in civvies, was preoccupied only by The Revolution.
Colin was born in 1945. Two small children, in a wretched flat in Notting Hill, then a run-down and poor part of London. Johnny was not often at home. He was working for the Party. By now it is necessary to explain that by the Party was meant the Communist Party, and what was meant to be heard was THE PARTY. When two strangers met it might go like this: ‘Are you in the Party too?’ ‘Yes, of course.’ I thought you must be.’ Meaning: You are a good person, I like you, and so you must, like me, be in the Party.
Frances did not join the Party, though Johnny told her to. It was bad for him, he said, to have a wife who would not join.
‘But who would know?’ enquired Frances, adding to his contempt for her, because she had no feeling for politics and never would.
‘The Party knows,’ said Johnny.
‘Too bad,’ said Frances.
They were definitely not getting on, and the Party was the least of it, though a great irritation for Frances. They were living in real hardship, not to say squalor. He saw this as a sign of inner grace. Returning from a weekend seminar, ‘Johnny Lennox on the Threat of American Aggression’, he would find her hanging up the children’s clothes to dry on rickety arrangements of pulleys and racks screwed precariously to the wall outside the kitchen window, or returning, one child dragging on her hand, the other in a pushchair, from the park. The well of the chair would be full of groceries, and tucked behind the child was a book she had been hoping to read while the children played. ‘You are a real working woman, Fran,’ he would compliment her.
If he was delighted, his mother was not. When she came, always having written first, on thick white paper you could cut yourself with, she sat with distaste on the edge of a chair which probably had residues of smeared biscuit or orange on it. She would announce, ‘Johnny, this cannot go on.’
‘And why not, Mutti?’
He called her Mutti because she hated it.
‘Your grandchildren,’ he would instruct her, ‘will be a credit to the People’s Britain.’
Frances would not let her eyes meet Julia’s at such moments, because she was not going to be disloyal. She felt that her life, all of it, and herself in it, was dowdy, ugly, exhausting, and Johnny’s nonsense was just a part of it. It would all end, she was sure of it. It would have to.
And it did, because Johnny announced that he had fallen in love with a real comrade, a Party member, and he was moving in with her.
‘And how am I going to live?’ asked Frances, already knowing what to expect.
‘I’ll pay maintenance, of course,’ said Johnny, but never did.
She found a council nursery, and got a small job in a business making theatre sets and costumes. It was badly paid, but she managed. Julia arrived to complain that the children were being neglected and their clothes were a disgrace.
‘Perhaps you should talk to your son?’ said Frances. ‘He owes me a year’s maintenance.’ Then it was two years, three years.
Julia asked whether if she got a decent allowance from the family would she give up her job and look after the boys?
Frances said no.
‘But I wouldn’t interfere with you,’ said Julia. ‘I promise you that.’
‘You don’t understand,’ said Frances.
‘No, I do not. And perhaps you would explain it to me?’
Johnny left Comrade Maureen and returned to her, Frances, saying that he had made a mistake. She took him back. She was lonely, knew the boys needed a father, was sex-starved.
He left again for another real, genuine comrade. When he again returned to Frances, she said to him: ‘Out.’
She was working full time in a theatre, earning not much but enough. The boys were by then ten and eight. There was trouble all the time at the schools, and they were not doing well.
‘What do you expect?’ said Julia.
‘I never expect anything,’ said Frances.
Then things changed, dramatically. Frances was amazed to hear that Comrade Johnny had agreed that Andrew should go to a good school. Julia said Eton, because her husband had gone there. Frances was waiting to hear that Johnny had refused Eton, and then was told that Johnny had been there, and had managed to conceal this damaging fact all these years. Julia did not mention it because his Eton career had hardly covered him or them with glory. He had gone for three years, but dropped out to go to the Spanish Civil War.
‘You mean to say you are happy for Andrew to go to that school?’ Frances said to him, on the telephone.
‘Well, you at least get a good education,’ said Johnny airily, and she could hear the unspoken: Look what it did for me.
So – Julia paying – Andrew took off from the poor rooms his mother and brother were living in, for Eton, and spent his holidays with schoolfriends, and became a polite stranger.
Frances went to an end-of-term at Eton, in an outfit bought to fit what she imagined would suit the occasion, and the first hat she had ever worn. She did all right, she thought, and could see Andrew was relieved when he saw her.
Then people came to ask after Julia, Philip’s widow, and the daughter-in-law of Philip’s father: an old man remembered him, as a small boy. It seemed the Lennoxes went to Eton as a matter of course. Johnny, or Jolyon, was enquired after. ‘Interesting said a man who had been Johnny’s teacher. ‘An interesting choice of career.’
Thereafter Julia went to the formal occasions, where she was made much of, and was surprised at it: visiting Eton in those brief three years of Jolyon’s attendance there, she had seen herself as Philip’s wife, and of not much account.
Colin refused Eton, because of a deep, complicated loyalty to his mother whom he had watched struggling all these years. This did not mean he did not quarrel with her, fight her, argue, and did so badly at school Frances was secretly convinced he was doing it on purpose to hurt her. But he was cold and angry with his father, when Johnny did blow in to say that he was so terribly sorry, but he really did not have the money to give them. He agreed to go to a progressive school, St Joseph’s, Julia paying for everything.
Johnny then came up with a suggestion that Frances at last did not refuse. Julia would let her and the boys have the lower part of her house. She did not need all that room, it was ridiculous …
Frances thought of Andrew, returning to various squalid addresses, or not returning, certainly never bringing friends home. She thought of Colin who made no secret of how much he hated how they were living. She said yes to Johnny, yes to Julia, and found herself in the great house that was Julia’s and always would be.
Only she knew what it cost her. She had kept her independence all this time, paid for herself and the boys, and not accepted money from Julia, nor from her parents who would have been happy to help. Now here she was, and it was a final capitulation: what to other people was ‘such a sensible arrangement’ was defeat. She was no longer herself, she was an appendage of the Lennox family.
As far as Johnny was concerned, he had done
