Chalcot Crescent

by Fay Weldon

  If I go back to Amos’ beginnings I can see he is the grandchild most likely to be caught up in extreme behaviour of some kind or another. He has never really belonged, any more than Venetia has. Venetia did to Amos what I did to her, and, at around the same age, started the ‘real’ family as if the first child was a mistake, accidental. The others are of the blood royal, as it were, while the first and misbegotten child is a Fitz to the others’ Lords, a by-blow, a bastard, through no doing of their own. Daughters are more placid and accepting, but sons will rail against fate, and look for a place to belong. William the Conqueror was known as William the Bastard at home in Normandy and had to conquer Britain to get a change of status. What will Amos do?

  The doorbell rang as I was writing this, but it was quite gentle and tentative so I had no hesitation in opening up. A lean young woman in her early twenties stood on the doorstep. And I thought Terry. The same hooded dark-blue eyes, the full, slightly twisted mouth, the narrow face, and I was back in St Andrews and drunk with Cointreau and my soul was watching the union below from up there in the corner of the ceiling. I don’t suppose angels get to many couplings but I daresay they do occasionally, when the consequences are of relevance to a wider future.

  ‘Are you Frances?’ she asks. ‘You knew my grandfather. I’m Amy. My mother Florrie knows your daughter, who’s married to Victor who works for NIFE.’

  ‘That’s so,’ I say. ‘You look so like your grandfather.’

  ‘How can I?’ she asks. ‘I’m a girl, he was a man.’

  ‘You’re a female version of him,’ I say. ‘The oestrogen version, not the testosterone one.’ She looks as if she’d like to argue but can’t really be bothered. Terry would look like that too when he was bored or disapproving or Liddy had said something simply stupid, which she often did. She wasn’t very bright, which was probably why he married her not me. Remember that was back in the fifties when dim girls were preferred above bright ones – probably because they made better mothers. Bright girls get distracted and don’t concentrate on motherhood. Though I’m not sure Liddy can have made a very good mother.

  ‘Was my Gramps your boyfriend?’ she asks, straight out.

  ‘Not in any permanent sort of way,’ I say.

  ‘It’s odd to think of old people having sex,’ she says.

  Tact is not her strong point but neither was it her grandfather’s. Why should people get better through the generations? Some do, some don’t. Some families are in entropy while others are burgeoning. Yet this girl is a great improvement on wan, ethereal Liddy. I think perhaps she is Aspergery: she looks too clever for her own good. People on the autistic spectrum are often beautiful, as if the sheer capacity for emotion was harmful to the foetus in the womb, and prevented perfect, symmetrical growth.

  ‘Anyway I never met him,’ she adds. ‘He shot himself before I was born.’ She doesn’t quite look directly at me, but I have the feeling she thinks the same ought to apply to me. But it may be nothing personal: the young are often like that. They really cannot see why the old should exist at all. I am not altogether out of sympathy: I sometimes share the feeling.

  She is here to see Amos. I call him down and they go off together in her tinny little Civi run-around. I wonder where she gets the petrol. I do not think they have anything other than a friendly relationship. Perhaps she is with Ethan, who is spoiled for choice.

  I am alone at last and now can turn my hand to fiction. I will give you a version of the moment of exclusion which set Amos off on the path towards social alienation. That moment when, they say, the loner instincts finally prevail, which seals the destiny of serial killers, terrorists and high-school assassins. I feel very unfair to Amos writing this: I have not the slightest evidence to support these speculations of mine. All I really have against Amos is that he swears all the time, smokes skunk, rants a good deal and means to hide my possessions in case the State gets them, and not him as in my will. (That too is probably unfair: inheritance duties are up to 80 per cent for all artworks and antiques: the money these fetch in sales these days is so pitiful that now the State just confiscates. Amos can’t expect much.) But then perhaps it is my revenge upon my family, thus to let loose my fantasies in fictional form. That psychoanalyst long ago would certainly say so. I wish Karl would come back from the dead and explain things to me. It seems the least the dead can do for the living.

