The Clothes On Their Backs: A Novel (No Series) Page 19

  Houses!

  ‘They all had gardens, you could see them,’ he said, ‘because they backed down to the railway line, some with fruit trees, others with rose bushes and others that were wild and overgrown, like no one cared for them. Windows long and the houses tall. I never saw nothing like this in Hungary, just apartment buildings round a courtyard and everyone knows everyone else’s business. Later I heard the saying they have here, “an Englishman’s home is his castle.” We have a castle in Buda, where the King used to live, I suppose. But in England, every man could be a king, even me. That’s what I understood, before I even got to the city.

  ‘I looked at the houses, I devoured them with my eyes. I wanted to know who owned them and who were the people who lived inside them, and how much rent do they pay, and who do they pay it to? What are the laws governing these transactions? How much money could a person like myself make from them? These were all the thoughts that were going through my mind as the train took me closer and closer to my new life. A lot of cats there were, too, in the gardens I saw from the train. And even squirrels running up and down the trees, and birds’ nests, very clear, in the bare branches. I marvelled at everything.’

  The time to be here was just after the war. If Uncle Sándor had not been demobbed in 1944 and sent back to Budapest, if he had been liberated by the British or the Americans and sent to a Displaced Persons camp, he might have got to England a decade earlier than he did. Back then, he told me, you could go to the auction room in Queen Victoria Street and buy a house for £10, even £5. That was how it was in those days. You bought dirt cheap, you sold dear. It was a bonanza and no capital gains tax. If Sándor had been in London then he would have become a property millionaire and be retired by the time they put him in prison. But arriving in 1956, he asked a few questions, got some answers and formed an opinion about how a man such as himself–a refugee with nothing–could make a good living, could even prosper and become rich.

  It was a chance meeting on the street which took him into his new line of business. My uncle always like to be at the heart of things, where the people were, that’s where you saw an opportunity, not sitting by yourself in a bedsit, staring at four walls. He found out that the place to be was Piccadilly Circus where the statue of the boy with the arrow was that everyone thought so much of, or Oxford Circus where four important streets met, and each one with big shops and a lot of people; people with money in their pockets, wanting to make purchases, there was an opening, everyone knew that.

  On Regent Street, around five o’clock on a winter Saturday just before Christmas, Sándor came across a young lad selling wind-up clockwork bears from a suitcase.

  The poor boy could only be twenty-two, twenty-three and already he had gone bald and wore a terrible wig. In his cheap suit and blue suede crêpe-soled shoes he was winding up the bears, which ran around the pavement under the legs of the crowd who gathered to watch. My uncle was not interested in childish things but he had nothing else to do. He watched the boy selling the bears, making a good success, he sold them easily. But the lad, for his part, saw Sándor watching him and Sándor understood at once that he thought he was a policeman, because he started to throw all the bears into the suitcase in a panic.

  He was not a good shot. Bears were standing on their heads on the pavement. Some of the heads and arms broke off because it was obvious that they were just cheap shit, and probably stolen anyway. The sight of the bears with their broken arms and legs, decapitated, frightened the children, and some of them started crying.

  ‘I want my money back,’ a woman demanded and she tried to snatch the purchased bear from her son’s hand but once a child has a toy he will never let it go and now there was a lot of screaming and crying, and in the meantime, the lad with the wig was running around trying to pick up all the bears.

  In his very basic English, Sándor explained to him that he was not a policemen and to prove it got down on his hands and knees and started to help him put the bears back in the suitcase. Together, the two of them tried to fix the heads and arms back on and wind them up with their keys to see if they still worked, and now they had a lot of bears running round and, quite naturally, they found that the best language to understand each other was not English, and not of course Hungarian which the boy didn’t know at all, but their mama loshen, their mother tongue, the one they learned when they were children themselves, one in the village in the Zémplen, the other in Bethnal Green; the language that is spoken, or was, not any more, in every country in Europe, crossing every border, and this way an Englishman and a Hungarian could talk to each other. In Yiddish.

