Goodness. Part 1

Goodness.

by Tim Parks.

Prologue.

My father was a missionary murdered in Burundi in 1956. It was very much his own fault. He had been warned to leave and by not doing so he risked getting the rest of us killed too. When we were captured in our white mission bungalow, my mother, my sister and I were given the choice of dying with him or of saying some simple formula that renounced our faith, after which we would be allowed to leave the country. I was too young of course either to have a faith or to renounce it, though I don't doubt what my decision would have been. My mother on the other hand was torn. She's a superst.i.tious woman and believes in the power of words spoken even when not meant, the kind of person who would feel guilty at discovering that the phrase she had innocently repeated in some foreign language was blasphemy. Even today she wonders if she won't be punished for all eternity for having responded to her maternal instinct and saved both herself and us.

It's curious thinking about this now. Presumably a shot rang out and dispatched my father. I don't remember, I was too small. I haven't the slightest memory either of him or of Africa. If I think of his martyrdom at all it is with total incomprehension. And if I mention the grotesque affair now it is only because over the years I have come to see it as just the first, the most absurdly emblematic, of a long series of incidents in which other people's pretensions to goodness were to clash, to my considerable detriment, with the most naked common sense.

Part One.

BEFORE HILARY.

A Bundle of Unpleasant Contradictions.

After my father's death we came back to England to live with my widowed grandfather and spinster aunt in an ill-conceived semi-detached in Park Royal, about mid way between the Middles.e.x Hospital and where they later built the A40. My grandfather, who had escaped his country labourer background with a naval career that pulled him up to the dizzy heights of home owners.h.i.+p, lace curtains, embossed wallpaper and the like, was of the opinion that he was doing us a great favour putting a roof over our heads, and having never been able to stomach my fervently evangelical father, adopted a told-you-so att.i.tude that was to weigh heavily on my sister Peggy and myself throughout our childhood, and even more so, one imagines, on my mother who had no money to go elsewhere.

'Those jungle boys,' the old man would begin, though I don't suppose he could have been much over fifty then, 'haven't got souls to save, have they?' He smoked a pipe, as grandfathers will, or used to, and regularly occupied a heavy shapeless armchair in an ungenerous living room choked with green Wedgewood and Hummels. 'Never saw the point of missionarying,' he grunted.

I remember, from where I would be lying on the hearthrug, being fascinated by his facial skin, especially on the cheeks where the pores were so thick and large as to suggest the texture of some old neglected sponge. Certainly they had soaked up enough in their time. His hair was already white and p.r.i.c.kly short, the kind old men scratch vigorously. 's.h.i.+fty sods too.' He sucked in through his nose. 'Saw enough of that lot in my time to know to leave well alone, I did.'

Naturally he was speaking, even in those early days, over the urgent clamour of the television which he watched fixedly but didn't appear to need to listen to. Unless it was encroaching deafness. He puffed one pipe while sc.r.a.ping the bowl of another. 'If Arthur'd had any sense at all he'd have kept a gun in the house. Couple of loud bangs would have had that lot scarpering. That's what I say.'

My mother only said. 'Please, Dad. Please,' and would get up and go into the kitchen. He might shout after her: 'For G.o.d's sake, Jenny, can't you even take a joke? Or are you going to mourn after him your whole b.l.o.o.d.y life?' She wouldn't answer. She would never answer. This is my mother's way. For my own part, I remember feeling desperately sorry for her, yet incapable of intervening, since I always suspected that Grandfather, incorrigibly unpleasant and offensive as he was, was right. What was the point of missionarying? What possible sense did it make? My father must have been mad to go out there talking to blacks with their bones in their noses, their drums, their funny clothes, when they wore them (we had photographs). It wasn't that I was of an age to hold any progressive beliefs on the equal value of all cultures and religions. Quite the contrary. Just that somehow, from the cradle, I didn't believe in the saving and transformation of souls. My intuition has always been that people are who they are and forever remain so, or at best will simply become more and more themselves, more and more that spirit that you can't help but feel destined to be. Just as it is destiny to be black, destiny to be white. This is what self means, surely. Otherwise who are we?

