Chalcot Crescent (3 page)

But even as I make my speech my voice trails away. I know what Amos is thinking but is too nice to say. How long since you had a play on, Gran? Twenty years? A novel published? Five? Forget it. The luxury trades are over, and that means you. You were a competent enough writer but you never rose to great heights: the world has forgotten you, as it forgets poor widow women since time began. You made a lot of money once but you spent it. Forget it.

‘Power’s back on,’ he says, and so it is. The street lights stop flickering and glow. Kettles can be boiled, mobiles recharged, computer work caught up with, shop tills worked again. The hospitals have priority, and generators, but there is a shortage of doctors and nurses. Those who came to us from overseas have gone home, where the climate is better and the wages turn up on time.

But yet, sitting here on the stairs in hiding at this advanced age of mine, under siege, in the company of this errant, druggie, foulmouthed grandson of mine, I am almost happy. This is the greatest surprise of all. I really do not care what happens next.
Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care, Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care, Massa’s gone away. Massa’s gone away.
History will wash over me like a tide and take me with it. I haven’t so long to live: I am not so eager to stay alive, though I will miss knowing what happens next. ‘They’ – the
forces of law, order and financial stability whose representatives are at the door – also have their kind side. Their committees will decide I am daft, provide me with a bed, warmth, a television set and even these days, I daresay, a computer. I can become a blogger whom nobody reads. I can fade away silently.

My daughters may come forward and offer to take me in, but really I would rather they did not. They have husbands and their duty lies towards them. I realize in retrospect I married my husbands mostly to get away from my mother. Perhaps they did the same to get away from me. Bang bang BANG de-bang. Nemesis at the door, and I don’t care.
We all live in a yellow submarine
. The tune runs through my head.

As you get older, songs from your youth run through your head unbidden. You think they are irrelevant but actually they are not. They’re like dreams, waiting to inform you if you will only take notice. Hymns are there a lot, these days.
See here hath been dawning another blue day, Think ’fore thou let it slip useless away
, as I wonder whether I can be bothered getting out of bed in the morning. Thus reproached, I rise and get on with this novel, or diary, or memoir, or whatever you want to call it. ‘I Vow to Thee My Country’ is another one.
And soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase, And her ways are ways of gentleness and all her paths are peace
.

Where does that come from, I wonder? I’m sure I love my country. I do, though it has become a hard place to love: going through a bad patch, as they say of marriages. I’ll work on it. One must not
give up hope. I remember all those Marxist groups of my youth, the firm belief that capitalism must destroy itself in time, and all you needed to do was destroy the old institutions from within and, phoenix-like, the Glorious New Society would arise. A likely tale, as it turned out. But it is not finished yet. It is too early to tell the forest from the trees.

Okay, let’s get it over. There is a lot to be told in this tale of the past fifty years. I had hoped to keep myself out of the history but I see I cannot, without exempting myself from guilt, which is hardly the point of a confessional. I have become very conscious, now I am old, as I remember being when I was a young woman and sex and babies were so closely bound together, of the interconnectedness of everything – the interplay of the gear wheels and cogs of acquaintance, the pistons and levers of event, that lead to forward motion. We do not have the visual images of connectedness that once we did: a sight of the ship’s engine on the Channel crossing, the polished brass, the thrusting levers, the pounding sexual power; or just how you had to wind the handle to make the car engine spring to life on a cold morning. It was obvious then how all things connected. The stray kitten that mewed on your doorstep, decades back, as you cooked fish fingers for the children’s tea, would turn out to belong to your long-lost best friend and the acquaintance would be resumed and then you’d run off with her husband. Fate determined all things. What happened was meant to be. With the advent of the computer that sense faded away. Engine units are sealed: robots made, replaced rather than mended. We email rather than meet, connectedness is electronic, there are few stray kittens because the cats are sensibly neutered. It has been a relief as well as a loss.

Actually, in the last year, the kittens have begun to appear again. No-one can afford to have cats neutered, or keep them alive when their kidneys fail, and the town vets are going out of business. The country vets prosper, as once again the nation has to feed itself. But that’s by the by.