  An Evening At Venetia’s

  ‘My God,’ Venetia had said when the news of the collapse of Cancer Cure came through on Victor’s email. ‘How are we going to live now?’

  No-one was buying her landscapes any more – or indeed anyone’s – and her job at the Arts Council had come to an end. She had been working part-time, allocating public money to deserving artists – not that she thought many of them were – but in the light of the new scheme afoot – Art for All – that would make qualified artists direct employees of the State, her skills were redundant. Or else her views as to what constituted good art, and what did not, were now seen as reactionary. The heating bills were immense and still climbing: she couldn’t paint if her fingers got too cold. If even Victor, one of the nation’s leading stem-cell scientists, was to lose his job, how would they manage?

  Victor told her not to panic, the Government was not going to let its brightest and best go to waste – and sure enough a posting came through from Job Direction before the end of the week. He was being offered Senior Scientist Grade 1 at NIFE, the National Institute for Food Excellence, with special responsibilities at managerial level. At Cancer Cure, Victor had been working on stem-cell therapies, in particular the implication of immuno-suppressive cytotoxic antineoplastosis: now he was required to divert them to development of new forms of disease-free edible protein. To work in the public sector was generally held to be a sensible move. The private sector was shrinking fast. The recession showed no sign of bottoming out – why should it? The public was not, as had at first been claimed, ‘sensibly putting off buying until price dropped’, they had just gone off buying for ever: consumerism was suddenly out of fashion. Sparse was in, lavish was out. All the same, Victor would receive almost double what Cancer Cure had paid.

  Venetia was uneasy. It seemed too good to be true. There would be no more worrying about money, whether she could afford acrylic paint – the price had zoomed up and it was in short supply – Mervyn would be able to study in a warm room, she would apparently as a Grade 1 spouse have access to the CiviStore, of which wondrous things were spoken. Was there something Victor wasn’t telling her? He had already, even before the interview, signed up under the Official Secrets Act 2012, so if there was he couldn’t anyway.

  ‘But I didn’t marry a civil servant,’ she said plaintively. ‘I married someone who was going to win the Nobel Prize.’

  ‘Well,’ said Victor, ‘for my part I always thought you would win the Turner prize and you haven’t. So we’re quits.’

  But he agreed to think it over.

  As for the Depression, Amos claimed, on one of his Friday visits home, at a time when Victor was still thinking it over, that it was sorting through the household waste that had started the whole thing off. While staring at an old chicken wing welded on to a sheet of oven paper, wondering if this was organic or inorganic waste, the thought had occurred to many that the answer was not to bring it into the house in the first place. A paper bag full of lentils would do for food, and later you could burn the bag in the gas-fire flame, for warmth. He was joking, of course, though sometimes it was rather hard to tell whether he was or he wasn’t.

  Ethan, as dark and ruddy as Amos was lean and pale, and hairy like Esau, said the recession was nothing to do with waste sorting, you had to go further back than that – but it was the fault of anorexic girls: they had started the fashion for non-consumption.

  Mervyn, who was then doing A levels in classics, more like a mini-version of his father, quiet, large, hairless and stolid, said the whole recession had been deliberately contrived by Europe to bring the peop
le under State control. Victor said it was okay to say that kind of thing at home, but he hoped Mervyn would be more prudent at school. Mervyn accepted the rebuke and asked his father about the other two jobs he had been offered. Weren’t you allowed a choice of three, before direction? Victor said they only told you what the other jobs were if you turned down the first.

  ‘Ah,’ said Mervyn, ‘like you’re more likely to get into the college you want, if you make it your first choice.’

  Victor said the first one was obviously the one they wanted you to take, and feeding the population was probably more vital in the years to come than curing it of disease. The young and healthy deserved consideration as well as the old and ill, who were taking up too much of the country’s resources as it was. Longevity was now a national problem, not a national ambition.

