Interpreters (16 page)

Brading Road has somehow survived the years of relentless redevelopment. Farrer & Farrer is housed in what must have been quite a large Edwardian family villa. The name is stencilled across the windows of the ground floor. A plump woman in her thirties, wearing a paisley patterned blouse and plain navy skirt, looks up at me expectantly. Her expensively highlighted hair is scraped off her face and secured with a navy velvet Alice band.

‘It’s Rosenthal. Julia Rosenthal,’ I say. ‘I’ve got an appointment at four-thirty.’

‘Bear with me a moment.’

She flicks through her appointment book, then glances at her watch and frowns slightly. ‘Ah, yes. With Mr Blenkinsop. I’ll see if he’s still here.’

‘I think the name on the letter was Turner.’

‘Mr Turner’s on holiday this week, I’m afraid. Mr Blenkinsop is handling his clients.’

She presses a button on her phone.

‘Nigel. Your client is here now. Yes, your four-thirty. Yes, I know it is. Shall I send her through? OK, no problem.’

She looks up at me and smiles tightly. ‘Do take a seat, Mrs Rosenthal. Mr Blenkinsop will be with you shortly.’

‘Thank you. Actually, it’s not Mrs Rosenthal.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Mrs Rosenthal is my mother. That’s why I’m here. It’s Dr, if you need a title.’

The receptionist looks down at her appointment book. Her cheeks are flushed with irritation.

The phone rings. She picks it up.

‘The key to which cupboard, Nigel? It’s in the safe.’ She laughs, coyly. ‘I don’t know where you’d be without me either!’

I pick up a brochure from the table. Whoever Farrer & Farrer once were, they’ve been replaced by David Turner, Nigel Blenkinsop and Jonathan Markham, all three of whom smile up at me in their sensible dark suits and ties that have been chosen to suggest just a hint of fun. From one of Angie’s catalogues, probably. I stare at the picture of Nigel Blenkinsop. He is slightly overweight. What little is left of his hair has been cut very short. His eyes are blue.
Trust me, they say. Make me the executor of your will. Let me do your conveyancing. Have this dance with me.

And Nigel Blenkinsop takes Katie Powell’s hand and leads her, in her dark blue Laura Ashley maxi-dress with the Chinese collar, away from the table, sticky with Coke and lemonade and soggy Cheezy Footballs and Twiglets, and on to the dance floor. And as their faces flash green, red and blue, and silver slivers of light flicker across the ceiling, my heart breaks into a thousand tiny pieces.

The phone rings again.

‘OK, Nigel, I’ll send
Dr
Rosenthal in.’

She looks up at me, unsmiling. ‘If you’d like to go through now. Second door on the right.’

Nigel Blenkinsop leans over his desk to shake my hand.

‘I think we’ve met before,’ I say.

‘Have we?’ He smiles, questioningly. ‘Do sit down.’

‘Thanks. In about 1973. Weren’t you at St Peter’s?’

‘I was. For my sins.’

‘Do you remember the discos – with the girls from the High School?’

He grimaces. ‘How could I forget?’

‘I used to go to them with my best friend, Katie Powell. Actually, she wasn’t my best friend for long.’

For one awful moment, I think he is going to say,
You mean my lovely wife Katie
, but he continues to look blank.

‘Never mind,’ I say. ‘It was a very long time ago. I wouldn’t really expect you to remember.’

‘I suppose I had hair then.’ He smiles, brushing his hand across his head. I notice he has a tiny hole in one earlobe. And a chunky silver ring on the wedding finger of his right hand. Clearly Farrer & Farrer’s dress code, while embracing the jaunty tie, stops short at any overt indication of homosexuality.

‘You did – lots of it. I think it was the Noddy Holder look you were cultivating at the time.’

‘Oh, well.’ He smiles again, ruefully. ‘Back to business.’

He puts his hand on a box that is sitting on his desk. It is a little smaller than a shoebox and wrapped in brown paper. The string is sealed with hard red wax.

‘Your mother deposited this box with Farrer & Farrer many years ago. Around the time the firm helped her with the sale of her property. We had instructions, in the event of her death, to contact you or your brother and hand it over.’

‘But she’s not dead.’

‘So I understand from her recent correspondence with the firm. And in good health, I hope?

‘Very. She’s walking in Germany at the moment. She wanted to spend her birthday there.’

