The Lubetkin Legacy Read online

  ‘It’s there somewhere, Bert. Under the sofa, I think,’ she insisted. Poor Mum, I thought, she’s really losing it. Who ever heard of a skylight under a sofa?

  I squeezed her hand and murmured, ‘Light, seeking light, doth light of light beguile.’

  ‘Ah! You can’t go wrong with Shakespeare! Did you hear that, Inna? Shakespeare, the Immortal Bard? Say some more, Bertie!’

  ‘Why, all delights are vain; but that most vain, which with pain purchased doth inherit pain …’ I repeated Biron’s speech.

  The crone looked baffled. ‘Is Pushkin, no?’

  ‘See what I mean?’ said Mother. ‘Emphasism. Now, Inna, sing us one of your foreign songs.’

  The old woman cleared her throat, spat and started to drone: ‘Povee veetre na-a Ukrainou … Is beautiful song of love from my country. De zalishil yah-ah-ah …’

  The other patients were craning in their beds to see what the racket was. Then the pink-tie doctor came up to the bedside consulting his notes. He looked hardly out of his teens, with tousled hair and long pointed shoes that needed a polish.

  ‘Are you Mr … er … Lukashenko?’

  This was not the time to go into the complexities of Mother’s marital history.

  ‘No. I’m her son. Berthold Sidebottom.’

  For some ignorant people, the name Sidebottom is a cause of mirth. The teen-doctor was one of those. In fact Sidebottom is an ancient Anglo-Saxon location name meaning ‘broad valley’, originating, it is believed, from a village in Cheshire.

  The doctor smirked behind his hand, straightened his tie and explained that my mother had atrial fibrillation. ‘I asked her how many she smokes. Her heart isn’t in good shape,’ he said in a low voice.

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She said first of March, 1932.’

  ‘That’s her birthday. She was eighty-two recently. I’m not sure how many she smokes, she keeps it secret – doesn’t want to set me a bad example.’

  The teen-doctor scratched behind his ear. ‘We’d better keep her in for a few days, Mr … er … Lukashenko.’ He glanced down at his notes.

  ‘Sidebottom. Lukashenko was her husband.’

  ‘Mr Sidebottom. Hum. Have you noticed any variation in her behaviour recently? Any forgetfulness, for example?’

  ‘Variation? Forgetfulness? I couldn’t say.’ I myself have found that a bit of selective amnesia can be helpful in coping with the vicissitudes of life. ‘Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety,’ I said.

  To my embarrassment, my eyes filled with tears. I thought back over the years I’d lived in the flat at the top of Madeley Court with my mother, assorted husbands and lovers, the politics, the sweet sherry, the parrot. In my recollection, she’d rambled a bit at the best of times, but the core of her had been steadfast as a rock. ‘Shakespeare,’ I said. The teen-doctor looked miffed, as if I’d been trying to get one up on him, so I added, ‘When you live with someone, you don’t always notice the changes. They hap-pen so gradually.’

  ‘You still live with your mother?’

  I detected a note of derision in his callow voice. Probably he was too wet behind the ears to understand how suddenly everything you take for granted can fall apart. You can reach half a century in age, you can have some modest success in your profession, you can go through life with all its ups and downs – mainly the latter, in my case – and still end up living with your mother. One day it could even happen to you, clever Dr Pointy-toes. People come and go in your life but your mother’s always there – until one day she isn’t any more. I was filled with regret for all the times I’d been irritated with her or taken her for granted.

  ‘Yes. We sup-port each other.’ My old stutter was spluttering into life. Must be the stress.

  Mum had slipped further down the bed. Her breathing was laboured. A frail filament of saliva glimmered between her open lips like a reminder of the transience of life. She let out a shuddering moan, ‘First of March, 1932!’ The filament snapped.

  The doctor dropped his voice to a murmur. ‘Of course we’ll do all we can, but I think she may not be with us very long.’

  Panic seized me. Big questions raced into my mind and took up fisticuffs with each other. How long was very long? Why did this have to happen to her just now? Why did it have to happen to me? Had I been a satisfactory son? How would I manage without her? What would happen to the parrot? What would happen to the flat?

