Chalcot Crescent (12 page)

I went into emergency gear: I did not let the expression on my face change, though no doubt my smile stiffened a little, as I worked out what was to be done. I remember the other occasions I had felt like this: when I first suspected Karl was running off with the Dumpling; when the phone rang at five one morning and it was Venetia saying Amos was in police custody; when little Polly was taken to hospital with suspected meningitis; when I waited for confirmation that Cynthia had been on the Paris flight; when the letter came from Liddy and I read that Terry was dead. The body reacts first and tells you what the mind is thinking. This was not
something that could be just brushed aside and life got on with. It was real: Amos hated his mother and his smiles were lies. And if he came to Shabbat meal on Friday night (which was not a real Shabbat meal because both Victor and Venetia were atheists, and viewed religion as the source of most of the world’s ills, but saw no harm in ceremony) and smiled and charmed, it was for some ulterior motive. And why? What had Venetia ever done other than love her son, cherish him, forgive him, visit him in prison, and include him in her new life with Victor as best she could? Was he mad?

It was a possibility. Schizoids turn on those who love them most. The mothers are the ones who get chopped up with the axe, not the enemies. It is something to do with neural pathways passing too closely to one another in the brain, I believe, and if you are unlucky hate and love can cross over.

It was a surprise. It was a shock I had not been expecting. There was something terribly wrong and something had to be done, and I was not sure I had the strength for it. I was old, and you lose your taste for the things that need to be done. And part of you thinks this is enough surprise for one life.

Venetia was born when I was twenty, without an attendant father, and brought up for her first ten years in the days of my trouble and poverty, before I went into advertising, met Karl, wrote books and became suddenly rich. Luck was on my side, and I had given birth to a blond, healthy, beaming child, Venetia, and luck was on her side too when, following in my footsteps, the child grew to conceive Amos, also out of turn. He too was beautiful and bright. I think there are some babies who are simply meant to be born: children of destiny rather than choice, their parentage being so unlikely, the coming together of the twain so accidental. Or it may just be that to seek likeness in a partner is counter-productive – you have a better chance of successful progeny if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Venetia was allowed to stay on at art school, became the pride of the traditionalist tutors, the despair of the conceptual fanciers, a tall, blonde, witty, willowy girl with large smoky-blue eyes and a good academic brain. Oxford wanted her, and Cambridge too, but she settled on Camberwell. I did not argue. It always seemed to me short-sighted to interfere with the children’s choice of education.

‘If only,’ they will wail, ‘you hadn’t made me go to that school; everything would have turned out differently.’

If you let them do as they want, they have only themselves to blame.

Had she gone to Oxford, though, and done PPE and gone into politics – she ran the school anarchist society and was a great platform speaker – she might be running the country now and we would not be in the mess we are in. But there it goes. Like her mother, never one to live alone, being something of a sex addict, and mildly masochistic, she and Amos shacked up with first Angus Astura, the conceptual artist who wrapped up the Savoy Hotel with a red ribbon and bow, but on opening day was discovered by the media in a broom cupboard with a PR girl. And after Angus came the concrete poet Peter Patel, who bored her to tears by the clunkiness of his verse. The suitors didn’t last long but were nevertheless in Venetia’s bed, and sons can put up with fathers in their mothers’ beds but passing uncles set off all kinds of neuroses.

I was always there in the background to support her financially, my allegedly feminist books selling like hot cakes the world over, providing both my daughters with security and, in the end, a comparatively respectable background. I’m not sure it did either of them any good.

When Amos was eight Venetia finally met someone halfway possible, and settled down with him: Victor, a biogeneticist with a respectable job, complete with pension, at the big London charity Cancer Cure. They moved into a big Victorian house in Grand Avenue, Muswell Hill, with a view over all London, and there they have stayed. Venetia did what she could to include Amos in her new family, and gave birth to Ethan and Mervyn. She employed au pairs to mind the children and found time to paint in the studio especially built for her by Victor at the bottom of the garden. He always seemed to have a little more money than his salary warranted: Amos said he took private work creating designer babies, but that was the kind of thing Amos would say.

