The Clothes On Their Backs: A Novel (No Series) Page 14

  ‘I do have some,’ I said. ‘I could go home and get them, I don’t live far from here.’

  ‘We’ll wait,’ said my uncle and it was only as I was walking down the street that I thought that I should not have told him my whereabouts in case he put two and two together and started to think I might be Vivien, his niece. And I was so green that I never thought that it was absurd to think that a man like Sándor Kovacs would buy a young girl an expensive dress unless he had some reason.

  We weren’t going far, just three stops on the tube, but my uncle had a phobia about the underground. It was not just the prison years in an enclosed space, and not even a morbid terror of tunnels. A narrow earthen passage somewhere in the Ukraine, he wasn’t sure exactly where, had fallen in on him some time in 1942. For a several hours he was buried alive and this was not the worst thing that happened to him during the war, but it was a time that he relived repeatedly in nightmares, whereas the other experiences had passed from raw shock to a sealed metal box inside his heavy chest, where they stayed, undisturbed.

  No, what bothered him was something more practical: the fear of falling. That in the moment he stepped on to the moving stair which took you down into the tunnels, as his right foot stepped forwards and his left foot followed, and his right hand grabbed for the moving rail, his eyes looking downwards–all these actions together, if not scrupulously coordinated with split second timing, which he didn’t feel capable of, especially with the clouded vision, would cause him to lose his balance and plunge down to his death. It was a prison legacy: fear of the iron steps.

  ‘He can’t do it any more,’ Eunice whispered. ‘I’ve tried to help him, but he panics. He buys his ticket, then he has to throw it away. As soon as he starts looking down, he gets the sweats.’ So we took a taxi, a black London cab, in which I had only ridden on one previous occasion in my life, when my parents and I set off for Paddington station for Hereford and my wedding, my father’s hands shaking as he handed the driver two pound notes.

  I sat on the tip-up seat, with Sándor and Eunice hand in hand together opposite me, the spun nest of blue-black hair and my uncle’s heavy shoulders in his best suit.

  We were going to a place I knew nothing about, a large room above a shop selling ironmongery in a street off Sussex Gardens, near Paddington station. You rang a bell in a side door and an invisible hand admitted you. People were arriving, some of them holding their dance shoes in paper bags, others already dancing as they skittered up the street, on their toes.

  ‘Look at those little beauties,’ my uncle said admiringly, as a pair of young black girls rushed past up the stairs with hair haloes round their heads like the saints in the old pictures.

  But Eunice dug her silver nails into his arm, to remind him that a woman her age doesn’t like too much attention being paid to the young things coming up.

  ‘Help me, Miranda,’ my uncle said, laughing. ‘Speak up in my defence. You know how it was for me. Every time I see these girls I feel like I’m a new man. I remember when I first arrived in London from Budapest and saw these little queens show off their goose-bump skin and they smiled their big smiles, and scream and jump around like crazy beans. I remember thinking, now I’m in a city.’

  Eunice snarled.

  ‘Darling, you think they look at me? Not a chance. Anyway what do I want with them when I have you, my dearest? It’s just to look, a man can look, can’t he?’ He winked at me.

  The silver talons dug more sharply into his arm, but he just turned to her, laughed, planted a kiss on her cheek.

  We climbed the cobwebbed and dusty stairs, the air smelling close and warm, of deodorants and powerful cheap scent. I saw my uncle suddenly in his element, dressed in his gangster’s suit, walking up the steps of a tenement, his meaty hands clenching in his pockets, his fingers longing to fiddle with cash, notes, loose change rattling in his palm, and so we ascended, him panting, clutching Eunice as though she was a stick or a cane.

  The sounds of people and music were rushing towards us and we entered a room where dapper men in suits and more two-tone shoes, and women little and–sixteen-stone ladies balanced on fat feet plunged into high heels, and brown twigs with no hips to speak of–were smoking, talking, drinking cups of tea from a metal urn poured into paper cups, holding them gingerly with their fingers. An uproar, and in the background, still turned low, the orchestra of Victor Sylvester, playing ‘Hernando’s Hideaway’ on a stereo with large box speakers.

