The Lubetkin Legacy (4 page)

One thing you can say about the English weather – it keeps you on your toes; it toughens you up to face the general spitefulness of life. Although it was almost mid-April, black clouds were bunched above the church spire as I cycled back to the hospital later that day, and a sudden cannonade of hailstones forced me to seek shelter under a greengrocer's awning. Bunches of bright daffodils winking from a bucket caught my eye. Good idea. She'd appreciate them.

In the bed where Mother had died yesterday, a new occupant was already installed, a slight grey shape on the freshly laundered palimpsest. But where was the old woman Inna?

‘Sss! Mister Bertie! Come here!'

She'd been moved to a bed by the window. The cardboard bowl had less than a centimetre of mucus. I realised she must be on the mend. Her hair was pulled back into two neat silver plaits coiled around her head and she was wearing elaborate cat's-eye spectacles whose frames sparkled at the corners with diamanté. Behind them her eyes were bright and alert. Even her skin had plumped out so the wrinkles appeared less deep. I guessed that at one time she must have been an attractive woman, with bold dark eyebrows and high cheekbones. Even now, as she turned away from the light, traces of beauty lingered in the curves and hollows of her face.

‘Hello, Inna. I came to see you.'

She accepted the daffodils with a gracious nod, and patted my hand. ‘Aha, you already missing you mama, poor Mister
Bertie. She was great lady. Almost like saint.' Her eyes rolled heavenward.

Although I loved my mother, I couldn't help feeling that Inna was exaggerating a bit. She can't have known her for much more than a day.

‘I've been thinking about our conversation yesterday, Inna. How you don't like living alone.'

Inna cocked her head to one side expectantly but said nothing.

‘I've been thinking … I have a problem … I have a nice flat but … I need …'

‘Aha?'

Did a small smile steal across her face, before she composed it into a look of concern? Some words from our previous conversation popped into my head: gobalki kosabki solatki. I had no idea what they were, but they sounded rather tasty – a step up from a lukewarm takeaway curry from Shazaad's. In stage drama, this is the point at which the gent falls to one knee and kisses the hand of the lady before slipping a ring on to it, but now I simply grabbed her hand and said, ‘Why don't you move in with me, Inna?'

Her lips pursed flirtatiously. ‘You want to make sex wit me, Mister Bertie?'

I wondered for one ghastly moment whether she really meant it. Although I had not given up hope that someday I would once again become an object of desire, this was not at all what I had in mind.

‘No, Inna, no. Truly, nothing could be further from my thoughts. I just want you to make globalki sobachki and slutki for me.'

‘Aha! I understand, Mister Bertie.' She winked. ‘You homosexy no problem for me, okay.'

‘No, it's not that, Inna. I'm not denying that I am homosexual.'
I was not going to be outshone in political correctness by George bloody Clooney. ‘But I'm not confirming it either. Man delights not me; no, nor woman neither. Though by the bloody grin on your face you seem to say so. That's Shakespeare for you.' I have long been intrigued by the question of the Immortal Bard's sexuality, but this did not seem to be the best time to discuss it. ‘All I want is for you to act like my mother. That's not too difficult, is it?' Then a sudden prudence seized me: usually motherhood is for life. ‘Just on a trial basis,' I added.

She may not have heard that last bit, for she was already crossing herself and declaring, ‘Aha, you poor mama! No one can be like her! God save her soul, she is already wit Lenin and Khrushchev and all Soviet saints in heaven!'

I felt a prick of apprehension. Maybe all old ladies are not so alike after all. Inna did seem to lurch wildly between conflicting ideologies, whereas Mother had been unshakeable in her beliefs. Then again, did it matter what she believed, so long as she was still cool with the gabolki kasobki and salotki? And would say the right things to Mrs Penny?

‘I know, Inna. But if you could just pretend …'

Inna arched her eyebrows. Dimples puckered her cheeks. The thought of being desired again, even if for the wrong reasons, had brought out the flirt in her.

‘If you say so, Mister Bertie.'

Curious about what I had let myself in for, I asked, ‘Tell me about yourself, Inna. Where are you from? When did you come to England?'

