Chalcot Crescent

by Fay Weldon

  Amos spent a lot of time on his mobile rather than cooking, and then it took him ten minutes to find the dried egg. He seemed to take the difficulty personally, and I wondered if his unknown father had a touch of obsessive-compulsive disorder: my side of the family being too casual and laid-back to have provided the genes which make people panicky if what they are looking for cannot be found at once. I had to get out of bed to help him to find it.

  Scrambled egg using dried egg is perfectly palatable, though better if you can get hold of blue-top milk to add to the mix, and not the green-top which is more readily available. In fact I quite like dried-egg scramble, if enough time and trouble is taken squashing out the lumps.

  Dried egg is once again imported from the USA: in return for our oats, as a kind of simple barter, while the international money systems wait for what is hopefully referred to as ‘the restoration of financial harmony’. I reckoned this would be a long time coming: natural calamity had piled on quantitative easement to intensify both food and water shortages and continued financial chaos. On the heels of the UG99 ravages, a new strain of resistant fusarium fungus meant cereal harvests failed over the American and Russian continents in 2011–12; but at least both were spared the avian flu, which got China in a big way; a new strain of dengue fever, resistant to antibiotics, swept Africa. Most air travel now is restricted to diplomats and government officials, and everyone who sets foot on foreign soil is well fumigated the instant they arrive. This puts most tourists off: that, and the currency restrictions. Here in the UK it’s £5 for every trip abroad, the same as it was in 1948. Even after the Devaluation that’s the same as saying ‘Just Stay Home’. No-one forbids anyone to do anything: people just know they need to be socially responsible.

  America sends out its surplus eggs, China sends out its surplus milk, we have a few oats over after the needs of our own sixty million are met. Oats are a hardy crop. I say sixty million but some say at least five million have vanished off the radar over the last five years, a great chunk of them our own citizens: flotillas of little boats are said to radiate out from our coves and beaches. A Dunkirk in reverse. Government doesn’t tell us, and if it did, would we believe them? Anyway, there seem to be more than enough people about, of all skin shades and divergent cultures, and just about enough food, water, warmth and power to get by.

  ‘Only dried fucking egg,’ says Amos. I explain I like dried eggs. They used to cheer me up in the austerity years after the war when we first came to England. They were a bright, bright yellow – still are – and a contrast to everything else in the country, which seemed to me as a twelve-year-old to have been dipped wholesale into some great vat of grey dye. Now of course one wonders if the hens have been fed on tartrazine to buck the yolk colour up artificially: then such suspicions never occurred to one. He asks me if I want to get up to eat or do I really want to eat in bed. I say I’ll get up to save getting crumbs everywhere.

  I asked Amos who he’d been talking to on the phone and he said his brother Ethan, and I said that was nice, would they be getting together later? And he said yes, and a few friends, and I asked if Mervyn was coming too, and Amos said no. Mervyn was not ‘in sympathy’. I wondered what that meant and Amos said ‘Oh, never mind. Waste of fucking time.’ So I asked how many friends. And Amos said eight. Which seemed rather a lot. Eight, other than for a dinner party, constituted a meeting. Something else occurred to me, and I asked if Amy would be coming over too. ‘She’s fucking got to come,’ said Amos. ‘She’s the life and soul of the party. It’s her project.’

  Oh yes. ‘Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the Party,’ sprang to my mind unbidden. That was what people used to write when trying out new pens on scraps of paper in shops. The party was the Communist Party, party of literate intellectuals worldwide in the middle years of the twentieth century. That was how the tradition of writing it had arrived, that and ‘the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’, for the more sensible reason that it contained all the letters of the alphabet. But still ‘the Party’. Life and soul of what Party?

  ‘You’ll be wanting to get on with your memoir, I suppose,’ Amos said now. ‘We’ll be upstairs. Don’t worry about it.’

  In other words you are not wanted at this meeting. And I know well enough that when the young say, ‘Don’t worry about it,’ it means you had better do so.

  ‘We’ll bring our own coffee,’ he says. Coffee! A likely tale. Just as over the post-war years powdered instant coffee had come to be known as simply coffee, so now had the powdered chicory and roasted oats version of today. But it wasn’t coffee as I once knew it.

