Interpreters Read online

  Only one window of the house overlooks the drive and the circular green beyond. When we lived here it was my parents’ bedroom. Every morning before school, I’d sit on the floor at the edge of the bed while my mother, bleary-eyed and weary from her Mogodon-infused sleep, would haul herself up on to one elbow and brush my waist-length hair. As I look up at the window, I can hear the rasping of the brush, my yelps of irritation as the bristles catch in the dense blonde knots and the hair is corralled into two long plaits. I wear my hair very short nowadays.

  Sometimes, in the summer, long after we’d been sent to bed, Max and I would tiptoe in, hide behind the net curtains and peer out enviously at our friends playing on the green. Every so often, a couple of mothers would wander out to call their children in and stand chatting in their cotton slacks or bright summer dresses, a cup of tea or glass of sherry in their hand. We would watch those women with the rapt attention and limited understanding of viewers of a TV documentary about a recently discovered and rather exotic tribe. Our mother never went out of the front of the house except to get into her car and, though she was the gardener in the family, she left the pruning of the roses in the front garden to my father.

  The curtain is twitching now. The woman is clearly not as practised at surreptitious peering as we were. She is probably noting down the registration number of the car parked outside her house, wondering if she has enough reason to contact Neighbourhood Watch about a middle-aged woman in an elderly Toyota who persists in staring at her house. But there can’t be a law against this… whatever it is… this reminiscing with uncertain intent.

  Did those mothers ever talk about us, I wonder, as they supervised the picking-up of bicycles, roller-skates, cricket bats and discarded jumpers? Did they ask their children, delicately, if they ever saw our mother, whether she was ‘any better now’? Did they ask them if they knew where our mother had been that time she went away so suddenly? Whether her disappearance had had any connection with our regular Sunday outings with our father?

  We never said anything to anyone in the Close about those Sundays. We learnt to evade the issue, to change the subject, to lie. Every other week, instead of re-enacting The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe on the green or cycling round the estate, or playing doctors and nurses with our friends behind the aptly named Feely family’s garden shed, Max and I would be driven through the neat, Sunday-sleepy suburbs, through the litter-blown streets of south London, to an imposing red-brick building on the bank of the Thames. My father would park the car by an elegant Hawksmoor church on whose steps old men in onion-like layers of soiled clothing would gather, surrounded by their bundles and bags, and gaze at us with bloodshot eyes.

  The church steps are still home to the poor and dispossessed, with their dirty sleeping bags, their cans of Special Brew and obedient dogs on strings, but they seem younger now, their eyes more blank than bloodshot. The red-brick building is still there, too, with its grand entrance hall, and vast stained glass windows. But now the confident doctors in white coats, the scurrying nurses in their starched white hats and the silent, anxious visitors have been replaced by self-assured young Americans in chinos and trainers, with mouthfuls of chewing gum and expensive metalwork.

  ‘You know the loony bin?’ I said to Max, that same winter in Dorset. A couple of days after I’d shouted at the little skippers, I think. ‘It’s a private American college now.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I went there. On my way here.’

  ‘What about Susanna?’

  ‘She came too, of course. I could hardly leave her in the car. She liked the stained glass. And the echoing hall.’

  ‘You’re mad!’

  ‘Well, then, it’s lucky it’s a college now and not a mental hospital, or they might have sectioned me too. Short-circuited my brain.’

  Max smiled, a little sadly.

  ‘Dad probably thought he was doing the right thing,’ he said quietly. ‘Sending her there.’ It was a Sunday morning, and when I looked at him as he stood by the frozen pond with his icy breath swirling round his head, for a moment he looked eight years old again, engulfed by my father’s cigarette smoke, gazing thoughtfully out of the car window as we sped through the empty streets.

  ‘Do you really believe that?’

  ‘I have to. Don’t you? If I didn’t, it would be unbearable. It would be –’ He stopped.

  ‘Mum never believed it,’ I said to him. ‘Or forgave him.’