  The teen-doctor moved away and the ward sister sailed up, shapely and black, a starched white cap riding like a clipper on the dark sea of her curls. ‘We need to change her catheter now. Can you give us a minute, Mr Lukashenko?’

  ‘Side-b-bottom.’

  ‘Sidebottom?’

  Our eyes met, and I was struck by how beautiful hers were, large and almond-shaped, with sweeping lashes. The beast in my pants stirred. Oh God, not now. I withdrew outside the drapes, thinking I’d better find the canteen and have a calming cup of tea, when from the next bed the old woman hissed, ‘Hsss! Stay. Sit. Talk. Nobody visit me. I am all alone.’

  As a penance for my unruly thoughts, I pulled up my chair closer to her bed and cleared my throat. It’s hard to know how to strike up conversation with a total stranger who thinks you are gay. Maybe I should put her right?

  ‘You think people who wear pink are homosexual. Well, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with being homosexual, but –’

  ‘Aha! No problem, Mister Bertie,’ the old woman interrupted. ‘No problem wit me. Everyone is children of God. Even Lenin has permitted it.’

  ‘Yes of course, but –’ I really needed that cup of tea.

  ‘You mama, Lily, say we must treat all people like own family. She like good Soviet woman. Always look at sunny side, Inna, she say.’

  ‘Yes, Mother’s a very special person.’ I glanced at the curtain around her bed, my heart pinched between anxiety and tenderness. There seemed to be a lot of whispering and clattering going on. ‘What about your family, Inna?’

  ‘Not homosexy. My husband, Dovik, Soviet citizen,’ Inna declared. ‘But dead.’ She leaned over and spat into her bowl.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry!’ I put on a faux-sympathetic voice, like Gertrude in Hamlet, trying to avert my eyes from the revolting greenish fluid that was lapping at the cardboard edges of her bowl.

  ‘Why for you sorry? You not killed him.’

  ‘No, indeed not, but –’

  ‘Killed by olihark wit poison! I living alone. Olihark knocking at door. Oy-oy-oy!’ This sounded delusional. She fixed me with dark agitated eyes. ‘Every day cooking golabki kobaski slatki, but nobody it wit since Dovik got dead.’ She wiped her nose on the sheet. ‘Husband Dovik always too much smoking. I got emphaseema. Heating expensive. My flat too much cold.’ She reached for my hand with her dry twiggy fingers and gave it a flirtatious squeeze. ‘You mama tell me she got nice flat from boyfriend. Now she worry if she will die they take away flat for under-bed tax and you will live homeless on street.’ Behind the silver curtain of hair, her eyes were watching me, dark and beady. What Mother been telling her?

  Mother had lived in the flat since it was built in 1952, and she used to tell me with misty eyes that Berthold Lubetkin, the architect who designed it, had promised it would be a home for ever for her and her children. But since then the buggers hadn’t built enough new homes to keep up with the demand, she fumed, and the ones instigated by the council leader, Alderman Harold Riley, and built by Lubetkin’s firm Tecton had been flogged off to private landlords – like the flat next door, which had once belonged to a dustman called Eric Perkins and now belonged to a property company who filled it with foreign students who played music all night and littered the lift with takeaway boxes.

  ‘Under-bed tax?’ Could they make me move out because of that?

  ‘Is new tax for under-bed occupant.’

  I kept mainly dog-eared scripts, odd socks and back copies of The Stage under my bed. Nothing you could call an occupant.

 
; ‘You mama very much worrying about break-up of post-war sensors. She say it make her sick in heart to think they take away her apartment and put you into street. This tax is work of Satan, she say. Mister Indunky Smeet. You know this devil-man?’

  ‘Not personally.’

  I’d heard of course of something called a bedroom tax, which Mother described variously as an affront to human decency, the final death-blow to the post-war consensus, and a pretext for squeezing more money out of poor people who happened to have a spare bedroom. But it never occurred to me that it might apply to me, so I hadn’t taken much notice. I did recall Mum and Flossie swearing at some minister on the television news recently; though, to be fair, this was not an uncommon occurrence. I sympathised with her righteous anger, of course, but I had my own problems to contend with, and you can’t just live in a permanent stew of rage, can you?

  ‘But I tell her no worry, Lily, this under-bed tax for lazies scrounging in bed all day. You hard-working decent, Mister Bertie?’ She eyed me sideways.