  ‘Disease-free edible protein?’ asked Amos. ‘From stem cells? Does that mean growing bulk meat in fucking vats?’

  Victor, made a little tense by his situation, asked Amos if he would mind not swearing on Shabbat.

  Amos said it wasn’t really Shabbat, was it, just a Friday night get-together with vaguely religious overtones.

  ‘True enough,’ said Victor, his thin eyebrows raised slightly in surprise at this sudden show of antagonism from Amos. There was very little else he could say. Victor had been raised in North London as a liberal Jew, gone to Cambridge, drifted into non-observance, been infected by religious sceptics, fallen romantically in love with Venetia, taken on Amos as his own and had two sons. Since Jewishness is determined by the mother, Victor had scarcely created a Jewish family, as his mother often lamented. But he was enough of a ritualist to like having Amos and Ethan home on Friday nights and to have a residual feeling that Shabbat was special. And Venetia would lay the table with a white cloth and light candles and serve chicken, for Victor’s sake. She liked it too.

  ‘Sorry I swore,’ Amos offered, relenting.

  From the beginning Venetia and Victor had been conscious of the need to make Amos feel included in the family, and not trailed along as an afterthought, dragging genes of unknown origin behind him. And for his part Amos had tried to make his stepfather and brothers feel at ease, and not hopelessly naive and bourgeois, and an act of folly on his mother’s part. All the same, before his mother married Victor, Friday nights had been pizza nights. And this was his dinner table as well as his stepfather’s, and he could surely swear if he wanted to – he hated to be told what he could and couldn’t do: there had been enough of that in his life – and it was easy enough to provoke Ethan and Mervyn into fits of hilarity, which always made Victor uneasy.

  They were sitting at the table, the candles lit, waiting for Venetia to bring in the roast chicken. It would be a capon, golden brown, and sprinkled with sesame seeds according to her mother’s recipe. It would be another united family triumph.

  Amos said the Government had started the whole thing off back in the Good Days by making every household reduce its carbon footprint and sort its waste into organic and inorganic. Any normal person, puzzled by a piece of plastic glued to an overcooked chicken wing, would decide the answer was not to bring it into the house in the first place. Then Ethan said the anti-consumption age was triggered by anorexic girls refusing to eat. Refusal became the fashion. They giggled at their own silliness. Mervyn said if his father was going to be making disease-free animal protein in the lab he hoped he would remember the crackling.

  ‘But does human skin make good crackling?’ asked Ethan, and fell about with laughter. ‘Daddy’s a stem-cell specialist, after all.’

  ‘Daddy’s going to be growing “long pig” for the nation,’ said Mervyn.

  Victor was not laughing. He was looking quite flushed. He said that cattle had stem cells too, as did every living thing, and then Amos said, ‘But humans don’t get foot-and-mouth, or scrapie, or mad cow disease or bird flu – or not often – I would have thought “long pig” is a well reliable source of animal protein. And the job’s inflation linked? You’re being fucking bribed, Daddy-o dude. They probably closed down the entire charity network just to get you on side.’

  Victor stayed silent for a little and rose to his feet. Venetia was bringing the chicken in, golden with National Butter, sesame-sprinkled: twenty food points splurged. She looked pretty: usually so pale, she was flushed from the cooker, and pleased to have all three children under one roof.

  ‘Before we begin,’ he said, ‘Shabbat shalom.’ Venetia, surprised, stood where she was. Victor went over to where Ethan sat and laid his hands on his shoulders and said, ‘May God make you like Joseph’s son Ephraim, a role model for all Israel,’ and went over to Mervyn and said ‘May God make you like Menasseh, Joseph’s son, a role model for all Israel,’ and sat down again and nodded for Venetia to put the food on the table.

  Amos said, taken aback, ‘What about me?’ and Victor just shook his head. Amos, Victor had declared, did not belong. It was a subdued meal after that.