  A woman passed in an electric blue sequined gown and matching shoes whose sequins had been stuck on the white silk with glue and they fell away from her as she walked, leaving a trail like blue dandruff. ‘Look,’ Eunice said to my uncle, giggling, ‘she needs a broom tied to her bottom to sweep them up.’

  ‘Oh, she don’t care,’ said Sándor, ‘she thinks she is the belle of the ball and why not? Just wait a minute, Miranda, we’ll find a partner for you when one of the ladies wants to sit it out.’

  ‘Our tune,’ Eunice said, as another record went on. The volume was turned up and the dancers began to take the floor.

  If I had a golden umbrella,

  With the sunshine on the inside

  And the rain on the outside

  ‘A golden umbrella,’ said Sándor to me: ‘this I have been looking for all my life. And now I got it.’

  My uncle’s golden umbrella was a room full of sweat, perfume, hair oil, laughter, gold teeth, Jamaica patties on plates, the tea urn, bottles of rum smuggled from the islands, folding chairs against the walls, the wooden floors, the yellow velvet curtains drawn against the afternoon light, the big gramophone, the piles of records, her cheek against his, his heart beating in his chest like a metronome, his hand on her smooth satin behind, her arms resting lightly on his, his old-fashioned bow when the dance ended, his Hungarian courtesy.

  All I could do was watch, and then even watching was not enough for him because he said, ‘I want you to dance.’ But I couldn’t dance. ‘You never took lessons?’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Your parents didn’t insist?’

  ‘It never entered their heads.’

  ‘What a pity, what a shame.’

  ‘It’s too formal for me. I just like to groove along to my own thing.’

  ‘Your own thing? Listen, miss. That is not dancing, it’s showing off.’

  ‘Jim will teach her,’ Eunice said, ‘Jim can dance with anyone.’

  They called over a small, dapper man in black patent shoes and a suit with a wide chalk stripe.

  ‘Jim,’ Eunice said. ‘How is life treating you? Easy, I hope?’

  ‘Not so bad, yet not so good,’ he said.

  ‘How’s business?’ Sándor said.

  He was a slow individual, not stupid, but in his speech, which was at variance with his flashing patent shoes, so it took him a while to formulate an answer.

  ‘The customers are no good,’ he said, finally.

  ‘What’s the matter with them?’ Eunice asked.

  But he had nothing further to add. He sighed, and tapped his shiny feet to the music.

  ‘I expect he means they steal,’ Eunice said in a whisper.

  ‘They just started now, all of a sudden?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Jim,’ Sándor said, turning to him, ‘do you have a problem I can help you with? The office is open.’ He laughed, but Jim just stood there, his mouth shut.

  ‘I’ll get it out of him,’ Eunice said. ‘Between me and Jim there’s no secrets. Never has been.’

  ‘Listen,’ Sándor said, ‘this is my–my secretary, Miranda. A very, very clever girl and the two of you have something in common.’

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘Reading.’

  ‘What do you read, Jim?’ I said sceptically.

  ‘He reads the papers,’ Eunice said, ‘he has a newsagent shop.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  ‘She reads books.’

  ‘Well, they’re all print,’ Sándo
r said. ‘Words, same thing. But can you teach her to dance, that’s the question?’

  Jim looked at me. ‘I’ll give it a go,’ he said.

  ‘They’re starting up with the tango,’ said Eunice. ‘That’s hard, maybe she should sit this one out.’

  ‘No, I’ll show her,’ Jim said.

  A man with short legs and a long trunk, wearing purple trousers and carrying a double-sided crocodile handbag over his shoulder, raised his hands. Everyone broke apart from their partners and formed a line.

  ‘Who is he?’ I whispered.

  ‘It’s Fabian,’ said Eunice. ‘Our teacher. He’s all the way from Argentina.’

  ‘What’s with the handbag?’ I asked, and she giggled.

  ‘No, no, you mustn’t mention that. It’s not what you think though, he isn’t one of them.’

  He reached forward and picked one of the women to instruct, a lanky girl with a morose horse face.

  ‘Watch what we do. Ladies, I want you to pay special attention, what I’m saying is for your benefit.’ We all pushed forward to take a good look. The horse-faced girl looked terrified.

