Ladies From Hell (3 page)

By this time a lot of other people were taking an interest, and a similar case to mine had got itself as far as the High Court. The judgement that finally emerged was an all-time lemon. A Social Security handout, it was ruled, was tax-exempt by definition, as anything else invalidated the concept of Relief. Also of course the whole system would at last vanish down a well-earned rathole, though that was never said in as many words. So my five nega wasn’t merely safe, it was bombproof.

I pondered the situation for a time; then I joined National Unity. The Party isn’t banned—after all we’re still a democracy, and proud of it—but for some years carrying a card had meant an automatic ten per cent surcharge. It had to be met, so up went the handout. Which meant I was five per cent better off than I had been on my old Class D. A quick conversion to Scientology paid fifteen and got me parity with a Class C basic; at which point I wrote to Clancy, Am’s mother. She was ahead of me though. She’d divorced Evan—they used one of those DIY instaschemes the Social Democratic Alliance pushed through during its last tussle with the Corridors of Power—so they’d both got their ten per cent loadings as singletons. SocDemAl had also brought in a hare-brained idea about using tax loadings instead of fines; so Clancy lowered the boom. She heaved bricks through the windows of every Funeral Parlour in Salisbury, got herself twenty-five per cent for five years and ended up better off than any of us. I heard her defence was that she could never stand euphemisms.

The Establishment took its revenge of course. Or rather it took a whole series of revenges, each wilder than the last. The first move was to disenfranchise all negatax payers. That
didn’t get to where I lived as I’d never voted anyway; the nearest I ever got to a polling booth was spinning a coin in front of the Recording Officer and getting slung out for cheek. Then they pronounced us second class citizens, which we’d been for years anyway, and banned us from jury service and from holding public office. That rebounded as well; having a class of legally-defined dropouts caused all sorts of piquant problems. There were some more High Court junketings, at the end of which the Pre-Raphs got themselves declared a public charity and there was a rush to adopt us as deductible assets. Owning your own nut case became the in thing overnight; it was a bit like being an eighteenth-century hermit. Which was why Lady A turned up in person one bright morning in a brand new State Alpha and hauled me off to the Ancestral Pile. Clancy, Am and Evan went to Wilton New House, where they’ve done very well; and the Overseers appeared.

That isn’t their proper title of course; they’re Field Liaison and Surveillance Officers, or some such bloody rubbish. But whatever you call them, the effect’s the same. All Class D’s have them now; they live with us, read our mail, bicker over our expenses and snoop generally. To each his priest and whore; it’s a bit like having a personalized super-accountant. If we clean a window for half an Anglo they’re supposed to pocket it and issue a receipt. In theory they never let us out of sight in case we concoct a mischief against the State, though in practice that’s a laugh a minute. They’re supposed to keep our noses to the grindstone too; their salary increments are keyed to our income in some way that’s never been fully made clear to me, so a year or two in the field can be quite profitable for them. But with negatax payers the situation’s very different. The snoopers are still expected to keep the percentages up; but the more we earn the more we
get
, which isn’t the name of the game at all. So either way a negatax Overseer can reckon on getting his balls chewed with monotonous regularity, and the only way the Service can staff the scheme at all is by making it a hyper short cut to Senior Grade. Hence the deepening lines on the forehead of my current watchdog; it’s a situation in which nobody
can win.

In fact, owning your own Overseer can have its compensations. As I said, George was coming on nicely; my first one fancied himself at Scrabble and there was another who was the best sort of chess opponent you could wish for, he always went to pieces if you collared his knights. And there was another, the fourth I think or it may have been the fifth, who played a really mean game of squash. I lost twelve pounds in four weeks after Lady A built the new court; I was quite sorry when he passed on.

I woke up thinking about Clancy. I’d decided I owed her a letter; I wanted to write anyway to find out when Am was likely to be coming down again. But there was a letter from her in the post. James brought it down from the house. He’s a bloody old tealeaf is James, but he does the silver salver bit a treat. I made some coffee, and he sat and had a crafty drag before he went back. Technically of course the Overseer should have opened the mail; but he wasn’t in evidence yet, though there were grampus-type noises coming from the bathroom. So I took the letter into the Barn to read. I could always give it to him later.

