Widows & Orphans

by Michael Arditti

  ‘All the more reason to support the Weedon bid!’

  ‘Maybe, if it were anyone but Weedon. It’ll be the Olympic pool saga all over again; the pier turned into another wheel park or extreme sports arena.’

  ‘Motorcycle jumping over the parapet?’ Brian asked.

  ‘Piers are about families,’ Duncan said. ‘They’re the ultimate seaside entertainment. All the excitement of being above water combined with the security of being on land.’ He broke off at the realisation that none of his six colleagues fitted the standard family mould any more than he did himself. Was it the result of their particular working environment or of a broader social collapse?

  ‘I hear that he plans to turn it into a gated community full of luxury flats,’ Ken said.

  ‘Why?’ Brian asked. ‘Would it count as an offshore tax haven?’

  ‘How could it support the weight?’ Jake asked. ‘The structure’s wobbly enough already.’

  ‘By shoring it up,’ Brian said. ‘They have this remarkable new invention called concrete.’

  ‘He’ll never get permission,’ Jake said, ignoring Brian’s tone.

  ‘Says who?’ Rowena asked. ‘Geoffrey Weedon has the Planning Committee in his pocket.’

  ‘That’s libel! Wouldn’t you agree, Ken?’ Brian asked, switching targets. ‘You being such an expert and all that?’

  Ken drained his cup, as if to drown the memory of the most humiliating episode of his career, and wordlessly held it out to Duncan to refill.

  ‘Surely it’s better that he takes it off our hands,’ Brian added, his slurred ‘s’s suggesting that his bumptiousness might be fuelled by alcohol. ‘Does no one here read the Mercury? Thought not. But there was a piece last summer – I think it was one of Ken’s – about the Council spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on insurance and scaffolding for the boarded-up pier. Meanwhile, it’s cutting back on facilities for kids.’

  ‘Not just kids,’ Sheila said. ‘Old people’s homes too, as I’ve found to my cost.’

  ‘Aren’t you still a year or two away from that?’ Jake asked innocently.

  ‘Not me, my mother!’ Sheila replied with such vehemence that Jake crushed his cup, splashing wine on his shirt.

  ‘What about tonight’s exhibition, Duncan?’ Rowena interpolated quickly. ‘Is it still going ahead?’

  ‘Most definitely. I’ve spoken to Glynis and the Chief Librarian. The children have been working their socks off over the summer. It would be monstrous to disappoint them.’

  ‘Is it true that there used to be two piers in the town?’ Brian asked Duncan. ‘That’s what your Battle of Britain pilot told me, but I didn’t want to press him in case he’d lost it.’

  ‘No, perfectly lucid. Just old,’ Duncan said.

  ‘And a hero,’ Jake added.

  ‘The second pier was at Salter,’ Duncan said, ‘but it was torn down in 1940 in case the Germans used it as a landing stage.’

  ‘But they left Francombe’s?’

  ‘Yes. I think the seabed had silted up so that boats wouldn’t have been able to reach it.’

  ‘There‘s an old joke,’ said Jake, who was notorious for his lack of humour, ‘that Churchill believed if the Nazis landed at Francombe, they’d lose heart and turn back.’

  ‘Right!’ Stewart stood up abruptly. ‘If that’s all, chief, I’m off. Some of us have homes to go to.’ His departure provoked a general exodus, leaving Duncan alone with Sheila, who gathered up the cups.

  ‘Don’t worry about those,’ Duncan said, ‘you go. Mary’ll be here any minute.’

  ‘Are you sure? As long as I’m not leaving them for you. I promised Mother I’d look in on her.’

  Duncan bit back the automatic enquiry, anxious to avoid another tortuous conversation in which he struggled to assuage Sheila’s guilt at having put her severely demented mother in a home. A succession of painful incidents, culminating in her burying Sheila’s collection of porcelain dolls in the back garden, had brought about the rupture that a lifetime of bullying and put-downs rendered long overdue. Yet every night after work Sheila visited her mother who, on the rare occasions that she recognised her, either sat in steely silence or vented a stream of abuse.

  ‘I’ll be off then,’ Sheila said, taking out one of the extra strong mints to which she had become addicted after reading a magazine article claiming that bitterness caused bad breath.

