Chalcot Crescent

by Fay Weldon

Writing is in my blood, as painting is in Venetia’s, and I, like her, am accustomed to the rejection and criticism which comes when the artist tries to impose his or her will on their audience other than in the most tentative of manners. Venetia gets more stick than I do because frankly she is not very good at what she does, but that doesn’t mean she gives up. I am good enough, just currently unpublished. If you have got this far, reader, you have got your money’s worth anyhow. Don’t even bother to skip – throw it away in disgust if this is how it takes you. Really, there is no obligation to get to the end of a book which annoys you.

  I am always concerned when people, finding out that I am a writer, apologize and say, ‘I’m not much of a reader actually. I know I ought but I just don’t seem able to find the time’ and then go on to tell me how they feel obliged to finish any book they begin. Well, of course, I say, you will be reluctant to open one in the first place, knowing what it might entail. It isn’t meant to be like that, I assure them. If you begin a book and you don’t like it, just throw it away. Or take it round to a charity shop. It’s like going to a party: some people you linger with, knowing you get on. Some people you exchange greetings with and move on fast. It’s nothing against them. They’re just not your kind of person. It’s the same with books. You must be prepared to discard. And though you may feel it’s a waste of money not reading a book you don’t get on with, that’s like not opening the windows when the weather turns warm for fear of wasting the central heating. So, as I say, now is a good point to abandon the book. You have my permission – even my encouragement.

  Back To The Point

  Now, the lifecycle of my house in Chalcot Crescent, Primrose Hill. The terrace was built in an elegant curve around 1810, just over two hundred years ago. I have been part of its life for fifty years, a quarter of its lifespan. I know nothing about the people before me who lived in this house: why should those who live here in the future think of me? We are all temporary, and to pretend otherwise is futile.

  Amos says I am being thrown out because it is a nice place for the nomenklatura to live. A brisk health-giving walk through Regent’s Park, to Park Crescent, which now houses Victor’s National Institute for Food Excellence: a little further on to CiviMedia in Portland Place, on through Piccadilly to Whitehall, and there you are, healthier but not tired out, the better to run the country. But Amos would say that, wouldn’t he. I am beginning to be very conscious of his paranoia.

  Areas of London go up and down but Primrose Hill has had a fifty-year run of good luck. It was built by a consortium of businessmen builders, property developers, and intended for a new breed of aspiring professionals. Space in London was beginning to fetch premium prices. Each house is only two rooms wide, but four storeys high, elegant and well proportioned, with french windows and balconies on the first floor, basement and attic rooms for the servants, and ‘the family’ content to be crammed into the middle. All went well until the age of railways; by 1860 smoke and smuts, from the marshalling yards needed for the trains puffing and belching out of the great new London terminal King’s Cross, had driven down property prices until anyone who could possibly afford to live anywhere else, did. The proletariat crowded in, immigrant labourers from Ireland – a fixture in England through the centuries: low-paid labour to build the canals, and then the railways, and in the sixties the motorways, and with the millennium to bury fibre-optic cables so the Internet could take off.

  So those who lived here at the turn of the last century were manual workers – they rented or boarded and did not own. Labourers, porters, laundry workers, shop girls, charwomen, struggling families living six to a room, the women doing their laundry in tubs in the street, sitting outside in summer, children swarming in the road. Then in the sixties the coal yards were closed, the trains abandoning steam for electricity. Primrose Hill ceased to be famous for having the highest bronchitis rate in all Britain, the middle classes returned, and the long narrow gardens out the back were filled in with kitchen and bathroom extensions, and glass conservatories. Things began to look up. The graceful Georgian façades remained untouched, protected as they were through various by-laws. And then the artists and writers and those with an eye for an attractive building crowded in – Karl bought the house in 1952 for £2,000 – and then I and Venetia moved in and Karl and I got married. Karl put half of his house in my name, an unusual thing to do at the time, and he must have loved me, at least in the beginning. He had been left money enough when he turned twenty-five: he was the illegitimate son of a wealthy businessman who wanted to do right by his son and go to heaven. Karl spent half on the house and the other half on a psychoanalysis course that went on for twenty-three years. My own went on for only eight.

