It was just a baby, she decided, and was rather sad about that. It was a boy so it ought to look different, but it looked like Magda only a lot smaller. It was asleep like Magda, too.
‘A boy,’ she said. ‘Don’t boys look different? This one looks the same as Magda.’
‘You’re looking at the wrong end!’ Poppa said and laughed hugely, the sort of very big laugh he made when he had been sitting downstairs for a long time with the other men. ‘At the other end, he looks different, oh boy, does he look different!’
‘Shut up, Viktor,’ Anya said and then looked at Zsuzske. ‘Listen, dolly, go and play, eh? Quietly. Don’t wake the baby –’
‘Which baby?’ Zsuzske said and looked over her shoulder at Magda, asleep on the rug. Suddenly she looked very big and very old. Not at all like a baby really.
‘Magda,’ Anya said after a moment. ‘Don’t wake Magda.’
‘What’s his name?’ she said then, suddenly feeling she could ask questions, be cheeky. Anya wouldn’t shout at her. It was another of those things she knew without knowing why she knew.
‘I – it’s,’ Anya began and then Poppa said, ‘He’s my boy Viktor, of course!’
‘No!’ That was Anya, suddenly loud. ‘No. This I won’t have. I can – I can’t have that.’
Poppa was very quiet, and Zsuzske looked at him and his face had gone still and solid.
‘I’m sorry, Maritza,’ he said and it was as though there was no one except him and Anya. No Magda, no Zsuzske, certainly no baby boy without a name. ‘I got excited. I didn’t think.’
‘I noticed,’ Anya said and looked again at the baby.
‘I’m sorry. It’s just – a man needs sons. If he can’t have sons, what is he?’
‘The father of daughters isn’t good enough?’
Poppa said nothing but he looked at the baby bundle with his eyes so wide and dark that he didn’t look like Poppa any more, Zsuzske thought, and suddenly she felt the crying inside her nose sharp and pushing and the tears came out of her eyes and she heard herself bawling, loudly.
Anya kneeled down then, and put her arm round her. She still had the baby in her other arm but she held Zsuzska close and then at last it was all right. Anya was just being the way she was and the crying stopped hurting and started being a nice feeling and Zsuzske snivelled and sniffled and squeezed her eyes to make the tears come out and felt good inside.
There was a sound then and the door they had shut behind them was pushed open and Zsuzske looked up over Anya’s shoulder and it was Kati. She was wearing a dressing gown and she looked tired, as though she’d just woken up.
‘Anya?’ she said and then the sort of crying that hurt came back into Zsuzske’s nose because Anya dropped her, stood up and dropped her, leaving her there alone in the middle of the floor so that she could go over to Kati and hold her in her spare arm.
Zsuzske hated Kati then. She often hated Kati, who shouted at her like a grown up but behaved like a child and made Anya hold and love her instead of Zsuzske.
‘Anya,’ Kati said again and now Poppa went over and took her arm. ‘Back to bed, Kati,’ he said loudly. ‘You’re in no condition to be out here. Back to bed, at once. You want you should be ill?’
‘I want to be dead,’ Kati said and began to cry loudly and Zsuzske did too and then it was Magda, sitting up on the rug and rubbing her eyes and shrieking, her nose running and her mouth shrieking and Zsuzske tried to cry louder but couldn’t. No one could cry louder than Magda, though Kati was trying to.
And then it was evening time. It had been afternoon and now it was evening. Zsuzske tried sometimes, afterwards, to remember what happened but she couldn’t. It was just the way it was; it was afternoon and there was the new baby and then it was evening time and the new baby wasn’t so new any more and Kati wasn’t in her dressing gown any more but was sitting by the fire, with Poppa and Momma, like a grown up person. And Zsuzske was in the big armchair curled up. She must have been asleep. That was it, asleep, only now she wasn’t. But her eyes were still closed and she listened to them talk, Anya and Poppa and Kati.
‘If you tell me, I promise you, I won’t make no trouble.
But a man’s entitled to know who makes such a disgrace of his house!’ Poppa was saying.
‘No!’ Kati said.
‘Listen, Kati, no one’ll make trouble, I promise you, no one will. But we have to decide, the birth certificate, everything – you ought to be married to the man, so the baby gets a decent certificate.’
