We Had It So Good Read online

  Stephen thought Andrea looked very pretty in an orange silk maxi dress. They walked together along Little Clarendon Street, past the head shops, and he thought he had never seen her so happy. She means this, he understood. He would go along with the deception if it meant so much to her. Chicks, even liberated chicks, had ideas about marriage that were hard to overcome, they were always waiting for someone to come and rescue them, the person they called the One. He understood this was a marriage of convenience, an immigration wedding to keep him out of the army, and if she thought it was more than that, he would collude with her. Why should I hurt her? he thought. She’s just a kid, a sweet kid. She had saved him from a certain fate in Arlington National Cemetery.

  He hasn’t told me he loves me, Andrea thought. I suppose because he doesn’t. Yet he had bought her a ring, a gold one. “No point in not doing the thing right, kiddo,” he said. So it was not entirely a charade.

  He turned to look at her as they stood in front of the registrar. Christ, he thought. What am I doing? Where am I? Sweat ran down the back of his neck. And then the moment passed. The wedding party went to the Radcliffe Hotel. Ivan had snapped a rosebud from its stem in a passing garden on the way to the register office and given it to Andrea to hold.

  At the Radcliffe they ordered drinks. “And the flower would like a glass of water, please,” Ivan said.

  “Well,” said John Baines, who would go on to a full professorship at Cornell, according to a Google search thirty years later. “Next you need to learn all the words of ‘God Save the Queen.’”

  “No way,” Stephen said. “I’m an American.”

  Grace turned up. She was dressed, mockingly, all in white.

  “How are the lovebirds?” she said, sitting down.

  “Very happy,” Stephen said, to annoy her.

  “I’m sorting out somewhere for us all to live in London,” said Ivan. The undergraduates had finished finals and their Oxford years were drawing to an end.

  “Not me,” said Grace. “I’m going to Cuba.”

  “Are you now, babe?”

  “You didn’t tell me,” said Andrea. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Grace looked coldly past her through the window.

  Excellent, thought Stephen, we’ll never see her again.

  Grace and Andrea said good-bye at the railway station. Andrea held her, Grace stood stiff as a board, receiving this embrace. She was leaving everything behind, her trunks of clothes, her books, her pictures, Ivan promised he would look after them for her, but she said there was no need, she was never coming back. “Fuck this fucking country,” she said.

  Stephen envied her the palm trees and the flat blue skies and the waves slapping against the shores of the island. Cuba was his mother’s home, her native land, though she had come to America when she was fourteen years old and thought of herself proudly as an American. In front of the television she had sat in anguish through the Bay of Pigs fiasco. “Those poor dead boys,” she said. “Good-looking young men who are never going to open their eyes again.” And her blue eye shadow formed blue tears that dropped from her chin onto the spotless white collar of her dress.

  Of Castro she said, “That beard! A man with a beard has something to hide. A moustache is very nice, it gives you something to look at on a face, but a beard is just a nest for germs.” Stephen had not sent her any photos of himself with his beard.

  The train trudged along the track with Grace inside it. Ivan said, “Poor girl.”

  But Andrea replied, “Don’t be silly, Grace will do great things, that’s what she is made for.”

  Stephen took the drastic step of cabling California, which produced a number of letters, two from his sisters wanting to know the girl’s name and was she pretty and was she rich and was her father a lord; one from his rabbi, Cousin Enrique, inquiring what he could do to get him out of it, money if necessary; and one from his mother saying she had wept for two days until her eyes were so red and sore her eyelashes had fallen out from rubbing. His father was silent. A month later a parcel arrived containing a rabbit-fur jacket with Andrea’s new initials, AN, embroidered in the silk lining.

  Stephen held out the jacket like a gentleman, as he had seen his father do for his mother, and she slipped her arms into it. The satin lining slid over her skin.

  “Now I know how you felt when you tried on the mink stole,” she said.

  “You don’t know what I felt.”

  But she just smiled. In the rabbit jacket she could do anything, be anyone. Her red hair fell down over the collar. In the mirror she saw a whole new person. Stephen, his reflection standing behind her, looked for the first time like a man who had suddenly and without warning fallen in love.