  His name was Mickey Elf. They went to a pub for a drink and my uncle explained his situation so that Mickey knew from the beginning that though Sándor was the immigrant, the refugee, while Mickey was born here, that it was he who would be the employer. And so they started out together, Mickey taking care of one thing, and my uncle the other. Mickey had all the connections.

  On Mickey’s advice, my uncle set up a letting agency, which anyone could do, you could run it from a bedsit, but owning the houses and taking the rents was where the money was. You could buy houses very cheap, Mickey explained, but the problem was the controlled tenants, the ones the law protected: you couldn’t get rid of them or raise their rent. You had to find ways and means to get round this problem, but my uncle said that there were always ways and means, of course there were. It just required brainpower, which he had.

  What I knew, what anyone who followed the trial knew–or what they read about him in the newspapers, gazing on the face of evil–was the squalor, the walls running with condensation, the children dying of bronchitis, the shivering, bitter cold those first arrivals from the Caribbean endured as Uncle Sándor’s tenants.

  ‘Let me tell you who nobody wanted to rent to,’ he told me. ‘The coloured people, the West Indians who came off the boats from their islands, the ones they brought here to drive the buses, and all that. Why? Why did they not want to rent to them? Their money was the same colour as anyone else’s money, no different. The ten shilling note was the same brown in an Englishman’s hand as it was in a Jamaican’s.

  ‘Prejudice. This is all there is to it. They arrived at Victoria station, same place I come to, by the way, and all their luggage is just put in one big pile by the platform and the pickpockets and petty thieves, the nice Englishman, would just go and buy a platform ticket, and help themselves. They came with high hopes in their hearts, and what did they find? Signs. No Coloureds. No dogs. These signs I knew from my own past experience, though my skin is pale.

  ‘No one forced the coloureds into my houses. I didn’t have to send out any bullyboys to tout for custom. Everyone knew my name, the name of Sándor Kovacs was as familiar to them in those days as Duke Ellington or Sonny Liston. In court a West Indian gentleman tried to speak up for me: “He was a saviour, and people respected him,” that’s what he said, and he was not even one of my tenants, but what they call a social worker. So I charged them a higher rent than a controlled tenant would have paid? Am I a charity?

  ‘A flat, a room which was unfurnished, you couldn’t get the tenant out, they could stay put for life and you can’t even raise the rent without going to a tribunal. That was the law. A furnished flat, this was a different proposition, tenants of furnished flats you could charge as much rent as the market can stand and you could give them a month’s notice, and if they didn’t get out, you could send the police to get them out.

  ‘Now what West Indian has furniture of his own? He doesn’t come here with a bed and a table. I provided everything–the bed, the table, the hotplate so he can cook his rice and peas. Maybe the mattress stinks of piss. So what? Where I come from, there wasn’t even so much as a mattress. Let me tell you, the rooms I rented would have been a palace to me, during the war. They called me a parasite. Listen, the parasites were the aristocrats, the owners who sat on their bottoms for a hundred years, waiting for the leases to come up. Me, I worked all hours in
the early days, collecting the rents and emptying the gas meters, the pennies I emptied into buckets and schlepped them home on the bus, before I had a car. That’s how it was.

  ‘Later, I got the rent collectors. I always employed their own people, other West Indians, just like them, I gave them a job when every door was slammed in their face. I told them, six pound is the rent. You keep five shilling. You see they are on commission, they have an incentive. In court I hear that they threaten the tenants if they don’t pay up on time. Whose fault is this? I never threatened no one. It’s their own people they should complain to, not me.

  ‘Of course when the West Indians moved in, the white tenants, the ones who paid a pound a week and still they complained, these rents are so low it was hardly worth collecting them, they screamed blue murder. How dare I give them these dark-faced people for neighbours? They play music all night long, drink rum, have parties. Animals.

  ‘You don’t like it? I said. So move.

