Interpreters (2 page)

‘Susanna could’ve chosen
me
. I chose a different way of living, didn’t I? All those years we lived in Africa. Just her and me?’

‘But she didn’t. Maybe because she didn’t feel she had to. Because you brought her up to be her own person, who makes her own decisions without worrying about what anyone else thinks of them. She didn’t need to agonise about upsetting you, because she knows how strong you are. That’s a good thing, isn’t it? You can’t have it both ways. Though that’s never stopped you from trying.’

‘But what do you think it looks like? That Susanna’s most significant influence is her
uncle
. Not her mother.’

‘That’s not true, and, even if it was, what’s so bad about that?’

‘You’d know if you’d had children.’

‘I have had children,’ said Max quietly. ‘Lots of them.’

If I were to get out of the car and walk past the row of shops where the parking attendant is still lingering, I’d pass the church where the gap-toothed vicar used to smile down at the Brownies and Cubs on church parade and hand out daffodils for us to take home on Mothering Sunday. I’d get to the privet hedges where Max and I used to pick food for our stick insects as we dawdled home for Sunday lunch. Amazingly, there’s still a farm here, its entrance at the far end of the shopping parade. We came here on a Sunday School outing once and were made to sing hymns in the fields. The farm labourers stood leaning on their rakes and pitchforks, smiling in a slightly embarrassed way as we sang ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’, Mr-T-in-charge-of-
under-sevens
’ joyful contralto carrying in the autumn breeze. I feel my ears reddening just thinking about it. I should put some money in the parking meter. I should walk through those fields again now. Walk fast for a couple of hours until I feel better. But I don’t get out of the car. I fumble in the glove compartment for one of the compilation cassettes that Susanna made me, years ago.
Happy Birthday, Mum
, it says on the label in her teenage handwriting.
I love you.
Hope you love this
. There is a little heart above the
i
. I push the cassette into the player, then pull away from the church and set off towards our old house. 

Eynsford Park Estate is a tribute to the architectural glory of the 1960s, whose designers favoured the style of building most small children will produce if prevailed upon to draw a house. All that is missing are the sun’s rays and the little black ‘m’s flying joyfully in the sky. When we moved here from a hospital flat in Bloomsbury the cement was still drying; the white paint on the timber cladding still gleamed; the newly seeded grass was only just beginning to clothe the bald verges. Our house, in Tenterden Close, was one of eight built round a circular green. For my mother it was like living in a Sartre play – only one way in and no way out. For us – for Max and me – it was heaven.

The first thing I notice as I drive into the cul-de-sac are the trees. On the green are three mature silver birches. For a moment I wonder how and when they got there. Then I realise that they are the saplings that used to serve us so well as rounders posts, as home in our games of ‘It’, as poles to grab on to and swing round and round until, too dizzy to stand up, we would collapse, shrieking with laughter, on to the grass. The trees are only a couple of years younger than I am. They have aged rather better.

I pull up outside number four, eject the cassette and switch off the engine. I sit in the car and look at the back door which, as with all the identical houses round the green, is at the side of the house. And I see the six-year-old me going up to it. In her school uniform – grey skirt, white shirt, maroon cardigan,
grey and maroon striped tie, grey felt hat. She tries to open the door but it is locked. It is never locked. She knocks. After a while the door is opened by the woman who cleans for us once a week.

It’s odd – I haven’t thought about that woman for decades. Mrs Prior. That was her name. I remember asking her why she never went to the toilet. I couldn’t understand why my question – couched in genuine admiration for her mighty bladder – should have caused so much offence. I don’t think she liked us much. In my memory, she and Brown Owl have merged into one – grey curls, fat calves and a general air of disapproval.

The six-year-old me goes into the house and shuts the door. Mrs Prior looks at me. ‘Your mother’s not here,’ she says. She sounds irritated and anxious all at once.

‘Where is she, then?’

‘She’s gone away for a rest.’

‘When’s she coming back?’

‘I don’t know – you’ll have to ask your father when he gets home from work.’

‘Will she be back tomorrow?’

‘I
very
much doubt it.’

‘When, then?’

‘I’ve told you, I don’t know. I was just rung up and asked to come along to be here when you and Max got home from school. I don’t know who it was I spoke to, I’m sure. It wasn’t your mother. And it’s not as though I haven’t got anything else I should be doing today. It’s my afternoon for the Nunns at number one. I don’t suppose they’re best pleased. I’ll be off as soon as your father’s home. So wash your hands and sit down and have a biscuit and a glass of squash. And then get on with your spellings or numbers or something quiet. Max’ll be home from his swimming lesson shortly.’

Mrs Prior was talking rubbish, I was sure of that. I knew my mother hadn’t gone away for a rest. Why should she need
a rest? She wasn’t tired at all. She was always racing around. I knew exactly what had happened.

