Chalcot Crescent (9 page)

Actually, I suspect, as I read through my account of Victor finding the money under Venetia’s mattress, that I am rather envious of Venetia and her ability to land on her feet and have her husband turn into one of the
nomenklatura
under her nose, at a time when that way survival lies. I have never been quite sure Victor was right for Venetia. She was an artist, and Victor was a scientist. The two do seem to like to get together, as do poets and scientists, the better to give each other a hard time. The scientists simply cannot understand why the poets and artists get more worldly attention and respect and headlines than they do. And the female poets and artists bow their head under the shame of it – that the scientists occupy the moral high ground, curing disease and helping mankind, and all the wives have to do is throw patterns of colours and words together and the world goes mad with delight. Yet still they insist on cleaving together. Nature, always seeking balance, chooses opposites to attain it. And the children turn out well, as the children of opposites so often do. The amiable and the morose, the competent and the incompetent.

Both parties to a union subject the other to a usually unspoken vetting process. He’s got a car and a job and a high IQ but he’s black and my parents hate him, but my friends approve so I will: she’s got good legs but supposing she turns into her mother and she drinks
too much, but she’s sexually kind and my friends like her so I will. What was Venetia thinking of when she made her decision? I have a dysfunctional family and a peculiar mother and I’m an artist so I’m an outsider, but he’s also an outsider, being Jewish, but he’s got a regular job and a stable personality and the respect of his peers and we can just be ordinary together and perhaps no-one will notice what outsiders we are? Heaven knows what goes on in the heads of one’s children.

I have a friend who writes film and TV scripts and wins BAFTAs, but her husband was a paediatrician and too busy saving babies to join with her in glory, or even be there at the ceremonies.

‘I came home from a BAFTA do with an award,’ she once said to me, ‘and I longed to celebrate, leap in the air and kiss him and have sex. He was so handsome. Like a surgeon in a Mills and Boon novel. But he was just back from the hospital exhausted and the baby had died after a five-hour operation. It had weighed less than two pounds, such a little scrap, but they’d thought it had a hope. So we went to bed and slept on separate sides of it because he had another operation booked for the morning and had to be fresh.’

They got a divorce, on the grounds of his infidelity. Presumably their timing had never been right. He’d be rejoicing about a successful conjoined twins separation and she’d be mourning a damning review. She never remarried.

‘Men want the glamour of fame at first but soon get fed up with it,’ she said. ‘No way a man can put up with not being top dog. They can’t stand your success.’ She was twenty years younger than me, well indoctrinated in the feminist cause, and seeing gender rather than human nature as the root of all ills. She never mentioned the word love: she would have been ashamed. Humiliation, boredom, embarrassment, unfairness, lack of togetherness, no reciprocity, all
words which came lightly to her lips, but never ‘love’. At least my children talk of it a lot.

‘I know Victor can seem a bit pompous to other people,’ Venetia will say, ‘but I love him.’

And Polly, my other daughter, the feminist, will constantly reassure her children that she loves them. I assume my children take it for granted that I love them, that I would die for them if I thought it would do them any good.

Me, I live alone now, but I would like to live with someone I love and who loves me. It seems such a simple thing to ask, and so difficult to achieve. I managed three batches of around fifteen years’ duration each – Karl, Edgar and Julian, with a few others in between, which I suppose these days counts almost as consistency. And at eighty I daresay one should give up. Though, why?

I ask, because when Amos came down the stairs again he was on his mobile.

‘I thought you were out of juice,’ I said.

‘I tapped into next door’s supply. They have a generator.’

‘But how did you get next door?’

‘Out the fucking back window and in through theirs,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. They’ll never know.’

‘You mean you broke in?’ I was appalled.

‘They’re away. Or repossessed, probably. I see the signs of a hasty exit.’

‘You broke their window?’

‘I was very careful,’ he said. ‘I put a towel round my hand.’

But he’d lost interest in me. He was on the phone.

‘Florrie,’ he was saying, ‘is Amy there? Tell her Amos called.’