Only Peggy objected. Only she stood up for Father. She said: 'You shouldn't say those kinds of things, Grandad.' We sat, lay, stood in that smoky suburban sitting room in West London: floral carpet, a pattern of coronation crowns and sceptres on the wallpaper, the grey TV carelessly wrapping and rewrapping time into odd half hours of this and that. Peggy said: 'Black people have souls just like us. Yes they do. Red and yellow, black and white, all are precious in His sight.'

What would she have been, seven, nine? She wore her hair in a ponytail and stood chubbily round-bottomed by Grandfather's chair. She said: 'Daddy was a good man. He loved the Lord Jesus and he wanted to save people so they wouldn't go to h.e.l.l. And now he has gone to heaven to wait for us there.'

While she spoke of course, my Grandfather would keep mumbling and rumbling his prejudices, since this wasn't really a conversation so much as two people at either end of life speaking their parts in each other's presence. 'Man would've done better if he'd thought of his own wife and kids before those b.l.o.o.d.y chimpanzees.'

I might catch the sound of my mother crying softly in the kitchen.

'G.o.d is looking after us,' Peggy insisted.

'With the help of muggins here's pension I suppose,' Grandfather came back. Until eventually he turned from the television to look at her out of sunken brown eyes. Though there was still a glint there. He would have been wearing his pub-going dark waistcoat, s.h.i.+rt-sleeves rolled up; a bulky, heavy-breathing presence.

Staring him out, she said: 'Don't be such a miserable old grumbler, Grandad. It's sinful to grumble and be miserable.'

The sight of her, rather than anything she said, would at last make him forget his racist grouching. He'd say, 'Come here, Peggy love. Come and sit on Grandad's knee.'

She pouted. She might well have had her hands on her hips. Probably she was already aware of striking poses. Certainly Grandfather recognised them when they were struck. He liked to grab her and cuddle her hard on his knee and say things like: 'My jewel, my Peggy. I do like a little girlie with some sparkle about her.'

My mother cooked, Grandfather rowed with or cuddled Peggy, and around six thirty Aunt Mavis came back, flopped down in an armchair, kicked off her shoes, treating us to a whiff of feet which n.o.body commented on, and lit a cigarette. I even remember the brand, Park Drive. They were the first I tried myself, stealing from her handbag. With her and Grandad together and the windows forever closed against 'the damp', we thus sat out the 1960s in a thick Virginia smog.

Very quietly, to myself and Peggy, when she had us on our own walking to church perhaps, my mother would say: 'Smoking is evil. Because it's an abuse of the body the Lord gave you.' It was the nearest she came to criticising Grandfather openly. She said: 'Our bodies are precious, holy. Every human body, His temple, made in His image. That's why you must never smoke. You must promise me you'll never smoke.' I suppose one might have objected that martyrdom was an even greater abuse of this image of G.o.d's we were supposed to be taking care of. But as a boy this never occurred and later there would seem no point in being cruel, since, come eighteen odd, you have learnt to humour rather than rebel. You have already won your freedom. Or at least you're of an age to think in such terms.

In line with her firm belief in the holiness of the human body, my mother wore no make-up, no earrings, no jewels at all apart from her wedding and engagement ring; she was a well-built, auburn, rather attractive woman, I suppose, with a pale quiet intense energy. Her sister, Aunt Mavis, on the other hand, made up heavily and did everything to hair and skin that the fas.h.i.+ons of each season dictated. Barely two years younger than my mother, she nevertheless affected the manner and aspirations of the teenage factory girls she worked with. I remember her, well into her thirties she must have been, still talking to us with adolescent dreaminess of Mr Right and the very large family she intended to have, when quite probably she had never so much as been kissed. She was ugly. Her features were oddly flat, she had no chin, and there was something out of true about her eyes, so that only one ever appeared to be looking directly at you.

