Clouds among the Stars. Victoria Clayton

She was panting and trembling. When, in the taxi going home, I asked her what had frightened her she said that people were looking at her and thinking her crazy. She feared she had been iettata – in other words, that someone had cast the evil eye on her. Her belief in this superstition was quite as strong as her devotion to the Virgin. Frequently she made the sign to protect herself against the iettatore, the first and little fingers outstretched and the middle ones curled. After that Maria-Alba rarely went out, groceries were delivered, and I bought most of her clothes, with varying degrees of success.

      ‘Egg?’ Maria-Alba pointed her spatula at me.

      ‘No, thank you.’

      ‘You lose weight. Troppo frequentare with the Russians.’

      I had told Maria-Alba several times that Dodge had been born and brought up in Pinner. I had been touched to discover that his real name was Nigel Arthur Wattles. The staid character this suggested was reassuring whenever Dodge, in militant mood, talked of Bond Street running with blood. But Maria-Alba persisted in believing that all anarchists were Soviets, dangerous political animals bent on the corruption of virtuous females.

      ‘Wearing black makes one look thinner.’

      ‘E troppo lugubre.’ Maria-Alba liked to wear orange, yellow or red, which made shopping for her extremely difficult in these days of punk for anyone under twenty-five, and pastels for anyone over.

      ‘It’s a badge of solidarity with the workers in the textile industry who have to slave all day making gorgeous clothes for the idle rich and who can only afford to clothe themselves in rags.’

      ‘Sciocchezze!’ Maria-Alba put down a plate of food in front of me and frowned. ‘You been doing bad things with that Russian.’

      ‘Honestly, Maria-Alba. I’m twenty-two. Years beyond the age of consent.’

      ‘Allora, bene! You admit!’ Maria-Alba’s glance was triumphant. ‘He give you a baby, certo, e poi un scandalo!’

      ‘How could there be a scandal? Everyone expects actors’ families to have babies out of wedlock. Pa would just be annoyed with me for being careless. Probably Ma would think it rather vulgar.’

      Maria-Alba widened her eyes with indignation. ‘E il bambino? You bring him into the world, with no name and despise by the grandmother! Ah, povero bebè!’

      ‘Harriet! You’re going to have a baby!’ Cordelia, my youngest sister, had come down into the kitchen. ‘Oh, good! I’ve been longing to be an aunt for ages. I thought it would have to be you. I can’t imagine Ophelia letting that stupid Crispin stick his thing into her. Ugh!’ she shuddered elaborately. ‘I’d better find the pram and try to get the rust off.’ She had run upstairs before I could protest.

      ‘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.’

       TWO

      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.