The Clothes On Their Backs: A Novel (No Series) Read online

  ‘Are you off?’ he said. ‘You haven’t had any tea yet.’

  ‘I’ve got to go.’

  ‘I’m going out myself, I’ll walk along with you, if you like.’

  I couldn’t stop him. It’s a free country and anyone has the right to walk down the street.

  We set off along Parkway to Camden tube, passing the pet shop, where he said he bought his fish. The cages in the windows were full of downtrodden creatures.

  ‘If you could, which would you have, a parrot or a monkey?’ he said.

  The parrots were of many colours and had tiny primeval eyes. I couldn’t see any monkeys there, but their hands disturbed me.

  ‘A goose,’ I said, ‘a Canada goose.’

  ‘That’s a bird but it’s not a parrot.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘My go. I’d take the monkey. I’d let it sleep in my bed. It would have to be female obviously, you don’t want a monkey’s dick sticking into you in the middle of the night. But no monkey business with the girl monkey, just to cuddle.’

  ‘You’re in need of a girlfriend, it seems,’ I said, teasingly. His nonsense was soothing after the menacing hours spent with my uncle.

  ‘I’ve got a girlfriend,’ he said, and his face seemed to acquire a little colour.

  ‘Where does she live?’ I asked.

  ‘She’s back home, where I come from.’

  ‘Is she coming to London to be with you?’

  ‘Don’t think so.’

  It seemed like an unsatisfactory arrangement, and I wondered if she even existed. ‘So perhaps she’s no longer your girlfriend?’ I said.

  ‘No, she is. What’s your name?’

  ‘Miranda. What about you?’

  ‘I’m Claude. Go on, laugh, everyone does. My mum got it from the pictures. There was some actor who played a Frenchman in a film she saw, but he wasn’t even French, she just thought he was.’

  ‘It is quite funny. Haven’t you got a middle name you could use?’

  ‘Yeah, Louis. Aka Louise, as they called me in school. So as you can see, I’m screwed either way. I’m stuck with Claude. You learn to live with it.’

  He was taller than me, and he walked fast with his shoulders hunched down and his hands in his jeans pockets, as if his head was driving forward through the air, pushing it back. His name was his face, and he challenged anyone to deal with it, as an ugly person learns to inhabit their body, make it something arresting and interesting.

  We descended the escalator at Camden tube station and waited on the platform. ‘I start work here next week,’ he said, lighting his little cigarette. ‘As a trainee guard.’

  Rats ran up and down on the rails. The train came with a blast of cold air drawn along the tunnels, the noise filling all the narrow space. We came back up at Bond Street to a fine sunny afternoon, the wind dropping all the time. The sides of the streets pushed you forwards like the arteries drive on the blood, in endless circulation.

  ‘My window,’ he said, ‘what about…’ But I was slipping away into my own privacy, remembering what Uncle Sándor had told me: of the brothers’ childhood in the village, and coming to Budapest, and my father being good with his hands, and my uncle good with his head. I didn’t even know what that city looked like. I was not curious about the place my parents came from, except I knew it was cold, dark, hard, evil. There were squares and cellars where they shot people. In the last months of the war people hid where they could, up or down. In 1956 the people rose up against the Soviets and were crushed. I couldn’t picture it and had never wanted to, until now.

  Then I found that we had lost each other in the crowd, for I was on my own on the pavement, so I turned up towards Harley Street, though I thought I caught a glimpse of him outside a pub, watching me, as I hurried along the street.

  Shocked and embarrassed was the mood of Benson Court when I returned home from my honeymoon a widow. The residents felt it must be their own fault, sending us to the Hotel Negresco, signing a death warrant, as the ballerina put it, theatrically crossing her hands across her breasts and holding her head to one side, when she stopped me on the stairs to offer her condolences.

  I went to see Gilbert. ‘You’ve been in the wars, haven’t you, poor love?’ he said. ‘Come and have a drink.’ The mantelpiece was full of invitations to parties, and the floor was covered with half-read books.

  I told him about my attempts to find a job, and all the applications I had sent off but he said, ‘Oh, applications darling, don’t you realise that that’s not how it works at all?’