“There’s one good thing to note,” Clancy said at the start. “Evan’s got the commission for the mural they were talking about. That’s ten thousand nega at least by the end of the year, so we’re thinking about another car.”

All right for some, sez I. I skimmed through the rest. There was a lot about the new commission; also Clancy had started on her Tytania. We’d all agreed the subject at the last annual gabfest, but Pre-Raphs being what they are nobody else had done anything about it yet. Jill and Barney Wellcome had visited from Devon, and there were some spicy fragments about Merriman and a Class A postcard in Cambridge. Am had got another piano grade and sent her love, but the best news was at the end. “I guess we’ll both be invading you next month,” Clancy had written. “Evan will be down in Soton drawing things on walls, and you know I like working in the Barn. If you can put up with us we might stop over till the Summerfest.” Which was very much OK by me.

I took the stepladder through into the lounge
and fetched a hammer and chisel. I was chipping happily away at the beam when George bowled in on a wave of pricey aftershave. His mood didn’t match the morning. “I hope you don’t think you’re going to make that blasted row all day,” was his opening shot. “You’ve got a living to earn.”

Under the circumstances appertaining it was a quaint remark, but I let it pass. My heart was like the Lark Ascending; the last thing I wanted was an argument. “It’s only one today,” I said soothingly, “And it’s nearly done. Grit your teeth; just one last little bangy.” I climbed down and started sweeping the chippings. “There’s a letter for us by the way,” I said. “It’s on the table. I didn’t think you’d mind if I had a peek first, it’s from a lover.” Clancy isn’t my lover as a matter of fact; never has been, never will be. I think far too much of her. But I wasn’t going to let him in on all my little secrets.

He looked a bit black. I thought he was going to make an issue of it but he didn’t. Instead he picked the letter up, glanced through it and marched off into his bedroom. He was only going to microfilm it for the files, he might just as well have done it on the spot; but he never did. Had his own brand of delicacy, did George.

In the afternoon I took him sketching, to make up. A prunus sapling was in bloom, on the far side of the Estate. The blossom hung fragile and pinkish-white against a background of evergreens. You could spend the rest of your life painting a thing like that; not the flowers, the dark green space of air beyond them.

The Controller turned up a couple of weeks later, well ahead of schedule. Jimmy the One was with me when he arrived, he spotted the black Alpha with the State pennants on its wings creaming its way up the drive. He pinched his fag out, blew through it and set off in pursuit at a fast Butler’s Lope, and I went looking for the Overseer.

We’d only had a couple of days’ notice of the change of arrangements. It had sent George into
a frenzy, dashing forward and back to Town buying everything from Glen Morangie to
petits fours
. Since he was on his best behaviour he lugged me with him every time and it was all fairly sordid; I only hoped I’d get a sniff at one of the corks later on.

When I found him he was still in a flat spin, though everything that could be done had been. We’d swept through and dusted—Lady A even lent us her Treasure for half a day—the Barn had been tidied to sterility and the Work in Progress was set out proudly down its length. I’d left Coventina on the easel and made her the centrepiece; I’d flanked her with the two other paintings I’d done of Am, the costume life and the one I was calling
Lolita 2000
. It had begun as a sort of
Zeitgeist
idea but it was really just Am, at her best and worst. I started it soon after I got George, he’d barged in while I was making the sketches. It gave him quite a turn; Am at fourteen, with her hair up and her knickers in a twist, lolling on the sofa like a cross between the Majas. She stuck her tongue out at him as well. Got a tongue like a bloody anteater, I’d never realized. He still didn’t like the canvas; he’d wanted to shuffle it round and bring one of the cricket series forward, but we’d run out of time.

The delegation was already sweeping toward us across the grass, making a good twenty knots. We went to meet it. The Controller was leading, flanked by a couple of hardfaced Vopo-type characters from Central Security. I took one look at him and decided I didn’t want to know after all. He had a face I’d have liked to paint, if I could have stood the strain; all the planes exaggerated, long nose and massive jaw, dangerous ears, little wide-set gravy-brown eyes. His cranium looked too small for the rest, and his bowler hat perched on it at an angle of menace. He had a way of moving that would have sent Marcel Duchamp’s knees weak, a sort of drifting action of the arms and legs that stressed the planes there too, in flashes of pinstripe and black; and he was getting bigger by the second. “My God,” I said, “the Great Sorn of Middlesbrough,” and made myself scarce. I had to crawl back
out of the woodwork later on though, to explain away the canvases.

