A Partisan's Daughter (14 page)

TWENTY-ONE

Getting In

If I didn’t love you so much, it wouldn’t bother me.

N
ext time that Chris came round I was feeling a bit sad because I had just heard on the radio that John Wayne was dead. I’d been listening to that
Deer Hunter
tune, which I liked back then, and the news came on. I used to watch all those stupid westerns in the afternoons before I went back to the hostess club, and my head was still spinning with last night’s champagne and cigarettes.

Because I was sad, I gave Chris an extra big hug when he came in, and he was very pleased. It made him all smiley. I told him about John Wayne, and he said “I always liked James Stewart really.
Destry Rides Again:
what a great film!”

“I never saw it,” I said. Years later I did see it, and I enjoyed it a lot. It had a kind of sweetness.

Once I’d got him a coffee and we were sitting in the basement, and I’d lit up, Chris said, “You know, it makes me very anxious, the amount of smoking that you do. It’s like watching somebody committing suicide.”

“I started smoking big in the hostess club,” I said. “You drink and smoke a lot. I only smoked a bit before then.”

“Last time I left here to see Dr. Patel, he asked me if I’d started smoking, because I smelled of it.”

I just looked at him, and he said, “It wouldn’t matter if I wasn’t fond of you. If I didn’t like you so much, it wouldn’t bother me, you committing suicide.”

I had the impression that he had been about to use the word “love” but changed to “like” at the last second. It made my heart jump. Chris said, “I had an uncle who was a big smoker. He was a strong man, very well built, he’d been a boxing champion in the army. He smoked a lot, and then quite suddenly his lungs packed up, emphysema, you know. Because he couldn’t breathe, his body wasted away, and he could hardly do anything at all. Once I was round there, and I had to help lift him off the toilet. He weighed almost nothing, and his hip bones were sticking through the skin. He had plasters over them. Do you know what he did?” Chris paused for the effect. “One day he put a shotgun under his chin and blew the top of his head away. Brains and bones and hair all over the walls and ceiling. I was in the house at the time. It was the worst experience of my life, going into that room and seeing that horrible mess after we heard the shot and ran upstairs. My aunt lost her marbles straight away and died a few months later, mostly from the shock, in my opinion. That’s why I want to shoot everyone in the tobacco trade. They’re worse than Hitler. Just think how many millions they must have killed.” Chris looked at me very coolly, and I looked at my cigarette. I stubbed it out, even though it was only half smoked. The heap of butts in the tray suddenly looked horrible to me. He said, “You were going to tell me about getting into the country.”

“Well,” I said, “it was quite something when you look back, but it annoyed Francis a hell of a lot. It was the first time that I’d really pissed him off, and it made me feel like shit.

“We were in the Channel, and he said, ‘I think we should take you to Dover. It’s a proper port of entry, and they’ll have all the people there who can process your papers.’

“I’d been dreading getting to this point. I said something stupid like, ‘Oh that was a musical sentence,’ and he raised an eyebrow, and I said, ‘Proper port of entry, people process papers,’ everything begins with a p.’

“He laughed and said, ‘Yes, but what about entering at Dover?’

“You know, I took a great big breath, and I had a dread in my stomach, and I said, ‘I don’t think I have the papers.’

“He looked at me like I was a complete idiot. He said, ‘You don’t have the papers? What do you mean, you don’t have the papers? You told me you didn’t need a visa. Is this a joke or something?’

“I was very embarrassed, I was sweating and my face was burning. I said, ‘I was afraid you wouldn’t take me.’ He shouted at me, ‘Damn right I wouldn’t have!’ His eyes were glowing and fiery, and I felt like an insect. He’d never raised his voice to me before, and it was shocking.

“So I did what I had to do, and I started to cry. I was saying, ‘But I wanted to be in England,’ and he was saying, ‘Well, you bloody well can’t be, can you?’ and I was saying, ‘But please, I want to be in England.’

“ ‘I’m going to take you in and hand you over,’ he said, ‘and they can bloody well deport you if they want to. What the fuck did you think you were doing? Do you think I’m going to sail you back to Dubrovnik or something? How the fuck can you be so fucking stupid?’

