The Boys

In the mornings Lawrence and Emily would cross the hall and tickle me awake, then he would disappear to make breakfast – a full English, adapted to accommodate the household rule about pork products. ‘Has to be full English,’ he would say, ‘what else?’ It seemed not to be a rhetorical question. One day Emily, citing ‘all that grease’, and exclaiming that Lawrence would ‘turn into a bloody egg’, prevailed on him to pick up pains au chocolat from Fast Mart.

‘Go on,’ she said, prodding him with a toe from her position on the purple beanbag beside my bed, ‘while they still remember being fresh.’

‘Fine. I’ll do it. For you. And the boy. But I’m not going to pretend I approve.’

‘Oh, and get us some fruit while you’re at it.’

‘Fruit? Fuck that.’

‘Fuck fruit, Lawrence?’

‘Yes, Emily, fuck it. Fuck them.’

‘Is there anything that doesn’t get fucked?’ she asked, then put her hand to her mouth.

‘Yes, Emily. Eggs. Toast. Beans.’

She prodded him again. ‘A couple of plums. Won’t kill you. And if it does, it’d be worth it.’ She licked her lips.

‘Plums? Give us a break.’

‘And make sure they’re not too hard. Touch them up a bit. Caress them.’

‘Soft plums! I’m not going to Harrods. You’ll be lucky if you get a soggy apple.’

Then we would sit together around the big new table which they’d picked up at IKEA, Lawrence at the head, swivelling his gaze between me and Emily as he talked. It was never about himself, his experiences, the past, but all of it reflected who he was and what he cared about, what he thought mattered, and as important, that some things were worth caring about, did matter: the construction of Brasília, the paintings from Pompeii in the archaeological museum in Naples, the vertiginous decline of the British welfare state. My parents had never talked about ‘the glory of popular administration’ or called anyone a ‘bloody genius’. They asked about my homework or moaned about Aunt Miriam and the latest ‘ghastly’ changes to the Waverley, the estate next to where we lived.

After we finished washing up, we would take a pot of tea to the attic room which always smelled of resin. I would sit on the floor near my father’s unsteady rocking as Emily folded his clothes and made the bed and Lawrence paced back and forth and pummelled him with questions about the Blitz, the Festival of Britain, Vienna ‘on the eve’, intoning the dates and names that had so quickly become central: 1194, when Duke Leopold V appointed Schlom as his master of the mint; 1782, when Emperor Joseph II laid down his Edict of Toleration; and on through 1900, 1918, ’33, ’38, Gombrich, Canetti, Freud. Before then I had struggled to work up any affinity for that vanished world, the black-and-white men with moustaches, that severe yet somehow kooky Gothic font. I had taken it for granted, resented the obligation to be interested. Before Lawrence started taking me, Cosmo’s was something I was forced to appreciate, bigger but not obviously better than the greasy spoon behind the Waverley car park which did circular sandwiches, pricier than the McDonald’s, and on the wrong side of the Finchley Road, and it didn’t serve milkshakes.

‘Johnny, your Jewish learning is . . . it’s pitiful, isn’t it?’ my father said once. ‘Nothing! I rue the day I met your wonderful mother.’

I reminded him I loved matzo ball soup. ‘I eat it all the time.’

‘From a packet!’

But Lawrence was engrossed by his mumbled memories, amazed by the artefacts my father had bought or been given and left lying around the place: Ringstrasse signage, copies of Karl Kraus’s magazine Die Fackel, a pipe that might have been Freud’s, a baking tray that carried the ‘last white bread rolls into the city’ (I never learned what this meant), silverware that hadn’t been pawned, a box of porridge oats and – the pride of the collection – a facsimile of the English statute against libelling groups or individuals that had so amazed and delighted the arriving European Jews, as if they’d been told all about it when their papers were being processed at Dover.

After one of these sessions, as we headed back downstairs, I asked Lawrence why he cared about all this weird stuff.

‘I like your old man. Always did.’ Perhaps he was worried I didn’t believe this or just wanted to give the matter more thought for his own sake, because he paused for a few moments, then said that it was crucial to believe in things, missions, causes, however ‘doomed or irrecoverable’.

