Widows & Orphans

by Michael Arditti

  ‘It’s the law, Mother. The woman had a perfect right.’

  ‘There were children present. And Muslims. You’re the one who’s always telling us we should be sensitive to other cultures.’

  ‘Now you’re being ridiculous. We simply reported the story; we didn’t print a photograph of the breasts.’

  ‘First you embarrass your readers; now you’re embarrassing our guest.’

  ‘Hardly,’ Duncan said, although a glimpse of Henry staring at his empty glass unsettled him. ‘What’s the Synod line, Vicar? And has it changed with women priests?’

  ‘I was just wondering,’ Henry said, ‘whether being banished to the café loo might be the modern equivalent of “No room at the inn”.’

  ‘No, it might not,’ Adele retorted. ‘It takes five minutes to prepare a bottle. But these women are out to shock. They’re as bad as the nudists at Salter Cove. No wonder there’s all this sexual perversion in the woods – forgive me, Henry,’ she said, mistaking the nature of her offence.

  ‘Now you’ve lost me,’ Duncan said.

  ‘It’s easy enough to blame the men and it’s true that they lack self-control, but are they entirely at fault? Time was when women maintained an air of mystery. Now everywhere you look there’s flesh. And not only flesh but bodily functions. Breastfeeding. Childbirth. Of course the men are so put off that they turn to one another.’

  Duncan was astounded, as much by the fact of his mother’s theories as by their tenor. Further discussion was prevented by the return of Chris, who cleared the plates and brought the dessert. ‘Queen of Puddings,’ he said, looking straight at Henry.

  ‘My favourite!’ Adele beamed. ‘Bang goes my diet!’

  ‘You know what they say: a little of what you fancy.’

  As he listened to their banter, Duncan marvelled once again at his mother’s ability to compartmentalise her life, exempting from her strictures a man whom he presumed to be no stranger to ‘sexual perversion’, albeit in the comfort of his own home.

  After lunch, they returned to the drawing room where Chris had set out Alison’s tennis trophies. Duncan wondered if his sister welcomed the reminder of her teenage triumphs or if, were she ever to pay an impromptu visit, she would be relieved to find them locked away. Every burnished cup and shield bore the dent of unfulfilled promise. Even in the cut and thrust of women’s tennis, few careers had collapsed as spectacularly as hers. She had always been superstitious, whether lining up her dolls at bedtime or listening to Janis Joplin’s ‘Try (Just A Little Bit Harder)’ when preparing to sit an exam, but what was an innocent quirk elsewhere became a burning obsession before a match. She wore the same skirt for years after a surprise victory at Eastbourne and whistled the first two bars of the Doctor Who theme whenever she left the changing room. Most crucial of all was that she tapped her foot every third or fourth step – he forgot which – when coming out on court. In the 1986 Wimbledon semi-finals, a noise in the crowd distracted her and she lost count. Her game fell apart and she was defeated in straight sets. The following year, despite reaching the third round in the French Open, she failed to qualify at home. In 1988 she retired, aged twenty-six.

  Privately, Duncan suspected that she had used the distraction as an excuse, either because she knew that she had reached her peak or else to escape the weight of public expectation. She had capitalised on her celebrity by launching a range of women’s sportswear, which, more than twenty years on and despite an ill-advised venture into ski accessories, continued to sell. Yet, although aware of the Mercury’s parlous state, neither she nor her husband and business partner, Malcolm, had once offered to waive her dividend. Equally galling was to hear his mother explaining why Alison’s business commitments prevented her from making the two-hour trip from London more than three or four times a year, while protesting roundly whenever Duncan, who brought out a twenty-four-page newspaper every Thursday, cancelled one of his twice-weekly visits. At forty-eight, he was inured to his mother’s favouritism but, as he had made clear in terms that even she could not ignore, the one thing that he would not countenance was that she should extend it to the next generation, belittling Jamie by praising his high-achieving cousins.

