by Linda Grant
Past factories and workshops and lock-ups, I ran. The energy of London transmitted itself to me, all the energy and vitality of a city awakening rose up inside me and my thoughts ran quicker still.
If I’d kept that baby, she would have most of the things she needed to become a real person by now. A head, legs, arms, hands, hair, and she would be developing feet and fingerprints. Her brain would be starting to receive messages and form memories of her time in the womb, which she would later forget, because everyone forgets. Resourcefully, she would be growing, intent on who she was going to become, her DNA deciding on Alexander’s long bones and blond hair or my short limbs and dark moustache. The DNA would be working out what it was going to send on into the future–the code string could reach back east to the village in the Zémplen, with the rabbis and plums, or to the county towns of western England, their churches and oak trees. My body would be a busy machine turning out this brand-new person.
This time next year I would have been wheeling her in a pram through Regent’s Park, past the rose garden. I would have showed her the lake with the water birds and explained the inner life of a goose, as her daddy understood it. And such an intense wave of regret came over me, such a searing sense that I had done the wrong thing and that Claude in his simple crude way was right, I was pierced to the core by his harsh words.
At last I got home and went into my little flat, dropped down on the bed, unwashed, fully dressed and fell asleep. I dreamed of my baby. Her name was Gertrude. What a stupid name! She had blue eyes and wore a velvet dress. She took my hand. ‘Mummy,’ she said. ‘Yes, darling?’ ‘What’s your name?’ I tried to tell her but my tongue was wood. I tried to shape it with my lips and the harder I tried, the more success I had. Yes, I could definitely hear myself.
‘Vivien,’ said my uncle. ‘Vivien! It’s ten o’clock. Are you still sleeping?’
‘You and that boy had an argument,’ he said. ‘I can see it written all over your face.’
Yes, I admitted it. His face lit up. He said he would get rid of him; a few pounds and he could leave the next day. But I said Claude had a right to live there and of course he rolled his eyes–‘You and your rights.’
‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘What did you see in that character? He was beneath you, a girl with a degree like yours.’
How could I explain to my uncle the erotic drag that pulled me towards him?
‘Oh, I understand now how it was. Don’t be embarrassed. Don’t make of that part of your life a prisoner and an exile, like my brother did. OK, you deserve a little toy after all you been through. But the toy is broken now, you throw it away, you move on to something else.’
‘Is that all that women are for you?’
‘In the past, yes. But I’ve changed. It’s true, even a villain like me can change his stripes.’
‘Spots.’
‘What spots?’
‘A leopard cannot change its spots, that’s the saying.’
‘I don’t know, I never saw a leopard so about whether he can change his spots or not, I have no opinion. But me, I have changed. I am going to be a very different man, you’ll see.’
We were in his flat, under the mural, drinking coffee, him in his cane peacock throne and me opposite him in my T-shirt and jeans with my legs pulled up and my hands around my knees as if I was protecting my abdomen from external assault.
We were not taping his life story; he saw I was exhausted and he wanted me to preserve my strength for a favour he had to ask me–would I go in the morning to Wood Green to help Eunice pack? She was moving in with him, to his flat, at long last. The boxes had been delivered and the removals van was coming tomorrow, she had taken the day off work but reluctantly admitted it was going to need two pairs of hands.
‘Why me of all people?’ I asked. ‘She doesn’t like me.’
‘That’s only because she doesn’t know you, and to tell the truth, you are not such an easy person to know, like your father in that respect–though not in any other, don’t get me wrong. You don’t have his personality at all, thank God.’
‘Why am I hard to get to know? I don’t understand.’
He smiled. ‘So, what shall I call you? Miranda? Vivien? What? You know, you are a girl who likes to put on a different face every five minutes, like a new dress, when she doesn’t need to at all because she is lovely in herself, with her own face. And all because she is not confident, she doesn’t trust her own instincts in case they lead her up a wrong path to disaster. I know that’s what you feel. I watch you when we are tape recording. Inside you are uncertain and must ask questions. This why and the why and the why. That is what you hide behind, your whys. You think if you ask why, it gives you a little time. You were like this as a child? Because I remember you, you know, standing by the door with a face full of eyes and I was trying to give you chocolate, but your father snatched it from my hand like it was poison.’
