The Clothes On Their Backs Read online

  ‘Why did you come in here, today?’ she said, in the old sharp tone I remembered, like being battered by icy needles. ‘You saw the closing down sale and thought you could get a bargain one last time?’

  ‘I was just passing,’ I said. ‘That’s all. Just passing.’

  ‘You never passed before?’

  ‘To be honest, Eunice,’ I said, ‘I always took another street, or I crossed to the other side of the road. I didn’t want to see you.’

  ‘So. You couldn’t even look me in the eye.’

  ‘Oh, come on. You tell me what I did wrong. I didn’t—’

  ‘You! You were a nasty, deceitful little girl. You broke that man’s heart. And after everything he went through.’

  ‘Yes, he had a hard life but that doesn’t—’

  ‘Doesn’t what? Doesn’t give him the right to make himself comfortable, for the old age he never had by the way, thanks to your meddling?’

  She slammed the dress down on the counter and threw it into a bag, unfolded, without tissue paper.

  ‘A hundred and twenty pound. Cash or charge?’

  I took out my credit card.

  ‘Oh! Platinum. You’ve done well for yourself, money always comes to money, I always say. A rich husband, I suppose.’

  And here we were again, back to where we started, Eunice and me. There would be no parole, no probation. I was still the nosy niece of her tormented lover, my uncle–and all the sorrow I inadvertently brought him, the girl she blamed for his premature death. Because he was the love of her life. That incongruous pair: the black manageress of a Marble Arch dress shop and the refugee slum landlord from Budapest.

  She pointed a brown-lined finger at me, the silver nails chipped, a slight tremor at the fingertips. She began to speak and then for no reason her eyes welled up and she started to cry. I had never seen this, not even at my uncle’s funeral when her face was hidden by a hat with a small black veil splashed with black net roses. But now all the past had overwhelmed her, the love she bore him, set in stone, turned molten in her chest.

  ‘You don’t know how it was that a man should look at me the way he did, after…that other thing,’ she said.

  ‘What other…?’ I began, but just as soon as they had started, the tears stopped. She slipped a smooth brown veil over her features; an old sadness was set in them, like stains you cannot remove.

  ‘I’ll wrap up the dress for you properly,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry I snapped at you, Vivien.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I understand.’ For it was nearly thirty years since he died and still she suffered. Was this what I had to look forward to–thirty years of hard grief ahead of me?

  Tentatively I reached out to touch her arm; her bones were fragile under her jacket and I was afraid that if I held her she would break. We had never touched before, apart from that first handshake on the street outside my uncle’s house, her blue-gloved hand in mine.

  She allowed me to rest my hand on her jacket. The silk of the sleeve surrendered slightly. She raised her face to mine, vivid and radiant.

  ‘I have so many feelings for that man, every day I think about him. You ever visit his grave? I do. Once a year. I take stones to weigh him down so he doesn’t rise up again and wander the earth in torment and in my flat I put a vase out with fresh flowers and a card on the mantelpiece, in memory. Did you see, I still got that watch he gave me, and the gold heart and chain with the little diamond in it. I only ever take that necklace off for a wash, and the lighter, I’ve still got that too, though I don’t smoke no more. I could have got a lot of money for those things but I never sell them. Never. They’re all I’ve got left of him, that wonderful man.’

  I walked up Marylebone High Street, the strings of the carrier bag swinging, containing the dress, my ruby-red silk jersey dress.

  This morning I had been forced along a different route by a police cordon set up because of a terrorist scare: a man was on a balcony with a towel wrapped round his waist, police marksmen had their guns aimed at him. There was supposed to be a bomb-making factory in the flat behind him. Last year there were blasts, deep in the tunnels, just as Claude predicted nearly thirty years ago, the stench of burning flesh, then rotting bodies deep down in the Piccadilly line.

  Diverted by terrorism, which led me to Eunice, and this red dress.

  I turned off at the familiar corner. My territory. I grew up here, these are my streets. I am a Londoner. I accept this city with all its uncontrollable chaos and dirty deficiencies. It leaves you alone to do what you like, and of where else can you say that with such conviction?

