Widows & Orphans

by Michael Arditti

  ‘Not once in all that time have you offered to give up – or even reduce – your dividend.’

  ‘I’m not a mind reader, Duncan. Why didn’t you let me know how serious things were?’

  ‘I tried, but every time the occasion arose, you started talking about your own expenses. The crippling cost of sending two boys to school and then to university, of keeping up the flat in London and the house in Oxfordshire and the villa in Umbria.’

  ‘That was a bargain. It was practically a shack when we bought it.’

  ‘You made me feel that, far from asking you to cut back, I should be offering you more. My marriage suffered; Linda said that I always put you and Mother first.’

  ‘Don’t you dare lay that on me! Cause of break-up? Cruelty. Husband’s? No, sister-in-law’s!’

  ‘I’m just trying to make you understand. And, yes, maybe the fault was mine. I was too proud; I didn’t want to lose face in front of my big-shot sister. Even so, you should have been more aware. You may not come here that often, but you’re not blind. You’ve seen the size of the paper and the state of the building; you’ve seen me. Look at me! I pay myself less than I pay my junior reporter. The only reason I’m not dossing in one of the hostels is that I’m living above the shop.’

  ‘That isn’t amusing, Duncan!’ Adele interjected. ‘I’ve told you before.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mother, but there’s more at stake than your sensibilities.’ Duncan turned to Alison. ‘These clothes aren’t fit for a scarecrow. Is it any wonder my son’s ashamed to be seen with me?’

  ‘That’s not the reason,’ Alison said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. I don’t know why I said it.’

  ‘That’s enough now, both of you,’ Adele said.

  ‘Tell me! What did you mean?’

  ‘Believe me, it’s nothing. Just something he said when we met at the Science Museum: how he pretended that you were his teacher rather than his father, because you insisted on reading out all the labels and quizzing him on every exhibit. You never let things be fun.’

  ‘He said that?’

  ‘It’s not important. Remember how embarrassed we used to be about Dad.’

  ‘Your father was always impeccably dressed,’ Adele said. ‘He wouldn’t have dreamt of leaving the house without a buttonhole. And I was the only one he allowed to pin it on. You’d do well to take a leaf out of his book, darling.’

  ‘Thank you, Mother, I’ll bear it in mind. Now, unless either of you has anything to add, I vote that we approve the accounts.’

  Three

  Disturbing Incidents at Nature Reserve

  by Rowena Birdseye

  Thursday, 17 October 2013

  Sussex Police and Francombe Borough Council Rangers are stepping up their patrols of Salter Nature Reserve following complaints from visitors who have suffered unwelcome advances in the woods.

  Steve Flanders, 27, of the Sussex Orienteering and Wayfarers Society (SOWS) reported that during an all-day event on Saturday, 5 October one of their members, who did not wish to be named, became detached from the main group after slipping on a stile. While removing his jogging bottoms to examine his leg, he received several inappropriate offers of assistance.

  In a separate incident, June Holder MBE, Honorary President of the Sussex branch of the International Mycological Association, was inspecting a newly discovered Bearded Tooth Fungus on the evening of Tuesday, 8 October. She returned to her car when she was spotted by a friend out walking his dog. As they chatted through the window, he was accosted by a middle-aged man who asked if there were ‘any decent action inside’.

  Miss Holder and her friend took some moments to realise what he meant. ‘When we did, we were most upset,’ she said. ‘My friend gave him the rough edge of his tongue and he slunk off with his tail between his legs. Salter Woods are home to many rare fungi – not just the Bearded Tooth but the Pepper Pot and twenty-eight species of waxcaps. It would be a tragedy if this precious natural resource were threatened by the activities of a few degenerates.’

  Asked by the Mercury to comment on the incidents, Len Barber, 62, Parks and Open Spaces Manager, Francombe Borough Council, stated that ‘I and my staff are fully committed to protecting the biodiversity of Salter Nature Reserve and to ensuring that all sections of the community are able to enjoy its facilities. Following these distressing reports, I myself paid two visits to the woods, the first at dusk on Friday and the second on Sunday afternoon. I’m pleased to say that I witnessed no improper behaviour and, although I was dressed in bright clothing, no one approached me apart from a vigilant Ranger.’

