Widows and Orphans

by Michael Arditti

Genres: Family Life; Marriage & Divorce; Literary Fiction; Small Town & Rural

Synopsis

Lyrical and witty, moving and profound: the story of a good man fighting for his principles in a hostile world

'An uncomfortable but very readable novel about the careless greeds of the way we live now' Helen Dunmore, Guardian

'A Graham Greene for our time' Spectator

'There are splendidly comic scenes worthy of Alan Ayckbourn' Ham and High

The Francombe & Salter Mercury has served the residents of two South Coast resorts for over 150 years. Hit by both the economic decline and the advent of new technology, Duncan Neville, the latest member of his family to occupy the editor's chair, is struggling to keep the paper afloat. Duncan's personal life is in similar disarray as he juggles the demands of his elderly mother, disaffected son, harassed ex-wife and devoted secretary.

Meanwhile, a childhood friend turned bitter rival unveils plans to rebuild the dilapidated pier, which, while promising to revive the town's fortunes, threaten its traditional ethos. Then Duncan meets Ellen, a recent divorcee, who has moved to Francombe with her two teenage children.

By turns lyrical, witty and poignant, Widows and Orphans casts an unflinching eye over the joys and adversities of contemporary life and paints a masterful portrait of a decent man fighting for his principles in a hostile world.

Release date: February 17, 2016

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 349

Sample

by Ken Newbold

Thursday, 19 September 2013

Francombe watched in horror on Monday night as a sea of flames swept through its historic pier, reducing much of the 980 foot structure to ashes and rubble.


For ten hours, seventy firemen and eight fire engines battled the blaze, their rescue efforts hampered by high winds and poor visibility. Roads were closed and nearby residents advised to keep their windows shut.

Sam Vernham, chief fire officer of Sussex Fire and Rescue Service, confirmed that the cause of the fire had yet to be established. ‘Full investigation must wait until structural engineers give us the go-ahead. Meanwhile, I urge people not to speculate, which will only cause more distress to those affected.’

This is the latest in a string of disasters to hit the 144-year-old pier. An earlier fire in June 2000 destroyed the Moorish pavilion. The pier itself was closed to the general public in June 2008, after two of its support columns were found to be in imminent danger of collapse.

In March 2009, a Save Our Pier petition, organised by the Mercury, attracted over 15,000 signatures and, in May 2011, Francombe Borough Council finally approved the com+pulsory purchase of the Grade II listed building from its Panamanian-based owners, Rockingham Securities. Last May, the Council narrowly voted to sell the pier to Weedon Investments, owned by controversial local entrepreneur, Geoffrey Weedon, whose plans for it have yet to be disclosed.


After surveying the devastation, Glynis Kingswood, Chair of the Francombe Pier Trust, declared: ‘This is a tragedy. The pier is Francombe and Francombe is the pier. We must all work together to rebuild this unique piece of our heritage.’




Of all the campaigns Duncan had launched in nearly thirty years at the helm of the Mercury, the one to secure the future of the pier remained closest to his heart. After three years during which the structure had been left to rot, the paper had set up the Save Our Pier petition, attracting the signatures of almost a fifth of Francombe’s residents; given away 10,000 stickers that had been plastered on windows, windscreens, walls and the Diamond Jubilee statue of Queen Victoria; and organised a Day of Protest in September 2009, which saw more than 2,000 people march on the Town Hall to demand that the Council take immediate action to purchase the pier from its absentee owners.


The march, extensively reported in the national media, achieved its objective. After a further two years of legal wrangling and a costly programme of emergency repairs, the Council assumed control of the pier. Meanwhile, the Francombe Pier Trust was established with the aim of restoring and running the pier as a viable local concern; but, although the Trust was awarded an £85,000 feasibility grant by English Heritage to conduct a structural survey and draw up architectural plans, it failed to obtain capital funding from either the Heritage Lottery or the EU. This bitter blow was compounded in May 2013 when the Council announced that, in view of both the Trust’s inability to raise finance and the assessors’ estimate that a sum in excess of £25,000,000 would be needed to repair the fabric, plus a similar amount to resume operation, it had agreed to sell the pier to Weedon Investments. Duncan, who attacked the decision in a series of hard-hitting editorials, had never given up hope that the sale might be revoked – until the fire.

