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  Haaapy Birsday to you.

  Rozsi, of course, widowed almost as young as her sister and more unjustly, has no such suitors. She lifts the knife. She smiles.

  2

  ‘Ven you think the doctor arrives?’

  Laura turns slowly. Ildi, the elder of her aunts-in-law, unmarried at eighty-two, still going to evening classes, cooking for fifty without apparent panic, is looking concerned. Of course Dr and Mrs Sudgeon are invited; all the elderly Hungarians and Czechs go to his surgery. It is worryingly easy to imagine distinguished Dr Alistair Sudgeon sitting on their hard-wearing green leather sofa, making conversation. Rozsi will be so proud.

  ‘Hmm,’ says Laura, a little too loudly. ‘Well.’

  Careful, says the voice of sense in her ear. Laura, however, has never mastered being careful. She was not careful when, as a hopeful would-be teacher, twenty-six and astonishingly clueless, she was impregnated by the handsome and utterly spoiled Peter Farkas behind a sweet-chestnut tree in Kensington Gardens. She was not careful for the next three years, tending baby Marina and fighting the cold in their rented flats while he pretended to paint, and borrowed from his overstretched parents and then left them entirely in the lurch.

  And, well over a decade later, sharing her mother-in-law’s two-and-a-half-bedroom flat with three pensioners and a sixteen-year-old, sleeping at night on their uncomfortable sofa with her clothes in the sideboard, she may be beyond carefulness entirely. Which perhaps explains why she has pledged her loins to the last person she should have chosen: Alistair Sudgeon, her very married employer.

  Marina is in the kitchen, washing up cakey cutlery. It is hot in here, and she is wearing a black wool polo-neck, with a huge locket of Zsuzsi’s, a kilt, black fifty-denier velvet-look tights and Edwardian ankle boots. She knows – she thinks she knows – how bad she looks, so why does she keep expecting someone’s handsome grandson to turn up and fall in love?

  Because, she tells herself, punishing her ugly cuticles with the washing-up brush, you always think that the next moment is when your life is going to change, and maybe it never will.

  This is a recent realization, which she is struggling to accept. Before the sixth form, clothes were tricky but it hardly mattered: her Ealing Girls’ friends were as scruffy as her, as styleless. It was their collective ignorance, she is coming to understand, which doomed her. While elsewhere girls were developing taste and fashion sense, crimping their hair and experimenting with coloured eyeliner, learning what would suit them, she and Katie and Katy and Ursula barely noticed what each other was wearing. Other things were more important, such as memorizing the titles of all Shakespeare’s plays.

  Then she came to Combe and discovered she had fallen irretrievably behind.

  How did this happen? First of all, she never knows what you ought to like. Red, for example, the colour of her duvet cover at Combe and her favourite jumper, is common, and she hadn’t known.

  Second, what if she dares to try something new but looks stupid, without realizing? She has a terror of this. That, and having food on her teeth.

  Third, she is naturally unappetizing.

  The truth, which her family do not acknowledge, is that some people can look all right, while others can’t. If you’re pretty, it’s fine to check your reflection in a mirror, or wear mascara. But what if you’re not? It’ll look like you think you are all right, that you can improve your appearance by smoothing your fringe, but you still have glasses, and spotty upper arms, and hideous knees, and eyebrows like a boy’s. Some people are beyond improvement and, when they try, they look like fools. This Marina will not be.

  She is uniquely cursed in other ways. She is shy; clumsy; short; fatherless; scared of cats, and the dark, and the future. She is going to be a doctor but knows she isn’t up to it, and if she doesn’t get into Cambridge her life will be over. And, unbeknownst to anyone at Combe, she lives with old people in a little bit of darkest Hungary, like a maiden in a fairy story. Or a troll.

  These things are too shameful to be spoken of. She keeps them in her rotten heart. On reflection, it occurs to her now, maybe her heart is the problem. For, although technically quite innocent, Marina has a very adult love. A world away, in Dorset, the boy she longs for – Simon Flowers, senior music scholar, day boy, bound for Cambridge this very October – is attending polite little family gatherings, packing his physics notes for the new term, writing essays with the clarity of the pure of heart. Nobody knows of her passion. There are so many reasons to keep her love secret: not least that it is against the school rules. And she will be teased about it, which is insupportable. And her family do not approve of boyfriends until she is at Cambridge, ‘meen-eemoom’. And he is an active member of the Christian Union.

