Waxwings Read online

  It was pronounced, dolefully, Ze moeur gauge. Tom was seven when he first heard the name of the angry and jealous god who came to preside over the Janeways with unforgiving vigilance. The Moeur Gauge was the answer to every important question: Why can’t we get a car? Why can’t we stay at the seaside? Why must I wear these old trousers to school? Fealty to the Moeur Gauge brought the Janeways not possession but conditional occupancy of the narrow, bay-windowed, pebbledash-fronted, semi-detached castle of dust and dinge that was the house on Ladysmith Road. All these houses were inclined to pokeyness; veiled behind identical net curtains, their dim front rooms were inadequately warmed in winter by coal fires. Ladysmith Road was at its best in the great fogs that still sometimes blanketed the London suburbs, when the lighted houses came into their own as cosy refuges from the noxious gloom of the outside world.

  But No. 127 was a special case, its pokeyness different from the rest. It was—as Tom came to understand when he entered his teens—a small corner of eastern Europe marooned in the Essex commuter belt. Walking through its front door was like passing through Checkpoint Charlie, the boiled-cabbage smell in the hall announcing that you were on the threshold of a new economic system, a new philosophy and politics. The Szanys had fled “Communism,” yet had established on Ladysmith Road something uncannily like a threadbare Soviet satellite. Their stockpiles of precious rubbish, their much-repaired clothes, their terror of spending money for fear of some nameless cataclysm to come, set them a world away from their English neighbors, who referred variously to the Janeways as “the Hungarians,” “the Russians,” “the Czechs,” “the Poles,” “the Romanians,” The one fact obvious to everyone was that they came from—and belonged to—the wrong side of the Iron Curtain.

  Yet in their own fashion, they were good capitalists. When Tom’s dad died in 1997, he left just over a million pounds, including a £100,000 trust for Finn’s education and £50,000 for Tom, who was named as the eventual inheritor of the Janeway estate—unless he should predecease his mother, in which case everything would go ultimately to Finn. For Katalin, her stewardship of this great pile of money was a source of terror, as if she had it in her to casually fritter away a million pounds. The thought of Katalin plundering Harrods on a credit card was, for Tom, enjoyably bizarre. When he suggested she might find it fun to go on a Mediterranean cruise, she was shocked.

  “I be such a crazybones? Tamás!”

  The house on Ladysmith Road had sold for £278,000, and the flat in Romford had cost £162,500. Tom went over the arithmetic with his mother, pointing out that a two-week cruise could hardly come to more than, say, £4,000.

  “No, I cannot. I would feel such a bad waster.”

  So she spent her fortune on boil-in-the-bag cod in white sauce, her Senior Bus Pass, and the weekly bottle of Harveys Bristol Cream sherry that had always been her only genuflection to the high life.

  Holding Finn’s pyjamas, Tom stood in the living room face-to-face with his mother, in a floral housecoat, in the front room of the house on Ladysmith Road, circa 1962. Her hair was pinned up in a disheveled black haystack, her lips thinly rouged to the outline of a cupid’s bow. She’d have been thirty-four then, a dozen years younger than he was now, though her knotted brows and fast-emerging spiderweb of anxiety lines made her look already old. The brown rubberized cord of the Hoover lay heaped in serpentine coils at her feet, though there was little trace of its passage through the house.

  Shamed, Tom fished out the Miele from the closet under the stairs and marched it from empty room to empty room, trying to suck the gloom and neglect out of the place. Shoving its blunt nose as far as it would go under the cat-ravaged couch, he hardly knew if he was in Ilford or Seattle.

  He was the family interpreter. Left to themselves, his parents spoke Hungarian. At Rowntrees, Ferenc Janeway spent his days in the borderless language of numbers. In English, Tom was grown-up, his parents the children. When they had to deal with tradesmen, solicitors, doctors, teachers, he was their short-trousered ambassador, negotiating glibly with the girl from Radio Rentals or the man from the gas board, then translating everything back into bare kitchen-English. His airy command of idiom—much of it found in books, and twenty or thirty years out of date—won him admiring plaudits from his parents.

