‘How do we give them to her,’ I ask Robin, ‘without her knowing that we’ve looked at them?’
‘We can’t,’ he says. ‘We’ll have to burn them.’
I wonder what these next few days are going to be like. I haven’t seen Sonya since January 1977. Later that year, she moved back to Switzerland, taking the children with her, but before she left she wrote me a three-page letter in which she blamed me for the break-up of the marriage. She claimed I had never supported her. It would have helped if I had been more grateful, she said, if I had come towards her sometimes and embraced her, but I always pushed her away. When I leave your father, she wrote, it will be him who suffers, not me. That sentence had precisely the effect she must have hoped it would have: not only was it true – Dad did suffer – but it shifted the burden of responsibility back on to me, and this at the very time when I thought I might finally have broken free.
Not me. Was that true as well? It was something Sonya needed to believe, perhaps. She knew it wouldn’t be easy to return to her home town and admit that her marriage had failed. But return she did. The years went by, and snippets of gossip reached us. Sonya’s working as a secretary. Sonya’s fallen out with her mother. Sonya’s seeing an ice-hockey coach. Sonya’s drinking. I didn’t pay much attention to any of it. With two children to bring up on her own, though, and very little income, her life must surely have been a struggle.
She emerges from Arrivals in a black knee-length raincoat that is belted tightly at the waist. Her hair looks darker, almost as dark as her coat, and her face is thinner, but she has the same jittery, sparkly quality about her, as if the atoms out of which she’s made move faster and more impulsively than other people’s. Distracted by the crowds and the announcements, Rosie and Hal haven’t seen us yet. Sonya has, though. Her head tilts to one side, and there, suddenly, is the eager, slightly toothy smile I remember from all the photographs Dad took when they were first in love.
When Sonya arrived as our au pair in 1969, she was nineteen. I was only six years younger. I was already at boarding-school by then, and wouldn’t have seen her except during the holidays. I never suspected that anything was going on.
After a year, Sonya flew home. My father wrote her letter after letter, telling her how much he loved her and how he could not envisage life without her. He begged her to become his wife. Sonya’s family were horrified. She was still so young, barely twenty. The man courting her was more than twice her age, and partially disabled. He already had three children. There was no money to speak of. Where on earth was the future in that?
In 1971, just before Easter, Dad called me into the sitting-room. His eyes were paler than usual, and he seemed to be trembling all over, like a car with its engine running. He told me Sonya had written, saying she was coming back. He wanted to marry Sonya, he said, but he wouldn’t go through with it unless we, his three sons, approved. Behind him, in the window, I could see Uncle Bert’s house. Uncle Bert was the father of one of my closest childhood friends, and his garage smelled of the sugared almonds and dolly mixtures he stacked against the wall in big square silver tins. It always surprised me that somebody who worked for a company that made sweets could have such a nasty temper. Every time we jumped over the fence to retrieve a ball, Uncle Bert would yell at us for treading on his flower beds. Once, he even pelted us with bits of broken glass. We took our revenge by pouring half a bag of sugar into his petrol tank. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Dad reach for his glass of water. He was still waiting for an answer.
Did I talk to my brothers? I suppose I must have. I imagine myself explaining that the marriage would be good for Dad, that he deserved it after all the terrible things that had happened to him, that it might be the only chance of happiness that he had left, and I can see Robin and Ralph, twelve and ten respectively, listening intently and glancing at each other now and then. Neither of them had any objections. Why would they? As an au pair, Sonya had been affectionate and lively, and she would be replacing a woman they couldn’t even remember.
After a civil ceremony in the Town Hall, we celebrated with lunch at a Chinese restaurant called the Summer Palace. During the meal, Sonya gave off a kind of giddy radiance – her eyes flashed and glittered, reminding me of mirror-balls – and an Italian-looking waiter with slick black hair and a suave manner was particularly attentive, which soured the occasion for my father. He was a jealous man, even on his own wedding day. Sonya was excited by the prospect of her new life – we were all excited – though I did wonder how somebody who was only twenty-one could claim to be ready to settle down – to ‘give up the bright lights’, as she put it.
