Almost English Read online

  Then she catches her breath. In the rosy darkness of her room in West Street, Mr Viney has just materialized before her, saying ‘a little life’. Is that what she wants? Laboratories? Hospital beds? In his voice was an implication – no, more than that – that science is somehow . . . unseemly. Base. Maybe he’s right. If she thinks of the smells of formaldehyde and the ugly textbooks, even the pictures in the Cambridge medicine prospectus, do they excite her? Or does her heart skip instead at the thought of the panelled history classroom at Combe, Mr Viney giving her extra help with the Tudors? If he could really help her change—

  But she can’t drop biology; Pa Pond won’t allow it.

  Chemistry?

  She thinks: you don’t even like it. Pa Kendall is practically dead. Imagine doing Elizabeth I instead of nuclear fission, being part of that world, the Vineys’ world, where everything is old and beautiful. What are you now? Small and ugly and cheap. And Pa Stenning—

  Her heart seems to stop, then start again, more urgently. Pa Stenning, head of history: the Vineys’, Mrs Viney’s, friend.

  Laura has been extraordinarily lucky. No one has noticed her theft. Every day she has waited for Marg’s face to show more than the usual combination of bored contempt, mild digestive discomfort and irritation at the many demands of the seriously sick upon the well.

  ‘If only,’ she is fond of saying, ‘they’d bloody listen to an expert,’ and Laura nods and smiles and wonders what Marg’s advice would be to her.

  Soon, Laura reassures herself, looking abstractedly at Marg’s neck hump, you could be beyond guilt, let alone punishment. Nevertheless, every time Marg stands up – she is a great fan of tea-breaks – Laura’s heart judders to a halt. She sweats, and frets, and fidgets, like a normal person who wants to carry on living, unincarcerated. At least she is definitely not thinking about Peter, who has not contacted her again. Not remotely. He is absolutely the last person on her mind.

  How do people find the time or privacy in which to kill themselves? This cannot go on. I, Laura thinks, cannot. Tomorrow, Thursday, she has the day off work to go with the family to Combe; it is Marina’s birthday. And then it is half-term, when they will be together. Perhaps after that, time could be found.

  On Wednesday evening, when she is wrapping Marina’s presents, Zsuzsi, pongyola-ed, appears.

  ‘Darling,’ she whispers hoarsely. ‘We must talk.’

  Laura takes a deep breath. ‘Actually,’ she says. ‘I was thinking . . . those clip-on earrings are lovely, but I don’t know . . . I mean, they might hurt her—’

  ‘Don’t be rid-iculos,’ says Zsuzsi. ‘No, it is the boy.’

  Her arms are folded. She is frowning fiercely, but there is something else in her expression: triumph? Interest?

  ‘Boy?’ says Laura. ‘Which one?’

  ‘There is another one?’

  ‘No! I mean . . . sorry, can we start again?’

  What emerges makes no sense at all. There seems to be a problem about that boy who came to Rozsi’s party; Zsuzsi, it seems, no longer approves of him. ‘You tell her,’ says Zsuzsi. ‘It is not allowed.’

  Why not? She won’t say. This is, for Farkases and Károlyis, not unusual, but what is Laura supposed to do?

  For her birthday, Marina is hoping for: an ear-piercing token; moisturizer; slightly tight jeans; cassette tapes; a bicycle; stationery; a dark pink blouse; Argyle socks from Aston; a pet; a nickname; Simon Flowers; her old life back.

  They have turned up early, to surprise Marina. On this day seventeen years ago, on a Nightingale ward at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital, Laura’s daughter was born.

  It is shiveringly cold when the Farkases leave London, but there is spring sunshine in Combe. ‘Vot a vether,’ says Rozsi.

  ‘Beautiful.’

  Laura, in too many clothes and laden like a donkey, hurries around the edge of the quadrangle, or pitch, or whatever they call it, in Rozsi’s wake. The skin of her forehead aches. The huge tail-coated man-boys ignore her, as do the girls, golden-maned racehorses in nasty acrylic blazers. Last night, when the others were in bed, Laura did several minutes of miscellaneous exercises on the living-room floor, stretching her blue limbs in the dark. What was the point? Look at the skin of the young, their faces. She might as well be dead.

