All the Beggars Riding Read online

  All the Beggars Riding

  Lucy Caldwell

  For Maureen and for Peter, for everything

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Late May, a Thursday

  The Chernobyl Effect

  The Chernobyl Effect

  The memoirs of Lara Moorhouse

  Fuengirola

  Brompton Cemetery

  The aqua park

  Sunday evening blues

  The other family

  Alfie and I

  Sunday 24th November 1985

  North End Road

  At Mr Rawalpindi’s

  The story of Jane Moorhouse

  Harley Street, September 1971

  The Langham Hotel, 1972

  Orford, Suffolk, December 1972

  Routh, East Riding of Yorkshire, Christmas 1972

  Allenby Mansions, Earls Court, June 1973

  Chelsea and Westminster, July 1973

  Canada, March 1976

  Alfred Jack Moorhouse and everything after

  What happened next

  Tracking them down

  Patrick Michael Connolly

  Afterwards

  It’s over a year later now

  Appendix: transcripts

  Author’s note

  Acknowledgements

  About the author

  By the same author

  Copyright

  The rain of London pimples

  The ebony streets with white

  And the neon-lamps of London

  Stain the canals of night

  And the park becomes a jungle

  In the alchemy of night.

  My wishes turn to violent

  Horses black as coal –

  The randy mares of fancy,

  The stallions of the soul –

  Eager to take the fences

  That fence about my soul.

  from Louis MacNeice,

  ‘London Rain’

  Late May, a Thursday, the morning. Early morning, say six, or half six, but the sunlight is already pouring in, through the curtainless window set high in the slope of the roof, over the narrow bed and the sheets and the bare boards of the floor, flooding the room and everything in it, so that everything feels lit from inside. You are standing, face upturned to the window, breathing in the sun. I can see you, almost: if I close my eyes I can almost see you. A Thursday morning in May, 1972.

  You’ve waited for this day, counting down each morning, as you wait for every second Thursday. Sometimes the waiting – delicious, unbearable – is almost better than the day itself, when it finally comes. The waiting, now, is like a bubble in your chest, and you are light and breathless with it.

  You’ll walk into work today, take the long way and go through Regent’s Park. The flower-beds, the rose garden: they’ll all look like they’re laid out for you, especially, and today.

  The weather has been unsettled lately, cloudless mornings turning into gusty skies and spatters of rain by mid-afternoon. You’re going to go to the cinema – you decided this on the phone last night – a special screening at the Odeon on High Street Kensington of Doctor Zhivago. You haven’t seen the film, and neither has he. Afterwards you’ll dander (his word, your new favourite) back to Earl’s Court, buy groceries on the way, a bottle of red wine, and you’ll cook something simple. Extraordinary how even the simplest of things – the buying of eggs and tomatoes and cheese, the slicing of a lettuce, the pouring of wine into a glass – is transfigured by love. Love. The bubble swells in your chest. You haven’t said it yet, neither of you, but maybe tonight he’ll say: I love you, Jane. I love you.

  The slight shadow that attempts to lace over the edges of things – your mind, the day – you push away.

  It’s a Thursday morning, an early Thursday morning, in May 1972, and you are poised on the edge of it, of everything. You walk over to the record player, propped on a crate in the corner, and put on a record: the B-side of Van Morrison’s ‘Come Running/Crazy Love’. You play it so quietly it’s barely audible – the house is still and the others asleep – but you know the words inside out by now, after two weeks of playing them over and over, until they seem woven into the very fabric of you. Silently, inside, you sing along, and start to take the foam curlers from your hair. You slept in them, so that the curl would take, and when you unpin your hair after work the wave should still be there.

  You wouldn’t change anything, you suddenly think. You don’t know where it comes from, or if it’s an illusion, a trick of the sunlight and the music and a sleepless night, but you know, just know, that everything, in the end, is going to be fine.

  The Chernobyl Effect

  The Chernobyl Effect

  The Chernobyl Effect was the name of the documentary. It was what started things. Late one mid-week channel-crawling night.

  It was one year after my mother died, almost to the date, and I had suddenly realised that I was an orphan now. ‘Orphan’: it sounds ridiculous to call yourself an orphan at the age of almost forty. But that evening, out of nowhere, it hit me – I felt it in my chest, like something physical – I was truly alone in the world.

  My mother was ill for a long time before she died. She suffered from heart disease, which is a grim sort of irony: intrinsic cardiomyopathies, to give the condition its medical name. Unpredictable weaknesses in the muscle of the heart that are not due to an identifiable external cause. It’s one of the leading indications for heart transplant, and indeed she should have, could have, been on the register for one, except that at every stage she point-blank refused. It was her heart, she said, over and over. She didn’t want it ripped out of her – she was occasionally, surprisingly prone to melodrama like that, my mother – and she didn’t want someone else’s heart in her. The drugs they gave her to try and stabilise her, as her condition deteriorated, caused her much suffering and weakness and confusion, but still she wouldn’t change her mind. She was stubborn as hell, my mother, when she set her mind to something. She was young, too: only fifty-nine when she died. Sometimes it felt like one more thing she’d set her mind upon, although it wasn’t as if she was religious, or believed in any grand reconciliation or redemption after death.

