Other People’s Houses (18 page)

The bombs that fell in our area were
mainly strays, but my mother was worried and unhappy. She had it on her mind that if something happened it was not even in her power to come to me. But she had had a letter from Kari and Gerti Gold, who were working as cook and butler for a doctor’s family in a pleasant town in Surrey. Kari had not even been interned, though he and Gerti had had to register as aliens and had to be home by the eleven
o’clock curfew. There was a helpful refugee committee who would surely find a job for my mother and a place for me to live nearby, and the Golds urged my mother to come. My mother gave notice to Mrs. Burns-Digby and sent for me.

I went to say good-by to the Hoopers, who were in an uproar; Albert had been called up and was going into the army. Dawn was in tears. Dawn and Albert had been going
to be married, and then decided to wait till he came back from the war. Gwenda said she would walk me to the station.

Albert and I said good-by. Our hands met briefly, but our eyes slid away, for he and I shared, like an obscenity between us, the knowledge that we had hated one another.

CHAPTER SIX

“Allchester”: The Alien

On the train to Allchester, my mother said she had brought writing paper and I could start my thank-you letters to everybody back in Mellbridge who had been kind to me—the Hoopers, the Grimsleys, and the committee lady—and I must not forget the Levines in Liverpool. But I felt sick and went into the lavatory at the end of the corridor and vomited away most
of the morning.

When we arrived, we went straight to the lodgings that Kari had found for us—a narrow little room at the head of the stairs. My mother made me lie down and sat by me and read me
David Copperfield
. We ate pears out of a paper bag, and it was cozy and nice. We did not know that my father had become so ill the authorities had declared him a friendly alien and given him his release
papers, and that he was even then traveling toward Allchester.

My father had only the address where the Golds worked to connect him with us. He arrived at the house late in the evening, as they were preparing to go to bed, and he looked so tired and ill they made him come into the kitchen and gave him a cup of coffee. They wrote on a piece of paper the address where my mother and I were staying.
My father got lost in the blackout of the strange town and stopped a policeman to ask the way, and the policeman arrested him for being an alien of hostile origin out on the street after the curfew and took him to the police station, where he entered the offense in my father’s alien’s registration book—so that subsequently my father was called in for questioning every time he changed his job or
address. Then the policeman himself walked my father to our lodgings.

I was asleep in the narrow single bed and did not know until I woke up the following morning that my father was back. My mother later told me that my father had ten shillings left from his railway fare and that she had about ten shillings and one pear left in the paper bag. They sat on the edge of the bed all night and cried
together.

In the morning, my mother looked up the number of the Refugee Committee and telephoned. She was told to come right over.

There was a Mrs. Dillon on duty behind the desk. Mrs. Dillon was a small woman in her late forties with gray hair cut short like a little girl’s. She wore a navy-blue cotton turban and a blue-flowered print dress. (Blue, she liked to tell people, was her favorite
color.) Her eyes were very bright and blue, and one was set higher and deeper in her face than the other. She asked my mother what was the matter with me, I looked so green.

I sat slumped way down in a chair, half listening. My mother told Mrs. Dillon that I had been sick all day yesterday, and Mrs. Dillon closed up the office and drove my mother and me up West Street in the rumble seat of her
old Ford. It was a leisurely, sunny street, with colonnaded shops and English people going about their business. Mrs. Dillon nodded and waved to acquaintances. She sang “
Un Bel Di
” in an uneven, cheery soprano. She told us she had studied singing in Italy when she was a girl. She turned off in an uphill direction, where there were great silent houses behind high walls—I could see fruit trees and
climbing roses inside the gardens—and past them to the last and grandest of the houses, a Georgian red brick. Beyond, the country opened out.

