Interpreters (12 page)

I look over at the built-in cupboard in which Max used to sleep when he was a little boy and I suddenly feel terribly sad. I don’t know why. It wasn’t as though he used to huddle in there to escape the blows of our parents – neither of them ever hit us. Not once. Or to hide from his sister. I could be pretty vicious sometimes, but I was never
that
bad. By the time my mother started to disappear, he was too big to sleep in his cupboard. Maybe that’s what all those scales and arpeggios were about.

When Max was nearly eighteen, the music stopped. One day he shut his violin in its case and I never saw it again. He told me he’d sold it.

‘So where’s the money?’ I asked disbelievingly.

‘I gave it to charity.’

‘What did you do that for?’

‘It seemed the right thing to do with it.’

‘Getting rid of the ghastly instrument was right, but you could have kept the money.’

‘Well, it’s gone.’

‘Where’s it gone?’

‘I put it in that collecting box outside W.H. Smith’s. The one with the sad girl in a calliper.’

‘You’re
the spastic!’ I shouted. ‘Mum’ll go mad.’

But my mother didn’t say anything very much when Max told her about the violin and the money. She was much less reticent when he explained, very calmly, that he’d given
up everything else as well – like turning up for school and revising for his A-levels.

I heard them arguing as I sat in my room trying to commit swathes of
Antony and Cleopatra
and Laurie Lee to memory for my O-level English mock. ‘You don’t have to be a doctor,’ my mother shouted over the unfamiliar sound of Pink Floyd – at least he’d started to listen to decent music rather than all that Vivaldi and Bach and other square rubbish. ‘You don’t have to be like any of that lot,’ my mother went on. ‘You don’t have to get the best results in the school. You don’t have to be a famous anything. Not a famous doctor, not a famous violinist. Whoever said you did?’

‘No one had to say it.’

‘You just have to stay at school and take your A-levels.’

‘What’s the point?’

‘Why throw it all away now?’

‘I’m not throwing anything away.’

‘You are. It’s your education. Do your A-levels and then you can do anything you like.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like get a degree. Have a career.’

‘And what’s the point of that?
You
never got a degree.’

‘And don’t you think I wish I had?’ she raged. ‘Don’t you think I’d like to have done a degree when I was your age, if things had been different, instead of struggling away trying to study now? Don’t you think it would be nice if your grandmother hadn’t been able to look down her nose at me all these years?’

‘She doesn’t look down her nose at you.’

‘Oh, no? Generations of physicists and doctors and surgeons marrying professors of maths and professional musicians and lawyers. And then her son, the famous doctor, marries some nobody who just had children and a nervous breakdown and never did anything else again. You think she didn’t laugh? Don’t be ridiculous. They all did.’

 ‘Dad wasn’t famous when he married you. And he never laughed at anything you did.’

‘He never noticed what I did. Do you think he knows what I’m doing now? Do you think he ever wonders where I go every day?’

‘But if you told him, he’d probably be quite interested.’

‘Max. Just do as I ask and stay at school. You’ve got less than two terms left. If you leave now, you won’t hurt your father or your grandmother or any of the rest of them. You’ll only hurt yourself. Do you think your father would even notice?’

‘I’m not trying to hurt anyone. Why would I want to do that?’

‘No? Well, just think about it.’

‘I’ve thought about it, Mum. I haven’t thought about anything else for weeks.’

‘Please, Max. Do it for me. If you won’t do it for yourself.’

I wonder what my grandmother would have said to someone trying to fit Max into her family tree?
And then there was Max – but don’t bother to write him down.
But I’m being unfair. She continued to enjoy his visits, long after he left home to eventually study art in Leeds after working in a hostel for homeless men for a couple of years. I imagine her shaking her head sadly over their game of chess and saying,
Your great-grandfather was a famous doctor, your grandfather was a famous doctor, your father was a famous doctor and you, too, could have been a famous doctor.
And I imagine Max just smiling at her kindly, moving his knight across the board to safety.

