Living with Strangers (4 page)

I finished my tea and took Chloé into the front room, the vast space we called the schoolroom. The house had once been a private dance school and still bore witness in the scuffed, dusty parquet and the oak barre that ran along the length of the room. There were mirrors too, but Molly had them removed, replacing them, over the years, with Josef’s prolific artwork. There was always music here – jazz, delta blues, the new folk revival. I remembered Adam playing the guitar – there was no shortage of girls with long floppy hair willing to sing for him. Often we were joined by others – friends, colleagues, pupils, neighbours – Saul called them the
waifs and strays.
A curious élite, they would just turn up, letting themselves in through a front door that was never locked, even at night, attaching themselves to our hospitality, sometimes for days at a time, lounging on the floor of the schoolroom or draping themselves across the sofas, reading old copies of
Peace News
and smoking strange cigarettes.

My job, if I dared to venture in, was to bring coffee. Sometimes, encouraged by a smile or nod of thanks, I would pick up something to read and sit in a corner, trying desperately to understand it. But the papers and pamphlets that were piled up around the schoolroom held little fascination for me then, much as I wished they did.

In the evenings, others would arrive for a meeting; the room would fill up, a profusion of smoke and duffel coats. Adam and Josef disappeared in there with Saul after supper and Molly too, when the little ones were asleep. I wasn’t supposed to be involved, was supposed to go to bed, but sometimes I would creep in, hiding at the back, sitting on a pile of newspapers. Not much of what I heard made sense but Saul spoke a lot at these meetings, more than was usual in the ebb and flow of our family. He was very serious, speaking with uncharacteristic intensity. At times he seemed to lose his words altogether and would shake his head and have to sit down again. Adam too was developing a taste for public speaking. The same group of floppy-haired females would sit on the floor at the front and gaze up devotedly whenever he opened his mouth.

I hovered in the middle, too young and too old, stuck between the two phases of the family, cut off even then, when everything was still good. I did try to keep up, to grasp some notion of the issues, but was intimidated by the length of the words:
disarmament, apartheid, unilateral
. For all the lively debate that took place in our house, it was hard to ask questions, hard to admit that I’d not miraculously absorbed what was going on, that I didn’t know the answers. I feared Adam’s scornful
Honestly Maddie, don’t you ever listen,
or worried that Josef might think me an idiot. So I would seek out Saul’s study and climb into the leather armchair by the leaky window that looked out over the garden. There, all the complex, confusing aspects of the world were taken care of and I did gradually learn more – enough to contribute round the table, to make my voice heard above the din of dispute and erudition. I had always loved the study, piled high with papers, journals and schoolwork, dark and heavy with Saul’s pipe smoke. He never lost his taste for Balkan tobacco, only now it seemed, it was killing him.

*

The schoolroom held no surprises; almost everything remained the same: the couch, the floor cushions, Josef’s art work on the wall above the barre; even the old jute curtains, unhooked at one end of the rod, still hung there, thinly preserved. There were just two additions – an upright piano, which I assumed had been acquired for Sophie and a wicker basket I remembered Molly using for laundry, which now held a few soft toys, a box of bricks, some old cars. Saul’s study I avoided; he had his bed in there now and was still sleeping. I would deal with that in time.

Upstairs, the first floor had changed little too, though the landing walls were a different colour and the antique bathroom suite replaced by something vaguely modern. Paul had put our bags in my old room on the second floor; I stole up there and opened the door. There was first a touch of Oma, whose room it had been before me, faintly present in the threadbare rug, the tarnished oval mirror, her bookcase. And then my own self – old and new divided. On the desk in the corner stood the green bottle with its chipped treasure; faded yellowing papers on my notice board rustled as I moved past them to the window. There I touched the bars that Saul had put up for safety, ran my finger in the dust on the sill.

Molly had made my bed and put up a cot – Sophie’s cot, with blue rabbits on the side, painted by Josef – a change from his usual artwork. Where had it been all these years? Had Adam used it for his son Samuel – the nephew I knew nothing about?

