They shared a flat on the fourth floor of a large Victorian house in Earls Court. They lived rent free. The landlord was an
amiable young Maltese called Jesus who ran a thriving whoring business elsewhere, liked the girls and required nothing of
them but that they both spent a couple of hours with him on Friday evenings between ten and twelve. When they pointed out
that that would leave Alice without a babysitter he changed his requirements to one hour each on Wednesday and Friday nights,
and threw in the electricity bill. He was very protective of Alice.
Beverley and Dionne were more than satisfied with this arrangement. His first suggestion had been problematic: it would have
been embarrassing to face one another on Saturday mornings after performing whatever intimate lesbian antics Jesus would have
expected of them on Friday nights. As it turned out, their obligations were not onerous, even rather sweet. All that was required
in the new arrangement was one or other of them kept him company, whilst
sitting decorously at the kitchen table, albeit naked, embroid ering prayer kneeling cushions, cross-stitching tapestry cushions
in the Berlin pattern, as his mother and aunts did back home, occasionally getting up to stir the soup he was making. Sometimes
there was full sex, but it was perfectly conventional and soon done: he had a fiancée at home and missed her.
Afterwards he would call either Dionne, if it was Wednesday night with Beverley, or Beverley, if it was Wednesday night with
Dionne, to come down with baby Alice and join him, decently clothed to eat the meal he had made. He liked to cook for them:
his specialty was kawlata soup, made of cabbage and pork. Jesus loved London, where he could grow rich modernising its antiquated
sex industry, but found the food execrable.
He liked to feel he was playing a part in helping the girls get an education: it was an investment: with his help they would
end up as high-class call-girls, bound for the top escort agencies, rather than lapsing into the hard-eyed hookerdom which
was the fate of so many lost girls with no family.
‘But why? Why?’ Beverley would ask. She found men strange. ‘Why? Why?’ was a refrain that echoed through her life. It was
more in Dionne’s nature to answer questions than to ask them. She was forever offering unlikely solutions to imponderable
questions.
‘Perhaps when he was a tiny little boy in Malta,’ said Dionne, ‘he would sit on the floor and wonder what his family looked
like with no clothes on. Now he is in a strange land and has unlimited money he can find out. I think it’s rather sweet.’
Dionne was to fulfil Jesus’ prophecy and end up as the widow of a senior government minister in Paris. The nearest she got
to playing Lady Macbeth was to pose in
tableaux vivants
like Nelson’s Emma Hamilton, striking classical attitudes based on Greek sculptures
for the pleasure of important guests. No one thought the worse of her for any of it, any more than they did of Pamela Harriman
in her time or Carla Bruni today. Dionne was content.
Dionne is old now, and arthritis has got her bones, but she has, as they say, her memories, and quite a lot of love letters
from important people which she can, if necessary, sell.
‘Now Bev,’ said Winter. ‘I think we are going to call you Rosa. Beverley is not the right name for you. It’s dismissive, throwaway,
colonial. We are revolutionaries. We are calling you Rosa after Rosa Luxemburg – last night’s vote was unanimous. The same
beautiful eyes, arched brows and springing hair over that high domed forehead. But why do you wear that dreary green shapeless
sweater all the time? One of the comrades turned up last night in a topless dress. They’re not exactly topless, just come
down in a V to the middle of the waist. Women need to do what they can to cheer the men up, as vice versa; we are gender equal.
Who’s Rosa Luxemburg? Good Lord, Bev – Rosa – You are so ignorant. They didn’t seem to teach you much at that Holloway College
of yours, but then it is a woman’s college. I expect they make it easier to get a first. I got a third deliberately. As Gramsci
pointed out, the crisis in the educational process of differentiation and specialisation has taken place chaotically, without
clear and precise principles, without a well-thought-out and consciously fixed plan, and the more one adds to the chaos the
better. If your obvious firsts get thirds, and vice versa, that undermines the whole bourgeois educational conspiracy. Rosa
Luxemburg was a socialist revolutionary who was murdered by the fascists in 1919.’
