Interpreters (6 page)

That was the year we went on holiday to Spain – me, Max, Mum and Roland. The idea was that we would drive down to a villa belonging to a friend of Roland’s, camping on the way, and my father, who was far too busy at work to take more than a week of leave, would fly out to join us once we had arrived.

Things didn’t go completely to plan. The car journey was strangely tense. For a reason neither Max nor I could understand, our mother refused to share her compartment of the tent with Roland and chose, instead, to sleep in the car. Edgy with incomprehension, Max and I lay in our section of the tent during those warm Mediterranean nights, giggling as we listened to Roland snoring away on the other side of the canvas dividing-wall or spied on him in his voluminous underpants and string vest. Once we caught sight of his dangly willy and had to burrow deep into our sleeping bags to muffle our hysterical laughter.

The night before we arrived at our Spanish villa, I woke to the sound of voices outside the tent. I nudged Max awake
and we shuffled, caterpillar-like in our sleeping bags, towards the entrance. We unzipped the door a couple of inches. My mother and Roland were sitting on the ground a few yards away. Roland was holding her hand.

‘Of course I can’t,’ we heard her say, her voice husky with misery or anger, we didn’t know which.

‘Why not?’

‘Why do you think?’

‘I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you.’

‘Because I can’t. And I can’t go on like this. It’s killing me.’

If Max hadn’t sneezed at that point, we might have found out what it was she couldn’t go on doing. What was killing her. But he did and we didn’t. For a while we thought she was just upset because she’d got sick of sleeping in the car, but, when we got to the resort near Malaga, and Roland stayed at the villa and the rest of us moved into an apartment on the beach to await our father, we began to think it might have been something else. It was only the three of us on the long, hot drive back to England.

Shortly after we got home, we heard the familiar sound of Roland’s Austin outside the house. Max and I rushed down the corridor to open the door, ready to hurl ourselves into his arms as we always did.

‘Just go upstairs,’ my mother said, blocking our route to the door. ‘We’re out.’ We stood behind her listening to the incessant ringing of the bell.

‘But he knows we’re here. He heard us,’ I whispered, feeling both desperately sorry for Roland and terribly ashamed at being party to this deception. ‘He’ll think it’s really rude. Let him in! Please, Mum.’

‘Go upstairs.’

‘He wants to see us. He’s come over specially.’ By now I was no longer whispering.

‘It’s not you he’s come to see.’

‘Open the door. Please, Mum,’ Max begged, the corners of his mouth quivering.

‘Go upstairs!’

So Max and I stood at her bedroom window, and watched through a crack in the net curtains as Roland Elliot drove out of the Close and out of our lives. We never heard our mother play the piano again.

‘CATHERINE’S BEDROOM – KEEP OUT!!’ it says on the door in blood-red ink on yellow paper. And underneath it in slightly smaller print, ‘I MEAN IT OR YOUR DEAD.’

I open the door of my old bedroom very cautiously; nothing falls on my head. The plain white textured wallpaper has been replaced by repeating pink and white ballerinas gamely pirouetting between the posters of scowling marines in camouflage combat gear and helmets sprouting abundant autumn foliage. The pale oak bookshelves that my mother built for me are still there, now painted matt cherry-red. In place of my rows of alphabetised Puffin books and my china animals are a glossy brochure advertising careers in the army, a pile of magazines featuring pouting teenage girls in skimpy vests and too much make-up, a copy of
David
Copperfield
that looks like a school set text, a small TV and a laptop computer. I somehow doubt that Catherine’s summer evenings are spent sitting on the windowsill reading until it is too dark to see the words on the page.

I don’t remember ever being read to as a child. Reading was what I did to other people, whether they liked it or not. From the moment that Jennifer Black was undeservedly promoted to a higher level of
Janet and John
than me – something I felt was so monstrously unfair that I wept from the moment I got home until my mother went out and bought the book for me and then sat and listened to me reading it all the way through – I vowed to be the best reader in the school. My
mother would sit on my bedroom floor, leaning against the bed, her eyes shut, while I read her my favourite books over and over again. She seemed to enjoy the experience. The only book she eventually begged to be spared was
Brer Rabbit
. She claimed not to understand what it was all those Brer Foxes, Brer Bears and Brer everyone elses were talking about. Perhaps it was my Southern States accent that let me down. I don’t think that my favourite Noel Streatfeild books did much for her either, with their eccentric English guardians and shabby-genteel houses on the Cromwell Road inhabited by unfeasibly gifted dancers, skaters and violinists in sensible macs and sturdy shoes; but those she tolerated in silence.

‘You know, Mum, you never read,’ I once observed, my rendition of
Great
Expectations
finished for the evening. I was leaning over the edge of my bed, brushing her hair and teasing it into ever more outlandish styles.

‘That’s because you like reading to me.’

‘No, I mean I’ve never seen you read a book, ever.’

My mother didn’t say anything. I carried on with my hairdressing for a while.

‘Are you sure you can read?’ I asked eventually.

She jerked her head away from my hands. ‘Of course I can read! I used to be just like you – reading all the time. I had even more books than you’ve got. And then. Well, that’s another story.’

