Chalcot Crescent by Fay Weldon

the stock was in the home, not the shop. What was Barbara doing in her life?
    The ‘sitting tenant’ was quite a feature in the street, their rented rooms having been bought over their heads. Such tenants could be bribed, or ‘bought out’ so they could rehouse themselves, and the young ones would go and the old ones would stay – as was their legal right. Middle-class life would have to move around them, and the convention grew up just to ignore their presence. Barbara stayed, for Karl could not afford the sum she demanded to leave – the inheritance had indeed been spent and he declined to use Frances’ earnings for this purpose – he liked Barbara as he liked many a bit of old battered furniture that had seen better days. Venetia, at the time thirteen, was on Barbara’s side too – Mummy was just being snobbish and the child had even persuaded Barbara to pose while she painted her. Venetia seemed blind to Karl’s hints that she should give up painting and stick to the recorder. But it was Frances who had to clear up after old Barbara – she leaked alittle as she walked – and Frances’ conviction that Barbara enjoyed her role as spectre at the feast, and had quantities of cash in the tin box under her bed.
    ‘I wish she would just die,’ Frances said under her breath on this occasion, as she served the chocolate mousse – six eggs, two packets of Menier chocolate – and the whiff of Barbara passing got to her and her guests. ‘Eighty-eight is far too long for anyone to go on.’
    Even as Frances murmured and Karl said crossly, ‘Don’t say that, it’s wicked,’ Barbara gurgled, grabbed her throat and collapsed on the floor in a heap of voluminous, smelly skirts with her dirty white laceless plimsolls sticking out. Karl reacted first, knelt at her side and tried artificial respiration while Frances hoped it wouldn’t work. The ambulance came, declared the old woman dead, and took the body away. The dinner party did not continue, though they waited while Frances made strong coffee for everyone because they had drunk so much of Karl’s home-made peach wine, which he made in the bath.
    No relatives were traced and Karl offered to pay for the funeral, though Frances did not see why he should, and rashly said it would be she who was paying anyway, from the joint account. She was the only one who paid into it. Joint accounts were new at the time and she and Karl were not even married, because of the previous wife in the mental home. Margaret’s passing words to Frances, on her way to Canberra, were, ‘You can be such a fool, my dear. Thank God Fay didn’t marry him.’
    ‘You killed her,’ said Karl. ‘I think the only decent thing for you to do is pay for the funeral.’
    ‘What do you mean, I killed her?’ demanded Frances. ‘I mopped up after her, cleaned up her burned saucepans, read her headlinesfrom the newspaper’ – she had done this too, trying not to hold her nose.
    ‘You ill wished her,’ said Karl, ‘I heard you, and she died on the spot.’
    He seemed quite serious: he accorded her great power when it suited him. She tried not to quarrel with him because he could sulk for days, and make her feel wholly in the wrong during that time, and lie not touching her in the bed, until lust overcame him and he moved nearer.
    So she arranged with the undertaker to have old Barbara buried, and put death announcements in the local papers. It did not occur to Frances to actually go to the funeral.
    ‘But she was like part of my family,’ said Venetia. ‘I don’t have aunts or grandmothers like other people.’
    ‘Yes, you do,’ said Frances, ‘just a long way away,’ and in case Venetia started asking questions about her father she agreed to go, and took time off work, and Karl shut the shop and they all went to the cemetery in Golders Green, a dismal place where it rained, and there were no taxis, and no friends or relatives of the deceased, and the priest complimented them on their