I sat down on the bed and fished in my bag for the letters, the small bundle that had started this long journey into the past, the transition object, a comfort from the old world to the new. Saul’s illness had prompted me to action, but in these letters lay the roots of why so much had gone wrong, of why I’d stayed away. Now I needed some answers, needed to find out what had happened all those years ago, why Josef had gone and why the very mention of his name had been met with a wall of silence – a silence that had followed me for fifteen years.

I put the letters down on the desk, set out Chloé’s night things and took our sponge bags to the bathroom. Then, leaning over the bannisters I heard Saul’s voice and went downstairs to meet him.

*

We were only four around the supper table. Sophie, on a music course in Manchester, would not be back until the end of the week. Chloé had finally fallen asleep but she’d settled badly, fretful in a new place. I left the table once or twice to check on her – she suddenly seemed a long way away.

Saul sat in his usual place at one end of the table. He picked at his food, as Oma used to do. The shock of his appearance had abated now; I had been prepared for change but was unwilling and unable to imagine what this illness would have done to him. Stooped and pale, a stone lighter, he had stood in the hall as I came down the stairs, putting out a hand as I reached the bottom. ‘Madeleine,’ was all he said. I took his hand and kissed him gently on the cheek.

Paul had cooked; it was a delightful meal of tiny portions, beautifully decorated. I discovered he now spent many hours in the kitchen.

‘It’s French,’ he said, ‘Nouvelle Cuisine, don’t they call it? Thought it might make you feel at home.’

I’d never eaten such food in France and I was a long way from feeling at home, but I loved him for the thought. He’d done something clever with cauliflower and mashed carrots; a piece of chicken breast lay next to them, zigzagged across with a dark brown sauce.

‘This is very good,’ I said.

‘It’s my new hobby – while I’m looking for a proper job.’ Paul kept his eyes on the plate. ‘It’s not easy, especially for people like me – not being a graduate or anything. I do have a sandwich round though – delivering to offices and things.’

‘But your tennis? Sophie says you’re coaching.’

‘Only in the summer. Unless you can go abroad, it’s very seasonal.’ He looked at me briefly. ‘I suppose I realise I’m not that good. A few local championships don’t make a career – it’s just the way it is. It’s the same with music – you need to excel, like Sophie.’

Was there envy in his voice? Did he fleetingly colour up and push his knife just a little too hard into the chicken?

Saul slowly emptied his mouth. ‘Sophie’s been offered a place at the Royal Academy. She starts in September.’

‘If she gets the grades.’ Molly added.

‘For ‘A’ level?’

‘And music. She needs grade 8 on the cello.’

I had never doubted Sophie’s skill – that she would sail through life unopposed, that her challenges would be minimal. But Paul – this was unexpected. He was dabbling – dabbling as I had done for years, trying things out, trying for the niche but never quite sure if you’ve found it. I had thought it was otherwise; I’d imagined that Josef and I were the only tainted, messy ones – Adam, Paul and Sophie clear cut. I helped myself to pommes sautées, proud for Sophie, but my heart went out to Paul.

Later, after clearing supper, I found Molly and Saul in the study. No longer much of a study, it had become simply his room. They were both reading; old postures, marginally changed, the room itself absorbing the paraphernalia of sickness – a bed, a side table covered with bottles and packets. They had brought in another armchair; I remembered it had been in the warm corner of the kitchen where Molly sat in the evenings when Saul was working.

They both looked up, surprised, as if forgetting that I’d come home. Maybe it simply forced them to acknowledge why I’d done so. Since Molly’s letter, I’d woken many times in the night, stalked again by dread; the fearful emptiness I nursed after Josef left, had returned. How must it be for them, now that mortality beckoned? How must it have been for them then, when they lost a son?

Saul put down his book. ‘The little one’s asleep?’

‘I think so. It’s been a long day.’

‘And you? Have you everything you need?’

‘Everything’s fine, thanks. I think I’ll go up now. See you in the morning.’ I hovered a moment, then wished them goodnight.

‘Goodnight, Madeleine,’ they said, and both returned to their books.
Plus ça change
… I thought.

*

Wide awake, I lay in my old bed looking up at the steep pitched ceiling. In the cot, Chloé slept sideways, her feet hanging down through the bars, worn out from the journey, the newness of it all. I eased her back gently – I didn’t want to risk her waking again.

