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

  My mother came in later, when it had grown dark and my father had returned home and settled himself in for a quiz show, writing down the answers and ticking off the correct ones.

  ‘You want something to eat? Soup?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There’s a place on Tottenham Court Road. I pass it sometimes. I see the girls go in and I see the girls come out again. It looks very nice, clean, hygienic, healthy. But look at you, you’re white as a sheet. Are you frightened? Don’t be, I won’t let anyone hurt you. I’ll be there all the time, I promise. I did it all alone, no mother to help me. But don’t worry, you will have me.’

  Her face was very near mine, her cracked skin and nut-brown hair with its few white strands. I was her third try at a child, she had cancelled the previous experiments.

  ‘Did Daddy know?’

  ‘Him? You think he could have lived with such knowledge? Every night he would expect a policeman. Go and have a bath, dear. You’ll feel better. Tomorrow we will telephone and make all the arrangements.’

  I soaped my body with Camay. The shower curtain had a pattern of yellow ducks on it; I felt that if I stayed there long enough they’d peck out my eyes.

  My mother came in and sat down on the edge of the bath. ‘It’s nothing,’ she told me. ‘Really quite a simple little procedure. Don’t be anxious.’

  ‘My life is awful.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘No one is trying to kill you.’

  I went to bed and lay beneath the covers. I heard the door handle turn, she came in and sat next to me on the bed and sang an old lullaby from my childhood.

  ‘Loola loola loola loola baby, do you want the moon to play with? Or the stars to run away with? Loola loola loola loola bye.’

  ‘After this,’ she said, ‘you have a fresh start. You’ll see. Of course it’s a great shame about Alexander, but let me tell you, life is very hard for people like us. No one should make you believe it is easy. It is not, not at all.’

  ‘What do you mean, people like us?’

  ‘The outsiders.’

  ‘I’m not an outsider.’

  ‘You think?’

  During the whole of his interminably long life, until his death at the age of eighty-six, I felt I was a stranger to my father–I don’t mean he didn’t love me, I know he did, but the limited means he had of expressing any form of affection had to find their way though so many obstacles in his personality that it was easier for him just to sit and look at me over his black dusty glasses, when he thought I was as intent as he usually was on the TV screen.

  He came home from work each night, his eyes aching, and turned on the set, and ate what my mother put in front of him, and after a while, he seemed to notice my presence.

  ‘Vivien! What are you still doing here?’

  ‘Daddy! I live here.’

  ‘Of course a father gives his daughter a roof over her head. I mean, why do you not have a job yet? You think it’s a disgrace to work?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘People who don’t like to work go to the bad, that’s my experience.’

  ‘I know who you’re talking about.’

  ‘Who? Who am I talking about?’

  ‘Unc—’

  ‘Don’t mention that name in my house. Anyway, I didn’t mean him, I meant the layabouts I see on the television, not to mention the ones who got jobs and don’t want to do them, the miners, for a start.’

  ‘No politics,’ said my mother. ‘I’m putting my foot down right here and now.’

  My parents had brought me up to be a mouse. Out of gratitude to England which gave them refuge, they chose to be mice-people and this condition of mousehood, of not saying much (to outsiders or even each other), of living quietly and modestly, of being industrious and obedient, was what they hoped for for me, too. And whatever Uncle Sándor was, he was no mouse. If he was anything he was a rhinoceros, coated in the mud of the river, goring and grabbing. Even while he slept, if he turned over a huge shoulder, the earth shook.

  ‘Who was that man, Daddy?’ I had said, after my father had finally slammed the door after the surprise visit in 1963.

  ‘No one. Forget about it.’ But I persisted.

  ‘Daddy! Who was he? Tell me, please, Daddy.’ And I climbed on his lap which was an action I rarely dared take because it either made him angry (‘I can’t see the screen! I’m missing everything, get out of the way!’) or he buried his face in my hair and smelt it, and said to my mother, ‘Isn’t she just good enough to eat?’ ‘Yes,’ she replied, making for the umpteenth time their little joke about me, ‘with chocolate sauce and ice-cream.’ For years I thought that maybe they did mean to eat me. You couldn’t be sure with them, perhaps it was an old Hungarian custom to cook daughters and serve them for dessert, like the old witch in my picture book who captured Hansel and Gretel in her gingerbread house.

