The Clothes On Their Backs Read online

We got the train to London and I took him through the front door of Benson Court. I had never noticed the smells before, of cleaning fluids and charladies’ sweat and, inside the flat, my mother’s cherry odour. ‘I was virtually born in this lift,’ I said, as we ascended. The mahogany cabin looked like an upturned coffin. He stretched his hands out to touch the sides. ‘This womb,’ he said, ‘this incubator of you. Tremendous. Well done.’

  My parents were struck dumb at the sight of the young English gentleman, the vertical lines at the side of his mouth which deepened when he smiled, his corduroy legs crossed on their cheap furniture as he patiently explained his proteins and what he did with them.

  ‘Does he know?’ my father whispered, coming into the kitchen where I was helping my mother put shop-bought Swiss roll on a plate and dusting a wine glass which came with the flat, in case he asked for a drink and one of us would have to run out to the shop to buy a bottle of something.

  ‘The bare bones,’ I said. He had asked me about my surname, Kovaks, and whether I was related to the infamous slum landlord. He knew the Sándor Kovacs story, as it had been reported, but he assured me that there was no connection in his mind between the two of us. One thing had nothing to do with the other, he said. This idea that blood will out was medieval nonsense, and he should know, he looked at blood through a microscope.

  In the late fifties, my father had undertaken the expense and effort of changing the whole family’s surname by deed poll from Kovacs to Kovaks. ‘Only one letter,’ he told my mother, ‘and now we’re no relation.’ Who did he think he was fooling? Himself, certainly. My mother never really swallowed it and kept on signing her name the old way. My father was more fastidious. She can’t spell, he told me. I married her and still she doesn’t know my name. He laughed, and winked at my mother, who ignored him.

  I pointed out the difference in the spelling to Alexander but when I applied for my first passport, for my first ever trip abroad (a weekend in Paris, what else?) he saw my birth certificate.

  ‘K or c, which is it?’ he asked. ‘I won’t give it back until you tell me.’ So I had to explain about the uncle, the man in the mohair suit with the leopardskin floozy.

  ‘How did he take it?’ my father asked, nervously, peering round the kitchen door, ill at ease with the presence of a stranger in the flat. ‘He still wants to carry on with you?’

  ‘Yes, he didn’t seem to mind at all.’

  ‘And he knows about prison and everything?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘You’re certain he understands?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘OK, then you better stick to him. You never know how the next one might react. Tell him he’s always welcome in our home.’

  We both began postgraduate dissertations, mine on Dickens’ minor characters, what were called the ‘grotesques’, whom I found familiar from my own upbringing at Benson Court. I was dreamy and lazy and it proceeded slowly, while Alexander raced through his, a disciplined and hard worker, putting in twelve-hour days at the lab and in the library.

  He was offered a job as part of a research team, at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland. He asked me to marry him, a formal proposal over dinner at an Italian restaurant with a bottle of wine and the presentation of a ring with a small chip of diamond in it. He didn’t want to go to America without me, I was the light of his life, he said, an exotic little black monkey whose fingers curled with pleasure when she was happy and who argued with tongue-tied inarticulate passion about what she cared about–literature, clothes, the colour of a lipstick. Serious and frivolous, exciting and sensual, sexy, incredibly sexy…and I cried out, ‘Is this how you really see me?’ ‘Yes!’ he said, amazed that I did not understand that this was who I was–did I really need him to be a mirror for me?

  My father was so worried about the task of giving me away, of walking down the aisle in a rented penguin suit with everyone looking at him, that it made him ill. He began to develop an ulcer, worrying about it.

  ‘You know, I don’t like it. I got no baptism certificate like we got for Vivien when she was born. She has the papers, I don’t. It’s not something you should do, if you haven’t got the papers. They can hold it against you.’

  He put the wrong stone in a necklace, the blue sapphire instead of the diamond, the first time in nearly forty years of loyal service with the same firm that my father had made a mistake. His boss, Mr Axelrod said the wedding was getting to him. He was sick with worry, ‘and personally,’ Axelrod said, ‘I think it’s psychological. And where’s Hereford anyway? Hertfordshire, I know. But Hereford I never heard of. What’s she got to get married for? She’s far too young.’

