Today Grace lives with Sebastian, who is fifteen years younger than she is. Or rather Sebastian lives with Grace. Grace may have the income, but Sebastian has the talent, the charm, and the future. He picks and chooses whom he lives with. Grace, these days, tends to take what comes along. Sebastian is a film director, or would be if he could raise the money to make a film. He was taught film-making at his public school, and took a degree in visual communication at college.
Today Grace lives in a half-finished flat, on the top floor of a large terrace house in Holland Park. She has been living there for six months, the last three of them with Sebastian. Here Chloe goes to visit her.
Builders have been knocking three rooms into one, but have gone away, it seems, in the middle of the task. There are piles of plaster rubble and heaps of sodden wallpaper, inside and outside the flat, and strips of wallpaper are still stretched half-pasted on a trestle table. Tins of paint stand open and congealing. Chloe automatically replaces the lids.
Grace crouches on the floor in front of the fan heater, drying her thick red hair. She has cleared a living space by the window, spread it with rugs and cushions, set up the hi-fi, plugged in an electric kettle and a small wall refrigerator, and within these limits has set up her home.
‘Don’t clear up the mess,’ says Grace. ‘I may have to sue. Everything has to look as dreadful as possible.’
Over the years Grace has developed quite a taste for litigation. She who once stood in court and wept, and screamed, now has a liking for the experience. And thus the conversation goes, between her and her friend Chloe:
Grace And how was Marjorie’s moustache? Or does she shave, these days?
Chloe She has better things to think about.
Grace What? The BBC? And how’s Patrick? Does she say?
Chloe Much the same, mad and mean.
Grace Why doesn’t she move in with him? What a waste of rent and rates.
Chloe He hasn’t asked her to.
Grace She has this dreadful habit of deferring to the male. She’s as bad as you, Chloe. Don’t you just love this flat?
Chloe It’s hard to say.
Grace I hate it. It’s been a nightmare.
Chloe You didn’t have to move. You could have kept the house in St John’s Wood.
Grace No I couldn’t. I sold it. I had to have the money. I couldn’t keep the buyer out for ever. His wife kept having babies and he kept complaining and in the end he had me evicted, well, more or less. The squatter people were very unhelpful.
Chloe That house was all you had. When you’ve got rid of the money, Grace, what will you do?
Grace Die. I hate it round here, don’t you? It’s a real middle-class ghetto. Full of short-sighted women with frizzy hair dressed all in leather and carrying teddy bears. All the real people have been driven out. You can’t think how filthy this flat was when I moved in. They had five children and the father was in prison and the mother had TB and the floorboards were sodden with piss. I tried painting them with lino paint but they still smelt so I got some builders in to replace the floors. It was when the boards were up that Sebastian moved in and said we might as well have the whole place done properly, so they started knocking down the partition walls, and then the Council turned up and said they weren’t partition walls at all, but structural, and the whole thing was illegal anyway and what about Planning Permission, and then of course the builders got disheartened and left. I’d paid them in advance – that was Sebastian’s idea, he said it was customary, to show you trusted them. And then Sebastian got this architect friend of his to do some drawings, and he met some more builders in a pub – that’s their mess over there, they were film technicians starting a new career, well, you know what the film industry’s like – and then the neighbours got up a petition to stop us spoiling the sky-line, and in the meanwhile the builders had been offered a film after all, and couldn’t refuse – they were making it in Belfast and the original crew had walked out – well, you know how it all is. I don’t have to tell you. Property is all very boring.
Chloe What happened to the mother with TB?
Grace Is that the only thing you care about?
Chloe Yes.
Grace I don’t know. I never asked. She was moved to the outskirts by some kind of agency, I believe. I paid her a thousand to get out. It was a fortune for someone like her.
Chloe And which is Stanhope’s room?
Grace You’ll have to ask the architect. He has a plan for some kind of ceiling suspension for guests. I don’t trust him, really. He’s all quick imaginative sketches and lots of talk and never any measurements.
Chloe Then why employ him?
Grace He’s Sebastian’s friend.
Chloe It’s your money.
Grace No it’s not, it’s Christie’s. He’s lying there in his grave – or at any rate his urn – cheering at the way I’ve mismanaged things. I’ve never earned a penny in my life, not in the pay packet sense. I wouldn’t know how to start. I’d quite like to be an opera singer, mind you.
Chloe Like your mother?
Grace No, not like my mother. I’d forgotten about her. I couldn’t bear to do anything which ran in the family. Is Stanhope musical?
Chloe He never mentions it, only football. He’s your son, not mine. They send you the school reports; you could always look it up, I suppose, under Extra Activities.
Grace I never read school reports. They should be abolished. They’re an invasion of a child’s privacy. What a child needs from a school is anonymity.
Chloe In that case, perhaps Stanhope should go to a comprehensive school. It’s what he wants to do.
Grace You always give in to the children, Chloe. How can a boy Stanhope’s age know what’s best for him? He’s far happier at a boarding school. They’ve got good teachers and wonderful equipment and splendid playing fields, and he must have lots of friends by now.
Chloe He doesn’t make friends easily.
Grace Then think how miserable he’d be at a comprehensive school.
Chloe You did tell him he only had to board ʼtil you had somewhere settled to live.
Grace Settled? Do you call this settled? And I don’t trust that architect. I don’t think Stanhope would be happy in a ceiling suspension, do you? No, he’ll have to stay where he is. And I’m certainly not having him at a comprehensive; why does he think he wants to go?
Chloe He wants to play soccer, not rugby.
Grace There you are, it’s ridiculous. Besides, with a stupid name like Stanhope he’d only get laughed at, down there amongst the yobs.
Grace changes her social attitudes along with her boyfriends, as a stick insect changes colour according to the bush it lands on. But the nervous craving for privilege keeps rearing its head. Though she is, at the moment, prepared to blow up Eton, or at any rate light the fuse for the dynamite Sebastian has laid, she will not have her son at a comprehensive school.
Chloe It was you who named him, Grace. You insisted on Stanhope, in spite of everyone’s advice.
Grace The whole episode of Stanhope was ridiculous, I quite agree. I should have had an abortion. I should never have listened to you, Chloe. Stanhope is your responsibility. Do you like my dress?
Chloe No.
Grace wears a navy-blue silk dress, made circa 1946; it has an uneven hem and frayed seams. It clings rather sadly to Grace’s small bosom, seeming to miss a more robust original owner.
Grace No? I do. I bought it down the Portobello. Marjorie’s mother had one like this. Do you think it’s the same one? I always wanted to be like Helen.
Chloe You’ve succeeded.
She does not mean it kindly.