Chalcot Crescent

by Fay Weldon

  Edgar fumes at me and calls me names, but really the sexual misdemeanours of thirty years ago have rather lost their power to shock and alarm. These days he’s with a lady of a certain age, a Harriet, with a thin face, wire-framed glasses and wispy hair, who has currently broken a leg and is presumably out of play or he wouldn’t be round at my place trying to revive old habits.

  The conference was meant to be discussing ways of bringing MAD to an end – MAD, Mutual Assured Destruction, in which neither side dared start a war for fear of being wiped out in return – and I’d been asked by the Moscow Writers’ Union, with whom I had had many dealings, to attend. It was more fun at the top table, listening to Norman Mailer, Kris Kristofferson, Günter Grass and the like, but I was delegated, being a rare female, and having rashly spoken on the subject, to the Human Rights Subcommittee, which, during the course of a couple of days, was meant to rewrite the Bill of Human Rights in simple, human terms, reflecting all views. It was my task, as the writer present, to record the deliberations of the Committee. I was sitting between an African potentate and an Iranian intellectual. The potentate asked me publicly if I would become his fifty-second wife – I couldn’t rank any higher, he apologized, for I might talk too much and divert him from serious business, when lives were at stake.

  ‘The right to have a silent spouse,’ I wrote down, ‘if lives are at stake.’

  The Iranian spoke of his horror at cannibalism on the battle front. (This was at the time of the Iraq–Iran war.) ‘The right not to be eaten after death,’ I wrote down. But I was never so sure about that, and still am not. What difference would it make? So long as I am not killed specifically for that purpose, anyone is welcome to ingest me, good for Gaia-style recycling.

  I excused myself from the Committee, pleading illness. I am not a sufficiently serious person to be trusted with matters of State, which require long words and obfuscations to make them work, and went in search of my journalist. Get ‘issues’ down to simple human terms and everything becomes frivolous, just more versions of the Watergate Tapes, in which President Nixon, once the doors were closed, spoke as he really meant – bums and crap and all, and had to go. Presidents are not expected to be like anyone else. Office itself is meant to make people wise. My experience has been that it doesn’t. The people who are serious are young and usually middle class, well fed, with parents who love them, and are in a position to develop principles. The revolutionary tendency flourishes amongst the well-to-do, rather than the poor.

  The noise upstairs has stopped. Edgar has heard nothing. I realize that Edgar is getting quite deaf. Men age so much faster than women. Or else he is still fuming about the journalist. Yes, he is.

  Edgar: You always were an unfaithful bitch. No wonder Karl got rid of you.

  Me: It was just the custom of the times, and you don’t have to keep me company. Feel free to go.

  He doesn’t, he asks for another cup of coffee. I give it to him. But he is not finished with my punishment. He asks if I know that the son Karl had when he so understandably left me is back from Ireland working at NIFE in some lowly position.

  Me: I daresay he will rise through the ranks.

  Men never forget one’s infidelity. I should not have told him about the Italian journalist. I don’t need enemies at the moment. But I couldn’t help it. I was boasting. So, how does Edgar know Henry is working at NIFE? Does Polly? I don’t think so. There was no love lost between my girls and Edgar. He was their stepfather after the Dumpling had died, and Karl had decided the by-blow Henry was going to be too much for him, and neither Venetia nor Polly would take him on – I’d have killed them if they’d offered – and I’d said, with truth, I was otherwise occupied and the child had been sent off to his maternal grandmother in Cork.

  Edgar: You lot were so ruthless about poor little Henry. I didn’t see any reason you and I shouldn’t have taken him on. We had the house, the space, the time. I could have done with a baby. But you wouldn’t hear of it, self-centred bitch that you always were. Your kids were grown up; you had nothing else to do, but no.

  Me: [feebly] I was a writer.

  I could see that his upper lip had lifted in a sneer because the hair on the right side of his beard lifted and stuck out. I was fascinated. He had much the same response to my books as did Karl. Girlish twaddle. Why did I pick such men? It egged me on, I daresay, to win the world’s respect since it wasn’t available at home.

