As Time Goes By

by Hilary Bailey

  ‘I wonder why she didn’t call in,’ Geoffrey said, as we went on walking.

  ‘She rang the bell yesterday,’ I said. ‘But you weren’t there. She was quite upset.’

  Geoffrey didn’t like upset women, one of the reasons he preferred me to Pauline, who was always yelling like a hooligan and flinging things about. So he didn’t ask why she was upset, which was a relief. I left him to draw the conclusion that Harriet had adopted her mother’s way of behaving, and said, ‘Perhaps we should be going back if you have all this work to do for Monday.’ He agreed and we turned for home.

  Later in November, as a foggy half-light filled the basement, Polly Kops was talking to her tall, common-law daughter-in-law, who was parking the baby so that she could get to her university lectures.

  ‘They’ve cut back on a cook,’ she said, putting a plastic bag of toys and disposable nappies on the table. ‘We think that’s the reason for the outbreak. First they cut the cleaner’s hours, then the other cook. The remaining one’s been complaining for ages she can’t do her work properly. She says she’d go, only she needs the job and what’s the point – they could replace her with someone who didn’t even try as hard as she was. It’s the hygiene, you see. No one notices the kitchen isn’t properly cleaned. If she hasn’t had time to do the tea towels she uses a slightly dirty one – with that sort of thing and a nursery full of babies and toddlers there’s always a risk. The mothers have tried to help out but most of them are working – what can you do? If I give up this course and stay at home to look after Rufus neither of us will have any future in the long run.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Polly.

  ‘My Mum won’t help,’ Val said. ‘According to her I should get a little part-time job, cash in hand, claim social security and stay at home. That’s the sort of thing her Mum did, back in the Caribbean, and her Mum’s Mum and her Mum before her. I don’t want to join the ranks of the toiling, put-upon black woman. It’s all very well celebrating these women in verse and prose but the women who write about them so admiringly haven’t brought up six children wrinkling their own hands in the white woman’s washtub and scrubbing her floors. Good luck to them.’

  ‘Anyway, your mother works at the Abbey National,’ Polly said.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Val. ‘She hasn’t seen a washtub since she left Barbados – even then she didn’t use it herself. She’s got her own washing machine. Fact is, she married my Dad respectably, had us respectably, went to church, got a good job and unless I’m prepared to do exactly the same she thinks I should be pitched back into the days of slavery. Of course, she thinks I’ll go on to have several other children by several other fathers, so she’s trying to make me suffer to put me off.’

  ‘Well, I can understand that,’ Polly said with feeling, thinking about her own past.

  ‘Well, there’s another thing, which is embarrassing,’ said Val. ‘Can you lend me a pound for a lunchtime coffee? I was counting on collecting the family allowance from the Post Office as I came past but when I looked the place was full of coppers – Mr Patel got broken into last night and he can’t do anything until the situation’s sorted out. I haven’t got time to go to the building society or the other Post Office now.’

  Polly gave her a pound from her purse. ‘Also,’ said Val, ‘I’m afraid I left your number at the Town Hall. I said you’d take a message. I had to phone them very early. This poor old woman downstairs was banging on my door at five in the morning. She felt something running over her in bed. When she put the light on this big grey rat ran across the floor and disappeared. She lay there for half an hour before she could summon up the courage to get out of bed. She said she could imagine them all attacking her feet. I’m sure they’re still in the pipes. They said they’d got rid of them, but no way. I mean, poor old thing – then there’s Rufus – he’ll have to sleep with me from now on. Imagine how he’d react – well,’ she said, glancing at Rufus, who was creeping up on the cat, who was pretending she didn’t know, ‘I’m sorry, but I thought if you were going to be in, you could sort of say I was out for a minute. Then if I miss the last lecture I can ring them before they go home.’

  ‘What about the old woman, though?’ asked Polly.

