albeit now a false one) and angled towards the television. The only real difference was that, where the netted window in the front room of the old house looked out onto a line of parked cars and the dirt-engrained façade of the houses opposite, the view from the full-width window on the tenth floor of the block was unimpeded, taking in the curve of the River Thames from Wandsworth Bridge to Battersea Bridge and a broad panorama across Fulham and Chelsea, stretching on out to the White City Stadium and beyond.
Dan glanced at his watch and began worrying about yet another roast ending up on the bird table. He walked across to the door. “How are you doing, Mum?” he called down the passage.
“Just a minute, dear.” Her voice came from the bedroom. “I’m just slipping into a thermal. I’m feeling the cold a bit.”
“Be as quick as you can, then.”
She appeared at the door of the bedroom with only one arm slipped into a sleeve of her vest, revealing an ample frontage encased in a flesh-coloured brassiere. “I am, Dan. Just be patient.”
“Okay. It’s just the—”
“The roast. I know, dear. And while your mind is on cooking, you should have a look at that recipe I found for you in Woman’s Weekly. I left it open on the coffee table.” She eventually managed to struggle into her vest. “I thought it looked rather good.”
I’m sure it will be, Dan thought, as he went back into the lounge and walked over to the table. Her idea of a good recipe was cheesy chicken or spiced meatballs in gravy. He picked up the magazine. Yes, that would be about the norm. An exciting lamb stew with kidney beans. He dropped the magazine back on the table.
His mother appeared, doing up the buttons of her overcoat. “Right, that’s me ready.”
“Good. Let’s go then.”
“Don’t forget the magazine.”
Dan blew out a resigned sigh and scooped up the Woman’s Weekly.
As it turned out, lunch happened to be a great success. Apart from the roast beef appearing from the oven in a state of readiness that Dan had always strived to achieve—a crispy coating of fat on the outside and succulently red in the middle—the meal was, as far as Dan could remember, the first for many a moon that had been conducted without one cross or needling word being fired across the table. That was, of course, the doing of Battersea Gran. When she had been married to Dan’s father, she had considered it her role in life to lavish him with praise and undying devotion (or “devoshun,” as she would pronounce it when warbling out one of her favorite songs, Johnny Tillotson’s “Poetry in Moshun”). However, since his death, that instinct had now been shifted onto her grandchildren, and in her simple, down-to-earth way, she always seemed able to extract from them the best of their characters. No matter what they did, it was always right by Battersea Gran—and they loved her for it. She was delighted by Josh’s ability to stack shelves in Tesco’s and intrigued by his visits to Horace’s Inferno; she became tearful with pride when, after lunch, she sat listening to Nina as she stuttered through the Braveheart theme on her flute; and, even though Dan had tried to admonish her for it, she roared with laughter at Millie’s stories of how she had been caught standing on top of the lavatory cistern in the school cloakrooms, blowing cigarette smoke up towards the Xpelair fan, or how she had given a one-fingered reply to the class geek when he asked her to go out with him.
As well as being a listener, Battersea Gran also had infinite knowledge of all things that interested the children, gleaned from the television in her flat. She knew more than either Dan or Josh about how Tottenham Hotspurs were doing in the league table, who scored the goals during their last match, and who the manager was lining up for his next multimillion-pound signing; she watched Top of the Pops every week so that she could baffle the girls with her knowledge of rappers and heavy metal bands and the endless stream of manufactured boy groups, girl groups, and mixed groups; and when Josh went to Manchester University (the first Porter ever to achieve this distinction), she would wake herself at five o’clock every morning to watch Open University. She even began to achieve a vague understanding of some of the complex mathematical problems that the ginger-moustached lecturer was writing down on his flipchart. But then she discovered that Josh was studying English, so thereafter she decided to give up her early morning vigils and just stick to the less erudite information that daytime television afforded her.
Every birthday and every Christmas, the children received expensive, jaw-dropping presents from their grandparents in Chester, but during their visits to London (which thankfully for Dan were both brief and scarce), neither of Jackie’s parents showed themselves capable of any degree of spontaneity or fun with the children. But then, Josh, Millie, and Nina had Battersea Gran to provide that, and they had an instinctive understanding that having her constantly in their lives was worth much more than the material goods bestowed upon them by the others. If there was ever to be a battle of loyalties, then Battersea Gran was always going to win hands down. Josh spoke for them all when he once described her as being the ultimate Gran.
That evening, the weather had displayed typically fickle British tendencies and changed from winter back to the Indian summer that Mr. Fish, the television weatherman, had promised. As Dan drove home after taking Battersea Gran back to her flat, he had to make use of the visor to shield his eyes from the watery rays of the setting sun, and the freezing draught that had earlier blown in through the gap at the top of the windscreen had now become a warm and comforting blast. Even though it was just before seven o’clock in the evening, Clapham Common was now awash with people who had been lured from their homes by the rise in temperature. As he sat in the queue for the traffic lights, Dan watched the walkers, the joggers, the footballers, the Frisbee throwers, and the kite flyers, as well as the bedlam of unruly dogs that joined in with any game that would accommodate them.