‘Yes, I remember it too, it’s the clearest memory I have of my childhood.’ I was busy storing away these remarks about my personality to examine later, when I had some quietness. I found them very surprising and even alarming because I thought of myself as someone constantly scrabbling to hold on to reason and logic in the face of my irrational parents and their old grudges, insecurities, neuroses and cranky opinions.
‘Really? What do you remember of me?’ He sat forward in the cane throne, eagerly.
‘I remember your blue suit and your suede shoes and your diamond watch, and the girl you were with in her leopardskin coat and her hat. I was watching you from the window when you both left, you were out on the pavement and she had chocolate round her mouth.’
He smiled. ‘Yes, that girl. I don’t know what happened to her, they come and go. I don’t know what happened to the suit either, or the watch. But what a nice child you were. I never had a child, or not that I hear about, anyway.’
‘Do you wish you did have one?’ I said, for I did not know then about my uncle’s sterility. His face froze a little. Grey shadows appeared in the creases of his face.
‘For many years I thought about a son. It’s normal for a man to want a son, but then you see a little daughter and your wish turns into something different. You realise that the way you treat a woman is the way your little girl will be treated by men in her own life. It can strike you like a plank of wood around the head, this thought. You know, I was never unkind to women, just careless. You shouldn’t be like that with people. I don’t want you to be careless, which is why I didn’t like you being with that boy. He was a plaything for you. But enough, it’s none of my business, I just express an opinion, and that’s it. Now it is time for the news.’
He switched on the set. They were interviewing John Tyndall, the leader of the National Front who was talking about the ‘white race’. I looked down at my hands to see what colour they were. A dirty olive brown. He was flanked by supporters, the men all wore white shirts and dark ties, and their heads seemed to have been boiled so that all the blood came to the surface.
‘Look at that frozen piece of shit,’ my uncle said. ‘You see I’m not worried for myself, it’s Eunice. Now she worries me sick, what’s going to happen to her. These people with the lace-up boots all over the place, who can control them?’
‘Well, I’m going on a demonstration next week,’ I said, with pride.
He laughed, the lower flabby lip trembling in his face and his brown eyes full of cynical mirth. ‘I seen demonstrations. People march in a crowd with signs in their hands, I saw it in Budapest in ’56. Does it ever come to anything?’
But despite the bravado he was afraid. I saw his face turn chalky in the cathode ray light of the screen and his hands clutched the sides of the cane peacock throne.
‘Eunice!’ he cried, as the lines of marching racists crossed the screen. ‘What is going to happen?’ he said, turning to me. ‘What are you going to do?’
I tried to explain to him about the days when it took me a long time to get rid of my leaflets, and the other times when p
eople took them so eagerly they seemed to be snatching them from your hands, and thanking you, blessing you, for just being there, and showing that if there was going to be trouble, there would be some people who would stand up to be counted.
‘Oh, you foolish girl,’ my uncle cried, in despair. ‘With all the brains in your head, your Shakespeare, look at you, dressed like a boy, and all your lovely hair gone.’
‘I’m going to grow it again,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to be a punk any more.’
‘Good. That makes me happy. And will we go on with the recordings? I haven’t told you anything yet that is important, the real story is coming, of what I did and what they did to me. You don’t know, you only know the beginning. You give me a kiss?’
‘Of course I will.’ I kissed his forehead gently and he reached out and grabbed my hand and put his lips to it. I felt those wet lips on my skin, the pressure of his fingers on my wrist, the nails whitening. My uncle, my flesh and blood which had suffered and made others to suffer. Revulsion and empathy, these were my feelings. He picked a white speck of lint or plaster from my hair. ‘You are dusty,’ he said, and his hand tentatively touched my cheek. ‘Grow it again, won’t you, your lovely hair. Let it be what it wishes, when I saw you when you were little you had corkscrews coming our of your head. So did my mother, exactly the same. And she used to try to fight the curls, like you do, but it was never a completely winning battle. I like a girl with a curl best of all.’
