The Lubetkin Legacy Page 10

  ‘Maybe I am naive. If so, I’d rather be naive than a crook.’

  As soon as she blurts it out, she knows it’s the wrong thing to say, but the wine has loosened her tongue. It isn’t even as if Global Resource Management takes the lion’s share of the 10,000 buckets at $49 each – it’s Mr Horace Nzangu, whoever he is. His British Virgin Isles-based shell company is simply set up and managed by GRM, who deduct their 2% commission. The buckets which Mr Nzangu resells to the Health Department in Nairobi come from a factory in China, at a cost of $1 each. Probably their actual makers received less than 1p a bucket.

  ‘Don’t get so emotional, chérie. It’s not personal, it’s just business. This is the system we work within. Look at it this way – wealth-makers need incentives. If they aren’t allowed to keep the wealth they generate, we’ll all be poorer in the end.’ He squeezes her hand. ‘Is it because of your family?’

  ‘It’s not my family. It’s not even the corruption in Kenya – everybody knows about that. But I didn’t realise that we over here … that you …! You’ve just helped someone to steal four million pounds from the poorest of the poor and taken your commission. And you seem to think it’s okay! Just business!’

  ‘It’s not my job to solve the world’s problems, Violet. Believe me, corruption in Kenya doesn’t depend on companies like GRM.’ He leans forward and forks a mouthful of meat. She watches his teeth chomping up and down as he chews.

  ‘You mean they’re corrupt but we’re so-o-o civilised?’ She takes another gulp of wine and waves her hands in the air.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Violet! You’re making yourself look ridiculous. Drop the preaching and welcome to the real world!’

  There’s something about the glint of the candlelight that hardens his features instead of softening them, a mean and hungry flash in his eyes, a cruel downward slant at the corners of his mouth she hadn’t noticed before. Sensitive chin-dimple men are not supposed to behave like this. For the first time, she wonders how old he is. He must be almost forty – way too old for her. What was she thinking of, accepting this date?

  ‘I don’t think God’s on your side this time.’ The wine has emboldened her. Fight the good fight! is ringing in her brain. ‘Didn’t anyone tell you, the meek will inherit the earth?’ She stands up, ready to leave.

  ‘Fine. Good luck to them. I’m all for it. In the meantime, let’s enjoy what life brings.’

  He gets up from his seat abruptly, pushing his chair over. Then he strides round to her side of the table and pulls her into his arms, holding her close to him. She can feel the beating of his heart, and her own, beating harder and faster, against his.

  ‘Violet, lovely Violet, I’ve been thinking about you, wanting you, ever since your interview.’ His voice rumbles darkly, urgently in her ear. ‘We could be so great together. Don’t spoil it.’

  Nick, with his floppy-puppy fumbles, never spoke in that voice. Now is the time to surrender, to let the shrillness melt away. As she wavers, he grips her tight and presses a kiss on her mouth. His lips are hard with an edge of sharp bristle. Something explodes in her head. She pushes him away, and as she does so catches a glass of red wine with her elbow. The red liquid flowers on his suit like blood from a gunshot.

  She kicks off her high heels, shoves them in her bag, and runs out barefoot into the night.

  Berthold: What a Piece of Work is a Man

  Night is the time for ghosts and memories, when the usual reference points of day are put to sleep, like Flossie under her tablecloth and Inna snoring lightly in Mother’s bedroom, while things that lurk in the shadows creep out. When I’d cleared out her room for Inna, I’d scooped together all Mother’s papers and photos into a large cardboard box and shoved it underneath the boiler. Now I got them out and spread them under the muted light of the table lamp, as I tried to prepare my funeral speech. I stared at the blank page in front of me, waiting for the light bulb of inspiration to click on in my brain.

  There was a fat brown envelope stuffed with leaflets, half-signed petitions, gestetnered flyers, crumpled posters. All through my childhood, Mother was the one to make a stand, start a campaign, mount a protest, organise a picket, lead a march. As a kid, I had found it all horribly embarrassing.

