Clouds among the Stars Read online

  Maria-Alba’s Catholicism was quite unlike the kind practised by the nuns of St Frideswide’s Convent where we girls had been to school. The saints were her friends, good-natured and capricious, only tuning in to her incessant demands when the mood suited them. She wore her faith like a second skin and constantly upbraided God and his henchmen for their mistakes. The nuns who had taught us were placatory and subservient to God. Their saints were unsympathetic taskmasters and their religion was a system of pleasure-proscriptive rules.

  Perhaps the differences had something to do with climate. Maria-Alba had spent her childhood in the broiling hills of Calabria, where the earth was the colour of cinnamon and violent storms rolled in daily from the sea. Maria-Alba’s mother had been a prostitute and had died from syphilis. I thought this might account for Maria-Alba’s abhorrence of sex and distrust of men, though she never said so.

  Maria-Alba liked to cook and she was good at it. She enjoyed eating as all good cooks do and, by the time the events I am about to describe took place, she was generously proportioned even for her height, which was just under six feet. She had trouble with her legs, and her ankles had spilled out over her shoes like proving dough. Her black hair, now streaked with grey, was always a little greasy. Her best feature was her nose, which was large and curved like a parrot’s beak and gave her face distinction.

  No doubt the reason Maria-Alba put up with us was because we understood and sympathised with her illness. She suffered from agoraphobia and the older she grew the worse it became. Once I was with Maria-Alba in Marks and Spencer – I must have been about twelve – surrounded by cheerful woollens and bright mirrors and comfortable smells of newness and cleanness. To my surprise, I saw Maria-Alba clinging with closed eyes to a rack of tangerine botany twin-sets. She was panting and trembling. When, in the taxi going home, I asked her what had frightened her she said that people were looking at her and thinking her crazy. She feared she had been iettata – in other words, that someone had cast the evil eye on her. Her belief in this superstition was quite as strong as her devotion to the Virgin. Frequently she made the sign to protect herself against the iettatore, the first and little fingers outstretched and the middle ones curled. After that Maria-Alba rarely went out, groceries were delivered, and I bought most of her clothes, with varying degrees of success.

  ‘Egg?’ Maria-Alba pointed her spatula at me.

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘You lose weight. Troppo frequentare with the Russians.’

  I had told Maria-Alba several times that Dodge had been born and brought up in Pinner. I had been touched to discover that his real name was Nigel Arthur Wattles. The staid character this suggested was reassuring whenever Dodge, in militant mood, talked of Bond Street running with blood. But Maria-Alba persisted in believing that all anarchists were Soviets, dangerous political animals bent on the corruption of virtuous females.

  ‘Wearing black makes one look thinner.’

  ‘E troppo lugubre.’ Maria-Alba liked to wear orange, yellow or red, which made shopping for her extremely difficult in these days of punk for anyone under twenty-five, and pastels for anyone over.

  ‘It’s a badge of solidarity with the workers in the textile industry who have to slave all day making gorgeous clothes for the idle rich and who can only afford to clothe themselves in rags.’

  ‘Sciocchezze!’ Maria-Alba put down a plate of food in front of me and frowned. ‘You been doing bad things with that Russian.’

  ‘Honestly, Maria-Alba. I’m twenty-two. Years beyond the age of consent.’

  ‘Allora, bene! You admit!’ Maria-Alba’s glance was triumphant. ‘He give you a baby, certo, e poi un scandalo!’

  ‘How could there be a scandal? Everyone expects actors’ families to have babies out of wedlock. Pa would just be annoyed with me for being careless. Probably Ma would think it rather vulgar.’

  Maria-Alba widened her eyes with indignation. ‘E il bambino? You bring him into the world, with no name and despise by the grandmother! Ah, povero bebè!’

  ‘Harriet! You’re going to have a baby!’ Cordelia, my youngest sister, had come down into the kitchen. ‘Oh, good! I’ve been longing to be an aunt for ages. I thought it would have to be you. I can’t imagine Ophelia letting that stupid Crispin stick his thing into her. Ugh!’ she shuddered elaborately. ‘I’d better find the pram and try to get the rust off.’ She had run upstairs before I could protest.

  ‘Senta, the young mind of Cordelia is macchiata. I ask Father Alwyn to come to talk to her. It is not right she think of sex like she do.’

