Cynara, at sixteen, was more than old enough to understand what was going on and certainly made it her business so to do.
Richie went off to California.
But the funeral was good. Rock Hudson, that icon of heterosexuality, had just been revealed as gay, and the closet door was
finally creaking open. The church was crowded; fulsome tribute was paid to Harry’s talents and character; no mention was made
of his gayness. Beverley stood up and made a speech. She scorned the congregation for its cowardice, society for its hypocrisy,
the press for its scummy cruelty: Harry was gay and that was that and why should he not be? A society which made men like
Harry marry women like her and live a life so full of dismal subterfuge they preferred death, just had to change. She challenged
the congregation. Let those present who were gay come forward and admit it. She sat down.
There was a shocked silence, and if you could hear the sound of slowly flapping kehua wings it was probably only the wheezing
of the sound system, which in churches always seems to have a life of its own. Then someone stood up, and another, and another,
they were popping up all over the place – fourteen men, three women – amongst them a few quite famous and recognisable faces
– seventeen people ‘came out’ that day. And then the congregation began to applaud. It was a great day, and a glorious moment.
And if Cynara was later to ditch Jesper and go to D’Dora, Beverley had no one to blame but herself.
Kehua hang in the sooty plane tree outside 11 Parliam Road where Cynara lives to this day. The road name is admittedly strange.
The terrace rows were built by speculative builders in 1904, and the belief is that one of the new breed of women shorthand
typists erron eously left an ‘ent’ off the end of the word, but after the plans were approved it was cheaper to leave the
road sign as it was and those who lived there soon got used to it.
Alice was so full of horror at the publicity, and what she saw as
her mother’s exhibitionism at Harry’s funeral, that she managed to get pregnant again and give birth to Scarlet, presumably
in an attempt to prove the basic heterosexuality of the universe. She brought this baby up herself, but rather in the manner
of Briony, Jackson’s ex, was a cat mother – the kind whose ambition is to acquire a baby and a house and then get rid of the
tomcat. She was to marry a somewhat dull but respectable accountant called Stanley, disliked by Cynara for no good reason,
who gave his wife little cause for complaint, until finally an affair with his secretary provided Alice with the ammunition
she needed to be rid of him.
She was a good mother, and tried to instil proper values in her daughter, and might well have done so had the peer group not
become so strong in society, and the eighties so consumerist – at any rate at the end of it there was Scarlet, making the
best of what she had, restless, forever optimistic, oddly unquestioning, though always looking over her shoulder to see what
better might be on offer. But she is my heroine, a product of her times and Beverley’s past combined, so I’m not going to
diss her. Just blame the kehua if she can’t settle.
There are a few clinging to the top of the lofty palm tree in the atrium of Nopasaran – no wonder Scarlet hates the place
– and back home there’s one hanging in the grapevine which grows so lavishly and splendidly in the conservatory at Lakeside
Chase, Rawdon, where Scarlet spent her first years.
Alice and her accountant husband chose the house so Alice could study the development of mollusc life in man-made lakes. Alice
has never seen or heard her kehua, but is always going to the doctors with vague complaints about her hearing, and the flashing
lights at the edges of her eyes. They can find nothing wrong.
Gerry was a mate of Harry’s from college days. It was only natural for Beverley and he to get together after Harry’s death,
for tea, sympathy and reminiscences. One thing led to another. She appreciated his raw, outland sexual energy, so unlike Harry’s,
but perhaps he reminded her too much of Arthur, and while she was humming and hawing about taking him on properly Fiona stepped
in and nabbed him and that was that.
Then Marcus came along, and Beverley turned out to be just a bit-part player in that particular life. But then wives so often
are.
My view is that in order for her to take her place in the GCGITS’ scheme of things, Beverley needed to be unpartnered in order
that the publication of Marcus Fletzner’s best-seller,
Slicing the Salami
, should happen. Fiona was just the convenient and all-too-disposable tool which allowed this to occur. At any rate, when
the book was published and Marcus, his use to the GCGITS over, was well dead, Gerry, minus Fiona, was allowed to drift back
on the scene. But not until Marcus’ death had made sure that his book found an immense and influential readership. Nothing,
in the world of the GSWITS and the GCGITS, is coincidental. They conspire in the pub.
