Chalcot Crescent (7 page)

‘I was thinking of getting a Stannah stairlift,’ I say. ‘But the house is too old, the banisters too delicate.’ Still he is not to be stopped. His bright-blue eyes, I realize, are large-pupilled. Is he on drugs, or is it just enthusiasm?

‘Even royalty,’ he goes on. ‘The highest in the land, for hundreds of years back. Those who make war, make peace, make inter national contracts. All in hock to the bankers. Scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours. Edward VII had gambling debts; Winston Churchill could not keep up Chartwell in style without loans. Lord Curzon was in hock to business friends, Roosevelt too.’

‘The Queen?’ I ask, but I cannot make him laugh. ‘Is she a lizard form too?’ He does not get the reference. There had been a conspiracy theorist nut in the nineties who went around claiming that the Queen was a lizard form from Sirius.

‘The best in the land infected by the scum of the land.’ His voice is rising. ‘They deserve to die, to be strung from the lampposts. Caged in a football stadium and machine gunned. Pinochet had the right idea. Death to the banksters!’

My grandson is mad. Drugs have affected him. I laugh.

‘Why are you laughing?’ he demands.

‘You were the sweetest little boy,’ I say.

And so he was, happy and trusting and full of energy. Venetia was a single mother: I did a lot of looking after Amos when he was small, when I was in my forties, between the books and the plays and the feminist conferences and promotional tours and the cultural exchanges with the Soviet Union. I ended up a good public speaker. Or if I couldn’t take time off to babysit, the country was awash with au pair girls who would, over here to learn English, or to catch an Englishman, when they were seen as desirable prey. Those were the days.

‘Why do you think we have wars? Who benefits? Not the people, that’s for sure. Not the peasants, the workforce, the poor: no, it’s bombs and starvation for them. They don’t have money, they can’t be robbed, blood-sucked, they might as well die. Bomb a city and at least someone can make money seeing that it’s put up again.’

‘Hush,’ I say to Amos now. ‘If you speak too loudly they will know you’re here.’

And again comes the thought that he’s the one they’re after, not me. But that must be wishful thinking brought on by my great age.

Are they just letting him know they’re on to him? I remember that back in the early seventies, when the arts of surveillance were just getting going, how my phone was tapped. I had been employed to write ‘the greatest romance in the world’ for a big US TV company – the love story of John and Jackie Kennedy. In those days you knew your phone was being tapped because there was no interference on the line – no static, no missed calls, no crossed lines – all the usual imperfections suddenly wiped away. But this was a CIA tapping, because they had one of the new word-sensitive monitors – which would cut in when you said anything that concerned them, in this case the word Kennedy, or Cuba, or President,
or assassination – and the tone of the background would alter pitch. I had fun with my friends trying it out. In those days no-one took ‘security’ seriously. They were just overgrown schoolboys, paranoiac fuckers playing games around an iron curtain.

But they had other tactics too when they wanted you to know they were on to you: a shot across your bows. The interference would increase: crossed lines would give you background conversations in which your name would be mentioned: nuisance calls with heavy breathing would get you to the phone at all times of day and night. You would mend your ways – not speak at the CND meeting, nor attend the ANC gathering – and they would go away. But you had been warned.

Perhaps this is what is happening now? Amos is being warned. It has nothing to do with the note that came through the letter box yesterday, saying that unless payment was made within the day officers of the law would be round to confiscate such of my belongings as they felt necessary to support my debt. Another surprise. One never quite believes it will come to this.

Rather, one believes that there is a guardian angel standing by who will come to the rescue when push comes to shove. When Karl says he has left me and the children for the Dumpling, the Angel will surely rewind time. When the letter from the court comes, the Angel will be there with a cheque from some film company and will hand it over and I won’t even have to go down to the front door to open it. Surely the Angel will be sitting here next to me on the stairs and Amos will not be mad, but sane, and like anyone else, but there is no angel. And yet that angel was with me so much of my life. She was there when I was born and gave me good looks, health and talent. She helped me make money. She helped me meet my destiny, who was Karl. And then Karl went. And then it was as if he took the
Angel to his new place. Not that she did the Dumpling much good.