  The street was halfway respectable when I moved in. I remember standing on the balcony and calling down to Venetia playing in the street below, ‘Venetia, come in, your avocado is ready,’ and thinking at the time, what is happening to me? What have I turned into? That was in the sixties, when avocados were new on the market and exotic and suddenly instead of being poor and single I was working in advertising and making good money and well housed and a property owner. What was happening was that I was wrapping myself in layer upon layer of hypocrisy.

  We in the creative arts were all socialists then, Marx or Trotsky our heroes. We were struggling for some imaginary working class who couldn’t wait not to be working class. Just as I worry vaguely now about what will happen to the dispossessed – rather less vaguely now it seems I am to become one of them – then I wondered where would the poor of the Crescent go, the manual workers, the cleaners, the laundry workers, the porters, the bin men and the coal men, as the avocado eaters swept in. ‘To the outskirts’, friends would say vaguely, rather as in Nazi Germany, no doubt, people would say of the Jews –‘Oh, I think they send them to resettlement camps, where there’s more room than in their ghettos.’ In those days, in our defence, cities had quite pleasant suburban outskirts, not just one vast desolate acre of business park after business park, all now empty and crumbling, left over from the Good Days when business buzzed and growth was constant.

  Karl and I had a ‘sitting tenant’, mind you, there when Karl bought the house over her head.

  Death Of A Sitting Tenant

  Picture her then, this bold, handsome, energetic young woman in her mid-thirties, this Frances, who once was me, with her sexy husband and her child by an earlier liaison, and her sister Fay finally out of the picture, and her mother, too, in Australia where the gum trees weep their bark away, and a novel or two – though derided by Karl – under her belt, and the belief that all would stay like this for ever, and nothing would go wrong in Chalcot Crescent: the place was charmed, as she was, and it would move steadily up in the world for ever, as would she. The hard times were over. Just a pity about the sitting tenant, who was old and shuffled and smelt, but who had her rights, which included the use of the kitchen. And to get to the kitchen Barbara had to pass by the dining table where Frances entertained her guests.

  One day she gave a dinner party for three other couples, four close friends. She was indefatigable now she was happy. Frances worked from an Elizabeth David cookbook. She prepared flaked cod with a shrimp sauce with brandy, lemon sorbet, and boeuf bourgignon with French beans and roast potatoes, and a tarte aux pommes with double cream. No-one worried about diet, or calories, and few were vegetarians and you’d have to look up ‘obese’ in the dictionary. People worried about status. And Barbara came shuffling through and there was a silence in the conversation – about the effect of the birth pill upon the relationship between the genders, and whether men would simply pass on responsibility for pregnancies to the woman.

  ‘Is that your mother, Frances?’ asked a guest.

  ‘No,’ said Frances, ‘it’s the sitting tenant.’

  And the conversation resumed, with a joke or two about how best death could be hastened. But Frances ground her teeth – so white and firm and strong – and determined that one way or another
the old crone must go. She needed the room for the nursery. She was five months pregnant. This did not terrify her – it occurred to no-one at the time that babies could be born imperfect – if the midwife thought the newborn not fit for the world that was her business. But she wanted space. Karl was now running an antique business. Most of the stock was in the home, not the shop. What was Barbara doing in her life?

  The ‘sitting tenant’ was quite a feature in the street, their rented rooms having been bought over their heads. Such tenants could be bribed, or ‘bought out’ so they could rehouse themselves, and the young ones would go and the old ones would stay – as was their legal right. Middle-class life would have to move around them, and the convention grew up just to ignore their presence. Barbara stayed, for Karl could not afford the sum she demanded to leave – the inheritance had indeed been spent and he declined to use Frances’ earnings for this purpose – he liked Barbara as he liked many a bit of old battered furniture that had seen better days. Venetia, at the time thirteen, was on Barbara’s side too – Mummy was just being snobbish and the child had even persuaded Barbara to pose while she painted her. Venetia seemed blind to Karl’s hints that she should give up painting and stick to the recorder. But it was Frances who had to clear up after old Barbara – she leaked a little as she walked – and Frances’ conviction that Barbara enjoyed her role as spectre at the feast, and had quantities of cash in the tin box under her bed.

