Meltdown (33 page)

‘For
some reason
?’ Henry spluttered. ‘You’ve brought up your children in it!’

‘Yes,’ Rupert agreed. ‘That’s probably it.’

And so the divorce had been finalized on a relatively equitable trade-off between Rupert and Amanda’s considerable property portfolio, art investments and cash assets against their RLB and other banking stocks and shares.

‘I know he’s done better out of it,’ Amanda told the girls, ‘and I know he’ll have found a way to hide some stock somewhere, but what can I do? If I know one thing about Rupert it’s that he’s good with money . . . Sometimes I wonder whether that’s the only thing I
do
know about him. Anyway, as I see it I can accept a deal which gives me everything I love but let him rip me off. Or I can fight him, have him get belligerent, probably lose stuff I want – and do you know what? In the end he’ll still find a way to rip me off.’

Amanda took the children to the country. She needed distance and besides, there were a number of prep schools she wished to visit. The eight-year-old had got quite out of hand since his father had left and she felt he needed discipline. She opened the envelope containing the decree nisi on the train and surprised herself by having a little cry.

Rupert didn’t cry. He punched the air, flexed his muscles in the bedroom mirror and flew Beatrice to Paris for dinner. His life was about to reignite! He was still hugely rich, he was no longer encumbered by numerous properties or the constant presence of children and he had a
twenty-two-year-old
girlfriend. He was a student once more! A multi-multi-millionaire student. He was in a position to grab his young girlfriend and party for years to come.

It was over dinner in Paris that Beatrice dropped her monumental bucket of piss on Rupert’s parade.

‘No, I won’t have any champagne, darling,’ she said, a look of nervous exhilaration crossing her features. ‘I don’t think I should . . .’

‘Should?’

I’m four weeks late, you see.’

Rupert stared at her over his oysters, his face also nervous but with no sign of exhilaration.

‘Late?’ he stammered. ‘You mean late as in
late
?’

Beatrice’s reply was to giggle coyly.

‘But you’re on the pill!’ Rupert snapped. ‘You
can’t
be pregnant.’

‘Yes, well, you see, I was counting up and actually I think I forgot one or two . . . You’re always so
demanding
when it comes to bedtime I get in a spin.’ Beatrice’s look was no longer nervous. There was a touch of defiance now. ‘You are pleased, aren’t you, darling? After all, we do love each other. You did
say
.’

Rupert didn’t reply. Yes, he’d said he loved her. And he did. He loved her for the wonderful, unencumbered, sexy girl she had been.

Now she was going to be . . . a mum.

His second student life had lasted less than a day.

Beatrice smiled a big, innocent smile and poured herself a mineral water.

‘What’s really great is that it will only be five years younger than your youngest,’ she said. ‘They can be proper siblings.’

They returned from Paris the next morning and Rupert spent the following week trying to decide what to do. Could he pay her off? She absolutely refused to get rid of it.

However, events took a hand and Rupert found himself with more to worry about than whether he’d still fancy Beatrice when she had piles, reflux and intermittent bladder control. Out of the blue the financial sector went into free fall. What had happened to Caledonian Granite the previous year was now happening to the entire British banking system. All the banks, but most particularly the Royal Lancashire, were suddenly exposed as shouldering enormous debts, debts far, far greater than any assets they could possibly have. They had been lending money and investing in expansion at an insane rate and there was no real money to cover these reckless transactions.

Overnight, as the world came to understand that the foundations of the great banking institutions in which they had placed their trust were shuddering, the share prices collapsed. RLB shares, which had been valued at £5, were suddenly valued at 50p and then 15p. The repercussions of this for the ordinary citizen and for the British economy were horrendous. They were also pretty bad for the chief executive officer of the bank, who had recently placed all his divorce settlement in one leaky basket. Suddenly Rupert was broke.

Which was how his ex-wife Amanda found herself with the opportunity for both outrage and revenge. Rupert had written to her in an effort to renegotiate the settlement. His argument was that it had been based on an assessment of his value that had now proved to be entirely false. He wanted to redivide the assets he had previously held with Amanda in order to get some of the property, art, cars and cash and to give her half of his millions of 15p shares.

