The Lubetkin Legacy (15 page)

In quiet moments at work Violet finds herself scanning employment ads and job-search sites. There's plenty of unpaid work experience out there, but the actual jobs now are mainly in tech start-ups or property development, which don't interest her.

Marc treats her with formal politeness, and makes no reference to their dinner date. Remembering the look in his eyes as he dabbed at the wine on his groin with a napkin now brings a small smile of satisfaction to her face. But the truth is that her flame of enthusiasm for her job has fizzled out. She wants something different – but what? She doesn't know. The only two jobs for which she applies both require references – of course they would. She can't name Marc Bonnier or Gillian Chalmers as referees without explaining why she wants to leave GRM, so she bangs in the applications just giving her academic references, knowing she doesn't stand much chance.

Meanwhile, the campaign to save the cherry trees has taken off. On Sunday evening she finds herself sitting squeezed thigh-to-thigh between Greg Smith – that is the towel-man's name – and Mrs Cracey on the maroon Dralon couch in Mrs Cracey's sitting room that smells faintly of cat pee. A couple of thin multicoloured cats are hanging around looking for an inviting knee to jump on to. The wheelchair man, whose name is Len, is parked in one corner. Mrs Tyldesley, the artist lady who lives next to Mrs Cracey, sits opposite them on a matching Dralon armchair sketching away. Greg's son Arthur
is perched on a kitchen stool, sucking his biro with concentration and scribbling on a notepad. They are drafting a petition to the Council to save the cherry trees.

The room reminds her of her grandmother's sitting room in Nairobi, with the same heavy Dralon furniture, a crucifix on each wall, and frilly net drapes obscuring the windows, even down to the same print of Jesus holding a lantern and knocking on a closed door, which her grandmother used to tell her represented the door of her heart. The sad look on Jesus' face always made her feel a twinge of guilt, and she pays her penance now by volunteering to type up the petition and email it to Greg who will run some copies off at work.

The look of alarm on Inna's face when I came in through the door after my discharge from hospital made me feel a twinge of guilt that I had exaggerated the seriousness of my injury. I slumped on the sofa, moaning from time to time, and let her ply me with tea and vodka. I had hoped the hospital would issue me with a pirate-style black eyepatch when they discharged me, but the one at the dispensary turned out to be confectionery-pink and rubbery. On my face, it looked like a misplaced cupcake.

‘Oy, you look like crazy, Bertie! One-eye blind crazy!'

‘The doctor said I've a fifty-fifty chance of losing my eye, Inna,' I said. Which was not entirely true – the doctor had said my eyesight was not at risk – but why waste all that goodwill that people seem to summon up for the blind?

‘Better you not lose it too soon. You ev birthday on Tuesday. I will invite Blackie coming for dinner. I will make golabki kobaski slatki.'

‘Lovely. But remember her name is Violet, not Blackie.'

‘Blackie, Violet, all same – innit, Indunky Smeet?'

The parrot looked mardy and did not respond. It must be tough for a creature of limited intelligence to handle so many name changes. I was brimming with excitement but I put on a display of nonchalance for Inna's benefit.

‘I was thinking, Inna, should I invest in one of those George Clooney-type coffee machines?'

You never know what will please a woman.

‘Too expensive,' Inna declared. ‘Waste of money. Dovik got one. Coffee in Lidl is better.'

Due to factors beyond my control, for which I largely blamed Jimmy, I had never managed to deliver the oration I had so painstakingly prepared for Mother's funeral. But now, lying on the sofa in the sitting room, I turned my melancholy one-eyed gaze on the casket of ashes which Jimmy had given me in hospital and which I had placed on the mantelpiece. All that energy and complexity compacted into a box of dust. I tried to recall what she had told me of her life. What I did not know would now remain a mystery.

Mum had been wont to brag of her humble origins. She had been born in a flat above a pie shop on Sutton Street, Shadwell, she claimed; not even a real flat. Just two rooms on the first floor, sharing the hall, staircase and mezzanine kitchen with another family. There was no bathroom, only a communal toilet in the back yard. Nevertheless, Mum said, they were better off than many families, who lived in just one room, or in a lightless basement. Her father, my Grandad Robert, born in 1890, had survived the horrors of the Great War and worked as a tally clerk in the Port of London. He had witnessed at first hand the humiliating scramble of unemployed dockers fighting each other for a brass tally, which was the promise of a day's work, tossed by a foreman into the hungry crowd. Once he saw a man killed in the crush. It affected him deeply, and Mum told me in a hushed voice that her father, before he died, had made her promise never to cross a picket fence. I puzzled over the mystery of the fence, but I did not question it, so powerful was the mystique of my grandfather. I snuggled beside Mother on the sofa and let her voice lead me through the gallery of the sepia-tinted past.