We went on watching the news but he had lost interest. I wrote down Eunice’s address and he thanked me. I wish I had finally got to the meat of the story, about how he had bought the west London houses and started to rent them out. I had a lot of questions I wanted to ask him about what he did and how he could defend himself, but it turned out this was the very last conversation we had, sitting in his flat in front of his mural, with the palm trees swaying on the wall and the sun shining in the painted sand.
He had a plate in his hands with a piece of cheesecake with strawberries under a red glaze which he had gone to Swiss Cottage to buy but he had barely eaten, for though he talked of cakes a great deal and did everything in his power to obtain them, I think it was the idea of cake that compelled him, because his digestion couldn’t stand the richness of so much sugar and fat. Thirty years later I still see him sitting in front of the mural with the plate of cheesecake, looking at me with a face of timid love and longing, then the brown eyes filming over, and his handkerchief rubbing at the panes of his mock tortoiseshell reading glasses.
I always thought that Eunice would live in a fussy flat with plenty of decoration and it was true, she had bought a few nice things–some pictures and ornaments, velvet curtains and African violets in plastic pots, but it was like a tidy hotel room, as if she came back here only to eat a meal, watch TV and sleep, and her real life, the public display, was in the shop or on my uncle’s arm. Her home was a place in which a child’s best doll was carefully put away in its original box and wrapped in pink tissue paper. She lived behind the front door of a Victorian terrace with a cracked dusty, stained-glass panel. It was just the door that interested her, the separation barrier between herself and the world.
She pointed across the street to the flats. ‘A different class of person lives over there,’ she said. ‘And not a nice class.’ A lot of bad boys, she said, petty criminals, cat burglars, receivers of stolen goods and kids who were just wild and impertinent and had no respect for their elders. One day one of them had run off with her handbag as she was walking to the tube station, and everything was in it–her purse, her keys, her lipstick, her national insurance card. She searched the neighbourhood and found it in a rubbish tip with everything gone and she had had to go to all the expense of changing the locks.
‘And then worse came along after that,’ she said: ‘the white boys with the boots and the shaved heads.’
So I told her about my activities in the Anti-Nazi League, hopeful of a favourable reaction that would make her like me, but with no great confidence that she would think more highly of them than my uncle. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it’s good you take a stand, we have got to stick together, us and you Hebrews. But these ones with the boots don’t take no notice of a leaflet.’
‘So what do you think should be done about it?’ I asked. For at least I was there, out on the streets, instead of hiding indoors.
She shrugged. ‘Well, you know, this is the one time that someone like Mickey Elf has his uses.’
I thought he was a strange character and my uncle’s close relationship with him was baffling, but she reminded me that they went back a long way, to the time when Sándor first came to London and my father had not been at all nice and welcoming to him, offering him a job working with his hands, in a factory when he was obviously a man with a businessman’s brain. Mickey had got him started. Mickey had the connections, Mickey told him what he could do, what anyone could do, if they were willing, or in the case of my uncle, had few other choices.
But how, I asked, could Mickey of all people be recruited into the fight against Fascism? Well, she replied, he had helped Jim with the ones who were bothering him in his shop, they hadn’t come back no more.
The dwarf-like figure in the bad wig had beaten up skinheads? I asked amazed. No, no, she said, not Mickey himself, of course not, his contacts. He knew a lot of people. She didn’t say it was the right way. It wasn’t, but it was one way, and sometimes one way is the only way.
She had all the boxes labelled so as to know in advance what would go in each one. Everything was done according to a system she had learned during many years in the retail sector but it was only mundane items like sheets, tea towels, cushions, knives and forks, some cans of food and packets of dried soups that she allowed me to pack. Her clothes she kept for herself, folding them with nimble fingers and placing them in suitcases as if she was handling a delicate child.
