Though life was full of handouts in those good days. Those were the days when it seemed that Len couldn’t go wrong. Money for jam, money for old rope. He worked hard enough, and so did Maureen, but they were still surprised by their good luck. It’s a joke, isn’t it, Len would say, as deal succeeded deal. And it was. That was why they got on so well: born from the same kind of background, motivated by the same wish to get on, they understood one another perfectly, and they agreed that their success was, really, a bit of a giggle. So they giggled together, over the oddities and pomposities of their elders, over the lack of nerve of their rivals, over the joke of finding themselves drinking large drinks in four-star hotels and driving a large car and bouncing about in a large soft bed. Maureen proved so good at business, so quick off the mark, that at one point Len suggested making her a partner, but she declined: it’s more fun pretending to be a secretary, she said, and he agreed. For the truth was that both of them found the idea of the boss-secretary relationship extremely stimulating, and variations on the theme afforded them much innocent amusement, during the prosperous late sixties and early seventies.
Maureen stared at the clippings of her toenails, neatly piled up on the Daily Mail. If Len had made her a partner, maybe she would have been in jail herself by now, instead of sitting here bored and irritable. As it was, there had been some talk of charging her with collusion, but luckily she’d been able to appear as simple secretary, a mere slave to orders. And, in fact, she hadn’t known much about Len’s last suicidal financial panics and misdealings until it was too late, because he’d been too embarrassed to let her in on them. So she hadn’t really been party to the fraud at all, only to the aftermath of it. She’d been able to appear in the witness box, looking very honest, in defense of Len’s character. She’s a good little actress, Len’s counsel had thought, watching her performance, but Maureen was not acting: she believed in Len, she was on Len’s side, against all the old buffers who had tried to trap him simply because they couldn’t make as much money as him.
Now she was beginning to wonder about herself and Len. After all, she thought, things have come to a sorry state, when a girl like me daren’t go and see an ordinary dentist. We were corrupted, Len and me. We lost our sense of reality. All that fine living. It’s true, it’s like a train, once you get on it and it starts moving, you can’t get off. You can’t go back. You can’t undo what you’ve done to yourself. Once you’ve started wanting more, you’ve got to go on, you can’t stop and you can’t go back.
Although Maureen had, in fact, been forced to go back. Not as far as the house in Attercliffe, but into this tiny flat, little better than a bed-sit really, with its two-ring electric cooker and its wheezy gas fire. The flat she’d lived in with Len had had the lot: de luxe washing machine, dishwasher, six-ring automatically timed cooker, deep freeze, lights that dimmed on a knob rather than blinked crudely off and on with a switch, underfloor central heating, two bathrooms, shower, remote control color television. The lot. And here she was, back with a little portable black-and-white set that she couldn’t even be bothered to watch.
Still, it could have been worse. At least I’ve got myself a decent job, thought Maureen. She was working for an architect, the most respectable employer she’d ever had. Though he, too, had shown a slight tendency over the last week or two to brush against her in corridors.
She spared a thought for Stan. Stan had got himself into trouble, at last. He’d been had up for offering bribes to council employees: the whole story had been ridiculous, a farce, tales of nightclub outings and wild nights in hotels, of call girls and twenty-pound notes, of tax evasion and pornomovies. Most of those involved had been over sixty, call girls excepted.
Poor old Stan. Perhaps he was a bit of a crook after all, thought Maureen. Perhaps I’m a bit of a crook, and that’s why I end up working for people who end up in jail.
Outside, appropriately, a police siren wailed.
I wonder if Len will guess, if I sleep with my architect, thought Maureen.
Kitty Friedmann lay in her hospital bed. She was surrounded by flowers, enormous bouquets of many colors: her bedside table was heaped high with gifts, letters, telegrams, chocolates, candies, grapes.
