Chalcot Crescent Read online

  Even so, Ethan was angry. He is a young man. He lost his Porsche and his string of girlfriends. He blames the bankers of the past – thus letting himself off the hook – the Bilderbergers and their kind, for setting up a universal Ponzi scheme and knowing very well what they were doing. He joined Redpeace, an angry Greenpeace breakaway group, and through its webpage circulated the facsimile of a letter written in 1838 by Amsel Rothschild to his New York agents, introducing the idea of ‘the mortgage’. The letter turned up on my computer, I am on Redpeace’s mailing list but do not download – it seems dangerous.

  The few who can understand the system will be either so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favours, that there will be no opposition from that class, while, on the other hand, that great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that Capital derives from the system, will bear its burden without complaint and, perhaps, without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests.

  Well, well, he was right, we did not suspect. But it’s not, I think, that we are mentally incapable. We would just rather not comprehend, and spent the money while we could, in our two-hundred-year patch of mania.

  As it happened, Ethan’s moment of anger and indignation quickly passed: he unsubscribed from Redpeace. Their missives still come through to me, but mostly I delete them unread as they arrive. I cannot bear a screen cluttered by irrelevancies. One day, one day, when I have the time to work out how it’s done, I will actively unsubscribe.

  Ethan likes being a Ministry driver, he tells me. You get to speed down the centre lane in cars not quite as good as the old Porsches – after the Volkswagen takeover they are not quite what they were, being more sedate and social – but good enough. The VIPs he drives confide in him. And he now has a less glossy but far nicer girlfriend in Neighbourhood Watch, whom I have not met but of whom he speaks in admiration, and only one, and so no longer has the emotional strain of juggling his affections as once he had to, checking over the Porsche for stray thongs in case one of the others found out. That kind of thing.

  O, What A Noble Mind Is Here O’erthrown

  Take no notice of me. I was pretty smart in my heyday, I daresay, but thinking Amos has left me on the stair just to roll a spliff is as likely to be the paranoia of old age – the carer is a thief; someone is trying to poison the cat; my metal fillings are broadcasting messages – as a rational judgment.

  What continues to worry me is why the men at the door don’t go away. Why are they so sure we’re in here? Why should they be so interested anyway in an aged lady novelist has-been? I got a glimpse of them as they arrived and got out of their car – two guys in a grey executive Lexus – a sure sign of an authority about its righteous business. One was large, young, black and handsome, shiny as a panther, the other small and white and undernourished. They wore suits and ties – almost as if they were in fancy dress, bringing a kind of bizarre Clockwork Orange formality with them. But you, dear reader, will be too young to remember that prophetic Kubrick film, and the sense of menace, of frightening times to come, of a world barely in control, that it brought with it.

  Bang, bang, bang-de-bang. I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down.

  My home, which I always thought so charming and so very me, so very much mine, so redolent of cultural superiority, turns out to be just a house of straw, built by selfish little pigs who once lived off the fat of the land, and need now to be brought to justice. See how I veer between a helpless defiance and an acute sense of guilt? Mea culpa, me and mine. Amos may be right: the admen have brought us to this state, where we side with those who have taken us hostage. The Stockholm syndrome of the debtor. I am on the side of those who persecute and damage me. Many a wife, of course, is in the same state.

  Outside the street lamps flicker on, and go out again. The light on the CiviCam at the end of the street stays off: that means it isn’t functioning. We’re meant to report it but nobody bothers: it’s a concrete monstrosity, quite out of keeping with the original Victorian gas lamps – which the Crescent is lucky enough to still have, albeit converted to electricity. This is a conservation area, and posh, or at least was, until a couple of years ago. Now pavements are beginning to crack and rats come out and stare at you, and no-one bothers to hammer out the dents in the Saabs and Mercedes that still line the street. Most turn out to be in negative equity, like the houses behind them, and there are no buyers. For years pundits kept saying things would pick up, that people were postponing buying until prices came down, but the fact turned out to be that people had just lost interest in buying things they didn’t need. Consumerism just went out of fashion one day, like the hula hoop – one day everywhere, the next nowhere, for no apparent reason, and after that there was no going back.

  Economists presuppose a population ruled by the rational self-interest of individuals, but alas, it is not the case. Societies are no different from the individuals that compose them, and are as likely to be ruled by Thanatos as Eros, to be periodically seized by the urge to self-destruct; just as the sun is given to a plague of sunspots from time to time for no apparent reason.

  There was a brief period, some three years ago, when deflation began to flatten out, hailed as the Recovery, but it was short-lived, and merely triggered off inflation.

  And inflation no longer had the charm it once had in making light of what one owed. The small print at the bottom of the credit agreements, by which everyone lived and no-one ever read, gave an option to whoever bought on the debt – ‘the banks, the banks,’ as Amos would cry in triumph, ‘the blood-sucking scum’ – to index-link existing debts. A rare person it was who could live free of debt, free of anxiety, free of fear of the future. The dread of nuclear war back in the sixties and seventies was nothing to it. But perhaps every decade chooses its own anxiety.

  Amos wriggles up with the blanket and tucks it round me. I had misjudged him. He loves his old gran.

