A stranger to herself, p.37
A Stranger to Herself, page 37
When I got in Di was sitting in the front room with a tall, thin man in jeans, about thirty-two or thirty-three; they were listening to some music.
‘Thought you’d be later,’ she said.
‘Dave never turned up,’ I told her. ‘I’m going to do some work.’ There was an odd silence. ‘Everything all right?’ I asked.
There was a pause. ‘Rog says the phone’s tapped,’ Di said reluctantly. This seems to be the way people convey such bits of information, news of burglaries, divorces, overdoses, people suddenly having to go to hospital. It’s as if they felt guilty about suddenly producing an unnecessarily dramatic note at an ordinary moment. They’re as embarrassed as if you were going to accuse them of having made it up to get attention.
‘The phone’s tapped? Are you sure? Why would anyone want to tap our phone?’ I added, ‘They’re welcome to listen to anything I say. I hope they enjoy my mother on the subject of her broad beans.’
I recognised Rog as Di’s friend who had worked at British Telecom before he left or got sacked, I wasn’t sure which.
‘Routine tap, I expect,’ he said. ‘They do it all the time. Hundreds of thousands a year. Random checks.’
‘How long does it go on for?’ I asked.
‘Few days. It depends if the machine picks up anything interesting.’
I went off and sat down in my room and began to look at my notes. The gaps were vast, the questions innumerable. Deep Throat had thrown doubt on Violet’s own report of herself, in I Affirm, but had not replaced it with many other, provable, facts. Above all, I still didn’t really understand. A biographer is like a policeman, who can only understand people by their actions. I began to type up the undeniable facts of Violet’s life. She’d married into the Levine family though lied about the date. She’d been at No 53 hospital, St Luc, between 1915 and 1917, and been elected MP for a constituency in Sunderland in 1945. I’d read old magazines and newspapers about her successful, if brief, political career. I’d also studied all Violet’s novels – and I had a reply from Ben Crutchley’s daughter, in Australia, saying she didn’t know very much about Violet because, as she wrote:
The family never saw Violet after she left home to work in a shop in 1913. Apparently in those days some of the assistants lived in, like a boarding school. Apparently she sent money through her sister, but otherwise she kept them at arm’s length. My father believed she wouldn’t own to her family in case they let her down in front of her wealthy in-laws. He was very bitter about the fact that when his mother died, leaving him and his brother very young, Violet never did anything. He always said if it hadn’t been for this his brother would never have lied about his age and joined the army, where he got killed. I suppose you want the truth. My father never had a good word to say about his sister. He used to laugh when he saw her pictures in the paper and say she was a conniving bitch. He also used to say what would people think if they knew that her daughter, who had married into a wealthy family was really the daughter of a postman. Tom Rawlins, I think his name was. He got killed in the First World War, so maybe no one will ever know the real truth. I suppose some sleeping dogs should be left. I’m sorry to give you all this bad news. I hope it won’t put you off Violet. If I can give you any more help, please get in touch. Look forward to hearing the whole story of my celebrated great-aunt!
I typed on for hours, as the thunder began to roll round the flats.
When I straightened up it was late evening. I went into the living-room with a cup of coffee. Di and Rog were sitting side by side on the sofa, gazing at the TV screen. Di’s face was sullen and angry. Rog was expressionless. As I walked in a voice was saying, ‘… all of us wish for nothing better than to live quietly with our families, undisturbed by crime and political violence. Nor do we wish, in our own homes, to be presented with images of crime and violence, or undesirable sexual material, or items which shock and disturb and the only effect of which is to publicise and encourage those who indulge in violence. We do not want newspapers and magazines, openly on sale in our local shops, to present us, or our children, with upsetting, distressing material, the only purpose of which is to pander to people’s worst instincts. To be forced to witness undesirable sexual material or shocking scenes of violence is an infringement of our liberty. It is for that reason that we have established the new board which, in response to complaints from the public, will have powers to seize books, newspapers and magazines of the kind I have described if it is on sale in shops, and prevent the broadcasting, on radio or TV, of this kind of material. And I’m perfectly sure,’ he added, his moustached face and burning-coal eyes giving way to a flashing collage of girlie pictures, dead bodies lying shot in dusty streets, fighting men and even more girlie pictures, ‘I’m perfectly sure,’ he repeated, ‘that in this we, the government, are responding to the decent wishes of ordinary people everywhere.’