Perhaps because we were so close in age, Sonya was curious to know how much experience I’d had with girls. Once, when we were alone together in the car, she asked me if I had ever made love. I swallowed, then muttered, No. You must tell me all about it when you do, she said. She began to talk about sex, and how wonderful it was; her face appeared to flood with light. I looked away from her, wishing I could vanish through the floor. We were about to leave for the shops, or maybe we had just come back. I seem to see Dad’s list in my hand: Crusty white loaf, 4 oz tongue, yellow fish for one.
When Sonya questioned me that day, I would almost certainly have blushed, not least because I’d just started going out with Larry Stevens, a boy at school. During the holidays, Larry and I wrote to each other constantly, and since our relationship took place outdoors, where we’d be less likely to be discovered, our letters were full of references to overgrown copses, unoccupied houses and disused signal boxes. Sonya had already noticed that I didn’t bring girls home. Now she was becoming aware of the letters that thumped on to the hall floor three or four times a week, and always with the same writing on the envelope. In the mornings I would try and intercept the post, but when I reached the bottom of the stairs Sonya would often be standing by the front door, Larry’s latest outpouring in her hand. So far as I know, she didn’t open any of the letters, though I wouldn’t have put it past her: her curiosity was such, I felt, that she would stop at nothing.
I was leading a double life, and the idea that I might be found out filled me with terror. I had already aroused the suspicions of my housemaster, a bulky, taciturn spin bowler from Yorkshire. One October night, Larry and I were out on the narrow road that circled the playing fields when I thought I heard the murmur of an engine behind us. I glanced over my shoulder. Just visible in the darkness was a car with no headlights on. I let go of Larry’s hand, then told him to turn around and walk back the way we’d come. A few moments later, we passed a Mini creeping along in first gear, and there, hunched over the steering wheel, a trilby pulled down level with his eyebrows, was the grim but sheepish figure of our housemaster. It was at about this time that he took to calling me into his study. The shelves behind him crammed with books on adolescent psychology, he would tilt his Anglepoise lamp until it shone into my face and then embark on remorseless, hour-long interrogations. He would accuse me of kissing Larry Stevens. I would deny it. He would accuse me again. If I had been able to out-stare him, he might have believed me, but his eyes were a dark, dead brown, like old cricket balls, the sort you might find under a hedge, and I always ended up looking away. It was bad enough being under scrutiny at school. Now it was happening at home as well.
By the summer of 1972, Larry and I had split up. The following term, I fell for the daughter of a classics master. She lived in the school grounds, on an avenue lined with chestnut trees, and I often walked past her house, hoping for a glimpse of her. I will never forget the day the front door opened as I approached, and she appeared in a pair of white shorts, her blonde hair gleaming. The overhanging trees made a green tunnel of the road, and the light was dense and intimate. I tried to think of something to say. Nothing came. I was just moving beyond the house when she called out to me. Heart pounding, I swung round, only to see a Labrador shamble across the lawn towards her. Rupert, it turned out, was the name of her dog.
Since I
still didn’t have a girlfriend, I think Sonya assumed I was gay, and by the mid-seventies she had started to make veiled attacks on me at mealtimes. On one occasion, after a silence at the table, she announced that, in her opinion, homosexuality was an illness. I kept my head down and made a careful incision in a boiled potato. It wasn’t natural, she went on. It was disgusting. My father agreed it wasn’t natural. It was evil, Sonya said. My father thought this might be going a bit far. Leaning over the table, Sonya accused him of being against her. My father seemed baffled. He wasn’t against her, he said.
‘You always take their side,’ she said, glancing at me, then threw down her knife and fork and whirled out of the room, slamming the door behind her.
I find it hard to remember much about that time, though there is one photo that helps to bring it back. I am reading a story to Rosie and Hal, both of whom are sitting on my knee. My hair is shoulder-length, and parted in the middle. This was 1975, and Robin had already left school. Since he now lived at home all year round, he witnessed the marriage beginning to disintegrate, and he would tell me about the quarrelling, Sonya brittle yet defiant, Dad gripped by an impotent despair. I only had limited experience of it myself. Once, while I was in my bedroom, Sonya began to scream hysterically somewhere below. I heard Dad say, ‘Stop it,’ but she didn’t. I jumped to my feet, then stood still, facing the wall. When Dad had told her to stop it eleven times, I put on David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs and turned the volume up. I was scared these arguments might kill my father, but couldn’t bring myself to intervene.
