Chalcot Crescent

by Fay Weldon

  How oddly authority phrases it. As if they were doing me a favour – ‘supporting my debt’.

  Once I would have rung my agent and she’d have the money round within the day. I was worth keeping out of trouble. But now I have no agent and the agent has no clients and there is no money. And I don’t know what to do for the best. Money gives you confidence. With money you can laugh at authority. Once you could always buy your way out of trouble. If your car gave too much trouble you just bought a new one and the secretary did the boring paperwork. How were we to know what would happen next? That it would all change, and so suddenly? How the State would micro-manage our lives, monitor our every transaction, tax us for making music, imprison us for a false word, oversee the legitimacy of our jokes, film our every movement, enter our houses at will, surround us with wardens, take our children from us, our cigarettes from our lips, ban the salt cellar from the table, and the wine from our glasses.

  And yes, Amos is right. I am angry. If I search for anger – see, I can find it.

  I am also angry at Mother Nature, who discards us after we are of childbearing age and withers us up, in spite of what we do to stop her with pills and potions, and makes our knees ache, and chill get into our bones, and gave us the ability to bear witness to our winding down. But she never had any interest in our comfort, let alone our contentment. All she ever wanted us to do was reproduce, and if we are beyond that, forget it. And of course all this stuff about the decline of the West is relevant, and dreadful, and someone needs to be punished, obviously, but what about me?

  How Well We Lived Then

  But how well we lived then, in the lemon veal and chocolate mousse days, when we all went to hell in our own way. How well in particular I lived. I consider this house of mine. It’s just so nice, though it could do with a coat of paint, inside and out. I bought what I wanted, not what I needed, and in the back of my mind was the idea that what you bought you could always sell. The oak refectory in the kitchen, the William and Mary dressing table, the Venetian chandelier in the bedroom where once I disported myself with Karl and quite a few others since – a mass of exquisite little glass flowers, each one different; the bookshelf of first editions, the Chagall on the wall, the Worcester dinner set, or what’s left of it. Investment? Never. When you come to sell it all it’s not worth a dime. Nobody wants it. Everyone’s selling, no-one buying. Might as well keep it and enjoy it. We are not yet at the stage when the girls are selling their honour for a bar of chocolate, or their family silver for a bag of potatoes – though some say that’s not far down the road. In the Crescent we’re growing our own potatoes and beans – the Neighbourhood Watch now exacts a tax of a quarter of all crops – things have gotten surprisingly feudal round here. People make jokes about Robin Hood and the Neighbourhood Watch is known as the Sheriff.

  The agents of corruption at the door can take it all. I didn’t really need it, didn’t really want it. It was just something to do. Really I have lost interest. Possessions are for the middle aged, not for the old. What I love is the life I lived here once. It is part of me, they can’t take that away from me. The house has been here nearly two hundred years. I have been part of it for some fifty of these. We are hermit crabs, we wait until we find one empty and then we crawl into it, shelter under its roof, and presently scuttle off somewhere new. I know oddly little about the people who lived here before me: why should those who live here in future think of me?

  I say none of this to Amos. He believes like all his generation that he was born in the year zero and history started with him.

  Amos has calmed down and fallen silent. The bailiffs are back in their car. Amos takes the opportunity to slither upstairs again. Off to find his gear and roll a spliff, I suppose. I wonder what is going on even now in his mother’s house? I can guess. Obsessive as ever about keeping my hand in – unlikely though the prospect of publishing is – I lie on my front, laptop on the stair above me, elbows on the stair below, and write the following. It is fiction but based on likelihood. Bang, bang, bang de-bang. Forget them. There is just enough light through the skylight above the front door to enable me to see the keyboard. I love fiction. It is so much easier to escape from than fact.

  Venetia’s Lovely Home

  ‘I had a call from Amos today,’ said Venetia to her husband Victor the next day at breakfast. ‘He’s staying over at Mum’s. Apparently she called him and said she’d had a letter from the bailiffs and he went over to reassure her.’ Amos was Victor’s stepson. They got on well enough, so long as Amos kept away from contentious issues.

