Now she had reached the streets where the Council put in Victorian lights, pollarded the trees and generally made graceful gestures to owner-occupiers. She’d nothing to complain about. Two neighbours, as well as Joe Coverdale, had mentioned that her house would be ideal for friends in Chicago or a cousin in Gloucester. She sensed they were afraid she might sell out to a speculator, who would turn the place into flats, or to a sinister man in the arms trade, or to some latter-day Sex Pistol. Naturally they wanted to keep up a full complement of families headed by film distributors, the chairmen of public boards, bankers and other like-minded persons with children and au pairs. The place was a laager, now, and you had to feel confident about the family in the next wagon.
Polly simply intended to sell to the highest bidder. She entered her threatened home, picking a number of bills of the redder than red kind from the mat, her head as usual flooded with the logistics of the move. The girls were on courses in central London – tricky to move too far out since, for one thing, they might take to never coming home. Val, Rufus’s mother, lived on the nearby Thackeray estate, another reason for not going too far; Clancy would probably leave if put down in some leafy avenue in Greenford; and, for herself, she had to stay near the business. Perhaps you couldn’t call a Saturday junk stall in the market a business, but, after all, it was the only business she had. As to Clancy’s departure down the leafy avenue, she thought, hearing him thud down to the landing at the top of the stairs, glancing up and seeing him standing there, looking menacing – well, perhaps that departure would be no bad thing. There’d been more of the secret phone calls. Was he just organising a deal she wasn’t supposed to know about in case she asked for money? Was it a woman? She was sure he wasn’t planning a surprise party for her, anyway. When she found out what it was about, she wouldn’t like it. It was all a far cry from the old days – the love affair, the resumed love affair ten years later, each of which events, she reflected, had left her with a child to support. Swaying on the landing Clancy demanded, ‘What happened to my Belize T-shirt?’
‘What?’ she said.
‘It’s pink,’ he said.
‘What happened to that cheque for three hundred pounds you were supposed to sign over to me?’ she responded. ‘Look at these – this one’s a final, final from the electricity. If I don’t take the money there in cash in twenty-four hours we’ll be singing round the piano by candle-light tomorrow evening. I’m not joking, Clancy.’
She sat down on the bottom step of the stairs with her back to him. For all she knew he would hurl himself down at her and kick her in the back, but she didn’t care. The house being full of young people, why should Clancy not think he could be another teenager? A more unpleasant one, admittedly. But by all the tokens he was closer to being a child. He played the guitar. He enjoyed messing about with computers. He enjoyed ping-pong, space invaders and, as long as he emerged as the best player, football. At twenty, even thirty, few people would have condemned this lively, mischievous, gifted child for his mistakes. He was promising. Now he was older, lines had appeared on his face, grimmer times had come and the promise had never been kept. And as Clancy had less fun his resentment grew and his charm faded. He was becoming bitter, and it didn’t suit him.
Ignoring the question about money he fluttered the pink T-shirt about. ‘But what happened to this T-shirt?’
‘You’re wearing a suit!’ she exclaimed. ‘It’s new!’
She looked at him with a horror she couldn’t explain to herself. It was grey, fairly expensive, she’d never seen it before. He wore a blue striped shirt and a tie the same colour as the suit. She peered up. His black slip-on shoes looked new, too. She was so frightened she got up and went downstairs into the kitchen.
Pam was in there. She opened the fridge door, closed it, then opened it and looked inside again, as if it might have filled magically with pizzas. Clancy came in with the T-shirt and shouted, ‘What are you planning to do about this?’
Polly said, ‘If you can buy yourself a complete new set of clothes you can buy yourself a new T-shirt. How can you do that – with all these bills to pay?’ She began to chop onions. ‘I don’t believe it,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe it.’
‘It’d be madness to start pouring money into this place,’ Clancy said. ‘You could go on for ever, like throwing money down the drain. Before I’d been here five minutes I was replacing the immersion heater, then this, then that, then the other.’
Sue came in, saying, ‘The LEB went down All Saints Road to turn off the power and they had to have two police vans to protect them. They thought there’d be a riot.’
