Kehua! E-Book

Fay Weldon

• Herausgeber: Corvus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Seitenzahl: 448

Beschreibung

Your writer, in conjuring this tale of murder, adultery, incest, ghosts, redemption and remorse, takes you first to a daffodil-filled garden in Highgate, North London, where, just outside the kitchen window, something startling shimmers on the very edges of perception. Fluttering and chattering, these are our kehua - a whole multiplying flock of Maori spirits (all will be explained) goaded into wakefulness by the conversation within. Scarlet - a long-legged, skinny young woman of the new world order - has announced to Beverley - her aged grandmother - that she intends to leave home and husband for the glamorous actor, Jackson Wright - he of the vampire films. Beverley may be well on her way to her ninth decade, but she's not beyond using this intelligence to stir up a little trouble. And neither are the kehua outside the window. The sins and traumas of the past haunt us all. Call them hungry ghosts, grateful dead, dybbuks, kelpies, poltergeists, furies or kehua, we carry them with us - across continents, oceans, decades and generations. Quite how they became attached to a three-year-old white girl is the origin of your writer's tale. Suffice to say that murder is at the root of it all, that Beverley and her female bloodline carry a weighty spiritual burden and that this is the story of how they learn to live with their ghosts, or maybe how their ghosts learn to live with them...

Leseprobe

Praise for Chalcot Crescent

‘Weldon’s mischievous blend of fact and fiction produces a hybrid that is at once futuristic satire, tragedy and tongue-in-cheek memoir… A persuasive fable: sinister, clever, funny and vintage Weldon.’

Independent

‘Sparkles with wit and acute observation. These, one feels, must be exactly the subtle ways in which government can slither from good intentions into dangerousness… a clever jeu d’esprit.’

Guardian

‘Spirited characters, led by Fay Weldon’s fictional sister, make this fresh take on sci-fi shine… It’s a pleasure… She’s an extraordinary writer.’

Observer

‘A great scroll of memory, skewed history and canny observation. Wonderfully imagined, constantly surprising.’

Saga Magazine

‘An apocalyptic vision that is too amusing to be taken entirely seriously. Or perhaps we should…’

Financial Times

‘Reads like a first novel… it’s so fresh and vibrant and funny. The funniest dystopian novel I’ve ever read.’

Boyd Hilton

‘Frances narrates much of the novel with a twinkle in her eye… knowingly light-hearted and tongue-in-cheek… Sharply observed, entertaining, and with a sparkling satirical edge.’

Independent on Sunday

‘This legendary English author really opens up in this wickedly sharp story of her imaginary sister Frances… Riveting!’

Look Magazine

‘Weldon’s impish sense of humour and gimlet-eyed social observations stand out.’

Sunday Times

‘Orwellian nightmare recast for the Twittering classes… You’ll be entertained if you enjoy Weldon’s trademark barbed frivolity.’

New Scientist

‘Weldon has created a sinister world of national poverty, suspicion and hopelessness with impressive attention to detail… The helplessness of old age and the timelessness of the pain Frances has picked up on the way are poignant.’

Spectator

Copyright

First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Corvus,an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

Copyright © Fay Weldon 2010. All rights reserved.

The moral right of Fay Weldon to be identified as the author ofthis work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright,Designs and Patents act of 1988.

“Falling In Love Again” Music & Original Words by FriedrichHollander, English Words by Reg Connelly © 1930, Published byFredeick Hollander Music, Administered in the UK by ChelseaMusic Publishing Ltd.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may bereproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in anyform or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyrightowner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and eventsportrayed in this novel are either products of the author’simagination or are used fictitiously.

First eBook Edition: January 2010

ISBN: 978-0-857-89057-3

Corvus

An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd

Ormond House

26-27 Boswell Street

London WC1N 3JZ

www.corvus-books.co.uk

Contents

Cover

Praise for Chalcot Crescent

Copyright

Kehua!

PART ONE

Scarlet blows the gaff

Where they live

In the basement

Running into a trap

Down in the basement

Scarlet’s plan for leaving home

Back to the basement

In the kitchen at Robinsdale

Murder in the family

A break for lunch

The first murder: a set piece

Jackson too is in a rush

Beverley talks about her will

Night in the basement

Now, about Louis

Scarlet washes Beverley’s hair

Louis thinks it over too

In the basement

Run, Lola, run

Lola’s move to Nopasaran

Would Louis mind?

At home with Cynara

Understanding Louis better

Another place, another time

Down here writing

Beverley feels better

What Lola is doing in the meanwhile

What happened next, in that other country long ago

A friend from Glastonbury drops by

What Beverley does when Scarlet leaves

Beverley, Gerry and Fiona

Down here writing

Louis at work when Beverley’s call is put through

How Jackson is getting on

What Jackson did next

Things are not working out in the basement

PART TWO

Beverley, pre-pubertal

Lola, pre-pubertal

Beverley at Fifteen

Beverley at sixteen

Beverley’s seventeenth birthday party

Holding brief

A drunken scene in Coromandel

Dido and Aeneas

The night before she ran

But it wasn’t…

Beverley at nineteen

Beverley at thirty

Beverley at thirty-four

Beverley at thirty-five

Underpinnings

Back to Beverley, and sanity

Beverley and Gerry, an interlude

A conversation between Marcus and Beverley

Let’s get out of here

PART THREE

Enchanted Scarlet

Lola waits for Louis

Alice’s mysterious pregnancy

The peace and quiet of the basement

And now for something completely different

D’Dora leaving home

D’Dora digs Alice out of her hole

After the row was over

Alice prepares to leave Lakeside Chase

Out in the garden

The convergence of the clan, the convening of the whanau

But Gerry is coming

The gathering of the kehua

Down in the basement

Another’s day’s writing

The cleansing of Robinsdale

Scarlet’s brush with death

Glossary

May the Maori amongst you excuse this fictional foray into your world, for which, believe me, I have the greatest respect, having as a child in the Coromandel encountered both taniwha and kehua.