As I grew older I began to appreciate that Aunt Mavis was a figure of fun, even ridicule. She said things out of the blue, laughed when there seemed no reason to, or alternatively cried. At nine or ten perhaps I began to feel seriously embarra.s.sed about her, especially if I brought friends home, embarra.s.sed that she was part of our family at all. It seemed so extraordinary, this having to accept the imposition of people you weren't comfortable with. Forever chattering and clapping her hands, forever retailing the small change of factory gossip, a curiously vacant expression hovered about Aunt Mavis's flattened features, a disturbing lack of focus. She wasn't a normal person. Apart from the television, she dedicated most of her spare time to the Harrow branch of the Elvis Presley Fan Club, of which she claimed to have been a founder member. And perhaps she was. It was inane enough. All I know is that as she chunnered on and on, always senseless, always excited, full of affected gestures and expressions which often she misunderstood, I simply wished and wished she would disappear.

Twenty years later, during the months of guerilla warfare that tore the heart out of our marriage, I remember s.h.i.+rley telling me that I had been entirely conditioned by this family of mine, that I had just soaked up the pathetic piety of my mother, the coa.r.s.eness of my grandfather, the amorality of my sister, and a fair dose of poor Aunt Mavis's dumbness too. These are the kinds of things one says in arguments, I suppose, and my own feeling is that nothing could be further from the truth. What kind of combination would that be? Piety, coa.r.s.eness, amorality?

'They don't mix,' I told her.

'Dead right,' she said, 'you're a bundle of contradictions, George Crawley, and unpleasant ones at that.'

But those were the good old days, pre-Hilary. I can't recall s.h.i.+rley and I arguing in quite the same aimless, indulgent way afterwards.

Walking Wounded My mother led a strange life. At home, in Gorst Road, she was little more than a slave. Even Aunt Mavis used to demand things of her, would say: 'I'm the modern woman, aren't I? Bringing home the bread, the least I can expect is to have my bed made for me.' She blinked, gormless and vapid.

Mother bowed to it. She did everything, shopped, cooked, washed up, cleaned, mended, gardened, darned, scrubbed, laundered, ironed. She was always tired, her skin always rough with work. And it occurs to me that apart from the brief interlude of her marriage, of Africa, she had been doing more or less the same thing in the same house since her early teens when her own mother died. For all of which she received no pay and less thanks, not a person who didn't take her for granted.

Yet the curious thing was that at our church, the local Methodists, Mother was a figure of considerable importance: a taker of meetings, reader of lessons, organiser of conferences and outings; a woman of quick decision, easy authority and loud, strong singing voice. We sang, 'He who would valiant be,' and she was booming and triumphant. For Father had been valiant. We sang, 'For all the saints, who from their labours rest,' and she had tears in her eyes, thinking of the saint my father had been, the rest he had deserved.

She was much loved, even revered. People came to her with their problems. They came with the most intimate problems, the most serious, even legal problems. For them she was both comfort and oracle. People came and wept with her, prayed with her, told everything. I always found, and to this day still do find, this fact extraordinary. I myself was unable to talk to my mother about anything: about religion, about my own wilderness of doubt, about my dead father, about Grandfather's unpleasantness, about Aunt Mavis's queerness, most of all about p.u.b.erty (Peggy's an explosion, physical and behavioural, my own slower, more furtive and guilty, later bold and deceitful). I was unable to talk to her about anything, and she in turn made no attempt to tackle anything intimate with me, nor with Peggy, who, through her friends at school, became my chief source of the vital information one inevitably grubs around for at that age.

I remember looking in Mother's handbag. I was supposed to be getting change for collection. She wasn't going to church for some reason. She had problems with her hips sometimes. Bouts of something or other. And ferreting for her purse amidst a mess of hankies, keys and sc.r.a.ps of paper, breathing the forever memorable, blown-nose and old-leather smell of her bag, I came across a tampon, a cylinder wrapped in ricepaper. I said: 'What's this, Mum?' At once she was fl.u.s.tered. I latched on immediately. 'What is it?' I said. 'Put it away.' 'But what is it, Mum?'

You would have thought, looking back, here was her opportunity to give young George his lesson, to guide him towards some mature understanding of the female body. But no, she says: 'It's a cigar.' I couldn't swear, but this may be the only straight lie my mother ever told me. 'For Grandfather.'

I looked at the long tube in its flimsy paper cover. It looked the right shape for a cigar, the big ones they advertised with organ music on the box. I said: 'But you don't like Grandad to smoke.' 'For his birthday,' she wriggled. 'It's next Friday you know.' She found a painful smile. 'We can waive a rule for his birthday, can't we? Bless his dear heart.'