  ‘How does it work?’

  ‘Silly girl, contacts!’

  ‘I haven’t got any contacts.’

  ‘Yes, you have, lots of them. Starting with me. Do you want me to see if there’s anything on the paper?’

  ‘A job on The Times?’

  ‘Probably not a job, but maybe some freelance work, I could certainly see about that. What about book reviewing, for example, do you think that might suit?’

  I could be a book reviewer, a literary critic for the newspapers, and I would go to parties and meet interesting people and make friends, and get a flat of my own somewhere! I had a sudden passion to read books again, a need for their deep nourishment. But didn’t I need to work for The Times to be entrusted with a book to review? Would they give me a book if I wasn’t paying national insurance and tax and had other numbers? My father had numbers and cards. Morris Axelrod gave them to him. No, Gilbert said, I would be what was called freelance, and freedom was already embedded in the word, so it was for me.

  Humbly grateful, I agreed to let him take out the pictures he had drawn of me at seventeen, and we looked at them, and he asked if I still looked like that, with my clothes off. I wasn’t sure. The girl in the pictures had a body that looked like a stem that is budding limbs. She was embryonic. My feet had calluses and faint scars now. My eyes seemed totally different. And I thought, Shouldn’t we talk about what time has done to you? but he was familiar and kind and I knew he couldn’t harm or hurt me, his pale chest would be warm against my cheek. So we went to bed, but most of the time I was trying to think of something else. Halfway through, his grandfather clock chimed eleven. I was lying there, counting the beats in my head, and further away, across the city, Big Ben joined in, that cracked bell.

  Next day he came home with a book for me to review; a novel about a limp young woman who falls for rugged men who are not interested in her. ‘It looks pretty drossy,’ he said, ‘but apparently she’s popular and they’ll give it a good spot. Do you want to come round for a drink tonight?’

  ‘No, thanks, I think I’ll make a start on the book.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  I lay on my bed reading the book, which was very sappy, in my opinion. I was summoning all the cruelty of the first-time reviewer trying to make her mark. To be intimidated by the author’s fame didn’t occur to me, for in my arrogance I couldn’t understand why someone who had, according to the author biography, a double first from Somerville College, Oxford, should lower herself to write such tripe, when she had the example of Virginia Woolf and George Eliot. I certainly wouldn’t, if ever I were to write a novel, which was bound to be of the highest literary order. There were definitely those in whom the serious demands of great art only revealed their intellectual limitations.

  No one had ever written such an incisive account of the failings of a novel. No one had ever defended literature so honourably from its own practitioners. This was a start, a start in literary journalism which I hoped could turn me, by osmosis, into a writer of books, as publishers admired my stinging prose and invited me to lunch to ask if I would like to write a novel myself. But the end of the next day, the review was returned to me with a brief note: ‘Next time, try writing in the English language.’

  I rang up the literary editor. ‘What’s wrong with my review? I spent two days on it.’

  ‘Yes, I can tell. What does “the surplus value of modernism” mean? No, please, don’t tell m
e. Listen, dear, all we want to know is what the subject is, a bit of an idea about the plot, who the characters are and whether the author has pulled off what they set out to do. That’s it. And if you could make the review interesting to read, obviously that would be a help.’

  ‘But no one in literary criticism, now is—’

  ‘As I say, if you want to review books, you need to know what a book review is. Just go and read a few, will you, and give me a ring in a couple of weeks. And could you post the book back or drop it off, if you’re passing. I need to give it to someone else.’

  I seemed to be going backwards in time, and nothing I could do would reverse the direction of my life. My work was no good, once again I was sleeping under the roof of my parents’ flat at Benson Court, and some sleeping was even in Gilbert’s bed. Soon I would be back in the jumble-sale hand-me-downs my mother bought me and which still hung in the wardrobe.