‘Well, that’s different! My mother celebrated her last birthday in that old Aberdeen Steak House at the edge of the Mall. She’s very much of the “I’m not all that keen on foreign food” generation. Luckily she doesn’t seem to have noticed that Scotland’s gone independent. So, as I was saying, David Turner received a new instruction recently, asking us to carry out her wishes now, rather than after her death.’

‘Do you know why she changed her mind?’

‘No – we rather thought you might.’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘Ah, well. Families, eh? Thirty years in this business and I’ve stopped being surprised about anything very much. There’s just a bit of paperwork to sort out. I thought I had the forms here but I must have left them in David Turner’s office. I’m really sorry about that. I’ll just be a couple of minutes.’

I try to imagine my mother getting into her car and driving to Farrer & Farrer to deposit the box. I wonder what she was wearing – what she was thinking. I wonder if it was the last thing she did before she locked up the house and left the Close for the last time.

For about a year after my father died, she stayed in Tenterden Close. I never saw her leave the house, though I suppose she must have done from time to time. As I came and went during my year between school and university, in which I did very little, I’d sometimes catch sight of her sitting in his chair in the study, gazing out at the garden, or lying on her bed, staring up at the ceiling. She didn’t say much during those months. Once when I came home, I saw that she had taken all her clothes out of her cupboards and was stuffing them into black dustbin liners. I stopped counting when I reached twenty-five.

‘What are you going to do with them?’ I asked.

‘I’m giving most of them away. Max put me in touch with an organisation that’ll take them. If you want anything, help yourself, but it’ll have to be today. The bags are being collected in the morning.’

Then one day, she invited Max and me for supper and told us that she had sold the house and bought a small flat in central London. We would be welcome to stay there whenever we wanted to. She would put our stuff in storage and we could get it out when we had somewhere to put it. The flat would be her base too, but she didn’t think she 
would be there much. She would sell it as soon as we didn’t need it any more.

‘Where are you going?’ we asked.

‘I’m not sure yet – I just know that I’m going.’

And that’s what she did. She went. Travelling everywhere by train or boat. Carrying one small suitcase. I think she was the owner of a capsule wardrobe before the term was ever invented. For the last thirty years or so she has lived in France, the Czech Republic, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Portugal and Morocco. Sometimes in large cities, sometimes in the countryside; sometimes moving on after only a few months, sometimes staying in the same place for a couple of years. Once, only once, my mother travelled by air. She flew out to Cameroon just after Susanna was born. I remember how she picked up my tiny baby and whispered in her ear, ‘You see, I kept my promise. I said I’d visit her
wherever
she went to live.’ I had to leave the room so that she wouldn’t see me cry.

My mother keeps in touch by postcard, even though she’s got a laptop and is very comfortable with modern communications technology. Whenever Max or I visit her, she is pleased to see us but seems quite relieved when it’s time for us to go and she can revert to her solitary life. She appears to be on nodding terms with her neighbours, but we are never introduced. The one person whose company she seems to really enjoy, whom she doesn’t seem at all keen to get rid of, is Susanna. It was Susanna who once told me that she and her grandmother had bumped into a gentleman in the entrance hall of the apartment in Paris who addressed my mother as Mrs Evans and made some allusion to her former career in the Foreign Office. In Prague, it appeared that my mother was a retired headmistress from Hampshire. When I told Max, he just shrugged his shoulders and smiled.

My mother always hated her birthdays and would usually be out of contact as the date approached, so Max and I were surprised when she wrote us identical postcards informing
us that she would be celebrating her birthday in Berlin and was then going to spend a few weeks walking. There was a particular forest route she wanted to retrace. Susanna had kindly agreed to accompany her.

‘Retrace? I didn’t know she’d ever been to Germany,’ I said to Max on the phone. ‘And why Berlin of all places, for her birthday?’

‘Why not? It’s supposed to be quite an amazing city these days. I read a really interesting article about the new Reichstag. I’d love to go.’

‘But since when has she “celebrated” a birthday? She could barely tolerate all the birthdays we spent with her.’

‘I know! Remember the miserable fortieth?’

‘I’ve tried to eradicate it from my memory. And what forest route? How far can an eighty-three-year-old walk, for God’s sake?’

‘I imagine that this eighty-three-year-old can walk a pretty long way. Probably further than Susanna.’

‘And why did Mum invite Susanna along and not us?