  ‘I wish she would just die,’ Frances said under her breath on this occasion, as she served the chocolate mousse – six eggs, two packets of Menier chocolate – and the whiff of Barbara passing got to her and her guests. ‘Eighty-eight is far too long for anyone to go on.’

  Even as Frances murmured and Karl said crossly, ‘Don’t say that, it’s wicked,’ Barbara gurgled, grabbed her throat and collapsed on the floor in a heap of voluminous, smelly skirts with her dirty white laceless plimsolls sticking out. Karl reacted first, knelt at her side and tried artificial respiration while Frances hoped it wouldn’t work. The ambulance came, declared the old woman dead, and took the body away. The dinner party did not continue, though they waited while Frances made strong coffee for everyone because they had drunk so much of Karl’s home-made peach wine, which he made in the bath.

  No relatives were traced and Karl offered to pay for the funeral, though Frances did not see why he should, and rashly said it would be she who was paying anyway, from the joint account. She was the only one who paid into it. Joint accounts were new at the time and she and Karl were not even married, because of the previous wife in the mental home. Margaret’s passing words to Frances, on her way to Canberra, were, ‘You can be such a fool, my dear. Thank God Fay didn’t marry him.’

  ‘You killed her,’ said Karl. ‘I think the only decent thing for you to do is pay for the funeral.’

  ‘What do you mean, I killed her?’ demanded Frances. ‘I mopped up after her, cleaned up her burned saucepans, read her headlines from the newspaper’ – she had done this too, trying not to hold her nose.

  ‘You ill wished her,’ said Karl, ‘I heard you, and she died on the spot.’

  He seemed quite serious: he accorded her great power when it suited him. She tried not to quarrel with him because he could sulk for days, and make her feel wholly in the wrong during that time, and lie not touching her in the bed, until lust overcame him and he moved nearer.

  So she arranged with the undertaker to have old Barbara buried, and put death announcements in the local papers. It did not occur to Frances to actually go to the funeral.

  ‘But she was like part of my family,’ said Venetia. ‘I don’t have aunts or grandmothers like other people.’

  ‘Yes, you do,’ said Frances, ‘just a long way away,’ and in case Venetia started asking questions about her father she agreed to go, and took time off work, and Karl shut the shop and they all went to the cemetery in Golders Green, a dismal place where it rained, and there were no taxis, and no friends or relatives of the deceased, and the priest complimented them on their consideration for a lovely, lonely old lady.

  ‘Do you think,’ asked Venetia, as they walked back to Golders Green Underground, and Frances felt the baby churning and kicking inside her, ‘that Barbara’s soul will enter into the baby?’

  It’s House Prices, Stupid!

  Surprisingly, Venetia and Karl got on well enough. That is to say, Venetia adored Karl and he tolerated her. It was all the more disturbing for the girl when he left us for the Dumpling. But all that divorce and broken-hearted stuff must be left for a subsequent chapter: it is the history of the house and the economy that matters now.

  When I bought Karl out of my share in the house in 1979 it cost me £60,000. (He was bitter about that, understandably, since he had given it to me in the first place.) Twenty years later it was worth £750,000. Then came the Labour Government of 1997 and the Consumer Decade – as it is now called – and by 2007 the house next door to me sold for £1.85 million. Then came the Shock of 2008, the Crunch of 2009–11 – when house prices plummeted and still no-one was buying; then the brief Recovery of 2012, when at least properties began to change hands again, though our friendly European neighbours became less friendly, the US embraced protectionism and the rest of the world had no choice but to follow. And then came the Bite, which is now, and with it a coalition and thoroughly dirigiste government which keeps its motives and actions very much to itself. And though a few major figures in the financial world went to prison, the nomenklatura still ride the middle lanes, have their mortgages paid for them, and do very well, thank you. The rest of us are presumably moving to the outskirts: fifty years on and we are back to where we began. I reckon I had the best of it.