  I saw a man kiss a woman on the nose as they were holding on to the rail on a lurching bus, and she smiled at him, and he reached around and kissed her again on the ear. I saw buckets of flowers in florists’ shops, and bouquets being created to give to someone who was loved. I saw women with briefcases streaming up the steps of Oxford Circus underground and walking north up Regent Street to Portland Place to the doors of the BBC. Everyone was in motion with things to do and places to go and people were falling in love, making love, having brand new thoughts that no one had ever had before and everything went on. New goods arrived in the shops. People were making money in their jobs to buy them. They were renting flats, buying houses, and above all they were kissing each other on London buses, and everyone and everything was busy while I was sitting on the bench in the communal garden watching the flowers very slowly grow before my eyes. But at least they grew.

  The man I had loved was dead and I was no longer even certain that I had loved him, or if it had been a child’s game, the impersonation of a grown-up woman who shared a flat with her boyfriend, got engaged, got married, went on honeymoon. The more I tried to relive them, the more fake my memories felt–I was no longer fully certain whether the events they recalled had happened to me or to a character in a film or book. I didn’t believe any more that I had ever left Benson Court, gone to university, met Alexander and married him in the chapel of the cathedral; it seemed impossible that I could have managed a series of such unlikely manoeuvres. Only the abortion remained real. It had to have been, my mother was there.

  When, one morning, I sat down to breakfast and my mother poured me a small glass of sweetened orange juice, and I bit down on it and heard the crack loudly rend the surface and saw my parents look at each other with meaningful nods, I decided that I had better go back to being Uncle Sándor’s secretary, for there, at least, there was £40 a week, and the completion of a story that remained kind of interesting to me: of who I was and where I had come from, the shadow land before I was born.

  ‘You didn’t turn up–six days in a row I waited,’ my uncle said, when he came down to open the door. ‘I bought a fresh cream cake, and you didn’t come. I sat and waited. I don’t like waiting. The cake spoiled.’

  He looked sick. He skin was even whiter than I remembered and his hands were covered in white, flaking patches.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘it was unavoidable.’

  ‘Why is this?’

  ‘I was in a pub and a bomb went off.’ There had been a bomb, in a pub in Islington, a small ineffective bomb that had been on the evening news, with no one killed but a cat that fell asleep on the abandoned holdall and was blown sky high, its tail wound round the best bitter pump and its eyes flung out into an ashtray. The insertion of myself inside this event seemed, as I spoke, yet another indication of my detachment from reality and my increasingly desperate attempts to get back to the concrete world of here and now which were no more than self-dramatisation.

  ‘What! You were hurt? How? What did they do to you?’ Again, I noticed that impulse to raise his arm and touch me, and again I flinched, and he noticed this too, and the arm lowered to his side.

  ‘I wasn’t hurt, no one was, apart from a cat.’

  ‘Yes, I heard about it. So if you weren’t hurt, why didn’t you come?’ His eyes were watering again and he wiped them on his sleeve.

  ‘I was in shock. What’s the matter with your eyes?’ I said, changing the subject.

  ‘I don’t know, maybe glaucoma, it makes you go blind in the end, but the optician says is something else.’

  ‘Do we have to stand in the hall?’

  ‘No, no, of course not, come upstairs. Please, and I’ll make you good strong Hungarian coffee. And you should eat a piece of cake, the sugars and the fats are good for you when you have a shock.’

  We reached his flat and sat down in our old places, him in the cane peacock throne, me mastering the tape recorder.

  ‘So where were we?’ he said.

  ‘In Budapest.’

  ‘Yes, Budapest. What do you want to know?’

  ‘What did you do when you left school?’

  ‘Here, eat. I just got the Battenberg, I wish I had a better class of refreshments to offer you.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m not hungry.’

  ‘You should be hungry. You’re too thin.’

  ‘I lost a bit of weight recently.’

  ‘Then definitely, I’m getting a real cake, for tomorrow. OK, first you must understand that the time I left school in 1934, it was when the Jewish quotas started to come in so I tell my father, why do we need to be Klein? This was our name, you know, in the village, but it is the time when a lot of Jews were changing their names, Hungarianising them, why not be something else? My father doesn’t care what name he has. My mother does not express an opinion. Ervin, my brother, is still at school and is not asked. So we became Kovacs, a very nice echt name. It was my doing, the name change. So from Sándor Klein, now I am Sándor Kovacs and I go looking for a job.’