  Even knowing what Sándor had done, knowing not long after, in fact, from the news on TV from which they could not shield me, I was still fascinated by my father’s reaction. I knew my daddy had a hot temper and bore age-long grudges against people I had never met, who had died before I was born, but nothing had ever before roused him to this level of volcanic rage. And never before had I heard him pronounce whole sentences in a foreign tongue, which I thought at first was Hungarian, and wasn’t.

  ‘What am I going to say when people ask if I’m related to him, Daddy?’ I asked, when I was about to go to university. ‘Don’t you think you should tell me a bit more? You say he lied when he said he was your brother…’

  ‘Just don’t you ever utter a word about that man,’ said my mother. ‘Nothing should pass your lips.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of telling strangers our business, of course not, but don’t you think I have the right to know? It’s my family too.’

  ‘Family? He stopped being family years ago, before you were ever born,’ my father said.

  ‘Aha!’

  ‘Oy, look what you made me say.’

  I started laughing. It was not easy to get one over on the old boy; normally he constructed an impenetrable screen of words.

  ‘Is he a cousin, then?’

  ‘A cousin you can cast off, who knows a cousin?’

  ‘Closer than that…so he is your brother!’

  He didn’t say anything, and I knew that for the first time I had defeated him.

  ‘Think what your poor father has had to put up with all these years,’ my mother said. ‘Knowing that that man could bring down everything on top of us. We kept him away as much for your sake, you know, Vivien.’

  ‘He’s poison,’ said my father. ‘Always was. He was never any good.’

  ‘Did you flee to England together?’

  ‘No, no, he didn’t see what was coming, like we did. We were smart, we read the papers, didn’t we, Berta? We paid attention and we weren’t so vain as to think that we could charm our way out of the horrible things that were happening. We knew that once a man gets a political idea into his head, then you need to move out of his way, because a man with a political idea will soon enough be a man with not just an idea but a gun. And a man with a gun and idea–well, you just run until you’re out of breath, and he can’t see you no more. But him! Even after the war he still hung on. He stuck it out until ’56. Fool.’

  ‘But what happened to him during the war?’

  ‘Well, he had a hard time, I’ll give him that. But that doesn’t give him no excuses.’

  ‘OK, but what…’

  And my parents, who believed in God in a mildish fashion, as long as he was a God that left them alone and didn’t pry into their affairs, or insist they could not watch the television, an undemanding God of no particular denomination, received at that moment a miracle. For the phone rang, which it did only a few times a year. It was the landlord’s agent to say that workmen were coming round to replace a broken lift cable and they were not to be concerned or ask them for identification, or call the police like last time.


  After half an hour of delivering paeans to the family who owned our flat, those great benefactors who expected no gratitude, indeed liked to stay as far away as possible from their properties, in their own villa in the south of France, it was obvious that the subject of my father’s brother, the notorious slum landlord, could not now be raised. The momentum was lost.

  I went to bed thinking about him and concocting some imaginary meetings between the two of us, in which I at last got to find out who exactly my parents had been, back in Budapest, and were they made this way or had fortune changed them. These daydreams were mildly pleasant and gave way to peaceful sleep with colourful shadows dancing inside my head. But then I went to university, got married and forgot about my uncle until I was back in my childhood bed, with many of the same old thoughts returning.

  If you are unemployed, if you face every morning the desolation of the days, you may find that not even reading can be stretched out adequately to cover all of the hours, because being without work, and largely friendless, and thrown back on your own cranky parents for company, has a strange effect on your mental state. You become aware of how long a day is, and your own responsibility to fill it from your own resources and how shockingly limited they turn out to be, what a sham and fake you are, how you fooled your husband, who believed in you, who thought you cared about thinking as much as he did.

