by Nigel Packer
She halted a moment, to sip her tea. ‘One morning, just after dawn, a great noise began up on deck. There were screams and shouts – the beams of light through the timbers went out. Another boat, we realised, was pulling up alongside us. Binh and I looked at each other as we hugged the boys in our arms. We did not look fearful, either of us. It was a look that said: “It is over now. We may die in a few seconds, with a bullet in our heads, or we may live for fifty more years. But we have reached the moment of truth, and at last our ordeal on this boat is over, along with the uncertainty of how and when it will end for us.”’
‘And who was on board this other boat?’
‘It was a large merchant ship. The crew were helpful, but a little shocked, I think, by what they found. We were given food and basic medical treatment, then transferred to a camp for refugees in Hong Kong. Conditions there were poor, by any normal standards, but after the weeks at sea, and our years in a war-torn country, we felt as though we had somehow landed in paradise. The boys ran up and down the paths between huts, simply because they could, and they laughed and clapped their hands for joy because the earth beneath their feet was solid, and the horizon no longer moved. But our fears soon returned. What would happen to us? Where would we go? The camp became crowded, there were problems. Finally we were told, after months of questioning and waiting, that we had been given the status of refugees by the British government. We would be going to live in London!’
Mrs Pham said this with a certain nostalgic pride, as she reached out to refill their cups from the pot.
‘What did you think of it when you first arrived?’ Otto asked.
‘It was strange but, in its way, wonderful. Marlowe House was huge, the city even more so. But we were alive, the whole family, in a country at peace with itself, so we were happy enough with our fate.’
‘And how did you settle? It can’t have been easy. As a foreigner in England, I remember it took me some considerable time. I even changed my surname in a bid to be better accepted.’
‘It was difficult. Binh had great trouble finding work. The language was a problem, especially during the early years, and there were not so many jobs around for anyone at that time.’
‘But he found something … eventually?’
‘Only ever casual work. Nothing well paid, or secure. I know he found this hard, though he rarely spoke about it. He never again found a real footing in life, the way he had done in Vietnam. One time, when he was serving at tables, in a restaurant belonging to an old friend, I took the children over to meet him at work. I became quite angry at the way some customers spoke to him. People in suits, clicking their fingers, ordering him around. I told him it was a disgrace, that he deserved more respect, especially given what he and his family had been through.’
‘And what did he say when you told him that?’
‘He laughed and said perhaps we should have stayed with the Communists in Saigon, after all! Binh was a good man, with a fine sense of humour; always better able to cope than I with the difficulties that sometimes came our way. Towards the end, with the struggle of work behind him, he was more or less completely at peace. Knowing he was no longer at the command of others left him with a great sense of freedom. He liked to tend the flowers in our window box, and we would go for short walks together by the river. Once, when he was feeling strong enough, we went to see the gardens at Kew.’
Mrs Pham fell silent as she finished her tea.
‘What happened to your husband?’ Otto asked her.
‘He passed away, three years ago, from cancer of the liver.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It was quick, a few months only. He didn’t suffer long.’
‘And your sons?’
‘They are back in Ho Chi Minh City, which is the modern name for Saigon, of course. The name has changed – the city, too. I hear it’s a thriving place, these days. I miss my children and my grandchildren, but we talk to each other all the time. They speak to me every other day on Skype.’
Otto sat staring into space. He was lost once more along the tangled paths of memory; Mrs Pham’s, now, as well as his own.
He saw for an instant an open-topped van, weighed down with household belongings. Family photographs, rolls of bedding, the horn of an old gramophone sticking out through the clutter. He felt his father’s arms beneath his shoulders, lifting him onto a seat beside his sisters. Then he felt again the sense of confusion, the change of atmosphere in the city that had been their home. The familiar sights – the opera house, tram wires and high tiers of chocolate cake – had taken on a new dimension since the Anschluss, one that he had struggled as a child to comprehend. Despite the appearance of calm on the streets, following the celebrations of the crowds a few days before, there was a new sense of fear in Vienna, of dangers unidentified. These were reflected back to Otto through the frightened eyes of his mother, as she helped his father up onto the seat beside them.
