We Had It So Good (10 page)

On the floor below, Martin also had two rooms, in the second of which he kept his stock, which consisted of cardboard boxes containing complicated machines which had to be plugged in, and
after emitting thunderous noises and great wafts of hot steam, produced a cup of coffee with a head of white foam sitting on top of it, like a pint of beer. It was called cappuccino and it originated in Italy.

“You see, on the Continent,” he said, “they wouldn't dream of drinking that instant muck. On the Continent coffee is a rite, almost a religion. Now, you might object that we're a tea-drinking nation, that we don't like coffee. You're an American, Steve, you appreciate what I'm trying to do. A cuppa is all very well, but when you introduce coffee to a country you're bringing sophistication. Coffee is more of a delicacy than tea, like caviar but affordable.”

Stephen's parents drank nothing but coffee, semitransparent stuff brewed in an electric percolator. This cappuccino was a fancyschmancy beverage. It took half an hour for the machine to get its act together to produce a single shot, and then you had to start all over again, emptying the grounds, washing out the filter, not to mention adroitly handling the steam arm, which needed to be maneuvered at a particular angle. He couldn't at first see it catching on.

But Martin, who wore brown wide-lapeled suits and orange kipper ties that covered half his chest, his trouser flares flapping, resolutely went out every morning with a briefcase full of brochures and worked his way through the cafés of the West End, retiring toward the end of the afternoon to Soho, his spiritual home. On Old Compton Street there was a café where such a machine was already installed, and they served slices of cream gateau with cherries steeped in liqueur. By six he would walk up to the French pub to drink gin and bitters and discuss coffee with Gaston, the moustachioed publican who had served General de Gaulle during the war. The romance of the Continent. Martin had dropped out of a language degree at the University of Birmingham after he had gone to Rome for a week one summer. When he returned, his brain was fried with the unfeasible vision that London would one day be a city where people sat out on the pavement in the sunshine,
drinking coffee, watching a passing parade of their neighbors stroll arm in arm along the boulevards.

“I like Martin,” Stephen said. “At least he has some initiative.” He reminded him of Clinton of Univ, both with big dreams and ambitions. Stephen was drawn in, became convinced that Britain would eventually become a coffee-drinking nation. The stuff tasted too good for it not to, but Andrea said what did that have to do with anything? The English, she believed, enjoyed things that tasted awful, hence the national cuisine. The first principle was to boil a vegetable until all taste and texture had been beaten out of it by the water's ferocious energy. Better still were foods that tasted of nothing at all. There was the huge popularity of packets of powder, which, when hot water was added, turned into a simulacrum of mashed potato, without lumps or any discernible flavor. Her parents had used it in the hotel.

“British food,” Stephen said, “is a substitute for central heating.”

Martin did a moonlight flit, leaving behind his coffee machines, which no one wanted. Ralph tried to sell them in all the cafés along Upper Street but discovered as Martin had that no one was interested. Eventually the bin men took most of them away, their chrome still bright beneath the cellophane wrappers, but Stephen and Andrea kept one, which they didn't use until finally they had a kitchen large enough to accommodate it. The highlight of their dinner parties in the eighties was the coffee they made, in their restaurant-size Gaggia.

“T
he seventies in London are really hard to describe,” Stephen would say to his children. “I was there and yet I can't pin it down, it was a very amorphous era with no discernible edges or outlines. I couldn't really tell you what it stood for, all I can do is describe how
we
lived, but others were going through very different times. You'd had this tremendous burst of energy and excitement in the sixties, the clothes, the music, the politics and afterward everything became less or even more of what it had been. When I say more, I'm thinking of that soulless overblown rock music, heavy metal, glam rock, prog rock. They messed and messed around with it until it was just a bunch of wigs and outfits. I mean, KISS!

“There was this time in Britain in the early seventies when they turned the power off for a few hours every day and you just had to literally sit there in the dark. We were lucky that the house had fireplaces in every room and we could go and scavenge wood, old boxes, anything you could burn to keep ourselves warm. We always had terrible colds, our noses running in the winter, and in my case it always went to my chest because of the damp and the fact that I still smoked thirty cigarettes a day. And it wasn't just here. In America there were lines of cars waiting to get gas because it was rationed, can you imagine Americans with rationing?

“Britain was in hock, we were failing and going cap in hand every five minutes to the IMF for loans and it still didn't make any difference. It was like you woke up from the sixties and asked yourself,
What changed?
And the answer was, not that much. Of course, Nixon resigned, that was great, the war ended, but here in London, it was… nebulous. Like an English summer. That's the best I can do. I'm not a words guy. So I can't think of anything good that came out of that decade, yet for us, me and your mother, those were good times.

“After the squat, commune, whatever you want to call it, we found a bedsit a couple of blocks away from where we are now, and then a few months later we got the flat in this house. We moved to Islington in 1972, when it was a run-down, working-class section, and we've been here ever since, with everything coming up all around us, and now you have to be as rich as Croesus to buy here because it's an easy commute to the City. We're probably the poorest middle-class people in the neighborhood and we can only afford it because we started so long ago. Everyone else is in hedge funds or works for Lehmans and Goldman Sachs. People we thought were the devil when we were their age.

“We were freewheeling for a couple of years after we came to London, your mother was working at the hotel and I was scraping a living doing a little bit of freelance science journalism. It started with a column in an alternative newspaper and then I began picking up pieces from some proper magazines, I believe the first one was about a subject no one was talking about in those days, the use of medical marijuana to ease the symptoms of multiple sclerosis, and this led to some actual reporting on the pharmaceutical industry. Soon I was writing a lot for
New Scientist,
and hoping they might give me a job. We could eat, let's put it that way, and if you could eat you didn't have too many other hassles.

