Hilary Bailey
As Time Goes By
For Tim Owens
Contents
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
A Note on the Author
Part I
The garden squares of this particular area of West London are unique. Here, as in no other part of a city full of green spaces, the houses back directly on to the squares. Residents can walk straight out and find in front of them several acres of tended garden, with trees, bushes, lawns, flowers, sometimes even a tennis court or two. In the larger gardens you could pasture a herd of cows (as, no doubt, people did until the town came out from Marble Arch a hundred and fifty years ago); you could grow enough potatoes to feed a large family for a year, stage a Live Aid concert, build high-rise flats for thousands. The only reason such squares exist is that when the Victorian speculators came to build their solid Victorian houses, with plenty of room for large families and their servants, they found the land too boggy and unstable for intensive building. Thus, they set the streets far apart, across the squares.
The whole neighbourhood is in fact in a valley. The houses are built over a network of small rivers and streams. One householder, digging the foundations for a tasteful conservatory, struck water but hastily covered over his incipient well in case of possible interventions by the Council’s Planning Department, the local Preservation Society or even some lively local entrepreneur who might want him to turn his house into a spa – an unthinkable idea, for law, commerce, politics and film-directing, not trade, are practised by the residents away from the garden squares. Twenty years ago many of the houses were slums. Now they have been restored to what they once were – Victorian family homes which men leave in the morning and return to gratefully at night, knowing that they will find their wives appreciating art, their little girls on the lawns in rather long frocks and white socks and their little boys waiting to play cricket with them.
At one particular time of year the particular garden we are concerned with looks particularly beautiful. The trees are green and red and gold, also brown. The grass has that patchy, but still green look of lawns which are chilled at night but struggle on gamely during the day, when it is still warm. Late roses bloom, the air is gold. At dawn a chill mist, a foot high, on the grass disperses when the day grows hot and the sky blue. And everything is to be appreciated more because, after all, these are the last days of summer – winter’s on the way, with its dim days, grey, late mornings and long, dark evenings; evenings which favour and give more character to the dark streets outside the railings of the square, where the muggers do overtime and chilly people throw down more chip-papers, polystyrene hamburger containers and empty crisp-bags; the evenings of the invisible dog-turd on the pavement, the invisible group of alcoholics in their favoured corners under the motorway further up.
As winter comes on and the street takes over, residents of the garden squares withdraw into well-lit and well-heated houses, turn on the patio lights and burglar alarms against the robbers, rapists, drunken hooligans and other malefactors now ready to come sneaking over the railings or through gaps between the houses left unprotected by the building workers always labouring on these increasingly valuable bits of property. Now they can come in dark clothing, even balaclavas, creeping over the dark lawns, hiding in the darkness of the bushes bringing the wicked streets of inner London into the enclave. With the sunshine gone, the paddling pools and garden furniture hauled inside, the garden darkening, as in a theatre, the scene has changed.
So, during these last days of summer, first of autumn, small children collect conkers in the mornings after windy nights. After supper groups still sit in the beautiful resigned light of the evenings but the garden, like its own plants and trees, is conserving, drawing into itself, resting.
Joe Coverdale’s first glimpse of Mrs Polly Kops, owner of number 1, Elgin Crescent, was not encouraging but then he, while glimpsing, did not look very dignified himself. Making his way after many years to the front door of the legendary number 1 which backed, as a house agent would say, and later did, on to the well-maintained communal gardens described above, he saw, because his eyes were dropped, scanning the pavements for dog-turds and bits of paper, movements in the basement of the house. Not a man to reject the opportunity to sum up a situation quickly, he bent his knees by the railings in an effort to see what was happening inside.
In the long kitchen, which let out, at the other end, into the garden, stood Mrs Polly Kops in a jersey and corduroy trousers, slightly stooped over the table in the window near the street, on which still stood the remains of a Sunday lunch – vegetable dishes, abandoned plates and knives and forks, a big bone on a plate. Joe saw that Polly Kops was not just standing at the table, she was obstinately dipping the paw of a small black and white kitten into what looked like a gravy jug. As the kitten struggled she held it on the table and tried to persuade it to lick its gravied little paw. As the kitten refused and continued to wriggle and try to escape, she attempted to force its paw into the gravy jug again. Appalled and agitated, though not just about the cat, Joe Coverdale remained stooping at the railings. Was it cruelty to animals or attempted kindness? Was Polly Kops really trying to teach a kitten to drink gravy from its paw while standing on a table, drink it from a vessel used by human beings, standing on a table used by human beings for their meals? What was going on at once-fabulous, legendary number 1 Elgin Crescent? Joe was upset. He had a dream, a plan for the future and Polly Kops was part of it. Her appearance and the scene in general carried no assurance the dream could ever come true. She had some grey hair, tired lines on her face, an old sweater and trousers without any style except that of a woman going about some heavy duties, whether feeding chickens or clearing out cupboards. The dream was of glamour, even sex, since Joe Coverdale had once slept with Polly Kops, years before. Meanwhile Polly gave up on the kitten, which sprang from the table with the velocity of a ping-pong ball.
Joe straightened up and took his six feet of fading handsome blondness along the pavement, mounting the steps of the house and trying the bell. After he had done so he read the postcard secured under the bell by some peeling-off sellotape. Pam and Sue Kops, 2 rings, Margaret Turnbull Goldstein 3 rings and underneath, an intrusive hand had written, Clancy Goldstein, 1 ring. Underneath this in magic marker someone had written ‘Pam and Sue – where are ya? J.’ Joe flinched. Clancy Goldstein might be living here – even answer the door, but it was too late now to turn back, with the sound of feet in the hall inside the door. He clung to the idea there still might be something to be done or got inside.
It had been about fifteen years since an Aeschylean mingling of family relationships and sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll had produced the terrible family tragedy of the Turnbulls on this very spot. Polly and her two cousins, one being the very Clancy who had written himself in on the doorbell, had somehow been responsible for killing Polly’s father, the uncle of the other two. Clancy, meanwhile, had turned out to be the father of two of Polly’s children while her husband, father of the twins, Pam and Sue, had, not unnaturally, left the scene. Then there’d been some vast inheritance, purloined by cousin Clancy. These sordid and melodramatic events, involving sudden deaths, illegitimacies and imprisonments, had all taken place some years before Joe Coverdale and his previous family had moved into the neighbourhood but they were widely and impressionistically discussed by the neighbours, and, though the details were complicated and confusing, the consensus was that although much too much had come out at the time, even more of this unsavoury business had been suppressed. The consensus further ran that, in ranking order, Clancy had behaved worst, Polly only a little less badly and that the conduct even of the betrayed husband Alexander Kops had been not
hing much to write home about. So, pondered Joe on the doorstep, Clancy, having run off with the family fortune, appeared to have returned, though not bringing much of the fortune back with him, if the condition of the building was anything to go by. The once-white front door was grubby and the paint was cracked. Along the bottom and halfway up there were black marks where, evidently, people had kicked it impatiently while waiting to be let in. The run-down condition of the building was more noticeable in contrast to the chic, pastel painted, parking-bayed, flowering-cherried atmosphere of the rest of the street.
Polly, in the doorway, said numbly, ‘Oh, Joe.’ He had taken her from the despairing ennui of a timeless wet Sunday afternoon in autumn, when sufferers imagine they can feel no worse, into the moment when an unwelcome arrival suddenly makes them realise they can feel a lot worse and probably will.
‘I was in the area, having lunch with your near-neighbours, the Greenwells, actually, so I thought I’d drop in and say hullo,’ declared Joe and, having presented credentials he thought passable, now stepped into the hall, The hall, the hall, the deplorable hall. There were sleeping bags, one rolled, one unrolled, on the floor. It had been used as an auxiliary bedroom for friends of the children who had sneaked into the house late at night. ‘It’s all right. They only slept in the hall because it was too late to go home.’ The coat rack groaned with anoraks, coats and hats, left behind by others or too small for the residents, or dragged groaning out of cupboards they had been stuffed into years ago, on the grounds they would ‘do’. Underneath lay trails of trainers, wellingtons, shoes, boots in profusion and bad condition.
Elsewhere were plastic bags containing books, swimming and sports kits, and items overdue for the cleaners. The once-expensive gilt and black embossed wallpaper was scuffed and marked. There was a huge brown damp patch on the ceiling and walls in one corner. Someone had written ‘Pam is a punk’ in black felt pen across a photograph of Geronimo. A poster for a gig at Acklam Hall hung crookedly beside the coats. It also seemed that someone might have thrown a pot of tea or coffee at the wall from the top of the stairs which led upwards to the first floor (they had). At the end of the hall stood the skeleton of a pram, lacking the carrycot which was meant to go on top. Instead, a guitar lay across the top of the frame.
Polly, walking ahead of Joe Coverdale through all this evidence, said wearily, ‘Come upstairs.’ Joe walked after her, beginning to feel tired himself. He had hoped for some glamour or, failing that, something seemly and important he could tell others, like an interesting fatal illness, a major scholarship to Oxbridge, a fascinating career change or a legacy. Instead everything spoke of chaos and decline. Upstairs, light flooded into the room through huge windows. On a sagging sofa lay a large baby, or small child, asleep with the empty carrycot beside him and a big panda on top. By the window stood a blue armchair surrounded by bits of paper with writing on them. In front of the chair were a television and a video.
‘Drink, Joe?’ suggested Polly. ‘There’s only whisky.’
Joe shook his head. ‘Drank quite a lot at lunch,’ he told her. ‘I was rather hoping for a cup of tea.’
‘All right,’ she said. ‘Don’t bang about and wake the baby.’ When she had gone Joe stood contemplating the child. Obviously it couldn’t be Polly and Clancy’s. But what was she doing, Polly, having yet another child? And who was the father this time? She must be forty-five if a day. No wonder she was teaching the cat to suck gravy from its paw. No wonder the mantelpiece was covered in bills. He walked over and read a page on the arm of the blue chair. There was one line on it, in black handwriting. It read: ‘Everybody’s got problems in Casablanca’. For Joe, it all added up. She had had a fifth child by God knew whom, the provenance of this one being even more doubtful than that of the other four. Then she’d gone mad, then she’d gone broke. Back at the blue chair he read from a page on the floor, ‘with the whole world crumbling we pick this time to fall in love’. Then, Joe added to himself, Polly’d evidently decided to bale herself out by writing a Mills and Boon novel. Oh dear, oh dear, he thought, reading another page, under the first, ‘Believe that I love you. Go, my darling –’ Unless the child belonged to one of her daughters, he speculated – an early mistake, an early disaster in fact. Oh dear, oh dear. Joe decided to drink his tea and clear out quickly afterwards. But the step on the stairs he thought was Polly with the tea, proved to be a thin man in jeans and a Bob Marley T-shirt. His red hair, faded like Polly’s, gave Joe the idea this was the dreaded Clancy Goldstein. He froze by the chair. Clancy was too old to be wearing a Bob Marley T-shirt and he looked rough, obviously felt it and was still wearily calculating the degree of roughness he was feeling and how far he could push it on before it became dangerous or even terminal.
‘Oh well,’ he said, advancing on the bottle of whisky, ‘what else is there to do on a wet Sunday afternoon?’ He poured a tot of whisky into a glass. ‘Or a fine bright Monday morning in April for that matter?’ he said as if to himself. ‘Seen Polly?’ he asked the visitor.
‘She went downstairs to make some tea,’ Joe said. ‘I’m Joe Coverdale, a former neighbour, hoping to become a neighbour again. Just looked in to say hullo.’
‘I think I’ve heard of you,’ said Clancy Goldstein, unpleasantly, drinking. His small wave of aggression passed. He flopped down on the other sofa, opposite the baby, and stretched thin legs and feet in battered trainers out on the upholstery. Joe, having nowhere to sit but in the blue chair, remained standing with his feet in all the papers.
‘Aah,’ said Clancy, on a long-drawn-out note of satisfaction. ‘It makes you think, though, doesn’t it?’
