by Linda Grant
You know, my life turned out more banal than I ever expected, for as I found out, to live is banal.
I got a couple of book reviews published and then a job on a little magazine, moved in with Vic to his flat in Clapham, started to dress like a woman approaching thirty, I had my first child, then another. Daughters! What a steep learning curve that was. We bought a big house by the Common, then Vic, who was in software design before anyone knew what those words meant, got a job in America. We were in St Louis for five years. I wrote a couple of children’s books which were quite successful; they’re still in print, I look them up every few months on Amazon to check their sales ranking. Vic got a big pay-off when the company was taken over by Microsoft and we moved to Deya, that rock-ribbed village on the island of Mallorca, to fulfil his dream to open a restaurant. He loved cooking.
It was a happy life, interrupted by a couple of affairs, one his, one mine, but you get through it. Then one lunchtime he had a heart attack taking a rack of lamb from the oven: the grease from the metal pan fell on his shoes. By the time the ambulance arrived from the city, he was dead. That’s all.
I sold the restaurant and came back to London eight months ago. It is true that I have let myself go, the girls talk about it all the time–my daughters, those fair, fat English girls with none of my anxieties and uncertainties who have spent their whole lives crossing borders without impediment. I watch them get dressed, I see the choices they make when they look in the mirror. They have passed out of that teenage phase when they must dress exactly as their friends dress in jeans that expose a naked slab of belly; they are with gathering certainty starting to define themselves, each going in a slightly different direction, Lillian and Rose, destined for their own little greatness.
The clothes you wear are a metamorphosis. They change you from the outside in. We are all trapped with these thick calves or pendulous breasts, our sunken chests, our dropping jowls. A million imperfections mar us. There are deep flaws we are not at liberty to do anything about except under the surgeon’s knife. So the most you can do is put on a new dress, a different tie. We are forever turning into someone else, and should never forget that someone else is always looking.
Eunice came back with a tray, a china pot of tea, cups, saucers, a bowl of sugar and a jug of milk. ‘I hope you don’t expect biscuits,’ she said. ‘I only eat sweet things when I go out to a nice restaurant. Sándor used to take me to some lovely places, with the sweets on a trolley that they wheel right up to your table so you can choose what you want. Now, tell me. What became of you?’
‘I told you already.’
‘Oh, I know that café in Spain where all the rich people used to go. I read about all that in the paper. I mean, why did you run away so fast?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Why didn’t you stay on in the house and collect Sándor’s rents for him? Why let everything go to waste and rack and ruin like it did, until there was nothing left, and those houses were slums, like they were when he bought them, and he spent all that time and money making them nice?’
‘What did it have to do with me?’
‘You inherited everything, didn’t you? You were his niece.’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘Who did?’
‘My father.’
‘Oh, him! So why did he not take over the business?’
I smiled to think of my father with a leather satchel over his shoulder, knocking on the doors of all those strangers, haranguing them if they were late with their rents.
‘It’s not the kind of person he was. He never had a head for finance and he certainly had no social skills.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I remember that, all right.’ She gave me a piercing look with her old eyes. ‘But he didn’t want the money?’
‘No. He wouldn’t touch it.’
‘What a wicked thing to do. Why wouldn’t he take his own brother’s legacy?’
‘He thought it was tainted. He didn’t believe in breaking the law, for any reason.’
‘And what do you think?’
‘About what?’
‘About breaking the law.’
‘I don’t care much about the law but I still think about the tenants.’
‘Oh, yes, those people. Well, you know some of them lived in a terrible way back home in Jamaica. They never knew about an inside toilet, or a sink or anything like that and when they came here they kept respectable people up in the middle of the night with their noise, their parties. And some of them didn’t want to work, they just lay around and smoked their spliff all day, making trouble. I don’t say there’s anything wrong with a little weed once in a while, but then other things come into it. And decent individuals who were born here had to keep their children away from them, they corrupted those good children.’
‘Is that what happened to your son?’ I said.
‘What’s that?’
‘Your son. Was he corrupted by them?’
‘My son is dead,’ she said briefly, and swallowed her tea as if she was trying to drown him inside her.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Why? Why should you be sorry?’
‘It’s horrible when a mother loses a child.’
She shrugged. ‘Death is death.’
‘When did your son die?’
‘Not so long ago.’
‘Who was his father?’ I asked her, feeling that I was entering a place in her life that was so hidden from view behind the suits and the hair spray and the false eyelashes that it seemed like the dark night that cannot be penetrated.
‘You want to know that?’ she said. ‘Of all the questions!’ She laughed. I don’t think I ever heard her make this sound before, a gurgling giggle in her throat.
I waited for a few moments to see if she would tell me, but evidently I had finally struck her dumb, because all she did was swallow her tea and look out the window at the passers-by, the crowd streaming south to the tube station, so helpless and vulnerable they looked, in their summer skirts and dresses, those thin fabrics, the sandals that barely held their feet, the lightness with which they passed along, almost floating, evaporating as they went in the steam of the humid early evening.
And Eunice went on drinking her tea in silence, a line drawn between her eyes, her head drooping as the cup emptied, and that gesture I saw in the morning through the glass, of her lifting her chin with her hand, pushing it upwards.
‘Jerome,’ she suddenly said, ‘it’s a long time since I thought of him.’
I waited for more.
