‘Martians make more sense than teenagers though – you’ve got all that to look forward to!’
The two couples stood there, smiling at each other, both having drifted closer during their chat. Penny and Howard side by side with an arm wrapped around each other, James behind Rebecca on her stool, an arm on her shoulder. Sharing memories and a future.
‘We’re so excited. Lovely to have some good news,’ said Howard.
‘That’s a hundred times you’ve said something like that today. Is something going on?’ Rebecca snapped.
‘Something like what? We’re just happy for you, Becky,’ Howard said.
‘We’re fine darling, honestly.’
‘Well now I’m really worried,’ said Rebecca.
Howard and Penny started a semaphore conversation using the top half of their faces, her fluttering eyelids pleading for a reprieve, his eyebrows resigned to getting it over with. Watching them James got an inkling that Rebecca might have had a point that something funny was going on.
‘Now, who’s for a top up?’ Howard asked, clearing his throat. With a wet rattle, he pulled the champagne bottle from the bucket of melting ice and poured more drinks for everyone. Rebecca hesitated before refusing the bottle hovering over her drained orange juice glass.
‘You can’t get anything past my girl, can you?’ smiled Howard. Rebecca’s grip got tighter on James’s hand.
‘Maybe we should wait til –’
‘Mum,’ said Rebecca.
‘Best to do it now, dear,’ said Howard, ‘in fact it’s a good time. This sort of good news puts it all in perspective, doesn’t it?’
He looked around the room expecting acknowledgement of the wisdom, but could only see anxious faces. He smiled his best authoritative smile, and picked up, then put down his champagne.
‘Your old man’s got himself in a bit of trouble with the law.’
Rebecca pulled her hand away from James, and hunched forward in her seat, stifling a shiver.
‘Your father was arrested last week,’ added Penny. ‘I wanted to leave it until at least after dinner.’
‘What…what was it?’ asked Rebecca. ‘The company?’
‘What? No, nothing like that,’ said Howard.
‘It’s a misunderstanding. Mr Maplestone has recommended us a very good expert in the area,’ Penny said.
‘Were you stealing?’
‘We’ll get it sorted out before you know it, all going to be absolutely fine. In a way it’s quite fascinating, the procedure,’ Howard said.
‘Your dad had been out, there was a mix-up, that’s all.’
‘Have you been charged, are you on bail, what’s going on?’ Rebecca tensed and shrugged away as James put a hand on her shoulder.
‘Just let your dad…’ he said.
‘There’s lots of technical terms for it, sound terrible. Very Victorian. Almost funny when you think about them.’
‘Just tell me what’s going on, Dad.’
‘Persistently importuning, lewd conduct, outraging public decency. Like Dickens…’
‘Dad’s been doing a lot of research himself on the internet.’
‘Jesus, are you having an affair or something? You didn’t…assault someone did you?’
‘They offered a caution, but apparently that would involve an admission of guilt, and of course nothing happened,’ said Penny.
‘What the fuck is it?’
‘There’s no need for that sort of language, Rebecca,’ said Howard. ‘You should know that I’m going to be challenging a ridiculous accusation of a public order offence that’s on shaky ground from the start.’
‘I didn’t want legal terms I wanted—’
‘It was the train station. I was caught short, there was a big burly copper in there. He got the wrong end of the stick. I was accused, I think the word on the street is, of cottaging.’
The room went silent. Rebecca went pale. Then she jumped from her seat and ran to the downstairs toilet, where the three of them listened as she noisily vomited.
‘I think that might be the start of morning sickness,’ said James.
‘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,’