Kehua!

A glossary of Maori words is provided on page 325.

PART ONE

Scarlet blows the gaff

Your writer, in telling you this tale of murder, adultery, incest, ghosts, redemption and remorse, takes you first to a comfortable house in Highgate, North London, where outside the kitchen window, dancing in the breeze, the daffodils are in glorious bloom: a host of yellow male stamens in vigorous competition, eager to puff their special pollen out into the world. No two daffodils are exactly alike, nor are any two humans. We attribute free will to humans, but not to daffodils – with whom we share 35 per cent of our DNA – though perhaps rashly, when we consider the way some human families behave. It may be that DNA and chance is all there is. We can only hope that this morning the strong wind blows the brightest and best of daffodil genes abroad, so all the gardens around are blessed by yellow loveliness.

Inside the kitchen, Scarlet, a young journalist of twenty-nine, is in conversation with her grandmother Beverley. Scarlet is indifferent to the marvels of nature – how the tender, sheltered female pistil, all receptivity, is rooted to the spot, while the boisterous male stamen above yearns for something better and brighter than plain stay-at-home she. To Scarlet a flower is just a flower, not a life lesson.

Daffodils occasionally self-fertilise, but not often. Inbreeding is unpopular in nature, in the plant and animal kingdoms alike.

‘I wasn’t going to tell you now, Gran,’ says Scarlet, as casually as she can make it seem, ‘but I’ve decided to run away from home.’

To which Beverley, aged seventy-seven, closes her eyes briefly like some wise old owl and replies: ‘That’s not surprising. There’s quite a breeze today. How those daffodils do bob about! Are you going to tell Louis before you go?’

Louis is Scarlet’s husband; everybody thinks he is anyway, though they never actually went through with the ceremony. The couple have been together for six years and have no children, so they are entwined merely out of custom and habit, like ivy tendrils curling up a tree, but not yet grown into one another. The severance will cause little distress, or none that Scarlet can see. She is anxious to be off to her new life, with a hop, a skip and a jump, as soon as she has packed her grandmother’s freezer with all the delicacies that a relative newly out of hospital is likely to favour. She reckons she can just get it done, and meet Jackson her lover in Costa’s Coffee House in Dean Street, Soho, by twelve-thirty. He will wait patiently if she is late but she would rather not be. A tune is running through her head which bodes no good. It is a doomy song in which Gene Pitney gets taken to a café and then can never go home any more. Twenty-four hours from her arms and he met and fell in love with someone else. It’s the kind of thing that happens, Scarlet knows. It’s at the very last minute that the prize is wrenched from you. She will not be late.

‘No,’ says Scarlet to her grandmother. Beverley has had a knee replacement, and is temporarily holed up on the sofa in her large and well-equipped kitchen. ‘I haven’t told him. I hate scenes. Let him come back to an empty house.’

Already Scarlet regrets telling Beverley she is leaving. She can see she’s in for a sermon. As if Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa were not enough, now the hop and the skip will turn into a lengthy drama with the hounds of doubt and anxiety snapping at her heels.

‘The house isn’t exactly empty,’ says Beverley. ‘Isn’t Lola staying?’ Lola is a wayward nymphet, and Scarlet’s sixteen-year-old niece. ‘I daresay she will look after him. But do be careful, all the same. Leaving home can cause all kinds of unexpected problems. But I don’t suppose Louis is the kind to go after you with the kitchen knife. And you haven’t got any children he can put in the back of the car and suffocate with exhaust fumes. So I expect you’re okay. But you can never quite be sure what manner of man you have, until you try and get away.’

Try to envisage the scene. The dancing daffodils: the smart kitchen: Scarlet, a long-legged skinny girl of the new no-nonsense world, with the bright, focused looks you might associate with a TV presenter, attractive and quick in her movements: a girl for the modern age, a little frightening to all but alpha males, in conversation with the raddled old lady, who, though obliged in her infirmity to rely on the kindness of family, is not beyond stirring up a little trouble.

‘I know it is tempting,’ says Beverley now, equably, from the sofa at the end of the long kitchen, ‘just to run, and on many occasions I have had to, and thus saved my life, both metaphorically and literally. But a woman does have to be cautious. Are you running to someone, Scarlet, or just running in general?’

‘To someone,’ admits Scarlet. ‘But it’s only temporary, a really nice guy with a whole range of emotions Louis simply doesn’t have. Louis is hardly the knifing sort. I wish he was. Jackson’s offered me a roof over my head. I’ll move out as soon as Louis sells the house and I can get somewhere of my own. Louis hit me last night, Gran, so there’s no way I can stay. You wouldn’t want me to.’

‘Hit you?’ enquires Beverley.

‘On my cheekbone,’ says Scarlet. ‘Just here. The bruise hasn’t come up yet.’

Beverley inspects her granddaughter for sign of injury but sees none.

‘Leaving in haste,’ says Beverley, ‘may sometimes be wise. The first time I did it I was three. I wore a blue and white checked dress and remember looking at my little white knees going one-two, one-two beneath the hem and wondering why my nice dress was bloodstained and why my legs were so short. My mother Kitchie, that’s your great-grandmother, had very good long legs, like yours and your mother’s. They bypassed me, more’s the pity.’