She was thinking about her grandson, Jonathan. It wasn’t right, the way Daniel went on at that poor boy. Nag, nag, poor little lad. They’d popped in to see her after school, and very nice he had looked, in his little pink and gray cap and blazer, but all Daniel had done had been to nag at him and about him—“Don’t touch this, Jonathan, no you can’t have that, Jonathan, don’t bang on Grandma’s bed, Jonathan,”—and when she’d tried to change the subject by asking how he was getting on at school, all she’d had was a long lecture from Daniel about how he couldn’t keep up with the maths and was having to have special coaching for his Latin, and how he didn’t like rugger but would have to learn. The poor little lad hadn’t been allowed to open his mouth. She’d managed to slip a box of chocs into his pocket when his dad wasn’t looking, but maybe that wasn’t the right thing to do, he was a bit plump, still, it wasn’t fair to keep on at a child like that, who cares if he isn’t a genius? Better have a word with Miriam. But then, Miriam herself was getting a bit odd these days, maybe she’d better keep her big mouth shut, never interfere between husband and wife. That hat she’d come round in, she must have picked it up at a jumble sale.
Perhaps Daniel had money worries. But how could he have, now poor Max was dead? Of course, times were hard, everyone’s business was in a bad way, and Daniel was not the greatest businessman in the world, she suspected—but still, Max must have left enough. Come his way long before he could have expected it. Max had always insisted on fair shares: however they’re doing, leave them all equal, then there’ll be no fighting after I’ve gone, that had been Max’s motto.
Miriam was getting skinny. But Daniel and Jonathan were getting fat. She must ask Miriam’s sister Evie if there was anything the matter with Miriam.
No, she mustn’t. She must mind her own business.
She heaved, uncomfortably. She felt uncomfortable, her leg was strapped and she couldn’t move it, and her bottom both itched and ached. The nurses had said to ring if she felt poorly, but she didn’t like to disturb them, poor overworked girls.
I hope Rachel will come in, she said to herself. I must remember to ask Rachel to call round on Mrs. Boxer the cleaning lady, and make sure she gets paid properly for all the time I’m in here. And to bring me another clean nightie. I couldn’t half do with a bath.
She picked up the Evening Standard, which Daniel had brought round, and turned to her favorite bit, the Londoner’s Diary. Who was up to what? Albert Finney was going to appear in a new play by Christopher Hampton. She’d be out in time to get to that, she hoped; she liked Finney, though the language in some of these plays was shocking. She smiled to herself, remembering what Miriam’s sister-in-law Zelda had said when they took her to see Harry Secombe in that new musical. “I never thought he’d sink so low,” she’d said, with inimitable outrage.
What else? A sculptor had left three million pounds. Now that was a nice sum to make with your own two hands. She wondered how much Max had left: nobody’d been tactless enough to tell her yet. Max always called me an extravagant woman, but I wasn’t really: look, here’s a story about a man who bought a house for half a million pounds. I’d never have let Max do a thing like that, would I? And it was only in Hampstead, the house. Can’t have been up to much. An Arab. Arabs are buying up all the London property market, Daniel says. But that’s just Daniel. Why shouldn’t they spend their money? It’s theirs, isn’t it?
On another page of the Standard, there was an article about a baby who was suffering from a rare bone disease: his mother was appealing for a donor, for new bone marrow. Kitty Friedmann’s eyes filled with tears. Poor little lad. Poor woman. Beneath the article about the baby was a brief report of an old man who had been kicked to death and robbed of forty pence on Wimbledon Common. She read this too. S
he continued to cry. She had always had the greatest difficulty in believing in the existence of ill luck, let alone of ill will. One of the many survivors of a family that had fled the pogroms of Russia in the 1880s, she had always refused to contemplate the possibility of evil: she had utterly suppressed all knowledge of the wickedness of history, had spent all her conscious life in atonement, in cheerfulness, in redressing the balance, in proving that such terrors could never have taken place. The Second World War had tried but not defeated her. Occasionally, faint shadows of doubt reached her: how, in this day and age, could a child die, slowly, publicly, foredoomed, of an incurable disease, how could an old man be kicked to death? Still crying, she turned to the cookery column, which she always enjoyed. She was blowing her nose vigorously, and reminding herself to remember to remind Rachel to remind Mrs. Boxer to tell Mr. Harris not to deliver the usual fish next week, when a nurse entered, on a routine visit, and noticed Kitty Friedmann’s red eyes. “Feeling sorry for ourselves, are we?” she said, in pointless nurselike jargon. Kitty Friedmann smiled, guiltily, at the poor overworked underpaid bitch of a nurse.