Chloe looked at Otto, wondering whether he might express whatever it was that appeared to be weighing on his mind. He turned instead to Mrs Pham.
‘Would you ever think of returning to Vietnam? Permanently, I mean.’
Mrs Pham thought for a second.
‘My children keep asking me that same question, almost every time we speak. They want to know why I stay in this horrible building.’
She paused.
‘Oh dear, I’m so sorry. What I mean to say is…’
‘I understand, don’t worry.’
Otto had replied with a small and rueful smile.
‘My children think I would be happier in Vietnam. But I’m not really so sure. If Marlowe House is pulled to the ground, I will return, but it’s many years now since I actually lived there. The idea of going back gives me butterflies. There are memories, you see, from the war. Too many of them, perhaps. So for now, at least, I think I will stay where I am. When I get up in the morning, look out and see the sun rise behind the nearby towers, I see it just as Binh and I did, every morning of our lives for thirty-five years. There is nowhere else on earth that can give me that – nowhere, even in the country of my birth, that has that kind of meaning for me.’
Otto looked thoughtful, remembering his own past.
‘It is difficult,’ he said, ‘returning to the scene of a traumatic experience. Once it has happened, life is never the same again. The world changes shape, and there’s nothing one can do to restore its contours. And then, somehow, without even intending it, a new life has appeared elsewhere. After that, it becomes difficult to ever think of going back.’
He looked at Mrs Pham, and continued, ‘It’s not easy to explain all this, when talking to other people, unless they’ve been through a similar experience themselves.’
She smiled, with understanding.
‘I’m glad you came to visit today – although, I must admit, I was a little nervous about the cameras.’
She asked him, then, if he had children of his own.
‘I have a son, called Daniel.’
‘That’s a beautiful name.’
‘It is. His mother chose it, as a matter of fact.’
‘And does Daniel have any children?’
‘A daughter and a son.’
‘Where do they live?’
‘Here in London.’
‘And you will be visiting them, your family, during your stay?’
Otto reddened and looked at the floor.
Chloe intervened.
‘Thank you so much for your time, Mrs Pham. It was kind of you to speak to us. We really shouldn’t keep you too much longer.’
Twenty-Two
Sitting alone in his living room late that evening, Otto looked out at the countless pins of light beneath the window. Gathered together, like the dots on a Pointillist painting, they formed a giant image of a city.
In the distance, he heard the sound of sirens. Somewhere, a helicopter hovered. At midnight, the insomniac capital stirred beneath his gaze.
Such a frenetic
sort of place, exhausting to me now.
Yet it was all a question of perspective, he realised. To Mrs Pham and her family, on the day of their arrival, London must have seemed an oasis of order and calm.
Lifting his spectacles from his face, he rubbed the pins of light from his eyes. His outer vision blurred, but his inner one intensified. At this late hour, the past flowed in on him unchecked.
‘Do you have any children?’ Mrs Pham had asked him earlier.
His memory, now, brought forth to him a son.
* * *
Daniel arrived in the world two weeks prematurely. He was delivered at home and, unusually for that era, Otto was present at the birth. He held Cynthia’s hand throughout, but was of less practical help than he had planned. In this sense, it set the tone for the years that were to follow.
The midwife, a fearsome woman in her late fifties, barked instructions at Cynthia as if she were a contestant at Crufts.
‘Push!’ she ordered. ‘Harder, Mrs Laird … harder. We can have this over and done with by teatime!’
When not haranguing Cynthia, the midwife harangued Otto for not joining in with her cries of encouragement. Instead, he held onto Cynthia’s hand, repeating time and again in a soft, plaintive mantra: ‘My poor Cynthia … my darling Cynthia … there, there, my love … there, there.’