  Edgar: That baby was part of the family, a blood relative of your children’s. When he was sent off practically by parcel post, I took it on myself to check up he was okay. He was fine. I kept in touch with the grandmother: in fact Harriet is her daughter. I re-met her at the funeral a couple of years back, and we got together. So when I say what is going on at NIFE I’ll have you know I’m not making it up.

  Yes, but what you don’t know, Edgar, I think – fuck Harriet, which you will, I expect, when her leg is better, and you’re welcome – is that Redpeace’s webpage is currently not available, and that your ex-stepdaughters’ half-brother is currently engaged in espionage next door and I’m not telling, so shucks to you and God knows why I was ever with you. Well, I do, on the rebound. And there was the sex.

  Edgar: And I can tell you this, he is not fond of Victor, and they say in Skibbereen sparks are going to fly. They say there Henry is something to do with Redpeace. There’s a lot of negative feeling about the collective farms. Henry’s vats are putting a lot of people out of business.

  Me: Ah yes, I expect the Skibbereen Eagle has got its eye on Victor.

  Edgar looks at me doubtfully. He hates it when I make a joke he doesn’t understand. In 1889 the tiny newspaper warned the world that it had its eye on the Tsar of Russia over his expansionist ambitions. I give up.

  Me: Henry is round to dinner with Victor and his family quite a lot. Or so Polly tells me.

  Edgar: [darkly] When he goes round to sup he carries a long spoon.

  Me: As one does, when dining with the Devil. I suppose for Henry Victor is a step-relative and not a half relative. Makes all the difference to an orphan in search of a family.

  I decide that after all I quite like Victor. If he’s to be an oligarch or President or whatever NUG decides, good for him. I wish him well. He’s much nicer than most men I know, and besides, a source of CiviStore goodies. I don’t suppose he’s really bringing Venetia into danger, security will be tight from the sound of it, and in the meanwhile Venetia has ample access to lots of acrylic paint. The children next door will be setting up an opposition party to Redpeace and all will be well and all will be well. I’m tired. I finally get Edgar to go, back to his Harriet. I write up my notes with what’s left of the battery and go to bed.

  A Visit From Amos, Ethan And Amy

  In the morning Ethan, Amy and Amos come pounding down the stairs in great good humour. They’d smelt my morning coffee on the Primus stove, and wanted some. I was down to my last few ounces, what with Edgar’s visit the night before. I was relieved to hear that Rosie and Steffie had gone home to Polly last night, and would be going to college in the morning. I would simply not mention to Polly that they had been through my front door and out someone else’s. Amy said the girls had been a great help lugging promotional material about. She had an unmelodious voice and disguised her willowy figure – so like her grandmother’s – beneath shapeless, shabby, grey to black clothes, wore her thick straight hair as if she’d combed it down from the centre, put a pudding basin over it, and then scissored round the edges.

  She reminded me of girls I’d known back in the seventies, who refused on moral grounds to make themselves attractive to men. As they approached their thirties they tended to relent, look in mirrors, and succumb to vanity. The cause was different but the mindset was the same. Presumably Amy thought the plainer she looked the more likely she was to bring about a world in which pink human protein grown in vats was not to enter the food chain. But she had her grandfather’s eyes, as I remembered Florrie had had, in the garden ou
t the back of this very house, a child sent out to play while the adults talked of death, those bright, hooded, dark eyes, Terry’s eyes. I tried to remember that Liddy had started as a friend and only later became a rival. I offered them some National Meat Loaf, just to see what happened and they shuddered and declined.

  ‘You ate enough of it yesterday,’ I said to Amos, which was tactless, and he just said:

  ‘I was younger then.’

  ‘You mustn’t eat that stuff, Gran,’ said Amy. So, I have been promoted. Gran! We’re all one family.

  ‘It’s cannibalism,’ said Ethan.

  Ethan was a tall, good-looking, quick-moving, extrovert lad, with thick black eyebrows beneath a thatch of curly hair, and was, I always thought, none too bright. Whereas his younger brother Mervyn was a dead ringer for Victor, a mini intellectual, Ethan was simply not. He was right for the City, for Porsches, for splashing money around, for cocaine parties and beautiful girls. He was born out of time, poor lad. And here he was with Amy, and I had to say that contrary to expectation she seemed quite right for him. They moved in unison, as lovers do: she spoke first; he then endorsed whatever it was she said. She was in charge, but they got on.