  Inspired by his secretary, Duncan returned to his office and rang his mother. As always, she answered on the fifth ring, which she judged to be the proper balance between eagerness and indifference.

  ‘Darling, how lovely to hear your voice!’ she said, launching straight into an account of how the smoke from the blaze had triggered her asthma.

  ‘But, Mother, that’s impossible,’ Duncan interjected. ‘The wind was in the opposite direction. It’s in our report.’

  ‘You of all people should know better than to believe what you read in the papers,’ she replied coldly. ‘I don’t see why you bother to ring when you just want to quarrel.’

  Scorning his spinelessness, he conceded that there might have been a crosswind. ‘Exactly,’ she said, mollified. ‘I knew that the pier was heading for trouble when the Winter Garden tea room started serving ketchup in plastic tomatoes.’

  Mention of the tea room made him long to speak to Jamie. He wondered how many of his son’s memories of the pier chimed with his own. Did he, for instance, recall how he posed for a photograph with his parents, their heads poking through the holes in a seabed tableau, a photograph that Duncan still treasured even if the split between the octopus and the crab prevented his keeping it on display, or how he wet himself laughing when the stone god in the Jungle Playground spat water in his father’s face? And if he did, would he give him the satisfaction of admitting it or retreat into his usual silence, as though both question and questioner bored him? In the event, Duncan had no way of knowing since, when he finally steeled himself to ring, he was sent straight to voicemail, leaving him with the vision of Jamie out with friends, having dinner with Linda and Derek, or, worse, checking his caller ID.

  Preferring to sit alone in his office, which passed for dedication, than in his flat, which felt like failure, Duncan switched the television on to South East Today. The lead story concerned a young man who had thrown himself off the ruins of Francombe Castle. The police efforts to talk him down had been thwarted by bystanders egging him on and taking pictures on their phones. ‘What’s the world coming to? Are we just items for each other’s Facebook pages?’ a stunned sergeant asked the reporter, before warning that the CCTV footage would be carefully studied and charges of aiding and abetting a suicide could not be ruled out. Duncan, spotting a possible splash for next week’s issue, emailed Ken to look into it. The second item concerned the pier, with the Mayor, the Chairman of the Francombe Chamber of Commerce, and a spokesman for the Hoteliers Association all making sombre comments in front of the smouldering structure. They were followed by a dauntingly bullish Geoffrey Weedon, who promised that the tragedy (a word that made the purist in Duncan bristle) would cause only a slight delay to the refurbishment plans. Then, in a startling non sequitur, he turned his practised smile to the camera. ‘Given the rumours sweeping through town,’ he said, ‘I’d like to state quite categorically that I played no part in starting the fire.’

  The reporter’s response was drowned out by a Hoover, as Mary peered round the door and asked if Duncan wanted her to ‘do’ the room. ‘Thank you,’ he said, welcoming the intrusion, since Mary’s stoicism was an inspiration should he ever feel prone to despair. She lived in a cramped fisherman’s cottage with her husband Bob, twin daughters Jilly and Janine, son Nick, his wife and their two children. Bob had lost his boat after being fined £25,000 for exceeding his EU cod quota. Nick, who worked with his father, fell behind with his rent and moved his family in with his parents. Both Jilly and Janine had been unemployed since leaving school three years before but scorned to become ‘skivvies’ li
ke their mother. The domestic tensions were exacerbated by what Mary euphemistically called Bob’s temper. ‘He lashes out when he’s had a drop – but only at the furniture. Last week he broke the settee. It’s a good thing our Norman’s still banged up in Ford. With Nick and Tess and the kiddies squeezing in, he’d have nowhere to sleep.’

  Duncan had protested in print against the injustice of Bob’s sentence. Even a non-fisherman knew that the autumn seas teemed with cod and that it was impossible to lay down nets without bringing up a bumper haul: in Bob’s case, nearly two tons. His defence was that he had been planning to adjust his future catches to comply with the quota, but the judge upheld the DEFRA inspector’s ruling that the quota should be divided into twelve equal shares. Even the Mercury’s front-page story that this was the same boat in which Bob’s grandfather had made three trips across the Channel to rescue soldiers stranded at Dunkirk failed to influence the court. Faced with a fine of more than half his annual turnover, together with legal costs that tripled after an ill-advised appeal, Bob sold his boat. Over the following months he took to drink; Nick to antidepressants; and Norman, his younger son, to crime, selling a mixture of cocaine and baking powder to holidaymakers, students and two undercover policemen. ‘It’s right that our Norman was charged. He’s a bad lad,’ Mary had said. ‘But not our Bob. What good would it have done anyone if he’d thrown the fish back in the sea? It’s just spite!’