Her mother Gladys, she told me, was born into a Yorkshire mining family in 1900, and had moved down to London during the Depression to work as a maid in the household of a Chelsea dentist. Never one to hold her tongue, Gladys, nicknamed Gobby Gladys, had stormed out after an argument over wages, and found a job in a rag factory in Whitechapel. Within two years she'd set up a trade union branch there. Gladys and Robert met at a rally in Bow at which George Lansbury was talking about his vision of a better society. Gladys, pint-sized and pugnacious, wearing high heels and a red felt hat with a flower on the side, jumped up and yelled that all this talk about ethics and aesthetics was highfalutin claptrap and we must fight the fascists in the streets. Robert, giant-sized and peaceable, looked on in awe and asked her out for a drink afterwards. There was a photo of them at their wedding, he tall and handsome in a double-breasted suit, she barely reaching to his shoulder even in high heels, wearing white silk, and flowers in her hair. If you looked closely, you could just detect the bump under the silk that was baby Lily, who was born in the year that George Lansbury became the leader of the Labour Party, and trundled around to Labour Party meetings and rallies all over the East End, her pram stuffed with leaflets.

I never met my Grandad Bob, he died before I was born, but I was once taken to meet Granny Gladys in her old people's home in Poplar. She was a tiny shrunken figure hunched over her Zimmer frame in a small overheated room that smelled of disinfectant and pee. There was a sampler on the wall embroidered in cross stitch, with the motto ‘Fellowship is Life'.

‘Kiss your granny, Bertie.' Mother gave me a little push, and I stumbled forward.

Her cheek felt dry and soft like crumpled tissue paper. She was still gobby; she railed in a shrill quavering voice against
Stanley Baldman, and Mum whispered that she meant the pre-war Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin who had been dead for twenty years. At tea, when I reached for a chocolate biscuit before it was offered, she rapped my fingers with a spoon.

When Granny Gladys died, Mother was inconsolable for weeks, but I was secretly glad, because I didn't like her much, and after the funeral I got Grandad's walking stick with a carved dog's head for the handle. Mother inherited the sampler, which she hung on the wall in the sitting room. She also inherited both Granny Gladys's gobby spirit and Grandad Bob's steadfastness. Even now, remembering the way her voice choked as she spoke about him brought a tear to my eye.

‘What does it mean, “fellowship is life”?' I had once asked, poking at the sampler with Grandad's walking stick.

She turned on me, her eyes shining with tears, and said, ‘They were only in power six years, and they gave us the NHS, unemployment benefit, pensions, proper education and thousands of new homes, including this one, Bert. That's what fellowship is.'

Greg comes back to Mrs Cracey's flat on Monday evening and presents a bundle of papers and some clipboards with a flourish. Len and Mrs Tyldesley are there too. Mrs Cracey pours five glasses of whisky, and declares that the garden of the Lord always blooms better with a little irrigation. Violet cheers and clinks glasses. Getting involved with the cherry tree campaign seems much more worthwhile than helping HN Holdings siphon money out of Kenya into Horace Nzangu's British Virgin Isles company.

Armed with the clipboards and petitions, they go out knocking on doors. Everyone signs, and some people even agree to write individual letters. Afterwards she goes back to Greg's flat for a coffee. He has one of those hi-tech coffee-making machines like Marc's that hisses and makes a lot of noise then produces a fragrant black dribble of coffee. It must be a man thing.

‘Where's Arthur?' she asks.

‘He's with his mother,' says Greg. ‘He stays with her half the week.'

Her stomach flutters a brief warning. She felt comfortable in the flat when Arthur was there, but being alone with Greg is not on her agenda. He is a lot older than her, with a complicated marital history and an appraising eye. This is not a man she wants to get involved with.

‘That must be tough. For both of you.' She glances towards the door just in case she needs to make a quick exit.