  I have always noticed, when married couples gather, how often really handsome men are joined to plain women, and vice versa. I don’t think it is that the plain ones – the horsey women, the fat bald men – have been married for their money. I think it is to do with wanting to join their spouses on the moral high ground, the urge to even out inequality, to return to the norm. ‘Golden couples’ are a rarity, usually to be found in Hollywood, where nobody started out, looks-wise, as they began. The film industry has collapsed. As drug profits failed and the need for money laundering diminished, one studio after another called in the receivers and turned off the lights. Small films in this country are made, but seldom shown: power cuts are frequent in areas where the little cinemas cluster, and Health and Safety need to see and check IDs, so it’s just too much of a bother to go. Don’t be duped! as the NUG posters say. Originality means untrusted and untrue. I don’t know who writes these posters: some PR department somewhere, I suppose, whose message gets so tortured in committee it hardly makes sense.

  I rather wished they would get on with their nefarious business, and go away, so I could start the long walk up to Polly’s to warn her to be careful, without alarming her. I was not particularly looking forward to the walk: I would have to keep stopping to rest along the way, and it wasn’t so much the humiliation of this that bothered me, but the rage that goes with growing old, of your body holding you up as if it was at war with your mind. Once body and mind were hand in glove – no longer so. The mind commanded, the body laughed. And soon enough the body would win, and simply die. But the Redpeacers lingered and ate all my raisins – again from the Grade 1 CiviStore – and seemed happy. Then Ethan had to be off to work so he drank his coffee, pecked me goodbye on my weathered cheek and said ‘Goodbye Gran’ affectionately and went not out the front door, but upstairs and presumably out via Rothwell Street where there were dud CiviCams.

  No sooner had Ethan left than I heard Henry coming downstairs. I could tell his footsteps, so like Karl’s it made me feel quite weak. After the divorce, when Karl stripped the house of all its contents, the court having allowed most of it to be seen as stock from his antique shop, and Karl stretching that permission to extremes so everything but the knocker went, and that stayed by accident, I sat in this very room and heard those very footsteps coming downstairs for what I assumed was the very last time. He was angry with me, and I was angry with him. He had the Dumpling; he had heard rumours of Edgar. But Karl had started it. And now this giant version of his father came into the room and looked at me, and spoke.

  ‘You’ll be Gran, my da’s ex-wife,’ he said. ‘Sure, and I’ll be thanking you for your hospitality.’

  ‘I didn’t have much choice,’ I said.

  ‘A little matter of necessity, darlin’,’ he said. His Irish accent seemed to me to be overdone, for my benefit, and slightly insulting.

  ‘Why?’ I asked. You have to stand up to these men or they assume you’re an idiot.

  ‘Let us say perhaps not of necessity, but certainly of opportunity.’ He smiled at me in a friendly and confiding way, as Karl did when he was planning some particular devilry, and said he understood my rather basic anger at his, Henry’s existence, which other members of his family had emphasized, but though his father might have technically divorced me, he himself, Henry, did not believe in divorce, and so far as he was concerned I was a family member and would be treated as such.

  ‘I don’t think anyone I know believes in divorce as if it was some kind of religion,’ I said. ‘It’s a legal procedure, that’s all. “Approve” might be a better word.’

  Amos and Amy were shaking their heads at me. I was not meant to argue. Just to accept, be grateful, and shut up. Amy was certainly not in charge of this operation, as I had thought. It was Henry.

  ‘Approve,’ he conceded, ‘okay, I don’t approve of divorce. You had a child by my father and so you stay a family member, connected by sanguinity.’ He had lost his Irish accent. It came and went as if two sides of his brain were in conflict.

  I thought, actually, this man is mad. It was quite a clear thought, unlike so many in my mind these days.

  ‘Rather an argument for polygamy,’ I said.

  ‘Why not,’ he said. ‘In the New Republic, my darlin’, it will be practised, within strict boundaries. Monogamy is hardly a natural state. We do not want too many lonely and cast-off women in the new society.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. ‘So, Henry, you are the new Oliver Cromwell.’ He looked a little puzzled.

