‘I just want my dad to have a nice birthday. Is that too much to ask?’
‘That’s been the question all the time. Or a version of it.’
We end up compromising. The night after my father’s birthday dinner, we cook another roast chicken, and we invite Brian round, and thus the spirit of the Brian treaty is upheld. Stuffing our faces with meat and three vegetables on consecutive nights may seem like a peculiar way to make the world a better place, but it seems to work for us.
OK, Vanessa Bell. She was a painter, so, you know, easier for her to live a beautiful life than it is for someone who has to deal with Mrs Cortenza and Barmy Brian and all the Holloway junkies. And she had children by more than one man, which might have made things a bit richer than they might otherwise have been. And the men she knocked around with were, it is only fair to say, more interesting and more talented than David and Stephen. They tended to be writers and painters and what have you, rather than people who wrote company brochures. And even though they didn’t have money, they were posh, whereas we’re not. It must be easier to live beautiful lives when you’re posh.
So, what I’m beginning to think—and I’m only halfway through the book, but I’m sure the second half will be more of the same—is that Vanessa Bell isn’t going to be too much help. OK, my brother may well end up filling his pockets with stones and jumping into the river, just as her sister did, but beyond that… Anyway, who lives a rich and beautiful life that I know? It’s no longer possible, surely, for anyone who works for a living, or lives in a city, or shops in a supermarket, or watches TV, or reads a newspaper, or drives a car, or eats frozen pizzas. A nice life, possibly, with a huge slice of luck and a little spare cash. And maybe even a good life, if… Well, let’s not go into all that. But rich and beautiful lives seem to be a discontinued line.
What helps is not Vanessa Bell, but reading about Vanessa Bell. I don’t want to be like Poppy the squashed cat any more. Ever since I moved back into the house after my stay at Janet’s, I have had the nagging feeling that I miss something, without quite being able to describe precisely what that something was. It’s not my former flatmates, or the chance of sleeping on my own in a bed (because, like I said, David and I fit, or have learned to fit, and sharing a duvet with him is frequently a comfort rather than a hardship), but something else, something that is clearly not important enough to me, in both senses: it should be more important to me than it is, because I miss it, and yet life is clearly not impossible without it, because I have been managing to survive despite its absence—in other words, it’s some spiritual equivalent of fruit, which I am bad about eating. And it is only when I have shut the bedroom door for the third or fourth time on my husband and children in order to find out precisely how Vanessa Bell’s life was better than my own that I work it out. It is the act of reading itself I miss, the opportunity to retreat further and further from the world until I have found some space, some air that isn’t stale, that hasn’t been breathed by my family a thousand times already. Janet’s bedsit seemed enormous when I moved into it, enormous and quiet, but this book is so much bigger than that. And when I’ve finished it I will start another one, and that might be even bigger, and then another, and I will be able to keep extending my house until it becomes a mansion, full of rooms where they can’t find me. And it’s not just reading, either, but listening, hearing something other than my children’s TV programmes and my husband’s pious drone and the chatter chatter chatter in my head.
What happened to me? However did I get it into my head that I was too busy for all this stuff? Maybe I can’t live a rich and beautiful life, but there are rich and beautiful things for sale all around me, even on the Holloway Road, and they are not an extravagance because if I buy some of them then I think I might be able to get by, and if I don’t then I think I might go under. I need a Discman and some CDs and half-a-dozen novels urgently, total cost maybe three hundred pounds. Three hundred pounds for a mansion! Imagine asking a building society manager for three hundred pounds! He’d give you cash out of his own pocket. And I could shave even that pitiful amount down. I could go to the library, and I could borrow the CDs… but I need the Discman. I don’t want anyone else to hear what I am hearing, and I want to be able to block out every last trace of the world I inhabit, even if it is just for half-an-hour a day. And yes, yes: just think how many cataract operations or bags of rice could be bought for three hundred pounds. And just think how long it would take a twelve-year-old Asian girl to earn that in her sweatshop. Can I be a good person and spend that much money on overpriced consumer goods? I don’t know. But I do know this: I’d be no good without them.
For the last three days, it has been raining and raining and raining—it has been raining harder than anyone can remember. It’s the kind of rain you’re supposed to get after a nuclear attack: rivers have broken their banks all over the country, and people are wading down High Streets, sandbagging their houses, abandoning their cars, rowing across fields. The traffic all over London has slowed and slowed and then, finally, stopped, and the trains aren’t running, and the buses are overstuffed like a human sandwich, with bits of arms and legs hanging out of them. It’s dark all day, and there’s this relentless, terrible howling noise. If you believe in ghosts, the kinds of ghosts who have been condemned to haunt us because they died terrible, painful deaths or did terrible, painful things to their loved ones, then this is your time, because we would listen to you now. We would have no option but to listen to you, because the evidence is all around us.
The last time it rained like this was in 1947, according to the news, but back then it was just a fluke, a freak of nature; this time around, they say, we are drowning because we have abused our planet, kicked and starved it until it has changed its nature and turned nasty. It feels like the end of the world. And our homes, homes which cost some of us a quarter of a million pounds or more, do not offer the kind of sanctuary that enables us to ignore what is going on out there: they are all too old, and at night the lights flicker and the windows rattle. I’m sure that I am not the only one in this house who wonders where Monkey and his friends are tonight.
Just as we were eating, water started to pour into the kitchen under the French windows; the drain outside, placed incompetently in the dip between the garden and the house, cannot cope. David digs out an old pair of wellingtons and a cycling cape and goes outside to see if anything can be done.
‘It’s full of rubbish,’ he shouts. ‘And there’s water pouring down from the gutter outside Tom’s room.’
He clears as much muck from the drain as he can with his hands, and then we all go upstairs to see what can be done with the guttering.
‘Leaves,’ David says. He’s half out of the sash window, holding on to the frame—which, I can see now, is rotten, and should have been repaired years ago. ‘I could reach them with a stick or something.’
Molly runs off and comes back with a broom, and David kneels on the windowsill, and starts to take wild pokes at the gutter with the handle.
‘Stop, David,’ I tell him. ‘It’s not safe.’
‘It’s fine.’
He’s wearing jeans, and Tom and I grab hold of one back pocket each in an attempt to anchor him, while Molly in turn hangs on to us, purposelessly but sweetly. My family, I think, just that. And then, I can do this. I can live this life. I can, I can. It’s a spark I want to cherish, a splutter of life in the flat battery; but just at the wrong moment I catch a glimpse of the night sky behind David, and I can see that there’s nothing out there at all.