The monotony of my task was soothing for it allowed me to make peace with all the warring thoughts that raged inside my head since the row with Claude. He had picked up some idea from his Irish father, the old hypocrite, because Claude was an only child so they had to be defying the Church one way or another. How was I to know that my story of Alexander’s death at the restaurant table and the abortion when I came back from London would send him so demented? He looked half crazed there in the mess room.
I knew how very different it would have been with Alexander. We would have sat quietly at the kitchen table together and discussed it in a rational manner, and he would have said, quite gently, I think, ‘Well, Vivien it is entirely your own decision, your own choice. Of course I have an opinion, but it’s your body, not mine.’ And these platitudes would have been the wheels on which we span forwards, these common mental agreements, the mutual language of educated people. But I was long beyond all that.
When the packing was all finished, and I was exhausted, only then did Eunice make me a cup of tea. ‘I haven’t got a cake to offer you, like Sándor,’ she said. ‘I like to keep my figure.’ But then she made me an offer, a suggestion so surprising that I had to reassess completely, from the start, the woman who sat in beige soft trousers, embroidered velvet house slippers and a mocha silk blouse, drinking tea from a china cup with rosebuds on it.
‘Would you like to share a spliff?’ She took out a silver foil with a little bit of hash in it and started to roll a joint. ‘I like a smoke at the end of the day, it’s relaxing, better than a glass of wine. Sándor don’t like it. He tried it once, I gave him a few puffs but it just made him sick, he doesn’t have the constitution for it.’
My uncle had made many disparaging remarks about drug addicts–hopheads, he called them. He liked to be in control as much as possible, and letting himself go, apart from with cakes and with women, was a dangerous idea, for letting yourself go was surrendering to the power of someone else and he was only prepared to do this in the case of Eunice. But this was her sole vice and so he would forgive her for it, because she drank only a few sips o
f wine and closely controlled what she ate.
It was Eunice’s last joint. She had decided she would not introduce drugs into her new home, for the police were always looking for a chance to arrest her fiancé who was still on parole, not because of anything he had done, just out of spite, she said. Eunice was no more fond of a policeman than my uncle.
We shared the hash in silence. As much as I tried to relax and focus my attention on the rosebuds on the exterior surface of the teacup I was still holding in my right hand, and as the rosebuds grew in size and in the intensity of their colour until they started to resemble cartoon roses with giant thorns and to appear faintly foolish, I could not keep out of my head, like a running commentary, thoughts of my unborn child. Whether I had really done the wrong thing, and if the child was going to stubbornly refuse to leave, to stay around, in spirit, as a ghost. Next Alexander’s small blue eyes looked down at me from heaven, his lips contorted into a smile. The dead gathered around thickly, my little baby, my grandmother with the lump in her chest, my grandfather in the lime pit. They spoke in foreign tongues; even Alexander began to speak Latin to me, and the baby babbled, accusingly.
‘This is strong shit,’ Eunice said. ‘What do they mix with this, opium?’
‘I don’t feel good,’ I said.
‘No, you don’t look good. Go and lie down.’
She took me to her bedroom and put a blanket over me. ‘Sleep it off,’ she said. ‘I’ll wake you in a couple of hours.’
I fell into an exhausted doze full of highly coloured dreams and was woken up with the command to come into the kitchen and eat a poached egg on toast. Its yellow eye looked up at me from the plate but when I’d eaten it I felt much better, alert and energetic. It was time to go. Eunice wanted to walk me to the tube station but I said I would be OK.
‘Thank you for coming,’ she said. ‘I know it was Sándor’s idea. He wanted us to get to know each other. Well, I see you are a hard worker and your heart is in the right place, even if you have faith in a leaflet. If I wasn’t moving out tomorrow I’d say you was welcome in my house any time.’
