A Fatal Attachment Read Free

His common touch had counterpointed Lydia’s already rather middle-class persona. It had sometimes felt, then, as if he had married the two sisters, not just one.
    Then the boys had grown too old and boisterous to be left with their grandparents, there had been Lydia’s brief marriage—or was that earlier? Anyway, and crucially, there had been the fact that Lydia had started to . . . to take the boys over. There was no other way of describing it. And then Gavin had died, a ball of fire on the Sir Galahad , and since then Andy had somehow felt childless. Unfair to Maurice, but there it was—childless and empty. Redundancy had been no more than a confirmation of that emptiness, one more brutal kick at the expiring corpse of his happiness and self-esteem. Bloody Lydia! She had robbed them of their boy, and then killed him. And left him and Thea empty shells of their former selves.
    He had a sudden vision of himself from the outside, as it might be any old layabout or drunk whiling away the day on a city bench, bemoaning his lack of the price of a pint, and compensating by mulling over all his ancient grievances.
    He ground his cigarette stub angrily into the grass and got up.
    It was still early for his appointment at (summons to, more like) the Department of Social Security. As he went out into the streets again he passed a pub with the doors open to let in the odd summer breeze. He could do with adrink. He looked in, caught the fug of beer fumes and tobacco smoke, heard the metallic chink of the fruit machine dispensing money to the mugs. Before he could turn into the Public Bar the juke-box started up, the bass charging into his head like a gang of football hooligans. He turned and went on his way. He didn’t much like town pubs these days. Only rarely went to his local village one, come to that. If a man’s got to get stinking drunk, he said to Thea, he should have the decency to do it in the privacy of his own home.
    He was lucky, really, that he could still say things like that to Thea—say them and laugh over them, say them without feeling shame-faced.
    He was early at the D.S.S. Inevitably he was early, He sat around waiting with the other people who were early like him, other people who had nothing to do. Promptly at 12:10 he was called in to Mrs Wharton’s office and found she was someone whom he had talked to briefly before: cool, down-to-earth, almost academic. He felt relieved. Like many another long-term unemployed person, he could cope with everything except sympathy.
    She was a busy woman, and came straight to the point.
    â€œYou’ve probably read in the press that the government is clamping down on people claiming unemployment benefits in the upper-age group,” she said, looking at him through large spectacles, grey-eyed, unsentimental. “This means they can no longer expect an automatic continuance of benefits, and are going to have to go on retraining courses to—”
    â€œIt’s a con,” broke in Andy Hoddle. “A PR con to try and convince the public that people like me are shysters who don’t want to work.”
    There was a pause, then a tiny smile from across the desk.
    â€œStrictly off the record, and I’d deny it if quoted, I agree. For most people in your age group in this area the chances of finding a job are virtually zero. But not for all, Mr Hoddle, how long is it since you applied for a job?”
    â€œOh God, years, I’m afraid.” He shook his head, unable to remember. “For about eighteen months or two years after I got the push I did, then . . . Well, it just got too depressing.”
    â€œExactly. And I suppose you just applied for jobs in your own field?”
    â€œWell, of course, I wasn’t very likely to get one out of it, was I? I was an industrial physicist with Haynes, the electronics group. I thought in my naïveté that there were firms that would grab someone with my