A Small Person Far Away

  “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…”

  Richard put his hand over hers and said, “I’ve always been so sorry that I never knew him. Or read him. It seems he’s untranslatable,” and the Dillons, after James had refilled her glass, tactfully embarked on a discussion of translations in general and that of a recent French play in particular.

  She was grateful for Richard’s hand and for not having to talk. She had not expected to be so upset. After all it had happened years ago. It was the thought of how it had happened, of course. She remembered Papa’s coffin draped with the Union Jack. Common practice, they had said for a British subject dying abroad. It had seemed strange, for Papa had never managed to speak English properly and had been a British subject only for the last year of his life. Then the icy hall where the German musicians had played Beethoven’s Seventh which Papa had loved so much, and the British soldiers who, together with Max and a local newspaperman, had helped to carry his coffin.

  As Papa had planned.

  If Mama died, it wouldn’t be like that. Anyway, Mama couldn’t die. She was too strong. Anna suddenly remembered with total clarity how Mama had looked when she and Max had arrived, stunned, in Hamburg.

  “Bitte etwas Tee.” Tea in the hotel bedroom, the only warm place in the devastated city. Mama saying, “There is something I must tell you about Papa.”

  As though anything else could possibly matter, Anna thought, apart from the fact that Papa was dead. Then Mama talking about how Papa had failed to recover from the effects of the stroke. But they knew that already. Something about German doctors. How you could get anything for a packet of cigarettes. What?? Anna had thought. What??

  “He was paralysed and in pain. He felt he could no longer think as clearly as he wished. I’d always promised to help him if that happened.”

  The sharp intake of breath from Max beside her. Mama’s eyes shifting minutely towards him.

  “So I did what he asked. I helped him.”

  She had said it in such matter of fact tones that even then Anna had not immediately understood.

  “It was what he wanted.” Mama had stared at them both, white faced and steely.

  Max had said in a forlorn voice, “But we never said goodbye to him.”

  She could not remember what she herself had said. But she had known with complete certainty that what Mama had done was right.

  She became aware of Richard looking at her. As usual, he knew what she was thinking. She sent him a reassuring look back and tried to listen to the conversation which seemed to have moved on from the French play to a discussion of its author. James Dillon said something witty and everyone laughed. Elizabeth, relaxed in her chair, brushed a strand of hair out of her face. She thought, I am the only person in this room to whom such things have happened. I don’t want to be. I want to belong here.

  “Of course the French system of education…”

  ‘What was it like being a child in Paris?”

  She realized that Elizabeth was addressing her.

  “In Paris? Oh—” She made an effort and began to talk about her school, the teacher called Madame Socrate who had helped her learn French, the friends she had made, outings to the country and to celebrate the 14th July. “I loved it,” she said and found herself smiling.

  “Of course you did.” James Dillon had risen and she saw that he was wearing his Head of Drama expression which she knew from the BBC. “Now here’s what we’re going to do. If your mother needs you, you’ll go and cope with whatever has to be done. And when you come back you’ll do that adaptation we talked about. But I’d like you also to think about writing something of your own.”

  For the first time she was startled into total attention. “Of my own?”

  “Why not? Needn’t be very long, but all your own work.” He raised his extravagant eyebrows. “Might be interesting.”

  It was so good to think about coming back from Berlin rather than going away that she tried to stifle her doubts about writing something original.

  “All right,” she said. “Though I’m not absolutely sure…”

  “Think about it,” said James.

  She was saved from having to say anything more by the arrival of the small boy with the guinea pig clutched to his chest. After being introduced, he wandered over to his mother and allowed himself to be hugged. Then he whispered in her ear, was told not to whisper and said loudly, “Can Patricia have a crisp?”

  “I didn’t know she liked crisps,” said Elizabeth.

  “I don’t know either.” His small face furrowed as he searched for the right word. “It’s an experiment,” he said precisely.

  He was given a potato crisp from a dish and they all watched while the guinea pig sniffed it in a corner of the floor and finally decided to crunch it up.

  “She likes it,” said the child, pleased.

  “Go and get a saucer,” said Elizabeth. “Then you and Patricia can have some crisps all to yourselves.”