  With everything Amos said my unease grew. Ethan but not Mervyn? What did that signify? Ethan had settled in so easily to his new life: perhaps too easily. Amos, and his feeling of not belonging, a reject, feeling morally superior to those who lay down the ethical rules. The sign of the agitator. Ethan, converted by his big brother, the Redpeace activist, the sleeper, unsubscribing, cutting the ties in order to penetrate government, pretending to like what actually he hated and resented. This was indeed paranoia. Mervyn, the younger sibling, placatory, not wanting to get involved, or raise his head above the parapet. What poison was filtering through to their lives? Worst of all now, Amy, child of the patricide, back from the past to haunt us all.

  ‘What exactly is the project?’ I asked lightly. ‘Blowing up the Cabinet?’

  Amos did not laugh in return: he just pretended he didn’t hear. Idealists and political romantics don’t do much laughing, and only hear what they want to hear. Amy, life and soul of the party. Did she go with Ethan or Amos? I hoped Amos, Ethan being better able to look after himself, relationship-wise. But that was a stupid, passing thought: my generation was showing: any sensible person would simply want Amy out of the way. Because that would be the way my particular cookie crumbled. First Terry, whom I stole, then Liddy, then Cynthia who died as punishment, then Florrie, now Amy come to destroy my grandchild, and all because I slept with Terry when I should not have done. It was gross disloyalty to a friend.

  ‘It’s a Redpeace meeting,’ he said. ‘She’s an area organizer.’

  Well, there you are. Cookie crumbled.

  Redpeace is not so much a movement as a cult, the fundamentalist spawn of Greenpeace. It is not a banned organization. It is against cruelty to animals, and is all for protectionism, free speech and the liberalization of the drug laws, in all of which policies it is in accord with NUG. It is also against human genetic engineering – an issue on which NUG are not partisan. So far so good. Myself, I rather doubt NUG’s espousal of free speech; the fact is that there are certain words that cannot be said – anything fat-ist, ageist, racist, sexist, or élitist – and certain concepts that must be espoused – all are born equal, for example, that nature means nothing and nurture everything; that there is no inheritable factor in IQ scores; that to be ‘middle class’ is an act of will (and a reprehensible one), not like prosperity itself, more often than not a function of IQ; that so long as the motive is pure the ends justify the means – and only by co-operation and pooling resources under dirigiste rule (while of course preserving democracy) will the nation climb out of the pit the politicians of the past dug for us. I take care not to voice my doubts too loudly.

  Greenpeace in the meanwhile has dissolved itself. The various ecology groups came together during the Recovery Years, and, in the same mood as did the charities, united to form a master organization, CiviGaia, the better to focus and express positive community and ecological indignation. Actual physical protest – marching round with placards – was seen as laughable. Other than on Pull Together Day, when everyone came out into the streets for carnivals, best banner competitions, local tugs-of-war, and free street barbecues. A few minor groups like Redpeace were allowed to stick it out on their own – it is ostensibly against NUG’s policy to ban anything or anyone – but began to seem mildly ridiculous and ineffective. Walk through the streets with a banner when it wasn’t Pull
Together Day and the children would hurl their shoes. And their mothers would have to run round picking them up and swearing at the protestors.

  Ethan, when he was angry and miserable at being made redundant, had joined Redpeace for a time, as I have told you, but soon realized he was keeping the company of conspiracy theorists and losers in general, and had got out. But now I rather wondered whether he had. Didn’t people go underground?

  Surely this must be paranoia. I was leaping ahead of myself, dissolving into the fiction around which I had built so much of my life. Amy’s ‘project’ was as likely to be finally giving in and joining up to CiviGaia as anything else. Which would be the reason Ethan was coming along. Or perhaps Ethan was ‘with’ Amy. The boys would do nothing to harm their poor old gran: it would not only be unkind, also impractical. My house was already under surveillance, and though Amos said the bailiffs would not be back for years, how could he be sure? But as Amos himself had pointed out, and I believed him, all agencies are one (fucking) agency. Security and financial breaches were now seen as associated threats: social irresponsibility putting the State at hazard.

