A Shock to the System (9 page)

There was no bite. Robert parked the Scirocco outside the house in Boileau Avenue just before seven and refused the invitation to come in for a drink. ‘No, no, I'll leave you to your family,' he said, making the word sound subtly like an unfortunate physical handicap.

Graham stood on the kerb, suitcase in hand.

‘Well, um, thank you for . . .' No, he mustn't say ‘having me', that sounded too like a schoolboy.

Absurdly, he felt as if Robert was about to tip him, with an avuncular wink to shove a fiver into his hand. Thank you for a great weekend.'

‘My pleasure. You must come again.'

And the Scirocco was gone.

Confused, Graham walked slowly towards his front door. He felt obscurely shamed. Patronised. Put in his place.

And as he unwillingly reached for his keys, he realised that making him feel like that had been the object of the exercise.

Four unwelcome surprises were waiting for Graham as he entered the house.

The first was the sound of a female row issuing from the sitting-room. The second was the absence of response when he switched on the hall light. The darkness delayed impact on him of the third and fourth, which lay in envelopes on the hall table.

Since the raised voices from the sitting-room continued uninterrupted, he reckoned they hadn't heard him come in. He couldn't face all that yet, so started towards the stairs and the inadequate refuge of his ‘study', a room optimistically described on the estate agent's details as ‘fifth bedroom/ dressing-room' and currently filled with lumber. At least it contained his swivel chair where he could sit for a while and make the adjustment from the conflicting emotions the weekend had stirred in him and the more predictable ones his family would arouse.

But that idea was scotched when he tried to switch on the landing light. Nothing. So it wasn't just the bulb gone in the hall. A power-cut? He looked hopefully out of the semi-circle of coloured glass over the front door, but the glow of lights opposite told him only his house was affected. Something else wrong with the wiring, no doubt.

Sanctuary denied, he dropped his overnight case heavily on the hall floor to announce his arrival, and pushed open the sitting-room door.

There were no lights in there either, though unlit candles stood on the mantelpiece and shelves, suggesting the power failure had happened at least twenty-four hours earlier. But the curtains had not been drawn and the room was lit by the orange spillage from a street light. The effect was theatrical, something Lilian Hinchcliffe managed to achieve in most of her scenes.

For, though she was shrinking in an armchair in her ‘poor little widow' pose, there was no doubt that it was Lilian's scene. Her two daughters stood either side of her, tense as cats over a mousehole. The atmosphere in the room combined with the evidence of the unlit candles to suggest the row had been going on for some time.

And the antagonism between Lilian and Charmian had reached such a pitch that Graham's entrance did not immediately stop their bitter hostilities.

‘. . .how you have the nerve to call your own mother selfish –'

‘Very easily. All my life I have never once seen you think of another person!'

‘How you can say that! Do you know what it's like to hear that from a child you have looked after, brought up –'

‘Fucked up, more likely.'

‘Now don't use that language to me. Anyway, if we're talking about selfishness, what about you?'

(Graham recognised one of his mother-in-law's favourite ploys. If Lilian was criticised, she immediately referred the criticism to her attacker; if someone was commended, she immediately brought the commendation round to herself. For Lilian Hinchcliffe nothing existed in its own right, nothing was granted life except in a comparison which included her.)

‘What about you, Charmian?' she repeated.

‘O.K. I know I'm selfish in some ways, but at least I don't pretend otherwise. I don't pretend to be loving and caring –'

‘Pretend! How little you understand!' Lilian appeared now to be auditioning for
Mother Courage.

‘Just because you have never known the love that a mother feels for a child. Merrily and I at least have that in common, whereas you –'

This was another favourite Lilian Hinchcliffe tactic – bring in whoever else was present, assume their support by a subtly inexact identification of their feelings with her own.

Merrily acknowledged the reference with a little shrug, which managed to combine smugness at the commendation and dissociation from her mother's words. Her eye caught Graham's with what, in another marriage, would have been complicity.