‘And then what?’

‘And then,’ she said, struggling to her feet, ‘one day a bomb fell on my bedroom and they all got burned.’

‘Was that in the Blitz?’

We had touched, very briefly, on the Second World War when we were presented with a middle-aged supply teacher from the north for History – the first male teacher ever to gain access to the staff room of my all-girls school. He had come to fill in for Miss Harvey – one of the teachers we knew to have tragically lost her fiancé in that very war. Caroline
Statham said, wasn’t it a bit of a coincidence that Miss Harvey had been off school ever since her friend Miss Kingston, who taught sixth form science and who had also reputedly lost her fiancé in the war, had moved away to be deputy head of a girls’ school in Norwich? I said I didn’t think so really, and Caroline had rolled her eyes and carried on carving Max’s name into her desk with her compass.

Mr Fielding’s grasp of the Tudors had turned out to be rather slight, so, having taught us a rhyme to help us remember the order and upshot of Henry VIII’s six marriages, he had decided to teach us about something ‘a little more recent and a great deal more bloody relevant’. Unfortunately, I could remember a lot more about his swearing in class, his badly fitting jacket and his unfamiliar vowel sounds than what D-Day and the Normandy landings were all about.

‘Mum?’

‘What, Julia?’

‘I said, was it in the Blitz that you lost all your books?’

‘Something like that. Now, goodnight.’ She leant down and kissed me on the forehead. ‘Sleep tight, and don’t turn your light on again the moment I’ve gone out of the room. And don’t sit reading on the windowsill, either.’

And that was the end of that discussion.

I walk over to the window. The bedroom overlooks the thinner L of the garden. There used to be a little pond here in which Max’s goldfish was reputed to live. Max had won it at a local fair and named it Looby Loo. As if in response to the ignominy of being named after Andy Pandy’s absurdly ineffectual sidekick, on release it had drifted passively out of its plastic bag and disappeared into the murky depths, not to be seen again. We would often sit by the pond, Max and I, poking holes in the emerald surface so viscous with pondweed and algae that the sticks could practically stand up on their own. Once, on a particularly warm evening, the fish – now about four times its original size – had risen slowly to
the surface like an ancient submarine, its bright orange fins leisurely parting the lush vegetation.

‘Oh, my God!’ Max stared first at the massive fish and then past me, his eyes wide with terror.

‘What?’ I panicked.

‘There’s an evil dwarf behind you.’

I spun round, letting out a piercing squeal, and Max collapsed on the lawn. He only stopped laughing when I knelt on his chest and squeezed him very tightly around the neck.

‘All right! All right! It was just a joke,’ he gasped, struggling out of my grasp. ‘You shouldn’t watch
The Singing Ringing
Tree
if it scares you so much.’ But each Thursday afternoon I would be drawn to the sofa to watch, appalled, as the terrifying events of the strange Eastern European fairytale unfolded in our sitting room.

Throughout my life I have had a recurring dream. Out of a lightly swirling mist a lake rises and takes shape. The banks drip with ferns and lichen. From behind a rock, a dwarf peers, its goatlike eyes bulbous and unblinking. A pulse throbs angrily in its squat, thick-set neck. Its menacing fingers grip the wet stone, squeeze the dense, dark moss. The dwarf sidles round the rock, a square head framed with wild, wiry hair followed by a long, powerful torso, on short, bowed legs. Still peering round, he waddles, scuttles, crab-like, stopping and starting, stopping and listening, down to the lake, and crouches, elbows splayed, at the water’s edge. A watery sun breaks through the thin grey cloud, catches the ripples as a great golden fish rises majestically through the water, bubbles rising and breaking, shattering the dwarf’s reflection into a hundred ripples. A branch cracks; the fish glides back down into the black water; the dwarf freezes, taut, alert, sniffs the damp air. Then is gone.

Max was right. I shouldn’t have watched it.

Perhaps rather rashly, given Angie’s warning about booby traps, I slide the cupboard door open. Catherine’s cupboards
are full, but not as full as mine used to be. My shelves used to be stuffed to bursting. Unlike most of my friends, whose mothers would go through their belongings periodically, consigning broken or outgrown toys to the Scouts’ jumble sales, my mother let us keep absolutely everything. Somewhere, in a set of plywood packing cases – now in Max’s attic, I think – we still have every single childhood book, toy, board game and school exercise book that we have ever owned.

No dolls, though. I never went through a doll phase. I didn’t need to – I had the real thing. For several years – probably from the ages of about nine to twelve, and before I reached the stage where I would have gladly chosen death over being seen out in public with my father – I would often accompany him on his regular weekend calls to one of the hospitals at which he worked. Almost every Sunday afternoon the phone would ring and my father, after a brief, hushed consultation, would announce to us that he had to go to work and would be back in a couple of hours. I could never understand why this made my mother so tight-lipped and angry. Surely doctors couldn’t help having to go to work at the weekend? Leaving Max to his violin practice and my mother to the debris of Sunday lunch, we would head off in the car away from Tenterden Close and my mother’s brooding discontent.

