by Gaby Koppel
With an almost supernatural degree of forethought, I’d left a pair of trainers in the car, otherwise the gravel at South End Green would have ruined my shoes before we’d even left the car park. And I’m thinking what if she does wake up, anyway? I’d like Bernie to squirm just a bit more before the end of the afternoon. Maybe Mutti will stagger downstairs half-undressed. Serve him right for being such a pompous prat.
“Are you OK?” I ask. Not that I really expect him to admit anything. My Dad. I just wish he’d just fight back sometimes.
“Ja, you know what she’s like. She finds it difficult, such events. She gets nervous. Of the other people. She thinks they are judging her.”
“She’s right”, I say, “They are.”
“They’ve all had… difficult experiences.”
“They just seem to behave as though it never happened.”
“Everybody got their own way of dealing with it.”
“They hate it when people dare to emote. It’s like they all made a smooth segue from German formality to the stiff upper lip.”
“So you think they should be more like your mother?”
“Of course not. But I admire her in a way. At least she tries to be honest. Even if it all goes tits up in the end.” We pass the pond. Children and parents are feeding the ducks, as the sun bounces off the water.
“Yes,” he says. “The situation we are facing now is difficult for her.”
“How are things?” I can feel him flinch. He’s strayed into difficult terrain, now he’s looking for a way out.
“Tight.”
I’m thinking how tight? Are the bailiffs outside the front door yet?
“Our agent in Ibiza has found somebody who wants to buy the flat. I told Aranca this morning. Was stupid of me to tell her before the party. These kind of changes are destabilising.”
“And if you sell, will that buy you a bit of time?” He pauses to catch his breath as the path begins to slope steeply uphill.
“Will last us for about six months, if we are careful.” I’m trying to work out how much that is, and how much of it Mutti will smoke and drink her way through.
We climb in silence for a few minutes. As Parliament Hill comes into view, we can see kites skidding about on the clouds above us.
“Now she’s got this idea.”
“What kind of idea?”
“She thinks she can get money.”
“Not quite with you – what money?”
“Compensation.”
“What for?”
“For the war. She thinks she can get compensation for what happened. From the Hungarian government. Some kind of new scheme.”
“So. Why not?”
“Just another bit of madness. Will be very little money. A token. Not worth it. A mountain of paperwork, lawyers’ fees, and God knows what else. And you know what your mother is like. It’s too difficult for her, this digging up the past. The price is too high.” He turns to me. “You need to help me, Lisbet. We must stop her going on with this meshugas.”
It’s like I’m the only thing standing between my parents and the void. What can I offer them? Not money, that’s for sure. I barely earn enough to maintain myself. I’m engaged to a bloke who just about scrapes together enough to keep himself in dark room equipment. Let’s not even think about a wedding.
“So,” I say, “She needs something to do, why not that? She might surprise you.” He shakes his head.
“Nothing good can come of it. It will kill us, this stupid scheme.”
He doesn’t look like a desperate man. Striding up the hill, as we talk, he’s all energy, the snowy hair setting off his tanned skin. Like a Saga advert for iron tablets. My friend Jane has always said he is her most perfect looking dad. Almost handsome, if it wasn’t for the too-long nose and the too-small chin. Jane says nobody wants their dad to be too good looking, so his imperfections just add to his perfect dad-ness.
But the weak mouth is a giveaway – he hides behind a German engineer’s approach to problems. When I was a teenager in pieces after splitting up with my boyfriend, he said let’s get out a piece of paper and write the pros on one side, the cons on the other, and decide on the best course of action. The only course of action I was capable of was throwing myself on the ground and screaming my head off. But his ridiculous logic was soothing, if maddening too.
We carry on climbing up to the top of Parliament Hill in silence. The grass is worn away at the top, where people stand to look at the view. We stand there now, London stretching away at our feet. Towards the city, the Heath unfolds its undulating greens – a civilised, rationalised form of nature, framing the horizon. In the distance you can just about make out St Paul’s Cathedral.
“I used to come here after the war when I was at university”, says Dad. “I loved the feeling of being on top of the city.” The trees waver in a warm May breeze.
“Nowadays it is fashionable to criticise the British for not letting in enough Jews. But I felt they treated us very reasonably.”
“Even when they locked you up?”
“Ja, what could they do?”
“So did you sit in your prison on the Isle of Man, and think – the Brits, how fair-minded and reasonable they are? And did you really think that when they sent you to Canada? One torpedo and you’d have been at the bottom of the Atlantic.”
I’ve seen the picture of my teenage father sitting round the camp-fire in the forest with lots of other confused looking men and boys. And the scratchy little notes he sent his mother asking her for parcels with shockolate. The first ones are in German, then later in English, very badly spelt. He was a boy running for his life, so they locked him up. And made a German boy write to his German mother in English so that his sad requests for home comforts and warm trousers could be read by the censor.
And though he still speaks strongly accented English, he’s absorbed something much more profoundly British – he’s horribly reasonable. “Yes actually it was fair enough,” he insists. “They were right, I could have been a spy.”