Scarlet grits her teeth. What have these toddler reminiscences to do with her? She has since childhood been incensed by her grandmother’s – and even her mother’s – ‘when I was a girl’ and ‘in those days’. Why can’t the old realise the irrelevance of the past? There can be no real comparison between then and now. People have surely moved on from the old days of ignorance, hate, violence and prejudice they are so fond of talking about. No, she should never have started the Louis hare running.

‘I can’t remember what my shoes were like,’ Beverley goes on, relentlessly, ‘it being such a long time ago – 1937, it must have been – but I think they were yellow. Or that might have just been the dust. We were in New Zealand then, in the South Island, on the Canterbury Plains. The dust on those dry country roads round Amberley was yellowy, a kind of dull ochre. You notice the colour of the earth more as a small child, I suppose, because you’re nearer to it.’

Beverley too wonders why she has set this particular hare running: now she has, she can see it will run and run. But then she takes a pleasure in rash action, and always has, and perhaps Scarlet inherits it. There is something grand about burning one’s boats. And Scarlet, bound by the tale of the family scandal, longs to get away to her lover, but like the wedding guest in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, holds still.

‘I was quite athletic as a child,’ Beverley says. ‘I even used to get the school gymnastic prize. And I was a really good little runner, a sprinter, until my bosom began to grow, and I developed an hourglass shape, and bounced while I ran. That was one of the early tragedies of my life. I expect it was that early experience of one-two, one-two down this dusty road to Kitchie’s best friend Rita that made me so value running. I wasn’t otherwise sportive in any way. I ran because Kitchie, that’s my mother, your great-grandmother, was lying dead on the kitchen floor. I wasn’t quite sure at the time what dead was, I was only three, but when I tried to open her eyelids she didn’t slap my hand away as she usually did. There was a lot of blood around; I remember thinking it was like the time when I blocked the basin with my flannel and the water overflowed and I thought that was funny. But this wasn’t funny and it wasn’t even water, which is a nothing sort of substance, but a strange red rather sticky stuff coming from my mother’s neck.’

‘They say you can’t remember things that happened when you were three,’ says Scarlet. She would rather not be hearing this. It is making her very angry. What sort of inheritance does she have? What has her grandmother done? As happens with many when they are shocked, their first instinct is to blame the victim for the crime.

‘I was rising four,’ says Beverley. ‘They say anything that suits them, and I am bad at dates. But help was required and I was sensible enough to know it, which was why my little legs were going as fast as I could make them. And the reason my mother was lying dead on the floor, though I didn’t know this until later, was because she’d told my father Walter, while he was cutting sandwiches, that she was running off with another man. So Walter cut her throat with the bread knife, leaving me, little Beverley, having my afternoon rest upstairs. Men do the oddest things when sex is involved. And fathers weren’t very close to their children in those days. They supported them and that was that. If it happened today I expect he’d have come after me too. In times of desperation, the nearest and dearest get it in the neck.’

‘You never told me,’ says Scarlet. She could see the Alexandra Palace mast between the trees. She feels it was probably transmitting invisible rays of evil, jagged and ill-intentioned, cursing her designs for the future. ‘What kind of genetic inheritance is this?’

Today Scarlet is a little pink and feverish about the cheekbones; perhaps her blood pressure is raised? If it is, it is only to be expected: last night she wept, screamed and threw crockery. A high colour suits her, brightening her eyes and suggesting she is not as self-possessed as she seems, and might have any number of vulnerabilities, which indeed she has. After she has had a row with Louis, and these days they are more and more frequent, men look after her in the street, and wonder if she needs rescuing. Today is such a day, and Jackson is indeed at hand. She has no real need to worry about losing Jackson. He would be hard put to it to find another more desirable than she, celebrity though he may be.

After last night’s row Louis went to sleep in one of the spare bedrooms of their (or at any rate his) dream home, Nopasaran. The bedrooms are described in the architectural press, where they often feature, as alcoves, being scooped like ice cream out of the concrete walls of a high central studio room. Guests are expected to reach the alcoves of this brutalist Bauhaus dwelling by climbing ladders, as once the cave-dwellers of the Dordogne climbed for security. Changing the bedding is not easy, and the help tends to leave if asked to do it – there is other easier work around – so Scarlet finds the task is frequently left to her.

No one in this book, other than peripheral characters like ‘the help’ as the particular reader may have realised, is particularly short of money; that is all in the past for them. The need to avoid poverty, once both the reason and the excuse for improper actions, no longer dictates their behaviour. This is not the case for Jackson, who is in financial trouble and has his eye upon Scarlet’s good job and general competence, as well as upon her face and figure, but find me anyone whose motives are wholly pure? He for his part could complain Scarlet loved him for his headlines, which once were large though they will soon be small. None so desperate as a failing celebrity.

Murder will out. Poverty was not the cause of the crime which was to so affect Beverley’s future and that of her descendants, and concerning which she had stayed silent for so long; rather it was love. And Beverley’s version of an event which happened on the other side of the world in 1937 may not be as accurate as she believes. A different truth may still come back to solve the problems of the present. Novels can no longer sit on shelves and pretend to be reality; they are not, they are inventions, suspensions of reality, and must declare themselves as such. By hook or by crook, or even by the intervention of the supernatural, we will get to the root of it.