I loved the comfortable, nicotine-imbued silence of those car journeys, during which my father would smoke cigarette after cigarette, flicking first the thin plastic film, then the silver paper, then the burning stubs and finally the empty cigarette packet out of the car window. I rather admired the way he could steer with his knees, even while driving round roundabouts, as he extracted his lighter from deep within his trouser pocket. There was slightly less flashing and hooting from swerving cars once he upgraded his car to one with a built-in cigarette lighter. Sometimes he would listen to classical music or the news on the radio, but mostly he just
stared ahead, thinking.

‘What are you thinking about, Dad?’ I asked once, having studied his impassive profile for several miles of London suburb.

‘What, dear?’

‘What do you think about all the time when you drive to work or sit at your desk in the evenings?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You must know. You’re the one thinking.’

‘Yes, dear.’

‘So what is it you think about? Work?’

He didn’t reply, hoping, no doubt, that I would get bored with interrogating him so we could revert to our companionable hush.

‘Go on – what do you think about? Me?’ I asked, hopefully.

He smiled. ‘Yes, you. All the time. Every minute of the day and night.’

‘Why do you never take anything I say seriously?’

‘I do, dear.’

At the hospital, I’d be delivered to Curtis Ward on the third floor where Sister Collins, her hands tucked into the bib of her apron, would take me on a personal ward-round, briskly pointing out the babies who were well enough to be taken out, changed, bathed and played with. It seems unthinkable now, that a ten-year-old child would be let loose in a ward full of babies, particularly seriously ill ones, but, as far as I remember, I never dropped or drowned one.

After an hour or two on the ward, I would wander into the Sister’s office and there would be my father, smoking and drinking coffee and looking much happier and more relaxed than he ever did at home. In Sister Collins’ office, my father became chatty – jovial, even. He seemed to occupy more space. I didn’t particularly like Sister Collins with her air of cool efficiency, her sardonic smile, and the annoying way she
looked at my father as though he was the cleverest and most fascinating person she had ever met. But my father seemed to like her a lot. It couldn’t have been her looks, unless it was the pale blue uniform he liked. It wasn’t that she was really ugly or anything like that, but she wasn’t nearly as pretty as some of the other younger nurses who would glance at me as they got on with their tasks. And, with her frizzy brown hair and hint of a moustache, she was not nearly as attractive as my mother. Below the ruffled cuffs of her short sleeves, her arms were pale and blotchy and, though I can no longer remember them, I’m sure her calves would have been on a par with those of Brown Owl and Mrs Prior.

It must have been the admiration my father liked – he certainly didn’t get much of that at home. My mother could go for days without speaking to him. I wasn’t sure that he noticed or, if he did, that he really minded. I think he preferred the stony silence to her miserable rants, to which he’d inevitably respond, ‘What, dear?’ before disappearing into his study via the drinks cabinet.

My interest in babies faded as my interest in boys increased, and my weekend trips to the hospital became rarer and rarer and finally stopped altogether. I’d almost forgotten about Sister Collins when one day, when I was about fifteen, my father did something very strange.

‘I’ve invited someone for dinner,’ he announced in the kitchen shortly after my mother had gone off on the first of her Open University residential weekends.

I put down the sheet of quotations from
Coriolanus
that I was learning for my end-of-term English exam and stared at my father. In our house, no one ever came for dinner. No one ever came, full stop. ‘Sorry?’

‘I’ve invited someone for dinner.’

‘Who?’

‘Sister Collins.’

I was suddenly filled with a feeling of dread so powerful
that I could barely breathe.

‘Why are you doing that?’

‘What, dear?’

‘Why’s she coming here?’

‘To discuss a chapter of a book I’m writing,’ he replied, unconvincingly, opening the kitchen cupboards and rummaging through the tins of condensed tomato soup, pots of liver pâté and jars of gherkins. ‘Tell Max, could you…?’

‘Who?’ asked Max, lowering his violin from his chin and letting the bow hang by his side.

‘Sister Collins.’

‘Who’s she?’

‘That nurse in charge of the ward where I used to go to play with the babies.’

‘Oh, yeah? What’s he cooking?’

‘What do you mean, what’s he cooking! She can’t come here.’

‘Why not?’

‘She just can’t.’

‘What’s so bad about her?’

‘Nothing.’

‘So why are you getting your knickers in a twist? Dad’s a great cook.’

‘That’s not the point!’

‘Why are you shouting?’

‘I’m not shouting. I’m just trying to tell you that if she comes to dinner something terrible will happen.’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know. But it will.’

‘So tell Dad.’

‘Tell him what?’

‘I don’t know. That’s what I was asking you.’

I sat on the landing halfway up the stairs. The smell of fried onion and roasting chicken wafted up from the kitchen. My father was an inventive cook who very occasionally
created astonishing, and often somewhat unusual, dishes from whatever he could lay his hands on. My mother provided us with delicious, nutritious, perfectly balanced meals throughout our childhood and adolescence, but of course the only meals I remember with any clarity are the few that my father made.