‘It takes a bit of getting used to,' he says.

They perch on stools in the kitchen; she stirs half a teaspoon of sugar into her coffee, which is a bit too strong and makes her pulses race. He doesn't talk about his marital problems or his work: he talks about his passion for sailing, and his ambition to sail around Cape Horn.

‘Does Arthur like sailing too?' she asks, as if saying Arthur's name will bring him into the room with them.

He laughs. ‘I'm working on him, but he prefers Minecraft.'

She remembers the forlorn look on the kid's face as he stepped out into the road, hunched over his screen.

‘What made you take up the cause of the cherry trees, Violet?' he asks.

She tells him about the eruption of new building in Nairobi. ‘The sheer arrogance of it. They think they can get away with it, because nobody will object. Or because they've paid somebody off. How about you? How did you end up living here?'

It seems odd that someone who seems to have money is living in a place like this. But Greg, like her, had only recently arrived in the flats, and, like her, he isn't planning to stay long.

‘I'm having some building work done on my house. It ran into problems and I had to move out in a hurry.'

‘That sounds bad.'

‘It is. Structural. You?'

‘Mm. I was staying with a friend before. In Croydon. I can't really afford it here unless I find some flatmates,' she adds with an embarrassed giggle.

Apart from the coffee machine, his flat is even barer than her own. It does have curtains, but no beds. Greg and his son had been sleeping on inflatable mattresses on the floor.

‘You can borrow some of mine,' says Violet. ‘I've got seven of everything.'

‘Seven?'

‘The previous occupants were dwarves.'

He laughs. His teeth are even and white, with pointed canines. His sleek dark hair is greying at the temples, his cheeks and chin perfectly chiselled, handsome in a George Clooney sort of way.

But way too old for her.

Between them they heave and manoeuvre two beds, two desks and three chairs out of her flat, into the lift, and across the walkway to his flat. The move takes them the best part of an hour. At the end of it they are breathless and exhausted.

‘Let me take you out for dinner,' he says.

She hesitates. The thought of good food in a proper restaurant with attentive male company is tempting, but she mustn't get herself into a situation she can't get out of. There is something quick and hungry about him which reminds her of Marc. She's learned her lesson.

‘Thanks. But I've promised to skype my grandma in Nairobi.'

She closes the door of her flat and sets the latch and the chain. She still doesn't feel quite safe here at night; the strange noises from the flat next door and the shouting in the street after the pubs close always put her on edge. She lowers the blue sari curtain and whisks up two eggs for an omelette, planning to skype her grandma after dinner. Then the doorbell buzzes.

She jumps up, her heart pounding, and listens. It buzzes again. Lucky the chain is on. Probably it is just Greg with a spare bundle of petitions, but you can't be too careful. She opens the door on the chain and peers through the crack out on to the concrete walkway where dusk is already drawing in. The shadowy figure standing there is almost invisible, dressed all in black; a stray beam of light from her kitchen window
glints on a pair of diamanté-framed spectacles. It takes her a moment to recognise the old lady from next door.

‘Allo, Blackie, I am next-door Inna,' the old lady croaks. ‘You vegetable?'

Calling her Blackie is one thing – she guessed from the old lady's tone that it was meant more descriptively than offensively. But no one has called her a vegetable before. What does it mean?

She opens the door. ‘Vegetable?'

‘You it it? I cook golabki kobaski slatki. Tomorrow half of seven.' The old lady's face crinkles up into a smile.

‘Oh, I see.' Though she doesn't see at all.

‘I am mother-sister from Lily.' Behind the sparkly spectacles, her dark eyes dance bright and merry.

‘Mhm?'

‘I cook. You no vegetable, okay?'

‘Okay?'

The old lady chortles and disappears into the dusk rubbing her hands. Seriously weird.

She closes the door and slices a tomato and toasts some slightly stale bread to go with her omelette, half regretting that she had turned down a proper meal in a restaurant. Then she skypes her Grandma Njoki in Nairobi.

‘Violet! Violet
mpenzi
!' A blurred and pixelated image of a wrinkled brown face with rubbery pink gums and pearly-white false teeth fills the screen of her laptop. ‘When you coming to visit us in Nairobi?'

‘As soon as possible, Nyanya Njoki! I'm saving up.' Which is not entirely true, but suddenly seems like a good idea.