Not What They Were Expecting

3

‘Fucking hell, what has he done?’

James could tell Rebecca was stressed by the swearing. She almost never swore, except when she was freaked out about something, and then she wouldn’t stop for hours and days on end. Not that he’d needed a handy pointer to tell him his wife was a little het-up on this occasion.

‘Fuck.’

They were driving further into town, from the leafy streets of Harrow Hill to the slightly scruffier leafy streets of Kilburn.

‘Did they say anything more to you?’

‘Darling, it was brutal, we talked about everything but. We were pretending like nothing had even happened. I’ve never heard so much polite chit-chat from people who’ve known each other for thirty years.’

‘Huh. It’s like the Christmas when I was fifteen, and they got all upset when Matthew told them he knew about Santa. I got the blame somehow, then after a blazing row it was back to endless discussion about how tasty the sprouts are.’

‘It’s such a shame really, to only have them once a year. I hear the secret’s in the blanching.’

‘There really isn’t any need for them to be fucking soggy I hear.’

It wasn’t entirely true that Howard’s arrest hadn’t come up for the rest of the day. In fact, between showing James hugely optimistic financial models for his company and 3D diagrams of car engines that neither of them really understood, Howard had been quite keen to talk about the case. It seemed he was winding up to make a bit of a crusade of it, maybe even scaling back on his work commitments to study up and represent himself.

But James figured this wasn’t something that Rebecca needed to know about right now – Howard would probably change his mind on that. And he certainly wasn’t going to tell her about how it had actually happened that her dad got arrested. Having to hear about bladder challenges for a man of Howard’s age’s, and getting nudges in the elbow about the perennial effects on a man’s anatomy of the bumpy track on the non-stopping Amersham train, had been a worse experience than having to shower with him the time they played tennis at his club.

Now it was the second part of their Christmas family extravaganza, Boxing Day at his mum and dad’s, or Ben and Margaret, as they preferred him to call them.

‘Just a few hours and we’ll be home,’ he said. ‘They have to go out this afternoon, a memorial event for some atrocity or other that happened this time twenty-five years ago.’

‘What memorial is it?’

‘Can’t remember.’

‘What happened?’

‘Don’t care.’

Rebecca shrugged that that seemed a fair enough response. James was permanently cynical about his parents’ humanitarian efforts. She’d never heard someone so uncharitable about people who chose to spend Christmas Day helping at a soup kitchen, but over the years she’d learned to see his point.

‘Darling,’ James said in as plummy an accent as he could manage, ‘what do you say we blow off the lefties and go and get pissed on vodka in the park?’

‘A delightful idea, darling,’ said Rebecca, ‘but I’m not sure that’s such a jolly good idea in my delicate condition.’

‘Hungover, eh? Better make it dry sherry and a quick bunk-up in the rhododendron bushes. That’ll get you spiffy again.’

‘Darling, there’s something I think you should know.’

‘Yes, darling?’

‘Well, darling.’