  So, anyway, she’d died, and for the first few months things had been indescribably bad, even though we weren’t particularly close. From the outside, I managed to look like a normal person: phoning the agency, getting my rota, seeing the patients, shopping, cooking, all the mundane rest of it. But inside I was alternately blank and lurching with grief, thick and oily, like waves, that would rise up and threaten to swamp me utterly. I won’t try to describe it any more: I’ll only sound histrionic. People kept saying, time will heal, and in a terrible, clichéd way, it does: every day life pastes its dull routines over the rawness, although the rawness is still there. Six months after, I’d begun to feel that I was surfacing; on a good day I might even be above the water, although of course without warning you can still be dragged back under. Then everything happened with Jeremy, and terrible as that was, it was galvanising in the sense that some kind of survival mechanism kicked in and there was so much practical stuff to sort out – a bit like the immediate aftermath of a death – that I was on autopilot for a while.

  I’m not explaining this very well: I’m getting everything jumbled up together. Which, in a way, is what it was; but that doesn’t help the telling of it. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I thought I’d come through the worst of it, when that night – two weeks ago now – I came across that programme on the TV and everything changed.

  *

  The documentary was about the after
math of those explosions that destroyed the fourth reactor at the nuclear power plant near Pripyat on the 26th of April 1986. I hadn’t thought about it in years, but as soon as I saw those infamous, grainy satellite photos of the power plant matchsticked and smouldering, and the rubber trunk-nosed radiation suits, it all came back to me. Sitting cross-legged with Alfie on the brown shagpile rug through Newsround and then all of the other news bulletins we could find, right through to the Nine O’Clock News and BBC2’s Newsnight, at which point our mother came home from work and made us switch off the television, saying it would give Alfie nightmares, which it did, of course: how could it not? The Soviet government was equivocating, and they were starting to detect radiation as far away – as near – as Glasgow. People on panel discussions were saying things like ‘Is this the end of the world as we know it?’

  Our world, that is, Alfie’s and mine, and our mother’s, had come to a sudden, messy and public end the autumn before. Sunday 24th November 1985: the date is seared in my memory. I was twelve, then, twelve and four months, and Alfie had just turned eight, when our father was killed – a freak accident, a helicopter crash in bad weather. Then came the revelations, and the reporters, and soon after that we had to move out of our home and into the grotty, ramshackle rooms on the North End Road. Unsurprisingly I had shut down: closed in on myself so tightly that nothing got through, or touched me, until I saw those first shaky BBC images.

  Within a millisecond or so of flicking to the channel, in less than the time it took me to realise what it was, this swirling, churning welter of things was set going inside of me. As if all the griefs in my life, my father, my mother, and to an extent Jeremy, as if I was mourning all of them: mourning myself and all my other selves.

  I’m getting ahead of myself, I know, jumbling things up again. I do intend to come to things properly, in their own time, in at least approximately the right order. It’s harder to tell a story, though, than you’d think. As I said earlier, lives aren’t orderly, and nor is memory: the mind doesn’t work like that. We make it so, when we narrate things – setting them in straight lines and in context – whereas in reality things are all mixed up, and you feel several things, even things that contradict each other, or that happened at separate times, or that aren’t on the surface even related, all at once. So I need somehow to convey the sensation of chancing on this documentary, so late at night, when what I was probably searching for and expecting was something banal and mind-numbing, anaesthetic, like reruns of Friends. Seeing the Chernobyl footage, and understanding on my pulses what it was, and the surreal sensation of being there a year after my mother died and at the same time it being five months after my father had died: as if both things, both times, were happening at once. I’m really not explaining this very well. It was as if there was no distinction between times and they were all just overlaid on top of each other, the same things happening again and again on their little loop in a hellish eternal present. And in that instant, I knew I had to do something: I was trapped and I needed to do something, change something, before it was too late.

  If you’ve ever had a panic attack, you’ll know what I mean. The feeling of everything happening at once, everything closing down on you, and in on you, and there being no way out, and worse than the physical is – and yes, this sounds over-the-top, too, but there’s no other way of putting it – a creeping, almost existential, sense of doom.

  The thing I just said, about separating strands out, and putting them in order, a beginning a middle and an end, and trying to understand them: that moment is when I decided – more than decided, knew – that that was what I needed to do, had to do. As if the telling of the story could somehow save me.

  Perhaps things will make more sense once I have explained the documentary a little.

