Chalcot Crescent (8 page)

Indeed, life at Grand Avenue, Muswell Hill, went on much as it had in pre-Crisis days. Senior civil servants, government ministers and the meritocracy lived here, in large detached houses. They had fuel allowances: their ration books arrived, their wages were paid in Euros and were seldom late. Roads up here on the heights were not potholed. The area suffered, along with the whole country, from power cuts and water shortages, but otherwise, at least if they closed their eyes as they were driven through more dilapidated areas to their places of work by CiviSecure chauffeurs, they could imagine
life was even better than once it had been: the cars varied, but most had powerful engines. Work-creation schemes had brought Soviet-style central lanes to most Whitehall streets, and were reserved for official cars, so gridlock was a thing of the past. Car sharing was obligatory, even at Victor’s level, and he would travel in with three or four others from the neighbourhood. Official cars were a variety of executive makes, confiscated from the thousands which had built up in dock areas all over the world back in 2009, waiting for orders that never came.

This year the Government would be bringing in the CiviCar: a green city runaround at an affordable price, if you were in State employment and had an unblemished citizen rating. Meanwhile the chauffeurs, many of them ex-City men, put the Mercedes, BMWs, Lexuses and Jaguars through their paces, and dreaded the arrival of the dreary but practical CiviCar. Four-wheel drives were seldom seen: they had come to symbolize waste, extravagance and greed, and it had become customary for street people to attack and trash them – a practice tolerated by the authorities as a safety valve for their anger.

Just after Victor’s transfer from oncology to Food Excellence, watch Victor help Venetia turn their mattress. He is a big solid expensive-looking man with large, bright brown eyes in a broad, slightly fleshy face. She worries that she may be colourless: dark eyeliner rings her very blue eyes, and she is seldom without lipstick. Her paintings reflect her worries: she uses acrylic paints which she applies vigorously on to white canvas. The mattress is big and expensive, and had been bought back in the days when Venetia was working for the Arts Council. They had bought it on their Selfridges store card, now fortunately at last paid off – though a £3,500 purchase had cost them £9,400 by the time the banks had assured Selfridges it could manage its customers’ finances better than they could, and raised the interest rate as the small print allowed them to do. Not even Victor had bothered to read the small print.

Now of course Venetia no longer worked for the Arts Council. The Recovery had rather suddenly turned into the Bite, and she had been made redundant. No more arts funding; no more grants; no more jobs. She was not sorry: now she could spend more time doing her own work. She was like her mother in this: you might not be able to sell your efforts, but that didn’t stop you working.

‘What is this envelope?’ Victor asks. It is a thick brown envelope stuffed between mattress and divan base.

‘Oh that,’ says Venetia. ‘It’s my severance pay.’ She had forgotten about it. ‘I have an artistic temperament, Mum,’ she excused herself to me. ‘I can never concentrate on deceit for long.’ And I remembered how I had left the note from my lover half hanging out of my coat pocket for Karl to find, and could see my daughter might well have inherited the gene for inadvertent confession from me.

‘But there’s more than two thousand pounds here,’ Victor says. ‘What is it doing under our mattress? Anyone could steal it.’

‘I don’t see how,’ says Venetia, ‘unless they were turning the mattress. And robbers don’t usually turn mattresses.’

‘They will make it a habit,’ says Victor sombrely, ‘unless citizens learn to trust the banks again.’

‘But they charge you for keeping your money there,’ says Venetia, ‘so what’s the point?’

‘Only a small sum,’ says Victor.

‘Do they brainwash you or something at your new job?’ asks Venetia. And Victor says, ‘No, as it happens. But one does learn something about the realities of life. If the currency were to be devalued again formally this would be worth nothing,’ and he refuses to say more on the subject. He takes the cash and pays it into Venetia’s bank account without any further conversation other than, ‘We all have to have trust and faith,’ he says, ‘and pull together. Besides, it isn’t good to be seen to hoard currency. It isn’t wise.’

It was useless hiding things from Victor: she should have known better, or else have felt more guilty and hidden it somewhere less obvious. He looked and remembered and learned: he forgot nothing, and it was getting worse. Once he could laugh at himself and apologize for being an obsessive compulsive – but now he stomps through the house ranting about missing keys or underpants, finding them where he left them and snorting his conviction that
‘someone’ had hidden them. Venetia thought perhaps his new job was a strain; but he said no, he liked it, it was good to be useful.

