Letters From Prague (3 page)

Perhaps he had stopped thinking of her by now: it was months since he wrote that letter. Perhaps he had given up hope of hearing from her, perhaps he thought she'd forgotten.

Forgotten!

I shall write to you, Karel, thought Harriet, leaning against the window pane. I shall write, and send parcels, and keep on writing. She closed her eyes and saw him in the shabby Earls Court bedsit, his thin suntanned face alight with affection and hope. She felt his arms go round her, drawing her close. She saw the ugly monstrous tanks, parting the weeping crowds on the streets of his city, the blank bemused faces of the young Russian soldiers, looking about them.

One day, we shall be together again, she thought. One day I shall see you again, Karel.

They stood outside the buffet near the Continental platform, having an argument: Harriet Pickering, tall, dark, furious, and her daughter Marsha Pickering, ten next birthday, tall for her age, dark hair cut in a bob, adamant.

Marsha was wearing blue-striped shorts, bright pink sweatshirt and trainers, every item new, chosen by her last Saturday and bought by Harriet for the journey. Beside them were two suitcases; each, in addition, carried a shoulder bag. Between them was the cause of the argument, just produced from Marsha's bag: small, white, pink-eyed and sleek, at present washing himself vigorously in her hands after his confinement. He was supposed to be in his nice airy cage, staying round the corner with Marsha's friend Ruby, who had been given a quantity of mouse food, mouse bedding and mouse instructions.

It was half-past ten on a cloudy morning in August, 1993, and their train went in twenty-five minutes. Harriet's parents, who had come to see them off, knew better than to intervene. Her father looked at the headlines, her mother looked at her watch.

Marsha said: ‘If he doesn't come, I'm not coming.'

‘You have no choice.'

‘I'll scream at the barrier,' said Marsha. ‘I'll scream and say you're abducting me. I'll ring up Childline. And the RSPCA.'

‘Look,' said Harriet, and drew a breath.

‘Look,' said Marsha fondly. ‘Isn't he sweet?'

Victor, for it was he, was bent over his right haunch, parting the fur with small, exquisite pink fingers and examining it with interest. Small mouse droppings fell through Marsha's fingers.

‘What,' demanded Harriet, ‘do you suppose we are going to do with him? How can we possibly take a mouse all that way?'

‘How,' demanded Marsha, ‘can we possibly leave him now? What are you going to do, abandon him on the station? Let him starve?'

Victor finished with the right haunch and returned to his face, running his hands all over at top speed, cleaning his handsome whiskers.

‘He could live with the pigeons,' said Harriet weakly. ‘He could have quite a nice life.'

For a moment there was a lull, as mother and daughter, each endowed with vivid imagination, pictured Victor, with small brown suitcase, setting up house with a benevolent pigeon family, living comfortably on crusts and burger buns, an interesting change from his usual well-monitored fare of rodent mix and grated vegetables; meeting, perhaps, another mouse. Marsha, with a rush of feeling, saw mouse babies, all in a nest; Harriet, whose vision of the bliss of motherhood had been tempered by the experience of living with Marsha, saw Victoria Station overrun with grey and white vermin. She saw poison being laid, and Victor eating it.

‘When,' she demanded, ‘did you go and get him from Ruby?'

‘This morning. While you were paying the milkman, and I had one last skateboard round the block, remember?'

Harriet remembered. She said, with real conviction: ‘Marsha, if I can't trust you, we're done for.'

‘I know,' Marsha was stroking Victor's long sleek back as he ran up her arm. ‘But I couldn't leave him. I'm sorry.'

They had spent the best part of ten minutes engaged in all this, and Harriet was dying for a coffee. They could get one on the train, but probably not for a while, and anyway it was nice to take one on with you, so you could avoid the first rush down the corridor, and settle down and relax.

With a nine-year old. And a mouse. All the way to Prague.

Harriet drew breath. ‘I'm sorry, too,' she said. ‘He's not coming.' She turned to her parents. ‘Help?'

They came to the rescue.

‘Darling.' Marsha's grandmother addressed her coaxingly.