  So you find a constant companion in a pack of cards, and lay them out on the table in endless games of patience until you are so sick of the aces and the twos and the suits and the kings and queens and bloody jacks, all the black and red and red and black, that they swarm in front of your eyes and rise up to fling themselves at you, with their smug royal faces, looking sideways at their own edges.

  I bought a second-hand copy of the I Ching, an ancient game of fortune telling which was in vogue at the time, and tossed coins between a closed nest of my hands but it never once turned out any good. The I Ching failed to predict correctly what the future really held for me–that only a year or so later I would be kicking myself for not having used my time profitably, finished my thesis for a start or at the very least read all of Proust and Tolstoy instead of playing with coins and Chinese hieroglyphics. But in the presence of those great intellects I felt all the more worthless and insignificant, and would shut the book and crawl away under the bedcovers, not getting up until my mother knocked on the door and said, ‘What? Are you going to spend the whole day stinking in bed?’

  So I walked.

  South to Oxford Street I tramped, to wander the halls of Selfridges with no money in my pockets. Down to the underpass, coming up at Marble Arch and down again to Hyde Park to watch the swans on the Serpentine and listen to the cranks and crackpots standing on their soapboxes at Speakers’ Corner and sometimes east and west, along Marylebone Road between the railway stations. My head had nothing in it, nothing. Sometimes I found a bench and sat down and fell asleep. When you start falling asleep on benches you know you’re in trouble.

  ‘Like Mrs Prescott,’ said my mother. ‘That’s who you turned into, you understand? Maybe she had a sorrow too. But watch out, all this walking will drive you crazy, like her.’

  What do you know about grief? I thought. You haven’t lived. You’ve never lived. You have no idea. You don’t know what it’s like to wake up every morning and see the light through the curtains, feel the sunshine tentatively casting patches on the walls, your spirits rising at the wonder of there being a new day, then remembering what you know: that there is no new day, just a dead repeat of the one before. For never again will you half listen to him talk about his proteins, or gently probe him about his childhood in the vicarage. You won’t walk together in Hyde Park and you won’t get on a plane and fly high in the air together and descend into the new world. You won’t you won’t you won’t. He won’t kiss you. He won’t insist that you put on those red lizard shoes with the high arc of the heel, the ache he called it.

  He won’t make you tea in the morning and bring it to you in bed. You will never find the record he wanted of Glen Gould playing the Goldberg Variations and watch the pleasure in his face as he unwraps it. You won’t cut his toenails, because his back is too bad to bend, after sitting over a microscope for many hours. You won’t ever again read a new poem about geese, because there will never be a new poem. He will never see his child’s face, and nor, of course, will you.

  (Was it deep grief, or just the devastation a person feels who comes home to find themselves burgled, the telly gone, the flat trashed.)

  Go and find a job, my mother said. A girl who had a degree from a university could have any career she chose, if she should want such a thing as a career, because a degree, this was like a special ticket you showed all the top people, and at once, as soon as they saw it, they knew you were to be let inside. This was my mother’s opinion. A person with a degree (especially one from that York University), a person who knew a lot about Charles Dickens, was at the very top of the tree. My mother didn’t know exactly what openings were available, but she was certain that whatever they were, they were mine for the choosing, and it was my own wilful obstinacy which prevented me from getting one.

  I went twice a week to the library on Marylebone Road to read the appointments pages in The Times and write down in my notebook the addresses of positions I could apply for, and sent off my minimal curriculum vitae which had a blank employment record; I had never had a job, of any kind. I sent away to be a researcher at the BBC, to become an editorial assistant on a literary magazine, to publicise books at Faber and Faber. I didn’t even get an interview.

  One day I swallowed my pride and applied for a job selling postcards in the shop at the National Portrait Gallery. My letter came straight back.

  I got so angry I rang them up. ‘Why won’t you even see me for the job?’ I said. ‘I know those postcards. I know the name of every writer who has a portrait in the gallery. I know the Chandos portrait of Shakespeare off by heart. I could describe it blindfold.’

