All at Sea, page 8
Kids Company closed down a year after Tony died, amid accusations of accounting irregularities and idiosyncratic governance. Having been heavily funded by the government, the charity’s closure created quite a public furore, and at the time of writing the conclusions of official investigations are still pending. I do not know what they will find. It is, however, safe to say that had Kids Company operated a more conventionally formal policy of appointments by committee, Tony would almost certainly not have got the job. But Camila understood what a biography like his would bring to the charity’s work, and her instincts were not wrong.
His formal job title was ‘keyworker’, but a more accurate description of the role would be surrogate parent. Whereas statutory social services operate within bureaucratic boundaries and office hours, Tony’s involvement in his young clients’ lives was limitlessly intimate, extending into every chaotic detail. If a boy refused to go to school, Tony would show up early each morning, get him out of bed, drive him to school, walk him to class, and if necessary even sit with him through his lessons. When a youngster needed a winter coat or warm shoes, Tony would take him clothes shopping. Defeated by the complexity of council housing applications, many of his clients were homeless, so Tony would steer them through the byzantine process, then help decorate and furnish their flats. Ungovernable pet dogs – pit bulls, usually – were a recurring challenge, requiring delicate negotiations to relinquish ownership to the RSPCA. In a typical working day Tony could advocate on behalf of one client in court, visit another in prison, apply for an apprenticeship, mediate in a row with a girlfriend, and take a carload of teenagers out to the cinema.
Having never had a job before, Tony was unfamiliar with the etiquette of formal employment. He went around telling everyone he knew how much he earned, and was puzzled by others’ reluctance to disclose their salaries in return. As Tony’s was a fraction of his former income, one might have thought he would rather keep it to himself. The new role of junior breadwinner would be a confronting adjustment for anyone to make, and of course he did not like it. Had his masculinity been any less secure, it would have been dangerously destabilising; had his ability to accommodate change been more like most of ours, it could have been impossible. But Tony had the most astonishing capacity to reconcile himself to new realities, and the cheerful dignity with which he accepted his reduced financial power was remarkable.
Tony’s willingness to change was one of the things that made him so good at his job. It is a tall order to turn up on a council estate and win the trust of impenetrably wary and often armed gang members. It is an even taller order to persuade them to suspend their suspicions and risk a different kind of life. Their resistance was entirely rational, based on a lifetime of overwhelming evidence that society did not want them, and had Tony’s faith in their potential been no more than an abstract ideal of liberal theory, I doubt he would have got very far. But he believed they could change because he had, and the respect his credibility commanded was literally life-changing for many of the young men he worked with.
Kids Company was founded on the philosophy that what every child needs, more than anything else, is to feel loved. The youngsters Tony worked with had known only neglect and abuse. His love for them was authentically unconditional, because he recognised so much of himself in their damage, and I recognised something of myself in its impact on them. No matter how many times my head had told me, in the early years with Tony, that our relationship was doomed and I should walk away, the force of his love had overpowered reason and compelled me to stay. Even then, for a long time I had still thought his faith in our future was fundamentally flawed. A romantic dream was lovely, but no contest for logic, and in the long run my intellectual analysis of our incompatibility would have to prevail. Now I was forced to concede that he had been right all along, and I was wrong. Love really had been enough to make anything possible.
What neither education nor a career could ever do was make Tony middle-class. When we first met, class was such an unfamiliar concept to Tony that he scarcely knew what the word even meant, for he had interpreted his life entirely through the prism of race, and the criminal class to which he had always belonged eludes conventional classification. This made him a more authentic class refugee than either Paul or I, and was both enormously attractive to me and an inexhaustible source of potential confusion. Many of my cultural expectations and assumptions were even more alien to Tony than they had been to my ex-husband. But whereas Paul had found them threatening, to Tony they were merely baffling, as anthropologically exotic as his criminal class codes were to me.