  Father Alwyn was a reedy, stooping young man with a nervous manner and when, recently, our paths had crossed on the heath, he had jumped when I said ‘Good morning’ and scuttled back towards the presbytery as though pursued by a hellish host.

  ‘I think possibly Cordelia knows more than he does about sex,’ I said.

  ‘Golly, Harriet!’ Cordelia had come back down again, her speedwell-blue eyes dismayed. ‘Isn’t it going to be agony? I saw this film and the woman having the baby was screaming the place down. She was sopping with sweat and practically tying the bars on the bed-head into clove-hitches. I don’t think I could bear it to be you.’ She flung her arms around me and began to sob.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Bron had come down after Cordelia. He sat at the table, snatched up the fork I had put down in order to comfort Cordelia and speared my rasher of bacon. ‘Any more where that came from, Maria-Alba, my darling?’ he said, between mouthfuls.

  ‘Harriet’s having a b-baby,’ Cordelia’s voice rose to a wail.

  ‘A baby?’ My eldest sister, Ophelia, who had drifted in after Bron, wrinkled her elegant nose in disgust. ‘My dear Harriet, how ghastly for you. I can’t bear the way they smell. Cheap talcum powder, milk and sick. It’s put me off breakfast.’ She floated upstairs again.

  ‘Really?’ Bron began on my mushrooms. ‘How idiotic. You’ll never get your figure back. And your mind will go to jelly.’

  ‘No, not really,’ I said a little crossly. ‘I wish you’d leave my plate alone. I’ve got to go out in a minute. Thank goodness I’m not having a baby if this is how my family receives the news.’

  ‘I don’t know whether to be pleased or sorry you aren’t,’ sniffed Cordelia, wiping her nose on my napkin. ‘It would’ve been fun to teach it tricks.’

  TWO

  Owlstone Road was not one of the most attractive streets in Clerkenwell and 14A was the most dilapidated house in the row. As I gave the secret knock – three quick raps followed by two at longer intervals – at the flaking front door I held my breath, for the basement area served as the local pissoir.

  The letter box opened and a wisp of smoke drifted into the street. I smelled marijuana. ‘Password,’ said a female voice.

  ‘Oh, um, wait a minute – I’ve forgotten. Is it “The Paris Commune”?’

  ‘That was last week.’ I heard the sound of bolts being drawn. In the gloom of the hall the kohl-encircled eyes of Yelena, known as Yell, glittered with animosity. ‘It’s too much trouble for you to remember the sodding password, isn’t it?’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said humbly. I knew when the revolution came Yell would denounce me as a patrician spy faster than you could say The Conquest of Bread. This was the title of Prince Kropotkin’s monumental work, which had been Dodge’s Christmas present to me. To my shame I was still on the second chapter.

  Avoiding the sliding heaps of pamphlets on the floor and a newspaper parcel of chips that lay open on the lowest step, adding a sharp vinegary smell to the general bouquet, I followed her up to the main office of SPIT. Dodge, who was sitting on his desk holding forth to a group of admiring neophytes, turned his head to give me a nod of acknowledgement before continuing his attack on Marx’s theory of the division of labour. As I had already heard it before, several times, I felt free to wander into the kitchen to put on the kettle.

  On the wall above the stove was a large photograph of Emma Goldman, the famous nineteenth-c
entury anarchist, known in America as ‘Red Emma’. Dodge had told me all about her. By day she had toiled in the sweatshops of New York, making corsets, and after work she had been a fiery orator on behalf of anarchist ideals. She had suffered imprisonment, humiliation and brutality from the police. She had been persecuted and slandered by the press and obliged to sleep in public parks and brothels. Her only crimes had been her uncompromising honesty and measureless sympathy with the labouring poor, but she had been driven to a state of complete physical and mental wreckage. Looking at her small angry eyes behind round-framed spectacles, her heavy jowls and turned-down mouth, I felt the weight of her reproach. I knew myself to be a fribble, incapable of self-sacrifice for a great cause. One night on a park bench would have delivered the deathblow to my zeal. I withdrew my eyes from Emma’s gimlets and took from my bag a tin of Vim and a cloth I had brought from home. While I waited for the kettle to boil, I attacked the disgusting accumulations of grime in the sink.

