Chalcot Crescent (30 page)

Nothing is for nothing, of course. I told them everything I knew. I handed over my laptop and they made good use of it. Fortunately for me the wife of the interrogator – ‘Just a formality, Dame Frances’ – was a fan and former reader of my novels, and longs for me to write a new one. NUG wives are powerful, it seems. Their whims
are often taken as official directives. It is not exactly the triumph of feminism but it is something. NUG’s policy is to incorporate aggression, not meet it head-on. They invite me on to their many quangos to discuss the motivation of their opponents. I have even encountered Henry at one of them, putting forward his views on the value of a new ethic. We were perfectly polite to one another. He is more closely supervised than I am, in the Hyde Park Facility for Rehabilitation.

This was where I was first taken, after Victor and I were hustled off in the ambulance. I told them everything I knew, but only on condition my family would not suffer. On the night of the coup NUG had cleared the Underground of antisocial forces. I intimated to the interrogator that I knew where a lot of bodies were buried – Ethan’s parentage, for one thing; Victor’s lack of judgment at taking in Henry for another. Bargaining with authority is always a risk. I do not forget Oliver Cromwell’s sack of the Irish town of Drogheda in 1649, even while negotiations were under way for its surrender: three and a half thousand people died at the hands of the New Model Army. I could see it might well be a toss-up between whether my whole family, grandchildren included, would join the National Meat Loaf mix (how NUG deny that scenario: never such a loathsome rumour!) or whether I could be relied upon as a trusted ally. Fortunately the decision was made in my favour.

Amos, Henry, Ethan and Amy stay in the Hyde Park Facility and are undergoing psychoanalysis. All have been given positions of responsibility within NUG. Ethan is in charge of the limousine unit and is responsible for the safe road transport of Ministers; Henry in NIFE works on the problems of getting sufficient calorie content into the daily diet of forty million citizens; Amy is really high up in Neighbourhood Watch; and Amos works on the fair allocation of
recreational drugs. I am not sure that this is the wisest method of dealing with social recalcitrants, but so long as I say so at meetings and am overruled, everyone seems happy.

The interrogator has studied the first draft of this memoir/fiction/diary. He is full of helpful suggestions. With the leisure and comfort I have now, and in the absence of quite so many surprises, I have been able to get on quite fast with the second draft you are reading now.

‘Just tell us more about Amos and Ethan,’ he says. ‘Everything you know.’

Amos is my flesh and blood – apart from some dollop of genes from a stranger, which I can’t be responsible for – and Ethan even more my flesh and blood, he being so very much in the family – so everything I know about them includes everything I know about me. Therefore this text.

The psychoanalysts here seem less interested in Henry and Amy: I think these days they are focusing more on nature than on nurture in their assessment of personality types: the flow of the genes rather than the weight of upbringing. It’s the way the world is going.

I have always used fiction to get to the heart of the matter, to discover what it is I know. It is up to the facility analysts, when they finally get round to reading this text, to decide what is memoir, what is fact, what is truth (Pilate-like, I wash my hands) or some embroidery of the truth.

Venetia calls round every couple of weeks. We are distant and friendly, and talk about nothing that might disconcert either of us. Once a month I am asked round to a Shabbat-style dinner. Photographers and film-makers are often present, as we talk about social issues. As for Polly, I suggested to her the other day that she and Corey and the girls moved into Chalcot Crescent, where there
is more light, air and good cheer than in Mornington Crescent. When I pointed out to her that the girls would get fewer colds, she capitulated. So a new generation of Prideauxs moves in. It’s good. I am all for continuity. And perhaps Rosie and Steffie will have daughters.

Sometimes I see myself like Job, whose ‘latter days God blessed more than the beginning.’ God and the Devil fight it out over Job: he loses his possessions and is visited by every calamity under the sun. Job challenges God, God accepts his rebuke, and Job says okay, he’ll stop whining. By giving in to the system, he gets everything. He ends up with fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen and a thousand she-asses – something of an overkill, one might think, suggesting a biblical writer eager to get home to his dinner.
And in all the land were no women found so fair as the daughters of Job
. That’s what it feels like to be me. Blessed, but only at the very end.

I wish Cynthia were here so I could tell her all about what happened next. So contrary was she, had I told her it was okay to go to Turkey she’d probably have stayed home and not fallen out of the sky. But there you are. One does what one does.