“It was the first time I ever heard Francis use any bad words, and it made me feel very frightened. I was crying and saying, ‘Don’t leave me, don’t leave me.’ He was saying, ‘I could be fined! I could lose my boat! They could put me in prison for all I know! Jesus Christ! I thought I could trust you!’

“ ‘Look,’ I said, ‘we got in everywhere else.’

“ ‘They were tiny places where the harbourmasters know me, and people like to visit for a couple of days. England is where every bloody foreigner wants to live, for some reason.’

“I said, ‘Everyone speaks English.’ He glared at me, and I said, ‘Can’t you ask someone if I need a visa?’

“ ‘You expect me to radio the coast guard and ask how to get a Yugoslav into the country? You’re madder than I thought.’

“ ‘Can’t you radio someone else?’

“ ‘Who, exactly? Do you think my mother has a radio set?’

“‘
OK
,’ I said. ‘My head is made of shit. Mad bloody people from the Balkans.’ Then I said, ‘England’s big, yes?’

“ ‘Pretty big,’ he replied, and he was looking at me suspiciously.

“I said, ‘Lots of places for a boat to land?’

“He said, ‘No. Absolutely not. We’ll just have to get into port and sort out the mess from there. We can find a consul or something.’

“I was looking at him, horrified, and he said, ‘And that’s that.’

“I said, ‘I thought you loved me.’

“He looked a bit like I’d hit him with a pan, and there was a very long silence while we just stared at each other, and he was wondering what on earth to say, and then finally he came up with: ‘You should wait for it to be said.’

“I was looking at him very hard, and I said, ‘You’ve been fucking me like you loved me,’ and he replied, ‘You should still wait for it to be said.’

“ ‘Why?’

“ ‘Because if you push it, it rolls over the edge and it gets broken.’

“I got angry. I don’t know why. Maybe I didn’t know what else to do, and I could see all my plans going down the toilet, and all my hopes messed up. I got so angry I started kicking the cabin door, and I was shouting, ‘Bloody English! Bloody English! Bloody fucking English!’ and then I did some shouting in Serbo-Croat, and I got a cooking knife and I stuck it into the wood, and I went and I started looking for things to throw in the sea, and I threw in a plate and the kettle, but then he came and held onto my wrists, and he was very strong, much stronger than I expected, and I kept kicking him in the legs but he wouldn’t move, and he just held my wrists until I ran out of energy, and I started crying again. We could see the white cliffs, and I remembered my daddy saying he’d always wanted to see them, and I was thinking that he never would, and that just made me cry even more. I was leaning over the guard rail and thinking about jumping in the sea and giving up on this stupid world.

“Francis let the sails go slack, so the boat was just tossing and crashing about on the water. I always hated it when he did that. He came up to me and said, ‘Look, it isn’t that I don’t want to break the law. It’s that I don’t want to get caught. Personally, I think people like you ought to be recruited, not kept out. But if I get caught, I’ve got a criminal record, and I don’t know what the penalty is.’

“I said, ‘
OK
, take me to France and leave me somewhere. I don’t care any more.’

“He tightened up the sails again, and we started going quite fast. We went past the North Foreland, and I was wondering what was going to happen to me. There were lots of big ships to avoid, because it was the Thames Estuary coming up. I said, ‘Are you going to take me to London?’ and he said, ‘You must be fucking joking.’

It turned out that he’d decided to go home by the usual route, because that wasn’t suspicious. It was just a question of talking to the usual people on the radio and doing the normal things.

“Just past Felixstowe we dropped anchor and waited for the tide to come in, because there were sandbanks that kept moving about, and he told me what the plan was. I packed up my things, and then I looked at the boat and all the familiar things about it, and I began to feel nostalgic already. All the nice shiny brass and wooden things. I thought, ‘
OK
, one day I’m going to marry Francis and I’ll be a British citizen, and then I’ll come back to this boat and we’ll go off to the sea again.’ I thought, ‘
OK
, so I don’t love him too much, the way I loved Alex, but I like him anyway, and the sex is bloody good, and we get on like friends, so why not? I bet he’d be a good father.’