  ‘Do you think they have heat sensors?’ I whisper.

  ‘The filth do,’ he murmurs, ‘so these shits will be next. All the agencies are now one and the fucking same.’

  Now I too had fallen for the attraction of bad language in the sixties, when the hippie classes associated it with the vital primitivism of the working classes, and envied it, and stole it as our own, along with people power, long unwashed hair, torn jeans and other accoutrements of poverty. For some reason we believed the non-thinking classes were more highly sexed than the bourgeoisie. My family complain I am foul-mouthed, and I do try not to be. A fuck or a shit when I drop something on my toe is about as far as I go. But I wish Amos wouldn’t do it: it somehow undermines his cause, his complaint against society.

  ‘But we’re still all right so long as we don’t open the door,’ I say. ‘They’re not allowed to break in, are they? It’s only if you let them in the first time they can come in any time, break the door down if necessary.’

  ‘Don’t fucking bank on it,’ says Amos. ‘Debt collectors now have powers once reserved for the police under the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005.’

  This child knows so much. He spent a year in prison for drug dealing, and was lucky it was not longer. I paid for the best lawyers, the best barristers. Ten years back I was wealthy. Now I live as others do. I can no longer protect my family. Nor could Victor at the time: he was then a scientist working with Cancer Cure and did the job for love rather than money. If he said the boy should face the consequences of his actions, it was because tough love was the prerogative of those with no money to spare, rather than from conviction, and both, I believe, were glad when I stepped in and helped. Venetia loves her son and Victor did his best to do so, though I daresay Amos was not the easiest of stepsons. We all love our children when they are born, sometimes quite passionately. I know I did. I know Venetia did. Yet so many children complain so bitterly about how their parents failed in love. I don’t know where it goes wrong.

  Victor is one of the few people I
know who is flourishing under the new NUG regime: he is no longer a struggling research scientist but works for the National Institute for Food Excellence: his salary is inflation-linked. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. He is in a position, thank God, to help his family face bad times, as I no longer am.

  But it’s no use bleating to Amos about mother love. He has resisted all society’s attempts to feminize him: he is a triumph of testosteronic impulse. He was always the bad boy of the class, the one who fought in the playground, dealt in football cards, buying cheap and selling dear, for all his gentle looks. He may have a girlfriend but if he does he does not mention her.

  ‘Amos,’ I say now, or words to this effect – ‘we are not terrorists, simply law-abiding citizens hiding from our creditors. A civil offence, probably, but hardly criminal. It is not as if I am a non-entity. Am I not Frances Prideaux, a declared national treasure – albeit some time ago – her plays in the West End, her popular novels translated all over the world? I am not defenceless. I have the power of public opinion behind me. I could ring The Times if the landline hadn’t been cut off, and they’d have their people round in no time, to watch another national treasure bite the dust of bankruptcy.’

  But even as I make my speech my voice trails away. I know what Amos is thinking but is too nice to say. How long since you had a play on, Gran? Twenty years? A novel published? Five? Forget it. The luxury trades are over, and that means you. You were a competent enough writer but you never rose to great heights: the world has forgotten you, as it forgets poor widow women since time began. You made a lot of money once but you spent it. Forget it.

  ‘Power’s back on,’ he says, and so it is. The street lights stop flickering and glow. Kettles can be boiled, mobiles recharged, computer work caught up with, shop tills worked again. The hospitals have priority, and generators, but there is a shortage of doctors and nurses. Those who came to us from overseas have gone home, where the climate is better and the wages turn up on time.

  But yet, sitting here on the stairs in hiding at this advanced age of mine, under siege, in the company of this errant, druggie, foulmouthed grandson of mine, I am almost happy. This is the greatest surprise of all. I really do not care what happens next. Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care, Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care, Massa’s gone away. Massa’s gone away. History will wash over me like a tide and take me with it. I haven’t so long to live: I am not so eager to stay alive, though I will miss knowing what happens next. ‘They’ – the forces of law, order and financial stability whose representatives are at the door – also have their kind side. Their committees will decide I am daft, provide me with a bed, warmth, a television set and even these days, I daresay, a computer. I can become a blogger whom nobody reads. I can fade away silently.

  My daughters may come forward and offer to take me in, but really I would rather they did not. They have husbands and their duty lies towards them. I realize in retrospect I married my husbands mostly to get away from my mother. Perhaps they did the same to get away from me. Bang bang BANG de-bang. Nemesis at the door, and I don’t care. We all live in a yellow submarine. The tune runs through my head.

  And our friends are all on board.

  Many more of them live next door.

  As you get older, songs from your youth run through your head unbidden. You think they are irrelevant but actually they are not. They’re like dreams, waiting to inform you if you will only take notice. Hymns are there a lot, these days. See here hath been dawning another blue day, Think ’fore thou let it slip useless away, as I wonder whether I can be bothered getting out of bed in the morning. Thus reproached, I rise and get on with this novel, or diary, or memoir, or whatever you want to call it. ‘I Vow to Thee My Country’ is another one. And soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase, And her ways are ways of gentleness and all her paths are peace.

