Chalcot Crescent (17 page)

That room upstairs served as my and Karl’s marital bedroom and many were the acts of joyous congress that took place there, and many the rows and reconciliations. He filled the whole house with stock from his antique shop, to my outrage, so I could hardly move through the rooms for stripped pine and old oak, and wood-worm and the smell of woodworm treatments filled the air, and I worried about little Polly breathing the stuff in, though Karl poohpoohed the idea. We are all much more health-conscious now.

And the stairs, on which Amos and I had taken refuge. Early on in the marriage I moved twelve aspidistra plants in their green Victorian plant holders, which sat two per stair so Polly was always tumbling down them, and put them outside the house, in a row along the iron railings, to wait for Karl to take them away. It was a public demonstration of my despair. But all Karl did was put them in our Volvo and take them round to his shop, and put his mattress on the floor and live there with them until I begged him to come home. And he sold the aspidistras to his best and prettiest lady clients and reported how he’d delivered them personally and how,
unlike tasteless me, they had loved and appreciated their charm and worth. So I didn’t try that again.

In the back garden, where now Redpeace was constructing their rat run, Karl used to keep a chemical bleaching tank for pine furniture – we had grown the prettiest clematis, a Daniel Deronda, over the tank to disguise it, and it was covered by a safety mesh, but one night a cat jumped in and the mesh broke and the next morning Karl pulled the poor creature out; it looked like a dying rat, but Karl took it round to the vet, and fetched it back two days later, looking splendidly healthy, and parasite free, pumped full of anti biotics and oestrogens. And we set the creature free and she presumably went home and no-one would ever know the adventures she had had, other than to say, perhaps, ‘My, Kitty’s looking good! And her fleas have gone! Wherever she disappeared to, it was good for her!’ That sticks in my mind. So much goes on behind our backs we never get to know.

The antique business had not begun when I first moved into that bedroom. I was thirty, and Venetia was seven. Karl was an artist, and this was his studio and there was a couch he slept on. When I got pregnant with Polly he moved his easel out and put it up in the attic, along with some very doomy paintings by his previous wife, which had heretofore lined the room. She had gone mad (‘No wonder!’ I would screech, during our rows) and was confined to a mental institution; he was in the process of divorcing her when we met.

Just my luck, the times convulsing as they currently are, if that previous wife turns out to have had a child by Karl he forgot to mention and it just so happens she or he is now also a member of Redpeace. Political agitation is in Karl’s blood. Look at Henry; at Amos; Steffie and Rosie, one generation down, have caught
it. Romantic radical impulse may run through my veins, but it doesn’t extend to action. I blame Karl, but I think he would have told me. He loved me, at least for the time being.

He moved his easel out with some ceremony, and said he had decided to give up art and be a married man and concentrate on being a stepfather to Venetia and father to the coming baby. And I was so impressed and pleased and thought, He really loves me! And he has not picked up a brush in ages anyhow, just filled the bedroom with dustsheets and the smell of oil paint and turps and on the floor old stiff hog brushes in cloudy jam jars, and now there will be room for a proper bed, and me as a fixture and true love triumphs, and all our troubles are over for ever. Instead of thinking, as I should have, Uh oh, before long he will blame me for stopping him painting. Which was what happened in the end. He said early on a man couldn’t be an artist and a family man and instead of saying what nonsense, of course you can, I took his word for it and believed it; I was a very idle thinker in those days, and if anyone said anything definite enough, I believed them, and besides I loved him and thought everything he said was wise and somehow final. I fear I still love him, even though he’s dead and gone, and died in circumstances that still make me wince with pain, in the arms of another, subsequent version of Dumpling I didn’t know about. Though I was with Julian by then. How can I blame him?

But now is now and there is the sound of moving furniture upstairs and from the ground floor next door the sound of creaks and bangs which make me think the back door is being freed. Amos said that Amy had the Neighbourhood Watch plans. How does she come to have these? Is she perhaps like some old Marxist and practising entryism? When you join the movement you want to subvert? Unless she is an NUG spy and practising a double bluff
and checking out Redpeace? In which case I must warn Amos. But he must have thought that out for himself. And until I know more I am just going to say nothing, stay in bed and write, warn nobody, not even suggest to Polly that her children are in bad company. Well, when were one’s children ever not?