Where they live

Where we live influences us, though we may deny it. High ceilings and big spaces make us expansive; cramped rooms and low ceilings turn us inward. Those who once lived where we live now influence our moods. A house is the sum of its occupants, past and present. People who live in new houses are probably the sensible ones; they can start afresh. They may seem shallow to us, hermit crabs that we are, these strange empty people, dwellers in the here and now of new developments; but perhaps a kinder word is subtext-less. How can our precursors in the bedroom where we sleep not send out their anxieties, their sexual worries to us? As you brush the stairs – should you condescend to do so – spare a thought for those who ran up and down them before you. Something echoing from the past, as she changes the sheets in Nopasaran’s alcoves, tossing the soiled bedding down, dragging the fresh up, almost drowns out Scarlet’s lust for Jackson.

Nopasaran, where Louis and Scarlet share their lives, was built in the 1930s when domestic help was easier to come by. It was designed to an advanced taste: hailed at the time as a machine for living in. Machines in those days had a better press than they do today. Louis loves the house; Scarlet hates it. Now she has resolved never to spend another day in it, let alone another night. She wants to go and live with her lover, who has atrocious taste and shagpile carpets – but livelier sexual habits than Louis. A row with Jackson would surely have ended with sex, not a disdainful exit to different rooms, let alone scooped and moulded alcoves.

A lot of people assume that Louis is gay but he is not: indeed he is most assiduous, in a heterosexual fashion, towards his wife. Two or three times a week is not bad after six years of togetherness, but there is nothing urgent about it any more and Scarlet is conscious of a shared falling away of desire, which reminds her that soon it will be her thirtieth birthday, that though she studied Journalism she is working in what amounts to glorified PR, and that her ambitions are somehow being stifled by Louis, who will not take her job seriously while taking his own extremely so.

Louis has a wealthy mother, and it is through her family connections that Louis and Scarlet own Nopasaran, a house-name Louis loves and Scarlet hates. No one ever spells it right: it frequently comes out as Noparasan in articles, and for some reason this enrages her. It can hardly matter, she tells herself. Louis agrees. Perhaps she has the same over-sensitivity to language that he has to design; she earns her living through words, as he earns his through the way things look.

Louis knows how to acknowledge difficulty, to soothe and disarm. He is a thoroughly reasonable, thoughtful and considerate person. Nopasaran – which is Spanish for ‘they shall not pass’: the battle cry in the Spanish Civil War of the Communists at the siege of Madrid – was designed in 1936 by Wells Coates, the Canadian minimalist architect. Enthusiasts come from all over the world – for some reason disproportionately from Japan – to cluster outside and admire, to peer in as best they can through billowing gauze curtains at the rough flat concrete walls.

Scarlet feels particularly bitter about the gauze curtains, which Louis prizes. He managed to acquire some original gauze drapes from the Cecil Beaton set for Lady Windermere’s Fan, the 1946 production on Broadway. Scarlet, unlike Louis, does not feel the pull of history. Nor indeed of the future. She sees in gauze curtains only the worst aspects of suburbia. Last night’s row had started, as so often, with disagreements over Nopasaran. Scarlet argued that it was no place to bring up children – they needed a degree of comfort, and au pairs would never stay: Louis argued that it was entirely suitable for developing their children’s aesthetic and political sensibilities, and talk of au pairs ‘struck terror to his heart’. Surely she must bring them up herself? What was the point of having children if you handed them over to someone else to rear?

‘You are going to say next,’ said Scarlet, ‘that my job is of no importance.’

‘I wouldn’t say that,’ said Louis, ‘just that any literate girl from a mediocre university with a 2: 1 could do it and you are worth more than that.’

He meant it as a compliment but she did not see it like that. He had been to Oxford, she to Kingston.

She said that one thing was certain: until they lived in a proper house she would not be breeding. Two-year-olds weren’t any good at scuttling up ladders to bed. They tended to fall.

‘This is a proper house,’ said Louis. ‘We are privileged to live here. What you really mean is that you’ve decided against having children.’

‘No I haven’t. I just want them by a man who isn’t a total nutter.’

‘I resent that,’ said Louis. ‘Have you been drinking? Wells Coates brought up his own children in this house. My grandmother used to visit him here.’

‘Any minute now you’re going to reveal that this is your an cestral home,’ said Scarlet.

‘No. I am just telling you that the only way I am ever going to leave this house is feet first.’

‘Me, I’d leave it with a hop, a skip and a jump,’ said Scarlet. ‘And I may yet.’

Scarlet had been drinking caipirinhas, clubland’s current favourite, snatching a quick drink with Jackson before getting home from work, and Louis had shared a bottle of champagne with a colleague before leaving Mayfair, where he works. Lola had been staying, though she was out late tonight, and that had disturbed their usual equilibrium, making them see each other as outsiders saw them, not necessarily to their advantage. Both were quicker to anger than usual. Starting a family was normally a subject they skirted around, but that evening they had both piled into it with energy. Louis maddened Scarlet further by raising his eyebrows and sighing as if to say, ‘What have I done in marrying a woman so bereft of aesthetic understanding?’ He should have refrained: it was this look from him that tipped her into defiance, making Jackson’s tasteless shag pad and pile carpet seem not so bad after all, for all the module in Art History she had done at Kingston, alongside her Journalism degree.

But then Louis did not suspect Scarlet of having an affair; it would be too vulgar of her. That she would allow herself to become physically and, worse, emotionally involved with someone as flashy and uneducated as Jackson was not within his comprehension. That Scarlet could move from a lover’s bed into the marriage bed within the space of an hour – as in the last couple of months she had, five times, on her way home from work – well, it shocks even your writer. Louis would be dumbfounded, undone. But Scarlet is good at hiding her tracks; it is part of the fun.