‘Well, you know, it was the war, I was a young girl, in Cardiff, and there were a lot of Americans, of course. GIs. So I met Jerome one night at the dance hall, I remember I was wearing a sky blue dress with a short net skirt which I made myself out of bits of material I found here and there, because you couldn’t get a lot during wartime. And Jerome showed me how to do the latest dance from America, the Lindy Hop they called it, he came right over and picked me because I was wearing such a lovely dress compared to all the girls in the room who looked so drab. He went overseas but thank God he wasn’t killed and he came back. So we got married and I went to live with him in Mississippi. But it wasn’t at all what I expected. It was not what I was accustomed to.’
‘In what way?’ Eunice in America. I thought she had never once left these shores.
‘I didn’t know about houses with no toilet inside, and pigs and dogs everywhere, and the white people who looked at you like you were not a human but a relation of the pigs and the dogs. No one raised a hand to me, before I came to America. To beat a person with a broom, a chain you use to tie up the dog? I had to run away with my baby, and it was very hard here, all on my own, trying to make a respectable life with a son who has no father and gives in to all the temptations. I don’t know why it happened, he was a lovely chubby baby and he turned into a lean young man with eyes in his head that see everything and don’t understand nothing. That’s how I met Sándor, when I used to come an
d visit my boy and I stood in the queue with Mickey Elf. Poor man, he had nobody to visit him but that one. So we struck up an acquaintance and in the end it was him I came to see, not my son because he didn’t want to know me any more.
‘Many years of work behind the counter it took to get this job in this lovely shop. And I remember when I was closing up that night, the day Sándor got out of prison, and he was waiting for me on the pavement outside, he’d been sitting in a café opposite, just waiting. And then he stepped up with a bouquet of roses and he bowed. He bowed down before me. To treat a person like me as if she was a queen when she had been hit and beaten and looked at in the street as if she was not human! Do you understand? This is dignity, this is respect.’
‘I understand.’
‘Do you? I never know with you.’
‘I’m not your enemy, Eunice. I was just a young immature girl who was lost and lonely and couldn’t find her way in life.’
‘Well, you seemed to me to know exactly what you wanted, with all your scheming.’
I stood up and lifted the tray with the empty cups. ‘I’ll help you,’ I said.
She nodded quickly. Behind the curtain there was a little room with a kettle, a sink, bills, inventories. A little bunch of pansies with short stems stood in a small vase which was placed on a lace doily.
‘What’s this?’ I said, picking up a framed picture.
She looked frightened. ‘Don’t tell anyone about that,’ she said. ‘I could go to prison.’
‘It’s cut out of a book, isn’t it?’
‘It was in the library. I took it home and I saw this picture. I got a pair of scissors and I thought no one would notice, but it’s a serious crime, isn’t it, to deface a library book?’
I looked at the photograph. It showed a line of men, in hats, double-breasted jackets, trousers with turn-ups, carrying suitcases, valises, briefcases, leather satchels. One or two of them wore tinted glasses in what must have been strong sunlight because of the shadows it was casting on the road. My uncle had stepped forward towards the camera and was smiling, that lower lip was unmistakable, even in the face of a young man. I recognised what everyone had seen in him, the cocky sexiness, the eyes with all their humour and avarice, that look of complicity, that intimate knowledge of the little one inside who cries out for life and is greedy for the whole world.
For that tiny naked figure, with its terrible hungers, cries in me, too.
We shook hands for the last time. She let me out and stood at the door of the shop, watching me walk up the street. The newspaper placards proclaimed the capture of the would-be terrorist. I was thinking about the bombs last year, just as I got back to London, the pieces of tattered cloth on the rails.
I was walking across the park, holding between my fingers the strings of the bag containing a new dress. It was a beautiful late afternoon, geese taking off in the sultry air over the lake. I hear the buzzing saw of a branch being felled, and the tree stood like a one-armed man against the clouding horizon. A new dress. Is this all it takes to make a new beginning, this shred of dyed cloth, shaped into the form of a woman’s body? The crowd hurried past, their faces lit with anxiety and excitement. Our vulnerability suddenly touched me, all our terrible, moving weaknesses contained in a jacket, a skirt, a pair of shoes.
Acknowledgements
I have drawn on an account of Labour Service Company 110/34 by Zoltan (csima) Singer in Randolph L Berman (ed.), The Wartime System of Labor Service in Hungary: Varieties of Experience, New York, Columbia University Press, 1995.
The character of Sándor Kovacs was inspired by that of the Notting Hill landlord, Peter Rachman, who was born in Lvov, Poland in 1919, survived the war in a Siberian labour camp, came to Britain as a refugee in 1946 and died in London in 1962. At the time of his death he was still searching for any surviving relatives. For information on housing in London in the post-war period, I have drawn on his biography, Rachman, by Shirley Green. London: Michael Joseph, 1979.
I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to George Szirtes for his help in describing Jewish life in Hungary and for his family insights into the horrors of the slave labour units. Any errors are mine and mine alone.
My warmest thanks, too, to Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper for the generous hospitality at their house in Kent during the writing of this book and where, in the unlikely setting of a bedroom overlooking the garden, Ervin and Berta Kovacs put in their first appearance. I would also like to thank Gillian Slovo and Andrea Levy for kindly agreeing to read an earlier version and for their helpful comments.
My thanks, as ever, to my agent Derek Johns who has pulled me out of so many scrapes, to Susan de Soissons and Elise Dillsworth at Virago, and above all, to my editor Lennie Goodings, who never, ever gives up.