Gloria had been brought up in a northern town. Larry, her father, a morose yet earnest man, sold insurance door-to-door to people who could barely afford it. Gloria didn’t think people did that anymore. Her past already seemed an antiquated curiosity-a virtual space recreated by the museum of the future. When he was at home and not lugging his ancient briefcase from one unfriendly doorstep to another, her father had spent his time slumped in front of the fire, devouring detective novels and sipping conservatively from a half-pint glass mug of beer. Her mother, Thelma, worked part-time in a local chemist’s shop. For work, she wore a knee-length white coat, the medical nature of which she offset with a large pair of pearl-and-gilt earrings. She claimed that working in a chemist made her privy to everyone’s intimate secrets, but as far as the young Gloria could tell she spent her time selling insoles and cotton wool, and the most excitement she derived from the job was arranging the Christmas window with tinsel and Yardley gift boxes.
Gloria’s parents led drab, listless lives that the wearing of pearl-and-gilt earrings and the reading of detective novels did little to enliven. Gloria presumed her life would be quite different-that glorious things would happen to her (as her name implied), that she would be illuminated within and without and her path would scorch like a comet’s. This did not happen!
Beryl and Jock, Graham’s parents, were not that different from Gloria’s own parents, they had more money and were further up the social ladder, but they had the same basic low expectations of life. They lived in a pleasant “Edinburgh bungalow” in Corstorphine, and Jock owned a relatively modest building firm from which he had made a decent living. Graham himself had done a year of civil engineering at Napier (“waste of fucking time”) before joining his father in the business. Within a decade he was in the boardroom of his own large empire, HATTER HOMES-REAL HOMES FOR REAL PEOPLE. Gloria had thought that slogan up many years ago and now really wished that she hadn’t.
Graham and Gloria had married in Edinburgh rather than in Gloria’s hometown (Gloria had come to Edinburgh as a student), and her parents traveled up on a Cheap Day Return and were away again as soon as the cake was cut. The cake was Graham’s mother’s Christmas cake, hastily converted for the wedding. Beryl always made her cake in September and left it swaddled in white cloths in the larder to mature, tenderly unwrapping it every week and adding a baptismal slug of brandy. By the time Christmas came around, the white cloths were stained the color of mahogany. Beryl fretted over the cake for the wedding, as it was still far from its nativity (they were married at the end of October), but she put on a stalwart face and decked it out in marzipan and royal icing as usual. In place of the centerpiece snowman, a plastic bridal couple was caught in the act of an unconvincing waltz. Everyone presumed Gloria was pregnant (she wasn’t), as if that would be the only reason Graham would have married her.
Perhaps their decision to marry in a register office had thrown the parents off balance, “But it’s not as if we’re Christians, Gloria,” Graham had said, which was true. Graham was an aggressive atheist, and Gloria-born one-quarter Leeds Jewish and one-quarter Irish Catholic, and raised a West Yorkshire Baptist-was a passive agnostic, although, for want of anything better, “Church of Scotland” was what she had put on her hospital admission form when she had to have a bunion removed two years ago, privately at the Murrayfield. If she imagined God at all, it was as a vague entity that hung around behind her left shoulder, rather like a nagging parrot.
Long ago, Gloria was sitting on a bar stool in a pub on the George IV Bridge in Edinburgh, wearing (unbelievable though it now seemed) a daringly short miniskirt, self-consciously smoking an Embassy and drinking a gin-and-orange and hoping she looked pretty while around her raged a heated student conversation about Marxism. Tim, her boyfriend at the time-a gangly youth with a white boy’s Afro before Afros of any kind were fashionable-was one of the most vociferous of the group, waving his hands around every time he said “exchange of commodities” or “the rate of surplus value” while Gloria sipped her gin-and-orange and nodded sagely, hoping that no one would expect her to contribute because she hadn’t the faintest idea what they were talking about. She was in the second year of her degree, studying history but in a lackadaisical kind of manner that ignored the political (the Declaration of Arbroath and Tennis-Court Oaths) in favor of the romantic (Rob Roy, Marie Antoinette) and that didn’t endear her to the teaching staff.
She couldn’t remember Tim’s surname now, all she could remember about him was his great cloud of hair, like a dandelion clock. Tim declared to the group that they were all working class now. Gloria frowned because she didn’t want to be working class, but everyone around her was murmuring in agreement-although there wasn’t one of them who wasn’t the offspring of a doctor or a lawyer or a businessman-when a loud voice announced, “That’s shite. You’d be nothing without capitalism. Capitalism has saved mankind.”And that was Graham.
He was wearing a sheepskin coat, a secondhand-car salesman’s kind of coat, and drinking a pint on his own in a corner of the bar. He had seemed like a man, but he hadn’t even reached his twenty-fifth birthday, which Gloria could see now was nothing.
And then he downed his beer and turned to her and said, “Are you coming?” and she’d slipped off her bar stool and followed him like a little dog because he was so forceful and attractive compared to someone with dandelion-clock hair.
And now it was all coming to an end. Yesterday the Specialist Fraud Unit had made an unexpected but polite appearance at Hatter Homes’ headquarters on Queensferry Road, and now Graham feared that they were about to throw a light into every murky corner of his business dealings. He had arrived home late, the worse for wear, downed a double of Macallan without even tasting it, and then slumped on the sofa, staring at the television like a blind man. Gloria fried for him a lamb chop with leftover potatoes and said, “Did they find your secret books, then?” and he laughed grimly and said, “They’ll never find my secrets, Gloria,” but for the first time in the thirty-nine years Gloria had known him, he didn’t sound cocky. They were coming for him, and he knew it.
It was the field that had done it for him. He had bought a greenbelt site that had no planning permission attached to it, he had got the land cheaply-land without planning permission is just a field, after all-but then, hey presto, six months later the planning permission was granted and now a hideous estate of two-, three-, and four-bedroom “family homes” was under construction on the northeastern outskirts of town.
A tidy little sum to someone in the planning department was all it had taken, the kind of transaction Graham had done a hundred times before, “greasing the wheels,” he called it. For Graham it had been a little thing, his corruption was so much wider and deeper and far-reaching than a green field on the edge of town. But it was the littlest things that often brought big men down.
Once the ambulance containing the Peugeot driver had disappeared, the policewomen started to take statements from the crowd. “Hopefully we’ll get something on the CCTV,” one of them said, indicating a camera that Gloria hadn’t noticed, high up on a wall. Gloria liked the idea that there were cameras watching everyone everywhere. Last year Graham had installed a new state-of-the-art security system in the house-cameras and infrared sensors and panic buttons and goodness knows what else. Gloria was fond of the helpful little robots that patrolled her garden with their spying eyes. Once, the eye of God watched people, now it was the camera lens.