‘Povee! Povee!’ Flossie wailed from her perch.
In a moment of quiet, Eustachia pitched in with a warbling soprano: ‘Keep on the sunny side! Always on the sunny side!’
‘Bravo!’ Lookerchunky clapped his hands. ‘Great philosophia! You must come in Ukraina! We heff too much of pessimism at present time.’
‘It’s what my speech therapist used to say,’ she giggled.
By now, of course, I had put two and two together, but I did not voice my suspicion that her speech therapist had been none other than my mother. There would be plenty of time for that in the future.
‘You are my sunny side, Eustachia.’
Berthold: Stacey
The night was sweet with human warmth, ample with dimpling flesh, moist with body fluids, and punctuated by trips to the bathroom. I woke late, with a jumble of songs running through my head. Occupying most of the bed, and hogging all of the duvet, Eustachia was snoring lightly. I kissed her on the nose and went in search of coffee.
In the kitchen, Lookerchunky, stark naked, was doing the same. I took a discreet look at his beast, which dangled raw-red and uncircumcised beside the cutlery drawer. It did not seem any bigger than mine.
‘Berthold, old chep, we heff to talk.’
‘Yes, but not now.’ I was desperate for coffee. There were barely two spoonfuls left in the Lidl own-brand jar. I commandeered them both into two cups, one for Eustachia and one for me. He could go hang himself, for all I cared.
‘You mother, Lilya, she very pessionette lady.’
‘Mhm.’ I poured in hot water.
‘We heff make loff all night.’
‘Mhm. I heard you.’
I opened the fridge door. As I bent down, the dull ache in my head became a sharp pain. There wasn’t much milk left, either. Really, it was too bad. Inna was supposed to take care of these things.
‘She want we liff together.’
‘Mhm.’ I stirred the beige liquid. ‘Where? Where do you propose to do that?’
‘She propose me liff wit her in flet. This flet.’
‘Oh no. No no no. You don’t get it, Lookerchunky.’
‘I understend how you feelink, Bertie old chep. But you grown-up men now. You too old for livink wit Mamma.’
‘Look, there’s something you need to know.’ A pulse in my head was beating like a hammer on a dustbin lid. ‘She’s not really my mother.’
‘Not mother? How is possible?’
‘My mother Lily is dead.’
‘God is dead! Ding dong! God is dead!’ No one had remembered to cover Flossie’s cage for the night. She was lounging on her perch with a morbid look in her eye.
Startled by the noise, Eustachia called from the bedroom, ‘Can I do anything?’
‘It’s all right, Stacey. I’m just coming. Do you take sugar?’
Stacey! What a ghastly name! I supposed I would get used to it.
‘I’m sweet enough as I am!’
We sipped our coffee-flavoured water sitting up side by side in bed, the duvet pulled up over our nakedness, her hair loosed from its ponytail and snaking in coppery coils over her splendid breasts. Through the wall, we heard the sounds of a shrill soprano and a mellow baritone yelling at each other. Fortunately, Lubetkin’s walls were thick enough that we couldn’t make out what they were saying.
Berthold: Cherry Cutter
Eustachia left early in a whirl of polyester, perfume and hastily applied lipstick. I took my time, knowing there was no coffee to look forward to and not even any money to go out and get some, until Inna surfaced.
I checked my emails, nothing much there – who the hell falls for these ridiculous Ukrainian bride ads anyway? – then I put on my paisley pyjamas to pad to the bathroom, turning the radio on to blot out the sound of Inna and Lookerchunky, who were still arguing. Sticking my razor-ready chin out in front of the bathroom mirror, I brooded over a new complexion imperfection – does Clooney have these red spider veins yet? – and the ghastliness of growing old. Then I heard the front door slam. I put my head out to see what was going on.
Inna was standing in her nightdress in the hall, gazing at the back of the closed door with a look of utter desolation on her face. ‘Why you do this to me, Bertie?’
‘Do what, Inna? The man is a scoundrel. A rogue. An impostor. We don’t know who he is. I’ve probably saved you from a fate worse than death.’
Though judging from what I had heard last night, she had already experienced a fate worse than death, and rather enjoyed it.