And I swallowed it. The extraordinary thing being that she then went out and actually bought a cigar for the old man's birthday. Odd, no, to think of my mother being so cunning, so resourceful in her prudishness? For what? To save my innocence? In a world where the worst is anyway chalked on every wall. In a family where, that very evening, Peggy had already told me everything, mocking my innocence, even showing me quite graphically (using a 'Q' tip) how you fitted them in.

Yet almost everybody in the church brought their problems to this woman, their confessions. They came to her after service in the hall where we had coffee and she would go off with them to the vestry, leaving Peggy and I to kick our heels in the yard amongst stacks of coal and tiles from the roof they'd had to remove because they were dangerous. They came to her at home in Gorst Road, sometimes late in the evening and she took them to her room. 'Here comes another of the walking wounded,' Grandfather would announce when the bell ding-donged in the middle of the Man from Uncle, Harry Worth's Half Hour. 'Out with the bandages. Call the nurse. Or is it to be last rites?' And when one Sat.u.r.day afternoon a black came, he said with his extraordinary flair for insensitivity: 'Don't you think we should frisk him? Don't want any trouble.'

But despite his prejudices and scorn Grandfather never actually prevented anybody from coming in. Even the most dishevelled of tramps (for Mother was famous for giving tea to vagrants in the kitchen 'Four sugars, ma'am'); even, as the sixties progressed, the occasional Indian (if Grandfather despised blacks, he truly loathed Indians). And this was another thing with my mother, that however much derision she attracted, and probably still attracts, she generally gets her way; and even if she doesn't answer back, she has a quiet authority in her pa.s.sivity, a power really, something terribly persuasive about her softly focusing brown eyes. Charisma. It was her 'ministry'.

'My ministry,' I heard her explaining when she turned down Eddie Foulkes who owned the Hallmarks Plastics factory on Bowes Road and always put a tenner in the collection plate. I was on hands and knees on threadbare carpet in the dark light at the top of the stairs. They were by the porch below. She had prayed about it and the Lord had told her no.

Grandfather was furious when I told him and there was the most almighty row. She was putting her prayer rubbish before the welfare of her b.l.o.o.d.y family. Wasn't it enough that her husband had been killed by a bunch of nignogs? Wasn't it enough that she lived on the social, that we couldn't afford decent clothes? Mother said Eddie had been divorced, she could never marry a man who had broken a solemn vow to someone else. Otherwise what did promises mean? Grandfather was livid. He spat. Peggy said everybody got divorced and she couldn't, see the problem, especially seeing as they liked each other. Eddie was fab. Mother didn't cry; Mother only cried when she was afraid for your soul. 'Maybe if I stayed at home and did nothin' all day I'd 'ave more of a chance of getting married,' Mavis said.

It was a nasty scene and partly my fault, since I had hoped the others would be able to change her mind and we could move into Eddie's big house over in Ealing. Also I honestly believed it would be the best thing for my mother. Grandfather raved on and on. I seem to remember it was on this occasion that he hit her. When the whole thing got too painful I went out the back and kicked a ball against the wall. I decided that after I had escaped my family and was in control of my life, I would never be gratuitously mean or violent, as Grandfather was, but then nor would I ever put up with anybody or any situation that made life unbearable, as Mother did. I would be honest and reasonable, generous where generosity was due, and I would always always choose the road that led to a happy, healthy, normal life.

Wasn't that a fair stab at a moral code? For a fourteen-year-old. And one I honestly do believe I've stuck to.

Although only a month or so ago, when she found my sc.r.a.pbook, s.h.i.+rley said: 'You are aware you're not human, aren't you? You are aware of that? Because I know what you're thinking.'

'Only too human,' I replied, 'to go by what's in those papers.'

But s.h.i.+rley had become one of the walking wounded herself by this time.

A Certain Grace Aunt Mavis finally found her Mr Right. Bob Hare was about ten years her younger, unemployed, slim to the point of frail and a Mormon. When he spoke it was with the extreme and unfriendly caution of somebody who is not expecting a fair trial. Oh, G.o.d,' Grandad announced after his first visit, 'a t.u.r.d on two legs. And I thought I'd seen it all.'