  “I’ll dress you from now on, kiddo,” he said. “Throw out that green robe, I hate it.”

  “No, Grace made it for me.”

  “Try on my jeans, you’d look great in blue jeans.”

  But she was too fat for them.

  “You don’t have any hips at all,” she said. “You’re like a rake.”

  “I’m not supposed to have hips, but you are. Come on, we’ll buy you some new jeans.”

  She had telephoned her parents to tell them she had got married. The phone rang in the hall and her mother answered, in her professional voice. Andrea transmitted the happy news.

  “You’ve fallen out of bed on the right side,” Julia said. “A rich Yank. You’re set up for life. I’ve no idea what’s going to happen to us when Ada dies. She has mentioned there might be a little something in the will, but you never know, do you? We could easily be on the street. Stick with the Yank, that’s my advice. I nearly had a Yank during the war. My mistake. I could be living in—where was it?—Boston, I think. But he got sent away, and that was the last I heard of him. That’s what the war was like, full of what-might-have-beens. Stick with your Yank. He’ll see you right, and if he doesn’t you can always be a rich divorcee. That’s the life.”

  “Can you put Dad on?”

  She heard his steps advance hesitantly over the carpet, a slippered shuffle.

  “I’m useless,” he said, before she could tell him her news. “I can’t offer anyone anything. Better not count on me. Talk to your mother again. Here she is.”

  A bell rang in the background. “No rest for the wicked,” her mother said.

  A few days later a card decorated with a silver horseshoe arrived in the post, and inside it, a ten-shilling note. It was so sad and paltry, Stephen thought. The girl was on her own, apart from Grace, who was gone, so she had only him. He accepted the responsibility, it was off the radar of his moral code not to, and anyway, who wanted the hassle of finding another chick when one was there already?

  A week later they drove to London, Andrea sweating in her rabbit jacket, Stephen behind the wheel of the red Triumph, approaching the orbital system, Hanger Lane, Acton, Hammersmith, Shepherds Bush, Notting Hill, Bayswater, Marble Arch, swinging north, up Baker Street and circumnavigating the white palaces of Regent’s Park, through Camden Town and north again to Chalk Farm, where the newlyweds had a room in a squat just south of Belsize Park, which Ivan had organized.

  “Don’t think of it as a squat,” he said, “it’s more of an urban commune based on the principles of Proudhon.”

  Stephen had no idea who Proudhon was, so Ivan wrote down the three principles of their new life on an index card which he could carry around in his pocket for easy reference.

  a) Property is theft

  b) Property is impossible

  c) Property is despotism

  No one had lived there since the war and its ownership was in dispute. Ivan and his school friend Julian, who had been studying Taoism in Devon until he caught dysentery from drinking unsanitary water collected in a water butt, had broken in through the rotten rear windows and moved in their mattresses.

  These windows, cracked and grimy, were now shaded with striped Indian bedspreads and bare lightbulbs dimmed with Chinese paper lanterns. Electrici
ty came and went, periodically stolen by hot-wiring the supply to adjacent properties. Eleven young people were inhabiting the squat, each with varying talents and competing visions. Ivan’s round face and button eyes, his cherubic puffs of blond hair belied his ingenious ability to commandeer goods and services from the tremendous waste of the wealthy neighborhood. People threw things away, Ivan went and got them. He had what the rest of the house lacked, scuttling energy, disappearing for hours at a time, leading some critics of the regime to speculate that he might have crossed over to the other side, the dark side, and got a job. But if he had, he was not sharing his wages. Stephen liked Ivan more and more. He made everything happen.

  Stephen and Andrea lay in bed smoking joints under the wedding cake moldings of the high ceilings. Once, there had been a chandelier. Mice huddled behind a derelict chest of drawers no one dared open which smelt of mold and prewar newspapers, with the inky, smudged faces of old murderers and their shadowed victims.

  To both of them, the chaos of London was bewildering. It was a hideous city, its massed redbrick houses with their postage stamp front gardens and net curtains were full of peering furtive faces, as if behind those windows were dismal, uninteresting secrets. London’s railway lines were overgrown with wildflowers and saplings on the embankments, the bridges graffitied. All the pubs closed down in the middle of the afternoon, and woke dozily blinking in the early evening, they smelt of sodden beer mats and stale sandwiches. The lumbering double-decker buses deadlocked in the narrow streets, the dirty newspaper pages blown on a hot wind—the whole mess of London intimidated them.