‘I say everything you tell me – mother, sister, friend, crazy – all I pretend it like you tell me. But you – why you not pretend some little thing for me, Bertie?’
‘Look, Inna, we need to get one thing clear. That man is not moving in here. No way.’
She said nothing, her mouth set in a sullen pout.
‘And another thing – why are we out of coffee? You know I need coffee in the morning if I am to function at all. It’s not too much to ask, is it? Look, I’m sorry …’
Her eyes were filling up with tears. Was I being too harsh?
‘… but I thought we had an agreement, Inna.’
‘I make agreement wit Lily, you mother. I make promise to Lily. I leave my lovely flat in Hempstead for livink in stinking council flat wit you! Oy!’
‘Mother wanted you to move in here?’ I had half suspected this.
‘She say to me, Inna, look after my son. He good man but useless. Witout me he will be starving of hunger. When I die he will be put out on street from under-bed tax.’
‘Mother said that to you?’ It’s nice to know that one’s parents have such confidence in one.
‘Lily good Soviet woman, like saint in heaven.’ Tears were coursing down the runnel-grooves in her cheeks. ‘She tell me you homosexy. I understand. You no marry. You need woman in house.’
‘Mother told you I was homosexual?’ Could this be true? I edged back to the kitchen, where the kettle was hissing and screaming for attention.
She followed, shuffling in her slippers, berating me in a mournful shriek that echoed the cadences of the kettle.
‘But I see you like lady. You chase first after black one, then after fatty one. What I can do? I think soon you will marry and I will be out.’
‘Ssh, Inna! There’s no need to shriek. Can’t we have a rational discussion?’
But she was having none of it.
‘I like nice man, nice flat, nice life. I write letters in Ukraina newspaper.’ She began to wail again. ‘Oy, I understand! You think I too old, you think Lev too young for me!’
‘The thought had crossed my mind.’
‘Young, old – love got no barricade for age! Look George Clooney! He forty-year-old man marry beautiful young wife.’
‘Actually, Inna, George Clooney is fifty-three.’
My correction was lost on her. ‘I more younger than Lily,’ she moaned.
Something dawned on me.
I said, ‘But Inna, this man, this Lookerchunky, he’s not the man my mother married. He wasn’t her husband. For all we know, he might be married to someone else.’
‘Not husband? Oy!’ Inna crossed herself fervently, as if I’d accused her of adultery. ‘So who he is?’
‘I’ve no idea. Maybe a relation or an acquaintance. Maybe just someone who read a story about a nice flat in London and a woman on her own, and decided to take a chance. The world is full of chancers like that. You can’t be too careful, Inna.’
She reached down two cups, filled them both with boiling water, and placed a tea bag in one of them, musing out loud, ‘All night he make love like big man-horse of Queen Ekaterina.’
‘Yes. All night. I heard. Look, Inna. That’s all well and good. But it still doesn’t give him the right to come and live in this flat.’
‘When morning come he sing beautiful song from my country. Mmm m mmm m!’ She broke into her wailing ditty. ‘You know this song, Mister Bertie? Soldier depart for great patriotic war, and his b
eloved Katyusha walk beside riverbank sing it to him.’ She flipped the single tea bag into the other cup and began wailing again. ‘Veestoopila na bereg Katyusha.’
‘Yes, it’s lovely. But we’ve run out of coffee. And milk.’
‘You see, Ukrainian people now living in London, they very nice people but all from West Ukraine. Different religion. Different history. They take down statue from Lenin and put up statue for Nazi.’ She loaded two spoonfuls of sugar into her tea and sipped carefully, sucking in air to cool her mouth. ‘In my country is twenty million dead from fight against Nazi in great patriotic war. Mmm na visokiy na krutoy … My father lost one leg. My Dovik lost all family.’
‘Yes. Splendid. You can tell me the story later. But have you got a fiver I can borrow?’
I pulled on my jeans and T-shirt and stumbled out into the grove clutching Inna’s fiver, thinking it would be imprudent to blow it all in one splendid triple-shot at Luigi’s, though the temptation was there. A fine rain wetted my hair. In my befuddled state, I noticed that something had changed in the grove, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. One of the feral moggies, a damp scrap of ginger, ran beside me, tail in the air, and rubbed herself against my legs. I bent to stroke her but she shied away then vanished into the shrubbery.