Venetia did not protest. She enjoyed her life with Victor and as long as she did not argue they got along fine. The sex was good and that always reassured her. Steady, and unworried, once or twice or even three times a week, after more than thirty years, and somehow in tune with the rhythm of the universe. True, she preferred the light off rather than on, being conscious of a certain slackness of skin, a certain barrelness of figure in middle age, but Victor didn’t seem to mind. ‘It’s all you,’ he’d say, taking a pinch of extra flesh at her waist and squeezing it gently, ‘that’s all that matters.’ She felt no jealousy of unknown research assistants he might meet at work, as she would have done when she was younger. They were the envy of their friends.

‘But he does seems to have lost his sense of humour,’ complains Venetia on the phone to Polly.

‘He never had one to lose,’ says Polly. ‘You delude yourself. Do you think he knows something about devaluation the rest of us don’t?’

‘He’s a scientist, not a currency expert,’ says Venetia. ‘And what he does is not so different from what he did before. It’s still stem-cell research; what he was doing for Cancer Cure. No-one’s wasting expertise these days.’

‘Spoken like Victor’s wife,’ says Polly. ‘Ask Ethan.’

Venetia’s second son Ethan had been in banking and now worked for NIFE like his father, but rather down the scale as a Ministry driver. Venetia asked. Ethan said to tell Polly devaluation was obviously on the cards, now inflation had started pushing back the deflationary pressures of the last few years and the effect of quantitative easement was being felt. But not to worry: everyone
should eat, drink and be merry while they could. As to the ‘bottoming out’, it was not going to happen. Democracies were simply not equipped to deal with a consumer society which had lost the knack of consuming, as after a stroke a man can lose the knack of speech. Ex-bankers loved gloom, Venetia had noticed.

Mervyn, Venetia’s second son by Victor, was studying Politics and Economics at the LSE, and expected to get a First. Classes were large – seminars of thirty students were not unusual – but as Victor pointed out, statistically speaking, size of class and quality of education were positively correlated. And Venetia would try not to let her eyebrows rise in doubt. At the Ministry, Victor took an obligatory weekly class on ‘Positive Thinking and the New Economy’: perhaps that was all the change in Victor amounted to. He learned his lessons well.

Amos has been gone a long time. He is probably asleep. The smell of skunk pervades the house, horrible strong stuff. The sort we used in the sixties was milder and made us witty and lively – or so we thought – and this new stuff just makes you surly and sends you to sleep. Before that, in the late forties and early fifties we took Dexedrine, a form of amphetamine, to keep us awake in lectures, and to help us pass exams. Snorting drugs, or smoking them, was beyond the limits of our sophistication. A friend of mine, subject to narcolepsy, now takes Dexedrine to stop him from falling into the teapot like the dormouse at the Mad Hatter’s tea party (a reference, for the benefit of you younger readers, to Lewis Carroll’s
Alice in Wonderland
) and he sometimes passes spare pills on to me. But they don’t work on me as once they did: they don’t fill me with the wild mental excitement, the exhilaration of the mind I remember: they just make me feel unconnected with reality in a misty and disagreeable kind of way.

Amos is past the full flowering of youth. Surely he should have grown out of drugs by now: he should no longer be claiming with a boyish laugh that he was born one spliff short of a complete human being. Nor am I totally convinced by his account of his life amongst the NGOs: it doesn’t quite ring true. I am not sure what he does for a living, but I imagine it to be more concerned with the
underside of society rather than its open face. He is forever ‘passing through’. He will turn up at the Hunter’s Alley house I bought for the use of the boys back in the days of my wealth, and use there as a base for a while, and Ethan and Mervyn will fuss over him, and do his laundry, and plug in his BlackBerry while the power is on, make a million phone calls, hop over to Muswell Hill to see his mum and be polite to Victor who we must not forget is his stepdad and then move on. For some reason one never quite likes to ask where to.

When I jokingly said on the phone this morning that I expected a call from the bailiffs any minute, he came round at once. Barely had he arrived than the joke ceased to be a joke and came true. We were lunching on our National Meat Loaf and the last of the tomatoes from my window boxes, when came the banging on the door and the world turned serious.