  ‘Really?’ said a sharp voice at the other end of the phone. ‘There were one hundred and sixty-nine applicants for this position, and fifty-two of them had degrees in art history.’

  Everything in me was yearning and longing to pull myself out of the mud, and still I stuck. I was jealous of myself. I was afraid that if I lost the knack of being the person I was only a month ago, who was engaged to Alexander, then I would be trapped as Vivien Kovaks for the rest of my life and I would have to marry someone in Benson Court and spend an hour every evening visiting my parents, up and down in that lift, forever ascending and getting nowhere. Or worse, I’d get my own flat, and be Mrs Prescott. Maybe her clothes had eaten into my soul.

  The library was full of people with colds and men with nowhere else to go. Signs on the walls prohibited spitting. I don’t see people spitting at all these days, let alone any signs warning against it, but people did spit then, spat into handkerchiefs, and a bluish-brown pall hung in the air beneath the fluorescent strip lighting, choking the lungs of non-smokers. A man in stained tweed trousers, fresh coloured in his complexion, who arrived at noon with a pint of milk and a tin of cat food in a string bag, was warned by library staff to keep his hands on the table at all times, whatever the subject of the books he was studying.

  But libraries have a serendipitous quality to them. They lead you on. Standing with my fingers in the card index, I saw in the K section, a familiar name, my own. Kneeling on the linoleum floor by the metal shelving I began reading a short, rather sensational work, which despite its arresting title–Kovacs, the King of Crime–was an investigation into slum housing in west London. A small inset of photographs in the middle revealed my uncle, taken through the window of his silver Jag, his bulbous face staring past the glass, enrobed in shadows. Next to it was a reproduction of an article in the Evening Standard, with the same photograph, this time captioned:

  IS THIS THE FACE OF EVIL?

  I examined the features: a heavy-set man with a pendulous lower lip a
nd a fat neck, a profile like Alfred Hitchcock above an exuberantly knotted tie looked back at me. I could just about recognise him as the same uncle who had called at the house with the golden bar of Toblerone and the West Indian girlfriend, but there, on the mat, years ago, he had been full of life and colour, in his bright-blue suit and sparkling wrist. The uncle in the book had a black ink smudge eating away part of the side of his face. The dots of the photographic reproduction didn’t do him any favours, either, making him appear pockmarked, while I remembered his skin as pale and smooth, pungent with expensive aftershave.

  It was a very unfortunate picture. The glass of the car window already cast him in shadows, but reproduced on the cheap shiny paper of what seemed to be a vanity press imprint he reminded me of old murderers and houses where bodies were found under the floorboards.

  According to the author, my uncle was a complete bastard, a cheap thug and greedy, grasping bloodsucker. Not just a slum landlord, but a racist, who let his black tenants live in unspeakable conditions. And not just a slum landlord and a racist, but a gangster, a man who employed local heavies to beat tenants who could not pay up on rent day. And not just a slum landlord, racist, thug and gangster, but a pimp, a man who kept teenage prostitutes in houses all over west London. A girl said she had given birth to three babies and two had died of bronchitis from the chronic damp and condensation. Another child fell through a rotten stair and broke his back. A father of seven was late with the rent: my uncle’s goons beat him with chains. And my uncle got up in the morning, shaved, splashed eau de Cologne from Jermyn Street on his Hitchcock face, put his feet into calfskin Lobb shoes and walked past the ormolu clocks and gilt furniture of his Bishops Avenue mansion to his Chippendale desk which was surrounded by unopened packing cases containing all the luxury goods he had carelessly bought on credit and never even looked at.

  The account of my uncle’s revolting crimes chilled me to the bone, the heart freezes. I had not really understood the extent of it. The interviews with his victims were heart-rending. The photographs of the squalid interiors of his houses were loathsome. Someone testified he’d seen better in the POW camps in Burma, yes that bad, and the book recorded that my uncle burst out laughing when he heard this, which demonstrated the callous disposition of a psychopath. I turned to the final page: