Almost English Page 13

  ‘God,’ he said and cleared his throat. Semen, she thought. Squirmy tadpoles all over her hand; she could get pregnant.

  ‘Tissue?’

  ‘It’s fine, I’ll go the bathroom. Don’t worry,’ she said kindly, holding her hand out stiffly like a piece of rotten meat.

  The big upstairs hallway was dark, the carpet soft, and she did not see his father until they were face to face.

  ‘Oh!’ she said, jumping. She hid the hand behind her back. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Bit late to be exploring, isn’t it?’ His voice was so quiet that she had to lean closer to hear him. Closed doors on either side; she listened hard, but all was still. Which one had he come out of ? Perhaps the Vineys sleep separately. Was he going for a marital visit?

  ‘I didn’t mean—’

  ‘Don’t apologize. Was something keeping you up?’ He smiled at her in the half-light. Could he smell it? ‘It’s terrific to have you here.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh yes. In the bosom. My family is everything to me, you know, but I cannot be limited. The enthusiasms of young people make life more liveable. You understand.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. When he touched her forearm, she gave a little jump. She looked up at him. A thread seemed to shoot between them. ‘You must come again,’ he murmured. ‘I insist that you do,’ and he turned and left her standing there, the thread pulled tight.

  16

  ‘The thing is,’ Laura says. ‘I know it’s late. But I have to go out.’

  Rozsi is visiting invalids; Zsuzsi is in bed with the Combe Almanac, reading out difficult words – ‘Vot is this “Dibbers”?’ – in a carrying voice through the open door. Only Ildi is in the living room, packing up knitted dolls for the poor children of Romania. ‘Vair-y sweet,’ she says, waving the hand of a soldier doll. ‘Ha-llo.’

  The Tube will be fastest, to Earls Court on the District Line. If only there was a quicker way. ‘Hello,’ says Laura politely to the soldier. ‘Ildi, is that all right? I’m a bit late . . .’

  Ildi, pulling down the skirt on a reversible princess homunculus, takes a breath. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘They—’

  ‘I know,’ says Laura. ‘But I won’t be long.’

  London at night. Why is her stomach fluttering? She stands in the roaring glare of the Underground, as if queuing to enter hell, and the pulse in her throat seems audible. Is it the heady fumes of strangers’ alcohol, the fact that nobody knows where she is? Or the thought of an accident: fear, pain, blood loss in public, but a solution of sorts? Which would be worse for Marina, in the long term: losing or keeping a mother like Laura?

  However, when she emerges at Stamford Brook and crosses King Street towards the Great West Road, her daughter is forgotten. Laura is wishing she had put on different clothes. Not that she will see anyone she knows, let alone have a conversation. She is only going to look.

  I am burying your ghost, she thinks, you . . . you bastard, and that will be the end of you.

  The boat on which Peter is staying is parked in something called Eyot’s Boatyard, on the north bank of one of the confusing loops of the river. You simply open the wooden gate and walk through, along a rickety platform, above a glistening surface of soft grey mud. No one questions or molests her. To her left are huge slimy stakes, a fence for giants. To her right is creaking, splashing, the muddy tide of the Thames. She had imagined gin palaces, technology, not this almost rural calm.

  Beau Geste, she reads on the side of the first boat, which is much bigger than she had expected, solidly built of grey riveted metal. Mirabelle, Basinger, Fidelity, Scheherazade. She does not expect to find Vivian. It would be better for all of them if she did not. She should turn around. She could still do it. This is where her future divides: happiness or sorrow. Life or death. Heart pounding like a dying thing, she walks on.

  The problem with co-education is that you are trapped. Marina has been unsuccessfully avoiding Guy since Sunday, which makes her either frigid or a prick tease. She keeps worrying that Simon Flowers will detect the odour of sin upon her, or even actual spermatozoa – she keeps seeming to smell something similar, on the Buttery stairs or crossing Founder’s Court under the trees. Oh, sperm, she can now think to herself airily. This is some comfort.

  She has drawn a plan of her place setting at dinner and written down every single book she saw at Stoker; it makes her feel like a criminal whenever she bumps into Guy. He keeps trying to entice her to his room.