It occurred to her even now, mid-row, that without the deceit Jackson might not seem so attractive. She had loved Louis and lusted for him when hiding that relationship from her family. They would find him boring, etiolated like some rare, pallid, carefully nurtured hothouse plant. Scarlet, out of Beverley, being more the tough, all-purpose, all-garden, all-climate-growth, adaptable and robust kind. As it happened, when she did finally present Louis, they liked him and said he would be good for her (what could they mean?) and even seemed to be more on his side than hers.

Louis is tall and thin and gentlemanly; he has a cavernous kind of face, good-looking in an intellectual, sensitive, gentle-eyed, slow-moving kind of way. Observers tended to murmur about ‘the attraction of opposites’. Beverley once remarked that theirs was the kind of instant unthinking sexual attraction that usually moves on to babies, as if nature was determined to get the pair together whatever society might have to say, but Scarlet, whose second three-year contraceptive implant is coming up for renewal, and who has already booked her appointment with the doctor to see to it, has so far thwarted nature.

‘So what you are telling me,’ said Scarlet, as the row moved up a notch, ‘is that I have to choose between this house and you.’ He was being wholly outrageous.

She heard the kind of chattering noises in her head she sometimes hears when she is about to lose her temper. It is somewhere between the clatter of cutlery in a kitchen drawer being rattled as a hand searches for something urgently needed that isn’t there, and the chatter of a clutch of baby crows rattling their throats in a nest. It sounds like a warning to run away, but probably has some boring cause to do with plumbing – there is a pump perched up in the roof next to something called a coffin tank.

The rattle, now more like a smoker’s cough, seemed to be coming from up above her and she looked up, but there was only the thirty-foot chamaedorea palm tree, planted by the architect seventy years ago and still growing up towards the atrium skylight, and a source of yet another dissatisfaction. Its leaves were stirred gently by the fan that switches on automatically whenever the lights go on to save the plant from too much condensation and consequent mould – Wells Coates left nothing to chance – and would at least turn itself off after an hour was up. Perhaps it was to do with the fan rather than the plumbing? The lower leaves of the palm were discolouring and needed to be removed but how could Scarlet get up there to do it? Why couldn’t she have a living room like anyone else, with a couple of armchairs and a sofa and a telly?

‘No,’ said Louis, bluntly. ‘What I am telling you is that you have to choose between no children and me.’

This was strong stuff. Scarlet was usually the one who issued edicts. Again, unwise of Louis; the balance stops wavering, tilts towards Jackson.

‘Well, sorry,’ said Scarlet, ‘if you won’t move house to somewhere more sensible and not out in the sticks, that’s about that, isn’t it? I like my life as it is. It’s far too early for me to start worrying about having children and why should I have them with a man who cares more about a pile of crumbling concrete than me. Sorry, but there are other fish in the sea.’

What she meant, of course, was that she loved Jackson more than she loved Louis, and just at the moment if she wanted anyone’s children it would be Jackson’s, and when Jackson kissed her goodbye outside the BarrioKool club in Shoreditch earlier that evening, saying, ‘Move out from him, move in with me, let him take his gauze curtains and go back to his mum,’ the feel and promise of his arm across her back made her catch her breath. ‘What have you got to lose? A house built seventy years ago by some tosser?’

So lightly had Jackson swept away decades of aesthetic aspiration, dedication and financial investment on Louis’ part that a kind of shift took place in Scarlet’s vision. If Nopasaran was not to be taken seriously, was Louis either? Louis could be seen by others not as an alpha male but as a pretentious wanker. At least Jackson had the respect of a lot of howling, enthusiastic, underdressed girls. The chattering from the tree dwindled into the kind of sparky noise which the cooker makes when you press the electric button to light the gas, but somehow suggested there was no time to be lost. Run, run, run was what she was hearing.

‘If I was choosing between you as you are tonight and the house I’d certainly go for the house,’ said Louis.

As you are tonight. He is hedging his bets; he is at his school-teachery worst. Why can’t he just commit himself and say: ‘I hate you’? Scarlet despised him the more. He was like his mother, po-faced and prudent, bloodless.

‘Pity you couldn’t have married your mother,’ said Scarlet, ‘instead of her opposite.’

Louis launched a furious blow into the air, which Scarlet managed to be in the way of, so that his knuckles scraped her cheekbones, thus giving herself the more reason to do what she wanted without qualm. Truth, tears, rage, insults, hysteria, then blended into distasteful memory; all that was clear to Scarlet now was that Louis took her favourite pillow with him to the lower spare alcove in the hope, he said, of silence and a good night’s sleep. Scarlet of course lay sleepless, while her husband presumably slept soundly, after the fashion of men, for the rest of the night.

So that was the row. And in an upper spare room, or scoop, or alcove, Scarlet’s niece Lola, who had slipped in unnoticed after her night out, listened to and cherished every word and wondered how best she could use them to her advantage.

In the basement

For your information, reader, your writer is working on her laptop down here with the spiders in her basement, where she has set up office, away from e-mail, landline and winter draughts. Stone walls prevent contact by mobile. It is very silent, even lonely, and the only music is the sound of the boiler switching itself on and off, and the washing machine stirring and churning in the otherwise empty room next door.

