A Shock to the System Read Free Page B

dropped dead of a heart attack. The extravagance of her character, so charming in company, curdled, with loneliness, into resentment and contrivance. She made increasing emotional demands on her two daughters, particularly Merrily. Charmian, having broken off an unsatisfactory marriage, lived a career girl existence on the fringes of journalism. Lilian blamed her for not producing a nice set of grandchildren like Merrily, who, as a result, had the dubious privilege of being the favoured daughter.
    The climax of Lilian’s emotional demands came in September 1980, with a suicide attempt. It was hopelessly inept. She left a blackmailing note and she tried to kill herself by swallowing paint stripper, of all things, though the small amount she took exposed the true nature of the gesture.
    As a cry for help, however, it worked; it was agreed that she was too isolated out in Abingdon, and she was moved into a flat in Barnes to be nearer her daughters (or, more strictly, her younger daughter, since Charmian lived in Islington).
    This made Lilian a semi-permanent fixture round the Boileau Avenue house. Graham didn’t mind that, so much as the fact that he seemed to have to keep subsidising her. She had had money in her time, but spent it all with a ready prodigality. Now she always seemed to be hard-up, and Merrily was constantly asking Graham for small sums to help her mother out.
    He resented it. But more than the fact that she was poor, he resented the fact that she was not rich. Though appreciating the advantages his parents had given him by education, he could not help noticing, as he felt his financial circumstances straiten, the even greater advantages enjoyed by contemporaries who had inherited, or stood to inherit, money.
    The biggest blow of a bad six months came at the end of November when Graham’s father and mother were both killed in a car crash.
    Though he had not of latter years seen them that often, and though his relationship with them was not a particularly affectionate one, he felt the shock profoundly.
    First, there was just the shock of a disaster, an intensified form of that experienced on passing a road accident or hearing news of a plane crash.
    This was followed by a feeling of anger, almost contempt, towards his father. For Eric Marshall and his wife’s deaths seemed to cast doubt on the principles of economy by which they had run their entire lives. The accident, Graham discovered from the police, need not have happened. His father, for whom saving money became an obsession as he grew older, had insisted on doing his own car maintenance. It was his inefficiency, in failing to tighten the wheel nuts adequately after a tyre-change, which had led to the fatal crash. For Graham, this knowledge diminished his father’s memory.
    All of Eric Marshall’s dicta now seemed suspect. The old line that ‘there’ll always be jobs for teachers’ took on a new irony with the growing recession, and the much-vaunted economy was also shown to be based on a false premise. A lifetime’s scrimping had produced virtually nothing to pass on to the next generation. Eric Marshall left no will (another supposed economy) and so legal fees took a large bite from the proceeds of the Mitcham house sale.
    But the greatest shock was the slowest to come. Since he had seen so little of his parents, and felt so little for them, it took Graham a long time to define the void that their deaths left in him.
    Slowly he realised that what he had lost with them was a point of reference for his achievements. From his earliest recollection, he had performed for them. Even in latter years he had rung them from time to time when he had news of some promotion or other triumph. And they had always responded.
    It had been their valuation that had given him the definition of ‘a success’, which he so readily accepted. He did not realise how much he had been cushioned by their unfailing response to his