Chalcot Crescent (5 page)

‘Good God,’ he said, ‘I was under the impression we had an open marriage. What are you going on about? It didn’t mean anything. We didn’t even know each other’s names. If you hadn’t made such a fuss Venetia would never have known about it.’

People used to talk like that. These days the young take their
sexual relationships seriously. People have a useful habit of turning disadvantages to advantages. Only when Aids made promiscuity dangerous did fidelity become fashionable, at least amongst the educated classes. Fifteen years previously, since the advent of the pill and widespread contraception, sexual adventure had been looked at favourably. Now sexual restraint turned from a bore into a virtue.

As for this ‘open marriage’ – I am sure I had never discussed it with Karl – it was not an age for discussion of anything other than politics. He just assumed it. We both belonged to the same Trotskyist group. Sexual jealousy was considered beneath contempt, which suited men rather more than it did women, and was one of the reasons – along with men’s assumption that we would make the coffee and do the secretarial work – that we moved over into feminism, invented the concept ‘sexism’ – which once defined could be found and deplored everywhere – and the rest is social history and why my daughter Polly is like she is. But back to the party and Venetia’s pregnancy.

‘It is far more likely to be your sexual adventures,’ Karl said, ‘and your example, that have set her off on this path. She should have trained as a secretary. She is no kind of artist. I could wish she had better taste in sculpture, though. If the child turns out to be a frog, serves her right.’

Karl did not like Paolozzi. He was definite in his tastes and, as so many artists of that generation were, convinced that if a work of art was saleable, it was worthless. Commercial success was the sure sign of artistic failure. As I made more money, and my column inches in the papers and magazines lengthened, so I lost artistic credibility in his eyes. He acknowledged the letters of Van Gogh, the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini and the novels of Wyndham
Lewis as acceptable literature, but very little else. My pathetic kitchen-sink novels, with their occasional inducements to the new feminism, were an embarrassment, though the money they brought in was welcome enough.

It is true that a week or so before the incident of the coats Karl had found an assignation note, half falling out of my jacket pocket as it hung upon its peg, and had read it, turned pale, stuffed it back in, and gone on up the stairs. The incident was not mentioned. And I had thought least said soonest mended, but perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps it was then that he began to fall out of love with me. I daresay I had left the note in my pocket to make sure Karl would find it – or so my analyst was determined to believe – just as he had the next week made sure I would find him beneath the coats at the party, with a scraggy-haired girl with big, dirty bare feet.

It was part of the culture at the time that any minor sexual peccadillo on either side of a partnership would be overlooked. The drugs of the day were not always as strong as they are now, but usually enough to make anyone dizzy. Karl and I were both in analysis, and understood only too well the concept of acting out – of performing an action to express, often subconsciously, one’s emotional conflicts – the results of such action all too often being antisocial or self-destructive. Everything we did was under each other’s, and our analysts’, scrutiny, and just as we delivered dreams to fit the analyst’s convenience, we would deliver our actions likewise, to fit the script the analysts were writing of our lives. We understood this in each other – or I had supposed we did.

Amos existed as a by-product of my infidelity, or Karl’s, or the analysts who prompted us to discussable action, or merely the demon lust come to take possession of my precious daughter. Whatever. Or perhaps somewhere up in the
Bardo Thodol
or the
Tibetan Book of the Dead
it was written that the soul of Amos should choose just such parents as Venetia and a stranger, to bring about the divine purpose of stopping the great wheel of government if only for an instant, so when it started up again, as such wheels always will, it set off in a slightly other and better direction. And why, now, Amos sat upon the stair with me, and dissembled, as people will with their old grans, whom they assume to be a bit daft but are not necessarily so.

Bang bang bang-de-bang. They are still there. They want my worldly goods. I am not so stuck on possessions as they imagine. I could go down and open the door to them and let events take their course, and say so to Amos, but he says on no account am I to do that. The bailiffs will go away in time and then we will have the opportunity of smuggling most of the valuables out. I wonder who he means by ‘we’?

