Wicked Women (18 page)

The cookery class at the Open Prison was doing rather better: Clive and Jim were baking £50 notes into a cake tin. Clive extracted them from between the pages of a cookery book called
Easy Steps to Home Baking
and handed them to Jim, who dipped them one by one into a rather over-vanillaed mix before laying them in the tin. He sang as he dipped. He was in love, and for a man to fall in love with his own wife is a happy experience. Can electrified fences a prison make, or cookery classes a cage?

And because new love flies through the universe, turning all things rosy, tipping the spires of the Bagshott Development—and even the poor, unfinished, stunted growth of Audrey Tower itself—with gold, Aunt Annie looking out over what to many was the debris of a ruined city and a languid slime of murky river and seeing only charm, progress and infinite possibility, said to Timothy, “Oh, by the way, a postcard came for you. It’s from your mother.” She’d meant just to forget its arrival. She’d never liked Audrey, even before she ran off with the chauffeur and so upset Jim.

The postcard was what’s known as a Sixteenth Century Dutch interior, a woman sweeping clean a yard, forget the yard’s outside, not inside.
See ya soon, kid,
the message on the back said in its enchantingly quivery red-biroed writing. The hand of his mother. Timothy rejoiced in his heart, felt his father’s blood surge more strongly in his veins, and his mother’s too, and the very next day took Mr. Hobbs aside and offered him and his wife a free holiday for two in the Bahamas, through certain travel agencies known personally to the Bagshott family, in return for Mr. Hobbs desisting from libelling Form 13.

“Schedule flight or charter?” asked Mr. Hobbs.

“Schedule,” replied Timothy.

“Club Class or Economy?” asked Mr. Hobbs.

“Club,” said Timothy, and so the deal was done. That Mr. Hobbs knew his time was up in teaching, that Mr. Korn—following a doctor’s report relating to the traumas suffered by the pretty student teacher (I’m not saying her prettiness had anything to do with the advent of natural justice: merely that it helps) which she had the courage to attribute to Mr. Hobbs and not the pupils—finally had sufficient evidence to apply to the Council for Mr. Hobbs’ dismissal, was neither here nor there. One thing to be said for Mr. Hobbs was that he was not proud, and another was that he knew which side his bread was buttered. It is important to keep looking for good in people, otherwise one might succumb to despair.

We next see Rupert Oates visiting Audrey Tower with a cake, a gift for Annie, baked by her brother Jim in prison. A nice scene this: Annie’s surprise and gratification at her brother’s thoughtfulness: her mixed pleasure (once Mr. Oates was gone—no Bagshott was born yesterday) and disappointment at finding her mouth more full of money than cake: the internal struggle as to whether or not to just swallow the note that said the money was to take Timothy out of Bagshott School and pay for his private education, or just keep the money herself, and the eventual triumph of good. Aunt Annie decided to act unselfishly and do as her brother wished. People make this kind of decision all the time, though cynics think they don’t. The assumption that the great men of the people act only in their own interest is a plague of our time.

Meanwhile, it’s packed lunch time in the Art Room, and Timothy stands on a chair and exhorts fans and doubters both to direct action. The power of the union, the will of the workers, so fast fading in the adult world, will find its revival in our schools: it is a prophecy: not a difficult one, if you consider the state of our schools. Rather like a Western scientist impressing a native tribe by predicting an eclipse.

“Fellow pupils,” cries Timothy. “Comrades! Have you no courage, no common sense? Are you sheep or are you men? Packed lunchers all, have you no pride? Daily we are subjected to these Ooster raids: it is too much. We must unite against these bullies: singly we are powerless; united and organised, who can stand against us? The formation of the Bagshott Protection Agency is under way—membership 50p, payable to me. Twitcher here will make a note of it. An offence against one is from now on an offence against all. The Teamsters Union was better than none. Ask any U.S. baggage handler.”

“We’ll get found out,” said Boy 1.

“We’ll get into trouble,” said Boy 2.

“We’ll get sent to Mr. Korn,” said Boy 3.

“But you’ll get to eat your dinner,” said Timothy Bagshott, and as the faces of Boys 1, 2 and 3 broke into smiles, Les lingered long upon them, at Angus’ request.

