Interpreters (15 page)
‘We love the Dutch,’ they all said. ‘Come and stay for the weekend.’ ‘Let us show you around London.’ ‘Have you been to the Tower of London yet? To Big Ben? To Windsor Castle? Come with us, we’ll take you.’ ‘Come for supper – we’re just off the King’s Road.’ ‘My father’s got a boat on Lake Windermere – you must come sailing.’ ‘Yes, we love the Dutch. And what a marvellous English accent you have,’ everyone said. And gradually people forgot where I was from. They didn’t even hear any more that I wasn’t English.
Were you happy?
Happy? Very. I had nothing. The contents of one small suitcase. I lived in one rented room. I had a bed, a table, a cupboard and an electric hotplate. There was a bathroom two floors up. My landlady lived below me. In the winter I could either get the bus home from work or put money in the gas meter. Sometimes all I had to eat all day was a tin of baked beans. But I was happier than I’d been for years.
Were you lonely?
I told you, everyone loved this girl from Holland. Especially Andrew.
Andrew?
His father ran the translation and interpreting service I worked for. We met outside his father’s office. He’d just
come down from Cambridge. I remember thinking that was a strange expression, to ‘come down’ from Cambridge.
Tell me about him.
He wasn’t important.
I’m interested.
He was tall and slim and very good-looking. And funny, I realised, once I got used to his sense of humour. And very English. And very wealthy. And such an enthusiast! He had a private pilot’s licence and used to fly me to France for the day. I hate flying now but I loved it then. He found out I was from Amsterdam and was intrigued. He thought I was the most fascinating person he’d ever met. He wanted to know all about my family and what it was like living in Holland during the war. He kept suggesting we fly there so that he could see all my old haunts, get to know some of my friends.
Did you tell him?
That actually I’d grown up in Berlin? That I was one of the enemy? What do you think? London was still full of bomb sites. And then he introduced me to his family and they were friendly and interested in me and Andrew’s sister told me how good I was for him. That we’d be perfect together. And then he proposed to me.
And did you accept?
Are you mad? How could I?
Why not?
If you’re asking that, I’ve been wasting my time here.
Why couldn’t you marry him?
Did you think you didn’t deserve him?
Did you think you didn’t deserve to be loved?
Did you feel you had to be punished?
What do you think you had to be punished for?
I hear a key in the door and then a voice calling out, ‘Hello, Julia. Are you still there?’
‘I’m up here.’
I slide the magazine into the middle of the pile, shut Angie’s bedroom door and go downstairs.
‘Had a good look around?’ Angie asks pleasantly. She is putting a couple of pizzas in the oven and a box of chips into the microwave. Three girls and Ben are hovering around her. She gestures at the cardboard packaging. ‘I know, it’s terrible, but Fridays are a nightmare. It’s a ridiculously early tea and then swimming, samba band and Guides all in different places. I should probably have spent the morning preparing a nutritious vegetable casserole but I’d end up throwing most of it in the bin – or what’s left of it after they’ve all picked out whichever bits of vegetable they claim they’re allergic to this week – so it makes more sense to go to the gym instead and feed them junk food. That way we’re all happy.’
The girls – I realise that Anna and Eleanor are twins – seem only mildly surprised to have had a stranger spending the afternoon looking round their house. Their uniform – grey skirts, white shirts, maroon jumpers – is oddly familiar.
‘Julia was at the same school as me and Auntie Becky. At
your
school. But the old one by the station – before they moved it. She used to live in this house a long time ago, when she was a little girl.’
‘Cool. Which room did you have?’ asks Catherine.
‘Yours.’
‘The best one!’ She grins.
‘I used to think so too,’ I say.
‘Did you like
my
room,’ asks Ben hopefully.
‘I did. And what a lot of guns.’
‘I warned you,’ laughs Angie.
‘I bet you never had to share,’ says Anna or Eleanor, resentfully.
‘I only had a brother. So we had a room each.’
‘Lucky you!’
‘A nice brother?’ asks Ben.
‘He was. Lovely.’
‘Is he dead?’
‘Dead? No.’
