Back then, the truth of the matter was that young Mr. and Mrs. Porter had struggled for a bit after they were married. But with the arrival of Josh, a beautiful, healthy nine-pound baby who had threatened to do permanent damage to Jackie’s elegantly light frame, they were quite content to live in a state of impecunious bliss in the minute flat that they rented off Baron’s Court Road.
Then, in 1986, when Josh was an eighteen-month-old bundle of trouble, all things changed and Dan had to alter his thinking about being born in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was the year of the Big Bang, the deregulation of the stock market, and the staid, formal image of the City took on a new and welcome vibrancy. Dan’s firm benefited immediately, being one of the first to be taken over by a large American financial conglomerate, and within three months, he had been plucked from relative obscurity by the company’s new senior vice president to be one of their market makers. And from the moment that he started, he thrived on it. His battling days at school had fitted him well for the job. He loved the quick decision, the adrenaline rush of making a deal, the subterfuge in offloading a nonperformer. But above all, he loved making money.
It was probably a much-needed energy release on Dan’s part that resulted in Jackie’s giving birth to Millie and Nina within the space of the next two years. The flat in Baron’s Court had begun to groan with overcrowding, so Dan decided to make the largest personal investment of his lifetime and took out a mortgage on the three-storey, four-bedroom house in Clapham. It was not until they had spent their first few months there, happily throwing themselves about this newly acquired space, that Jackie reminded Dan of their conversation in the Central Park Diner. Three children and a house in a suburb south of the river. They had achieved it all, minus the dogs. Jackie said that the dogs could wait.
Dan had never paid much attention to the letters from headhunting firms that kept turning up in his in-tray. He was quite content to work in a familiar environment with colleagues that he knew and trusted. But there came the time when, at the age of five, Nina joined Millie at Alleyn’s School, and with Josh already attending Dulwich College for Boys, Dan suddenly found himself faced with paying three hefty school fees. Having tied up the greater proportion of his extensive savings in long-term investments, the effect on the family’s bank balance was immediate, even though Jackie had by now resumed work for three days a week with Rebecca Talworth. Either Dan had to find a better-paid job for himself or else such luxuries as their twice-yearly holidays abroad would have to be forfeited.
Within a month, Dan had been headhunted by a Hong Kong–based investment bank, and thereafter he played the field, never staying with any company for longer than a year. But he found that, no matter for whom he was working, he loved what he did, and he could never quite believe his good fortune in ending up doing a job that made him money and made him smile. It had always been a bit of a laugh, a game, like playing one schoolboy prank after another.
And then he had been badly caught out. Having decided to switch a substantial amount of his investments over to dot.com technology, he moved to another job that paid so well that the cash-in penalties incurred by the change were going to be written off in a year. But five months later, the dot.com bubble burst. Dan had seen it coming and had tried to offload his shares as fast as he could, but traders by now were wary of his techniques and treated them like leprosy. All he could do thereafter was to watch their value drop day by day. And then he had found the internal e-mail on his computer. At first he thought it a mistake that he had received it, obviously just sent out on blanket coverage. Nevertheless, he had read the e-mail through, two pages of corporate jargon, explaining that the company was being forced to shed jobs due to the collapse of the dot.com market. It wasn’t until he reached the last paragraph that the true meaning of the e-mail hit him.
“This company has always adopted a policy of last-in, first-out, and for this reason, we find ourselves with no alternative other than to terminate your contract of employment.”
There were further remarks and apologies, but Dan hadn’t bothered to read them. He picked up the telephone and immediately called the firm of headhunters that had secured his last position. Over the next hour, he tried time and time again to make contact with someone who could give him advice, but he never managed to get past the sweet-talking receptionist. Eventually, he replaced the receiver, and it slowly began to dawn on him that, for the first time in his working life, he was going to be without financial security and without a job.
At first, he had felt furious with himself for investing so recklessly and bitterly resentful at losing his job, but when, over the next few weeks, he received no offers from the headhunting firms that in the past had been falling over themselves to entice him away from one company to another, those feelings compounded to one of pure terror. At night, sleep deserted him and he would more often than not end up in the kitchen in the early hours of the morning drinking endless cups of tea and trying to blank out his thoughts by watching Open University or second-rate films on the television.
But those thoughts were all too pervasive, and during his lonely nighttime vigils, he constantly mulled over the effects that his new circumstances would have on the comfortable lifestyle that he and his family had enjoyed up until then. Due to his catastrophic investment in the dot.com market, he no longer had the financial resources to keep the family protected from the consequences of his unemployment; he had only been with the company for two months, so there was to be no substantial redundancy payment; he would have to freeze his pension contributions; the girls were just about to go back to Alleyn’s for the start of the autumn term, and he knew that if his unemployment was to be long term, there was no way that he could keep them at the school; it was the start of Millie’s sixth form year, so what would be least disruptive to her? Maybe it would be better to move them both to Clapham High School now, rather than halfway through Millie’s A-level course.
He couldn’t afford to lose the house, either. That was the bedrock of security for his family. At least he had made it a priority to pay off the mortgage, but he couldn’t allow the bank to treat it as part of his estate if he were to go completely broke. It would be better to put it immediately into Jackie’s name.
And what about Jackie? She was being supportive, but she had other things to think about now, especially with this new high-powered job with Rebecca Tal-worth. He knew that he disturbed her every time he got out of bed. She would make that aggravated clicking noise with her tongue and turn over to face away from him. They never used to bicker, but it had now become almost a daily occurrence. But he couldn’t blame her for that. After all, it was he who had blown away the family’s security on a bad investment, and it was he who had been like a bear with a sore head ever since he had lost his job, and everyone in the household had been affected by it.
All, that is, except Josh. He kept his own counsel. He had returned home, having dropped out of Manchester University during his first year, and had immediately set about making himself a stranger to his own family. He found himself a job stacking shelves in Tesco’s and then spent every bit of money that he made in the ear-shattering depths of Horace’s Inferno, one of Brixton’s more notorious clubs. Dan was inwardly enraged that his son should have given up on an opportunity in life that he himself had never been afforded. Yet he’d never sought confrontation over the issue, thinking that it might quite easily result in his son’s leaving home and setting himself up in some dive of a flat where he would be completely without parental control.
Always, when morning came and Dan had been woken from his fitful slumber on the kitchen sofa by the sounds of Jackie moving around upstairs, neither one scene from the film nor one equation from the Open University course had ever registered in his brain. There had always been too many other things flying around in his head.