Bob spent his days proselytising on doorsteps in Shepherd's Bush and Holland Park. Although timid, he was obviously grimly determined, constantly summoning up all his courage to get a foot in the door and jabber out his lines: the Book of Mormon, the moral decay of our society, the only road to salvation, the importance of the family, what have you. Naturally the reaction he was most at home with was rebuff. He drew the dole and rent relief, which disgusted my grandfather, and was unhealthily pale and sickly-looking in a pinched, persecuted way. If he had any attraction at all it was that haunted and haunting, thin-boned, soft-eyed pa.s.sion you often find in black-and-white photos of refugees and general strikers. Mother saw red, though she was careful to call him 'Poor dear Bob'. Aunt Mavis was having none of it and after only a couple of months married him without telling any of us, so that late one Sat.u.r.day afternoon, there she was, tubby in tight slacks, gathering her clobber together and setting off for a bedsit in Haringey.

Where very soon she miscarried. Not once but twice. This much I learnt from Peggy who had overheard a conversation between Mother and Grandfather. Mother, who blamed herself terribly for this injudicious marriage and visited regularly, asked me to come with her to cheer Mavis up, telling me only that she was depressed. I refused. My mother insisted. Why should I? I asked. Had Mavis ever come to see me? Perhaps I was just annoyed that at sixteen or seventeen, or whatever I now was, I still wasn't to be let in on the serious and intimate information in the family, I was being treated like a child, my opinion wasn't required. I told her I wouldn't go unless Mavis asked me herself. Mother said this att.i.tude was unchristian of me and selfish. I pointed out that no one else was being asked to go, not Peggy, not Grandfather. 'We can go into town afterwards,' she pleaded, 'perhaps treat you to something you want to see.' For it was and still is so important to Mother that an appearance of family solidarity be kept up.

We took two long London bus-rides through depressing streets, the new estates that were already slums. There was a terraced house, four flights of uncarpeted stairs, a dingy yellow door where a rag did for a doormat and a note said: 'Bell don't work. Knock.'

I blame my mother really for never finding out more about Mavis and what was wrong with her. I mean, it's one thing being good and generous to all and sundry, but my own feeling is that we have certain strategic responsibilities to the members of our family that are far more important. Mavis was obviously not quite right in the head. One knew that if only from the way people instinctively treated her with condescension, not unkindly, but with indulgence rather, the way you treat animals, half-wits, tiny babies. Yet my mother never enquired into what might lie behind this. I have no memory of any doctor ever being invited to p.r.o.nounce on her odd facial features or r.e.t.a.r.ded mental development. She was just accepted from the start for what she was, dumb, childish, ugly. And while it's all very well saying we're all G.o.d's creatures whatever's the matter with us, I do believe that Mother failed in her duty here.

Bob was out to see the social security people. Mavis was in bed, eating sweets, smoking. Fis.h.i.+ng for a piece of toffee stuck to her teeth, she talked about her miscarriages quite openly in my presence, despite initial frowns and signs of discouragement from my mother. Mother asked had the doctors said anything about why, and Mavis laughed and said, nothing that made any sense. She blew out smoke through one nostril and then the other. She and Bob were determined she said. They had mostly got married for the kids. He was mad about them.

I wanted to go because of the smell, the unpleasantness, and then the embarra.s.sing inanity of my aunt's twitter. She was showing some baby clothes she had bought now. She was sure it was going to be a boy. She giggled. When it finally decided to turn up. I remember her big pear-shaped body heaving from one side of the bed to another to pick things up off the floor; she let out grunts, her cigarette flecking the blankets with ash. I was desperate to go, I get quite frantic sometimes when I find myself in unpleasant situations, I simply can't bear it, I feel I will die of unpleasantness; but Mother of course felt duty bound to wash the dishes, hoover the carpet, save the unsaveable. I offered to help, to speed things up, but was told to keep Mavis company, drink my tea.

