Chalcot Crescent (21 page)

‘I don’t think anyone I know believes in divorce as if it was some kind of religion,’ I said. ‘It’s a legal procedure, that’s all. “Approve” might be a better word.’

Amos and Amy were shaking their heads at me. I was not meant to argue. Just to accept, be grateful, and shut up. Amy was certainly not in charge of this operation, as I had thought. It was Henry.

‘Approve,’ he conceded, ‘okay, I don’t approve of divorce. You had a child by my father and so you stay a family member, connected by sanguinity.’ He had lost his Irish accent. It came and went as if two sides of his brain were in conflict.

I thought, actually, this man is mad. It was quite a clear thought, unlike so many in my mind these days.

‘Rather an argument for polygamy,’ I said.

‘Why not,’ he said. ‘In the New Republic, my darlin’, it will be practised, within strict boundaries. Monogamy is hardly a natural state. We do not want too many lonely and cast-off women in the new society.’

‘I see,’ I said. ‘So, Henry, you are the new Oliver Cromwell.’ He looked a little puzzled.

He did not get the allusion. That the tyrannical monster Oliver Cromwell had already laid claim to a New Republic five hundred years back had escaped him. So presumably had the fact that Cromwell had had King Charles’ head chopped off on scaffolding outside the very Banqueting Hall where now NIFE reigned. There had been little history taught in the schools for years, but surely in Ireland, where Cromwell was still remembered and hated, Henry would have picked up something? Apparently not. And people are quite capable of replaying history without reference to what happened in the past. There are only so many movements to go round. The age of excess has collapsed, the age of austerity is here, and within its confines Henry will try to effect a coup, and undo NUG, to which he is not so different (I know a control freak when I see one, believe me), and employ useful idiots (my family, I fear, which unhappily is also his: Karl should not have gone off with the Dumpling) to achieve it. God knows how many others are plotting with him. And then the New Republic, with its strict polygamy and families forbidden to split and no delicious National Meat Loaf, too, will collapse and then some equivalent of Charles II will bring back Nell Gwyn and oranges, the dancing girls and the maypoles, and we will all be sexy and happy again. Till the banks collapse or whatever
form it takes, and the cycle continues in sackcloth and ashes.

‘Sure and I don’t get you, Gran,’ he said, and his tongue flickered out like a little snake’s and he licked his lips.

‘Oliver Cromwell had all kinds of bright ideas,’ I said, ‘long ago. He tried to ban Christmas.’

‘You’re kiddin’ me, Gran,’ he said. But I was no grandmother to this monster, this Cromwell reborn. No blood of mine ran in his veins. What had Karl’s sexual dereliction brought down upon the world? A Cromwell who believed in the subjugation of women, who would have them all back in their box, four to every man’s bed?

I could pretty much envisage the scene in Hunter’s Alley, where I in my folly had allowed my family to congregate and fall into bad ways, as Henry geared up his useful fools to sticking point, no doubt to direct action. But what was it? Were his forces gathering even now? Perhaps he had recruited the Jokers to his side? Organized, they would be a powerful force for mayhem. All I knew for sure was that my grandchildren Amos and Ethan and possibly Mervyn, and my best friend’s granddaughter Amy too, and Rosie and Steffie as well, whose blood I was prepared to share, so nearly mine it was – all, all in danger.

I can imagine the scene in Hunter’s Alley, before NUG realized it was a problem and closed it down, so there was nowhere my family could meet. I bought the house because it was such a pretty place in such a squalid area, of storage warehouses and car-part dumps, and seemed a good investment (those were the days). I thought the boys could always make use of it as they grew older and wanted to be nearer the heart of the metropolis, and, frankly, away from what I saw as Victor and Venetia’s rather stifling home life, but still near to Polly and Corey and the girls. More fool me.

It’s three up, two down, bathroom and kitchen, and had stood for three hundred years or so, so why should it give up now? Or so the estate agent told me, rubbing his hands as the old fool me approached. I haven’t been there for a couple of years, but Polly goes in to keep an eye on things. But her eye, I suspect, after years with Corey, is not as sharp or as stringent as it used to be. Polly and Corey live in what to my mind is squalor, but to many of their generation is common sense. Why waste time cleaning? There were a blissful couple of years when for a few months everyone could just move on as if it was the Mad Hatter’s tea party, and squat in somebody else’s empty house, but NUG clamped down on that pretty soon. You stay where you are so they can keep an eye on you. Stay still, stay safe, stay home – be CiviSecure!