Happy Paul took care to record the conversation of the Ooster boys as they approached the Art Room, the dinner of others on their minds. It went like this:

Ripper: “Jon-Jon, big brother, there’s something I want to know.”

“What’s that?” asked Jon-Jon.

Ripper: “If our mum ever won at Bingo, instead of always losing, would we get chicken legs for dinner, like Timothy Bagshott?”

“Spastic,” said Jon-Jon, “you are a spastic. Our mum always wins at Bingo. She just tells us she doesn’t.”

Tears came into Ripper’s eyes. Boys depend dreadfully upon their mother’s love, no matter how much taller than their mothers they become. Joe-Joe said nothing. He was a silent lad, and had spoken very little since the day his pet rabbit produced a litter of twelve and Barley Ooster flushed the lot down the toilet. It had been a miracle birth: how can a single pet rabbit produce a litter without divine intervention? And indeed, the problems with Audrey Tower plumbing dated from that traumatic day, though the tenants preferred to blame Jim Bagshott.

As the Ooster boys leaned heavily through the Art Room door and splintered it for the third time that term, they were set upon by the Bagshott Protection Society, in united and organised protest, and forcibly thrown out again into the corridor, bruised, surprised, and without their trainers. “It’s a madhouse, this school,” said Jon-Jon. “You can’t even get dinner when you’re hungry,” said Ripper. But Joe-Joe said, he who had been silent for so long, “If we asked Mr. Oates, he’d get us free cooked dinners every day.”

Money, time and patience ran out for Angus at this stage. There was trouble with the crew. Paul had another job to go to; Les lost interest once he had perceived there was nowhere for the story to go but to a happy ending, and began to frame his shots sloppily and forgot to renew the batteries before they ran out, thus holding everybody up intolerably, and to the detriment of the shooting schedule.

Angus was obliged to forgo the dramatic—well, fairly dramatic—scenes in which Timothy Bagshott gave the cake money back to his Aunt Annie, and told Mr. Korn he wanted to stay on at Bagshott School, which, now he had organised a little, he had come to love. He was certainly finding it profitable. Viewers never got to see how Jim confessed to the Parent Governors that the school swimming pool was potentially dangerous and how in return, and for health reasons, he was let out on parole. How Audrey and Jim (reformed by love) and Timothy returned to Amanda, to run a centre for the homeless. How Aunt Annie ran off with Barley Ooster—why do you think she wouldn’t move to a thatched cottage?—to Mrs. Ooster’s great relief. Mrs. Ooster had come to dislike sex and Annie had all her years of celibacy to make up for, which suited everyone. Mrs. Ooster was now able to give all her love and affection to her boys, who became model members of society. How Twitcher’s father paid for him to have his short-sightedness cured by the new Soviet method of paring away the cornea, so the lad was no longer obliged to wear glasses. How Joe-Joe’s rabbit gave birth to another set of miraculous young, which Joe-Joe, now his father was happy with Aunt Annie, was allowed to raise: how a vandal-proof toilet was installed at the entrance to Audrey Tower and its remaining seven floors constructed without undue torment to those already living there, and so forth. All these happy occurrences were left drifting in the hopeful air—too expensive to be nailed on film and, besides, as everyone knows, good news is no news. So forget it. Who cares about dramatic form?

“Paul, are you happy?” enquired Angus for the last time, and Paul replied, “Yes” with some sincerity, for with the end of filming he was at least free to return to the arms of his girlfriend, and as his parting shot gave Angus a few more lines from Rupert Oates’ head.

“Though socialism’s dead and gone, they say,

Yet still shall justice and compassion win the day.

How else can man (and woman too) live with him (her) self?

Only with understanding, empathy, good management these three,

Shall come the proper sharing out of wealth,

The best will, not the worst will, of the people be set free.

No one’s a villain, but the world has made him so.

No one’s a villain, but if you ask him won’t say no.

Who, me?”

Thank you, Rupert Oates, you’ll be late for your meeting.

“S
OME THINGS ARE HELD
in common by all of us,” I tell Ed. “Like what?” he asks.

“The way a young woman looks in a mirror,” I say, “and pats her hair as she passes. A tilt of the chin, a twisting of profile. Love me, love me, how loveable I am! How perfect!”

