‘Supper’s ready, Max.’ Francesca stood in the doorway.
Max rolled off the sofa, stood up and stretched. Francesca gave me a sad half-smile as she led the way to the table.
‘This smells great, Frannie,’ said Max. ‘I’ll miss your cooking when I move. You should come too. There’s a lot to be said for communal living. Really. Ask my sister. That’s what she’s studying.’
‘Don’t,’ I warned Francesca, who looked as though she was about to cry as she busied herself serving up a steaming vegetable stew and home-baked bread. ‘I can’t think of anything worse, myself. But Max swears by it. He thinks it’s the way forward and we should all do it.’
A car horn sounds behind me. I look in the mirror and see a woman in a white Volvo estate gesturing towards the house. I am blocking her drive. I start the engine and edge forward a couple of yards. She parks outside the double garage and gets out of the car. She is dressed in her gym kit and is carrying a bottle of water. I watch her as she walks up to the front door and lets herself in. I see her pick up the post from the floor of the glass porch. She pauses for a moment to look at me, then goes inside.
And so there I was in Berlin – ‘the cheese head’ as he used to call me, when he called me anything at all. And I didn’t understand a word anyone was saying. Not one word. I simply couldn’t believe it, the first time he hit me.
He hit you?
No one had ever hit me before. Or even shouted or said anything unkind. I remember that I’d only been in Berlin for about a week. And he pointed to some envelopes that were lying on the hall table and told me to do something with them. I picked them up but I couldn’t understand what he was saying. So I asked him to repeat what he’d said – he could understand Dutch perfectly well. But he just walked over to me and hit me on the back of my head. And I dropped the envelopes and he hit me again. ‘I forbid you to speak Dutch in my house,’ he said. That was the first and last thing he ever said to me in Dutch. And so I had to learn German pretty quickly. You learn everything pretty quickly if the alternative is the back of your father’s hand.
Did your father hit you often?
And you learn
everything
pretty quickly if all the children at your school jeer when you sit on the boys’ side of the classroom because you don’t understand what the teacher
is saying when she tells you to sit on the girls’ side. And if they all make fun of your accent and if they all hate you – the teacher and the pupils and the shopkeepers – because you’re from Holland and they hate the Dutch.
Did your father hit you often?
He’d summon me into his study. It was always kept locked when he was out. No one was ever allowed in there except by special invitation. He had lovely things in there that he collected on all his business trips. Persian carpets. Swiss clocks. Venetian glass vases. Japanese lacquered boxes. Lovely things. And he’d say something like, ‘I saw you today outside school with your hands in your pockets,’ and then bang! Or ‘I heard you whistling – no girl should ever whistle. You’re not a market woman,’ and then bang! And boy, could he hit hard! He kept a special comb in his study and it was one of my jobs to make sure all the fringes on his Turkish carpet were combed absolutely straight. And he’d call me in and say, ‘Look at this – do you call this straight?’ – and then bang!
How was he with your mother?
Every morning, he would announce what he wanted for supper and then hand my mother the exact amount of money. He’d literally count it out into the palm of her hand. When he came home from work, he’d go and sit in his study and ring a bell. At which point my mother would carry in his supper tray. I used to dream of putting poison in his wine or ground glass in his sauerkraut. Then he would change and go out for the evening. Berlin was full of cabarets and nightclubs in those days. You’ll know that – you’ve seen the films. You’ve read those books.
Isherwood. Yes.
He must have had a lovely time, don’t you think? Occasionally I’d catch sight of him with one of his girlfriends in a restaurant
or café on my way home from school at lunchtime. They were always very glamorous, his women, with their bright red lipstick and smart tailored jackets. Well, he was pretty popular wih women. Handsome, clever, well-off, charming…
Charming?
Very charming. (SILENCE) We had a furnace in the cellar. And he’d come into my bedroom and look around and say, ‘Where did you get that ridiculous toy?’ or ‘Who gave you that stupid book?’ or ‘What’s that thing you’re sewing when you could be doing something useful?’ And then I’d have to go down to the cellar with him and he’d open the lid of the furnace and I had to drop the toy, or book, or collection of silk butterflies or whatever else it was, into the flames. And he’d smile as he watched. And if I ever cried, he’d hit me very hard. Here, on the back of my head. Once – it was one of the very few times my grandparents visited from Holland – I remember my grandfather gave me the most beautiful wooden ark. He had made it himself out of old cigar boxes. And in the animals went. Two by two. (SILENCE) I opened my hand like this and in they went. Two by two. And then my father took the ark and he put it on the cellar floor and he made me stamp on it until there was nothing left but a pile of splinters. And in they all went.