  ‘I suppose you think being a drudge in the kitchen and a whore in bed is the way to get a man.’ Yell had followed me into the kitchen. She bent to take a cake from the oven. She was the only person at SPIT who ever bothered to cook and was really much more domesticated than I was. I looked hungrily at the delicious golden dome from which rose puffs of scented moisture.

  ‘Sorry, what?’ I scrubbed harder. I wanted to give myself time to think. Yell always made me nervous. She began to scratch with her thumbnail at a blob of congealed egg on the enamel of the cooker.

  ‘Can’t you see you’re betraying the sisterhood when you concentrate on the menial tasks and neglect the great ones?’

  ‘Surely there’s nothing political about cleaning a sink?’

  ‘Everything’s political.’ Yell scraped more energetically at the egg, so presumably drudgery was a question of scale. ‘You want Dodge to abandon his principles so he can go on screwing you. You want him to marry you and become a wage-slave in the suburbs. I’d rather be celibate than betray my ideals.’

  I stopped scouring to glance at Yell. She didn’t look well. She was very thin and her skin was pasty, apart from some red spots under her eyes. I decided to try appeasement. ‘I’m sure he’d never even consider doing such a thing. I know how important all this is to him. And the brotherhood. He often says what a support you are to him, particularly.’

  Yell sucked hard on the homemade cigarette she was smoking and blew the smoke straight into my face. ‘You little bitch!’ she said before marching out of the kitchen.

  ‘Can’t you women manage to get on?’ complained Dodge, as we walked to the appointed place of demonstration. ‘I’m fed up with all the rowing that goes on in the Sect.’

  ‘I think I’m beginning to hallucinate. I breathed in two whole lungfuls of whatever Yell was smoking. I feel most peculiar.’ I was hungry, having had hardly any breakfast, thanks to Bron, and nothing for lunch but Yell’s cake. I stumbled a little beneath the burden of two stout poles on which were fixed cardboard placards proclaiming our beliefs. Several of the brethren had not turned up and we were having to double up with the banners.

  People stared at us as we walked towards Parliament Square. Their expressions were unfriendly. I had not realised before how many variations there are on the human physiognomy. All had the regulation two eyes, nose, mouth, ears and chin but there were so many squints, wall eyes, crooked noses, misaligned jaws and deranged expressions that it was like being in a painting of hell by Bosch or Brueghel. ‘I do try to get on with her but some people are impossible to please. She seems to hate me but I don’t know what I’ve done.’

  ‘It isn’t you, you dumb cluck.’ Dodge gave me that look of stern condescension I had become accustomed to. ‘She’s in love with me, of course.’

  I looked at Yell’s angular figure marching in front of me. Like me she wore scruffy black, but her hair was short and ragged, which suggested proper commitment to serious issues. ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Are you at all in love with her?’

  Dodge brandished his placard at a passer-by who was shouting insults at us. ‘I’m sleeping with you, aren’t I?’ Which was an unsatisfactory answer.

  On reaching the square Dodge mounted the wooden box brought along for the purpose by Hank and Otto, our two burliest partisans, and began his speech.

  When he was delivering a harangue, I found Dodge quite irresistible. He was magnificent, fierce and solemn by turns. He began by flinging up his arm to direct, with an imperative forefinger, our sights to higher and better courses. Then he rolled his head forward, shoulders drooping, hands outstretched, oppressed by the apathy of the world. He looked marvellous from a distance. Because he considered taking pleasure in food selfish and hedonistic, he ate very little, so his cheekbones were sharp and his eyes smouldered in deep sockets. Also, from a distance, you could not see the sprinkling of acne on his chin.

  ‘Order is slavery,’ he began. ‘Thought in chains. Order is the continuous warfare of man against man, trade against trade, class against class, country against country. Order is nine-tenths of mankind working to provide luxurious idleness for a handful. Order is the slaughter of a generation on the battlefield. It is the peasant dying of starvation while the rich man dies of obesity. It is the woman selling herself to feed her children. Order is the degradation of the human race, maintained by the whip and the lash.’