‘Maybe she wanted an interpreter? Susanna’s German’s pretty fluent.’

‘And walking’s never exactly been her thing. Either of their things. And why didn’t Susanna tell me she was going? It must all have been arranged when I last spoke to her. When she rang me about that article.’

‘After all these years, you’re still asking questions that you’re never going to get any answers to. Stop wondering and come and spend a few days with me. With me and Max-
son-of
-Max. Mikey’s back inside. Come on, Julia. I really want to see you.’

So that’s what my mother is doing now. Walking through the forests of Germany with my daughter as I sit here in Farrer & Farrer, looking at a small box on the solicitor’s desk.

‘So sorry to have kept you,’ says Nigel Blenkinsop, coming into the room clutching a few sheets of paper. ‘So, I’ll 
just need a couple of signatures. Here… and here… and here. Lovely. Thanks. That all seems to be in order. Perhaps we’ll meet again some time,’ he says without a lot of conviction.

He shakes my hand and passes me the box. It isn’t heavy – about the weight of a couple of hardback books. The receptionist is standing at the front door, a bunch of keys in her hands. Very slowly – so that she can be sure that I realise that the office is now closed and she has had to stay late on a Friday evening – she unlocks the door.

I get into the car. I look at the package. It’s addressed to the two of us, to Max and me. I wonder for a moment whether to wait until I get to Max’s house before I open it, then I break the seal and pull off the string and brown paper. Inside the cardboard box is a set of cassettes. They are numbered one to sixteen, but, apart from that, there is nothing to suggest what they contain. I pick out the first one and insert it into the cassette player. Then I start the ignition, press
play
and set off. 

Interpreters
was inspired by a journey I made to Germany for the eightieth birthday celebrations of an old family friend. On returning to England, I knew I wanted to write about the experience of being a middle-class child of immigrant parents and the degree to which we are defined by, and interpret, our upbringing. Above all, I wanted to explore the changing experience of childhood – particularly a 1970s childhood, when children were largely excluded from the complexities of adult life and when there was no sense of entitlement to an explanation of, or information about, their parents’ lives. I wanted, too, to better understand the experience of growing up so close to the Second World War, to recognise the wish of many people to place a distance between their present and that particular element of their pasts. And to explore the ambiguities of young, ordinary people who grew up in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s feeling, decades later, a requirement upon them to share in an experience of collective shame.

During the years that I have spent thinking about the ethical issues inherent in writing memoir and autobiography, while working on a PhD in creative writing at the University of Sussex, I have come to share something of Lily Briscoe’s belief, in
To the Lighthouse
, that we can never really know the truth about anyone or any event, that ‘this making up scenes about them, is what we call “knowing” people, “thinking” of them, “being fond” of them! Not a word of it [is] true…’. Increasingly I have come to believe that if one can never really know the truth, even about those closest to us, it would be more ethical, even more ‘true’, to fictionalise whatever truths we think we know.

In
Interpreters
, I have attempted to retain the emotional core of my childhood and a few key facts. I am indebted to my indomitable grandmother’s memoirs of her years in Turkey, on which I have drawn quite heavily. Beyond this,
Interpreters
is a work of fiction. But there are some emotional truths within that fiction. Like Julia, I wish I had known my father better and for longer. Max was inspired by the very precious relationship I have with my two brothers (neither of whom is a free-spirited, blond-haired Steiner school teacher, artist or foster-carer). Julia’s mother is a product of my imagination but very much inspired by the love, respect and gratitude I feel for my own mother.

I am grateful to my husband, Alastair, and my children, Anna and Sebastian, for their unstinting love and support. Bobbie Farsides and Bruce Young were hugely encouraging at the start of my writing career and continue to be so. Many thanks, too, for their support and encouragement in so very many ways, to Lee-Anne Mason, Kate Whyman, Martha Leyton, Martin Shovel, Sarah Mistry, Paul Keyte, Margaretta Jolly and Sue Roe. I am indebted to Candida Lacey and to Vicky Blunden, Linda McQueen and all at Myriad Editions for their support, belief and editorial suggestions. I am grateful, too, to my colleagues and students at Brighton and Sussex Medical School for the most stimulating and enjoyable ‘day job’ anyone could wish for. And thanks to Arts Council England for the Grant for the Arts that bought me some writing time in the tranquil silence of St Cuthman’s Retreat Centre.