  ‘I know. Did you tell Susanna what the place used to be? Why you’d been there before?’

  ‘No. There didn’t seem to be any need to.’

  ‘I thought you were living by some new code of ultimate truthfulness, or something. That there would never be any secrets between the two of you.’

  ‘She’s very small.’

  ‘It’s her heritage too, in a way.’

  ‘Lucky old Susanna!’

  ‘It wasn’t that bad.’

  ‘I’m not saying it was.’

  ‘And I know it’s none of my business, but all this secrecy about her father – what’s the worst that could happen if she knew a bit about him? If we all did? All I know is that he died very suddenly and that his surname – or first name – may or may not have been Thomas.’

  Max hadn’t asked any questions three years earlier when he’d found me standing on his doorstep, trembling with misery and lack of sleep, a howling one-year-old in my arms. He just took Susanna from me and jiggled and rocked her until she was quiet then put me into his spare bed. I stayed in that bed for nearly three weeks, curled up in a ball, nursing my grief, while Max brought me meals and looked after his niece and everyone else. By the time I could face seeing anyone or doing anything again, Susanna had learned to walk, using Max’s housemates’ wheelchairs for support. She cried all the way back to Cameroon.

  To reach our mother, we had to climb five flights of steep stone stairs. Unable to resist sidling up to the edge, I would gaze down through the gap in the dark wooden banisters which smelt of beeswax and bare feet, and imagine plunging down, head-first, to land – smashed and bloody – on the intricate Victorian floor tiles. Once, we took a wrong turning off one of the interminable corridors and passed a darkened ward full of people in metal beds, seemingly just sleeping. The patient nearest the door was awake and stared at us as we passed. Max looked back and gave him a polite little wave.

  We never saw the room where the electric shock treatments took place.

  I don’t remember how long my mother spent in that place. I don’t know how many times they strapped her down with leather belts, put a block of rubber in her mouth, attached the wires and flicked the switch. I can’t remember how often Max and I sat on the bed in her little room, watching her expressionless face, each of us holding one of her hands, trying to tell her things that might make her smile. We became careful storytellers. Or rather, I did, and took it upon myself to edit Max’s stories as he told them or to nudge or kick him if I could manage to do so without my mother noticing. ‘Clara has come to help look after us during the week. It’s nice having her to stay,’ he’d say to my mother as he fiddled with the rings on the hand he was holding in both of his. ‘And it’s really nice for Dad to have his mother around.’

  My grandmother insisted we call her Clara – she didn’t like any of the names our friends called their grandmothers. Nan? Nanna? Nanny? What sort of stupid names are those? Why would I want to be called after a kind of goat?

  ‘No, it isn’t. It’s not at all nice having her to stay,’ I’d say. ‘She’s really bossy. She tells us to lay the table and tidy up and stuff. And make our own beds. It’s horrible. And she makes us eat sauerkraut and sausages with disgusting chewy skin and it makes me want to be sick.’

  ‘Dad’s taught me to sew on buttons – he’s really good at sewing. Ouch! Julia! What did you do that for?’

  ‘Do what? Mum taught me to sew on buttons ages ago, and other stuff, didn’t you, Mum?’

  I didn’t tell my
mother that my father had learnt to plait my hair quite expertly, that he did it slowly and gently even if he did incorporate all the knots; that on Saturdays, as Max and I lay on the floor watching Thunderbirds, he concocted exotic meals from whatever he could find in the fridge; that once, on a rare occasion when he got home early enough to collect me from school, my teacher, Miss Wharton, had told him that he was ‘coping marvellously with everything’, and gazed at him with soppy, admiring eyes. ‘If there is anything I can ever do to help, all you have to do is ask, Mr Rosenthal. Anything at all.’ I didn’t tell my mother that it was nice at home without all the shouting and crying.

  I didn’t tell her these things, but I thought them. Storyteller and traitor.

  The weeks and months passed. My grandmother returned home to Oxford, after a pre-Christmas celebration with presents and special German Christmas food that I carefully edited out of the narrative on our next weekend visit.

