The People on Privilege Hill Read online

  “The vicar?”

  “Yes. It’s in the Milly Ming Trust documents. I often wonder if Amelia Menzies was a bit mischievous. I’ve never met a vicar yet who enjoyed it. It’s a pity there are no women clergy, I say. There may be one day. You never know.”

  The first time I drove to the Centre I sat outside in the car in the parking space that the police always left for us and it seemed a long wait. When Mrs. Stott brought the now childless mothers back at last they looked rather dazed. We asked them where they wanted to be driven but they said they’d get a bus and we passed them soon, standing at a bus stop, giggling and lighting cigarettes. They had pinched faces and heavy breasts.

  “Don’t fret,” said Mrs. Stott. “They’ll have another one next year. Here’s a tissue.”

  “I think they’re brave,” I said, “brave not to have had an abortion. Brave altogether.”

  “They probably never got round to having an abortion,” she said. “More to the point, why didn’t they use the pill?”

  By the end of the sixties things began to change among the clientele of the Milly Ming. The girls complained that they couldn’t have their boyfriends round, or go down the pub or out shopping. They were often aggressive and shouted and fought and walked out. There were some feminists. Numbers fell and there was talk of topping up the Home with the home-less, or even with hip-replacements-in-waiting. The staff deteriorated and the grounds were neglected. The matron gave up evening prayers. The church pew emptied.

  One wet and vacant afternoon I walked across the Common to the Milly Ming to introduce myself as usual to the next mother I was to take to the Adoption Centre. I rang the bell long and hard before someone, bleared with sleep and in bedroom slippers, opened the door and flopped away. In the hall the Reverend Menzies’s old crucifix was hung with coats. Facing it was the portrait of Amelia seated under a palm tree in the days of her foreign travels. She looked, as ever, a bright defiant woman.

  I walked into what was still called the morning room, which was almost bare though there was a little writing desk I hadn’t seen before and a perky-looking woman sitting at it. She didn’t look up. But then both she and the desk were gone and there was only the drab room with the table-tennis table with its broken net.

  A trick of the light.

  A stately Jamaican girl, very near her time, was resting her forehead against the glass of a French window, watching the rain. She turned and said, “So?”

  I said I was to be her driver.

  “Why they always send us old women?”

  “Look,” she said, “you wanna know something? I don’t need no driver. I don’t want no preparations. All I want is out. It out and me out. It’s goin’ to a better life—right? I know. I’ve had two already only don’t tell them here. The first one thinks I’m her big sister. Fine. The second one she likes my mother best and my mother likes her best. Fine. So this one I’m dumping. Right? Old woman?”

  “I see.”

  “And it’s going in a blanket. Right? And afterwards I’m going buying shoes.”

  “I see.”

  “Red stilettos. Don’t look at me like that. Old woman.”

  So then I left the morning room and made for the front door across the hall; but as I passed the portrait whose wide eyes were as usual gazing up the staircase behind me, I turned to look in the same direction and again I saw the woman who had been at the writing desk. Now she was standing looking down at me from the landing, the light behind her. Then she flicked away and there was nothing.

  The Jamaican girl’s voice made me jump and when I turned I saw that she was looking up the staircase too. “Was she there again?” she said.

  “Yes. Who is she?”

  “She a ghost.”

  “Is she a ... happy ghost? She somehow looks a sort of ... sort of a confident ghost?”

  “Sometimes no. Sometimes she been a very unhappy ghost. Jamaicans know about ghosts. At night she walk about, up and down, up and down. One time bad thing happen to her, I guess.”

  “Are you ... are you afraid here?”

  She turned to look at the painting and said, “Look. She in Jamaica there, see. She at Duns River Falls. She happy there, see.”

  “I wonder why she came home?”

  “I certainly do wonder that. Jesus, Joseph and Mary, I do wonder that!”

  There was nobody now on the stairs but I think we were both listening to the silence.

  “Won’t be long. I’ll see you again soon,” I said. “I’m going home now.”

  “You know then, old woman, what’s home?”

