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

  And with the arrest and subsequent conviction of Sándor Kovacs in 1964, one of the darkest periods in the history of west London came to an end. The government’s policy of urban renewal promises new, sanitary housing at affordable rents for all. A modern Britain is in the making, one in which the shadows of the past, of unscrupulous foreigners squeezing profits from the poorest and most vulnerable, are fast being banished for ever. A new dawn, a new equality. The reign of Sándor Kovacs, his henchmen and his kin, had come to a final end.

  There was something about this account that I did not quite like, though I couldn’t put my finger on it. Knowing what we do now, about the slums that sixties social housing erected over the slums that they destroyed to make way for them, it seems painfully obvious that the schemes of political visionaries are always doomed to disappointment but I was also struck queasily by two words: ‘foreigners’ and ‘kin’.

  For there remained in my mind that black girl with the nylon leopardskin coat and the mock-croc handbag with the gilt clasps, and the bar of Toblerone, the heavy weight of it in my uncle’s hand as he tried to give it to me, as if it were a gold ingot. And I could see his hand-stitched suede shoes, and the way he looked at me, eagerly but also with sorrow and nervousness, and my father screaming, my uncle laughing. And these events were more real to me than the Sándor Kovacs in this book.

  We were at a wedding once, here in London, after we got engaged, a society occasion, someone with whom Alexander had been to school. While he was on the dance floor leading about the groom’s sister, a woman leaned across on her elbows, already sloshed, looked at my place card and said, ‘I just have to mention that I knew your father. And I must say, I do think it was awful what happened to him.’

  ‘My father? How could you have known my father?’

  ‘Well, darling, he knew absolutely everyone. It was such rubbish what they said about him in the papers. People were quite happy to shake his hand at the time, I mean, it was anything goes, you could rub shoulders with who you liked and who cared? I knew some very nice people who were quite fascinated by him and would have taken him up in a big way if only he had managed to jump through the right hoops. Anyway, he was always perfectly charming to me.’

  ‘But you couldn’t have met my father, he never goes out.’

  ‘Well, not now, perhaps, but at the beginning of the sixties you bumped into him everywhere.’

  ‘And where was my mother? Did you meet her?’

  ‘Well, you know I never really heard anything about her, he didn’t say much. I rather had the impression that she had died. But perhaps that’s wrong. To be honest, I don’t think I ever quite asked. One always assumed that he was on the loose, sexually, I mean. And despite being rather an ugly man–do forgive me, he was always rather amusing about his looks–one found him quite attractive, though in a coarse way. Well, I adored him, I could have spent hours with him. Not that we ever went to bed, but a girlfriend of mine did. Anyway, do tell me, what is he up to now?’

  ’I’m sorry, but could you tell me who you think my father is?’

  ‘Why Sándor Kovacs, of course. Who else were we talking about?’

  This woman, bright, loquacious, lit by crystal chandeliers, on the other side of a table littered with demitasse cups and silver coffee spoons, was a fragile, brittle blonde, the type who smokes too much and spent too much time in the sun in Cannes in the fifties and sixties, skin driven into ferocious grooves and whorls on her face and neck. Mrs Simone Chase, she was called: ‘My older sister came out with the groom’s mother, we seem to have been mixed up with that lot one way or another since before the war. Except they have better luck getting their marriages to stick than us. I’m a gay divorcee.’

  She put her cigarette out in the pool of coffee in her saucer, and looked around to see if there was any more to drink.

  ‘Bloody petit fours, aren’t you sick of the sight of them? Wherever you go there are petit bloody fours and they’re always identical. It’s not as if anyone ever touches them.’

  ‘Sándor Kovacs is not my father,’ I said. ‘My father’s name is Ervin. He works in Hatton Garden mending jewellery and putting old stones into modern settings. He lives with my mother in a flat off Marylebone High Street.’