  On Christmas morning, Max bounded into my bedroom. ‘Guess what!’ ‘What?’

  ‘Guess.’

  ‘I dunno. What?’

  ‘We’ve got the best present ever! Mum’s home!’

  ‘She’s not. She’s in the loony bin. We saw her there last Sunday.’

  ‘No, she’s home. She’s in her bedroom. I’ve seen her. Come on!’

  But I was filled with such longing and such dread that I couldn’t move. Such longing and dread and guilt. I wanted a new bike. Not the mother I’d last seen in her bedroom, sitting slumped on the floor, her back against the wall, screaming at our father. Screaming about her teeth and his silence and the lies, and how he didn’t care and what was she being punished for? Screaming that she would rather be dead than live this life. This terrible, lonely, empty life. But when I finally went in, having first quickly ascertained by peeping into the sitting room that it wasn’t a case of a new bike or my mother, she was sitting up in her bed, smiling at something Max was telling her. My father brought her a cup of coffee. She thanked him in a voice that seemed normal, friendly even. I remember climbing into her bed, putting my arms around her and thinking that things would be all right from now on.

  And I suppose that, for a while, they were. One drawer in the kitchen that had previously been home to miscellaneous bits and pieces that didn’t belong anywhere else in the house was now full of pill bottles. Our mother called us into the kitchen, opened the drawer, and told us that they weren’t sweets, not even the ones that looked just like big red Smarties, and said that we must never touch them. And so we never did, even though I really wanted to bite open the little black and red capsules that reminded me of the guards outside Buckingham Palace, and the thin daffodil-like yellow and green ones, and tip out the tightly packed powder. And I wanted to know how one teeny chalky-white tablet could help you to sleep and how a whole handful could send you to sleep forever.

  There is a knock at the car window. I jump and turn my head. It is the woman from the upstairs window. I wonder how she has managed to come out of the house and round the back of the car to the driver’s side without me seeing her. I contemplate starting the ignition and driving off but worry that I’ll run over her foot if I do that. I roll down the window and smile weakly.

  ‘Hello,’ she says. ‘It’s Julia Rosenthal, isn’t it.’

  It seems a statement, rather than a question, so I keep quiet.

  ‘You used to live here, didn’t you.’

  Another statement. I wonder if she is perhaps a lawyer.

  ‘I’m Angie Plaistow. I was at school with you.’

  My face must look blank because she continues. ‘It’s all right. I wouldn’t expect you to remember me. I was a few years below you. One of those irritating upper thirds when you were in the fifth form or something. You used to shush me in the library. You’re more likely to remember my older sister Becky, from the year above you. You haven’t changed a bit.’

  She has one of those friendly, open faces. There are smile lines around her pale blue eyes.

  ‘It’s so weird. Your name came up about a week or two ago. After all this time. It must be synchronicity or something. I was on the phone to Emily Lancaster who used to live in the house behind this one and was in my class all the way through, and anyway, we were going on about the kids as usual and all that parents and children stuff – Emily’s got two girls – and she said she’d read something about your daughter and her uncle in the Observer or the Sunday Times or something. And she remembered you’d been at the same school as us and used to live in this house. I’ve been meaning to have a look for it. We get the Sundays most weeks – God knows why – we never seem to get around to reading them. It’s probably buried in the paper mountain by my bed.’

  My face must look slightly less blank because she pauses for a few seconds and looks at me quizzically.

  ‘Do you want to come in?’

  III

  Tell me about your grandparents.

  My grandparents? God! Was my grandmother a difficult woman! She couldn’t have been more different from my mother. What is it you say? Chalk and cheese? She didn’t visit us very often but when she did she’d say to me, ‘You’re just like your father.’

  Why do you think she said that?

  I don’t know. She didn’t make any attempt to hide how much she disliked my father. Despised him, even. ‘The German’, she always called him. In the same tone of voice that she used when she talked about ‘the Natives’ she’d encountered in Indonesia. So I had a pretty good idea what she thought about me.