When the Crunch hit in 2009, people stopped buying paintings and decided they could as well tear pictures out of old Sunday supplements and bung those up on their walls. Venetia went on painting and stockpiled her canvases. During the Recovery she got a part-time job with the Arts Council, but that went too, with the Bite, as indeed did the weekend supplements. (No advertising, no supplements.) NUGNews did a Saturday supplement but it wasn’t much fun. The paper was low quality and the colours were dreary, and soon people had nothing to put on their walls. So now every month Venetia would complete a painting, put it against the railings outside the house and wait for someone to take it away. Which they always did.

‘Art should be free,’ said Venetia. ‘It can’t be valued in monetary terms.’

Victor, thank God, will do anything he can to please Venetia and thinks she is a genius. Her paintings are rather bright and unlikely, thick acrylic bold colours in circular shapes. I pretend to like them and have some on my wall.

They’re not unlike the ones she did at her first nursery school, where she was happy. I was still an unmarried mother and walked with her to school every day and she had my undivided attention. Then I married Karl and had Polly and I think that rather put her nose out of joint, as my mother having other children before me, put mine. It’s usually older siblings who cause trouble for the ones that come along next, but in my case it was the next sister up I took against. She could read and write before me, and I was envious, but I think it was being left out of that painting that really got to me.

If I go back to Amos’ beginnings I can see he is the grandchild most likely to be caught up in extreme behaviour of some kind or another. He has never really belonged, any more than Venetia has.
Venetia did to Amos what I did to her, and, at around the same age, started the ‘real’ family as if the first child was a mistake, accidental. The others are of the blood royal, as it were, while the first and misbegotten child is a Fitz to the others’ Lords, a by-blow, a bastard, through no doing of their own. Daughters are more placid and accepting, but sons will rail against fate, and look for a place to belong. William the Conqueror was known as William the Bastard at home in Normandy and had to conquer Britain to get a change of status. What will Amos do?

The doorbell rang as I was writing this, but it was quite gentle and tentative so I had no hesitation in opening up. A lean young woman in her early twenties stood on the doorstep. And I thought Terry. The same hooded dark-blue eyes, the full, slightly twisted mouth, the narrow face, and I was back in St Andrews and drunk with Cointreau and my soul was watching the union below from up there in the corner of the ceiling. I don’t suppose angels get to many couplings but I daresay they do occasionally, when the consequences are of relevance to a wider future.

‘Are you Frances?’ she asks. ‘You knew my grandfather. I’m Amy. My mother Florrie knows your daughter, who’s married to Victor who works for NIFE.’

‘That’s so,’ I say. ‘You look so like your grandfather.’

‘How can I?’ she asks. ‘I’m a girl, he was a man.’

‘You’re a female version of him,’ I say. ‘The oestrogen version, not the testosterone one.’ She looks as if she’d like to argue but can’t really be bothered. Terry would look like that too when he was bored or disapproving or Liddy had said something simply stupid, which she often did. She wasn’t very bright, which was probably why he married her not me. Remember that was back in the fifties when dim girls were preferred above bright ones – probably
because they made better mothers. Bright girls get distracted and don’t concentrate on motherhood. Though I’m not sure Liddy can have made a very good mother.

‘Was my Gramps your boyfriend?’ she asks, straight out.

‘Not in any permanent sort of way,’ I say.

‘It’s odd to think of old people having sex,’ she says.

Tact is not her strong point but neither was it her grandfather’s. Why should people get better through the generations? Some do, some don’t. Some families are in entropy while others are burgeoning. Yet this girl is a great improvement on wan, ethereal Liddy. I think perhaps she is Aspergery: she looks too clever for her own good. People on the autistic spectrum are often beautiful, as if the sheer capacity for emotion was harmful to the foetus in the womb, and prevented perfect, symmetrical growth.

