Chalcot Crescent

by Fay Weldon

  I will not bore you with an account of my walk to Mornington Crescent where Polly, Corey and the girls live, other than it was long, tiring and painful, and whenever I wanted someone’s low wall to sit upon and rest, there was none. I got heart pains, and however much one thinks one welcomes death, heart pains, though usually indigestion, can give one a nasty turn. But they went away.

  They live in the bottom third of a tall London house not unlike the one I live in, but rather darker, and with a bad damp problem. Mornington Crescent, like Chalcot Crescent, was built around 1820, but intended for a grander clientele, and should have looked out, magnificently, one-sidedly, on to the greenery, space and elegance of Harrington Square. Now it looks out on to the concrete slab that is the back of the old art deco cigarette factory, with its Egyptian motifs and its place in the guidebooks. The building has been converted to offices – which these days stand mostly empty – but the façade has been preserved, with a great bronze cat on either side of the wide steps, still staring balefully out at passers-by. It is a beautiful and eccentric building from the front, but from the back an ugly, looming, squalid nightmare, cutting out light and air to poor Mornington Crescent. Some developer, back in 1926, got permission to fill in an available space, and the residents at the time were too poor to object, or perhaps notice.

  In the days of my wealth I was always trying to persuade Polly to move somewhere healthier, but she refused the offer of my tainted wealth. I can’t remember quite what it was that tainted it – I think it was because I had stuck with mainstream commercial publishers and had eschewed the feminist presses. Something like that. But there was always something, with both Venetia and Polly. As there had been with Jane, Fay and myself, when it came to our mother Margaret. Namely, why did you leave our father?

  Perhaps with the New Republic divorce will be banned. Or, if not, marriage, for that seldom happens in the first place these days, but at any rate leaving your partner once you have children. But then, of course, who would have children?

  I forgot to look at Henry’s feet to see if they are exceptionally large. I have no doubt he will be in my life again – I have to go home sometime, somehow effect an entry – and no doubt will have an opportunity to find out.

  ‘Mum,’ cried Polly,’ did you walk all this way, or did somebody drop you off?’

  ‘I walked,’ I say.

  Polly is getting on for fifty. I keep expecting to see her at around fifteen, with her frizzy, fulsome hair, and her little rosebud disapproving mouth, so like my big sister Jane’s, and the slight figure and the worried look, which actually is less worried now she has something to worry about – namely two daughters caught up in a dangerous political movement of which she knows nothing. If she was fifteen I’d be in my forties, with good knees, and would have been over to Mornington Crescent in fifteen minutes, not an hour and a half. Polly’s on half-time, now the schools open only three days a week to save power and staffing costs. She works far less hard than she used to and is much better-tempered as a consequence. With unemployment at 60 per cent there are enough people at home to look after the children and indeed teach them. Literacy rates have soared since there’s been less schooling.

  ‘Why didn’t you ring me?’ she asks. ‘I’d have come over to fetch you, and I would have tidied up.’

  The flat is in a mess. Nobody bothers to put things away, or arrange anything in a neat pile so it gives the impression, however false, of order and good cheer. This is not living, this is home as base. There are piles of clothes everywhere and Corey has been mending his motorbike in the kitchen. It is not in Polly’s nature to tidy up any more than it is Corey’s. She is too busy with what is in her head and he with what is not in his. The girls attend to their bodies and not what is around them. A shortage of water and light does not help. But I fear Polly is depressed. And there is something she is not telling me. She does not quite look me in the eye.

  But at least she and Corey have managed to keep the flat. Money is short for everyone, but since NUG declared the debt amnesty for the lower-income groups life has been easier for a lot of people. Alas, the amnesty did not apply to the self-employed, such as me. Amos says it is the State’s intention to get rid of all personal freedoms, and the comparative autonomy of the self-employed irks them. But then I see the State as a collection of committees making difficult decisions on our behalf, which quite often go wrong, while he personifies it as an irritable, stupid, domestic despot of an individual, neurotic, stalking the land and out to get him personally.

  ‘My mobile’s out of juice,’ I said. ‘Amos very kindly took it away to friends who have a generator.’

  ‘I thought Health and Safety didn’t allow generators,’ said Polly. ‘Trust Amos. Is he still with you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. What else was I going to say? That actually I have had to break out of my house because Amos asked some family round, including, by the way, your daughters; Ethan’s girlfriend sealed up my lock with superglue; your half-brother Henry is an embryo Mussolini; the house next door is prepared for a kidnapping; Victor is in some way involved, and Venetia must be warned? If I could hardly believe this nonsense, how could she?

  ‘Do you have any tea?’ I asked. I needed time to think. ‘And then if you have any petrol can we go round to Venetia’s? It’s so long since I’ve seen her.’