Now the surprise of this letter, of all the other letters one has had in one’s life. Here are your excellent A grades from school; here is confirmation of your daughter’s scholarship; your offer of a pay rise if you will only stay on at the agency; (Karl) ‘I love you, darling, for ever more’ – or words to that effect; will you accept a Damehood from the Queen for services to literature?; (Fay) ‘I’m okay now about you marrying Karl, will you come out for a holiday?’ – I never did; you have sold the film rights to
D-I-V-O-R-C-E
, and the opera rights, and it is now translated into ten different languages; the British Council wants you to represent your country; will you be President of our charity? And so on and so forth and now this.

How oddly authority phrases it. As if they were doing me a favour – ‘supporting my debt’.

Once I would have rung my agent and she’d have the money round within the day. I was worth keeping out of trouble. But now I have no agent and the agent has no clients and there is no money. And I don’t know what to do for the best. Money gives you confidence. With money you can laugh at authority. Once you could always buy your way out of trouble. If your car gave too much trouble you just bought a new one and the secretary did the boring paperwork. How were we to know what would happen next? That it would all change, and so suddenly? How the State would micro-manage our lives, monitor our every transaction, tax us for making music, imprison us for a false word, oversee the legitimacy of our jokes, film our every movement, enter our houses at will, surround us with wardens, take our children from us, our cigarettes from our lips, ban the salt cellar from the table, and the wine from our glasses.

And yes, Amos is right. I am angry. If I search for anger – see, I can find it.

I am also angry at Mother Nature, who discards us after we are of childbearing age and withers us up, in spite of what we do to stop her with pills and potions, and makes our knees ache, and chill get into our bones, and gave us the ability to bear witness to our winding down. But she never had any interest in our comfort, let alone our contentment. All she ever wanted us to do was reproduce, and if we are beyond that, forget it. And of course all this stuff about the decline of the West is relevant, and dreadful, and someone needs to be punished, obviously, but what about me?

But how well we lived then, in the lemon veal and chocolate mousse days, when we all went to hell in our own way. How well in particular I lived. I consider this house of mine. It’s just so nice, though it could do with a coat of paint, inside and out. I bought what I wanted, not what I needed, and in the back of my mind was the idea that what you bought you could always sell. The oak refectory in the kitchen, the William and Mary dressing table, the Venetian chandelier in the bedroom where once I disported myself with Karl and quite a few others since – a mass of exquisite little glass flowers, each one different; the bookshelf of first editions, the Chagall on the wall, the Worcester dinner set, or what’s left of it. Investment? Never. When you come to sell it all it’s not worth a dime. Nobody wants it. Everyone’s selling, no-one buying. Might as well keep it and enjoy it. We are not yet at the stage when the girls are selling their honour for a bar of chocolate, or their family silver for a bag of potatoes – though some say that’s not far down the road. In the Crescent we’re growing our own potatoes and beans – the Neighbourhood Watch now exacts a tax of a quarter of all crops – things have gotten surprisingly feudal round here. People make jokes about Robin Hood and the Neighbourhood Watch is known as the Sheriff.

The agents of corruption at the door can take it all. I didn’t really
need it, didn’t really want it. It was just something to do. Really I have lost interest. Possessions are for the middle aged, not for the old. What I love is the life I lived here once. It is part of me, they can’t take that away from me. The house has been here nearly two hundred years. I have been part of it for some fifty of these. We are hermit crabs, we wait until we find one empty and then we crawl into it, shelter under its roof, and presently scuttle off somewhere new. I know oddly little about the people who lived here before me: why should those who live here in future think of me?

I say none of this to Amos. He believes like all his generation that he was born in the year zero and history started with him.

Amos has calmed down and fallen silent. The bailiffs are back in their car. Amos takes the opportunity to slither upstairs again. Off to find his gear and roll a spliff, I suppose. I wonder what is going on even now in his mother’s house? I can guess. Obsessive as ever about keeping my hand in – unlikely though the prospect of publishing is – I lie on my front, laptop on the stair above me, elbows on the stair below, and write the following. It is fiction but based on likelihood. Bang, bang, bang de-bang. Forget them. There is just enough light through the skylight above the front door to enable me to see the keyboard. I love fiction. It is so much easier to escape from than fact.