‘Tell them it’s your baby,’ Kati said. ‘I won’t say.’
There was silence then. Zsuzske, lying curled up with the light of the fire making orange patterns behind her closed eyes listened to the silence and knew it was best to stay asleep. It was a bad silence.
‘What did you say?’ Poppa said.
‘You heard me,’ Kati said. ‘I won’t say. It’s my affair. Mine, you hear me? If I tell you who it was, you’ll make such a fuss, you’ll make him marry me, and I don’t want to. He wants to but I don’t, so there’s an end to it. So I won’t tell you. You can’t make me.’
‘You said to say it’s our baby,’ Poppa said. His voice was loud and Zsuzske thought, if he talks so loud I’ll have to wake up and I don’t want to. I don’t want them to know I’m awake. Shut up, Poppa. Be quiet, Poppa.
‘So?’ Kati again.
‘You want us to do that? To say it’s our baby?’ This was Anya’s voice and Zsuzske listened and thought – Anya sounds like me when she says to me do you want another potato and I don’t know if I do. She doesn’t know what she wants. It was strange to think of grown-ups not knowing what they wanted.
‘Why not? No one knows about me. I didn’t show much, did I?’ Kati began to sound like she usually did, whining and wanting things, and Zsuzske liked that. She’d been sounding all wrong, this past few days. What past few days? She tried to remember and couldn’t. ‘I’ve not put my nose outside these rotten walls except at night this past three months, hiding away. You were pregnant – who knows what happened to your baby? Only us. We’re the only ones know your baby died. So say this one is your baby. It doesn’t have to be mine, I don’t want it –’
‘Don’t want our little boy?’ Poppa said, and his voice was big and loud again. ‘That lovely boy who –’
‘I don’t care. I don’t care, I don’t care!’ Kati was shouting and crying and now Zsuzske had to wake up, she was making so much noise. She had to and she sat up and looked round.
It was strange being Zsuzske. Sometimes she remembered everything that happened to her in every tiny bit. She remembered how many bites there were on her apple and how many sweets had been in the bag Poppa had brought her. But then there were times when whole days, whole weeks, even longer, just fell into a black hole in her mind and she couldn’t ever find them again.
It was like that with Kati. One moment she was there in the sitting room and crying, I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care,’ and the next it was a long time afterwards and she wasn’t there. She hadn’t been there for a long time. There was the Yard, and it was a hot Sunday afternoon and Anya had come out with a chair and was sleeping in it in the sun and Magda was running up and down with her dog on wheels and Istvan was in the high chair and banging on the front of it with his bricks and throwing them down so that Zsuzske had to pick them up.
‘Be a good sister,’ Anya had said sleepily, sitting there with her arms folded. ‘Pick up your little brother’s bricks when he throws them. Be a nice big sister –’
And because she was now seven and getting to be such a nice big girl, she had to.
And there suddenly was Kati again coming through the archway with a tall man with a thin face. She was wearing a white satin dress with a pouched front over a deep white belt and it was trimmed all round its flounced skirt with white spotted net frills edged with baby ribbon. The sleeves were frilled too, and her hat was made of pleated satin ribbon, like her shirt. Zsuzske had never seen anything qui
te so beautiful and she pulled her blue serge dress over her black stockinged legs and scowled at her sister.
But she paid her no attention. ‘This is Ferenc, Momma,’ she said and Anya sat up and held out her hand and the tall man bent over it and said something and kissed the air over it.
There was a lot of talking and laughing then and Poppa came out and sat in the sun as well, and they sent Zsuzske to the ice cream shop in Bateman Street, where Mr. Ferraro was open even on Sundays, to fetch strawberry cornets, and by the time she came back they were all acting as though they’d been there for ever and that Ferenc, who was the tall man, had been there for ever too. They told her he was to marry her sister Kati and Poppa had cried and looked sour and then fetched wine and laughed instead and Zsuzske and Magda and Istvan had been allowed to eat all the ice cream. A good day, really, Zsuzske had thought. Till all the grown ups went inside to sit at a table in the corner of the restaurant and talk some more and left Zsuzske to look after the little ones in the sunshiny Yard. And Mr. Bosquet had come out into the Yard.