  Polly set out to make nettle tea. Nettles grow quite profusely at the back of the Black Cat factory. It’s damp and nettles like damp. Some ‘real’ tea is available – there was cheery stuff on NUGNews the other day about Cutty Sark-style clippers racing through the Roaring Forties as part of the revived tea trade. It looked great, but I was pretty sure most of it was special effects. Corey and the girls were at Westminster Abbey, said Polly, rehearsing for a free-for-all candle-lit performance of the Messiah. Corey had a good voice and the girls squeaked a bit on the high notes, but they had fun. They were staying overnight with friends. I hoped all this to be true. And yes, she had petrol, and she was happy to take me: there were a few things Venetia and I ought to sort out.

  ‘What do you mean, sort out?’ I asked. I was the mother: she was the child. I was the one who was in charge. But she kept talking as if it was the other way around.

  ‘Actually,’ Polly said, finally finding the tea in the general muddle and only then remembering to put on the kettle – the power was out but she has Calor gas – ‘Venetia has been rather staying out of your way. She’s putting off telling you. Henry’s been staying up there with her and Victor. She doesn’t want to hurt you.’

  ‘So it’s more than just the occasional visit on Friday nights?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If you don’t want to hurt me, Polly, try telling me the whole truth and not part of the truth.’ I was quite sharp. She snivelled, as if she were a little girl, but I could see the time must come when I would snivel when reprimanded and she would not. It was not a nice thought. So few, when one thought of the future, were.

  ‘But he’s moving out this week. I think he may have gone already.’

  Yes, and living next door to me. I was right, things were hotting up. The tea was horrible, but Polly had sugar.

  ‘I suppose Venetia brought the sugar round on one of her Lady Bountiful trips,’ I said.

  ‘Now you’re being mean about Venetia,’ she complained. ‘What is the matter with you? You’re not usually like this. You look exhausted. Why come all this way if you’re just going to be nasty to me? I’ve had enough troubles as it is today.’

  I asked her what troubles. She said she’d been awake all night waiting for the girls to get home: when they did she couldn’t sleep. She thought they were lying. They said they were going to a Redpeace meeting at Hunter’s Alley. But it sounded more like some kind of rally to her, Polly, which would get them into trouble with the law. And their hands smelt of glue and she thought they might have been putting up posters. She longed for the old days when you worried about things like drink and drugs. When would things ever get
back to normal?

  ‘This is normal,’ I said. ‘It was the good times that were the anomaly.’

  And I told her about the day way back in 2005 when I’d gone to a garage for some unrationed petrol for my ’05 car and they had on sale – a bargain from China, only 99p – what looked like an six-inch-long cigarette lighter with a little compass set into the handle. I bought it. ‘What’s it for, exactly?’ I asked, and the boy stared a little and said he had no idea – perhaps it was for lighting fires?

  ‘But why then the compass?’ I asked, and he shrugged. ‘Someone thought it up,’ he said. ‘And you bought it, didn’t you?’

  I knew then we were heading for real trouble. If the wealth of nations depended upon the invention and creation of unnecessary things, such as battery firelighters with built-in compasses, we were already up shit creek. If the survival of multitudes depended upon pointlessness, and those multitudes existed only because of the desperate busyness of nations ‘thinking things up’, why then any shock, any surprise, could shatter the globalist construct. We were nearing the end of the tramlines of absurdity, and there would be nowhere to go but back. It was a process described by Carl Jung as enantiodromia – why Saul, persecutor of the Christians, saw a great light and turned in an instant into St Paul, defender of them. A great light shone into the world of unnatural plenty, and lo, there was frugality. It was the equivalent of the principle of equilibrium in the natural world, which declares that any extreme is opposed by the system in order to restore balance. The Great Accelerator, the Hadron Collider, switched on to discover the secrets of the universe, spun so fast for half an hour it burned itself to death. The super-abundance of any force inevitably produces its opposite, and so the overcrowded world, the dog devouring its own tail to satisfy its greed, must one day abandon consumption because, simply, it could go no further. And on that amazing day, the St Crispin’s Day of the new order, we happened to be there.

  ‘You’ll make a drama out of anything,’ was all Polly said. ‘And it’s all very well, but I have a dreadful cough.’

  It’s true, she has. Normal life is full of coughs, colds, toothache and unreplaced hips and knees. Money used to cure these ills: now it can’t. Money is nothing but a medium of exchange, after all. And I have nothing to give in exchange any more, other than a little maternal love and concern. Once I gave money and bought and sold love, I daresay.

  ‘Things have to bottom out in the end,’ Polly said.

  ‘No they don’t,’ I said. ‘These are the Last Times, and we are the ones to witness them.’

  Well, I am gloomy, and troubled. Old ladies imagine things. As you grow older the far past seems more real than the recent past. Surely I must have imagined what happened last night, this morning. The shock of the bailiffs’ knock on the door – bang-bang-bang-de-bang – had triggered some paranoiac episode. Or I have finally flipped, and cannot tell fact from fiction any more, period. Bring on the men in white coats – only now they do not come kindly, to hospitalize you, they come in brown uniforms, to throw you in jail or disappear you in some even more sinister way, into Victor’s pride, the pink oh-so-sliceable National Meat Loaf, perhaps. Or perhaps passive-smoking Amos’ stinky skunk has upset my mental balance. And the surprise and shock of finding that Venetia is in touch with the by-blow Henry, who is not even a blood relative, has been the last straw. Oh, surprise, surprise!