  ‘Now they accused me of forcing them out of their homes, of putting pimps and prostitutes into respectable houses. This is another matter. You know me, by now. You know that I always dealt in this line of work.’

  But what about his brother? I interrupted. How did the reunion go?

  My uncle looked very angry. ‘No,’ he said, shortly, ‘that didn’t work out.’ And he reached forward to turn off the tape recorder so I should know that our session had come to an end and it was time for me to start typing.

  A new set of workmen arrived the day before my party and roofed over the garden with a crimson marquee which cast a rosy flickering glow above everything as the canvas rippled in the light wind. They stood on ladders and decorated the tent with swags of flowers and gold cardboard 25s and at one end they put up a floral arch and three gold-painted wooden steps which led up to a platform with a golden throne, above which a crown hung suspended from a length of cord attached to a pulley. White-clothed trestle tables were piled with ice buckets, rented glasses, plates and cutlery. Small tables and chairs were dotted around, each chair tied with a gold bow and a gold 25 with a silver tassel. The uneven ground had been rolled and strips of plastic turf laid down.

  ‘Look at this,’ said my uncle. ‘Have you ever seen such a sight? Magnificent! And I don’t even think it is going to rain. A beautiful evening, they say.’

  ‘You did very well, Sándor,’ said Eunice. ‘It’s like a fairy palace out here. Much better than the jubilee.’

  ‘That was for the Queen but this girl is a queen, also. Wait until it gets dark, they got lanterns, paper, but with real candles inside them. And the food! Sumptuous. This is a word, sumptuous?’

  ‘Yes, it’s a word,’ I said.

  ’See? My English is getting better all the time. What a lucky break for me that I met you that time in the park.’

  ‘Yes, what a coincidence.’ Sándor and I each knew by now, I think, what the other knew. Two cats held our tongues, they dug their claws in but tonight would be the night of revelation, the reunification of the two brothers and the remaining secrets out in the open. ‘Who arranged all this?’ I asked, looking around in awe, reminded of the Hotel Negresco and all its opulent swagger.

  ‘Harrods, of course! The finest shop in the world where, like I told you, you can buy anything you want, a cat a dog, a tent. They took care of everything, very, very fine people. And I got a surprise. A big surprise for you, Meeranda.’

  ‘Oh, yes, Miranda,’ Eunice said, turning to me. ‘Who all of this is in aid of. Because she has a birthday.’

  ‘It’s not every day a person is twenty-five,’ said my uncle. ‘The day I was twenty-five, that was another matter.’

  ‘And you’re not even a relation, are you, Miranda?’ Eunice said, drilling me with her black eyes.

  ‘But tonight we will meet her family. You say they’re going to come all right?’

  ‘Yes, they’re coming.’

  ‘Wonderful. What a surprise they will have,’ said my uncle.

  ‘Indeed. Who is going to be sitting on the throne, by the way?’

  ‘You, of course. You are the queen.’

  I looked at it, aghast. Cold dread came over me. ‘I’m not sitting there!’

  ‘Don’t be silly, who else should sit?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I’m not going to.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s embarrassing!’

  ‘You afraid you get a red face from people looking at you? Don’t worry, you’re amongst friends here!’

  ‘I don’t mind sitting in a throne,’ Eunice said. ‘I don’t see twenty-five again, but if a man wants to treat me like a queen, I don’t throw it back in his face.’

  I began to panic. Was it possible not to turn up for my own party at this late stage and stop others from attending?

  ‘And we got a new dress for you,’ Sándor said. ‘Wait till you see it, it’s a beauty. Eunice ordered it special.’

  ‘Yes, from Italy.’

  ‘Where is it?’ I asked, looking around.

  ‘I had it sent,’ said my uncle.

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Your house, of course.’

  ‘But you don’t know my address.’

  ‘My dear, I have associates, they know everything about a person.’ And he picked up my hand and kissed it, his eyes wet. So then I was certain.