  ‘Negative thinking’ has joined a list of other punishable hate crimes. Smile and the World Smiles with You currently goes up on posters all over London, and our exported oats are shipped in hessian sacks with red smileys printed all over them. I expect a piece of research has come out maintaining that good cheer increases productivity in the same spirit as farmers swear that playing Mozart to cows increases their milk yield.

  Amos The Outsider

  On the whole I devote mornings to writing my memoir, and afternoons to a strange kind of fictional fantasy, in which I write my account of what may, or may not, be going on in my children’s households. The publishing industry is at the end of its tether, and is reluctant to publish any books at all. Readers have gone off the misery memoir, and want accounts of heroism and good cheer, of the kind Samuel Smiles delivered to the public with Self-Help, in 1859. Samuel Smiles – Self-Help! How could such a title and such a name not sell to the populace? In the same way as my grandfather Edgar Jepson increased bread sales no end in the First World War with his advertising slogan Eat More Bread! Simplicity works. The theory being that if you ate more bread you would eat less meat. Which is why the National Unity Government, or NUG (slogan: Hug the NUG!), had contrived that the National Meat Loaf has a lot of oats in it and not much meat. It has a rather haggis-like consistency but it’s okay. My teeth are not too bad for their age; they look all right on the outside – in the days of my wealth I had very expensive veneers done, which will certainly outlast me, no matter what happens to the yellowing teeth behind them.

  There were other Smiles books – Character, Thrift, Duty. O Samuel Smiles, thy country needs thee now!

  ‘Gran, where did you get the blue-top milk from?’

  ‘From your mother. She gets it from the CiviStore on Victor’s card.’

  Time was when low-fat green-top was all the rage. But the passion for skinniness has altogether abated. The fatter you are, the warmer you can keep. NUG is building up the dairy herds once again, as the nation strives for self-sufficiency in food – forget dangerous methane-emitting ruminants – we’re hungry – and if we don’t eat, and we don’t have jobs, we riot and burn things down and frighten politicians so much they up and go away, no doubt taking their ill-gotten gains with them, leaving us the poorer, and searching for another leader. After NUG was elected the cult of personality simply evaporated; no statues, no public appearances, just the occasional decree in NUGNews and an illegible signature. But goodies for the nomenklatura, and scrapings for the rest, same as always.

  ‘Well, she bloody well would, wouldn’t she,’ said Amos, and of all the things he had said lately this was the one that struck home. I realized this was a son who did not love his mother, and I felt my blood run cold. And when I say that I mean it. It was as if the stuff no longer ran merrily through my heart, but sluggishly, and thickly, and I felt a chill follow the arteries as it ran through my body.

  I went into emergency gear: I did not let the expression on my face change, though no doubt my smile stiffened a little, as I worked out what was to be done. I remember the other occasions I had felt like this: when I first suspected Karl was running off with the Dumpling; when the phone rang at five one morning and it was Venetia saying Amos was in police custody; when little Polly was taken to hospital with suspected meningitis; when I waited for confirmation that Cynthia had been on the Paris flight; when the letter came from Liddy and I read that Terry was dead. The body reacts first and tells you what the mind is thinking. This was not something that could be just brushed aside and life got on with. It was real: Amos hated his mother and his smiles were lies. And if he came to Shabbat meal on Friday night (which was not a real Shabbat meal because both Victor and Venetia were atheists, and viewed religion as the source of most of the world’s ills, but saw no harm in ceremony) and smiled and charmed, it was for some ulterior motive. And why? What had Venetia ever done other than love her son, cherish him, forgive him, visit him in prison, and include him in her new life with Victor as best she could? Was he mad?

  It was a possibility. Schizoids turn on those who love them most. The mothers are the ones who get chopped up with the axe, not the enemies. It is something to do with neural pathways passing too closely to one another in the brain, I believe, and if you are unlucky hate and love can cross over.

  It was a surprise. It was a shock I had not been expecting. There was something terribly wrong and something had to be done, and I was not sure I had the strength for it. I was old, and you lose your taste for the things that need to be done. And part of you thinks this is enough surprise for one life.

