When Serena met George around her twenty-ninth birthday, it was as if some curse had lifted and all the jagged pieces of her life so amazingly and unexpectedly fell into place.
Before that she was a hopeless misfit, suffering from what they now call low self-esteem and an over-placatory nature.
The curse moved over from her to me – perhaps this is the fate of sisters – and it was my turn to endure a decade of blighted life as a single mother, trying to bring up two children – one a sports fanatic, the other, stunningly talented but basically unfriendly. Until then, I was the one who was enviable. I was thin and she was fat.
I daresay if you add up the anxious, tearful, tormented days and nights we have had throughout life, the pair of us, they come to about the same. I clocked up a good few in my seventy-first year, when Sebastian was held incommunicado in a Dutch police cell, and later in prison, but I don’t think as many as Serena did, flailing and wailing and staring into space, when George betrayed her, turned against her, locked her out of her home, around the time of her sixtieth birthday. She married again soon enough.
Martyn On The Way Home From Work
New Century House, where Martyn works as a statistical journalist for Devolution, is newly built and well funded: it stands all glass, steel and shininess, in a block of small rather mean streets between Westminster and Petty France. It is pleasantly decorated and has effective climate control. There was a Legionnaires’ Disease scare when the building first opened – stagnant water had been circulating in the ‘veins’ of the building, its opening by the Prime Minister having been delayed for more than a year – but the source of the epidemic was quickly detected and put right and only a janitor died. A Feng Shui expert was called in to help with the foyer. As a result the entrance to Starbucks is at an angle calculated to welcome customers and revitalise takings. It seems to be working. The noise from cheerful non-smoking coffee drinkers floats up the escalators until well after ten each morning: the elevators smell of hot chocolate croissants.
Each of the seven floors has a dedicated rest room for stressed staff, with a good supply of fresh towels for showers, and for a small fee pillows are available for those who need to sleep. Research shows that nothing improves productivity like the short power-nap. Since Kitty arrived Martyn has made good use of these rooms. The baby sleeps well by day but not by night, no matter how often Hattie takes her to the breast, and it is impossible for Martyn to sleep through the wrigglings and moanings of both mother and child.
As well as serving as the offices of the sister magazines Devolution and Evolution, the building houses the headquarters of three think-tanks or public policy research institutes – the Centre for Post-Communist Economic Development, the Policy Coordination of Welfare Reform Initiative, the Institute for Social Commentary – and two quangos dealing with societal management and measurement.
There has been some talk of Martyn being seconded part-time to the Welfare Reform Initiative under the new Moving and Growing Human Resources Plan, which deals with unemployment issues, but Martyn is manoeuvering so this won’t happen. The pay is more, but Martyn sees his future in political journalism and indeed in politics itself. He is more likely to be selected as a candidate out of a journalistic background than from one more concerned with statistical research. He needs visibility.
Martyn is taking a nap in the fourth-floor sanctuary. It is a pale green room with pink features; rather hard on the eye but the colours are recognised to foster sleep. At home Hattie and he have strong, dark, powerful colours on the walls and they have painted the furniture red: Kitty’s cot is yellow to maximise her synaptic responses. Hattie scorns the New Age – crystals and horoscopes and so on – but has a belief in the power of colours to influence mood which Martyn finds endearing. His own upbringing was so practical and no-nonsense he sometimes finds himself hungry for Southern whimsicality.
Martyn is joined by his editor and immediate boss Harold Mappin, who collapses on an adjacent couch (modelled on one from a first-century Roman fresco) saying ‘they’ve junked almost the entire edition. Except for your Skinflints and Killjoys piece, which went down a treat. How can they call this living? If I don’t have a bit of shut-eye I shall kill myself. Debora’s wearing me out. God save us from younger women.’
There has been some policy change at the top: new health initiatives are proving too expensive for the Treasury: research is showing what Martyn had always suspected – that the more you asked young healthy people to look after their health the less inclined they were to do it: only the already ailing and the elderly bothered. The focus of the autumn issue is now to be devoted to good news rather than grim warnings. Also, circulation is falling – even the Government departments amongst which Devolution is read, themselves victims of spending cuts, are no longer taking the magazine.
All this Harold delivers to Martyn, who is pleased and flattered to be taken into his confidence, while arranging his pillows. More significantly still, he also says that he has changed his mind about transferring Martyn to the Welfare Reform Initiative. ‘Much too dull for a dude like you. We need you in the team. What about a positive piece on the new cholesterol research? What this country needs is good news.’
‘You mean something like Why You and the Chip Butty Can Be Friends?’ asks Martyn. He is speaking ironically but Harold just says, ‘Exactly’ and falls asleep, not waiting for further comment, arms flung above his head like a small child.
Harold is a large, noisy, hairy man in his fifties, with shrewd eyes. His staff put it about that he is autistic, or at any rate has Asperger’s: they look up the symptoms on the Internet, hoping for grounds for their belief that his communication and social interaction skills are so minimal he can be described as mad, and they can ignore him. Martyn has always got on with him perfectly well.
Martyn goes home encouraged and cheered. He walks to Trafalgar Square and takes the Barnet branch of the Northern Line from Charing Cross back to Kentish Town Station. Many a Westminster worker has taken exactly this route home to Kentish Town since the line was built, a hundred years ago. You walk a little first, both for the exercise and to save the trouble of changing at Embankment. And like so many before him he approaches home with a mixture of emotions: desire to see his family conflicting with a kind of terror that they exist at all. The waiting family is the source of all pleasure and the source of all dread. Once he was young and free: now he has obligations and must not be selfish.
If he is promoted as he can see he might well be, from editor to commissioning editor, his salary will jump by some £6,000 a year. That would mean Hattie could stay home with the baby, and they would no longer need to have an au pair. He wants his house to himself. Hattie, being flesh of his flesh, doesn’t count as another person: Kitty’s arrival had been an upset but she too now feels like an extension of himself, not a foreign body to be eased out.
Privacy had been dearly earned in his growing years – the lad Martyn would sit by himself in the cold in the outside loo and read, just to get a bit of peace – and not even reading had been private: you read the book your teachers said you should read and had to discuss it afterwards, otherwise you didn’t pass your exams and then what became of you? To the man Martyn the idea of a stranger living at close quarters, sharing his table, sharing his television, knowing his secrets, feels nightmarish. Surely the value of money lay not in the things you bought, but in the time, space and privacy it earned for you?
At home, there was at least the peace of familiarity, although currently disturbed and messy and Hattie mad and the baby crying and no food in the fridge. But this peopled privacy was what he had chosen, and what he wanted; it was his delight. His domestic happiness was like a Russian doll, securely weighted