But I reckon NUG’s eye had missed Hunter’s Alley. It would be housing as many young activists as could cram in the door. Middle class rather than working class, but when were revolutionaries ever not? The working class gets on with the work, the middle classes with the indignation. The activists would mostly be white British: in the great exodus the West Indians had streamed to the USA and many a Muslim, outdone in moral fervour by NUG, chose to take his family back to Pakistan where life was easier. Sunni and Shia fought it out, local enmities loomed more importantly than international grievances, and a new Wahabi imam was preaching a form of non-violent Sufism to great effect on YouTube, which was still able to flourish in oil-producing countries where the electricity supply was stable. Sweet-tongued girls now sang to you as your computer booted up, YouTube lies but NUTube knows!

And Henry would have been doing a Cromwell, sweet-talking the useful idiots of Hunter’s Alley. I supposed he had spent the last few years organizing like Joe Hill, with pig farming as a useful cover. He was a born politician, an agitator, he meant to change the world for its betterment, no matter how few people agreed, and he had the cruelty – he got that from his father, whose tongue would snicker out and lick his lips when he had something hurtful to say – and charisma to accomplish it. He was working up to the dissolution of parliament. Okay, everyone wanted to get rid of NUG, who had grown intolerably odious to the whole nation, but once it was gone – and in the end all governments did go – what would be in its place? Children, hold on tight to Nurse, for fear of finding something worse.

‘It is high time to bring to an end the rule of the fools and knaves, the godless sociologists and therapists who lounge and dribble in Whitehall,’ he would be saying. The room would be smoky with
spliff. For years it had been the drug of choice for the young who wanted to change the world. The girls would be looking up at him with adoration. He would be wearing a uniform – brown, with military overtones, rather tight trousers. He would choose one, or even two, of the girls to take to bed: Rosie and Steffie would be his choice, ripe, dusky peaches, not Amy, who looked so cross all the time. But you never knew. He might see her as more of a challenge. I hoped so. I was responsible for her for ever, but she was not my flesh and blood.

‘They have dishonoured us by their lies, their contempt of all virtue: they have defiled us by their practice of every vice,’ he would be saying. ‘Their hypocrisy hurts us. With my own eyes I have seen them insult the Lord. They do not believe but they say they do. They live off the fat of the land while their people go hungry. They distort, they manipulate, they lie; where others sing hymns to God they sing their jingles to commerce and control. They are enemies to all good government, they are a pack of mercenary wretches, like Esau they have sold their country for a mess of pottage and like Judas betrayed their beliefs for a few pieces of money.’

It did not matter really what he said, so long as he sounded as if he believed it.

‘We will not forgive them for they know what they do. We will replace these repulsive fools with the New Republic. Ethan, brother, tell us what you have seen in the back of your car.’

‘I have seen all sorts of things,’ Ethan will say, ‘some of it rather funny. It’s blow-job heaven. These old geezers on Viagra with the young girls from the food labs. If they want to keep their jobs it’s blow, blow, blow.’

‘Amy, sister,’ says Henry, ‘tell us what you have seen at Neighbourhood Watch.’

‘I have seen them take the crops that belong by rights to the people, and sell them and pocket the proceeds,’ says Amy. That’s rather tame, but the best she can do. She is rewarded by a smile and the flash of blue eyes. Perhaps she’s the one for tonight.

‘Amos, brother, what have you seen?’

‘I have seen what goes into National Meat Loaf,’ says Amos. ‘We are eating the cloned bodies of pigs, all right, but as well as those of Jokers, autistics, the insane and other enemies of the State, well laced with a new generation of tranquillizers and SSRIs – selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors – and assorted NUGNumbered flavour enhancers.’

‘And who presides over this abomination?’ Henry shrieks. ‘Your stepfather, Brother Amos, who like Claudius crept into your mother’s bed before the funeral baked meats were cold.’

Ah, so that’s it. He’s after Victor.