  ‘What does he want from her this time?’ asked Victor, buttering his toast. It was National Butter, all you could get in the shops at a regulated price. It was made out of fat from many undeclared countries of origin, but with enough Chinese dried milk in it to make it look, taste and behave like butter. If you melted it, it was true, there was a degree of solid residue left in the pan, and with every batch that came into the shops there seemed to be more solids and less oil, but it was okay. Better at any rate, Victor assured Venetia, and more nutritional than the low fat-alternatives Venetia had insisted the family eat in the pre-Crisis days when obesity had been a social problem. Victor liked to look on the bright side, sometimes almost to the point of self-delusion, ever since he had stopped work in oncology research, and been co-opted on to the Committee of the National Institute for Food Excellence.

  That had been three years back, when all the major charities, including Cancer Cure, had agreed to pool their efforts, in the interests of humanity, efficiency and consistency, to combine in the new umbrella organization, CiviKindness, or CK. There was really no option, private donations having fallen away to the extent they had. Almost overnight, public attitudes had changed. Let the volunteer army rattle boxes as it would, and professional fund-raisers plead and shame, giving was suddenly out of fashion. Either the public had no money to spare, having decided charity begins at home; or they suspected the various organizations creamed off too high a proportion of the takings. Or, as Venetia thought, they were simply sick of unpleasant images: women with hooks through their mouths, children with harelips, burned babies and so on. The people had given up on giving, as CiviKindness pointed out, so the State had no choice but to take over. Legacies to the various charities now went straight to CiviKindness, as did long-standing bank orders, cancellation no longer being an option. Specialist research staff were allocated to various government departments so talent was not wasted. Victor had been lucky enough to be taken on by the NIFE, where his pay was index-linked and his family covered by health insurance. No wonder Victor was cheerful: just sometimes, Venetia thought, too cheerful.

  ‘Perhaps he doesn’t want anything from her,’ said Venetia, peaceably. ‘Perhaps it’s just to keep his Gran company.’

  ‘Nutty old bat,’ said Victor cheerfully. ‘They’re both delinquents. And Amos always has an eye to the main chance.’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t talk about my mother like that,’ said Venetia, ‘or my son.’ Victor looked surprised.

  ‘But it’s true,’ he said. ‘I’m very fond of your mother but she is a nutty old bat and she should have sold that house when it was worth something. And you know perfectly well what Amos is like. Sometimes I really don’t understand you.’

  It was a statement of fact. He didn’t, and she would have to explain yet again, if it seemed worth it, that family cohesion was not best served by the facing of difficult truths. But it didn’t seem worth it so she let it ride. Victor was very much a left-brain person, a scientist, logical and clear-headed, on the Aspergery side. As her sister Polly observed, when it came to emotional intelligence Victor was one sandwich short of a picnic, and it had got worse in his new job. Venetia refrained from saying that when it came to Corey the lights were on but nobody was at home, and wouldn’t it be nice if he had a job at all. Venetia spent a lot of time biting back this remark or that in the interest of family unity. The task had to be left to someone and the mantle
had fallen on Venetia. She was a strong, handsome woman, mother of sons, not as young as she had been but still full of fortitude and wearing well.

  She could be relied upon to have candles ready in a power cut, a bath full of water when the taps ran dry and, until the UG99 wheat fungus got going in 2010 and put an end to wheat growing worldwide, a loaf of National Bread in the cupboard. Now of course she had Victor’s work food card to use at any of the CiviStore Grade 1 shops, and rye bread was available. Sometimes she wondered what exactly Victor did at the NIFE to deserve such goodies, but he was not meant to talk about his work at home and she honoured that.

