Almost English Read online

  She looks at her plate, the crumbly mess of home-made bread on the tablecloth because she didn’t know what to do about side plates, and makes herself say, ‘I . . . I should ring home. Just so they—’

  ‘Nah, don’t bother,’ he says. ‘They’ll be fine.’

  ‘No, you don’t— I really have to. And I should get something better for your mum. Chocolates?’ She hears herself say ‘chocklits’ but he doesn’t seem to notice. ‘If I could run to the shops.’ The tulips are still upstairs on her bag; two have lost their heads. What can she give the others? Rozsi rarely leaves the flat without a selection of gift items – boxes of handkerchiefs; stockings in plastic eggs; wooden dolls hand-carved in Prague and horrible floral notelets; beaded glasses chains; liqueur chocolates – which she distributes to every tradesperson and cashier and even the teachers at Ealing Girls’, until Marina wept for her to stop.

  ‘God, no, not presents,’ he says, grasping her hand awkwardly across the table. ‘Dad hates them. People usually just leave a tip for Evelyn.’

  ‘Do you often have guests?’ she asks to distract him; she needs her hand back to fold her napkin, but there are no napkin rings. He scrumples up his and chucks it at his plate. ‘Does your mothe—’

  ‘Shh,’ he says, reaching out a finger to stroke the back of her hand, tracing the tendons with a sheen of ham fat. ‘Come on, eat up,’ and he gives her a significant look.

  Laura comes home, a little earlier than the others. I have been entombed here, she thinks as she unlocks the flat door, like a prawn trapped in aspic, and now it will all fall apart. She puts on the kettle to keep herself company and listens to the straining water. By now, she thinks, sitting on the edge of the sofa like a woman in a waiting room, Mitzi Sudgeon will be lying bravely on a chaise longue in the middle of the Bazaar, having attendance danced upon her. Yet however much Laura pricks herself with this thought, she cannot feel it. The kitchen smells of smallness, secrets which would be better kept; the stoicism of old women doing their best far from home. Think, she tells herself. Think.

  She has to tell them about Peter.

  The light slowly fades. She must show them the letter. There is no reason to keep it secret. Only a monster would do that.

  13

  In Guy’s room, on Guy’s bed. They are kissing in a bubble of beauty, distant birdsong, the soft pluck and suck of their mouths. Marina can see past the red rim of his ear, illuminated by the setting January sun, which pours, much warmer than it feels outside, through his window. The room smells fresh: bonfire and laundry; this counteracts the whiffs of scalp from Guy’s unwashed hair.

  She has lied to her family and she will be expelled.

  What if, overcome by lust, he presses her to the bed and takes her maidenhood? If everything is either a good or bad omen for her future, as she increasingly suspects, then wouldn’t losing her maidenhood, -head, -hood, in a country house bode well? She is trying to tell whether his penis is erect; something is digging into her, but it could be his belt buckle. Far below them someone shouts. Guy pauses and so, for a moment, she is the one kissing him, as if she is the boy. Then they switch back. ‘I love you,’ he murmurs.

  Her heart is thumping in her right ear: with fear, or passion. ‘I love you too,’ she says.

  By dinnertime, she means it. It must be love, this pain of longing and desire. She feels it everywhere: in the Stoker vegetable garden, where she is told real cabbages grow; in a sort of coat room by the back door, lined with worn leather shoes and sun-bleached tennis plimsolls, where Guy sends her to look for his spare football boots; on the wooden staircase, sniffing up the scent of sunny dust; in the downstairs loo with its rustic door catch and cool whitewashed walls. There is a grander lavatory, but she avoids it; the chill of the tiled floor in this one, the dead wasps and daddy-long-legs in the corners move her profoundly, the luxury of having insects you forget to sweep up. It is extraordinarily cold in here and surprisingly unluxurious; old-fashioned stiff taps, a shower curtain powdery with limescale. She thinks of the Vineys, naked behind it; disgusting peasant, she tells herself, and pinches the skin of her palm.

  Outside is even worse; by now she is homesick for it. If, she thinks passionately, I had room for an entire flower bed of lavender, I’d learn how to dry it, or distil it; I wouldn’t just leave it out there, unappreciated. There are trees pinioned against walls with wire and lead pegs. Every crumbling brick, each forgotten crevice of gate and shed and wall, makes her covetous. She fills her pockets and sleeves with black conkers, skeleton leaves, pebbles, a few strands of real wool left unnoticed on a fence.