  ‘I can’t,’ she always tells him. ‘We’ll be expelled.’ Neither of them has referred to what happened in his bedroom at home; the awkwardness has turned into abruptness, as if she has done something wrong. Perhaps she has. Her elbow is still stiff and sore, which is not helping. At least when they’re below stage at Divvers, with infants around the corner painting papier mâché and Pa Stenning likely to appear at any moment, there is a limit to what he expects her to do, or have done unto her. But Guy is ingenious. Shutting the prop-room door is forbidden, but he has found a place behind Costumes 4: Heralds/Mummers/Slaves, where they can lean against a packing case and not be seen.

  He is very pressing.

  ‘Aren’t you scared of being caught?’ she says when he undoes the top two buttons of her blouse. She has developed a habit of checking them frequently with her fingers; she has a terrible fear of accidentally coming unbuttoned in public and not noticing. Her chest in the cool air feels extremely nude. She keeps her eyes well above his waist.

  ‘We’ll be fine,’ he says. ‘Stenning won’t say a word.’

  As he feels her, she thinks this over. Next time he takes his mouth away, she says, ‘Why not?’

  ‘God, you’re chatty,’ he says.

  ‘No, really, tell me.’

  ‘Friend of my parents,’ he says, trying to unpeel her fingers from the edge of the crate. She knows what he wants her to do.

  ‘By, by the way,’ she says. ‘I need your address.’

  ‘No, you don’t.’

  ‘I do,’ she says, holding her head away from him. ‘It’s not in the Register, for some reason.’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Guy. ‘Stenning did Dad a favour.’

  Marina nods knowledgeably. ‘Because of confidentiality, probably. I have to write your mother a thank-you card.’

  ‘Not too gushy.’

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ she says. ‘But to be polite . . .’

  ‘Come on, babe. Just let me—’

  ‘OK,’ she says. ‘You can, if you’re quick. But then will you give me their address?’ It could, she thinks, be the beginning of a correspondence.

  Here it is.

  It looks like a home-made bath toy: a square white cabin, a stumpy dark body with a single pale stripe. Other boats have foliage outside in pots, and bright windows and fences; they might be on land, with seagulls for squirrels, were it not for the gangplanks and the smell of the river, sloshing and pulsing out of sight. Vivian has nothing: black wood, dangerous-looking loops of wires. She had expected luxurious bohemianism, not rot, not squalor. It looks more like a prison ship than a houseboat.

  She is two gangplanks away, by Second Childhood. Provided that nobody comes past she can see Vivian quite easily. The portholes are not completely dark; there is a dim glow in one or possibly two, muted by curtains and dirt.

  Surely nothing so ordinary could contain Peter? After living in her head for thirteen years, how is it possible that he could be here?

  It is cold but not yet raining. She could stand here for an hour or more, just watching; contemplating how much she hates him. Damn you, she thinks experimentally and imagines how, if she had any strength of character, she would stride up to the deck and knock and shout until he emerged.

  At that moment there is a sound from the boat, as if it had belched, and a splash, and a light illuminates one of the blind portholes by the door. Someone is coming out; it is him, it must be and, if he sees her here, her last grains of self-respect will crumble completely. He is coming; she can almost h
ear him at the door. She must get away.

  Yet she hesitates. What would I do, she thinks: shout at him? Rub his face in that lost horrible time, those wasted years?

  Ten o’clock. Marina lies in the bath, washing with an extraordinarily expensive Crabtree & Evelyn rose glycerine soap which she bought herself last term and has not yet dared to use. Every one of her possessions is wrong: she can see that now. She will throw out all her toiletries, her London clothes, and start again.

  It feels like the beginning of a new life. She has drafted several thank-you letters to Mrs Viney, including one – ‘Thank you for your kindness, your understanding, your friendship’ – which rather moved her, and then has written up the best one on a special Italian note card, adding a reference to Mrs Viney’s graciousness, asking for the return of her forgotten blue flannel, hinting, lightly yet heavily, about a return visit. She has also said, which isn’t strictly a lie, that during her stay she possibly had a temperature, which would explain any strange-seeming behaviour. ‘My real character, you might say, is much more refined!!’

