We Had It So Good Read online

  The communal meals, the ritual nightly eating of brown rice seasoned with tamari sauce, the half-cooked soybean croquettes which induced sudden attacks of flatulence, had been turned by Julian into a strict macrobiotic experiment based on the principles of yin and yang. Which Stephen said were simply acids and alkalines.

  Macrobiotics, said Julian, made you placid, an army could never go to war on a macrobiotic diet (but you could fart your enemies into submission, Stephen thought). “In Tibet…” Julian said. In Tibet he would be happy. His skin was even whiter than Andrea’s and his watery eyes peered out from beneath a fringe of poker-straight yellow hair. He did not make a move without studying the Tarot cards, whose old figures sat complacently looking back at him with their determined outcomes. With trembling fingers he dealt and redealt the deck searching for an acceptable future, but always drawing such figures as the Hanged Man.

  “I really can’t stand that stuff,” Stephen said to Ivan. “Why does he do it?”

  “Poor Julian.”

  “What’s his problem?”

  “I think he’s queer. He sucked me at school, everyone sucked everyone else, there wasn’t much else on offer at boarding school, but he was the one who liked it. We never refer to it now.”

  There were a few pansies on board ship, you knew how to deal with them or you got someone else to do it for you.

  “There’s nothing wrong with being a faggot,” said Stephen. “I mean, they can’t help it, can they? As long as they stick to their own kind.”

  “Yes, but he’s starting to bring them home.”

  “Here?”

  “He goes out at night to Hampstead Heath and asks them to come back for a cup of tea and a bite to eat and they’re not our type at all.”

  “What type are they?”

  “Well, they look like builders. Or lorry drivers.”

  “And he makes them soybean croquettes?”

  “Exactly. Then they start getting nasty. They want a fry-up or at least a bacon sandwich and he starts lecturing them about yin and yang.”

  One day Julian disappeared, his stuff emptied from his room, vanishing into a dying era, without a trace (decades later, Stephen googled him and came up with nothing, assuming that he really had gone to Tibet and almost certainly died there of some illness to which his Western system had no immunity, or else he had worked his way across to San Francisco and taken part in the great carnival of human flesh in the late seventies and died of that instead).

  A different type took his place, Les, a feral boy who had grown up in poverty with too little calcium in his diet. His fingernails peeled and his teeth were tiny, sharp and pointed like a cat’s. He made a living begging on the bridge that led over the Thames to the South Bank. “I am hungry” read his sign. And he looked hungry. Ivan brought him home, but later regretted it.

  Les in turn introduced Scotch Dave to the commune. He wore the regulation jeans, T-shirt, beads and bells, and his hair and beard were a matted brown tangle.

  Andrea was the thing that hadn’t yet been invented: a cash machine. She was a lassie with a pay packet and a fur coat. Winter was cold, he had his eye on that bunny.

  “I need money,” he said to her, in the kitchen. “I need it quick. Come on. Don’t waste my time.”

  She opened her purse and handed him the change. He looked at the coins in his hand, picked out the brown pennies and threw them in her face. “You don’t insult me,” he said. “Next time, you’ll give me a note.”

  “The problem was,” Stephen told Max and Marianne, “the experiment was constantly being subverted by people who didn’t have a higher consciousness, just an eye for a free space and a free meal.”

  The children didn’t believe in the squat. In 2004, the house in Chalk Farm would go on the market for two and a half million pounds, bought by a couple who worked for Goldman Sachs. Max said, “These are just stories they tell us to make us think that once upon a time they were interesting. I mean, can you really see Mum in a squat? Or Dad with his food fads eating anything without a nutrition label?”

  “They had to have been young once,” said Marianne. “Grace says they were.” But they had not seen Grace for years, she was a legend.

  Ivan confirmed that everything they had told the children about the squat was true, but nothing Uncle Ivan said was credible. Everyone knew that people who work in advertising are professional liars.

  Moving In

  Ralph had been having a nap on the camp bed in his office. These after-lunch naps were his sole pleasure now, when he could return for twenty minutes to a dream world in which images better than the cinema—for often he was part of the action—were lit with flattering clarity. They were about boys. In real life he would not have dared even to look too closely at a boy. And these boys were nothing like the one who stood on the step, with a black unattractive beard and the slightly chubby ginger-haired girl next to him. The boys in his dreams were clean-shaven, short-haired and wore simple white singlets. They smelt of soap. He believed he could smell the soap in his dreams, though he understood this was not possible.

  “We’ve come about the rooms,” Stephen said. “We sent you a letter.”

  “Hippies, good, you won’t need the bathroom much.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, we wash.”

  They climbed the stairs to the top of the house. The first room was almost entirely taken up by a double bed, they had to sidle their way around it to reach the wardrobe.

  “And here’s your lounge. All this furniture was made during the war, top quality. Government issue. It’ll last a lifetime. And you’ve got a view. You can see the Post Office Tower over there. I should charge extra for that.”

  “We could see it where we were before,” Andrea said.