I am beginning to get a fair idea of what is going on. It concerns National Meat Loaf, the very stuff Amos and I were eating, along with the last of the tomatoes from my window box, when the first surprise knock on the front door came, and made us dive for the safety of the stairs. And it concerns NIFE.

Amos is an opportunistic fellow; I do not think he had any of this planned. I think the knock on the door came as much of a surprise to him as it did to me. But he knew once the bailiffs, or secret police, or whoever they were had gone, that there was a window of opportunity, that the CiviCams on the street were out of action – no doubt the bailiffs had reported it – and seized the opportunity to host a Redpeace meeting. The Neighbourhood Watch requires prior notification of any private gathering of six or more people, with names and ID scans – all the pubs have gone out of business, most of the café chains have gone; no custom and no coffee – so spontaneous gatherings are rare. Former town halls have been converted to CiviGet-Together Centres, and they’re safe and well regulated, as NUG keeps telling us, but they’re too gloomy and shadowy for comfort, haunted by the ghosts of dead aldermen and their pinchpenny ways. Mind you, pinchpenny is back in fashion.

Redpeace is not a banned organization – NUG ‘favours free speech’ – but I did look up the Redpeace website the other day and
found it simply wasn’t there. There was just a ‘this page is unavailable’ message. Thinking back, I was pretty sure there had been nothing particularly inflammatory there. Something boring about family values – that’s okay; NUG is pro-family, so long as the children are in school for most of their waking hours, and not overly influenced by their parents – and a more entertaining article about the theoretical right or otherwise of parents, sexually abused themselves as children, to be cloned and rear themselves into adulthood, thus putting right what has been spoiled by the father. Cloning stays a fairly contentious issue with the public, but NUG stays quiet on the subject. Speculation has it that livestock cloning was well under way during the Hunger – the alarming period when food prices rose so dramatically – but went wrong within the year and had to be halted. As had initially been feared, cloned animals – even once researchers were past the initial problems of inflammation of the brain and spinal cord disorders, overly large foetuses and placental problems which put the host as risk – turned out to have weak immune systems. Some new virus or bacteria was bound to come along and thrive, wiping out not only cloned animals but infecting the non-genetic stock. Which was what happened. Did Redpeace have some special interest? And NUG some new sensitivity? Was that why the webpage had been pulled? I must ask Amos, or such of the gathering upstairs who eventually saw fit to acknowledge my existence.

And talking about entryism, infiltration, what about Henry? Was it anything to do with Victor, initially working in stem-cell biotechnology, and now risen high in Food Excellence (slogan:
Devoting Resources To Your Nutritional Satisfaction
)? If Henry had been thrown out of a non-GM pig farm to make way for newer breeding methods, he was hardly likely to be a Victor fan. Yet he had
used Victor’s influence to worm himself into a job at NIFE. But then so had Ethan.

I knew that these days there was little love lost between Victor and Amos. Apart from anything else, having a jailbird stepson would be something of an embarrassment for Victor. Perhaps Victor was seeking revenge on Amos, and that was why the Redpeace website had been closed down. But this was surely paranoia running wild?

All the same I wish I knew at least something about the art school student who imposed himself on my innocent daughter and begat Amos. God knows what sort of villainy runs in the blood the other side of the looks and charm. Perhaps one day the father will turn up and be yet another of life’s little surprises? Of course the father may not have been a student at all – Venetia implied it and I assumed it. Underneath an angular Paolozzi seemed fitting for an art student, but for all I knew it could have been a professor, or even an art critic – though they do not usually seem of the randy hitand-run type. Too cerebral. Venetia, when she was eighteen, had translucency and innocence enough to attract any villain. She has grown quite substantial as she’s grown older, and looks handsome enough but no longer breathtaking, and oozes respectability. Just right for a senior politician. He chose well.

Pity about her family, Victor may have thought, but love conquered all.

To fiction! There is too much solid text here for comfort.

