The Clothes On Their Backs: A Novel (No Series) Page 8

  And I now understand that he believed he could prepare a good impression, he wanted to defend himself in the court of public opinion, my opinion, prove that he had a case. He didn’t want to plead for special mercy because he was my uncle, his brother’s brother. He badly wanted me to know that he wasn’t the face of evil, but something more complicated altogether.

  ‘I have many memories,’ he said. ‘That’s what I’m writing, I want to put everything down, so there’s a record, so they will know.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘The world, of course, and any other interested party.’

  ‘Who might that be?’

  He hesitated. But then he turned to me with those watery eyes which had once been the colour of bitter chocolate and had faded to fawn, the lip wet, the chin shaking.

  ‘My brother.’

  When he turned up on the doorstep and they screamed at each other, I was struck dumb by his existing at all, appearing out of a void (and he had once been in a void, as I was to discover, a terrifying emptiness, as close to death as death itself, like death, darker than it, and irradiated with fear). That my father hated him was obvious, the bespectacled gnome who laboured twenty-five years not to be noticed in anything he did, and this crude gangster, this mobster appears out of the past, from a time that seemed more and more like a hallucination than the real past. But the words ‘my brother’ were quite strange for me to hear, as an only child, and I felt a slight shock of envy that there was once something between them, an intimacy between siblings that I had never experienced.

  ‘So what do you plan to do with the memoir when you’ve finished it?’ I said, not daring yet to go towards that brother word.

  ‘I get it published, of course. I want that it’s a book, with my name on the cover.’

  ‘How much have you written so far?’

  ‘Eleven pages. How many do you need to make a book?’

  ‘I don’t know. Quite a lot, I think.’

  ‘That’s the problem. Still, I got a lot to say.’

  ‘You should finish it, then.’

  ‘It comes slow, very very slow.’

  ‘Do you do this all day?’

  ‘No, just in the mornings, here in the park. I can’t stand to be alone in a room. A room I don’t like, especially if it’s a little one.’

  His eyes started to water again.

  ‘I’m not crying, I got an eye condition. Two day ago I trod on my spectacles, I can’t see too good to write until the optician makes me another pair. I’m waiting. But I don’t want to miss a day, no. How do I know how long I got left in life to say everything that I need to say? You can’t waste, waste is terrible. Do you understand that? Do you, dear?’ He turned to me with the expression of a man who has lost the power of speech and is trying to communicate something urgent with his eyes.

  ‘Yes, I know, it is terrible.’ My own life was nothing but waste.

  His face altered, looked puzzled.

  ‘You married, courting?’

  ‘I’m a widow, my husband died.’

  ‘What?’ He slumped back on the bench, shocked. ‘How is this? A young girl like you? What a shame, terrible shame. What makes you a widow?’

  I told him.

  ‘What a story!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He’s dead from a piece of steak? Choked to death in a restaurant on your honeymoon?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Nobody could do nothing?’

  ‘They kept slapping him on the back, but it didn’t work.’

  ‘My dear.’

  He moved his arm as if to take my hand, but I pulled my elbows in to my sides. I didn’t want him to touch me.

  I remember returning from the bathroom where I had combed my hair and reapplied my lipstick. He always hated cold food; his father took an age to say grace, the vegetables were tepid and the gravy congealed, so he would not wait for me. I saw him sprawled back on the chair, his legs kicking and thrashing and a fist banging on the table, as if he were trying to attract attention. His eyes rolled back in his head and his mouth open, a big black O.

  ‘What is it, what’s wrong?’ I cried.

  But he just turned to look at me with such a stare of accusation.

  A waiter started to bash him on the back, uselessly pummelling while Alexander shook his head furiously and stabbed with his fists at his abdomen, just under the ribs. The plate was pushed towards the salt, his entrecôte, with a corner cut away, and pommes frites scattered across the tablecloth. He lunged at the edge of the table, then laid down his head on it, tears welling up in his eyes. The waiter went on slapping and hitting him.

  I saw the hairs on his arms silver under the many lights, the white cuff, with its twenty-first-birthday cufflinks, the wedding ring still unfamiliar and slightly loose on the finger of his left hand. I watched him going under, I watched as he saw the surface of life closing in over his head, going down into blackness. And as I went on watching, his eyes closed, the brain died for want of oxygen, the heart stopped.

  It was so accidental. You walk into a bathroom while an unknown girl lies in the bath, next to a vase of poppies, and she reminds you of a painting you once saw, and three years later, because of that, because of her, at the age of twenty-four, you are dead. Not dead for a year or so, but dead altogether. Death by choking, on a one-inch piece of steak, unable to communicate the instructions on how to do the still unknown Heimlich manoeuvre.

  ‘It’s a terrible thing,’ my uncle was saying. ‘I saw myself people who died and I couldn’t do nothing for them. Still it doesn’t leave you alone, thinking what you might have done. So now what happens to you?’

  ‘I couldn’t go to Baltimore. I didn’t have a job there and I couldn’t afford the flat we’d rented even if I did. I came back to London, to stay with my parents for a while.’

  ‘You got a job?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You got a profession?’

  ‘I have a BA in English literature, and I was doing a thesis.’