  This is Benson Court, where I was born. No programme of modernisation and refurbishment was ever agreed on by the squabbling residents of the flats. The same dusty brass lamps suspended from the ceilings, and the same Canaletto reproductions in tarnished gilt frames hanging on the walls. The lift’s cage, its clanking metal gates opening and closing, the groaning cables, the wood-panelled cabin with its pull-down leather seat, all unchanged. A tenant died in there last year. My father pressed the button to go downstairs and a corpse ascended, sitting upright with her shopping–the retired ballerina, dead with her head becomingly to one side. That old girl always knew how to strike a pose.

  I let myself in. Silence. Dust. Smells. Memory. I went into the kitchen, which was the worst room, to make a cup of tea. Things were in the fridge that didn’t belong there, books and pens my father used to write his bizarre letters to the newspapers, advertisements cut out of discarded magazines left by the bins–a disembodied hand displaying a diamond watch.

  I sat down at the table and drank my tea. The stove on which my mother had heated countless tins of soup stood as if it did not know that in a few days, when the house clearance men arrived, it would be broken up for scrap. No one wanted that charred and grease-blackened engine, gas wheezing through its pipes. Not even a museum would take it. Vic, my husband, tried to make an omelette on it, once. There was something badly wrong with the heat distribution of the burners, he said; they flickered like guttering candles. I’d die for one of his omelettes, flecked with chives or plump cubes of pink ham. I’ll have one again, some day, in that place, that other place.

  By Friday, everything would be gone. All traces of my parents and their nearly sixty-year residence of these four rooms would vanish under coats of new paint, the old lino torn up, the place fumigated. The flat was encrusted with our lives. I had left long ago, my mother was sixteen years gone, my father wheezing out his last breath in his TV armchair, a copy of the Radio Times still in his fingers when I found him the following day. Sixty years of their interminable tenancy. How strange it was that people could acquire such apparent permanence, that nothing, not a bomb, could shift them (and bombs had fallen, not on this flat, but nearby during the blitz, my parents below ground in the air-raid shelter in the garden and back up in the lift the next morning to the kitchen in time for breakfast). At the end of the week nothing would remain. In a month, strangers. And for the rest of my life I would walk past Benson Court without the key to unlock the front door, without authorisation to ascend in the lift. No doubt they would throw away the old hessian doormat. A new welcome would take its place.

  A sigh of wind against the window. Opposite, a drawn blind. The lift was silent; it had not moved from the same floor. The whole mansion block was still, and I was alone in there, with nothing for company but a new dress. ‘Clothe me,’ I thought, ‘I am cold.’

  A bell chimed in the hall. My uncle’s voice echoed through the flat. I heard him suddenly, like a hallucination.

  The uncle who was the love of the life of Eunice, the manageress of the Marble Arch dress shop, the uncle who could be killed by many methods, dead but unwilling to lie down, was speaking, shouting.

  I have not forgotten our summer together, when I learned the only truth that matters: that suffering does not ennoble and that survivors survive because of their strength or cunning or luck, not their goodness, and certainly not their
innocence.

  And then I laughed, for he was there. For almost thirty years my uncle had been in hiding in a cardboard box. I had brought it back to the flat myself a few months after he died and placed it in my mother’s wardrobe, pushed to the back.

  I went into the bedroom and I parted her clothes to reach it, past her brown felt waistcoats, her wooden stick which my father refused to throw away. Not since she died had I seen that stick and I reached out to touch it, at first gingerly, then tenderly, rubbing my fingers against the grain. I felt the wearing down of the wood that her hands had gripped for so long, the satisfying curve in the neck–the cells of her body were all over that thing.

  Here he was: my uncle had come to rest in his sister-in-law’s wardrobe, next to that stick, which was the object that first drew her to his attention, and as a result of this she married my father and they left Budapest and came to London, and I was born, and my daughters born, and everything follows.

  Not literally in the wardrobe. He was still under his marble stone in the cemetery, but his voice was alive, in the series of tape recordings and sheets of paper on which I had painstakingly typed the transcripts, and of course his own account, which he had tried to write himself.

