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  But they do not ask.

  There is nothing to do. The Ealing Girls’ half-term isn’t until next week. Toiling beside her mother in the tiny kitchen, every single maternal feature – her floury hair, her sugary hands, her parsleyed apron – is unbearable. She looks at the back of her head, looks at the frying pan, sighs regretfully. Her hopes for a correspondence with Guy’s mother have been fruitless but, she thinks, I could write again. She might invite me. Maybe she’s already decided that she will.

  ‘Are you sure,’ Marina asks, ‘that no one has rung for me?’

  ‘No, sweetheart.’

  ‘Because I’m expecting, um, someone, a friend, to ring about homework. Just a friend. She’s called Nancy.’

  She knows that she sounds ridiculous, that she is stirring the pan of tomato sauce much too quickly. But her mother seems satisfied. Really, anyone would think she wanted to be deceived.

  On Monday her mother and grandmother go to work. Ildi is off to the library; Zsuzsi is meeting Perlmutter Sári at the swimming pool: ‘Marinaka, don’t you vant to get slim?’ They have left her bean-and-sausage soup, meatloaf and sliced-up oranges for lunch, money for the new Picasso exhibition and the instruction to stop biting her lip, ‘because,’ Rozsi says, ‘it make you look like mad girl.’ And, most horribly of all, tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. Is it possible that someone could be at a mixed, in fact largely a boys’, school, and receive nothing? She fears it is. She never has had a real one. If Guy’s mother or sister asks what she had this year, she is going to lie.

  Waiting for the post, in case a card has come early, is maddening. She has a furtive look at Hungary in her atlas, but instead of Pálaszlany in the Carpathian mountains, where Mr Viney said, she can only find somewhere called Polslav in Russia. What if they ask her back to Stoker and he mentions it again?

  What is Mr Viney doing right now? And Mrs Viney? Are they thinking of her?

  Many doctors nowadays believe that an informed patient is a happy patient. They have helpful charts and anatomical models, purchased from the pharmaceutical reps. It isn’t hard to do.

  But Alistair is not one of these.

  How then can Laura find out what she needs to know? Marina’s biology textbooks have told her nothing; they seem to edit disease from them, as if it is more important to understand pond weed than human weakness. Somewhere in this surgery may be information which could save Peter, or at least answer the questions she did not dare to ask.

  So Laura leafs furtively through out-of-date drugs manuals. She pays more attention than usual to the ailments of patients waiting to be seen. At last, as the surgery is about to close, she finds a small plastic model of the human torso at the back of a filing cabinet.

  ‘You finished the referral yet for Mrs Trent?’ calls Marg. ‘Only He’s asking.’

  ‘Hold on,’ says Laura. ‘I’m just . . . I . . .’

  After all these years, how can she be so confused about organs? These little red beans must be kidneys. She touches one with her finger; in truth, she strokes it. If only, Laura thinks, one could simply stare at them, like those metal hearts and legs in Mexican churches, and they would heal. In desperate circumstances it should be possible; but what if you did, and it used up your miracle allowance, and then your child needed healing too?

  On the bus home she gives herself a talking-to. You can’t spend five weeks longing for half-term, then spend the whole time in a daze, dreading the day your daughter goes back but trying to avoid her. Did you fill up on her last night, while you had the chance? Were you patient, indulgent, gripped by all those stories of tedious Pa Kendall and cruel Pa Pond? You were not.

  It is only when she is walking down Moscow Road that she realizes that she has failed to send Marina a Valentine’s card. She has never forgotten before, through all those years when simple mother love, and embossed kittens, were all her daughter needed; through teenagerhood, agonizing about how, with a simple signature, to convey faith in future romance without giving false hope that it was either from some spotty Ealing boy or, worse still, her father. But this year, Laura senses, her usual unsatisfactory compromise:

  ? [Mum]

  will not do. It is so easy to outrage Marina; she is becoming more, not less, prickly with age. Well, Laura thinks, letting herself in through the flat door; too late. I can’t start faking postmarks now.

  ‘Hello,’ she calls.

  Then she sees the flowers.

  There is a bunch of roses on the dining table: at least ten, big fat creamy ones. She breathes in sweetness. Marina is looking at her over the top of them, like a suspicious hare. Laura’s mouth is dry; she hardly dares to ask.