  ‘I told you, the boy has a job in America, in a laboratory.’

  ‘Is he going to find a cure for cancer?’

  ‘You know what? That’s exactly right. He’s on a team, I tell you. A team for curing cancer.’

  ‘A team is what you have in a football game or the other one, cricket.’

  ‘Yes, well this is another kind of team, a science team. And by the time they’ve finished, all the illnesses will be stopped dead, just like that.’

  ‘So what will people die from?’

  ‘How should I know? Maybe we’ll live for ever.’

  ‘You mean I got to put up with you, working here for all eternity?’

  ‘What, you’re going to give me the sack now, just because I got everlasting life?’

  I had to walk down the aisle all by myself; my father was going to vomit all over my dress if I put him through this ordeal. So I, alone, in a grey satin gown, strolled towards my groom, as he stood in his new suit, his hair cut close to the nape of his neck, his cheeks shaved, a pale gold knife, standing there.

  It was done, and my father collapsed and fanned himself with his hymn sheet. ‘Berta,’ he whispered to my mother, ‘all our troubles are over. They can’t touch us now.’

  ‘Please, Ervin,’ she said, ‘don’t go boasting of this to your brother.’

  My parents bought us the honeymoon as a wedding present, which was touching because they had never been on a holiday themselves, had barely left London in nearly forty years, let alone been abroad, apart from where they came from. But how could they find a hotel, and where? And what about the travel arrangements? Their idea of what a honeymoon should be like was from the television; they knew there must be cocktails, glasses of champagne, sunsets, almost certainly some kind of beach, or at least a sea view. Apart from the Thames, they thought about a cruise, but it was too expensive; they considered Rome, but no sea view there. They were adamant about that sea view. They had only seen running water outside their bathtub when they made their own tumultuous crossing of the English Channel in an overnight sailing before the war, spending every minute below deck and occasionally looking out with a brief, terrified glance through a porthole to the rushing black sea. But they knew that the sea didn’t have to be like that. You could have a palm tree, for example, though they couldn’t decide what grew on it: dates, coconuts, bananas?

  After many nights of discussion my father decided to take what was for him a huge step: he turned to the only people they knew who could assist–the neighbours, who were delighted, especially the longer-standing residents who had watched me grow up, playing noisily alone in those carpeted halls, pushing the button of the lift in mischief, running around the communal garden in my imaginary world.

  Gilbert, who had taken my virginity and was delighted to be passing me on to a husband, convened a meeting in his flat to decide on our destination. The ballerina was there, the plutocrat husband, the BBC announcer, an orthopaedic surgeon who had just moved in, and other interested and opinionated parties. Ten altogether, not including my parents, who had never once set foot in any other flat in the building; they had no idea that other people lived this way under the same roof, with coffee tables, dinner services, paintings, rugs, ornaments, brocade curtains, chintz-covered sofas, bookshelves, sideboards, tassels.

  After
intense debate–and two pots of coffee and a decanter of wine which my parents didn’t touch, but ate the foil-wrapped chocolate liqueurs instead–they chose the French Riviera, specifically Nice, the Hotel Negresco, and a brochure was sent for and the prices noted, my parents with hands on their chests, like they were about to have heart attacks, screaming with shock at the tariffs. And then letters, telegrams, money orders: three nights booked in a room with sea view and balcony, breakfast and one dinner included.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Gilbert, ‘she’ll like it there.’

  ‘The place you are going to is renowned,’ said my father. ‘That’s all you need to know. Renowned.’

  ‘For what?’ asked Alexander as we got out of the taxi and walked into the lobby. ‘Vulgarity?’

  ‘Well, I like it,’ I said, looking round.

  ‘What? What do you like?’

