Sufferance, page 6
I didn’t pay it a great deal of attention because there had already been a stream of such orders dealing with various groups: Catholics, Protestants, Romanies, Communist party-members, ex-servicemen, prisoners-of-war, and so on. It seemed just another tiresome piece of bureaucracy.
* * *
I hardly had time to think about that, when I found I had to deal with a crisis at home. As soon as I walked into the apartment, my wife told me what had happened about an hour earlier.
My younger daughter arrived on the earlier tram and the girl got back ten minutes later. My daughter was with her mother in the kitchen, and they heard her going into the bedroom. Then the girl uttered a terrible scream. When my wife and daughter rushed to find out what was the matter, they discovered her staring at her oriental doll. It was lying on the floor with its beautiful china face smashed and the clothes covered in paint of various colours. The girl was almost hysterical. She said she had entered the room and found it like that with a pillow on top of it. By the time I arrived, the apartment was in uproar. The two girls were screaming at each other, both in tears. The girl shouted at my daughter that she had done it. She angrily denied the charge and said she had not even been into the room since she got back. It escalated from there and my daughter cried: Why don’t you just go away? Nobody wants you here.
The girl’s chin was wobbling as she said: Your parents have been kind to me. They like having me here even if you don’t.
My daughter replied: No, they don’t. They hate you like we all do. We’ve only been nice to you because your daddy’s rich and might give mine a better job.
That provoked such a screwed up, intense, angry look on the girl’s face that I felt the first feelings of alarm. She said: No he won’t. He’ll be so angry at the way you’ve treated me, he’ll get his revenge on all of you. She ran out of the room.
My wife suggested that the destruction of the doll had happened by accident. That was just remotely possible since the thing was sometimes left on the shelf above where the girl said she had found it. However, it seemed unlikely that a fall from that height—even onto the bare boards near the wall—would have broken its face into so many fragments. And the presence of the paint was hard to explain as an accident. The girls had been using watercolours the previous day and had mixed some in little pots. But they had not been left on the floor where the doll had apparently fallen onto them, and even if that had occurred, it was difficult to see how the paint had so thoroughly smeared the doll’s garments. Above all, even assuming the doll had been left on the shelf and the paints somehow positioned below it, why had the doll fallen? Even slamming the door of the room should not have dislodged it, and nobody had had any reason to open or close the door during the day. And if it had been covered by a pillow, how had that got there?
My wife told me she was convinced the girl had done it herself to cause trouble. She insisted that there had been a delay of at least a minute between her going into the bedroom and the scream. Why had she taken so long to notice something that was so obvious?
I was sceptical she could have done it in so short a time.
In that case, my wife argued, she did it this morning after our daughter had left for the tram. She had a good ten minutes.
If that were true, the doll had been lying there undiscovered all day. My wife could not recall if she had happened to look into the room. It was not the day on which the domestic cleaned it, and so she would have had no reason to go in while she was working at the apartment earlier that day.
The girl insisted our daughter had done it immediately after getting home, but my wife was certain that, as she herself said, she had not even gone into the bedroom but had come straight to the kitchen.
My elder daughter returned just in time for supper. She could throw no light on the matter since she had left the house shortly after the girls and had been out all day looking for work and meeting friends.
It occurred to me that another possibility was that the domestic had done it, but I could not imagine what motive she might have had. I decided not to voice my suspicion to my wife.
The value of the doll had been utterly destroyed. What was surprising was that the girl seemed to become fonder of it than before. I had expected her to have thrown it away since she was far too old to play with such toys. On the contrary, she now became inseparable from it. She removed the few fragments of the face that remained and took off the spoiled clothes and threw them away. The doll was now a faceless stuffed figure in brown fabric and yet she treasured it and kept it with her much of the time, as if afraid someone would steal it from her even though it was now worthless.
* * *
The regime of staggered arrivals and departures for the two girls was only in force for a short time and that was because just two days after the incident with the doll, the authorities revealed their plans for our Eastern Zone. As my former colleague had told me, a new entity called the ‘Ministry of Protection’ was created to look after the interests of people like the girl, and a representative of it was being formed within our city administration.
The following evening it was announced on the nine o’clock news that the new ‘Department of Protection’ had been set up, and its first directive was that all schools were required to look at the identity-card of every child and report to the department any whose names or addresses indicated that they were members of the ‘protected community’. Children in that category would be given the chance to attend a school at which they could study their own culture, and plans were in hand to set up a network of such institutions. Until then they would not be required to attend existing places of learning and that ‘guidance’—as it was called—was to take immediate effect.
* * *
On Monday, therefore, our younger daughter went to school alone while the girl stayed at home all day.
