Yet none of the shoppers walking past me showed the slightest concern. Another Chelsea party had run out of control, though the guests were too drunk to realize it. And, in a way, this was true. Most of the rebels, and even a few of the ringleaders, never grasped what was happening in this comfortable enclave. But then these likeable and over-educated revolutionaries were rebelling against themselves.
Even I, David Markham, a trained psychologist infiltrated into Chelsea Marina as a police spy – a deception I was the last to discover – failed to see what was going on. But I was distracted by my unusual friendship with Richard Gould, the hard-working paediatrician who was the leader of the revolt – the Doctor Moreau of the Chelsea set, as our shared lover, Kay Churchill, christened him. Soon after our first meeting, Richard lost interest in Chelsea Marina and moved on to a far more radical revolution, which he knew was closer to my heart.
I approached the crime-scene tapes that closed the King’s Road entrance to the estate, and showed my pass to the two policemen waiting for the Home Secretary’s arrival. The driver of a florist’s delivery van was arguing with them, pointing to a large display of arum lilies on the seat beside him. I guessed that a local resident, some happily married solicitor or account executive, had been too busy with the revolution to cancel his wife’s birthday bouquet.
The constables were unmoved, refusing to let the driver into the estate. They sensed that something deeply suspect had taken place in this once law-abiding community, an event that required the presence of a cabinet minister and his retinue of worthies. The visitors – Home Office advisers, concerned churchmen, senior social workers and pyschologists, including myself – would begin their tour at noon, in an hour’s time. No armed police would guard us, on the safe assumption that a rebellious middle class was too well mannered to pose a physical threat. But, as I knew all too well, that was the threat.
Appearances proved nothing and everything. The policemen waved me through, barely glancing at my pass. Having been harangued for weeks by articulate mothers in the scruffiest jeans, they knew that my fashionable haircut, courtesy of BBC make-up, dove-grey suit and sunbed tan ruled me out as a native of Chelsea Marina. The residents would die rather than resemble a minor television guru, a renegade intellectual from the dubious world of video-conferencing and airport seminars.
But the suit was a disguise, which I had put on for the first time in six months, after stuffing my torn leather jacket and denims into the dustbin. I sprang lightly over the crime-scene tapes, far fitter than the policemen guessed. The ‘terrorist actions’, as the Home Secretary termed them, had soon toughened up a lazy physique softened by years of boarding lounges and hotel atriums. Even my wife Sally, forever tolerant and never surprised, was impressed by my muscular arms as she counted the bruises left by scuffles with police and security guards.
But a disguise could go too far. Catching sight of myself in the broken windows of the gatehouse, I loosened the knot of my tie. I was still unsure what role I was playing. Richard Gould and I had been seen together so often, and the constables should have recognized me as the chief accomplice of this hunted terrorist. When I waved to them they turned away, scanning the King’s Road for the Home Secretary’s limousine. I felt a pang of disappointment. For a few seconds I had wanted them to challenge me.
In front of me lay Chelsea Marina, its streets empty as never before in its twenty-year existence. The entire population had vanished, leaving a zone of silence like an urban nature reserve. Eight hundred families had fled, abandoning their comfortable kitchens, herb gardens and book-lined living rooms. Without the slightest regret, they had turned their backs on themselves and all they had once believed in.
Beyond the rooftops I could hear the west London traffic, but it faded as I walked down Beaufort Avenue, the estate’s main thoroughfare. The vast metropolis that surrounded Chelsea Marina was still holding its breath. Here the revolution of the middle class had begun, not the uprising of a desperate proletariat, but the rebellion of the educated professional class who were society’s keel and anchor. In these quiet roads, the scene of uncountable dinner parties, surgeons and insurance brokers, architects and health service managers, had built their barricades and overturned their cars to block the fire engines and rescue teams who were trying to save them. They rejected all offers of help, refusing to air their real grievances or to say whether any grievances existed at all.
The siege negotiators sent in by Kensington and Chelsea Council were met first by silence, then by mockery, and finally by petrol bombs. For reasons no one understood, the inhabitants of Chelsea Marina had set about dismantling their middle-class world. They lit bonfires of books and paintings, educational toys and videos. The television news showed families arm in arm, surrounded by overturned cars, their faces proudly lit by the flames.
I passed a fire-gutted BMW, lying wheels uppermost beside the kerb, and stared at its ruptured fuel tank. An airliner cruised over central London, and hundreds of broken windows trembled under the droning engines, as if releasing their last anger. Curiously, the residents who destroyed Chelsea Marina had shown no anger at all. They had quietly discarded their world as if putting out their rubbish for collection.
This uncanny calm and, more worryingly, the residents’ indifference to the huge financial penalties they would pay, had prompted the Home Secretary’s visit. Henry Kendall, a colleague at the Institute with close Home Office contacts, told me that other sites of middle-class unrest were coming to light, in well-to-do suburbs of Guildford, Leeds and Manchester. All over England an entire professional caste was rejecting everything it had worked so hard to secure.
I watched the airliner cross the Fulham skyline, then lost it among the exposed roof-beams of a burnt-out house at the end of Beaufort Avenue. Its owners, a local headmistress and her doctor husband, had left Chelsea Marina with their three children, after holding out to the last minutes before the police riot teams overwhelmed them. They had been in the forefront of the rebellion, determined to expose the blatant injustice that ruled their lives. I imagined them endlessly circling the M25 in their muddy Land Rover, locked in a deep trance.
Where had they gone? Many of the residents had retreated to their country cottages, or were staying with friends who supported the struggle with food parcels and cheerful e-mails. Others had set off on indefinite tours of the Lake District and the Scottish Highlands. Towing their trailers, they were the vanguard of an itinerant middle class, a new tribe of university-trained gypsies who knew their law and would raise hell with local councils.
Kay Churchill, the film studies lecturer at South Bank University who became my landlady, was arrested by the police and released on bail. Still proclaiming the revolution, she held forth on an afternoon cable channel. Her cramped but comfortable home, with its shabby sofas and film stills, had been drowned by the powerful hoses of the Chelsea Fire Service.
I missed Kay and her shaky crown of ash-grey hair, her erratic opinions and ever-flowing wine, but her abandoned house was my reason for arriving an hour before the Home Secretary. I hoped that my laptop was still on the coffee table in Kay’s living room, where we had laid out our maps and planned the arson attacks on the National Film Theatre and the Albert Hall. During the final moments of the revolt, as the police helicopters hovered overhead, Kay was so determined to convert the handsome fire chief to her cause that his men had ample time to shatter her windows with their water jets. A neighbour had pulled Kay from the house, but the laptop was still there for the police forensic teams to find.
I reached the end of Beaufort Avenue, at the silent centre of Chelsea Marina. A seven-storey block of flats stood beside Cadogan Circle, banners hanging limply from the balconies and offering their slogans to the unlistening air. I crossed the road to Grosvenor Place, Kay’s raffish cul-de-sac and a reminder of another, older Chelsea. The short road had been home to a convicted antiques dealer, two lesbian marriages and an alcoholic Concorde pilot, and was a haven of bad company and good cheer.
I walked towards Kay’s dishevelled house, listening to my footsteps click behind me, echoes of guilt trying to flee the scene but managing only to approach itself. Distracted by the sight of so many empty houses, I tripped on the kerb and leaned against a builder’s skip heaped with household possessions. The revolutionaries, as ever considerate