  He did not get the allusion. That the tyrannical monster Oliver Cromwell had already laid claim to a New Republic five hundred years back had escaped him. So presumably had the fact that Cromwell had had King Charles’ head chopped off on scaffolding outside the very Banqueting Hall where now NIFE reigned. There had been little history taught in the schools for years, but surely in Ireland, where Cromwell was still remembered and hated, Henry would have picked up something? Apparently not. And people are quite capable of replaying history without reference to what happened in the past. There are only so many movements to go round. The age of excess has collapsed, the age of austerity is here, and within its confines Henry will try to effect a coup, and undo NUG, to which he is not so different (I know a control freak when I see one, believe me), and employ useful idiots (my family, I fear, which unhappily is also his: Karl should not have gone off with the Dumpling) to achieve it. God knows how many others are plotting with him. And then the New Republic, with its strict polygamy and families forbidden to split and no delicious National Meat Loaf, too, will collapse and then some equivalent of Charles II will bring back Nell Gwyn and oranges, the dancing girls and the maypoles, and we will all be sexy and happy again. Till the banks collapse or whatever form it takes, and the cycle continues in sackcloth and ashes.

  ‘Sure and I don’t get you, Gran,’ he said, and his tongue flickered out like a little snake’s and he licked his lips.

  ‘Oliver Cromwell had all kinds of bright ideas,’ I said, ‘long ago. He tried to ban Christmas.’

  ‘You’re kiddin’ me, Gran,’ he said. But I was no grandmother to this monster, this Cromwell reborn. No blood of mine ran in his veins. What had Karl’s sexual dereliction brought down upon the world? A Cromwell who believed in the subjugation of women, who would have them all back in their box, four to every man’s bed?

  I could pretty much envisage the scene in Hunter’s Alley, where I in my folly had allowed my family to congregate and fall into bad ways, as Henry geared up his useful fools to sticking point, no doubt to direct action. But what was it? Were his forces gathering even now? Perhaps he had recruited the Jokers to his side? Organized, they would be a powerful force for mayhem. All I knew for sure was that my grandchildren Amos and Ethan and possibly Mervyn, and my best friend’s gra
nddaughter Amy too, and Rosie and Steffie as well, whose blood I was prepared to share, so nearly mine it was – all, all in danger.

  In The Name Of God, Go!

  I can imagine the scene in Hunter’s Alley, before NUG realized it was a problem and closed it down, so there was nowhere my family could meet. I bought the house because it was such a pretty place in such a squalid area, of storage warehouses and car-part dumps, and seemed a good investment (those were the days). I thought the boys could always make use of it as they grew older and wanted to be nearer the heart of the metropolis, and, frankly, away from what I saw as Victor and Venetia’s rather stifling home life, but still near to Polly and Corey and the girls. More fool me.

  It’s three up, two down, bathroom and kitchen, and had stood for three hundred years or so, so why should it give up now? Or so the estate agent told me, rubbing his hands as the old fool me approached. I haven’t been there for a couple of years, but Polly goes in to keep an eye on things. But her eye, I suspect, after years with Corey, is not as sharp or as stringent as it used to be. Polly and Corey live in what to my mind is squalor, but to many of their generation is common sense. Why waste time cleaning? There were a blissful couple of years when for a few months everyone could just move on as if it was the Mad Hatter’s tea party, and squat in somebody else’s empty house, but NUG clamped down on that pretty soon. You stay where you are so they can keep an eye on you. Stay still, stay safe, stay home – be CiviSecure!

  But I reckon NUG’s eye had missed Hunter’s Alley. It would be housing as many young activists as could cram in the door. Middle class rather than working class, but when were revolutionaries ever not? The working class gets on with the work, the middle classes with the indignation. The activists would mostly be white British: in the great exodus the West Indians had streamed to the USA and many a Muslim, outdone in moral fervour by NUG, chose to take his family back to Pakistan where life was easier. Sunni and Shia fought it out, local enmities loomed more importantly than international grievances, and a new Wahabi imam was preaching a form of non-violent Sufism to great effect on YouTube, which was still able to flourish in oil-producing countries where the electricity supply was stable. Sweet-tongued girls now sang to you as your computer booted up, YouTube lies but NUTube knows!