Chalcot Crescent (4 page)

This happens in 1961 when Frances is twenty-seven, and lives in a walk-up (seven flights, ninety stairs) with her mother and little Venetia. Her mother Margaret stays in with Venetia when Frances goes out to work in her advertising agency. Margaret hates it when Frances goes out to parties in the evening and she is left alone, chafing from the burden of how her daughter obliges her to live, feeling excluded. Frances feels her sister Fay should take a little of the burden of entertaining Margaret off her shoulders – Margaret declines to make friends or have a social life of her own: she was born in 1909, after all, and feels company means family: that friends should drop in their visiting cards, not themselves, and remain at a
formal distance. Margaret never much liked any of her children bringing friends home, and as for lovers, seriously no.

Fay earns double what Frances does. Sometimes she feels bad about Frances’ hard life, but then Frances has only herself to blame. And Frances does not have to bear the burden of guilt Fay does: she did not have an abortion. Fay rather envies her that. Abortion is illegal and you go to prison for having one if you are found out, but the police aren’t looking very hard. They would have their work cut out to get round everyone. Both Fay and Frances are unusual in that they have well-paid jobs and are unmarried in an age when few women can support themselves, or want to.

‘I look forward to meeting him,’ says Frances.

‘You might not get on with each other very well,’ says Fay.

‘Why not?’

‘He has an artistic sensibility,’ says Fay.

‘You mean I haven’t?’ demands Frances.

‘The new Chinese rug you’re so proud of,’ says Fay, ‘is hardly the last word in aesthetic chic.’

‘What’s the matter with it?’ demanded Frances.

‘It’s nylon, it’s machine-made and mass-produced,’ said Fay.

Frances was proud of the rug, the first household item she had ever bought for her home after years of living in cheap flats. It suggested to her that things were looking up: that there just might be a future in which possessions and pleasures were freely available. It was circular, thick, dusky pink with a giant dragon woven into it. She loved it. It was luxurious: she had achieved it by her own work and her own efforts. It was her own taste, not her mother’s. She had overridden Margaret to buy it. Margaret liked only what was sensible and virtuous. Frances was proud of it. Venetia liked to sit in the middle of it and hum nursery rhymes. Frances had shown
the carpet off to people, and thought they looked at her rather curiously. Were they all laughing at her?

She said nothing but resolved she would steal Karl from Fay. She would have him and make his artistic sensibilities her own. She would move in, escape her mother, have this man’s babies, make him buy a washing machine and not let Fay lord it over her any more, by virtue of her two years’ seniority and childlessness. All sight unseen. But some passing deity – of the kind who existed in the magic London of the past – was passing by in the balmy, enchanted air of that night, heard her unspoken mind and granted her wish.

The party was at Studio House, 1 Hampstead Hill Gardens, a vast house now divided into ten luxury apartments, but then in single occupancy, owned by Professor William Empson, author of the
Seven Types of Ambiguity
, a book that many admired but few understood, and his fiercely beautiful wife Hetta, who had begun life on the South African veldt, where her father laid about her with a sjambok the better to keep her in order, but failed. The Empsons supervised the wilder shores of literary and artistic life in the sixties. Wine flowed, bread and cheese were devoured by the struggling, hungry and talented: Elias Canetti of
Crowds and Power
was there, and the young Bernice Rubens and her husband Rudy Nassauer, and Iris Murdoch – wearing slippers even then – and John Bayley. Mira Hamermesh the film-maker, and Nic Roeg and Karel Reisz, and the young Roger Graef, and Jonathan Miller and Angela Carter were all there: but not Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, because they were down in Devon, around the time Assia Wevill and her husband David were visiting for the weekend. Sylvia asked Assia to peel the potatoes and Assia felt herself misused and treated like the maid and went down the garden path to where Ted was, and flirted with
him and kissed him just to be revenged on Sylvia, and see where that led, two dead women and one dead child later.

In just that same spirit did Frances go up to Karl at the Empson party, after having talked briefly to William himself, who remarked that 1961 was a palindrome and like a pencil; sharpened at both ends, and, when she asked him why he was wearing two ties, replied to her that he couldn’t find his belt. All that energy and promise, there and then not there like a puff of smoke in the cosmos.

