Chalcot Crescent (26 page)

‘I may be completely wrong,’ I say. ‘I’m a novelist. Two coincidental accidents don’t make a murder attempt. Because CiviCars are leased out by NUG doesn’t mean they’re all bugged. Because a thought crosses both our minds that Victor is capable of dis appearing a political rival, doesn’t mean he is. Because Venetia implies Victor beats her up, doesn’t mean he does.’

‘How can you doubt the word of your own daughter!’ complains Polly. ‘What sort of feminist are you? If a man lays a finger on a woman it is her duty to leave at once. She owes it to her sisters.’

And there, on the top of Muswell Hill, she makes a political speech with only her mother to hear. She manages to leave Corey out of her definition of ‘man’ – I would be very surprised if he hasn’t taken the odd swipe at her – so much does she like the sex. She is in denial. But then I suppose we all use our indignation as cover for the real dangers in our lives. Amos will be raging against the evils of society while he is smoking and drinking himself to death. It is not so much denial, I daresay, as a misplacement of fear. We rage because we are afraid.

In the face of her own theoretical indignation against the male, I notice, she seems to have forgotten her own predicament. It is left to me to point out that if even the remote possibility exists that political powers are out to get rid of her, her girls could be left motherless, and Corey would perhaps prove an adequate single parent,
but probably not. It wouldn’t necessarily be Victor doing it, I am at pains to point out – it would be NUGInform, busy building the image of Victor as the respectable, God-fearing husband and father he once was and now to all accounts no longer is.

It’s not that I don’t understand Polly’s indignation. We went to a café and spent far too much money on two cups of acorn coffee with dried milk, and what they called a Spam sandwich, which was actually slices of National Meat Loaf between some rather stale National Bread, but up here tradition lingers, and vegetarians are not altogether convinced that NML is suitable for vegetarians, though the slogans say so. My vision of the bubbling broth and the hare-like haunches stayed with me a little as I lifted the stuff to my mouth but not for long. It was good, though if Victor was in charge of the nation’s bread he should do something about the texture. This batch was so gritty it stuck between the teeth.

As we sit there, putting off the time when I will have to come face to face with Venetia, I realize just how much I don’t want to see her. What happens next is going to be even more dreadful than what is happening now. Forget the sealing up of my front door, forget Redpeace, forget NUG, forget Venetia’s putative battering, Polly’s ‘accidents’, I will have to talk about Henry to Venetia. I have to face my own anger, my own past. And we have got along so satisfactorily for so many years without doing so.

Polly is still fuming about my lack of feminist credentials so I tell her the story of Doreen, who came to the door of Chalcot Crescent in the early days of my marriage to Karl. The girls are always glad when I manage to talk about Karl without rancour: it somehow seems to validate their childhoods.

In the winter of 1965 a pretty girl called Doreen – pretty in a febrile, sensitive, quivery, me-me-me kind of way, a fashion model from South Africa – knocked at the front door of Chalcot Crescent in the middle of the night. I left Karl sleeping in the bed and went downstairs shivering in my nightie, and there found Doreen and her seven-year-old daughter Chloe on the step. They too were in their nighties – white cotton with pink smocking as was fashionable at the time – shivering in the cold. Doreen’s face was streaming with blood. Her nose was broken. They had run out in the street and come to me. Chloe held her mother by the hand rather than the other way around. I didn’t know her very well but she lived round the corner and Chloe went to the same school as Venetia. I found a cloth for Doreen’s face, and put Chloe to bed in the lower bunk in Polly’s bedroom. She asked if I would look after Mummy and I said I would. ‘Daddy shouts in the night,’ she said, and went off to sleep. I put Doreen to bed on the sofa.

I knew Daddy shouted because I had been woken one night a
month or two earlier also by Doreen, calling me up on the phone, whimpering down the line and saying, ‘Stop him shouting,’ and this roaring sound halfway between an enraged bull and the sound of a sjambok cutting through the air, and ‘Help me, help me’ from Doreen. And then the phone was slammed down mid-roar. I didn’t have her telephone number to call back and it was before the days when you pressed a key and it happened. Karl had woken and asked what was happening. I said I thought Saul Delpick the journalist was murdering his wife.