  A Brief History Of My First Daughter Venetia

  Venetia was born when I was twenty, without an attendant father, and brought up for her first ten years in the days of my trouble and poverty, before I went into advertising, met Karl, wrote books and became suddenly rich. Luck was on my side, and I had given birth to a blond, healthy, beaming child, Venetia, and luck was on her side too when, following in my footsteps, the child grew to conceive Amos, also out of turn. He too was beautiful and bright. I think there are some babies who are simply meant to be born: children of destiny rather than choice, their parentage being so unlikely, the coming together of the twain so accidental. Or it may just be that to seek likeness in a partner is counter-productive – you have a better chance of successful progeny if you don’t know what you’re doing.

  Venetia was allowed to stay on at art school, became the pride of the traditionalist tutors, the despair of the conceptual fanciers, a tall, blonde, witty, willowy girl with large smoky-blue eyes and a good academic brain. Oxford wanted her, and Cambridge too, but she settled on Camberwell. I did not argue. It always seemed to me short-sighted to interfere with the children’s choice of education.

  ‘If only,’ they will wail, ‘you hadn’t made me go to that school; everything would have turned out differently.’

  If you let them do as they want, they have only themselves to blame.

  Had she gone to Oxford, though, and done PPE and gone into politics – she ran the school anarchist society and was a great platform speaker – she might be running the country now and we would not be in the mess we are in. But there it goes. Like her mother, never one to live alone, being something of a sex addict, and mildly masochistic, she and Amos shacked up with first Angus Astura, the conceptual artist who wrapped up the Savoy Hotel with a red ribbon and bow, but on opening day was discovered by the media in a broom cupboard with a PR girl. And after Angus came the concrete poet Peter Patel, who bored her to tears by the clunkiness of his verse. The suitors didn’t last long but were nevertheless in Venetia’s bed, and sons can put up with fathers in their mothers’ beds but passing uncles set off all kinds of neuroses.

  I was always there in the background to support her financially, my allegedly feminist books selling like hot cakes the world over, providi
ng both my daughters with security and, in the end, a comparatively respectable background. I’m not sure it did either of them any good.

  When Amos was eight Venetia finally met someone halfway possible, and settled down with him: Victor, a biogeneticist with a respectable job, complete with pension, at the big London charity Cancer Cure. They moved into a big Victorian house in Grand Avenue, Muswell Hill, with a view over all London, and there they have stayed. Venetia did what she could to include Amos in her new family, and gave birth to Ethan and Mervyn. She employed au pairs to mind the children and found time to paint in the studio especially built for her by Victor at the bottom of the garden. He always seemed to have a little more money than his salary warranted: Amos said he took private work creating designer babies, but that was the kind of thing Amos would say.

  When the Crunch hit in 2009, people stopped buying paintings and decided they could as well tear pictures out of old Sunday supplements and bung those up on their walls. Venetia went on painting and stockpiled her canvases. During the Recovery she got a part-time job with the Arts Council, but that went too, with the Bite, as indeed did the weekend supplements. (No advertising, no supplements.) NUGNews did a Saturday supplement but it wasn’t much fun. The paper was low quality and the colours were dreary, and soon people had nothing to put on their walls. So now every month Venetia would complete a painting, put it against the railings outside the house and wait for someone to take it away. Which they always did.

  ‘Art should be free,’ said Venetia. ‘It can’t be valued in monetary terms.’

  Victor, thank God, will do anything he can to please Venetia and thinks she is a genius. Her paintings are rather bright and unlikely, thick acrylic bold colours in circular shapes. I pretend to like them and have some on my wall.

  They’re not unlike the ones she did at her first nursery school, where she was happy. I was still an unmarried mother and walked with her to school every day and she had my undivided attention. Then I married Karl and had Polly and I think that rather put her nose out of joint, as my mother having other children before me, put mine. It’s usually older siblings who cause trouble for the ones that come along next, but in my case it was the next sister up I took against. She could read and write before me, and I was envious, but I think it was being left out of that painting that really got to me.