success’.
CHAPTER TWO
It was after the move into the Boileau Avenue house that things began to change. Whether the change was for good or for bad was not at first clear — certainly there was no sense of things ‘going wrong’, but events of the ensuing six months produced a marked difference in Graham’s attitude to his life and circumstances.
First, there was money. He had, needless to say, done his sums carefully and knew that the house was a good long-term investment. But the property market was sluggish. There seemed to be no immediate sign that prices would rise, as they had done so gratifyingly over the previous decade.
And the outgoings on the new house were considerable. The Marshalls had dispensed with a private pre- purchase survey. Graham, in unconscious echo of his father’s manner, had announced that, since the building society was prepared to lend so much money on the property, there couldn’t be much wrong with it. This economy was rewarded by a sudden bill for woodworm treatment, which ate up what was left of their savings after the expenses of the move.
Graham and Merrily had prepared theoretically for certain retrenchments after they moved, but they found their reality unpalatable. Ten years of living above their income had nourished habits of extravagance which they found hard to break. The spectre of worrying about money, which had loomed over Graham’s childhood but been exorcised in his early twenties by success at Crasoco, threatened to rise again.
Their altered circumstances were reflected in that year’s holiday. Instead of the customary fortnight in Cyprus, they decided to economise by renting a cottage in South Wales. Appalling weather ensured that the holiday was a disaster and necessitated long drives to find diversions for the children, which made the whole exercise almost as expensive as going abroad.
The children did not enjoy it and were not of an age to disguise their disappointment. Graham found he spent much of the holiday shouting at them. They had lost the charm which smallness had imparted, and their physical development presaged worse problems ahead. Henry already had the downy lip, swelling nose and moody secrets of adolescence. Emma, though only eleven, had lost her spontaneity of affection and replaced it with a kind of mannered coquettishness, which augured badly for the future.
Also, they were getting expensive. Both went to private schools and, apart from the inevitable cost of replacing the clothes they outgrew with such rapidity, they were getting to the age of costly entertainments. Graham found himself sounding more and more like his father as he grudgingly paid out for school trips or cinema seats or the hire of tennis courts. They seemed incapable of doing anything that didn’t cost money.
And, as they grew more expensive, so he seemed to get less out of them. They were just two young people who happened to be growing up in his house, and at his expense. When he looked at them objectively he realised they held no interest for him whatever.
The habit of objectivity, or even remoteness, increasingly coloured his view of his wife, too. Having not thought about her much for some years, he now found he was looking at her as an outsider might.
And what did the outsider see? A thin, materialistic, rather silly woman of nearly forty.
The waiflike beauty which had been crowned with flowers at their wedding had hardened into angularity. Childbearing had deflated the breasts and spread the hips. And the waiflike charm which went with the appearance had degenerated into empty mannerism.
There was no split in the marriage. They were faithful to each other, and still made love at least once a week, murmuring apposite endearments as they did so. But love-making had become routine for both of them, almost a chore, better than stacking the dishwasher, but less exciting than having a gin and tonic.
As he had with his children, Graham now looked increasingly at his wife with detachment. He realised, with only the mildest of shocks, that she meant nothing to him.
And she did bring with her positive disadvantages, mostly in the form of her mother. Initially, Graham had got on well with Lilian Hinchcliffe. He enjoyed the reflection of her fame as an actress, and the studied bohemianism of her lifestyle contrasted favourably with his own parents’ mouselike reticence. Visits to Lilian’s cottage near Abingdon ensured varied — sometimes eminent — company, plentiful alcohol and occasional cannabis. Her extravagant personality and his limited connection, through her, with the unconventional world of show business gave him an extra dimension to his colleagues. He could still hold attention in the Crasoco canteen with accounts of her outrageousness, of her much-vaunted affairs, of the fifteen-year marriage to Charmian and Merrily’s playwright father (long vanished into alcoholism and death), and, more significantly, of the supposed early liaison with the internationally known and fabulously wealthy film actor, William Essex. All these details gave Graham’s mother-in- law very positive advantages.
But Lilian changed as she grew older. Her youthful looks, skilfully maintained into her sixties, suddenly gave way, and cosmetic attempts to repair them made her grotesque. Round the same period, acting work seemed to dry up, and her longterm live-in lover, a costume designer, suddenly dropped dead of a heart attack. The extravagance of her character, so charming in company, curdled, with loneliness, into resentment and contrivance. She made increasing emotional demands on her two daughters, particularly Merrily. Charmian, having broken off an unsatisfactory marriage, lived a career girl existence on the fringes of journalism. Lilian blamed her for not producing a nice set of grandchildren like Merrily, who, as a result, had the dubious privilege of being the favoured daughter.
The climax of Lilian’s emotional demands came in September 1980, with a suicide attempt. It was hopelessly inept. She left a blackmailing note and she tried to kill herself by swallowing paint stripper, of all things, though the small amount she took exposed the true nature of the gesture.
As a cry for help, however, it worked; it was agreed that she was too isolated out in Abingdon, and she was moved into a flat in Barnes to be nearer her daughters (or, more strictly, her younger daughter, since Charmian lived in Islington).
This made Lilian a semi-permanent fixture round the Boileau Avenue house. Graham didn’t mind that, so much as the fact that he seemed to have to keep subsidising her. She had had money in her time, but spent it all with a ready prodigality. Now she always seemed to be hard-up, and Merrily was constantly asking Graham for small sums to help her mother out.
He resented it. But more than the fact that she was poor, he resented the fact that she was not rich. Though appreciating the advantages his parents had given him by education, he could not help noticing, as he felt his financial circumstances straiten, the even greater advantages enjoyed by contemporaries who had inherited, or stood to inherit, money.
The biggest blow of a bad six months came at the end of November when Graham’s father and mother were both killed in a car crash.
Though he had not of latter years seen them that often, and though his relationship with them was not a particularly affectionate one, he felt the shock profoundly.
First, there was just the shock of a disaster, an intensified form of that experienced on passing a road accident or hearing news of a plane crash.
This was followed by a feeling of anger, almost contempt, towards his father. For Eric Marshall and his wife’s deaths seemed to cast doubt on the principles of economy by which they had run their entire lives. The accident, Graham discovered from the police, need not have happened. His father, for whom saving money became an obsession as he grew older, had insisted on doing his own car maintenance. It was his inefficiency, in failing to tighten the wheel nuts adequately after a tyre-change, which had led to the fatal crash. For Graham, this knowledge diminished his father’s memory.
All of Eric Marshall’s dicta now seemed suspect. The old line that ‘there’ll always be jobs for teachers’ took on a new irony with the growing recession, and the much-vaunted economy was also shown to be based on a false premise. A lifetime’s scrimping had produced virtually nothing to pass on to the next generation. Eric Marshall left no will (another supposed economy) and so legal fees took a large bite from the proceeds of the Mitcham house sale.
But the greatest shock was the slowest to come. Since he had seen so little of his parents, and felt so little for them, it took Graham a long time to define the void that their deaths left in him.
