Chalcot Crescent (16 page)

She will never forgive me for not taking Karl back when I could have. Should have. Wanted to, but there was Edgar in the way by then. And I wasn’t going to take on the plain dull little baby dumpling, who was obviously going to grow into the plain middle-aged man I had let into my house. Let Karl take the consequences of his actions. I had had enough.

‘You should jump in a taxi and come over to us.’

Jump? Me? What planet is she on? Though that she is reluctant to accept that I am growing old is comforting. And I’m not going to say I don’t have any money for taxis either, and that the bailiffs have been, because then Polly will go on and on about how badly I manage money, and how I always trusted men whom no women in their right minds would have trusted. How can I call myself a feminist, etc.

I can at least trust Amos not to tell the family about the bailiffs: I wouldn’t even have to remind him: he will understand the subtleties of the situation. That is probably why he is my favourite grandchild, even though I suspect him of being a conman, a terrorist and a madman, and even now he is dismantling my house.

I will be really sorry to leave this life, as soon I must. It is so full of wonder, as well as horror. A surprise round every corner and the pace is hotting up. The GSITS is keeping very busy. The GSITS – the Great Screenwriter in the Sky – appeared in one of my early novels,
The Rules of Life
. He’s the one who got the commission to script
the story of the world. He is a B-picture writer by nature, that’s the trouble: his sights are set low. If he gets into a plot difficulty he does something spectacular and thoroughly unlikely: sinks the
Titanic
, explodes Krakatoa, kills Kennedy, thinks up Watergate, pulls down the Berlin Wall, has Carla Bruni marry Sarkozy, and the GSITS’s latest plot extravaganza is to bring capitalism tumbling down by way of the Fourth Estate – after the French revolution, Edmund Burke, looking up at the Press Gallery of the House of Commons, said, ‘Yonder sits the Fourth Estate, and they are more important than them all.’ I think the GSITS is on cocaine; he is so feverish at the moment. And dreadfully and dangerously easily bored. But I have my private concerns to get on with.

I casually bring my conversation with Polly round to the subject of Henry.

‘You know that baby the Dumpling had, Polly –’

‘Don’t call her that, please, Mum. Her name was Claire. You mean my half-brother Henry, Claire and Karl’s child?’

‘Okay, that Henry. Do you see him? I mean, socially?’

‘Of course we do.’

‘Why has no-one seen fit to mention it?’

‘Because you’d have hysterics, Mum. No-one wants to upset you.’

Like hell they don’t. They don’t think twice about keeping secrets. How can I protect them if they don’t tell the truth? And the secrets always come out in the end and I am always upset. Surely they know that by now.

I ask if Venetia sees him too.

‘Of course. Why wouldn’t she? He’s family.’

‘Not by any wish of mine,’ I say. ‘And he isn’t a blood relative of hers. I suppose you have to see him out of politeness but I don’t see why Venetia has to.’

‘Mum. He’s a nice guy. He’s Karl’s child. All this stuff about blood and genes, it’s sheer biologism. You’ve got to get over it.’

Polly goes on about biologism a lot. I am guilty of it apparently. It is the doctrine that men and women were born different, that they have biological differences that cannot be cured by Nurofen or social conditioning. It is why she goes to such lengths to turn Corey into a woman (darning, for heaven’s sake!). I grant you our lot did our best to turn ourselves into men, with our bovver boots, dungarees, aversion to lipstick and refusal to smile (as placatory to men) but once we had our equal rights and equal(ish) pay, we returned to high heels pretty quickly. No amount of evidence that male and female brains are wired differently will convince her. In the beginning, according to Polly, we were all born equal in intelligence, looks, health, charm, colour and gender. If we end up unequal then it is somebody’s fault. Society, or poverty, or lack of education, or racist taunts, or male oppression. In the nature/nurture debate, where most sway between the 60/40 ranges, my daughter goes for 99 per cent nurture, 1 per cent nature. She is in fact denying me.

