The Lubetkin Legacy Read online

  ‘So you lived with Dovik in Odessa?’

  ‘Odessa, Georgia, Krim, Kharkiv. All one great Soviet Union. But in Great Patriotic War many Jews killed in Odessa.’ She crossed herself again. ‘Only my Dovik got away. Now I living Hempstead. One day I will tell you my story.’

  The beautiful ward sister, coming up to change Inna’s phlegm bowl, recognised me and offered condolences. ‘She was a lovely lady, your mother. And a perfect patient. No fuss.’

  No fuss. I remembered Mother’s last words and the terrible whisperings behind the curtain before I was admitted to witness her death. Tears stung my eyes.

  ‘I don’t know how I’ll get on without her.’

  ‘Still, it’s nice you’ve made a new friend. Mrs Alfandari doesn’t get many visitors. Do you, sweetheart?’

  Alfandari – what kind of a name was that? It sounded Italian or Middle Eastern, not Ukrainian. Who was this woman I had just invited into my life?

  ‘Yes, Mister Bertie has invited me go live wit him. I will mekkit golabki kobaski slatki.’

  Inna smiled, and for the first time I noticed the black edges of her teeth. Mother’s were even and pearly white – though of course they were not her own. I was already having second thoughts about my invitation when the beautiful nurse beamed, ‘Oh, that’s so lovely. You’ll have to give us the details for our discharge procedure.’

  She smiled, and my doubts vanished as it struck me that in all my fifty-two years I had never been out with a black woman. Now they suddenly seemed to be cropping up everywhere. There was that astonishingly pretty girl in Luigi’s the other morning, and now this beautiful nurse. Without Mother’s officious appraisal to greet them at the door, I could even invite them to the flat. A cloud shifted and a shaft of sunlight struck my heart. Before me a whole new world of possibilities was opening up.

  The storm clouds had completely disappeared by the time I cycled home. The sky was borage blue with scraps of cirrus driven along by a blustery wind that set the daffodils in all the window boxes and forecourts dancing.

  ‘When daffodils begin to peer,’ I sang as my wheels spun along merrily, ‘With heigh! The doxy over the dale …’

  It was Autolycus’s song in The Winter’s Tale, which I’d sung at the New Vic in Newcastle, directed by the great Peter Cheeseman. That was back in 1997. Before the Prozac. Before Meredith’s death and the break-up with Stephanie. In those days, I still had hair. I wasn’t quite George Clooney, but I was on my way.

  I crossed the cherry grove and hit the lift button to carry me up to my home on the fifth floor, before spotting the Lift Out of Order notice. Again. Madeley Court, the 1952 local authority housing block where I lived with Mum, had definitely seen better days. The paintwork was shabby and the concrete surfaces were discoloured. Even the name-sign had been vandalised many years ago by a friend of my half-brother Howard, a kid called Nige, who had an exceptional head for heights and a long rope he had filched from the tarpaulin of a lorry he was robbing. He had prised away some of the ornate terracotta tiles, and the missing letters had never been replaced, leaving just: MAD Y URT. Mad Yurt. The name seemed apt.

  ‘One day he’ll fall! Splat! Brains spread all over the pavement. If he’s got any brains!’ raved Mrs Crazy from the balcony of her flat directly below ours, who had narrowly missed being hit by the falling L.

  ‘Shut up! Stop your shouting!’ Mother shouted down at full volume from our balcony. ‘You’re lowering the tone around here. It used to be decent before you moved in, Crazy! You think wearing a big cross on your neck makes you holy. Well, it don’t! It makes you a bigot!’

  Mrs Crazy, whose real name was Mrs Cracey, was the widow of a former East End evangelical minister undone by gambling and alcohol. She and Mum enjoyed that particularly venomous enmity reserved for people who have once been close friends. As the oldest resident, in both senses, Mum felt her status entitled her to respect. Mrs Cracey, a retired dental secretary some ten years younger than Mother, flaunted godliness and social superiority, which after her husband’s death from liver failure gradually drifted away from the evangelical and towards the High Church, as evidenced by her purple coat, mitre-like hairstyle conserved under a shower cap, and her penchant for jewellery, including the inevitable flashy gold cross on a chain around her neck. She patronised Lily as a lower-class upstart and a godforsaken communist.