  Poring over the new issue of the paper, which Sheila had placed on his desk together with a piece of her home-made gingerbread, as long-established a ritual as his mother’s pinning of his father’s buttonhole, Duncan felt confident that it was worth 80p of anyone’s money. Even in a quiet week for news, there was a disturbing report on the youths stealing alcohol hand gel from the Princess Royal lavatories, sensitively written by Ken who, ever since his daughter’s death, had kept all hospital-related items for himself. There was a second such story, also by Ken, of a woman on Incapacity Benefit who, having been referred to a review panel, swallowed a cocktail of drugs to lend credence to her claim. She misjudged the dose and was now on a life-support machine facing the prospect of permanent brain damage. Contrast was provided by heartening features on the Francombe Talking Newspaper’s autumn tea party for its clients and the Hedgehog and Garden Bird Rescue Team’s round-the-clock care for an orphaned hoglet.

  His sole reservations concerned the front page. Should he have opted for Brian’s report on the successful trial of seagull-proof dustbin bags on the Pudsey Road estate, rather than Rowena’s on the continuing problems at Salter Nature Reserve? On balance, he had decided that, whatever the benefits for residents who would no longer wake up to rubbish-strewn lawns, the bin bags were too parochial and, notwithstanding his mother’s charge that he was wallowing in filth, had ventured back into the woods. This had the additional virtue of mollifying Rowena, who had complained of being given fewer lead stories than the unseasoned Brian, hinting darkly that she might have a case for gender discrimination.

  After reading the paper from cover to cover and finding only one glaring typo in the description of the St Anselm Over Sixties Ladies’ Bowling Champion as ‘unbearable’ (he waited grimly for the howls of protest), he made his way into the reporters’ room.

  ‘Great work this week, everyone. Lovely splash on the Nature Reserve, Rowena.’

  ‘It’d have been a damn sight better if the copy hadn’t been hacked to bits,’ she said, scowling at Stewart.

  ‘Come on! You did go a little OTT on the debris,’ Stewart replied. ‘It read as if it had spilt out of one of Brian’s dustbin bags.’

  ‘It wasn’t me; it was the fungus woman. She said there were places you couldn’t move for condoms. A couple of times she thought she’d found some exotic mushroom which turned out to be a spunk-filled johnny.’

  ‘She said that?’ Stewart asked.

  ‘I paraphrase.’

  ‘Look on the bright side,’ Brian said. ‘At least they’re practising safe sex.’

  ‘Oh yes, laugh at everything, why don’t you?’ Brian assumed an air of injured innocence. ‘I don’t want to come on all Mary Whitehouse, but it isn’t only plants that are being harmed. Look at that tramp!’

  ‘There’s no news yet on Dragon’s assailants,’ Duncan said. ‘The police are keeping an open mind.’

  ‘Too open if you ask me,’ Rowena replied. ‘It’s a no-brainer. After his crusade against cruising.’

  ‘I never had you down as a closet homophobe,’ Brian said.

  ‘Oh, grow up! But why can’t they screw around in private like everyone else?’

  ‘It’s not just gays who gather in the woods,’ Ken said. ‘It used to be a popular spot for kids to make out.’ Duncan blushed as a torrent of long-forgotten memories – New Year’s Eve, Da
isy Clarke, dampness first on the ground and then on his groin – engulfed him. Across the room, he heard Brian mutter something about being ‘a good boy, tucked up by ten with the latest Jane Austen’, but the subsequent banter was lost in the thrill of his recollections. He was sixteen and home for the Christmas holidays, struggling to re-establish old friendships after two years at Lancing. One of his friends – it might even have been Geoffrey Weedon, but he suspected that that was his mind creating patterns – had thrown a party and Daisy, already a notorious nymphet, had chosen ‘the posh boy’ to help her see in the New Year. Revelling in the resentment of boys he had planned to appease, he accompanied Daisy to Salter, the long trek punctuated by regular gulps of cider. The romance of the woods soon faded as they tripped over concealed roots, flinched at sinister murmurs and shivered in the cold. Any advantage he might have gained by offering Daisy his jacket was squandered when, in a rush of ardour, he compared her to Titania and she accused him of smut.