But she may even be right. Corey makes a better mother than she ever did. A whole race of new young men coo over their babies, cook, cry, splash themselves with perfume. They are more female than their teachers, who are all tough women (male teachers may be tarred by the paedophile tendency) like Polly, who shaves her head and looks like Sigourney Weaver in an
Alien
film. Perhaps the new men are trying to restore a natural balance, like Cynthia feeling she was entitled to a good time because she had just been through a bad. And we know how that ended.

‘This Henry,’ I say. ‘Does he come round to yours?’

‘Sometimes,’ she says. ‘But sometimes he goes over to Venetia
and Victor for one of their Friday-night things, and we go too and see him there.’

‘That must be quite a crowd,’ I say.

‘It is,’ she says. ‘It’s fun. And you get real chicken and not National, and real coffee, not roast parsnip or whatever it is.’

‘I’ve never seen him when I’ve been over there,’ I say. Not that I’ve been there much lately. Venetia tends to come down to me.

‘Well, of course you wouldn’t,’ says Polly. ‘Why would anyone in their senses ask him and you at the same time? You won’t acknowledge his existence any more than he acknowledges yours. You refused to take him in when he was a motherless child, and you could have done, but you wanted your sex life with the fascist Edgar, so Karl his father got liver cancer and died. So he’s not too fond of you.’

‘That is the most extraordinary way of looking at things,’ I say. ‘Perhaps you ought to write fiction. It’s in the family, you know.’

There is a crashing noise from upstairs and then silence. They have broken through.

‘What is that noise?’ asks Polly. ‘Are you all right, Mum?’

‘I’m fine,’ I say. ‘Just some people next door doing building work.’

‘Lucky old them,’ says Polly. She asks why the matter of Henry has come up at all. Has Amos been making mischief?

I say as casually as I can that Amos referred to an Uncle Henry, and I didn’t think it could be her father’s by-blow because surely he was living somewhere in the Irish boondocks, the Dumpling’s mother having taken him in to rear him.

‘He is a man, Mother. He is fourteen years younger than I am. He is not a by-blow, my father and Claire were legally married.’

I ask if he has large feet. I do wish the past was over, but it never seems to be.

She is baffled. I don’t pursue the matter.

Three years back, she tells me, Henry lost his job in the private sector – he was some kind of pig farmer (that figures): but agricultural land is now of course communally owned and ‘efficiently’ farmed. He’d normally just have stayed in his old job and been paid by the State, instead of pocketing profits, but he’d run out on his own community, somehow managed to avoid Job Direction, and come to London.

‘So now what? He’s scrounging off you? He won’t be able to get a job. He’ll be on their lists.’

‘Victor found him a place in the NIFE Registry,’ said Polly.

So the by-blow of the Dumpling survived to really get his feet under my family’s table. And now he is in my house. I am indifferent to his good looks. He used his mother to steal my husband Karl for a father. And for all I know Karl conducted much of his affair with the Dumpling in that very same room upstairs, which was my and Karl’s marital bedroom, when I was off on some book tour in some other country, trusting. I feel the piercing pain in the heart that is physical jealousy, and which I can see I will never grow out of, and which I used to think would age me early and finish me off but no such luck. I keep my voice even.

‘But that’s pure and simple nepotism,’ I declared on the way. ‘Good Lord, this government. And nobody notices!’

‘No more than they noticed Ethan getting to be a NIFE driver, which is one of the cushiest jobs going. Nobody quarrels with Victor, he’s top dog at NIFE.’

‘Venetia quarrels with Victor,’ I said.

‘That’s what wives do,’ said Polly. ‘That’s why I never did anything so stupid as to marry.’ She quarrels with Corey all the time, but never mind.

‘And I don’t know why you describe Victor as a top man: he’s a scientist not a politician.’

‘Mum. NUG doesn’t have politicians, it has management. No-one trusts politicians after the mess they made of things. Victor gave up science ages back and is now NUG Manager, Grade 1, with special responsibility for nutrition.’

‘But that’s like being in the Cabinet. You’re joking.’