  The strain of her various cleaning jobs, plus a regular weekend shift on her brother-in-law’s fish stall, had taken its toll on Mary. It was hard to believe that at forty-four she was only two years older than Linda. Despite his contempt for television makeover shows, Duncan secretly hoped for one to visit Francombe and work its restorative magic on Mary. Meanwhile, he helped her as much as he could, recommending her to Henry Grainger at St Edward’s after he was forced to cut her hours, and giving her both an office computer when Nick’s was repossessed and a set of his mother’s old china when hers was mysteriously smashed.

  ‘Would you like a glass – that is, a cup – of wine?’ he asked Mary, who looked alarmed. ‘It’s been a tough day. I think we deserve it.’

  ‘Best not. It goes straight to my head and I have to make them their tea when I finish here.’ With five able-bodied adults living at home, Duncan failed to see why none of them could cook dinner, but Mary insisted that that would be ‘rubbing their noses in it’.

  ‘Then why not take the bottle? Three for two, so it cost me nothing,’ he added tactfully.

  ‘Best not,’ she replied after a pause. ‘Too much temptation. Bless you.’ Then she switched on the Hoover, as if afraid of what else she might say.

  Duncan went up to his flat. When he built Mercury House in 1922, his great-grandfather had reserved the top floor for his private use. Although he and Duncan’s grandfather had slept there in emergencies, Duncan’s father did so regularly, citing ‘late night meetings’, the true nature of which Duncan only discovered after his death. He himself had moved in on his divorce seven years earlier, a temporary expedient that convenience and thrift had made permanent. Small but serviceable, it comprised a galley kitchen where he ate his meals, having sworn off TV dinners after a shot of a shit-filled bath in a documentary on child neglect; an airy sitting room with a carved oak frieze; and two bedrooms, one of which, as the door plaque announced, was Jamie’s. Shortly after the divorce, they had spent a Saturday morning at Debenhams where Jamie, exploiting his new licence, chose a red racing-car bed, tiger-print beanbag and Jungle Book wallpaper, which was replaced when it gave him nightmares. In recent years he had stayed so seldom that Duncan had appropriated the room for his exercise bike.

  Thoughts of Jamie filled him with an eviscerating loneliness. When Linda left him, his one consolation had been that she was remaining in Francombe, enabling him to see his son twice a week and to be close at hand in a crisis. But as the years passed, his so-near-yet-so-far status had grown ever more painful. Rather than restricting his access to Jamie, Linda had included him in so many family events that Derek would surely have objected, were it not for his even more convoluted relationship with his own ex-wife. Nevertheless, he was the perennial outsider, grateful for their indulgence of what should have been a right. Jamie’s edginess when they ran into each other in the street made him feel like a stranger. It was as though ‘Dad’ were a subject with a set place on the timetable, which he refused to study out of hours. In his bleaker moments, he wondered whether he had been rash to rule out sending Jamie to boarding school. At least then he and Linda would have been on an equal footing, sharing both the holidays and the emotional reserve. But even if he had broken the solemn vow he made on leaving Lancing, he could never have afforded the fees.

  The next morning he went down to the office at 8.30 to find Ken busy at his desk. As expected, he was fully informed about the castle suicide and had sent Brian to visit the bereaved parents. ‘Is that wise?’ Duncan asked, dubious of Brian’s discretion.

  ‘Still waters, young Brian!’ Ken said. ‘Besides, he’s the same age as the victim – or should that be perpetrator? It might help them open up.’

  Rowena had gone to the Town Hall on a tip-off from an anonymous guest that at a wedding on Tuesday the bride’s two teenage daughters had taken the ‘no confetti on the steps’ rule to heart and, instead, thrown their late father’s ashes over the newly-weds. Ken himself planned to monitor developments on the pier where, according to his source in the fire brigade, charred bedding had been retrieved from the rubble of the Winter Garden, fanning conjecture that the blaze had been started by one or more vagrants.

