Sonia helped Natalie and the children move into the love nest. Sonia was a good sort before she became a murderer. Sonia gritted her teeth and put up with her own disappointment, and the prospect of loneliness once again. You can be lonelier with three small children than without them. It’s something to do with the burden of perpetually looking after, never being looked after. Sometimes, it’s true, Bess would make Sonia a cup of tea, and Sonia would have to try not to cry, from the sheer relief of it. (Okay, self-pity. Long sad notes on the violin, and so there should be. Poor bloody Sonia, say I. She had a raw rough deal. She got mixed up with bad bad men: the kind who destroy with smiles and self-righteousness, so you don’t know you’re under attack until it’s too late.)
Sonia consoled Natalie by telling her that in a time of low female employment and low female wages (same thing) an ordinary woman had these alternatives: she could live off the State or live off men. She could not take the middle way and live off her wages. Natalie had tried that, hadn’t she, and failed. So now she was the auctioneer’s paramour.
Sonia suggested most forcibly to Natalie that she let the children go with their father. What sort of life could Natalie offer them? What sort of future did they have in this worn-out, sold-up, clapped-out country? Not even a change of government could save it now. Too late! Drug addiction, cancer, suicide all epidemic amongst the young! At least their father had a swimming pool.
Oh, but Natalie was stubborn.
‘My children have got me,’ she said. ‘I’ll work for them. I’ll see them through.’
‘You can’t,’ said Sonia brutally. ‘There’s nothing here for the young. Look what they’ve made of us! A nation of whores and criminals. I cheated on the bus on the way up here. I got away with someone’s thrown-away ticket. I’m a criminal, you’re a whore.’
‘I prefer the word paramour,’ said Natalie, primly.
Angus came up to the flat two or three times a week. Jean knew all about it.
‘Can’t you even park your flash car discreetly?’ was all she asked. ‘Does it have to be right outside her door? Everyone knows. It’s “Oh Jean, saw your husband’s car in Wells’ market again: Oh Jean, I thought you ought to know.”’ Jean slept soundly enough on her side of the hard orthopaedic mattress, in spite of her protests. Angus thought if she lost no sleep over it he could be doing her little harm. Sex with Natalie made him want sex with Jean, but if he approached her she’d shrug him off saying he was too old and fat to be the great lover, and please not to paw her about, for God’s sake. She was tired and had work to do. Angus thought perhaps he might ask her for a divorce, but he feared her tongue if he broached the matter. He didn’t like the way Alice and Ben looked at him, either. Alice stared reproachfully with her wide blue eyes, so like her mother’s, and Ben with a steely hostility as if he, Angus, was a debtor, and Ben the creditor. And they would quite deliberately make holes in the carpet with the toes of their shoes. Luxury flats were not really suitable for children: the carpets might look thick and rich but in fact were flimsy, and the same went for the rest of the furniture. Only the bed was solid, soft and fine: just about double enough. Sometimes, they ended up on the floor; but with her stifling her laughter, her moans, for the children’s sake. One way and another, Angus agreed with me that the children ought to go, before Harry changed his mind.
‘But he’s a criminal,’ Natalie would protest. ‘And they’re all I’ve got.’
‘You’ve got me!’
‘We want to go,’ the children said. That was a shock. Ingratitude! Alice would come home crying from school, Ben would return sulky and bruised. Alice stole sweets from Woolworths (Alice, stealing!), and Ben’s homework was never marked because of the teachers’ strike.
‘I’ll never get any GCSE’s at this rate,’ he said. ‘I’ll work in a factory all my life. Well, that’s what you want! That’s your ambition for me!’
‘I don’t,’ she’d protest.
‘You do,’ he’d say, bitterly. ‘You hate me because I’m my father’s son.’
Oh yes, oh yes, Ben and Alice wanted to go all right. Here was Daddy, offering a villa on the Spanish coast, complete with swimming pool, money, sun and status – he sent them letters and photographs, and also once an appalling little note on scented paper from the beauty queen, saying she knew she could never take their mother’s place but she wanted to be their friend. And what could Natalie offer her children? The prospect of living in a holiday flat in Wells that lasted as long as their mother’s relationship with a married man, and consequent nudges and giggles at a school they hated. Of course they wanted to go. Wouldn’t you? Look at it their way. Their mother had driven their father, by her unfaithfulness, into the arms of another; had discouraged him so that his business failed; had given away the family dog; had let the family car be repossessed – and what else? Oh yes, had disgraced them by working up at the quarry, by living off the State; had made them sleep on mattresses on the floor and taken them out of a school where they were happy and put them in one where they were miserable, to be laughed at by thicks and turnip tops. No, Ben and Alice were not pleased by their mother. Some children (not all) find themselves extremely offended by parental misfortune.
The only problem to my mind was, in the end, why did Harry Harris want them? Ungrateful little brats.
In the end Harry won and the children went. Natalie let them go. They cried when they hugged her goodbye. They left from Bristol Airport. Angus drove them there in the Audi Quattro, and they kept putting down the electric windows on the way so the upholstery got spattered with rain. They knew that life was a fight, and they meant to win it: they would swim forever in their father’s swimming pool – he who knew how to enjoy himself and how to get out of debt quick. Angus spent all that Saturday night in bed with Natalie and most of Sunday too, and did not have to pretend to be just another visitor. He no longer blamed Jean for not having given him children. Natalie wept and mourned and raged a little, but in an agreeably sensuous manner. She needed comfort and he gave it to her.