Simon Brett - A Shock to the System

Robert and Graham walked back to the car, parked illegally but unmolested, on double yellow lines. Now, thought Graham, now it comes. Now we get on to work, now I find out the purpose of the weekend.

But it didn’t come. Robert talked affably of irrelevancies, showing interest in Graham’s life, asking about his house, his family. Graham answered warily, waiting for the bite.

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?’