Chalcot Crescent (6 page)

I rang friends. Terry! Suicide! Twenty years out of college and we alumni had kept in touch. More surprising that sixty years on those who survive still do. It was soon after the war – families had disintegrated, homes been destroyed, populations dispersed – stuck up there in the Scotland, on the end of a long damp dishrag (so my mother described it) we students were one another’s family.

‘Oh yes, that Terry.’ They were slightly disparaging about him, even in his death. He was never really one of them: he did science; they did humanities: never the twain should meet, except in bed. ‘Oh yes, Terry. Working for the Douglas Aircraft Company. The one whose DC10 just fell out of the sky. You had a friend on that? Oh, bad luck.’

And then the next surprise. Liddy came over from California. The daughter, Florrie, came too. She was twelve. She played outside with Venetia while we talked. She looked like her father; the same hooded eyes, the same dark shiny hair. Part of me thought she
should be my child. Liddy said if you’re wondering why he did it, that air crash in Paris played on his mind. He blamed himself. She’d come back from shopping and found him with a bullet through his brain and a gun in his hand and a file in front of him. It contained all the memos he’d sent to the company saying their DC10 was unsafe, there was no way an aircraft should be built with the control cables running the length of the fuselage floor, when that floor was not reinforced, and loss of pressure could collapse it. They’d sat on his memos and done nothing. A lot of people were killed.

‘I know,’ I said, ‘my best friend was on that aircraft.’

I thought if he’d been married to me he wouldn’t have killed himself. I would not have let the memos go unanswered, the fuselage would have been strengthened so when the cargo door blew out its floor wouldn’t have collapsed and the control cables would not have been severed and everyone would have got safely home, though no doubt a few might have been sucked out with the pressurized air as it fled the aircraft. If I had not lain around weeping and had more courage and more sense of self-worth and had any idea how to set about it, which to others seemed to come naturally, but not to me, I might taken Terry away from Liddy and Cynthia’s children would still have a mother. She would have clung on and not been sucked out.

And then I lost touch with Liddy, rather deliberately. There was too much going on in my life: I was too busy being a famous author, and emotionally tossed and turned by Karl, to take on moral responsibility for a widow and child. There must be others, I thought, but I didn’t check. I was too angry with her for letting Terry die. I was too jealous because she had had more of Terry than I ever did, wafting around in the attic with the smell of sex seeping down the stairs to torment me while I wept in the basement, and because in
the end she let melancholy and remorse overwhelm him. But really I suspect it was because she once said to me, when I asked her why I didn’t have the success with men she did, simply, ‘Because you’re not beautiful.’ Terry really wasn’t one of us, anyway, and nor was Liddy. She studied Botany. But I hope Florrie was okay. Children can get caught up in this sort of madness, and it ends in tears, sometimes death. I feel bad about Florrie. I should have been, as they say these days, ‘there for her’.

I remember my friend Susannah, who came over in the exodus of mostly Jewish white refugees from South Africa in the sixties, in flight from apartheid, to continue the fight for the ANC in Europe. Architects, musicians, writers, poets, intellectuals all. Karl and I were giving a dinner party – I marvel now at how much I could do when young, up at five to write the novels, three days a week at the advertising agency (never give up your day job), two children, four-course dinner parties: Elizabeth David, creamy fish balls, lemon roast veal, chocolate mousse – murderous in today’s terms, all cream and brandy but oh my! The delights – and Susannah had read one of my novels and said it was wicked to try to upset the established order, she would never work or earn: feminism was evil – women existed to serve and adore men – and I argued, and she and her husband Jonathan got up and walked out. And Karl blamed me.

But a couple of weeks later Susannah was round in tears: she had got home from shopping to find her husband had sold the house over her head without telling her – men could do that – and had gone to Israel to be a rabbi. Now what was she to do? I refrained from saying, ‘I told you so,’ and did my best for her: got her lawyers and so on, and lent her some of my ill-gotten gains.