On my way back with my bulging carrier bag – it’s amazing what you can get in Lidl for a fiver – I noticed among the cherry trees there was a litter of discarded food packaging, nappies, a black bin bag of unknown contents, a peed-on foam mattress, and a large finely executed turd. Canine? Human? I clicked my tongue in annoyance.
Then I realised what had changed – the tents had gone. They must have left in the night so silently that I hadn’t heard them. Then again, we were making quite a racket ourselves.
Inna was out when I got back. Oh dear. Had she run off in tears to search for the impostor Lookerchunky? Sipping my first proper coffee of the day – it was almost ten o’clock, for godssake – my mood mellowed, and I began to wonder whether I had been unduly hard on Inna, who certainly deserved a mild rebuke for dereliction of coffee duty, but had, to her credit, come up with the necessary fiver. When she came back, I would apologise.
I gazed out of the window. The familiar view was tinted with the sepia of melancholy, to which the flavour of Lidl own-brand may have contributed. Yes, I had behaved badly. I’d been a jerk. I yearned for a glimpse of a forgiving angel skipping along the path between the trees. Where had she been going with that enormous suitcase yesterday? With surprising fondness I also anticipated the stately progress of a Genuinely Good Person, a saver of strays, flea-bitten in the line of duty, coming with a file folder under her arm to rescue me. Or be rescued by me. It came down to the same thing.
Suddenly a commotion at the bottom of the grove caught my eye. A white van had pulled up by the kerb – two white vans, in fact – and men were getting out with heavy-duty tools. Then one of those fork-lift trucks with a platform on the front trundled up, I think they call them cherry pickers. Or cherry cutters in this case. Within minutes, I heard the ghastly high-pitched whine of an electric saw, which was not unlike Inna’s earlier singing. Should I rush down and chain myself to a tree? Without Violet to witness my heroism, the whole scenario seemed a lot less appealing.
The same tree I had been chained to was now under attack, amid a crash of branches and a flurry of pigeon’s wings. Did I owe it to Violet to continue the struggle which she had started, even though she was no longer here? Or was that merely quixotic? While heroism and inertia battled it out in my brain, a wiry figure in a purple coat had no such doubts. Mrs Crazy appeared in the cherry grove with her two umbrellas, and started beating the hapless tree cutters about head and shoulders. One of them went down with a crash. The other got on his mobile phone.
Moments later a police car pulled up behind the white vans. Two coppers strolled down the path towards the scene of tree carnage, and had words with Mrs Crazy. I couldn’t hear what they said, but I could guess. Mrs Crazy listened, started to argue back, then took a swing with her umbrella. In a flash, one of them got her in an armlock. The other whipped out a pair of handcuffs, and between them they bundled her into the back of their car. The whole scene had lasted no more than ten minutes.
Then the chainsaws whined on.
Berthold: Priory Green
I put Flossie out on the balcony to bear witness, and withdrew into the quiet seclusion of my flat to lick my existential wounds. Mother was dead. Violet was gone. Inna was still out. Eustachia had work to do. All the women who had buoyed me up in the last few months were floating other boats, and I was on my own, my life drifting aimlessly until something or someone took command. The relentless whine of the chainsaws in the grove chorused my impotence, while a rodent of self-hatred gnawed at my guts. I had taken Mother for granted, I had behaved badly towards Inna, I had let Violet down, I had taken advantage of Eustachia’s neediness. I was the rat.
I had not fixed a definite date with Eustachia when we parted. Should I give her a ring now, or would that upset the balance of power in our relationship? Loneliness and male pride warred briefly in my chest. I picked up the phone, and found that some idiot – Inna, no doubt – had left it off the hook. How long had I been incommunicado? What if Violet had called for a last-ditch rescue? What if the police had found my bike? What if someone had been trying to contact me with a fabulous stage role?
Tutting, I dialled Eustachia’s office number and got an answering machine. ‘Would you like to see a film, Stacey?’ The message I left was studiedly neutral in tone.