Not everybody in Britain on that night in November was alone, incapacitated, or in jail. Nevertheless, over the country depression lay like fog, which was just about all that was missing to lower spirits even further, and there was even a little of that in East Anglia. All over the nation, families who had listened to the news looked at one another and said, “Goodness me,” or “Whatever next,” or “I give up,” or “Well, fuck that,” before embarking on an evening’s viewing of color television, or a large hot meal, or a trip to the pub, or a choral society evening. All over the country, people blamed other people for all the things that were going wrong—the trades unions, the present government, the miners, the car workers, the seamen, the Arabs, the Irish, their own husbands, their own wives, their own idle good-for-nothing offspring, comprehensive education. Nobody knew whose fault it really was, but most people managed to complain fairly forcefully about somebody: only a few were stunned into honorable silence. Those who had been complaining for the last twenty years about the negligible rise in the cost of living did not, of course, have the grace to wish that they had saved their breath to cool their porridge, because once a complainer always a complainer, so those who had complained most when there was nothing to complain about were having a really wonderful time now.
Expansionist plans were, it is true, here and there being checked: for a second holiday, a three-piece living room set, a new car. But very few people were having to work out how to do without what they already had, though they were puzzled by the way their hard-fought wage increases had got them nowhere at all. The old headline phrases of freeze and squeeze had for the first time become for everyone, not merely for the old and unemployed, a living image, a reality: millions who had groaned over them in steadily increasing prosperity were now obliged to think again. A huge icy fist, with large cold fingers, was squeezing and chilling the people of Britain, that great and puissant nation, slowing down their blood, locking them into immobility, fixing them in a solid stasis, like fish in a frozen river: there they all were in their large houses and their small houses, with their first mortgages and second mortgages, in their rented flats and council flats and basement bed-sits and their caravans: stuck, congealed, among possessions, in attitudes, in achievements they had hoped next month to shed, and with which they were now condemned to live. The flow had ceased to flow; the ball had stopped rolling; the game of musical chairs was over. Rien ne va plus, the croupier had shouted.
Some, who had thought they understood, were more bewildered than others. An economist who had just received a salary increase of £2,000 in expectation of next year’s inflation pondered the problem of growth over a supper of macaroni cheese. He was one of those who had tried to work out an antigrowth policy. He had signally failed to communicate his enthusiasm for this concept to others, and, indeed, recognizing his sigh of relief at the salary increase, to himself. Man needs a prospect of increase. Only static, stagnant, hopeless communities can live without it. The poor must get rich, the rich must get richer. He prodded his static macaroni cheese, a satisfying but fattening dish in pleasant tones of cream, yellow, and brown, in pleasantly graded, smooth, affiliated, doughy textures: one of the favorite dishes of his childhood, as of his manhood. His real tastes had changed little with the years. Why then the elation at an extra £2,000 a year when he of all people knew how little that could mean?
There were, of course, a few perverse souls who enjoyed the prospect of a little austerity. They had been happiest during the war, and had returned to a life of cheese-rind-paring and carrot-growing with alacrity. To them, affluence had always been an unreal delusion: there was nothing in it against which one could pit one’s wits. And now once more, with a sense of virtue, they could go around switching off heat and lowering the power of electric light bulbs, bathing in water three inches deep, using up old crusts, and thinning sauces in the bottoms of old bottles with vinegar. Some of them even wanted to reintroduce rationing and were disappointed when first sugar, then petrol, then salt, then lavatory rolls dropped off the economic hook. According to their enemies, their philosophy was: it is wrong to enjoy oneself, it is right to sit in the cold by a candle end. But they, in fact, enjoyed sitting by a candle end.