  Tapes, stick. These objects, this ordinary rubbish belonging to people who were dead, had survived them all. And the girl I had let go was also there, somewhere, just waiting for me to put on a red silk jersey dress to make her presence known. I was looking for her. She was somewhere in this flat–not a ghost for I am still alive, very much in the world, I don’t pass through lightly or silently. I am my uncle’s flesh and blood, after all, and nothing he ever did was without an impression.

  This is the place where I was born, this mansion block off Marylebone High Street, my mother going into labour in the lift while my father was out at work; writhing and screaming, riding up and down. The metal doors unfolded like an accordion and a surgeon from the Middlesex Hospital saw her, in a pool of her own broken waters. He pushed her into his flat and delivered me on the sofa. I came into the world staring at a pre-war Bakelite light fitting and an oil painting of Highland cattle above the fireplace. High summer, 19 July 1953, and I was named Vivien, after the surgeon’s wife.

  At 2.30 in the afternoon the surgeon telephoned my father at work to convey the news, but he did not leave until 5 p.m., his usual time, despite his boss, Mr Axelrod, telling him he could go home at once. I understand his insistence on not having his routine disrupted. My father was terrified of change. When change was in the air anything could happen, and he already suffered from an anxiety: that any small disturbance in his circumstances would bring everything down–the flat, the wife, the job, the new daughter, London itself, then England, and he would slide down the map of the world, back to Hungary, clinging on uselessly, ridiculously, with his fingers clutching the smooth, rolling surface of the globe.

  Benson Court. Built around the turn of the century, in overdecorated red brick. At the back a garden with a lawn, low-maintenance bushes, and a couple of flowerbeds which our flat did not overlook. We had a side view from our kitchen of the mansion block next door; the other rooms looked out on to the street, a quiet cut-through for pedestrians, with a one-way sign at the end which got rid of most of the traffic. You could not drive from our front door to anywhere useful like Marylebone High Street or Euston Road. But so what? Neither of my parents could drive, let alone own a car.

  I am the child of old parents, a pair of cranky, odd Europeans with weird opinions. Oppressive ideas formed in the stale gloom. My father became very crazy in his last years without my mother’s restraining influence. Without her, he filled himself up with the gas of his own thoughts and floated off into another dimension. At the end he became a fervent admirer of the American president, George W. Bush: ‘Not a smart man, but that’s what you want–the last thing we need is for the intellectuals to gain power; I tell you, some ideas are so ridiculous only a professor could swallow them.’ From the time he retired, he took to writing smudged inky letters to the newspapers which he gave me to post and I never did. What was the point? They were illegible, he could barely see the paper himself.

  Our flat was rented, for a pittance. The bowler-hatted ladies of the Women’s Royal Voluntary Service found it for my parents when they arrived in England in 1938 as young refugees from Budapest. There is a photograph of them turning the key in the front door, their smiles like wooden postboxes. Safely on the other side, they bolted it, and tried to come out as little as possible. They had brought with them a single piece of furnishing: an ivory Chinaman with an ebony fishing rod which was a wedding present from my mother’s aunt. For the Coronation of the Queen they bought a television which they coddled with their constant anxious attention, worrying that if they left it off too long it would refuse to turn back on, for sets in those days needed ‘warming up’, and suppose it got too cold? Would it die altogether, out of spite for their neglect?

  The landlord was a philanthropist who had property all over London. Every week he sent a man in a Harris tweed overcoat and a trilby hat to collect the rent, which my parents had ready in an envelope. They were never late with a payment. The philanthropist would try raising it, to get them to move on, but my parents paid up without a murmur. No work was done on the interior; the fixtures and fittings grew more old-fashioned, my parents didn’t care. It never occurred to them that a flat off Marylebone High Street, a short walk from Oxford Circus, the railway stations and the BBC, might be worth a lot of money. They genuinely believed that the philanthropist (and when he died in 1962, his heirs) would rent the flat to another set of arriving refugees once they were gone. They had no idea.