  ‘What are these?’

  Marina swallows audibly, then flushes. ‘I don’t . . . I, do you know it’s Valentine’s Day tomorrow?’

  Laura nods.

  ‘But I ran after the man from the florist,’ Marina says. ‘And he just smirked. It was so rude, as if I didn’t need to know. I, you didn’t, um, expect something?’

  ‘Of course not,’ her mother says a little sharply.

  Would it be strange to touch them? Their petals are curved like tiny breasts. When she first saw them and thought ‘Peter’, she was being stupid; she can see that now. What she has to do is refuse to think of him.

  ‘Come on, sweetheart,’ she says, brightly ridiculous. ‘You must know who sent them to you.’

  Marina’s face cracks into an enormous smile. She looks down. ‘So you think they’re for me?’ she says.

  ‘Who else could they be for?’

  ‘Well, no one,’ says Marina.

  Laura pretends to look delighted. ‘Well, how fantastic,’ she says. ‘But it’s that chap, Guy, surely?’

  ‘Oh, do you think?’ Marina looks oddly downcast.

  ‘Well, darling, who else could it be, if they’re for you? Although, well, let’s see before we worry about that.’

  ‘I don’t—’

  ‘Wait a minute. Wasn’t there a card?’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘You mad girl,’ Laura says. ‘Look, that little white envelope.’

  ‘Oh, that,’ Marina says, ‘I thought that was the bill,’ and grabs it. Her hands seem slippery; she has to tear it with her teeth. ‘Hang on,’ she says. Then her face falls further. ‘Oh.’

  Laura looks away, to preserve her modesty, but can it truthfully be said that, in her own heart, a tiny spark of hope does not sputter back into life? Let us assume not; she is a mother. She takes the card.

  Édes Zsuzsi,

  she reads.

  Virág virágnak.

  Imré.

  Behind her, Marina’s bedroom door slams shut. Laura simply closes up her heart.

  25

  Tuesday, 14 February

  Nothing from Peter. He said that he would be in touch when he had news, which could mean anything. Laura’s imaginings grow more fanciful: ghostly messages during the Six O’Clock News, envelopes dropped by passing doves on to her typewriter keys. She decides to go back to the boat, or write a letter, hundreds of times a day. In the meantime he is always with her, breathing into her ear as she strap-hangs on the bus to Baker Street, or squashed beside her in the bath, sweat and steam on his forehead, their sternums together, mouth to mouth.

  Yet every morning, when she wakes on her sofa, itching with the dust of ages, she is coshed again on the head by the fact of his disease. Or is it a fact? Could there be a mistake, or a chance of salvation? It is impossible to concentrate at work, what with the constant flow of rival medical crises: consultants’ details, urology reports, investigations into cataclysmic tumours of the bowel and larynx and tongue, about which once she would have shed private tears, and now is almost immune.

  Can kidney cancer really be so much better? Peter said it is. Remission: in his case is that permanent, or merely retreating? She could hardly have asked Peter himself. He says that, now that they have removed ‘the bugger’, he will be fine, ‘if they got all of it,’ which any day his surgeon
will reveal.

  And how in God’s name does she tell Rozsi and the others about this?

  For almost the first time in her life she cannot eat. She is distracted, even with Marina. Mitzi Sudgeon comes to work with nourishing beef and barley soup for her husband and Laura cannot even be bothered to hate her. Soon she will be fired, in any case, for poor administration if not for the pills, and then how will the family manage?

  Marina is standing in the phone box outside Queensway Tube, trying to summon her nerve to dial. It has not been easy to escape. Rozsi has been increasingly determined to take her out with Mrs Dobos and the Dobos grandchild; Marina has only just managed to postpone it until this afternoon.

  She has planned this for days. Her shaking fingers hold a bus ticket on which she has listed some conversational subjects in case Mr Viney answers, or Mrs.

  However, by the time Guy answers the phone, Marina has forgotten even the most basic pleasantries. ‘Christ,’ he says. ‘You’re always so stroppy.’

  ‘I’m not,’ says Marina. ‘It’s just how my voice comes out.’ But she can’t talk to him any more; since the kissing she has forgotten how. She has gone socially backwards. When she hangs up, the chill wind of splitting up is whistling around the telephone booth. Please, no, she thinks. Don’t chuck me. How will I ever see your parents again?