  Indeed, life at Grand Avenue, Muswell Hill, went on much as it had in pre-Crisis days. Senior civil servants, government ministers and the meritocracy lived here, in large detached houses. They had fuel allowances: their ration books arrived, their wages were paid in Euros and were seldom late. Roads up here on the heights were not potholed. The area suffered, along with the whole country, from power cuts and water shortages, but otherwise, at least if they closed their eyes as they were driven through more dilapidated areas to their places of work by CiviSecure chauffeurs, they could imagine life was even better than once it had been: the cars varied, but most had powerful engines. Work-creation schemes had brought Soviet-style central lanes to most Whitehall streets, and were reserved for official cars, so gridlock was a thing of the past. Car sharing was obligatory, even at Victor’s level, and he would travel in with three or four others from the neighbourhood. Official cars were a variety of executive makes, confiscated from the thousands which had built up in dock areas all over the world back in 2009, waiting for orders that never came.

  This year the Government would be bringing in the CiviCar: a green city runaround at an affordable price, if you were in State employment and had an unblemished citizen rating. Meanwhile the chauffeurs, many of them ex-City men, put the Mercedes, BMWs, Lexuses and Jaguars through their paces, and dreaded the arrival of the dreary but practical CiviCar. Four-wheel drives were seldom seen: they had come to symbolize waste, extravagance and greed, and it had become customary for street people to attack and trash them – a practice tolerated by the authorities as a safety valve for their anger.

  Another Scene From Venetia’s Life, According To Her Mother, Who Wasn’t There But Can Imagine

  Just after Victor’s transfer from oncology to Food Excellence, watch Victor help Venetia turn their mattress. He is a big solid expensive-looking man with large, bright brown eyes in a broad, slightly fleshy face. She worries that she may be colourless: dark eyeliner rings her very blue eyes, and she is seldom without lipstick. Her paintings reflect her worries: she uses acrylic paints which she applies vigorously on to white canvas. The mattress is big and expensive, and had been bought back in the days when Venetia was working for the Arts Council. They had bought it on their Selfridges store card, now fortunately at last paid off – though a £3,500 purchase had cost them £9,400 by the time the banks had assured Selfridges it could manage its customers’ finances better than they could, and raised the interest rate as the small print allowed them to do. Not even Victor had bothered to read the small print.

  Now of course Venetia no longer worked for the Arts Council. The Recovery had rather suddenly turned into the Bite, and she had been made redundant. No more arts funding; no more grants; no more jobs. She was not sorry: now she could spend more time doing her own work. She was like her mother in this: you might not be able to sell your efforts, but that didn’t stop you working.

  ‘What is this envelope?’ Victor asks. It is a thick brown envelope stuffed between mattress and divan base.

  ‘Oh that,’ says Venetia. ‘It’s my severance pay.’ She had forgotten about it. ‘I have an artistic temperament, Mum,’ she excused herself to me. ‘I can never concentrate on deceit for long.’ And I remembered how I had left the note from my lover half hanging out of my coat pocket for Karl to find, and could see my daughter might well have inherited the gene for inadvertent confession from me.

  ‘But there’s more than two thousand pounds here,’ Victor says. ‘What is it doing under our mattress? Anyone could steal it.’

  ‘I don’t see how,’ says Venetia, ‘unless they were turning the mattress. And robbers don’t usually turn mattresses.’

  ‘They will make it a habit,’ says Victor sombrely, ‘unless citizens learn to trust the banks again.’

  ‘But they charge you for keeping your money there,’ says Venetia, ‘so what’s the point?’

  ‘Only a small sum,’ says Victor.

  ‘Do they brainwash you or something at your new job?’ asks Venetia. And Victor says, ‘No, as it happens. But one does learn something about the realities of life. If the currency were to be devalued again formally this would be worth nothing,’ and he refuses to say more on the subject. He takes the cash and pays it into Venetia’s bank account without any further conversation other than, ‘We all have to have trust and faith,’ he says, ‘and pull together. Besides, it isn’t good to be seen to hoard currency. It isn’t wise.’

  It was useless hiding things from Victor: she should have known better, or else have felt more guilty and hidden it somewhere less obvious. He looked and remembered and learned: he forgot nothing, and it was getting worse. Once he could laugh at himself and apologize for being an obsessive compulsive – but now he stomps through the house ranting about missing keys or underpants, finding them where he left them and snorting his conviction that ‘someone’ had hidden them. Venetia thought perhaps his new job was a strain; but he said no, he liked it, it was good to be useful.