“You were seventeen!”
He shrugs. “You know, Lisbet, other people were not so lucky.” That shuts me up. As we make our way back down the hill in silence, I’m wondering how to stop Mutti driving my fair-minded, reasonable dad crazy with a hopeless compensation claim.
At Bernhard’s house, the waiting staff are washing glasses and stacking chairs. There’s no sign of Mutti. Bernie is sitting with a few remaining guests, taking coffee with petit fours. He doesn’t invite us to join them, which is hardly surprising given the unscheduled floorshow we put on.
“Er, my mother?” I venture. They barely turn their heads.
“I’m not a babysitter for the feeble-minded,” spits Bernie without turning his head. “Can’t you control her? It can’t be that difficult to keep her off the booze. Or just leave her at home next time.”
In the silence that follows, one of the guests picks up a petit four from the tray and examines it closely before biting it in half. “She went for a walk,” he says, from the corner of a mouth half-full of oozing marzipan. The remark is directed at Dad rather than me.
“A walk?” asks my father. “Aranca? Are you sure?” We look at each other.
“I’m sure she wanted to clear her head. Probably just gone round the block.”
“Yes, you are probably right. We’ll catch up with her.” He’s rubbish at lying, but no one seems to notice. Bernie ushers us out into the hallway for a farewell that manages to be both unnecessarily elaborate and arctic in its coldness. It takes the form of a lecture on the subject of respect. My father nods, patiently.
His reward is another of Bernie’s ceremonial bear hugs, though there seems little true affection in the embrace. And I am treated to an obscure and improving religious bon mot. Dad is halfway up the garden path before I manage to extricate myself. As I turn to join him, I feel a sharp sting on my backside, but I’m on the doorstep before I can work out what it was. I’ve been pinched on the
bottom. I turn my head just in time to see teeth glinting through facial hair as the door slams shut.
We get into the Datsun, and start cruising round Hendon. It’s looking as though the evening is about to turn into a repeat of our airport adventure, when the mobile rings. It’s the head waiter at the Cosmo restaurant in Swiss Cottage. A lady customer seems to have lost her bearings, he says.
When we get there, Mutti is tucking into the restaurant’s signature dish – Wiener schnitzel and mixed salad, with a large glass of iced soda water. I slide into the upholstered bench next to her, and she gives me a terse nod without looking up from her plate.
Dad and I order coffees, but none of us say anything much. When Mutti has finished her meal, Dad pays the bill, and says, “Come on then, old girl.”
She puts her head on one side, and lights a cigarette. “Is not the same here any more.”
I look around. The restaurant is half full of elderly Mittel Europeans just like my parents. It’s busier in the café beyond a half-wall. The espresso machine is going non-stop, and plates and plates of apple strudel are doing the rounds below a canopy of smoke.
She shakes her head. “I stay here.”
“You can’t stay here. They shut at ten-thirty.”
“Not here in the restaurant. With Elizabeth.”
“What?”
“Cardiff is not a civilised place.”
“Bit late to decide that now. You can’t stay with me.”
“Your spare room will be most comfortable, thank you.”
“But what will you do all day, when I’m working?”
“I have – business interests.”
“What business interests?” As long as I can remember my mother has been a hausfrau plus. The only business interests she’s been cultivating are investments in mayonnaise futures, given the number of jars she’s got stashed away in the larder.
“You will see.”
“Is this something to do the compensation thing?” My father winces and she gives him one of her blackest looks.
“Confidential business interests,” she glares. It’s a stand-off. She refuses to get into the car with Dad, and by now we are the only people left in the restaurant. The waiter keeps asking if we want anything else and looking at his watch.
As Mutti puts on her jacket with elaborate slowness, I’m desperately trying to work out a strategy to get us out of the stalemate. He’s standing there, his best suit now looking crumpled, fiddling despondently with the car keys. Surely the poor man deserves a bit of a break. Nobody ever thinks what all this is doing to him.
Ten minutes later, I watch the Datsun disappear up the Finchley Road towards the North Circular heading for the M4 and the uncivilised lands beyond, while I set off for the tube station, Mutti two paces behind me. Dave’ll be staying at his place. If I didn’t know better, I’d say she was doing her best to keep us apart.
It’s only when we get home that I really understand what I’ve agreed to. My new flatmate is an elderly alcoholic and nicotine addict who’s got me in a psychological half nelson. It sounds like a script by Roman Polanski. Let’s just hope neither of us meets a sticky end by way of the rear balcony. Long after she’s hit the sack, I’m sitting up with a large glass of red, asking myself how I let it happen.
Chapter 5
For my tenth birthday my parents gave me a typewriter. Not a toy one like some of my friends had, but a proper Olivetti Lettera 32 portable, in a dashing shade of turquoise with a same-colour carrying case. By then I’d already shown some flair for writing, and Mutti was determined to encourage me. Ten was double figures, she reasoned, which meant I was virtually an adult. That meant I needed to be equipped for the job.