I was glad he was in touch with an Amy. Perhaps he did have a love life after all. And if it was an Amy he was not gay. Which had occurred to me, and is always rather a pity because of the issue of grandchildren, or non-issue. But Florrie?

It is not so common a name. And that friend of mine, Cynthia, who fell out of the plane all those years ago. And the friend I betrayed whose name was Liddy, and whose daughter was called Florrie and she went outside to play with Venetia while we talked
about forging Terry’s death certificate so it read cardiac infarction rather than
felo de se
. Was it possible that Venetia and Florrie had stayed in touch? That Florrie had a daughter called Amy and that was the Amy Amos was trying to find?

The Cynthia/Liddy/Terry story had not finished there. And this is the truth of it: the world is fuller of stories and surprises than you would ever guess. The cogwheel factor of Terry who took my virginity under the influence of Cointreau and who failed to marry me so I had Venetia and he had Florrie was unstoppable. Another wheel engaged; it had just taken time to do so. Then by God it got going. Decades later I got a letter from a retired admiral who had worked with Terry on the development of visual landing aids for aircraft carriers, and it said Terry had not killed himself, Florrie had shot him. She had got mixed up with a Californian sun/drugs/occult/youth cult: this was when that sunny world was building up to the Manson Family excesses. Terry had been going to ship the whole family back to London to get Florrie away from it, and Florrie found out, waited until her mother went shopping, found her father’s gun, loaded it, and shot him in the head as he worked at his desk. Patricide. Then she just sat on the floor and stared into space.

Liddy came home and with friends rearranged the scene so it looked like suicide, and the police, though they had their suspicions, went along with the version of a depressed man ending it all. The family was British, not one of theirs, on the way out of the country; who wanted a scandal, a lot of rich kids involved, and a crazy twelve-year-old locked up for life? Terry had talked of me a lot, said the Admiral, he’d want me to know the truth, and because he didn’t want Terry to be thought of as a quitter, a suicide, because he was simply not. I spoke to the admiral briefly on the phone – we agreed Liddy had probably done the right thing. Terry
would have wanted her to do it this way. He would want to take the blame for his child. It was nothing whatsoever to do with the Paris air crash.

And he had talked of me a lot. That made me feel real again, tied up with a kind of silken bow, like a sheaf of old love letters. It was enough.

I called up the alumni to let them know. Not suicide, murder. Remember him differently, I said, but they didn’t seem much interested. He was never one of them, after all, just part of me.

‘Is that the Florrie who’s a friend of your mother?’ I asked Amos.

‘Yes, that’s her,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you know her father or something?’

‘Yes I did,’ I said. ‘How’s Amy?’

‘Amy’s fucking A,’ he said.

‘Not on drugs or anything?’ I asked.

‘No more than anyone,’ he said. ‘Why?’

‘Just wondered,’ I said. All this in-the-genes stuff. It wasn’t quite what I wanted for Amos. But God knows what the lad had running through his veins. What had become of Amos’ hit-and-run father anyway? In prison, on a whaling ship, an accountant, a politician, a designer of posters for the National United Government that now ruled us, for whom Victor worked, and Ethan drove, and who then was the righteous man?

Those outside had given up bang-de-banging.

‘They’ve gone,’ he said. ‘The scum have scarpered. I think we’re free.’

‘But they’ll be back,’ I said. I was chilled and tired and felt like crying.

Amos went loping down the stairs putting on all the lights – power had again been restored. ‘Not necessarily,’ he said, and told
me there was a note put through the door saying the bailiffs would be returning with a court order allowing forcible entry. But it would take them years, said Amos, to get round to it: the courts were backed up solid and we were safe for a while. In fact safer than usual. I’d have been ticked off a list. There were so many bankruptcies and repossessions in the offing the debt collection agencies were overwhelmed. And no-one’s heart was in it, anyway, because what did you do with houses once there was no-one in them? They just grew mouldy and fell down.