  “How much?” said Stephen.

  “Eight pound a week, but that’s all in. There’s a television room downstairs for use of all the tenants and a hot plate out in the hall where you can make a bit of dinner if you know how to juggle the pans about. The bathroom’s on the floor below.”

  They walked down to his office, a cupboard on the second floor where he kept his rent books and his camp bed. They were made to sign a contract expressly forbidding them from many activities, such as playing musical instruments, “But apart from all that,” Ralph said, “it’s Liberty Hall, you can come and go as you please, you’ve got your own front door key. I can also give you a ten percent discount on anything you buy at my shop.”

  “What do you sell?”

  “Haberdashery. Tea towels, linens, nighties, ladies’ corsets. Come and have a look, it’s just on Upper Street. I used to be in show business but you get more pleasure out of selling a woman a reasonably priced girdle. At least you receive some appreciation.”

  “What did you do when you were in show business?” Andrea asked.

  “I had a conjuring act. One time I had a chance of a spot at the Palladium, but it didn’t quite come off.”

  “You should show us some tricks sometime. Can you saw a lady in half?”

  “I know how it’s done. I can draw you a diagram. But the fittings are very expensive.”

  Looking out of the window of their flat Stephen saw the roofs, the chimneys, the birds alighting on fences, the leaves browning and burnishing in the mild autumn sun, the pungent burning of bonfires, evenings drawing in and, inside their room, a fireplace where Andrea toasted bread on a long fork and they ate it, with slices of strong yellow cheese. They had been in London for a year. She had been promoted to trainee receptionist at the Savoy and was taking part-time courses at the Tavistock Clinic, learning how to be what Stephen called a shrink.

  Ralph’s shop was halfway along Upper Street with the corsets in the window, pink, boned like fish, with suspenders hanging off them. Everything in the neighborhood was flyblown, old, decayed, moldy, dusty, unkempt and, apart from the houses, very small. The air in north London smelt of grease, blown on the wind from the chip shop. If, in a pub, you asked for ice, they would lift the
lid of a leather-covered barrel and with tongs remove a single cube, too sluggish even to slip around, melting in a puddle of tepid water. This would be plopped ceremoniously into the glass, where it vanished on impact.

  “Oh, stop moaning,” said Andrea. “In the hotel we reused the water left in the guests’ glasses to make ice.”

  She mocked his standards of hygiene, the minutes he spent brushing his teeth and drawing lengths of string between them, as he had been taught by the family dentist back home. He was, she said, an unduly clean person.

  “Don’t do that,” he replied. “Don’t analyze me.”

  The tenants of the house were a mixture of elderly widowers and spinsters who shuffled up and down stairs with their shopping in string bags, and a few new arrivals in London. The old people died and their coffins were carried off down the narrow stairs by men with black ribbons tied to their hats to a pauper’s grave somewhere in Essex. Stephen did not understand how a life could be lived and end so forlornly, without the press of relations, of uncles and cousins and sisters, and crowded rooms and raised voices. He had never spoken to them. They did not answer when he said a polite hello. He did not understand that his Afro and messy beard frightened them.

  On the floor below, Martin also had two rooms, in the second of which he kept his stock, which consisted of cardboard boxes containing complicated machines which had to be plugged in, and after emitting thunderous noises and great wafts of hot steam, produced a cup of coffee with a head of white foam sitting on top of it, like a pint of beer. It was called cappuccino and it originated in Italy.

  “You see, on the Continent,” he said, “they wouldn’t dream of drinking that instant muck. On the Continent coffee is a rite, almost a religion. Now, you might object that we’re a tea-drinking nation, that we don’t like coffee. You’re an American, Steve, you appreciate what I’m trying to do. A cuppa is all very well, but when you introduce coffee to a country you’re bringing sophistication. Coffee is more of a delicacy than tea, like caviar but affordable.”

  Stephen’s parents drank nothing but coffee, semitransparent stuff brewed in an electric percolator. This cappuccino was a fancyschmancy beverage. It took half an hour for the machine to get its act together to produce a single shot, and then you had to start all over again, emptying the grounds, washing out the filter, not to mention adroitly handling the steam arm, which needed to be maneuvered at a particular angle. He couldn’t at first see it catching on.

  But Martin, who wore brown wide-lapeled suits and orange kipper ties that covered half his chest, his trouser flares flapping, resolutely went out every morning with a briefcase full of brochures and worked his way through the cafés of the West End, retiring toward the end of the afternoon to Soho, his spiritual home. On Old Compton Street there was a café where such a machine was already installed, and they served slices of cream gateau with cherries steeped in liqueur. By six he would walk up to the French pub to drink gin and bitters and discuss coffee with Gaston, the moustachioed publican who had served General de Gaulle during the war. The romance of the Continent. Martin had dropped out of a language degree at the University of Birmingham after he had gone to Rome for a week one summer. When he returned, his brain was fried with the unfeasible vision that London would one day be a city where people sat out on the pavement in the sunshine, drinking coffee, watching a passing parade of their neighbors stroll arm in arm along the boulevards.