  Everyone was coming to the party to meet the mysterious man with the large library who had been my employer for the past two months. My parents had agreed to attend, Gilbert, the cartoonist, promised to put in an appearance, the ballerina and the plutocrat, they would definitely be there, for they loved parties of any kind, particularly ones where he would meet new, unattached young ladies, and she would get a chance to reminisce about her days en pointe. Several of my comrades from the Anti Nazi League had accepted the invitation, and of course my uncle’s sidekick, Mickey Elf, and his wife Sandra. Only Claude could not come, because he was on late shift; he would arrive when the last empty bottle was being thrown into the bin, but he had a present for me, ‘because I’ve got wages,’ he said, ‘and I can afford it. It’s a surprise.’

  So many surprises.

  I went home in the early afternoon and found my mother standing in the hall holding a box. ‘Something has come for you, what is it?’ she said. ‘I can’t wait for you to open it.’

  ‘I think it’s a dress.’

  ‘Who bought you a dress?’

  ‘An admirer.’

  ‘Oh, you and your secrets.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me about secrets,’ I said, as I opened the box. ‘You’re the one for secrets, not me.’

  My parents had spent several days worrying about the party: how they would get there, what they would wear and whether it was appropriate to bring some kind of gift to the host, perhaps a box of After Eight mints or Black Magic chocolates, which they had seen in shops and considered to be highly sophisticated and upper class. My mother found a cream linen dress, only a couple of seasons out of date, in the Oxfam shop. She tied a ribbon on to her brown, rubber-tipped stick, ‘because it’s such an ugly old thing, I feel ashamed to carry it sometimes.’ I watched her twisting the loops of the white satin into a bow, the girl who all her life had had to bear this stigma of her disability. She looked up. ‘There,’ she said, ‘that’s much nicer, don’t you think?’

  I had not understood until now how much my mother must have hated the symbol of her lifelong handicap. I thought because she wore the brown felt waistcoats she didn’t care how she looked, dressed only for practicality. I was embarrassed that I had never before realised that the ugly stick was always with her and that it must have made her feel ugly too.

  She saw my face.

  ‘What? No good? Should I take it off?’

  ‘No, leave it. It cheers it up a bit.’

  ’‘I don’t want to make a show of you in front of your friends and this important man who is employing you. Your father is enough on that count.’

  ‘You’ll never make a
show of me,’ I said. ‘Don’t think that. When you were my age, did you hate having to always carry a stick?’

  ‘Of course, what young girl wouldn’t?’

  ‘Did it make you shy with boys?’

  ‘Yes it did.’

  ‘So how did you meet Daddy?’

  She paused, and then smiled. She had a lovely mouth, which I am told I inherited from her. Her washed face had a healthy shine which had dulled with the years, cracked deeply, but those occasional smiles illuminated her.

  ‘Let me tell you a secret–now don’t repeat this to your father, I’m only telling you because it’s a special day. It wasn’t Ervin I met first in his family, it was his terrible brother. He walked past me when I was in a café with some girlfriends and he tipped his hat, just like that. Not at the others, at me. My stick was leaning against the table so it wasn’t a mistake. He knew. I was so surprised and blushing, but he came over and asked me to join him the next day for an ice-cream. Well, you know, no one had ever paid any attention to me before in that way, so I turned up. Why not? It was an adventure for me. All by myself, I went, I was eighteen.’

  ‘Where was this?’

  ‘Oh, a café along the river where you could sit out and eat ices and look at Buda on the other side and the boats sailing along. Now after only a few minutes even an innocent could see that he was a bad man, a womaniser, not for me at all, but then who should turn up but Ervin and he introduced us, and then Ervin–well.’

  ‘So you knew Sándor before Daddy?’

  ‘Yes, only a day. But I have to admit, if I never met him, then I never met your father, and where would you be now, eh?’

  ‘Nowhere.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And then of course Ervin had the sense to bring us out of Hungary in the nick of time. Sándor has no such sense.’

  ‘What was he like?