  ‘Oh yes. Absolutely.’

  ‘What work you working, Mister Bertie?’

  ‘Actually, I’m an actor.’

  I always dread this question. It raises such expectations.

  ‘Aha! Like George Clooney!’ Inna cooed. ‘You mekking film?’

  ‘I’m mainly a stage actor. Best known for my Shakespearean roles. And some television.’ If you can count a stint as a proud football dad in a washing-powder advert back in 1999. ‘But I’m not working at present.’

  The old woman was still impressed. ‘I never met actor before. I would like met wit George Clooney. He got nice eyes. Nice smile. Nice teeth. Everything nice.’ She pursed her lips and discharged some more green phlegm. I looked away.

  Bloody George Clooney. If he and I didn’t happen to share a common birthday, I probably wouldn’t care; in fact I probably wouldn’t even notice him. As it was, I couldn’t help comparing his success with mine (lack of). Of course someone who has dedicated his life to Art, as I have, cannot expect to wallow in the excesses of materialism. We have our spiritual consolations. But still, it would be nice to have more than an occasional latte at Luigi’s to look forward to.

  Take the case in point: it was George bloody Clooney with his affected smile and clean-cut chin that this old crone lusted after; yet it was I, Sidebottom, who sat here at her wretched bedside watching her phlegm-bowl fill to overflowing. How could that be fair?

  The beautiful nurse was still making busy sounds behind Mum’s curtain. It seemed to have been going on a very long time.

  Inna’s hands fiddled with the sheet. She gave me a sly look. ‘You got good apartment. Your mother tell me about her.’

  ‘Yes, it’s a nice flat. Top floor.’

  ‘Aha! Top floor, good flat, bad lift. She say lift always broken, nobody repair her because she got hysterity.’

  ‘Hysterity?’ It’s true the lift was getting cranky but I personally would have described it as unreliable rather than hysterical.

  ‘She say banks made creases we give money. Now banks got all our money we get hysterity.’

  ‘Ah, you mean austerity! There’s a lot of it around nowadays.’

  ‘Yes. Hysterity. You mama explain to me. Very clever lady. Almost like Soviet economist.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t go so far –’

  ‘She love this flat, you mama. It is so beautiful, she say, she got it from arshitek boyfriend.’

  Why was she going on about the flat? What had Mother been saying? Suddenly she crossed herself and fell silent, listening. I listened too. Behind the curtains around Mother’s bed a machine had been beeping constantly. Now in the silence I became aware that the sound was becoming intermittent. There was a flurry of scurrying and scuffling and low voices talking in urgent whispers.

  Suddenly the nurse drew back the curtains, and murmured, ‘Mr Lukashenko, your mother has taken a turn for the worse.’

  I leaned over her and peered into her dear old face, so familiar yet so mysterious, already sealed behind the glass wall of the departure lounge, checked in for the one-way journey to the undiscovered country.

  ‘Mum. Mum, it’s me, Bertie. I’m with you.’ I took her hand.

  Mum let out a long rattling sigh. A single blue butterfly fluttered on the withered garden of her face. Pulling herself up in bed with immense effort, she gripped my arm and drew me down towards her, to whisper into my ear, ‘Don’t let them get the flat, Berthold!’ Then she fell back on the pillows with a groan.

  Violet: Mary Atiemo

  Violet doesn’t plan on staying in the flat for long. When she’s saved up some money from her amazing salary, she’ll find something better – not a council flat. This place is convenient for work, and she was lucky to get it at short notice, but she viewed it in a hurry and didn’t notice how tatty the decor was and how rough the neighbourhood. On the day she arrived she watched someone being carried out on a stretcher. And there are those strange alarming shrieks from the flat next door, which sound like someone possessed by a shetani. Besides, it’s too big for one person. The smooth-talking estate agent had persuaded her it would be easy to find some room-mates, but now she isn’t sure she’s ready for another flat share after her last disastrous experience.

  When she first came to London, she’d done casual office work and waitressing to fund her internship with an NGO and shared a zero-housework flat in Hammersmith with a girl from Singapore and two boys from uni, one of whom was her boyfriend, Nick. The Singaporean girl, who used to borrow her clothes, eventually borrowed Nick too. She came home early one day to find them having a shower together.