  Alison arrived on Sunday evening, two hours behind schedule. Duncan met her at Francombe station and drove her to Ridgemount where, knowing that Adele wanted her daughter to herself, he declined the cursory invitation to dinner. The following morning the three reconvened in the Mercury boardroom, the annual general meeting being one of the rare occasions on which his mother ventured out. As sole directors and equal shareholders, they constituted the entire gathering. Even Dudley Williams, the company accountant, mindful of the balance sheet he himself had drawn up, had sent a certified copy of the accounts, advising Duncan that there was no point in paying him to attend.

  The boardroom itself harked back to happier days, with its ormolu chandelier, oval walnut table, burgundy velvet curtains and portraits of Duncan’s four predecessors on the oak-panelled walls. While his mother and sister glanced through their agendas, Duncan studied the men from whom he had received his dual inheritance. In pride of place above a heavy sideboard was his great-great-grandfather, a printer and stationer who had founded the paper to exploit his press’s spare capacity and, during its first ten years, had brought out the four-page weekly single-handed, a practice to which his descendant feared that he might soon be forced to revert. By its sixth issue, the Mercury’s masthead declared it to be ‘Francombe’s most influential journal, with a wide readership among the nobility, gentry, clergy and visitors of the borough and its vicinity’, a claim that was borne out as its circulation soared, while the various Observers, Advertisers, Heralds and Worlds folded.

  After forty years at the helm, the founding editor was succeeded by his son, who ran the paper from his father’s death in 1909 until his own in 1927. Although the briefest stewardship to date, it was commemorated in the finest portrait – by John Singer Sargent – on which, as he gazed at its delicate palette and subtle brushwork, Duncan struggled not to place a price tag. His great-grandfather was in turn succeeded by his son, Duncan’s grandfather, for three decades chairman of the Francombe Conservative Association (and knighted for political and public services in 1958), who used the paper as a platform for his reactionary views, denouncing ‘the socialists and rabble rousers who are infecting our town’. Alone of the four editors, he did not die in harness but retired in 1960 in favour of Duncan’s father, who took a more conciliatory line both in his editorials and with his staff, less by virtue of broader sympathies than from a longing for an easy life.

  Afraid of provoking industrial unrest, he put off investment in new technology and, when he suffered a fatal heart attack in March 1986 while proposing the loyal toast at a Rotary Club lunch, the paper was still produced using hot metal. The inflated wage bill was just one of the drains on the company, which, as Duncan found out, owed almost £800,000 to the bank and the Inland Revenue. He was in his second year at Cambridge when his father died and, although expecting to succeed him in due course, he had never imagined that it would be so soon. It rapidly became clear that the only way to save the Mercury and to safeguard his mother’s future was for him to come home and take over the paper, the wrench of leaving his friends assuaged at least temporarily by the spate of media interest in ‘the youngest editor in the country’. He persuaded his creditors to defer their demands while he streamlined the basic operation. After selling off the bookbinding and design divisions, the staff houses and sports fields, and taking out an additional loan, he invested in a web-offset printing plant, imposed new working practices and prepared to confront the print unions. To his boundless relief, their attention was focused on events in Wapping and he was able to impose the necessary redundancies with minimal conflict.

  For the first fifteen years all went well. He had the satisfaction of restoring both the paper’s finances and its reputation. He was fortunate in that the Francombe Citizen, a free sheet launched in th
e early Eighties to counter what it saw as the Mercury’s subservience to the Chamber of Commerce and the Town Hall, collapsed shortly after his arrival. Its much-vaunted independence was not matched by editorial rigour and, despite a public appeal for funds, it was bankrupted when the Mayor successfully sued it for naming his underage ‘carjacker son’. With his rival removed, Duncan established a culture of campaigning journalism at the Mercury, which led, among other things, to the rescue of a mobile library, two day centres and an ancient right of way through a pop star’s new estate; the exposure of the Council’s attempt to conceal the Saxon burial site under a proposed multi-storey car park; and the jailing of the director and two nurses behind the sadistic regime at Rosecroft psychiatric hospital.