  ‘You’re not seriously pinching that stick, are you?’ asks Guy, scuffling around with a forgotten tennis ball.

  ‘No! Course not.’

  ‘Well, it’s bloody time to go,’ he says. ‘Getting snory.’

  ‘I’m just off to, to get a cardigan,’ she says when they go indoors, and she runs up to her room to conceal her thefts in her overnight bag. This house smells like nowhere she has ever been, full of places a child could make her own: alcoves and dusty landings, airing cupboards, tables to roll underneath; old paint on skirting boards so thick its chips have edges. She hates that child. It should be her.

  Her bedroom is the best, or worst. It is a cool pale nest of ironed white bedlinen and discreet floral wallpaper. There is a silver monogrammed hairbrush, space on the bookshelves, a dressing table whose tiny wooden drawers contain nothing but a picture hook and a couple of tiddlywinks. She can feel her lungs expanding. She thinks: I’ll fling open the window, the casement, for some air.

  But Marina has a problem, which she always forgets. Her body never knows where it is. If someone else, for example, pulled aside the curtain, would they realize in time that the ornament on the windowsill, a green china bird-cum-nutcracker which, in another setting, she would consider hideous but obviously not here, might be knocked off? Because she does not realize, or does not quite believe it, and so the green bird jumps off the windowsill, falls on the radiator and crashes to the floor.

  She has to leave, right away. Before dinner. She will take the pieces with her, all nine, no, twelve of them, and get them mended in London. She could write a letter on the train. Or should she own up, and be cast out? She dithers, then panics, and she is just gathering her possessions when her bedroom door opens.

  Laura, in the kitchen, holding Peter’s letter above the bin, watches her hand tremble. Has she always been so indecisive? It is hard to remember; her memory, too, seems worse. She feels extraordinarily old, better suited to a long convalescence in a rest home than to dealing with an ex, now current, husband. The thought of him is exhausting. Wouldn’t it be better for us all, she thinks, if I pretended the letter had never arrived?

  It is only Guy.

  ‘Wotcha,’ he says.

  Marina boldly kisses him, to distract him from the bag on her bed. Unusually for a Combe boy on a Saturday night, he does not reek of deodorant and aftershave and Clearasil and anti-fungal foot lotion. He looks, she tells herself, almost attractive, doesn’t he? ‘I,’ she says. ‘Actuall—’

  ‘You not dressing for dinner?’

  ‘Sh, should I have?’ she asks, only now noticing that he has changed into ironed chinos, a light blue shirt. ‘Really? Oh God. I can. Give me a minute. Or,’ she says nervously, ‘maybe I should just leave—’

  ‘Don’t be a prat. And you can’t change. Dinner has to be on time.’

  Tears are beginning to boil their way up her throat into her nose. She follows him downstairs, feeling her palm stick to the banisters, sick with self-disgust. What if someone goes to air her bed, as they do in Tatler, and finds the broken china in her washbag? How could she not have thought of dressing for dinner? Breeding will out.

  Mrs Viney, whom Guy mentioned in passing upstairs is the Honourable Nancy, waits for them at the bottom of the stairs with Guy’s sister, who is holding the big black dog by its collar. Marina’s heart gives a little jerk of terror.

  ‘
Oh, darlings,’ says Mrs Viney, who looks like Katharine Hepburn in wide black trousers and a dark pink blouse. ‘You look gorgeous. Marina, what lovely boots.’

  ‘She forgot to change,’ says Guy ungallantly.

  ‘Didn’t you realize?’ says his sister, who is wearing a pale grey sleeveless dress, in which her collarbones and scapula and sternum are clearly visible. Thank God Rozsi isn’t here; she is not, Marina suspects, wearing a bra. ‘I suppose not everyone— Guyie, you oaf, you should have warned her about our strange ways.’

  ‘You should,’ says his beautiful mother. ‘But it doesn’t matter, not one bit. We’re all scruffbags here.’

  ‘I could lend you something,’ says Lucy Viney and, although Marina looks up sharply, she doesn’t see her smirk.

  ‘You’re about twice her height,’ Guy tells his sister. ‘And half her girth.’

  ‘Guy. Be good and take Beckett,’ says his mother.

  ‘No, seriously,’ says Marina, ‘I don’t think—’

  ‘Nonsense,’ says Lucy Viney briskly. ‘Tell you what, you could borrow Emster’s skirt, Evelyn’s just mended it.’