It occurs to me that the men at the door may be after Amos, not me at all. This is a worrying thought, if also a comforting one. But no. If they were CiviSecure they would simply break in. No, it is my money and possessions they are after. But you can’t get blood out of
stone. I hear there are vast warehouses all over the country full of repossessed goods. No-one wants them any more, or can afford them even at knock-down prices. The
nomenklatura
take their pick on Sunday afternoons, or so it is said, but very quietly.

When I was in my early thirties I would sit upon these very stairs when Karl and the children were asleep, and write and write my novels. I used wide-spaced A4 pads and a Pentel pen. Karl was irritated by the sound of a typewriter; so many things irritated him: fox hunters, Conservatives, pop music – jazz was okay: he played New Orleans trumpet whenever he got a chance. He was suspicious of domestic machinery of all kinds; so the stairs had to be swept down with a brush and pan – not the Hoover, with its bump, bump, bump down the stairs as I dragged it down after me, or the whirr of the washing machine, with its annoying change in sound levels as it changed pace from soak to wash to spin, so in the end it seemed easier to lug the nappies round to the launderette.

The novels were popular, being a celebration of outrage at the domestic fate of women at the time, and over the years. The hessian stair carpet with the holes, which had nearly sent us to our deaths many a time, I replaced; but the nylon mix with its static electricity gave Karl a headache. Fortunately pretty soon I could afford pure wool. Mothproofed, of course – I sometimes thought this was what gave me headaches, but Karl insisted.

Otherwise I found the stairs a good place to write. I was not cut off from the life of the household, yet not quite part of it. The children were reassured by my presence there, and would bypass
me deftly, and not stop to cling, or whine, or demand, or plead, but simply get on with their lives. My life in the advertising agency had trained me in instant recall, cured me of the belief that one needed peace and quiet to write. One did not – one needed only desperation and deadlines.

Sometimes early in the morning, when she was around three, Polly would come down wrapped in her blue dressing gown with the pink bobbles, ignoring me, and sit in front of the letter box waiting for the postman to arrive. When the letter box clicked open she would growl like a dog, catch the letters as they fell, wait for the sound of the postman’s feet retreating, and push them out of the house again. She was always a very territorial little girl. Karl was a good father to Polly, and I saw no reason why she should become such a feminist, and continue to see all men as oppressors, long after the liberation revolution had been won and the world feminized. There are as many women being chauffeured down the centre lanes of our cities as there are men, and I am sure the women are the most draconian of all. I expect feminism is in her nature as much as in her nurture. And of course the postman was a man.

When her stepdaughters Steffie and Rosie were small she would throw out their My Little Ponies, Barbie dolls and any toy in pink, green or purple as soon as they came into the house. I regret to say I would make a point of giving them fairy castles in violet and mauve, and Cinderellas in white crinolines, carefully chosen not to quite be within the embargo but nearly. Corey their father would notice and laugh. He is an amiable man, and the laugh seems to rise from the depths of his being to embrace the whole room and everyone in it. The laugh entrances Polly, who takes the world so seriously and literally, even as she disapproves. Her bark is worse than her bite: at least I hope so. My little stepdaughters would go
and search the bins after she had thrown their treasures out and retrieve them, and she didn’t seem to notice. The gesture is the thing and they all know it.

For his part Karl scarcely noticed Venetia when she was growing up. The more she adored him the more he overlooked her. He was perfectly pleasant to her: she was a blonde, handsome, straight-forward, clever child, who took to painting to win her stepfather’s approval, and kept it up all her life. But he believed she had no ‘real’ talent, and was without that personality which harboured the true artist. In other words she was not like him. She was not his. She did not look like him, think like him, or suffer like him. She would never weep over the letters of Van Gogh; but would laugh uproariously over comics. She might come top in maths and science, but that only made her the more suspect in his eyes. He put up with his stepdaughter for my sake, but she did not interest him. For which I suppose I should be grateful – many a mother suffers when the stepfather she chooses for her child is too admiring and noticing of the growing girl for comfort.