In Henry Thackery House, North Kensington, ordinary people’s decent wishes were centred on being able to walk home at night without meeting a mugger, getting their rubbish cleared, getting a paid job, managing to keep up with the bills and finding a bed in hospital when they needed one. We sat there in complete gloom with lightning flashes coming through the window. The announcer’s voice, superimposed over the picture on the screen, of a dark man with good teeth, a clean shirt, maroon tie, and a big smile said, ‘That was the Right Honourable Adrian Critchlow, Minister for Home Affairs.’ A muted rendering of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ started up as the face faded. The ads began. As a car driven by a woman in evening dress leaped a line of red buses, Di stated, ‘Here is the news. There isn’t any, except that everything in Britain is perfect and the Queen’s corgi has given birth to five nice puppies.’
‘Where’s the Prime Minister these days?’ I asked.
‘Too unpopular,’ Rog claimed. ‘Critchlow’s been pushed into the limelight while they polish up the leader’s image. They seem to be trundling it out occasionally, like Hindenberg. Banning the news will help all that.’
‘Except for the terrifying pictures of disturbances in other countries,’ said Di. ‘That always helps, makes you glad you’re British. You missed the bit where he said women had been offended for too long by degrading pictures of themselves and how no one knew how many sexual attacks were caused by this material.’
‘No one does,’ I said. ‘But that Critchlow looks to me as if he’d like to conduct one.’
Rog stood up. ‘Why should he bother,’ he said, ‘when he’s fucking all of us all the time?’
‘He comes from near where I live,’ Di remarked. ‘Our local baker knows his mother. His father was a war hero, very strict. He was something to do with the coastguards. Adrian was the only child, apple of his parents’ eye – piano lessons, violin, tons of homework. Now he’s a self-made millionaire. They’re quite proud of him, round there. Some of them.’
‘Should have been drowned in the harbour,’ Rog said. ‘Well, come on, if we’re going to the film.’ They were alike, he and Di, but it was more a similarity of expression than physique – both were taut, tired, energetic, quick-eyed. Neither face looked as if it had seen a balanced meal on a plate with attendant knife and fork in a month of Sundays.
They went out in their macs, through the storm, leaving me in the darkened living-room, lit by lightning from time to time. Critchlow’s face stayed with me. You can fall in love with someone you’ve never met, a film star or a musician and you can fall in hate with them as well. I hated Critchlow – his conman’s smile, that well-cut head of black hair, nearly too long, and his fresh, well-fed face. I hated those eyes usually called ‘compelling’ and ‘sincere’, that firm, baritone voice, that air of authority and concern. According to Critchlow, we all belonged to an imaginary family in a neat house in the suburb of a large town. If we were unlucky, and didn’t, by going along with Critchlow, we soon would. In this imaginary family no one ever committed a crime (but was always afraid of being the victim of one), no one needed an abortion, or wanted a divorce, no breadwinner ever absconded, there were never too many children, the breadwinner never lost his job or home, no one in the home ever wanted to be a poet, a mercenary soldier, was gay, abnormally gifted, or clinically depressed. No one was Chinese, Asian or black. Father would be a policeman, or a small businessman, Mother would stay at home washing the net curtains, looking after the old and the sick. Every son went to a fee-paying school to study science and technology, every daughter was an underpaid, but dedicated nurse.