  ‘Good heavens, are you absolutely certain?’ She looked up at me; her hair, a fine gold mesh helmet hardened with lacquer, stood away from her scalp and her face beneath drooped under the burden because after she had stared at me for a few moments, her eyes fell to looking about the table for more wine.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, with unbecoming vehemence, being too young, too green, to have mastered nonchalance, and certainly not sang-froid.

  ‘But, darling, he told me all about this little girl, a dark-haired thing, he said, very dark. And even mentioned her name. Began with a V. What could it be but Vivien, surely not Vera. Could it have been Veronica? No, it couldn’t because I remember quite plainly that he said you were named after Vivien Leigh, so you see it has to be Vivien. I can’t have got it mixed up.’

  Kovacs is a common Hungarian name and Sándor Kovacs is not my father and I was not named after Vivien Leigh.’

  ‘I find that quite odd,’ she said. ‘And you’ve never heard of him?’

  ‘Of course, I’ve heard of him. But only on the news.’ I looked around. Alexander was still moving effortlessly round the dance floor with that upper-class grace of his. ‘What was he like?’ I said quickly.

  ‘Well, as I say, frightfully coarse, and he wore the most extraordinary clothes, flashy watches, terribly nouveau riche, but they all were, they had money to burn and they were showing off like billy-o, that crowd. You know, the fat blonde starlet and her cockney husband, what were their names? I don’t remember at all, now. Bethnal Green bingo kings, that type. What they didn’t say much about in the newspapers, because of the scandal, was that he had a great liking for coloured girls…’

  ‘Why was that a scandal?’

  ‘Because of who else they were sleeping with, darling. Some of whom are in this very room, but I shan’t name names. Not after all this time. Thing about Sándor is that I don’t think I ever saw him in public with a white woman, though he did sleep with them when he got the chance, and quite well-bred girls, too, but he was more of a trophy hunter, in that respect. You felt there were notches on the bedpost–and with coronets, if he could manage it, but he always kicked them out in the nicest possible way the next morning. A friend of mine said he had the most awful scars on his back, terrible really, the war. Ghastly. The coloured girls he dragged around with him made him even more beyond the pale, at least in my set, but you know when you met him, you couldn’t help but notice that he had terribly kind eyes. Or at least I thought so. A beautiful brown, like rather good chocolate. Personally, I think he was a public benefactor.’

  Alexander returned to the table.

  ‘Who are we talking about?’ he said.

  ‘Sándor Kovacs,’ said Mrs Chase.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Alexander said. ‘A fascinating study.’

  ‘People said he was evil, you know,’ said Mrs Chase. ‘But I don’t. Never. People talk a lot of rot, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Alexander, coldly.

  In the state I was in, the early summer of that year, 1977, that dreadful grief and boredom, failure and worthlessness, I decided that I would go and find my uncle. Why not? I didn’t have anything else to do. The more I thought about him, the more I visualised that photograph, and those words on the page–Is this the face of evil–the more I found myself pondering questions that were beyond my limited philosophical reach. I had never met evil, only read about it in books, in the plays of William Shakespeare, but even Macbeth was a person of flesh and blood, who was spooked by a dagger, floating in the air.

  So I looked up my uncle in the phone book and there, to my surprise, he was.

  The mornings lightened, summer began and I woke earlier and earlier. The silence of the city punctuated by stray cars. Then the gatherin
g moan of traffic along the main arterial roads, trains arriving, departing at the stations. Clatter of heels on the pavements outside my window, girls walking to work in offices. The dustman’s cart grinding its brakes, the electric motor of the milkman’s float. London in the morning.

  My father had already left for the day. My mother was sitting in the kitchen in her brown dressing gown, drinking milky coffee. Her hair was all haywire. She looked heavy and old, and I saw the first twisting of her hands that would be the rheumatoid arthritis which was about to begin its additional torment of her body.

  ‘You know I think I will paint that stool,’ she said. ‘We got it when we came here, but it is very chipped. I’ll do it while I still can.’

  ‘What colour?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe green.’