Yatt House is on a hilltop, large, square, stone and respectable, typical of the kind built in the 1840s for the wealthy professional classes. There is an acre of garden, and crumbling outbuildings. My workroom is part of the old servants’ quarters, and the hard blue-limestone stairs down to it are worn in their centre from their constant toiling up and down, up and down, labouring to keep those upstairs fed, watered and comfortable. For some reason I feel it to be my natural place down here, and I like it, but I reckon the last time anyone replastered or decorated was in 1914, when the young men of the house – three sons – went off to war, poor things, and only one returned.

Bits of plaster flake from the walls and dust collects from nowhere on the flagstone floors, as do fallen leaves, though I have no idea how they get in. Concrete filler crumbles into tiny black balls and drifts across the shiny white windowsill beneath the cracked shutters, where someone once bodged a repair. But my laptop works as well here as anywhere, thanks to WiFi, and it is warm, so the drama Scarlet is about to release into the world by her intemperate and imprudent action, her running away from home, can grow and blossom unhindered by fingers too cold to work the keyboard. Which is what happens in my proper, smart office upstairs when the prevailing south-west winds blow hard and cold.

The ground slopes away from the house quite steeply here, so that my window is at ground level. It overlooks a narrow concrete patio and then a stretch of green grass falls away, so it is far less sinister than the rooms at the front, where the old iron ranges and the locked wooden cage around the wine racks still remain. It is a kindness to call them rooms at all – cellars would be more accurate, lit as they are by tiny grated windows set into the brickwork. The room I have chosen to work in must have been the servants’ sitting and dining room. The old bell rack is still here, and the rusty mechanism quivers when anyone rings the front-door bell, though I cannot find any wire that connects them.

The house above is safely bright, cheerful and light, and children love to open the door to the basement and look down the worn stairs to the dark space below where I lurk. Some venture down to explore, some don’t. My little grandchild Tahuri came yesterday, shuddering with delighted fear. She’s four, and half Maori, of a warrior tribe, and brave.

‘Do I have to go down?’ she asked first. I heard her.

‘Of course not.’

‘I want to, but suppose there are kehua?’

‘Kehua live in New Zealand,’ said her mother, ‘on the other side of the world. They don’t have them here in England.’

‘They could come in an aeroplane’. She pronounces the word carefully, aer-o-plane. She is proud of it. ‘They could have come with us, in the luggage rack.’

‘The kehua are just spirits who come to take you home after you’re dead. They’re perfectly friendly unless you’ve done something really, really bad.’

‘Are they making that rattling sound I can hear down there?’

‘No, that’s just your granny typing on the keyboard.’

‘I’m a bit scared.’

‘Don’t be,’ says Aroha. ‘Kehua live in trees, not houses.’

‘Do they hang from the branches upside down like fruit bats?’ Tahuri asks.

‘I expect so,’ says her mother.

Tahuri decides it’s safe enough to come down. She is very brave. Aroha follows.

I ask Aroha to tell me more about kehua and she says they’re the Maori spirits of the wandering dead, adrift from their ancestral home. They’re not dangerous, just lost souls making themselves useful, though people can get really frightened. Transfer them to another culture and they’d be ghostly sheepdogs, snapping at your ankles to make you do what you should while scaring you out of your wits. Kehua see their task as herding stray members of the whanau back home, so the living and dead can be back together in their spiritual habitation. Kehua are the ones who come to collect your soul after the proper death rituals have been performed: the ones who make you homesick if you’re away too long from the urupa, the graveyard, a beautiful place special to the tribe. Kehua put thoughts into your head to get you there, and not necessarily sensible ones. They’re not very bright, just obsessive in their need to get the whole hapu back together in one way or another.

‘The hapu?’

‘The Maori are very family-conscious,’ says Aroha. ‘Hapu is what they call their kinship group, which is a subgroup of the iwi, or tribe. The taniwha, river monsters, who guard the iwi, are a very different matter. You don’t want to meet them in a place you don’t belong on a dark night. They have teeth and talons and can do you physical harm. Kehua just use mental and emotional pressure.’

I ask her what kehua look like and she says nobody quite knows, you hear them rather than see them, they’re thought to have wings, which they rub together to make a clattering chattering sound. It registers with you as good advice but you’re not wise to listen. They’re like the grateful dead of Central European mythology, or the Jewish dybbuks, or the hungry ghosts in Japan. They try to return you a favour but they understand only what the dead want, not what the living need, so they get it wrong. Poor things. They haven’t much brain. Why should they have? They’re dead.

Aroha has a Master’s in Anthropology from King’s College London. She’s a lovely, warm, rounded, vibrant creature and I am pleased to have her in my basement, and little graceful Tahuri too, who says she has just found the ghost of a daddy-long-legs on my unswept windowsill and holds it up by one fragile leg to examine it.

‘Does this have a kehua?’ she asks, but doesn’t wait for an answer, just drops it into a dusty corner where it joins its family of assorted dried-up, dead-and-gone insects. We all go up for tea in the living world.

The next night it snows and it settles, so when I go down early to work and open the shutters, light streams in and for once the room is actually bright, so I don’t have to turn on the overhead light. The early sun is making the snow sparkle, and the red spindle-berries glow in the hedge the far side of the garden, so it’s all white, green and red, like the Italian flag. And then I see a large rat run across the snow just in front of my window, leaving a trail where his belly dragged. Mice leave rather charming little footprints, rats leave runnels. Well, well, it’s all metaphor.

