Chalcot Crescent (27 page)

‘Mum,’ she says, ‘you only like Victor because it’s through him you get hold of real coffee and sugar. You are a Vicar of Bray. Victor is a monster who puts human meat stuff into the National Meat Loaf.’

I am aware that I am putting off the moment of truth, and so is she. I more or less know what I am going to be told. I want to live in a world in which I don’t know a little longer.

‘You’ve been reading Redpeace,’ I say. ‘It’s all in there and all lies.’

‘Ethan says it isn’t.’

‘Does Ethan know he isn’t Victor’s child?’

‘No.’

‘Then he’s an ungrateful lout, biting the hand that feeds him.’

But I can put it off no longer.

‘Who is Ethan’s father? Tell me.’

One should never ask one’s children a direct question any more than offer a direct command, it opens the way too easily to a blank refusal to speak, or act. I remember only too well an episode upon the stairs when I forgot and told Polly outright to wash her face. She had come back from Primrose Hill where she had been taking part in a protest. The conversation had gone like this. She was six.

‘What was the protest about?’ I asked her.

‘Something about caning in schools,’ she said.

‘Do you have caning in your school?’

‘No.’ Then realizing I was questioning the reasonableness or otherwise of the protest, she added, ‘But we might have any time.’

‘Ah,’ I said. Then because her mouth was ringed with a mixture of ice cream, chocolate and sticky sweets I said,

‘Go and wash your face, Polly.’

‘No,’ she said.

‘Polly,’ I repeated. ‘Your face is very dirty. Go and wash it.’

‘I won’t,’ she said.

‘Do as I say.’

‘No. Why should I?’

I think hard for a good reason.

‘Because I’m your mother.’

‘I didn’t ask to be born.’ Very shrewd. Where can she have got it from? She’s only six. I should have said, ‘Wouldn’t it be a good
idea for you to wash your face,’ or ‘You would look much prettier with a clean mouth’ – anything but the direct command. The ‘no’ still comes, but only to the proposition, not the command. But too late now.

‘I told you to wash your face, so wash it.’

‘No. Why should I?’

‘Because I’m bigger than you,’ I said, getting to the nub of the matter, and I slapped her across the cheek to prove it. I have never hit her before or since, or, until now, given her a direct command. She said nothing and stared at me. She turned on her heel and went to her bedroom, which was then where my kitchen is now. I stayed where I am, helpless with remorse. What had I done? She will hate me for ever. A minute later she comes out of her room. Her face is smeared with blood.

‘See what you did,’ she said. I was horrified. Then I remembered she could make her nose bleed at will by sticking a sharp fingernail up her right nostril.

I began to laugh. So did she. She went up to the bathroom and washed her face, from blood and ice cream, chocolate and sticky sweets, and came down good as gold, and peaceful. I do not think this conversation will have so good a conclusion this time.

‘It isn’t going to be easy for you,’ says Polly. ‘It wasn’t easy for me either, I can tell you. Another half-brother all this time, and not knowing. But it’s not as if they were blood relatives.’

‘I told you to tell me who Ethan’s father is.’

‘Oh Mum, work it out. She only did it for your sake. So you and Karl would get together again, and poor little Henry would have a mother. But you wouldn’t.’

So. Karl. Karl fucked his stepdaughter and Ethan was born. The square Mussolini jaw came down through the male line.

The senior policeman is coming over to us. He is smiling. We have been approved.

‘I’m honoured,’ he says, ‘Lady Venetia’s mother and sister! We’ll lead you in.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ I say. ‘I’ve been taken rather suddenly ill. My daughter here will take me home.’

He is all concern, but I say I feel faint and I have no doubt I look it.

Polly takes me home. There are no roadblocks. She prattles on the while. I think I hate her too.

‘We should have gone on in to see Venetia,’ she says. ‘It wasn’t good to back out like that. We should all have talked it through. Made our peace.’

Where does she think she’s living? Munchkinland?

‘Mother, it happened a long time ago. She’s had to bear the burden of secrecy ever since.’

The burden of secrecy! The joy of deceit, more likely.

‘Poor Daddy. He was so unhappy when Claire died, and he tried so hard with the baby.’

