The Upholstered Apocalypse

‘they’re all a little mad,’ I told Sally, pointing to the swirl of excited bubbles in the Jacuzzi. ‘A strange fringe group. Huge obsessions floating around a cozy living room. It’s useful to see just how odd apparently sane people can be.’

‘So they’re harmless cranks?’

‘I’m not sure they’re harmless. They’re in the grip of some bizarre ideas. Abolish the 20^th Century. Ban tourism. Politics, commerce, education - all corrupt.’

‘It’s a point of view. They are a bit.’

‘Sally . . .’ I smiled down at her, lying comfortably in the whirl-bath with a stack of fashion magazines, the pic­ture of comfort and security. ‘See it in context. This is Kropotkin with pink gins and wall-to-wall Axminster. These people want to change the world, use violence if they need to, but they’ve never had the central heating turned off in their lives.’

‘They’ve got you going, though. You haven’t been so fired up for years.’

‘That’s true. I wonder why . . . ?’ I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror, hair springing from my forehead, face as tense as the Reverend Dexter’s. I seemed twenty years younger, the newly graduated man of science with an askew tie knot and a glowing desire to straighten out the world. ‘I might write a paper about the phenomenon. “The Upholstered Apocalypse.” The middle classes have moved from charity work and civic responsibility to fantasies of cataclysmic change. Whisky sours and armageddon

‘At least they cared for you. This doctor, Richard Gould -I looked him up on the net. He helped to invent a new kind of shunt for babies with hydrocephalus.’

‘Good for him. I mean it. He never let me see his face -why, I don’t know.’

‘Perhaps they were having you on.’ Sally caught my hand as I prowled the bathroom. ‘Let’s face it, dear. You’re just waiting to be shocked.’

‘I’ve thought about that.’ I sat on the edge of the bath, inhaling the heady scents of Sally’s body. ‘I’d been pushed around by the police, and they knew I was an amateur. Hard-core demonstrators never get knocked to the ground — far too dangerous. They do their thing and skip off before the rough stuff begins. Like Angela, the Kingston housewife at Olympia. Really quick on her feet, and happy to leave me to face the music.’

‘This film lecturer helped you. She sounds sweet.’

‘Kay Churchill. She was great. Completely scatty, but she saved me outside the court. I was in a bad way.’

I waited for Sally to sympathize, but she lay passively in the bath, playing with the bubbles on her breasts. The X-rays at the Royal Free Hospital had shown no rib fractures, but the cat fanciers’ boots had bruised my spleen, as Joan Chang predicted. Collecting me from the hospital, Sally glanced at the plates with a perfunctory nod. She was immersed in her own perpetual recovery, and had no wish to share her monopoly of doubt and discomfort with anyone, even her husband. In her mind, my bruises were self-inflicted, far removed from the meaningless injuries that presided over her life like an insoluble mystery.

‘David, towel . . . When are you going back to Chelsea Marina?’

‘I’ll give them a miss. They’re not the kind of people who set off bombs.’

‘But they mentioned Heathrow. You overheard them when they thought you were asleep. That was the first thing you said when the cab driver helped you up the steps.’

‘They were trying to impress me. Or impress themselves. They feed on conspiracy. This biker priest - he’s frightened of violence. Something happened in the Philippines, long before Heathrow.’

‘What about Dr Gould? When he was fourteen he was hauled before a juvenile court, charged with an arson attack on a Kilburn department store.’

‘Sally, I’m impressed.’ I watched her fasten the bath towel under her arms. ‘You should be working for the Antiterrorist Squad.’

‘It’s all on the net. Dr Gould has his own website. He’s uploaded his testimony to the juvenile court - he’s obviously proud of it.’

‘Being arrested by the police is part of the thrill. The teacher catches you out, and you feel loved.’

‘The department store in Kilburn was built by Gould’s father.’ Sally examined her teeth in the mirror. ‘He was a commercial architect and builder. When he died the firm was bought up by McAlpine’s.’

‘Sally . . . take it easy.’

She stood with her back to the mirror, body and hair swathed in white towels, staring at me through the drifting steam like a priestess at an archaic marine shrine. Looking into her eyes, I sensed that I could see my whole future.

‘David, listen to me.’

‘For God’s sake . . .’ I opened the window, letting the steam float away. ‘Sally, you’re obsessed by this.’

‘Yes, I am.’ She held my shoulders and made me sit on the edge of the bidet. ‘We have to find the truth about the Heathrow bomb. Or Laura’s death is going to hang over you for ever. You might as well have her mummy sitting in your chair at the office.’

‘I agree. I’m trying to pick up the scent.’

‘Good. Don’t give up. I want to lock the past away and turn the key.’