  Another envelope contained essential financial information – on Jimmy’s instructions I’d already applied for probate and cancelled her pensions, but I’d left the bank account with her standing order for the rent in place for the time being, though the money in it would run out pretty soon. More envelopes were stuffed with household bills, receipts, and guarantees for long-defunct appliances. All that claggy paperwork that sticks to us as we pass through nature to eternity.

  Sucking the end of my pen for inspiration, I mulled over my speech, searching for clues to the essence of this woman I’d lived with for so many years, yet whose inner life I’d hardly known. According to the pre-war school reports, she had been a bright girl but inattentive. Postcards from windy East Coast seaside resorts showed her smiling unconvincingly. There were Girl Guide badges – she’d baked buns to fund-raise for the war effort. I made a note of that. Here in a thick cream envelope were her three marriage certificates, to Ted Madeley, the councillor who had fixed the flat for her and died soon after, to my strap-happy dad, Wicked Sidney Sidebottom, and to Lev Lukashenko, who had run off with what remained of her money. I had dreaded an existential revelation – for example, that I was not her son at all but a stray kid she had adopted, like my half-brother Howard. But here was my own birth certificate – I had been her only child.

  There was nothing to shed light on her claim to a love affair with Berthold Lubetkin, nor to nourish my secret hope that the genius architect had been my true father, and not the swindler Sid Sidebottom. If I had hoped to find love letters or personal diaries, I was disappointed. She had kept her love affairs, like her smoking, secret. Once I had left home I would sometimes find, on my occasional visits, an overflowing ashtray or a stranger lurking in her bedroom, but if they ever wrote letters, she had either burned them or returned them.

  Wrapped between the pages of a newspaper dated 1967 was a childish hand-drawn card. It was a picture of a house with a blue door and a pointed roof, and a wisp of smoke coming out of the chimney and a blonde woman with matchstick legs standing as tall as the house itself. Inside the card a greeting – my eyes misted up as I read: To the best Mum in the wurld. She had treasured it all these years.

  On a parchment scroll inside a cardboard tube was her Speech Therapy Diploma. After her success with my stammer, she found her vocation and undertook the training which allowed her to practise in the NHS. ‘Which became her lasting passion,’ I wrote.

  And there, right at the bottom, was the tenancy agreement for the flat in the names of Mr and Mrs Ted Madeley. Soon to be in the name of Mr Berthold Sidebottom, if all went to plan.

  Mother had often talked with admiration about reformers like Aneurin Bevan, the post-war Health Minister who created the NHS, Alderman Harold Riley the Labour council leader in Finsbury, Berthold Lubetkin the architect, Dr Chuni Lal Katial, the public health campaigner and the first elected South Asian mayor in Britain, who commissioned Lubetkin’s Finsbury Health Centre, and short-lived Ted Madeley who briefly led the Housing Committee. But the actual men who haunted her bedroom were generally of a different ilk. It was as if her reforming zeal spilled over from social improvement and attracted her to men who needed improvement; flaky, unreliable types like Wicked Sid Sidebottom and Lev Lukashenko, who sponged off her and made her life a misery. As the Bard put it, ‘overmastered with a piece of valiant dust’.

  It’s normal, I suppose, for a boy to resent his father and want his mother all to himself, Mr Freud had a word for it, but in my case it was more than just a subconscious feeling of sexual rivalry. I was a scared little kid, bullied by Howard and strapped by my dad, with only Mum to stick up for me. ‘Sensitive’ was the word she used to describe me, as though I was a troublesome tooth.

  Ha
ndsome Howard was my role model as well as my tormentor. Mum used to say it was from Howard that I got the yen to be a performer. He was working by then at the Shoreditch branch of Dolcis but he fancied himself as a rock star and practised air guitar in the evenings at home, while I crooned squeakily into a hairbrush, ‘Don’t be cruel to a heart so true.’ If I made a mistake he grabbed the hairbrush out of my hand and whacked me, probably a response he’d learned from Sid.