  “I like Martin,” Stephen said. “At least he has some initiative.” He reminded him of Clinton of Univ, both with big dreams and ambitions. Stephen was drawn in, became convinced that Britain would eventually become a coffee-drinking nation. The stuff tasted too good for it not to, but Andrea said what did that have to do with anything? The English, she believed, enjoyed things that tasted awful, hence the national cuisine. The first principle was to boil a vegetable until all taste and texture had been beaten out of it by the water’s ferocious energy. Better still were foods that tasted of nothing at all. There was the huge popularity of packets of powder, which, when hot water was added, turned into a simulacrum of mashed potato, without lumps or any discernible flavor. Her parents had used it in the hotel.

  “British food,” Stephen said, “is a substitute for central heating.”

  Martin did a moonlight flit, leaving behind his coffee machines, which no one wanted. Ralph tried to sell them in all the cafés along Upper Street but discovered as Martin had that no one was interested. Eventually the bin men took most of them away, their chrome still bright beneath the cellophane wrappers, but Stephen and Andrea kept one, which they didn’t use until finally they had a kitchen large enough to accommodate it. The highlight of their dinner parties in the eighties was the coffee they made, in their restaurant-size Gaggia.

  Marx

  “The seventies in London are really hard to describe,” Stephen would say to his children. “I was there and yet I can’t pin it down, it was a very amorphous era with no discernible edges or outlines. I couldn’t really tell you what it stood for, all I can do is describe how we lived, but others were going through very different times. You’d had this tremendous burst of energy and excitement in the sixties, the clothes, the music, the politics and afterward everything became less or even more of what it had been. When I say more, I’m thinking of that soulless overblown rock music, heavy metal, glam rock, prog rock. They messed and messed around with it until it was just a bunch of wigs and outfits. I mean, KISS!

  “There was this time in Britain in the early seventies when they turned the power off for a few hours every day and you just had to literally sit there in the dark. We were lucky that the house had fireplaces in every room and we could go and scavenge wood, old boxes, anything you could burn to keep ourselves warm. We always had terrible colds, our noses running in the winter, and in my case it always went to my chest because of the damp and the fact that I still smoked thirty cigarettes a day. And it wasn’t just here. In America there were lines of cars waiting to get gas because it was rationed, can you imagine Americans with rationing?

  “Britain was in hock, we were failing and going cap in hand every five minutes to the IMF for loans and it still didn’t make any difference. It was like you woke up from the sixties and asked yourself, What changed? And the answer was, not that much. Of course, Nixon resigned, that was great, the war ended, but here in London, it was… nebulous. Like an English summer. That’s the best I can do. I’m not a words guy. So I can’t think of anything good that came out of that decade, yet for us, me and your mother, those were good times.

  “After the squat, commune, whatever you want to call it, we found a bedsit a couple of blocks away from where we are now, and then a few months later we got the flat in this house. We moved to Islington in 1972, when it was a run-down, working-class section, and we’ve been here ever since, with everything coming up all around us, and now you have to be as rich as Croesus to buy here because it’s an easy commute to the City. We’re probably the poorest middle-class people in the neighborhood and we can only afford it because we started so long ago. Everyone else is in hedge funds or works for Lehmans and Goldman Sachs. People we thought were the devil when we were their age.

  “We were freewheeling for a couple of years after we came to London, your mother was working at the hotel and I was scraping a living doing a little bit of freelance science journalism. It started with a column in an alternative newspaper and then I began picking up pieces from some proper magazines, I believe the first one was about a subject no one was talking about in those days, the use of medical marijuana to ease the symptoms of multiple sclerosis, and this led to some actual reporting on the pharmaceutical industry. Soon I was writing a lot for New Scientist, and hoping they might give me a job. We could eat, let’s put it that way, and if you could eat you didn’t have too many other hassles.

  “I remember one night we went to a party in Hampstead. What we had no idea about at the time we were living in the squat was that Ivan’s parents owned a house just
up the road and he used to retreat back there when he’d had enough. It was why he always looked and smelt cleaner than the rest of us and he was filching stuff from their house when we ran out of what we needed. Ivan was always a very pragmatic anarchist. His father was a barrister and he’d checked out the legal position about squatting, written letters to the council and the police and all this was going on in the background without us really knowing. It was actually Ivan’s old man who was the true anarchist, a really crazy character who always made a rule of only defending clients he was certain were guilty because he liked to get one over on the law. So he usually lost his cases but it didn’t matter because his wife, Ivan’s mother, had money.

  “After the squat was taken over by this Scottish guy everyone was scared of, Ivan moved back home for a while, which was fine by us, because he was always having great parties. The one I remember very clearly, because of what happened the following day, had an Arabian Nights theme and you had to come in fancy dress. I was a sultan with a turban around my head and robes made of curtains. Your mother made everything, she cut me out a scimitar from cardboard and painted it silver. She wore a red gown and a gauzy veil that fell over her face and dressed like that we went by tube to the party.