  But Andrea was more resourceful; they could have done with a girl like her at sea, in more ways than one, Stephen thought, admiringly.

  After a few days, with an A-Z and a tube map, she went down to the Savoy, located the staff entrance and got herself a job as a chambermaid. She knew hotels, how they functioned. She understood that they were a hive and that a hive always fed its drones. Her hair tied back, her body dampened under a white and blue checked maid’s uniform and apron, black lace-up shoes on her feet, she passed anonymously through the rooms, seeing the unmade beds, the stained sheets, the half-written letters on the desk, the condom in the wastebasket, the clothes in the wardrobes, the indentations made by the feet that inhabited the shoes left out each night for polishing. Every chamber in the hotel surrendered to her key.

  Andrea brought home from work soap, needles, thread, small bottles of shampoo. The hotel staff ate together in the basement; she secreted slices of bread and butter in a paper napkin in her pocket, ends of ham, sometimes a scotch egg and tomatoes. The couple consumed them in secret. She kept the rabbit jacket well hidden when she wasn’t wearing it. Stephen loved to see her walking quickly across the room, naked apart from the fur, which reached just below her waist, and the auburn triangle above her lovely white thighs and dimpled knees. He liked the little extra flesh on her. He could not stand gaunt women. One day he would have enough money to buy her a bottle of perfume so the jacket would be scented like the coats of the film stars.

  He wrote his father a thank-you letter, and enclosed a photograph of Andrea sitting by the window, the light of London on those veiled eyes and parted lips.

  In the house Julian cooked, and was investigating the principles of macrobiotic eating. A row broke out in the kitchen when one of the girls stole (or rather liberated from their capitalist oppressors in a corner shop) a packet of chocolate biscuits. A house meeting was convened to discuss their presence in the kitchen. Julian wanted them thrown out, the sugar in them was poison. Ivan thought they should be fairly distributed, while Elaine believed that they should be given as a prize to the commune member who was considered to have made the greatest contribution to the general well-being and maintenance of the collective. Thus introducing the notion of meritocracy, which was howled down.

  Stephen sidelined the debate by going out to the shop and buying his own packet of chocolate biscuits, which he ate at night, in bed with Andrea. He did not mention this act of bourgeois individualism. He wanted Andrea to lick the melting chocolate from his fingers.

  When Ivan was on a prolonged absence of several days, the squatters painted a mural across the stuccoed surface of the house depicting an idyllic land of large-breasted chicks harvesting marijuana leaves from an endless garden while the face of Karl Marx beamed down from a bearded sun. “We’re not bloody Marxists,” Ivan said when he returned. “We’re anarchists.”

  “This must be Marx in his anarchist phase,” said Stephen, pointing to the marijuana plantation. He had enjoyed painting his beard.

  “I’ve decided we’re going to share everything,” Ivan said, “even clothes. Every night we’ll take off whatever we’re wearing and put it in the clothes stash, then next morning people can just come and take whatever they like. It will be amazing.”

  “I don’t want to wear your smelly jeans.”

  “And no one’s wearing my fur jacket,” said Andrea.

  The girls in the house set up the clothes stash but the boys refused to take part. Andrea noticed they did not like the idea of someone else’s shirt or shoes touching their own skin, which was curious, a sign, she thought, of their fear of intimacy. While Stephen slept she slit the outside seams of his jeans from the hem to the knee and cut triangles from the green velvet dress and sewed them in. His Levi’s had turned into flares. In the morning he awoke and stumbled into his trousers. He looked down and saw his feet disappearing below the flapping fabric. Was there something a little faggoty about wearing parts of a girl’s dress in your pants? Men with long hair were often taken for girls or pansies, but not him, not with his beard and his black Afro. In the end he decided he liked the altered jeans. Something of his wife, his old lady, was next to his skin. She belonged to him. The thought was agreeable.

