A Small Person Far Away (2 page)

“Come on,” said Richard, “You need a drink.” He poured her some of the whisky they normally kept for visitors and she gulped it down. “And food,” he said. By the time they had made sandwiches and coffee and were sitting down to eat them in the little living room, she felt better.

“But I still don’t understand it,” she said, clasping the hot mug for comfort. “Surely nowadays when people get pneumonia the doctors just fill them with penicillin? Unless the Germans haven’t got it yet.”

“They must have.”

“Anyway, the Americans would have it, and they’re the ones she works for. And how did she ever get pneumonia in the first place?”

Richard considered it. “Didn’t she say something about sailing in her last letter? Perhaps if they’d had an accident – if she’d got very wet and cold and hadn’t changed her clothes—”

“Konrad would make her.”

For a moment they shared a vision of Konrad, solid and dependable, and Mama laughing and shouting, “It’s only a bit of water.” She always said a bit of water – it was one of the few mistakes she made in English. But perhaps she and Konrad spoke German together when they were alone. It astonished Anna that she had no idea whether they did or not.

“I’ll see if I can find the letter,” she said and suddenly remembered something. “I don’t believe I ever answered it.”

“We haven’t had it that long, have we?”

“I don’t know.”

The letter, when she uncovered it, turned out to be like most of Mama’s – a fairly emphatic account of small successes in her work and social life. She had been chosen to go to Hanover for a few days in connection with her work, and she and Konrad had been invited to a Thanksgiving party by an American general. The only reference to sailing was that the weather was now too cold to do so, and that she and Konrad were playing a lot of bridge instead. It was exactly one month old.

“It doesn’t matter, love,” said Richard. “You’ll be talking to Konrad tonight and if it’s really serious you’ll see your mother tomorrow.”

“I know.” But it still worried her. “I kept meaning to write,” she said. “But with the flat and the new job—” Somehow she felt that a letter would have protected Mama from catching pneumonia.

“Well, no one can catch pneumonia from playing bridge,” said Richard. “Not even your mother,” and she laughed because it was true. Mama did everything to excess.

Suddenly, for no particular reason, she remembered Mama trying to buy her some boots when they had first come to England. Mama had walked her the whole length of Oxford Street from Tottenham Court Road to Marble Arch and they had gone into every shoe shop on the way. Anna had soon noticed that the various branches of Dolcis, Lilley and Skinner and Mansfield all had the same stock, but Mama had remained convinced that somehow, somewhere, there might be lurking a pair of boots just fractionally better or cheaper than any of the rest. When at last they bought some similar to the very first pair they had seen, Mama had said, “Well, at least we know that we haven’t missed anything.”

Mama could never bear to miss anything, real or imaginary, from a cheaper pair of boots to a day in the sun.

“She’s a romantic,” said Anna. “She always has been. I suppose Papa was too, but in a different way.”

“What I’ve always found surprising is that she resented being a refugee so much more than he did,” said Richard. “At least from what you’ve told me. After all, as a writer he really lost everything. Money, a great reputation and the language he wrote in.” He looked troubled, as always when he talked about Papa. “I don’t know how one could go on after that.”

For a moment Anna saw Papa quite clearly in his shabby room, sitting at his rickety typewriter and smiling fondly, ironically, without a trace of self-pity. Reluctantly, she let the picture fade.

“It sounds odd,” she said, “but in a way I think he found it interesting. And of course it was hard for Mama because she had to cope with the practical things.”

When Papa could no longer earn any money, Mama had supported the family with a series of secretarial jobs. Though she had learned neither shorthand nor typing, she had still managed, somehow, to reproduce approximately what had been dictated to her. She had survived, but she had hated it. At night, in the bedroom which she and Anna shared in the Putney boarding house, she had talked of all the things she had hoped to do in her life and now might never do. Sometimes when she set out for her boring work in the mornings, she was filled with such rage and despair that they made a kind of aura round her. Anna remembered that one of her employers, a man with slicked-down hair who dealt in third-rate clothing, had sacked her because, he said, just being in the same room with her made him feel exhausted. Mama had come home and cried and Anna had felt helpless and guilty, as though she ought to have been able to do something about it.