Mrs. Dillon led us through the gate, on which was the word “Adorato,” and around the right of the house into the kitchen garden. A black cocker spaniel came to greet Mrs. Dillon, who embraced and kissed him. She settled my mother and me on chairs under
a pear tree in the kitchen garden and went into the house. The garden was shaped like a huge triangle. It was set in the fork of the roads going north to London and east through the town to the sea beyond. Everything looked rich and green. A gardener was weeding among the vegetables. There were rows upon rows of berrybushes—gooseberry, raspberry, and red and black currants—ripening under a great net
held up by poles at the corners, like a low room with a roof of net. The net sagged under the weight of an immense black cat that was sleeping in it. We could see a sloping lawn shaded by a walnut tree, and beyond that, on a lower level, past the rock garden and the six poplars, a rose garden at the back of the house, out of which Mrs. Dillon presently came, bringing another lady with her. She
said this was her sister, Miss Douglas. This lady looked much neater in the same kind of flowered dress, and thinner and straighter and older and uglier. I was feeling ill again. Miss Douglas said she and her sister would like to have me come and live with them. I could stay right away. My mother went back to the office with Mrs. Dillon. Miss Douglas took me inside, where I very quickly asked for
a bathroom to vomit in. And that was how I became a member of that household of women. There were Miss Douglas and Mrs. Dillon and I, and Milly, the maid, in the kitchen with her baby, Lila. The only male creature ever to come into that house was Canon Godfrey, a very tall, beautiful old man in clerical black and a wide-brimmed hat. I would see him at odd times during the week padding noiselessly,
with turned-out toes, up the carpeted stair to the upstairs front room, which Miss Douglas had made into a study for him. The gardener was called Bromley, and came daily. He fetched his lunch at the tradesmen’s door and took it to eat in the tool shed behind the kitchen garden.

Mrs. Dillon sent my mother to a Scottish family just outside town, who were looking for a cook-housekeeper. My father
was harder to place. He stayed in the little room at the head of the stairs—the lodging Kari Gold had found for us—and Mrs. Dillon found him gardening work by the day.

I saw my parents every Thursday, when my mother was off. Sometimes the Golds invited us over to the house where they worked.

Kari was a handsome, gregarious man and Gerti was a most hospitable woman. The kitchen was always full
of people. A former newspaperman with whom Kari had worked as a sports reporter on a Vienna daily came down from London. There was a young composer called Hans Frankel and his fiancée, who worked as a nursemaid in the Allchester area, and a Viennese lawyer and his wife, who were also a “married couple.” There was a pleasant haze of smoke and the smell of strong coffee that Gerti kept making all
the afternoon.

Once the door leading to the front of the house opened, and the doctor’s wife stood stock-still to see her kitchen full of relaxed and jabbering foreigners. My eyes met hers in the second before she backed quietly away and closed the door. No one had seen her but me.

The women were sitting around the table talking, telling anecdotes of their preposterous “ladies.” They spoke of
their lost parents and relatives, from whom they heard nothing beyond the rare twenty-five-word Red Cross form letters. They sat and cried. The men stood talking of politics and discussing the progress of the war.

Some Thursdays we all met again at the club that the Committee organized for the Allchester refugees in the abandoned fire-house downtown. There was a big hall with a wooden floor that
looked dusty under the naked electric bulbs hanging from high up on the ceiling. All around the walls were framed photographs of the firemen’s football teams from the year 1927 through 1940. Mrs. Dillon stood behind the trestle table set with paper cups and poured tea. Beginners’ English classes were held in a small office off the main hall. A lecturer came down from London to give talks on “What
Is Expected of the Alien in a Foreign Country.” Once, Mrs. Dillon gave a concert of arias and accompanied herself on the piano.

My mother tells me a story that I seem to have chosen to forget, for I want nothing to spoil my infatuation with that formal, gentle town. Its Georgian and Victorian houses stand amidst lawns, birdbaths, rock gardens, flower beds, all enclosed by high rose- and ivy-covered
walls. My father worked as assistant gardener in a small park belonging to a Mrs. Lambston. Mrs. Lambston kept a donkey to amuse her children in the school holidays. During the term, the donkey helped pull the manure and take garbage down to the bonfire. My mother says that one day Mrs. Lambston thought the donkey was looking tired and told my father to unharness the poor dear and pull the
cart himself. My mother swears that this is what brought on a new hemorrhage that laid him up in the Allchester County Hospital, just back of Adorato.

