Interpreters Page 3

  After she put the phone down, she had gone into her bedroom, sat down on the floor, and started to cry. I crept on to her lap and put my arms around her but she didn’t stop. She didn’t even put her arms around me. Max brought her a cup of tea with four sugars in, even though we weren’t really allowed to use the kettle, but she left it to get cold. She just sat there crying for hours and hours. We’d seen her cry before, but only once or twice, and nothing like this. We put ourselves to bed and lay shivering in the dark. We heard our father come home, and eventually go upstairs and into the bedroom – and then the screaming started. Some time, in the middle of the night, I woke up. My mother was still crying and shouting at my father. If he was still in the room, he wasn’t saying anything.

  I got out of bed and went into Max’s room. The bed was empty. I opened the cupboard door.

  ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Listen to what she’s saying.’

  But Max slept on, his white blanket pulled up around his ears.

  So yes, that day, when I came home to an empty house, I knew exactly what had happened. My mother had lied and then she’d gone mad – that was why she had been so strange when she came to pick me up from Jackie’s house – and then she had been put away somewhere. In a way, I was relieved.

  ‘Were you glad?’ I asked Max years later in Dorset. We were standing in a field behind the Steiner school at which he had been teaching for the past three years. The fuchsia hedges, barely visible through the freezing fog, were stiff with frost. I had forgotten what English winters could be like, and my whole body rebelled against the biting cold.

  ‘Glad?’ he asked.

  ‘When Mum went away. That first time.’

  He didn’t answer. I turned to look at him. He was gazing over at a group of children bundled up in layers of colourful jumpers, stripy tights, bobble hats and woolly mittens who were playing skipping games, their breath rising in gusts of smoke and merging with the white sky.

  Windmill, windmill going round and round

  Along came the farmer with grain to grind.

  He was smiling – a smile suffused with such serenity that I wanted to push him to the frozen ground and hit him very hard.

  ‘Is it compulsory to wear hand-knitted rainbow jumpers at a Steiner school?’ I asked viciously. ‘And Peruvian hats with ear flaps?’

  ‘Sorry?’ he replied, not taking his eyes off the children.

  ‘And do you have to be called Griffin or Ocean or… or… Gaia? What if you’re called Kevin or Penelope or something? What if your father’s a tax accountant or a civil servant, or a bus conductor, and not a bloody biodynamic beekeeper or a llama-breeder or… or a fucking shaman? What if you feel uncomfortable cultivating your dreadlocks and your organic dope? If it’s not really you? What if you want to grow dahlias?’

  ‘Why are you so angry?’ he asked quietly, turning to look at me.

  ‘Why aren’t you?’ I shouted, my voice hoarse with cold and fury.

  The small skippers stopped their game. They looked over at us, curious to see what would happen next. Max squeezed my arm then walked up to the children. He hugged the smallest one then crouched down and said something to them that I couldn’t hear. After a few seconds the children regrouped and two of them began turning the rope.

  ‘Higher!’ Max shouted.

  The two rope-turners grasped the end of the rope with both hands, their faces screwed up with effort and concentration, and the rope soared high above them.

  Max leaped forward and, as the rope touched the ground, he jumped. He did star jumps, tuck jumps; he hopped first on one foot and then the other. His long blond curls danced around his head. The children laughed and yelled out words of encouragement. I watched Max’s face. And what I saw was joy. Sheer joy.

  ‘Come on!’ he called to me, holding out his arms. But I shook my head and walked away so that the children wouldn’t see me cry.

  ‘I didn’t know you could skip,’ I said later, as we sat by the fire in the little cottage he shared with another teacher and a couple of ancient lurchers he had inherited from a neighbour who had died a couple of years ago. ‘You’re quite good.’ The wood was damp and spat on to the stone hearth. We watched the marooned embers glow and die. The dogs whimpered and kicked in their sleep as they dreamed of rabbits and wide open spaces.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I’m sorry I shouted. Very un-Steiner.’

  ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘I just wanted you to tell me that you know what I’m talking about. You were there, Max. In your previous incarnation as a quite normal person who didn’t wear fingerless gloves and who occasionally brushed his hair.’

  Max held out his still-gloved hands in a gesture of conciliation. ‘I do know what you’re talking about,’ he said gently.

  And I, as usual, felt ashamed. He was always the peacemaker, the good guy, the one who thought the best of everyone, even when all the evidence was there to suggest it would be very much wiser not to. He was the one who would hitch-hike through Europe and end up paying for the driver’s petrol. The one who would invite total strangers into his house with no fear of being macheted to death in his sleep. Who could never pass a beggar without giving them whatever he had on him. I remember, when he was about ten, he gave the remains of his Mars bar to a gypsy girl in Dublin. He didn’t notice the expression of scorn on her face, and I didn’t have the heart to mention it. Max never judged, never criticised. Not like me. Once, when we were walking to school together, and for a reason I can no longer remember, I screamed at him to shut up and drop dead. ‘Look around, and say that again,’ he said, calmly and a little sadly, nodding up at the top of a garden fence. There, caught in some raspberry netting and hanging lifeless from one spindly foot, was a thrush. It stared at me, its eye opaque and sunken. I kept quiet for a while after that.