The birth of a child, for many fathers, is an experience bordering on the spiritual. Otto’s memory, in later years, was more of a nightmare fairground ride. He recalled only fragments, such as gripping Cynthia’s hand more firmly with each renewed scream (his own palm as trembling and sticky as hers), closing his eyes now and then, whenever his head started to spin out of control, and then opening them – to focus, if possible, on the bay window and the swaying oak tree outside. Occasionally, he would glance down for a glimpse of something purplish and messy, before averting his eyes again to the window. His overriding sensations once it had finished were of relief, both baby and mother having emerged bloodied but in good health from their ordeal, and an awestruck admiration for Cynthia’s limitless resistance to pain. Upon seeing her, wan and drained, cradling the sleeping baby in the glow of the bedroom lamp, he had undergone his moment of revelation. But that was later, after the clean-up, once the image of the trauma and viscera had faded.
Daniel was not an especially happy baby, as testified by the albums full of photographs showing a furious, red-faced creature either just recovering from one explosion of rage, or about to launch into another. He suffered greatly from colic during the early months of his life, rendering sleep a sweet memory for his bleary-eyed parents, who took it in turns to walk the infant around the bedroom, gently bouncing and rocking him in their arms in a bid to help wind him. There was a particular rhythm that appeared to work each time, though he struggled so much that it sometimes took a while for him to find it. At weekends, the family walked on Hampstead Heath: at first pushing Daniel in his pram, then watching him move on unsteady legs as he chased after pigeons and toppled onto his hands. Sometimes he would be surprised to tears; at others, distracted by his parents’ intervention into laughter.
Like his mother and father, Daniel was a sharp-minded child, observing the world around him with a keen and penetrating eye. Sometimes, Cynthia would catch the tube down with Daniel to the office on Portland Place. He would sit at Otto’s work desk, flooded by the light from the window, and practise drawing pictures of houses, frowning in concentration and his tongue protruding slightly from the corner of his mouth.
As Daniel grew to school age, Otto felt conscious that he was playing a more peripheral role in his son’s life than he would have liked. Whenever Otto returned from one of his frequent trips abroad, the boy always ran to hug him with a naturalness that brought a tightness to Otto’s throat. Yet he sensed that an inevitable distance was growing between them. He felt, even when Daniel was seven or eight, a certain formality on both their parts that, as the years passed, would grow ever more entrenched.
I tried to overcome it, but it’s so difficult to alter these situations, once the pattern has been set. Could I have done more, to remove the barriers that grew into adulthood?
What Daniel felt and thought, his hopes, dreams and concerns – these were largely the preserve of his mother. Circumstances, somehow, had conspired to shut Otto out. Like many others of his generation, he had played the role of a father without ever quite being the real thing. That he appeared unable to do anything about this had frustrated him immensely at the time. He was glad to see, with later generations, that the situation had begun to change.
* * *
Many moments from Daniel’s childhood returned to Otto throughout that evening. Yet for some reason it was the kite that wouldn’t leave him. If only there had been more memories like that one.
Looking up, he saw Daniel, at the age of five or six, hovering on the threshold of his study in Hampstead. He was waiting, as usual, to be noticed and invited inside.
‘Daniel. Hello. How nice it is to see you.’
Otto took off his spectacles and smiled at his son, laying the partially constructed kite to one side.
The little boy ran into the study and hugged him.
‘Hi, Daddy.’
‘How did you get on with your sums?’
‘Okay. Full marks. What are you doing?’
‘I’m making a kite.’
‘For who?’
‘For you.’
‘Really?’
The look of delight on Daniel’s face prompted Otto to ruffle his hair.
‘I thought we might take it to Grandma and Grandpa’s house, the next time we visit. We’re going there in a few weeks’ time. Remember how windy it gets in those hills during the winter?’
Daniel nodded.
‘The scarf.’