All was quiet when he entered the house. There was a note on the third step of the stairs that explained the silence. Jessica Napier, one of Millie’s closest friends from her previous school, had rung to ask Millie and Nina around to her house for the evening. Dan scrumpled up the paper in his fist and walked through to the kitchen. He was pleased about that. Millie had had little contact with Jessica since she left Alleyn’s. Maybe this heralded a new beginning to their relationship.
He briefly considered taking Biggles and Cruise out to join the hordes on Clapham Common, but then decided that, for once, they could make do with their nightly traipse around the block. It was a better idea to enjoy the tranquility while it lasted. He took a beer from the fridge, picked up a Sunday magazine from the table, and made his way out into the back garden.
He flicked the ring pull on the can and sucked away the froth, then pulled a lichen-covered garden seat from under an untamed honeysuckle at the bottom of the garden and positioned it in the sun, giving the seat a perfunctory sweep with his hand before sitting down. He opened the magazine at a page that showed the unappetizing image of a lamb stew with kidney beans floating like drowned beetles on its grease-bubbled surface. He turned back to the front cover and swore quietly to himself, realizing that he had picked up his mother’s Woman’s Weekly by mistake. He took a long pull from his beer can and spun the magazine onto the seat beside him. It fell to the ground and lay with its pages flapping over in the breeze.
Dan sat with eyes closed and head tilted back until he sensed the sun’s warming rays leave his face. He watched as its fiery tip sank behind the rooftops of the houses at the end of the street, taking with it what little heat had been afforded the day. Feeling a shiver run through his body, he decided that it was time to head indoors.
As he leaned forward to pick up the magazine, he noticed a spider crawling its way across the page, perfectly dissecting the face of a woman with high cheekbones and bright blue eyes that caught the blinding glint of a camera flash. As it continued on its way, the spider was momentarily lost against a background of spiky brown hair before appearing once more on the cold grey of the rain-clouded sky. And then, with a few tentative steps, it descended from the magazine and scuttled away across the bricked patio to the sanctuary of the weed-infested flower border.
Dan picked up the magazine and studied the photograph. The woman was standing with her arms around the shoulders of two small children whose impish grins would seem to indicate that her loving envelopment was probably more a necessary entrapment for the benefit of the photographer. Behind the three figures, dark, colourless hills ran down into the dull, glassy waters of some kind of lake or reservoir. Against this background, the multicoloured plaid trousers that the woman and two children were wearing contrasted brightly.
Dan stood up from the bench, beer can in hand, and made his way across to the French doors that led into the house. As he walked, he read the headline that was written below the photograph. “Too Good Boss Decides to Sell Business.”
He deposited the empty can in the rubbish bin as he passed, and then sat down at the table, laying the magazine open in front of him. The headline intrigued him. Surely this homely looking woman, with not a trace of makeup on her face, wasn’t the one being described as a “too good boss”? Dammit, if she was, she was a far cry from any of the high-powered businesswomen that he had ever come across. He knew for a fact that Jackie would never set foot in her workplace with features that looked as if they had been scrubbed clean with a pumice stone. What the hell did she do to be described as a “too good boss”? He leaned forward on the table and began to read the article.
Twelve years ago, Katie Trenchard (42) had everything set out for what she thought would be a peaceful and comfortable life. She and her husband Patrick (45) lived in a handsome detached house in the village of Cloveden, five miles from Plymouth, where Patrick worked as a lecturer in marine biology at the university. There were shops, cinemas, and theatres within easy reach, they entertained on a regular basis, and they were able to
make use of the many facilities that the university had to offer. And then, in one crazy month, they made a decision that would change their lives forever. They sold their beloved house, said goodbye to their friends, and moved to Fort William in the northwest of Scotland where they ploughed every last penny into the purchase of Seascape, a small prawn-processing factory.
“It was Patrick’s fault,” says Katie, narrowing her strikingly blue eyes. “It had always been his lifetime ambition to run a business of his own. He had carried out a number of small research projects for Seascape and heard through the grapevine that it was for sale. He knew that it was an opportunity he couldn’t let slip.”
Dan raised his eyebrows. Bloody fools, he thought to himself. What a madcap thing to do.
Within three months of taking over the business, the Trenchards had set up new agencies in France, Italy, and Spain, and very soon found that demand for their product outstripped supply. However, any profit that was being made had to be ploughed straight back into the business to upgrade its ageing equipment and meet the stringent regulations laid down by the Health and Safety Office of the Highland Regional Council. Consequently, there were no funds available for sumptuous accommodation, and for the first two years, they lived in only just bearable comfort in a three-room crofter’s cottage on the shores of Loch Eil.
“Mind you, we very rarely seemed to be at home,” says Katie. “The workers started at seven o’clock every morning and Patrick and I were always there half an hour before they arrived. During the high season, when the prawns were coming in thick and fast, the packers were producing over 10 tonnes a day, which meant that we all had to work on into the night just to keep up with our intake. Patrick and I would walk around like zombies for about four months of the year!”
A Risk Worth Taking Page 7