‘Why
did
you give it all up, Max?’ I asked him one time when I went up to Leeds to see him.

‘All what?’

‘All your music. All your being brilliant at everything.’

‘I wasn’t brilliant at everything.’

‘You were.’

‘Only in comparison with you.’

‘Shut up!’

‘You asked for it.’

‘But, seriously, what happened that day? When you gave up the violin and everything?’

‘Nothing happened on a particular day. And I didn’t give up everything. I gave in, you might remember. I stayed at school. I got those A-levels Mum cared so much about.’

‘But people don’t change overnight for no reason. Something must have happened to you. People don’t just suddenly give everything up.’

‘What did I give up?’

‘The chance to be as unhappy as Dad, maybe? Was that what all that was about?’

‘It’s not that simple.’

‘But that must’ve had something to do with it. What good did it ever do him – being the best? Being famous? Who remembers him now?’

I saw Max swallow.

‘We do.’

‘But that’s not what he cared about. He just wanted his mother to be proud of him.’

‘She was. She was always going on about how incredibly famous he was.’

‘But she stopped, didn’t she? When he started to shake too much to operate. When they suggested he might like to take some leave and perhaps not try to rush back to work too soon.’

‘He was hugely respected at the hospital. Didn’t you used to tell me how much the nurses loved him?’

‘Yeah, well. Let’s not go there.’

‘Okay, perhaps not.’

‘You know, it took them less than a week to paint over his name in the hospital car park. I went to have a look. Some
ambitious registrar must have opened a bottle of champagne the day they announced Dad’s death. All that work, all the time he didn’t spend with us – what was it all for?’

‘There are lots of parents out there who remember Dad, I’m sure, and lots of children who are alive today because of him,’ said Max, and I could see that his eyes were brimming with tears.

‘Do you think they even knew he had children of his own?’

‘I don’t know. I doubt it. Why?’

‘I sometimes wonder if we existed for him at all, the moment he drove out of the Close. I mind, you know.’

‘Mind what?’

‘That Dad was only ever really happy when he was at work. When we weren’t around. It was never
us
who made him happy.’

‘We don’t know that. There’s nothing much we
do
know about him so I don’t think we can hazard a guess at what, if anything, made him happy.’

‘But what about you, Max? Are you happy now?’

‘What do you think?’ He smiled at me and suddenly everything began to feel a bit better.

I looked round his tiny studio room, at the dirty skylight, the jars of brushes on the floor, the half-finished canvases piled up against the wall, the unmade bed. ‘It’s hard to tell, really.’

‘Well, I am, actually. Very. Though I miss the men at the hostel. They still write, one or two of them, which is nice. But the other students in this house are really great. We cook together and stuff. And you? Is all your exotic travelling making you happy? Thanks for that thing, by the way,’ he said, nodding up at the wall from where a dark wooden mask with tufts of reddish-brown hair glared out at us.

‘I thought it would remind you of me.’ I laughed.

‘Not quite angry enough. Or ugly enough.’

‘Shut up! And it’s not just exotic travelling. It’s part of my course. And I’m thinking of going back to West Africa when I graduate. There’s an incredible anthropologist I want to work with.’

‘Oh, yes?’ Max looked at me quizzically, a smile playing round his eyes.

‘What?’ I said, and realised too late how defensive I sounded.

‘Nothing. It’s just the way you looked when you said
incredible
. Like this.’

Max put on a dreamy, lovestruck expression. I picked up a pillow from his bed and hurled it at him. It caught one of the jars of brushes. A stream of turpentine flowed towards the wall. Max untied his scarf and blotted the liquid up just before it reached the canvases.

‘Sorry,’ I said.

He smiled.

‘No problem.’ 

It’s impossible not to hear the sound of the violin in this room. It’s as though the walls have absorbed the millions of notes that have been played here. I find it hard to believe that, in the silences between the bursts of computer-generated automatic rifle fire, the sharp detonation of caps, and the sound of wailing boy bands, Ben and his sisters don’t sometimes hear the distant sound of Bach or Vivaldi.