‘We come in 1992. Husband got research job. Bacteriophage. Wit Doctor Soothill. Very good man. You know him?'

‘I can't say I do. And you …?'

‘In Ukraina I was nurse. But to work in here I got to learn English.'

Thank heavens for that, then. I said, ‘Mother's last husband, Lucky Lukashenko, was from Ukraine. From Lviv, right in the west. She probably told you.'

‘Hah! Lviv is Galicia, not real Ukraina.' She spat into her phlegm receptacle. ‘Galicia only 1939 got in Ukraina. Before was wit Hungary, Poland, Lithuania, Ruthenia, Avstria. All Catholiki. Real Ukraina Orthodox true faith.'

She crossed herself. Behind the diamanté glasses, her fire-coal eyes blazed with ardour. I had heard Lucky Lukashenko going on in a similar vein about the non-Ukrainianness of the population of the east who, he claimed, were all transplanted Russians, people of low culture and criminal tendencies. So I already had some inkling of how touchy these Slavs could be.

‘I born Moldova, but live Odessa,' she added.

‘Odessa? Really?'

All of a sudden she took on a more exotic air, redolent of champagne and caviar, of grand bougainvillea-draped villas and leafy boulevards haunted by Pushkin and Eisenstein.

‘Ah! Odessa. Most beautiful city in world. Beautiful street. Beautiful monument. Beautiful harbour. Beautiful sea. Beautiful moon. Beautiful people all time laughing, making joke, eating slatki, drinking shampanskoye, falling in love.' She narrowed her eyes. ‘You ever been in love, Mister Bertie? Wit lady, I mean, not wit man?'

‘Actually, I was married once.' Okay, so I was letting the side down by not sticking up for gay love, but frankly her obsession was getting tiresome.

‘You mama ev told me. Very bad woman. Ectress.' She wrinkled her nose, as though the very idea carried a noxious whiff. ‘No wonder you gone homosexy.'

Stephanie, my ex, had sniffily described Mother as an interfering over-protective drama queen, and Mother always referred to her in a voice loaded with sarcasm as ‘your darling
wife'. Stephanie had never forgiven me for Meredith's death, and I had never forgiven myself. After my divorce and breakdown, Mother and I had settled into a companionable domesticity, a bit like marriage without the sex, which took place, if at all, off piste. I was the man in her life, and she was the woman in mine. When I had relationships with other women, I didn't bring them home. And by then I think she was past bringing men home – or if she did, she was discreet. I wondered about Inna's love life.

‘So you lived with Dovik in Odessa?'

‘Odessa, Georgia, Krim, Kharkiv. All one great Soviet Union. But in Great Patriotic War many Jews killed in Odessa.' She crossed herself again. ‘Only my Dovik got away. Now I living Hempstead. One day I will tell you my story.'

The beautiful ward sister, coming up to change Inna's phlegm bowl, recognised me and offered condolences. ‘She was a lovely lady, your mother. And a perfect patient. No fuss.'

No fuss. I remembered Mother's last words and the terrible whisperings behind the curtain before I was admitted to witness her death. Tears stung my eyes.

‘I don't know how I'll get on without her.'

‘Still, it's nice you've made a new friend. Mrs Alfandari doesn't get many visitors. Do you, sweetheart?'

Alfandari – what kind of a name was that? It sounded Italian or Middle Eastern, not Ukrainian. Who was this woman I had just invited into my life?

‘Yes, Mister Bertie has invited me go live wit him. I will mekkit golabki kobaski slatki.'

Inna smiled, and for the first time I noticed the black edges of her teeth. Mother's were even and pearly white – though of course they were not her own. I was already having second thoughts about my invitation when the beautiful nurse
beamed, ‘Oh, that's so lovely. You'll have to give us the details for our discharge procedure.'

She smiled, and my doubts vanished as it struck me that in all my fifty-two years I had never been out with a black woman. Now they suddenly seemed to be cropping up everywhere. There was that astonishingly pretty girl in Luigi's the other morning, and now this beautiful nurse. Without Mother's officious appraisal to greet them at the door, I could even invite them to the flat. A cloud shifted and a shaft of sunlight struck my heart. Before me a whole new world of possibilities was opening up.