The convention of false modesty was a mystery to him. Why would anyone pretend to be bad at something they were good at? He assumed that self-deprecation would be taken at face value, and as he would rather be thought well of it struck him as much more sensible to tell people how brilliant he was. There was no limit to Tony’s boasting; it was quite shameless, and could be extravagant to the point of baroque. I feared it could only achieve the opposite of its intended effect, but nothing I said could convince Tony that bragging about his talents might cause others to doubt them. My refusal to refer to him as ‘Daddy’ – as in, ‘Jake, give the bottle to Daddy,’ or ‘Daddy’s home!’ thoroughly bemused him. My explanation that it was anathema to my very faintly counter-cultural class made no sense to him, but after a while Jake began calling him Tony too, and in due course gave up calling me Mum and opted for Decca instead. I don’t think Tony ever really liked it, but he was wise enough to see that insisting upon Daddy would be pedantic, and probably futile anyway.
His critique of other social codes was illuminating. For example, I was brought up to preface any request for a favour with a long list of reasons why it might justifiably be declined, because it was good manners to make it easy for the other person to say no. Tony found this bizarre. If you want the answer to be yes, why go out of your way to invite no? When I began to notice that Tony got what he wanted far more frequently than I did, I came to see his point.
He was similarly bewildered by my obligation to display elaborate interest in the health of our Albanian cleaner’s extended family. I would dutifully tidy up before she arrived, then spend hours soliciting updates on the various ailments afflicting her husband’s second cousin in Pristina, or her grandmother’s hip replacement, under the misapprehension that this would convey respect and make her like me. Tony’s policy was altogether more successful. He would lie in bed like a sultan while she cleaned around him, and dispatch her to the kitchen to make him cups of coffee. I stopped dying of embarrassment when it became abundantly clear that she was much fonder of him than of me. ‘Oooh, Tony, you are so funny!’ she would giggle affectionately.
What was tactlessly rude in my eyes was often, I came to see, surprisingly winning. A painfully shy young man on Tony’s course consulted him for advice about how to approach a student he fancied. Tony’s response made my hair stand on end. ‘Listen, mate, there’s no point even talking to her till you sort out your teeth. They’re a bloody mess, mate, they look awful.’ A few weeks later the man knocked at our door again. He had come to say thank you. Having followed Tony’s advice and taken himself off to a dentist, his teeth were now sparkling white, and he was taking the girl out on a date that night. ‘You are a true friend,’ he beamed, hugging Tony.
The differences that used to make our relationship feel untenable now seemed to make life with Tony endlessly interesting. In some respects, however, the gulf would always remain so unbridgeable that at times it seemed a miracle we were still together. Like most criminals, Tony’s relationship with money had always been impulsive and carelessly chaotic. The chancy nature of illicit earnings is notoriously unconducive to financial planning, and vast sums would be lavished away as quickly as they appeared. A fixed monthly salary had no impact whatsoever on his inability to budget, and the recklessness of his attitude to debt drove me mad. Likewise, no amount of education would alter the fundamental way his mind worked. Tony’s thought process would never be academic or analytic, and he found it impossible to distinguish empirically based beliefs from desires. If you asked him if he thought it would rain tomorrow, his reply would have nothing to do with the Met Office forecast, and everything to do with whether or not he wanted the sun to shine.
The fact that his opinions turned out to be right more often than logic or the laws of probability could explain did not necessarily help, and begged a disconcerting question. Would it be more rewarding to be with someone who was more often wrong than right, but reached his faulty conclusions via a cognitive route I could relate to? I could never be sure. When Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink came out, Tony was nonplussed by its excitable reception among the intelligentsia. Its revelations of how small a part intellectual analysis plays in most human decisions struck him as stating the obvious. We went to hear the author talk, and afterwards he was quite sniffy. ‘What’s the big deal? He’s just describing how I think. I could have written that book.’ But I think he was gratified to find the workings of his mind recognised by an esteemed professor. They still remained a mystery to me. I could not understand how anyone could enjoy The Sopranos and The Transformers in equal measure, or deny any contrast in quality. But I could see that if the choice is between critical discernment and non-judgemental pleasure, the latter might well take the prize.