  ‘I don’t want you to go forward when I am trying to lead you. I am leading, I will control you,’ he said to her, turning to us, with each sentence. ‘Don’t be so analytical, just concentrate on taking big steps. All ways of thinking pale into insignificance if you just take big steps and leave the thinking to me. When you dance you embark on an adventure, you cannot predict what will happen to you, or where you will be taken. And finally, I want to remind everyone here of something: it is not necessarily the best-looking girl who looks best when she dances the tango. Do you understand? Do you get it? It is the girl who agrees to follow, to be led.’

  The horse girl smirked. Already she was prettier, we could all see that.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Has everyone understood? I want you to find a partner and make a start.’

  Jim stepped forward and took me in his arms. He was not much taller than me, and smelt of rum and aftershave. ‘You just follow what I do,’ he said. ‘It’s easy. OK?’

  We began to move. ‘Follow,’ he said. ‘Follow.’

  And to my surprise, I could do it.

  ‘Look,’ Sándor shouted to Eunice as we passed them, sitting down on one of the wooden benches, Eunice fanning herself with a small tortoiseshell fan she’d taken from her handbag. ‘See, this one she does fine. I told you.’

  Eunice tossed her head. ‘Yes, Jake the Fake,’ she said. ‘A good effort.’

  Fabian walked round looking at people’s shoulders and feet. He pointed at me.

  ‘See this girl? This is a girl who knows what to wear for tango. These shoes will give her the ability to dance, even if she has no natural aptitude.’

  Everyone was looking at us. The crowd of faces were smiling at me, the young white girl in the crazy high red lizard shoes and the shimmering dress from Eunice’s shop and her short partner, eye to eye.

  Jim held me tight, he took good care of me. I felt alive again, that I was not a person who only existed within the pages of a book, a papery individual. Not happy, for the music was very dark, but it gave the darkness of my own life, the sadness, the physical ache–its real meaning. We are born to suffer, we can’t avoid pain. All we can do is enter it, and turn it against itself. And that’s what tango does.

  ‘Smile,’ Fabian ordered. ‘Show some teeth.’

  ‘By the way, what was Jim’s problem?’ Sándor said to Eunice, as we stood on the street waiting for a taxi. ‘Did you find out anything?’

  ‘Oh, poor Jim. It’s skinheads. They have started coming into his shop every day and throwing things around.’

  ‘What are skinheads?’

  ‘Bad boys.’

  ‘Why do they throw things around in his shop?’

  ‘Because they don’t like the coloured people.’

  ‘I know the type from back home, their heads are full of poisonous substances. Destroyed. What can we do for him?’

  ‘He needs a security guard, someone who will stand at the door and keep those bad boys out.’

  ‘Protection. Easy. I’ll call Mickey.’

  ‘I don’t like Mickey. Keep him out of it.’

  ‘How can you dislike that boy? He’s harmless, and my oldest friend here.’

  ‘He drags you down, Sándor, to his level. You could have been an important businessman without him, and respectable.’

  ‘Oh, Eunice, you don’t know about business. Come here, give me a kiss.’

  I watched them. I saw her laugh, and turn her face to him, and the unspeakable tenderness with which he touched her lips. I don’t know how long we’d been there, my feet in my red lizard shoes were bloody, a ruby liquid seeped through on to my toenails and outlined them in red. The clouds were a painted rag in the sky over Paddington and the pale outline of the rising moon was visible between the buildings. We were a little past the longest day.

  ‘That’s a lovely dress,’ my mother said, when I came home. ‘Where do you get that dress?’

  ‘I bought it from a stall on Portobello Road market.’

  ‘No, no, this is a new dress.’

  ‘It isn’t.’

  ‘It looks like no one ever wore it before.’

  ‘Maybe they bought it and didn’t like it. I don’t know.’

  I was being blocked in the hall, in front of my bedroom; her back was to the door. She stood for a moment, then said something to herself in Hungarian, which she rarely did, a fragment of a thought, her eyes distrustful, then she let me pass.

  ‘I don’t want you to be unhappy,’ she said. ‘Not my daughter.’

  ‘Well, I have been unhappy.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘So can’t you just leave me alone?’

  ‘Did your employer give you this dress?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s what happened.’

