She worked hard indeed, it seemed to him, who left for the Stores warehouse at the same time every weekday morning and returned at the same time every evening. Even longer hours than she had sat at the sewing machine, its whirrs, snipped-off stops and starts that had accompanied Sundays while he sat reading this country’s newspapers with its particular political obsessions resultant from its history he didn’t share, scenes he couldn’t visualise, and the boy entrancedly mimed American shrieks and howls of heroes and villains he was watching on TV. There are no regular hours in the business of selling houses. Prospective buyers and sellers expect the agent to be at their disposal in the evenings and over weekends, whenever it suits the one who is in the market, so to speak. She could hardly oppose with personal inconvenience: ‘My husband is waiting for me to cook dinner’ he proposed, laughing at presumption of an agent’s life being measured against the client’s. You don’t have to be a philosopher to know immigration means accepting the conditions declared if you want to survive. He and Peter, helpful little lad, put together the meal, frying eggs or heating up the goulash she’d frozen after preparing early some morning — not often the chance for such tasks, some clients want to view houses before going to their offices, legal chambers or doctors’ consulting rooms. And it’s true that it’s a good time to take them viewing, have them come upon a fine house in the fresh light, as a face that may be destined to become familiar, owned. Late-afternoon client viewing appointments would extend into evening, particularly, she learnt and related to him, if things were going well, she could sense that the client’s interest in a particular property was rising; advantage must be taken of this by continuing discussion relaxed over a drink in some elegant hotel bar. If she arrived back from these other houses only when the meal father and son had concocted was greasy-cold, it didn’t matter: she felt the deal was done. He heated up food for her. She would smile to him, almost nervously, for acknowledgement: commission on the sale of such a prime property was going to be higher than she, without qualifications for any profession, could ever have expected to gain, any way, any place.
The money she was bringing in eased some of the stringencies in their life. Peter had fine sports equipment he had yearned for, the old car was traded in for a later second-hand model and now was Fred’s exclusively — the Agency provided Zsuzsi with a car that would give clients confidence in her income status as high enough to be informed of the expectations of their own. But funds didn’t extend to provide for major changes in their life — she had to spend considerably on being well-dressed (no time for homemade outfits), groomed, visits to an expensive hairdressing salon, including manicure, people notice proletarian hands as a sign of limitations. Of course she had the luck to be good-looking, right basis for being produced by these methods as exceptionally so.
They made a handsome couple when it was assumed, on occasion, husbands, wives, or gay partners of the Agency personnel would get together for the obligatory Christmas party, or some cocktail hour to mark particular progress in the business. He did not know the personal incumbents of Zsuzsi’s colleagues, beyond these encounters, well enough to discover what range of topics they might have in common to talk about; except sports events. In this country even women shared this lingua franca. Spectator passion for team sports is the only universal religion. Its faithful adherents are everywhere; he was a football centre-forward as a student somewhere else but the litany held good; he followed the matches on fields locally and internationally and could give all the responses. There were the lunches among the agents only, with professional concerns to be discussed ‘in house’; anyway lunch break at the supermarket didn’t allow time for such leisurely customs. Fred ate in the canteen, or picked up something more to his taste in the deli section where there were hams and spiced sausage imported from Italy and other European countries. Zsuzsi said, yes, good idea, when he once suggested, after mother and son had spent a happily riotous half-hour teasing each other in South African English slang, that they should speak to the boy a short time every day, even round a meal, in Magyar. So that he would have it. It turned out meals were not a suitable choice, the boy was tired after a day at school, play, homework. She didn’t have other spare time.
He began to speak their language to the boy without explanation while they were absorbed together in the things fathers are drawn into by young sons — construction with plastic building kits, articulating bodies of battery-operated outer-space monsters. The child spoke unawaringly the Magyar word for ‘leg’, ‘face’, used the verbs for ‘fly’, ‘shoot’. But he resented that the creativity he wanted to share with his father was turning into another kind of homework when his father tried to get him to put the words into a sentence, repeating this as it came from his father’s voice. He’d suddenly kick over the half-finished creation, scatter the weapons and cloak of the monster, laughing angrily.
Photographs that had been brought in the baggage of emigration and had sifted away somewhere in immigration: when they were shown to the boy so that he might make the words material, come to life in images—‘That’s our house’—he was only half-attentive. ‘Our house isn’t like that.’ ‘It’s my house, where I lived when I was like you. A little boy.’ Of course, the turret and balustrade would seem to him a picture in a book of fairy tales — but this generation of kids don’t have Grimm read to them… he wouldn’t even have that vision, to match.