  In recent years, however, the position had changed dramatically. The growth of the Internet and effects of the Recession had dealt the paper a double blow from which it was doubtful it would ever recover. There were only so many pages that the paper could lose before it lost its purpose. In the past, Duncan had been able to assign a two-man team for two months to a single story; now, with a skeleton staff, he could barely afford to send one man for a day on patch. The news team spent as much time paraphrasing press releases as filing their own reports. Without the resources to hold the police and the Council to account, the paper was as tame as it had been in his father’s day, although the imperative now was economic rather than social. It sometimes felt as if the journalists’ sole function was to supply copy in order to sell advertising. But advertising revenue had fallen by seventeen per cent over the past year. Classified adverts had migrated to the web, where they would be up and running in an hour rather than the week it took at the Mercury, and display adverts, once a guaranteed moneymaker, had been hard hit by the cuts in public spending and dearth of job vacancies.

  Turning to his mother, who was chiding him for the dead bulbs in the chandelier, Duncan felt a pang of unease. His sustained attempts to spare both her and Alison the full extent of the paper’s decline would make today’s disclosures all the more shocking. They were granted a temporary reprieve when Sheila brought in tea and digestives, Duncan noting with relief that she had abandoned the broken-biscuit assortment, which, penny-wise, she had taken to buying at the market. Adele, whose coolness towards her husband’s pretty young secretary had survived both his death and Sheila’s lost looks, complimented her on a hairstyle that had not changed in a decade. Alison, with the solicitude she could afford on a flying visit, asked after her mother, flinching at the vehemence of the response.

  ‘I did everything I could to keep her at home. The doctor said I’d end up being put away myself. Duncan will tell you … I’m sorry.’ Clasping her hand to her mouth, she fled from the room.

  ‘Did I miss something?’ Adele asked.

  ‘I presume she’s finally put the old witch away,’ Alison replied. ‘Not a moment too soon if you ask me.’

  ‘That’s a dreadful thing to say. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy,’ Adele said, breaking off as though to evaluate the hyperbole.

  ‘She had no choice. Her mother’s behaviour grew more and more deranged. She buried all Sheila’s dolls in a flowerbed. They might still be there if her neighbour’s dog hadn’t dug up a bone. She ordered vast quantities of maternity clothes to be sent to her here at the office, although how much of that was madness and how much malice I wouldn’t like to say.’

  ‘So where is she now?’ Alison asked.

  ‘Castlemaine. The old Regis Hotel next to the golf course.’

  ‘A dreadful place,’ Adele said. ‘One of the residents fell and was found screaming in agony. But she had liver cancer, so they just upped her morphine without even bothering to give her an X-ray. It was six months before they discovered she’d broken her hip. Chris told me. I asked Duncan to put it in the paper. That was a genuine scandal – not like the filth he prints now.’ Duncan shook his head as Alison gazed at him nonplussed. ‘But no, he’s afraid of offending the staff in case they refuse to take me!’

  ‘What?’ Alison said.

  ‘Where’s all this coming from, Mother?’ Duncan asked. ‘Castlemaine is a psychiatric geriatric home. No one’s suggesting that you need psychiatric care.’

  ‘Or geriatric care, I hope,’ Alison added.

  ‘Well, she does have Chris.’

  ‘He’s my housekeeper,’ Adele said, reclassifying him to suit the occasion. ‘I can’t be expected to run Ridgemount all alone.’

  ‘I agree. Which leads us neatly to the matter in hand. You both have a copy of the accounts.’

  ‘Do we have to look at it all, dear?’ Adele asked, as reluctant as if it were a list of fatty foods.

  ‘Not unless you want to. It doesn’t make for pleasant reading. For the third year running we’ve registered a loss.’

  ‘Surely that’s just on paper?’

  ‘Well, everything’s on paper, Mother. But we owe the bank in the region of £400,000. We took out a five-year loan, which we’re due to repay in January. That won’t be possible, though I’m confident we can negotiate a deferment. Even with the slump in property prices, this building is excellent collateral.’

  ‘How could you let everything slide?’ Alison asked.

  ‘We’re hardly unique,’ Duncan said, bridling at her tone. ‘Do you have any idea how many local papers have gone under in the last few years? At least we’re still here.’

  ‘Just!’ Alison replied.