Sally broke off when her mobile rang. She greeted a friend and strolled into the bedroom, listening intently. She cupped the phone and said to me: ‘David, there’s a picture of you in the Kensington News.’ She sat on the bed and huddled happily over a pillow. ‘He was fined. A hundred pounds. Yes, I’m married to a criminal .

I was glad to see Sally enjoying my new-found fame. I had taken a week’s sick leave from the Institute, but Henry Kendall rang to confide that Professor Arnold was unhappy with my conviction. Corporate clients might prefer not to be advised by a psychologist with a criminal record. Clearly my status had slipped, along with my claims on the director’s chair.

Luckily there was a long tradition of maverick psychologists with a taste for oddball behaviour. My mother had been a psychoanalyst in the 19605, a friend of R.D. Laing and a familiar figure on CND marches, joining Bertrand Russell at anti-nuclear sit-ins and being glamorously dragged away by the police. Late-night discussion programmes on tele­vision were as much her natural home as the consulting room.

As a child I watched her on my grandmother’s TV set, deeply impressed by the caftans, waist-length black hair and fiercely articulate passion. Free love and legalized drugs meant little to me, though I guessed they were in some way connected to the friendly but unfamiliar men who appeared on her weekend visits, and to the home-made cigarettes she taught me to roll for

her and which she smoked despite the protests of my wearily tolerant grandmother.

For all her acclaim, her magazine profiles and pronounce­ments on Piaget and Melanie Klein, her knowledge of mother­hood was almost entirely theoretical. Until the age of three, I was brought up by a series of au pairs, recruited from the waiting room of her once-a-week free clinic - moody escapees from provincial French universities, neurotic American gradu­ates unwilling to grasp the concept of childhood, Japanese deep-therapy freaks who locked me into my bedroom and insisted that I slept for twenty-four hours a day. Eventually I was rescued by my grandmother and her second husband, a retired judge. It was some years before I noticed that the other boys at school enjoyed a social phenomenon known as fathers.

By the time I joined University College London my mother’s hippy phase was long over, and she had become a quiet and serious-minded analyst at the Tavistock Clinic. I hoped that her maternal instinct, suppressed through most of my child­hood, might find a late flowering. But we never became more than friends, and she failed to attend my graduation ceremony.

‘She sounds a bitch,’ Laura had commiserated, inviting me to join her family at the lunch after the ceremony. I replied truthfully: ‘She’s a free spirit. She loved me deeply — for ten minutes. Then it was over.’

At the Adler, dealing with dysfunctional families, I found that all too many parents were indifferent to their children. Popular myth assumed that child-parent relationships were rich and fulfilling, but in some families they were absent altogether. Laura stepped into a waiting vacuum; with her aggressive emotions, fiercely for or against me, she was the opposite of my mother. After my gentle grandmother, treating the smallest tantrum with the wisdom of Solomon, Laura had been a typhoon of cleansing passion.

Now my mother was an elderly patient in a Highgate hospice, dying of inoperable ovarian cancer. Her huge and still swelling abdomen made her look pregnant, a seventy-year-old woman still unaware that she was with child. Sitting beside the bed of this barely responsive being, I realized rather sadly that I was no longer very interested in her.

of an ambivalent will to walk. We had exchanged confidences during my visits, friendly teasing with only the slightest hint of flirtation. But at that moment, as she hobbled towards me on her sticks, wrists white with pain and anger at herself, I had known that we would become lovers.

As always, a perverse calculus refreshed and redefined the world.

‘David . . .’ Sally switched off her phone. ‘You’re a celebrity. Dinner invitations are pouring in . . .’

‘Heaven forbid. I’ll have to think up a party turn.’

‘Don’t mock yourself- you do that too often.’ Sally stared at me with real respect. ‘You’ve fought with police. How many people can say that?’

‘How many want to? They’re on our side.’

‘Almost. What about Heathrow? It’s the one real lead we’ve had. David, you’ve got to change your mind.’

‘All right, then. I’ll go back to Chelsea Marina and ask around. This clergyman, and the people close to Kay Churchill. I’ll see if I can contact Dr Gould.’

‘Good. We need to know what happened to Laura. A lot hangs on it, David

There was more than a faint threat in her voice. She still wore the bath towel around her body, and was waiting for me to leave the room before tossing it onto the bed, a sure sign of a slight estrangement between us. She had decided that Laura’s pointless death carried some kind of defiant message that would at last bring closure to my first marriage.

But already I knew that my quest for Laura’s murderer was really about my second marriage. Avoiding Sally’s stare, I remembered the furious knotting of her eyebrows when she took her first unaided steps in the orthopaedic ward at St Mary’s. Damp with sweat, her nightdress clung to her skin, and I could see the muscles coming alive in her thighs, diagrams

 

 

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