  ‘Then make it an emerald green, or a grass green.’

  ‘This sounds very bright.’

  ‘We could do with some brightness round here.’

  ‘You think we are a little drab?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Maybe you are right. It always seems enough work just to keep it all clean, never mind you worry about what it looks like.’

  She sometimes got little jobs in shops, serving behind the counter, but my father always found an excuse to talk her out of them. A very handsome Spaniard with an oiled black quiff once took an interest in her. I think he just felt she needed some flattery, to cheer her up; he encouraged her to buy a real silk scarf. After that, my father became very fussy about domestic cleaning, and would run his finger over surfaces. ‘Berta, look at this, the house goes to rack and ruin with you at work.’ So she gave up the job and spent her mornings on her hands and knees scrubbing linoleum, and in the afternoons she knitted things no one would ever wear.

  My mother’s green period would last ten weeks, all that summer. Once she touched the top of my father’s nose with the brush, and laughed at him.

  ‘Berta, what you lost your mind? I got to send a doctor for you?’

  ‘Don’t make such a fuss, here’s a turpentine rag, rub it off, if you’re so fussy.’

  ‘And what are you going to do today?’ she said to me, as she boiled the kettle, looking out through the window to that other flat, whose blinds were still drawn and whose occupants were seldom seen.

  ‘I’m going out,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, I’m pleased to hear this. Where do you go so early in the morning?’

  ‘For a walk.’

  ‘More walking. You’re very thin, you walk and you do not eat. Is there still pain, down there?’

  ‘No, no pain.’

  ‘So just in the heart. I still have this pain from what I did, and twice it was, for me.’

  I ran out of the kitchen and out of the flat, turned up the High Street, crossed Marylebone Road and went into Regent’s Park.

  The park was ringed by white palaces, lions roared in the distant zoo. Crossing the road, I came almost at once to a boating lake, with birds–geese, like the ones Alexander had studied and written his poems about. You could walk from north to south through London’s parks, you could pass through Hampstead Heath, Parliament Hill Fields, Primrose Hill down to Regent’s Park to Hyde Park, St James’s Park, Green Park–the parks reached almost to the river, and to the west the great open spaces of Richmond, Clapham, Wandsworth. One park had deer, and another a picture gallery; parks with theatres, open air concerts, zoos. This was my nature, these mown lawns, bandstands, boating lakes, ice-cream vans, cafés that closed in winter.

  The birds were making a big noise in the early summer morning, and they demanded my attention. I sat down on a bench to look at them and think about what Alexander saw. Their small eyes watched me, their webbed feet padded across the grass, they clustered round crusts of bread. You couldn’t imagine what they were thinking, he said, because their brains were in their wings, they had compasses in there, and maps. They knew exactly what they were doing.

  ‘Young lady, excuse me, this is my bench, every day I sit here.’ And he was just standing there in a mackintosh, with a leather folder under his arm, his hair grey and thin, his face white, the lower lip trembling, all the weight in the barrel chest and the shoulders, straining against the cotton of his shirt, his legs and feet like those of the water birds, a superfluous under-structure. My uncle.

  I never saw prison pallor before. Nothing he would do would ever return to him his old complexion. Jail had rendered him monochrome, his voice faltering as he looked at me and his hands holding his leather folder tightly, pressed against his belly. I saw now the same nose as mine, the same fleshy nostrils which he shared with my father and which were their legacy to the next generation, not a big nose, a flat podgy nose. Everything else I got from my mother. And he was of a totally different build to my father, with small feet, which was strange because his hands were swollen, like rubber gloves filled with water.

  ‘OK,’ I said, my throat closing on the word. ‘I’ll move along to make room.’

  He sat down, unbuttoned his mackintosh and unzipped the leather folder, which held inside it a pad of lined paper and a loop containing a gold pen. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. This was the Sándor Kovacs I knew all about, with the flashy trinkets, the platinum and diamond life.