  ‘I’ve had more communists than you’ve had hot dinners!’ was Mum’s oblique retort as she flicked a long finger of ash over the balcony, the gold and diamonds on her fingers glinting in the sun. She too was not averse to a bit of bling.

  That was my first inkling that the community spirit of our block was provisional and mutable, despite the revolutionary intention of the architect Berthold Lubetkin to design solidarity into the structure of the estate.

  Berthold Lubetkin, after whom I was named, was either an old flame of Mother’s or a celebrated Russian modernist architect, depending on whom you chose to believe. According to her, Lubetkin’s company Tecton had been responsible for the finest post-war public housing in London, and it was a sodding shame that he was best known for the penguin pool at London Zoo. When the sherry sweetened her memory she would sometimes drop hints about a secret love affair with Lubetkin, and weepily confess that it was thanks to him that she came to occupy this prime penthouse flat in the flagship Tecton development.

  In an alternative version of the story, Lubetkin was born in Georgia, and Mother got her flat thanks to Ted Madeley, who sat on the Council’s Housing Committee alongside the legendary Alderman Harold Riley, who had first commissioned Lubetkin. Riley was a passionate socialist but not much of a looker. Lily admired him, but fell for handsome already-married Ted Madeley. She lived with Ted out of wedlock at first, a shocking enough deed at the time, then she married him, thereby acquiring the tenancy of this desirable flat. After Ted died, she had married twice more and raised two children here (though only I was hers by birth – the other was my half-brother, Howard, my father’s son from a previous marriage, of whom more later).

  ‘So it serves them right!’ she would declare. ‘They’ and ‘Them’ were shape-shifters who featured large in Mother’s demonology.

  The spacious and sunny top-floor flat in Madeley Court which had been my childhood home later became my sanctuary, when my life fell apart and I needed somewhere to go to ground. As a child I’d taken for granted the two generous-sized bedrooms and small study, the comfortable old-fashioned kitchen and the square book-lined living room; but its special surprise, which even as a kid I had appreciated, was the south-facing balcony where Flossie the parrot was put out in her cage on summer mornings to sun herself, and where the impulse-bought barbecue rusted drowsily under the red dome of its lid. In front of the flats was a fenced area of communal garden which we called the grove, where cherry blossom flowered, toddlers played on swings, old folks cultivated dahlias in raised beds, and where Howard, my louche half-brother, snogged the local schoolgirls, weather permitting. Idyllic would be too strong a word, but it was all perfectly pleasant. Even the vandalism was minimal.

  Neighbours had come and gone; the flats which had been built to rehouse the poor from the slums of the East End now housed a global community who lived together in relative harmony, though without the same intimacy as the original East Enders. I had never got to know the seven foreign students crammed into the flat next door where the dustman Eric Perkins had once lived – they changed every year. But there were people who still recognised me and greeted me when I went out, which made it feel like home.

  Now some swivel-eyed politician, of whom Mrs Penny was the local instrument, wanted to take it all away, and cast me out into the unknown. A bedsit in Balham? Or Bradford? I’d already experienced the transience and insecurity of the private rented sector. It nearly did for me. Why couldn’t they just leave me alone? What I’d almost forgotten, before Mrs Penny reminded me, was that for several years, while Howard had lived with us, I had slept in the tiny study off the si
tting room. Technically, it could be a three-bedroom flat – to which I, having dedicated my life to the Immortal Bard instead of to Mammon, was not entitled. The monstrous unfairness of it gnawed at my guts.

  Watching the sun go down from the balcony, I tried to imagine what it would be like living here without Mother. I was on the opening page of a new chapter in my life. Had I been foolhardy to invite the phlegmy old woman Inna Alfandari into my life, or had I stumbled upon the only possible way to secure my home?

  The more I thought about her sighs, smiles and glances, the more I wondered whether I’d been had.

  Or did my dear protective mother, deliberately or unwittingly, plant the idea in Inna’s head? And what about the beautiful ward sister, whose presence had sealed the arrangement? In retrospect, there was something rather sinister about the way her elaborate white headgear perched on her dark curls without any apparent tether, and the secretive ticking of the little gold watch pinned to her bosom. Had they plotted this peculiar ménage, no doubt from the best of motives: mutual support, friendship, to keep depression at bay?

  From the balcony, I watched a boy wandering down the winding path through the grove towards the road, his head bent down over a phone in his hands. As he stepped off the pavement, a speeding white van, using the street as a short cut, appeared out of nowhere.

  ‘Careful!’ I shouted, but I was too far away and my voice did not carry. The driver swerved just in time, the white van of destiny sped by, and the boy escaped.

  ‘Careful!’ Flossie screeched from inside the flat.

  ‘Hello, old girl. It’s just you and me, now.’

  I topped up Flossie’s feeder, grateful for her chattering which cut through the stifling silence in the flat. As I filled the water bottle, I noticed that her cage needed cleaning out. It was getting disgusting. Hopefully, this was a little job that Inna, grateful to be rescued from loneliness, would be glad to take on. Pleased at my good deed, I turned on the computer in the study and tried googling various spellings of gobalki, kosabki and solatki but I drew a complete blank.

  Violet: Karen

  International wealth preservation sounds much more glamorous than international insurance. Violet has started googling for information, should the possibility of a transfer ever arise. Her first taste of her new job has been a bit disappointing. She’d imagined a succession of high-level business meetings, negotiating with billionaire clients and steely underwriters, involving complex calculations using new software packages she’d learned at uni. Instead, she seemed to spend her first weeks mainly at the photocopier or making very weak organic ashwagandha tea for Gillian Chalmers, the head of the International Insurance Department at GRM, who spent her whole time in meetings, apparently ignoring her new assistant.

  So it has fallen to Laura, Marc Bonnier’s assistant, to induct her into the culture of the firm. Laura is a brisk cheerful girl about her age – with a rather fat stomach, which she conceals under loose draped tops, lively eyes and shiny dark hair – who came into the Wealth Preservation Unit three years ago as a graduate trainee. Since international insurance is not her field, she briefs Violet on the office gossip instead: who is going out with whom, who is due for a million-pound bonus, and who is in or out of favour with the CEO.

  ‘It must be great working for Marc Bonnier,’ Violet ventured one day, ‘he’s so –’ She bit her tongue. To talk of a male colleague as hot was just too girly. ‘So impressive.’

  ‘You’re lucky to be working for Gillian Chalmers,’ Laura said. ‘She’s the rising star around here, and she’s had to fight hard to get where she is. It’s still a male-dominated environment.’

  ‘Mmm. I had noticed.’ Though being dominated by Marc Bonnier seemed quite appealing.

  ‘Don’t be fooled by Gillian’s traditional style. She thinks to get on in a man’s world women have to look professional – you know, suits, heels, all that.’ She glanced at Violet’s short skirt, black tights and cardigan. ‘She can be quite a dragon, but don’t be put off.’

  In the kitchen corner off the open-plan office where the juniors work, which still houses an ancient photocopier as well as a fridge, kettle and a selection of personal mugs, to which Violet’s yellow one has now been added, Laura informs her that Gillian Chalmers and Marc Bonnier, the two principals who interviewed her for her job, used to be an item for years, but split up acrimoniously about six months ago, and that Marc is on the prowl for a replacement.

  She doesn’t tell Laura that she’d found herself standing next to Marc Bonnier in the lunch queue in the staff restaurant yesterday, and while she was fumbling in her bag he whipped out his swipe card and paid for her lunch. He himself only had a black coffee and a bowl of salad.

  ‘Tell me about yourself, Violet. I didn’t have a chance to get to know you during the interview.’

  He sat down opposite her while she tucked into a prawn curry (prawns are supposed to make you brainy) and told him she was fascinated by international insurance.

  He raised one eyebrow and grinned. ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’ She laughed. ‘Well, I’m interested in other things too.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  So she talked about backpacking around Brazil, without mentioning Nick, with whom she’d travelled. The way he watched her as she talked made her cheeks flush. It seemed far too informal for a boss‒worker relationship.

  Why, she wondered, did Marc Bonnier and Gillian Chalmers split up? Maybe it’s because of Gillian’s dominating personality – but she doesn’t say this to Laura, who seems to rather hero-worship Gillian.

  Then this morning, without warning, Gillian summons her to her office.

  ‘I’m sorry I’ve been a bit busy these past few weeks, Violet. I’ve had a couple of deadlines. I hope you’ve settled in.’ Without waiting for an answer, she hands her a thick black slip case. ‘We want to develop our reputation as a global company. That’s one of the reasons we appointed you, Violet. We were impressed by your language skills. I’d like you to take a look at this proposal, and prepare a risk assessment so that we can match our client to a suitable underwriter.’

  Their client, who goes by the initials HN Holdings, is seeking to build a shopping mall in Nairobi’s downtown district. She takes the slip case with a tremor of panic. At her interview she’d managed to sound knowledgeable and confident, but being faced with a real-life situation with millions of dollars at stake is different.

  ‘Er … which risks …?’

  ‘That’s up to you to discover. There are known terrorist risks in Nairobi, which you need to quantify and put in perspective, alongside other potential risks in that environment. You know Nairobi, don’t you?’

  ‘Oh yes, I was born there.’ She doesn’t add that she was eight years old when she left.

  ‘Excellent. I’m sure you’ll do a good job.’ Gillian smiles briefly and turns her gaze back to her computer monitor, indicating that the meeting is over.

  Back at her desk, Violet opens the slip case to pore through the papers and photographs. The figures involved are astronomical, the language is bristling with jargon, yet through all the abstraction a rush of memories flood in on her of Nairobi’s hot bustling streets, seedy shopping parades, and the chaotic building sites where new developments spring up apparently unplanned on any corner or patch of land. And in their wake another cooler memory tiptoes in, of the quiet sunny bungalow in a suburb called Karen where she lived until she was eight. Her mind wanders through the cool rooms out on to the veranda and down to the wide securely fenced garden where hummingbirds glimmer in the flower beds and Mfumu, her dog, lazes in the shade all afternoon, moving around to keep out of the sun. That was a happy time.

  She can’t exactly remember when she realised she was different from the ragged children who crowded around the car that picked her up from school each day. Her father was a newly qualified doctor from Edinburgh doing a stint of VSO before settling down to a well-paid consultant’s job in a teaching hospital in England. Her mo
ther was a nurse at the Mbagathi District Hospital on an HIV-prevention team. They met over a suspect blood sample, and soon realised that they shared a love of benga music and mandazi. They married in the Presbyterian Church on Mai Mahiu Road six months later, and in less than a year Violet was born. When her father’s VSO term ended, he took a post at the same hospital.

  While her parents were at work, her grandmother Njoki looked after her at her home in Langata. It was a two-storey wooden house that smelled of spice and black soap, with a front-facing veranda that had a view over the garden towards the mountains and a back window looking down towards the river where the Kibera slum festered like an open sore and skinny Maasai cattle grazed on any parched patch of grass.

  She smiles as she remembers her grandmother’s flowery pinafores, the scent of coconut oil on her hair, and the way her face wrinkled like an expressive prune when she told her funny stories about the naughty monkeys that lived in the forest; but of her grandfather Josaphat she has no memory at all. He died when she was three. She tries to recall what her grandmother said about his death; the circumstances had been hushed up in a fog of sighs, murmurs and downcast glances.

  Once her cousin Lynette, in a rage after losing half her garden in a corrupt land deal, muttered down the phone, ‘Mnyamaa kadumbu.’ Those who keep quiet survive. By the time she started her geography degree at Warwick, it had become a catchphrase in Kenya; troublesome people were getting bumped off regularly. Yes, if she is to assess the hazards of investing in Nairobi, corruption will be high in her league of risks.

  ‘Wake up. You look miles away.’ Laura lays a hand on her shoulder as she passes by her desk on her way to the Wealth Preservation office.