Widows & Orphans

by Michael Arditti

  ‘Is Craig equally serious about her?’

  ‘He’s a sixteen-year-old boy: you tell me! The one advantage of the relationship is that it’s reconciled her to moving to Francombe. I wish I could say the same for Neil. He’s not as openly antagonistic towards me as his sister; he can’t bear to see me in tears. Though I suspect that it’s less out of genuine compassion than because it makes him feel insecure.’

  ‘Maybe it’s both?’ Duncan said, trying to blot out the memory of Neil’s tirade against his mother on parents’ evening.

  ‘He’s the more disturbed by everything that’s happened. Boys need their fathers.’

  ‘True.’ Duncan wondered if she had forgotten his own separation from Jamie or assumed that, because he was not incarcerated, their relationship must be close.

  ‘He’s become so aloof. When he’s not at school, he spends most of the time holed up in his room. He’s never been what you’d call an outgoing boy, but he used to enjoy cycling and chess and gardening – he had his own flowerbeds in Radlett and heaven help the gardener if he touched them. Now he shows no interest in anything. He’s punishing me for bringing him here because it’s easier than punishing his father who’s the reason we came, although of course the person he’s really punishing is himself.’

  ‘Does he read?’

  ‘If only! He’s glued to his computer. It’s as though he can only engage with the world when it’s at one remove and in two dimensions.’

  ‘How about friends?’

  ‘None to speak of, or at least that he speaks of. I knew that the first few weeks at a new school would be tough but things haven’t improved. Then again, he’s so prickly, such a mixture of bitterness and aggression and envy and spite, I’m not sure I’d want to be his friend. It’s hard enough being his mother.’

  Duncan thought of asking Jamie to take him under his wing but feared that it would do more harm than good. ‘I know it’s not a solution, but if he’d like the odd game of chess … I play every Thursday with Henry Grainger of St Edward’s. He beats me hands down. I could use the practice.’

  ‘That’s really kind. Of course I’ll ask, though I don’t hold out much hope. But there is one thing. I hesitate to mention it when you already have so much on your plate. The other evening you were saying how you were hurt that Jamie was doing his local history project on the wheel park –’

  ‘Oh lord, I hope I wasn’t moaning.’

  ‘This is me you’re talking to! Anyway, I wondered if you’d consider helping Neil. He told the teacher that he knew nothing about Francombe and asked if he could do his project on Radlett, specifically the Victorian mental hospital that recently shut down at Shenley. But the man was adamant that “local” meant local to them. Somehow it’s come to stand for everything Neil hates about moving down here. If you could give him a hand with the history of the Mercury … It wouldn’t have to be too in-depth, just pointing him in the right direction.’

  ‘I’d be delighted.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘That’s wonderful. I know that it’s not the same as doing it with Jamie.’

  ‘I’ll still enjoy it, and it’ll be a chance to get to know Neil.’ Even as he spoke, Duncan felt a fraud. Had he agreed to her request out of sympathy for Neil, to prove himself to Ellen, to compensate for Jamie’s collaboration with Derek, or, given that clear-cut motives rarely existed outside books, from a combination of the three?

  Reaching Bedford early, they had an all-day breakfast at the Titanic Café. Visiting time was from 3.15 to 4.15, but Ellen had been told to arrive half an hour beforehand, so at 2.30 they walked to the prison where she touched up her lipstick and added a dab of powder to her cheeks. ‘War paint,’ she said ruefully, before disappearing into the gatehouse, which with its two-toned brickwork, gabled roof and white portico might have passed for a faculty building in a new university, were it not for the razor wire on the adjoining wall.

  Having planned to spend the afternoon exploring the town, Duncan chose instead to stroll round the perimeter of the prison, which, like all such institutions, exerted a strong pull on both his conscience and his imagination. While he had long since abandoned the ‘Property is Theft’ sloganising of his teens, he harboured deep reservations about the efficacy, expense and, above all, the justice of locking up so many people. ‘The rich man in his castle’ and ‘the poor man at his gate’ might have been omitted from modern versions of the popular hymn (although not without a struggle, as Henry had discovered at St Edward’s), but the rich man on the bench and the poor man in the dock remained an integral part of the social order.

