from the outside High View looks solid and grand enough. It has recently been converted from the factory it once was to luxury apartments, but keeps many of the original features, including its large windows, and interior corridors still in the original small red brick. There is a doorman, George, who lives on the premises. Doralee and Peter are lucky enough to have the penthouse flat – a mere five floors up, but still giving them a view to the west of the city and an expanse of sky, from which they can observe the brilliant sunsets of the last days of Empire. They do not see it like this, of course, though Doralee’s father Graham sometimes gloomily mutters words to this effect. Rather they see themselves as living on the brink of a bright new world, in which all will be fair, and the nations of the earth glad and wise, and as one.
When Doralee flung open the window to air the room, the edge of the curtain blew in and caught the vase – long red roses given to her by Peter when he came back from work the previous evening – and toppled it.
The bed would have to be stripped and the mattress exposed to the air to dry: she would be late for her Pilates class. She felt vaguely vengeful: the vase would have to go down to Age Concern. There was no time in her life for the agents of misrule; for accidents or inefficiencies, or cheap vases with not sufficient weighting at the base. Everything has to go. She sponged the mattress down, first unbuttoning the cover and removing it, but a water stain would undoubtedly be left. Fortunately the roses, though perfect, long stemmed and without thorns, seemed to have very little to do with nature and had not clouded or coloured the water at all. She asked Peter to drop the cover down to Kleene Machine round the corner in Wilkins Parade, together with her once worn black dress with the thin satin straps, on which some idiot had dropped champagne, and a couple of Peter’s shirts.
Kleene Machine offered a next-day delivery service. Doralee suspected she paid over the odds for it, but completed work could be left downstairs with George the doorman, and that was convenient. If he wasn’t at his desk in the lobby, as sometimes happened, you just opened his cupboard yourself and took the clothes from the rack. The other tenants – there were eight flats in the building, a new conversion of what had been originally a children’s home, then a sweet factory, then a makeshift warehouse, and was now a much-sought-after apartment block – had so far shown themselves respectable and honest. Someone had once taken her Armani white blouse with the frilled cuffs but she accepted it had been a genuine error and George had been able to run the culprit to earth. Sometimes on a hot day you got a waft of a sweet spicy warm smell that seemed to permeate the corridors. Doralee worried about the drains but George said that was only the Indian sweet factory asserting itself and perfectly pleasant. Once she swore she could hear children playing up and down the corridors, and complained to George, but he said that was just sound waves still drifting in from the time when it was a children’s home. He had an explanation for everything, Peter remarked, so long as it enabled him to do as little as possible and go back to sleep.
The instructions that had come with Doralee and Peter’s foam mattress claimed that unlike the products of old-fashioned competitors this mattress did not have to be turned. Doralee turned it nevertheless, every Saturday morning before she went to the supermarket, just to be on the safe side. Peterloo – her pet name for her partner Peter – would help her. They’d turn the mattress together, loving the thump it made as it bounced after falling onto the wooden base, and the little spurt of dust which followed, which proved the claims of the manufacturer to be in error. Foam rubber does attract and absorb dust – not to the extent that upholstered mattresses do, of course, but perhaps, as Doralee feared, more than enough to harbour the mites and other tiny creatures which settled around all larger ones. By such small shared pleasures are good marriages made. True, this was not a marriage, but a close and even harmonious partnership, albeit unblessed by higher powers.
If Doralee was a stickler for efficiency and hygiene, it was perhaps because her mother Ruby had been the opposite. These things are meant to go in sequence, each generation over-compensating in the interests of a balance which never arrives. Ruby, the mother, had been generous-hearted and affectionate to her children and, after her husband had gone, to a number of men, all of whom Doralee detested.
Ruby, born a bright and wilful girl in Liverpool, had married the son of a country parson and come to live in the country in her thirties. She had embraced county life with enthusiasm, even as her husband learned to eschew it. She rode to hounds while Graham joined anti-vivisection movements, and she turned litter louts of travellers from her land as he fought for the human rights of nomads. She became high church as he declared his faith in socialism and humanity, and ran the parish council as he turned his vision to the outside world and non-governmental organisations. Graham worried about population density while Ruby had baby after baby. Her energy was extraordinary and her goodwill too: she battered through opposition and hostility, to be accepted in the end by both village and gentry, who asked her to their cocktail parties if not always their dinners.
‘Ruby and I both do good works, but our idea of Good is very different,’ as Graham explained to Eve, the yoga teacher with whom he eventually ran off.
Ruby now lived in the vicarage in which Graham – who had a surprising eye for the main chance for one so technically virtuous – had been reared, and which Graham had been prudent enough to buy in the Seventies, when the Church Commissioners rather unwisely sold off all their properties at rock bottom prices.
Graham, in Ruby’s eyes, had left home babbling of true love and leaving five children. In his own eyes he had left home to save his soul and the world. Ruby, in Doralee’s eyes, was guilty of sins of commission and Graham of sins of omission. Mother shouldn’t have done this and that; Father should have done that and this. Doralee herself simply wanted to get things right. She could not understand why balance was so hard to achieve.
Peter seemed better able to accept his family. Although his mother was Jewish, he felt unburdened by his past. Two generations since her family had given up practising their religion, and Holocaust guilt had barely touched him. He was one of two brothers: their father had died of cancer when he was seven but he had been well insured, not particularly close to his family and his mother Adrienne was a competent woman. She had not encouraged grief or self-pity, and had put both boys into boarding schools and got on with her life. Now she worked for a property company, and it was through her good offices that Doralee and Peter had acquired the loft apartment at a good price. It was a neighbourhood which could go up or could go down, his mother had warned, but her firm reckoned it was going up – indeed, they were investing pretty heavily in their belief that it would – and Peter’s mother seldom got that kind of thing wrong. She had friends in the Planning Department.
Doralee was neat and small, and conventionally pretty, other than that she had wild frizzy pre-Raphaelite hair, which burst plentifully from her head as if all her bottled-up subversive energy was determined to get out. Usually such hair is red, but Doralee’s was straw coloured. She had to colour in her eyebrows to seem to have any at all. She was notable for her shapely behind, once publicly compared by Peter’s editor at the newspaper’s Christmas party to that of Kylie Minogue. It had been touch and go whether Peter’s female colleagues would enter a complaint against Peter’s editor for sexual harassment in the workplace, but since Doralee was not actually an employee of the newspaper, merely an employee’s partner, the matter had been dropped, to Peter’s relief. He just wanted to get on with his work, which he liked: he didn’t want to make a fuss. He was well informed and well-educated: his mother had got him to a good public school, though this was not something he thanked her for. He kept quiet about it: best in the new world to have risen from the ranks in the face of adversity, but it could not be helped. He would rise above the disadvantage.
He went hand in hand with Doralee through a sensible and controllable life, and thought her bum was better than Kylie Minogue’s and had not in the least minded the editor saying so, but kept quiet about