I was born in 1934 in New Zealand to Dr Frank and Margaret Birkinshaw, younger sister to Jane and Fay, whose portraits can be seen in the Wellington Art Gallery even today. (New Zealand has weathered the last five years rather well: at least it has enough food to eat, though petrol is severely rationed, air flights are limited because of cyber attacks from one militant group or another, and pirate ships from Indonesia torment the Pacific. There was even some talk that cowrie shells were to be the new international medium of exchange, but I think it was fanciful.) Rita Angus, the artist who painted my sisters Jane and Fay, decided that I was too noisy and fidgety a child to include in the picture and that I spoiled her composition. I was only two. I have always felt the exclusion, and I daresay resented it.

My parents divorced and in 1946 my mother Margaret, on the first civilian boat out of New Zealand, where the war had trapped her, brought me and my two sisters to London. She was penniless but valiant, and never put much value on fathers, or indeed men in general. The city, as my twelve-year-old self remembers it, was in pretty much the state it is today. Hungry, unpainted, swarming with grey-faced people and with weeds pushing up between paving stones. Scholarships took me to grammar school, and thence to St Andrews University, where I followed in my sister Fay’s footsteps
and studied Economics and Psychology. Jane went to Exeter and there, always a traditionalist, took a degree in English Literature. We girls were left fatherless in 1946. Fay and Jane had both disappointed my mother by having boy babies at an early age by unsuitable men. I followed suit, giving birth to a girl, Venetia. Fay had no option – no money, no home, too early for State help – but to have her child adopted. Jane, pregnant by a penniless artist, was at least married.

‘All three of you were punishing your mother,’ a psychoanalyst later told me, ‘for leaving your father, abandoning him on the other side of the world, and letting him die there.’

I daresay he was right. Poor Margaret was thereafter to spend her life looking after our various offspring.

But another, simpler, version is that when I was a girl it was a common assumption that you didn’t get pregnant if you did it standing up. I believed it, and that’s how Venetia came to be born. So many of us are born out of ignorance, or drunkenness, or accident, so few out of considered choice. Even today’s children, whose early sexual knowledge comes mostly from computer porn, assume that sexual intercourse consists of blow-jobs and anal congress, with the vagina as a mere afterthought, and scarcely a condom in sight. The sex education teacher may spout away all she likes, but is obviously talking nonsense: the child sees, the child knows, the rate of teenage pregnancies continue to rise. What happens is one thing, what ought to happen is quite another.

Venetia was conceived in one of those little alleys that run between Wardour and Dean Street in Soho, me leaning back against a wall, skirts up to my waist. It was a full black skirt with an underlay of white net petticoats. Derek was Fay’s boyfriend, and he loved her, but I had sexual wiles and she did not, and she could not forgive
him for his fling with me, and broken-hearted he wandered off to Canada and died there skiing into a tree, some said on purpose. Poor Fay, I pattered after her like a curse, always the envious younger sibling, taking what was hers whenever I could. Chips from her plate, shillings from her piggy bank, whole paragraphs from her essays, boyfriends from her side. In the end, when I married Karl, I knew perfectly well he was the husband she should rightfully have had. Yet she never betrayed me: it was always her impulse to understand and forgive. She came to the wedding and smiled bravely; I felt a bit bad but not all that bad.

I knew something momentous had happened when Venetia was conceived if only because the outside world faded away and stillness fell: Derek and I had entered into a slow-motion existence. This hiatus, this pause in actuality, had nothing to do with love, though I assumed at the time it had, being young and romantic. But I have felt the stillness a few times since. I believe it to be when your life veers off from its expected path, like a car slowing down before taking a sharp corner: there is a kind of pause while the parallel universes sort themselves out. I felt it again today when the bang on the door first came and I decided I would not answer it, but hide. I was glad to feel it after so long. I was still in the world of possible outcomes, alternative universes, not the one I have been stuck in for so long, until now, upon the stair.

Pregnant with Venetia, a fact I did not know until Derek was well dead and there was no point in telling Fay, who was also pregnant by him, I refrained from having an abortion or considering adoption. I had a sense that what was meant to be was meant to be and fate was on my side. I had a degree, I had good friends, I was passionately in love with Venetia, unborn and born, and was never very sensitive to what the world thought of me. I attributed the
pregnancy to an unknown passer-by of wealth, good looks and charm, which indeed was true of Derek. So much one must do for one’s illegitimate child – leave them with an image of an admirable if absent father.

