Chalcot Crescent

by Fay Weldon

  When I jokingly said on the phone this morning that I expected a call from the bailiffs any minute, he came round at once. Barely had he arrived than the joke ceased to be a joke and came true. We were lunching on our National Meat Loaf and the last of the tomatoes from my window boxes, when came the banging on the door and the world turned serious.

  I did not of course write the previous section about life in Venetia’s lovely home exactly as you read it above. I admit I have worked on it. I have had the time to do so. I wrote it rather roughly on the stairs, in first draft, while my leg cramped and my neck twinged, so I was happy enough to stop and stretch when Amos finally came loping down the stairs with my blanket, preceded by a waft of skunk.

  Amos’ Genetic Inheritance

  Amos’ natural father, donor of the genes, was unknown – other than very briefly to his mother. It had been on my daughter Venetia’s first night at Camberwell Art School, at the Freshers’ ball, and the candlelight too flickery for recognition of who exactly was so pleasuring her, and when the tutors became involved whoever it was never came forward. It is not unusual for virgins to get pregnant on their first sexual encounter. Sheer surprise makes any waiting egg drop from the Fallopian tube, and bingo!

  Amos is Venetia’s eldest son and has over the years offered more problems than her other two boys, Ethan and Mervyn. But then the genes are different. Amos, brilliant at school, a good-looking charmer, a leader of men, worshipped by the two younger boys – and then suddenly a druggie drop-out at sixteen, and a professional drug dealer by twenty-two. ‘That’s what happens if boys don’t have a proper father,’ or so everyone said. I don’t think it made the slightest difference. He had Victor as a stepfather from the age of seven and a perfectly steady, even boring life, until he decided to hot it up via the drug trade. At twenty-three he was in prison – shopped by his associates for having got too big for his boots, muscling in where the big boys – serious boys, the ones who murdered and tortured – thought they had every right to be, shocked back into sense by the company he found himself obliged to keep. By twenty-four he had turned his life around. It is dreadful having a family member in prison: there is no more innocent enjoyment to be had – it is the family’s sentence as well as the child’s – but inside he at least learned – as Victor put it – to appreciate his family, and give up his ghastly friends.

  Since then Amos has come and gone in our lives, polite – other than for his propensity to swear, which seems ineradicable – self-supporting, affectionate, charming, but always slightly enigmatic: no fixed address that one knew of, but always contactable by email or mobile. An activist, an environmentalist, an aid worker, employed by various NGOs abroad – though one by one, as the Crunch bit and global markets vanished, these dropped off the map and left the failed countries of the world to struggle on their own. Which by all accounts they are doing quite satisfactorily – rather better without us than with us – though the accounts are unreliable as ever. Whether an eyewitness blog emanates from a genuine blogger or a government source who is to say?

  Amos had no fixed address by his own doing, by the way: it was no wish of mine. Indeed, I had bought a rather mean little house at 11 Hunter’s Alley in King’s Cross primarily for Amos, but where Ethan and Mervyn now live, in benign young-man squalor. Amos occasionally turns up and spends the night, just passing through. I gifted the house to the three of them formally five years back, which, as everyone agreed, was amazingly generous of me, and certainly rather rash, since my last book could not even find a publisher. But as I say, it took me some time to wind down my spending habits – I had my own personal credit crunch a couple of years before everyone else. The bank manager had ceased to be a person and become an interchangeable minx in a short skirt, called my ‘personal advisor’. And all she said was, ‘We cannot extend your loan. In fact we are calling in your overdraft.’

  The Hunter’s Alley house was cheap because I had a friend – I had met her when she was producing a forensic science drama, on which I was one of the writers, with whom I had been working on a forensic science TV series – who knew someone who dealt in repossessed houses. A recluse had been found dead inside No. 11 when the police came knocking on the door because of the smell: the body had lain undiscovered for six weeks and it was summer. The house was council property: they had cleaned it up and put it up for sale. I bought it. I had no scruples.

  Most houses have had someone die in them: it doesn’t stop new owners in the present enjoying the property of the departed. I surprise myself by how little I care. And I wonder if my karma is suffering because of that. Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby comes alarmingly to mind. Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies. Who was the other one? Ah yes. Mrs Bedonebyasyoudid. Which was the most terrible? The latter always turned up after Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby had gone by, and you had ignored her and were about to be punished. The Victorians were great on retribution. These days we focus on understanding and forgiving, though we are allowed the grief now compulsorily announced from the witness box by members of the victim’s family. And written, one suspects, by some mawkish policeman with a liking for the job. ‘Such a bubbly girl: everyone loved her: the grief is with us every day.’ ‘Our fine son with all his life in front of him taken from us on the eve of his A levels’ – or even the ones who say to their child’s rapist and murderer, ‘I am a Christian, I forgive him.’ What kind of morality is that?