He decided maybe it was time to intervene, but he had not reckoned with the speed or vehemence of Charmian's reaction.

‘Don't you throw that in my face, you fucking cow! Just because I haven't had any children, don't think that –'

‘I'm sorry.' Lilian was now using her noble suffering voice.

‘But if you couldn't keep your marriage together, I can hardly be expected  –'

‘You think I didn't have children because I couldn't keep my marriage together? Don't you realise, you fool, that the reason we split up was because I
couldn't
have children!'

This revelation threw even Lilian off her stroke and, after a pause, it was Charmian who continued, though her voice was now tight with the threat of tears. ‘And the fact that you never knew that, never thought to ask about it, that I never felt able to confide it in you, is a pretty fair comment on the amount of “loving” and “caring” I expected from you.'

Lilian was still silent.

‘Don't you think I wanted children? Do you think the “career girl” image was a deliberate choice? Don't you think I'd like to be looked after, bovine and protected like Merrily, always with excuses, the excuses of pregnancy, or feeding them, or cooking for them, my maternal duties of “loving” and “caring” like a sick note excusing me any need for wider responsibility or charity? Don't you think . . .'

But there the emotion swamped her eloquence and, before she was caught short by tears, she moved abruptly to the door. ‘I'm going.'

Graham drew aside, then followed her into the hall, where she was scrabbling her way into her coat.

‘I'm sorry,' he said.

She looked at him. ‘Yes, I'm sure you are.'

The tears gleaming on her eyelids did not exclude irony from her tone. Graham looked away as she grabbed her bag and slammed out of the house. He did not like the way Charmian looked at him. He always thought he detected too much understanding in her grey eyes.

Lilian was weeping when he got back into the sitting-room. This was a noisy business, not uncontrolled, but with an actress's instinct for maximum effect.

Merrily stood, irresolute but somehow satisfied, her arms posed in a mannered shrug. ‘Oh dear, oh dear,' she said in a little voice, then came across, with continuing theatricality, to deposit a small kiss on Graham's lips.

In the dim orange light she looked strikingly like her mother and he had to restrain himself from flinching.

‘How was your high-powered weekend?'

‘Fine,' he lied.

‘Well, you see the squalor to which you return.' She gestured to the candles on the mantelpiece. ‘Have you got your lighter to illuminate the dismal scene?'

He handed it over. Graham no longer smoked, but he always carried the lighter. Sourly, he realised that he had started to do so to light George Brewer's succession of cigarettes. He was damned if the sycophancy would continue with Robert Benham's small cigars.

‘Anyway, what is all this?' he asked testily.

‘No power.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Saturday morning I awoke and said “let there be light” and behold, there was no light.'

‘What is it? Just a fuse or . . . ?'

This time Merrily's shrug was a three-act play. ‘How should I know, darling?' Her eyes widened ingenuously. ‘How should two women and two children alone in a house know what in the world had happened?'

‘If it happened yesterday morning you could have got someone in.'

‘But, Graham, you're being so horrid about money at the moment, I thought you might be cross. I thought it better to wait for you to come home.'

‘Oh, for God's sake! I bet it's just a fuse. I'll go and have a look at it.'

He snatched a candle from the mantelpiece. The unnecessary speed with which he moved had the effect of putting the flame out. Relighting it spoiled his exit.

Anyway, Lilian wasn't going to allow anyone an exit. She had been upstaged for too long by the discussion of the power failure; even her pneumatic weeping had not caused sufficient distraction. She decided it was time to reassert her star status.

Prefacing her words with a dramatic sniff, she announced, ‘I am going to cut her out of my will.'

‘What?' Graham asked wearily. He knew from experience that it was quicker in the long run to react immediately to his mother-in-law's bombshells. Being ignored simply challenged her to find new levels of deviousness.