Bang-bang-bang de-bang. Again. What are they trying to do to us? Break our nerve?

‘It may be,’ I say to Amos now, ‘that I deserve my fate. That I do indeed have a debt to society. The bailiffs at the door have right on their side. I lived off the fat of the land for a while: but what had I done to deserve it? For a few words on paper which if they did anything at all disrupted society, upset the natural balance of the genders, trained women to despise men, and so on.’ But I am only trying the words out for size. I do not believe them.

That story I was telling you about Cynthia falling out of the DC10; it did not end there. Not even death is final. The past comes towards us, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, to make our futures. The aircraft disintegrated in the air and many of the bodies just fell out and tumbled down to the ground, still strapped to their seats. Did they die as they fell? Were they unconscious when they hit? Or did Cynthia float down in her seat, drifting this way, drifting that way, and have time to think on the way, ‘I should never have left the children’? If she could have, she would have. That’s motherhood for you. I don’t suppose she bothered to think, I should have listened to my friend Frances. Now she’ll be able to say, ‘I told you so.’ So many things we don’t know, will never know. A Day of Judgment would be good, in which all things were made clear. Who was on the grassy knoll when Kennedy was killed? What would have happened had King Harold won at Hastings? What did my friend Cynthia think as she fell from the sky? And yet certain things have a way of emerging, splinters of fact working their way out from the flesh of the past. And then, like as not, one wishes they hadn’t.

That air crash was all surprises. I had a letter a couple of months later from my friend Liddy in Venice, California, enclosing a death certificate, saying could I do something for her, her husband Terry had committed suicide. She had told his old parents in London
he had died of a heart attack, because it seemed kinder than the truth. Who wants to know their only son has given back the gift of life? Only now they wanted to see the death certificate. Could I have it forged, so it no longer said death by his own hand, but by cardiac arrest?

That was three surprises in one. (A) Terry? Dead? How could he be? Nobody had told me: he was the love of my life; if I hadn’t married Karl I would still be yearning after him day and night. Indignation mixed with grief. (B) Suicide? But why, how? (C) Why did Liddy think I was the kind of person you asked to forge death certificates? But she was right about me, because I ran straight round to a friend, a commercial artist, weeping, and asked him to do it and he did.

I wept because Terry was dead, the one who came to me in dreams – and still does, though I am in my eighties. He never made it beyond his thirties. A working-class lad, dark, handsome and chippy, lots of shiny black hair, hooded eyes, infinitely glamorous. He rode a motorbike, made me drunk on Cointreau one night, delicately removed the plain woollen dark green dressing gown my mother had made for me – he said it made him laugh, but it was all I had – and took my virginity. That was 1953. I was nineteen, and felt my virginity to be a great curse. Men until then had seemed too polite and responsible to take it away.

That was the greatest surprise I ever had – the first acquaintance with sex. Such a surprise my spirit left my body and watched from a corner of the ceiling while the act was performed. I never looked back: sex was not just a many splendoured thing; it was the only important thing in the world. He was no ardent swain, more’s the pity, but I think he liked me, and I passionately and madly adored him. At the time he was having it off with my best friend Liddy (not
that the phrase was used in those days: sex was a serious matter, and she had his engagement ring – just as well, contraception then being by the withdrawal method only). She was the pale, slender, doe-eyed beauty: I was the plain friend every pretty girl likes to have, to act as foil.

Whenever Liddy was out of town he would come secretly to my bed in the basement, and when he was in bed with her in the attic, which was mostly – I would weep and weep into my pillow. I suppose that by the time she sent the death certificate she knew this. I don’t think she knew at the time. We all believe our sexual activities can stay secret: in my experience they never do. Someone always tells. In the end Liddy married him and I daresay in one of their rows the subject came up. And she may well have felt I owed her a favour.