Marcus came to Robinsdale by appointment.
‘Thank you for seeing me, Mrs Batcombe, I know you’re not too fond of the press. In the circumstances it’s good of you. You’ll
be glad to hear that I don’t want to talk about Harry but about the NWC, the North-West Cadre. I am writing a book about neo-Trotskyists and I have come to the chapter on Joey Matthews, and his effect on the institutions of this country and the consequent
dumbing down of established culture –’
‘We never called it the NWC,’ she said. ‘We didn’t call it anything in particular. But yes, Joey wuz here.’
Marcus stands on the doorstep and in the trees the kehua stir and flap their wings – they’ve been quiescent since Gerry left,
and I reckon they’ve quite caught Beverley’s liking for events: with kehua influence seems to flow both ways.
Marcus is not the kind to catch the sound. If anything he’s an atheist of the Dawkins school. The rain begins; not hard but
a dampening drizzle.
He is a big, handsome fleshy man, carelessly dressed, bright-eyed and forceful, and has made a living for many years by a
quick wit and a lively tongue, an eye for the controversial, and entertaining an old-fashioned conceit that Britain should
be for the British and there are reds under every bed. He survived until entrapped
by the
Sunday Times
and recorded saying at a drunken dinner party that all immigrants were welcome so long as they pissed on the Koran at Border
Control. ‘Then we could go back to the old days of free travel.’ He was recorded and declined to say (a) that his remarks
were taken out of context or (b) that he was sorry. The ensuing uproar lost him his job at the BBC and his column in
The Times
, so he was able to focus on
Slicing the Salami
, though his publishers wanted him to call it
The Gramsci Effect
. No one would understand salami slicing, it being a term invented by the Communist leader Rakosi in 1945. But then no one
had heard of Gramsci either.
‘What is the name of the book?’ Still she did not let him in.
‘
Slicing the Salami
,’ he said, making the decision there and then.
‘What does that mean?’
He had to make his pitch from the step.
‘It means demanding a little more each day, like cutting up a salami, thin slice after thin slice, until you have the whole
sausage. It was Stalin’s tactic for winning control of Eastern Europe, country after country, by violence, lies and misinformation,
and it worked. It remains the Islamic tactic for holy Jihad today. It was what Joey Matthews from Moscow was doing in London,
in 1965, slicing the salami, funding the useful idiots. The only question is, quite whose sausage it was. May I come in?’
‘No. You can’t. Useful idiots?’
‘Lenin’s phrase. The young intellectuals, lefties, budding politicians, writers, artists, academics, prelates, all on automatic
pilot, who still think it is their duty to destroy the old bourgeois institutions and build the world from scratch. Little
by little the Commies still slice the salami of the West.’
‘That sounds like us,’ she said blithely. ‘Transitional demands,
that kind of thing. “Make Poverty History”. Sounds good, feels good, looks good on a poster.’
The girls who belonged to the NWC were there to make coffee and provide home comforts, not because of their brains. But perhaps
she had a few, thought Marcus. The widow Batcombe, previously Max – he was the freedom fighter who famously died in a shoot-out
in a Bolivian jungle, and who yet might make a chapter – was looking promising. Women kept love letters if nothing else. And
she had made that speech at Batcombe’s funeral.
‘It would be easier if we could talk inside,’ he suggested.
He could see over her shoulder comfort, order, stability, cleanliness, permanence and prosperity within, all the things he
thought he did not need and now suddenly did. It was drizzling, and he had no coat. His personal life was in disarray, his
dandruff was bad, his shirt was frayed, even he acknowledged he smoked and drank too much, his girlfriend had left him for
a Labour Party activist, his washing machine had broken down and he was hungry. If he looked at Beverley he saw a woman in
her mid-sixties who had kept her figure, and had probably had a facelift or two: a smarter, slimmer version of his mother,
whom he loved. But at the moment he wanted more than anything just to be let in. She might give him coffee. He hated damp
clothes.