  ‘An educated lady I been talking to all this time. You read lots of books and I never asked. You know all about that racket.’

  ‘Which racket?’

  ‘Books, how you write them, and get them published.’

  ‘No, I only know about Dickens, Shakespeare, people like that. I don’t know much about contemporary authors.’

  ‘I saw a movie of him, years ago. Henry Five with Laurence Olivier. I didn’t understand too much, the English they spoke back in them old days is too hard for me, but he was some king, eh? Very nice. Mind you, nothing like real life.’

  ‘I don’t know a lot about real life,’ I said.

  ‘So? I don’t know nothing about Shakespeare. We each got our own limitations, yes? Am I right?’ He smiled tentatively.

  There was a great hue and cry on the lake, a terrible flap of wings and a lot of birds making a big fuss. Perhaps they heard what we could not, a bomb going off in the underground caverns of the city. There had been bombs the year before.

  ‘These ones are geese,’ he said, pointing to the ones with the black heads. ‘I know because they got a board there with pictures of everything, and a description underneath.’

  ‘My husband wrote poems about geese,’ I said.

  ‘Geese? You can write a poem about such a thing? I never knew. I thought poetry is about love.’

  ‘You can write a poem about anything you like.’

  ‘But why a goose?’

  ‘He was trying to get to the very bottom of them, to enter, as it were, the soul of a goose.’

  ‘A bird has a soul?’

  ‘Well, Alexander believed they did. He thought about them a lot.’

  ‘What is to think?’

  ‘All kinds of things. He kept lots of notes. About the velocity of the air against their wings, the lightness of their skeletons, the weight of the beak, what they needed to do with their eyes. Flight, migration, water, navigation–the science of being a goose expressed in metaph
or.’

  He took another look at the geese. He kept his eyes on them for a few moments then shook his head. ‘Now, you see I look at a bird, I just see a bird, you see something else. This is why it is important to listen to intellectuals, a man like me can pick up very useful information though I don’t know how I can squeeze any use out of these birds, except roasted, with potatoes, or made into a soup. You write poetry yourself?’

  ‘No, I just parse it.’

  ‘What is parse?’

  ‘You take it apart to see how it works.’

  But he had lost interest in poetry. He was formulating the plan. Plans came to him extremely fast, that is how the brain of a businessman works–ideas strike like lightning, they flash and dazzle and illuminate. You see what was darkness a second ago, and the genius of a businessman is to hold on to it, to keep it as a picture inside his brain and elaborate it, to go on imagining what you saw.

  ‘Say, I just thought. If you got no job, how would you like to come to work for me?’

  ‘In what capacity?’ I said, startled. How low my fortunes had sunk, to be asked to be my uncle’s rent collector.

  ‘I thought maybe you help me write my book.’

  ‘How could I do that?’

  ‘I buy a tape recorder, a typewriter. I tell you everything, you get it over right. All the words spelled with the letters in the order they should be. No mistakes. You play back, you listen, you write it all down nice.’

  ‘And you’ll pay me?’

  ‘Pay? Of course, I pay. What do you think I am?’

  ‘And when would I start?’

  ‘Soon as you like. Come Monday.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘No, you better come to my house. We have to have electricity for the tape recorder.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘I am Sándor Kovacs,’ he told me, and I saw in his eyes that his heart was flooded, which surprised me at the time.

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ I said, trawling around in my mind for a name and coming up with a girl in school who had a smooth waterfall of blonde hair. ‘I’m Miranda Collins.’

  ‘Meeranda,’ he said. ‘Meeranda. I don’t know this name. From what language does it come?’

  If you try, if you have a profound willingness to let yourself go completely you can enter the mind of another person. It takes a certain habit of thought, honed by many years of reading in the way I read, that (scorned by Alexander) immersion in books, so that they are not so much inside your head; rather, as if they are a dream, you are inside them.

  There is a trick I often play when I am bored, or waiting, on a bus or a train, or in airport departure lounges, a knack of predicting when a person is going to stand up to buy a newspaper or a cup of coffee or take some papers out of a briefcase. I also have a bizarre ability always to know what time it is, without a clock or wristwatch. Alexander once told me that it was a logic which passed at the speed of light, going too fast to be monitored; and I was pleased when I heard this, because I had worried that it was a form of mental disturbance. A few times until I reached the more settled shores of my thirties, marriage and my daughters, I really worried that I was crazy, that my parents had driven me mad or I was just born this way, or that it was the closed air of Benson Court.

  Now, I don’t think I was ever mad, I just possessed the only child’s overactive imagination. Whether you always get people right when you try to imagine being them, well, that’s a separate question, but the more you practise it, the more interesting life becomes, though also harder to bear because you understand how quickly most people reach their own limitations, how impossible it is for them to fulfil your ardent expectations of them.

  So I think now, thirty years later, about my uncle making his preparations for my arrival. What it must have meant to him to know that at long last I was coming to his house, the little girl he had once seen clutching the edge of an open door, the child now grown up and with her own sorrows and heartbreaks. Every time I go to Harrods I see him moving up in the lift to the third floor. His ghost must dwell in that place; I hope it does.

