Sunday lunch in Queen’s Park with Henry and Sandra. Jomier goes alone. He is without Judith. Both have agreed that it is best for each to break the news to their children of their proposed cohabitation in the absence of the other. Judith also thinks she should cook lunch for the emotionally needy Ophelia – the quality time that Ophelia feels she was denied as a child when her mother was off with Alfredo, Giles, et al. Jomier has not seen his son, daughter-in-law and their children since before Christmas: in the new year they had gone skiing in Courchevel with their friends the Crockford-Tylers. Sam and Ned run to embrace their grandfather. Sandra kisses him on both cheeks. Henry too embraces his father. He has mulled some wine. The children beg to taste it. Henry gives them a sip. Samantha stumbles around pretending to be drunk. Ned follows her, rolling and laughing, round and round the mound of plastic toys they have been given for Christmas.
Henry has cooked a chicken with roast potatoes and Brussels sprouts. He is in a benign mood – relieved, Jomier suspects, that the holiday season is over and he has returned to the calm of his office. Sandra is preoccupied: Tracey, the Australian nanny, has chosen this moment to go skiing herself. She will not be back for another week. Sandra feels that Tracey should have fixed her skiing holiday to coincide with theirs rather than falling in with the plans of her Aussie friends. But she does not want to lose Tracey and so has had to swallow her irritation and try and work out if the taking and fetching of children to school can be undertaken by Alena the au pair alone.
Henry and Sandra go through the permutations of this nanny crisis as they eat lunch. Jomier has no suggestions other than offering his own services as auxiliary au pair should they be required. Henry too affects detachment: Sandra’s staff is her affair. This annoys Sandra as much as Tracey’s holiday plans but she tries not to show it. Clearly there has been some pre-nup agreement that nannies and au pairs were her responsibility while cooking chickens was his.
Only after they have moved on to a dessert of stale mince pies, and the children have retreated to watch CBeebies on the television, do they talk about Wiltshire and Venice and Courchevel. Henry is reticent about Wiltshire. ‘All very comfortable.’ Max’s sister Lydia had been there with her husband and children. Max has converted one outbuilding into a giant playroom with a billiard table and another into a mini-cinema with a Bluetooth DVD player and 56-inch plasma TV. Henry had called Louisa on Christmas Day and again on New Year’s Day from Courchevel. ‘She said she hadn’t been well.’
‘It’s all those pisco sours and the dulce de leche,’ says Jomier.
‘No doubt,’ says Henry. ‘Or perhaps it was just flu.’
Jomier wonders why Louisa had said nothing to him about being ill when he called her from the Hotel Palazzo Solaia. Perhaps she had sickened after Christmas. Should he have called her on New Year’s Day?
‘And Venice?’ asks Henry. ‘How was it?’ He puts the question cautiously – almost reluctantly – and, as he asks it, Sandra turns away. Neither wants to hear about sexagenarian sex.
‘We had to walk on duckboards to reach our hotel,’ says Jomier.
‘It was flooded?’
‘On the first day. We upgraded.’
‘To the Danieli?’
‘No, to a hotel called the Palazzo Solaia: but it was good.’
‘Expensive?’ asks Henry.
Jomier shrugs. ‘You get what you pay for.’
‘Not always.’
‘In this case, I’d say we did. The Christmas dinner was good.’
Jomier does not want to talk about the costs of the Hotel Palazzo Solaia because it reminds him of his spreadsheet and Judith’s froideur. He describes the wonderful art galleries and churches and scuole; the Christmas markets, the tucked-away restaurants, midnight Mass in St Mark’s. ‘And we got on so well,’ he adds, ‘that we decided to move in together when we got back.’
Silence. Sandra looks at Henry. Henry says: ‘That’s wonderful.’ He says this but does he mean it? Jomier’s son sounds like a politician caught off guard. Then: ‘Will you get married?’
‘I wouldn’t have thought so. It hasn’t come to that as yet.’
‘Will you move in with her,’ asks Sandra, ‘or will she move in with you?’
‘The idea,’ says Jomier, ‘is to pool our resources. Sell our houses and buy a new one together.’
Again Sandra looks at her husband. What are the ramifications? What’s the downside for us? Henry does not meet her glance. He is trying hard to think of what will make his father happy. ‘I am really pleased,’ he says. ‘She really seems to suit you and it can’t be easy . . .’ His voice tails off.
‘To commit at our age?’ suggests Jomier.
‘Yes, I suppose that’s what I meant. Once bitten, twice shy.’
‘One values companionship as one grows older,’ says Jomier.
