‘It’s all done. God!’ Stella picked a dish towel up off the floor and threw it onto the counter. ‘I am so sick of clearing up.’
Given their resources, it had not occurred to me that Stella might be feeling the weight of a domestic burden. But little Betty’s arrival must have ushered in a dramatic change of pace for her. And from the times I had met him, I was confident Georgy was not a man to look after himself. He had that preppy, over-mothered quality. Not one to keep the laundry in check, was my guess. Not adept in the stacking of dishwashers.
Fel came into the room. She had been crying. She held my eye long enough that I knew not to ask any questions. Betty went over and took her hand, and though Fel smiled and gave her hand a returning squeeze, nothing came of it: no talk, no game.
‘Is it time we were going?’ I asked.
Fel nodded.
‘Stella, call us any time. Is Mum going to be all right?’
‘We’ll be fine.’
‘Any time.’
‘Yes. Thanks.’
Fel and I bent down and took turns to kiss the top of Betty’s head. We left through the front door. Evening was drawing in. The boys lingering near the house had wandered off; there was no one on the street.
I said, ‘Let’s walk along the canal a bit. We can get a bus from the Roman Road.’
Fel followed where I led, without enthusiasm. We met the canal at the southern end of the tunnel, where it emerges from its underground passage of Islington. We picked our way down leaf-slimed steps to the towpath. It was a bright night. Most of them were, since the Bund had begun to light the Moon. We glimpsed it through damp, bare branches: a new moon, illumined by the lamps newly lit on its surface. Like this, it hardly seemed a solid thing at alclass="underline" more a scaffold of lit strings stretched across a small, circular void.
‘Mum thinks there’s going to be a war.’
‘Is that what she says?’
‘She reckons the Victory’s a warship. I don’t know where she gets this shit.’
‘My dad. Upstairs he was telling me much the same thing.’
‘Really?’ I was disconcerted. I had assumed Betty had been listening to the local phone-in shows. Maybe they both had. ‘Georgy buys into this idea?’
‘Daddy just had death threats daubed over his garden wall.’
I had no reply to that. ‘What did he say to you?’
Fel did not reply.
The roads running parallel to the canal descended slowly till the only thing separating the towpath from the road and its council housing, the bricks curdling under bright orange sodium lamps, was a low chain-link fence. Houses like these, I thought, were likely to be my only mark upon the world, and then not for long. The economies of the Bund were ungainsayable, and the whole city would be a Bund construction in time. Rage towards this future, though ugly and to be deplored, was not an unnatural response. ‘We should get out of here,’ I said.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘I mean we should get out of London altogether.’
‘Are you so frightened?’
‘It’s not a question of being frightened,’ I said, ‘it’s a question of being expected to take sides in a conflict that as far as I can see is entirely fatuous.’
We walked in silence. Beyond the estate were retail parks, more housing and, as we neared the Roman Road, the iron fences and towering plane trees of Victoria Park.
Fel said, ‘My mother rejected the Bund. Did I ever tell you this?’
‘You’ve never told me anything about your mother.’
‘She was Moldovan. Her family were boatmen before the War. Farmers before that. Peasants. Not thinkers. The last people you would ever expect to make a stand over an idea. When she left the Bund, she tried to take me with her to Palestine. I was too little to remember. I’m told that when we reached the Mandate, the authorities tore me off her and put me on the first boat home. I do think I remember Daddy waiting at the dock as we sailed into Tilbury. My mother died a year later during a typhus outbreak in Jerusalem. I have no idea why she suddenly decided to cling to the old faith, and it’s hopeless asking Daddy, all he ever does is quote from his own speeches. The debt we owe future generations. The promise of technology. Maybe my mother embraced Jehovah as the only voice strong enough in her head to contend with Daddy’s.’
The moral to all this did not need spelling out: the sides choose you.
‘We could go to Shropshire,’ I said. ‘Stella doesn’t use her house there. It needs someone to look after it.’
‘What would be the point of that?’
‘We could do what your mum tried to do. We could try to lead a normal life. You keep saying that’s what you want. Would you like a normal life with me?’
The look she shot me revealed how much she hoped for, and how uncertain she was that I would commit.
‘Nothing’s off the table,’ I said, careless and (strange how the feeling had crept up on me) desperate. ‘Absolutely nothing.’
If that had been true, I would have been prepared to utter the word ‘baby’ out loud. But some calculating part of me still clung on.
‘Let’s have a normal life,’ I said.
The smell was overpowering. A yeasty, cheesy, sour stench.
Fel stared into the dark of the hall. ‘What is that?’
I felt for the light.
Stella’s Shropshire cottage was infested with chickies. We could hear them scuttling about behind the furniture. Upstairs they thumped and bumped their way into hiding. They were as big as children but had the timid instincts of mice.
The carpets downstairs were smothered in scraps of paper. Every book in the place had been torn to pieces and chewed up for nest materials. The flock had been pulled out of the living-room sofa through rents in its covers. There was a foul-smelling stain in the corner of the living-room ceiling, so it was easy to guess where in the house the chickies went to relieve themselves.
Fel gazed about her at the ruin: ‘How is this even possible?’
‘The neighbours must be away.’
‘Jesus.’ She fished out her glass slab of a phone. Naturally there was no signal. ‘Where’s the land phone again?’
‘Over there. Who are you going to call?’
‘The firemen, of course.’
The fire brigade would bring exterminators. ‘It’s not that bad,’ I said.
Fel dialled. I came over and, gently, took the receiver out of her hand. ‘It’s not that bad. Let me deal with it.’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘Let me assess the damage. If we call the fire service, Stella’s insurance premiums will go up.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘We can go to Ludlow and find a hotel. Give me tonight to assess the damage and if necessary we can call the fire brigade in the morning.’
Fel spotted the stain on the ceiling. ‘Oh, God.’
‘Let’s find you a nice hotel.’
By the time I got back to the house, it was after eleven. The rooms were silent. Perhaps the chickies had already evacuated. I doubted it. I went into the kitchen. The radio on the windowsill was tuned to a music channel. I scanned for a talk show and turned the volume as high as it would go. Human voices were a more reliable deterrent. Use music and you were as likely to get chickies dancing as running away.
The player in the living room had no radio but I found a cassette of Third Kingdom, a popular if rather overwrought radio drama that imagined the state of continental Europe had Germany’s most notorious post-war chancellor not choked on that grape.
I went upstairs, letting the din on the ground floor do its work. Upstairs was far worse. There was a nest in the main bedroom, extending from the end of the bed and covering the window. It was made in the main of plastic waste which they must have dragged from fields above the cottage: fertiliser and feed bags, tarpaulin, bubble wrap. It was held together by stuff that had been chewed up and urinated upon to form a smelly cement. God knows what else had gone into it. Fabric. Paper. Bits of carpet. I fetched a broom out of the upstairs closet. I poked it into the nest. There was no sound. I wiggled the broom handle and heard the delicate interior crumble. The nest appeared to be empty.