Then came odd jobs and hard times, with my poor mother Margaret helping out – how desperately she had hoped for a life of her own, free from children, but we would not let her – until Fay got me a job as a copywriter. Fay, still unmarried but with lovers aplenty, rose and rose unstoppable – and without, I may say, scruple, in the advertising industry. She could afford to be generous. And soon I too was earning well: I was even better than she was at the persuasive game. She, childless, remained a quasi-man inside the industry. I had not married – children were not seen as the items of value they are now: no man wanted a stepchild if he could help it – but I had Venetia, and she turned out to be an advantage, not a handicap. In those days it was rare for women to rise to the heights of the advertising industry, but I could look at the suited men round the boardroom table and say to them softly, ‘I am a woman, a mother, I understand what women want,’ and they would believe me, and trust me, and I was right, and more, I had a way with words on the page. And I got them (and kept them) good clients.

Also, as I was an unmarried mother, and therefore a bad girl, the boardroom men had little hesitation in approaching me for sex, and I was happy to oblige at a time when blow-jobs were not yet common currency. To me they seemed a simple, cheerful and kindly act towards needy married men. ‘Nice’ wives seemed to be mean with sex: the thought of the blow-job was peculiar and strange to the decent women of the time. Procreation was the point of marriage, not pleasure. But I will not dwell on all that. It is a long time ago, and we shed our skins every seven years. On marrying
Karl I quickly had another baby, Polly, a half-sister for Venetia, and turned into the contented wife and mother I always had the potential to be, had not my envy of Fay propelled me into other ways of life.

It was when Venetia was seven that the all-forgiving Fay took me to a party where I met her then boyfriend Karl Prideaux, artist, musician, charmer and antique dealer, and stole him right from under her nose. For once it was not because I wanted something of Fay’s – not that she was ever to believe it – I just wanted Karl, on first sight, as he wanted me. Destined, foretold, all that.

I was a different person then. I look at that time from afar with a sense of awe and marvel. I am no longer me: my skin has changed too often, five times and more if you allow ten years for a complete change. I am the other Frances back then, going with her big sister Fay to a party in Hampstead, where the artists and writers gather. Fay is accustomed to such excitements, Frances not so. Were the nights different then? It feels like it: they carried more mystery, more sense of future. But perhaps that is just youth. The moon is full, it is the days before yellow lines on the road, and anyone can park anywhere, and no-one had yet stood upon the moon and explained it was a lump of rock, with film to prove it and depress everyone, not a gift to lovers from heaven, or made of green cheese either. These days Frances, looking at the moon, senses entropy, and, listening out, can only dimly hear the music of the spheres. But when she was walking alongside her big sister, their high heels clicking in unison, she a couple of inches taller and slimmer of waist, such music rang sweetly in her ears, and the very air seemed scented with promise of excitements to come.

‘You haven’t met Karl, have you,’ says Fay. ‘I met him at the launderette in Regent’s Park Road. My washing machine had broken down.’

‘So now of course you use his,’ remarks Frances.

‘He doesn’t believe in domestic machinery,’ says Fay. ‘So now I take his washing down there as well.’

‘What does he believe in?’ asks Frances.

‘Sex,’ says Fay, and for some reason this irritates Frances very much. Her life is earnest, Fay’s is all frivolity.

Fay lives in a house in Chalcot Square round the corner from Chalcot Crescent. She bought it for £6,000 cash. Women can’t get mortgages from banks, but they can borrow money from friends and lovers and pay it back. Chalcot Square was run-down, the green patch in front of the houses grey, damp and littered with old prams and bits of dismantled bicycles. Rachman, the famous slum landlord of the day, frightened elderly tenants out by painting the evil eye on the front doors and employing actors to prance around as evil voodoo shamans. But she is not elderly, she is young, and not easily frightened, and has a plan anyway to move in with Karl around the corner in the Crescent, where it is lighter, and airier, and far more pleasant, and the grass of Primrose Hill is thick and green, and you can hear the lions roar in London Zoo just down the road.