  Victor took the job. The next month Amos was in trouble with the law and would have been in prison for a long, long time, had his grandmother not intervened. Ecstasy, in which Amos was dealing, is no longer classified as a dangerous drug and, along with marijuana, cocaine, amphetamines and heroin, is all but legalized. The price of drugs, by the way, has come right down, which some say was the final blow to the stability of the world economy to which it had provided a proportion of the available investment capital, which was as large as it was unspoken. The police have too much else to do to bother with illegal substances. If people want to destroy themselves, let them. One less mouth to feed.

  But I think it would have been some such act of non-acknowledgement on Victor’s part that set Amos off on his vengeful path. Just as the rage of the suicide bomber, they say, is set off by some casual insult about colour, nationality or creed.

  No End To The Surprises

  The guests are gathering. I watch them come in from the front window and am careful not to be seen. Amy is opening the door to them. She is a gangly, but vigorous girl. If she and Ethan had babies they would be my great-grandchildren, and some of them might look like Terry. The thought makes me feel oddly guilty: I should be worrying if they would look like Karl, who I have always maintained was the love of my life. I have to believe that to retain my sense of victimhood, so important to a woman.

  Two young girls come to the door, hand in hand, with the long legs and skinny bottoms girls seem to have nowadays. They are a different shape to the stumpy-legged things we were. I can’t see their faces because they are wearing hoods, but they act and move with the confidence of extreme good looks. The hand on the bell is dark: I imagine they are Afro-Caribbean. They do not look like revolutionaries, just girls out for a giggle. They go on upstairs and I hear screams of excitement as they greet Amos.

  When Ethan comes to the door, he uses the big brass knocker. Another surprise. Most people choose the bell instead – and the bailiffs used their fists – so heavy, antique and ornate is this intimidating fish of a knocker. But Karl would always use the knocker, should he by any chance be shut out, and the chandelier in the living room would quiver and chink in response, and he liked that. Now when Ethan uses it, he seems like Karl to be marking out his territory, almost as if he is Karl come home. But perhaps it is just he knows that the door will be opened by Amy, which it is. She seems too serious and ungainly a girl to be his type. But what does one know about one’s own flesh and blood?

  I could perfectly well intervene and welcome the guests in myself, and perhaps I should. It is, after all, my house. But these guests are of another, more vigorous generation. It seems to me they know what they are doing and I don’t. I have been disenfranchised by virtue of age and my conditioning into the niceties of a former society, no matter how hard in my youth I tried to disregard them. The young are almost another species. Their loyalties are to each other, not to family. All the same, I could, and perhaps should, ring Venetia on her landline (another of Victor’s perks: in an age of p
ower cuts recharging mobiles became a hassle) but I don’t want to be seen to be interfering.

  What could I say? ‘Venetia, two of your sons are in my house and making me uneasy. Did you know they may be involved with Redpeace? No, I know it isn’t a banned organization, and they are adults, and I know how hard you try to make sure everything in the garden is just fine, but I have a terrible feeling it isn’t.’ No, I’m not going to say that. There is always a slight barrier between Venetia and me. I don’t know what it is about.

  Well, I do. I married Karl and gave her a stepfather and a half-sister and she could have had me to herself, if I’d truly loved her and not been so promiscuous with my affections. But she’d liked Karl well enough and looked up to him, and wanted him for a father. It was because of Karl, in the vain hope of winning his approval, that she turned her back on academia and studied art.

  ‘For God’s sake try and stop her,’ Karl said to me. ‘She’s a nice girl but completely without talent.’

  ‘Camberwell Art School doesn’t seem to think so,’ I murmured.

  ‘Of course they don’t,’ Karl said. ‘Bunch of talentless wankers.’

  If she’d chosen to go to college he’d have said, ‘For God’s sake try and get her to art school. She’s a nice girl but has no brains at all in her noddle.’

  And I’d have said Oxford seemed to think differently, and he’d have said, ‘Shower of poncy tossers. They just want to get into her knickers.’