Clouds among the Stars

‘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-century 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.

I ran for what seemed like miles until the pain in my knee forced me to stop. I sank onto a step in a doorway, almost weeping with pain and despair. Although some of the brotherhood considered it their bounden duty to be militant whenever possible, and there had been much talk of previous bloody scrums, I had never witnessed them. This was only my second demonstration. The first had taken place on a hot July day in St James’s Park when everyone had been too good-humoured to care much about anything but sunbathing and ice creams.

Violence at first hand was unfamiliar to me. I had lived all my life in peaceful Blackheath and Maria-Alba disapproved of smacking children. At St Frideswide’s the nuns had patrolled the playground and even the sticking out of tongues was strictly forbidden. The crazy, indiscriminate aggression I had just witnessed was deeply disturbing. But none the less I was ashamed of myself. I had enrolled myself in the cause and at the first hint of danger I had run away. I had deserted not only my comrades but also the man I loved. At this moment he might be lying helpless while the battle raged about him, badly hurt or – terrible thought – even dead.

A car drew up at the kerb and a woman with bleached hair and a hard face stepped out. She looked at me with an expression of loathing. ‘This is not a public bench. I shall fetch the porter if you don’t move off.’

I hobbled as fast as my knee would allow me back to Parliament Square. It took some time as blood was seeping through the leg of my jeans and the rubbing of fabric on flesh was agony. ‘Actor on murder charge,’ shouted the man who had a kiosk near the Sanctuary. It went through my mind that my parents would be very interested in this piece of news, as they knew every thespian of any reputation. Then the square came in sight and I forgot about it.

The fighting was over. People stood about, talking, but of Dodge and Yell and the other members of SPIT there was no sign. I spotted a Black Maria disappearing into the traffic. The pavement was littered with squashed oranges and broken eggs and trampled placards. A packet of lard oozed and glistened on the pavement. The only person I recognized was the old woman with the black straw hat. She was trying to persuade a policeman, who was attempting to get her into the police car, to dance with her.

‘Anyone see what happened this afternoon?’ Another policemen addressed the crowd. ‘We’d like to take statements from some of you.’ The crowd thinned rapidly and I joined the exodus.

The warmth of the day had gone now and Nikolskoye looked particularly uninviting in the fading light. I almost turned back when I saw Hank and Otto walking up the steps but I knew I ought to face up to having behaved badly. I steeled myself to bear their resentment.

‘Hey! Look who’s here!’ Hank called when he saw me. ‘You were great, Harriet! Ha, ha! When I saw you hit that policeman! I’d never have believed it! I had you down as a stuck-up bourgeoise coquette.’

I grinned feebly as Otto gave me a clenched-fist salute. ‘Come in, Sister, and ve shall drink you a toast. It vas a good day’s work, nicht war? Leetle old ladies must take care ven Harriet is about. She vill knock them down!’ He mimed a punch aimed at my shoulder.

I noticed that Otto was missing an earring and that his lobe was a nasty mess. Hank’s nose was swollen to twice its usual size. We went upstairs, the two men congratulating each other on the blows they had managed to get in, in the name of freedom. What had seemed to me to be a disaster, bordering on farce, was apparently another glorious chapter in the history of heroic resistance to the forces of oppression. My appearance at headquarters met with cries of approval. Dodge and Yell were absent, having been taken to the police station, but it was generally agreed that neither of them had been much hurt.

My health was drunk in warm beer and my fearless militancy made much of. We finished Yell’s cake and then Hank went out for fish and chips, and we had a greasy feast of celebration. Though it was hard to see wherein lay the victory exactly, I went along gratefully with the general mood of self-congratulation. I had never in my life been fêted for anything and it was a heady experience.

It was half-past six when I got home. I looked wildly dishevelled, almost villainous, in the hall mirror – the personification of caducity. My hair was hanging in strings from the egg and the blood from a cut on my cheek had dried in a streak of blackish-red blobs. My knee was agony and my thumb was sore.

‘Ehilà, Harriet! C’è da impazzire!’ Maria-Alba’s head appeared in the lighted doorway that led to the basement stairs. Her eyes and mouth were large with anguish. ‘Clarissa is having the fits and Ophelia is lock in the bedroom. Bron is gone to The Green Dragon and Portia is nowhere found! Non so più che fare!’

‘Harriet!’ Cordelia flung herself at me. ‘I’m going to kill myself! I’ve made a potion of laburnum seeds and deadly nightshade for us all to drink …’ The rest was drowned by sobbing.