‘Oh her,’ said Karl, ‘she deserves it. She’s a drunk. I would murder her if she was mine. Come back to bed.’

So I went back to bed, but I can still hear the air quivering with the violence and hatred of that shout, and the sense of entitlement that went with it.

I checked out where she lived and went round and Doreen was limping and her face was bruised and she said she had walked into a door. She was courteous but distant. I went away and asked around friends, and people looked shocked at the very suggestion that someone as respected as Saul could possibly be harming his wife, and more, that if he was she must have provoked him. It was the time before sisterhood. Female loyalty was owed to the provider of money and home, not to friends. Women got the blame for everything in those days. If a man ran off with his mistress, the wife had neglected him or the mistress had seduced him, or probably both. The man stayed innocent and well thought of throughout.

Karl was angry and wanted her out of his house, out of his life, off his sofa. Saul was his friend and Doreen was going round bad-mouthing a good man: she was a neurotic slut who had trapped him into marriage, slept around and called poor Saul vile names. It was true: I had heard her impugn her husband’s virility over the
dinner table, and shocking it was, but then if he beat her up in private by night she might turn a bit nasty in public by day. Ranks closed against me. This was not at the time a possible scenario. Wife battering was known to happen amongst the drunken, ill-educated, work-shy classes, but not in middle-class homes. Sex-crazed women deserved a beating, asked for it, and even encouraged it, the better to enjoy the reconciliation afterwards.

Everyone said Doreen had dragged her child out of bed in the middle of the night and broken her own nose to make it bleed.

I paid for a hotel, I paid her lawyers, I paid to set her free. She divorced Saul and moved back with Chloe into the marital home. It was unheard of. Until that court case, if you left your husband you left the child. No-one forgave me, and I daresay my defiance of Karl started the rot of our marriage. The Dumpling did as she was told.

‘Why come to me?’ I asked Doreen that night. ‘You have lots of friends to go to.’

‘You’re the only brave one,’ she said, ‘because you earn your own money.’

‘I suppose now you have no money,’ said Polly, ‘you are no longer brave.’

‘That’s pretty much true,’ I said.

‘You’ve told me all this, Mum,’ says Polly. ‘But it’s way in the past.’ How children do hate to receive instruction from their parents. I sympathize. I remember my grandmother trying to teach me to play the piano, and the boiling rage of resentment it called up in me. ‘Can we get on? At this rate we’ll never get to Venetia’s.’

‘I’ve never told you what happened next,’ I say.

I tell her Saul never forgave Doreen and never stopped loving her. He married again and beat up the second wife in the same way. Doreen stayed lonely and tearful for the rest of her life, which was not a long one. She took to yoga and drink and had druggie boyfriends who also beat her up. She neglected the house once it was hers, died of drink and few people came to her funeral. Chloe was okay, but after the flight in the night became and stayed over-weight. Nervy people can coat themselves in fat so the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune don’t hurt so much when they land. I think that was the case with Chloe.

I should not have interfered. Doreen and Saul would still be together, and might even have gone to AA and no longer disturbed the neighbours; Saul’s second wife would have been saved the shouting and hitting. Chloe would have grown up to be as beautiful as her mother. Fathers for Justice would not have gone on risking their necks perching on tall buildings in attempts to see their children.

I have really annoyed Polly. This not what she wants to hear about – the difference between what ought to happen and what does happen. For example, you go to Turkey because you deserve it, and come back to fall out of the sky. Justice is not built into the system, but this is a really hard concept for some people to accept.

At the third roadblock rebuilding is proceeding apace. I scarcely recognize the area. Most has been torn down: big new attractive houses – the word dacha comes to mind – parklands and ponds are being built where once Grand Avenue stood in suburban splendour. Dominating all, such has been the skill of NUG architects, is the old Victorian family home of Victor and Venetia, now with an outgrowth of steel and glass buildings, and topped by an array of spiky aerials, which means it is very much in touch with the rest of the world.