He stood there in the shadow of his shop door and called Zsuzske and she went to him at once, for he was a nice man, a big nice old man who was as frightened inside as she was, sometimes. She knew that because of the way he looked at her sideways and blinked at her and she would smile at him and say, ‘Don’t worry! It may never happen!’ the way her father did all the time when he saw him. And Mr. Bosquet would laugh and not look quite so frightened. But most of the time he did.
‘Who was that?’ he said, and Zsuzske looked over her shoulder to see where he was staring. They could see into the restaurant from here, see the four shapes sitting round the table.
‘That is Ferenc,’ Zsuzske said, proud to have the answers to a grown-up’s question, even a frightened grown-up like Mr. Bosquet. ‘That is Ferenc Kiss and he’s going to marry my sister and Anya says I can be a bridesmaid. What to bridesmaids do, Mr. Bosquet?’
‘They wear pretty dresses,’ he said after a moment and she had stared at him, surprised. He didn’t sound frightened now. He sounded angry. ‘She’s marrying that man?’
‘Yes. She says she’s going to have the best white dress and lilies of the valley and –’
‘Why?’
‘She didn’t say.’
‘What about –’ He had looked down at her then and his face had gone smooth. ‘Where is she going to live? She and her Ferenc Kiss?’
‘She didn’t say.’ Zsuzske was mystified. He’d never talked so much or so directly as long as she could remember. Not ever. ‘She said they were going to look for a flat. She told Poppa she was going to look for a flat. They’re all talking about that now, I think. That and money.’ And she had nodded seriously. They always sat round tables when they talked about money. She’d heard it often.
‘And they’ll be just the two of them in this flat?’ Mr. Bosquet said. ‘Just them and no one else?’
‘I don’t know,’ Zsuzske said. She was getting bored now and wanted to lick her ice cream more quickly and she couldn’t do that while he was talking all the time. It wouldn’t be polite. ‘Who else should there be?’
‘Your – the baby. Istvan,’ he said and after a moment looked across the Yard to the high chair by the door in the sun, where Istvan was getting ice cream in his hair, rubbing it in and looking happy.
‘My little brother,’ Zsuzske said.
‘That’s right. Your little brother,’ Mr. Bosquet said and he sounded angry again. ‘That’s who. Your little brother.’
‘I don’t know, Mr. Bosquet,’ Zsuzske said and now it was important not to talk to him any more. ‘I’m going home now. Goodbye.’ And she ran across the Yard and started to clean the ice cream off Istvan’s face, though it made him cry when she took the soggy cornet away from him. He bawled a lot and Poppa came out and picked him up and soothed him and shouted at her for making him cry and took him inside. She sat on the step of the restaurant and looked across to the tobacco shop. It was quite silent now, with the door shut and the blinds down, but she knew he was in there and watching, though she didn’t know how she knew.
There was something else she knew too, though she never told anyone about it. She knew now that Istvan wasn’t her little brother. He didn’t have the same Anya and Poppa she had. Whatever they said. He had a different Anya and Poppa and Zsuzske knew who they were.
35
‘Are you quite sure?’ Joel said and then made a face at his own foolishness. ‘I’m sorry! That was a silly question.’
‘I wouldn’t say if I wasn’t sure,’ the old woman said. ‘That was the first time I knew for sure that afternoon. But afterwards – oh, there were things said, things I saw that proved it. The rows Anya and Poppa had –’ She sighed, a ghostly little noise that made her great belly rise like bread. ‘He tried to forget Istvan wasn’t his son, you see. He tried to pretend there hadn’t been any other man. And Kati never said. Poor old Jean!’
‘Who?’
‘Jean Bosquet. He loved my sister, Kati, poor old man. He told me often and often. He knew it had been wrong, knew she was only fifteen, but couldn’t help it. The way he told me, I knew it wasn’t his fault. It was hers. She made him do it –’
‘He told you that? A child your age?’ Joel was shocked and didn’t care if she knew.