I did not of course write the previous section about life in Venetia’s lovely home exactly as you read it above. I admit I have worked on it. I have had the time to do so. I wrote it rather roughly on the stairs, in first draft, while my leg cramped and my neck twinged, so I was happy enough to stop and stretch when Amos finally came loping down the stairs with my blanket, preceded by a waft of skunk.

Amos’ natural father, donor of the genes, was unknown – other than very briefly to his mother. It had been on my daughter Venetia’s first night at Camberwell Art School, at the Freshers’ ball, and the candlelight too flickery for recognition of who exactly was so pleasuring her, and when the tutors became involved whoever it was never came forward. It is not unusual for virgins to get pregnant on their first sexual encounter. Sheer surprise makes any waiting egg drop from the Fallopian tube, and bingo!

Amos is Venetia’s eldest son and has over the years offered more problems than her other two boys, Ethan and Mervyn. But then the genes are different. Amos, brilliant at school, a good-looking charmer, a leader of men, worshipped by the two younger boys – and then suddenly a druggie drop-out at sixteen, and a professional drug dealer by twenty-two. ‘That’s what happens if boys don’t have a proper father,’ or so everyone said. I don’t think it made the slightest difference. He had Victor as a stepfather from the age of seven and a perfectly steady, even boring life, until he decided to hot it up via the drug trade. At twenty-three he was in prison – shopped by his associates for having got too big for his boots, muscling in where the big boys – serious boys, the ones who murdered and tortured – thought they had every right to be, shocked back into sense by the company he found himself obliged to keep. By twenty-four he had turned his
life around. It is dreadful having a family member in prison: there is no more innocent enjoyment to be had – it is the family’s sentence as well as the child’s – but inside he at least learned – as Victor put it – to appreciate his family, and give up his ghastly friends.

Since then Amos has come and gone in our lives, polite – other than for his propensity to swear, which seems ineradicable – self-supporting, affectionate, charming, but always slightly enigmatic: no fixed address that one knew of, but always contactable by email or mobile. An activist, an environmentalist, an aid worker, employed by various NGOs abroad – though one by one, as the Crunch bit and global markets vanished, these dropped off the map and left the failed countries of the world to struggle on their own. Which by all accounts they are doing quite satisfactorily – rather better without us than with us – though the accounts are unreliable as ever. Whether an eyewitness blog emanates from a genuine blogger or a government source who is to say?

Amos had no fixed address by his own doing, by the way: it was no wish of mine. Indeed, I had bought a rather mean little house at 11 Hunter’s Alley in King’s Cross primarily for Amos, but where Ethan and Mervyn now live, in benign young-man squalor. Amos occasionally turns up and spends the night, just passing through. I gifted the house to the three of them formally five years back, which, as everyone agreed, was amazingly generous of me, and certainly rather rash, since my last book could not even find a publisher. But as I say, it took me some time to wind down my spending habits – I had my own personal credit crunch a couple of years before everyone else. The bank manager had ceased to be a person and become an interchangeable minx in a short skirt, called my ‘personal advisor’. And all she said was, ‘We cannot extend your loan. In fact we are calling in your overdraft.’

The Hunter’s Alley house was cheap because I had a friend – I had met her when she was producing a forensic science drama, on which I was one of the writers, with whom I had been working on a forensic science TV series – who knew someone who dealt in repossessed houses. A recluse had been found dead inside No. 11 when the police came knocking on the door because of the smell: the body had lain undiscovered for six weeks and it was summer. The house was council property: they had cleaned it up and put it up for sale. I bought it. I had no scruples.

Most houses have had someone die in them: it doesn’t stop new owners in the present enjoying the property of the departed. I surprise myself by how little I care. And I wonder if my karma is suffering because of that. Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby comes alarmingly to mind. Charles Kingsley’s
The Water Babies
. Who was the other one? Ah yes. Mrs Bedonebyasyoudid. Which was the most terrible? The latter always turned up after Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby had gone by, and you had ignored her and were about to be punished. The Victorians were great on retribution. These days we focus on understanding and forgiving, though we are allowed the grief now compulsorily announced from the witness box by members of the victim’s family. And written, one suspects, by some mawkish policeman with a liking for the job. ‘Such a bubbly girl: everyone loved her: the grief is with us every day.’ ‘Our fine son with all his life in front of him taken from us on the eve of his A levels’ – or even the ones who say to their child’s rapist and murderer, ‘I am a Christian, I forgive him.’ What kind of morality is that?