Winter Max – born 1928, christened Julian Waxmann Maidment,
nicknamed at school (Harrow) Earglue – was a good-looking young man with a Zapata moustache, not too much brain and a swaggering
air. Beverley loved him very much, quite a lot of the time. She found a picture of Rosa Luxemburg and saw a horse-faced woman
with a sour gaze and was horrified. But world revolution was obviously a must and everyone she knew believed in it, and the
men had agreed that marriage was incontestably a form of exclusive private property and as such was to be abhorred.
But Winter was prepared to marry her and formally adopt Alice in spite of his principles, which seldom seemed to apply to
him but only to others, if she changed her name to Rosa and wore a topless dress to a meeting or two. So she did, and he was
then proud to own her, and she vaguely proud to be owned.
She had a job as a secretary at University College London where the mummified body of Jeremy Bentham sat in a chair by the
doorway, but even her degree would not get her any further than that. The savings had long ago run out and she remembered
what Rita said: in the end you will have to marry to get a roof over your head.
Jesus had bought a house in Paris more suitable to his wealth and status, and the girls had been roofless once again. Dionne
followed him to Paris; Beverley had Alice to think about and stayed in West London where the child was doing well at Holland
Park Comprehensive. Here Alice was taught by Gramsciist ideologues who’d studied Fromm and Marcuse and saw a new way to the
‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in things like teenage consumer culture. At any rate Alice had been a top-notch little gymnast
until six months previously, when she was told that competition was a tool of capitalism, whereupon she had suddenly grown
sultry-eyed and started buying lipsticks and refusing to wear tennis shoes.
It seemed to her mother that the spirit of competition, deprived
of its natural sustenance, simply turned to acquisition instead. She tried to say as much to Joey Matthews the cell leader
when the matter came up for discussion. Joey Matthews – born 1914, christened Josef Maybaum, later of Trinity College with
Blunt and Burgess – sighed and said in his perfectly modulated voice: ‘The long march through the hegemony is very long and
slow indeed, I fear. When it is feminised it becomes more a limp than a march,’ which Rosa took as a rebuke. She, a woman,
was holding up the long march by quibbling with doctrine. He then quoted Adorno: ‘“Sport is the liberation of the body humiliated
by economic interests, the return to the body of a part of the functions of which it has been deprived by industrial society,”’
and advised, ‘Wean the child off it, Rosa.’
Tell that to a ruptured hymen, thought Rosa, rudely, and quite went off Marxism for a bit, especially when Joey, who had been
particularly charmed by the topless dress, came into the kitchen while she was making coffee for everyone, and made a pass
at her with his trembling hand.
The wedding to Winter had been a big posh do in Gloucester-shire with a lot of Maidment family and titles on his side and
only little Alice and Dionne on hers; which rather relieved everyone, she thought. The roof over her head was now Robinsdale,
in North London, spacious enough for meetings and for party members to be put up for the night, and was not too far away from
the Soviet Trade Delegation in Highgate.
There was much coffee to be made, and now she was married Winter had gone off the idea of topless dresses, or indeed parties,
and open, companionate marriages – so nothing was much fun, but at least she could put her past behind her, and be, just a
bit, like anyone else. There was now nothing wrong with her life except
boredom, and so she spent a lot of time worrying about whether Trotsky was the villain or Stalin, and copy-editing the far-left
magazine
Black Hole
. She was soon pregnant with Richie.
‘Rosa, I’ve been thinking.’
‘Have you, Winter?’ He had taken LSD the day before. He still seemed slightly dazed and complained of flashbacks.
‘You and I have been very close to each other for some time. Practically pro-hegemonistic; it isn’t good.’
‘I like it.’
‘Yes, I know you do. But it is lazy. A woman needs to be free, to be liberated. Marriage is like prostitution, you are a slave,
providing sexual, domestic and child-rearing services in return for board and lodging.’
‘I’d earn if there were any jobs.’
‘I wouldn’t want you to be working. You are quite busy enough. The children need you. I just want you to be sexually free.’
‘Ah, sexually.’
‘Joey’s going to be staying over tonight. We all owe him so much. He’s moving to Moscow. He’s appointed me leader of the cadre.’