My mother had told me and Max that lying was a terrible, unforgivable thing. I couldn’t remember who had lied to whom or what about, but it must have been something quite major. There were things called white lies, she had told us, which were all right sometimes, but lying – proper lying – was always wrong. Lying destroyed people’s lives, she had said, looking as if she was about to cry. It destroyed whole countries. We couldn’t quite see how lying could do
that
much damage but we hadn’t said anything. It was best not to when she was in that kind of a mood. But some time in the weeks leading up to her disappearance she had lied to my grandmother. I had listened to the phone call, sitting halfway up the stairs in my dark blue brushed-nylon nightie, and I knew, as I heard her tell her mother-in-law that Max and I would not be able to go and stay with her in Oxford after all as we were both ill and weren’t up to travelling by train, and then elaborate wildly on the story, that something terrible was happening. We weren’t ill at all. It was a complete lie. And not even a white one. If anyone wasn’t feeling well, it was
her
, not us. We had tried not to stare at her when she had come home from the dentist some weeks earlier, her face bloated and mottled, her mouth a mess of pulpy red and nothingness where once her teeth had been. She’d had to keep wiping away the blood-flecked spit that trickled from her swollen mouth. She still couldn’t speak very well, her ‘s’s were funny. But now she had smart new plastic teeth and, though for some reason she wouldn’t speak to our father, wouldn’t eat with us and seemed generally angry about everything, she wasn’t really any more ill than we were. And we were fine.

After she put the phone down, she had gone into her bedroom, sat down on the floor, and started to cry. I crept on to her lap and put my arms around her but she didn’t stop. She didn’t even put her arms around me. Max brought
her a cup of tea with four sugars in, even though we weren’t really allowed to use the kettle, but she left it to get cold. She just sat there crying for hours and hours. We’d seen her cry before, but only once or twice, and nothing like this. We put ourselves to bed and lay shivering in the dark. We heard our father come home, and eventually go upstairs and into the bedroom – and then the screaming started. Some time, in the middle of the night, I woke up. My mother was still crying and shouting at my father. If he was still in the room, he wasn’t saying anything.

I got out of bed and went into Max’s room. The bed was empty. I opened the cupboard door.

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Listen to what she’s saying.’

But Max slept on, his white blanket pulled up around his ears.

So yes, that day, when I came home to an empty house, I knew exactly what had happened. My mother had lied and then she’d gone mad – that was why she had been so strange when she came to pick me up from Jackie’s house – and then she had been put away somewhere. In a way, I was relieved.

‘Were you glad?’ I asked Max years later in Dorset. We were standing in a field behind the Steiner school at which he had been teaching for the past three years. The fuchsia hedges, barely visible through the freezing fog, were stiff with frost. I had forgotten what English winters could be like, and my whole body rebelled against the biting cold.

‘Glad?’ he asked.

‘When Mum went away. That first time.’

He didn’t answer. I turned to look at him. He was gazing over at a group of children bundled up in layers of colourful jumpers, stripy tights, bobble hats and woolly mittens who were playing skipping games, their breath rising in gusts of smoke and merging with the white sky.

Windmill, windmill going round and round

Along came the farmer with grain to grind.

He was smiling – a smile suffused with such serenity that I wanted to push him to the frozen ground and hit him very hard.

‘Is it compulsory to wear hand-knitted rainbow jumpers at a Steiner school?’ I asked viciously. ‘And Peruvian hats with ear flaps?’

‘Sorry?’ he replied, not taking his eyes off the children.

‘And do you have to be called Griffin or Ocean or… or… Gaia? What if you’re called Kevin or Penelope or something? What if your father’s a tax accountant or a civil servant, or a bus conductor, and not a bloody biodynamic beekeeper or a llama-breeder or… or a fucking
shaman
? What if you feel uncomfortable cultivating your dreadlocks and your organic dope? If it’s not really
you
? What if you want to grow
dahlias
?’

‘Why are you so angry?’ he asked quietly, turning to look at me.

‘Why aren’t you?’ I shouted, my voice hoarse with cold and fury.

The small skippers stopped their game. They looked over at us, curious to see what would happen next. Max squeezed my arm then walked up to the children. He hugged the smallest one then crouched down and said something to them that I couldn’t hear. After a few seconds the children regrouped and two of them began turning the rope.

‘Higher!’ Max shouted.

The two rope-turners grasped the end of the rope with both hands, their faces screwed up with effort and concentration, and the rope soared high above them.

Max leaped forward and, as the rope touched the ground, he jumped. He did star jumps, tuck jumps; he hopped first on one foot and then the other. His long blond curls danced around his head. The children laughed and yelled out words of encouragement. I watched Max’s face. And what I saw was joy. Sheer joy.

‘Come on!’ he called to me, holding out his arms. But I shook my head and walked away so that the children wouldn’t see me cry.

