Victoria Clayton - 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.’

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?’