  As I listened to these now familiar words I felt the customary surge of indignation. As Dodge cited revolution after revolution that had been crushed by tank and gun, my dissatisfaction with the state of the world grew. Why should wealth and land be held by the few while the masses starved? Capitalism was undoubtedly a mistake. ‘Hurrah!’ I shouted with the others whenever Dodge made a particularly telling point. But when he described what anarchy could do to right the wrongs of mankind, I felt less certain. Would people really work more productively because they knew it would benefit their neighbours? I hoped so but I had to admit to a crumb of doubt.

  A crowd gathered. Among them was a bad-tempered-looking policeman. At once I felt guilty, an absurd reaction bred of a childish fear of authority. I shook one of my banners vigorously and gave a cry of pain as a huge splinter from the stick drove itself deep into my thumb. It was then I heard the uplifted voice of a newspaper vendor, crying, ‘Read all abaht it! Famous actor arrested for murder! Read all abaht it!’

  I hardly took in the sense of it as I attempted to grasp with my teeth the end of the splinter, which had disappeared in welling blood.

  ‘Here, before you, is the walking, breathing demonstration of my thesis,’ said Dodge, really warmed up now. He pointed to an old lady in a battered black straw hat, who stood just in front of me, crouching over her cane as she twisted her arthritic neck to stare up at him. ‘Well, Mother, you could tell us a thing or two about capitalist repression, I should think! How many times have you had to put your children hungry to bed while you laboured sorrowfully over some wearisome task for which you were paid a pittance?’

  ‘Shame!’ yelled one of the brotherhood. The old woman stared round at us, cackling and displaying toothless gums, apparently enjoying the attention.

  ‘How many times has your body been numb with cold because the coal mined by brave men, dying of silicosis, has gone to power the great factories that provide wealth only for their owners?’

  ‘Scandal!’ roared the revolutionists. The old lady waved her stick at us and screamed with laughter.

  ‘How many times have you had to scrape and contrive to put a decent meal on the table for your husband when he came home, weary and sore oppressed?’

  The crowd murmured sympathetically but, in a lightning change of mood, the old woman seemed suddenly to resent being the object of universal pity.

  ‘My ’usband was a no-good drunken layabout. ’E never did a honest day’s work in ’is life. When ’e ran off with the tart from the Co-op I was pleased to see the back of ’im!’

  ‘So put that in your pipe and smoke it!’ heckled one of the crowd.

>   ‘Yeah! What choo got ter say ter that?’ jeered the old woman with consummate ingratitude. I noticed for the first time that she seemed a little drunk. ‘You blinking lefties think you can tell us all what to do but we ain’t ’aving none of it!’

  Dodge opened his mouth to reply but at that moment one of the placards I was cradling in the crook of my arm, so I could suck my throbbing thumb, toppled over and fell on the old lady. It knocked her hat over her eyes and sent her staggering round in circles until she sat down with a thump on the pavement while her basket went spinning.

  ‘’Ere!’ shouted a spectator. ‘There’s no call for violence just ’cause she don’t agree with you!’

  Dodge jumped from the podium. He and the policeman helped the old lady up but as soon as they put her on her feet she began to swipe at Dodge’s legs with her stick. She possessed a surprising amount of strength for such an ancient old thing. In the confusion I accidentally let go of the second placard. It knocked the policeman’s helmet from his head. He swore loudly and blew his whistle.

  What happened then was terrifying. It began as an exchange of insults between the anarchists and the audience, accompanied by the jabbing of fingers and some pushing and shoving. Then like a flame creeping through dry twigs it flared into violence. In seconds there was a whirling mêlée of fists and boots and flying objects. A fat old man, his eyes glaring and his lips stretched back from his teeth in hatred, kicked me hard on the knee. I staggered against the railings. An egg, presumably from the old lady’s shopping basket, struck my eyebrow. Surprisingly, it hurt quite a lot. As I tried to wipe away the strings of white a youth with long matted hair aimed a blow at my cheek, snatched my bag from my shoulder and ran off with it. I was much too frightened to put up a fight. Someone was screaming. I wanted to scream too, but I was breathless with shock and fear. I stared in awe as Yell climbed the statue of Abraham Lincoln, shouting defiance and waving a banner before someone hit her smack on the forehead with an orange and knocked her from the pedestal into the crowd. A police car, with lights flashing and siren blaring drew up at the perimeter of the scrimmage. I saw a gap between the combatants and before I had time to think what I was doing I was through it and running hard.