‘’Cos you said
was
, which is in the past.’
‘No, he’s alive. Very much so. I’m going to stay with him for a few days after I leave here. He lives in Dorset now. In the middle of the countryside.’
‘Did he go to
my
school?’
‘No, he went on a train to his.’
‘By himself?’
‘Yes, all by himself.’
‘Here, wash your hands, everyone,’ says Angie. ‘And Julia, would you like pizza and chips with this lot or a nice quiet G&T? Actually I’m not going to give you the choice. Let’s leave them to it. Anna and Ellie, can you set the table and Catherine, you get the chips out of the microwave when it pings? The pizza will need a bit longer.’
Angie leads me into the sitting room and gets a bottle of gin out of a corner cabinet.
‘Actually, I’d better not,’ I say, sitting down. ‘I’m driving.’
‘Of course you are! I forgot. And so am I. Damn! What time’s your appointment with the solicitor?
‘Four-thirty.’ I look at my watch. It is quarter past four. ‘I’d better go, I suppose.’
‘Gosh, yes!’ Angie says, glancing at the clock on the mantelpiece. ‘What a shame. I wanted to hear all about your daughter. Do you know the way?’
‘It’s in Brading Road – just next to our school.’
‘Where our school
used
to be, you mean! You won’t recognise anything around there – it’s all been pulled down and rebuilt.’
She puts the bottle of gin on the table and, rather reluctantly, shows me to the front door.
‘Listen, it’s been
so
lovely meeting you. Come again any time.’
‘I will.’
But I know I won’t.
‘Thank you
so
much, Angie. For letting me look around.’
‘It’s a pleasure. I mean it – come back any time.’
I rehearse the journey to Brading Road as I get into the car. Left out of the Close, down the street and out of the estate, across the main road that our mother dreaded so much, past the rows of pebbledashed villas and an ugly Catholic church, and across another road to the station. Here Max and I would part company and he’d get on the train while I’d walk down the hill to my school. Between the station and school was a depot where freshly slaughtered pigs were skinned, frozen and hung upside down on great metal hooks. Racks and racks of them staring out at us, their mouths and eyes wide open. Men in white coats smeared with blood, and white peaked caps, would stand, balancing solid pigs’ carcasses on their shoulders, whistling and calling out at us, and sometimes tossing a pig’s penis or hairy ear in our direction. We trod carefully through the bloody debris in our outdoor shoes and ignored the rude men as our headmistress had advised us to. There would be complaints nowadays. Traumatised vegetarian schoolgirls, and their outraged parents, demanding compensation.
Angie was right. I don’t recognise anything. Whole streets have disappeared. Where once there was a row of shops and a recreation ground, there is now a series of roundabouts. I head for the station, which thankfully has been allowed to remain in the same place, though the road leading down the hill has gone, along with the pig works and the school and the rows of dusty elm trees. They have been replaced by a massive shopping mall, all brick and chrome and glass. A glass lift on the outside of the building transports shoppers from one ornamental palm-infested floor to the next.
Groups of schoolchildren in black trousers and green polo shirts are hanging around at the entrance, talking on their mobile phones, eating chips, laughing. A tall, very thin girl with long, dead-straight fair hair is pinned against one of the glass doors, her hands up the shirt of a slightly shorter boy who has abandoned his sports bag a few feet away and – legs splayed for better balance – is kissing her as though he hasn’t had a decent meal in days. I’d like to go up to them and say,
We weren’t allowed to eat in the street in school uniform, or talk to boys anywhere near the school building, or loosen our ties, or take off our hats, let alone snog!
And no doubt they’d look at me with the same withering indifference with which they regard the mothers with pushchairs and the old people with walking sticks who are trying to negotiate a clear route round their legs and bags and chip wrappers, or the young security guard with his walkie-talkie who seems to be trying to suggest that they might like to congregate away from the shopping centre.