It is never sensible to put too much trust in men’s continued capacity to look after you. They get swept up in some sexual or
religious or radical fever and put you aside as trivial. And once out of your lives they forget about you altogether; their life with you is wiped from memory. You remember, they do not. It is as if you never were. Divorce baffles women, but seems normal enough to men. We are a different species, and the male of the species was devised to stick around while women are pregnant and children are helpless, and roar at the mouth of the cave – but if she’ll do the roaring, and he the earning, he’s off. Or if, like Susannah’s husband, his wife never did Shabbat properly. Though it turned out – it usually does, men seldom go to empty beds – there was another woman involved.

‘After your grandfather left me –’ I say to Amos.

‘He was not my real fucking grandfather,’ Amos reminded me. ‘He was no blood relation. We shared no genes. I was conceived under the statue of a frog by Paolozzi.’

‘I did not know your mother had been so specific about the details,’ I remarked. ‘Karl, while he was with us, brought you up as one of his own grandchildren.’

‘Until he fucking left,’ said Amos. The children of warring protagonists harbour more bitterness, and longer, than do the protagonists themselves.

I had long ago worn out my anger with Karl, though it was strong and vicious enough while it lasted. He left me for a fat, plain, placid girl sculptress whom he said had more talent in her fore-finger than I had in my whole body. He had by now deserted Freud for Jung, and had a therapist of the cut-the-ties-that-bind variety, recommended, I later discovered, by the sculptress herself. He had a kind of affair with the therapist – at any rate it involved a lot of massage and relief of tension, and then moved on to the sculptress herself. The divorce laws were by now such that I had to support
Karl and her, whom I came to refer to as the Dumpling, in their old rectory in the country with a good north light and a studio they could share, and occupy the moral high ground at my expense and be happy. I was angry at the time, I do admit. In fact I nearly died from rage, which translated itself into acute asthma. Karl seemed to like fat girls. He should have stayed with my sister Fay.

Venetia was reluctant to keep up the contact but Polly, then fourteen, would spend the occasional weekend with her father and new stepmother, to my disgust. She did not like the Dumpling, or politely told me she did not, complaining that she went round with bare feet, and that they were large and often dirty. I have always wondered if it was she beneath the coats at that party long ago, but I have never asked and what did it matter? I would rather not know how many years the deceit had been going on. It would be too painful. It would only obviate the good years, the years when Polly would patter down the stairs to confront the postman; it would delete more of my past than I could bear.

The Dumpling died a couple of years later of one of those rare quick cancers that sometimes follow on a pregnancy, leaving Karl with a son, Henry. Karl wanted to move back with me but I had by now bought him out of the Chalcot Crescent house and was living in it as I pleased, with a washing machine and a lover, and the Brancusi Karl had used as doorstops now on marble plinths, and my various awards – BAFTA, Society of Authors, prizes for best short story, framed and on the walls, and could give smart parties, which Karl would have found meretricious – and I would not have him back. Though Venetia and Polly begged me to.

But they wanted him back for themselves, not for me. And he would have been off again: he had the taste for it by now, and so did I, for other men and lots of them. Just as I never forgave my mother
for leaving my father, so my children never quite forgave me for not having Karl back. I see it in their eyes when I go round to see them, or they come over to visit me. Mother, the one that lost them their father. Forget I gave birth to them, reared them, all that stuff: forget it was he who left me; in their minds I drove out Father.

Sometimes Karl would visit, and bring Henry round: a very dull child with his mother’s placidity and large feet. These things fade into the past, but they are never over. Fate had meant Karl for me, brought us together by a stroke of magic and I had believed destiny meant us to live happily ever after, but Karl had reneged on destiny. It was all there in my books, that this would be the outcome. I wrote it over and over and over. Men are faithless bastards. I just never believed it for myself. In the end I just felt like such a fool. And the thought of him and the Dumpling in an intimate embrace was still more than I could endure and still is, decades later, long after both have died and turned to dust.

‘I thought my good fortune,’ I say now to Amos, ‘was like money. I thought it was a tap that flowed and never stopped. Love and marriage, mortgage and money. I should have known better.’

‘No-one knew any fucking better,’ says Amos. ‘We have all been cheated, conned, fleeced and suckered. Why aren’t you angry? You should be.’

I reply that it is not in my nature to be angry for long.

‘I was angry with your grandfather for a bit,’ I admit, ‘but it did nobody any good and it was too exhausting to keep it up.’

‘You women always reduce things to the personal,’ he says. ‘Don’t you even see what has been going on out there? Aren’t you interested?’