  ‘Surprise surprise!’ Duncan replied. ‘Any bets as to how soon it becomes a gang of the Albanian/Iranian/Kurdish asylum seekers who are overrunning the town?’

  As usual on a Thursday, Duncan spent the first part of the morning reading the paper from cover to cover. Echoing his father, he found that no matter how closely he had examined the dummy, the stories ‘smelt’ different on the printed page – which had, of course, been literally true in the days of hot metal. He was pleased with both the reporting of the fire and the leader in which he called on the town to reassess its values as it rebuilt its pier. His one regret was the use of agency photographs, identical ones having appeared in both the Telegraph and the Mail, and he tormented himself with the thought of the unique perspective that Bert Ponsonby would have brought. His reading was interrupted by three calls of complaint. The first was from a Mrs Greene, furious that her name had been rendered ‘commonplace’ by the omission of the final ‘e’ in a list of volunteer tree wardens. The second was from Luca Salvatore, owner of Pizza on the Prom, warning him to keep away from his restaurant after the story on mouse droppings in his kitchen. The third was from Heather Bayley, a local Brown Owl, accusing him of ‘blatant prejudice’ against the Brownies for his failure to feature the 1st Switherton Pack’s Annual Fun Day. ‘We had face painting, knife carving and an inspirational demonstration of balloon twisting from Tawny Owl.’

  At four o’clock Duncan left the office for the Central Library to attend to the final arrangements for the Pier Project exhibition, which the Mercury was sponsoring. In an emergency meeting the previous day, the Francombe Pier Trust had decided that, despite the wretched timing, the exhibition should go ahead, both to avoid disappointing the many children who had taken part and in the hope that images of the pier’s illustrious past might influence plans for its future.

  Struck by a bitter wind as soon as he stepped into the street, Duncan cast a solicitous glance at the four thinly dressed middle-aged men in the graffiti-sprayed bus shelter, members of Francombe’s army of homeless huddled together for warmth until their hostel reopened at six. One had a bandaged wrist and another a black eye and split lip, injuries sustained either in bouts of insobriety or in fights with visiting youths for whom attacking the locals held more appeal than legitimate entertainments. Duncan’s cheery ‘Good afternoon’ was met by three vacant stares and one ‘You don’t say so, old
bean’, which at least showed spirit. He turned away down the shabby side street, which in his childhood had housed a row of specialist shops dealing in coins, maps, cameras and fishing tackle. Now only the coin shop remained, although its heavy grille, stamped with an advert for its website, was generally down. Elsewhere, a café offered all-day breakfasts with OAP discounts; a tattoo parlour blazoned its designs on assorted body parts; three charity shops ran the gamut of Francombe concern, from Age UK through Cats Protection to the Fishermen’s Mission; and a 24 hour mini-mart sold Iraqi, Kurdish and Afghani produce to the refugees and asylum seekers who, with an irony to which only immigration officers could be blind, were housed in the same hostels as the drunks.

  He walked up the Parade, the town’s main thoroughfare, where a string of chain stores competed for what remained of its custom. He was accosted by Enid Marshall, his mother’s bridge partner, who had lost her husband to their GP, her divorce settlement in a failed Lloyd’s syndicate, and her only son in a Texan cult suicide, but who refused to dwell on the past, brushing off every expression of sympathy with a brusque ‘Worse things happen at sea’. Dropping a pound into her RNLI collecting tin, he continued on his way, past the statue of Queen Victoria, her glower finally justified after cuts to the Council’s cleaning budget had left her permanently daubed with seagull droppings, and entered the library. He crossed the vaulted marble hall with its bas-reliefs of Aristotle, Shakespeare, Dryden, Scott, Dickens and Carlyle, the last of whose books had long since been dispatched to storage, and climbed the well-worn stairs to the Reference Section, its usual sober display replaced by the vibrancy of the Pier Project entries.

  Back in March, with hopes high for its own bid, the Francombe Pier Trust had sought to stimulate interest in the restoration by holding a children’s art competition. The Mercury agreed to sponsor it, provided that the three prizes of £1,000, £500 and £250 consisted of books for the winners’ school libraries. The sheer weight of entries confounded the Jeremiahs, who had claimed that without a personal incentive nobody would take part, and although the Project had been overtaken by events, Duncan found cause for celebration in the vision and accomplishment of the various paintings, models, collages and lone digital projection on show.