Free Interpreters by Sue Eckstein Page A

he threw his leather music case into the back of his grey Austin. ‘Go on! You wouldn’t mind, would you, Mum?’
    And so, by the spring of 1967, Mr Elliot – Roland as he asked us to call him – was coming to see us most days. On sunny afternoons after school, my mother would drive us all into the country where Max and I climbed trees and looked for beetles while she and Roland sat on a tartan rug on the grass watching us. Sometimes we’d feel rather sorry for our father, who was stuck at work saving the lives of small children and missing out on all the fun. One day during the summer holiday he came home, after what must have been an unusually quiet day at the hospital, to find the four of us flushed with sunshine and happiness, eating Battenberg cake in the garden. He looked slightly surprised to see us all, I thought.
    ‘Roland.’
    Roland stood up to shake my father’s hand. ‘Oscar. Good to see you again. How are you?’
    ‘Fine, thank you, and you?’
    ‘Fine. Enjoying the lovely weather and the delightful company.’
    ‘Are you?’
    My father looked around as though wondering which particular delightful company Roland was referring to. Then he glanced in the direction of his study.
    ‘Well, I must get –’
    ‘Why don’t you take a day off work and come out with us tomorrow, Dad?’ I asked. ‘Roland’s coming if he can cancel one of his lessons and we’re going to Rochester Castle.’
    I can’t remember what he replied, but I do remember that he never took up the offer of accompanying us on what Max and I increasingly came to think of as our family outings. My mother was very happy during those months and so Max and I grew happier and less wary, less scared she might suddenly go mad again and disappear once more. Her piano lessons got longer and longer, though, oddly, we never heard much Schumann or Beethoven, or anything else really. She sometimes forgot to give us biscuits. My father would come home late in the evening to find Roland and my mother watching The Forsyte Saga together. He didn’t have a TV of his own.
    That was the year we went on holiday to Spain – me, Max, Mum and Roland. The idea was that we would drive down to a villa belonging to a friend of Roland’s, camping on the way, and my father, who was far too busy at work to take more than a week of leave, would fly out to join us once we had arrived.
    Things didn’t go completely to plan. The car journey was strangely tense. For a reason neither Max nor I could understand, our mother refused to share her compartment of the tent with Roland and chose, instead, to sleep in the car. Edgy with incomprehension, Max and I lay in our section of the tent during those warm Mediterranean nights, giggling as we listened to Roland snoring away on the other side of the canvas dividing-wall or spied on him in his voluminous underpants and string vest. Once we caught sight of his dangly willy and had to burrow deep into our sleeping bags to muffle our hysterical laughter.
    The night before we arrived at our Spanish villa, I woke to the sound of voices outside the tent. I nudged Max awakeand we shuffled, caterpillar-like in our sleeping bags, towards the entrance. We unzipped the door a couple of inches. My mother and Roland were sitting on the ground a few yards away. Roland was holding her hand.
    ‘Of course I can’t,’ we heard her say, her voice husky with misery or anger, we didn’t know which.
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘Why do you think?’
    ‘I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you.’
    ‘Because I can’t. And I can’t go on like this. It’s killing me.’
    If Max hadn’t sneezed at that point, we might have found out what it was she couldn’t go on doing. What was killing her. But he did and we didn’t. For a while we thought she was just upset because she’d got sick of sleeping in the car, but, when we got to the resort near Malaga, and Roland stayed at the villa and the rest of us moved into an apartment on the beach to