Running into a trap

Let me remind you. Scarlet is our heroine, Louis her common law husband, and Jackson her lover. She is between her husband and her lover, but although we are already on page 23 she has still not got any further than her grandmother’s kitchen where she has brought food for the freezer. It is this sort of novel, I am afraid. Like a river that overflows its banks, it spreads sideways rather than carves its way forward, plot-wise. Well, never mind. It is what it is. If Scarlet had lived in a more ordinary house we could have got on faster; had she only known, she could have blamed Louis for this too, for making her live in Nopasaran. Yet the unofficial wedding party was held in its garden and she was happy enough about it at the time. So much sexual guilt will do you in. Blame and opprobrium are hurled with abandon by the betrayer towards the innocent party.

Beverley is the grandmother with the new knee and the splendid kitchen in Highgate. So far referred to but undescribed are Scarlet’s mother Alice, a staunch Christian, and Cynara, Alice’s daughter, fifteen years older than Scarlet, who is a staunch feminist barrister. Staunchness runs in the family, though it does seem to have rather bypassed Scarlet. Lola, whom we met briefly pretending to be asleep in the spare room at Nopasaran. Lola, who is Cynara’s daughter and Scarlet’s niece, is a treacherous little bitch, staunch only in her desire to have Louis and Nopasaran for herself.

The goodies from Waitrose that Scarlet unpacks – should you have a yen for such detail – include creamy fisherman’s pie, lamb biryani chicken with lime and coriander, oriental salmon with lima beans, steam-fresh broccoli, par-cooked croissants. (I am really hungry as I write this – I have had no breakfast and it is already lunchtime.) Scarlet, as we know, had hoped to be out of the house by mid-morning, but now that she has rashly blurted out the truth, her grandmother will clearly not let her go without further discussion. Scarlet wishes she’d stayed quiet and waited for news to seep through to friends and family in the normal way. As it is there will be uproar enough when they find out.

You can’t do this, Scarlet, her mother will say. Just stay where you are and see it through. You inherit instability from your fathers. Both you girls do. I will pray for you as ever – what else can I do? – but sometimes I feel I’m wasting God’s time.

You are, you are, Scarlet will want to say. Not that there is a God. And Alice will want to reply, What are we then? A plague of woodlice on a rock hurtling through space? So they will not have the conversation. The subject is too fundamental. Neither mother nor daughter is quite prepared to cut the other off. Both hope the other will recover their reason and believe as they do.

Scarlet’s sister Cynara will roll her eyes sigh and say, Out of the frying pan into the fire. Do think again, Scarlet. Louis isn’t so bad, but isn’t there some nice woman you can shack up with? Anyone can see you’re a lesbian. Which they can’t. But then Cynara’s specialty is seeing what she wants to see, not what is, and what she sees everywhere is the villainy of men.

But Scarlet does rather look forward to telling her friends of the severance of her bond with Louis. The more boring ones will no doubt protest briefly and say, You can’t do this to us. We’ve got too used to saying Louis-and-Scarlet. The others, the fun ones in fashion PR, will say, Jackson Wright? Wow! Go for it, Scarlet. But all they know is that Jackson got a lot of column inches for his last vampire film, so their advice can’t be relied upon.

Her uncle Richie, whom she seldom sees, but admires, and who is paranoid on the subject of gayness, will eventually call from Hollywood and say something along the lines of, Oh so Louis finally decided to come out, did he? And Scarlet will leap to Louis’s defence, and in so doing lose her resolve to leave him. Scarlet likes Louis. She is fond of Louis. She just doesn’t love him – at least not today – and certainly not in the carnal way she loves Jackson – and she hates living in Nopasaran – but she does not like others denying his heterosexuality. What would that make her?

She hates the way people just can’t leave other people alone to live their lives in the way they want, but most of all she hates the way she cares what other people think of her. She feels resolve drifting away. She has to get out of here. There is twittering in her ears. She is just not where she should be. She has not run far enough yet.

It is her own fault. She should have kept her mouth shut and said nothing; she could already have escaped from Nopasaran at last, looking out over the Soho rooftops from Jackson’s fabulous apartment in fabulous Campion Tower, in Jackson’s fabulous bed, with Jackson’s fabulous body beside her. Louis has narrow shoulders and few muscles; he is a life-of-the-mind man. Jackson, so far as Scarlet knows, is a life-of-the-body man. All these life-altering things happening, and here Scarlet still is, trying to decide whether moules marinière can be frozen or should be eaten before their sell-by date. Should she put the delicate little white cucumber sandwiches out for Beverley’s tea or not? Will they dry and curl up? Life keeps leaping from the mundane to the cosmic and back again.

As for Beverley, she thinks the girl is looking decidedly shifty. I haven’t described Beverley in any great detail. She looks much like any other seventy-eight-year-old, one who has seen better days and become, as the old do, somehow fuzzy round the edges. But she’s not too bad; when she comes into a room she brings energy with her: she does not deplete it in those around. Her figure remains trim, her heels stay more high than flat, in spite of the recent trouble with her knee. She has a vulgar tendency to wear satins and velvets, and what the unkind would call bling: large pieces of gold and platinum jewellery better suited to evening than day.

The antique yellow-velvet sofa where she nurses her recovering leg is under a window, where tiny, elegant fronds of Virginia creeper, red and green, push in under the frame. In winter it is almost impossible to keep the room warm, in spite of the Aga’s year-round, patient efforts. The north wind can blow in quite cruelly, but it’s not too bad today. The other side of the daffodils the lawn runs down to a little stream that flows between reeds and marks the end of the garden. Someone once even saw a fish here, really tiny, but nevertheless a sign that the energies of nature cannot be denied for ever. In the 1730s a minor tributary of the River Fleet escaped when the rest of the flow was diverted into underground culverts, and has flowed in a trickle through the back garden ever since, to disappear from sight where the brambles and elders of Highgate Cemetery grow thickest, there where Karl Marx’s massive bearded headstone stands.