But the transition from childhood also needed to be marked in some appropriate manner, and not just with gifts however lavish. Of course there was a three-course dinner at Sully House, but that’s how we had celebrated all my birthdays since I could remember. It was a family tradition and the only difference this time was that I was permitted to sip the Piesporter Michelsberg. No, Mutti declared, this year I would have a grand party.
In retrospect, maybe she was feeling guilty because I’d never had a birthday party before and she wanted to make it up to me with one big world-beating bash. She didn’t realise that I’d deliberately avoided the ghastly indignity of bringing my parents and my school friends face to face. Actually, calling them “friends” is a vast exaggeration – acquaintances would be more accurate. They were a pallid lot of Susans and Carolines, who looked like they belonged to a different species to me – blonde and blue-eyed, with squeaky little voices.
Their mummies were like grown-up versions of themselves, with Alice bands on their blonde manes, and neat little skirts. None of them ever spoke to Mutti at the school gate. Her booming Hungarian vowels formed a ten metre exclusion zone. You could see them looking at her rolling red locks and billowing cigarette smoke as they might have regarded a African tribesman wearing nothing but neck rings and a horn over his penis.
When it came to the party, I must have got carried away with a combination of Mutti’s florid fantasy and my own pre-adolescent hormonal ferment. She’d been a debutante herself in Budapest, and been courted by scores of young men bearing bouquets to her door. So at least she had some experience of romance, and that must have convinced me.
We had inevitable differences about the style of the event. The whole Beatles thing had passed Mutti by, so she envisaged ball-gowns and cups of fruit punch followed by Coronation Chicken to the strains of a big band in what passed for a smart local hotel. I was aiming more for mini-skirts and Coca Cola, with cheese and pineapple chunks on cocktail sticks stuck into half a grapefruit, while “Yeah Yeah Yeah” blasted out of the Dansette in our front room. To my great surprise, she gave way on everything apart from the menu. She even got her dressmaker to knock me up a dress just like one Mary Quant was wearing in a picture I cut out of a magazine.
On the day, I watched with trepidation as the butcher and greengrocer delivered, and Mutti set to in the kitchen. Thirty minutes before the appointed hour, Mutti was still up to her elbows in coleslaw.
Mercifully, she managed to get upstairs by the time the first few guests were smoothing down their velvet pinafore frocks as their coats were whisked away by “the help”. I’d put on a long playing record. Shy girls were making stilted conversation with spotty boys while their parents admired our collection of delft china figurines. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that Mutti had come back downstairs wearing an outsize version of the style of dress that Jackie Kennedy went for. Her love of patent leather must have started around then and she was wearing a nice pair of shiny black court shoes. The whole ensemble would have looked terrific, if only she’d managed to get her lipstick on straight.
I became aware that she had pounced onto an unwary trio of parents, and was regaling them with her opinion of the music, which was poor. By the time we approached the buffet, she was far from steady on her feet. At some point in the evening, a lot of food ended up on the floor and angry words were exchanged. I was hiding in the downstairs toilet; when I came out most of the guests had disappeared. So by the time we got to Uncle Bernhard’s reception in Hampstead Garden Suburb Mutti had form in the party department, and I shouldn’t have been surprised by what happened.
The Grand Ball proved to be a bit of a watershed in all our lives. Together with the typewriter it signalled the official start of my adulthood, but not in the way Mutti intended. Though she must have been drinking for years by then, I don’t remember it affecting anything much. Afterwards it affected everything.
The first day of high school I found myself having to explain why I wasn’t wearing the uniform tie. I wasn’t brave enough to tell the truth. That my mother had taken me out, heading with all good intentions to the department store to get the necessary. She’d become confused halfway through the day and came home without half the kit. After writing out “I must remember ALL my school uniform” one hu
ndred times, I went home and helped myself to enough money from her purse to get a tie the following morning. So I got another hundred lines for being late.
When she didn’t turn up for parents’ evening at school, it was apparently because I’d failed to tell her about it. Meissen china plates smashed because I was clumsy. And when she crashed the car under the influence, I was hastily swapped into the driver’s seat and had lost my no claims bonus before my eighteenth birthday.
I tried my best to get on with being an ordinary teenager, albeit one without much of a social life. But in the frequent periods when Mutti’s drinking got out of hand, I was also handbag carrier, clearer up and fixer. Dad was at work and didn’t see that I’d made the dinner and ordered the groceries. I also negotiated with irate tradesmen, smoothed out relations with the neighbours and even on one terrible occasion kept the police off our backs. I spent many lonely nights yearning for a mummy with a velvet Alice band, even if she was holding a chip pan in her hand. But at least I had my Olivetti for company.
Chapter 6
The focal point in our office is a white board fixed to the wall, divided by thick, black grid lines. Current stories are listed down the left, and progress charted in a series of squares, culminating in transmission date. Next to my case, there’s a large question mark, then blank, blank, blank and blank. The production meeting is tomorrow. I turn towards my desk, with a knot in my stomach, and catch Andrew’s eye. He winks. Bastard.