Lawrence had been working his way through the bound volumes of the journal on which my father worked, going all the way back to 1948. He loved that the first issue began by explaining that the first issue was now out. But he was more consumed by substantive matters: certificates of naturalisation, the stigma attached to displaced persons, the elusive work permits, ‘possibilities’ in Palestine, the marshalling of volunteers, the housing of children. He told Emily and me about the changing attitude to the prospect of Jews from Germany and Austria and Hungary becoming members of the English bourgeoisie. They were initially appalled, he said, and never entirely accepted it, and so the seductions and dangers of assimilation provided the subtext of many articles. He had learned from a discussion on the correspondence page that my father himself had pushed back on one matter. The trustees had decided to add ‘the children of’ to the front-page claim ‘Edited by Jewish Refugees’, and though he objected, arguing that as a minor he had been no less under threat of extermination, that he himself was a Jewish refugee, he also acknowledged that his struggle was viewed as historic. Lawrence argued that another choice was even more ‘culpable’. For over four decades, the journal’s office had been based at Fairfax Mansions, a ten-minute walk from our house, but he had noted that in the late 1980s it had relocated to the suburbs. This was already recognisable as one of Lawrence’s themes – not just how the Jews should live but exactly where.

‘The Finchley Road points two ways,’ he told me. ‘London, and Hendon.’ He persuaded himself – and, as was so often the case, set about trying to persuade me  – that it was a greater tribute to my heritage to head in the first direction, away from Montessori schools and car ownership, towards town. We owed it to our forebears to partake of civilian life, bohemian excitements, the ‘mood’ partly created by the great generation of émigrés. He talked of the duty to ‘really make things count.’ Drawing on knowledge he’d acquired mere moments earlier, he pointed out that the emergency committee established to facilitate travel from Germany and Austria, and to oversee the well-being of refugee children, had their offices in Bloomsbury – ‘Down the road, a stone’s throw, Johnny, from all the theatres and sex clubs.’ And he showed real giddiness when he explained that the Warburg Institute, the art history library transplanted from Germany, moved from Thames House, SW1P, to the Imperial Institute, SW7, and then Woburn Square, WC1H. ‘I mean, Johnny. Talk about going from strength to strength!’ He was studying around the corner, and when he should probably have been concentrating on a degree that would have been taxing for someone whose school attendance had been intermittent, he began undertaking research on a range of developing obsessions there and in the nearby Wiener Holocaust Library.

My father died that September, days before the start of the new school term, almost Yom Kippur. He was 63. I had been the first to head up top that morning and found him in his bed. A second stroke, or a series of small strokes, had brought on what I overheard the paramedic call a very massive heart attack, sounding awestruck, even impressed. One day he had been a reminder of injustice, suffering, forbearance, his membranous blue eyes glaring at the floorboards, as if trying to root out the point of surviving. The next day, after a short service at which only the rabbi spoke, he was a vase – soothing, classical, stored in the cupboard above my mother’s wardrobe until a future ceremony that never occurred. Lawrence and Emily moved into the attic room, with what they referred to as ‘the working fireplace’ and the ‘proper king-size’, apparently untroubled by its very recent history.

The morning routine ended when the new term started. Lawrence and Emily were usually asleep when I got ready for school and were rarely around when I got back. Emily started doing shifts at the pub on the roundabout, Ye Olde Swiss Cottage. Lawrence was often nipping out, for seminars and design ‘labs’ followed by a visit to Chinatown, or for films at the Odeon on the roundabout, then an extended browse in the Swiss Cottage library, a building he never needed any excuse for visiting because, as he liked to remind me, with an undimmed sense of joy and awe, it had been designed by Sir Basil Spence, a Scottish architect, and one of the countless people he referred to as ‘a hero’ or ‘a personal hero’, a category that sounded gendered but in practice wasn’t. If they were both in, they stayed together, up top. Occasionally they would call on me to act as go-between or judge during their increasingly frequent rows then dismiss me so that, as Emily once said, ‘Lawrence can show he’s sorry the only way he knows how.’ Otherwise, if I wanted to get near to them, to feel part of it, to hear them discussing their plans or dissecting their new group of friends, singing along to Sonic Youth and Tracy Chapman, or to watch their Tuesday ‘noodle night’, Emily lying back against the fireplace while Lawrence sat in the rocking chair reading out bits of John Berger and Jilly Cooper with his mouth full, I would crawl up the stairs, one knee at a time, and peer through the crack in the door frame. One night towards the end of that first year, I heard Lawrence crying.

‘I mean, she’s just so fucking…’ I couldn’t quite hear the adjective.

At first, I thought he was talking to himself about Emily. I’d noticed that he was distraught after even the smallest difference of opinion.

Then I heard Emily say, ‘It’s bad, I know, I see now. But remember. I adore you.’

This was my first inkling that the decision to let him and Emily stay was not to be the prelude to a great reconciliation. During the autumn term, Lawrence and my mother stopped interacting almost entirely. He would come into the kitchen for a snack or a cup of green tea and not acknowledge her presence.

The door wasn’t fully closed, so I nudged it a little, then closed one eye to increase the clarity in the other. Lawrence was lying down. Emily repeated, ‘I adore you,’ while he dried his eyes with a fist.