  But as soon as the envelope went into the porter’s bag, she realized that something about the tone was wrong. Should she have enclosed money for Evelyn, or somehow paid for her meals? Why did she say, ‘If ever there is anything I can do for you, please do be get be in touch’?

  Then Guy told her that his parents hate thank-you cards. ‘And Christmas cards. And when people write actual comments in the visitors’ book. It’s just so . . . you know. Naff.’

  ‘God, I know. Exactly,’ Marina lied, wishing she could commit fell . . . fel . . . or no, what’s that other thing? Felo de se. If she writes again to apologize for having written, is that correct, or will it make things worse?

  Somebody shouts in the corridor outside the bathroom and she jumps horizontally, creating waves. In her first week the girls had to be measured and checked for rubella vaccinations in the San, arms crossed over their bras as they were herded towards the school doctor’s office. She was still excited about Combe, and this was fuel: a genuine sanatorium; barley water. Quarantine. She was admitted into the presence of Dr Slater: ‘Lie down there,’ he said to her, nodding at a camp bed. But it was lower than she expected and somehow she lay down too soon, and dropped a foot through the air to the mattress.

  That, she thinks, was when she should have left.

  Any reasonable person would have waited to see if Peter emerged on the deck, but not Laura. Instead, in her fright she bit her lip; licking the wound, tasting blood or poisonous river mud, she stumbled on until she reached the road.

  I hate you, she thinks, only partly to him. She should go home. She is going more slowly now, past big houses with gardens stretching down to the water, displaying the warm coppery rooms of families and couples, or of people as lonely as her. She walks back along the pavement, hopelessly bedraggled: the woman who missed her chance. The damp cold air stings her ringing lip, which, however, seems to lack the energy to bleed. What do I do? she asks the paving stones. What do I dowhat doIdo – but, realistically, who will answer? If only she believed in God, or there was a helpline: somebody who could decide, quite objectively, whether pining like this for one’s child is proof of bad or good mothering; whether it would be better for someone in her position to stay, or dispose of herself; and, if the latter, how to do it so that her absence will be barely noticed.

  She could live in a cave, a wild-haired keeper of chickens, but it would embarrass Marina.

  An accident would be simpler. Don’t forget you’re a coward, she reminds herself; it would have to involve no pain. So, considering the comparative advantages of Tube crashes, gas explosions, IRA bombs and falling anvils, she turns a corner and there is the river, just for her.

  She seems to have run out of breath. It is so cold. She has taken a wrong turning somewhere and ended up here, on a concrete bank with only spindly railings to keep her from the water.

  The railings themselves are just a foot’s width or so apart, connected along the top by a horizontal bar at the perfect height for unsatisfactory people, such as a short man or a too-tall embarrassingly weeping woman, to wedge their elbows uncomfortably upon it if they wished or, indeed, their foot. No one is around. She looks down at her ugly black court shoe from Debenhams, the toe scuffed because she is an inelegant walker, the heel beginning to loosen. It would fit.

  No. She closes her eyes and lifts her face towards the grey scent and sound of water. People do do this, she tells herself, all the time. Virginia Woolf and . . . no, think of women with children. There was one the other day, a mother, in Zsuzsi’s paper: ‘So selfish, those poor babies,’ she had said, and Laura had agreed. It is almost half-term and, if she does it now, Marina might think it was because Laura didn’t want to spend the holiday with her daughter, which is quite wrong. But wouldn’t this way be kinder, more open to interpretation, than some of the alternatives? No one passes, as perhaps she hopes they might. She wipes her nose on her sleeve; it does not matter, she reminds herself, resting her cheek for comfort on a railing tip, if her tears are obvious when she goes back to the flat because she won’t be going. She almost believes it, even as she loathes her own self-pity. She could pull herself up and jump down to the bank; she is strong. But someone might see. Even now, the thought of a stranger smirking at her awkward climbing, the skirt tangled around her ugly tights or pulled across her bottom, is shameful.

  Yet there is no one here. Now she could do it. Now. Now.