  ‘She says she can borrow this old terrier from this old boyfriend of hers,’ Val said. ‘And the terrier’ll protect her from the rats. But pets are forbidden, so she needs to be covered in case someone makes a fuss. Not that the whole place isn’t full of Alsatians and Dobermanns people are keeping as guard dogs but you never know – Rufus, she’ll only scratch you. Well, that’s it, Polly, I’m sorry to throw all my problems at you at once.’

  ‘This is no time to give up your degree,’ Polly responded stoutly.

  ‘Quite honestly, I’d put him to bed for a bit,’ said Val. ‘He was up at five – weren’t we all?’

  Polly found an old jigsaw puzzle in a box under the stairs and sat vaguely doing it with Rufus. He could have a sleep after he’d eaten his lunch and she could take another crack at Casablanca. She’d have to finish it before Christmas and also keep the stall running because after Christmas she’d have to clear up the house, now ten years overdue for a spring clean. Prospective purchasers might start coming to view as soon as the place was on the market and the spectacle of a disorderly woman as vendor would cheer them into dramatically low offers.

  This Christmas they’d be eating and drinking up the family home, as they had for several years now, each bottle of wine represented a brick, each portion of chestnut stuffing an inch of waterpipe, each slice of Christmas pudding a bit of plaster off the ceiling.

  They’d been close, last week, to electronic death, total systems failure, no TV, no videos, guitars, no computers or record players. She’d pledged the top of the mantelpiece at the bank to prevent that catastrophe which was, as the poet Virgil so beautifully put it, nobody’s fault really. Pam and Sue and Margaret were only teenagers with no experience of life, and Clancy was congenitally irresponsible, as she knew, having as a child once watched him take a carving knife to all his stuffed toys, and his pillows and his own best shirt and trousers, a memorable moment. By now, too, he was probably mentally unstable through natural instability and its closest friends, narcotics and alcohol abuse.

  Even Max, her oldest child, who had been reared by her mother, had managed to join the shipwreck. When Val had become pregnant just after her ‘A’ levels, at eighteen, he had offered to marry her and take her away to share his postgraduate student’s income in Cambridge but Val, who had a place to study economics at London University, refused the offer, dreading marriage, dreading financial dependency, being a burden to Max, and the wreck of her own future. Now she, Polly, had become part-time common-law mother-in-law to Val and granny to little Rufus. Val and Max had each in their own way done the right thing. Nobody’s fault, really, as the poet said, but, as a later hand interpolated, somebody always had to pay.

  ‘I’m not much good at being noble,’ Polly Kops remarked to herself, ‘but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.’ How could you translate that into modern English over forty years later?

  As Rufus was completing the vandalisation of his dinner, with the cat on one side scooping up the odd bits with its paw, Margaret came in with a plastic bag full of books saying, ‘Strike action.’

  ‘Mind the baby then,’ said Polly, seizing an advantage. ‘I must get on. Just a couple of hours.’

  ‘I was going to do my homework!’ Margaret told her. ‘I asked for extra work like you said. Now you say mind the baby.’

  ‘I can’t help it,’ said Polly, ‘I’m desperate.’

  ‘Oh well,’ said Margaret, ‘I’ll take him upstairs and play him some tapes.’

  ‘He’d be better off going for a walk in the pushchair,’ Polly told her.

  ‘Babies are supposed to be included in people’s normal, everyday activities,’ Margaret told her. ‘It socialises them.’ />
  ‘Do as you please,’ said Polly, leaving the room quickly to get back to the plane to Lisbon.

  ‘I’m just a gymslip auntie,’ said Margaret and, scooping up Rufus, took him upstairs to her room.

  Half an hour later Clancy put his head round the door chanting ‘Everybody’s got problems in Casablanca. Casablanca’s giving everyone problems. Pram in the hall – where’s the baby?’

  Polly knew he would either play enticingly with Rufus, his grandson, or complain bitterly and demand attention until the baby was out of the house. The horrific network of blood ties in the house didn’t worry him at all. He didn’t believe in any of it. She watched the once-intelligent amber eyes harden and said, ‘Don’t start any trouble, Clancy. I’m busy, Margaret’s minding the baby for a bit, everything’s all right.’