She laughed then, a bubble that turned into a cough. ‘No – no – he wasn’t like that. He was a good man. He wasn’t telling me when he talked. Not in so many words. It was just the way people do talk to children sometimes. They talk to themselves really, with the child listening.’ She managed a portentous little nod, moving her head heavily on her pillows. ‘But I understood what he was saying. He wanted Kati but she didn’t want him, and he wanted Istvan but she wouldn’t admit he had a right to him so what could the poor old man do? He married Violetta and then Yves was born.’ She squinted at Joel. ‘You know Yves?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure I’ve heard about Yves –’
‘Then listen,’ she said tartly. ‘Jean Bosquet, when my sister wouldn’t have him and married Ferenc Kiss instead, went and married Violetta – her father had the patisserie in Dean Street. And they had this little boy, Yves – and then they had a girl, I forget the name – and then they died and Yves had the shop after them –’
‘Mucky,’ Joel said, and nodded. ‘Of course. Mucky.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘Not important. But I know who you mean, now. Look, Mrs. Balog – didn’t anyone else in the family know that Istvan was your parents’ grandson and not their son?’
‘Kati knew,’ she said and grinned and a couple of long yellow teeth showed in the dark cavern of her mouth.
‘And no one else?’
She was silent for a long time, and her eyes seemed to have glazed and he watched her, not wanting to push her too hard but wanting so much to know all she had to tell him that he could almost taste his own hunger. But he managed to be patient. And was rewarded.
‘I can see them still, you know that?’ she said almost dreamily. ‘When I think of the old days, I see the scenes inside my head and see the people there and I don’t say to myself, what are they saying? I just look at the people there and I hear them start talking and I listen.’ She chuckled then, a soft little sound that was oddly young. ‘I was a wicked child! I sat under tables and I sat in corners and I kept myself small, and I listened. They forgot I was there, and I just listened and listened and I knew everything and none of them knew I knew. A wicked child.’
‘I rather think you were,’ Joel said and laughed too and she looked at him with a glint of pure mischief in her eyes and laughed with him, and for a moment there was a rapport there into which the vast age gap between them seemed to vanish completely.
‘It was sad for Anya, though,’ she said suddenly and then started to pant a little as she tried to haul herself up the bed. She had slipped down so that her head was poked forward and at once he got to his feet and leaned o
ver and tucking his arm into hers, the way he had been used to do for his mother when she had been ill, gave a practised heave. And she came up the bed and lay back gasping a little on the pillows.
‘Why sad for your mother?’
‘She never felt right about it. Poppa, he could pretend Istvan was his boy but she always knew he wasn’t. She’d lost so many. So many babies and they were all hers, all special. The last one she had which died just six weeks before Istvan was born, that one was very special. The only time she had a boy, you see. She told me when my Leonard was born – the only time she had a boy it died. She didn’t realise what she was saying to me, I think, about Istvan. But she said it. Poor Anya. Poor Poppa –’ She looked very directly at Joel then. ‘But do you understand? Your own are special, the way no one else’s ever can be. My Paul – he’s so much more to me than Richard and Veronica and Charles. They’re my grandchildren and they’re important, but they aren’t mine, are they? And Istvan was never my Anya’s. He was Poppa’s but never hers. She looked after him and loved him, you understand.’ She peered closely at him and put out one gnarled hand to tug at his sleeve. It was clearly important to her that he should understand. ‘She cared for him and reared him as carefully as she did we three, but she never felt for him as Poppa did.’
‘I understand,’ Joel said gently though still loudly and patted her hand. ‘She was a good lady, your mother. I know that. A good lady who suffered a lot.’
‘Being married to Poppa, she suffered,’ the old lady said and again produced a little cackle of laughter. ‘Oh, he was so wicked, my Poppa. So lovely and so wicked! The gambling, the drinking, the laughing, the stories, the way he talked – oh, he was a wonderfully wicked old man!’ And she seemed to light up as she stared back at her father down the long corridors of the dead years.
‘I’m sure he was,’ Joel said and again patted her hand.
‘And he won in the end, though she tried so hard to stop it.’ She shook her head and made a little face. ‘Well, they both won. Both lost too. The last years that was all they ever talked about. The money, the Family Trust, who should have it, who shouldn’t. And then when she threatened to have him locked up in a hospital and made us all agree to help her – that was bad. I was bad –’
Lunching at Laura's Page 35