‘I had a call from Amos today,’ said Venetia to her husband Victor the next day at breakfast. ‘He’s staying over at Mum’s. Apparently she called him and said she’d had a letter from the bailiffs and he went over to reassure her.’ Amos was Victor’s stepson. They got on well enough, so long as Amos kept away from contentious issues.

‘What does he want from her this time?’ asked Victor, buttering his toast. It was National Butter, all you could get in the shops at a regulated price. It was made out of fat from many undeclared countries of origin, but with enough Chinese dried milk in it to make it look, taste and behave like butter. If you melted it, it was true, there was a degree of solid residue left in the pan, and with every batch that came into the shops there seemed to be more solids and less oil, but it was okay. Better at any rate, Victor assured Venetia, and more nutritional than the low fat-alternatives Venetia had insisted the family eat in the pre-Crisis days when obesity had been a social problem. Victor liked to look on the bright side, sometimes almost to the point of self-delusion, ever since he had stopped work in oncology research, and been co-opted on to the Committee of the National Institute for Food Excellence.

That had been three years back, when all the major charities, including Cancer Cure, had agreed to pool their efforts, in the interests of humanity, efficiency and consistency, to combine in the new
umbrella organization, CiviKindness, or CK. There was really no option, private donations having fallen away to the extent they had. Almost overnight, public attitudes had changed. Let the volunteer army rattle boxes as it would, and professional fund-raisers plead and shame, giving was suddenly out of fashion. Either the public had no money to spare, having decided charity begins at home; or they suspected the various organizations creamed off too high a proportion of the takings. Or, as Venetia thought, they were simply sick of unpleasant images: women with hooks through their mouths, children with harelips, burned babies and so on. The people had given up on giving, as CiviKindness pointed out, so the State had no choice but to take over. Legacies to the various charities now went straight to CiviKindness, as did long-standing bank orders, cancellation no longer being an option. Specialist research staff were allocated to various government departments so talent was not wasted. Victor had been lucky enough to be taken on by the NIFE, where his pay was index-linked and his family covered by health insurance. No wonder Victor was cheerful: just sometimes, Venetia thought, too cheerful.

‘Perhaps he doesn’t want anything from her,’ said Venetia, peaceably. ‘Perhaps it’s just to keep his Gran company.’

‘Nutty old bat,’ said Victor cheerfully. ‘They’re both delinquents. And Amos always has an eye to the main chance.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t talk about my mother like that,’ said Venetia, ‘or my son.’ Victor looked surprised.

‘But it’s true,’ he said. ‘I’m very fond of your mother but she is a nutty old bat and she should have sold that house when it was worth something. And you know perfectly well what Amos is like. Sometimes I really don’t understand you.’

It was a statement of fact. He didn’t, and she would have to
explain yet again, if it seemed worth it, that family cohesion was not best served by the facing of difficult truths. But it didn’t seem worth it so she let it ride. Victor was very much a left-brain person, a scientist, logical and clear-headed, on the Aspergery side. As her sister Polly observed, when it came to emotional intelligence Victor was one sandwich short of a picnic, and it had got worse in his new job. Venetia refrained from saying that when it came to Corey the lights were on but nobody was at home, and wouldn’t it be nice if he had a job at all. Venetia spent a lot of time biting back this remark or that in the interest of family unity. The task had to be left to someone and the mantle had fallen on Venetia. She was a strong, handsome woman, mother of sons, not as young as she had been but still full of fortitude and wearing well.

She could be relied upon to have candles ready in a power cut, a bath full of water when the taps ran dry and, until the UG99 wheat fungus got going in 2010 and put an end to wheat growing worldwide, a loaf of National Bread in the cupboard. Now of course she had Victor’s work food card to use at any of the CiviStore Grade 1 shops, and rye bread was available. Sometimes she wondered what exactly Victor did at the NIFE to deserve such goodies, but he was not meant to talk about his work at home and she honoured that.