  I liked everything: the wood-panelled bar, the heavy chandeliers, the tapestries, the crystal whisky fountain, the atmosphere of decadence and luxury and inertia. I liked the creepy child in a tiny mink jacket lounging in front of the sculpted floral arrangements; the severe blonde women in tweeds and pearls sipping cocktails in the velvet club armchairs; the names of the dishes on the menu held on a gilt easel outside the dining room.

  And most of all I liked our reflection in the mirrors that we passed: the young English lord in the white open-neck shirt and a petrol blue linen jacket, and his dark wife with the persistent shadow on her upper lip, her raisin eyes, her sallow complexion offset by a slash of scarlet lipstick. Her cream bouclé wool jacket, short navy crêpe skirt, two-tone shoes.

  ‘You’re in your element here,’ Alexander said, ‘now you’re dressed just right for the setting.’

  We went for a walk along the Baie des Anges. I’m married, I thought. I’m Vivien Amory. I’m free. And yet I still didn’t fully understand his attraction to me, however close he held the mirror.

  ‘Why were you so very certain when you came in on me in the bath that time? How did you know from the very start?’

  ‘We were getting too stringy, we Amorys,’ he said, putting his arm around me and kissing the top of my head, while passers-by smiled at us because we so obviously had the white phosphorescent gleam of a wedding still about us. ‘Every generation an Amory would marry a tall blonde and we got longer and whiter until we started to look like worms. When I was going up to university my father said, bring down the height can you, and get some red blood in our veins. So it was you, there you were, in the bath. Of course you weren’t at all what he had in mind, but I can’t help that.’

  ‘What did he have in mind?’

  But he just started laughing.

  Mid-afternoon. Benson Court is quiet. The ballerina wakes from her afternoon nap, it’s not her day for lunch in the Fountain Room, and the plutocrat is writing letters in the study to his mistress. Gilbert is at work scratching with his pen at a piece of paper, malicious slashes; he’d rather poke the eyes out of the prime minister himself, he hates them, fat or thin, they are all liars and crooks. My father is still in Hatton Garden, looking through his magnifying eye at diamonds, and who knows what thoughts pass through his mind during those long hours he spends at his bench with the cold lumps of carbon?

  I am trying to read a book. A book I read already. Sometimes I weep, suddenly, and wipe my eyes on my sleeve. The memories of Nice are worn down to thin panels of beaten gold. His blue eyes looking out at me from beneath the blond lashes as he died, eyes now locked up in a box. And the box is in a hole in the ground and some metamorphosis of Alexander is taking place, he is being recomposed, back into proteins, and the proteins feed the soil, and the yew trees of the churchyard and the dandelions and the ornamental roses at the gate. The earthen mound above his body gently subsides. Soon his ribs will be crushed under marble.

  He died. He died on the second night of our honeymoon, a ghastly accident. You take a misstep, you turn your head the wrong way when you cross the road, you gargle with bleach instead of mouthwash, it’s just ridiculous the doors that are slightly ajar between life and death. Life’s extreme fragility is all around us, as if we are perpetually walking on floors of cracked glass.

  That beautiful boy was dead and would not be alive again. I couldn’t believe it, standing looking at Alexander, of all people, inert, silent, perpetually incommunicative. I was still wet inside from his last act, up in our honeymoon bed, our clothes scattered across the floor and the red lizard high-heeled shoes tumbling over and over the roiling sheets.

  I’m glad I still have a photograph, because he left such a short, shallow groove in the world. Yet many years later, after all the things that happened since his death, and long after that, sometimes before I go to sleep I still see his face, the small blue eyes, the thinning hair, the narrow smile. I turn towards an empty sleeve.

  I returned home alone, to the claustrophobic flat and its boiled cabbage smells, my parents more shocked than me, if that were possible, more frightened, as if a policeman might suddenly appear and arrest me for somehow being implicated in the murder of a real Englishman.

  ‘You know,’ my mother is saying, ‘during the war you never knew if you would get to the end of the week alive, the terrible bombing.’

  The ivory Chinaman with the ebony fishing rod, yellow with age, broken and mended invisibly by my father’s expert nimble fingers, looks at me with two tiny ebony eyes. Simon used to say all kinds of things in my head and then he fell silent for many years. Right now he has found his voice, saying: She’s up to something, pay attention.

