A Small Person Far Away (16 page)

“I’m so glad it’s all right.”

“Yes, well, of course we’ll have to see.” But her eyes were bright. “He wants us to go away on a holiday together,” she said. “As soon as I’m better. The doctor thinks I should stay here for a few days, and then maybe a week in a convalescent home.” She made a face. “God knows how much it’ll all cost. But after that – we thought, not Italy at this time of year, but perhaps somewhere in the Alps.”

“It sounds a very good idea.”

“Yes.” Her lip quivered for a moment. “I think I probably need it. It’s all been quite a shock.”

“Of course.”

“Yes. The doctor says I’m lucky to have come through it. He says I nearly died.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I still think it might have been best.”

“Nonsense, Mama,” said Max.

Mama looked suddenly very pleased.

“It seems,” she said, “that anyone less strong than me certainly would have done.”

Later the conversation drifted to the past. “Do you remember?” said Mama. How she used to buy bruised strawberries in Paris for almost nothing and cut off the bad bits to make a delicious Sunday pudding. The bomb that wrecked their Bloomsbury boarding house. The last years in Putney.

“You had a blue hat with a veil,” said Anna.

“That’s right. I got it at C&A, and everyone thought it came from Bond Street.”

“That woman who ran the boarding house – she used to put a camp bed up for me when I came to visit and never charged me,” said Max. “She was a very decent soul.”

“She ended up by marrying one of the guests, a Pole. Do you remember, the one who made the bird noises? We used to call him the Woodpigeon.”

“It was all quite funny, really,” said Anna, but Mama would not have it.

“It was awful,” she said. “It was the most awful time of my life.”

When the nurse brought her supper, she ate it in their company, trying to press various bits upon them. “Wouldn’t you like just a little bit of meat?” she would say. “Or at least a carrot?”

They both assured her that they would be able to eat at the party, and she seemed to regret not being able to go. “There’ll be a lot of interesting people,” she said. “Just about everyone from the British Council.”

But when it came near the time for them to leave, all her new-found composure collapsed. She clung to Max and tears ran down her cheeks.

“I’ll wait in the entrance hall,” said Anna. She kissed Mama. “See you in the morning,” she said as cheerfully as she could manage. Mama gazed at her distractedly through her tears. “Of course,” she murmured. “You’ll still be here, won’t you, Anna.” Then she turned back to Max, and the last thing Anna heard as she left the room was her unhappy voice saying, “Oh, Max – I don’t know if I can go on.”

Outside, the lights in the corridors were already dimmed down. There was no one about and, although it was not yet nine o’clock, it felt like the middle of the night. In the entrance hall, only a shaded lamp shone on the desk where the porter sat writing figures in a book, and he did not look up when Anna came in. The heating must be turned down as well as the lights, she thought, for she felt suddenly cold.

She found a chair and sat there, listening to the scratching of the porter’s pen and thinking about Mama. Mama weeping, Mama saying, “I can’t go on,” Mama in the blue hat…

A car drove past outside, scraping the gravel. The waiting-room chairs threw leaping shadows across the walls, and in the glass kiosk where flowers and chocolates were sold during the day, a tinselly bird on a box of sweets was momentarily picked out and sparkled in the darkness.

And then she suddenly remembered. She remembered the time Mama had cried while wearing her blue hat with the veil. Not gradually, but all at once, completely, as though it had just that minute happened, and her first feeling was one of amazement that she could ever have forgotten.

It had happened – if anything had happened at all – during her first year at art school. Everyone had thought that, once the war was over, things would be better, but for Mama and Papa they had got worse. Papa’s health was failing and, since so many young people had returned from the fighting, Mama could no longer get even the third-rate secretarial jobs which had, until then, kept them afloat.

Anna still shared a room with Mama and had felt full of compassion. But she was also doing what she wanted for the first time since she was grown up. She had only three years in which to do it, and she was determined that nothing was going to stop her. She still had long conversations with Papa about painting and writing – things which interested them both. But when Mama started on her money worries and the hopelessness of the future, there was a point beyond which she would not listen. She would nod her head deceitfully and escape into thoughts of her work and her friends, and Mama who always knew, of course, what she was up to, would call her cold and unaffectionate.

And then one day – it must have been a Saturday, because she had been shopping in Putney High Street – this curious thing had happened.

She had just caught a bus home and was still standing on the platform, when she had heard her name called by what seemed to be a disembodied voice. She was tired and nervous after pretending to listen to Mama late into the previous night, and for a moment the sound had really frightened her. Then she had seen Mama’s face, white and tense, looking up at her from the pavement as the bus swept by, and she had jumped off at the traffic lights and hurried back to her.

“What is it?” she had asked, and even now she could clearly see Mama standing there, outside Woolworth’s, shouting, “I don’t want to go on! I can’t!”

She had felt angry and helpless, but before she could say anything, Mama had cried, “It didn’t work. I really tried and it didn’t work.”

“What didn’t work?” she had asked, and Mama had said, “The Professor’s pills.” Then she had looked Anna straight in the eye and said, “I took them.”

At first, she remembered, she had not known what Mama was talking about. She had just stared at Mama as she stood there in her blue hat with a windowful of Woolworth’s Easter chicks behind her. And then, suddenly, she had understood.

The Professor, a friend, had given Papa the pills in 1940, as a last resort in case he and Mama were captured by the Nazis. They were instant poison.

She had stared at Mama in horror and cried, “When did you take them?” and Mama had said, “Last night, when you were asleep. I took one, but nothing happened, and then I took the other, and still nothing happened, and then I thought perhaps there was a delayed effect and I waited, but nothing happened, nothing happened at all!” She had begun to cry, and then she had noticed Anna’s horrified face and said, “I took them in the bathroom, so that you wouldn’t find me dead in bed.”