  Marina, mystified, finds her hand being taken by Lucy as she is propelled down another corridor, past yet more doors and into a little dark room full of laundry, with a sewing machine.

  ‘There you go,’ Guy’s sister says, holding out a mini-skirt in bright turquoise wool, somewhere between tweed and felt. ‘Perfect,’ and, sitting up on a high stool, she waits for Marina to try it on.

  ‘I,’ says Marina. Her cheeks burn; she can feel sweat on the backs of her knees and in her armpits. She thinks: I cannot do this.

  ‘Better hurry up,’ says Lucy Viney. ‘I heard the bell.’ This, whatever it means, shocks Marina into life. She pulls her jumper down to her thighs and starts undoing her boots with trembling hands, talking with no idea how to stop about other people the Vineys might know at Combe. She cannot bring herself to meet Lucy’s eye; her mottled thighs and navy cotton Principessa Girl underpants, which Rozsi calls her ‘good school knicker’– if only today she had worn her Berlei Junior Girdle – glow luminously under the overhead bulb. She thinks: I want to shoot myself. Somehow, by talking more and more quickly, she forces herself to remove her jeans and grab the skirt, which has a difficult fabric-covered belt with buttons and a zip and a hook. She shuts her eyes as she pulls it on, over her thighs. It is tight on her bum. It will not do up.

  ‘God, was that another mouse?’ says Guy’s sister, kicking a clothes basket with her toe and Marina seizes the chance to breathe in far enough to pull up the zip, feeling the pulling of stitches as she tugs it round to the back. ‘Let’s go,’ Lucy says impatiently. ‘Not really your build, Emster, but at least she’s bigger than me,’ and she gives Marina a smile crossed with a wince. ‘She won’t mind a bit.’

  ‘I, I need tights,’ whispers Marina. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘No, you’ll be fine,’ says Lucy, jumping off her stool. She is wearing oddly broken-down ballet pumps, which would horrify Rozsi; her feet are long and bony, like her hands. ‘I never do.’

  ‘Please.’

  Guy’s sister sighs. ‘Hang on,’ she says and she goes out of the room, leaving the door wide open, and comes back with a pair of bobbly mid-brown tights, damp and longer than Marina’s legs. ‘Just washed,’ she says, and Marina bends to put them on.

  As they emerge into the hallway, Marina turns to ask a polite question and finds that she has been abandoned. Her throat is tight; don’t cry, peasant girl, she thinks. There is a strong smell of flowers: Turkish delight, she thinks stupidly; attar of roses. I need perfume. No, scent.

  ‘There you are, we’d quite lost you. You must think us dreadfully rude,’ says a voice. When Mrs Viney puts her arm around her and walks on down the corridor, Marina’s face is pressed against the rose-coloured silk, in the region of her lower shoulder, or upper breast. Held as she is against Guy’s mother’s side, like a dwarf in a three-legged race, she can see her jawline, the soft pale skin under her chin. She is, for a mother, startlingly lovely. Turkish delight: she breathes it in.

  Here it is at last, the heart of the house: a room the size of a normal school hall, with chintzy sofas and dark forbidding chairs and a round polished table in the big bay window covered with Country Life. There is no trace of their host’s profession here; one does not enter a drawing room in order to be educated. There is an immense fireplace, in which most of a tree is half-heartedly burning; above it on a notably ugly marble mantelpiece, cream and green and yellow like candied vomit, stand invitations, and silver christening mugs, and fat candlesticks, and photographs of people on horses.

  So comfortingly old-fashioned, so cheerfully Philistine. What does it matter if there are generations of dog fur in the corners and moths deep in the velvet curtains; if the wiring, with one further mouse nibble, will plunge the house into darkness, or flames? Stoker belonged to Mrs Viney’s mother; perhaps, thinks Marina, she has only just died. The parquet is coming up in the corners, and the window frames are quite obviously plugged with newspaper; if you slept in here alone you would wake up with chilblains, at best. This room says: you see, we are too grand to care.

  ‘We’re awfully quiet here,’ says Mrs Viney. ‘Just a few friends – can you bear it?’

  ‘It’s fine,’ says Marina. Her voice is croaky with shyness; there is a strong chance of sudden dramatic fainting, or being sick. ‘We never have people to din . . . I mean, not much.’