There was no sound in the house. I’d vaguely heard Paul come in, the stairs creaking as he made his way up to his room. Pulling a blanket from the bed, I wrapped myself in it, drew back the curtains and opened the window. I looked again down the long years to the garden, to the plum tree and the endless green-gold muddle that lay beneath. There was no moon, no stars, but I saw how the red glow of North London permanently lit the sky. I thought of my little home in France, of the flat above the bar where at night there was no light at all, just a deep, black stillness arching up over the house, and the darker line on the horizon that marked the edge of the forest.

The air was damp and cool, but I caught a breath of something else too, a spring breath, something new. I closed the window, went to the desk where the bundle of letters now lay and unfastened them. The bedroom door was ajar; a thin strip of light came in from the landing, enough to see by, enough to remind me of what was contained within those fragile pages.

Here, in the room where I’d written them, I picked up the letters one by one, stumbling again through my early years. I saw my father standing by the window, telling me Josef had gone, then the weeks, months, years of silence that followed, when I had tried to grow up in a home that was falling apart.

7
^th
June 1963

The day after Josef leaves, I go into the garden and hide among the raspberry canes. I sit crying on an old upturned bucket. Later, I’m violently sick in the bathroom, retching and choking until nothing more will come. Molly hears me and calls from outside the door; she sounds angry, as if I have no business being ill. I go to lie down on my bed, light-headed and sore, unable to think.

In the weeks that follow, I grow fierce, or suddenly sullen, then intensely sad, crying at night, in the morning, in the canteen at school. Life is disconnected. I wander outside normal parameters, apart and unattached, rolling in one direction while the rest of the world rolls in another. Adjacent cogs, functioning at a tangent.

I miss Josef most at mealtimes; his place opposite mine gapes vacantly. We still assemble at suppertime – the little ones, Molly, Saul and I – but we sit amid the stunned silence now, passing dishes between us like offerings we are too shocked to acknowledge. Sophie watches, her large eyes confused, searching for a cue, the moment that will give her permission to speak. But no cue comes and she sits, meal after meal, infected by the sadness, reprimanded by association and not knowing why.

Paul tries. Paul always tries. The sudden silence at the table he takes as an excuse to fill the gaps, for asking the obvious questions that I dare not: Where’s Josef? When’s he coming home? Is he ill? Is he dead? Molly and Saul exchange a glance, Molly puts a gentle hand on Paul’s wrist so that he too looks from one to the other, bewildered. And Saul, always last to leave the table, waiting for the room to clear before lighting his pipe, now often stands up in the middle of the meal as if he’s suddenly remembered something, and leaves us, his food half-eaten, congealed on the plate.

I begin to adopt strange eating habits, one day ravenously hungry, the next wanting nothing at all. I lose weight; my hair, thick and stubbornly wavy like Molly’s, begins to fall out in handfuls, which I gather up and put in the dustbin so that no one will see. I grow spots across my back and forehead. If I’m not being sick I catch a succession of colds, feverish things that last for weeks. Molly watches me from a distance, tempting me with food she spends hours preparing, cloistered in the kitchen while Saul shuts himself away in his study.

We are all three shut away then, each to our own corner, quietly moving back to back, avoiding eyes and common spaces, not looking as we take refuge in the silence. Only Paul and Sophie connect us, their childish optimism overlays it all with an innocent veneer of chatter, routine, normality. I ask them later what they remember from that time. It transpires they have barely a memory at all, Josef a faint presence fabricated from the few photos we have and the aching void that is his room. I creep in there sometimes and sit on his bed, soothed by the smell of his work – of linseed oil, paint and smoke. His art things lie untouched, his pictures propped up around the walls. A ghost room.

At Christmas Adam comes home, Paul and Sophie get over-excited and we barely touch the mountains of food that Molly has prepared. Adam takes parcels back to Manchester and we’re eating cold turkey for weeks.

It helps that Saul is at school, that his job there means I can travel with him in the car sometimes, when I can’t face the bus, the questions, the inquisitive eyes. This sick sadness I carry around is soothed a little knowing he’s nearby, a piece of home transposed, even though the place I knew as home no longer exists.