And then she asked around and found out that Karl Prideaux was a talented painter, that his wife had gone mad and was murderous and locked up in a loony bin, and a better painter than he was, that he’d been left money and was in psychoanalysis, that he hated his mother, that he’d come into money and gave drunken parties in Chalcot Crescent down the hill, that since his wife left – she had taken to sleeping in a dustbin before they came to take her away – he slept with anyone that moved, what was that pretty fat girl doing at this party – wasn’t she in advertising –?

‘That’s my sister,’ said Frances –

‘And how about you? It’s a lovely night. Would you like to come outside into the moonlight where it’s a bit quieter –’

‘No thanks.’

She can see where Karl stands with a group of friends, where he seems to be the natural centre of attraction, his arm around Fay, who is looking singularly pleased with herself. She catches his eye. He is not tall, but stocky and muscular, Picasso-like.

‘That’s my sister,’ says Fay. ‘She’s the one with the illegitimate child who lives with my mother. She’s very brave.’

Karl looks at Frances properly. She looks at him. They know each other. The powers from on high have arranged the whole thing, including her wrong, mean motive, which is now irrelevant.

‘I have a child too,’ he says. She hadn’t known that. And then to Fay – ‘No child is illegitimate. It has as much right in the world as anyone else.’ It’s a rebuke. She flushes.

And within two minutes Karl and Frances were out in the garden where it was quieter, underneath the fairy lights, and he was asking why she looked so unhappy, and she was telling him about the married man she was seeing, about the ‘Cry Me a River’ syndrome, and then before they knew it they were on the ground beneath the trees and he said, as men did in those days, ‘I’ll only put it in a little way,’ but of course he didn’t. She thought he was like the pulse of the universe, its heartbeat – that, then this, that, then this, that, then this – the steady rhythm of life itself and the sudden understanding kept her with him for years, though it did not prevent her, from time to time, when upset or jealous or simply bored, for looking for the same quality elsewhere.

When they went back inside to fetch her coat, Fay was standing there, blonde curls askew, make-up streaming down her face. She looked awful when she cried. Frances felt bad about it but not for long.

Then they were walking together down the hill towards Chalcot Crescent and he said, ‘I feel bad about your sister. One shouldn’t go to a party with one girl and leave it with another,’ and Frances said probably not but it was too late now. Within a week they were living together.

Studio House now stands empty, dilapidated and with Virginia creeper pushing out its window frames, its garden a mixture of rubble and weeds. It held its own until 2011, when an epidemic of unknown origin and a 60 per cent fatality rate spread out from the Royal Free Hospital and crept up as far as St Stephen’s on Rosslyn Hill, and down the road as far as the Vale of Health, before
seeming to burn itself out – there were too few trained pathologists to find a vaccine, let alone a cure – but they reckoned it was carried by rats on a house-to-house basis. By then most of Hampstead had vacated the premises, but the rats hadn’t, so very few inhabitants returned.

‘Making love to you is like making love to the sea,’ Karl said, after the second day.

‘And with Fay?’ I asked.

‘To the village pond,’ he said. What chance did she have? I didn’t tell her he said that. But I treasured it for ever.

For once she pleaded with me. ‘But I love him, Frances,’ she bleated. I took no notice. She was too docile for him, anyway: he would have made her life hell. He needed someone like me to fight him back.

So I moved with Venetia into Karl’s house and have stayed here ever since. From No. 3 Chalcot Crescent I have lived through five decades of world history: I have been living witness to the birth and death of feminism, the terror and denial of the dangers of nuclear war, the rise and fall of terrorism, the fall of first communism, then capitalism – which once we thought would last for ever – the death and rebirth of nationalism, and I survived. Now finally world history reaches my doorstep and comes the knock on the door and the bailiffs are here.

These stairs I sit upon – the carpets have been renewed from time to time, upgraded as my books sold and my income grew, from worn brown hessian to dark-patterned Axminster to avocado nylon mix to white pure wool – now feel rather thin and grubby. I cannot
afford to have them professionally cleaned. Nowadays I use dustpan and brush, as I did at the beginning. (It is almost impossible to find vacuum cleaner bags in the shops: whether a genuine shortage or a government ploy to stop us using electricity, who is to say? We are all conspiracy theorists now.) Wealth changed to poverty with the passage of time. Agents rooked me, and accountants cheated me: I was never as clever as I thought. Fashions in writers change. I believed I was rich long after I ceased to be so. Another Hollywood film, the next West End musical, that I always believed were around the corner to rescue me and mine never materialized.