  “The whole shebang!” his father said, rolling the phrase hesitantly around on his own tongue. “The cat’s pyjamas!”

  Tom, though, caught the flicker of amusement in people’s eyes when he was talking. Though as fluent as any Essex-born child of his age, he was slightly, indefinably off-key. English wasn’t exactly his second language, nor was it quite his first. He was encouraged by his parents to think of it as an exotic possession—a chest of treasures he could store up in his bedroom at the back of the house, along with his fishing tackle and his model-aeroplane kits from Keil Kraft. His parents had their language; he had his, and he loved its cadences and quirks of phrase, spending rapt hours alone, enlarging and polishing his word-hoard. In Mrs. Atherton’s class at Rose Lane Primary, his fellow-pupils yawned through her by-rote vocabulary drills, but not Tom. He added each new precious item to his collection—those merry grigs and quiet church mice, the charm of finches, the clamour of rooks, the pride of lions, the murmuration of starlings, the covey of partridges, the exaltation of larks.

  In the Bloemfontein Avenue branch library just around the corner, Tom entered a truly foreign world, tagging along behind a tribe of marvelous children quite unlike any to be seen in Ilford. They all lived in extended families, in big houses in the country, attended by cooks, gardeners, gamekeepers, and dogs. The boys went to boarding schools— wild, colorful republics run from top to bottom by the boys themselves, from whom Tom picked up the glamorous argot of “fagging,” “keeping cave,” “fains I,” “beaks,” and daydreamed his way into the Lower Remove. On their epic summer holidays, these super-children sailed boats, solved mysteries, tickled trout, rode on horseback (the girls had their own ponies), and mounted fantastically elaborate practical jokes.

  Halfway through Swallows and Amazons, and vainly trying to imagine what would happen if a girl named Titty were to show up in Mrs. Atherton’s class, Tom realized for the first time that England was another country, and Ladysmith Road not so much a part of it as a colonial dependency inhabited by an inferior people. The England of the books, the real England, began somewhere in London and stretched out westward from the city into a rich, dappled landscape of green hills, brambly footpaths, oak trees, and half-timbered Tudor villages, where gnarled rustics leaned on five-barred gates and every crackle in the night was a poacher up to no good.

  In Ilford there were no hills, no hedgerows, no nature, unless you counted the reservoir where Tom went fishing with his dad—just council estates, shopping parades, and long identical streets of bow-fronted semi-detacheds. On rare family day trips to London, he felt he was standing in the foyer of a legendary country, privileged to be allowed a peek inside.

  In Hamley’s, the toyshop, a fair-haired boy about his age interrogated the shop assistant in a loud, bright, cut-glass accent, as if she were not an authority but a menial. The boy’s mother, a perfumed, willowy woman in a hacking jacket and tweed skirt, watched over him with a distracted smile. “Oh, really!” he said, pronouncing it rully. “Hadn’t you better look it up in the Hornby catalogue? We haven’t got all day.”

  That was England. So was the changing of the guard at Bucking-ham Palace, where Tom and his parents stood in the crowd craning for a glimpse of trumpets, drums, and busbies, the sound of the marching band blurred by the whirr of home-movie-cameras and the pigeon-chatter of people talking in a dozen different languages. Tom knew instinctively that this was where Janeways belonged—with the dazed and passive tourists for whom England was a pageant and a mystery, viewable only from a respectful distance.

  Going home at Christmas after his first term at Sussex, he took the train from Liverpool Street and watched the sooty grandeur of London fray out through Stratford, Forest
Gate, Wanstead Flats, and Manor Park. Smoke from chimneys was pasted low over the housetops by a fierce easterly wind blowing in off the North Sea. At Seven Kings, a fox watched the train go by from a hillock of blackened shale, its greasy pelt mottled with bald patches. Though the diesel locomotive, jolting to a stop at every station on the line, made the most of the journey, it was, at most, only ten or eleven miles. As a child Tom had believed the distance to be immense, and London a glamorous elsewhere half a world away, but now he surprised himself with the thought that he’d actually grown up as a Londoner without ever knowing it, and that his sense of provincial exclusion was a peculiar gift bestowed by the capital on its citizens in order to keep them in their proper stations.