‘Fuck you. Sue me,’ was Amanda’s four-word text in reply to this suggestion, which Rupert had made ‘in a spirit of fair play and hoping to avoid incurring further lawyers’ costs’.

Rupert had therefore applied to a judge, who began by asking an obvious question.

‘Tell me, Lord Bennett,’ he said sternly, ‘had the shares which you chose to keep in the original settlement continued to climb in the manner that you had expected them to, would you now be offering Lady Bennett a bonus “in a spirit of fair play”?’

Rupert claimed that he might well have done exactly that but the judge did not believe a word of it. He ruled in favour of Amanda, who did not attend the hearing but celebrated in a restaurant nearby.

Beatrice was in court, her tummy already beginning to show.

Into the abyss

The day had arrived for Toby to attend his new school.

Jimmy had talked a tough game to Monica about sending their son to Caterham Road, but in truth he was as miserable and scared as she had been at the prospect. He tried to overcome his fears, for his own sake as much as the boy’s.

He told himself that the loathing and terror he felt as he approached the school with Toby on that first morning was all wrong. It was snobbery, it was prejudice and it was also probably a sort of racism. Jimmy was honest enough to recognize that the extraordinary and unfamiliar mix of ethnic groups that he saw milling about in front of the school scared him.

He just knew that this school was going to be hard as nails and that Toby would be lucky to learn anything amid the Babylonian babble of the twelve languages that were proudly listed on the much-sprayed and graffitied school sign.

Toby was clearly pretty scared too. He had slipped his hand from Jimmy’s as they approached the gate, but up until that point he had been holding it tight. Starting a new school in the middle when everybody else has known each other for years is hard enough at the best of times, but when you’re plummeting down the social scale as you do it you’re bound to feel a bit intimidated.

‘You’ll be fine, Tobe,’ Jimmy said. ‘Just don’t let on you went to a posh school. Remember, try and talk like they do on
EastEnders
.’

‘I’m not going to say anything at all,’ Toby replied.

‘Any
fing
,’ Jimmy corrected him.

As they approached the school and the pavement became more and more crowded with milling parents and scampering children, Jimmy’s worst fears seemed to be confirmed. Every face looked to him to be hard and forbidding. He struggled to avoid catching anybody’s eye. He was convinced that every adult and child assembling on the pavement had him and Toby marked down as interlopers.

Ponces.

Posh bastards.

The gates were still locked when they arrived and so they were forced to stand about with the rest of the parents, carers and kids waiting to be admitted. Some boys were kicking a stone around, their dirty, scuffed shoes getting more so by the minute. Jimmy glanced down and saw that Toby was discreetly trying to scuff his own. Jimmy had polished them that morning. How stupid! He regretted it now.

The boys kicking the stone looked so tough, their shouts and laughter so loud and harsh. Jimmy felt a bit scared of them himself so he could only imagine what Toby was feeling. Two boys who must have been Year Six looked particularly intimidating. One of them even had patterns razored into his close-cropped hair.

Then they both went for the stone in a close tackle and crashed into each other hard. They bashed heads and went down together, hitting the pavement in a noisy heap.

Then they burst into tears.

Jimmy looked around. A man who had been smoking a cigarette threw it aside and went to pick the boys up.

‘Come on, lads,’ he said, reaching down. ‘Crying cos you’ve had a bump? Anyone would think you were Premier League players!’

The boys got the joke and at the same time realized that they had been making a fuss in front of the smaller kids and quickly made an effort to pull themselves together.

The two little boys didn’t look so much like thugs after that. They looked like little boys.

For a moment, Jimmy felt better.

Then he stole a look at some of the mothers. They really did look tough. Horribly so. There were mullet haircuts and quite a few tattoos and piercings. Bulging tracky pants and much flesh on display. Some were smoking and one or two were giving their kids crisps even though it was only eight thirty in the morning.

Jimmy tried to look away.