‘I didn’t know you could skip,’ I said later, as we sat by the fire in the little cottage he shared with another teacher and a couple of ancient lurchers he had inherited from a neighbour who had died a couple of years ago. ‘You’re quite good.’ The wood was damp and spat on to the stone hearth. We watched the marooned embers glow and die. The dogs whimpered and kicked in their sleep as they dreamed of rabbits and wide open spaces.

‘Thanks.’

‘I’m sorry I shouted. Very un-Steiner.’

‘It’s OK.’

‘I just wanted you to tell me that you know what I’m talking about. You were
there
, Max. In your previous incarnation as a quite normal person who didn’t wear fingerless gloves and who occasionally brushed his hair.’

Max held out his still-gloved hands in a gesture of conciliation. ‘I
do
know what you’re talking about,’ he said gently.

And I, as usual, felt ashamed. He was always the peacemaker, the good guy, the one who thought the best of everyone, even when all the evidence was there to suggest it would be very much wiser not to. He was the one who would hitch-hike through Europe and end up paying for the driver’s petrol. The one who would invite total strangers into his house with no fear of being macheted to death in his sleep. Who could never pass a beggar without giving them whatever he had on him. I remember, when he was about ten, he gave the remains of his Mars bar to a gypsy girl in Dublin. He didn’t notice the expression of scorn on her face, and I didn’t have the heart to mention it. Max never judged, never criticised. Not like me. Once, when we were walking to school together, and for a reason I can no longer remember, I
screamed at him to shut up and drop dead. ‘Look around, and say that again,’ he said, calmly and a little sadly, nodding up at the top of a garden fence. There, caught in some raspberry netting and hanging lifeless from one spindly foot, was a thrush. It stared at me, its eye opaque and sunken. I kept quiet for a while after that.

During the period that I most adored Max, I’d follow him wherever he went. He never objected when I insisted on accompanying him on his ‘Bob-a-Job’ missions round the estate. I somehow doubt that the Scout Association still encourages little boys in shorts to go into complete strangers’ houses and offer to do anything for them for five pence. It’s a shame, in a way. While Max polished the neighbours’ silver golfing trophies, weeded their flowerbeds or cleaned their shoes, I would sit drinking Ribena and eating squashed-fly biscuits off brightly coloured melamine plates, chattering about my rabbit or my current favourite book or TV programme to the housewives in their housecoats or floral pinnies.

‘And I wanted you to tell me that I’m doing it better. With Susanna,’ I said, hoping that his housemate Francesca – who didn’t seem able to take her eyes off Max whenever they were together (something Max denied vehemently when I pointed it out to him) – would stay in the kitchen a little longer, perfecting the meal that it was her turn to cook. ‘No, I don’t mean better. That sounds awful. Unfair. I don’t really know what I mean.’

‘You’re doing fine. Susanna’s a lovely child. Extraordinarily lovely, in fact. You know that.’

‘And now you’re supposed to say, “And you’re a great mother.”’

‘You don’t need me to tell you that.’

‘But I’d like you to.’

‘You’re doing absolutely fine. Though of course she’ll have inherited most of her finer points from her Uncle Max.’

‘Oh, yeah!’

‘Or her father.’

‘You don’t know anything about him.’

‘No, but I’d like to. As you know. And you do realise that Susanna is going to want to know, sooner or later?’

‘She might not.’

‘Oh, Julia,’ Max laughed as he walked over to the deep armchair in the corner of the room where Susanna was sleeping. He felt her forehead and stroked her blonde hair off her face. He pulled the blankets up to her chin. Then he came back to the fire and hugged me. His hair smelt of woodsmoke and winter sky. ‘You’re crazy.’

‘Hey,’ I said, looking over his shoulder at the mantelpiece. ‘A postcard. Where’s she gone this time?’

He walked across the room and picked up the card. ‘Haven’t you had one from here?’ he asked, turning it over.

‘It probably arrived after I left for England. If it arrived at all. I only seem to get about one in three things through the post.’

‘Orvieto.’

‘Spain.’

‘Italy, actually.’

‘I knew that.’

‘Of course you did.’

‘I
did
.’

‘Here, shove up.’ Max sat down next to me, then stretched out and lay with his head in my lap, his bare feet dangling over the end of the sofa. ‘Tell me a story,’ he said, shutting his eyes. He put on his best BBC documentary-maker voice. ‘
Tell me about your time in Africa.
Ouch! No pinching. Go on. Tell me something.’

And so I described the reddish-brown scrub, the vast baobab trees, the women in their bright batik wrappers and head-dresses harvesting chilli peppers. I told him about the gaggles of little girls in faded cotton dresses and worn
flip-flops,
who would run into our compound on their way home from school to play with Susanna, picking her up and tying her to their backs or bringing her toys made of plastic bottles or old Coke cans when she grew too big for them to carry around. I told him about the hours I spent in the villages, watching, listening, recording, writing.