Marsha looked mulish. ‘What?'

‘Please may we have him? Just until you come home? He'd be such good company when we'll be missing you both.'

‘I'll miss
him
,' said Marsha. ‘Anyway, you've got Thomas. He'll eat him, I know it.'

‘I know,' said her grandfather. ‘I've the very idea.'

‘What?'

‘He can come to the office. He can sit on my desk and entertain me while I do my sums. He can help.'

‘He needs cleaning out –'

‘I'll clean him out. I'll enjoy it. Much better than doing sums.'

‘With what?' asked Harriet. ‘You need sawdust, bedding, he has to have a dish, food, water bottle – honestly Marsha, this really is too bad. Poor Grandpa.'

‘I've got all those things,' said Marsha calmly. ‘They're all in my suitcase.'

Harriet looked at her. ‘Then you'd better get them out again, sharpish. And what on earth are we going to put him in now?'

Everyone thought, as Marsha bent to unzip her bursting bag.

‘A burger box?' suggested her grandmother.

Harriet looked at her gratefully.

‘Brilliant,' said Marsha, removing mouse equipment from amongst pyjamas and sweatshirts. ‘Can we get them to punch airholes in it?'

‘We'd better get a move on,' said Harriet's father.

Some minutes later they emerged from the buffet with a carton of orange juice, coffee in a polystyrene beaker and Victor in a polystyrene burger box, scrabbling. People were moving steadily through the barrier. They made for it, hotfoot.

‘Thank you,' said Harriet, hugging her parents. ‘Whatever would I do without you?'

‘Have a wonderful time.' Her father patted her shoulder. ‘Give our love to Hugh and Susanna.'

‘I wanted them to see Victor,' said Marsha.

‘Never mind, darling.' Her grandmother gently took the box.

‘Thank you so much for letting us borrow him. It'll do Grandpa the world of good.'

Marsha looked at the box. Beside them, the queue for the train moved faster.

‘Come on,' said Harriet quickly. ‘Come on, or we're done for.'

They all made their way down the platform. Reserved seats were waiting in Carriage D.

‘Promise me something,' said Harriet, as they settled themselves, and looked out to where her parents were waiting, holding the box with encouraging expressions.

‘What?'

‘Don't ever lie to me again.'

‘I didn't lie.'

‘Deceive, then. You know what I mean.'

‘OK.'

‘And for the rest of the journey you do as you're told, OK?'

Marsha hesitated.

‘Please?' said Harriet. She felt for her passport. Their passport: hers, with Marsha's photograph inside it, so no one could ever take her away. It had always, almost since the beginning, been just the two of them.

‘Don't keep on about it,' said Marsha. ‘I'll try.'

They both knew it was touch and go.

Their seats were opposite each other by the window of a No Smoking compartment; their luggage was stowed away above them. Harriet carefully removed the lid of the polystyrene beaker and let the smell of British Rail coffee waft with a little wreath of steam towards her. She sat back, waiting for it to cool, watching the compartment fill with travellers. Vast nylon rucksacks on aluminium frames were heaved about in the corridor, children ripped open packets of crisps and asked when they would get there; childless couples opened their books. Beside them, two clean Dutch students were settling into their seats. Since the end of term at the comprehensive school where she tried to teach, and at the primary school where Marsha was supposed to learn, Harriet had been ironing, packing, organising the departure of one lodger and the arrival of another, cancelling papers and milk. She had risen this morning at half-past six. Now she let the surrounding activity wash over her. Opposite, Marsha was pulling a sorry face. She'd be all right once they got moving.

Last-minute passengers were panting up to the doors. Harriet, drinking her coffee, barely took them in. She forgot about Marsha, forgot about the mouse. She saw an afternoon in autumn, twenty-five years ago, two figures on the same platform, both in denim jackets; she saw them cling to each other and kiss; she saw, as the last door now slammed to, Karel, at the window in the corridor, leaning out with, his cigarette, and she running alongside as the train began to move, waving and waving.

‘We write! We write!'