  “All right.” He scooped up the guinea pig. “Come on, Patricia,” he said. “You’re going to have…” He hesitated, but as he got to the door they heard him say happily, “A banquet.”

  In the quiet after he’d gone, Anna could hear the recorders, now both on the same tune, from the floor above.

  “He’s got quite a vocabulary,” said Richard. “How old is he?”

  “Six,” said Elizabeth. Clearly he was the apple of their eye.

  “Loves words,” said James. “Been reading since he was four. Taken to writing stories now.”

  “Most of them about Patricia,” giggled Elizabeth. “I bet you didn’t know guinea pigs can pilot aeroplanes.” She stopped as the child reappeared and helped him fill a saucer with crisps. Then she was struck by a thought. “I do find it absolutely extraordinary,” she said to Anna, “that when you were his age you were speaking nothing but German. Can you still speak it?”

  “A bit,” said Anna. “I’ve forgotten a lot of it.”

  Elizabeth handed the child the saucer. “This lady has forgotten nearly all the words she knew when she was your age, can you imagine?” she said. “And she’s learned a whole lot of new ones instead.”

  He stared at Anna in disbelief. Then he said, “I wouldn’t.”

  “Wouldn’t what?” asked his father.

  “Forget.” He saw everyone looking at him and took a deep breath. “I wouldn’t forget the words I know. Even if – even if I learned a million trillion new words. I’d always remember.”

  “Well, it would only be if you went to a place where no one spoke English,” said James. “And you’re not going to do that, are you?”

  “I’d still remember,” said the child.

  His father smiled. “Would you?”

  “I’d remember Patricia.” He pressed the guinea pig hard to his small chest. “And what’s more,” he said triumphantly, “I’d remember her in English!”

  Everyone laughed. Richard got up and said they must leave, but before they could do so there was a noise on the landing and a girl of about nine appeared, lugging a large impassive baby in her arms.

  “He wants his supper,” she announced, and a slightly younger girl following behind her shouted, “And so do I!” They both dissolved into giggles and Anna found herself being introduced to them while at the same time saying her farewells to their parents. In the confusion the baby was dumped on the floor with the guinea pig until Elizabeth picked it up again and it began with great concentration to suck the end of her sleeve.

  James saw Anna and Richard to the door. “Best of luck,” he said through the children’s shouted goodbyes. “And think about what I said.”

  Anna was left with the picture of Elizabeth standing at the top of the stairs and smiling with the baby in her arms.

  “I told you she was nice,” said Richard as they started on their walk back.


  She nodded. The rain had stopped but it must have lasted some time, for the pavements were sodden.

  “I wonder if I could really write something of my own,” she said. “It’d be interesting to try. If I do have to go to Mama, I don’t suppose I’d have to be away very long.”

  “Probably just a few days.”

  Notting Hill Gate was deserted. The demonstrators, no doubt discouraged by the downpour, had all gone home. A torn placard lying in a puddle was the only sign that they had ever been there.

  “You know what I really hate about going to Berlin?” said Anna, picking her way round it. “I know it’s stupid, but I’m frightened the Russians might suddenly close in and take it over and then I’d be trapped. They couldn’t, could they?”

  He shook his head. “It would mean war with America.”

  “I know. But it still frightens me.”

  “Were you very frightened when you escaped from Germany?”

  “That’s what’s so silly. I never realized till much later what it had been about. In fact, I remember making some idiotic remark at the frontier and Mama having to shut me up. Mama made it all seem quite normal.” They trudged along among the puddles. “I wish at least I’d answered her letter,” she said.

  Once back in the flat, she became very practical. “We’d better make a list,” she said, “of all the things that have to be seen to, like the rug being delivered. And what are you going to eat while I’m away? I could cook something tonight for you to warm up.”

  She made the list and decided about the food, and by the time Konrad’s call was due she felt ready to cope with anything he might say. Sitting by the telephone, she rehearsed the various things she wanted to ask him and waited. He came through punctually at nine o’clock. There was a jumble of German voices and then his, reassuringly calm.

  “How is Mama?” she asked.

  “Her condition is unchanged,” he said and then in what was obviously a prepared speech, “I think it is right that you should come tomorrow. I think that one of her relatives should be here.”