  With a modesty that belied her reputation, she declared French kissing to be vile and at first denied him any greater licence than to fondle her breasts through her blouse, but when he threatened to walk away and leave her she relented, agreeing to take off her bra provided that he took off his pants. His delight in her gentle breasts was matched by her disgust at his rigid penis. Refusing to believe that it was involuntary, she charged him with ‘cheating’. She allowed him to stroke her nipples, pushing him away when he grew too ardent, but refused to touch his penis, claiming that it was dirty. He begged her to hitch up her skirt but, hissing with outrage, she insisted that he wasn’t going ‘to get two for the price of one’. They appeared to have reached an impasse when, telling him to ‘get on with it then if you’re going to’, she lay back and pulled down her knickers, clenching her thighs so tightly that all he could do was rub his face in the silky threads of her pubic hair. Almost at once he felt a starburst in his blood and fell back, gasping. Granting him no respite, she jumped up, adjusted her clothes and gazed at him in triumph, as if her pleasure derived not from desire or even contact but from witnessing his loss of control. ‘You happy then?’ she asked, which struck him as the cruellest question he had ever heard.

  ‘You’re smiling, Duncan,’ Sheila said approvingly, as she entered the room with a plate of broken biscuits.

  ‘Am I?’ He felt the muscles in his jaw tighten and wondered how an experience that had been so wretched at the time could be so affecting in retrospect. ‘I suppose I am.’ He had rarely seen Daisy after that, as the distance between Francombe and Lancing lengthened and his old friendships descended into polite indifference or, in Geoffrey’s case, bitter rivalry. Twenty years on, they had briefly resumed contact when Linda, intent on a home delivery, selected Daisy as her midwife. Daisy’s manner towards him was so relaxed that he started to wonder whether he might have dreamt the entire episode. Nevertheless, he had thought it only right to tell Linda who, far from feeling threatened by their past intimacy, maintained that it validated her choice. Full of respect for Daisy’s professionalism, he had to admit that there was a kind of symmetry in watching the birth of his first child alongside the woman with whom the whole adventure had begun.

  ‘If it is, then it’s the boys who put pressure on them,’ Rowena was saying. Duncan made an effort to concentrate on the exchange. ‘Don’t you remember that headmistress describing how girls as young as ten were being bullied into giving boys blowjobs on the grounds that they weren’t real sex? What do you think?’ she asked Sheila, stifling her usual contempt for her views in a bid for female solidarity.

  ‘Oh, you know me,’ Sheila said, looking ruffled. ‘I’m just an old fuddy-duddy. In my day, blowjobs were something you got at the hairdresser.’ Brian sniggered; Ken and Stewart laughed; even Jake cracked a smile. After a moment of confusion, Sheila assumed a knowing expression as if to claim credit for the joke. ‘Minds like sewers! I’m surprised at you, Brian Gannon,’ she said, simpering at her favourite, oblivious to the biro he was holding on which a busty blonde lost her bikini every time that he tipped it up. ‘Don’t let these reprobates lead you astray.’

  ‘Not me,’ he said. ‘Innocent as a lamb.’

  Sheila raised an eyebrow, the effect of which was to set her blinking uncontrollably. ‘Now I can’t stand here gossiping all day,’ she said. ‘Don’t forget the children will be here at two. Mary’s coming in at noon to give the place a good clean. It looks like a pigsty.’

  ‘Great,’ Stewart said, as she left the room. ‘So now it will smell like one too.’

  ‘That’s not kind,’ Duncan said.

  ‘Come on, Duncan. You may shut your eyes to what’s happening in the woods,’ Rowena said, refusing to let the matter drop, ‘but you can’t ignore what’s under your nose.’

  ‘Literally,’ said Jake, laconic as ever.

  ‘You’d have thought things would improve when her husband gave up his boat,’ Stewart said.

  ‘But it’s not a fishy smell,’ Brian said. ‘More like carpet glue.’

  ‘That’s enough!’ Duncan said. ‘You should be ashamed of yourselves. Mary has more to worry about than a spot of BO. For her last birthday I bought her an M&S cardigan. Sheila caught her taking it back and exchanging it for food.’

