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 beloved 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.