  ‘It’s Laura,’ Laura is saying into the surgery telephone, with an eye on the door. ‘Peter’s, well, his— I really do need him to ring.’

  ‘I do not know,’ says Suze, Jensen’s girlfriend. She has the kind of American accent favoured by beautiful Scandinavians with relaxed attitudes towards sex. ‘I will see him later. Maybe you will try then.’

  ‘But . . . no. No.’ The word sits between them on the telephone line, a grey unit of power. ‘I mean, I need to speak to him now. I’ve only got ten minutes; it’s my lunch break and, well, I can’t usually talk. Please. He said I could leave him messages with you and he’d ring. He said.’

  ‘What can I do? I am performing my yoga now. I cannot go into the garden and ask—’

  ‘Hang on. He’s in the garden?’

  ‘No. Of course not. He is at the end of the garden. In the boat.’

  ‘I don’t understand. His boat is at the end of your garden? You mean, parked?’

  ‘It is moored on the water, yes. My yoga—’

  ‘So. Sorry. You live right next to the river?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says simply. ‘A very big house. My ex-husband is a record producer.’

  Laura is well aware that other people, through sheer force of will, persuade strangers to obey them. Rozsi can do it. One day Marina will. ‘Look,’ Laura says. ‘I know about Peter’s, you know. His cancer. And I need to find out what his consultant said. Please. I do. So is there any way you could – ’ her voice catches, but she trudges on – ‘you could go and ask him now, very quickly, if he would come to the phone? Please?’

  And Suze says, ‘OK.’

  People, thinks Marina dreamily, are like napkin rings. You either have a hallmark or you don’t.

  There must be moments in a person’s life when they can be assessed and their value discovered. It is probably measurable scientifically: if you have reached a specified age, say seventeen, and not reached a certain height, or been able to run a mile in under eight minutes, or received any Valentine’s cards at all, doesn’t that make it officially, probably medically, unlikely that things will improve?

  First post: nothing. Second post, on which she has always counted to bring her a life-changing letter: nothing either. The others are all out; she is threading a needle through the skin of her palm, thinking: I am epically bored. Heroically bored. Cataclysmically . . .

  This is not helping. She has been for a nice walk in Kensington Gardens with Ildi, and made Zsuzsi a beautiful cup of coffee, and been forced to take stuffed cabbage to the ‘poor girls’ in Flat Seven, the bristly chinned Mrs and Miss Fisch, for which she was rewarded with a hard New Berry Fruit and nearly an hour of questions. Now Marina lies sadly on the sofa like Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Whenever she thinks of Combe she feels sick. But she cannot distract herself with rereading The Snoopy Compendium or ringing Ursula; these youthful pleasures are lost to her. Now that she is beginning to understand the scale of her social inadequacy, not a moment can be wasted. Last night she tried to read Brideshead Revisited, which made her weepy with disappointment at herself, and it. Maybe she should try something Mrs Viney would like; a cloth-bound Winnie the Pooh was on the bedside table at Stoker, softened by several generations of little Hons’ hands. There is an old paperback of The Wind in the Willows somewhere, probably in the sideboard behind her, where Marina’s mother keeps old letters and baby shoes. In a minute, Marina thinks, unless someone comes to the door to propose to me, I’ll look.

  But the smell of Zsuzsi’s roses distracts her. The flat is full of noises usually too familiar to hear – the ticking of the plate clock, the rattling of the clothes racks in the dry cleaners’ on the corner, the terminal decline of the Farkas fridge – which do not comfort her as once they might. Her family is immune to her suffering.

  Meanwhile, in Stourpaine, Blandford St Mary, Simon Flowers is in the bosom of his family, having scones made for him and little posies of country flowers, practising on a grand piano in black tie. Imagining herself beside him, turning the pages, even miraculously accompanying him on another grand piano, perhaps shiny white, her throat aches with thwarted love. But why is it that, since knowing the Vineys, she feels even more confused? She is starting to realize quite how misguided, how style-less, how vulgar, she was before. If people like Mrs Viney do not see the point of people like Simon Flowers, his inner beauty, is it possible that they are right? Maybe, she thinks dozily, musicians are less glamorous than she had realized.