  The Chernobyl Effect was made maybe ten years after the catastrophe. It consisted of a series of interviews with survivors from Pripyat and evacuees from the surrounding villages, and two doctors or scientists with deliberately distorted voices and blacked-out eyes. The doctors, or scientists, were the least interesting: they talked in solemn chains of statistics and made predictions about percentages and roentgens per hour. But the survivors – or ‘victims’ might be a better word, because there was nothing triumphant about them, no sense that they’d overcome – they were twitching and palsied, clinging on to life by their flaking fingernails. Hardly any of the men spoke. It was the women who wanted to tell their stories. The women, with their craggy, sunken faces and teeth like pickled walnuts, looked like grandmothers – older than grandmothers, like ancient crones or hags from Belarusian folk stories. But most of them were no older than me, and some of them were five, ten years younger. When the reactor exploded, they’d been nineteen, twenty-one, twenty-four. Newlyweds, young mothers, strong, healthy wives. Most of their menfolk worked at the plant, and they supplemented the wages by keeping chickens, and maybe a cow; by growing potatoes, cabbages, and a few rows of black radishes. The day of the explosions was a Friday. At about midday, word got around that there was a fire at the plant. As the sun set, they watched it in the distance, and it was wilder and more beautiful than you could ever imagine, they said, the flickering streams of colour and shining light, like something from an American movie. They piled outside to watch it, passed around bottles of the local spirit, let their children stay up way past their bedtime. The word had spread to villages further afield by this time, and family, friends came in cars or on bicycles to see the unearthly light and the showers of sparks – like fireworks, on an indescribable scale – holding their children on their shoulders so they too could see and remember. No one knew how dangerous it was. Even the next morning, when the streets filled with tanks and gas-masked soldiers, they weren’t scared. It was reassuring, one woman said, to think that the might of the Army had come to help them. They were to leave for a few days, the loudspeakers said, just as a precaution, so the scientists could do tests and the firemen could wash down the roads and buildings. They were to take with them essential documents only – identity cards and papers, marriage and birth certificates – and schoolchildren could bring their books, but that was all. Even now, the women said, no one was scared, or if they were, they were just beginning to be. They talked of leaving bread on the table, and spoons – old folks’ superstitions, at their mother-in-law’s or grandmother’s insistence. If there is bread on the table, and a spoon for every soul in the house, then you can come back, and things will be as they were. Some of them – their stories started to fragment now – suspected that something was wrong, and they tried to smuggle out belongings by wearing three dresses over each other, wrapping their babies in extra blankets and hiding in the layers valuables like silver christening spoons, putting seed potatoes in their children’s pockets and hoods. But the soldiers knew, and the soldiers stopped them. Some tried to bring their cats, or the best-laying hens, and were forced at gunpoint to abandon them. Children were crying by now, and some old babushkas were refusing to leave, accusing the government of trying to steal their cow, their goat, their silver, sitting down in the middle of the road or running into the forest, and the soldiers dragged them up and slung them into the army trucks like sacks of manure.

  I’m going into too much detail. This was only the backdrop, so to speak: it isn’t the important part, the part I need to tell. That part came next.

  As the chorus of women started telling of the evacuation and subsequent days and weeks, the camp beds in school gymnasiums and allocation of rooms in damp tower blocks, the fear and rumours that bred from each other, especially once the sickness started, the nausea and vomiting and diarrhoea that affected most of them, but the children and infants worst, the blister packs of iodine tablets and half-gallons of milk distributed to each head of household, the hair loss and weight loss and ulcerated skin, the doctors who wore rubber suits and masks even when weighing and examining babies – as they spoke of these things, they grew visibly more upset until one by one they refused to talk any more
. They got up and walked away or turned their faces from the camera, until the documentary cut to a picture of a graveyard and a voice-over began about mortality rates and radiation sickness in children.

  Then a new story began. Compared to this story, the Pripyat survivors’ tales paled. You understood they’d been – pardon the grotesque phrase, but this is what it seemed like – a sort of warm-up act.

  The second story took the angle of the workers at the plant, the ones who’d been there on that Friday. Most if not all of them were dead, the voiceover intoned; they’d died within weeks. The documentary crew had been unable to track down many surviving relatives who were prepared to talk to a camera: the narrator hinted at obstruction by politicians, and veiled threats, and thwarted leads. This was, as he reminded us, little more than a decade after the incident. But they’d found one widow, Nastasya, they called her, although that wasn’t her real name. She sat in profile to the camera, so that most of her face was in shadow. Her black headscarf was tightly bound under her chin, and her voice, in the gaps between the translation, was low and rasping. On the day of the explosions, she was twenty-two, and she had been married for three months and seventeen days. I could tell you the hours, too, she said. I could tell you the minutes and the seconds, because we were newlyweds, and each hour and minute and second was a kind of wonder. We said I love you many times a day, and I think now that we didn’t know what those words meant. Her husband was a worker at the plant, she said, and they lived in the dormitory with the other workers and wives, a seven-storey block about half a mile from Chernobyl. Their room was on the fourth floor, facing north, and when they heard the blasts they got up and went to the window – it was about half past one in the morning – and they could see the flames. Her husband, Aleksander, was working the early shift, from six to six, and she tried to persuade him to come back to bed, but he was already buttoning on his shirt and overalls and said that it was his duty to help, they had been drilled for this, she must go back to bed and keep all the windows closed.