  The day came and Mrs. Stott had the flu, and the vicar would be coming with us to the Centre instead of her. Could I manage?

  I said, “This girl’s not friendly. All she wants is shoes.”

  “There you are then,” said Mrs. Stott. “You’ll all be fine.”

  But we weren’t.

  Here on the appointed day was the mother, glorious in a low-cut dress in the hallway of the Milly Ming, and between the crucifix and the portrait the baby in a blanket lay on the floor. And here was the vicar, painfully young and blushing and very good-looking, and the girl couldn’t take her eyes off him. “Here,” she said and handed him the bundle. “Now then, hand him down to me here in the back. D’you want to get in the back of the car with me, Reverend?”

  But the vicar strapped himself firmly in the front of the car beside me. He was nervous.

  Off we went on the long stop-start journey through the suburbs. And through the fumes of diesel from the road outside I began to notice the other smell in the car: fresh and milky and sweet, the smell of a newborn child. It is said to be the same as the smell of new-baked bread. It clutched at my heart.

  So long ago.

  “Why you cryin’, old lady?” came from the back.

  “Remembering my own.”

  “That be some time ago, girl!”

  She fell silent.

  We arrived. We all sat silent, staring ahead.

  Then the vicar found that he couldn’t undo his seat belt. He said that he never could get on with other people’s seat belts. He grew angry, and I had to bend and struggle with it down near the vicar’s thigh, and he began to squirm and clear his throat, and I found that I couldn’t undo it either. We began to bicker.

  I bickered with the vicar.

  And suddenly the girl in the back shouted—she bellowed out—“Jesus, Mary and Joseph! I’ve had enough. Old virgins! I’m off. The shoes can wait. We’re off home.”

  I jumped out of the car, but she was gone with the bundle. The summer crowds passed up and down the pavement, and the world continued on its way.

  I am an old woman now. I live in one of the twelve houses built over the garden of the Milly Ming, which still survives as six enormous luxury apartments. My arthritis is bad for I am almost ninety but I can look after myself and still cut my bit of lawn. Close under the hedge one day I found a tiny marble slab with some initials on it and 1899, the year she came home from Jamaica. Of course it may only be a pet cat: but I put flowers on it at Christmas and Easter.

  THE HAIR OF THE DOG

  The Airedale’s head fitted snugly into the palm of her hand. The walking stick had been her husband’s favourite, a present from their daughter Rosie, a very expensive present from the Burlington Arcade, bought over thirty years ago. Eleanor held the knob tight as she felt about with the ferrule of the stick on the station platform to step off the train. She took her time.

  Then she thought, I must watch out. I’m behaving like an old woman on a stick. I could easily do without one.

  But the dog’s tiny ivory head was a comfort: a reminder of poor George’s firm hand.

  Victoria Station. She hadn’t seen it in years. It was scarcely recognisable as the placid airy forecourt to the line of trains where, when she was young, she had waited for friends. (“I’ll be under the clock. Don’t hurry. I’ll have a book.”) There had been two trains an hour from Brighton, then, and in the nicest of th
em, the Brighton Belle, the rose-coloured lamps on the tablecloths in the buffet car had always been lit.

  Eleanor was not what you’d call old, but she could remember steam. Perhaps even Rosie could remember steam, for Eleanor had taken her when she was small to see the last steam train out of Victoria. They had stood on the bridge at South Wimbledon to watch it vanish beneath them in its cloud of thin air.

  Leaning on the stick, Eleanor watched the station now. The clock, hanging like a white full moon, was not there. There were no unhurried girls reading books. Everything was movement. Strings and streams of alien life all looking angry, resentful or sad. Or driven. People moved at a trot, never touching, never colliding. Sometimes they swept along in groups across invisible currents, confident, unstoppable: like bats from caves at sunset. She stood for a moment gripping the stick, closed her eyes, opened them and stepped into the mêlée.