  Venetia did not protest. She enjoyed her life with Victor and as long as she did not argue they got along fine. The sex was good and that always reassured her. Steady, and unworried, once or twice or even three times a week, after more than thirty years, and somehow in tune with the rhythm of the universe. True, she preferred the light off rather than on, being conscious of a certain slackness of skin, a certain barrelness of figure in middle age, but Victor didn’t seem to mind. ‘It’s all you,’ he’d say, taking a pinch of extra flesh at her waist and squeezing it gently, ‘that’s all that matters.’ She felt no jealousy of unknown research assistants he might meet at work, as she would have done when she was younger. They were the envy of their friends.

  ‘But he does seems to have lost his sense of humour,’ complains Venetia on the phone to Polly.

  ‘He never had one to lose,’ says Polly. ‘You delude yourself. Do you think he knows something about devaluation the rest of us don’t?’

  ‘He’s a scientist, not a currency expert,’ says Venetia. ‘And what he does is not so different from what he did before. It’s still stem-cell research; what he was doing for Cancer Cure. No-one’s wasting expertise these days.’

  ‘Spoken like Victor’s wife,’ says Polly. ‘Ask Ethan.’

  Venetia’s second son Ethan had been in banking and now worked for NIFE like his father, but rather down the scale as a Ministry driver. Venetia asked. Ethan said to tell Polly devaluation was obviously on the cards, now inflation had started pushing back the deflationary pressures of the last few years and the effect of quantitative easement was being felt. But not to worry: everyone should eat, drink and be merry while they could. As to the ‘bottoming out’, it was not going to happen. Democracies were simply not equipped to deal with a consumer society which had lost the knack of consuming, as after a stroke a man can lose the knack of speech. Ex-bankers loved gloom, Venetia had noticed.

  Mervyn, Venetia’s second son by Victor, was studying Politics and Economics at the LSE, and expected to get a First. Classes were large – seminars of thirty students were not unusual – but as Victor pointed out, statistically speaking, size of class and quality of education were positively correlated. And Venetia would try not to let her eyebrows rise in doubt. At the Ministry, Victor took an obligatory weekly class on ‘Positive Thinking and the New Economy’: perhaps that was all the change in Victor amounted to. He learned hi
s lessons well.

  Sitting On The Stairs Waiting For The Bailiffs To Go

  Amos has been gone a long time. He is probably asleep. The smell of skunk pervades the house, horrible strong stuff. The sort we used in the sixties was milder and made us witty and lively – or so we thought – and this new stuff just makes you surly and sends you to sleep. Before that, in the late forties and early fifties we took Dexedrine, a form of amphetamine, to keep us awake in lectures, and to help us pass exams. Snorting drugs, or smoking them, was beyond the limits of our sophistication. A friend of mine, subject to narcolepsy, now takes Dexedrine to stop him from falling into the teapot like the dormouse at the Mad Hatter’s tea party (a reference, for the benefit of you younger readers, to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland) and he sometimes passes spare pills on to me. But they don’t work on me as once they did: they don’t fill me with the wild mental excitement, the exhilaration of the mind I remember: they just make me feel unconnected with reality in a misty and disagreeable kind of way.

  Amos is past the full flowering of youth. Surely he should have grown out of drugs by now: he should no longer be claiming with a boyish laugh that he was born one spliff short of a complete human being. Nor am I totally convinced by his account of his life amongst the NGOs: it doesn’t quite ring true. I am not sure what he does for a living, but I imagine it to be more concerned with the underside of society rather than its open face. He is forever ‘passing through’. He will turn up at the Hunter’s Alley house I bought for the use of the boys back in the days of my wealth, and use there as a base for a while, and Ethan and Mervyn will fuss over him, and do his laundry, and plug in his BlackBerry while the power is on, make a million phone calls, hop over to Muswell Hill to see his mum and be polite to Victor who we must not forget is his stepdad and then move on. For some reason one never quite likes to ask where to.