Anna had suddenly felt very old – perhaps that was when it all began, she thought – and angry that Mama should have made her feel like this, and yet dreadfully, overwhelmingly sorry for her. She had been conscious of the pavement under her feet and of the shoppers pushing past her in and out of Woolworth’s, and she had looked at Mama crying and the Easter chicks behind her, and at last she had said, “Well, of course it would have made all the difference to me, finding you dead in the bathroom instead.”

Mama had sniffed and said, “I thought perhaps the maid might find me.”

“For God’s sake,” Anna had shouted, “the maid, me, Papa – what difference does it make?” and Mama had said in a small voice, “Well, I knew it would upset you, of course.” She had looked so absurd, with her snub nose and her blue hat with the veil, that Anna had suddenly started to laugh. Mama had asked, “Why is that funny?” But then she had laughed as well, and they had both become aware of an icy wind blowing down Putney High Street and had gone inside Woolworth’s to get warm.

She could not remember exactly what had happened after that. They had walked round Woolworth’s – she rather thought Mama had bought some mending thread – and they had talked about the extraordinary fact that the Professor’s pills had been completely innocuous. (“I might have known they wouldn’t work,” Mama had said, “I always thought he was a charlatan.”) She remembered wondering what the Professor would have done if there had really been a Nazi invasion. Would he then have replaced them with proper ones? But perhaps, said Mama, the pills they had were really effective, only they had lost their strength over the years. From what she could recall of her chemistry lessons at school, she seemed to believe that this was possible.

They had ended up drinking tea at Lyons and, with Mama sitting hale and hearty on the other side of the table, it had seemed as though, after all, nothing had really happened.

And had it? wondered Anna in the half-darkness of the hospital, while the sound of the car slowly faded, someone, somewhere, shut a door, and the porter’s pen went on scratching.

There had been so much talk, in those days, of suicide. For Mama, just talking about it might have been a kind of safety valve. Perhaps she never even took the pills, thought Anna, or else she knew all along that they wouldn’t work. If Mama had really tried to kill herself, she thought, surely I could not have forgotten. She could not remember ever talking about it to Max or Papa. But perhaps she had just not wanted to think about it, so as to get on with her own life.

She was still trying to work it out, when she jumped at a touch. It was Konrad, reassuringly large and patient.

“Your brother’s just coming,” he said. “Let’s go to this dreadful party, so you can ring up your Richard.”

Ken Hathaway lived in an old-fashioned flat full of heavy German furniture. He seemed inordinately pleased to see them and welcomed them with a delighted, rabbity smile.

“So nice to see new faces,” he cried. “The old ones do get rather used in such a small community – don’t you agree, Konrad?”

There was a large silver bowl containing a pale liquid with bits of fruit afloat in it, and a fair-haired young German was ladling it into glasses.

“German cold punch,” said Ken proudly. “Günther’s own concoction. God knows what he puts in it.”

Judging by the happy sounds of the guests, thought Anna, it was probably plenty.

As Ken was about to sweep them off and introduce them, Konrad put a restraining hand on his arm. “Just before we join the festivities,” he said, “do you think Anna could ring her husband in London?”

“Only very quickly,” she said.

Ken waved a generous hand. “My dear,” he said, “help yourself. It’s in the bedroom. But you’ll be lucky if you get through. There’ve been delays all day – this wretched Suez business, I suppose.”

She found the bedroom filled with everybody’s coats, and sat on the edge of the bed in a gap between them. The operator took a long time to answer and then gave a disapproving snort when asked for London. “Up to two hours’ delay,” he said, and was persuaded only with difficulty to book the call.

When she emerged from the bedroom, Konrad and Max had already been absorbed by the party. Konrad was talking to a bald man in a dark suit, and Max had got a middle-aged blonde who was gazing at him with the stunned delight so long familiar to Anna, as though she had just found a lot of gold at the bottom of her handbag. Then Ken bore down on her with a glass and an earnest-looking man who turned out to be some kind of academic.

“I’m interested in medieval history,” he shouted over the mixed English and German voices, “though here I’m working on—” But she never discovered what he was working on, for a grey-haired woman next to her gave a little scream.

“Suez! Hungary!” she cried. “What a fuss they make about these things. Here in Berlin we’re used to crises. Were you here during the Airlift?”

Her partner, a small clerkish person, had carelessly been elsewhere, and she abandoned him with contempt, but a fat German with glasses smiled his agreement.

“Berlin can take it,” he shouted, with difficulty, in English. “Like London,
nicht wahr
, in the bomps?”

Anna could think of nothing to reply to this, so she looked vague and thought of Richard, while the voices rose another decibel.

“… trigger off World War Three,” cried an invisible strategist, and the academic’s measured tones rose momentarily above the rest. “One old and one new empire, each clinging to its conquests…”

“More punch,” said Günther and filled up the glasses.

Someone had closed the bedroom door and she wondered if she would still be able to hear the telephone. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Ken lead Max away from the blonde who followed him sadly with her eyes, and introduce him to a tall man with a pipe.

“They could take Berlin in ten minutes,” said the grey-haired woman, and someone replied, “But the United States of America…”

Then Ken was upon her and propelled her to another part of the room, where various people asked after Mama and expressed pleasure at her recovering from pneumonia. Clearly Konrad had done a good job in explaining her illness.

“We really miss her,” said an American colonel, meaning it. “In a tight little community like ours…” A woman with a fringe said, “She’s the best translator we’ve got,” and a girl with freckles and a ponytail said, “Somehow you can always tell when she’s there.”

More punch – Ken pouring this time. A sudden burst of laughter from a group nearby, followed by a ringing sound, so that for a moment she thought it was the telephone, but it was only all of them clinking glasses.