After graduating from Cambridge, I spent six months in America and Mexico, returning only days before my twenty-first birthday. How I wished I’d stayed away. By then, the fights had become frequent and vicious. Sonya had learned about the mental illness on my mother’s side of the family, and was using it as ammunition. ‘At least my children won’t have any madness in them,’ she said once, at lunchtime. I felt my insides knot with fury. When the meal was over, I took all the light bulbs out of the scullery cupboard, where Dad kept them, and hurled them, one by one, against the side wall of the house. A few days later, Dad emerged from the scullery, looking bemused. ‘Has anyone seen the light bulbs?’ he said. ‘I’m sure I bought some.’
That winter I got a job at the Birds Eye factory, lifting tray after tray of cream cakes off a conveyor belt. By the end of my shift, I would be aching all over. Still, anything was better than being in the house. Sonya had been clamouring to go out at night – a meal in a restaurant, a show at the Congress Theatre – but Dad wanted her to sit at home with him. Play cards or watch TV. Go to bed early. I thought he was asking the impossible of her. She was only twenty-seven, after all. When I suggested that she might be feeling stifled, he looked away from me, tight-lipped.
‘She chose this life,’ he said. ‘Nobody forced her.’
In three months, I had saved enough money to go travelling again. This time I chose Athens. Sonya was feeling so restless and trapped by then that I think she was envious of my forthcoming trip. She might even have thought I was deliberately flaunting my freedom. But I had dreamt of leaving Eastbourne for years, ever since I discovered there was a world beyond it.
While I was away, Sonya and my father separated. Sonya won the legal battle for custody, and then, in a decision he found unjust, not to say vindictive, she was granted permission to take Rosie and Hal to Switzerland with her to live. By the time I returned from Greece in the autumn, Dad was on his own. Throughout his life, he had appealed for peace and quiet, and those words had come back to haunt him: the silence in the house on Summerdown Road was a constant, pitiless reminder of the fact that he had lost his children.
I had only been home for a few days when he found a packet of raw jelly in the larder. I had just done the weekly shopping, and since he knew where everything belonged he was helping me to put the groceries away, but he had come to a standstill, with his back turned and his head lowered.
‘Dad?’ I said.
The jelly had been tampered with, he told me in an odd, strangled voice. At first he had suspected mice, but when he slid the jelly out of its packet he noticed a human bite-mark. Rosie had always loved jelly, he said. She must have crept into the larder one day when nobody was looking. His shoulders shook, and a tear appeared, round and black, on the stone floor of the larder.
‘Dad,’ I said again.
Stepping closer, I took him in my arms. I couldn’t hold him too tight, though, or I would hurt him.
*
Eleven now, Rosie has grown, the top of her head level with her mother’s shoulder, and she chats happily as we cross the airport car park, but Hal, two years her junior, scarcely opens his mouth. I am struck by his looks – of all of us, he is the one who most resembles Dad – but I also notice that he seems confused, distracted. Perhaps he is finding the English hard to follow; he isn’t as fluent as Rosie, nowhere near.
On the journey back to Eastbourne, I let Robin do all the talking. Every once in a while I glance at Sonya in the rear-view mirror, her face in profile, angled towards the window, or lowered, shaded in, and my mind drifts back to the mid-seventies. At the time, I felt she targeted me unfairly, but now, a decade later, I have decided to put the past behind me, and I’m hoping she will do the same.
Turning into Victoria Drive, I accelerate up the hill towards the hulking silhouette of St Elizabeth’s.
‘So strange,’ Sonya murmurs.
She will have recognized the church, and she will know, as I do, that we are only about a mile from home.
That night, when the children are in bed, we settle round the kitchen table with a bottle of red wine. Sonya soon becomes tearful, and I remember how a single glass would often be enough to make her tipsy.
‘I had to come back,’ she says. ‘Just because things go wrong, it doesn’t mean you forget how it was.’