‘Don’t you miss it?’ I asked Max on one of my visits back to England, when he had been living and working in a sheltered community in Devon for a few years. We were lying side by side on his ancient bed in one of the huge old shared houses, as the only chair in the room was doubling up as his wardrobe and filing cabinet.

‘Miss what?’

‘Your hideous violin.’

‘You obviously don’t.’

‘I don’t miss the endless practising – the same two bars played a thousand times.’

‘Do you think you might be exaggerating just a little bit?’

‘Who,
me
?’

Max smiled. Rather sadly, I thought.

‘I tried to buy it back, you know,’ he said. ‘I was going to borrow the money from Clara.’

‘So why didn’t you?’

‘It was gone by the time I got back to the shop. It was quite a rare instrument. Someone would have been pleased to
get their hands on it.’

‘Couldn’t you have found out who had bought it and asked them to sell it back to you?’

‘I suppose so, but I thought maybe it was a sign.’

‘What kind of sign?’

‘A reminder of the consequences of decisions made in haste.’

‘You’re mental.’

‘So you’ve so often said. And I thought we’d been through all this. Years ago.’

‘You could have got it back easily if you’d tried. You were really good. You could have been a professional musician. Don’t you ever wonder what would have happened if you’d not sold it? Or if you’d borrowed the money and bought another violin? It didn’t have to be the one Mum gave you. You might not have had to live in a hostel in Islington, or a shit-hole in Leeds for years. Or live in this Munster House now with a bunch of spastics.’

‘I loved the hostel and the Leeds place was quite cosy, actually, and this “Munster House” is a brilliant place to live. And, just for your information, people with cerebral palsy aren’t called spastics any more.’

‘I do know that,’ I said, ashamed as usual.

‘I know you do,’ he said kindly. ‘And anyway, what’s the point of looking back all the time – wondering how things might have been, what would have happened if things had been different? Things are just how they are or how they were.’

‘What’s the point in
not
wondering?’

‘So you can get on with your life.’

‘Is that what you are doing?’

‘I suppose it is. What I’m trying to do, anyway.’

‘And you’re saying I’m not?’

‘I didn’t say that at all.’

‘But you thought it.’

‘I didn’t, actually.’

‘You make me feel like some kind of freak,’ I shouted.

‘It’s your new hairdo and the tan.’

‘Don’t laugh at me.’

‘Well, don’t be so daft, then. How can I possibly make you feel like a freak?’

‘The way you just accept everything that happens to you. That happened to you when you were a child. The way you just see the good in everything. It makes me
sick
!’

‘I don’t think I see the good in everything. I try to – but it doesn’t always work. Some things that happen make it really hard.’

He stopped and turned his face away from mine. Each time we met, it was our father’s death to which our meandering conversations returned. And each time we talked about him, Max’s eyes would fill with tears and mine would stay resolutely dry, while I felt a knot tighten in my throat until I thought I’d suffocate.

‘It was good Dad died so suddenly,’ I said after a while, when I felt it was safe to try to breathe again. ‘And without any pain or anything. He’d have made a crap hospital patient.’

‘You’ll have to watch it. You’re starting to see the good in everything,’ said Max, wiping his face with the corner of the frayed cotton bedspread.

‘But don’t you ever wonder who that woman was, at his funeral?’ I couldn’t help asking.

‘Which woman?’

‘The youngish one with long curly brown hair, standing a bit apart when everyone was leaving the crematorium.’

‘I don’t remember any young woman with long curly brown hair.’

‘You must do. I pointed her out to you.’

‘Given that we know absolutely nothing about Dad’s life apart from what Clara used to tell us, it could have been anyone. His secretary, a grown-up patient, a junior doctor, a
nurse, the person from the off-licence where he bought his whisky and fags.’

‘But who do you think it was?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘But don’t you want to know?’

‘Why would I want to know?’