  ‘Why isn’t she at school?’ he demanded.

  ‘Ask them,’ Polly said. ‘It’s a strike. I think I got a note. The teachers have gone off to lobby Parliament.’

  ‘So that means she has to spend her time as an unpaid child minder?’ Clancy said. ‘I’m going up there to tell her to stop. What about her ‘O’ levels? I’m not having my daughter used.’

  ‘He’s her nephew,’ Polly cried as he rushed out. ‘He’s your own damn grandchild. She likes him. You never went to school anyway, not unless you could help it.’

  He probably did not hear much of this. Polly stood with her hand on the banisters wondering what he was doing in the house. Each of them had helped to make the other what he or she was now – probably neither of them, like Dr Frankenstein, enjoyed what they had made. Clancy was no longer the attractive, insouciant, fascinating man, excused all because of his talent and potential. He had aged, his potential was now a not very impressive actuality, he had grown sour. Things had gone wrong, times had changed, life was harder. There was not much room for an old hippie in the music business now. His heirs abhorred the ’60s mix of sentiment and machismo, the ethic and the style which had self-indulgently led them without warning into the ’80s. Their own style was very different from the leg-thrusting, groin-twisting, guitar-jerking, tight-jeaned, big-belted appeals for peace and love. The parents’ minds had been blown; their children were addicts. They had had sex; their children had AIDS. The long-locked Cavaliers were out of business and Clancy was angry about it. Of course, his rage had its practical side – it inhibited her from asking him to make any useful contribution to the home he lived in. She slid her hand in front of her down the banisters, speeding towards a confrontation in the kitchen. She wasn’t going to let him get away with yet another uncontested row.

  Downstairs, he was upsetting Margaret and wiping the chocolatey smile off Rufus’s face. ‘You go upstairs and get on with some school work, Margaret,’ he was saying. ‘I’m sick of you minding the baby all the time. Let his mother do it. She had him.’

  ‘Val’s trying to get a degree –’ said Polly.

  ‘In third world economics, so she can help her people,’ said Clancy. ‘Well, charity begins at home. She can start here by taking care of the kid.’

  ‘As if you cared,’ said Polly. ‘All you want is to hold women back by quoting their maternal duties at them. You’ve never felt you had to take care of anybody but yourself, and you haven’t made a very good job of that. You haven’t seen your mother for three months and she’s got a bad leg – my mother’s looking after her. You’ve never cared about me or your own children. Where did you get your exemption from? Tell me where the office is – I’d like to go there. My mother’s got a bad leg, too. You don’t care who looks after who as long as you don’t have to. You’re only talking about it in order to make trouble. We’re all struggling here and doing the best we can.’

  ‘I didn’t realise I was part of the cast of Grapes of Wrath,’ Clancy said. ‘I mean, I thought this house was worth half a million pounds. Fact is, this place is a shambles, you’re a shambles. You had a lot, you lost it –’

  ‘You took it,’ interrupted Polly.

  ‘What’s the difference? You wasted all the rest,’ he retorted. ‘You’re just going to have to sell up, get a sensible job, get things organised. All I want to do is protect my child from some of your consequences.’

  Polly choked. The injustice was cruel. So was the justice. She had got herself into a muddle, committed crimes against mankind. She had behind her the inflated property prices, but no work record at a time of heavy unemployment and no proper training. The only jobs she could get would be low-grade, low-paid work in a canteen, shop or a school, paid at women’s rates, about two pounds an hour.

  With her responsibilities and overheads it would hardly be worth while. And on a good day, Saturday, she could get a week’s wages, almost, in cash, from the stall. She told Clancy, ‘If you want to protect your child you could start by bringing in some money. She needs new shoes. And a lot else. We all need a lot else. You’ve been here nearly a year and I’ve been keeping you most of the time – roof over your head, heat and light, spaghetti and all that. I see you with money but you aren’t giving me any. I don’t even know where it’s coming from. I may not be much of a success but look at you.’

