Simon Brett - A Shock to the System

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?’

Was it from now on to be his fate, Graham wondered, to be accused of peccadillos he had not committed, while his great crime went undetected? Again he felt the exhausted urge to laugh, but he restrained himself.

‘No, Merrily, I am not.’

She looked at him with what was designed to be a searching, reproachful look, and walked out of the room. He watched her go, irritated by her irrelevance.

Before she was out of sight, she was out of his mind.

Money.

That was the main problem. Somehow he had to raise his income, or cut their expenses. He felt his father’s meanness rising in him, and hated it. He wanted country cottages and boats and expensive women, not that awful small-minded cheese-paring to which he too now seemed to be sentenced.

He got out a bank statement, resentfully remembering the number of occasions he had seen Eric Marshall do the same, and started to check through the regular payments.

There was only one that could be reduced and make any worthwhile saving. It was the figure of nearly a hundred pounds paid each month to an insurance company, the endowment part of their endowment mortgage. If he could convert the mortgage back to a simple one. . The endowment was a good long-term investment, but his problems had to be resolved in the shortterm. He reached for the folder which contained all the documents relating to their recent house purchase.