For Duncan, the pier had always been the best of Francombe. At school, his home town had been derided by boys who, if they holidayed in England at all, headed for the more refined reaches of Cornwall and Suffolk. Even in its Victorian heyday, it had never enjoyed the prestige of its neighbouring resorts. While Brighton, Eastbourne and Worthing attracted the affluent middle classes, Francombe catered to ‘clerks and other working people’ from London’s East End. By the 1960s, any lingering claims to gentility had been abandoned in a welter of binge drinking and gang warfare. But amid the bug-infested guesthouses, grimy pubs, litter-strewn beaches and vomit-splattered pavements, one monument remained unsullied. From the octagonal tollbooths and glass-covered Winter Garden to the multi-domed pavilion and horseshoe arcade, the pier stood comparison with any in the country.


The midget photographer with the monkey that never blinked; the gypsy fortune teller with the aniseed-scented booth; the sad-faced silhouettist with scissors as adept as a brush; the flea circus boasting ‘the smallest big top in the world’: these formed the pattern of Duncan’s childhood memories, as they did for so many in Francombe. Then in 1969 when he was five years old, there was the unforgettable celebration of the Mercury’s centenary. His father hired the pavilion for a banquet attended by his entire staff, past and present, and a host of local luminaries. Duncan, pledged to be on his best behaviour, sat rigidly through the profusion of speeches, disgracing himself only once when he asked in a piercing whisper why the Mayor was wearing a necklace. He danced with his mother, his sister Alison and, as she had never ceased to remind him, his father’s young secretary, Sheila. He watched the fireworks, which magically spelt out Mercury and 100 Years across the night sky. Then, lulled by the swash of the waves against the columns, he fell fast asleep.


Emerging from his reverie with an acute sense of loss, Duncan was tempted to approve the dummy front page with its one-word headline, ‘Gutted’, above a photograph of the pier head smothered in smoke and looking eerily like St Paul’s at the height of the Blitz, but he shied away from the twin offences of sensationalism and sentimentality. Now, more than ever, he was determined to stick to the standards for which the paper was known – and, in some quarters, ridiculed. So, having settled on the more sober ‘Francombe Pier Inferno’, he signed off the page and put the paper to bed.


He walked into the reporters’ room, which as ever contrived to look both cluttered and depleted. Despite the eight empty desks, Ken, the news editor, sat facing his two reporters, Rowena and Brian, at a single desk in the centre, with Stewart, the sub, and Jake, the sports editor, at desks on either side. While Stewart’s was obsessively neat, with even the pens in his tray graded according to size, the others were in varying states of chaos. Files, books and papers were scattered across every surface, along with a hairbrush, make-up bag and headache pills (Rowena), an electric-blue T-shirt and large tub of protein powder (Brian) and, ominously, a spike full of invoices (Ken). Although Mary, the cleaner, made sporadic raids on the news desk, Jake had berated her so often for disturbing his filing system that she had given up on sport, with the result that two half-eaten pizzas rested on a pile of football programmes as if he were preparing a feature on botulism at the ground rather than analysing Francombe FC’s prospects for the new season. Four ancient computer monitors gathered dust beside the packed bookshelves. Slumped over one was Humphrey, a giant teddy bear who had been left unclaimed after a competition and adopted as the office mascot. Much prized for his soothing presence, he was regularly called on to mediate in staff disputes. Whatever layers of irony had once informed Rowena’s You don’t have to be mad to work here but it helps poster had long been worn away.