He scrutinized each one in turn in a pin-dropping silence, while the Vopos made little sheafs of notes—God knows what about—and George shuffled his feet and sweated. He did essay a couple of comments, to prove the keenness of his stewardship; the Controller regarded him for a moment with no detectable expression, and he went back into his shell with a click. The Overlord went through the sketchbooks, once more in silence; the studies I’d made for the portrait of Lady A, the cricket match stuff, the drawings I’d done in the Wellcomes’ orchard at the last Fest, the lot. Finally he turned back to the three full-lengths. He paced up and down in front of them for a time like an RSM on punishment parade before he delivered himself of his opinion. He was a New Man, all right; he hadn’t even bothered to have his accent psyched out. “That one,” he said, nodding grimly, “yer might call pretty. But if either of t’others comes on to t’market, I’ll ’ave yer for obscenity. Make a note…”

The scribbling redoubled; and I did some Shylock-type bobs and hand-wringings. I don’t mind having a bit of a go when the time seems right; but I wasn’t taking him on, he was way out of my league. “It’s lucky it won’t happen then,” I babbled cheerfully. “Coventina belongs to Lady A, and the others aren’t for sale.”

That spiked the first cannon. But he had plenty of shots left. Like threatening to refer me to the Divisive Activities Committee, getting me drafted into a Socially Profitable Occupation and all the rest. It didn’t worry me too much; it’s been tried already, they know I’m unemployable. But I was still glad when the broadside stopped, and he hauled the Overseer off for his going-over. I sat and smoked a pipe and listened to his voice rising and falling in the distance. It sounded like a summer storm.

Things quietened down after about an hour; I waited till the black car oozed away along the drive,
and went through to the Office. Normally it was out of bounds, but it seemed today was different. George was still sitting behind the desk, like Patience on the Monument but without the smile. In front of him was a virgin bottle of whisky. I looked at it, and so did he. He said, “He’s teetotal.”

I got him a glass, poured a couple of fingers and took some myself. To my surprise he drained his at a gulp, and held the glass out for a refill. He said, “He’s pegging me. Another three years. Of
this
. Hannah won’t stand for it…”

I made soothing noises. “I shouldn’t think he meant it,” I said. “He’s probably not half as bad as he seems. You know, bluff exterior concealing a heart of gold…” He looked at me, and I tailed off.

“He meant it,” he said hollowly. “He signed the Reprimand under my nose. Left it for me to transmit.”

I clucked. “Then try and see it from his point of view,” I said brightly. “It’s probably the only way the poor chap can get an erection.”

The Overseer stared at me for a moment with total blankness. Then he said, “If only you’d paint more
landscapes
…”

I made a pot of tea. It seemed the only decent thing to do. By evening he had recovered sufficiently to take a little Schubert. I let it get dark and played the
Winterreise
. The canvases stood about and listened.

He sat swilling the liquid in his glass till the pickup lifted. Then he said mournfully, “Why do you do it, anyway?”

“Do what?”

“Paint all those young girls.”

I considered. “I like young girls,” I said finally. “So the older I get, the more I do it. Like Father William standing on his head.”

He rubbed his face wearily. He said, “He even changed his mind about the one he said he liked. Wanted to know what that thing was on her arm.”

I turned a light on. The three Personae jumped from gloom. “It’s a brace,” I said. “She strained her wrist at tennis. Just a brace.” I wondered what the hell the Controller
had thought it was anyway. In the mood he’d been in he’d probably taken it as the apparatus of a Nameless Vice.

The Overseer said suddenly, “You fancy her, don’t you?”

“Er … sorry?”

He glared at the canvases. He said, “The girl. Amaryllis. You
fancy
her.”

I said gently, “I
enjoy
her. That’s a bit different.”