‘That’s right. It’s where Mummy’s headscarf blew away last time. That’s what gave me the idea to build you this.’
The kite gradually took shape over the course of the next few days. Daniel popped into the study two or three times an evening to see how it was progressing. Cynthia, too, glanced in periodically.
‘It looks lovely,’ she said. ‘Good enough to hang on a wall.’
‘It’s been a fascinating challenge. So different, technically, to what I usually do, yet with certain underlying similarities.’
When completed, the kite had a highly elaborate shape. The wire frame and pieces of fabric formed a delicate series of interconnecting folds.
‘Like paper screens inside a Japanese house,’ Cynthia told him, admiringly.
‘Let’s hope it’s a little more aerodynamic than they are.’
They were to find out, two weeks later, on a raw and blustery afternoon in the Chilterns.
The three of them stood at the top of a hill, overlooking a field of furrowed clay.
‘Do you think it will work?’ Otto shouted to Daniel and Cynthia.
He had his doubts. The structure was fragile; the wind that day was high, howling in over the fields towards them.
‘Let’s try, Daddy,’ cried Daniel, in his duffel coat and galoshes, the scarf his mother had knitted for him pushed up around his ears.
Otto handed the kite to him and gently explained what to do.
‘By the edges … that’s it. Try not to press too hard. Lift it up, right in front of you, and then, when I give the word, you can let it go up into the sky. Okay?’
Daniel nodded and dutifully held out the kite, while Otto took the spool and wound out the string. He continued speaking as he moved backwards.
‘Perfectly still. Won’t be a minute … let’s see if this contraption can fly.’
Cynthia, moving closer to Daniel, wrapped him in her arms and kissed the top of his head.
‘Ready, darling? This is going to be fun.’
In her arms, Daniel trembled in anticipation. The kite in his hands trembled, too. Otto, his tall body visible over the curve of the hill, appeared to be nearly ready.
‘Okay? Hold it up now, h
igh as you can,’ he called.
Daniel lifted his arms. The kite flapped and struggled as he gripped it between his fingers.
‘The wind wants to take it away, Daddy,’ he shouted.
‘Not just yet, a few more seconds.’
Otto adjusted his glasses.
‘Okay, when you’re ready,’ he called.
‘Let’s count down together,’ Cynthia whispered to Daniel.
‘Three … two … one … GO!’
Daniel loosened his grip on the frame, and the kite sprang eagerly from his grasp, twisting and turning in a series of leaps, mounting the sky as if it were a staircase. He and Cynthia cheered as they watched it go, laughing and clapping their hands. Their laughter then redoubled as they looked across at Otto, who fought to keep control as the kite ascended.
‘Oh no,’ he shouted, raising another wave of laughter, as the spool escaped his grasp and bounced away across the grass.
‘Catch it, Daddy!’ shouted Daniel.
‘Catch it, Otto!’ shouted Cynthia.
He tried to chase it down, a grin upon his face, waving his arms and shouting in a way he knew would amuse Daniel. But his smile began to fade as the spool continued to unravel. The kite rose ever higher into the sky. Gaining ground, Otto reached down to grab the elusive spool, but toppled forward onto the grass at the vital moment. Looking on, helpless, he watched it lifting from the earth to follow into the slipstream of the soaring kite. Within a few more seconds, his masterpiece was vanishing over the hills and out of sight. It was an entirely new experience and somewhat disconcerting. That sort of thing didn’t happen with his buildings.
‘Oh damn,’ he exclaimed to himself, as the laughter in the background turned to gasps. ‘That thing works a lot better than I anticipated.’
Racing back to the car, they set off in pursuit of the kite. Yet scanning the skies through the windscreen, they could see nothing but fast-moving clouds. All afternoon they drove through the narrow lanes, stopping to peer over gates and into hedgerows. But no glimpse of a broken frame, or a twisted piece of fabric, appeared to solve the mystery of its escape.