“We were coming down the Orwell Estuary, and he sailed very close to one bank, just using the engines, you know? We stopped and he dropped the anchor, and we lowered down the little dinghy, and it was going up and down and scraping against the side of the
Sweet Olivia Bunbury,
so that I was worried about the varnish.

“He went down the little ladder, and then he held on while I climbed down. He said, ‘Have you any idea how bloody stupid this is?’ as I stepped into the dinghy. He had a rope tied up to the
Sweet Olivia,
and as we rowed to the shore he just let it coil out of the boat. It was only forty metres but it seemed a very long way.

“We landed on a concrete slope covered with that slippery green weed that’s like silk. There was a little yard of derelict boats in a patch of woods. There was a great big iron hull, upside down, and it was rusted through, and it was up on blocks. Francis said, ‘If it rains while you’re waiting, just nip under there.’ It must have been a very elegant boat in its great days.

“He gave me a little kiss on the cheek, and he hauled himself back to the
Sweet Olivia Bunbury.
I watched him climb up on deck, raise the anchor and press the starter. He gave me a little wave, and off he went to Ipswich.

“I waited there for two hours. I had all the usual panics: ‘Maybe he’s just abandoned me, maybe he had a heart attack, maybe he crashed, maybe he went to the police.’ I sat in the woods by the river, with all those abandoned boats rotting around me, and I thought about how everything falls to bits in the end. Anyway, Francis did finally come in his car and pick me up. He’d cleared customs and put the boat to bed. That’s what he called it, ‘putting the boat to bed.’ When he walked down into the wood I was so pleased to see him that I cried.”

Chris listened to what I said and then asked, “So where did you go?”

“Oh, Francis had a house near Ipswich. It was a nice house in a village called Bentley. There was a pub called The Case Is Altered. I always remembered that. It was such a funny name. The village was
OK
. I sort of liked it, but it wasn’t very exciting. It was a place for being peaceful. I stayed with Francis for two years.”

“What happened?”

“It was me. My own stupid fucking fault as usual. I got fed up.”

“Fed up?”

“You know, being in the same place, sleeping with the same man that I didn’t love too much, too much trouble to get into Ipswich on the bloody bus and back again, no bloody job, always eating the same meals and saying the same things. I was a shithead, like always.”

“At least you know you’re a shithead,” said Chris. “I am, but I don’t know it yet. Not Know with a big K. I get a lot of hints that I ignore.”

“It was a good time for Francis, though. You know, he loved me, and it made him write good bubblegum. The next year we went out in the boat again, for three months, and I got out and back in the same way. We laughed about it and it didn’t bother us. Really it was all good adventures.”

“But you finished it?”

“I finished it. I wanted more interesting things. You know, London, Buckingham Palace, British Museum, intellectuals talking about big things, the Underground, the theatre, rich people in nice cars, a big affair with someone fantastic, like Mick Jagger, maybe Prince Charles. Francis didn’t want me to go, and he cried a lot and he even begged me, and he told me he loved me and he wanted to marry me. But, you know me, I was full of shit and I didn’t realise till it was too late. I couldn’t get it out of my mind for years, how I fucked it all up and hurt him, and how I had stupid ideas about love. You know, he even helped me find a room in London, and he paid the deposit, and he gave me six hundred pounds just to get me started. He did that even though I kicked him in the belly.”

Chris said, “But wouldn’t he have had you back?”

“Maybe, but when I finally got back in touch with him he’d got married, and he was happy anyway. He said, ‘Roza, I really loved you.’ If I’d got in touch a year before, maybe everything would have worked out, but I didn’t think he’d want me. I didn’t feel good enough to ask. I was just a piece of crap by then. That’s what I thought, after what happened. I wouldn’t be able to accept anyone who was stupid enough to accept me. I could have just telephoned, but every time I went to a telephone box, I just picked up the receiver and then put it back down again, and thought, ‘Maybe I’ll call tomorrow,’ and sometimes I went in and out of the box, lifting the receiver and putting it down again, and then someone else would come and want to use the phone, and I’d go away and wait another day.”