This generation had produced another minority group, their spiritual and often their physical offspring: the war babies. They had accepted recession with a balanced cheerfulness, for they had always been astonished at their own purchasing power each time they bought a pound of bananas or a small pot of double cream. Hearing the gusts of anguish that shook the country, they shook their heads in mild amusement. Early childhood had solved for these lucky few the economic problem of growth: they would never be able to regard growth, or indeed survival, as anything other than an astonishing blessing.
Others enjoyed the crisis for more indirect reasons. Odd new groups of the far left hoped that each rise in the bank rate and each strike in a car factory heralded the final collapse of capitalism. Sociologists expressed approval of the rate of social change, the radicalizing influence of increasing confrontations of worker and management. Out of this, some sincerely believed, would rise a new order, of selfless, social, greedless beings. So they applauded disruptive strikes for more pay and illogically snapped crossly at their children when their children told them that, yes, it really did cost 15 pence to get to the football match on the bus, and, yes, that really did make 30 pence there and back, and, yes, there were three of them, and yes, 3 times 30 was 90, and could they also have at least 50 pence each for a hamburger and 20 pence each for a Coke?
There were also the real poor: the old, the unemployed, the undesirable immigrants. They were better off than they would have been in the thirties, for Britain is, after all, a welfare state, and not many slip through its net. Let us not think of them. Their rewards will be in heaven.
Finally, there was the small communion of saints, who truly hoped that from this crisis would come a better sharing among the nations of the earth; who truly in their hearts applauded the rise in price of raw materials from the poorer countries of the earth; who thought of the poor, and of themselves rarely, and included themselves among the rich—which most of them, by Western European standards, were not. They tried now to repress their horror and their satisfaction at the unedifying spectacle of the death-throes of greed in their own so-privileged nation. Among these, one might record an elderly Quaker in Keighley who sent every spare penny of her small income to a school in Africa where she had once worked; a one-time Member of Parliament who had lost his job through lack of charisma and was prepared to spend the rest of his life working, ill-paid, for the Child Poverty Action group; a bishop who had taken in his youth a vow of poverty and celibacy, in fear of his own too great charisma, and who prayed nightly for the country of his birth, where most people were so much richer than he, where the needs of others, compared to his own, seemed to be so great.
> There are not many people like the bishop, the ex-M.P., and the elderly Quaker. It is just as well that there are not more. Self-sacrifice is all very well, in the eyes of God, but where would the country be without self-interest? Two and a half centuries ago the poet Pope expressed the optimistic view, which maybe he believed, that God ordained self-love and love of society should be the same. But which self, which society? The population of Britain then was only five and a half million: now it is sixty million.
Pity the bishop, on his knees on the cold linoleum. His love is strained, dilute, insufficient. Could even God’s love suffice this multitude?
It must be said that even the bishop cannot find it in his heart to regret that Britain has struck oil.
This is the state of the nation.
By half past eight, on this same long November evening, Anthony Keating had finished his sausages, idled away half an hour with a cup of coffee, switched the radio on and off several times, and done some thinking. He had thought about the nature of property, and why it was that some people considered the owning of property particularly wicked: why was it more wicked to own a strip of land with a house on it than to own a sausage, a bicycle, a secondhand fur coat, or a color television set? Then he wondered why it was that the British, unlike some other nations, had traditionally considered it a good thing to own one’s own house and one’s own little garden. Then he wondered how much space there would be left if everybody did in fact own a little house and a little garden. Then he tried to imagine a situation in which there might be free housing, as there is free education and free medicine, and, in some districts, free contraception. And failed.
The Ice Age Page 7
