Claire had a bit of a goodbye party and we came down to see her off. That was a bit of a shock. The house was a tip with all the washing and the toys and there was nowhere to get your Hoover round. It had that warm smell of old milk that you get in those family homes where you can’t be sure anything is ever really clean.
I had managed to ignore the Mods and Rockers in the sixties, and to smile as kindly as I could at the long hair and glitter of the seventies, but some of those women were eye-popping. They had either shaved the sides of their head or dyed their hair purple and they wore those boiler suits that made them all look as if they were plumbers. Some of them had bright stripy knitwear – alpaca, I think it was, with bits of twig in it, quite rough to the touch. Not much chance of finding a single man between the lot of them, I’d have thought. And hardly any of them were wearing make-up, not even lipstick. I always have to have my lipstick. It helps me concentrate.
At the kitchen table, eating aubergine lasagne or some other Italian muck, Claire was entertaining her new friends: Gail, Pasha and Franny. I think they were the ones who told her that make-up was a sign of masculine domination. Honestly. They were about as exciting as a box of billiard balls.
It was the little girl I felt sorry for, always watching her parents, not sure what any of those women were doing in her home. With a hippy you knew where you were, but with this lot you felt anything could happen. God forbid that any of them would ever want to live near me.
Claire told me I should think about joining them. ‘You are joking,’ I said, but I could see that she was either testing me or making fun. She had that ambiguous tone clever people always adopt, half-joking, half-serious, and you’re supposed to guess which one they mean. If you think they’re joking they say they were being serious. If you take them seriously they say that they were joking. You can’t win.
‘Well, Violet,’ Claire said, using my full name to make me listen, ‘it’s quite simple. Are you on the side of death or are you on the side of life? Because that’s the only decision you have to make.’
‘Well, Claire,’ I replied, ‘I don’t think you can achieve world peace by going camping.’
‘And so are you going to do anything about it, Violet? Anything at all?’
‘I’ve been in enough wars,’ I said. Her tone of voice was starting to give me the pip. If you ask me, the world was messed up enough as it was without that lot trying to sort it out.