  Why People Get Together

  Actually, I suspect, as I read through my account of Victor finding the money under Venetia’s mattress, that I am rather envious of Venetia and her ability to land on her feet and have her husband turn into one of the nomenklatura under her nose, at a time when that way survival lies. I have never been quite sure Victor was right for Venetia. She was an artist, and Victor was a scientist. The two do seem to like to get together, as do poets and scientists, the better to give each other a hard time. The scientists simply cannot understand why the poets and artists get more worldly attention and respect and headlines than they do. And the female poets and artists bow their head under the shame of it – that the scientists occupy the moral high ground, curing disease and helping mankind, and all the wives have to do is throw patterns of colours and words together and the world goes mad with delight. Yet still they insist on cleaving together. Nature, always seeking balance, chooses opposites to attain it. And the children turn out well, as the children of opposites so often do. The amiable and the morose, the competent and the incompetent.

  Both parties to a union subject the other to a usually unspoken vetting process. He’s got a car and a job and a high IQ but he’s black and my parents hate him, but my friends approve so I will: she’s got good legs but supposing she turns into her mother and she drinks too much, but she’s sexually kind and my friends like her so I will. What was Venetia thinking of when she made her decision? I have a dysfunctional family and a peculiar mother and I’m an artist so I’m an outsider, but he’s also an outsider, being Jewish, but he’s got a regular job and a stable personality and the respect of his peers and we can just be ordinary together and perhaps no-one will notice what outsiders we are? Heaven knows what goes on in the heads of one’s children.

  I have a friend who writes film and TV scripts and wins BAFTAs, but her husband was a paediatrician and too busy saving babies to join with her in glory, or even be there at the ceremonies.

  ‘I came home from a BAFTA do with an award,’ she once said to me, ‘and I longed to celebrate, leap in the air and kiss him and have sex. He was so handsome. Like a surgeon in a Mills and Boon novel. But he was just back from the hospital exhausted and the baby had died after a five-hour operation. It had weighed less than two pounds, such a little scrap, but they’d thought it had a hope. So we went to bed and slept on separate sides of it because he had another operation booked for the morning and had to be fresh.’

  They got a divorce, on the grounds of his infidelity. Presumably their timing had never been right. He’d be rejoicing about a
successful conjoined twins separation and she’d be mourning a damning review. She never remarried.

  ‘Men want the glamour of fame at first but soon get fed up with it,’ she said. ‘No way a man can put up with not being top dog. They can’t stand your success.’ She was twenty years younger than me, well indoctrinated in the feminist cause, and seeing gender rather than human nature as the root of all ills. She never mentioned the word love: she would have been ashamed. Humiliation, boredom, embarrassment, unfairness, lack of togetherness, no reciprocity, all words which came lightly to her lips, but never ‘love’. At least my children talk of it a lot.

  ‘I know Victor can seem a bit pompous to other people,’ Venetia will say, ‘but I love him.’

  And Polly, my other daughter, the feminist, will constantly reassure her children that she loves them. I assume my children take it for granted that I love them, that I would die for them if I thought it would do them any good.

  Me, I live alone now, but I would like to live with someone I love and who loves me. It seems such a simple thing to ask, and so difficult to achieve. I managed three batches of around fifteen years’ duration each – Karl, Edgar and Julian, with a few others in between, which I suppose these days counts almost as consistency. And at eighty I daresay one should give up. Though, why?

  Do You Remember Florrie?

  I ask, because when Amos came down the stairs again he was on his mobile.

  ‘I thought you were out of juice,’ I said.

  ‘I tapped into next door’s supply. They have a generator.’

  ‘But how did you get next door?’

  ‘Out the fucking back window and in through theirs,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. They’ll never know.’

  ‘You mean you broke in?’ I was appalled.

  ‘They’re away. Or repossessed, probably. I see the signs of a hasty exit.’

  ‘You broke their window?’

  ‘I was very careful,’ he said. ‘I put a towel round my hand.’

  But he’d lost interest in me. He was on the phone.

  ‘Florrie,’ he was saying, ‘is Amy there? Tell her Amos called.’

  I was glad he was in touch with an Amy. Perhaps he did have a love life after all. And if it was an Amy he was not gay. Which had occurred to me, and is always rather a pity because of the issue of grandchildren, or non-issue. But Florrie?

  It is not so common a name. And that friend of mine, Cynthia, who fell out of the plane all those years ago. And the friend I betrayed whose name was Liddy, and whose daughter was called Florrie and she went outside to play with Venetia while we talked about forging Terry’s death certificate so it read cardiac infarction rather than felo de se. Was it possible that Venetia and Florrie had stayed in touch? That Florrie had a daughter called Amy and that was the Amy Amos was trying to find?

  The Cynthia/Liddy/Terry story had not finished there. And this is the truth of it: the world is fuller of stories and surprises than you would ever guess. The cogwheel factor of Terry who took my virginity under the influence of Cointreau and who failed to marry me so I had Venetia and he had Florrie was unstoppable. Another wheel engaged; it had just taken time to do so. Then by God it got going. Decades later I got a letter from a retired admiral who had worked with Terry on the development of visual landing aids for aircraft carriers, and it said Terry had not killed himself, Florrie had shot him. She had got mixed up with a Californian sun/drugs/occult/youth cult: this was when that sunny world was building up to the Manson Family excesses. Terry had been going to ship the whole family back to London to get Florrie away from it, and Florrie found out, waited until her mother went shopping, found her father’s gun, loaded it, and shot him in the head as he worked at his desk. Patricide. Then she just sat on the floor and stared into space.

