Chalcot Crescent (13 page)

Ethan, as dark and ruddy as Amos was lean and pale, and hairy like Esau, said the recession was nothing to do with waste sorting, you had to go further back than that – but it was the fault of anorexic girls: they had started the fashion for non-consumption.

Mervyn, who was then doing A levels in classics, more like a mini-version of his father, quiet, large, hairless and stolid, said the whole recession had been deliberately contrived by Europe to bring the people under State control. Victor said it was okay to say that kind of thing at home, but he hoped Mervyn would be more prudent at school. Mervyn accepted the rebuke and asked his father about the other two jobs he had been offered. Weren’t you allowed a choice of three, before direction? Victor said they only told you what the other jobs were if you turned down the first.

‘Ah,’ said Mervyn, ‘like you’re more likely to get into the college you want, if you make it your first choice.’

Victor said the first one was obviously the one they wanted you to take, and feeding the population was probably more vital in the years to come than curing it of disease. The young and healthy deserved consideration as well as the old and ill, who were taking up too much of the country’s resources as it was. Longevity was now a national problem, not a national ambition.

‘Disease-free edible protein?’ asked Amos. ‘From stem cells? Does that mean growing bulk meat in fucking vats?’

Victor, made a little tense by his situation, asked Amos if he would mind not swearing on Shabbat.

Amos said it wasn’t really Shabbat, was it, just a Friday night get-together with vaguely religious overtones.

‘True enough,’ said Victor, his thin eyebrows raised slightly in
surprise at this sudden show of antagonism from Amos. There was very little else he could say. Victor had been raised in North London as a liberal Jew, gone to Cambridge, drifted into non-observance, been infected by religious sceptics, fallen romantically in love with Venetia, taken on Amos as his own and had two sons. Since Jewishness is determined by the mother, Victor had scarcely created a Jewish family, as his mother often lamented. But he was enough of a ritualist to like having Amos and Ethan home on Friday nights and to have a residual feeling that Shabbat was special. And Venetia would lay the table with a white cloth and light candles and serve chicken, for Victor’s sake. She liked it too.

‘Sorry I swore,’ Amos offered, relenting.

From the beginning Venetia and Victor had been conscious of the need to make Amos feel included in the family, and not trailed along as an afterthought, dragging genes of unknown origin behind him. And for his part Amos had tried to make his stepfather and brothers feel at ease, and not hopelessly naive and bourgeois, and an act of folly on his mother’s part. All the same, before his mother married Victor, Friday nights had been pizza nights. And this was his dinner table as well as his stepfather’s, and he could surely swear if he wanted to – he hated to be told what he could and couldn’t do: there had been enough of that in his life – and it was easy enough to provoke Ethan and Mervyn into fits of hilarity, which always made Victor uneasy.

They were sitting at the table, the candles lit, waiting for Venetia to bring in the roast chicken. It would be a capon, golden brown, and sprinkled with sesame seeds according to her mother’s recipe. It would be another united family triumph.

Amos said the Government had started the whole thing off back in the Good Days by making every household reduce its carbon
footprint and sort its waste into organic and inorganic. Any normal person, puzzled by a piece of plastic glued to an overcooked chicken wing, would decide the answer was not to bring it into the house in the first place. Then Ethan said the anti-consumption age was triggered by anorexic girls refusing to eat. Refusal became the fashion. They giggled at their own silliness. Mervyn said if his father was going to be making disease-free animal protein in the lab he hoped he would remember the crackling.

‘But does human skin make good crackling?’ asked Ethan, and fell about with laughter. ‘Daddy’s a stem-cell specialist, after all.’

‘Daddy’s going to be growing “long pig” for the nation,’ said Mervyn.

Victor was not laughing. He was looking quite flushed. He said that cattle had stem cells too, as did every living thing, and then Amos said, ‘But humans don’t get foot-and-mouth, or scrapie, or mad cow disease or bird flu – or not often – I would have thought “long pig” is a well reliable source of animal protein. And the job’s inflation linked? You’re being fucking bribed, Daddy-o dude. They probably closed down the entire charity network just to get you on side.’