‘Tell me,’ I say. He does. He explains how the conman works. The conman says to the sucker, ‘Let’s play a fast one on Joey,’ the sucker is tempted and colludes, and before he knows it Joey’s up and away, part of the deal, the sucker is out of pocket, and the conman is laughing all the way to the bank.

‘And these days the conman is the bank, and we’re all of us the suckers.’

‘Then I shouldn’t have colluded,’ I say, ‘I shouldn’t have been tempted. I shouldn’t have bought goods I couldn’t afford. I shouldn’t have gambled on the stock exchange with money I hadn’t
earned, spending on what I hadn’t got, used my credit cards, my store cards, for things I fancied but didn’t need. My fault.’

‘You and a zillion million others,’ Amos said. ‘It’s been a gigantic con, the better to soften you up, aided and abetted by the admen. The friendly bank, the caring government, your flexible friend. This is a nice house, throw you out and the State can house its own. That’s all this is about.’

Amos is no blood relation to his Aunt Polly but they talk the same way. The only difference is that Polly goes on and on about the evils of the patriarchy, whereas for Amos it’s The System. I see myself in both of them: they must get the conspiracy theorist genes from me.

Corey, Polly’s partner (she doesn’t ‘believe in’ marriage), gets on with his muscle building and crowd-control evening classes and all Polly’s indignation flows over his head. Corey once complained to me that if he was just quiet, staring at his sports shoe for a while, Polly would ask him what he was brooding about, and tell him to learn to express his feelings. ‘But I haven’t got any feelings,’ Corey said, ‘I’m just looking at my sports shoe. Why can’t she accept that?’

I suggest to Corey that in the interests of a quiet life he could invent some internal agonies but he shook his head and said that would be lying. He didn’t have any. They get on well enough. But who has Amos got in his life to ‘share’ with? He may have a girlfriend, and I don’t think he’s gay, but he likes to keep his personal life mysterious. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t confide in his mother. Ever since Venetia foolishly asked Amos not to talk politics or religion at dinner because it annoyed Victor, he just talks small talk when he’s round there. Venetia said I was always saying that to Polly – no politics or religion at the dinner table. And that is why Polly is what she is – but I’m sure I never said any such thing to the girl.
One’s children are always recalling things one could swear one never said. Anyway, these days he seldom rants on.

‘The elephant in the room you refuse to see is growing so large it’s about to split the house itself,’ says Amos. Is he some kind of a public speaker? He has the words off pat. I know so little about this scion of mine. ‘The elephant is barring all the exits, trunk against the door: tail up the chimney, flanks blocking the view from the window.’

‘You can see this elephant then?’ I ask. I feel the need to placate and distract him as if I am dealing with a madman. We are sitting here on the stairs, an old lady and a youngish man, hiding from the bailiffs, and he, he is making a speech. At least he brought me a blanket. A thought occurs to me again that they might be after him, not me. They may not be bailiffs, and they might be secret police. They arrived half an hour after he did. But that’s paranoia: they would have burst in with guns blazing. No, this lot come armed with writs and warrants. Sooner or later I am going to have to go to the loo. I will have to stand up. I refuse to crawl.

Let them see me, let them take me in charge, let them carry off all my possessions.

I hope the water is back on. It usually is, in sequence with the power supply. There is a big water shortage: one of our chief exports now is water. Freely it falls from the sky into our reservoirs, whence it is carried off to God knows where in the world, but probably to France. What we get from the taps is metered, expensive, and the supply cut for four hours a day. The seas of the world are polluted so that salination is an even more expensive business than once it was, and so our rain, once our misfortune, is suddenly now our export good fortune.

‘We are owned by the banks,’ Amos is saying. ‘Everyone is owned
and controlled, every politician with a secret, every scientist with flaky funding. Every journalist or academic who wants to keep his job – debt runs the world. They have made sure of that. Mrs Thatcher started it when she got rid of public housing. Every man his own householder: every man owned by the mortgage company, that is – and then she turned the mortgage companies, with their overtones of Social Credit, into private equity firms and the rest is history. Every proud house owner who got an overdraft to build a conservatory, every father who took out a loan for his daughter’s wedding, every parent who borrows to buy a child’s holiday –’