Meanwhile, at a lower level, life rumbled on. Unbuckling my belt, I went and settled myself in the loo with my jeans around my ankles, pulled the Lubetkin book off the shelf, and looked in the index for Priory Green.
The Priory Green Estate, where Eustachia had found me clinging to the railings, was one of Lubetkin’s largest projects of social housing in London. To the modernist architects, the bombed cities of post-war Europe seemed like so many blank canvases on which to erect their dreams. Priory Green was conceived before the war but not completed until 1958. The plans had been drawn up to generous Tecton proportions and constructed out of top-class Ove Arup reinforced concrete; all the flats had a private balcony, habitable rooms faced south, east or west, and communal facilities included a circular laundry with a tall chimney, which I hadn’t noticed yesterday. But during the war, building work was suspended and Harold Riley, the alderman who had commissioned the work from Tecton, was ousted and disgraced following a disagreement about two deep concrete air-raid shelters he’d had built under the Town Hall in defiance of the party line.
By the time work restarted on the estate after the war, the housing need was much greater, the political climate had changed, and Harold Riley was surcharged and personally bankrupted by his political rivals. Lubetkin himself had retreated from London; he supervised the project at arm’s length from his farmhouse in Gloucestershire, a disillusioned and embittered old man.
Reading this filled me with a deep melancholy that was only partially alleviated by a particularly satisfying bowel movement. Above the noise of the water rushing into the cistern as I flushed, I heard another mournful call: Ding dong! Hoiking up my jeans, I went to answer the door.
It was the postman, with an envelope in his hand. Why hadn’t he just put it through the letter box?
‘Outstanding postage due. One pound and eleven pence. That’s eleven pence owing because the postage now costs fifty-three pence. And one pound administration charge.’
‘Blimey. Let me see the letter.’ I didn’t want to be paying out all that for junk mail. Besides, I wasn’t sure I had one pound and eleven pence. He handed it over. It was a small white envelope, handwritten to Mr Berthold Sidebottom. The postmark gave nothing away. ‘Hang on a minute.’
I could have just stepped back into the flat with it in my hand and slammed the door, but looking down I noticed a solid black chukka boot resting on the threshold. He had obviously been in thi
s situation before. I had ten pence left over from my shopping, there were three twenty pences in the loose change jar and I found a fifty-pence coin in the pocket of Inna’s black cardigan hanging in the hall. The postman took it all, gave me change, and made me sign something.
‘Thanks, mate. By the way, your zip’s undone.’
The letter was from someone called Bronwyn at The Bridge Theatre in Poplar, asking me whether I was available immediately to take up the role of Lucky in their production of Waiting for Godot, for which I had recently auditioned. Apparently the actor who had been playing Lucky had unluckily tripped over the rope, slipped off the stage and broken his leg, and the understudy was re-sitting his finals. She apologised for writing, but said that they had tried to phone and got a ‘number out of service’ message. They didn’t have my mobile number. She added a PS on a personal note, saying that she’d been at the audition, had loved the way I delivered Lucky’s speech with a stammer, and hoped I would integrate it into my performance.
The stammer. Yes. I recalled that it was the rope that had brought on the stammer, and I had stammered helplessly all through the audition. One of the panel had had the bright idea of tethering me with Lucky’s rope while I spoke to see how I looked, and I had come out in a cold sweat. Unfortunately, Beckett’s broken lines did not work the same flowing magic as Shakespeare’s; in fact they made it worse. ‘God with white b-b-beard … since the death of b-b-Bishop b-b-Berkeley … it is estab-b-blished b-b-beyond all doubt … that man … for reasons unknown … lab-b-bours ab-b-bandoned …’
The letter was dated two days ago. I phoned straight away. Bronwyn was ecstatic. She would email over a copy of the script right away, she said. What was my email address? Could I start tonight?
‘Tonight?’
‘Would that be okay, Mr Sidebottom? You’re familiar with the play, aren’t you? Our bar manager has been standing in, but he’s been struggling, even with the text in his hands.’
‘I’m not sure I could memorise it in a couple of hours. It’s quite complicated.’
The Lubetkin Legacy Page 25