As for Fay, she recovered from her heartbreak soon enough, and went to be writer in residence in ANU in Canberra and there married a professor of anthropology. She writes cookbooks, which do well enough. My mother Margaret eventually joined her in that town, as did my elder sister Jane and her two boys. Jane writes poetry, and her work is well received. It is mythical stuff; I don’t understand it. Jane once complained I did not have a poetic bone in my body.

‘At least I write to the edges of the page, and get paid for my pains, which is more than you do,’ I said sharply, and she looked at me with her cool judging eyes and dismissed me as frivolous.

So now I have Australian relatives but we are not often in touch. Shadows of various resentments remain. My father died in New Zealand, suddenly, in 1949. I scarcely remember him, and blame my mother for that. But mostly I am conscious of Fay blaming me for changing the path of her life so drastically. Vibes drift over from the Antipodes.

And it’s true when Karl and I were going through hard times – we would have the most tremendous rows – he would say, ‘I should never have left your sister. I must have been mad to go off with you,’
and I would say, ‘I should have let Fay keep you, fat cow that she was,’ and he would say, ‘You are so bony it hurts,’ and it would all end in bed, and we would forget until next time. Sometimes I wonder what kind of children Fay and Karl would have made together, if I had not intervened. So many ‘what ifs’, so few answered.

Eventually Karl left me and the children for a rural life and another woman and I bought him out of the house. I say that flatly but it almost killed me. I have five grandchildren. Venetia was to become an artist and have three boys, Amos – following my example, as she is quick to point out, out of wedlock – and Ethan and Mervyn within it, by Victor, then a scientist of integrity and passion, if a trifle Aspergery. Polly, a staunch feminist, took on board as stepdaughters Steffie and Rosie, children of her partner Corey, a rugger-playing lad from Samoa: and I regard these two girls, both now at art school, as grandchildren though not of my genetic descent. So much any decent woman must do, in these days of extended families.

So that is my family: that is how Amos comes to be my grandchild. His father is unknown. Venetia, to be blunt, was always vaguely in love, albeit platonically, with her stepfather Karl. These are the complications that ensue when marriages cease to be for life, when children are born out of wedlock, when governments, out of some peculiar obsession of their own, discourage marriage by legal and financial penalties, and make the temporary bond more popular than the permanent. Partnerships split apart like seedpods, and the poor children burst out into the world and drift with the wind to take root where best they can, rather than where they were meant. I know I am in no position to talk: I too failed. I was a stupid girl, with little sense of responsibility, of the significance of marriage, of how one’s actions rebound through the decades, how the
lusts of the past come back to haunt us.
Hamlet
’s ghost’s complaint.
So lust, though to a radiant angel link’d, will sate itself in a celestial bed, And prey on garbage
. Venetia was born of lust: so was Amos. But then perhaps they are the best children of all: the garbage ones flicker with radiance; they are the most interesting.

Some ten years into the marriage, and there was trouble between Karl and me when I found him embracing another beneath the coats at some artist’s drunken party; words were exchanged. Venetia, also at the party, overheard my tears and protests, and the following week, drunk herself after the Freshers’ ball – she was seventeen and had just started at St Martin’s School of Art – allowed herself to lose her virginity to some passing student stranger beneath a half-finished sculpture of a frog by Paolozzi, which she seemed to think somehow sanctified the act. In Venetia’s world, art was all, as it was in Karl’s. And thus Amos was born, father unknown. I was shocked and concerned for her. At least I could name Venetia’s father, even though I lost touch with him.

‘It’s all your fault,’ I said to Karl, after she came home triumphant with a positive pregnancy test. ‘You beneath the coats, she beneath a sculpture. She felt betrayed by you as much as I did. Why wouldn’t she want to get even with us by getting pregnant?’ We were both in psychoanalysis at the time.