“I remember one night we went to a party in Hampstead. What we had no idea about at the time we were living in the squat was
that Ivan's parents owned a house just up the road and he used to retreat back there when he'd had enough. It was why he always looked and smelt cleaner than the rest of us and he was filching stuff from their house when we ran out of what we needed. Ivan was always a very pragmatic anarchist. His father was a barrister and he'd checked out the legal position about squatting, written letters to the council and the police and all this was going on in the background without us really knowing. It was actually Ivan's old man who was the true anarchist, a really crazy character who always made a rule of only defending clients he was certain were guilty because he liked to get one over on the law. So he usually lost his cases but it didn't matter because his wife, Ivan's mother, had money.

“After the squat was taken over by this Scottish guy everyone was scared of, Ivan moved back home for a while, which was fine by us, because he was always having great parties. The one I remember very clearly, because of what happened the following day, had an Arabian Nights theme and you had to come in fancy dress. I was a sultan with a turban around my head and robes made of curtains. Your mother made everything, she cut me out a scimitar from cardboard and painted it silver. She wore a red gown and a gauzy veil that fell over her face and dressed like that we went by tube to the party.

“In the garden they'd covered the whole of the grass with a marquee and right in the middle of it was a long table full of food and in the center of that a whole roast pig with an apple in its mouth. Which now I come to think of it wasn't so Arab, but even so, it was just a magical evening. There were these flowers which didn't look much but had a sweet perfume to them and apparently they only give off a scent at night. I don't know the name, your mother does for sure. But I still remember that party in the garden, and the smell of the flowers and the spice smell of dope, a swinging censer with joss sticks, and the smell of the pig which was being
carved up, and thinking, How does it get better than this? But also believing wholeheartedly that it
would
get better because surely the rest of your life was going to be parties, more parties, that would surprise and delight you. London was a big place and all over it there must be these kinds of events happening and you would go on and on turning up at nine and ringing a bell and being invited into a magical world.

“I remember thinking, London is
okay
. It's really okay if it's like this, that others live this way, with this stylish ease. Style in a different way from how they mean it now. Inside, the house was full of books, endless shelves of haphazard volumes, you could have been blindfolded and pull one down and find something that interested you. The furniture was old and shabby, armchairs with torn chintz covers with flower patterns, and up one wall there was a line of empty cans from other countries with Arabic writing all over them and pictures of what they'd once had inside. Tomatoes, henna, okra. Well, we stayed up all night and ate bacon and eggs in the kitchen around six a.m. having had
no
sleep. There was dancing, and your mother and I bopped under the moon amid the scent of those night flowers and even then we can't have been too tired because when we left, we took a wrong turn and we ended up on the edge of Hampstead Heath.

“To me it looked like open country, we'd got to the end of London altogether, but she said no, it was a kind of park. Let's walk across it, she said, and so we did. We walked clear across the heath in the early-morning sun and we came to a hill which we climbed and there was London, spread out in front of us, wow! You could see everything, St. Paul's Cathedral, the Post Office Tower, only the river you could not see but it was there. That's why we went back the day of the big eclipse, decades later, and sat on the same spot where we had lain down the morning after that party. And looked up at the sun through the special glasses, then saw the lights of London come on automatically as the city thought it was dusk, at
midday. But we saw it with our own eyes, it only happens twice a century.

“And on we went until we reached some high walls and this was Highgate Cemetery, where Karl Marx is buried. So I wanted to see that, for sure, even though I wasn't a doctrinaire left-winger, he was still an important man, and we climbed up and over the walls, falling down among the weeds and the nettles, completely filthy and our fancy dress robes torn, and we wandered around forever through the graves, the dew still on the grass. The cemetery in the early-morning light was so eerie and beautiful, the ivy clinging to the walls. There was a little section with the graves of children and babies and your mother burst into tears when she saw a teddy-shaped gravestone, a little boy who only lived a few days.

“After a while we found this big bombastic statue of Marx, just his head on a kind of plinth. There was only one thing to do when you're in front of the father of communism and no one else is around. We rolled a joint, of course, and then we fell asleep. The sun was rising higher and higher in the sky, it must have been around eight-thirty and shadows had started appearing. It was utterly peaceful. No one was about, just the two of us, and though we were in a burial ground, still it felt to me like we were two kids in the Garden of Eden, the first and only people alive, and we had no troubles, just hope and happiness. Your mother woke up and touched me, I touched her back. What can I say? That, we both believe, is how you were conceived, Marianne. On a sweet summer morning in the grass below Karl Marx's monument.

“Quite a few people we know are buried just across from him in the journalists' section and I have been to funerals there, especially during the AIDS time, when a lot of people our age died. And others were killed by their enemies, that's where they buried Farzad Bazoft, the journalist who was murdered by Saddam Hussein. I've stood in a suit by the coffin of some poor dead soul and looked across the path to Karl Marx and remembered that morning so
long ago in the seventies that now seems lost in a mist which came down from history, obscuring it. And even though I am mourning, I always remember that it was there we started something,
you,
Marianne.

“Eventually we found our way out and walked across another park and we were in Highgate Village, it was Saturday, and we fell asleep on the top deck, the front seat, woke up in the West End and had to double back, home to Islington.

“So these are my memories of the seventies, just things we did together. And the people are long lost. You walk along the street or you're on the tube coming home from work and someone your own age or older, some tired-looking person, is sitting there reading a novel or a newspaper or just staring into space, and you think, Did I know you once? Were we at the same parties? Did I sit on the floor eating a bowl of brown rice with veggies in our squat and you were there, rolling a joint on an album cover? Did you turn out just like us? Middle-aged people whose kids are older now than we were then?