  ‘Really? I thought that was mostly in the East End.’

  I lit a cigarette. I was smoking a lot since I got back from Nice, and the joints of my fingers were nicotine stained, my nails bitten down to raw skin. My mother waved the smoke away with her hand; both my parents thought it was a ‘filthy’ habit’ but I kept filling saucers with my ash and my reddened, lipsticked stubs.

  ‘No, no, no,’ she said, ‘it was everywhere. I think of it a lot now because of the Irish bombs.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ I held the smoke in my lungs as long as I could. The burning of my tissues gave me a masochistic pleasure.

  ‘Yes, it was a horrible time, you know, horrible. You had to look after number one.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘A woman who thought to bring a child into the world had second thoughts in such a time.’

  ‘I suppose she would.’

  Her words murmured like the sounds of Benson Court itself: the coughing pipes, the floorboards’ creak, the doors along the hall opening and closing, the panting ascent of the lift and the accordion pleats of its metal cage opening and closing, the life and soul of the building. And this room, with its brown leather sofa; its faded wallpaper on which one could barely make out the pattern of bamboo; the oak floorboards covered in cheap rugs; the empty walnut sideboard containing no bottles, decanters, or dinner services; the velvet curtains even more faded than the wallpaper–nothing indicated that the flat was a home and not a cheap rooming house, except the framed colour photograph of me, in my grey academic gown and mortarboard, clutching the rolled-up certificate which was my degree, taken with Alexander’s camera, and to the right of me a Canada goose attempting to mount a female of the species in the grass beside the artificial lake.

  The Chinaman closed his eyes and went to sleep, having alerted me to the presence of a subtext in the room.

  ‘If you found out you were pregnant, for example, you might want to consider your situation quite carefully.’

  I looked up. Her head was still bent over the brown sock.

  ‘Yes, you might ask yourself if you would even get through the whole thing, if the baby would die with fright inside you, because of the bombing all the time. It wouldn’t want to come out at all.’

  ‘Who did this happen to?’ I said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did what happen?’

  ‘What you’re saying.’

  ‘I
’m not saying nothing, just an observation, that’s all. Horrible food we ate during the war, no fresh fruit. A little bit of meat. Your father found it hard to do without butter, and no lemons for his tea–that was the worst of it, I think, for him. The coffee was atrocious, too. Just chicory, I think.’

  ‘We were talking about babies.’

  ‘Oh, yes, we were. If a person is expecting a baby and it’s not a good situation, they need to consider what to do.’

  ‘You mean abortion? Wasn’t that illegal during the war?’

  ‘Yes, of course it was. It was a very serious crime. A person could go to prison for this.’

  ‘So what did people do?’

  She shrugged. ‘They did what they did.’

  ‘And why are you telling me this now?’

  ‘Oh! Just to remind you that some things need looking at from all angles.’

  ‘Why remind me?’

  She looked up, finally, from the brown sock. ‘Are you stupid, Vivien? I am not stupid.’

  ‘But I’m not—’

  ‘Is it me you lie to, or do you also lie to yourself?’

  I got up and left the room, stood for a moment in the hall, leaning against the door frame, and experienced that strange sensation I felt as a child, of sudden elongation, of my feet being too far away from my head, or perhaps the other way round. One is not oneself at all, at all. I was able eventually to reach my room, to lie down on the white candlewick bedspread across from the Swan Lake picture. The cygnets stood on tiptoe with tiny waists and slender calves. I put my hands on my breasts and squeezed but they were tender and my belly was distended.

  Possessed by another living thing that clung with force to my insides, I looked round at the walls that I had once so willingly imprisoned myself in, and felt the cage door clang shut. An interior tenderness throbbed painfully. The thoughts were back, like hammers in my head. I touched my breasts tentatively with a finger and thought of a warm, wet mouth, sucking. Fear, panic, desperation. And I had nowhere to go but where I was already.