  ‘Marina must be in lessons,’ she says. ‘We’re not really allowed to find . . . she might not like—’

  ‘Don’t be a silly,’ Rozsi says, unbuttoning her checked raincoat swiftly, like a huntsman flaying a boar.

  However, Marina is not to be found. The teachers and children they ask are not helpful: anyone would think, Laura starts telling Peter in her head, that we were just tourists inspecting the ruins, not payers of thousands of pounds in fees.

  Rozsi is beginning to hobble; Ildi does not look well, Zsuzsi, resplendent in golden faux-fox, starts saying, ‘Tair-ible,’ loudly. She is quite capable of bursting into a lesson.

  Oh, God, thinks Laura. But I want Marina. I need my daughter back.

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ she says. ‘I’ll run and find her. You . . . why don’t you sit here, and I’ll bring her to you?’

  Leaving the others complaining in Hungarian on a bench, she hurries through a stone archway into a dead end; is squashed against the outside wall of Bute while two pensioners stagger past her with blue sacks of bedlinen; sees a herd of tiny boys marching across a courtyard dressed like army officers; and at last, hot and ruffled, arrives at West Street, where the smirking girls in the television room claim not to have seen Marina.

  ‘But what shall I do?’ she says desperately. ‘I need to know—’

  ‘I can take you to her room,’ says a colourless girl with bad skin. ‘We share.’ And she leads Laura through an infinitely complicated series of fire doors while comparing the workers’ cottage origins of West Street with her own happy home in Sussex, which features a paddock, a double garage and something called a plunge pool.

  The bedroom she shares with Laura’s daughter is horrible. It has three doors: one leading to the corridor, one to a fire escape and one to ‘Billie and Simonetta’s room. I dare say you know about them.’ Laura nods. The girl, Heidi, will not take her hungry eyes off her face. Half of this room is Marina: the new dressing gown and Laura Ashley deckchair-striped duvet cover they bought together, the pillow she longs to sniff, a good luck wooden spoon from Ursula; postcards on the section of wall half-hidden by her desk.

  Then she notices something. Photographs surround the end of her bed, of Ursula and various Kates on holiday, the beloved Miss Coverdale of Ealing Girls’ accepting flowers when she emigrated to be married in Canada, before she came back. But where are the photographs of her family?

  Although Marina has been too embarrassed to admit to her birthday, the arrival of her great-aunts’ card – tray-sized and in a special padded envelope – two days early has helped the news to escape. It feels blasphemous to be here at all on this her sacred day, even though some of West Street are being nice; Hannah North has actually made her a card, and Jennifer de los Santos insisted that today she should be the guardian of the West Street mascot, Toffee: a pale blue boy kitten in a little T-shirt.

  But this is not how birthdays should be. She is seventeen, still a virgin, still a scientist. Her family is coming later for lunch, after double biology and this term’s new torture, lacrosse, which is not archaically jolly after all but involves hard muddy balls rocketing about at face height. It seems possible that she will not survive until then; I’m not even sure, she thinks, tears starting to her eyes, that I want to. And every time she walks past Tom Thomson making girls kneel she feels violently upset, which proves how badly she fits in. And her birthday letter from Ursula is mainly a paean to elegant-minded Miss Tyce: the fun they have in her early modern history lessons, the tea at her house in Ravenscourt Park, and the story she told them there about a girl they never even knew, someone’s big sister, who streaked on her last-ever day of school, through Prize Assembly. ‘She must be a S
apphist,’ Urs wrote.

  She has just survived First Quarter, and is on her way to the tuck shop for a consoling sherbet dib-dab when she suddenly looks behind her: a woman’s instinct. Just coming out of North Gate is Simon Flowers, carrying his music case, his shoulders movingly thin. He is with a girl from his year, throwing Marina into such despair that some moments pass before she notices the person behind them: it is Laura, her mother.

  Zsuzsi is reapplying her lipstick when Laura returns. ‘Estée Lauder,’ she announces to passing schoolboys. ‘Also from Hungary.’

  Laura nods, distracted by her own stupidity. Marina will be furious with her for letting them turn up like this. ‘Maybe we should—’ she begins and then her heart seems to bound out of her chest at the sight of her daughter, her beloved, running self-consciously towards them around the grass.

  She manages not to drop her bags and race to meet her, this semi-stranger in uniform. She tries to pretend that Marina looks happy to see them: so much lovelier and more worthy of life than anything else in the world.

