Meltdown (32 page)

‘It’s not about
giving in
,’ Monica snapped, ‘and it’s not about you either, Jim. This is about Toby and—’

‘Exactly, Mon! It’s all about Toby and we
have
to give Toby the chance to make this work. If we start trying to cosset him now, trying to hide him from God knows what, wrapping him in cotton wool and locking the world out, he’s going to look back and say that we didn’t have any faith in him. That we didn’t think he could cut it in the real world. That we didn’t have enough respect for him to believe that he could survive stuff that most kids see as part and parcel of everyday life.’

‘But . . . but he’s so . . .’ Monica didn’t get any further. She was trying not to cry.

‘Think about it, Mon. Seriously. What will he say when he’s ten? Twelve? Fifteen? Sitting at home with a mad stir-crazy mum who’s trying to simultaneously hothouse him for Cambridge and stop him ever meeting any other children? I don’t know, maybe home education works for some people, geniuses or whatever. But Toby’s not a genius. He’s an ordinary kid. Like we were. I’d have
hated
home education. Wouldn’t you? I’d rather have faced Caterham any day than be the weird kid with the weird mum. In fact I
did
face Caterham. You did too. We both went to state primaries and . . .’

‘It was different then, and we started at the start, not in the middle, and it wasn’t in London and—’

‘I don’t like it, Monica!’ Jimmy said, more firm than gentle now. ‘I wish it was different but it isn’t. It’s hard. It’s going to be tough on all of us, mainly Tobes, but we have to face this together, as a family.’

Monica smiled.

‘God. We’ve role-reversed, you bastard,’ she said. ‘I’ve gone all stupid and impetuous and you’re pretending to be wise.’

‘I used up all my stupid, gambling our entire lives on a massive property development,’ Jimmy said, taking her hand. ‘I’m all stupided out right now.’

Together they went upstairs and looked in on their son.

‘He’s just so posh,’ Monica whispered unhappily as they stared down at him. ‘We’ve made him so posh. And now we’re going to send him to
Caterham
.’

‘We’ll just have to help him with that, Mon,’ Jimmy whispered back. ‘We’ll do it. I promise.’

And so in the remaining time that Toby had at Abbey Hall and in the brief school-holiday period that followed, Monica and Jimmy found themselves desperately trying to get Toby not to speak posh.

They began with the glottal stop.

‘There are no Ts in
got to
, Tobes,’ Jimmy would explain, ‘not any more. It’s a single word,
go-ah
to rhyme with
shocker,
as in
sorry, mate, I’ve go-ah go now
.’

It was a near-impossible task to undo five years of expensively acquired grammar and pronunciation in a matter of weeks. There was no accent posher than the accent of a pre-pubescent boy who has attended an expensive English prep school. Later on, those boys would deliberately acquire a kind of slurred Mockney which, although still posh, would at least be twenty-first-century posh. But at seven years old they all sounded like Victorian choirboys or Oliver Twist in the 1948 David Lean movie. It made Monica weep to hear it.

‘They’ll
kill
him,’ she whispered desperately to Jimmy, but Jimmy persevered.

‘Tobes, mate,’ he said, ‘it’s
’orrible
, not
h-orrible
. The H is silent. All Hs are silent from now on, OK? Hs are the enemy. Repeat after me,
I ’appen to ’ave an ’orrible ’eadache
.’

Every man for himself

‘Roop?’

The voice on the other end sounded buoyant enough but artificially so. Rupert trying to sound pleasant was never going to convince.

‘Hello, Jimmy. What can I do for you?’

‘I’ve tried five times this morning. You never pick up.’

‘So I’ve picked up now. What’s on your mind?’

‘Mate, I need to ask a favour.’

‘Well, you can ask, Jim.’

Jimmy tried to laugh. Laugh as if nothing had changed between him and his old friend. Laugh as they had laughed together just a few months before, when it had seemed that they owned London.

Jimmy did not own London any more, not any part of it. Certainly not his own house or the street he had bought against it. It had been only two months since his redundancy but already he had come to realize that the bits he had thought he owned actually owned him, holding him tight in a vicious coil of debt.

‘OK, here goes,’ Jimmy said. ‘One of your guys from the RLB says there’s a possibility that they might have to foreclose on Webb Street. I mean, that’s got to be a joke, right? They’re not going to do that.’