  Where does that come from, I wonder? I’m sure I love my country. I do, though it has become a hard place to love: going through a bad patch, as they say of marriages. I’ll work on it. One must not give up hope. I remember all those Marxist groups of my youth, the firm belief that capitalism must destroy itself in time, and all you needed to do was destroy the old institutions from within and, phoenix-like, the Glorious New Society would arise. A likely tale, as it turned out. But it is not finished yet. It is too early to tell the forest from the trees.

  How I Come To Be Amos’ Grandmother

  Okay, let’s get it over. There is a lot to be told in this tale of the past fifty years. I had hoped to keep myself out of the history but I see I cannot, without exempting myself from guilt, which is hardly the point of a confessional. I have become very conscious, now I am old, as I remember being when I was a young woman and sex and babies were so closely bound together, of the interconnectedness of everything – the interplay of the gear wheels and cogs of acquaintance, the pistons and levers of event, that lead to forward motion. We do not have the visual images of connectedness that once we did: a sight of the ship’s engine on the Channel crossing, the polished brass, the thrusting levers, the pounding sexual power; or just how you had to wind the handle to make the car engine spring to life on a cold morning. It was obvious then how all things connected. The stray kitten that mewed on your doorstep, decades back, as you cooked fish fingers for the children’s tea, would turn out to belong to your long-lost best friend and the acquaintance would be resumed and then you’d run off with her husband. Fate determined all things. What happened was meant to be. With the advent of the computer that sense faded away. Engine units are sealed: robots made, replaced rather than mended. We email rather than meet, connectedness is electronic, there are few stray kittens because the cats are sensibly neutered. It has been a relief as well as a loss.

  Actually, in the last year, the kittens have begun to appear again. No-one can afford to have cats neutered, or keep them alive when their kidneys fail, and the town vets are going out of business. The country vets prosper, as once again the nation has to feed itself. But that’s by the by.

  And As I Was Saying

  I was born in 1934 in New Zealand to Dr Frank and Margaret Birkinshaw, younger sister to Jane and Fay, whose portraits can be seen in the Wellington Art Gallery even today. (New Zealand has weathered the last five years rather well: at least it has enough food to eat, though petrol is severely rationed, air flights are limited because of cyber attacks from one militant group or another, and pirate ships from Indonesia torment the Pacific. There was even some talk that cowrie shells were to be the new international medium of exchange, but I think it was fanciful.) Rita Angus, the artist who painted my sisters Jane and Fay, decided that I was too noisy and fidgety a child to include in the picture and that I spoiled her composition. I was only two. I have always felt the exclusion, and I daresay resented it.

  My parents divorced and in 1946 my mother Margaret, on the first civilian boat out of New Zealand, where the war had trapped her, brought me and my two sisters to London. She was penniless but valiant, and never put much value on fathers, or indeed men in general. The city, as my twelve-year-old self remembers it, was in pretty much the state it is today. Hungry, unpainted, swarming with grey-faced people and with weeds pushing up between paving stones. Scholarships took me to grammar school, and thence to St Andrews University, where I followed in my sister Fay’s footsteps and studied Economics and Psychology. Jane went to Exeter and there, always a traditionalist, took a degree in English Literature. We girls were left fatherless in 1946. Fay and Jane had both disappointed my mother by having boy babies at an early age by unsuitable men. I followed suit, giving birth to a girl, Venetia. Fay had no option – no money, no home, too early for State help – but to have her child adopted. Jane, pregnant by a penniless artist, was at least married.

  ‘All three of you were punishing your mother,’ a psychoanalyst later told me, ‘for leaving your father, abandoning him on the other side of the world, and letting him die there.’

  I daresay he
was right. Poor Margaret was thereafter to spend her life looking after our various offspring.

  But another, simpler, version is that when I was a girl it was a common assumption that you didn’t get pregnant if you did it standing up. I believed it, and that’s how Venetia came to be born. So many of us are born out of ignorance, or drunkenness, or accident, so few out of considered choice. Even today’s children, whose early sexual knowledge comes mostly from computer porn, assume that sexual intercourse consists of blow-jobs and anal congress, with the vagina as a mere afterthought, and scarcely a condom in sight. The sex education teacher may spout away all she likes, but is obviously talking nonsense: the child sees, the child knows, the rate of teenage pregnancies continue to rise. What happens is one thing, what ought to happen is quite another.

  Venetia was conceived in one of those little alleys that run between Wardour and Dean Street in Soho, me leaning back against a wall, skirts up to my waist. It was a full black skirt with an underlay of white net petticoats. Derek was Fay’s boyfriend, and he loved her, but I had sexual wiles and she did not, and she could not forgive him for his fling with me, and broken-hearted he wandered off to Canada and died there skiing into a tree, some said on purpose. Poor Fay, I pattered after her like a curse, always the envious younger sibling, taking what was hers whenever I could. Chips from her plate, shillings from her piggy bank, whole paragraphs from her essays, boyfriends from her side. In the end, when I married Karl, I knew perfectly well he was the husband she should rightfully have had. Yet she never betrayed me: it was always her impulse to understand and forgive. She came to the wedding and smiled bravely; I felt a bit bad but not all that bad.