  In 1810 when this house was built there was 36 per cent inflation; in 1933, 38 per cent deflation; in 1977, 26 per cent inflation: by 2011, 10 per cent deflation and the last time I looked inflation was 27 per cent and rising. I marvel at how accurately I can remember the details of house prices and economic history, and how vaguely I recall the dates of my personal life. These seem to have their own narrative, little to do with the actual statistics of birth, marriage and death. Emotional truths are registered in the memory, clouded by wishful thinking or lingering resentments. Even at the time you live through them it is hard enough to keep up. The stroppy three-year-old looms so large in the mother’s consciousness she is astonished to find it is so tiny and helpless, when the first day of nursery school arrives. When the clingy teenager declares she is pregnant the mother is amazed: she had thought her daughter was a child.

  But ask me for inflation statistics and I can be relied upon to be both accurate and knowledgeable. Violent swings are commonplace, always uncomfortable for some, and comfortable for others. I studied Economics at college in the days when the Theory of Value held good and monetarism and its excitements had not yet seduced governments with their vision of infinite growth, and continuous progress, and lads like my grandson Ethan were not lured away into the City to dance, demons on the heads of pins, instead of becoming scientists, doctors, accountants, civil servants, proper people. The banksters are excoriated now, but they too were conned, like everyone else.

  I could claim moral rights and demand that Amos, Ethan and Mervyn take me in to the very small house in Hunter’s Alley that I bought for them in the Consumer Decade. But I wouldn’t want that. And Corey and Polly and the children live in a very small apartment, and I do not think I could live with Venetia and Victor, who is too like Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice for comfort. No, I will throw myself upon the State and the comfort of strangers. According to all accounts, it is usually to be had. Those who know you least well go out of their way to help. It’s familiarity breeds contempt, or if not contempt, which seems far too harsh a sentiment, an awareness of the emotional complexities you bring with you.

  Surely ‘they’ will not leave me standing in the street. And, as I say, some miracle might happen. It always has in the past – a musical made of one of my old books, the
reissue of a DVD, a film, an archive bought – unexpected money in the bank, debts paid, and everything back to normal. Well, normal as far as that exists today, but at least, like old Barbara fifty years ago, permitted by the State to stay in this house until I die. I’m glad we went to her funeral and I don’t think her soul went into Polly. But perhaps it did. She must have been rather angry the other side of her apparent patience, as she shuffled past our chattering dinner parties on her way to make a piece of cheese on toast, too uninteresting even to be addressed as ‘the sitting tenant’, which I, up to my eyes in mortgage, in effect now am. The biter bit, and serves me right.

  Anyway, that is the story of the Crescent until now. I am a little worried about Amos’ assumption that ‘we’ will smuggle my belongings to a place of safety and thus defraud the State. I have lived all my life as a decent citizen, a payer of taxes, a giver to charity – my banker’s order to Oxfam now goes automatically to the CiviKindness people – but I can see perhaps none of that good behaviour has helped me very much in life. I must somehow find my inner bitch.

  Breakfast With Amos

  But here and now is good. I slept surprisingly well. Amos stayed the night, and in the morning seemed totally normal and offered to bring me breakfast in bed and I accepted with gratitude. I often stay in bed to write until the need for coffee becomes too great to resist – especially when Venetia has slipped me some of the real stuff from the CiviStore. After that my concentration fades and it can be hours before I return to my laptop. But this morning I got a whole lot of writing done, with nice warm toes, before Amos called that breakfast was ready. During which time I was able to fill you in very adequately on recent economic history and the rise and fall of house prices, though I daresay I lost a few readers.