There was silence on the line.

‘Roop?’ said Jimmy. ‘You still there?’

‘Still here.’

‘Well, what do you think?’

‘Sorry. I didn’t realize you’d finished.’

‘Well, I have. They say they might want to foreclose.’

‘They might. I mean if you can’t service the interest on your debt.’

‘Rupert, I have a cash-flow problem. I’ve lost my job. I won’t be getting a bonus this year.’

‘I know that, Jim. What do you want me to say?’

Suddenly Jimmy was angry. Rupert was being an arse.

‘That you’ll call off your people, Rupert! Obviously that’s what I want you to say.’

‘This is a branch issue, Jimmy. I’m the bloody CEO.’

‘Exactly. You’re the bloody boss.’

‘It’s a branch issue, Jim.’

‘Rupert, you encouraged me to take out the mortgages. To go for the whole street! It was your idea. Now the street’s worth less than the debt and falling. I’m fucked.’

‘You’re an adult, Jim. Are you saying that your decisions are my fault?’

‘No, but . . .’

‘But what, Jimmy? What are you saying?’

There was a pause.

‘I’m saying that I’m currently fucked.’

‘And what do you want me to do about it?’

‘I want you to pick up the phone to your Hackney team and tell them to back off and give me some space.’

‘And what excuse should I offer? That you’re my mate?’

‘Why do you need an excuse? You’re the boss.’

‘And how long do you think I’d stay the boss if it was known that I run the bank as a limit-free credit facility?’

‘But that’s exactly how you
did
fucking run it, Rupert!’ Jimmy shouted. ‘That’s why I’m in this shit.’

‘We don’t give credit any more,’ Rupert said. ‘We’ve stopped lending and I’m afraid to say, Jim, that we want our money back. It’s not personal and you have no right to make it so. A lot of people are in the same situation as you.’

There was nothing more to discuss.

‘See you, Roop,’ Jimmy said quietly.

‘See you, Jim. Love to Mon.’

‘Yeah. Love to Amanda.’

‘Beatrice.’

‘Oh yeah, that’s right. Beatrice.’

Jimmy turned off his phone, cursing himself for wasting money on such a pointless call. He knew Rupert. Why had he expected any result other than zero?

Sitting in his office at the Royal Lancashire Bank, Rupert hung up the phone too. The bank might want its money back but Rupert knew that it wasn’t going to get it. Not from Jimmy or from any of its thousands of defaulting debtors. In fact, the truth was it had never had the money in the first place, not much of it anyway, and its capital had long since been swallowed up in the mountain of bad debt that Rupert had generated, lending all those excitingly vast sums of non-existent money.

The bank was broke. He knew it and shortly so would the world.

A negotiated settlement

Amanda had given up trying to be nice about her ex-husband in front of their children.

‘Your father left us because he’s a selfish, silly man who wanted to be with a girl half his age,’ she would tell them, immune to the confusion and sadness this provoked in children who had been brought up to see their father as some sort of god.

‘Why the hell should I lie?’ Amanda said. ‘I could tell them a lot worse. I simply refuse to bring them up in some fantasy that he still loves them really, so that he can waltz back into their lives when they’re adults and blame it all on me. That’s what happens, you know. The mum gets left with all the work and the hurt while the bloody shag rat becomes some jolly but remote figure who only has the fun bits and keeps dropping hints about mum never having been the easiest person to live with. They’ll end up blaming me, I know they will, so fuck him. He’s a bastard, a selfish bastard, and I will
not
lie to our children about it. If he had loved them as much as they thought he did, he would not have broken up their fucking home because he’d gone ga-ga over some bit of totty who no doubt never has a headache and sucks like a Hoover.’

Amanda had taken a firm and aggressive line from the start, but it got firmer and more aggressive with subsequent developments as the iron that Rupert had thrust into her soul hardened in its intensity.

First and to no one’s surprise but Rupert’s, it seemed, Beatrice managed to get herself pregnant. Monica and Lizzie had spotted that one coming a mile off. They’d whispered it to each other on the very first occasion that Rupert had introduced Beatrice to the gang.

‘The girl’s just besotted with Rupert,’ Monica said, ‘and she’s terrified he’ll eventually feel so guilty about his kids he’ll go back to them.’