  There are cold miles between the sofas; the hearth alone is bathroom sized. At home only Zsuzsi smokes; Rozsi, as everyone keeps telling her, gave up smoking sixty a day the minute Marina and her mother moved in. But all their guests do. Here, at Stoker, they are concentrating on drinking. ‘I expect you know Jerry,’ she says, indicating a familiar-looking grey-haired man just emptying his glass.

  ‘Er . . . yes, maybe, I—’ Marina says, tentatively putting out her hand but Mrs Viney steers her onward, saying, ‘and Immo, of course, and Horatia,’ smiling at a woman with big horn-rimmed glasses and hair piled up like a blonde cottage loaf. ‘Olly, darling, you’ll get young Marina a drink, won’t you? He’s a poppet,’ she whispers to Marina, nodding at a man in red trousers. ‘He’ll love you. Now, will you excuse me? I must just . . .’ and she drifts away. Guy is dealing with the dog; it is lying on its back in a basket by the fire, violently exposing itself. The red trouser man gives her a glass of fizzy wine; she nods and blushes at him like an idiot and, understandably disgusted, he wanders off. She sits down on a little old-fashioned chair, fat with tapestried cushions, but they prickle so that she stands clumsily and twists her ankle. Lucy Viney is talking to a thin dark clever-looking woman, who flicks a glance at Marina; then she, too, ignores her.

  If only Marina had social graces. If only she had courage, like her relatives, or Nancy Mitford. Guy’s house must be full of linen cupboards in which to hide, or helpful stableboys who, for a generous tip, might drive—

  That man in a dark jacket, on a spindly-looking sofa leagues away, is Alexander Viney.

  His hair is silver velvet in the firelight; with his shaven chin and mighty nose he reminds her of a mature and warlike god. To her disappointment, Marina sees that he is talking to the woman with glasses and silly hair, to whom she has taken a dislike. His hand seems to drop behind and then rise up her back, as if he is pattering his fingers along her spine. Marina lowers her eyes in confusion. She has a sudden longing to be at home, stuffing cabbage-leaf parcels with minced pork and veal, or discussing the correct age to read Middlemarch. She wants to ring Urs, 229 5104, and report to her: I am here in the halls of greatness, et tout va bien. Non, je blague. Avec tristesse, comme toujours je suis dégueulasse.

  She is small and primitive, like someone in a Brueghel. No one is talking to her, with her stiff smile and stupid hands. Like a girl in a fairy story, she thinks in wishes:

  Please.

  Please.

  Please.

  But nothing happens. She smiles unat
tractively, walks over to a table and pretends to be admiring an ashtray made of a hoof or a horn. If she were at Simon Flowers’s house she could be reading poetry aloud to his younger sisters, or watching his parents play string quartets. She could join in on the cello. Her foot touches something: a blood-smudged bone, half-gnawed, and in her shock she knocks into a dog bowl under the table. Water sloshes on the rug and the parquet beneath it; at home she would rush to wipe it up. Here she can only pray to the God of Evaporation.

  ‘Young person,’ says a voice.

  All other sound seems to leave the room, as if someone had pressed their lips to it and sucked the flavour out.

  Alexander Viney lifts his energetic eyebrows. His forehead crinkles in four straight lines, as if he is amused.

  ‘So you are . . .’

  ‘I’m Guy’s er,’ she says stupidly, aglow like a fiery radish. Mr Viney lifts his eyebrows again: one, two. ‘I mean,’ she begins. ‘I— we met.’

  ‘I know who you are. You said. I’m not quite geriatr—’

  ‘Yes,’ she says without thinking, ‘I saw your age in Who’s Who.’

  ‘Indeed. Don’t interrupt. Rather, the question is: what are you? That’s the aspect which interests me.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Good Lord. It’s quite straightforward: are you whatever it is you people say now . . . his girlfriend? Do people have girlfriends these days?’

  She can feel everyone watching. There is a strange silence, curdy and dense. She says, ‘I think, er, maybe some do. But not at Combe.’

  ‘Oh really. What happens at Combe?’

  ‘We . . . that’s not allowed. We . . . toil, instead. Some of us.’

  ‘Do you now?’ His eyebrows rise even higher. ‘Toil,’ he says thoughtfully, his eyes still on her. ‘D’you know, that’s a good word. So you’re not his girlfriend.’

  ‘I—’

  ‘No need to answer,’ he says, smilingly. ‘Now tell me. What else are you? Don’t look so nonplussed: that dark plait like a squaw, those impressive eyebrows. You look like you should be ululating at Mafia funerals. Spanish? I don’t know. Not Greek?’