Any money we earned, or anything we got on benefits, we pooled for rent and household expenses and bills. If decisions had to be made we sat round the kitchen table and talked them through. Daphne brought a perfectly round white piece of quartz from her parents’ holiday home by the sea, and we put it at the centre of the table; you picked it up if you wanted to speak and replaced it when you’d finished. Housework and cooking were supposed to be shared equally, regardless of gender. On summer nights we hung paper lanterns in the old plum and apple trees in the back garden and lay out in the uncut scented grass, drinking cheap wine and smoking dope, confessing our beliefs and our hopes and fears. I had to be careful not to talk too much: Sheila and Neil and Daphne would pounce if they thought something you said was wrong or showed false consciousness. They were tactful about my lack of education but the tact could be worse than the pouncing. Later, another element in the heady pleasure of those nights was the secrets I was holding back, burning me from inside.
The men did try to help with the housework. Neil — plump and softly shapeless, bearded — would do the vacuuming: frowning short-sightedly, cigarette uptilted at the corner of his mouth, poking the nozzle benevolently, vaguely into corners, dropping ash on the carpet behind him. Nicky washed up energetically, breaking things. But in the end Jude and I did most of it — and we didn’t mind, it only seemed fair, because the others were out at work all day, bringing in money. Anyway, we weren’t obsessed with cleaning like our mothers, victims of the ‘privatised family existence of late capitalism’. We discussed all these issues, using the white stone. There was a kind of glamour at first for the ones who found real jobs, joining the working classes. Nicky was working as a labourer, building a bypass; Sheila was in a little factory that made meat pies, Daphne helped on a play scheme for difficult children. Neil was the only one who was still a student, working on his PhD. He was a Marxist, dissecting everything down to its basis in class conflict and economics — cheerfully he saw through everyone’s illusions. He always had his working-class background on his side in his arguments against Daphne, because she came from a wealthy, arty family. Daphne was fiercely feminist: she believed that the nuclear family was an invention of capitalism to keep women oppressed, and that all men were conditioned by society to enjoy the idea of violence against women. Even when men thought they were being kind or loving or protecting women, Daphne said, really underneath it was a kind of violence against them because of its context in the wider world, where men had all the power. I was excited by her arguments. Sometimes they seemed triumphant truths which could be superimposed on every aspect of life, revealing its inner nature: they explained my stepfather and my whole history, they vindicated me. I was burning with zeal for a revolutionary breakthrough in my life.
I worked in the café in the mornings because that was when Lukie went to nursery: in the afternoons he fell asleep on our bed and I dozed beside him. When Lukie woke we had tea downstairs in the kitchen with Jude. She and I cooked vegetarian curries and pasta dishes while Lukie played with his cars and Playmobil. Jude was from Bolton, she blushed easily and was freckled and fair with a poised small figure like a child’s. Her embroidered pictures had been a great success at the art college; now she had an agent and was selling to London galleries. They were shocking raw scenes of threat and conflict: girls with slashes of red silk for their mouths and vaginas, stiff net sewn on for their skirts, bits of gold braid for their tiaras; stick-men sewn in waxed black thread, in long crude stitches. (These days they fetch astronomical prices. I owned one for a while — but I had to sell it one lean year.) Jude didn’t take politics as seriously as Daphne did. She thought everything was funny — her embroideries were funny too, in a zany, extreme sort of way.
She even thought Baz was funny, in his fixation on her. He was a tall skinny guy with a pretty, fine-boned face, startling under the shock of his orange hair. She’d slept with him once, apparently, in her first week at the art college, because she was too shy to tell him she was gay. — Trust me to choose the crazy one, she said. When Daphne called the police once because Baz followed them back to the house and broke a window trying to get in, Baz told the police that Jude was his wife and that she’d been abducted by a cult. You could see that they were half inclined to believe him.
Sheila had got a first in classics at the university, yet it was Neil who was studying for his PhD now, while she worked earning the money to support them both. When she got back from the pie factory in the evenings I could see from her bleached expression how it exhausted and disgusted her; once I found her in tears, scrubbing at her neck and arms in the bathroom, saying she couldn’t get rid of the meat smell (it was true, you could smell onions and gravy wherever she was). Because I’d worked that summer in the chocolate factory, I could guess how the other workers might resent her because she was different — but when I commiserated she turned on me. Sheila was tall, austerely judgmental, with white skin that made her face like a marble sculpture, and a mass of red-brown hair which she had to put up in a net for work.
— Other people have to spend their whole lives in these places, she said. — What’s so different about us, that we should be exempt? I’d despise myself if I couldn’t put up with it for a couple of years.
But I didn’t think that the self-sacrifice would last. There was something willed and exaggerated in how she dedicated herself to Neil, serving him as if his work was more important than anything in her own life. Often Neil didn’t even get out of bed to go to the university library until lunchtime, and she must know it; it was as if she was giving him as much scope as possible not to live up to her expectations.
Daphne and Sheila were always falling out. Sheila took Neil’s side in all the arguments, and she offended people with her blurted, stern remarks, though I didn’t mind them; I could see it was difficult for her to speak lightly about ordinary things. She found Daphne exasperating, and scarcely bothered to conceal it. Daphne was voluptuous, with creamy skin and chestnut hair and huge curvaceous calves (she’d played hockey at school). It was true that her assured, loud flow of talk was guilelessly self-centred, muddling together her outrage at patriarchy with her stomach cramps. Yet she was somehow at the commune’s heart; without her I’m not sure we’d have hung together. She was bossy and fearless, doggedly principled — it was Daphne who dealt with our landlord when the roof leaked or the immersion heater broke. Her confidence convinced the rest of us. But she couldn’t help nagging away at Sheila, wanting to make little scenes and nurse grudges, contrive tearful reconciliations.
Nicky was the peacemaker in our community. He had the gift of attention to other people; he could talk to anyone, and he never forgot what they told him. This wasn’t only with his friends: he got to know the men he worked with on the bypass, or locals he met in the pubs who remembered when the city docks were still in use and the dockers unloaded the timber carrying the long planks on their shoulders, or when the bombs fell on Newfoundland Road and destroyed the vinegar works. I marvelled at his practical knowledge of places and histories, which my mind shied away from, indolent. I knew it was admirable that he didn’t talk about himself. But something ruthless in me drew back sometimes even from our moments of most tender intimacy. I would think: he’s too simple for me. Then I’d be appalled at myself — it was me who was simple: narrow in my selfish, sticky fascination with my own feelings. I made up to him then with my affection and attention.