  Never had he been more aware of this than at Cambridge, where, in his second – and, as it turned out, final – year, a group of students looking for an original party venue fixed on a country house near Newmarket, which one of their number, John Fitzsimmons, a distant cousin of the owners, knew to be empty apart from an elderly housekeeper. So, preceded by John who had slipped a Nembutal into the housekeeper’s tea, thirty or so of his friends turned up and, boosting their supply of alcohol with several choice bottles from their hosts’ cellar, proceeded to make merry. In the early hours the police, alerted by a neighbouring farmer, arrived to investigate, but John’s patrician tones and plausible story swiftly satisfied them and, apologising for the intrusion, they drove off. The revellers then carried on until dawn when they returned to Cambridge by car, bike, motorcycle and, in the case of the ever-flamboyant Julia Flitton, on a white stallion. The housekeeper, either mollified by the large tip left on her chair or terrified of the owners’ response to her negligence, kept silent and nothing more was heard of the incident. Duncan put it from his mind until the following term when he listened to his bedder’s tearful account of her son who, in revenge for being thrown in the Cam by a gang of rowers, had set fire to the Pembroke boathouse. He was convicted of arson and jailed for eight years.

  For weeks, Duncan agonised over whether to report his own crime in order to highlight the inequity, finally deciding that it would be futile, doing nothing for the wretched arsonist and incriminating his friends. But he never lost his sense of outrage and, in his first year at the Mercury, he commissioned a series of articles on conditions in the three prisons – Lewes, Blantyre House and East Sutton Park – that served the Francombe area. In several hard-hitting leaders he decried the inadequacy of the prisoner’s discharge grant, which, at a few pounds, was an open invitation to reoffend, and he upbraided the Council for the lack of jobs and facilities for exinmates. More controversially, he questioned the basic principles behind judicial policy, arguing that white-collar crime, which was perpetrated by well-off, well-educated people and motivated by greed, should be dealt with more severely than burglaries, assaults and even rapes, which were perpetrated by inadequate, damaged and deprived people in need of help rather than punishment.

  Duncan trusted that it was revulsion at Matthew’s crime, a cynical attack on the most revered institution in the country, which reconciled him to his sentence, and not Ellen’s anguished expression when she emerged from the gatehouse, conspicuous among a group of women whose drabness seemed designed to reassure their husbands of their fidelity.

  ‘Quick, let’s escape!’ she said, grabbing his arm with unexpected force. ‘How did it go?’

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t ask questions,’ she said, only to answer his tacit ones unbidden once they were back in the car and heading out of town. ‘I don’t know what to think. Last time he barely spoke to me; he was as distant as some of my most damaged kids. Today it was the opposite; he never stopped talking. But it wasn’t to me. Not really. I might as well have been his mother or even a prison psychiatrist monitoring how well he’s settling in.’

  ‘Isn’t that good? An acceptance that things have changed?’

  ‘I suppose so. I know I shouldn’t mind, but we’ve driven all this way and he didn’t ask me a single question about myself or the job or the house or Francombe or even – and th
is is what hurt the most – the children. When I mentioned them, he seemed almost indifferent.’

  ‘Maybe it’s self-defence?’ Duncan said, angry at making excuses for a man who, no matter how hard he tried to block him out, cast a permanent shadow over their relationship. ‘He knows he can do nothing for them so he’s withdrawing emotionally. I find it hard enough being apart from Jamie and I’m not in jail.’

  ‘Do you think so? Yes, of course. Thank you. I couldn’t bear it if the one real thing – the only real thing – we’ve ever had meant nothing to him. He spent the entire visit chattering about his cellmate, what they watched on TV, the bowl he was making in the prison workshop, his weight loss course –’

  ‘I didn’t know he was fat.’

  ‘He is now. After almost an hour of telling me about table tennis and music appreciation and the over-forties gym sessions and how his fellow inmates distrust the prison doctor so they come to him for a diagnosis, I felt sure he was putting on an act – talking big as he always has, desperate to prove he’s top dog. Then he let slip that he’s due to be transferred to a Category C prison –’

  ‘When?’