  Did you mind?

  It would have been nice if she’d liked me. I suppose I wanted her to like me, at least when I was younger – but I didn’t really care that much because, when she came, so did my grandfather. And he was such a lovely man. He loved me, I was absolutely sure of that, even if she so obviously didn’t. He used to call me his ‘little radish’ and swing me round by my arms. He smelt wonderful – it was pipe tobacco and gin, I suppose. Far too much of both. But I loved the smell – and he had one of those moustaches that curled upwards like this. Like a smile. White, with yellow tips from all the nicotine. (SILENCE) And I used to think, I can’t be that bad if I have a grandfather like Opa, can I? I can’t be the worthless person my father and grandmother think I am, if I’m related to Opa. If he’s my grandfather.

  (SILENCE)

  There’s a tissue there.

  (SILENCE)

  What are you feeling now?

  Nothing. It’s all right.

  Do you want to talk about it?

  Not really, no.

  (SILENCE)

  Take your time. Here – have another tissue.

  My mother never seemed to bear the slightest grudge at what her parents had done to her.

  What had they done to her?

  They left her with the nuns in a convent school in Amsterdam when she was five and sailed to Indonesia with the Dutch army to help suppress the Yellow Peril. And didn’t come back once until she was eighteen. I know. It’s hard to believe. They left her with the nuns for thirteen years. When my mother told me, I simply didn’t believe her. I used to ask her, ‘How could they do that? How could they leave you behind?’ ‘It was complicated,’ was all my mother would say. Actually, now I think about it, maybe she minded more than she ever let on. I remember she told me that, each year, her parents would have a huge comb of bananas shipped to the convent. And the one thing my mother never ate was bananas.

  Tell me more about your grandmother.

  More about my grandmother? There’s not a lot more to tell. She spoke several Indonesian dialects, with faultless accents apparently. I’m sure her command Indonesian was particularly good. I wouldn’t have wanted to be a servant in her household. I suppose I have that to thank her for, if nothing else.

  What to thank her for?

  Her gift for languages. Which I somehow inherited.

  Of course. Sorry. Carry on.

  I know for a fact that she spoke German very well, but during her visits to us, and certai
nly in the presence of her German son-in-law and her German granddaughter, she claimed not to understand a single word. She must have hated it when her daughter had to marry the first German she met.

  Had to?

  Well, thirteen years in a convent – I don’t suppose there was much excitement or sex education there. My mother told me the nuns had taught her French and German, as well as humanities and domestic science, so she was useful to this handsome, charming German engineer who was working so far from home and in need of some female company. I don’t suppose he’d counted on quite how much female company he’d get out of it. He hadn’t counted on a Dutch Catholic who’d want to keep the brat.

  Chapter Four

  ‘Sorry the place is such a mess,’ says Angie as we walk into the house. Normally people say that when their house is looking immaculate but, in this case, it really is a mess. I stumble over a lone roller-blade and send the wheels spinning angrily.

  ‘See what I mean? I have been thinking about clearing up. I was coming up with a plan of action while I was on the treadmill, but then I saw you sitting in the car and any excuse to do anything other than tidy. Actually, I’ve almost given up aspiring to an orderly house. I just about managed to keep the lid on the chaos before number four arrived. But he was the proverbial straw. Geoff doesn’t seem to notice the mess, so what’s the point, really?’

  I smile in agreement, even though I like a tidy house. I think my mother found it quite strange that she’d spawned a daughter who ordered her Puffin paperbacks alphabetically, who lined up her china animals according to species and height and her dolls in national costume by geographical region. She grimaced when once she found me painstakingly combing out the fringes of the sitting room rug with my fingers.

  ‘Aren’t you pleased?’ I asked her indignantly, my feelings hurt.

  ‘Of course I am,’ she replied unconvincingly.

  ‘You don’t sound it.’

  ‘No, you’ve done a lovely job. Thank you.’

  ‘What’s wrong with them? They look beautiful when they’re not all messed up and tangled.’