  She was on her way to lunch at the Goring Hotel, which she remembered as being just round the corner from the station, but now that she had reached the Victoria Street entrance, which was just the same (she remembered all at once that she had once stood here asking people to sign a petition against the execution of Ruth Ellis, the last—please God—hanging in England in 1955), now that she was here on the corner the Goring was nowhere to be seen. Maybe it was to the right, on Buckingham Palace Road. Somewhere around Grosvenor Gardens? This part of London had been her home once and she remembered its street names better than those in Wimbledon where they had moved next, and where Rosie had grown up and been married, and certainly better than the streets in Brighton where she lived alone now. In her mind she could see the white steps and polished brass of the Goring. She knew it still existed because a table had been booked there for this lunch.

  So she would have to get a taxi. And the cab driver would say, “It’s not worth the fare, love, it’s just round the corner.” Then she would have to flourish the Airedale stick and look lame.

  She stood for a long time in the taxi queue (thank goodness she’d come on the earlier train) and eventually it was her turn and the cab driver said, “It’s not worth the fare, love. Just over the road at the lights. Up left and turn right.”

  So she walked to the corner and watched the skeins of traffic run by, and looked across to the memorial to Marshal Foch on his horse with the elegant tail. She had pushed Rosie in her pram to see him every afternoon. Now, the traffic screamed and streamed.

  And there fell one of the mysterious silences that occasionally drop over London: the lull, the pause that happens in no other capital city (George had always said it was to do with the alignment of traffic lights) and that she had forgotten. Tears filled her eyes with the beauty of the silence, its promise. London froze.

  But no, it did not freeze. It warmed. The poisonous air around Eleanor warmed and a cleansing waft drifted towards her, from the park and the wide streets of Belgravia to the north, caressing her hair.

  Then it passed and the clamour returned, the crowds were all at it again, the police sirens and the ambulances. She took a hold on her mind and on the Airedale’s head, turned from the traffic that pawed the ground behind the red lights and instead of right crossed left into Ebury Street where she had come as a bride.

  For two pounds a week they had lived in a couple of rooms above a maker of sculptured memorials and an angel, six foot high, had stared from his window each evening as she came home from the office. Its stone gaze knew when she was first home, which was almost always. It knew that she would have to go out again to buy the supper and that she had less than five shillings. “And after that,” it said, “when you are back with the sausages the phone will ring and you must be prepared for him to say, ‘I’m afraid I’ll be late. Don’t wait for me.’”

  The delicate eighteenth-century house, the whole of the long, eighteenth-century street, had disappeared with the angel long ago to be replaced by this blood-red stretch of four-storey mansions where a one-room apartment cost a quarter of a million pounds.

  But north of it—away she went now, up Eccleston Street and into Belgrave Place and beyond—there were still the magnificent crescents and mansions that her daughter Rosie had beheld for her first two years, enthroned in her Silver Cross perambulator. Eleanor walked towards Grosvenor Crescent and here was a mews, each garage and pastel-painted little house breathing money. Burglar alarms decorated every one of the garrets of the nineteenth-century stable boys, and a chauffeur was grooming a thoroughbred Porsche.

  “Yes? Can I help you?”

  She said, “I knew it here once. There was a little hairdresser,” and he turned away and went on polishing.

  “Oh, but there’s the flower stall,” she said aloud on the corner of Belgrave Square. “Still blazing away.” And with suddenly young feet and the memory of her first high-heeled London boots, her Mary Quant minidress and a particular hat—a silky sou’wester patterned like a Dalmatian—she plunged out in elderly brogues into the almost certain death of the traffic spinning up to Hyde Park Corner, flourishing the Airedale stick on high.

  She reached the farther shore and paused on her stick beside the Artillery Memorial’s bronze figures: private soldiers deep in thought, heads gravely bowed, a fourth lying dead, his tin hat on his chest. Survivors of 1914–18. Eleanor knew them well. She had over the years, when you still drove into London by car, stopped beside them stuck in traffic for ten minutes at a time. She was a pacifist and had regularly marched to Aldermaston but these four had always humbled her, exalted her: obedient, silent, unassailable heroes. They wouldn’t have ended their lives tottering on fancy walking sticks.