And what did Daddy think I was, when he left? Happy?

‘And you know how Venetia always adored him. And she was all alone with Amos.’

Oh the poor, poor thing. I was paying for her keep, sending Amos to school. Venetia is a festering store of ingratitude.

‘And Daddy had become so helpful about her art. It made such a difference to her. It’s only like Woody Allen and his stepdaughter. They’re very happy together.’

I don’t seem to remember Mia Farrow being very happy about it.

‘It’s not like it was an abuse of power thing.’

‘No?’

‘Oh Mum, loosen up.’

Is she insane?

‘Venetia didn’t mean to get pregnant. When she found out she wanted to get rid of it, but Karl said keep it. It would be company for Henry. He really loved Henry. Venetia would have moved in with Daddy but she thought it would make you unhappy, so she married Victor and everyone assumed it was Victor’s child.’

Oh honourable, kindly, disgusting Venetia. ‘Lady’ Venetia. That was quick. You are not my daughter. Every pleasure I ever took in motherhood I hereby renounce and deny.

I wish you had never been born. I envisage you and Karl together and want to vomit. You took me into another universe all right and it is hell, and ever since I’ve known you, always has been. I should never have been born. I curse my mother’s womb, and my own, and Venetia’s. And Polly’s, come to that. I almost curse Rosie’s and Steffie’s but find I can’t.

Prattle, prattle, prattle, on Polly goes. God, she’s stupid.

‘Mum. Please speak to me. You haven’t said a word all the way down.’

‘Just leave me on the corner of the Crescent. I’ll be fine.’

She leaves me on the corner of the Crescent. I go to No. 3 and try to turn the key in the lock. I can’t. It is bunged up with superglue. I walk round the corner to 7 Rothwell Street and find the front door open. I am not conscious of pain in my knees but I expect it is there. I go through the house and into the potato field and across the mud, and curse the potato flowers and hope they wither and rot. No. 5 is as I left it. They have not come back. Perhaps they have been arrested and shot and made into National Meat Loaf. I hope so. I get up the stairs somehow, past the empty armchair with the
still-waiting duct tape, through the hole in the wall, and down again to my own room. I lie on the bed and fall asleep.

Presently I wake up and open up my laptop and write the scenes between Karl and the slut Venetia.

A country farmhouse, dilapidated and charming. Old copper pans for cooking hang from ancient beams, and are actually used, though badly in need of tinning. An ancient Aga, a charming old oak Welsh dresser, hung with chipped antique mugs and lined with cracked blue-and-white china. Everything is good to look at from a distance but on close inspection, rather grimy. A red hen running about the floor and shitting at will, two cats and two dogs. Paintings and drawings fill every available space on the walls. Ornaments and
objets trouvés
cover every surface. A toddler sits on the floor, wetnappied, sticky-mouthed, untended. A slight smell of spliff and baby’s poo combine to make a warm, welcoming atmosphere. An artist’s home, fertile and creative.

Outside, geese chattering. A cluster of rather scraggy rare-breed sheep that probably don’t get enough to eat stare mournfully towards the house. Venetia pulls up in her fetching yellow Volkswagen. The sheep scatter in alarm. She wears white and high-heeled pink shoes. She has a nice figure and a soulful look. She goes inside and snatches up the baby, takes it to the sink and starts washing its bottom. Fortunately, and surprisingly, there is a roll of paper towels available.

Venetia:
[
calling
] Dad!

Karl comes down the stairs. He wears an artist’s smock and practically has a paintbrush between his teeth. He is a cross between Picasso and Rembrandt.

Karl:
Oh it’s you, Venn. Don’t call me Dad.

Venetia:
[
hurt
] Why not?

Karl:
Because I’m not your dad. We are not blood relatives. I just happened to be around when your spider mother caught me like a fly in her trap. I struggled for years and finally escaped. I should have gone home with her sister and it would never have come to this. Alone, a baby on my hands, a show to get ready in the next six weeks and the tank out of heating oil. I have been very depressed, Venn.

Venetia:
I’m sorry. I found the baby sitting on the floor crying and covered with shit.

Karl:
Then thank you for picking him up. I don’t know how he gets out of his cot.

Venetia:
Babies do grow, Daddy, with time.