  Lugging his twin suitcases down Ladysmith Road that December afternoon—the Antler cases, found by his mother in a summer sale, were a lurid clan-tartan, and a cause of serious embarrassment—he felt himself to be a stranger of a different kind. Before he could ring the bell of 127, his mother flung the door wide, and they kissed on the step. Her hair, cut in a ragged bob, was graying now, and her web of wrinkles put Tom unchivalrously in mind of the cracked moonscape of Auden’s famous phiz.

  Her happiness left him tongue-tied. She was in the middle of making the dinner she always cooked for momentous occasions, goulash with dumplings and paprika potatoes; and he spotted the bottle of wine, Bull’s Blood of Eger, on the sideboard in the dining room. Dicing an onion in the kitchen, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, she was a torrent of excited talk. Ten weeks away among the English-born had spoiled Tom’s ear, and he could barely follow what she was saying.

  “Oh, drágám, Papi come home early tonight, he is so . . . But you sit in your coat, like you not stay, is so cold? Vékoni! Too thin! Papi, he want so much to talk with you. He saves up. I know all night will be politikai talk. Oh, Tamás— egyetmista already, is hard to believe! Profeszor next! You’re hungry, yes? What you want to eat? Pirítós? Toasty?”

  He’d sat there with a guilty, shit-eating grin on his face, taking in the shabbiness and clutter of the house with the detachment of a visiting stranger. Toppling stacks of Manchester Guardian Weeklys were piled against the kitchen wall, hundreds and hundreds of copies, going back into the 1950s. You could dig through that yellowing mulch, and find the Suez Crisis, the space dog, the Cuban missile stand-off, Kennedy’s assassination . . . Each weekend, Tom’s father would work his way slowly through the latest edition, cover to cover, like a textbook, before filling it in the dank archives along the kitchen wall.

  Tom’s mother passed him a mug of tea, and he had to excavate a space for it between the piled bills and circulars on the table. The bare forty-watt bulb overhead didn’t so much light the kitchen as expose its wilderness of fast-darkening shadows, with his mother moving among them like a badger in its sett.

  “Three weeks!” she said. “Tomorrow we go to Judit and Andras house—always, they ask about you, and how are your studies.”

  Twenty minutes at home, and three weeks sounded like an age. Tom tried to shorten it by naming to himself the books he had to read before the beginning of the new term—Gawain and the Green Knight, Troilus and Criseyde, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, Comus, Clarissa, Tom Jones. He thought, already longingly, of his square, sunlit study-bedroom in Park Village on the campus: the Hockney swimming-pool poster on the wall, the color-coded spines of the Penguin Poets on the shelf, the mandala-patterned Indian bedspread, the scent of freesias (Nuala’s contribution, but she would be far away in Larne for the entire Christmas vac).

  “Papi buy two tickets for the football game on Saturday. For him and for you.”

  “That’s great. Who are they playing?”

  “Oh, Tamás—I don’t know. I thought you would know.”

  It was his closest tie with his father now—the shared fiction that both of them were passionate fans of West Ham United. Several times a season, they’d make the trek to Upton Park and roar with one voice for Geoff Hurst and Bobby Moore. At first, Tom believed that he was humoring his soccer-crazed dad, then that his dad was humoring him; lately, he’d come to realize that each of them was aware of the other’s lack of real interest, and that this secret knowledge bound them more intimately than mere fandom ever could have done.

  So they kitted up in striped blue-and-claret football scarves—Tom hiding most of his inside the RAF greatcoat that he’d bought at the army-surplus shop—and cheered themselves hoarse from the stands when Moore, in midfield, sent the ball soaring across to Hurst, who headed it smack into the visitors’ net. When the Hammers pulled off a truly brilliant goal, father and son hugged each other tight—something they never ever did at home.

  At Upton Park, it didn’t matter that Tom was going to Sussex to read English, rather than to Cambridge to read mathematics. For all his dad’s efforts to demonstrate the logical beauty of simultaneous equations, Tom had failed ‘O’ Level maths first time around. When the results came in the post (eleven passes, one fail), he saw the tragic disappointment in his father’s face, that the passes counted for nothing, and the fail for everything. Only when West Ham beat Arsenal 3 to 2 the following Saturday were Tom and his father reconciled.