‘I thought it was going to be Clive?’ Clive was the only working-class member of the North-West Cadre. Others tore their jeans,
went unshaved, and tried to look poor and oppressed but it seldom worked. Clive wore a tie and polished his shoes, edited
Black Hole
, was an agent for left-wing writers, and was followed everywhere by MI5. He had great street credibility.
‘Joey says I’m probably a better bet,’ said Winter. ‘He’ll decide tomorrow. I really want this, Rosa.’
He grabbed her hand and squeezed it and looked at her imploringly. What was this about? She realised.
‘You mean you want me to join him in the bed tonight?’
‘Well, yes. It’s a matter of revolutionary progress, liberation from old bonds of tradition. No one has to worry about getting
pregnant any more. Why not? We should offer ourselves to each other freely. I don’t mean you sneak in, nothing furtive. I’ll
show you to the bedside myself. He’s expecting you. He really wants you, always has. What do you say, Rosa?’
‘Actually, I’d rather not, Winter. He’s too old. And my name is Beverley.’
‘You bourgeoise cow,’ he said, and slammed out of the house and stayed out.
She called Dionne in Paris and said, ‘Why? Why?’ and Dionne said men did that. It was a status thing. Pack behaviour. A dog
with a bone will step back and release it when top dog comes along and wants it. That was what executive dinner parties were
all about. You were there as a potential offering to the boss.
‘Oh,’ said Beverley, ‘I see.’
Joey arrived, assuming Winter would be there in the house. He did not seem to mind that he wasn’t, other than remarking that
Winter always chickened out of group sex. Beverley did indeed join Joey in the bed. Winter was right: why indeed not? And
he was not too old; he was a randy old goat. She told him so and he said he had been anointed by the blood of the workers.
He fucked for all of them. She had not heard this one before, though she could see it was true enough.
She asked Joey not to tell Winter the details but he said one had
to be open about these matters and tell the truth, otherwise in his experience there was trouble.
‘Ah yes,’ she said. ‘Trust between comrades is imperative to the struggle.’
‘I always feel you’re laughing at us,’ he complained, as Butt, Crossly, Ferguson and Barker had felt so long ago.
‘Good Lord, no,’ she said.
Winter came back about midday. Joey told Winter the liberating deed was more than satisfactorily done and at length, and he
was very pleased. He formally bequeathed Winter the cadre there and then, and, more, left a briefcase stuffed with cash behind,
to go towards the big
Rock Against Racism
demo. Then he flew back to Moscow, first class. Joey showed Beverley the tickets.
‘There’s no first class available on Aeroflot so I have to take the BA flight,’ he said. ‘Moscow always treats me well. The
East Germans make you fly economy.’
Winter called her Bev from then on and screwed her nightly for a week. After that she was perfectly civil to him but more
sensitive to the flaws in his character. On occasion, when he felt the need to restore his virility, he would search out people
in the party he wanted or needed to impress and offer his wife to them, as a cat will drag in a dead bird and offer it to
the one who fills the plate with cat food. She obliged, while feeling rather like the bird, a morally superior bird, of course.
One Saturday Winter came back with a lot of gear from a camping shop and the famous army surplus store called Laurence Corner,
and said he was on his way to Bolivia to join Che Guevara in the bitter fight against the imperialist lackeys. Beverley managed
to get hold of Joey in Moscow and Joey only laughed.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I know, they contacted me and asked for a reference for poor Winter, can you believe it? But those 26th July
people have really got it organised. I wrote back saying: “Good on enthusiasm, poor on brains”. They must have taken him on.
Nothing I can do. Make sure he leaves a will.’
Beverley could have worked harder at dissuading Winter but she didn’t. She didn’t quite send him off to war, but almost. Like
the brake cable she’d almost cut all the way through, but not quite. Winter was shot and killed in the jungle within days
of arriving in Bolivia, by quite whose side it was never made clear, nor in what circumstances. Che Guevara himself was shot
and killed within a month.
Winter had indeed made a new will, and had left a copy with his solicitors, without telling her. He had left Robinsdale to
Beverley but the bulk of his money to the Movement. The Maidment parents and family shunned her, believing it was she who
had led their Julian astray. She thought perhaps she had. Anything for a bit of excitement.