When I got back that evening my wife told me what had happened when the domestic arrived for work and saw the girl. When she heard why she was not at school, she said: Do you want to put on a spare pinny and help me do the living-room?
And to my wife’s surprise, the girl had taken the pinafore from her and tied it on. That spoiled lazy creature who could not be induced to keep her own part of the bedroom tidy! My wife had told her to take it off and explained to the domestic that she was a guest and could not be expected to do housework.
My wife said to me later that at least it would have kept her busy since she had just sat around the whole day doing her nails, tinkling on the piano, and browsing through our elder daughter’s fashion magazines.
At first the girl was delighted not to have to go to lessons. And she talked—tactlessly, I thought—of how excited she was at the prospect of going to a school where she would meet her friends again. (I suppose she was assuming that the children of wealthy members of her community would choose to leave their schools in the former capital and return here to attend one of the new schools since they could live at home. But I knew that if they had been in the capital when the invasion occurred, they would not have been able to get back.)
I felt responsible for the girl, and so I told my younger daughter that until she started at her new school, she should teach her in the evening the things she had learned that day and do her homework with her. Both girls were dismayed by the idea, but my daughter made a good attempt. It didn’t work, and they merely bickered and squabbled at the dining-table after supper for a couple of hours. My daughter complained to me that the girl was too stupid to understand anything. After a week I took over and tried to do it myself, and I had as little success as my daughter. It wasn’t that the girl was stupid exactly—in some respects she was quite clever, or perhaps I should say cunning because it was always when her own interests were involved that she was most acute. But she had no desire to learn anything whose usefulness to her she could not immediately see. However, I persevered with her studies.
Since it was embarrassing for both of us to have the others listening as we sat at the table—especially my younger daughter whose mocking, mischievous face I often caught looking in our direction when the girl was being particularly slow-witted—after a few days I took her into my study for her lessons so that we would not be overheard.
* * *
By now the lists of wealthy members of the girl’s community had begun to be distributed. Each list had between five and ten names and was numbered and then given to one of us. I received mine now and it was number ‘3’. We had to produce a complete set of accounts for each of the individuals named. We were ordered to keep the list and the corresponding accounts carefully locked up since they were highly confidential.
By this time my wife had begun to find the girl’s presence in the house all day a serious nuisance. She complained that when she had gone shopping, the girl had insisted on trailing along with her. And that had been tiresome when she had met her friends in a café for a gossip of the kind that would be inhibited by the presence of a thirteen-year-old.
Our elder daughter took no responsibility for the girl. She was mostly either in her room playing records or out visiting girl-friends or roaming around the city asking for work at dress-shops and occasionally being given a day or two of cutting and sewing.
The lessons I was giving the girl weren’t going well. By that time of the evening I was tired, but the girl had been cooped up all day and was bored and restless. Although she disliked learning, the hour she spent with me was a kind of high point of her day, and she dressed specially for it in the frock she said her father liked. She would sit very close to me, and I could smell the expensive perfume she had brought from home.
Things weren’t helped by the fact that my wife kept bursting into the room. It became intolerable. She was doing it three or four times in the course of the hour and with the flimsiest pretexts: Did we want something to drink? Were we too cold?
The girl would say something like: Thank you, but we’re fine as we are. And my wife would take that badly and flounce out.
* * *
When I came home on Friday evening I found that all was not well. The girl was sulking in her room and my wife was fuming in the living-room. I soon heard the story. They had gone into the centre to shop, and the girl had got on her nerves with her constant demands for attention or money to buy trinkets and with her unwillingness to walk more than a few yards without pestering her to take a taxi or at least a tram.
That night when we were going to bed my wife told me she wanted to send the girl back to her own house where she would be perfectly comfortable being looked after by the servant. I pointed out that she got on with the woman extremely badly. My wife remained unconvinced, and I told her that in my weekly meetings with the woman during the last few weeks I had become convinced she was an extremely unpleasant person and not someone to whose care a child should be entrusted. My wife responded that was unfortunate but it was no concern of ours. The girl’s parents had chosen to leave the servant in charge of her, and we were not justified in questioning their decision.
I said that sending her back now would undo all the good we had done by looking after her. When her parents returned she would not tell them how well we had treated her. Instead, she would complain about us—if she even mentioned us at all—and describe how we had driven her away for no good reason. My wife was obdurate and insisted that our paramount obligation was to our own children, whose peace of mind was now being threatened by the girl’s presence.