After my father came out, Mrs. MacKenzie, the lady for whom my mother was working, invited him to stay with them, so that my mother could look after him. The MacKenzies lived in an Elizabethan water mill belonging to the National Trust—Mr. MacKenzie
was an architect. On Sundays, when I went out to visit my parents, we all had our dinner in the living room, whose walls, floor, and ceiling were warm-colored unvarnished old wood, at a great, heavy oak trestle table. That was a magnificent table, at which there was room for the four MacKenzie daughters, their school friends, an ancient grandmother, a simple-minded cousin, and, as often as not,
some friends of Mr. and Mrs. MacKenzie—architects, writers, and ballet dancers, come to rest up from the nightly shock of the London blitz—and there was room, too, for the refugee cook, and the cook’s daughter, and the cook’s sick husband.

I was in love with the MacKenzie family, and could have been in a state of happiness those Sundays had it not been for the presence of my father, who was always
turning to my mother to have her translate what people were saying to him, and never understood the jokes going around. If the twins, who were fifteen, got the giggles and started my mother off, Mr. MacKenzie, at the head of the table, seeing the three helpless, would pass the plates round the other side, but my father would put on his mock-amused face and say, “Ha-ha, ha-ha, ha-haaa, very funny.”
I kept my eyes lowered to my plate. My mother stopped laughing and said she must go and look after her dessert in the kitchen.

Mrs. MacKenzie said, “Mr. Groszmann has been in one of those ridiculous internment camps and he has been rather ill, but you’re better now, aren’t you? I think you’re getting your color back.”

“What?” said my father, turning to me for a translation and answering in German,
“Not much better. All these wooden steps are hard for me, and I think the air out here is too damp to do anybody any good. Tell them.”

“He says he is much better, thank you,” I said, blushing painfully, “and he thanks you very much for letting him stay in the Mill with my mother.”

After a few weeks, my father did get stronger. Mrs. Dillon found him a new little room in Allchester and, when Mrs.
Lambston refused to have him back, persuaded Miss Douglas to let him come in three days a week to help Bromley in our garden. One day the following spring, I was coming up the hill from school and saw Mrs. Dillon holding the front door open, waiting for me. She had a handkerchief balled up in her hand. She made me come into the drawing room and sit down on the sofa, and she sat down beside me
and patted my hand. She said my father had had a stroke, right at the bottom of the garden, and they had taken him to the County Hospital. “Your mother is with him.” Mrs. Dillon kept stroking my hands with her handkerchief. “Poor darling,” she said.

“I’m all right,” I said, embarrassed by her sympathy, which I did not feel I deserved, for my eyes were dry and my heart beat steadily.

“Such poor,
cold hands,” murmured Mrs. Dillon. “Come sit closer to the fire and I’ll build it up warm and nice for you.”

“I always have cold hands,” I said.

At night, they had the maid bring me hot chocolate to have before the fire, and Miss Douglas said to Mrs. Dillon, “We’ll send him magazines. Mary, don’t forget to make up a package of old
Punches
and
Tatlers.
”

When they thought I had gone up to bed,
Mrs. Dillon told Miss Douglas, who had been out of the house at the time, what had happened. “It seems he had just finished the lawn and was going to put the machine away, poor thing, because when I found him he was lying in the path outside the tool shed and he had lost all control of himself, poor man.”

I stopped listening outside the door and went up the stairs to my room. I argued that what
Mrs. Dillon had said about my father losing control might not have meant that he had lain in the path in his own excrement, but I could not get rid of this picture in my mind. Often, later, and particularly when I was talking with my father face to face, I would wonder if that was what Mrs. Dillon had meant.

The next day, I went to the hospital straight from school. My mother was waiting for
me in the corridor outside the ward, and she smiled, because she was so pleased to see me, though her face was a high red color and her eyes were shining wet. “That terrible hat they make you wear,” she said, smoothing my hair under the panama with the school ribbon. “Dr. Adler says Daddy is doing very well. I don’t want you to be frightened if he doesn’t recognize you, or says anything strange. It’s
all the medicines he’s been getting. I just want you to stay a minute. Oh, and darling, I don’t know whether they told you. Daddy’s left side is paralyzed, which often happens after a stroke. The doctor says there’s a good chance it might disappear completely. Come along. For just a minute.”