Outside these decent homes prowled hordes of undisciplined trades unionists, black race rioters, housebreakers, proselytising gays, rampant feminists, the wilfully unemployed, hooligans and yobboes, and terrorists of all nationalities. It was Critchlow who would protect the decent home, drive off the mobs of race rioters, terrorists, gays ready to rush down Laburnum Avenue, looting, burning and mincing. Not only protect it, but somehow prevent anyone in it from falling into the same traps. It was a simple, consoling system based on the proposition that all evil lay outside the home and if you did as you were told and were quiet and didn’t give Daddy a headache he’d make sure the crocodiles didn’t eat you up.
Critchlow must long ago have lost his allegiance to those ordinary folk of Laburnum Avenue, from which he sprang, if he’d ever had any. He’d given his loyalty elsewhere. Still, he had his appeal. Men liked his firm and soldierly manner, women his clean and courteous bearing. He’d been decorated while doing his national service in Korea, he’d got a double first at Oxford afterwards, and a blue for badminton. He played the organ in church on Christmas Day. He had a twin son and daughter, one a nurse, the other a doctor, no prizes for guessing which. He was a man you could look up to.
Assuming the phone was tapped, I went and shouted down it, ‘I hate you, Adrian Critchlow.’ I felt a fool when I’d done it, and jumped childishly when the phone rang immediately afterwards, thinking it might be Critchlow, calling back. It was Andy. ‘I thought you’d be away for much longer,’ I said.
‘There was an unpleasantness,’ he said. ‘Let’s go out for a drink. Pop on a dress – I’ve got to meet some people for a nightcap in the bar at the Connaught.’
It was pouring with rain now. In the car I asked him why he’d come back so soon from Cuba. He told me shortly, ‘I was asked to leave. I’ve no idea why. I’d got most of what I wanted anyway, so it didn’t matter. I can do the rest from here.’
‘Why?’ I asked again.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It came like a bolt from the blue – no explanations.’
The people we were to meet were an American Democratic Senator and his wife. Andy invited them to stay with us in the country, when we were established, asking me, immediately, if I’d tracked down any suitable homes. Responding to the congratulations of the Senator and his wife I told him I hadn’t found anything yet, not saying that this was because I hadn’t been looking.
Andy was very quiet on the way home and not pleased with his thoughts. He seemed to relax as we got to his flat, then lost his temper because there was no milk in the fridge, and, again, when he found a note and a few messages taken down by Mrs Connelly when she was there – his answering machine had gone wrong.
‘Well, at least she noticed it wasn’t working,’ I said.
‘I’ll have to get some back-up system,’ he said. ‘It’s ridiculous to rely on one machine when you’re away as often as I am.’ He seemed badly rattled. I brought him a drink, but when I came back with it he was ringing a firm to organise the installation of another answering machine. He banged the phone down. ‘My God,’ he said, ‘you’d think at least they’d have an answering machine.’
It was all mad. Andy’d been thrown out of Cuba; then, as if to compensate for all this, he’d spun me off to the Connaught, in a dress, introduced me to some strangers, and temporarily regained his good spirits; now he was in one of those states of agitation where only total order and control of circumstances will impart peace of mind.
I’d often thought Andy might be one of those very intelligent neurotics who tailor their circumstances so well to suit their neuroses that no one notices they’re dotty. He’d secured a job with a built-in overload of challenge and excitement. He was well paid for never living in the same place, with the same people, for too long. He was brilliantly adapted for what he did, but then, I thought, so was a jungle animal. Like an animal, Andy dashed off hunting, used all his resources to find his prey – in his case it was information – then he ate it, and then relaxed, glutted, dashed off and did it all over again. It made me see why he was so attached to his cat, Rupert, who was out as usual.
More trouble arose when he claimed someone had been playing his stereo in his absence. Finally he sat down to relax with me on a sofa listening to a record, and as he relaxed, I began to twitch. I was getting a transfer from his own taut muscles. As the fog came down in my own brain I realised I’d never seen him quite so bad. What had happened in Cuba? Or, what else was happening?
‘You’re hitting the bottle,’ he said, as I got up for a refill. He added, never stupid, ‘Trying to blot me out?’
‘You’re away a lot. I have to adjust to your comings and goings.’
