‘If I hadn’t looked at the finances, I’d still be in a state of pristine ignorance, wouldn’t I?’
‘So. You just went into my office and helped yourself.’
Dad, I thought, Dad! Don’t say that to her.
‘Are you honestly,’ Mum’s voice turned quivery, ‘telling me – me, Michael, me – that I’m not allowed into your office? That your filing cabinets are out of bounds for me as well as the children? Are you?’
Dad said nothing.
‘Call me old fashioned, but I think a wife who discovers her husband is in hock to the tune of five thousand pounds is entitled to some pretty bloody straight answers.’
I felt sick, cold and old.
‘And where,’ Dad finally said, ‘did this sudden interest in accountancy spring from?’
‘Why have you remortgaged our house?’
The Tomorrow’s World presenter was gluing himself to the ceiling of the studio. ‘British brains dream up a chemical bond stronger than gravity!’ The presenter grinned. ‘You can bet your life on it!’
‘Right. Then I’ll tell you why, shall I?’
‘I do wish you would.’
‘Rescheduling.’
‘Are you trying,’ Mum did a half-laugh, ‘to dazzle me with jargon?’
‘It’s not jargon. It’s rescheduling. Please don’t go all hysterical on me because—’
‘How am I supposed to respond, Michael? Using our house as security! Then the money gets paid out in tidy parcels to God knows where. Or is it to God knows who?’
‘What,’ Dad went quiet as death, ‘do you mean by that?’
‘I politely ask you what is going on,’ Mum’d backed off from some sort of brink, ‘and all I get is evasion. Can you tell me what I’m supposed to think? Please? Because I don’t understand what’s—’
‘Exactly, Helena! Thank you! You just put your finger on it! You don’t understand! I took out the loan because there was a shortfall! I know money is for the little people to sort out, but as you may have noticed while you did your Sherlock Holmes act this afternoon, we’ve got thumping great ruddy mortgage payments to keep up on the first mortgage! Insurance premiums on all this junk you insist on buying! Utility bills! Your blessed kitchen and your new Royal ruddy Doulton dinner service – that we’ll use to impress your sister and Brian twice a year at most – to pay for! Your car to be replaced whenever its ashtray’s gone out of fashion! And now, now, you’ve decided life isn’t worth living without…new adventures in landscape gardening!’
‘Voice, Michael. The kids’ll hear.’
‘That never seems to worry you.’
‘Now you’re getting hysterical.’
‘Right. “Hysterical”. Fine. You asked for a suggestion, Helena, so here we go. I suggest that you spend your waking life in meetings, more bloody meetings, get blamed for staff shortages, for stock leakages, for disappointing balance sheets. I suggest you bugger up your back clocking up twenty, twenty-five, thirty thousand road miles per year! Then, then, you are welcome to call me hysterical. Until then, I’d be grateful if you didn’t give me the third bloody degree on how I choose to juggle your bills. That’s my suggestion.’
Dad stomped upstairs.
He’s slamming his filing-cabinet drawers.
Mum hasn’t left the dining room. I hope to God she isn’t crying.
Wish Tomorrow’s World would open up and swallow me.
War’s an auction where whoever can pay most in damage and still be standing wins. The news is bad. Brian Hanrahan said the landing at San Carlos Bay was the bloodiest day for the Royal Navy since the Second World War. The hills blocked our radar so we didn’t see the warplanes coming till they were right on top of us. The clear morning was a gift to the Argentinians. They attacked the main ships, not the troop transporters, ’cause once the task force is sunk, our land forces’ll be easy to pick off. HMS Ardent was sunk. HMS Brilliant is crippled. HMS Antrim and HMS Argonaut are out of the war for good. TV’s been showing the same pictures, all day. An enemy Mirage III-E sharks through a skyful of Sea Cats and Sea Wolfs and Sea Slugs. Water spouts kerboom in the bay. Black smoke pours from the hull of the Ardent. For the first time we saw the Falkland Islands themselves. Treeless, houseless, hedgeless, no colours bar greys and greens. Julia said it’s like the Hebrides and she’s right. (We went to Mull three years ago for the rainiest holiday in Taylor history, but the best one. Me and Dad played Subbuteo the entire week. I was Liverpool, he was Nottingham Forest.) Brian