Although he lacked his father’s easy conviviality, Duncan prided himself on running a close-knit team. Foremost among them was Ken, not only the paper’s news editor but his deputy, a role that had been nominal for the past three years during which he had not taken a single day’s holiday or sick leave. Having, in his own words, ‘fallen in love with journalism’ on his paper round, Ken had been hired as a junior reporter straight from school in 1970. His starting salary was £6 a week, of which he paid £2 to his mother for his keep, £1 on travel, and 30 shillings to the retired secretary who taught him shorthand and typing; sums that seemed as comical to the generations of juniors to whom he described them as did his lifelong dedication to the paper itself. Unlike them, he had never seen the Mercury as a stepping stone to Fleet Street but remained passionately committed to a strong and crusading local press. He had kept the faith for more than four decades, but in recent years it had been severely tested, first by the paper’s relentless struggle to survive and then by his only daughter’s death. In the one human-interest story he chose not to write, he had donated a kidney to her, which her body rejected. ‘It’s a good thing it wasn’t his liver,’ Rowena had said when she found him drunk at his desk.


Rowena herself had been with the paper on and off for almost twenty years, the ‘off’ being the three years she spent at home after her daughter was born: the daughter who, on her parents’ acrimonious divorce, had elected to live with her father, a move that Rowena imputed solely to his greater spending power. This in turn fuelled her resentment of the editor-proprietor who consistently undervalued her. She was forty-five years old, a fact that Duncan acknowledged guiltily, given her objections to the frequency with which women’s ages were printed in the paper compared to men’s. Since her divorce, she had been reluctant to cover anything that might be considered women’s issues, be they jumble sales, zumba classes or multiple births. Meanwhile, she relished every chance, however inopportune, to highlight male hypocrisy, as in a recent piece on a golden wedding when she caustically pointed out that the husband’s claim of not having looked at another woman for fifty years had been ‘flatly contradicted when he fondled my bottom as he showed me out’. She then turned her fire on her male subeditor when the line was cut.

Stewart, the subeditor in question, had been at the paper almost as long as Rowena, although he could not blame his lack of advancement on the demands of childcare when it was the absence of children that had blighted his life. Having struggled for years, first with the stresses of IVF and then with the hormonal changes that the treatment produced in his wife, Gillian, he had finally left her for Laura who, as fate would have it, also failed to conceive. Their hopes of adoption were dashed by Gillian’s damning testimonial. In company he made light of it, citing their greater disposable income, but in private he dropped his guard; Duncan had found him in tears over the story of a woman and her three young children burnt to death by a fallen candle after their electricity was cut off. His emotions were heightened by having to check copy, devise headlines and input pictures for the entire paper. The increased pressure led to errors, such as the once exemplary Mercury printing a photograph of the new Lady Mayoress under the caption ‘Mystery Beast Spotted in the Woods’, eliciting furious protests from the Town Hall.


Like Stewart, Jake had joined the paper as one of a department of three but, unlike Stewart, he relished the chance to run it single-handed. Duncan, whose involvement in sport had ended when he left school and whose interest in it waned after Alison retired from professional tennis, was happy to cede responsibility for the four back pages to a man who was a passionate enthusiast for every kind of game except cricket, for which he displayed such aversion that he insisted on covering it under a pseudonym. A classic armchair enthusiast, Jake was large and lumbering, the balls of paper around the bin a token of his ineptitude. During his first years at the Mercury he lived with his mother, who sent him to work every day with a packet of fish-paste sandwiches. When she died following a massive stroke, he discovered that she had changed her will, leaving her house to the long-estranged sister who had come to nurse her three months before. Duncan was one of many who urged him to contest the will but he refused, preferring to rent a room from an elderly widow, who cooked and cleaned for him, and even made him fish-paste sandwiches. On evenings when he wasn’t at work and she at bingo, they watched television together. Duncan, who had dinner with his mother twice a week, found their domesticity a threat. Brian, on the other hand, claimed that they were conducting a torrid affair. ‘You’re a gerontophile,’ he said, with all the relish of one who had just learnt the word.


Jake’s pained expression made it clear that the idea of such an affair (or, indeed, of any affair) had never occurred to him. ‘What do they teach you at school these days?’ he asked.