Victor stayed silent for a little and rose to his feet. Venetia was bringing the chicken in, golden with National Butter, sesame-sprinkled: twenty food points splurged. She looked pretty: usually so pale, she was flushed from the cooker, and pleased to have all three children under one roof.

‘Before we begin,’ he said, ‘Shabbat shalom.’ Venetia, surprised, stood where she was. Victor went over to where Ethan sat and laid his hands on his shoulders and said, ‘May God make you like Joseph’s son Ephraim, a role model for all Israel,’ and went over to Mervyn and said ‘May God make you like Menasseh, Joseph’s son,
a role model for all Israel,’ and sat down again and nodded for Venetia to put the food on the table.

Amos said, taken aback, ‘What about me?’ and Victor just shook his head. Amos, Victor had declared, did not belong. It was a subdued meal after that.

Victor took the job. The next month Amos was in trouble with the law and would have been in prison for a long, long time, had his grandmother not intervened. Ecstasy, in which Amos was dealing, is no longer classified as a dangerous drug and, along with marijuana, cocaine, amphetamines and heroin, is all but legalized. The price of drugs, by the way, has come right down, which some say was the final blow to the stability of the world economy to which it had provided a proportion of the available investment capital, which was as large as it was unspoken. The police have too much else to do to bother with illegal substances. If people want to destroy themselves, let them. One less mouth to feed.

But I think it would have been some such act of non-acknowledgement on Victor’s part that set Amos off on his vengeful path. Just as the rage of the suicide bomber, they say, is set off by some casual insult about colour, nationality or creed.

The guests are gathering. I watch them come in from the front window and am careful not to be seen. Amy is opening the door to them. She is a gangly, but vigorous girl. If she and Ethan had babies they would be my great-grandchildren, and some of them might look like Terry. The thought makes me feel oddly guilty: I should be worrying if they would look like Karl, who I have always maintained was the love of my life. I have to believe that to retain my sense of victimhood, so important to a woman.

Two young girls come to the door, hand in hand, with the long legs and skinny bottoms girls seem to have nowadays. They are a different shape to the stumpy-legged things we were. I can’t see their faces because they are wearing hoods, but they act and move with the confidence of extreme good looks. The hand on the bell is dark: I imagine they are Afro-Caribbean. They do not look like revolutionaries, just girls out for a giggle. They go on upstairs and I hear screams of excitement as they greet Amos.

When Ethan comes to the door, he uses the big brass knocker. Another surprise. Most people choose the bell instead – and the bailiffs used their fists – so heavy, antique and ornate is this intimidating fish of a knocker. But Karl would always use the knocker, should he by any chance be shut out, and the chandelier in the living room would quiver and chink in response, and he liked that. Now
when Ethan uses it, he seems like Karl to be marking out his territory, almost as if he is Karl come home. But perhaps it is just he knows that the door will be opened by Amy, which it is. She seems too serious and ungainly a girl to be his type. But what does one know about one’s own flesh and blood?

I could perfectly well intervene and welcome the guests in myself, and perhaps I should. It is, after all, my house. But these guests are of another, more vigorous generation. It seems to me they know what they are doing and I don’t. I have been disenfranchised by virtue of age and my conditioning into the niceties of a former society, no matter how hard in my youth I tried to disregard them. The young are almost another species. Their loyalties are to each other, not to family. All the same, I could, and perhaps should, ring Venetia on her landline (another of Victor’s perks: in an age of power cuts recharging mobiles became a hassle) but I don’t want to be seen to be interfering.

What could I say? ‘Venetia, two of your sons are in my house and making me uneasy. Did you know they may be involved with Redpeace? No, I know it isn’t a banned organization, and they are adults, and I know how hard you try to make sure everything in the garden is just fine, but I have a terrible feeling it isn’t.’ No, I’m not going to say that. There is always a slight barrier between Venetia and me. I don’t know what it is about.

Well, I do. I married Karl and gave her a stepfather and a half-sister and she could have had me to herself, if I’d truly loved her and not been so promiscuous with my affections. But she’d liked Karl well enough and looked up to him, and wanted him for a father. It was because of Karl, in the vain hope of winning his approval, that she turned her back on academia and studied art.