  Yet although Simon Flowers is in the year above, she knows him well, by observation. He may even have feelings for her. He has smiled at her in Chapel, for example, which is quite unheard of for an Upper, particularly one so glamorous, so talented. Admittedly, they have not technically spoken but she has stared unwaveringly at him to convey her devotion; he can’t not know how she feels. It is deafening. She thinks about him every few minutes, planning for their passionately intellectual future. She feels physical pain at the thought of their being asunder. And so she has become increasingly sure that the life-changing moment of union will happen; it has to. Thought beams should make a difference. If you want to see someone enough, they should come.

  But what if he doesn’t? Nothing, not even the many tragedies of her youth, has pained her as much as the mere sight of his sensitive hands, his leather briefcase, his wire-rimmed glasses. Without him her life will be ashes; besides, she will be unable to care for another. First love can never be repeated. She has read Turgenev. She knows.

  ‘Quickly,’ whispers Great-aunt Ildi. ‘Where is nice ashtray for Mrs Dobos?’

  Mrs Dobos, her grandmother’s employer, raises her prima ballerina’s head and stares at Marina, as if assessing stock. She is on the most comfortable chair; they dusted behind the radiators in case she looks.

  ‘Here it is,’ says Marina, with a lovely smile. ‘All washed up specially.’

  ‘Marinaka dar-link,’ says Mrs Dobos. ‘You still do not tell me about Combe-Abbey. You are liking it, as I say you will. You are happy there. I can tell: you eat well. Your bust grows.’

  ‘I—’

  ‘Of course you are happy. It is von-darefool school. Von-darefoolopportoonity.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Marina. ‘I am very very lucky. Thank you, Mrs Dobos, for recommending it.’

  Once Laura was reasonably intelligent. She had thoughts like: what should we do about Europe? She cared about starving children, about the decline of native woodland. As it turns out, all that concern was varnish. She is merely a collection of needs which are unfortunately not going to be met: to free herself from Dr Alistair Sudgeon, her ageing paramour; to carry her daughter’s pure childhood scent around with her in a sniffable capsule, if not Marina in person, like a papoose; to slice through the knot of guilt and duty and financial embarrassment which tightens daily and find somewhere else to live: an independent adult woman with her daughter.

  Until September, only four months ago, she could cope with all of this. It was so good for Marina to be brought up with the in-laws, with their culture and their love and all that food; it hardly seemed to matter that she, Laura, wasn’t even related to them. When she compared Westminster Court with the bungalow in Kestonbridge, or an unaffordable studio flat beyond the M25, she knew that they were lucky.

  Then Marina went away to school and none of the treats Laura had promised herself, cinema matinées, visits to friends in Bath and Bristol, had happened. She did not want them after all; she just wanted Marina back.

  Her entanglement with Alistair Sudgeon is not helping. Any minute now he will appear on the doorstep with Mitzi, his wife, with whom Laura seems to be becoming obsessed.

  Mitzi Sudgeon is a legend: her energy, her terrible fecund power. Unlike Laura,
who has reached her forty-second year with no more to her name than a teenager, houseless, carless, husbandless, Mitzi excels. In addition to four children she has produced hundreds, probably thousands, of pastel drawings: dancing gypsies, merry vagabonds, babes in arms. Her jam is perfect, or as close to perfection as can be achieved without the legendary Nemtudom plums of Tarpa, near the River Tisza, of which Laura has frequently heard. She makes curtains and marital bedspreads. She bakes relentlessly. She organizes pensioners’ aerobics sessions at Alistair’s surgery.

  She is, moreover, an actual Hungarian. In 1956, while the eight-year-old Laura, daughter of two irredeemably English postal workers who called each other ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’ and aimed only not to be noticed, was failing to learn to skip in a Birmingham playground, plucky Mitzi, only three years older, was stowing herself away on a tannery barge and preparing to meet her future.