I stood by the bed with my hands in my pockets. I didn't want any tea and I had spent my whole childhood in the same house as Mavis without ever talking to her. Was it likely we would find anything to say to each other now? I told her we were going into town afterwards to see the Queen's stamp collection. I told her Peggy had got herself a dog but then never bothered to look after it, she was so busy playing the drums in a rock group all the time. Grandfather loathed the thing. I told her I was going to university in a year or two so as to be able to leave home. Mavis licked a thumb. I asked her if she liked being married, and she said it was all right and stopping work was the best thing that could ever have happened to her, not having to get up so early and have your hands ruined by those hot machines. 'Which reminds me,' she said. 'Where's me lipstick?'

Bob came back. He stood frail and knotty-haired in the doorway watching my mother down on her knees having a go at crud on the carpet. The room was quite big, maybe fifteen by fifteen, but it had everything, kitchenette, bed, table, chairs, sofa, so it was cluttered, with just the one orange-curtained window and a busy road behind to rattle it.

'No need to do that,' he said brusquely. 'I'd have done that.'

When he got closer to us you couldn't not be aware he'd been drinking. He looked belligerent, ready to snap.

'We clean the place every day,' he insisted. His eyes were pink.

Preparing to leave, Mother made a whole pantomine of signs with her eyes for him to come outside and have a word about Mavis. A rock would have understood, but Bob's strained face merely filled with puzzlement. I was tugging at Mother's coat cuff to be gone. Mavis was propped up in bed staring chinlessly. How old must she have been? Thirty-six? Thirty-eight? Mother made her signs again. Perhaps half understanding, Bob said: 'We're okay. We don't need help from no one.' He was tense.

'Cheerie bye,' Mother called past him to her sister. At the corner of the stairs we heard raised voices above us. Shouting. Mother hesitated one short second in mid step, then quickened her pace.

With what relief I let myself out into the street and took a breath of fresh air! I had hurried on ahead. For life, as I have so often insisted to s.h.i.+rley of late, should have a certain grace, shouldn't it? A certain grace. Please. Otherwise I do believe one might as well be dead.

A Cla.s.sic Case The first time I threw in my weight in an attempt to tip the scales toward sanity and common sense was on the occasion of Peggy's first pregnancy. I would have been living in Leicester by then. s.h.i.+rley and I had moved in together, having found ourselves quite a decent semi some miles from the university; it was pricey, but we shared with a couple of other students and Mr Harcourt, her father, unwittingly provided what I couldn't always afford.

It would be difficult to exaggerate what a release this change of scene was, how wonderful at last, at last, not to have to worry that Mother would find out what one was up to, not to have to face her silent and suffering reproach, her insistent, if never spoken, 'Be thou me! Be thou me!' I didn't go back home from one end of term to the other and certainly not for such minor events as Grandfather's prostectomy or Aunt Mavis's suicide attempt. Mother wrote asking me to come and I wrote back asking what possible help could I be, and explaining that the important thing for me surely was to get the best degree possible and so escape the poverty trap that in the future world of high technology and high unemployment people from my sort of unskilled lower middle-cla.s.s background were in every danger of falling into.

Mother wrote to say she understood, though it would be nice if I could make it home just sometimes, and she kept me up to date on such events as the death of Peggy's dog Jagger (fed chicken bones by Grandfather), the church meetings she spoke at, what she had cooked when so and so and so and so, who were missionaries in Borneo or clergymen from Nigeria, had come to lunch, her contacts with Peggy (scrubbing clean some slum my sister was squatting in, lending her ten pounds she would never see again), stories of a stray cat she had taken in, a tramp she had fed who had walked off with Grandfather's favourite lighter, so and so who had been converted when so and so came to speak to the youth fellows.h.i.+p, conversations with the next door neighbours about the state of the sewage pipes under the garden, our sycamore that took light from their front room, the rotting fence they wanted to fix and Mother couldn't afford to, etc. etc.

I didn't go home. I was happy as I had never been before: work, play, parties, independence, self-indulgence, s.h.i.+rley. Until mid way through the third year Mother sent a telegram: 'Peggy in family way, please please come.'

