The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

Emerson Abbott never had great ambitions for his son. He had seen too many examples of the tragic results the pressure of such expectations in upper-class families could have on the children. He didn’t even need to look far. Not even as far as those public-school friends of his who had failed to achieve the successes expected of them, and who drank until every bottle in the world was dry before plucking up courage for the great leap, from penthouse apartments in Kensington or Hampstead and five floors down to where the asphalt is just as hard as it is in Brixton and Tottenham. Not even as far as Archie, the nephew whom he had last seen among bloodstained sheets and disposable needles in a hotel room in Amsterdam, with the mark of the angel of death’s kiss already shaped on his lips, who had refused to go home with him and carelessly pointed a revolver in his direction in a way that told Emerson Archie didn’t much care which way it was pointing when he pulled the trigger.

No, Emerson didn’t need to look far. Only as far as the mirror.

For nearly thirty years he had been an unhappy publisher who published books written by idiots that were about idiots and that were bought by idiots. But there were enough of these idiots for Emerson in the course of his professional career to have tripled the already considerable family fortune, a fact that gave greater pleasure to his wife Emma than it did to himself. He could well remember that warm summer day in Cornwall when they got married, but he had forgotten why. Perhaps she was just in the right place at the right time, and from the right family, and in a very short while he no longer knew which interested him less: the money, the books or his wife. He had hinted at the possibility of divorce, and three weeks later she had told him, radiant with joy, that she was pregnant. Emerson experienced a deep and sincere happiness that lasted for about ten days. By the time he sat in the waiting room at St Mary’s Hospital he was unhappy again. It was a boy. They named him Ken after Emerson’s father, got a nanny for him, sent him to a boarding school and one day he was standing in his father’s office and asking if he could have a car.

Emerson had looked up in surprise at the young man standing in front of him. He had inherited his mother’s equine features and almost lipless mouth, but the rest came undoubtedly from him. The long, narrow nose with his father’s close-set eyebrows formed a T-shape in the middle of the face with two pale blue eyes on each side. They had expected that his blond hair would gradually turn into his mother’s mousy grey, but that hadn’t happened. Ken had already developed the blasé and the would-be self-irony that gives the British their reputation for charm, and his blue eyes twinkled when he saw his father’s confusion.

Emerson realised that even though he had intended to make ambitious plans for his son he would probably never have had time to realise them. How could his son have become an adult without his having noticed it? Had he been too busy being unhappy, of being the person everyone in his circle thought he ought to be, and if that was the case, why didn’t that include being a father to his only son? It pained him. Or did it? He thought about it. Yes, it really did pain him. He raised his hands impotently aloft.

Maybe Ken had counted on his father’s guilty conscience, and maybe not. At any rate, he got his car.