‘Well, they won’t have any trouble here,’ Polly said. She stopped chopping the onions, ran upstairs, got an envelope from her bag in the hall, wrote a cheque and stamped the envelope. She carried envelopes and stamps in her bag all the time, and had become an expert in leaving the bills until the last possible moment, and knowing how long the cheques would take to bounce. She went quickly to the pillar box and posted the gas bill. She came back and went on chopping the onions. Clancy was still in the kitchen.
‘I’d better finish that script before the snooty purchasers start tramping round the house,’ she said, half to herself. ‘They’ll pay something when I’ve finished. It’ll help with the removal.’
‘What removal?’ asked Clancy.
‘I’ve got to sell the house,’ she said. ‘That means moving.’ She had said this often before.
‘You could do with somewhere smaller, in better condition,’ Clancy said as if it were a new theme. ‘Leave a bit of money over.’
‘You must be joking,’ said Polly. ‘Not with Alexander claiming a percentage.’
‘Tell him to get stuffed,’ Clancy said.
‘Get stuffed yourself,’ muttered Polly.
‘Don’t you fucking talk to me like that,’ Clancy said viciously. ‘You keep a civil tongue in your head.’
Hands on hips she faced him. ‘I don’t have to do anything, Clancy,’ she said. She knew he might hit her but didn’t care. He turned round to leave the room. There was a big thump from some way off.
‘I wonder if that’s a bomb,’ said Polly, counting up who was in and who was out. Had Val told her what she was doing this evening? Clancy went out of the room. Polly went on cutting onions. She put them in a pan.
‘I think I should go to another school,’ Margaret said, coming in with some books under her arm.
‘They’re usually on strike,’ Mrs Kops said.
‘That’s the point,’ Margaret said. ‘Can I go to another school?’
‘If you can think of anywhere, let me know,’ Polly said, throwing mince in with the onions, hardly knowing what she was doing. Clancy was artfully avoiding a full confrontation, even though he couldn’t bring himself to be normal. He was also turning a blind eye to any domestic problems. She wondered if he had damaged his brain with drugs or was just plain selfish. She almost wished she had been blown up herself but went on cooking supper without noticing her teeth were clenched.
I felt the gap between us widening; there seemed to be nothing I could do to close it. It was like a nightmare, where you fall and fall, scratch and scrabble to haul yourself up again. But you can’t. I tried harder in the ways you do – I joined a club and spent two lunchtimes a week exercising. I worked on my appearance and bought disastrously expensive sweaters and skirts, shoes and stockings. I abolished the rota system where we cooked supper on alternate evenings and instead did it myself every night. I scamped the students’ essays and the work on my lectures because I didn’t care. What was the point of a successful career if, in some way, it was affecting my home life? I did everything a woman can do to restore peace and harmony in her home, regain the love of her husband. Was there another woman? How could there have been? Geoffrey’s life was exactly as before and in any case women know these things even before they happen. Meanwhile I refused to extend my hours at the Simpson and hoped that the refusal would mean that they wouldn’
t offer me the full lectureship which was going to be available shortly. I didn’t want to have to make a decision about promotion and extra duties while things were so uncertain. I needed all my time to concentrate on Geoffrey while pretending not to. Christmas was all-important to me now – that would be when I could reclaim my husband from wherever he had gone.
Polly Kops had accidentally turned the video of Casablanca over to the one o’clock news while reaching for a pen and found herself watching men struggling and cars on fire in Belfast. Outside, a November drizzle came down over the trees. She wondered why Ingrid hadn’t sent a more effective message to Bogart at the railway station when her husband had suddenly turned up.
‘Richard. I cannot go with you or ever see you again. You must not ask why. Just believe that I love you. Go, my darling, and God bless you.’
Surely she could have made it a little bit plainer? What stopped her from going to the station and whispering the story in his ear? This lack of common sense had caused a lot of trouble and the making of a film Polly now heartily wished she’d never heard of. Well, those were the days when women were expected to be a bit dim-witted. But then Ingrid was a little bit too fast at covering the fact that she’d known Rick before they met in the American café Casablanca. ‘Who’s Rick?’ she says, quick as a flash, pretending to her husband she’s never known Rick. Too experienced, Polly thought, but then she was married to a Czech with a Hungarian surname, so who knew who was up to what?