And then a squad of CiviSecure would have come roaring up Hunter’s Alley and my family – always quick on their feet except for Victor, who was on the ponderous side – would have been down the garden and over the back wall and melted into the crowds, leaving nothing but a whiff of spliff behind them, and looking for somewhere else to settle in. Gran’s. Naturally.

CiviSecure use battering rams to break down doors, and never mend them, so the rats come in, and dust and disease, and that’s the end of my property in Hunter’s Alley. It was a nice thought while it lasted.

‘Would it be true to say you had visitors last night, now.’ It was a statement, not a question. ‘And me particularly warning you not to open the door!’

I explained I had an ex-husband drop by and he said yes, he knew that, and it was not a visitor of whom he approved. I felt obliged to say that, to position myself safely. Henry was really quite a frightening man. Harriet with the broken leg was of the same family as Henry Prideaux, future Lord Protector of the Kingdom, and deserved his respect, which probably did not extend to her boyfriend, though nearing seventy, visiting his ex-wife with a view, however thwarted, to geriatric hanky-panky.

Henry said in future it would be wiser for me not to receive visitors but to stay in the house. Just until this particular operation was finished. I looked at Amos, whom I had thought so dashing and bad and fine, and Amy, who seemed so plain but strong, and they would not meet my eyes. With Henry in the room other people seemed somehow so weak. I wondered what the particular operation was, after which I would be free to wander at will.

I had my mouth open to speak but he did not let me.

‘Just lock the front door and seal it with superglue,’ he said to Amy.

Surprise, surprise, and not one safely in the past, like Cynthia
falling out of the sky or Karl running off with the Dumpling, but here and now. And blow me, Amy went off to rummage in the drawer beneath the sink and actually found the superglue and fed it into the lock. I wondered if she shared the susceptibility of her mother Florrie that had made the poor child fall in with the Manson gang prototype in hippie California. Probably. I wondered if Redpeace had weapons, and if they did, would they would use them?

‘Sure and you’re blissfully self-contained in here I see, Gran,’ said Henry. ‘You’ll be just fine. We’ll make sure you’re fed and watered and you can get on with your writing. Amos tells me you don’t go upstairs.’

‘My legs are too weak,’ I said, my plan already forming in my mind.

He went to the front window and looked down into the basement area below.

‘And I don’t think you’ll be jumping down into that, Gran,’ he said. He was right. I wouldn’t. In any case there was a CiviCam trained on the road and Neighbourhood Watch would be round in no time to find out what was going on and there’d be no end to it. If you called the authorities the chances were that you’d be the one to land up in prison. It was the way they worked. Saved time, trouble and paperwork, and led to far fewer complaints.

He’s forgotten my phone, I thought, but no. Of course not; Henry was not a forgetful person, any more than his father had been – other than the knocker on the door which was why I valued it so. Symbol of at least a minor victory.

‘Tell you what, boy,’ Henry said, ‘if you take Gran’s phone we can charge it up for her next door. I’ll be thinking there’s a bit of juice left in the generator.’

Amos took my phone. If you show no doubt when giving instructions, it becomes natural for others to obey them. People like being told what to do, as Hitler said in
Mein Kampf
. So long as you tell them firmly enough they feel secure and enjoy it.

‘Remind me, too, to bring in a few cans of petrol when we have a minute,’ and Henry gave me the benefit of a sweet smile, Karl’s smile, and it occurred to me that it was a threat to burn the house down, me included in fixtures and furnishings. Henry really didn’t like me: but I daresay the circumstances of his birth gave him reason not to. And heaven knows how Venetia and Polly had presented me to him. Let alone Harriet of the broken leg. Edgar would have made a good job of badmouthing me to her, as men so often do of the women who were once in their lives. That is, if they remember them at all.

I wondered whether, if Karl hadn’t disencumbered himself of Henry, how the child would have grown up. Was control freakery built into dictators, or was it acquired through childhood trauma? Stalin was well and truly traumatized as a child. His father abandoned the family, his arm withered up, he was pitted by smallpox, he was stunted in growth. On the other hand Mussolini got on well with his father, and was reckoned handsome, courageous, charismatic, and erudite – if violent as a child. Hitler had a puny kind of sex-life. I wondered what Henry’s was like, and thought it was probably like his father’s, kind of impulsive and frequent. I didn’t want to think about it.