‘Anyway I never met him,’ she adds. ‘He shot himself before I was born.’ She doesn’t quite look directly at me, but I have the feeling she thinks the same ought to apply to me. But it may be nothing personal: the young are often like that. They really cannot see why the old should exist at all. I am not altogether out of sympathy: I sometimes share the feeling.

She is here to see Amos. I call him down and they go off together in her tinny little Civi run-around. I wonder where she gets the petrol. I do not think they have anything other than a friendly relationship. Perhaps she is with Ethan, who is spoiled for choice.

I am alone at last and now can turn my hand to fiction. I will give you a version of the moment of exclusion which set Amos off on the path towards social alienation. That moment when, they say, the loner instincts finally prevail, which seals the destiny of serial killers, terrorists and high-school assassins. I feel very unfair to Amos writing this: I have not the slightest evidence to support these
speculations of mine. All I really have against Amos is that he swears all the time, smokes skunk, rants a good deal and means to hide my possessions in case the State gets them, and not him as in my will. (That too is probably unfair: inheritance duties are up to 80 per cent for all artworks and antiques: the money these fetch in sales these days is so pitiful that now the State just confiscates. Amos can’t expect much.) But then perhaps it is my revenge upon my family, thus to let loose my fantasies in fictional form. That psychoanalyst long ago would certainly say so. I wish Karl would come back from the dead and explain things to me. It seems the least the dead can do for the living.

‘My God,’ Venetia had said when the news of the collapse of Cancer Cure came through on Victor’s email. ‘How are we going to live now?’

No-one was buying her landscapes any more – or indeed anyone’s – and her job at the Arts Council had come to an end. She had been working part-time, allocating public money to deserving artists – not that she thought many of them were – but in the light of the new scheme afoot –
Art for All
– that would make qualified artists direct employees of the State, her skills were redundant. Or else her views as to what constituted good art, and what did not, were now seen as reactionary. The heating bills were immense and still climbing: she couldn’t paint if her fingers got too cold. If even Victor, one of the nation’s leading stem-cell scientists, was to lose his job, how would they manage?

Victor told her not to panic, the Government was not going to let its brightest and best go to waste – and sure enough a posting came through from Job Direction before the end of the week. He was being offered Senior Scientist Grade 1 at NIFE, the National Institute for Food Excellence, with special responsibilities at managerial level. At Cancer Cure, Victor had been working on stem-cell therapies, in particular the implication of immuno-suppressive cytotoxic antineoplastosis: now he was required to divert them to
development of new forms of disease-free edible protein. To work in the public sector was generally held to be a sensible move. The private sector was shrinking fast. The recession showed no sign of bottoming out – why should it? The public was not, as had at first been claimed, ‘sensibly putting off buying until price dropped’, they had just gone off buying for ever: consumerism was suddenly out of fashion. Sparse was in, lavish was out. All the same, Victor would receive almost double what Cancer Cure had paid.

Venetia was uneasy. It seemed too good to be true. There would be no more worrying about money, whether she could afford acrylic paint – the price had zoomed up and it was in short supply – Mervyn would be able to study in a warm room, she would apparently as a Grade 1 spouse have access to the CiviStore, of which wondrous things were spoken. Was there something Victor wasn’t telling her? He had already, even before the interview, signed up under the Official Secrets Act 2012, so if there was he couldn’t anyway.

‘But I didn’t marry a civil servant,’ she said plaintively. ‘I married someone who was going to win the Nobel Prize.’

‘Well,’ said Victor, ‘for my part I always thought you would win the Turner prize and you haven’t. So we’re quits.’

But he agreed to think it over.

As for the Depression, Amos claimed, on one of his Friday visits home, at a time when Victor was still thinking it over, that it was sorting through the household waste that had started the whole thing off. While staring at an old chicken wing welded on to a sheet of oven paper, wondering if this was organic or inorganic waste, the thought had occurred to many that the answer was not to bring it into the house in the first place. A paper bag full of lentils would do for food, and later you could burn the bag in the gas-fire flame, for
warmth. He was joking, of course, though sometimes it was rather hard to tell whether he was or he wasn’t.