The Lubetkin Legacy

Berthold: Mrs Penny

Mrs Penny, the Council’s housing officer, was twenty minutes late. I’d tried to telephone to cancel her visit of course, feeling too devastated to do battle with the tentacles of bureaucracy so soon after Mother’s sudden death, but the Town Hall phone was constantly engaged and I gave up in the end. Well, it was probably best to get the tenancy business out of the way sooner rather than later. At last the doorbell rang. Ding dong!

‘Ding dong! First of March, 1932! Ding dong!’ Flossie chimed, to make absolutely bloody sure I’d heard.

Mrs Penny stood on the doorstep, reaching out her hand.

‘Mr Madeley?’

Should I correct her? I let it pass, and took her pale manicured hand. It was like shaking a lettuce leaf out of the fridge — cold and limp, not what you’d expect from such a warm solid-looking woman.

‘Come in. Come in. I appreciate your …’ What exactly did I appreciate? ‘Your hair.’

Her hair was shiny and a slightly unnatural copper colour, swept up in a curled ponytail with a deep fringe and long curled sideburns, sort of country-and-western singer meets rabbi. She ignored my comment and advanced into the entrance hall, releasing a powerful floral perfume in her wake. Was she my type? She was in her fifties, I guessed, not unattractive for her age, but way too old for me. She was a bit plump, too, though her high-heeled shoes made her legs look shapely. A saucy pink silk scarf was tucked into the lapels of her municipal-colour raincoat.

‘It’s ages since I’ve been in one of these big old family flats.’ Her voice was pleasant and low, with a slight hesitation, not quite a stutter, that at once disarmed me. ‘There’s not many left with the Council now. They’ve mostly been bought up and sold on under Right to Buy. I’m surprised this one wasn’t. It would have been quite an —’ she stopped, aware she was committing a faux pas.

‘Investment. Mum didn’t agree with it.’

Mother could have bought the flat for £8,000 back in 1981, after the Right to Buy came in, but she had refused. ‘I told them to stick their offer where the sun don’t shine,’ she’d told me. ‘I said it belongs to the people of this borough and it ain’t yours to sell.’

I’d already left home by then, and it never occurred to me that I would return one day, let alone seek to inherit the tenancy, so I was mildly amused at Mum’s fury. Needless to say, when Eric Perkins next door — now resident in the South of France — resold his for £38,000 a few years later, she was regretful and envious. But by then she had divorced Lev Lukashenko, and he’d disappeared with all her cash.

Mrs Penny peered in through the open door to my mother’s bedroom, where the assortment of crumpled lingerie was still strewn on the floor.

‘You do sometimes wonder,’ she said cryptically, making a note.

She also noted down that my mother had lived in the flat since it was built, and that I had lived there from birth until I went to university, and then again for the last eight years. She didn’t ask why I had come back eight years ago, and I wondered whether, if she had, I would have told her the truth. She asked about siblings, and I explained that my half-brother from my father’s previous marriage had moved out many years ago.

‘Mmm. I always longed to live in one of these big modern flats. I grew up in a poky terrace in Hackney. It’s nice that you can support Mum, and help her keep her independence in today’s challenging environment.’

There was something so sympathetic in her manner that I was on the point of pouring my heart out, telling her about my daughter Meredith’s death and the bear pit of depression, the split-up with Stephanie, the stutter, the dead end of my career, the eviction from my bedsit, the hospitalisation, the valiant way I had fought back with Mother’s help against the bloody injustice of life.

A sudden squawk from Flossie interrupted my train of thought. ‘Shut up, Flossie!’

Yes, Flossie was right — I must shut up. Despite her niceness, she was the local agent of ‘Them’ — the shadowy bureaucracy that Mother had warned me about — probably on a reconnaissance mission.

‘She sup-ports me too,’ I replied. ‘We look after each other.’

‘I’ve got this tenancy registered to a Mr and Mrs Madeley,’ she said. ‘Is that right?’

‘She remarried. She’s now Mrs Lukashenko.’

‘Luckychinko? That’s a pretty name. Chinese, is it?’

‘Ukrainian, actually. Her last husband was Ukrainian.’

‘Mm.’ She scribbled something in her file.