Karl:
That daddy thing again! It’s perverted. Don’t do it.

Venetia:
It is very cold in here. The baby’s nose is running. Dad, you can’t live like this. And Mum can’t live like she is. She cries all the time. It’s too upsetting.

Karl:
Your mother is perfectly happy in my house, which as you know well she robbed me of, cavorting with her lover. What do you expect me to do about it?

Venetia:
Go back to her. She loves you.

Karl:
Of course she loves me; women always love me, the meaner I am to them the more they come crawling. That is her misfortune, not mine. She’s a selfish hard-hearted neurotic half-man of a bitch. Claire was all woman. She had at least some aesthetic
understanding and it’s a tragedy to the art world that she’s gone. Let alone to me.

Venetia:
Daddy, Camberwell are giving me a joint show. Former pupils. Will you come to it?

Karl:
No. Nothing good ever came out of Camberwell. Put that baby to bed and come up to the attic and see what I’m doing. Since I left your mother it’s all falling into place.

Venetia:
The baby needs feeding,

Karl:
It can wait.

He finds a baby’s bottle full of a browny-pink liquid and puts it in the baby’s mouth. The baby drinks and falls asleep.

Venetia:
What’s that?

Karl:
A herbal tea. Have some.

She says no, and then she drinks. He makes her some more. The baby is put to bed. They go up together to his attic which is full of paints and turpentine and paintings of Claire naked (he never painted me naked) and it’s as erotic as hell. She flatters him and tells him he’s better than Picasso and looks like Picasso too. It’s so cold they have to get under the old kelim carpet – worn so thin it can be used as a blanket. She tries to persuade him to come back to me, and he says if he was feeling warmer he might consider it, so she does what she can to warm him, and because she’s always wanted to since she was seven, and now she’s one up on me, isn’t she. And actually, oddly, now that’s out of their system, he does give it a go but I turn him away. He doesn’t come back to haunt me, more’s the pity, but the baby does.

But that’s enough of that. Why do I torment myself?

I shut up my laptop. I have put off life long enough, which is all writing is. I understand Venetia now: I don’t forgive her. I do not want to see her or think of her again. She is too like me: a girl with round heels (the ones who with just a push fall back upon a bed), in a state of acute denial; she does exactly what she wants while believing she is acting selflessly. Karl is mad, not bad, and uses ‘art’ in the same way, to justify his actions. If we all fell for it and suffered for it, more fool us. And besides, he is dead – as Venetia said to me of my father, when she was five, and I was trying to explain the concept of death – ‘Oh I see. One of those people who lived in the past.’ But all such charming memories have been rendered worthless. I would be quite happy to be the same: someone who lived in the past. But I do not have the tablets to hand to see to it.

I had a daughter, Venetia, who, in my absence, slipped in beside my husband and had a baby by him. She reared the baby as another man’s, under my nose, and hugged the guilty, joyous secret to herself. These are the facts of the matter. Forget governments, food shortages, kidnappings, CiviSecure and the like – they are what they are and change with the times – we could be living just as well through the Great Plague, or the Inquisition – the world outside the home composes just the frame for our lives, not the life itself.
Me and mine have been betrayed by my daughter, this is the nub of the matter. All the rest is white noise.

I have no idea what the time is. I have no mobile, no clock. I listen. All is quiet next door. The space is empty. The armchair and its rolls of duct tape wait for a victim who perhaps will never come. I look out the back window. It’s dusk. The white potato flowers seem luminescent. I hope they have not been damaged by my curses. After all, what has changed? Ethan – my grandchild and stepchild both – is still the man he is, and not so interesting a human being, come to that. I have never been so attached to him as I have been to his brother Amos. I used to think that was because Ethan had inherited Victor’s scientific bent, but no. He just lacks the creative sensibility of the rest of the family. Though he is certainly not as bright as his half-brother Mervyn. Venetia was wasting her time. Though if Ethan and Amy were to have children – is it even possible that I misremember and Venetia was Terry’s child –

Women have a great propensity to forget what is inconvenient – namely, who exactly is the father of this baby kicking away in my tummy?

The song in my mind surfaces. ‘I Am My Own Grandpaw’ –