‘If she knows Roop at all,’ Lizzie replied, ‘she’ll know he doesn’t do guilt.’

‘Everyone does guilt in some way or other. It just depends what about,’ Monica said. ‘In the end, private stuff can get even the biggest bastard. Hitler did guilt. You know, over that niece who killed herself. Jimmy was watching a documentary about it on the History Channel.’

‘They should call it the Third Reich Channel, that’s all they ever seem to talk about. Robbo loves it.’

‘Yes, well, Hitler had the SS put flowers on her grave every year.’

‘Yes, Mon,’ said Lizzie, ‘but that was Hitler. We’re talking about Rupert.’

Whether Monica or Lizzie was right about Rupert’s capacity for human emotion and the likelihood of it leading him to return to his family, Beatrice had undoubtedly made the equation more complex by providing him with a second one.

‘The bastard!’ Amanda railed. ‘A fucking
baby
. Our youngest is only five! I suppose he’s imagining they’re going to
play
together and that I’m going to pal up with fucking Beatrice for the good of the extended family! Well, fuck that! No. Seriously.
Fuck
that! I will never have the bitch or her brat
near
my kids.’

The news of the pregnancy had been hard enough for Amanda to take but when, in the light of the sudden and crippling credit crunch, Rupert attempted to renegotiate the terms of their divorce she went apoplectic. For here was an opportunity not only for outrage but, more importantly, for
revenge
.

The original divorce had been swift and businesslike. Rupert knew that whatever he did he was going to end up handing over half, so he might as well get on with it rather than rack up a million quid’s worth of lawyers’ fees pursuing a pointless exercise in avoidance. Amanda was not stupid and she knew her rights. They’d been married for thirteen years, they had two children and there was no way on earth she was going to let him fight her anywhere but London or LA, where the law was clear.

‘I’m buggered for half so bring it on,’ Rupert said to the lads over a boys’ curry convened to discuss the issue.

‘Quite right too, you bastard.’ Henry grinned. ‘Besides which, what difference does it make? Half of a squillion is still a squillion as far as I can see. You’ve still got more than you could ever possibly need.’

‘I always need more, mate. That’s why I get it.’

‘Personally I think you should be screwed till the pips squeak,’ David said.

‘I am being, mate!’ Rupert said with a wink and what he clearly believed was a rakish smile. ‘Believe me, I am being.’

‘Oh please!’ Jimmy protested. ‘You absolute wanker.’

‘Did you ever think what this does to us?’ David said.

‘No, as a matter of fact I didn’t. Not even slightly,’ Rupert replied. ‘What does it do to you?’

‘Well, first and foremost it puts all our girls on the defensive. We have to defend
ourselves
for your shagging.’

‘Not following,’ Rupert said. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’m talking about months of “Don’t you go doing it” and “If you do, bloody tell me so I can do it first.”’

‘He’s right actually,’ Henry said. ‘The first thing Jane said to me when we heard was “Oh, I suppose you’re jealous and now you want to run off with a twenty-year-old yourself.” Amazing. I hadn’t said a word. Not a bloody word, but she acted as if I’d been behind the whole thing.’

‘The minute one bloke goes off with a younger girl,’ David said, ‘all the other girls get nervous and belligerent. That’s what you’ve done to us.’

‘Well, I’m sorry,’ Rupert replied smugly, ‘but I do not arrange my private affairs primarily to make your totty feel good about themselves.’

‘We’d noticed,’ David snapped.

‘Anyway, it’s all over now, thank God,’ Rupert went on. ‘Done and dusted, so everyone can forget about it. Amanda can have all the stuff, the houses, the cash, three of the cars and the art. I’ll just keep the vintage Lamborghini, my golf clubs and the share options.’

‘She’ll see through that,’ Henry sneered. ‘RLB shares doubled in value last year and will again this year. By next year it’ll be as if you’d never given anything away at all.’

‘Property isn’t doing so badly either,’ Rupert replied.

‘Not as well as the Royal Lancashire Bank, mate.’

‘Nothing does as well as the RLB,’ said Jimmy and Rupert conceded this point with a wry grin.

‘Fortunately for me,’ he said, ‘Amanda loves the art. Let’s face it, she chose it all. And besides, for some reason she has a sentimental attitude to the property.’