‘No,’ she said, ‘you can’t come in. I don’t want to talk about Winter. I have my family to consider.’
‘I’ll leave Winter out of it. I promise.’
‘Yeah, right,’ she said. ‘Bears don’t shit in the woods.’
‘I only want to talk about Joey.’
‘As a matter of interest, what became of him?’
‘He died in Berlin, in August 1991, on the day Yeltsin rode the tank and the old order collapsed, to be born again in Brussels.
Forgive me if I quote from my own book: “
The formal dissolution of the Soviet Union was announced four months later; two months later the final agreement at Maastricht
was reached. Was this, for Joey Matthews, born Josef Maybaum, double, even triple agent, victory or defeat?
” You see the kind of book it is? No one is going to want to read it. It can do no one any possible harm.’
She finally stood aside and let him in, made him coffee, and even offered him some bread and cheese. She said she could always
tell when men were hungry. They looked at you with reproachful eyes. Once it was sex they were after. These days it was food.
The coffee was strong, the Cheddar basic but good, the bread was Waitrose best and there was a linen napkin. It was not how
his girlfriends served food. They tore off a section of kitchen roll. They did not eat bread. They always seemed too busy
thinking or tarting themselves up to look after the finer things in life. She offered him whisky with his coffee, a single
malt, and he accepted and she swigged one too. Then they both had another. Then she brought out the bottle. Better and better.
‘How well did you know Joey?’ He had his recorder on, his pencil out. ‘Was he heterosexual? A lot of those Cairncross guys
were ambivalent.’
‘I spent the night with him just up there,’ she said, and she pointed to the ceiling. ‘He was a good fuck, and I still remember
it.’
He felt shocked and excited. ‘
I danced with the woman who danced with the Prince of Wales
.’ He had his chapter. Joey had come alive. Now it would be easy. He looked at her again and some kind of erotic quality seemed
to have entered into her, to which he responded. If Joe had done it so would he.
‘I was sold to pay for a
Rock Against Racism
event,’ she said.
Better and better. He asked if the NWC had taken all their
papers with them: was there anything left? She said they took nothing; without Joe they were hopeless, without Winter they
were distraught. All their stuff was still in her attic; they were always meant to be taking it away but no one had ever turned
up.
‘Would I be able to look through them?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘There’s too much of it. You’d be here for ever, cramping my style. I’m looking for a husband.’
He could see he might have to marry her. Which he did, selling his flat to pay his debts, moving into Robinsdale. She was
ten years older than he. Her family was aghast, and stayed away whenever they decently could. Their mother had not only married
a right-wing, racist, atheist fascist, but one notorious for his views, embarrassing in the very association. Their reaction
pained Beverley, but she was busy again and her bed was filled. He was companionable but not particularly active in bed, which
suited her, and he made her laugh, as she did him. The kehua hibernated. Laughter puts them to sleep.
It took Marcus two years to finish the book, during which Beverley helped with the research, and Marcus grew sleek and smooth,
joined AA, stopped taking cocaine and won back a few friends. In the attic he and Beverley found membership lists, accounts,
diaries and correspondence, and also £2,000 in cash. She found compromising photographs of comrades who had once been young
and were now in high places, running universities, hospital trusts, prison reform, the media and charities. A couple were
ministers of the Crown. No one had ended up poor. It seemed that to be a justified sinner – as Marcus categorised all ‘lefties’;
those who believed the means justify the ends – guaranteed worldly success and wealth, and that to have a secret agenda made
a person effective in the world.
Beverley, categorising, listing, annotating, précising, handed the stuff over to Marcus without comment, other than to say
she thought he should be careful. Marcus spent many hours with his publishers’ lawyers: Beverley, ever practical, hired a
security guard to look under the car every morning. Various interests tried to have the book banned. Hostile reviews came
out even before publication. Marcus loved every minute of it, Beverley hated every minute.
She lamented the night she had spent with Joey: she lamented even more that she had invited Marcus over the doorstep. The
past was the past, what did it have to do with the present? She rashly said as much to Marcus.