  Then one day when he was in his late teens, he came home with an electric guitar, a sleek shiny little devil, which he said he’d bought with the money from his shoe-shop job. I stared open-mouthed. This was not pretending – this was the real thing. He struck a chord and growled in a voice I had not heard before, ‘Hey, Bert, take a walk on the wild side.’ I was electrified.

  Sid reached for the belt. ‘You’re not playing that in this house!’

  Howard gave him the finger and walked away, taking the guitar. Next day, while Dad was out, he came back for a holdall of clothes. Mum pleaded with him to stay, but he wouldn’t listen.

  Mum missed Howard and continued to talk about him for a long while as though he was still part of our lives. From time to time he came back for a meal when he was sure that Dad was out. After he left, Mum took my side more determinedly in my run-ins with Dad, until the day came when she told him to clear out too. I didn’t hear their final row, but when I asked where he was that evening, she said, ‘It’s just you and me now, Bertie. He’s not coming back.’ We were sitting on the sofa with a book – I think it was Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare but I may have imagined that. ‘We’ll be all right together,’ she said. I can still remember the rush of triumph spiked with panic that took my breath away.

  After my parents divorced I didn’t see my father again for a few years. Mum said he’d been bringing us down and we were better off without him. She removed his photo from the wall and launched us on an all-out programme of personal improvement and social betterment. Education and culture were to be my gateway to social mobility, and every weekend she dragged me around all the free resources of the libraries, art galleries and museums in London. I guess some of it rubbed off.

  Ted Madeley, her first husband, had once been a teacher and had argued that the revolution would come about without bloodshed through education, she said. ‘See, Bertie, it’s the post-war consensus. The welfare state will sweep away class differences by advancing the working classes.’

  I quite liked the thought of being advanced without all the bother of an actual revolution, so I worked hard at it. Highbury Grove School, which I attended from the age of eleven, was not the nearest school, but the nearest one that Mum judged would bring me into the right sort of milieu for advancement.

  I can still remember the shock of seeing my first live performance at the theatre. It was a schools matinee performance at the Young Vic of The Merchant of Venice which we were ‘doing’ for O-levels. I remember the blanket of stillness settling over us as the lights went down, and the tiny spotlit figures on the faraway stage commandeering my senses, my intellect, my breathing, my emotions, taking me on such a journey through madness to wisdom that when we came out on to the pavement in broad daylight three hours later and I saw the next audience already queuing to enter, I thought it must be some trick; I could not believe that same whole experience could be repeated again and again.

  I joined the drama club at school, with a head already full of the Shakespeare soliloquies I had practised with Mum. By the time I was sixteen I knew I wanted to be an actor. Mum didn’t discourage me, but urged me to get a qualification I could fall back on. I promised her that if I didn’t get into drama school I would train to be a teacher like Ted Madeley, which satisfied her yearning for financial security and for a better social standing than I had inherited from my dad.

  Nevertheless, she and Sid must have kept in touch because out of the blue he turned up at my school’s Sixth Form performance of Hamlet. I didn’t spot him until Act II Scene 2, sitting in the third row, his eyebrows bunched in a frown. What a p-p-piece of work is a man. The b-b-beauty of the world. I almost lost it. But Mum, sitting in the front row with the other parents, caught my eye and rescued me with a discreet forefinger placed between her lips. My guardian angels, Mum and the Immortal Bard.

  Dad came up in the interval, stylishly turned out as always, and handsome in a way that caused a stir among the mums in the audience. I thought he was going to berate me for being a pansy or something, but he said, ‘That was beautiful. I’m really proud of you, son.’ I saw tears were shining in his eyes, but it was too late by then.

  While I was getting changed out of my costume, I caught an oblique glimpse out of a side window that overlooked the school car park. Under a tree in the far corner, I saw my parents standing close in conversation. Then Dad tried to put his arm around Mum, she shoved him away, and he strolled across and got into a car that was parked alongside the teachers’ cars. And what a car. It was a shiny midnight-blue Jaguar with a personalised number plate SID 123. I watched him get in, reverse slowly out, and drive away. Mum came back inside to look for me, and we walked together to the bus stop. I didn’t tell my mother I’d seen Dad’s car, I somehow felt that would be disloyal, and she never mentioned it.