“It’s such bad luck that this illness should have happened now,” she said to Richard. “Just when everything is so much better for her at last.”

She cleared away the lunch things while Richard picked at his script and then she looked out some clothes to pack, in case it should really be necessary for her to go to Berlin. For some reason the thought filled her with horror. Why? she thought. Why should I mind so much? She could not convince herself that Mama’s illness was really dangerous, so it wasn’t that. Rather it was a fear of going back. Back to Berlin? Back to Mama? Silly, she thought. It’s not as though they could keep me there.

When she returned to the living room, Richard was crumpling yet another page into the wastepaper basket.

“No good,” he said. “Real life is too distracting.” He looked at his watch. “What do you want to do till Konrad rings up?”

Something clicked in her memory. “Good heavens!” she cried. “We’re supposed to go to the Dillons. I’d totally forgotten. I’d better ring him quickly.”

“The Dillons? Oh,” he said. “Drinks with the boss.” He put out his hand as she reached for the telephone. “Don’t cancel it. You’ll have to tell him anyway if you go to Berlin.”

James Dillon was head of the BBC Drama Department and the invitation was to mark her promotion from editor to script writer.

“But we have to be here when Konrad rings.”

“It’s only a brisk walk. There’s plenty of time. Come on,” he said. “It’ll be better than sitting here and brooding.”

It was dark when they set out, and suddenly cold with a thin drizzle of rain. She pulled her coat tight about her and let Richard lead her through the network of quiet streets. Though Richard had met James Dillon’s family before, she had never been to their house. Her promotion had been James Dillons’ idea, but it was Richard who had originally encouraged her to write. When they had first met, he had read a short story she had written in between the paintings which she considered her real work. “This is good,” he had said. “You must do more.”

At first it had seemed like cheating, for though words came to her fairly easily (“Runs in the family,” Richard had said), she had set her heart on being a painter. But no one seemed eager to buy her pictures, whereas she had no trouble at all in landing a minor job in television. By the time she and Richard were married, she was editing plays, and now here she was, officially a script writer. It had all happened so quickly that she still thought of it as his world rather than hers. “I hope I can really do this job,” she said, and then, “What’s James Dillon’s wife like?”

“Nice,” he said. “Don’t worry.”

They were reaching the end of a narrow side street and became aware of many voices and footsteps ahead of them. As they turned into the brightness of Notting Hill Gate, they found themselves suddenly surrounded by a great crowd. In spite of the rain which had begun to fall in earnest, a mass of people blocked the pavement, overflowing into the gutter, and were moving slowly but determinedly all in the same direction. In the road beyond, two policemen were trying to keep a space between the crowd and the passing cars. For a moment Anna and Richard were swept along with the rest.

“Who are they?” said Richard, and then they saw, swaying in the darkness above them, the pale handwritten placards.

“It must be Hungary again,” said Anna. “I saw a procession in Hyde Park this morning.”

At that moment the crowd slowed to a stop, and simultaneously a noisy party emerged from a pub nearby, causing a congestion. One of them, a large drunken looking woman, almost tripped and swore loudly.

“What the hell’s this then?” she said, and another member of the group answered, “Bloody Hungary.”

A placard bearer near Anna, an elderly man in dark clothes, mistook this exchange for interest in his cause and turned towards them. “The Russians kill our people,” he explained with difficulty in a thick accent. “Many hundreds die each day. Please the English to help us…”

The woman stared incredulously. “Think we want another war?” she shouted. “I’m not having anyone drop bombs on my kids just for a lot of bloody foreigners!”