The storm clouds had completely disappeared by the time I cycled home. The sky was borage blue with scraps of cirrus driven along by a blustery wind that set the daffodils in all the window boxes and forecourts dancing.

‘When daffodils begin to peer,' I sang as my wheels spun along merrily, ‘With heigh! The doxy over the dale …'

It was Autolycus's song in
The Winter's Tale
, which I'd sung at the New Vic in Newcastle, directed by the great Peter Cheeseman. That was back in 1997. Before the Prozac. Before Meredith's death and the break-up with Stephanie. In those days, I still had hair. I wasn't quite George Clooney, but I was on my way.

I crossed the cherry grove and hit the lift button to carry me up to my home on the fifth floor, before spotting the
Lift Out of Order
notice. Again. Madeley Court, the 1952 local authority housing block where I lived with Mum, had definitely seen better days. The paintwork was shabby and the concrete surfaces were discoloured. Even the name-sign had been vandalised many years ago by a friend of my half-brother Howard, a kid called Nige, who had an exceptional head for heights and
a long rope he had filched from the tarpaulin of a lorry he was robbing. He had prised away some of the ornate terracotta tiles, and the missing letters had never been replaced, leaving just: MAD    Y    URT. Mad Yurt. The name seemed apt.

‘One day he'll fall! Splat! Brains spread all over the pavement. If he's got any brains!' raved Mrs Crazy from the balcony of her flat directly below ours, who had narrowly missed being hit by the falling L.

‘Shut up! Stop your shouting!' Mother shouted down at full volume from our balcony. ‘You're lowering the tone around here. It used to be decent before you moved in, Crazy! You think wearing a big cross on your neck makes you holy. Well, it don't! It makes you a bigot!'

Mrs Crazy, whose real name was Mrs Cracey, was the widow of a former East End evangelical minister undone by gambling and alcohol. She and Mum enjoyed that particularly venomous enmity reserved for people who have once been close friends. As the oldest resident, in both senses, Mum felt her status entitled her to respect. Mrs Cracey, a retired dental secretary some ten years younger than Mother, flaunted godliness and social superiority, which after her husband's death from liver failure gradually drifted away from the evangelical and towards the High Church, as evidenced by her purple coat, mitre-like hairstyle conserved under a shower cap, and her penchant for jewellery, including the inevitable flashy gold cross on a chain around her neck. She patronised Lily as a lower-class upstart and a godforsaken communist.

‘I've had more communists than you've had hot dinners!' was Mum's oblique retort as she flicked a long finger of ash over the balcony, the gold and diamonds on her fingers glinting in the sun. She too was not averse to a bit of bling.

That was my first inkling that the community spirit of our block was provisional and mutable, despite the revolutionary
intention of the architect Berthold Lubetkin to design solidarity into the structure of the estate.

Berthold Lubetkin, after whom I was named, was either an old flame of Mother's or a celebrated Russian modernist architect, depending on whom you chose to believe. According to her, Lubetkin's company Tecton had been responsible for the finest post-war public housing in London, and it was a sodding shame that he was best known for the penguin pool at London Zoo. When the sherry sweetened her memory she would sometimes drop hints about a secret love affair with Lubetkin, and weepily confess that it was thanks to him that she came to occupy this prime penthouse flat in the flagship Tecton development.

In an alternative version of the story, Lubetkin was born in Georgia, and Mother got her flat thanks to Ted Madeley, who sat on the Council's Housing Committee alongside the legendary Alderman Harold Riley, who had first commissioned Lubetkin. Riley was a passionate socialist but not much of a looker. Lily admired him, but fell for handsome already-married Ted Madeley. She lived with Ted out of wedlock at first, a shocking enough deed at the time, then she married him, thereby acquiring the tenancy of this desirable flat. After Ted died, she had married twice more and raised two children here (though only I was hers by birth – the other was my half-brother, Howard, my father's son from a previous marriage, of whom more later).