It was a cla.s.sic case of people not doing what was most sensible and convenient for everybody concerned, and thus a forerunner of events to come. Worth dwelling on. Mavis, I discovered on arrival home (Mother's letters were clearly rather less informative than they liked to present themselves), had come back to live in Gorst Road after swallowing a half bottle of bleach. Her second attempt. Bringing only the minimum dole with her, she spent her days listening to old Elvis Presley records in her room and whining about Bob who had now left the Mormons and joined some Eastern fringe religion based in Indonesia and run by a charismatic figure known as the Bapi. This had disorientated Mavis. The Bapi had ordered Bob, as he did all his converts, to take a new name. So Bob was now Raschid. The root cause of their break-up had apparently been that Mavis, in a surprising show of independence, had infuriated Bob by refusing to call him Raschid or to contemplate changing her own name. She was Mavis and she liked to be called Mavis. I suppose the only positive thing about all this was that it was a good story to tell at dinner parties. Financially it was a disaster.

Peggy meanwhile had been squatting in Islington playing drums in a small folk group and helping in a War on Want shop on Camden High Street which had been raided for drugs on three occasions. Thrown out of the squat a few days before, she had temporarily returned home, more to make a visit than out of any real need for refuge, since Peggy could have found a bed at a moment's notice almost anywhere in the city, so extensive was and is her network of friends, or rather of those people who immediately recognise in her one of their own subculture.

She came home and over tea quite by the way and without the slightest sense of momentousness, told Mother that she was pregnant. Later in the same conversation, throughout which Mother had with her customary infinite caution been trying to find out more, Peggy asked her for a large, indeed by our family standards huge, sum of money, without specifying why she needed it. At which Mother had quickly put an old-fas.h.i.+oned two and two together and telegrammed me.

I arrived in the afternoon towards three. In a clearly agitated state, so unlike the serene air of wisdom she would offer her walking wounded, Mother caught me at the door before I could ring the bell, so as to grab a private word: she had stalled Peggy over the issue of the money, she said, though in reality she could never afford such a sum. She had stalled her to prevent her from going elsewhere before I arrived. She wanted me to talk to her rather than doing it herself because she knew Peggy considered her something of a religious fuddy duddy whereas coming from me the advice would have much more authority. Peggy respected me. She was always saying how much common sense I had and how well I was doing. And of course I was young. Everybody set so much store by what generation you belonged to these days. I must tell her that it was wrong to have an abortion. Quite wrong. It was killing a child. It was murder. There was nothing more one could say about it and all the modern arguments in its favour were just unadulterated inst.i.tutionalised selfishness. How could they be anything but? A child was alive and you killed it, and it was so shameful that something that called itself the women's movement supported such carnage. Peggy must have the baby. She must. If she didn't want it afterwards, Mother herself would keep it. Something somehow could always be arranged. There were so many people wanted babies and couldn't have them.

I was a shade overwhelmed. Every day, or at least every month of her life in her role as self-appointed social worker Mother must have dealt with more or less similar situations; she'd had plenty of girls from the church come to her pregnant by the wrong man, or by the right man at the wrong time. Yet her sense of urgency now, her determination to persuade, was extraordinary. The wrinkled corners of her soft mouth trembled. Her hands were clasped together with unnatural force. Her living soul-self seemed to be concentrated in the fluttering, watering eyes looking at me so intensely. You could see how for her, for my mother, a simple suburban abortion was raised to the level of a vast metaphysical showdown between good and evil. There were angels and demons perched all over the furniture.

'Please, George,' she said. 'Please.'

Fresh, or rather stale, from coach and tube, still struggling a little to reaccustom myself to the prayer-meeting rhetoric, I pointed out that Peggy could hardly want the money for an abortion, since abortions, like it or not, were now free on the health service. Mother stopped. She was breathing quickly: 'Oh, of course. Of course. How stupid of me. How stupid!' And she asked: 'Is there any chance she doesn't know?'

Peggy apparently was out the back soaking up the year's first suns.h.i.+ne. I said I would go and talk to her, get to the bottom of it at once. 'Please,' Mother said again. 'Okay,' I said.