  ‘Nice, eh?’ he said, holding it up to show it to me. ‘It’s what you call Cartier, the very best.’ (He rolled his r’s like my parents.) ‘They make watches, all kinds of things, but only in the finest materials. What do you think?’

  ‘It looks very smooth to hold.’

  ‘Exactly. Quality workmanship. That’s how you tell something is expensive, not how much it cost or what it is made of.’

  I could smell him, he was so close. The same scent of expensive aftershave, masking a sweet sick odour. My third blood relation.

  He started writing, slowly, his meaty hand moving through a sentence. It was painful to watch him.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, looking up at me, ‘I write very slow. The slowness is not in my brain, but the fingers. I got frostbite during the war, some of the flesh is a bit not right, this is why a good pen is a must, or I drop it.’

  ‘I see.’

  He wrote for a another minute or so, then stopped, rubbed his fingers.

  ‘You come to this park often? You a regular?’

  ‘No, I was just cutting through.’

  ‘I come every morning. I get restless and don’t sleep too good, and I get up in the dawn and come for a walk here, sit by the lake, me and the birds. We watch the sun come up over London. Well, I watch, they got their own business to attend to. Very beautiful the what-you-call it, the wet that comes down on the grass.’

  ‘The dew.’

  ‘Yes, dew.

  He bent his head back to his writing. I acknowlege I was not a better son

  ‘Excuse me, there’s a d in that,’ I said, unable to help myself, the little know-it-all.

  ‘You say a d?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Where is this d?’

  ‘Before the g.’

  ‘Show me.’

  He handed me the gold pen and I wrote it out for him. When I finished, he spelt it aloud. A C K N O W L E D G E.’

  ‘Yet when I say it, I don’t make a d in my mouth.’

  ‘The letter g can be tricky that way.’

  ‘Thank you, that’s a help. I don’t spell good at all and as for my writing, well, look, you see how I make too many loops?’

  ‘What are you writing?’

  ‘My memoirs.’

  ‘Are you writing your memoirs because you’re famous?’ I said, waiting for the moment at which I would reveal myself as his niece, who knew exactly who he was, because I wanted to hear first what he told me, what he had to say about himself. If he was contrite, if he offered himself up as a repentant sinner, or if he had concocted excuses for his crimes.

  ‘I was, once.’

  I gave him an excuse to lie. ‘An actor?’

  ‘No, I was in business.’


  ‘Retired?’

  ‘I gave up my profession some time ago, but I had a few golden years, everyone is entitled to them, if they can get them, and to cherish the memory, keep it bright.’

  I thought of the Toblerone in the gold box, the gilt knickknacks, the gold tooth I could see at the back of his dental work, and understood, with the surprise of pity, that this was as golden as it had got for him, and how short the years had been, seven altogether, between him escaping from Hungary and finally the arrest, trial, imprisonment.

  ‘So what was your line of work?’ I asked.

  ‘Property, and entertainment.’

  He doesn’t remember me, I thought. Why should he? I was just a little girl, and now I was a grown woman, or that was how I thought of myself.

  There were several moments in this conversation when I could have told my uncle who I was, and there were times too, I later understood, when he could have revealed himself to me too, for it turned out he recognised me at once, and not because he had a good memory, but because my father had gloatingly gone to see him in prison: three visits in which photographs of me arriving at university, graduating, and engaged to Alexander were pushed across at him, so he could feast his eyes on the success my father had made of himself, through me. But I didn’t know that, at the time.

  Nor did say–I am Vivien Kovaks, your niece, the little girl you came to see once. I couldn’t find the words, even though the words were simple. He was so…I don’t know. When I had looked at the newspaper in the library, and when I read that book about him, he was an idea, not a person, just a set of opinions about slum housing. When I had imagined this meeting there was a speech, in which I would announce myself, and I had made up his reply as well, but it turned out that in real life he wasn’t opinions, he was flesh and blood, and fingernails and nose hairs.