Then there was Rick, who couldn’t go back to the USA for reasons never properly explained, and then proposed to go anyway – they seemed a fishy sort of trio, Polly thought, and she ought to know.
Then there was the fact that Bergman was obviously a lot tougher than she was pretending to be. She was working with the Resistance – she’d been on the run. Polly decided to rewrite the whole thing. Bogart, Ingrid and her patriot husband would all go off arm-in-arm to fight the foe. To preserve the romance one of them would have to die. Honeycutt mightn’t like it, but he’d have to put up with it. And in the meantime she numbly watched a real African dying on TV while revolving bills, the latest letter from Alexander’s solicitors and Rufus’s cough through her brain. Rearranging the simple affairs of the denizens of Casablanca was no problem at all.
Polly had been up since six sorting out her goods for the Saturday stall, then gone round to collect a couple of pictures from a woman in Peckham who’d heard of her from a friend. The washing machine had then broken down; she’d had to take the money for the electricity bill before last to the office in cash; she’d been watching Casablanca on the video for an hour-and-a-half and all she’d had to eat was a cup of tea and a bun. Someone would have to go to the laundrette before nightfall, and it would probably be her. She planned a nap to sustain her and got instead Joe Coverdale, let in, presumably, by Margaret who was watching TV in the basement, having been sent home from school at 10.30.
‘Joe,’ she said. ‘Haven’t you got a phone?’
‘I have – yours is temporarily disconnected.’
‘They must’ve caught up with me,’ said Polly. ‘Still, you’d better leave. Clancy’s in a rotten mood and I’m busy.’
‘Just came round to tell you we’ve been successful – just exchanged contracts on number 22.’
‘Pity I’m moving so soon,’ Polly said. ‘Joe – I wish you’d clear off. I told you I never liked what you did to Kate. I mean – you’re all right. You wisely married money when it became unsafe to be poor. You’ve made the right move at the right time and we all see the point. And if it’s a bit boring – well, there’s a price for everything. You may feel the blood’s travelling a bit slowly round your body, and the light’s a bit dimmer these days, but at least you’re safe. Also you aren’t going around wrecking women’s lives for pleasure any more, which has to be a plus. You had a vice – women’s pain – just like heroin. Now you’re off it the world may never seem the same again, but that’s life as a reclaimed addict. Anyway, I can’t help you. You won’t meet Mick Jagger here. Pam and Sue won’t show you their garters –’
‘For God’s sake, Polly. You’re extremely nervous. You’re going over the top,’ he told her. Then, sympathetically, ‘Are things so very hard?’
‘Everybody in Casablanca has problems,’ she said. ‘Joe – I’m worn out. Please leave. I’d ring the cops if I had a phone.’
‘Same old Polly,’ he said, standing up. ‘I hope things start improving for you soon.’ In the doorway he said, ‘I loved her very deeply, Kate, you know.’
Polly shouted ‘Clear off,’ weakly and tiredly threw her pad at him, but it fell short just as he left and hit the floor in a shower of loose pages. When these characters from staunch and incorruptible parts of the country like Yorkshire went wrong they really went wrong. It was probably better to get inoculated with deception and ambiguity early than meet these items later on in life and go down with the full dose of self-corruption, petty ambition, ruthlessness and greed. She’d met Joe Coverdale first when he was an unhappy civil servant helplessly wrecking his own marriage. He was tougher now; his illusions had gone. Come to that, she’d known Clancy when he’d been a dedicated musician and Alexander when he’d been a hero of the revolution instead of a merchant banker.
Time had taken its toll of all of them. As for her, she’d never had anything to betray, like her Yorkshire principles, or music, or the revolution, which was one of the good things about being a woman of her generation. You weren’t expected to be a success, make a mark or stand up for the right. She’d just taken up various men and had children. Now she was like the British Empire, done for but still dealing with the consequences of the past; the men had gone with the money, the children remained. A relief, in a way, thought Polly, not to have to set yourself up as an icon for others to look at, then betray your own standards and justify it, or say you hadn’t. She felt quite cheered, and turned back to the script. The phone being off, Arnold couldn’t call her, worrying about her wrecking his credit with Honeycutt. She was back in the timeless world of war-torn Algeria. They were singing the Marseillaise in the bar, now. It was grand. It always was.