This was a question that had long exercised Duncan in respect of his youngest member of staff. Like Ken, Brian had joined the Mercury straight from school, but the intervening four decades had given him a very different outlook. In his three years at the paper he had shown both a genuine desire to learn and a tacit contempt for his teachers. It was impossible to fault either his commitment or his work. Despite the lurid tales of his nightly exploits, which Duncan suspected revealed a talent for fiction as much as for reportage, he was at his desk by 8.30 each morning. He embarked on every assignment that Ken gave him, from Council meetings to ‘death knocks’, with the same enthusiasm that he did his various dates, insisting on the need for experience before he respectively specialised and settled down. He was the one writer who never complained of the extra work involved in maintaining the website (while regularly complaining of the flaws in the site itself). His confusion of brashness with charm would land him in trouble should he ever secure the Fleet Street job he so desperately craved.


While the rest of the staff laughed off Brian’s posturing, Sheila took it seriously. Too shrewd not to realise that his deference was a form of mockery, she nonetheless succumbed to it, responding with a skittishness that only incited him further. Her repeated claim that ‘I’m old enough to be your mother’ was particularly unfortunate, given his calculation that she was old enough to be his grandmother, or even his great-grandmother had she followed the Francombe trend for underage pregnancy. Sheila had joined the staff in 1967 as Duncan’s father’s secretary. Even Duncan, who had known her all his life, found it hard to credit that, along with her shorthand and typing speeds, her chief assets had been her breezy manner and infectious laugh. He could not help equating Sheila’s faded appeal with that of the paper itself. When he restructured the company on his father’s death, Duncan had promoted her to office manager, which, as she wryly remarked, combined her former responsibilities with those of receptionist, administrator and general dogsbody.


In this last capacity she entered the room, bringing the two bottles of wine that Duncan had requested to thank the staff for their efforts in covering the fire. ‘Three for two,’ she whispered to him. ‘I’ve hidden the other one in your desk.’

‘I think we can rise to a third on this occasion,’ he replied, ignoring her frown. ‘Does anyone have a corkscrew? Oh, it’s a screw-top,’ he said, abashed. He poured the South African Shiraz into seven plastic cups, dismissing Jake’s protests that sport had been unaffected by the last-minute page changes. ‘Cheers, one and all! You’ve done the paper proud. For once we’re about more than offloading someone’s old car.’

‘Should shift a few copies,’ Ken said. ‘Your father used to say that readers loved big disasters; it was small ones that bored them.’

‘Cheery chap, your old man!’ Brian said.

‘He was,’ Ken said sharply. ‘A real gent!’

‘Just be grateful that it happened last night,’ Stewart said. ‘Think if it was tonight or tomorrow and we couldn’t cover it till next week!’

‘We’d look more out of touch than ever,’ Rowena said, swilling her wine so rapidly that Duncan felt aggrieved.

‘Don’t forget the website,’ Brian said. ‘I’m updating it every couple of hours. Not that there’s much new. Just a load of hot air from the usual suspects. “This is a sad day for Francombe” and all that!’


‘Well, isn’t it?’ Duncan asked mildly.

‘Yeah, but you know as well as me that none of them have set foot on the pier for years.’

‘No one has,’ Ken said. ‘In case it’s escaped your notice, it’s been closed for the past five.’

‘Any word yet on a possible cause?’ Sheila asked.

‘At last time of asking, the firemen still hadn’t been given the green light to go in,’ Ken said.

‘It’s obviously arson,’ Rowena said.

‘Why obviously?’ Sheila asked.


‘Who stands to benefit? Weedon, of course.’

Duncan was glad to hear Rowena voice suspicions that, given his personal connections, he was wary of voicing himself.

‘I don’t see why,’ Jake said, as ever favouring natural causes. ‘It only means they’ll have to rebuild – or at any rate underpin – the structure.’

‘They were doing that anyway. That is, if the sale went ahead. Who’s going to fight it now? Who else has the cash? Not you and your Trust, Duncan?’

‘Empty pockets, I’m afraid. We’ve come to the end of the road.’

‘No offence,’ Brian said. ‘But why all this fuss about a pile of crumbling masonry? No one I know would be seen dead on it, except to laugh at the grockles.’

‘It’s those grockles, as you so graciously put it, who keep Francombe afloat,’ Duncan said. ‘Our business plan showed that since the pier’s been out of action the town’s lost 600,000 visitors a year and millions of pounds of income.’

‘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’ like 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, hav