  ‘What does he want from you?’

  ‘Nothing. He’s just rich.’

  ‘Don’t let him take advantage of you. I don’t think a romantic affair with an older man is good for you at all. Your heart needs its rest.’

  Sometimes I came across her sitting alone in the kitchen, thoughtfully drinking a cup of strong, scalding hot coffee, a dribble of it on her chin. Her eyes were focused on a fixed point on the wall, as if she were trying by some means of teleportation to budge it. But when she heard me in the doorway she put her hand up to her hair and ran her fingers through it. It was heavy, coarse and dry, like mine. Then she stood and moved to the sink to rinse out her cup, wiped it with a tea towel and put it away in the cupboard, as if it were evidence of something.

  I didn’t understand her then, I don’t think I do so any better now, years after her death. I asked her once, ‘Why did you marry Daddy?’ And inexplicably, she said, ‘He used to sing me American songs.’ ‘What songs?’ ‘From the films.’ ‘I don’t believe it.’ ‘Well, yes, I know, but he was different in those days.’

  If I regret how many lies I told her, it has to be remembered that her form of lying was silence, secrecy. She hid behind what she pretended was her poor mastery of the English language. It’s true she wasn’t very expressive, but her hands were full of subtlety, and she rarely used them to touch another person. She was tactile, but just for objects.

  ‘Can I get into my room now?’ I said.

  ‘Of course. When have I ever been able to stop you doing anything you set your heart on?’ And she turned away, and watched me enter, and I heard her still standing there, breathing, on the other side of the door.

  ‘Still I don’t have a cream cake for you,’ Uncle Sándor said, when I arrived next morning. ‘Tomorrow, definite. I get a chocolate gâteau, wait and see. You’ll be amazed.’

  Did I enjoy the dancing? I told him I did. And would I like to come again, next week? Yes, perhaps. The afternoon and early evening in the room in Paddington was the most untroubled time I had spent since Alexander died, and I loved the new dress. Sometimes you put a dress
on and it becomes you, it is your flesh and blood and that is what had happened to this one, instead of my body rejecting it.

  ‘We have to find you a handsome young partner,’ he said. ‘Jim is only a short-term arrangement.’

  We spent the morning on the last moments of my uncle’s carefree life as a pimp in Budapest, where he was popular, successful with women, and able to find ways and means of supporting his parents, my grandparents. I enjoyed listening to someone who was voluble, who didn’t excrete small constipated pieces of information, under great pressure. Out it came, there was no stopping him, he was a man who loved to talk. I asked him about my grandmother, and he described a hard-working soft motherly woman, practical and good with her hands, but also somewhat star-struck, who adored the cinema on the rare occasions when she had an opportunity to go (perhaps my father used to accompany her and there he learned his American songs); she would collect pictures of Hungarian film stars from magazines and paste them in an album. My grandfather had become too cerebral for her, and with the freedom of a city she had stopped being a rural person,: she was now at the centre of the modern age. I asked him how old she was, around this time, and he said that she was born in 1896 so she was in her early forties and still strong, ebullient, but deferring to men in most matters. And since his father was lost in his comparative theology books, this meant that it was Sándor who was the head of the household.

  She had a music box, he remembered, which she bought not long after they arrived in Budapest, at a shop on Rákószi út, and when you lifted the lid a lady doll and a gentleman doll popped up and danced to the waltz of the city, the famous tune ‘The Blue Danube’. They only opened it on Sunday mornings, he said, and they all sat there, him, my grandparents and my father, and sometimes my mother was there too, once they were engaged. What happened to the music box? I asked. But he didn’t know. It wasn’t there when he came back at the end of the war, perhaps someone stole it.

  We were now drawing closer to episodes in his life that would cause him immense pain to remember. During his trial, when my parents tried to send me out of the room when the news came on, there were oblique references to his wartime experiences. It was conceded that, as a refugee, he had ‘had a bad war’ in the words of the reporter, which I didn’t understand, for surely all war was terrible and terrifying–blood, death, torture, blitz, camps. But if you watched the films they made, The Great Escape, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Ice Cold in Alex, it seemed it was possible for war to be a chance for heroism and medal winning.