Singled Out (12 page)

‘Sounding spontaneous needn't mean lacking authority. It's just that we live in the age of the sound-bite. Politicians have to be able to encapsulate their message in one, snappy sentence.'

He looked even more downcast. ‘As I say, I don't think that sort of thing comes very naturally to me. Is it the kind of skill that can be learnt?'

‘Of course it is,' Laura reassured him, knowing that in his case she was lying. ‘And you must believe that too, or you wouldn't have booked in for this training, would you? Don't worry, we'll get there. It may take time, but we'll get there.'

She stole a look at her watch. Only twenty minutes gone of their two-hour session. God, this was uphill work. ‘Tell you what,' she said, ‘we'll try the same sort of straight-to-camera piece, but this time I'll put it on tape. Then we can go through it in detail … you'll be able to see when you're not sounding spontaneous … see where the body language looks wrong. OK?'

‘OK,' said the prospective parliamentary candidate miserably.

She left the studios at one, politely deflecting the prospective parliamentary candidate's proposal of lunch. She had become adept over the years at turning down such offers. Though now pushing fifty, Laura Fisher was still a magnet for masculine attention. But she never offered any encouragement. If men became importunate, she fell back on the fiction of another lover, and was thus able to maintain her long habit of celibacy.

Andy was busy in the Online Edit Suite working on a corporate video. Laura gave him a wave through the small window in the door and noticed with satisfaction that the film's director was accompanied by the client who had commissioned the work. The client had seemed a nitpicker, likely to argue with the director over every edit, which meant the session would probably overrun, which in turn meant more money for Lewthwaite Studios. Laura didn't like to find herself thinking in such a mercenary way, but circumstances made it unavoidable.

She was going to work at home that afternoon, sorting through her old files to devise a course on the making of television documentaries. It shouldn't be too difficult, and she had plenty of under-employed contacts in the business who would be more than willing to give the odd lecture for a hundred quid. Yes, then all she would need to do would be to sort out some clips from her old films, work out a four-day timetable and advertise in the trade press. Given the reaction to her other courses, she expected a large and prompt response to the offer. And she reckoned she could hike up the prices a bit on this one.

September was giving way gracefully to October. As she emerged into the pale, bright sunlight, and started the climb up to Brandon Hill Park, Laura once again approved her decision to move to Bristol. She had got out of London when Tom was five, unwilling to bring him up and send him to school in the capital. Bristol, with its excellent rail service, had proved an ideal base, and she quickly established an efficient sequence of mother's helps, capable of looking after her son when she was off working.

At thirteen he had gone away to boarding school. Now he was reading media studies, with the ultimate ambition of being a journalist, at the rather grandiosely named University of the West of England – what used to be called Bristol Poly – and was once again living at home.

All in all, Laura considered she had done well with Tom's upbringing. Her love for him had never wavered and, though the nature of her work had meant long absences, she hoped he had been aware of the continuity of that love. Her plans for his care while she was away had always been meticulous, and the right present would always have been there for a birthday or special celebration, even if she hadn't. The aim of Laura's life – to give her son an upbringing as different as humanly possible from her own – had been achieved.

In spite of her love for Tom, there was always a slight distance between them, a lack of intimacy that she sometimes regretted, but that she reckoned was the price all working mothers had to pay. She had juggled the demands of family and career with skill and compassion.

Tom had grown up a quiet, reserved boy, but those were qualities that Laura could recognize in herself and did not worry her. He did not seem to have many friends, but then she had always held back from giving too much of herself to others. It was difficult to tell what he was thinking for much of the time, but Laura could empathize with a reticence which matched her own.

At times this reticence bordered on the secretive. He would sometimes disappear without explanation for days on end. Laura did not quiz him about these absences. He was nineteen, after all, and she hoped they meant he was quietly developing his own social life.

She loved him, of that she had never had any doubt. And she felt fairly confident that Tom loved her, though it would not have been in his nature to put the sentiment into words. She sometimes wished that she had produced a more confident, outgoing child, but had come to terms with the fact that Tom had inherited the quietness of her own personality. At least he had shown no signs of the murderous nature shared by his grandfather and father. If he had a fault, it lay in the repression of anger and violence; his inability to express adversarial feelings at times clearly caused him mental pain.

When she first discovered the identity of the man who had impregnated her, Laura had been thrown into turmoil. She had spent many sleepless nights, agonized by Kent's words about bad blood and patterns repeating themselves, but gradually the panics had faded. What erased them was Tom himself, his beauty, his charm. It was impossible to believe the existence of congenital evil in such a perfect shape.

By the time they moved to Bristol, the anxiety had vanished completely. Five-year-old Tom, with his ash-blond hair and surprisingly blue eyes, had to be on the side of the angels. The circle of evil had been broken. Laura's decision to have a child on her own had been vindicated.

That did not mean of course that Tom was perfect. Throughout his life he had many habits that annoyed his mother. His passivity was the one that surfaced when she returned that afternoon to their neat house in Charlotte Street South. Tom lolled on the sitting room sofa, with the television on and the remote control drooping loosely in his hand.

‘What are you watching?'

‘I don't know.'

The answer was predictable and always stimulated a little spurt of anger in Laura. As someone who had spent all her professional life in television, she hated the zapping mentality of the younger generation. Programmes were made by programme-makers. Bad ones should be ignored, good ones should be sought out and watched with reverence. The idea of flicking randomly from channel to channel was anathema to Laura.

‘Have you done anything about lunch?' she asked, knowing the answer to that question would be equally predictable.

‘No. I wasn't sure when you were coming back. I didn't want to start doing anything in case you'd got something planned.'

‘I hadn't got anything planned …' Laura stomped through to the kitchen ‘… beyond making some toast and putting some tarama, pâté and cheese out on a tray …'

‘Fine then.' Tom pressed the remote control to change channel yet again.