  “We were poor for so long,” Stephen told his children, “but, man, it was a great kind of poor to be. We didn’t miss money, not at all. You could always get what you needed, and you didn’t really need much. The summers were wonderful. We used to walk down through Regent’s Park and go to the art museums because the pictures were free and there were parties all the time, and happenings. You don’t seem to have those anymore. A happening was an anarchist kind of thing. That was it, it just happened, despite all the reasons why it shouldn’t. I liked the anarchists. The other stuff, the Marxist bullshit, I could take it or leave it.”

  Under Ivan’s energetic direction, the squatters did what they could to reverse the dereliction of the house; they painted the walls and covered up the mouse holes. They restored the toilets to working order and paid a chimney sweep to unblock the fireplaces. Andrea planted sunflower seeds and vegetables in the garden, and they grew. They had a crop of tiny finger-shaped carrots and sour white onions. The sunflowers reared up, waving overgrown heads and dense, pollen-heavy hearts around which radiated hectic yellow petals, held up on hairy thick stems. Stephen was amazed at his wife’s numerous gifts.

  When Andrea had first gone to Kent to stay with Grace in the holidays, after the failure of the hotel, she had strayed out beneath the wisteria bower and down an Alice in Wonderland path which twisted back upon itself and took you into a maze made of box hedge, and instead of getting lost she found her way out of there, down to the scented roses, and stood watching Grace’s mother, who silently handed her a hoe and nodded at the green heads of weeds which needed to be amputated. This is how she learned to garden, a skill Grace had refused to acquire, but Andrea, Stephen slowly observed, was a homemaker, a fixer-up of things untidy or even derelict. She made things better, she would make him better if he gave her half a chance.

  Andrea taught Stephen how to grow all kinds of things and built him a simple lean-to shelter to cover the traces of his marijuana crop. He had thoroughly digested the 1964 landmark paper of Mechoulam, Gaoni and Edery, which isolated a delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol as the main psychoactive substance in dope, and asked his wife to advise on how to maximize growing conditions t
o produce grade-A grass. This was for the private consumption of the house.

  The acid factory at Oxford had been covered in the underground press and its closure by the university authorities, the fascist pigs, had led to a sudden supply shortage of highgrade hallucinogens. The lesson was that quality drugs, produced by ethical manufacturers, non-bread-heads, not out to serve the interests of the Man, gave quality trips with no unwanted side effects involving demonic visitations, extreme paranoia and lengthy stays in psychiatric wards.

  “You know a lot about drugs, Stephen,” Andrea said one night. “You know more than anyone else. Why don’t you write a book about it?”

  “I can barely write a letter,” he said.

  “Well, you could write something.”

  “What could I write?”

  Ivan came in from his secret travels. “Andrea thinks I should write a book about drugs,” Stephen said.

  “Funny you should say that because one of the underground mags is looking for someone to write about drugs. They want someone who knows what’s safe to take and what isn’t, what the effects are, that kind of thing.”

  “Wow,” he said. “I could do that. Thanks.”

  So Stephen Newman was famously, for a few months in 1971, “Doc California,” explaining the chemical makeup of various legal and illegal substances. Why Dexedrine made you hustle and why hash made you want to sit still. His column featured grainy photographs of drugs currently available and came with a disclaimer that the author did not, of course, endorse the purchase or taking of these drugs. His mug shot at the top, photocopied, reduced him to contrasty black and white, and his eyes to burning coals of intense, staring knowledge.

  Winter arrived. Their room, with views across London to the cloud-shrouded revolving restaurant of the Post Office Tower, the city borne down under the weight of brown skies, was heated by a twobar electric fire when the power was on. Stephen knew nothing at all about cold. The ice tormented him. The chill was in their bones. The damp was in their internal organs. He feared waking to find a frozen drop of semen at the end of his penis. Would it hurt? Would it damage his precious cock? The last thing they did at night before they put their bodies gingerly down onto the frosty sheets was to lay their clothes out on the floor around the electric fire. Waking in the morning, hugging each other to exchange the heat of their bodies, they watched their breath freeze in the icy air and dared each other to jump up and run a few feet across the icy floorboards to flick the switch to turn it on. Then come back to bed and wait for their jeans, dresses, T-shirts and shoes to warm up a little, to take the intense cold off the fibers before they could wear them.