  Maybe she should give him up.

  On Thursday, at the end of a long foul day, Ildi approaches Laura with a book in her hand. Rozsi is at a charity meeting; Zsuzsi and Marina are in their rooms. Laura thinks: Christ, she wants me to read to her. This afternoon at the surgery, Marg answered the phone: ‘Sodding ring-offs,’ she said, loudly enough for the waiting room to hear, but Laura has a feeling that it was Peter, trying to speak to her. The situation is impossible. He says it’s his job to tell the others that he is in London but, until he does, the lie is growing; isn’t she going to have to tell them soon?

  And, covering everything like ash, in four days Marina is going back to school.

  Ildi holds out the book. ‘What is this, dar-link?’

  ‘Sorry, no idea. Was there any post for me?’ Other people who have done wrong either repent and stop, or are blind to their sin and carry on sinning. How do they do this, leading themselves by the hand to the next crime and the next, as if through a meadow, trampling daisies underfoot? She, Laura, knows that seeing Peter secretly is terrible, yet she has not stopped.

  Ildi seems not to hear her. ‘It is important,’ she says, looking nervously towards Marina’s bedroom door. ‘I find it earlier on Marinaka’s shelf, I am looking for dictionary. And I do not know what to do, so I wait for you.’

  Laura flops down into a chair. Radiotherapy radiotherapy: it rings in her brain like the name of a beloved. Despite her patchy receptionist’s knowledge, it is strangely difficult to remember the scanty facts he told her: what exactly they did to him before the surgery or might do now, if the news is bad. She can imagine Peter bald and sickly, can visualize his grave, but it has become muddled with the time when her mother was dying; when, if either the Aston Park hospital or Laura had been vigilant, she might have recovered. Why, Laura wonders now, am I so sleepy? I could put my head down on the table—

  ‘Dar-link,’ says Ildi. ‘Please.’

  To humour her, Laura takes the book. She reads the jacket. ‘Oh, Alexander Viney. Well, that’s educational, isn’t it? Isn’t he the one who— God, Ildi, what’s wrong?’

  Sweet soft-cheeked Ildi is sobbing, quietly, politely, like a Jane Austen character giv
en tragic news. Nothing Laura can say will soothe her.

  ‘But I don’t understand. What has Marina done?’ She can’t remember what she is supposed to know; should she tell Ildi that Zsuzsi has already spoken to her? ‘It’s not . . . unsuitable, is it?’ He is quite attractive, at least in his photograph, but how could a history book offend them? ‘It’s not, well, unsuitable, is it? Actually, I’ve been—’

  ‘Nem, nem,’ says Ildi, searching her cardigan pockets for a handkerchief. ‘Nem tu dom. It is just . . . it is just . . .’

  ‘It’s not that the wars will upset her, is it?’ she asks. ‘And you don’t know him, do you?’

  ‘No!’ Ildi says, as if grievously insulted. ‘I? No, not at all.’

  ‘But honestly,’ says Laura, turning the pages. ‘I don’t see the— oh, there’s something written. Look, it’s signed for her. See? How nice: “To Marina, my fiercest fan.” He’s spelled it right too. “Until,” I can’t read that bit. “Very best, Alexander Viney”.’

  ‘Dis-gusting,’ says sweet Ildi.

  ‘Look, unless someone tells me what the problem is— Is it a, a personal thing?’ That must be it, she is thinking: the past. Her brain is flinching from the very idea. This is another of her weaknesses. Over the years she has heard fragments, censored for the ears of children and Englishwomen but still too awful to bear. She knows what she should have done: approached the subject rationally, researched, asked diplomatic questions, then carefully informed her child, with a mixture of fact and reassurance, of the essential facts about her family’s past. She has not done this. So great is her cowardice, her selfishness, that instead she has buried the little she knows in her mind, like an inexpert grave-robber shoving the unspeakable, pale and wet and soft, back into the pit.

  In Rozsi’s room, the radio flicks off. ‘Quickly, take it,’ Ildi whispers. ‘You throw in dustbin, outside. And you tell Marina—’

  ‘I can’t! I don’t understand—’

  ‘Never, ever, in this house. Nothing about him. You must tell her. But Rozsi, it will kill her. We never let her know.’