We have to line up behind rows of white CiviVans, no doubt already bringing in items of luxury and pleasure. It was like the Good Days back again, when the traffic jams would be caused by cheerful activity and the sheer volume of vehicles, not the booths of CiviSecure. The end of the road is gated, as is Downing Street, and the policemen are armed. But at least here we have proper adult policemen to check our passage, stare at us long and hard, and confiscate our IDs. They are polite to us but check ahead and we are motioned into a lay-by to wait for permission to pass.

‘It seems NUG is coming to Victor, not Victor going to NUG,’ I say.

‘Told you so,’ says my daughter. And then, ‘It’s probably nothing to do with Victor beating her up, probably no-one minds that at all, like you: at least they have the excuse that they’re men. You don’t.’

I wonder what it is she objects to exactly. The truth or my refusal to deny the truth? It’s a fact that in the past I never carried the story on to its proper end but wrapped it up with the successful court case. Today was different.

‘It’s the other things she told me,’ complains Polly. I hate it when she is in this mean mode.

I blame myself for having smoked while I was pregnant with her. But perhaps I don’t need to. Polly is a Scorpio and they can get moody, bitchy, self-pitying and destructive, in which case one can blame the time of birth and not the faulty, irresponsible, smoking mother and I am off the hook.

‘And even then I wish she had not told me what she did,’ Polly goes on. ‘I don’t know why she had to, since she spent nearly thirty years not, and never told a soul.’

‘What is that, Polly?’ I ask. ‘What secret?’

Long-kept secrets are usually to do with the fathering of babies. Ethan someone else’s baby, not Victor’s? But I’d have known. Surely. And it’s true; Ethan doesn’t look much like Victor. Even I have
remarked upon that. Then who? Who was involved with Venetia all those years ago?

‘Tell me about it,’ I say.

‘We’ll have to get out of the car,’ she says, ‘if your mad fantasies about bugging are true.’

‘Okay,’ I say, and get out of the car. I wish I hadn’t.

Good Lord, I think: surely I deserve a break. That’s what Cynthia said and I denied it to her. Now it’s I who deserve one. I may have been a bad girl in my youth but since then I’ve paid my way, worked hard all my life, been a conscientious citizen, got the law changed, become wealthy and famous, worked for charity, helped others on their way, was dubbed a Dame for my pains, had books published and plays performed, and still it has come to this.

Forget bailiffs at the door, the taxman coming, eyesight if not exactly fading, at least needing light bulbs that are bright, God help me now. Do not let me hear what I think I am going to hear, and from the mouth of my own daughter, who ought to know better than to try to kill me with the truth. The girls have always been full of blame, blaming my various lovers for my present predicament. I blame myself – for the last thirty-five years I have caught up lovers and husbands in a spiral of self-destruct and they really didn’t know what hit them.

‘What Venetia told me,’ says Polly, ‘and she was crying and bending over the sink with a bit of steak held to her eye – can you imagine, real steak? – wasn’t just about him hitting her, it was about Ethan.’

‘If Victor had just “heard about Ethan” perhaps that is why your sister had a piece of steak to her eye. Men get funny about that
kind of thing. When your father realized I had a lover, he hit me. I didn’t hold it against him. I do not suppose Venetia will hold it against Victor. I hope they sort it out.’

I add that I am glad the taps have been running because it might mask what was heard on the mikes. Polly doesn’t like the thought of me having a lover – one rule for the men, apparently, one for the women, same old thing – and called me a slut.

‘No, I was not a slut,’ say I. ‘Certainly not by the standard of the times.’

And I point out that I’d only had a lover in the first place because her father had decided he was too good for me, artistically speaking, and had already gone off with a semi-human, malformed creature shaped like a dumpling. What was I meant to do? Live on my own and mourn my loss for ever? I was doing it for their sake, I add. So I wouldn’t be an emotional burden on them for ever.

‘She was a perfectly nice, very attractive woman, just not too bright and a bit fat. And I don’t think you’re remembering things in order,’ says Polly. ‘Our father made a mistake, that’s all, and wanted to come home. But you only cared about yourself, not us.’

Ah, there we have it, laid out clear.

‘So I suppose Venetia having a baby and palming it off on poor Victor is my fault too? I like Victor.’