‘What is it? What’s the matter?’ I was used to my family’s dramatics. I expected Maria-Alba to tell me the boiler had gone out, and Cordelia that she had been given a C for Latin.

‘Waldo sarà impiccato per omicidio. Your father is to be hang! For murder!’ Maria-Alba sank to her knees and wrung her hands above her head.

Cordelia screamed and fainted.

THREE

We laid Cordelia on the ebony and gilt day bed, which had come from the set of Antony and Cleopatra. Its frame was made of writhing snakes with leopards’ heads supporting the scrolled arms. The coats, lacrosse sticks, cricket bats and school satchels that had been carelessly chucked on to it over the years had chipped off most of the gesso, and Bron, when a small boy, had indelibly inked spectacles round the leopards’ eyes, but it made a striking effect as you walked in through the front door. Next to it, a life-sized statue of Anubis, the Egyptian god with the head of a jackal, acted as a hat stand.

Maria-Alba snatched several feathers from an ostrich boa that was draped round Anubis’s neck, set a lighted match to them and held them under Cordelia’s nose. Cordelia came to immediately, complaining volubly about the disgusting smell. She gazed up at me with tragic eyes.

‘Don’t kiss me goodbye, my dearest sister, lest you take the poison from my lips. I love all my family but you’re my favourite. Portia was a pig yesterday when I asked if I could borrow her mohair jersey.’

‘Stop acting at once, this minute, and tell me truthfully. Did you swallow any nightshade and laburnum mixture?’ I spoke sharply because Cordelia frequently told lies. Also I wanted to bring myself back from the immense distance to which Maria-Alba’s broken sentences had sent me. I saw myself bending over my sister in one of those out-of-the-body experiences people have when they nearly die. My sight was dim and I seemed to be intermittently deaf.

‘I – I – don’t remember.’ Cordelia pressed her hand to her head and fluttered her lashes.

‘C’è bisogno di emetico. Salt and water,’ said Maria-Alba grimly. ‘I go make it.’

‘You’ll be wasting your time because I won’t drink it.’ Cordelia sat up, looking cross. ‘I hate this family. Isn’t it bad enough that my own darling father is a prisoner and a captive and perhaps even going to be hung without you trying to make me sick?’

‘Hanged,’ I corrected automatically while muffled shock waves boomed in my head like the tolling of a submerged bell.

Cordelia glared at me. ‘I expect if someone strapped you to a table and swung an axe over your naked quivering flesh like in The Pit and the Pendulum, you’d be correcting his grammar.’

‘Probably. Anyway, they don’t hang people any more in this country.’

‘Don’t they? Really not? Because I saw this film and the man was going to be hung – oh, all right, hanged – and the priest asked him to pretend to be afraid so that all the people who looked up to him as a hero would despise him and turn from their villainy and it was so awful when he started to cry and tried to get away – I wanted to be sick, it was so horrible. You see, you don’t know whether he’s pretending or he really is frightened –’

‘It was only film.’ My voice echoed as though my ears were stuffed with cotton wool. ‘Hanging is against the law.’

‘The law! Fie!’ said a voice from above. We looked up. My mother stood at the head of the staircase, dressed all in black. ‘The bloody book of law you shall yourselves read in the bitter letter.’

‘King Lear,’ said Cordelia.

‘Othello,’ I said at the same moment.

It was our parents’ habit to quote extensively from Shakespeare’s plays because, naturally, they knew reams of it by heart. As if this was not bad enough we were supposed to respond with the source of the quotation. In a spirit of rebellion against this pernicious cruelty we had agreed years ago to attribute any quotation to the particular play from which our Christian names had been taken (I had taken to using my second name to avoid embarrassment) and, naturally, sooner or later, we were bound to be spot on. Our parents never tumbled to this stratagem as they lived on a more exalted plane from our juvenile utterances and never really listened to us. Bron scored the fewest hits and Ophelia was most often right, which says something about Hamlet.

‘The quality of mercy is not strained –’ my mother began.

She delivered the speech very slowly with plenty of pomp and circumstance for the bit about the thronèd monarch and the sceptred sway. I hoped she would stop when she got to ‘Therefore, Jew’, as it was hardly relevant, but she carried on.

‘Somebody’s got to tell me what’s happening,’ I said as soon as she had finished. ‘It can’t be true that Pa’s been arrested!’