She went on scribbling for a bit, then went downstairs and sorted out a few more black plastic rubbish bags full of old suits, men’s shoes and lampshades, a collection of items which had not been improved by being first squashed under four dining-room chairs, and then neglected for five weeks. The small pile of good items – a rug, an art nouveau lamp and a Molyneux dress – in one corner, compared with the ten sacks of stuff, from false teeth to old saucepans, destined for the War on Want, was slightly discouraging. Nevertheless she had a call to make at Redcliffe Gardens that afternoon, later, and hoped, like someone panning for gold, that there she’d get a better proportion of yellow dust to dross.
Her system was quite simple. One week she took her van to a network of streets in almost any part of London where the houses were over a hundred years old. Then she delivered xeroxed leaflets at the houses stating that she would buy items, or take away discarded items free and would return in a week’s time. A week later she returned and rang doorbells and knocked on knockers. Half the people were out, the other half, mostly, had nothing for her. But some had items they wanted to sell, and to encourage them, she took items she didn’t want. She saw now that the whole world had always run on the basis of people wanting things they hadn’t got and trying to get rid of the ones they had. Meanwhile, she heard bits of people’s life stories and tried to refuse to buy false teeth. In this way, she got very tired and made a bit of a living. One or two things assisted her – she wasn’t obviously greedy, didn’t bully, didn’t get annoyed when she wasn’t handed priceless items by ignorant owners. Her biggest advantage was negative. She was no threat. Nearly everyone would trust a middle-aged woman on her own with an old van, let her into the house to look at things.
Upstairs, Clancy Goldstein was sitting by the phone on the top landing, waiting for a call he would never get, since the phone was off.
He was depressed and angry, dropping ash from a roll-up on the floor beside his chair and thinking, ‘I’ve got to get out of here.’
At the Simpson Institute Anna Lombard was packing her papers into a briefcase to take home and work on after she had put the casserole of pheasant in the oven. With efficient movements she ordered her pictures and notes and dropped the folders into her case, took the stairs down, in case she met Victoria Churchill-Smith in the lift and got held up by a long chat on strategies towards the crèche or some other campaign topic. As her heels clacked down the stairs she thought, I can’t deal with all that while I’ve got this crisis on my hands. She felt Geoffrey was wilfully drifting further and further away from her, letting the current take him until in the end he would not just be out of her reach but off on some lonely separate journey of his own. At the bottom of the stairs she dashed past Victoria, muttering that she was late, and got into the car, heading for Sainsbury’s. She had given up asking Geoffrey to help her with the shopping on Saturdays. Now, she did it by herself on Friday evenings, so that Geoffrey could relax over the weekend.
On Saturday morning Polly was standing by her stall, tired but content in the watery sunshine. By 9.30 that morning she had shifted half the haul picked up in Redcliffe Gardens, to other dealers. She had got more on the colour TV than she expected but was suffering from dealer’s angst in case the brass lamp, hardly dented, was worth more than the £50 she had let it go for. Meanwhile the large plastic bagful of 1950s clip-together beads, poppits, which had come from a very unsavoury bag of junk given to her by an old man, was selling like hot cakes to girls keen to look like Debbie Reynolds in her heyday. In addition she had a nice heap of embroidered satin cushions, made by a woman who had sold them to her at 7.30 that morning, also ten Hardy Amies hats, two brass clocks, a selection of old earrings which no one ever wanted, a crocodile handbag, three pairs of riding boots, three pairs of tiny kid boots, a set of encyclopaedias, a lamp with a pink silk shade and a few opera cloaks hanging on a rail beside the stall. Later that legendary market figure, the man from the production department of a TV company, came up and bought the tiny kid boots for a series about Victorian orphans. Next to her, the second-hand-book seller looked at her enviously. The Nigerian woman behind her, who was selling amber, congratulated her. By midday she had £300 in her pocket and sauntered off, leaving the stall in her daughters’ care.
As Time Goes By Page 4