  During the period that I most adored Max, I’d follow him wherever he went. He never objected when I insisted on accompanying him on his ‘Bob-a-Job’ missions round the estate. I somehow doubt that the Scout Association still encourages little boys in shorts to go into complete strangers’ houses and offer to do anything for them for five pence. It’s a shame, in a way. While Max polished the neighbours’ silver golfing trophies, weeded their flowerbeds or cleaned their shoes, I would sit drinking Ribena and eating squashed-fly biscuits off brightly coloured melamine plates, chattering about my rabbit or my current favourite book or TV programme to the housewives in their housecoats or floral pinnies.

  ‘And I wanted you to tell me that I’m doing it better. With Susanna,’ I said, hoping that his housemate Francesca – who didn’t seem able to take her eyes off Max whenever they were together (something Max denied vehemently when I pointed it out to him) – would stay in the kitchen a little longer, perfecting the meal that it was her turn to cook. ‘No, I don’t mean better. That sounds awful. Unfair. I don’t really know what I mean.’

  ‘You’re doing fine. Susanna’s a lovely child. Extraordinarily lovely, in fact. You know that.’

  ‘And now you’re supposed to say, “And you’re a great mother.”’

  ‘You don’t need me to tell you that.’

  ‘But I’d like you to.’

  ‘You’re doing absolutely fine. Though of course she’ll have inherited most of her finer points from her Uncle Max.’

  ‘Oh, yeah!’

  ‘Or her father.’

  ‘You don’t know anything about him.’

  ‘No, but I’d like to. As you know. And you do realise that Susanna is going to want to know, sooner or later?’

  ‘She might not.’

  ‘Oh, Julia,’ Max laughed as he walked over to the deep armchair in the corner of the room where Susanna was sleeping. He felt her forehead and stroked her blonde hair off her face. He pulled the blankets up to her chin. Then he came back to the fire and hugged me. His hair smelt of woodsmoke and winter sky. ‘You’re crazy.’

  ‘Hey,’ I said, looking over his shoulder at the mantelpiece. ‘A postcard. Wh
ere’s she gone this time?’

  He walked across the room and picked up the card. ‘Haven’t you had one from here?’ he asked, turning it over.

  ‘It probably arrived after I left for England. If it arrived at all. I only seem to get about one in three things through the post.’

  ‘Orvieto.’

  ‘Spain.’

  ‘Italy, actually.’

  ‘I knew that.’

  ‘Of course you did.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Here, shove up.’ Max sat down next to me, then stretched out and lay with his head in my lap, his bare feet dangling over the end of the sofa. ‘Tell me a story,’ he said, shutting his eyes. He put on his best BBC documentary-maker voice. ‘Tell me about your time in Africa. Ouch! No pinching. Go on. Tell me something.’

  And so I described the reddish-brown scrub, the vast baobab trees, the women in their bright batik wrappers and headdresses harvesting chilli peppers. I told him about the gaggles of little girls in faded cotton dresses and worn flip-flops, who would run into our compound on their way home from school to play with Susanna, picking her up and tying her to their backs or bringing her toys made of plastic bottles or old Coke cans when she grew too big for them to carry around. I told him about the hours I spent in the villages, watching, listening, recording, writing.

  ‘Supper’s ready, Max.’ Francesca stood in the doorway.

  Max rolled off the sofa, stood up and stretched. Francesca gave me a sad half-smile as she led the way to the table.

  ‘This smells great, Frannie,’ said Max. ‘I’ll miss your cooking when I move. You should come too. There’s a lot to be said for communal living. Really. Ask my sister. That’s what she’s studying.’

  ‘Don’t,’ I warned Francesca, who looked as though she was about to cry as she busied herself serving up a steaming vegetable stew and home-baked bread. ‘I can’t think of anything worse, myself. But Max swears by it. He thinks it’s the way forward and we should all do it.’

  A car horn sounds behind me. I look in the mirror and see a woman in a white Volvo estate gesturing towards the house. I am blocking her drive. I start the engine and edge forward a couple of yards. She parks outside the double garage and gets out of the car. She is dressed in her gym kit and is carrying a bottle of water. I watch her as she walks up to the front door and lets herself in. I see her pick up the post from the floor of the glass porch. She pauses for a moment to look at me, then goes inside.

  II

  And so there I was in Berlin – ‘the cheese head’ as he used to call me, when he called me anything at all. And I didn’t understand a word anyone was saying. Not one word. I simply couldn’t believe it, the first time he hit me.

  (SILENCE)

  He hit you?

  No one had ever hit me before. Or even shouted or said anything unkind. I remember that I’d only been in Berlin for about a week. And he pointed to some envelopes that were lying on the hall table and told me to do something with them. I picked them up but I couldn’t understand what he was saying. So I asked him to repeat what he’d said – he could understand Dutch perfectly well. But he just walked over to me and hit me on the back of my head. And I dropped the envelopes and he hit me again. ‘I forbid you to speak Dutch in my house,’ he said. That was the first and last thing he ever said to me in Dutch. And so I had to learn German pretty quickly. You learn everything pretty quickly if the alternative is the back of your father’s hand.