Somewhere around here was the first pizzeria to come to town. My friends and I thought it was unbelievably glamorous and cosmopolitan. The waiters wore very tight black trousers and even tighter black shirts, and spoke in accents that swung wildly from south London to somewhere indeterminate south of Calais. It was there that Caroline Statham once, to my surprise, invited me for a pizza after
school. Always the first – to kiss with tongues, to put her hand right inside a boy’s Y-fronts, and finally (so she coolly claimed, though none of us really believed her) to have
full-blown
sex with the man with the shaven head and the anchor tattoo who sold flowers outside the station – Caroline shared something of the glamour of the pizzeria.
‘Couldn’t you just tell Max?’ Caroline asked me, picking off pieces of mushroom and onion and kernels of sweetcorn until all that was left of her pizza was an orangey-red spongey mass.
‘Tell him what?’
‘That I really fancy him.’
‘Don’t you think that would sound a bit weird, coming from me? Why don’t you tell him yourself?’
‘I don’t see him on the way home any more.’
‘He’s doing his exams. He doesn’t have to go into school very often these days. You could ring him up when you get home.’
‘I can’t do that. He’ll think I’m some kind of slag. And anyway, your dad’s really scary.’
‘He’s not scary.’
‘Well, he sounds pretty scary on the phone.’
‘He’s just tired.’
‘What’s he doing at home so early in the afternoon, anyway? I thought he was some kind of “famous doctor”.’ Caroline drew little inverted commas in the air with her fingers.
‘He’s been ill.’
‘Shouldn’t he be able to cure himself? If he’s such a “famous doctor”?’ she asked, her greasy fingers repeating the punctuation marks.
I watched, hating her, as she took a bite of pizza. A long thread of pinkish cheese stuck to the side of her face and hung forlornly from her chin.
‘Do you think Max
would
go out with me?’
‘I don’t know. He doesn’t really go out with anyone.’
‘Well, that’s a lie. I’ve seen him out with loads of different girls.’
‘He doesn’t want that kind of relationship. He told me.’
‘What kind of relationship?’
‘I don’t know. You’ll have to ask him.’
‘Don’t just say things and then not be able to explain them. That’s pathetic. Look, I paid for your pizza.’
‘I know. Thanks. It was nice.’
‘So now you have to ask him.’
‘Okay, I will, but I can’t promise anything.’
‘And don’t tell him about Kevin-at-the-flower-stall. I don’t want him to get the wrong idea about me. We didn’t really go all the way.’
Max smiled as I told him about the pizza outing and passed on the message.
‘So what shall I tell her, Max?’
‘That next time you’ll have the pepperoni.’
‘Ha bloody ha. What shall I really tell her?’
‘That I’ll be going away very soon, so it’s probably not the best time to start a relationship.’
‘I’m not sure it’s a relationship she wants. More like your body. God knows why.’
‘Oh, well, in that case just give me her number.’
‘You don’t mean that.’
‘No, I don’t mean that. I’m going to be pretty busy at the hostel from what I’ve read about it. And it’s very much men only.’
‘Don’t go.’
‘I have to. I’ve accepted the job.’
‘You’re not even being paid.’
‘That’s not the point.’
‘Exactly. There’s no point. Stay here.’
‘I can’t. I really want to go.’
‘But what about me?’
‘You’ll be fine. You’ve got loads of friends – and anyway, you’ll be gone in a couple of years. There’ll be no stopping you.’
‘You can’t leave me here with Mum and Dad. I’ll die.’
‘Don’t you think you’re being a teeny bit melodramatic?’
‘OK, I won’t die, but it’ll be awful. Without you.’ ‘You can come and visit me. It’s only north London. I’ll sneak you in.’
‘Do you promise?’
‘But only if you don’t cry.’
‘I’m not crying.’
‘But only if clear salty liquid doesn’t come out of the little holes next to your eyes. Come here, stupid.’
Max came over to me and wrapped me in his arms. And even as I buried my face in his school shirt and wept at the thought of life at home without him, I felt a little flicker of victory. Caroline Statham would never, ever get to hold my brother this close.
I met him at a party in Bloomsbury. Or rather I saw him there.
Andrew?
Not Andrew, no.
No, sorry, of course not.
Go on.