And they had written: the polished bureau which had stood once in the bedroom of her parents'house in Kensington stood now in the sitting room of her own house in Shepherd's Bush, and had in its second drawer a wooden box of letters. Each was written on thin cheap paper, each one worn from being unfolded and folded again, read and re-read.

Thank you for writing, I was pleased to hear from you
…
I am sorry not
to
have written, but things have been
…
I am afraid that
– something crossed out –
All is well, but
unfortunately
– something crossed out –
I am afraid that it has been a long time since I wrote to
you
…
I am afraid that it is difficult for me to write to you at present
…
I am afraid
…
I am afraid
…

Then they had stopped. The last worn letter in the box was dated March 1971. Harriet had read it with her dictionary-phrase book, sitting at the plain, light wood desk of her university study bedroom. Her life had changed: A-levels long distant, first-year history exams behind her, new people all around her. One, in particular, she liked the look of, as she had liked the look of Karel. Reading his letter, trying, yet again, to guess what lay behind the formal phrases, he seemed far from her in a way which she knew in her heart was due not only to absence, or distance, but her own preoccupations. He was fading. She had thought that would never happen, but she knew, if she were honest, that it was so.

And what, she thought then, folding the letter, and putting it back in its envelope, was the point of anything if one could not be honest?

There was a knock at the door.

‘Harriet? We're off – you ready?'

‘Coming!'

She put on her long dark Julie Christie coat and left the room, leaving the letter on the desk, leaving that part of her life behind her, running down the corridor to catch up with her friends.

Weeks later, feeling almost as though it were a task, she wrote, briefly:

Since it is so hard for us to communicate, perhaps it is better that we do not try, though I shall always remember you with affection and hope that all is well with you
…

She dropped the letter into the campus box next morning, on her way to a lecture, posting it with a card to her brother, who was working for his O-levels. And then, hurrying across the windswept grass and tarmac to the lecture theatre, she forgot about Karel.

The whistle blew, the train began to move.

‘We're off!' said Marsha, waving to her grandparents.

‘We're off.' Harriet smiled at her, and at them, waving back, standing near to each other, solid and kind.

‘Goodbye, goodbye.'

The train swung round the bend in the track. ‘All right?' she asked.

‘Not yet.' Marsha sat down again.

‘When will you be all right?'

‘When we get to Brussels. When we see Uncle Hugh and Susanna.' She unwrapped the straw on her carton of orange juice and began to drink.

‘Yes, I'm looking forward to seeing them, too.'

In truth. Harriet was a little apprehensive. Did merchant banker brothers really welcome impoverished teacher sisters? Would Susanna, a banker's daughter who did not, apparently, work, and with whom she had, surely, little in common, find showing them round the city a chore? Despite the fact that she had married her brother, and invited Marsha to be her bridesmaid, Harriet felt she hardly knew Susanna.

Marsha had been a pleased but somewhat astonished bridesmaid. She had never been to such an event in her life, and was unlikely to do so again, Harriet's friends being, on the whole, either resolutely unwed; partnered without formalities; or succumbing only as the children grew older, their grandparents sadder, slipping off to the Register Office in the lunch hour and holding a drunken party that evening.

‘So make the most of it,' Harriet told her daughter, twirling before the mirror of her grandmother's bedroom, in full-skirted cream silk with a dusty rose sash. It wasn't a church wedding, but Susanna had said she wanted the chance to dress up, and to dress Marsha up, and Marsha, uncertain at first, had, in the end, enjoyed unheard-of outings to Liberty's.

From downstairs came the muted exclamations of aunts, arriving, followed by uncles, clearing their throats.

Marsha regarded herself in the full-length mirror. ‘I look amazing!'

‘You do look nice,' said Harriet. Was this pretty child, with gleaming hair and satin pumps, really the one who spent most of her time in secondhand dungarees and trainers, refusing to do things? She held out a coronet of tiny cream silk flowers, with ribbons at the back. ‘Let's put this on now.' The gleaming head bent obediently; Harriet settled the coronet in place, smoothed out the pair of cream ribbons. Together, mother and daughter regarded the reflection, and hugged each, other. ‘Perfect. Perfect!'