  Did your father hit you often?

  And you learn everything pretty quickly if all the children at your school jeer when you sit on the boys’ side of the classroom because you don’t understand what the teacher is saying when she tells you to sit on the girls’ side. And if they all make fun of your accent and if they all hate you – the teacher and the pupils and the shopkeepers – because you’re from Holland and they hate the Dutch.

  Did your father hit you often?

  He’d summon me into his study. It was always kept locked when he was out. No one was ever allowed in there except by special invitation. He had lovely things in there that he collected on all his business trips. Persian carpets. Swiss clocks. Venetian glass vases. Japanese lacquered boxes. Lovely things. And he’d say something like, ‘I saw you today outside school with your hands in your pockets,’ and then bang! Or ‘I heard you whistling – no girl should ever whistle. You’re not a market woman,’ and then bang! And boy, could he hit hard! He kept a special comb in his study and it was one of my jobs to make sure all the fringes on his Turkish carpet were combed absolutely straight. And he’d call me in and say, ‘Look at this – do you call this straight?’ – and then bang!

  How was he with your mother?

  Every morning, he would announce what he wanted for supper and then hand my mother the exact amount of money. He’d literally count it out into the palm of her hand. When he came home from work, he’d go and sit in his study and ring a bell. At which point my mother would carry in his supper tray. I used to dream of putting poison in his wine or ground glass in his sauerkraut. Then he would change and go out for the evening. Berlin was full of cabarets and nightclubs in those days. You’ll know that – you’ve seen the films. You’ve read those books.

  Isherwood. Yes.

  He must have had a lovely time, don’t you think? Occasionally I’d catch sight of him with one of his girlfriends in a restaurant or café on my way home from school at lunchtime. They were always very glamorous, his women, with their bright red lipstick and smart tailored jackets. Well, he was pretty popular wih women. Handsome, clever, well-off, charming…

  Charming?

  Very charming. (SILENCE) We had a furnace in the cellar. And he’d come into my bedroom and look around and say, ‘Where did you get that ridiculous toy?’ or ‘Who gave you that stupid book?’ or ‘What’s that thing you’re sewing when you could be doing something useful?’ And then I’d have to go down to the cellar with him and he’d open the lid of the furnace and I had to drop the toy, or book, or collection of silk butterflies or whatever else it was, into the flames. And he’d smile as he watched. And if I ever cried, he’d hit me very hard. Here, on the back of my head. Once – it was one of the very few times my grandparents visited from Holland – I remember my grandfather gave me the most beautiful wooden ark. He had made it himself out of old cigar boxes. And in the animals went. Two by two. (SILENCE) I opened my hand like this and in they went. Two by two. And then my father took the ark and he put it on the cellar floor and he made me stamp on it until there was nothing left but a pile of splinters. And in they all went.

  (LONG SILENCE)

  And your mother?

  (SILENCE)

  Sorry?

  Tell me about her.

  I told you – she was the kindest person there was.

  Did he hit her too?

  Sometimes. When the mood took him. When his supper was late, or one of his mistresses had stood him up.

  (SILENCE)

  Tell me about her.

  Who?

  Your mother.

  Everyone loved my mother. Except my father, I suppose. Even my father’s mistresses liked her. It wasn’t just that they felt sorry for her; they really liked her as a person. Once – my God, I haven’t thought about this for years. Once, one of them – one of the mistresses – came to our house when my father was at work. I must have been about eleven, I suppose. The woman had a little white dog. One of those fluffy, yappy things. I’d seen her eating with my father in town. They always sat at a window table. She used to put the dog on her lap and feed it bits of meat from her plate. My father must have hated that! I didn’t know how my mother would react to this woman coming in to her house – I think she could somehow tolerate all the infidelity and philandering so long as it wasn’t shoved right under her nose. They came into the living room and sat down. I was sitting behind one of the armchairs in a corner sewing a badge on to my uniform – so they didn’t see that I was in the room. At the time I didn’t really unders
tand what they were saying. Something about pregnancy and money. I remember the little white dog came round the back of the armchair and started licking my knees. I had to pinch my nose to stop myself giggling and giving myself away. At first my mother sounded shocked and even angry, and then, as the woman continued to talk, she started laughing. Much later I realised what was going on – the woman was suggesting she pretend to be pregnant to extract the money for an abortion from my father. She was pretty sure he’d do anything to stop his life being inconvenienced in any way. She was offering to share the proceeds with my mother. Fifty-fifty. I don’t know if they ever went through with their plan, but I like to think they did.

  Chapter Three

  The front door, which was once canary-yellow, is now a dark Oxford blue. The drive has been newly tarmacked. Otherwise everything looks just the same. If I had the courage, I would go up to the door and ring the bell. I would say, ‘I used to live here. I was just driving by and remembering things from a long time ago, and I’d very much like to have a look around, if you don’t mind.’ Do I look like a respectable product of this estate? Like someone who might have a macramé plant-hanger, with spider plants cascading from it, suspended from the roof of my porch? Like someone whose other car could possibly be a Volvo?