And your mother?
Sorry?
Tell me about her.
I told you – she was the kindest person there was.
Did he hit her too?
Sometimes. When the mood took him. When his supper was late, or one of his mistresses had stood him up.
Tell me about her.
Who?
Your mother.
Everyone loved my mother. Except my father, I suppose. Even my father’s mistresses liked her. It wasn’t just that they felt sorry for her; they really liked her as a person. Once – my God, I haven’t thought about this for years. Once, one of them – one of the mistresses – came to our house when my father was at work. I must have been about eleven, I suppose. The woman had a little white dog. One of those fluffy, yappy things. I’d seen her eating with my father in town. They always sat at a window table. She used to put the dog on her lap and feed it bits of meat from her plate. My father must have hated that! I didn’t know how my mother would react to this woman coming in to her house – I think she could somehow tolerate all the infidelity and philandering so long as it wasn’t shoved right under her nose. They came into the living room and sat down. I was sitting behind one of the armchairs in a corner sewing a badge on to my uniform – so they didn’t see that I was in the room. At the time I didn’t really understand what they were saying. Something about pregnancy and money. I remember the little white dog came round the back of the armchair and started licking my knees. I had to pinch my nose to stop myself giggling and giving myself away. At first my mother sounded shocked and even angry, and then, as the woman continued to talk, she started laughing. Much later I realised what was going on – the woman was suggesting she pretend to be pregnant to extract the money for an abortion from my father. She was pretty
sure he’d do anything to stop his life being inconvenienced in any way. She was offering to share the proceeds with my mother. Fifty-fifty. I don’t know if they ever went through with their plan, but I like to think they did.
The front door, which was once canary-yellow, is now a dark Oxford blue. The drive has been newly tarmacked. Otherwise everything looks just the same. If I had the courage, I would go up to the door and ring the bell. I would say, ‘I used to live here. I was just driving by and remembering things from a long time ago, and I’d very much like to have a look around, if you don’t mind.’ Do I look like a respectable product of this estate? Like someone who might have a macramé
plant-hanger
, with spider plants cascading from it, suspended from the roof of my porch? Like someone whose other car could possibly be a Volvo?
Only one window of the house overlooks the drive and the circular green beyond. When we lived here it was my parents’ bedroom. Every morning before school, I’d sit on the floor at the edge of the bed while my mother, bleary-eyed and weary from her Mogodon-infused sleep, would haul herself up on to one elbow and brush my waist-length hair. As I look up at the window, I can hear the rasping of the brush, my yelps of irritation as the bristles catch in the dense blonde knots and the hair is corralled into two long plaits. I wear my hair very short nowadays.
Sometimes, in the summer, long after we’d been sent to bed, Max and I would tiptoe in, hide behind the net curtains and peer out enviously at our friends playing on the green. Every so often, a couple of mothers would wander out to call their children in and stand chatting in their cotton slacks or
bright summer dresses, a cup of tea or glass of sherry in their hand. We would watch those women with the rapt attention and limited understanding of viewers of a TV documentary about a recently discovered and rather exotic tribe.
Our
mother never went out of the front of the house except to get into her car and, though she was the gardener in the family, she left the pruning of the roses in the front garden to my father.
The curtain is twitching now. The woman is clearly not as practised at surreptitious peering as we were. She is probably noting down the registration number of the car parked outside her house, wondering if she has enough reason to contact Neighbourhood Watch about a middle-aged woman in an elderly Toyota who persists in staring at her house. But there can’t be a law against this… whatever it is… this reminiscing with uncertain intent.
Did those mothers ever talk about us, I wonder, as they supervised the picking-up of bicycles, roller-skates, cricket bats and discarded jumpers? Did they ask their children, delicately, if they ever saw our mother, whether she was ‘any better now’? Did they ask them if they knew where our mother had been that time she went away so suddenly? Whether her disappearance had had any connection with our regular Sunday outings with our father?
We never said anything to anyone in the Close about those Sundays. We learnt to evade the issue, to change the subject, to lie. Every other week, instead of re-enacting
The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
on the green or cycling round the estate, or playing doctors and nurses with our friends behind the aptly named Feely family’s garden shed, Max and I would be driven through the neat, Sunday-sleepy suburbs, through the litter-blown streets of south London, to an imposing red-brick building on the bank of the Thames. My father would park the car by an elegant Hawksmoor church on whose steps old men in onion-like layers of soiled
clothing would gather, surrounded by their bundles and bags, and gaze at us with bloodshot eyes.