  ‘No one predicted the rise of the Internet. We thought we’d see it off the same way that we saw off local radio and the free press in the Nineties. Plus, the economic downturn has wiped out our advertising.’

  ‘I’ve always said that there are too many adverts in the paper,’ Adele interjected.

  ‘Yes, Mother, but we operate in the real world. Anyway, it’s nothing new. I was looking through the archives. In the very first issue, great-great-grandfather published a list of all the hotel and lodging-house guests in Francombe, presumably in the hope that they’d each buy a copy. I’ve been thinking of reviving the practice – although no doubt it’s in breach of some EU privacy law.’

  ‘And I don’t suppose that anyone today would choose to broadcast their presence in the town.’

  ‘Nonsense, darling,’ Adele said crisply. ‘Now that the carpet factory has been shut down, the sea is perfectly safe.’

  ‘But the web has hit more than advertising. The management consultants I brought in –’

  ‘I don’t suppose they came cheap,’ Alison said.

  ‘No, but highly recommended. They told me that local newspapers were of no interest to the young. “That’s not such a problem here,” I said, “Francombe has an ageing population.” “By young,” one replied, “we mean anyone under sixty.”’

  ‘That’s young to me,’ Adele said.

  ‘So did these highly paid consultants come up with any solutions?’ Alison asked.

  ‘Nothing that I hadn’t already considered and discounted.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Selling out to one of the conglomerates. Along with ninety-five per cent of the local press. Becoming a four-page insert in a generic paper produced in Ipswich or Basingstoke. Turning back the clock to when great-grandfather bought syndicated stories from London off the shelf.’

  ‘But would it solve the problem?’ Adele asked. ‘Would they pay?’

  ‘They’d pay something. The title has value, as does the building, although as I said they’d switch production elsewhere. I can’t see them keeping on any of the staff except maybe Brian. When you tot it up, there’s almost a hundred and fifty years of loyalty in that office. I can’t just chuck it away.’

  ‘They’d be given decent settlements, surely?’ Alison said.

  ‘That depends on the deal. One thing I know for certain is that I’d be first for the scrapheap.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Adele said. ‘You do a marvellous job. Everyone says so. Regional Editor of the Year.’

  ‘In 1994, Mother. The only award
we’ve had since then was second prize in the “Britain in Bloom” Business Category last summer.’

  ‘Maybe it’d be for the best if we did sell up,’ Alison said gently. ‘Especially for you, Duncan. While there’s still time for you to try something else.’

  ‘It’s not just the staff I’d be letting down. What about them?’ Duncan asked, pointing at the portraits. ‘How can I walk away from everything they achieved?’

  ‘They’re dead! Besides, what do you think will happen after you’re gone? I can’t see Jamie sacrificing himself to save the paper – always supposing there’s still a paper to save. And would you want him to waste his life the way you’ve done?’

  ‘Waste my life?’

  ‘I didn’t mean that. You know what I mean. You were a talented kid; you wanted to write. I still remember that sketch show in Cambridge. Instead, you chose to moulder in this two-bit town.’

  ‘You can be very hurtful sometimes,’ Adele said. ‘Francombe dates back to before the Conquest. It’s twinned with Cadiz.’

  ‘What choice did I have? Do you think I wanted to abandon my friends and my studies and my hopes and ambitions and practically everything else that makes life meaningful at twenty-one … no, not just at twenty-one, but for ever? If I hadn’t come back and sorted out Father’s mess, the paper would have gone under. Your shares would have been worthless. I’d have managed; I’d have got a grant to finish my degree and then, who knows, maybe a traineeship with the BBC? But what about you and Mother? What would you have done?’

  ‘If you want to play the martyr, that’s your affair, but please leave me out of it. I never asked you for anything.’

  ‘It was spring 1986. Ring any bells? You were training for Wimbledon. I was so proud of you; we all were. I was determined to make sure you’d have nothing else on your mind.’

  ‘That was very kind of you. And I’m sorry if I didn’t appreciate it. But as you’ll remember, my own career didn’t go exactly to plan. Besides, it was nearly thirty years ago. What does it have to do with what’s happening now?’