‘For God’s sake try and stop her,’ Karl said to me. ‘She’s a nice girl but completely without talent.’

‘Camberwell Art School doesn’t seem to think so,’ I murmured.

‘Of course they don’t,’ Karl said. ‘Bunch of talentless wankers.’

If she’d chosen to go to college he’d have said, ‘For God’s sake try and get her to art school. She’s a nice girl but has no brains at all in her noddle.’

And I’d have said Oxford seemed to think differently, and he’d have said, ‘Shower of poncy tossers. They just want to get into her knickers.’

It was by being so meanly capricious with his approval and acceptance that he kept the women around him in a state of adoration. I hesitate to say this of the alleged love of my life but show him a female and he’d try to fuck up her mind.

Mind-fucker is not a phrase you often hear these days, but when men were men and women were women, and men had the power and the money and women did not, there were lots of them. They were emotional manipulators, insidious, and why I’m still brooding about him and why Venetia is still painting hopeless paintings, which, now she has access to the CiviStore and an unlimited supply of acrylic paints, are thicker and brighter and more defiant than ever. Good for her.

What I do is call Venetia up and she answers and I ask her if she remembers playing with a little girl called Florrie. She replies, ‘Yes, of course I do. Her father had just killed himself and she cried all the time. I met her again on Friends Reunited, and went round to visit her once or twice. She has a daughter called Amy. Ethan is going out with her. She’s a bit bonkers but at least she has a brain. Why?’

‘They’ve borrowed my house to have a meeting,’ I say.

‘They’re always having meetings,’ says Venetia. ‘Don’t worry
about it. It’s only Redpeace. They bring their own coffee.’

‘Why can’t they have the meeting in your house?’

‘They tried,’ said Venetia, ‘but you know what Victor is. He hates having people in the house he hasn’t invited himself.’

Well, yes, I do know about that kind of thing. Karl was like that, and Edgar, whom I lived with in this house for seven years from 1982 to 1989. Karl filled the house with painters and antique dealers but couldn’t stand writers, and Edgar filled it with Tory MPs and journalists and conspiracy theorists and couldn’t stand novelists, and let me know it, even though it was my house he had moved into. Perhaps it’s just a male trait. Or merely human: I daresay some women are like that about their husbands’ friends.

I must get out of the habit of writing ‘husband’. So few women are married these days. Correction: ‘Some women are like that about their partners’ friends.’

Edgar and I parted on political grounds in 1989, when the Wall came down and that was the end of the Soviet Union and the fear of war. I rejoiced, but Edgar said it was just the beginning of the Sovietization of Europe. As freedom fled east, control would flee west. Europe was just the USSR Lite: the majority of the new European Commissioners were ex-Stasis and the like from the old East Bloc. He was so far to the right, politically, that in the end I couldn’t bear it, and asked him to go. That was a surprise too. He was terrific in bed but in the end principle seemed more important than sex. But I was, of course, growing older.

Venetia and I chatted a little about this and that – I didn’t mention the bailiffs. Somehow I’d manage to find the money to keep them off. I always had in the past, why not again? I was not finished yet. Then Venetia said, quite casually, she thought she was converting to Judaism.

I said I must just go and switch off the kettle, and by the time I came back I had composed my voice, so it sounded, I hoped, quite normal.

‘Any religion is better than none, I suppose,’ I said. ‘But it will upset Amos.’

‘What’s Amos got to do with anything? He goes his own way. Actually, you’re quite right, when I mentioned it he kicked your mother’s old dresser so hard he hurt his toe, and then he slipped and fell over. I’m afraid I laughed, it was so funny. But he was having a real temper tantrum, the way he did when he was four. So no, I reckon he doesn’t much go for it.’

I thought that was probably an understatement. Amos had put up with having one quarter of a mother for years – Victor, Ethan and Mervyn taking the other three – now his mother was betraying the years he had had her to himself, before she lugged him off to live with Victor and build a family which didn’t really include him. Now she was making quite sure it didn’t. No wonder he was behaving oddly. Perhaps the boy wasn’t mad, just upset. I was being silly, elderly, mad myself.