The church steps are still home to the poor and dispossessed, with their dirty sleeping bags, their cans of Special Brew and obedient dogs on strings, but they seem younger now, their eyes more blank than bloodshot. The red-brick building is still there, too, with its grand entrance hall, and vast stained glass windows. But now the confident doctors in white coats, the scurrying nurses in their starched white hats and the silent, anxious visitors have been replaced by self-assured young Americans in chinos and trainers, with mouthfuls of chewing gum and expensive metalwork.
‘You know the loony bin?’ I said to Max, that same winter in Dorset. A couple of days after I’d shouted at the little skippers, I think. ‘It’s a private American college now.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘I went there. On my way here.’
‘What about Susanna?’
‘She came too, of course. I could hardly leave her in the car. She liked the stained glass. And the echoing hall.’
‘You’re mad!’
‘Well, then, it’s lucky it’s a college now and not a mental hospital, or they might have sectioned me too. Short-circuited
my
brain.’
Max smiled, a little sadly.
‘Dad probably thought he was doing the right thing,’ he said quietly. ‘Sending her there.’ It was a Sunday morning, and when I looked at him as he stood by the frozen pond with his icy breath swirling round his head, for a moment he looked eight years old again, engulfed by my father’s cigarette smoke, gazing thoughtfully out of the car window as we sped through the empty streets.
‘Do you really believe that?’
‘I have to. Don’t you? If I didn’t, it would be unbearable. It would be –’ He stopped.
‘Mum never believed it,’ I said to him. ‘Or forgave him.’
‘I know. Did you tell Susanna what the place used to be? Why you’d been there before?’
‘No. There didn’t seem to be any need to.’
‘I thought you were living by some new code of ultimate truthfulness, or something. That there would never be any secrets between the two of you.’
‘She’s very small.’
‘It’s her heritage too, in a way.’
‘Lucky old Susanna!’
‘It wasn’t that bad.’
‘I’m not saying it was.’
‘And I know it’s none of my business, but all this secrecy about her father – what’s the worst that could happen if she knew a bit about him? If we all did? All I know is that he died very suddenly and that his surname – or first name – may or may not have been Thomas.’
Max hadn’t asked any questions three years earlier when he’d found me standing on his doorstep, trembling with misery and lack of sleep, a howling one-year-old in my arms. He just took Susanna from me and jiggled and rocked her until she was quiet then put me into his spare bed. I stayed in that bed for nearly three weeks, curled up in a ball, nursing my grief, while Max brought me meals and looked after his niece and everyone else. By the time I could face seeing anyone or doing anything again, Susanna had learned to walk, using Max’s housemates’ wheelchairs for support. She cried all the way back to Cameroon.
To reach our mother, we had to climb five flights of steep stone stairs. Unable to resist sidling up to the edge, I would gaze down through the gap in the dark wooden banisters which smelt of beeswax and bare feet, and imagine plunging down, head-first, to land – smashed and bloody – on the intricate Victorian floor tiles. Once, we took a wrong turning off one of the interminable corridors and passed a darkened
ward full of people in metal beds, seemingly just sleeping. The patient nearest the door was awake and stared at us as we passed. Max looked back and gave him a polite little wave.
We never saw the room where the electric shock treatments took place.
I don’t remember how long my mother spent in that place. I don’t know how many times they strapped her down with leather belts, put a block of rubber in her mouth, attached the wires and flicked the switch. I can’t remember how often Max and I sat on the bed in her little room, watching her expressionless face, each of us holding one of her hands, trying to tell her things that might make her smile. We became careful storytellers. Or rather,
I
did, and took it upon myself to edit Max’s stories as he told them or to nudge or kick him if I could manage to do so without my mother noticing. ‘Clara has come to help look after us during the week. It’s nice having her to stay,’ he’d say to my mother as he fiddled with the rings on the hand he was holding in both of his. ‘And it’s really nice for Dad to have his mother around.’
My grandmother insisted we call her Clara – she didn’t like any of the names our friends called their grandmothers.
Nan? Nanna? Nanny? What sort of stupid names are those? Why would I want to be called after a kind of goat?
‘No, it isn’t. It’s not at all nice having her to stay,’ I’d say. ‘She’s really bossy. She tells us to lay the table and tidy up and stuff. And make our own beds. It’s horrible. And she makes us eat sauerkraut and sausages with disgusting chewy skin and it makes me want to be sick.’