  He loved entering early in the morning, just after the uniformed men in top hats and overcoats would open the doors to the first shoppers. He knew he was safe there, in what he called the finest store in the world, where you could buy anything you wanted, even a cat or a dog; fish, birds in cages. Sometimes he would spend a whole day just looking at all the beautiful things he had once owned before he went to prison, and had treated far too lightly, feeling that they were like water that fell through his fingers; but the pleasure was in holding them for a moment, until something else caught his eye.

  Walking through the halls he smells the perfumes, he watches the beautiful women in their spring dresses and their high heels. He sees a young lady with red hair, a dimpled chin and black patent leather shoes on her high-arched feet turning, and catching the eye of the man who is watching her. For a moment he thinks she’s going to scream and call for a security guard, but she doesn’t; she smiles to herself, because she understands that she has been acknowledged, even by a creature like him: an old man with a pendulous lower lip. And she is a respectable woman, too, my uncle can tell this at once. If we were introduced, he thinks, he would kiss her hand, like he once kissed Shirley Bassey’s, and there he is, standing there among the face paint, all of him yearning, longing, just to put his mouth lightly to her skin, like a queen.

  On Sunday, he rested and thought. He was thinking about why I had given him a false name. Why Collins? Maybe Collins was my married name, but Miranda? Many people he knew used aliases for all kinds of reasons, but he didn’t expect them from a young girl, unless she was running away to London to leave behind mothers and fathers and husbands, people she didn’t want to find her.

  And various maybes turned themselves over in his mind, until he found, at last, as I would discover later, the most likely explanation: that I was spying on him for someone else.

  I see him in bed that night with Eunice.

  ‘Spying? Who for?’ she asks him. He is leaning against the cane headboard, his eyes watering in the light from the bedside lamp that she bought for him, a china base in the shape of a little gleaming black boy holding aloft a red silk parasol, which was the lampshade.

  ‘The newspapers, maybe.’

  ‘Sándor,’ she says, rubbing hand cream into her skin, massaging it all the way up to the elbows, ‘the papers haven’t been interested in you for years.’

  ‘Well, that’s true,’ he admits, knowing that only Eunice would say it to his face, a bold and no-nonsense woman who did not engage with fantasies, only reality. Which is what he admired about her.

  He couldn’t wait for Monday, though, to see me again. That I know for sure, and I was excited, too.

  My parents wanted to know where I was going. I told them I’d found a part-time job, off the books, working for a man who had a private library, cataloguing his collection, and they believed me, relieved to have me out of the house instead of moping, crying, sleeping. My mood had changed completely: I had something to live for again, my own intense curiosity about the man who was supposed to be the face of evil but had the nostril hairs and shaking lip and the faded eyes. There were a thousand questions I wanted to ask, about my mother and father and about their past in Budapest as young people without a care in the world, before they became the reclusive refugees who hid behind their front door and were timidly grateful for any kindness. After all those blanks and silences I had grown up having to take for granted, I was going to get the answers on a plate.

  I knew that I was going to meet a monster, a true beast. The crimes spoke for themselves, but the beast was housed in the body of a man in early old age. Whose fingers felt pain when he held a pen. With a spelling mistake.

  He was going to tell me his confessions, or what his exculpation of his sins would turn out to be, and I would need all my wits about me, more than the woefully thin experience of life that comes from growing up in Benson Court and go
ing straight to a windy concrete university not eight years old. So I wished Alexander was still alive, for he threaded together his fingers and explained (he got this from his father the vicar) that there were absolute distinctions between right and wrong and you could achieve them by logic and clear thinking. There was a vast literature on the subject, which he had dipped into in his teens, when he was slipping away from the control of theology into the boundless sea of atheism and required a new moral code, one which had not been handed down on tablets of stone.

  Logic. Which nobody in my family had ever considered to be a trait worth cultivating or a methodology with any discernible purpose to it. You operated on instinct and emotions, mainly fear and cowardice. Principles were for other people, the kind who had sideboards and cut-glass decanters and documents with their names on that nobody in a uniform could quibble about. They were a luxury, like fresh flowers in vases and meals out in restaurants; you could aspire to be one day the sort of person who had the status and disposable income to afford a principle, but the foundations of your existence were distrust and, if you were endowed with brains, cunning.

  This inheritance was all I had at my disposal in the coming meeting with my uncle, the fiend. And books. I thought of him as Fagin, who fed on the flesh of his gang of street kids, except I had always had a certain sympathy with that doomed gent, who seemed less cruel than the one who shut up Oliver Twist in a coffin to sleep at night. At least his boys had freedom, laughter, a marketable skill, pickpocketing.

  The house was a narrow, tall early Victorian terrace off Parkway near the tube station, a dirty, windy, dishevelled area of London, one of its neighbourhoods where spring comes later and winter earlier. The houses are worth a great deal now, but then you could buy them cheap. They held unconventional pets, and the cats and dogs looked hungry and disoriented. It took Sándor some time to get down the stairs. He opened the door white and panting, dressed in a maroon zip-up cardigan and velvet house-slippers with a crest embroidered in gold and blue thread, the kind you steal from a hotel.