The way a man straightens his tie, takes a breath and squares his jaw before going into a room full of strangers who make him nervous: gestures held in common, I say; species behaviour, no matter how individual we believe them to be: your Aunt Sally, my nephew Bill; you name them, they do it: or did it when young. And indeed these are gestures which can trigger love, if observed at the right time, at the right place, and thereby work to the furtherance of the species. Women are more fertile when they love their partners, did you know that? Orgasm—researchers equate orgasm with love, for some reason—enables women to retain sperm. That’s what all that excitement’s about, apparently. It would be easy enough for Ed to agree with me: he does. He nods. I am accustomed to sweeping a generalisation or so through his head; he not too resisting. The “men do this; women do that” stuff goes on sounding reasonable enough, but the times catch up with us and overwhelm us, and what I could once say now turns out to be, when I think about it a little longer—how can I put it?—gender deceptive.

That is to say, these days a young man will pat his hair as he passes a mirror, with an equal tilt of his chin, a misting of exhaled breath, just as if he were Marilyn Monroe, and a career woman will pause and square her shoulder-pads before going into her meeting to convince and impress the foe. Nor will either activity be indicative of any dilution of—and here I search for the new language and come up with—“appropriate gender energy.” The man who admires his hair in the mirror is as likely to relate to the “opposite” sex as his own, or as likely as he ever was: and it’s the same for women. You can be as female as you like or don’t like, in your big clumping boots; as male as you like in your crushed velvet trews. Or at least in the great cities of the world this is so; in country areas the sexes remain “opposite” in their forced polarity, the better to reproduce the species.

These thoughts come to me as we wait for the next batch of prospective house-buyers to come up the drive. We sit in the front garden in the sun and watch for a car to turn in from the main road, down the dip, past the duck pond, and up the drive to the yard. This is an old farmhouse; the yard is still partly cobbled. City drivers hate it: they fear for their suspension. Naively, I once believed a partly cobbled yard would be a selling point. The Estate Agent tells me otherwise.

Edward and I can no longer live here at Grazecot. We are too old, the children tell us, and we agree. Our knees creak. We lose the energy for gardening, though Edward can still prune the roses, and I still cry, “Not so hard, not so deep!” and he makes his annual reply: “The harsher the better: no gain without pain!” The children describe us as “rattling round in that great house like peas in a pod,” but I never noticed peas rattling in a pod—broad beans will do it sometimes, if they’re accidentally left on the stalks through the winter: the pods turn brown and brittle and the beans inside shrivel a little and lose their attaching strings as their housing shakes in the wind. But peas don’t rattle: especially modern peas, with their almost edible, tender pods, genetically engineered turning into
mange-tout.
Eat everything!

But the children were never interested in the garden. There was too much of it around to arouse their interest. Hetty disconcerted me the other day—she had come to stay, bringing the children: she had had another quarrel with Rory: it is time they stopped it: she is my youngest and nearly forty—Hetty, as I say, disconcerted me by calling a dahlia a poppy. I looked at her aghast and she said, “Oh, Mom, you know they all look alike to me. I’m not a visual person, never was.” And all I said was, as I always say: the familiar rhetoric “Don’t call me Mom.” And Hetty, of course, took not the slightest notice. The protests of mothers blow like a mild, familiar wind round the ears of children, fit only to be ignored.

When Guy, my oldest, was twelve, he brought an American friend home for the school holidays, and the poor boy’s mother died suddenly in the States while he was with us, and I rashly said, “Look on me as your mother, Al”—the kind of sentimental, silly thing one says
in extremis
—and the wretched child did. He took to calling me “Mom.” His father was already dead, and he was a whole two years with us at Grazecot, waiting to be claimed, by which time all the children called me that: Mom. Al left and simply vanished from our lives: he didn’t even write a thank-you letter: some wealthy uncle had finally turned up to fetch him, as if he were out of a Dickens novel. All Al left as legacy was “Mom.” He was nearly fifteen by the time he left—I don’t blame him for his discourtesy—fifteen is a self-conscious age, when one is only too anxious to forget the past, and Al, given the opportunity to disconnect the young man from the child, no doubt simply took it. And I was busy enough with my own three, and working too—Supermom, Al called me—up and down to the city on the train, forever trying to catch up with myself, with never quite enough time to feel the pleasure of simply living.