  Funny, that, Tom thought, switching off the Miele in the house on Queen Anne Hill: when they were dropped from First Division football in England, both Geoff Hurst and Bobby Moore landed up here, as the geriatric stars of the Seattle Sounders. Ian Tatchell had seen them in the late Seventies, playing to thin crowds of English expatriates and American curiosity-seekers.

  “They had bandaged knees, and sometimes the bandages came unraveled: it looked like the escape of the mummies from the British Museum.”

  He also claimed to have spotted Bobby Moore, captain of England and hero of the 1966 World Cup, standing forlorn and unrecognized in the checkout line at Ken’s Market.

  “What was he buying?” Tom asked.

  “A six-pack of Coors, a carton of Luckies, and a frozen pizza.”

  His cleaning efforts made no more impression than his mother’s used to do. The ingrained shabbiness of the house defeated him. You could rearrange the stuff in the rooms till kingdom come, but they’d always look like a pig’s dinner. There wasn’t a stick of furniture that didn’t conjure the image of the yard sale where Tom and Beth had found it, but it was like adopting feral kittens or abused Russian toddlers: feral stayed feral, and the flinty scowl of the state orphanage remained on the children’s faces long after they’d been dressed in new clothes from Gap Kids and fed on peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. So it was with these cast-offs. Abandonment was in their nature, and it showed. Eyeing the cane-back rocker in the living room (U District estate sale, 1993), Tom saw just why Beth had taken virtually nothing from the house and turned to Ikea for furnishings.

  He pushed the Miele back into the closet. Even on this brightest of winter days, the ground-floor rooms needed electric lights to alleviate their sullen timbered gloom. Give them horse brasses and hunting horns, and they’d pass as bars in some dusky Tudor pub—the Old Bull & Bush or the Goat & Compasses. “It’s a bit dark,” Beth had said after they’d viewed the house. Dark? It was bloody sepulchral. How peculiar that it had taken him eight years to notice what Beth had seen in a glance.

  He saw it now, though, and he was excited by the novelty of standing in her shoes, looking out through her eyes. Moving stealthily, like an intruder, not wanting to break the spell, he set out on a tour of the house, seeing what she must have seen when he was down in the basement talking with the realtor.

  To him, its age—ninety was historic in this young city—had always meant solidity, permanence, but now he saw it as infection and decrepitude. Who’d want to take on a house where so many slights and sorrows must have festered unspoken in the L-shaped kitchen, and so many doctors and undertakers’ men must have gone up and down those stairs?

  He remembered the sound of her footsteps on the bare boards overhead while the realtor banged on about how the house was built like a ship. Trying t
o retrace her footsteps, Tom became aware of details that he’d never paid much attention to before: the hairline crack in the exposed brickwork of the chimney, the tipsy slope of the floor, the failure of any of the doors to hang quite true. She’d stopped—just here—and thought, This place is a fucking liability. He was certain of it.

  He climbed the stairs to the half-landing, where a dead yellowjacket lay on the dusty sill of the tall stained-glass window. With its leaded panes of scarlet and dark green, it might have been looted from a church. It turned sunshine into a somber, multicolored twilight—useless as a window, though handy, perhaps, if you had the sudden urge to fall to your knees and say your prayers. He felt Beth’s pang of dislike for its shabby ecclesiastical pretensions, and remembered how for him the window had been a selling point, lending a splash of grandeur to the house. Why hadn’t they got rid of the stupid thing years ago? The house was starved of light, and a single sheet of plain glass would brighten up the whole ground floor. He’d find a glazier. It was a simple job—an afternoon’s work, at most.

  In Finn’s room, he saw at once that the glum beige of the walls had to go. Painting them white was within even Tom’s limited capacity in the home-improvements department. He’d let Finn help. Across the hall, he opened the door of his and Beth’s bedroom, and took in the heavy old-gold drapes that had come with the house; the sash window with its broken cord, now propped partway open with a book; the repro “Chippendale” vanity with a blemished oval mirror (Ballard, ’94), that Beth had never used.