‘I don’t know. To make sense of things.’

‘How would knowing who that woman was make sense of anything? It’s as though you’re always hoping that something will suddenly drop into place. People aren’t jigsaws. You can’t just look for missing pieces to slot in and complete the picture. Life’s not some kind of puzzle that you have to solve before you can get on with your own.’

‘What if she was his secret love-child? Wouldn’t that make you feel different about knowing or not knowing?’

‘It might, I suppose, though I’ve always found having
one
sister quite a challenge.’

I went up to the window. A couple of magpies were strutting about on the flat roof. Two for joy. I wondered if my father ever felt joy. I wondered again what he felt when his hands began to shake too much to allow him to hold a scalpel, when there were no more press cuttings and publications for his mother to paste into her scrapbooks, when there was nothing left of him for her to be proud of. I wondered what he was thinking in the moments before he shut his eyes and his heart stopped and the cigarette fell out of his mouth.

I went with Max to the hospital mortuary where my father’s body had been taken. Max went in first. I sat on a red plastic sofa in the little anteroom watching a nurse making notes in a cardboard file at a desk in the corner. From time to time she looked up and smiled at me kindly. There was a little hole in the sofa from which a small clump of white nylon stuffing billowed. I forced it back in and pressed the pieces of torn red plastic together. Then Max came out and sat down next to me. I felt my fingers creeping towards his leg. He
took my hand and squeezed it. For a moment I thought we were back in Miss Everett’s class and that everything would be all right. I could feel his body shake as he sat there, crying quietly.

‘It’s your turn,’ he said after a while, letting go of my hand and wiping the tears from his face with the back of his hand.

‘I don’t think I can go in.’

‘It was OK, actually.’

‘I don’t want to see him dead.’

‘I think you’ll regret it if you don’t. It’s important that you see him. Go on. I’ll wait for you here.’

I draw up a chair to the bed on which my father has been laid out. He doesn’t look dead, just different. I put my hand on his, feeling his long, thin fingers. I can’t remember the last time I touched him. I can’t remember what I said to him the last time I saw him. I hope it was something kind but I’m not sure that it was. I want to say something to him now, even though it’s too late. Something important. I want to say,
I told you this would happen, but you never listened
. I want to say,
I need you to know that I loved you all those times I shouted and threw my books around your study.
I want to say,
I loved our silent journeys. I loved the crazy meals you made us.
I want to say,
I wish I’d known you.

I kiss him on his cold forehead.

‘Bye, Dad,’ I say.

We thought my grandmother would give up and die when her only child – her genius son – predeceased her. At his funeral she looked like a tiny, frail old woodland creature, her rheumy eyes staring at the floor, her gnarled hands clutching the pew in the crematorium chapel. But when Max and I visited her a few weeks later it was as though she’d never had a son. Over coffee and plum cake, she talked about the lamentable decline in available bridge partners; about the new cash registers at the supermarket which none of the stupid girls had learned to operate properly. She asked Max if it
was now time to stop all that nonsense work with the
down-and
-outs and take up his place at art school; or, better still, apply to a proper university. Perhaps it was not too late to do medicine after all. She told me she wasn’t surprised that I hadn’t had the intellectual ability to get into Oxford, but that I’d probably enjoy Edinburgh once I’d learned to understand the horrible accent.
And what is this anthropology? Is it really a serious subject to study at university? It is such shame you are too unintelligent to study medicine. To be a doctor.
Of my father there was no mention.
And then there was Clara Eisenstein who married Arthur Rosenthal 1925, and they had, in 1926, Oscar – no don’t bother to write him down.

My grandmother was very keen to reach a hundred. She didn’t care about the telegram from the Queen –
for in Germany I am already so very famous.
In her centenary year, she appeared in a well-received German television documentary about the lives of German exiles between 1935 and 1950. She was awarded some kind of honorary chair at a new medical school in Hamburg. And then, having reached her target during an extended trip to Germany, she came back to Oxford to die. Unfortunately for her, all those decades of swimming and fruit-picking worked against her. Her body refused to obey. Finally, at a hundred and four, she put her papers in order, locked up her house, admitted herself into an upmarket nursing home and, very efficiently, starved herself to death.

