Jomier has two children. A son and a daughter. Jomier’s son Henry is now thirty-seven. He works in the City and by Jomier’s standards is a rich man. Henry does not think he is rich because so many of his friends are richer still. Henry pays interest on a mortgage of half a million pounds. This represents 70 per cent of the value of the purchase price of his house in Queen’s Park. The house is now worth twice the amount he paid for it but this brings little comfort to Henry whose friends’ houses in Notting Hill have tripled, even quadrupled in value. Henry is a partner in an investment bank. He hopes one day to earn enough money to buy a house in Notting Hill. And a cottage in Dorset. But he must also pay the salary of a nanny and fees at private schools. Jomier fears that the high-flying Henry may, like his father and grandfather before him, never quite reach the sun. The Jomier gene: mediocrity triggered in middle age.
Henry’s wife is called Sandra. This embarrasses Jomier because it reminds him of the other Sandra who in most ways is identical to the Sandra who is married to his son. She is a corporate lawyer and goes off to an office in Holborn every morning, catching a Bakerloo Line train at Queen’s Park. Their two children are left in the charge of Tracey, the Australian nanny, and Alena, the Slovakian au pair. Jomier’s five-year-old granddaughter Samantha speaks English with a bizarre accent – half Danube basin, half Great Barrier Reef.
Henry Jomier is a good son. He treats his father politely but thinks he is a loser. Henry has friends whose fathers are also barristers but all are either High Court judges or QCs. Jomier applied three times to the Lord Chancellor’s Office to be made a QC and all three of his applications were rejected. Henry tells his father that if he had been black or Asian or female his application would have succeeded. Yet Henry’s friends’ fathers who are High Court judges or QCs are not black or Asian or female but plummy members of the English upper class. What Henry means is that if Jomier had been black or Asian or female his mediocrity might have been overlooked. Jomier does not have a first-class mind. The Lord Chancellor knows it. Jomier knows it. Henry knows it. His father is a loser but you cannot divorce a father so you make the best of it. And Henry does make the best of it. He rings his father every now and then to make sure he is OK. He asks him to Sunday lunch every month or six weeks. There are no other guests. Just the children. Tilly and Max are asked to dinner parties by Henry and Sandra. Henry feels more at ease with his mother. They share the same values. And Max is a figure in the City. Henry’s friends are impressed.
Jomier feels a pang of anguish when he thinks of his daughter Louisa. She lives in Argentina. It is as if she is dead. She is married to an Anglo-Argentinian with an apartment in Buenos Aires and an estancia in Corrientes. Jomier loathes his son-in-law Jaime as much as he loves his daughter: the opposing emotions are in perfect equilibrium. Jaime is called Jimmy by his mother and father, his five siblings, twenty-three cousins and his Argentinian friends. The Anglo-Saxon diminutive is to remind the world that he has Anglo-Saxon blood in his veins. But there is not much: Jomier estimates that it is no more than a quarter. He is three-quarters Argentinian, which means mostly Italian since 60 per cent of the immigrants to Argentina came from Italy, shedding everything fine as they crossed the Atlantic – their culture, their cuisine – retaining only their mafiosi vendettas and taste for posturing dictators – Mussolini, Perón.
Jimmy is tall. That, perhaps, comes from his Anglo-Saxon genes; or perhaps just a diet of flat meat. He is also thick-set and strong. When he greets Jomier he slaps him on the back. A heavy blow lands on Jomier’s shoulder blade; a sing-song greeting is bellowed in his ear. There are many things that Jomier dislikes about his son-in-law: his crass materialism, his snobbery, his contempt for the poor, for losers (like Jomier); but most of all Jomier hates his Chiquita-banana accent. And the venom has spread to anything South American – salsa, the tango, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Che Guevara.
How? How, how, how could his beloved Louisa, the creature he loved more than anyone else in the world – a precious child, an intelligent adolescent, a beautiful young woman (universally acknowledged) who went from Godolphin and Latymer to Bristol University, leaving with a 2:1 degree in History – have married this bufón, Jaime Miller de Ramirez? She had travelled in her gap year to South America, then had returned to Buenos Aires to teach English as a Foreign Language. Good, Jomier had thought. She should see something of the world before settling down with a nice young journalist or lawyer in London. But fate had decreed otherwise. She had introductions to families in BA. She had met and married Jimmy. Married him in the parish church of St Edward the Confessor in Appleton, Hampshire, with a reception in the Old Rectory, Tilly’s childhood home. Louisa had walked down the aisle of the church on Jomier’s arm. Jomier had wondered at his ability to hide his misery and smile. At the reception, genteel delight: a good match. Ten thousand acres of pampas. Jollity. Celebration. Jimmy’s compañeros from Argentina hoping to get lucky with Louisa’s spinster friends. Old friends of the grandparents in morning coats and dowdy dresses. Friends of the middle-aged Jomiers. Louisa’s stepfather, Max, and adoptive siblings, Chuck and Hayden. But no Jane.
Was that why she had fallen for Jimmy? A man like Max? Tall, rich, foreign, strong. Was the macho Jimmy chosen because he was as unlike the unsexed, hoodwinked papa as it was possible for a man to be? Consciously? Semi-consciously? Unconsciously? Or had Jomier nothing to do with Louisa’s choice in love? Pheromones. The tanned and muscular estanciero versus the pallid bankers and lawyers back home. Jomier does not like thinking of his daughter in bed with Jimmy. He had always had a problem with her boyfriends – in her adolescence anxious about late nights, sleepovers, weekends away. Sooner or later, he had known, she would lose her virginity; sooner rather than later; to a boy at Latymer; a boy at St Paul’s; a boy at Bristol. He knew it would happen. Tilly hoped it would happen. She wanted her daughter to have the adventures she wished she had had at the same age. Go for it! Had Louisa sensed her mother’s urging her to have sex? Had they discussed it? Girl talk? Discussions hidden from Jomier – like all fathers genetically programmed to protect his daughter from sexual predators; young men who want sex without commitment – a redundant and so ridiculous instinct thanks to the liberation of women and the invention of the pill?