Tony’s determination to enjoy himself was contagious, and made me a sunnier version of myself than I would have believed possible. The second pregnancy was a surprise – I had only been back at work a month from maternity leave – but this time I trusted Tony’s enthusiasm, and in the spring of 2011 Joe was born. We were beside ourselves with joy. Weeks later Tony graduated from university with a first. In full mortar-board and gown regalia, he wore an expression of such unbridled triumph as he received his certificate that a great gale of cheers and laughter erupted across the hall. That Christmas we took the boys to Treasure Beach, and by the end of the holiday we had bought a piece of land in the village, and begun plans to build a house.
After all the dissonance and fracture of our early years, at last we seemed to make sense. The jigsaw pieces of our separate lives had reassembled themselves into a coherent identity, and created a family that felt like home. Sometimes the consonance felt almost uncanny. Tony’s background made him perfect for Kids Company; his job made him heroic to my world; becoming parents together had made us happier than we could have dreamed. The misfit class identity which had looked like such a problem for so long had led me to someone who turned out to embody liberal ideals of equality, human potential and tolerance more authentically than most of the middle-class lefties I know who talk a good game, including myself.
In May 2013 we sold our house in Hackney and bought a dilapidated old farmhouse in rural Kent. Having never been able to see myself raising a family in the city, I wanted the open fields and freedom of my childhood for our boys. Tony was equally enthusiastic, and the house hunt began in high spirits. After several dispiriting months I was beginning to wonder if finding a countryside idyll within commuting distance of work was a fantasy. Were we even cut out for country life, anyway? Tony was blithely undaunted by the prospect of being the only non-white face for miles, but I worried that he might have underestimated the depth of rural prejudice.
All doubts vanished the day we found Tubslake. Overgrown and ungentrified, the timber-frame house was a beguiling muddle of beams and inglenook fireplaces surrounded by an ancient oasthouse, three dilapidated barns, an enormous piggery and meadowland. Our hearts were lost before we reached the front door. After six long anxious months of negotiations, it was ours. We packed our old life into a removals lorry and set off in a daze of blissful disbelief. I thought we were the luckiest family alive.
The boys were enchanted by their new world of bluebells and badgers, trees and dens. Tony was delirious with excitement, bursting with schemes for chickens, pigs and orchards, and made friends with half the neighbourhood within months of moving in. He began plans to convert the barns into dormitories and classrooms, and create an educational farm for Kids Company youngsters to escape to. ‘I’ve got everything I ever wanted,’ he took to marvelling. Soon so did I. A less auspicious beginning to our life together would have been difficult to script, and yet everything precious to me I now owed to him.
For years after leaving my marriage, I had had a nagging doubt that nothing I built with Tony could ever be more than second-best. ‘Dec,’ he remarked one day, as we lay in bed. ‘If we had both signed up for internet dating sites, what algorithm in the world would have matched us up?’ Any website as insane as that, I agreed, would probably be sued, and both of us laughed. But against all reasonable expectations, we had made it.
5
As the news of Tony’s death flies through Treasure Beach, villagers descend upon Calabash Cottage, bursting into the bedroom in breathless disbelief. Voices are clamouring, yelling, murmuring; I perch on the foot of the bed rocking. In the pandemonium Jake and Joe are led away to the villa next door. Someone hands me a Valium. The police arrive and want Tony’s passport; when they hand it back an hour later it is wrapped in a plastic bag containing his watch and gold chain. Tony has become a body. I become dimly aware that the policemen are expecting me to give a statement, until the indignant crowd shoos them out of the cottage.