Mrs Penny was impressed, as most people are, by the sitting room with its rooftop view over London towards the City. My father, Wicked Sid Sidebottom, Mum’s second husband, who’d been a bit of a handyman when he wasn’t being wicked, had put up the bookshelves in the living room, giving the flat a genteelly bohemian air, though the books were mostly his thrillers and Mum’s romances, interspersed with a few leather-bound classics for gravitas. The floor was carpeted with Persian rugs, rescued by Lev ‘Lucky’ Lukashenko, her last husband, from a fire-damaged warehouse — they still retained a faint whiff of their smoky odour. The walls were cluttered with pictures and photographs which had fascinated me as a child, though now I barely noticed them. Without wanting to appear snobbish, I would guess it was a notch above your average council flat.

‘My, it’s spacious! May I?’

Without waiting for a reply, she opened the door to my bedroom and stepped inside. There was something so presumptuous, so rudely intrusive, in this action it was as if she had yanked down my underpants to examine my private parts. Worse, in fact, because at least I can confirm that my privates are clean. My room was as untidy as Mum’s but in a different way. Dead coffee cups, stacks of newspapers and theatre magazines, sports shoes, T-shirts and cycling gear instead of soiled silk.

‘I’m afraid it’s a bit of a mess.’ Why the hell was I apologising to her?

‘Don’t worry. You should see some of the places I visit, Mr Luckyshtonko. Is that another bedroom you’ve got through there?’

Alarm bells started ringing in my head and Mother’s last words rang in my ears. I remembered the beep … beep … beep and the terrible groan when it stopped.

‘It’s just a small study.’

What I didn’t say was that when Howard lived with us — he was my father’s son by a previous marriage — that little study had been my bedroom. What was it Inna had said about the under-bed tax? My heart thumped. While Mrs Penny was taking notes, I decided to make a pre-emptive move.

‘I would like to register the tenancy in my name. Would there be any p-problem with me taking it over from my mother?’

‘Hm.’ Mrs Penny sucked the end of her biro nervously. ‘No, not normally a problem, Mr Lucky-s-stinker. You need to satisfy certain conditions. For example, you would need to demonstrate your relationship with the tenant, and you would need to provide evidence that you have actually lived here as your main abode for the last two years.’

‘Fine. No problem.’

‘But in the challenging currently prevailing climate of acute multi-causal public sector housing defectiveness, I mean deficiency, and a major increase in the number of deserving qualified decent hard-working local families on local authority waiting lists, the Council is spearheading a multi-fanged, I mean — pranged. No, sorry, I mean a multi-pronged initiative. To counteract incidence of under-occupancy in the borough.’ She spoke too fast, mangling the words between her teeth. ‘It means that a tenant in receipt of housing benefit might incur an under-occupancy charge. According to the Council’s newly formulated criteria, this flat could be classed as having too many rooms.’

‘Too many rooms?’ She should see where George bloody Clooney lives.

‘I’m just doing my job,’ she murmured, blushing rather sweetly and lowering her head to flick through her file. ‘But don’t worry, the rule doesn’t apply to pensioners. Your mother is still living here, isn’t she?’

‘Yes.’ As I said it, a spasm tightened my jaw. But it was too late. The word had bolted. ‘She’s just popped out to the shops,’ I added, for realism.

Mrs Penny smiled. Her face was pretty, her features delicate and doll-like, despite her age. ‘Oh, where does she go for her shopping?’

‘Er … just around the corner.’

‘I live locally myself. The area has improved so much, hasn’t it? There’s even a Waitrose not far away.’

‘Mm.’ I made a mental note to avoid Waitrose from now on. ‘She goes out quite a lot.’

‘Important to keep active at her age. How old is she, by the way?’

‘Eighty-two.’

Mrs Penny made another note.

‘Well, the easiest thing would be for her just to sign a little form to put the tenancy jointly in your names, in the event of her death or mental disability. But no rush. Just keep us informed of any change of circumstances, won’t you, Mr Looka-skansko?’

‘Of course.’

She stowed her notebook in her handbag.

I watched through the window as she crossed the grove and squeezed herself into a small red car parked on the far side. Then I flopped down on the sofa. The whole encounter had been far more stressful than I had imagined. Fortunately the sherry bottle was not quite empty.

‘God is dead!’ Flossie called.

‘Shut up, Flossie.’

‘Shut up, Flossie,’ Flossie retorted. The Dom‒sub relationship only applied with Mum. She and I would have to fight it out now.

‘Shut up, Flossie. I need to think!’

What I was thinking, as with a trembling hand I poured the last drops of sweet sherry into a chipped crystal glass, is that frankly, when you think about it, one dotty old lady is pretty much like another, isn’t she? If a substitute were to appear in Mum’s place, who would know the difference?