‘There were good times,’ I say, ‘weren’t there?’
She nods slowly, dreamily.
I ask how it began.
‘After three days,’ she says. ‘After three days he said, I’m in love with you.’
She wasn’t in love with him, she tells us, but he didn’t give up, and eventually she fell for him. They didn’t sleep together, though, not while she was our au pair, not even once. ‘I wanted to,’ she says, ‘but he said, No – not until we are married. I stayed in my room, and he stayed in his.’
She returned to Switzerland. After a year, she found she missed Dad – us too – and she flew back, and not long afterwards, while sitting on Dad’s knee, she finally agreed to marry him.
She lights a cigarette, then looks round at the room, and her eyes blur in a kind of wonderment. ‘So strange,’ she says again.
She is back in the house, but he is gone. I wonder which fact is harder to believe.
‘I still loved him,’ she says later, ‘even when it all went wrong.’
No one speaks.
She takes a drag on her cigarette and blows the smoke into the air above the table. ‘I still love him,’ she says, ‘even now.’
Hanne rings early the next day. She tells me that she has had a call from a woman at the Olympiastadion. My hand flies up to my mouth. I completely forgot I was supposed to be starting a new job on the first of March.
In early February, while looking through the paper, I noticed an advertisement for a cleaning job at the stadium where Hitler’s Olympics had taken place in 1936. I rang the number and secured an interview. The next day, I took the U-bahn to Spandauer Damm. I was to see a certain Frau Blücher.
As I left the U-bahn station, the stadium loomed out of the mist, bleak and forbidding, and I felt a quick, furtive thrill in the pit of my stomach. At the stadium gates, I asked for Frau Blücher and was directed to a flight of dank concrete stairs. I climbed down to the bottom, as instructed, and set off along a wide corridor that was lit by regularly spaced low-voltage bulbs. Behind one of the many doors, each of which was labelled in a mysterious, bureaucratic German that rese
mbled code, I found Frau Blücher. The shapeless coat she wore over her clothes was the colour of charcoal, and her straight grey hair, which stopped just short of her ear lobes, had been cut so brutally that I imagined a pair of garden shears had been involved, or even, perhaps, a spade. She regarded me from across the room with considerable suspicion. Clearly I wasn’t the sort of applicant she’d been expecting.
Lighting a cigarette, she asked me why I wanted the job.
‘I’m writing a book,’ I said. ‘It’s a dream of mine, to be a writer. But I need money.’ I paused, trying to think of words that might tilt the scales in my favour. ‘My German’s not so good – you can probably hear that – but I can work hard.’ I paused again, then added, ‘I’m twenty-eight.’
‘Ein Schriftsteller …’ She frowned. ‘No writing here.’
‘Of course not,’ I said, smiling. ‘Anyway, my typewriter’s at home, in Kreuzberg.’
It might have been a mistake to mention Kreuzberg, since it had a somewhat dubious reputation – people believed it to be riddled with anarchists, immigrants and other assorted scroungers, a belief that wasn’t entirely without foundation – but Frau Blücher didn’t appear to care. Stubbing out her cigarette, she informed me of the hourly rate. Perhaps she was hoping this might put me off. I just nodded, though, as if the figure was somehow familiar to me, or unsurprising. She studied me for several seconds, long enough for me to notice that one of her eyes was bigger than the other. Now I thought about it, she looked a bit like a Picasso.
‘Also gut,’ she said at last. ‘You can start next month.’
When Hanne returned that evening, I told her the exciting news, and we joked about the fact that she would now be living with a Putzermann – a cleaner.
Sitting in Dad’s chair, I stare at the blank side wall of Uncle Bert’s house. I had been looking forward to working at the Olympic stadium. I had already pictured myself underground, diligently sweeping. Imagine the thoughts that would come to me, the conversations I would have! The stadium was a world in itself, with its own unique rituals and regulations, and I felt sure that it would provide me with all sorts of extraordinary material – even, perhaps, a book. But now the job would go to someone else … In not appearing at the beginning of March, I had almost certainly confirmed Frau Blücher’s initial opinion of me, that I wasn’t a serious candidate for the position.
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