‘What does?’ asked Joe after a pause.
‘All of it,’ said Clancy, fixing his eyeballs, so torn by thirty years of long nights, jaded dawns, and crisis-filled days that it seemed they might never look at anything normally again, ‘All of it, mate.’ Outside the rain came down steadily on the quiet autumn trees. In an effort to deal with the animal in Clancy which, Joe knew, might be on the verge of an act of aggression, he said only, ‘That’s right.’ As Clancy lay there silently he then ventured, ‘Polly seems to be writing a book. Am I right?’
‘Very right,’ agreed Clancy energetically. ‘Very, very right indeed.’ He lapsed again and then said, in a dreamy, menacing voice, ‘What’s a poor woman to do? By Polly Kops née Turnbull née Goldstein. That’s the problem. We know what the book’s called, but what’s the name of the author? What will she call herself? Molly Bloom?’ he said. ‘Yes. Yes. Yes. Molly Bloom.’ His face sagged and his voice trailed away. Polly came into the room with a tray containing a teapot, milk in a jug and two mugs. She stared blankly at Clancy, on the sofa. ‘I thought you were out,’ she said.
‘I’m in now,’ he said. ‘I won’t have any tea, thank you very much.’
‘Could you move your feet so that Joe can sit down?’ she asked. ‘Oh,’ said Clancy, springing to his feet and standing pitched slightly forward, ‘Oh – forgive me. I’m so sorry. Am I taking up too much room? Shall I rearrange the furniture while I’m at it? Let Joe sit with the light on his good side? Or, better still, shall I leave? That’s a good idea. I’ll leave. Then Joe can do what he wants – have a bath, Joe? Splash in some Badedas. Help yourself to the aftershave. Don’t mind me, I only live here. Stick a few things in the washing machine while you’re at it. No – on second thoughts I don’t recommend it. My advice is, don’t do it. Otherwise she’ll make your smalls so very small, not to mention pink, you’ll never be the same man again. Next thing, darling, you’re singing Bellini.’
He began to sing an aria in a high-pitched voice. Polly said, ‘I think I ought to go upstairs and have a rest,’ but since both men had been her lovers, neither took any notice.
‘Why don’t we take the tea down to the kitchen, out of the way,’ suggested Joe.
‘All right,’ said Polly glumly.
As Joe picked up the tray Clancy began to laugh, got up and poured himself another drink.
&
nbsp; ‘He’s a bit upset,’ Polly said on the stairs. She did not say why.
In the kitchen Joe sat down at the kitchen table and said, ‘This is nice. Like the old days. If these kitchen walls could only speak –’
‘What old days?’ asked Polly.
‘You don’t remember?’ said Joe somewhat archly.
‘No,’ said Polly.
‘Well –’ said Joe. ‘And did you hear – I got married?’
‘No,’ said Polly. She added, ‘Quite honestly, I can’t sit here chatting about all this. The way you treated Katie Mulvaney was disgusting. She loved you, you said you loved her and then you let her down. She was very upset. Very upset indeed. Now you’re here and I don’t know why –’
‘Come on, Polly,’ said Joe. ‘It was impossible. She had three children – how could we have managed? I couldn’t have stood that household for five minutes. And Kate and I are very different people – it wouldn’t have worked out.’
His dialogue was so convincing she believed it. She thought of Kate, her friend, getting paler and thinner, unable to deal with Joe’s duplicities. He had told half the truth. She told the other half. ‘You acted in bad faith,’ she said. ‘You couldn’t even tell her. You kept on having affairs and letting her suspect, or find out. You fed your ego on her.’
‘I couldn’t tell her what I didn’t know myself,’ he responded. ‘I didn’t know what I was doing. She had the choice. She could have done something about it.’
‘What?’
‘Well – what women do – threatened me, or made me take her on holiday – given me an ultimatum –’
‘She didn’t know anything about all that,’ Polly declared. ‘I suppose she thought you were over nine years old. You wouldn’t go cramming down cakes to make you sick until she dragged you away from the table –’
As Time Goes By Page 1