  The guests show no sign of leaving. There is still more cake to be eaten: a symphony in chocolate and cream; there are Sobranies still to smoke, black kavitchka to drink, marzipan fruits to nibble, families to be discussed. They are all dreadful gigglers; Ildi, whispering to Zsuzsi in the corner, has tears of laughter running down her pink cheeks. And the food keeps coming. Rozsi’s oldest friend, Pelzer Fanni, has brought a toddler-sized box of her favourite chocolates from Austria, Mozartkugeln, decorated with his silly girlish face.

  ‘Von-darefool,’ say the shoals of interchangeable cousins. Laura smiles and nods until her cheeks ache with insincerity. She fears them all: protective, touchy, there is so much they insist on knowing, and Laura is no match for them, least of all tonight.

  What if, when Alistair arrives, whose desire, or at least the thought of whose desire, so excites her, she starts glowing through her clothes? One of the in-laws will surely notice; not Ildi, too sweet and innocent for suspicion, but what about Zsuzsi, with her instinct for sex? Rozsi, whose thoughts are unreadable, like a polar bear’s? My jig, she thinks, is up.

  She needs somewhere to think. It will have to be the bathroom, although it will be considered a dereliction of hostessly duty. Shyly she begins to kiss her way towards the kitchen, slashing through the alien corn and, whatever her lips say, her mind is thinking: please. Please. Please.

  But what is she asking for? Love, peace, privacy? Or the opposite of peace: something that will change everything, for better or for worse?

  Marina is going back to school in under a week, and another evening has been wasted. Laura has barely seen, let alone talked to her, or grabbed her and sniffed her hair, howled like a lunatic, held on. She wants to lie face down on the cold tiles and weep. But she cannot, so she tells herself to buck up, blows her nose, and washes her face like the mildly disappointed marmalade-making Women’s Institute member she could so easily have been.

  Water is dripping off her nose. She looks like a different species from her daughter, as if a Labrador had produced a salmon. If Alistair talks to Marina, will she talk back?

  It happens all the time: people think she is just another nervous teenager, easily melted, and Laura winces to see how their teasing always turns her child to stiffness like a small strict scientist, how quickly she is offended and embarrassed, her flammable pride. Is it normal to be simultaneously so self-conscious and so prickly? Since starting at Combe it has been worse, for reasons Marina will not discuss. Show them what you really are, Laura wills her, watching her daughter’s monosyllabic answers. With her big worried eyebrows and dark thick plait, she has the air of a small Russian poet about to kill herself for love.

  Oh, darling, thinks her mother. One day someone will see you. Just, please, not yet.

  When the intercom buzzes, Marina knows. This, you see, is how love feels: a heightened awareness, almost psychic, that the beloved is here. Like a magnet seeking metal, a stranded alien found by the mother ship, she is propelled towards him, dodging aged Hungarians with their walking sticks and their determination to pinch her youthful flesh. It is not surprising that she has sensed his approach. In a sandstorm or an avalanche she could probably detect him. Her body would thrum like an antenna, if that is what they do.

  How she thrums. Given the strength of her devotion to Simon Flowers, how could it not be him? He must have relented. He has come for her.

  ‘Hello?’ someone says into the intercom box. No one answers, which is a sort of sign. Her heart is banging, and organs do not lie. She has willed him here: a hot metallic beam of longing, pulling him all the way from the house he shares with his parents and two little sisters at 29 Mill Road, Stourpaine, Blandford St Mary, Dorset, DT11 2JP, into her arms.

  ‘I’ll go,’ she says, although everyone is looking. Electric blood booms beneath her skin. Could she have wished him into existence? Until now, fetching the Evening Standard for her great-aunt Zsuzsi, or going to the National Portrait Gallery to catch up on the Tudors, or watching the people on the up escalator as she goes down, with her better profile carefully turned their way, she has been certain that in the next minute, or the next, or next, her fortune will change. All it would take was one large aristocratic family or kindly professor. They would recognize her unusual sensitivity, her hitherto unsuspected beauty, and they would welcome her.

  This holiday, in the era of Simon Flowers, it has been different. He must come to London, after all, to visit elderly relatives, or buy madrigals. Every time she leaves the flat she is merely a surface, ready to be seen by him.