  Liddy came home and with friends rearranged the scene so it looked like suicide, and the police, though they had their suspicions, went along with the version of a depressed man ending it all. The family was British, not one of theirs, on the way out of the country; who wanted a scandal, a lot of rich kids involved, and a crazy twelve-year-old locked up for life? Terry had talked of me a lot, said the Admiral, he’d want me to know the truth, and because he didn’t want Terry to be thought of as a quitter, a suicide, because he was simply not. I spoke to the admiral briefly on the phone – we agreed Liddy had probably done the right thing. Terry would have wanted her to do it this way. He would want to take the blame for his child. It was nothing whatsoever to do with the Paris air crash.

  And he had talked of me a lot. That made me feel real again, tied up with a kind of silken bow, like a sheaf of old love letters. It was enough.

  I called up the alumni to let them know. Not suicide, murder. Remember him differently, I said, but they didn’t seem much interested. He was never one of them, after all, just part of me.

  ‘Is that the Florrie who’s a friend of your mother?’ I asked Amos.

  ‘Yes, that’s her,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you know her father or something?’

  ‘Yes I did,’ I said. ‘How’s Amy?’

  ‘Amy’s fucking A,’ he said.

  ‘Not on drugs or anything?’ I asked.

  ‘No more than anyone,’ he said. ‘Why?’

  ‘Just wondered,’ I said. All this in-the-genes stuff. It wasn’t quite what I wanted for Amos. But God knows what the lad had running through his veins. What had become of Amos’ hit-and-run father anyway? In prison, on a whaling ship, an accountant, a politician, a designer of posters for the National United Government that now ruled us, for whom Victor worked, and Ethan drove, and who then was the righteous man?

  Those outside had given up bang-de-banging.

  ‘They’ve gone,’ he said. ‘The scum have scarpered. I think we’re free.’

  ‘But they’ll be back,’ I said. I was chilled and tired and felt like crying.

  Amos went loping down the stairs putting on all the lights – power had again been restored. ‘Not necessarily,’ he said, and told me there was a note put through the door saying the bailiffs would be returning with a court order allowing forcible entry. But it would take them years, said Amos, to get round to it: the courts were backed up solid and we were safe for a while. In fact safer than usual. I’d have been ticked off a list. There were so many bankruptcies and repossessions in the offing the debt collection agencies were overwhelmed. And no-one’s heart was in it, anyway, because what did you do with houses once there was no-one in them? They just grew mouldy and fell down.

  Regulations now forbade anyone from owning an empty house for more than a year; property developers were out of business, and to live in a repossessed house was seen as unlucky. A hysteria of superstition had seized the nation: fortune-telling and clairvoyance were one of the few growth areas, along with debt-collection agencies and security firms. And everyone knew when a house had been repossessed: since the coalition party – National United Government – got in, posters saying Repossessed – NUG scum did this would be plastered over empty houses, and it could be days before anyone got round to tearing them down again.

  And where did the new generation of the dispossessed go? Friends, family, the streets – though the police scooped the actively homeless up pretty quickly. People spoke of ‘the outskirts’ – wherever the outskirts were.

  ‘I see the Joneses have gone, I wonder where to?’

  ‘Oh, the outskirts, I think,’ comes the reply.

  Some vague kind of place where people find housing. Fuel is rationed so no-one wants to go searching. In hard times you look after your own.

  In the morning, said Amos, we’d see about packing up everything of value in the house and removing it from the premises. I was too tired to argue. I’d talk to him in the morning. I went to bed and got warm, while I still had a bed to get warm in.

  But I do rather wonder what Amos wants from me. And what is this ‘we’?

  He had to help me up. My knees had seized up. At eighty-whatever-I am you have to keep them moving.
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  A Brief History Of My House

  Let me make it clear that I do not want the bailiffs to take my furniture away. I want to go on living in this house until I die, with my Paula Rego on the wall, the possible Brancusi on the shelf, the Wyndham Lewis first editions, the stuff I bought in the days of my youth, and wealth. I often deny that I am interested in possessions, or am materialistic, but I deceive myself. I remember my mother Margaret saying to me that all old women end up in bedsitting rooms with a favourite ornament and a family photo if they’re lucky, and I fear it was true for her, she was bedridden at the end with a mind as clear as a slightly doomy bell, but I never wanted it to be true for me. I wanted simply to stay where I was, as I was, rattling around in eight rooms, until I just did not wake up one morning. It is a tall narrow townhouse, old and draughty – quite unsuitable for someone who chills down easily and has bad knees, I know, but it is home.

  You can skip the rest of this section if you want, and go forward to the ongoing story of Amos and Amy, daughter of Florrie, and their connection with the extremist organization Redpeace, an off-shoot of Greenpeace, their conspiracies, their explosives, and how they took Victor as hostage. What I say next will be boring to some, but it places Chalcot Crescent in a historical context, and projects to a world ahead which was bound to come, and so seems to me to be important to have as a background as we work out what is going to happen next in the unbottomed-out economy.