‘Of course,’ says Henry.
‘And what about her children?’ asks Sandra.
‘They’re grown up,’ says Jomier.
Sandra nods. It takes little imagination for Jomier to imagine what she has left unsaid: ‘I know they’re grown up but from everything you’ve told us about the daughter and the layabout son in Devon they might turn out to be a nightmare and a drain on your resources and ergo eat into your grandchildren’s inheritance.’
The fiscal implications have also struck Henry. The effort of thinking about what would make his father happy has been too great to sustain. He returns to default. ‘Would you jointly own the new house?’ he asks.
‘That’s the idea.’
‘Are your present houses of equal value?’
‘More or less, I think. We haven’t got to that.’
‘It’s just that if one of you were to die . . .’
‘We haven’t got to that either.’
‘I mean, I’m delighted for you,’ says Henry, ‘but there are various factors that will have to be taken into account.’
Jomier is not upset by his son’s condescension. He feels it reflects well on his upbringing that Henry has grown so well into the role of paterfamilias that he now treats his father like a King Lear: compare and contrast with the dropout Tim living off his father with his potting mistress in Devon. Jomier also sympathises with Henry’s anxieties: he too is made uneasy by the thought that the equity tied up in his house in Hammersmith should find its way via a 50 per cent stake in a house in Notting Hill to Judith and from Judith to the demented Ophelia and the ne’er-do-well Tim. ‘I’m sure something can be worked out,’ he says. ‘There would have to be safeguards.’
‘And is now the time to make the move?’ The question is put by Sandra whose fingers never leave the pulse of the property market.
‘The market seems strong,’ says Jomier.
‘Overall, yes,’ says Sandra, speaking in her crisp office voice. ‘But while you would certainly get a good price for your houses, there has not been the same feeding frenzy in Hammersmith and Wandsworth as there has been in Notting Hill.’
‘What about Chelsea?’ asks Jomier.
‘Just as bad,’ says Sandra. ‘I really would doubt that the joint proceeds of your two houses would get you anything nice.’
Jomier suspects this may be true. ‘Then we’ll get a bigger house in Wandsworth or Hammersmith,’ he says.
‘It might come to that,’ says Sandra.
Henry goes to the stove to make coffee. Jomier asks Sandra about the Crockford-Tylers with whom they went skiing. He is not interested in the Crockford-Tylers. He asks the question to direct their conversation away from the property market and his plans to share a house with Judith. It has made him feel uncomfortable. The idea of life with Judith in Wandsworth or Hammersmith is subtly different from the idea of living with Judith in Notting Hill or Chelsea.
After lunch Ned says he wants to see boats so they drive in convoy down to the river. They go for a walk in Fulham Palace Gardens. They pass the memorial to those who died fighting for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. Henry says that the Republicans, had they been victorious, would have set up a Stalinist tyranny; and that it is therefore wrong that those who fought for them should be commemorated as heroes. Jomier suggests that at the time people did not know of Stalin’s atrocities. Henry counters that the facts were there, but were airbrushed out of public dialogue by Communist fellow-travellers in the media and academe. Jomier thinks back to his leftist youth – demonstrating in Grosvenor Square with his friend Marco. What had they thought about the gulags, or Mao’s Cultural Revolution? He cannot remember. ‘Communism,’ he says to Henry, ‘draws on humanity’s belief in its own perfectibility.’
‘A chimera,’ says Henry.
‘No doubt,’ says Jomier.
‘A dangerous chimera. Like the Muslims’ belief in a universal caliphate.’
‘Perhaps one day,’ says Jomier, ‘there will be a memorial to the young Pakistanis from Bradford who went to fight for al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.’
‘Unlikely,’ says Henry.
‘A hundred years ago,’ says Jomier, ‘it would have been thought unlikely that there would be a large mosque in Regent’s Park.’
Sandra walks ahead following Samantha and Ned on their scooters. She does not like men’s talk – politics, history, cars – but accepts that it is something she must put up with when her father-in-law comes to lunch. Jomier would like to have more to say to her than he does about children, schools, the property market. He would like to talk to her about corporate law but does not understand what it is she does in her office in Holborn. He does not understand what Henry does either, or what anyone does in the City that brings them such rich rewards.
They look at boats on the Thames. Then they part. Henry and Sandra throw scooters and children into the back of their four-year-old E-Class Mercedes Estate. Jomier drives back to Hammersmith in his Golf. He has much to think about. Should he ring Louisa? What time is it in Buenos Aires? He does not feel up to it. His mind goes on standby as his Panasonic Viera television springs to life.