  Cheered by their chastened expressions, Duncan returned to his office, where he set out to read the FA report into racist chants on Francombe FC terraces, but his mind remained fixed on the Nature Reserve. Rowena might attack him for wilful blindness, but her wild speculation about Dragon’s attackers made him all the more determined to stick to his editorial code. Dwindling circulation notwithstanding, exposure in the Mercury had the power to destroy livelihoods, even lives. Unlike civic corruption or corporate fraud, sexual impropriety did not warrant the risk. Nothing in his sorely debased profession disgusted him more than the tabloid tactic of pandering to prurience under the guise of upholding morality. So when the duty manager of the Metropole Hotel had rung with the story of a TV weatherman who spent the night with a hostess from the Sugarbaby nightclub, he put down the phone, just as he did when a disaffected Liberal activist alerted him to the party chairman’s affair with the Labour leader’s wife. The dilemma had been more acute when a police contact brought him a list of local paedophiles during the furore over the Hawksey Road Children’s Home but, with the fate of Bert Ponsonby’s mother in mind, he had deemed the threat of vigilantism to be greater than that of the men’s reoffending and refused to publish their names. Linda was outraged, repeatedly asking what he would have done had Jamie been one of the victims. He replied that his gut reaction would have been different but his decision the same. The Mercury was Francombe’s conscience, not its judge and definitely not its executioner.

  The visit of a group of sixth-formers from Francis Preston High School gave him the opportunity to canvas the views of the next generation. With the exception of Brian, who enjoyed showing off to his near contemporaries, the staff regarded such visits, of which there were four or five a year, as both an intrusion and an embarrassment. To Duncan, however, they were a far more agreeable part of the Mercury’s outreach programme than the editor’s surgeries, where he was at the mercy of every crank who harangued him on the paper’s failure to highlight the menace of chewing gum residue on pavements, or the piles of foreign-language pamphlets in the library, or even a next-door neighbour’s overgrown privet hedge. While his ultimate aim was that an insight into the workings of the paper should encourage the pupils to become readers, his immediate one was that they should become contributors. It was hardly surprising that the Mercury held little appeal for the young when they were barely mentioned outside the sports section. In conjunction with their English teachers, he had adopted a policy of offering each visiting group a features page to fill with any topic of their choice. Although this had so far resulted in a series of earnest pieces on overpopulation, genocide and global warming, rather than the first-hand concerns for which he had hoped, he valued the experiment and planned to extend it.


  Duncan welcomed the group in the opulent entrance hall that had once doubled as an enquiries office but was now used largely for deliveries. Their relief at being out of school mixed with resentment at remaining constrained, the eight girls and six boys milled around the hall as if defying him to excite their interest. After a brief conversation with their teacher, Pete Daniels, a slight man in his late twenties with haunted eyes, a wispy beard, bolo tie and canvas belt with Wolverine embossed on the buckle, Duncan was ready to take up the challenge.

  ‘Good afternoon, everyone. I’m Duncan Neville, the Mercury’s editor, and I’d like to welcome you to your paper. That’s neither an empty phrase nor an advertising slogan. My great-great-grandfather founded the paper. My family and I are the proprietors, but you are the owners.’

  ‘Aren’t they the same thing?’ asked a girl wearing three of the colour-coded jelly bracelets that Rowena had analysed in a recent feature. Duncan trusted that she had chosen the black, blue and green bands for aesthetic effect rather than sexual symbolism.

  ‘A thesaurus would tell you yes, but I beg to differ. In a very real sense, the paper belongs to Francombe. You’re the ones who read it, who advertise in it, who ring in with stories and complaints and yes, sometimes even with compliments. So I say again you’re the owners. We’re merely the guardians.’

  ‘Which bit’s mine then?’ asked a boy with his collar button undone and his tie knotted halfway down his chest.

  ‘The bit you buy for 80p every Thursday,’ Duncan replied.

  ‘You must be joking!’

  ‘So how many of you do read it?’

  The silence was broken by a red-haired girl with translucent skin and freckles. ‘I sometimes see it at my nan’s,’ she said. ‘She gets it to find out who’s died.’

  ‘That’s a perfectly valid reason,’ Duncan said, cutting into the laughter. ‘It’s part of life in a community. In today’s world, too many communities are splintered. Some of you may not know your neighbours.’