  Now, at last, he will see. Her life will change tonight. She bangs her elbow on the door handle but hardly notices. The air in the basement corridor is pure oxygen. She flies over the sparkling night-blue linoleum, bypassing the lift, in whose coffin of walnut veneer and leatherette she has dreamed of kissing his chapped lips and now, after her time in the wilderness, can dream again. She will look upon his dear scholarly face and he will rescue her, transform Combe, relieve her of her virginity, set her off towards the glorious adulthood which awaits her. So what if boarding school is not what she had hoped? If the boys are scary and the girls are aliens and they call the townspeople of Combe and Melcombe peasants? She runs up the stairs and bursts into the entrance hall, the strip lighting blazing benedictions upon young love.

  The pitch of the party has definitely changed; it is quieter, tenser, as if an adulterer is in their midst. They may be sensing imminent excitement: a storming out, tears, insults. When Laura was growing up, public displays of emotion would lead to lifelong polite ostracism. Her in-laws, however, can take drama in their stride.

  Or maybe they are waiting for the Sudgeons, she thinks, as the telephone begins to ring.

  Because of the noise, Laura hurries into the great-aunts’ room to grab the phone between their beds.

  ‘Hello?’

  There is only silence.

  Her mouth is dry. ‘Hello?’ she says again and then, softly, probably inaudibly, she whispers into the yellowing plastic: ‘Is that you?’

  Silence.

  ‘Who is it?’ calls her mother-in-law through the doorway. ‘Viszontlátásra, dar-link – hurry, Mrs Volf goes now.’

  ‘I . . . I think a wrong number,’ she shouts back, and the line goes dead.

  Simon Flowers is not here. Nobody is. Marina leans back against the front door, trying not to be seen by the people waiting at the bus stop, and is rinsed by a cold wave of self-disgust.

  Heartache spreads across her chest, telling her that she will never love again. Simon Flowers is the only boy at Combe she can imagine even liking. He has qualities the others lack: intelligence. Fineness. Beauty, even, if one is sensitive enough to see it. She would give him everything. She would even, it seems, risk letting him into the flat.

  Unbeknownst to him, this was to have been a significant, almost ceremonial, moment. For Marina, most things are. She has powers, although she is not sure how they work. Perhaps a suspicion had always been there, an awareness that all that stands between her relatives and their gradual decline into poverty, starvation, diseases missed by neglectful doct
ors who laugh at their accents, is six years at medical school and lifelong vigilance. However, she had only been away at school a few weeks when she realized that everything she fears stems, via an osmotic process in which she is the conduit, from Combe. Combe is not her family’s salvation but their nemesis, she can see that now. Everyone there is so healthy. Everyone at home is weak and flimsy, and growing more so, while she is away from them.

  Perhaps, without the homesickness, she would have felt less oppressed by responsibility. Instead, as term, slowly, passed, her sadness did not retreat. She missed her elderly relatives’ wrinkly elbows, the soft cords of their necks; whenever she saw a pensioner at a bus stop she would try to carry their bags. What if, as she increasingly feared, she was actually killing them long distance?

  One freezing November evening, passing the ruins of Combe Abbey on her tremulous way into dinner, she saw a stone which seemed to be glinting significantly, and made a vow. Under the gas-style light of the new old-fashioned street lamps, she accepted the task of protecting her relatives from pain, sorrow and death. I alone, she swore, will do it, whatever it involves. Decontamination. Quarantine. And, obviously, ensuring that no one from Combe ever crossed the threshold.

  The only exception was to be Simon Flowers: a boy of whom even her family would approve. So great was her love that she had decided he was worth the risk. But he is not here. The damage has been done by thought alone and—

  ‘Hey,’ says someone in the bus-stop queue.

  ‘Hello?’ She squints into the darkness, hoping that Simon Flowers’s slender frame will materialize but, in his place, stands someone vaguely familiar: a paleish, slabby, mouse-haired boy. Her face starts to heat like a kettle element, tainting the air around her.

  ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘You know. School.’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ she says, although she does recognize him now, a younger boy from Combe, a Fiver, not even in her house: Guy somebody. Rain is beading on his hair, she notes, still observant despite the shipwreck of her hopes and dreams. ‘What are you doing here?’