The magpies on the roof were ousted by a group of starlings squabbling over a piece of mouldy bread. I heard the mattress squeak as Max got off his bed and came up behind me. He wrapped his arms around me.

‘You’ll be fine. We’ll both be fine. The sins of the fathers, if there really were any sins, don’t have to be carried down the generations. We can make our own futures. Our own kinds of families in any way we choose. Like I’ve chosen these people here as my family. Hey! You’re finally getting fat! I hadn’t 
noticed before. It must be all that rice and groundnut stew you’ve been eating.’

I waited for a few seconds – a few seconds in which Max’s hands tightened round my waist and I felt his warm breath on my neck.

‘God! Julia. How pregnant
are
you?’ he said very quietly.

‘Nearly five months,’ I replied, keeping my eyes on the starlings.

Max went back to his bed and sat down.

‘Was that part of the plan?’ he asked.

‘I was the one who alphabetised my books, remember? And did fantastically complicated revision timetables. I was school librarian. I loved filing. I’m not exactly the
having an accident
kind of person. If I were, this would be a little Tony Wealden or some other St Peter’s reject.’

‘But you were always pretty crap at maths. And you didn’t think Tony Wealden was a reject at the time. Quite the opposite, I always thought, judging by the terrible noises the two of you made. You used to put me off my violin practice.’

‘You can’t possibly have heard us from two rooms away. And this wasn’t an accident,’ I said, lying down beside him and putting my hands over my small bulge.

‘So who’s the father?’

‘Well, that’s the slightly complicated bit. Well, not really
slightly
complicated.’

‘Don’t tell me. The incredible anthropologist.’

‘How did you know that?’

‘You’re a lot more obvious than you’d like to think. What’s he like?’

‘Lovely. And old.’

‘Like really old or just a bit older than you?’

‘Really old. Nearly sixty.’

‘God, Julia! Is this Oedipal or what?’

‘And married. With children.’

‘Oh, great!’

‘About my age – the children are.’

‘Isn’t this taking your anthropological research into the family and kinship a little too far?’

‘Since when have you been the expert on relationships? With your string of weeping, abandoned women and crazy made-up families of society’s misfits and cripples.’

‘I’ve never abandoned anyone. I’ve just never wanted that kind of relationship: just me and one other person living in a little house together. I’ve always been very clear about that, whoever I’ve been with. And we’re all misfits and cripples in some way, don’t you think?’

‘Speak for yourself.’

‘Is the baby going to know its father?’

‘I hope so. But it’s tricky.’

‘Does his wife know?’

‘No. And she isn’t going to.’

‘How do you feel about that?’

‘Bad. About the lie.’

‘More a lack of truth.’

‘I suppose so. Is that better or worse?’

‘Don’t ask me – Mum was always the one with the complex theory of truth and lies. Does she know about the baby?’

‘Not yet. She’s in transit again, I think. I’ll tell her when she next sends me her address.’

‘What do you think she’ll say?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘Nor me. So it’ll just be you and the baby?’

‘That’s the idea.’

‘It’ll be very hard. Have you really thought about it?’

‘Look, it’s not exactly as though our father played a huge part in our childhood. And at least my baby won’t grow up being torn in two all the time. Maybe a father who really isn’t
there is better than a father who is there, but isn’t. And maybe a happy single mother is better than an unhappy married one. At least I’ll have the chance to do it right.’

‘Mum and Dad didn’t do that badly.’

‘I didn’t say they did. But there are lots of things I’ll do differently. And some things I’ll make bloody sure I do better.’

‘So what’s his name? The very old anthropologist?’

‘I can’t tell you.’

‘Don’t be daft.’

‘I can’t. I promised I’d never tell anyone.’

‘He can’t make you do that.’