  ‘No idea. Neither has he. But it could be any day now and he isn’t pleased. He claims he couldn’t bear to start again from scratch, but that’s a smokescreen. The truth is that he thrives on all the rules and regulations. He doesn’t want to go into a more relaxed regime.’

  ‘But that’s perverse!’

  ‘And swindling an institution you described as “criminally underfunded” isn’t? Sorry, I’m still on edge. I listened to him and suddenly everything fell into place: the blind rage when one of us used his coat peg; the cast-iron timetables that turned the simplest journey into a military campaign; the desperate need for order to keep all his demons at bay.’

  ‘What demons?’

  ‘I wish I knew. If I did, I might have been able to help. But I’m convinced that the fraud was part and parcel of it. Why steal all that money? We didn’t need it; we didn’t use it. Sure, there was the house and the cars and the holidays and the parties (not that he showed much sign of enjoying them). But by getting away with it all for so long, he could fool himself that he was in control.’

  ‘He’ll have a job doing that now.’

  ‘Exactly. And, when I saw him looking more content than he has done in years, I realised that he no longer has to pretend. Far from being a punishment, his sentence is a kind of relief. The prison walls are nothing compared to the ones he built around himself.’

  ‘I’m struggling to take all this in.’

  ‘Do you think I’m on the wrong track?’

  ‘I don’t know; I don’t know him.’

  ‘The truth is that neither do I. How is it possible to live in the same house, to share the same bed and make love to a man for sixteen years and have so little idea of what’s going on inside his head? I suppose it would be the same if I’d found out he was having an affair. When the police first came to interview me, I assumed that’s why Matthew had done it. It was the only logical explanation. Now I know better than to look for one.’

  Her voice cracked and Duncan was afraid that she was about to break down. ‘You’re free of him now,’ he said.

  ‘Am I? It’s not just the kids. I can push him to the back of my mind but I doubt I’ll ever push him out of it.’

  ‘I do understand.’

  ‘Of course. You and Linda get on so well, I sometimes forget you were ever married.’

  ‘Ah yes. The poster couple for divorce.’

  ‘From the outside, you seem so compatible that it’s hard to see why you ever split up. Sorry, I don’t mean to pry. Well, that’s not true, actually.’ She smiled for the first time all day.

  ‘You’re not prying. It’s very simple. I’m sure there were lots of subsidiary reasons but there was one overwhelming one. She wanted another child, which I couldn’t – well, a mixture of couldn’t and wouldn’t – give her.’

  The bitter irony was that her much longed-for second child had been born severely disabled. He wondered whether, had Rose been his daughter (and, given his genetic make-up, it was a possibility he had often considered), their relationship might have been strengthened. He would have loved Rose so much; indeed, in moments of self-reproach he feared that her dependency would have made her easier to love than Jamie. Suppressing the thought, he asked Ellen to hand him a butterscotch from the packet in the dashboard. She unwrapped it with delicious intimacy before taking one herself. They savoured their sweets in silence, united, he suspected, by memories of their pasts.

  In retrospect, it was clear that he should never have married Linda. They met when she had just turned twenty and was widely held to be the most beautiful girl in Francombe: a verdict confirmed by the judges of the annual Seafood Festival who crowned her Queen. Fellow guests at a Chamber of Commerce reception for national travel agents, they sought refuge from the tedium, scarcely leaving one another’s side all evening. Over the next few months Duncan invited her out whenever he could and, on occasions when he was working late, brought her to the office, heedless of the smirks of the staff. She was funny and vibrant and sweet-natured, and far cleverer than her constant self-deprecation might suggest. Despite her protests, he was eager to introduce her to his university friends, but after a meal with Angus and Miles following a live recording of The Carmichael Report; a weekend in Jarrow with Alice and her new husband, Lesley, the area dean; and, most painfully, a reunion in Devon with the cast members of Cambridge Marmalade, he resolved to make a complete break with the past.