  I could see that all the time he was talking he was watching me, and for the first time I began to wonder if he knew who I was. This was the earliest suspicion, but I was too interested in the story to pursue it, because it was a revelation that my name was only a few years old, and that we were something different before. That I was the very first of our Kleins to be born with the name Kovacs.

  ‘You want more coffee, a smoke?’ he said.

  ‘No, thanks. Tell me about your first job.’

  ‘My first job was a good job, in a real estate office. This is 1934. People already don’t like the Jews, but what can you do? Maybe we are not so likeable. What do you think?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About the Jews being not lovable.’

  ‘I don’t have an opinion,’ I said. ‘Please continue.’

  ‘OK,’ my uncle said, smiling slightly and giving me a benign and even gently pitying look that I could not decode. ‘I was only eighteen. Now I’m going back to the time that without doubt was the very best of my life, because even when I lived high off the hog in the house in the Bishops Avenue, I was beset by nightmares, I admit. The job is all day renting apartments, all over the city. I get to know Pest like the back of my hand, every street. We had some marvellous flats on our books. You know the buildings they put up had stone faces on them, yes, the faces stuck out into the street and looked at you. Some of them were knights from the old times, but nearly every building was decorated. So by day I run around the city on my bicycle, showing tenants flats, but at night, this was when I was truly alive. In Budapest we have cafés, still, to this day, but nothing like the cafés before the war. Palaces, they seem to me, with waiters in beautiful attire…this is the word?’

  ‘Attire, yes.’

  ‘The cafés were full of wonderful people, journalists, writers, politicians, crazy people. Ladies in their fur coats and fur hats, and the fur casts a shadow on their face like lace. This was my education, not university, in the cafés of Budapest. Nothing is like it here, in England. When I first arrived, I looked
for the cafés, I go to the Kardomah, only housewives and in the evening they close.’

  ‘What were you reading at that time?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘In Budapest in the thirties.’

  ‘Reading? Me? Nothing, I wasn’t reading nothing.’

  ‘But why did you want to be among the intellectuals?’

  ‘I like to hear them talk. I like to study what they say. To pick up tips. You see if you listen to the intellectuals you learn how to bullshit, and this is very important in my line of business. Do I offend you? I remember now you are an intellectual yourself.’

  And now we were coming to a part of Sándor’s story where he had to make a decision. A little girl had stood with her small fingers clutching the frame of a front door, looking up at her uncle, while her father screamed abuse at him in a foreign language. He wanted to give her chocolate: he was not permitted. What would follow, the tale of his crimes, his terrible deeds, which he had every intention of defending himself against, these accusations–that was one thing; but he wanted that little dark child, now a young woman, also dark, with a faint shadow on her upper lip, to know that her law-abiding father was a hypocrite and a prig. If it alienated me, he didn’t care. Someone had to know, Eunice knew, but no one in the future would consider her opinion–for Eunice, the beautiful girl, was just a coloured woman who worked in a shop, with a son who was in prison.

  He knew from court how some people’s opinions had more weight than others, and the girl in front of him had a degree in poetry from York University. Which was not Oxford or Cambridge, admittedly, but still very good, he’d made enquiries.

  ‘OK, look, I tell you about the cafés,’ he said, and his brown eyes looked straight at me, those eyes which could be dead or alive according to his mood but were always alive in these pauses, as he took a mouthful of strong coffee and thought about what he was going to say next. How do you play it? Farce, the best way.

  ‘I don’t earn too much in the office, I have work, but this kind of work is not going to make me a millionaire. To be a millionaire I need my own business, you don’t make yourself rich if you are at someone else’s beck and call. I have a lot of energy, but I can’t see an opportunity. Now comes the time when I see one. Listen, Miranda, never in my life was I a good-looking man. I never looked like no movie star. But for some reason women like me. They like to talk to me, I am easy with them, and this makes them easy with me. That is the way it is. I meet a lot of young ladies in the cafés, all kinds. Some single, some married. Some working, some not. I have a lot of acquaintances. A young man who is easy with people, who has energy, who knows the city very well, who has a knowledge of empty apartments, this person has an opportunity. You understand?’