‘Mum, Venetia lives like a queen up there. Roast chicken, real coffee; they have a generator and their own power supply. There’s a crew from CiviFilm coming to take pictures of the family next Friday. There are security men everywhere, though, which is horrid. The houses on either side were taken down last week. There’s plaster dust everywhere. Hasn’t she told you?’

No, she hasn’t. She only told me she was thinking of converting to Judaism. Venetia, my little atheist! I wonder what’s really going on? Perhaps it’s some kind of bid for family harmony, respectability? I can see my side of the family must be something of an embarrassment to Victor if he’s set on political ascendancy. Well, even Bush had a brother. So does Obama.

Perhaps I should have opened the door to the bailiffs? Perhaps they came with good news? An NUG Manager Grade 1 is not going to let his mother-in-law go bankrupt. But no, no, life is not that easy. That’s Pollyanna thinking. But I am still brooding about the by-blow, in my house, upstairs. If he visits Victor, has a job with NIFE, and yet slaps up
NUG is scum
posters on repossessed houses for Redpeace, is he an agent provocateur? What kind of double-double agent can he be? Mind you, everyone knows that NIHE, the National Institute of Homes for Everyone, is at daggers drawn with NIFE, and everyone is on NIFE’s side because at least very few of us are hungry, just bored with our food, while many of us
are homeless. When it comes down to it there is a lot to be said for efficiency.

Polly says she has to get on with her marking, she has to go. She says she’s glad she told me about Henry. But the more they put it off the more difficult it had become. No-one wanted to give me a heart attack; my resentment of poor Claire and Henry was bordering on the pathological, did I realize that?

‘Oh I do, I do,’ I say, and ask where Henry is living.

‘He’s squashing in with Ethan and Mervyn in Hunter’s Alley,’ says my daughter, ‘while he waits for housing allocation. He’s been there for months. I don’t know how they all manage. But the girls go over there a lot. They’re all over there now. They’ve got involved with Redpeace. Thank God they’re beginning to show an interest in something other than hair-bands and make-up.’

‘Well, no, Polly,’ I feel like saying, ‘actually they are all in my house at this very moment,’ but I don’t. I have learned some prudence over the years, and that sometimes it is better to think before one speaks, even – well perhaps especially – when family is involved. This is just such a moment. My house is bigger than Hunter’s Alley and at this very moment is getting even bigger, extending into No. 5, and perhaps the girls just came over here on impulse and forgot to tell their mother. But I think not. Because the pretty dusky girls at the door are of course my own grandchildren, Rosie and Steffie, and I had failed to recognize them. Polly must be quite right; I do neglect them. Mind you, they had been wearing hoods and the body language of today’s bouncy adolescent girls does not reflect that of their elders. Even so. But at least I had remembered their names without difficulty.

Rosie and Steffie, now joined with their cousins in an activist cell, planning to evade CiviCams (which is a criminal offence – as,
I may say, is moving personal valuables to the detriment of the community interest) to race unseen through the potato field, and out into Rothwell Street, and no doubt use the same route to get in again, carrying with them, what? – forbidden posters, and leaflets today, leading to peroxide and fertilizer tomorrow – as NUG reminds us, in the same way governments in the past assured us, and equally falsely, that marijuana use today inevitably leads to heroin use tomorrow. All that sounds pretty active to me, the kind of activity governments since time began have not liked. I am too old for all this. Of course I am on my family’s side. Of course NUG is an atrocious government and protest is necessary. I just wish they’d go away and organize it somewhere else. Revolutionary zeal still has power to move me and play me Pete Seeger on YouTube and I am flooded with nostalgia –

I am almost in tears at the memory of youthful togetherness we found in the Labour Movement of my teenage in the fifties. Yes, but even so, this is my nice home and I have a few years left and I would like to save what I can. I don’t want Redpeace damaging my prospects. If I’d bought No. 14 Hunter’s Alley instead of No. 11 there was an extra room and they could have had their meetings there, but No. 11 was £75,000 cheaper and my income was dropping – even I had noticed that. Royalties were coming in with a nought missing.

But it would be good to have the valuables out of the room upstairs; the Paula Rego and the possible Brancusi and the first editions. So much for Joe Hill and the Labour Movement.