Free Chalcot Crescent by Fay Weldon Page A

than thirty years, and somehow in tune with the rhythm of the universe. True, she preferred the light off rather than on, being conscious of a certain slackness of skin, a certain barrelness of figure in middle age, but Victor didn’t seem to mind. ‘It’s all you,’ he’d say, taking a pinch of extra flesh at her waist and squeezing it gently, ‘that’s all that matters.’ She felt no jealousy of unknown research assistants he might meet at work, as she would have done when she was younger. They were the envy of their friends.
    ‘But he does seems to have lost his sense of humour,’ complains Venetia on the phone to Polly.
    ‘He never had one to lose,’ says Polly. ‘You delude yourself. Do you think he knows something about devaluation the rest of us don’t?’
    ‘He’s a scientist, not a currency expert,’ says Venetia. ‘And what he does is not so different from what he did before. It’s still stem-cell research; what he was doing for Cancer Cure. No-one’s wasting expertise these days.’
    ‘Spoken like Victor’s wife,’ says Polly. ‘Ask Ethan.’
    Venetia’s second son Ethan had been in banking and now worked for NIFE like his father, but rather down the scale as a Ministry driver. Venetia asked. Ethan said to tell Polly devaluation was obviously on the cards, now inflation had started pushing back the deflationary pressures of the last few years and the effect of quantitative easement was being felt. But not to worry: everyoneshould eat, drink and be merry while they could. As to the ‘bottoming out’, it was not going to happen. Democracies were simply not equipped to deal with a consumer society which had lost the knack of consuming, as after a stroke a man can lose the knack of speech. Ex-bankers loved gloom, Venetia had noticed.
    Mervyn, Venetia’s second son by Victor, was studying Politics and Economics at the LSE, and expected to get a First. Classes were large – seminars of thirty students were not unusual – but as Victor pointed out, statistically speaking, size of class and quality of education were positively correlated. And Venetia would try not to let her eyebrows rise in doubt. At the Ministry, Victor took an obligatory weekly class on ‘Positive Thinking and the New Economy’: perhaps that was all the change in Victor amounted to. He learned his lessons well.

Sitting On The Stairs Waiting For The Bailiffs To Go
    Amos has been gone a long time. He is probably asleep. The smell of skunk pervades the house, horrible strong stuff. The sort we used in the sixties was milder and made us witty and lively – or so we thought – and this new stuff just makes you surly and sends you to sleep. Before that, in the late forties and early fifties we took Dexedrine, a form of amphetamine, to keep us awake in lectures, and to help us pass exams. Snorting drugs, or smoking them, was beyond the limits of our sophistication. A friend of mine, subject to narcolepsy, now takes Dexedrine to stop him from falling into the teapot like the dormouse at the Mad Hatter’s tea party (a reference, for the benefit of you younger readers, to Lewis Carroll’s
Alice in Wonderland
) and he sometimes passes spare pills on to me. But they don’t work on me as once they did: they don’t fill me with the wild mental excitement, the exhilaration of the mind I remember: they just make me feel unconnected with reality in a misty and disagreeable kind of way.
    Amos is past the full flowering of youth. Surely he should have grown out of drugs by now: he should no longer be claiming with a boyish laugh that he was born one spliff short of a complete human being. Nor am I totally convinced by his account of his life amongst the NGOs: it doesn’t quite ring true. I am not sure what he does for a living, but I imagine it to be more concerned with theunderside of society rather than its open face. He is forever ‘passing through’. He will turn up at the Hunter’s Alley house I bought for the use of the boys