  It was the word ‘success’ which drove Clancy mad. He yelled, ‘You’ve wrecked everything, you stupid bitch. You give me no support – you never have. This place is a tip. There’s a muddle and confusion all day long. You’re hunched over that bloody video all the time like a maniac. That script’s a disaster area.’ And he picked up a pottery vase containing a few yellow chrysanthemums and threw it on the floor. The vase broke, the flowers fell out and yellow petals lay in a spreading patch of water on the floor. The cat came up, sniffed at the puddle and walked away. ‘Amazing!’ Clancy shouted. ‘Asking anyone to pay to live here. Most people would pay to get out.’

  ‘Right,’ shouted Polly. ‘You can put your cheque in the post. Pack up now and piss off.’

  ‘I’m packing now, before you change your mind,’ he shouted.

  Polly sat down heavily and stared at the cups on the table. It would be a relief if he went but she was apprehensive about being without a man in the house. In theory it ought to be better but what happened if the rapist broke in, or there was another kind of threat? But, she thought, Clancy’s the worst threat there is. She said to Margaret, who was still standing there, ‘Sorry, Margaret. You know how it’s been. We need a breathing space.’

  ‘I’ll get a dustpan and brush,’ said Margaret. She began to sweep up the pieces.

  ‘Perhaps it’ll work out,’ Polly said.

  Margaret told her, ‘Don’t worry. It was obvious. Pam and Sue were getting fed up with it. They were talking about asking him to push off, or trying to get you to tell him to go. I couldn’t do anything because he’s my dad.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Polly, at a loss. ‘Well, I’m glad no one’s going to be too upset –’

  ‘I don’t think you realised,’ Margaret said, ‘he’s dealing.’

  Polly stared at her daughter. ‘What in?’ She saw the reason for the phone calls, the goings in and comings out. She’d been a fool not to see. What else had she missed?

  ‘Heroin, a bit of cocaine,’ Margaret told her. ‘We thought you didn’t know.’

  ‘Oh, my God,’ Polly said. ‘I suppose everybody knew and thought I knew.’

  ‘Not everybody,’ said Margaret.

  ‘You miss a lot when you’re worrying about money.’

  ‘You probably couldn’t believe he’d do it,’ her daughter said sympathetically.

  ‘You must be joking,’ Polly told her. ‘Well, this is very nasty for you. He hasn’t been selling to anybody you know, has he?’

  Margaret shook her head. Polly stared at her hard. If she’d missed this, what else had she not noticed?

  ‘I should turn him in,’ she said. ‘Look what he’s doing. Why didn’t I suspect? Why didn’t one of you tell me? How did you find out?’

  ‘Nige at school told me. His brother knows some of the people. Then I told Pam and Sue – t
hey said they’d heard rumours.’

  ‘Heroin,’ said Polly. ‘He should have his arms torn off.’

  ‘We were going to tell you,’ Margaret said. ‘We only found out a few months ago. Val said she’d tell you.’

  In more refined, less hard-pressed circles, Polly would have been put to bed for a week after hearing that her lover, the father of her children, was trafficking in heroin. But now she swept visions of fourteen-year-old addicts and funerals out of her head and said, ‘I’ll wait for him in the hall and make sure I get the keys. Then you’ll have to come and help me make some calls in Chelsea and Fulham and put the goods in the van. Ring up Fiona and ask her if she wants to come. I’ll give you a couple of quid each and supper at McDonald’s.’

  And this was done. Polly went and stood grimly in the hall until Clancy came downstairs with his bag. As he rounded the bend in the stairs he readied himself for attack. He hit the hall floor saying, ‘Look – this simply wasn’t –’ Polly said only ‘Keys,’ holding out her hand, and Clancy, who had been through many scenes in his life and knew when there was no point in saying anything, handed over the keys. He shut the door quietly behind him.

  Polly stood there for a moment, then got her coat. She said in the van, ‘He’ll stay clean for a bit, in case I turn him in, so there’s no point in reporting him. There wouldn’t be any evidence. Also he’ll lie low. No point in a hue and cry. They’d only go round and upset his mum.’