Just then the crowd began to move again and a gap opened between Anna and the kerb. “Come on,” said Richard and pushed her through. They ran across Notting Hill Gate in the increasingly heavy rain, then zig-zagged through dark side streets on the other side until they were standing outside a tall terraced house and Richard was ringing the bell. She only had time to take in an overgrown front garden with what looked like a pram under a tarpaulin, when the door was opened by a slight, pretty woman with untidy fair hair.

“Richard!” she cried. “And you must be Anna. I’m Elizabeth. How lovely – we’ve been longing to see you.”

She led the way through the narrow hall, edging with practised ease round a large balding teddy and a scooter leaning against the wall.

“Did you get caught up in the procession?” she called back as they followed her up the narrow stairs. “They’ve been demonstrating outside the Russian Embassy all day. Poor souls, much good may it do them.”

She suddenly darted sideways into a kitchen festooned with washing, where a small boy was eating cornflakes with a guinea pig squatting next to his dish.

“James thinks no one is going to lift a finger to help them. He thinks it’s Munich all over again,” she said as Anna and Richard caught up with her and, almost in the same breath to the little boy, “Darling, you won’t forget to put Patricia back in her cage, will you. Remember how upset you were when Daddy nearly trod on her.”

In the momentary silence while she snatched some ice cubes from the refrigerator into a glass bowl, the sound of two recorders, each playing a different tune and interspersed with wild childish giggles, drifted down from somewhere above.

“I’m afraid the girls are not really musical,” she said and added, “Of course no one wants a third world war.”

As they followed her out of the kitchen, Anna saw that the guinea pig was now slurping up cornflakes, its front paws in the dish, and the small boy called after them, “It wasn’t Patricia’s fault. Daddy should have looked!”

In the L-shaped drawing room next door James Dillon was waiting for them, his Roman emperor’s face incongruous above the old sweater he was wearing instead of his usual BBC pinstripes. He kissed Anna and put an arm round Richard’s shoulders, and when they were all settled with drinks, raised his glass.

“To you,” he said. “To Richard’s new serial which I’m sure will be as good as his first and to Anna’s new job.”

This was the cue she had nervously been waiting for. She said quickly, “I’m afraid I may not be able to start straight away,” and explained about Mama’s illness. The Dillons were immediately full of sympathy. James told her not to worry and to take as much time off as she liked and Elizabeth said, how awful for her but nowadays with penicillin pneumonia wasn’t nearly as serious as it used to be. Then she said, “But whatever is your mother doing in Berlin?”

James said, “It’s where you came from, isn’t it?” and Anna explained that Mama was translating documents for the American Occupation Force and that, yes, she and her family had lived in Berlin until they had had to flee from the Nazis when she was nine.

“I didn’t see any horrors,” she said quickly, alarmed by more sympathy in Elizabeth’s eyes. “My parents got us out before any of it happened. In fact, my brother and I rather enjoyed it. We lived in Switzerland and in France before we came here and we really liked all the different schools and different languages. But of course it was very hard for my parents, especially my father being a writer.”

“Terrible.” James shook his head, and Elizabeth asked, “And where is your father now?”

“Oh,” said Anna, “he died soon after the war.” She felt suddenly dangerously exposed. Something was rising up inside her and she began to talk very fast so as to keep it under. “He died in Hamburg,” she almost gabbled. “Actually it was very strange because he’d never been back to Germany since we left. But the British Control Commission asked him to write about the German theatre which was just starting up again. He’d been famous as a drama critic before Hitler, you see, and I think it was supposed to be good for German morale.”

She paused, but the Dillons were both looking at her, absorbed in the story, and she had to continue.

“They flew him over – he’d never flown, but he loved it. I don’t think he knew quite what to expect when he got there, but when he stepped off the plane, there were reporters and photographers waiting for him. And then a great lunch with speeches, and a tour of the city. And when he walked into the theatre that evening the audience stood up and applauded. I suppose it was all too much for him. Anyway—” She glanced at Richard, suddenly horribly unsure if she could go on. “He had a stroke and died a few weeks later. My mother was with him, but we… my brother and I…”