I said that although we had not taken her in simply because we hoped to gain some favour from her father, at the same time we should not lightly throw away that possibility. Times were uncertain and given that my job was poorly paid and my hold on it insecure, it would be rash to abandon what might be a chance of being offered a better position. We had already expended a not inconsiderable sum on her food and other expenses and if we abandoned her, her father would be unlikely to refund me for my expenses on his daughter’s behalf.
Then my wife brought up the fact that I was now teaching the girl. I thought at first that she was thinking merely of my interests, and I admitted I was always tired in the evenings and wanted simply to relax with the newspaper in front of the wireless. But it turned out that wasn’t my wife’s main concern. Part of it was that she felt I was neglecting my own children and in danger of arousing their jealousy by devoting so much time and attention to the girl. Especially, she said, when I was shut up in a room with her away from the rest of the family. I agreed to discontinue the lessons. Having won this point, my wife relented and consented to let the girl stay. She said that our domestic had got on well with her and the solution might be, after all, to consign the girl to her custody during the hours she was working in the apartment.
* * *
When I told the girl the next morning that there would be no more lessons, she was surprisingly disappointed given how uninterested in learning she had always been.
The week-end passed with less friction than usual and on Monday, when the domestic arrived, the girl put on a pinafore and followed the woman around the apartment helping with the housework—or at least believing she was being useful—and chattering nineteen to the dozen. When my younger daughter got back from school, she joined the two of them in preparing the evening meal or baking cakes. The only time when the two younger girls were not quarrelling during this period was when they were working together under the supervision of the domestic.
* * *
Then a week or so later another means of occupying the girl and keeping her out of my wife’s hair appeared. On Tuesday evening when I got home, my wife told me that as she and the girl were setting off for the shops that morning, they had met the joiner’s wife on the landing below with her two small children. The girl had made a great fuss of them, and the good-natured young woman had invited her to come in tomorrow evening and help her bath them and put them to bed. She had responded with great enthusiasm: I’d love to.
My wife thought it was an excellent idea. It would get the girl out of the apartment for a couple of hours and give us all a much-needed break at a time when we four family members were all together. I agreed, but after dinner I took the girl into my study and made her sit down. I issued a solemn warning that she must reveal absolutely nothing about herself to anyone in that family. They knew her first name and her age and beyond that they must know nothing at all: her family’s name, the part of town where she lived, or the nature of her father’s work. She looked puzzled and I explained that her father’s surname was unusual and if her relationship to him became known, since he was a very prominent businessman in the city, it might create awkwardness. The joiner and his wife were very poor while her family was very rich. It was better not to let them know how great the disparity in their circumstances was.
All of that was true, but I was also worried that her surname would betray her membership of the community. I knew that the old man, who was the father of either the joiner or his wife, had nasty views about politics, and I didn’t want to give him anything to get his teeth into. I had heard him once or twice, as I passed his landing, holding forth about foreigners coming into our country and buying up our houses and businesses, and I was pretty sure he would have a particularly strong prejudice against the ‘protected community’.
The next evening the girl made her first visit to the joiner’s apartment and a couple of hours later came back in a more cheerful mood than I had seen for weeks. We asked her how she had got on and she said: The little girl is adorable. And the boy is about the same age as my brother and reminds me of him so much.
I thought for a moment she had gone mad because I was thinking of her brother who was believed to be in a prisoner-of-war camp and had forgotten that she had another one who was much younger than her.
It was clear that she and the joiner’s wife had become friends, and it seemed strange that a girl who was so self-obsessed and loved to be the centre of attention should be so fond of small children who are demanding in just the same way.
From now on the girl went down to the other apartment every evening and was often late to the dinner-table. None of us minded and it felt very good to be alone as a family once again.
For one thing, we were able to release our pent-up irritation at the girl’s boastfulness or laugh at her misunderstandings. One evening about two weeks after she had started visiting the apartment below and while she was still there, my younger daughter told us how she had asked her: Don’t your parents go out in the evenings? I’ve never seen them dress up and set off somewhere. She had gone on to say that most evenings her mother and father put on evening-clothes and went out and she did not see them again that day. And it appeared that she saw very little of them at all because her father had usually left for work by the time she had breakfast and her mother never appeared before midday, by which time—at least on weekdays—the girl was at school.
I was so intrigued by this that when she joined us a little later, I asked her about it. She was only too happy to chatter about her parents’ glamorous lives. It became apparent that she very rarely shared the evening meal with them in the way that we four always did. She and her younger brother ate much earlier and in a separate room—the nursery?—and it was a special treat for her to eat in the dining-room on the rare occasions when her parents were neither dining out nor entertaining guests at home. The only time she spent with her mother was in the early evening, when she would sometimes chat to her while she was getting dressed with the help of her maid.