‘I am going to cut Charmian out of my will. I'll go up to town and see Mr. Burchfield tomorrow. No daughter of mine can speak to me like that and get away with it. No, at the moment everything's left equally between the two girls. I'm going to change that. I'll make you two my sole beneficiaries.' Oh God, if it weren't so pathetic, it'd be laughable, Graham thought. Such matriarchal gestures might be appropriate for someone who had some property to leave, but for an old woman who survived on subs from her son-in-law, it was grotesque. The only effect of Charmian's exclusion from the will would be to absolve her of responsibility for her mother's debts.

To his surprise, Graham found himself saying, ‘Thank you.' Angry for having done so, he turned again to the door. ‘I must go and sort out these lights.'

‘Oh, before you go,' Merrily cooed, ‘could you just get Mummy a drink? She needs it, she's awfully upset.'

Wordlessly, Graham went across to the drinks cupboard. Though why the hell they couldn't get drinks for themselves . . . why there was this inverse discrimination whereby men were expected to do various fatuous menial tasks and . . .

There was no sherry in the cupboard.

‘No, we finished it last night,' Merrily agreed.

‘But, hell, I bought a new bottle on Thursday evening.'

‘I know, but last night there we were, huddled in the dark like evacuees in the Underground during the Blitz . . .'

It wasn't worth pointing out to her that anyone who was an evacuee wouldn't have been in the Underground during the Blitz. ‘If you knew there wasn't any there, why the hell did you ask me to get her a drink?'

‘Oh,' Merrily replied skittishly. ‘I meant get her a drink from the off-licence.'

It was after ten by the time Graham finally got to his ‘study' and opened the other two unwelcome surprises. He did so by candlelight, because changing all the fuses and barking his knuckles severely had not brought back the power supply.

In view of this, the first unwelcome letter was ironic. It was a written estimate from the electrician who had been so gloomy about the house's wiring. For reasons which were certainly not explained and would probably only be comprehensible to another electrician, he had seen fit to raise the price from one thousand four hundred to a round two thousand pounds. Excluding V.A.T.

The second letter was from the bank. Its tone was even less friendly than the previous one. In spite of warnings, the Marshalls' overdraft had increased and the manager demanded a ‘speedy settlement'; if this was not forthcoming, he threatened ‘withdrawal of facilities'.

Graham sat for some time over cheque book and calculator, trying the sums in a variety of ways, but the overdraft he came up with was still one hundred and fifty pounds short of the figure the bank quoted. The thought that the bank's computer had made a mistake began to glow inside him. He liked the idea of computers being fallible; it seemed in some way to strike back at Robert Benham. He started to frame sarcasms for the letter he would write to the manager.

‘Are you coming to bed?'

Merrily's voice fluted behind him. She leaned childishly in the doorframe, a nightdress like an oversize T-shirt sagging from the sharp edges of her body.

‘I will be soon. You haven't been doing any joint account cheques I don't know about, have you?'

‘No. I don't think so. Not big ones.'

‘Good. The bank manager's got a –'

‘Oh, except for Henry and Emma's music lessons . . .'

That turned out to be the missing figure. Seventy-five pounds for each child. Graham felt too tired even to lose his temper. He made some caustic remark and turned back to his calculator.

He assumed Merrily had gone and was surprised, two minutes later, to hear her repeat, ‘I said, are you coming to bed?' Fourteen years of marriage had not left any room for ambiguity in the invitation. He swung his chair round to contemplate his wife. But he was too angry and the memory of Tara Liston's perfect proportions was too recent for him to feel any stirring of lust.

‘No, not yet,' he replied.

She came across to him and, with that mistaken sense of timing she shared with her mother, kissed his lips and fumbled down at the inert folds of his lap.

He jerked his head away. Merrily's hand came up to either side of his face, holding him in imitation of some film she had once seen.

‘Who is it, Graham?'

‘What?'

‘Who is the woman you're seeing?'

‘Merrily . . .' Weariness at her stupidity sapped him.

‘No, come on. Am I expected to believe this story about spending the weekend with your new boss?' Her small voice had grown squeaky with emotion. ‘Go on, are you going to tell me who it is?'