Regulations now forbade anyone from owning an empty house for more than a year; property developers were out of business, and to live in a repossessed house was seen as unlucky. A hysteria of superstition had seized the nation: fortune-telling and clairvoyance were one of the few growth areas, along with debt-collection agencies and security firms. And everyone knew when a house had been repossessed: since the coalition party – National United Government – got in, posters saying
Repossessed – NUG scum did this
would be plastered over empty houses, and it could be days before anyone got round to tearing them down again.

And where did the new generation of the dispossessed go? Friends, family, the streets – though the police scooped the actively homeless up pretty quickly. People spoke of ‘the outskirts’ – wherever the outskirts were.

‘I see the Joneses have gone, I wonder where to?’

‘Oh, the outskirts, I think,’ comes the reply.

Some vague kind of place where people find housing. Fuel is rationed so no-one wants to go searching. In hard times you look after your own.

In the morning, said Amos, we’d see about packing up everything of value in the house and removing it from the premises. I was
too tired to argue. I’d talk to him in the morning. I went to bed and got warm, while I still had a bed to get warm in.

But I do rather wonder what Amos wants from me. And what is this ‘we’?

He had to help me up. My knees had seized up. At eighty-whatever-I am you have to keep them moving.

Let me make it clear that I do not want the bailiffs to take my furniture away. I want to go on living in this house until I die, with my Paula Rego on the wall, the possible Brancusi on the shelf, the Wyndham Lewis first editions, the stuff I bought in the days of my youth, and wealth. I often deny that I am interested in possessions, or am materialistic, but I deceive myself. I remember my mother Margaret saying to me that all old women end up in bedsitting rooms with a favourite ornament and a family photo if they’re lucky, and I fear it was true for her, she was bedridden at the end with a mind as clear as a slightly doomy bell, but I never wanted it to be true for me. I wanted simply to stay where I was, as I was, rattling around in eight rooms, until I just did not wake up one morning. It is a tall narrow townhouse, old and draughty – quite unsuitable for someone who chills down easily and has bad knees, I know, but it is home.

You can skip the rest of this section if you want, and go forward to the ongoing story of Amos and Amy, daughter of Florrie, and their connection with the extremist organization Redpeace, an off-shoot of Greenpeace, their conspiracies, their explosives, and how they took Victor as hostage. What I say next will be boring to some, but it places Chalcot Crescent in a historical context, and projects to a world ahead which was bound to come, and so seems to me to
be important to have as a background as we work out what is going to happen next in the unbottomed-out economy.

Writing is in my blood, as painting is in Venetia’s, and I, like her, am accustomed to the rejection and criticism which comes when the artist tries to impose his or her will on their audience other than in the most tentative of manners. Venetia gets more stick than I do because frankly she is not very good at what she does, but that doesn’t mean she gives up. I am good enough, just currently unpublished. If you have got this far, reader, you have got your money’s worth anyhow. Don’t even bother to skip – throw it away in disgust if this is how it takes you. Really, there is no obligation to get to the end of a book which annoys you.

I am always concerned when people, finding out that I am a writer, apologize and say, ‘I’m not much of a reader actually. I know I ought but I just don’t seem able to find the time’ and then go on to tell me how they feel obliged to finish any book they begin. Well, of course, I say, you will be reluctant to open one in the first place, knowing what it might entail. It isn’t meant to be like that, I assure them. If you begin a book and you don’t like it, just throw it away. Or take it round to a charity shop. It’s like going to a party: some people you linger with, knowing you get on. Some people you exchange greetings with and move on fast. It’s nothing against them. They’re just not your kind of person. It’s the same with books. You must be prepared to discard. And though you may feel it’s a waste of money not reading a book you don’t get on with, that’s like not opening the windows when the weather turns warm for fear of wasting the central heating. So, as I say, now is a good point to abandon the book. You have my permission – even my encouragement.

Now, the lifecycle of my house in Chalcot Crescent, Primrose Hill. The terrace was built in an elegant curve around 1810, just over two hundred years ago. I have been part of its life for fifty years, a quarter of its lifespan. I know nothing about the people before me who lived in this house: why should those who live here in the future think of me? We are all temporary, and to pretend otherwise is futile.