  17

  Tuesday, 31 January

  Swimming: Dorset and Devon Schools’ Championship Gala, Senior Boys, Junior Girls, Yeovil College, 1 p.m. and 5 p.m.; Lowers (geog.) trip to Galapagos Islands begins; Shaftesbury Historical Association and Percy Society talk by Dr Bill Reed (Southampton Further Education College): ‘Desolation, Persecution, Rebirth: Christianity During the Late Middle Ages’, Old Library, 7 p.m.

  Why is it so difficult to think about anything else? When net-ball practice ends, Marina dashes to the library to look for Alexander Viney’s books. They have almost all of them: not, as she might have assumed, dry as death, but full of human stories, sympathetic to his characters, their desperation, their angry pride. Better still, she is allowed to look through the archive, the shelves labelled Alumni and Friends of Combe, where in a yellowed Sunday supplement she finds an interview: The Old Rectory, Stoker, as seen from the lawn; Guy and Lucy in fat blond infancy; their beautiful mother.

  There are notices on the library walls:

  SPEECH IS SILVERN BUT SILENCE IS GOLDEN.

  EATING WILL RESULT IN EXPULSION.

  VHS VIDEO TAPES ON REQUEST.

  Ten minutes later, after a lecture from Mrs Iredale, the notoriously sex-hungry deputy librarian, she is sitting in a windowless storage room, listening to Alexander Viney’s voice. It warms his listeners: clever, seductive, certain. She has turned off the light. He is only a metre away. ‘The man of letters must ignore what others require of him,’ he says, ‘a political agenda, say, or faith. God forbid.’

  He is younger here; his hair is darker. It looks as if they have filmed this on the terrace at Stoker. Are they happy, he and Mrs Viney? Marina creeps closer to the television. Was she sitting near him, just off camera? Or wandering in the herb garden alone, thinking sad thoughts of—

  ‘No,’ said Alexander Viney, unexpectedly loudly. ‘For history to reach us, it must concern its protagonists’ private lives. It must speak of their hopes, their secrets: it must speak of their dark hearts.’

  He seems to be addressing her. Does he mean that everyone, not just Marina, has desires which cannot be talked about?

  Laura, disappointingly, is still alive. It takes courage to throw oneself into a river, to be fished out by the Thames police and written about in the Notting Hill Gazette so, because she is cowardly, she stared at the water a little longer, went home, woke up the next morning and left for work. Which is why, four days later, apparently unchanged except for a slight escalation of self-loathing, she is
sitting at her desk at the surgery, about to make everything worse.

  It would be very easy to reach Peter, now that he has decided she may. As his letter thoughtfully explained, if Laura wanted to she could leave a message on the answer phone of Suze, who is ‘a’ girlfriend of Jensen, who owns that grim boat, Vivian. The letter, still stubbornly unburnt, is stuffed at the back of the sideboard, hidden in a copy of The L-Shaped Room. Admittedly Laura, although increasingly unable to retain the smallest work-related fact, has remembered Suze’s number perfectly, but she doesn’t have to act on it. She doesn’t have to ring.

  In which case, why is she sitting here, phone in hand, about to dial? Because she is stupid. You stupid fool: even if his half-baked system worked, he’d hardly be able to ring you back, either here or at home, scene of so many lives he has ruined.

  So she writes. Just a plain office slip, asking him to meet her so that she can say what she needs to, and establish some facts. Then it will be over.

  She puts it in the surgery postbag, takes it out, runs round the corner to the Post Office under the unlikely pretext of needing an aerogramme, and only when she has returned to her desk does she realize that she is about to ruin her life, again. She can’t see Peter. What was she thinking? Was there something in her harmless helpful solitary childhood, or her mother’s painful sinking into death, which so weakened her that she attracts disaster? It cannot be sane to live like this, lurching between catastrophes, moving ever further from the world of normal people who live the life they choose.

  The rest of the day is a daze of regret. The evening is no better. Mrs Dobos has honoured them by coming ‘for a little coffee’, in order to discuss the possibility that Combe might be good enough for her own granddaughter, spoilt Natalya. Laura keeps forgetting to smile sufficiently. She is concentrating on hiding the fact that, only a millimetre or two below the surface of the woman they think they see, she has been whittled out entirely, and replaced with something black and hidden.