‘Something which I would have thought you were quite capable of doing for yourself!' Laura shouted through the kitchen door.

‘Oh, it's all right, Mum. Chill out.'

‘Well, it's easy enough for you to …' Laura restrained herself and was silent. She didn't want to degenerate into the parody of a nagging parent, but she had to admit that living with Tom was not as easy as she had expected it to be. They hadn't spent so much time together for a long time – since before he had started boarding in fact. During his school holidays they had either gone away together or Laura had been off working. Now, while she developed Lewthwaite Studios, she was spending much more time at home than she was used to.

She had discouraged Tom from going to university in Bristol. She thought he ought to show more enterprise and look further afield. But he had been adamant. The media studies course fitted his ambitions, and he seemed to like the idea of living with his mother. ‘Give us a chance to get to know each other,' he had once said with one of his enigmatic, half-humorous smiles.

‘We know each other perfectly well,' she had countered.

‘Oh yes?'

It distressed Laura that Tom aggravated her so much. Perhaps she just wasn't used to living with someone else in the house so much of the time. She also had an unworthy suspicion that Tom's desire to live at home was a kind of cowardice, a fear of venturing into the outside world. It riled her to think that she hadn't brought up a child whose independence of spirit matched her own.

Another factor in her dissatisfaction was the distrust of college training instinctive to someone who had learnt their craft the hard way. Laura had become a producer of television documentaries by working in the medium, moving from researcher to
Newsviews
feature director to ever bigger projects. She had genuine doubts whether anyone could learn journalism from sitting in a lecture hall. If Tom really wanted to work on newspapers, he should go out and work on newspapers.

She looked at her son as she brought the tray of lunch in from the kitchen. The sofa seemed too low for him and his legs took up a disproportionate amount of the carpet. The ash-blond hair which had made him such a stunning five-year-old had long ago dulled to light brown. It looked to her as if it could do with a wash, but she knew better than to raise the subject. The brilliant blue eyes seemed also to have dulled and taken on a slight shiftiness as he grew older. Spots burgeoned between Tom's eyebrows and gathered beneath the corners of his mouth.

Laura felt an unreasoning regret that he didn't look better. Why couldn't she have produced a son who had outgrown the symptoms of adolescence by the time he was nineteen? Why couldn't she have had more control over the way Tom had turned out?

He zapped the remote once again, and Laura felt certain he had done it to annoy her. Whether he had or not, she snapped, ‘Switch it off unless you're actually watching something.'

With a sigh of long-suffering at the unreasonableness of all parents, Tom switched the television off.

‘Didn't you have any lectures this morning?'

‘No.'

‘Been working at home?'

‘Done a bit.'

Laura didn't know whether to believe him or not. She knew she must stop imposing her own energy and imperatives on to her son, but sometimes it was hard. She tried to reason that she was almost a workaholic, and Tom's laid-back approach was a lot healthier, but she only half-convinced herself.

‘Going in this afternoon?' she asked, hoping the enquiry sounded casual rather than reproachful.

From Tom's sigh it clearly hadn't been casual enough. ‘May do. Probably. Got some research I should be doing in the library.'

‘Research on what?'

But this was a question too far. Tom clammed up again and replied, ‘Oh, this and that.'

Laura knew she shouldn't, but couldn't help continuing her catechism. ‘Going to be out this evening?'

‘No. Don't think so.'

‘I thought students were meant to have a wild social life.'

‘So?'

‘Well, you don't seem to.'

‘I see the people I want to see.'

‘When? I don't see much evidence of you seeing them.'

‘I see them when I want to see them,' he replied gnomically and unhelpfully.

Laura forced herself into silence. She didn't consider that she nagged, but she knew that's how it might appear to an outsider. That was also, so far as she could tell, how it appeared to Tom. Rob's view was that Laura's personality, her relentless efficiency, had frightened Tom off. He didn't want to enter any kind of competition with his mother, for fear that he might lose. In effect, what Rob was saying was that Laura swamped her son.

Occasionally she worried there might be an element of truth in the theory. Thinking about Rob brought his illness back into her mind. Things weren't looking too good. She didn't dare contemplate what would happen to their partnership and the finances of Lewthwaite Studios if he were to die. Must go and visit him again soon, she reminded herself.

‘Oh,' said Tom suddenly, a half-eaten slice of toast and taramasalata in his hand. ‘A bloke came round this morning looking for you.'

‘Bloke? What bloke?'

Tom seemed deliberately to evade her direct question. ‘I said you'd be in this afternoon. He said he'd call then.'

‘Who was he? What was his name?'

‘Said his name was Michael Rowntree,' Tom replied casually.

If he hadn't given his name, she wouldn't have recognized him. Michael's hair had virtually all gone, only a few wisps were left, tucked away behind his ears. And whereas, when she had last seen him he had been running to fat, he was now cadaverously thin. He could have been in his sixties rather than his fifties.

His clothes were filthy – a checked shirt whose frayed collar was rimmed with grime, trousers of beige corduroy here and there worn smooth, a sports jacket whose tweed was dimmed with dirt and some of whose seams had unravelled. On his feet were grubby blue trainers with white flashes. His body gave off a sour odour. He looked like one of the homeless whom the recession had driven on to the streets of Britain's cities.

More disturbing than Michael's physical decrepitude, however, was his expression. His eyes had the unfixed glaze of insanity. Laura was glad that Tom hadn't yet left for college. He was upstairs, supposedly ‘getting library stuff together'.

‘Aren't you going to invite me in then?' asked Michael.

She had not been intending to, but somehow this direct question was impossible to refuse. He came through into the sitting room. ‘Very nice,' he said, looking round. ‘Very nicely done.'