‘Dad’s taught me to sew on buttons – he’s really good at sewing. Ouch! Julia! What did you do that for?’
‘Do what? Mum taught me to sew on buttons ages ago, and other stuff, didn’t you, Mum?’
I didn’t tell my mother that my father had learnt to plait my hair quite expertly, that he did it slowly and gently even if he did incorporate all the knots; that on Saturdays, as Max
and I lay on the floor watching
Thunderbirds
, he concocted exotic meals from whatever he could find in the fridge; that once, on a rare occasion when he got home early enough to collect me from school, my teacher, Miss Wharton, had told him that he was ‘coping marvellously with everything’, and gazed at him with soppy, admiring eyes. ‘If there is anything I can ever do to help, all you have to do is ask, Mr Rosenthal. Anything at all.’ I didn’t tell my mother that it was nice at home without all the shouting and crying.
I didn’t tell her these things, but I thought them. Storyteller and traitor.
The weeks and months passed. My grandmother returned home to Oxford, after a pre-Christmas celebration with presents and special German Christmas food that I carefully edited out of the narrative on our next weekend visit.
On Christmas morning, Max bounded into my bedroom. ‘Guess what!’ ‘What?’
‘Guess.’
‘I dunno. What?’
‘We’ve got the best present ever! Mum’s home!’
‘She’s not. She’s in the loony bin. We saw her there last Sunday.’
‘No, she’s home. She’s in her bedroom. I’ve seen her. Come on!’
But I was filled with such longing and such dread that I couldn’t move. Such longing and dread and guilt. I wanted a new bike. Not the mother I’d last seen in her bedroom, sitting slumped on the floor, her back against the wall, screaming at our father. Screaming about her teeth and his silence and the lies, and how he didn’t care and what was she being punished for? Screaming that she would rather be dead than live this life. This terrible, lonely, empty life. But when I finally went in, having first quickly ascertained by peeping into the sitting room that it wasn’t a case of a new bike
or
my
mother, she was sitting up in her bed, smiling at something Max was telling her. My father brought her a cup of coffee. She thanked him in a voice that seemed normal, friendly even. I remember climbing into her bed, putting my arms around her and thinking that things would be all right from now on.
And I suppose that, for a while, they were. One drawer in the kitchen that had previously been home to miscellaneous bits and pieces that didn’t belong anywhere else in the house was now full of pill bottles. Our mother called us into the kitchen, opened the drawer, and told us that they weren’t sweets, not even the ones that looked just like big red Smarties, and said that we must never touch them. And so we never did, even though I really wanted to bite open the little black and red capsules that reminded me of the guards outside Buckingham Palace, and the thin daffodil-like yellow and green ones, and tip out the tightly packed powder. And I wanted to know how one teeny chalky-white tablet could help you to sleep and how a whole handful could send you to sleep forever.
There is a knock at the car window. I jump and turn my head. It is the woman from the upstairs window. I wonder how she has managed to come out of the house and round the back of the car to the driver’s side without me seeing her. I contemplate starting the ignition and driving off but worry that I’ll run over her foot if I do that. I roll down the window and smile weakly.
‘Hello,’ she says. ‘It’s Julia Rosenthal, isn’t it.’
It seems a statement, rather than a question, so I keep quiet.
‘You used to live here, didn’t you.’
Another statement. I wonder if she is perhaps a lawyer.
‘I’m Angie Plaistow. I was at school with you.’
My face must look blank because she continues. ‘It’s all right. I wouldn’t expect you to remember me. I was a few years
below you. One of those irritating upper thirds when you were in the fifth form or something. You used to shush me in the library. You’re more likely to remember my older sister Becky, from the year above you. You haven’t changed a bit.’
She has one of those friendly, open faces. There are smile lines around her pale blue eyes.
‘It’s so weird. Your name came up about a week or two ago. After all this time. It must be synchronicity or something. I was on the phone to Emily Lancaster who used to live in the house behind this one and was in my class all the way through, and anyway, we were going on about the kids as usual and all that parents and children stuff – Emily’s got two girls – and she said she’d read something about your daughter and her uncle in the
Observer
or the
Sunday Times
or something. And she remembered you’d been at the same school as us and used to live in this house. I’ve been meaning to have a look for it. We get the Sundays most weeks – God knows why – we never seem to get around to reading them. It’s probably buried in the paper mountain by my bed.’
My face must look slightly less blank because she pauses for a few seconds and looks at me quizzically.
‘Do you want to come in?’