‘Victor,’ cries Venetia in alarm, ‘what is all this about a show in Cork Street in March? At the Medici Gallery? I’m not an A-list painter. I’ve never pretended I am.’

‘You only think that because your stepfather undermined your confidence,’ says Victor. ‘Of course you are. I’ve always had faith in you.’

‘But no-one at the Medici has seen what I do.’

‘That’s neither here nor there,’ says Victor. ‘CiviArt thinks well of you and the Medici trusts their judgment. NUG is a great supporter of the arts.’

Venetia is washing her hair. Hers is one of the few houses down the street the water cuts seem to have missed, so although it’s Saturday morning she can turn on the taps and get a pleasant, dependable flow of the precious stuff from both hot and cold taps. Not that there are many houses left in the road. This, indeed, is why she is washing her hair: the air is full of lime plaster and dust from demolished homes all around, and it wreaks havoc with hair and skin, no matter how assiduously the new maids wield the vacuum cleaners. Victor strides up and down the master bedroom and in and out of the bathroom, smiling and reassuring, looking through his recently replenished wardrobes. The tailors came to him; he did not go to the tailors. Times have changed.

He is not the man she married, she thinks, there is something wolfish about the smile, which she never noticed before. Or perhaps she just never looked, she took him so much for granted. But he admires her bum as she bends over the washbasin and gives it a little pinch. Victor loves her, she thinks, which is just as well, for men who become successful in middle age are known to decide they deserve a younger, prettier, sexier wife than they already have, and pension the old one off.

‘But Victor, NUG never used to be a supporter of the arts,’ she protests. ‘When the Arts Council fired me the general feeling was that at a time of national emergency anyone with artistic aspirations was positively antisocial.’

‘Remind me again of the name of the guy who fired you,’ says Victor, as if casually, but Venetia found herself lying, saying she thought the poor man had died of a heart attack. He hadn’t liked firing her any more than she had liked being fired.

‘Saves a bullet,’ says Victor, and of course it’s a joke, but Venetia finds herself slightly shivery, and is glad of a warm towel to wrap around her wet hair. Even their towel rails stay heated all day.

‘It’s thanks to me, Venetia,’ says Victor, ‘that the Board is now persuaded that at a time like this it is particularly important to foster creativity in the community.’

‘I bet you made a really good speech, darling,’ says Venetia.

‘I did,’ he says. ‘I’ve really become quite something of an orator.’

‘Doesn’t surprise me, darling,’ says Venetia and then, ‘but it may be a little difficult to get an exhibition together by next March.’

‘Sorry, but that’s the timetable,’ says Victor. ‘The launch of the New Venice, Land of the Arts initiative. If it’s a problem we can bring in some apprentices to help you get things done. We thought
we’d go with Venetia, Queen of the New Venice, or something like that. How does that strike you?’

‘Sounds good to me,’ says Venetia.

She hardly knows what else to say. Does she want to be a famous painter or a good painter? What is a good painter anyway? What would Karl do? She needs time to think. She used to talk things like this over with Victor, but he’s someone else now. Her mother would complicate things even more; the boys aren’t interested; talking to Polly about the new Victor seems slightly dangerous, for some reason; and talking to her friends would be construed as disloyal. She doesn’t know why she feels she has to be very, very careful but she does.

‘How are things looking for next Friday?’ asks Victor.

‘Same as usual,’ says Venetia, surprised. ‘Chicken.’

‘Because we have a camera crew coming in to take a few pictures,’ says Victor. ‘Perhaps better if we don’t have Amos around. Henry’s fine: man of the soil, nothing elitist about this typical family. Don’t get too big a chicken; we’re a people family like Obama’s, and food is short. We can have a second supper afterwards.’

‘Okay,’ says Venetia.

It feels safer not to raise difficulties. For some reason she remembers that she has always meant to read the autobiography of Svetlana, Stalin’s daughter. Perhaps she will be able to get round to it finally, if the house is filling up with servants and apprentices, all determined they will do the chores. What happened to Svetlana’s mother? Didn’t she commit suicide? At least Victor doesn’t have a moustache.