  The reason for this cluelessness was that my father spent all day with his eye focused on a small point, a few inches away from his nose. He was a master craftsman in the back room of a jeweller’s in Hatton Garden, the street in Farringdon where you go and buy gold and diamonds weighed out on tiny scales. The gold and the diamonds are brought in from Antwerp by men with black coats, black beards, black hats, black briefcases handcuffed to their wrists, talking on their mobile phones in a variety of languages, and minds that are very quick with numbers, but my father had absolutely nothing to do with them. He was always in his dusty workshop, crowded with boxes and paperwork, under an intensely bright lamp, restoring broken necklaces and putting old stones in new settings. That was his work from the age of sixteen until his eyesight finally failed at eighty-one, when a black cloud came down, as if God had sent one of his plagues upon him.

  Many people passed through Benson Court over the years. The surgeon and his wife moved out to Finchley when I was five, and although a card would arrive on my birthday, eventually they went to Canada and we lost touch. In the kitchen window across the passage between the two mansion blocks, new curtains, new blinds and new people appeared; we never met any of them. I saw a woman once, standing there crying, alone, in the middle of the night, her mascara running and the fluorescent light overhead tingeing her blonde hair green. In 1968 a small child dressed in red clown shorts climbed on to the ledge, balanced, for a moment, toppling sideways, until a large arm hooked itself around him and brought him in to safety. A politician lived there for a bit, I saw him once, on the news on the living room TV, and then a minute later, when I went into the kitchen to make a cup of coffee, there he was again, boiling a kettle in his shirtsleeves.

  Years go by, people come and go. The radio announcer with the exquisite voice and the war-hero boyfriend with the special medal moved in; the ageing ballerina, and her husband, the Persian carpet dealer, and dealer in much else, I suppose, since she habitually referred to him not as my husband but as ‘the plutocrat’; Gilbert, the newspaper cartoonist who drew pictures of politicians with long spiteful noses, whether they had them or not. You saw them running up the stairs, you heard the noise of parties, saw famous faces. And many others who hid themselves behind their doors and drank, or wept, or ran companies whose business was obscure. Sometimes you heard
foreign tongues in the lift. An attaché at the Indian embassy kept his blonde mistress in a flat.

  But in all that time I was always the only child in our building, I don’t know why. Maybe there was something in the lead pipes that frustrated fertility, though my mother and father had managed it to make me. Or perhaps it was just that Benson Court was the kind of place that people came to because they were lonely and needed the stimulation of the city. Or they were in transit. Or maybe there was a child-free policy that had been overruled for my parents the refugees. I know there were no large pets, or if they were, they hid themselves carefully.

  A solitary upbringing. I lived mainly in my small bedroom overlooking the street, with a single narrow child’s bed and a white candlewick bedspread. On the opposite wall was a framed picture, a scene from Swan Lake, the corps de ballet as cygnets, snow, rosy dappled water, and on the chest of drawers, my books, held in place by a pair of chipped plaster horse bookends and an ornament, a glossy china dog; a spaniel, I think. My only friend was the ivory Chinaman in the living room, which my parents had brought from Hungary. I called him Simon and he often spoke to me. I did not tell my parents this.

  The clothes in the wardrobe were strange. Most of them were hand-me-downs from the WRVS: tweed skirts and ivory-coloured rayon blouses with Peter Pan collars, all done up to the neck in pearl buttons, and rimed with discoloured lace like dirty snow. There are no pictures of me wearing them. My father never owned a camera or knew how to operate one. As far as I knew, no evidence existed that I was ever a child.

  What I remember, when I think back, is not a childhood, but Benson Court itself, and me in the corridors and the communal garden, or in my room with my dictionary which my parents had handed over in embossed wrapping paper, as if it was the keys to the kingdom (which for them, whose native tongue was not English, it was), and so the liking for words was born in me, an immigrant trait. I was trying to puzzle out the many mysteries of my simple existence, just lying there thinking. Not about homework, but playing with thoughts, as another, more athletic child might continuously bounce a ball with a tennis racket against a wall or throw it into a hoop. I thought about the distance between us and the sun, and then the moon, then Australia and so on, until I put my finger to the tip of my nose and practised how close I could get to it without the two surfaces quite meeting, and whether there was a measurement for that. Everything felt too near, yet eerily distant at the same time. The outside world looked as if it was seen through the thick glass window of a speeding train, or at least how such an experience had been described in a book, for I had never been on a train. I did not get outside the perimeters of London until I was eighteen.