I’m much more comfortable here than I was in that big house in Norwich, says Jo. I didn’t like Norwich, I didn’t like the university, I never had any real friends there. I know more people in Cambridge than I ever did in Norwich. I’ve always had friends in Cambridge, and I used to have family here. We used to have Christmas here. I’ve known Cambridge since I was a child. Anyway, I couldn’t afford to go on living there on my own, the house was too big. I downsized, and now I’m living as I like. I’ve got selfish in my old age. I live as I like.
Some retired dons in Cambridge still live in comfort and dignity in college properties, Fran knows. And she knows that Jo knows that Athene Grange is mimicking that comfort and dignity. But if it mimics them to her comfort and satisfaction, so what?
Fran is fond of her flat in Tarrant Towers, although it is a bad address, a bad postcode, and the lifts often break down. But the view is glorious, the great view over London. She likes to watch the cloudscapes assemble from afar, the great galleons of cumulus sailing her way on the approaching storm; she likes the red-streaked clouds of evening, the pierced and the torn caverns beyond the beyond of the everlasting blue, the rents and the gashes and the intimations. She endures the lowering blanketed greys of winter, the monotonous dull skies of February, and waits for the opening drama of the spring. Elevate, sublimate, transcend, that’s what the view tells Fran. And climbing up the concrete stairwell once or twice a week is good for the heart.
She likes Tarrant Towers. She likes its insalubrious garage space. She couldn’t do without a garage. She needs her car, she needs to keep moving.
Imagine Claude Stubbs. Imagine him released from Fran’s controlling vision of him, if we can. Yes, he is there, he is occupying his own space. Cyrus the stout tabby is settled on the end of Claude’s day bed, his softly rounded white-tipped front paws curved comfortably inwards towards one another in a slightly camp submissive gesture that Claude finds deeply endearing. The claws are sheathed and amply padded. Cyrus is not a young cat and he enjoys the circumstances of Claude’s confinement, he is pleased that Claude is not well. Claude hardly ever goes out now, except on forays to the hospital, so Claude is almost always there to be with Cyrus. Cyrus approves of this regime. The radio is playing, the television is on although the sound is mute, and Claude’s mind moves towards the next plated meal, which he thinks is potato, egg and anchovy bake, a dish he believes to have been invented by Fran, though in fact it is a debased version of a recipe she once read in a Jane Grigson book in the 1970s, in the far-off days when she used to hope that one day she would learn how to cook.
Claude has little notion of Fran’s increasingly vexed relationship with food. He has never had to cook anything, ever, except toast and an egg. He likes the anchovy bake, so he won’t have it for lunch, he will save it up for supper. Something to look forward to. His minder, who is called Persephone, has already been in to see to him and has left him a plastic box containing chicken and avocado sandwiches on brown and an M&S tropical fruit salad. Claude is supposed to like mangoes, and most of the time he does, though perhaps not quite as often as they appear on his menu. Persephone is a tall good-looking black girl with expensively smooth dark gold hair. She says she’s from Zimbabwe, and she’s forty years younger than Fran. She makes him think about sex, but thinking about it is all that he can do. She told him this morning some rigmarole about the flowers that one of her beaux had sent her for Valentine’s Day. Orange lilies, and a huge golden metal heart sticking up out of them. A bit dangerous, a bit menacing, for flowers, said Persephone. More like a weapon than a love offering.
Persephone is no fool.
It’s bloody freezing out there, said Persephone, you’re better off here in bed.
People often say thoughtless things like that to Claude. He doesn’t mind as much as he used to. He’s got used to it. He wouldn’t like Persephone’s life, no, not at all.
Persephone likes Cyrus, or pretends to, and never complains about changing the cat litter. But she is well paid to do that kind of thing. At least she doesn’t have to change Claude’s litter or empty his bedpan. Not yet.
He’s mobile enough to get to the kitchen, with the aid of his Chelsea and Westminster NHS crutches. He’s not on the NHS, or not wholly on the NHS, just as when in practice he wasn’t wholly on the NHS nor wholly private. He’s always been an opportunist. He acquired the crutches as an outpatient in an earlier and less terminal state of affairs, and although he was supposed to have returned them long ago, he hasn’t. They’ve been standing in the cupboard in the spare room for years. They’ve come in handy now.
With the crutches, he can still get, very slowly, to the lav, as they used to call it in Romley. He doesn’t always get there in time, as he sometimes misjudges the urgency and the difficulties of the journey, but he gets there.
Imagine Claude, imagining his first wife Francesca. Fran is at a conference up north somewhere. She’s always buzzing around the country, despatched by that Quakerly quango on geriatric housing that employs her. Quango, charity, NGO, he’s never been quite sure what it is, but it’s something to do with the elderly, and it does pay her a salary. She’s a busybody, a typical social-worker middle-class busybody type. And however public-spirited she may think she is, she is as utterly selfish as anyone he has ever known. She’s just as selfish as all his colleagues rolled together – the surgeons, the oncologists, the anaesthetists, the consultants, the chief medical officers, the professors, the heads of all the royal colleges. Everybody is selfish, and Fran is as selfish as the rest of them. She doesn’t work for the public interest, but because she likes doing it, because it keeps her busy, because it makes her feel important and on top of the game.
What game? At her age? It’s tragic, it’s pathetic.
He visualises the potato, egg and anchovy bake. He likes salt, and maybe his salt intake has contributed to his present lamentable condition. There’s probably double cream in there too. Too late to start worrying about all of that now.
Maybe Fran is trying to kill him off. She had threatened to murder him several times, half a century ago, but there wouldn’t be much in it for her if he died now. She’d be let off the plated meals, but it’s Claude’s convenient view that, in her masochistic womanly way, she enjoys making them.
She doesn’t know what’s in his will, and would never ask. She doesn’t even ask what provision he’s made for their two children and his grandchildren. But she knows Persephone is pricey, and his life expectancy is actuarially uncertain. Who knows how long he and a succession of Persephones could survive before he ran out of money?
He knows, but she doesn’t.
He will have half a bottle, perhaps a bottle, of the very good Chablis with the bake. He has resolved to drink expensive wine until he dies. Neither of his wives could tell one bottle from another, let alone one year from another, although both of them could knock it back. He has decided to enjoy what he can, while he can.
Fran now lives alone in a high-rise council flat on a dismal North London estate, having recently moved from a much nicer ground-floor garden flat in Highgate where she lived with that man Hamish. He has never seen the council flat, but she has described it to him, briefly and provocatively. He has accused her of slumming, but she has denied this. She has used lofty words for her lofty eyrie. Atonement, absolution, amnesty. No, none of those words is quite right, his memory for words is going, but he’s sure one of those that she used to justify her choice of residence begins with an A. And she had mentioned the view, what she called the overview.
Odd how one can remember bits of words, but not always the words themselves. Maybe it’s a word that he applied to it, not her. Anyway, it began with an A. Proper nouns go first, then abstract nouns, then nouns, then verbs. So he’s been told.
It’s a damn sight nicer in Tarrant Towers than in Romley and Chingwell