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it had all been too awkward. What was her position? Should she leap up and sort out the children’s laundry as she had been doing for years? Should she sit on the rug and engage Toby in some brilliant game before settling down on a bean bag to read him something fun but improving while the adults ignored them both and sipped wine? Or should she sit on the couch and drink her coffee with Monica like some newly discovered friend, politely but firmly declining all Toby’s demands to do all the stuff with him that she used to do? On her second visit Jodie had given in and done some painting with Toby, partly out of habit and partly out of sympathy. After half an hour she had realized that Monica had fallen back into old habits too and gone off to catch up on phone calls and emails. Jodie had had to disengage herself from a bewildered Toby and call to Monica that she needed to be getting back for her bar shift.
    After that, Jodie didn’t visit again. She and Jimmy and Monica all understood that the situation was mutually upsetting and unworkable. The only person who didn’t understand was Toby, who simply found that somebody who’d always told him she loved him and who had seemed genuinely committed to his education in the finer points of Australian hard rock was now rejecting him, leaving not so much as a Cold Chisel album in the glove compartment of the Discovery.
    ‘How was it with David?’ Monica asked.
    ‘Pretty tense, as you’d expect,’ Jimmy replied. ‘His firm want paying, of course. Why wouldn’t they? They blame David for the bad debt, which is understandable as it was him who brought in our commission. Poor old Dave’s pretty stressed out in general now that his precious Rainbow Project has gone tits up too.’
    ‘Yes, that’s gone pretty sour, hasn’t it?’ Monica seemed to seize on the opportunity to talk about other people’s troubles. ‘It was even on the news. It looked so pathetic, two ridiculous-looking concrete spikes pointing at each other.’
    ‘Yeah, it was in the Standard too. It’s being used as a symbol of corporate excess. Hubris gone berserk. The headline was Two Fingers to Caution , which didn’t really work because they don’t look remotely like fingers. Of course, as originating architect David’s name’s all over it, so he’s seriously shagged.’
    Together they walked their two younger children around the kitchen for a while, Cressida back in the buggy, Lillie in Monica’s arms.
    ‘It’s like some Greek tragedy, isn’t it?’ Monica said, breaking the silence.
    ‘It’s certainly some sort of bloody tragedy,’ Jimmy replied, once more finding it in himself to smile.
    ‘No, it’s Greek,’ Monica insisted, smiling too. ‘Greek tragedies aren’t just any tragedies. They need a fall.’
    Monica had taken Theatre Studies as a subsidiary to her English degree and therefore knew her stuff. She had even been slated to play the king’s mother in a third-year production of Oedipus until the student director had informed her that in his vision of the play she would be expected to allow the actor playing Oedipus to suckle her breasts.
    ‘You mean actually get my tits out ?’ Monica had exclaimed in a voice that turned heads in the union canteen.
    ‘Yes,’ the earnest (and clearly very horny) young director had replied.
    ‘And let a post-grad engineering student suck them ?’
    ‘He’s mother-fixated. That’s the point of the play.’
    And that had been the end of Monica’s acting career. Now she was playing a suckling mother for real.
    ‘No, it really is a Greek tragedy,’ Monica went on. ‘All power, wealth and glory. Then the fall. You. David. You were both doing so well , weren’t you?’

Over the Rainbow
    Having had to study for a proper job, Jimmy’s old uni mate David had taken rather longer than Jimmy, Rupert or Lizzie (and Robbo) to join London’s financial elite. In fact until around ’97 he had had even less money than Henry, which was astonishing