  There was a faith healer of Deal,

  Who said though I fancy I feel,

  When I sit on a pin,

  And it punctures my skin,

  I dislike what I fancy I feel.

  That the world is in the state it is in is no fantasy. It is real enough. The tea Polly hands me is nettle tea, not Earl Grey. Even her face puckers at the taste.

  ‘What are you doing, Mum?’ asks Polly.

  ‘Pinching my leg,’ I say, ‘to see if it hurts.’

  ‘Does it?’

  ‘Not much,’ I say. ‘But then I tend to be numb in odd places these days. The soles of my feet, for example, are no longer a reliable witness to the surface I walk on. But enough to tell me, yes, it hurts. Yes, I am real, and the world of NUG is real and the days of plenty are over for good.’

  She hates me talking like this. She looks at me as if to say ‘No wonder my father left you. No wonder he had a baby by the Irish Dumpling.’ It is the look she directs at her students, no doubt, to keep them in order when their flights of fancy disturb her. Her father was an artist, her mother was a writer, and Polly means to keep not just her own feet on the ground, but those of everyone around her. She is a literal-minded soul. In her experience, creativity leads to disaster. I am quite sorry for her students, though they will pass their exams, heads bowed beneath the burden of so much reality.

  And Polly certainly cannot conceive that we are really living in the end of times, that it’s goodbye to all that, all the goodies we had in the past. The easy days will not come again: they were a one-off, an abortive mutation in the evolution of civilization, as the peacock’s tail is over the top when it comes to attracting the dowdy peahen, merely an over-response. If the processes of evolution were to start all over, you could wait for ever for the peacock’s tail, just as you’d have to wait for ever for the rise of the froth and bubble of the hedge funds, or Paris Hilton to step again from a plane in a white fur coat. An accidental over-response, now righted. Face it, the good times are gone. They will not return.

  So, farewell to it all, to the time that was, when I was rich, and safe, guarded by money, when the streets were crowded and noisy and thrilling, not quiet, as they are now, and lovers knocked upon the door, not bailiffs. When I went to smart hairdressers and fashion shows, hired limousines at will, saw something I liked and just had it, person or possession. When there were mwah-mwah-mwahs from people who had their names in the papers, when I did too, when friends used my name to get a booking at The Ivy, and one ordered Iranian caviar without a second’s thought for the poor pregnant fish whose eggs we stole and ate, at great expense, on money it turned out we didn’t have. When people queued to talk to me at parties. Gone, all gone.

  Marx saw first the collapse of capitalism under the weight of its own contradictions, the rise of communism and then the withering away of the State. I saw it in person: I was there on those St Crispin’s Days.

  This day is called the feast of Crispian:

  He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,

  Will stand a tip-toe when this day is named,

  And rouse him at the name of Crispian.

  He that shall live this day, and see old age,

  Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,

  And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian:’

  Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.

  And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’

  Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,

  But he’ll remember with advantages

  What feats he did that day: then shall our names,

  Familiar in his mouth as household words,

  Lehman, Madoff, and Northern Rock,

  The Royal Bank of Scotland, Brown,

  Be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d.

  This story shall the good man teach his son;

  And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,

  From this day to the ending of the world,

  But we in it shall be remembered;

  We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.

  Marx got the order of events wrong. I can bear witness. I was there. Communism was the first to go. I saw it fall at the Intellectuals’ Conference in the Kremlin, when Gorbachev said that war was no longer revolution carried out by other means. That was in 1988. I was there in Berlin the day the Wall came down, in 1989, when anything-goes fled East and control fled West. I saw the collapse of capitalism, the first of the dominoes falling with Lehman in 2008, then down they all went, faster and faster, click, click, click, until the old order lay flattened on the floor.
And yesterday morning I saw the rise of the State when Henry the lordly misbegotten spoke in my kitchen. The State has no intention of withering away.

  Just another surprise, an unlikeliness, like Cynthia falling out of the sky: Henry turning up as master of the universe, Lord of the New Republic, handsome and frightening in equal measure. William the Conqueror was William the Bastard back home in Normandy. They say that’s why he felt the need to conquer England, just to change his surname. Must all England suffer because I was unkind, such a bitch to Karl that I wouldn’t house his child?

  ‘Oh Mum,’ says Polly, ‘write it all down.’ (I will, I will, I say, and do.)

  I must have been talking aloud. Another sign of batty old age.

  ‘I was trying to tell you about my day,’ she says, ‘but you weren’t listening.’

  How about my day, girl? Yes, how about that?

  She’d had a nasty fright. She’d been walking out of the Crescent into the Hampstead Road and a car coming towards her had mounted the pavement and was making straight for her and she’d had to jump backwards into a doorway to avoid it – and it had reversed and come back at her at speed, only there happened to be a security guard – one of the new ones with the brown uniforms and epaulettes, and a CiviCam in the helmet – just coming round the corner and the car had seemed to change its mind, squealed to a stop an inch from her, and then just driven on.