Free Chalcot Crescent by Fay Weldon

extravagance and greed, and it had become customary for street people to attack and trash them – a practice tolerated by the authorities as a safety valve for their anger.

Another Scene From Venetia’s Life, According To Her Mother, Who Wasn’t There But Can Imagine
    Just after Victor’s transfer from oncology to Food Excellence, watch Victor help Venetia turn their mattress. He is a big solid expensive-looking man with large, bright brown eyes in a broad, slightly fleshy face. She worries that she may be colourless: dark eyeliner rings her very blue eyes, and she is seldom without lipstick. Her paintings reflect her worries: she uses acrylic paints which she applies vigorously on to white canvas. The mattress is big and expensive, and had been bought back in the days when Venetia was working for the Arts Council. They had bought it on their Selfridges store card, now fortunately at last paid off – though a £3,500 purchase had cost them £9,400 by the time the banks had assured Selfridges it could manage its customers’ finances better than they could, and raised the interest rate as the small print allowed them to do. Not even Victor had bothered to read the small print.
    Now of course Venetia no longer worked for the Arts Council. The Recovery had rather suddenly turned into the Bite, and she had been made redundant. No more arts funding; no more grants; no more jobs. She was not sorry: now she could spend more time doing her own work. She was like her mother in this: you might not be able to sell your efforts, but that didn’t stop you working.
    ‘What is this envelope?’ Victor asks. It is a thick brown envelope stuffed between mattress and divan base.
    ‘Oh that,’ says Venetia. ‘It’s my severance pay.’ She had forgotten about it. ‘I have an artistic temperament, Mum,’ she excused herself to me. ‘I can never concentrate on deceit for long.’ And I remembered how I had left the note from my lover half hanging out of my coat pocket for Karl to find, and could see my daughter might well have inherited the gene for inadvertent confession from me.
    ‘But there’s more than two thousand pounds here,’ Victor says. ‘What is it doing under our mattress? Anyone could steal it.’
    ‘I don’t see how,’ says Venetia, ‘unless they were turning the mattress. And robbers don’t usually turn mattresses.’
    ‘They will make it a habit,’ says Victor sombrely, ‘unless citizens learn to trust the banks again.’
    ‘But they charge you for keeping your money there,’ says Venetia, ‘so what’s the point?’
    ‘Only a small sum,’ says Victor.
    ‘Do they brainwash you or something at your new job?’ asks Venetia. And Victor says, ‘No, as it happens. But one does learn something about the realities of life. If the currency were to be devalued again formally this would be worth nothing,’ and he refuses to say more on the subject. He takes the cash and pays it into Venetia’s bank account without any further conversation other than, ‘We all have to have trust and faith,’ he says, ‘and pull together. Besides, it isn’t good to be seen to hoard currency. It isn’t wise.’
    It was useless hiding things from Victor: she should have known better, or else have felt more guilty and hidden it somewhere less obvious. He looked and remembered and learned: he forgot nothing, and it was getting worse. Once he could laugh at himself and apologize for being an obsessive compulsive – but now he stomps through the house ranting about missing keys or underpants, finding them where he left them and snorting his conviction that‘someone’ had hidden them. Venetia thought perhaps his new job was a strain; but he said no, he liked it, it was good to be useful.
    Venetia did not protest. She enjoyed her life with Victor and as long as she did not argue they got along fine. The sex was good and that always reassured her. Steady, and unworried, once or twice or even three times a week, after more