So far we had talked in undertones amidst the pungent shoe and old geranium smells of the porch, but now, crossing living room and kitchen to reach the back, I was struck as never before by the dinginess of my old home. The wallpaper was a glazed yellow brown, the carpet threadbare a rug aslant, itself badly worn, rather obviously covering the hole by the pa.s.sage door. Sofa and armchair with their washed out once elastic covers were more than ever tattered and shapeless.

I looked, and found it desperately poignant to think of my dear mother wasted in that unpromising environment. I felt a surge of moral energy. I was the success of the house. I was about to graduate. These people needed help and it was up to me to give it to them. Rather than staying away, I should be making regular visits to check the situation out, see what ought to be done.

I opened the back door. Outside was a twice folded handkerchief of lawn surrounded by rosebushes and other, for me nameless, flowers which my mother somehow found time to cultivate and water and worry about. They about half-hid the black creosoted fence that sagged behind. I stepped out, ducked under a line straining with damp was.h.i.+ng, and found Peggy sprawled on a patch of dandelions in bra and pants, exposing her chunky pale body to suns.h.i.+ne that seemed barely warm. A scruffy little dog n.o.body had told me about was idly licking her ribs.

'Peggy.'

She sat up and broadly smiled surprise. 'You too!' she said. 'Quite a reunion. How nice.' Falling forward as her body came up, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were plump. She stroked the little dog. 'Do you like Theo? He waylaid me on the Heath and refuses to go away.'

I pushed aside a damp green nylon sheet and squatted down. I paused. I said: 'Mother tells me you're pregnant.'

She was squinting still to adjust her eyes. 'Oh you've grown a moustache.' She burst out into one of her laughs. 'Makes you look a bit AC/DC.'

In a low voice, I explained that Mother had telegrammed for me to come down to persuade her not to have an abortion, but that in fact I was entirely on her side. Entirely. So not to worry. Of course she should have an abortion. The feminists were perfectly right. It was her body to do what she wanted with. It was her decision. If she went and had a baby now what kind of career could she ever expect to have? Not to mention the poor child growing up in these slummy surroundings, with not even much prospect of work at the end of the day, and then the present international climate, the threat of nuclear war and so on. Was it a world to bring kids into? I'd support her one hundred per cent if Mother started putting on any pressure, in fact I felt just about ready for a showdown, let her know what I thought about her repressive religious ideas, though seeing as it was really none of her business the best thing would be simply not to say anything and then to present her with a fait accompli. If she . . .

'But I don't want to have an abortion,' Peggy blinked.

I was taken aback. She leaned over and ruffled my hair. She kissed my cheek, playing older sister. 'Don't worry your little head about it, Georgie, you're so worked up, cool it, take it easy, I'll sort it all out myself, it's no problem.'

She smiled. Then she said: 'So poor Mum thought I was planning an abortion?' and she got up and ran into the house to tell Mother she had never had any intention of getting an abortion. Never. How on earth had she got that idea into her head? Oh, when she'd asked for money it was because she and some other friends were clubbing together to put up bail for one of the guys in the squat who'd been arrested. Completely trumped up drugs charges. The police should be ashamed of themselves. From the garden I could hear Mother weeping for joy, fierce hiccups of emotion, promising what funds she had.

Later, over tea and buns, which she insisted on baking and even icing as a sort of celebration, Mother asked: 'Not the father, I hope?'

'You what?' Peggy was licking her finger to pick up crumbs from her plate. Mavis fed herself vacantly.

'This fellow who's been arrested. He's not the father?'

'Oh no,' Peggy laughed.

I couldn't help feeling as we munched away that I was the only one there actually concerned about the practical implications of this development. I said: 'So maybe you wouldn't mind telling Mum who the father is, since she's probably going to have to look after the poor child.'

Peggy turned to me in surprise. 'Oh my, aren't we a sour puss!'

Mother said: 'George's only trying to help, dear. It was so nice of him to come down. Now do tell us about the chappie.'

'His name's Dave,' Peggy said. 'He's an actor, a wonderful man. We're going to get married as soon as we can. And we shall be looking after the child ourselves, thank you very much. Why ever shouldn't we?'

'Don't look at me,' Mavis came out in an inexplicable huff.

'I thought,' I said, 'that getting married was one of the few things you could do from one moment to the next if you really wanted to.'