He’d done little paying work since, but had ‘run the house’ and attended to the children while his wife established herself as a producer. ‘I’m a feminist house-husband,’ he liked to boast. ‘All I do is support women, and has the sisterhood been grateful?’
‘Right-ho!’ he said now. He and Maggie touched glasses and downed the grappa.
‘Do you always drink at this time?’
‘Marta seems to think so.’
As they left the house, Maggie asked to see the rooms where he worked, smiling when she saw the birchwood ladder-backed chair Joe had restored as a present for Max when they first met.
She reached into her bag and said, ‘Joe sent this.’ It was a flat wooden paperknife decorated with carved symbols.
‘It’s lovely, thanks,’ he said, putting it on his desk. ‘I must find something to give him too.’
He pointed at the long white wall, against which leaned numerous frames covered in brown paper. ‘Like everyone else, I’ve begun to collect art and photographs,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t until recently that materialism made any sense to me. Now I think, this is mine, mine, and I’ve earned it.’
He and Maggie strolled up the road to where his new black Volkswagen convertible was parked. The restaurant was ten minutes’ walk away but Max was keen to show off the car.
He regarded her: like him, she was in her mid-fifties, and usually wore walking or what he considered ‘climbing’ and wet-weather clothes, with boots. She spent more time outside than him, and was tanned and lined, with greying hair that she might have cut herself, and no make-up. In his view, with this Patti Smith look, she appeared older than him now, but as Lucy said, if you think someone your age seems worn out, take it for granted you look twice as bad.
She said, ‘My God, it’s so wealthy here. But the foreigners I’ve noticed — they’re all employees and cheap labour, aren’t they?’
‘At this time of day they would be,’ he said. ‘Nannies, au pairs, cleaners, builders. What did you expect? Amazing to think, Maggie, of how London’s cleaned up since we were students. Can you remember how filthy it was then, graffiti, squats, and the tube an even more filthy pit than now, and no one paying for anything?’
‘Today it’s all control,’ she said.
‘It would be pretty to think so. But my kids are nervous on the street. Up the road there’s an estate where the wild boys see us as rich pickings.’
‘Only the very obedient survive, isn’t that right?’
‘How is it where you are?’
She and Joe still lived in a village in Somerset. When the commune had failed, they’d moved into a low-rent collapsing cottage which they had renovated.
‘You wouldn’t believe the poverty down there. It’s another country, which means it’s dull, and my work is repetitive, mostly with old women,’ she said. ‘That’s part of what I want to talk about.’
They sat in the car and Max put on a Clash CD. ‘Did we ever see them?’ he asked as ‘London Calling’ started. ‘I’m not sure we did, though we saw most of the other bands then.’ He went on, ‘Now, when I think about it, what a little paradise it was when we were together. The Health Service, unemployment benefit, cheap housing, the BBC, subsidised theatre. Mum and Dad didn’t pay a penny for my education, and if you came from a respectable but ordinary background, you believed you could get out and live differently to your parents. All that went when Thatcher came to power.’
For years he and Maggie were ‘political’ all the time; even their record collection had aided the revolution. He was proud of the anti-racist work they did, and the street stand-offs with the National Front. Much of the rest of their life together puzzled him, and he had begun to think it might be important to discuss it with Maggie later, after a few more drinks. She was argumentative, but he had begun to enjoy disputing, if not goading her, and liked to believe he was less scared of her than before.
‘That reminds me,’ he said, as the roof of the car slid open and the sound boomed into the street. ‘I didn’t show you the pictures of me receiving my OBE from the Queen.’
She was laughing. ‘I can’t wait.’
‘Naturally the medal wasn’t for me, but for the work everyone did for the company. I have a picture you can put on the mantelpiece. Joe will enjoy it.’
‘You’re going to be in a provocative mood today.’
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘But how can you not be fascinated by this funny little country? You go inside Buckingham Palace and there are Beefeaters, Chelsea Pensioners, Gurkhas, men in silver armour standing completely still, with like, you know, fur piled on their heads. There are other men walking across the Palace carpets wearing spurs on their shiny boots, a host of queens, and everyone else in badly fitting borrowed or hired suits. It’s like being sober at a fancy dress party.’
‘Do you really believe you’ve made a contribution?’
He said, ‘If you ever watch Spanish or Italian TV you’ll get some idea of the quality of what we do over here.’
‘I won’t have a TV in the house. Joe has to go to the pub to watch football.’
‘What is it, in your view, that people should be doing?’
‘Why can’t they talk?’
‘Watching the telly is more fun, I would have thought.’
Entering their usual restaurant in Hammersmith Grove, he said, ‘The service is terrible here, particularly since the Poles have sensed the downturn and have started to desert. But there’s no rush is there?’
As it was warm, they could sit outside, separated from the public by a neat hedge. The place was rarely crowded at lunchtime: there were only a few businessmen, a table of women who looked like footballers’ wives, and a couple of media executives who Max nodded at.
After they sat down she said, ‘I want to leave my job and home and come down here to live. Obviously I’ve got no money, but I’ll get a job.’
‘It’s too expensive, Maggie,’ he said, studying the menu. ‘We’re only just ahead. Four kids at private school — can you imagine? And capitalism’s having a breakdown, as Marx told us it would, every few years. Not a good time at all to try anything new, thank God. Can I order the wine?’
‘Max, I can’t wait for capitalism to sort itself out. You know how stubborn and bloody-minded I am — it’s one of those things I have to do.’
He asked, ‘Are you leaving Joe? Is that what it is?’
‘Neither of us is seeing anyone at the moment, but you know we don’t make a big deal about sharing. We can’t be everything to each other.’
‘I’ve been wondering about that,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘It’s such a peculiar and difficult thing.’
Joe had become part of their circle after they’d left university. A tall, long-bearded, lefty ex-public schoolboy with eyes which appealed to girls, he had started out as a furniture restorer to the rich, but wanted to be an honest worker, doing useful everyday toil. People liked to say his hands spoke for him, which Max considered to be a mercy, for otherwise he was almost completely silent. He would visit the flat Max and Maggie shared, and would smile, nod and shake his head, but rarely open his mouth. Later, when Max and Maggie split up and she began to go out with Joe, she would warn her friends that he’d say nothing. More annoyingly, because of Joe’s imperturbable silence, great wisdom was often attributed to him, as well as virtue: he was a committed activist. If you were poor and needed someone to work on your house for more or less nothing, he’d be there. Because he hated money and ‘breadheads’, if you wanted to pay him, better give him something useful, a bicycle, some potatoes, weed, a piano that needed mending.