These surely were the ignorant, aggressive, self-assertive women so often described in the tabloid press. Stupid, self-righteous and strutting. Undermining class discipline by always taking the side of their delinquent children over the teacher, no matter what horror their kids might have committed.

One or two of them glanced Jimmy’s way. He was a new face. Toby was a new face. Jimmy stared at the ground, desperate to avoid their curious glances. He was convinced that once these women had him in their sights they would mark him down as an enemy. They would band together in a knot of ignorant malice and mutter about who the fuck Jimmy and his little snob kid thought they were.

He began to catch snippets of their conversation. The accents were a mixed bunch, but the majority tone was the post-Cockney Estuary of the white London native.

‘I couldn’ do it eeva! Could you do it? I couldn’,’ one woman was complaining.

‘I arsed Mr Hurley, ’e sez ’e sometimes doan unnerstan’ it ’isself,’ another replied.

‘It ain’t like it woz when we dun it.’

‘An’ I couldn’ even do it ven!’

There was laughter at this.

‘I ’ated maffs. Absolu’ly ’ated it. Nah I’ve go’ah do it orl over aggen.’

Suddenly Jimmy understood what they were talking about. It was the bloody new way of teaching maths! He knew all about that and he bloody hated it too. Some complete
twat
at the Department of Education had decided that the way maths had been taught for decades was wrong and long division was wrong and carrying numbers from left to right in subtraction was wrong and God knows what else was wrong besides.

This had occurred at about the same time that another ministerial arse had decreed that homework was a thing to be
shared
by parent and pupil. It was pure George Orwell! A faceless government suddenly required all mums and dads to do homework with their kids while simultaneously decreeing that it would be impossible to understand!

Why change the maths? Barnes Wallis had designed the Bouncing Bomb on old maths. Those two blokes who split the atom had done it using old maths. DNA had been discovered on old maths and the Spitfire designed with it. In fact an entire empire had been created and run on old maths! Now we had new maths and Britain was a basket case once more. Was there a connection? Jimmy felt that somehow there might be.

The parents at Abbey Hall had cursed this change in maths too. They had struggled with it and complained about it at the school gates just as these other mothers at the opposite end of the social spectrum were doing now. It seemed the National Curriculum (to which even private schools had to pay lip service) was a great leveller.

‘They’re goan’ ta do an evenin’, Mr ’urley sez. So’s we can bleedin’ learn ah ta do it. I’m def’n’ly goan’. Maybe I’ll finally be able to add up me shoppin’! It neva comes aht right.’

‘You should do it on your compu’ah. Get a spreadsheet off of Office.’

‘I’m rubbish at the compu’ah.’

With each exchange these women were becoming a little less threatening. Less ferocious-looking. In fact they no longer looked ferocious at all.

Abbey Hall had arranged an evening to explain the new methods of teaching maths to the parents. Monica had tried to do her accounts on an Office spreadsheet. She had been rubbish at it too.

Just then a car pulled up and what appeared to be a huge bundle of white and pink layers got out of the passenger seat.

‘’Allo, June,’ some of the mothers chorused.

‘Morning all,’ the bundle said. ‘Twenty-six snowflake costumes. Took me three nights.’

‘You love it, June,’ a woman said.

‘It keeps me busy,’ the bundle replied, heading off towards the office entrance to the school.

Again Jimmy’s mind went back to Abbey Hall.

They’d had a mum like June there. Daphne Phipps. She astonished everybody with the amount of costumes she could produce. Prior to her advent, the school had hired costumes from a professional supplier for their joint productions with St Hilda’s Girls. Daphne Phipps had set up a costume department and single-handedly clothed the entire cast of
Oliver
.

The thought of St Hilda’s Girls School brought Cressida and Lillie to Jimmy’s mind. Both their names had been put down at birth. Jimmy presumed that they were still there. He supposed he ought to write and tell the headmistress that the places would not be needed. It had been such a horrible fight to get on the list too. Every mum in Notting Hill seemed to favour St Hilda’s Girls and Jimmy remembered Monica’s panic when she heard a rumour that some mums were getting the sex of their babies scanned and putting down names
from the womb
.