  She walked on, over the grass, past the ironic monument to Peace, carefully edged across the next flow of traffic into Green Park where she sat down on a seat facing the palisades of the garden walls of Buckingham Palace.

  Around her, lovers lay in the grass like peasants in a Bruegel meadow but showing more flesh. Among them people ate lunchtime baguettes with both hands. Above it all the sky was high and blue, as high and blue as on the February day just over twenty-five years ago when she had come up to London from the Wimbledon mansion (George’s late nights in the office had paid off) to buy the hat for Rosie’s wedding.

  “We always say, you know,” said the assistant in the small Knightsbridge store much classier than Harrods, “that the wedding hat should be chosen after the hairdo. I hope I’m not being intrusive.”

  What a nice girl, thought Eleanor. I can’t imagine Rosie saying she didn’t want to be intrusive. This girl loves her mother. I know it. Oh, if—. This girl is not too clever and she goes home to see her mother every week. Oh—.

  “Actually, I’m on my way to have my hair done now,” she said, touching her pearls and mentioning a famous name. “I’ve decided to go to the top.”

  “Have you heard of this one?” The girl produced a card. “He doesn’t advertise. It’s entirely word of mouth, but royalty goes. You should ask for Gideon. He’s wonderful with straight hair. He cuts mine.”

  Sun shone down on the girl’s razor-sharp cap of straight hair and Eleanor thanked her and said she would come back to choose the hat later. Then she walked and stood outside the salon where she had the appointment. It was on the curve of a Knightsbridge terrace near Sloane Street and she watched through the acreage of plate glass all the beautiful people reflected in half a hundred mirrors. The faces, chins on chests, were very young, and the hairdressers looked even younger, and were enamelled and glossed like dolls. Everyone looked the same: a box of soldiers. Weighty glass doors with golden doorknobs the size of dustbin lids swung to and fro, and each time they released a heavy scent and loud music into the street.

  Eleanor turned away and walked off. She walked and walked holding the card in her hand until at length she reached a cobbled mews. One of the shabby cottages had rosy lights like the Brighton Belle and shone on the sunny day through trails of ivy and a wandering vine. There was nothing to suggest hairdressing. It was a cross between a tea shop and an orchid
house, and it was silent. She walked in—a jingling bell—and it was warm after the February streets. There were mirrors and basins but bookshelves and climbing plants too, and a sweet damp smell. No one was about.

  “Hello?” she called. “Gideon? I’m to ask for Gideon.”

  A gaunt young man stood at a doorway. “Hi?”

  “I’m told,” she said in her magistrate’s voice, “that you are good with straight hair. Are you Gideon?”

  “I am and I am.”

  “I’m the mother of a bride. Someone recommended—well, I thought of a perm, actually. At somewhere well known. But maybe it’s time to give up straight hair and I’m in the wrong place. I’ll be wearing a hat, of course, for the wedding.”

  “No,” he said. “That’s out of the question. You will not be wearing a hat. And no bag. And no matching shoes. You are not your mother. Sit down.”

  She sat before a looking-glass that showed a green cave under the sea. She saw several young men sliding about in it. They were behind her, watching her. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “This is a man’s hairdresser. I’m the only woman. I didn’t know. This is a barber’s shop.”

  “Certainly not,” he said and took a piece of her hair on each side of her head behind the ears and pulled it down hard in the tips of his fingers. “You have a horrible provincial haircut.”

  “I beg your—”

  Scissors appeared in his hand and he began to cut.

  “Oh! I didn’t mean today. I only came in to make an appointment. The wedding’s not until April.”

  “That leaves us hardly any time. Coffee?”

  “We’re all gay, of course, here,” he said.

  “Oh, well, yes. I realise that,” she said, trying to sound advanced.

  “Now,” he said, “we’ll shampoo you and blow-dry.”

  Years ago, Eleanor had learned how to circumvent the final moment of the ritual of a coiffure, when the client is “shown the back” above the ever-ageing neck. She always closed her eyes and said, “Oh, lovely, thank you.”