  When they married after a two-year courtship, Duncan felt as though he were making a commitment not just to Linda but to Francombe, turning his back on the metropolis and pledging himself to the coast. By any standards – not least those that he had observed as a boy – their first years together were happy. Linda, while continuing to work in her parents’ shop, relished her connection with the Mercury, which, having fought off the challenge of the Francombe Citizen and BBC Southern Counties, was once again solvent. But for all her pride in his achievement, he knew that he had failed her in the one thing that mattered. Every christening mug and romper suit and rattle that she bought for a friend’s baby brought it home. Nothing in her life, even her love for him, could compare with her longing for a child.

  Although he shared Linda’s hopes of parenthood, Duncan knew that it would not be easy. At the start of their relationship he had confessed that he suffered from Klinefelter Syndrome, but he had been so frightened of scaring her off that having explained he was still able to produce some viable sperm he had failed to emphasise how few. It was not a subject on which he cared to dwell. He had been diagnosed at fifteen after two years as the butt of changing-room jokes about eunuchs and castrati. He had never felt so alone. With a father who made virility the yardstick of his identity and a mother who was repulsed by the least physical defect, he found little sympathy at home. The Germanic name and extra X chromosomes made him desperate to conceal the condition from his friends, who would have shown him no mercy. Even the medical dictionary in the school library – more often consulted as a masturbatory aid – produced only the threat of further hideous and degrading symptoms. Fortunately, an enlightened housemaster reassured him that he was a late developer while encouraging him to take up running, for which his rangy body was perfectly formed. As ever at school, sporting prowess held the key to acceptance. When he finally reached puberty the following year, he was so keen to display himself in the dormitory and showers that he risked fresh notoriety. Since then he had been determined to turn the condition to his advantage. Not only did his light beard free him from daily shaving but it brought unexpected success with women, for whom the Burt Reynolds look had lost its appeal. And whatever the medical dictionary might say about his low sex drive, he had striven to make up for it in performance.

  Linda came off the Pill as soon as they were married, but her fervent conviction that ‘Nature will find a way’ was put to the test when,
four years later, she was still not pregnant. For the first time in his life Duncan was faced with the full force of female obsession. They saw their GP, whom Duncan suspected of trivialising the issue with his sketch-show advice that he should stop cycling to work, wear boxer shorts instead of Y-fronts, and give up eating curry. When those failed to achieve results, he proposed that they try surgical sperm retrieval coupled with testosterone therapy. The treatment was not without risks, including liver failure, heart attacks and strokes, and Duncan was shocked by how readily Linda brushed them aside. In the event he suffered little more than sore gums, a foul taste in his mouth and the acne that he had escaped during adolescence. He was also prone to fits of anger, particularly with Linda, although he was unsure how much of that was due to the drugs and how much to his dismay at her cavalier attitude to his health.

  His sperm were extracted and implanted one by one in her eggs, in a procedure that seemed scarcely less miraculous than birth itself. When she finally fell pregnant, their elation was tinged with anxiety that if it were a boy he would inherit KS, and in a more acute form than his father. It was not until the tests revealed him to be clear of abnormalities that they could breathe freely. Then Jamie was born, so perfect that for the first time since childhood Duncan was tempted to see his life as divinely ordained. He hoped that Linda would feel the same sense of completion, but her boundless love for her baby made her all the more determined to try again. When he pointed out that they might have another boy who in turn might have the rogue chromosomes, she accused him of being more concerned about the dangers to himself. But it was her health that he was protecting as much as his own. She had suffered badly from overstimulated ovaries and mood swings during the treatment. The example of Gillian Canning, who had been so scarred by IVF that Stewart left her, should give them pause.

  For her part, Linda grew convinced that his denial of her greatest desire was proof that he no longer loved her. Then at Geoffrey and Frances Weedon’s wedding she met a man who did. Whether or not Geoffrey’s aim in choosing Musclebound, the ‘Ultimate Eighties tribute band’, to play at the reception was to keep Duncan off the dance floor, it had that effect. Meanwhile Linda, enjoying a rare chance to revisit the hits of her youth, and Derek, shrugging off the ticklish role of his ex-wife’s new brother-in-law, boogied through the night. Shortly afterwards they embarked on an affair, which, with a logic that would have been laughed out of any court but a divorce court, Linda maintained had been justified first by Duncan’s indifference to her needs and then by his blindness to her infidelity.