  Funerals are a time for celebration not for blame, but if I was to blame Mother for anything, it would be for the absence of positive male role models in my life. This was turning out to be a more complicated and nuanced story than the simple triumph over adversity that is the usual stuff of memorial tributes.

  ‘Ding dong! God is dead!’ called Flossie.

  ‘Yes, I know. I’m just trying to summarise the story of her life.’

  ‘First of March, 1932!’

  ‘To thirteenth of April, 2014. Beloved mother. Brave spirit. Rest in peace.’

  Violet: Planning

  Next day, Violet telephones Laura for a post-mortem of her faux-fab date.

  Laura laughs. ‘Ha ha! I warned you! Let me guess – French restaurant, French accent, father an art dealer in Paris …’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘He’s already tried that on with half the women at GRM. Actually, he’s just a jumped-up real-estate salesman from Quebec. Don’t beat yourself up over it, Violet. Once you get to know him, he’s good to work for. He’s fun, he knows his stuff, and it’s a growing field – wealth preservation.’

  ‘I can’t ever go back there.’

  ‘Don’t be an idiot, Violet. Don’t give up your job just because of a grope. It’s a rite of passage that all the women at GRM go through.’

  ‘You …?’

  ‘Mm-hm. I was already married, so I didn’t go on the restaurant date. But sure, there was a quick fumble in the lift. He doesn’t mind the occasional slap, you know.’ Laura chuckles. ‘In fact he’ll respect you for it.’

  They agree to meet for lunch in town next week at a baby-friendly venue, and buoyed by Laura’s encouragement, she gets ready to go into work. The lilac outfit, to show courage. The high heels to make her feel tall inside. Now, sitting on the top deck of the bus, she suddenly gets cold feet. Though she knows now that Marc is just a jerk, and she was naive to fall for his patter, strangely that doesn’t seem to cancel out the effect of the chin dimple and twinkling smile. Laura is right to laugh. She was an idiot. How will she ever be able to face him again?

  By the time the bus has passed through two stops, she’s decided to leave, to find something different. But how will she explain to her parents and friends, who were so supportive of her brilliant City career, that her dream job is no longer a dream?

  ‘Next stop Town Hall.’

  The recorded announcement on the bus startles her out of her reverie. She looks out of the window. They have stopped beside an imposing grey building with stone steps at the front. On impulse she jumps up and races down the stairs.

  It appears that the Planning Department offices are not in this Town Hall at all, which is now an arts centre, but in another building miles aw
ay. She catches another bus back and pings the bell at reception.

  A young planning officer ambles out in his shirtsleeves. He looks her up and down and says very politely, ‘I can show you the plans, miss. Come this way.’

  He leads her to a long echoing room with a huge square table where plans are spread out under a blinking fluorescent light. There is a smell of polish and dust.

  ‘It’s this parcel of land here, in front of the council estate,’ he points. The lines, hatches and numbers seem incomprehensible at first, but the young man is doing his best to be helpful.

  ‘In front of Madeley Court?’

  ‘That’s it, miss.’

  ‘Isn’t it a bit close?’

  ‘It’s within planning guidelines.’

  He seems incredibly young for the job he’s doing, more like a sixth-former than a real planner, with rosy cheeks, a fluff of downy hair on his upper lip that is struggling to be a moustache, and a pair of heavy black-rimmed spectacles, as though he wants to make himself look older. It is a known fact that people who wear spectacles are usually brainy, but this does not seem to apply in his case.

  ‘But there are lovely cherry trees growing there.’

  He glances down at her high heels and his tone becomes more respectful.

  ‘Public open space is expensive to maintain, miss. We’ve had to make cuts in our environmental budget. But we’re demanding additional planting as part of the scheme, which the developer will be responsible for maintaining.’

  ‘So you’ve already agreed it?’

  ‘Hm.’ He looks shifty. ‘There have been preliminary discussions with the parties involved. It’s still got to go before the Council.’

  ‘But what do you think about it, Mr …’ She peers forward to read his name badge, ‘… Mr Rowland.’