  ‘Now she come,’ says Rozsi. ‘Laura, you buy her that skirt? Tair-ible. Dar-link,’ she calls piercingly across the grass. ‘We wait for you.’

  Marina’s blush deepens, like a sponge filling up. ‘I – gosh,’ she says. ‘What’s happened? Why are you here already? Is everyone OK?’

  ‘Funny,’ says Ildi. ‘Happy Birsday!’

  Marina kisses the others and then her mother. Laura bends awkwardly, trying with one hand on Marina’s shoulder to convey reassurance, her huge unmanageable love, and thereby missing her chance to breathe in the scent of her daughter’s hair, to which she has been looking forward since Reading.

  ‘But why—’

  Laura says, ‘We . . . Rozsi . . . it just seemed a good idea to come up early. They thought. That’s all right, darling, isn’t it? If it isn’t, we could easily go—’

  ‘Von-darefool,’ beams Ildi, holding up supplementary offerings one by one: a week’s supply of peeled carrots, a first-aid manual, a jar of creamed spinach and a signed copy of An Interesting Life by Lady Renate Kennedy, of crystal hedgehog fame.

  ‘The thing is,’ Marina says to Rozsi, ‘I can’t—’

  ‘Dar-link. We come from London with Zsuzsi and Ildi and Laura. Now we go to town and we find a nice café and eat a little something and then.’

  ‘But,’ Marina tells her, ‘I’m not allowed. I’m really not. I’ve got lots . . . Spanish, I’m doing that now, isn’t that great, and lessons and rehearsing for the play and so much prep.’

  Laura’s bag twists in her hands. Why doesn’t she want to see us? That strange business about the Dobos lunch—

  Marina has always been painfully trustworthy. Laura has never doubted this before. Besides, in Westminster Court children respect adults; they never, never lie. She looks hard at Marina, whose face tells her that she knows Laura knows. But what do I know? thinks Laura. And what happens next?

  Surely it isn’t that she knows about me. Or is it? Jesus Christ almighty. Could she somehow have seen her mother with her father?

  ‘I thought I was meeting you at Mario’s,’ Marina says. ‘Should I ask Pa Daventry if I can go now?’

  Laura frowns. ‘I don’t want you getting into trouble.’

  ‘Don’t be funny,’ says Rozsi. ‘I tell him.’

  ‘No!’ Marina says.

  ‘You know,’ says Laura, ‘we would love to see you. But if you don’t think—’ It is not so easy to occupy the moral high ground when you have been rolling in a muddy morass; when, less than a week ago, you got drunk with your former – legally, current – husband and betrayed everyone you know and love by . . .

  ‘Mum,’ says Marina.

  By . . .

  Here it is again, that sinking sensation, as quicksand or a bog might feel, a fate she has always found particularly easy to imagine. Everything is hopeless. Nothing will be all right. Sinking lower, and l—

  Then she stops. What, she wonders, is Peter doing now?

  Lunch is, as usual, far from restful, but the worst moment is not when Zsuzsi confides loudly that their waiter is an idiot, or when they sing ‘Happy Birthday’, or Marina’s lip wobbles at the sight of her book token. It is right at the end, when Laura passes her her pink-and-navy scarf and sees, written on the label: VINEY.

  So, just before they leave to catch the London train, she pretends that she left her gloves in West Street and goes with Marina to find them. It is like walking next to a firework; Marina seethes and smoulders, but it is too dangerous to investigate. It is only when they are passing Bute that she dares to say, ‘How are things?’

  ‘You know. We said.’

  ‘And Guy?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Noth— nothing. He seems a lovely chap. But—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well.’ She hesitates, then follows her into the television room, smiling shyly at the girls watching an Australian soap, who look away.

  ‘Can we talk somewhere?’ asks Laura.

  ‘I have nowhere,’ Marina says in a tragic monotone. ‘Nowhere of my own.’

  ‘Right. Well, maybe just through here,’ Laura suggests, opening the door at the other end to where the pay phone sits, under the stairs. ‘Have they fixed – oh. It doesn’t look broken.’

  ‘Why should it be?’ snaps Marina. Then she stops. ‘I mean, it was, the other weekend . . .’

  Cold little fingers of dread and panic clutch at Laura’s stomach. ‘But . . . oh, sweetheart. Is something going on?’

  ‘No, it’s not. Why would it be?’