  Her friend Jessie, who had just moved into a flat in Croydon with her boyfriend, let her sleep on the sofa in the sitting room. But a month on a sofa is a long time.

  The agency that found her this flat in Madeley Court specialises in student lettings, and it is furnished with seven narrow beds, seven desks, seven wooden chairs, seven small chests of drawers, and a small round table in the kitchen. How did seven people squeeze into here? Maybe they were dwarves? She smiles, remembering the movie she saw with Jessie, when they were both at primary school in Bakewell.

  When she got the flat, Jessie lent her a spare duvet, pillows, a set of yellow crockery and a frying pan. She texts Jessie a ‘Thank You’, with a picture of yellow crockery on the kitchen shelf.

  She opens another door off the sitting room/bedroom, and finds it leads out on to a balcony with a view – she hadn’t expected that. Leaning on the parapet, looking down on the flowering tops of the cherry trees and the splashes of yellow from the daffodils in the verges, she breathes deeply and closes her eyes. The sunlight on her skin touches her memory with the view from her grandmother’s veranda in Langata, Nairobi, the Nandi Flame trees and the dazzling blood lilies. It’s been a long while since she remembered that time in her childhood. A man with a bald head is pushing his bicycle across the green. Looks like the same old guy she saw in Luigi’s. Maybe he lives nearby.

  She’s only been in her new job for a month – thinking of it still makes her stomach flip with excitement. Tonight she’s meeting up with her friends at the Lazy Lounge to celebrate her birthday. So now is her only chance to sort out her flat and explore her new neighbourhood. She puts on her trainers and decides to go out for a run while the weather holds.

  It’s a mixed sort of area, where old-fashioned terraces rub shoulders with scruffy council estates, little artsy shops, galleries and studios tucked up the side streets, and further away a lively street market. She passes several building sites bristling with cranes where modern offices and apartments are shooting up, and from time to time she catches the dark gleam of a river or canal threading its way between the streets.

  In terms of clothes shops the area is disappointing, but there are plenty of cafés and eateries with cheap and interesting menus, two supermarkets – Lidl close by and Waitrose a bit further away. She stocks up in both places, spending freely, especially on treats for hers
elf. She buys a kettle in a quaint little hardware store halfway up a side street, where she also splurges on a cafetière. As an afterthought she buys a blue plastic bucket with a mop, a dustpan and brush, some rubber gloves and detergent, just in case the agency cleaner never shows up.

  By the time she’s unpacked her shopping there’s still no sign of the cleaner, and she is resigned to doing it herself. But first she plugs in the kettle to try it out, and spoons coffee – Kenya AA of course – into the cafetière.

  Just as she pours on the water and breathes in the dark aroma, the doorbell rings. A young black girl is standing there, so young and skinny she looks like only a kid, wearing a blue overall and carrying a mop and bucket, a brush and some rubber gloves. Violet peers at her name badge: Homeshine Sanitary Contractors. Mary Atiemo. That’s a Kenyan name.

  ‘Cleaning contractor,’ says the girl with a broad smile. Her front tooth is chipped. Violet’s grandmother Njoki used to say that dental deficiency is a sign of untrustworthiness. She was full of funny ideas like that.

  ‘You’re late,’ says Violet. ‘I was just going to do it myself.’

  ‘Sorry, please,’ says the girl. ‘No bus. Please, let me clean it for you. No clean, no pay today.’

  Tears well into her eyes. Violet hesitates. She looks a bit useless, lost in her too-big uniform, twig thin, smaller than the mop she’s carrying, this scrap of a girl standing on the grey concrete walkway, with a grey thundery sky looming behind her.

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Kenya. Nairobi,’ Mary Atiemo says. ‘Kibera. You know Kenya?’

  ‘I was born in Nairobi,’ she replies. She remembers Kibera; it’s a slum not far from her grandmother’s house. Once or twice she glimpsed its dirty twisted alleys from the back seat of the car and shuddered. How has this slum girl from that wretched insanitary place got to be a ‘sanitary contractor’ in London, standing here on her doorstep just as she’s standing on the doorstep of her exciting new life? It seems a bad omen, as if the past won’t let her go.

  ‘My mother is Kenyan,’ she adds, to put the girl at ease.