‘Better, once we’ve got a more stable life.’
I heard some parrots screech in a jungle, quite clearly.
‘What’s new?’ he asked. ‘How’s Di?’
‘She seems fine, says the phone’s tapped,’ I told him. ‘Her friend Rog used to work for Telecom and he said it’s routine – spot checks on the entire population. I suppose it’s since they got the satellites up – once you could see everything from aloft the intelligence service became useless for prowling round installations taking snaps and pretending to be bird watchers, so they had to find another way to keep themselves in work. Checking forty million phones a year, hearing all the latest about Carla’s wedding and orders for copper piping and so forth keeps them nice and busy. No one has to lose their job.’
As I chatted I heard whispers in my head, then another tropical bird screamed. I knew I was going mad.
Andy didn’t, of course. ‘It’s as good a theory as any,’ he said, ‘better than anything of Gottlieb’s. His assumption is that what happens is being planned by malevolent geniuses, when, actually, it wasn’t, or even if it was, it’s turned into a complete cock-up. If they’re tapping your phone at all, inevitably it’ll be because they’re tapping the wrong one.’
‘I was meant to meet Dave,’ I said, ‘but he never turned up.’
‘That’s good news. But I must say, if life’s going on here in its usual relaxed Mexican way, I can’t see why you haven’t managed to phone a few house agents.’
‘I only got back from Brighton today,’ I answered defensively. ‘Late.’
‘They do have phones in Brighton,’ he said. ‘And house agents. Still, I’ll be here for a bit, so we can do it together.’
I looked into his very blue eyes, at his tanned face, the slightly beaky nose. Andy, First-in-last-out Littlebrown, the man with a head full of helicopter noise, gunfire and people shouting in foreign languages, looked at me with the eyes of a child, a boy younger than my son Ray. I was the person who was going to make it all right, make a home, be Mrs Bear in her pinny, with tea ready, when Rupert came home from one of his adventures. I was being offered a new life by this handsome and intelligent man, the thought of whom could make me nearly collapse with desire on a bus going round Hyde Park Corner. Yet I couldn’t say the right words. I just kissed him. I think that made him think it was all right.
Looking back, I can see that from that moment Andy was my victim, a hard idea for me to accept even now, so much Mr Wrong had he always been. Quite hard for any woman to accept, so strong is our mythology, in fact our religion, of victimisation. The rape statistics, the income statistics, all the statistics support our victim status. But I know now that from that point on the seesaw began, imperceptibly, to tip. Andy had always sat at the top end, surveying the trees, the grass, the plain with a lordly eye, while I sat at the bottom end with my feet in a puddle. Then his end started sinking. I began to rise. Neither of us noticed it at first, and later, when we did, we both believed it would take nothing at all for Andy to bump me into the puddle again. Then suddenly it was too late. Irreversibly, my end of the seesaw went up; Andy hit the bottom with a spine-jarring smack – and fell off.
Violet Levine, 1936
Violet had fainted down the last flight of stairs at the house in Cheyne Walk. Her daughter, Joanna, a tall fifteen-year-old, was bending over her as she lay by the newel post in the hall at the bottom of the stairs. Her eyes opened. They met her bewildered daughter’s eyes, then her own face filled with horror. She whispered, ‘Get Allie. Get Allie.’ And Allie, whom she had not seen for nearly three years since Violet moved into the Cheyne Walk house with Polly, came, horrified, to help her sister for the last time.
It had been two years since Frederick had given way to Violet’s blackmail. He could not risk a scandalous divorce. In particular, he couldn’t risk his daughter’s marriage. It seemed unlikely that the Christian-Smiths alone could put enough pressure on their son Harry to make him withdraw from the marriage. However, Harry’s own thoughts about how his marginal constituency might react to the full story of his mother-in-law’s life could make the final difference. Pamela herself certainly thought so and Frederick was not prepared to gamble his daughter’s happiness. So, saying nothing to his family about the reasons, he increased Violet’s allowance and gave her the twenty thousand pounds she demanded.