  And so begins one of the worst and, thanks to their household arrangements, only rows of their life. Laura fails to find out anything, and achieves even less. Given that she has no idea why Zsuzsi disapproves of Guy, and the boy is at the same school, she can’t very well forbid Marina to see him. When she tries again to discover something, anything, about this father of his, the historian, Marina’s outrage intensifies. She says, ‘You want to destroy your only child’s chance—’

  ‘Chance?’ says Laura. ‘Of what?’

  But Marina will not explain and, what with the waiting Farkas party, and West Street girls bounding up and down stairs in tracksuits, and a complete lack of maternal authority, Laura cannot make her. This has become the worst possible moment to ask about Combe itself, whether she’s happy here and, with Marina’s dark hints about not being wanted at home, ‘So you sent me away,’ and some confusing references to Philistines and Science versus Art, the moment passes. Besides, it is difficult to concentrate fully when Marina’s expression is so like Peter’s and, really, is there much point in trying to control her child when Laura herself is being so deceitful?

  ‘I might not even want to be a doctor,’ Marina is saying. ‘Medicine isn’t everything. In fact, if you must know, it was Mr Viney who—’

  ‘Hold on,’ Laura says. ‘You’ve been talking to him?’

  ‘I’m allowed.’

  Marina is crimson; Laura marches on. ‘Alone?’ Marina’s silence makes it clear that she has gone too far. ‘If you were, that would be fine. I mean, fine with me. Not with Rozsi, obviously.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘The problem is, look, can’t you just avoid this man, Alis— Alexander Viney.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘I, I’m not sure,’ says Laura weakly. ‘It’s probably nothing. You know how they are.’

  22

  Saturday, 11 February

  Cross country: 23rd Boys’ Dangerhurst Run and 1st Girls’ Dangerhurst Run, Petersbridge, 2.30 p.m.; netball v Epsom College: 1st VII (Greer’s), 2.30 p.m.; Dorset/Somerset Schools’ Indoor Rowing Championships, St Steven’s College, Bournemouth, 3 p.m.; Fitzgerald House Concert, Divinity Hall, 7.30 p.m.; Film Club: Kind Hearts and Coronets

  When Ildi comes into the living room, Laura is just hanging up.

  ‘Oh!’ she says. ‘I didn’t realize you were heard. Here. Er.’

  She could say it right now. ‘Tha
t was Peter on the phone.’ There is no excuse. For three whole weeks Laura has known that Ildi’s nephew is alive and said nothing. If they think he is dead, she has been murdering him, over and over again.

  ‘But, Sir,’ says Marina, gripping the door handle a little harder. It is just after morning school, when Pa Daventry is usually blowing whistles on the rugby pitch. She had wanted to leave a note. ‘Do I really need permission, just for one A level? It’s quite diff—’

  Pa Daventry is sitting in his naval captain’s chair, tapping his fountain pen against a big brass inkstand: the kind of object an enraged admiral might throw. Photographs of the rugby team, group and solo portraits, muscular action shots, surround him like the angelic host. ‘That’s as maybe,’ he says, ‘but you are not an exception to the rules, Miss Farkas. Albeit that you think you are.’

  He thinks girls are uneducable; he told Lucinda Prentice’s brother so. Maybe he is right. She does feel stupid. Perhaps if she shows an interest in his naval models . . . ‘What, what’s this boat?’

  ‘The Ark Royal. And it’s a ship. Don’t touch.’

  Only a fool would cry in front of Pa Daventry, but she can’t stop worrying about the row with her mother.

  ‘A ship, of course,’ she says, examining an oil painting of a naval battle. ‘Yes, it does look more . . . shippy in this one.’

  ‘That’s the Battle of Trafalgar; you’re pointing at the Redoubtable. Good God, is this some sort of joke?’

  ‘No, no, not at all. I’m just . . . sorry.’ She looks around for further talking points: that big barometer, or possibly clock? The sailing ship in its enormous bottle? It doesn’t look fragile, but . . . just in time, she snatches her hand away. ‘Oh great, binoculars,’ she says. ‘I’m always trying to spot constellations. Can I have a look? Can you just see the playing-fields from here, or—’

  ‘Will that be all?’ he says, putting them in his drawer. ‘I am a busy man.’

  ‘But,’ she says. ‘So if I can’t ask my m— parents, I can’t swap subjects?’