Beverley’s house Robinsdale too has its history, which should not be ignored. Its very bourgeoisity seems to have attracted to it revolutionaries of one kind or another. It gave them shelter and comfort even while they despised it. A very parental kind of house, in fact, late Victorian, solidly built, if in a rather gloomy Gothic style, double fronted and detached, complete with turrets and, apart from the problem with the windows, fortunate in that its owners and tenants have always maintained it well. But then revolutionaries tend to spring from the educated middle classes, and to keep their own houses in order, whilst undermining the structures that oppress the masses. A wealthy but radical owner of gold mines in South Africa had the house built for his American wife, Ellen, in the 1890s. Here, in the healthy air and light of Highgate, she ran a small progressive school for the daughters of aspiring professionals. She was the one who named it Robinsdale, after the birds who twittered to her on her first inspection of the site.

The school continued in her spirit after her death in 1925, and the famous free-thinker and educationalist Dora, wife to Bertrand Russell, was a frequent visitor in the twenties and thirties. The school closed during the Second World War and was converted in the fifties by its new owner – a founder member of the New Communist Party of Great Britain – into a private dwelling. Beverley, being of a no-nonsense disposition, sees nothing incongruous with the house name, though her children have always found it naff, and don’t understand why she doesn’t just take the name board on the gate away and call it No. 15 Elder Grove, which it is on the council records, or better still, sell it as an old people’s home or a school and live somewhere more practical. But she won’t.

Beverley, as it happens, has vague plans to marry again – she comes from a generation of women who like to be married – but the plans are still embryonic and she will not mention them to her family. Would they carp and agitate, suspecting her judgement and wondering what would happen to their inheritance if some new man, some fortune hunter, were to step in and claim it? They are all principled, in their different ways, and unworldly, not interested in gaining wealth, but they certainly do not want to see it disappearing.

Beverley’s hair is in need of a wash. She likes to look her best, even at her age, in case a new man should walk through the door. She could well afford to hire someone to come in and do it, but when Scarlet suggests it Beverley is dismissive. It seems a needless extravagance. Beverley has seen hard times and good times, and is always fearful that the bad times may come again. She has been widowed thrice. Perhaps she attracts death, for it always circles her, while leaving her alone, other than to dump unexpected wealth at her door. Certainly she sees herself as ‘prone to sudden events’ as an astrologer once described it, something to do with Uranus and Aries being in the ascendant when she was born. Neither her mother nor father was around in her childhood to confirm the exact time of her birth – the father having killed the mother and then himself, as Beverley now relates.

‘You’re not concentrating, Scarlet,’ complains Beverley. ‘I tell you something I’ve kept hidden all my life and all you have is a mild worry about whether or not you inherit unfortunate genes. Well, you do, though two generations down they are quite diluted. God knows what your father brought into the family. But it’s no use. You have sex on your mind. Just finish with the groceries and then fetch me my plant spray.’

Scarlet, surprised, gives up stacking Beverley’s frozen-food chest, and fetches the ugly green plastic flask Beverley uses to mist her geraniums. Beverley lifts the blanket that keeps her warm, pulls up her skirt, and gives her still quite shapely bare legs – albeit the left thigh still badly bruised from the surgeon’s efforts – a quick blast of water, and then asks Scarlet to come closer. Whereupon she aims a similar blast at Scarlet’s cheek, just below the spot where Louis allegedly hit her.

‘I get the water from the stream at the bottom of the garden,’ says Beverley by way of explanation. ‘In the old days the water from the River Fleet was thought to have healing powers. I find it works very well on the computer. When it crashes I give it a quick blast.’

Scarlet pushes back her damp hair in outrage. She presses her fingers where the bruise was meant to be, but feels no tenderness. She cannot think which is the worst conclusion: to suppose that there was no bruise in the first place, or that the water has done the healing. She decides the solution is not to think about it at all.

Down in the basement

I don’t think it’s haunted down here where I write. It’s just that at night there’s a general feel of busyness around me, a sense of movement, an urgency, a stirring in air that’s never quite still. It’s okay, I almost like it, it’s company. Just sometimes, like now, when I’m working late at night and invention falters and I pause and become conscious of my surroundings; and the dishwasher upstairs in the scullery has finished, and the chandeliers in the library above me have stopped tinkling and I know this means Rex has gone to bed, only then do I feel in the least spooked. If I listen hard there is something near by interrupting the silence, and I wish that it wasn’t.

It is a sound I can interpret only as an intent breathing too close by for comfort, and then a hissing and silence, hissing and silence, and a suggestion of the satisfaction of work well done – as if whoever’s standing next to me is inviting me to share their pride. Which I would, I am sure, if only you, ghost, whoever you are, were meant to be here, but you aren’t. You’re out of your time, your time is way back then, when you were the laundress with your steam iron, down here where the basic work of Yatt House has always been done, at least for the longer part of its existence. What I hear is the hiss of steam as a hundred years ago you press the iron on to damp fabric and then lift it again. And press, and lift. It is perfectly possible that it’s the radiators cooling down now the central heating has clicked itself off for the night, but I don’t think so. Go away anyway. This is my room, my space, my year to occupy it. I have work to get on with.