I’d come back from another long day at the agency. It was all a bit awkward there since I’d turned down Andrew’s proposal. I’d had to walk as I’d spent my bus fare on a roll and a piece of cheese – and I was pretty tired and hungry. I couldn’t afford to put any more money in the gas meter, so, when the girl in the room above mine invited me to her boyfriend’s party, a hot, crowded room with free food seemed a good idea. It’s odd how clearly I remember that party. I asked the girl, ‘Who’s that little man on his own, over there by the window?’ And she said something like, ‘Oh that’s Oscar Rosenthal. He’s a doctor. Frightfully clever, John says.’ She couldn’t remember how her boyfriend knew him. She’d met him once or twice before – but he was a bit of a dark horse. She thought maybe I could get something out of him. ‘You’re the interpreter,’ she said. But by the time we’d pushed our way through the crowd, he’d left.
And then
…
And then a few weeks after that, late one Friday afternoon, I was called in to the casualty department of the local hospital to translate for an elderly man who had been found lying on his floor at home. He was thin and confused but pretty strong for someone who hadn’t eaten for a few days, and there was no way he was going to let anyone in a uniform near him. He was sitting up in the bed and shouting at the nurses in a mixture of Yiddish and German. And I went up to him and put my hand on his shoulder and told him in German, ‘It’s all right. You’re quite safe here. You’re in a hospital in London. No one is going to hurt you. They just want to put in a drip – it’s just saline. Salt water. It’ll make you feel a lot better. I’ll stay here with you and keep an eye on them while they do it.’ And he looked up at me and smiled very weakly and stretched out his arm and I noticed that he had blue numbers tattooed on it. And when the doctor came to take his arm, and put in the drip, I saw that it was the same quiet little man from the party. (SILENCE) And somehow we ended up having a cup of coffee in the doctor’s mess, the little doctor and me. I liked his stillness. And I liked the way he didn’t say very much and his lack of that very English skill of small talk. I liked the way he didn’t ask me lots of questions about myself like all the others did. And he had kind eyes. And then he looked at his watch and asked me if I’d like a glass of sherry. He had a bottle in his room that a patient had given him. And I liked the way it took him a couple of cigarettes and a glass of sherry and a couple of false starts to ask me if I’d like to go to a Prom with him the next week. He said he had a spare ticket and it would be a shame to let it go to waste. But if I didn’t want to come, it didn’t matter at all. He wasn’t even sure he wouldn’t be on call that evening. So different from Andrew with his very English confidence and his certainty that there was nothing I could possibly want to do other than spend every
minute of the day with him. I liked this quiet little man’s voice, with its almost imperceptible trace of an accent. I liked the way he occupied the room but still didn’t really seem to fit in. That there was something of the foreigner about him. Something of the outsider. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’d love to.’ We did go to the Prom and then he walked me back to my room. I could see the landlady’s curtains twitch as we stood together outside the house. He told me he had a new job beginning the following week, in Newcastle. A six-month contract and then he hoped he’d be back in London to start a job in paediatrics. If I was still here when he got back, he’d rather like to see me again. But, of course, only if I had nothing better to do. He took my landlady’s phone number. I didn’t really expect to hear from him again. And life went on very much as before. But almost exactly six months later the phone rang and it was him. I was surprised at how pleased I was to hear his voice. Once, months later, we were in Hyde Park and there were all these couples laughing and holding hands, and old men on their soapboxes ranting about the government or rationing or whatever – just saying whatever came into their heads – and I said to Oscar, ‘This could never have happened where I come from. Do you even know where that is? There’s so much we don’t know about each other – so much about the past – my past.’ And he said, ‘Why should I be interested in the past? Why should the past matter?’ And he just smiled his shy smile. And that was that. No past. Just a future. And then it was New Year’s Eve and he asked me if I’d spend it with him. He’d like to take me to Trafalgar Square. And as we stood by the fountain, as the chimes of Big Ben rang out and everyone shouted and cheered, he took my hand and asked me to marry him. And I thought, yes, why not? Maybe this is someone I could be happy with. Maybe this is someone I could make happy. Maybe this is the future.