I have often wondered which of my friends I would phone on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, but never considered which one I would call first in a catastrophe. The answer turns out to be none of them. It is my three brothers I call first – Tom in Hackney, Ben in Manhattan and then Matt in Gloucestershire, who has already been told and is sobbing down the line when he answers. Someone hands me a phone, and I find myself talking to my ex-husband in London, who has heard the news from a friend in the village. After speaking to my father in Wiltshire, the friend I phone is the journalist Jenni Russell.
I don’t know what to say to them, because the truth sounds like a lie. I see now why formulaic preambles such as Are you sitting down? are useful, because otherwise a sudden death is impossible to announce without sounding out of your mind. Even as I start to speak, I know it will sound like madness. All I can say, over and over, is: ‘Tony’s drowned. He’s lying on the beach, he’s dead. He’s just lying there dead.’ Jenni doesn’t even know we’re in Jamaica when she answers her phone. She asks if I want her to come, and I expect to say of course not, but what comes out of my mouth is: ‘Yes. Come, please come.’ The audacity of my need shocks me. Already, I am becoming unrecognisable to myself.
People keep crowding into the cottage. I have lost all track of time when our friend Laura, the wife of Jason, who owns Jake’s, packs a bag of clothes and drives us away to their house in the mountains. Jake and Joe are silent in the back seat of the car, pale and bewildered. I have to clench my hands between my knees to stop myself flinging open the door and jumping out. I cannot believe we are simply abandoning Tony; how can we leave him there like that? I know I can’t run back to him on the beach, I know others are taking care of his body, I know I have to stay with Jake and Joe. But to get in a car and drive away feels like unspeakable betrayal.
At Laura’s house Jake and Joe play with her children with a vacant air of detachment that reminds me of sleepwalkers. I drift from room to room in a Valium haze, restless and disorientated; Jenni tells me later that we spoke several times on the phone, but I have no recollection. Friends from the village arrive, and we sit at the long wooden table on the veranda, gazing out over the vastness of the distant ocean. In London a friend tells Tony’s nineteen-year-old daughter that he has died. Just before midnight Ben arrives from New York.
Ben is the eldest brother, six years older than me, and six foot eight tall. When we were children he was the sensible, serious one – our father called it ‘first child-itis’, but we called him a young fogey, and liked to make fun of his self-appointed seniority. He graduated from Oxford, moved to New York, became a Wall Street banker, married an Ivy League doctor and in due course ascended to elite membership of the Upper East Side’s 0.01 per cent while the rest of us were still falling about in nightclubs. At forty-nine he is the most grown-up grown-up I know, and when his arms fold around me I can almost believe everything will be alright. I crumple into bed, weak with relief that Ben is here. Jake is asleep beside me; in the morning, for the first time in his life he has wet the bed.
We awake to clouds so low and heavy that the entire house is swaddled in mist. It’s like being in an aeroplane. Jake and Joe seem curiously unsurprised by Ben’s arrival, and play together so unselfconsciously that I wonder if they could have blanked the previous day’s memory. Then Joe spots Tony’s phone on a sofa.
‘That’s Tony’s phone,’ he says.
‘Yes,’ says Jake. ‘But he died. I walked into the sea, and he died saving me.’
‘Oh yeah,’ Joe says. ‘So does that mean we can play on his phone?’
Someone tells me that a newspaper in London, The Times, has already called Jake’s, asking for details of Tony’s death. I am thrown – not least because ever since we left Calabash Cottage, a lie has been circling in my mind. Was Jake clear about exactly what happened – and might he in time forget? Would it be kinder to let him grow up being told a story of how Tony drowned that spared him any risk of misplaced guilt? I have never had much interest in rigid rules for parenting, but honesty has always seemed so obviously important that a self-imposed prohibition against lying would have seemed laughably unnecessary. I am shocked by the temptation to lie to my own son. It is a relief that the truth will be printed in black and white, and I can no longer succumb to the allure of deceit.
