Almost English Page 22

Rozsi, according to cousin Fülöp, used to be a Communist. He also claimed she was a student, somewhere like Vienna or Budapest; this seems less likely, but Rozsi was always clever, a fact of which they are all very proud. At least with the Communism there is evidence. Marina has heard a story about her great-grandfather, who owned a factory – no, that can’t be right. He might have been the foreman. In any case, the workers, or possibly serfs, went on strike, much like the miners. Rozsi was a daring young woman, probably about Marina’s age, so although she was only the second or third oldest she was sent by their father to talk to the rebels. She was meant to explain to them why they should behave. But when she came back, she told her father, ‘They are right.’

  This proves it. Doesn’t it? So let’s say that in, roughly, 1938, Rozsi was the cleverest and most charismatic of the Károlyi girls. War had not yet come to their Transylvanian village of cow bells and merry milkmaids, and neither had any English people. Which is fine, because she was in Budapest, being the kind of student Marina intends to be. And a fine-boned English officer (Mr Viney, hence his mastery of the area) on a Grand Tour stopped there to feed his horses and . . . here she is hazy, but Love must have been involved. She has the setting but not the story: a station platform. Lipstick. Snow. The romance of war but not the sorrow, because that is something she is too scared to think about.

  Yes, Rozsi fell in love with him but was jilted because of her unusual intelligence and then . . . then . . . consoled herself with Zoltan. Poor Zoltan. All Marina knows about her grandfather’s side of the family is that his father was a manufacturer of saddlery. Presumably, therefore, Zoltan in those days was quite rich, and glamorous, and he chivalrously rescued her.

  This is all perfectly possible, provided that the ages, of which she is uncertain, match up. Threads of Gold is secreted under her mattress. When Heidi goes for her nightly hair-wash, she pulls it out. ‘Alexander Viney,’ it informs her, ‘born in 1944, is a scholar of Westminster and Oxford.’

  Hang on.

  So if it wasn’t him, who was it? Did he have brothers? Was it his father, or something to do with the First World War? That is the problem: finding out. She needs a convenient attic filled with caches of letters, or an elderly nursemaid with a tale to tell. Ildi might explain, but she doesn’t want to make her cry. Rozsi? Too scary. Zsuzsi?

  I wish you could tell me, she thinks at her dear grandfather, but his face is indistinct. I am, she tells herself, caught between warring families. But I will be true to the Montagues. Or is it the Capulets? Anyway, one of the two.

  Laura’s secret pills are calling her name. When she is at the flat the sideboard seems to throb; every time one of the aunts-in-law needs a napkin, she has to leap up and fetch it herself. Their presence makes her queasy. Might it help if she just took one?

  Peter would know. Well, yes, Peter; back she goes, like an itch, a tic, to Thursday. One minute she was all ready to pledge herself to a life of nursing; the next she was cast out. What did she do? It has just ended, snap, leaving her standing like an idiot on half of a bridge, while the bit she was meant to travel across lies foaming below in the water.

  Fool, she thinks. You should have known.

  She is updating addresses at the surgery: who has died a lonely bedsitter death, who has wisely left for another practice. Every word is a second wasted, when Peter may now have so few. She thinks: Wilfred Bunting, I resent you. Were you the one with the wart? What’s happened to my memory? Hello, Margret O’Reilly, the baldest woman I ever knew. Oh, Irene Saxle (Dcd) of Queensford Gardens W8, poor Mrs Saxle, I love Peter Farkas, again.

  My God.

  She stares down at the point of her pencil: the soft wood, the metallic gleam. Is that what this is? She knew already. Love was always there.

  Why, Marina wants to know, is the Lower School so excited about Founder’s Day? Every time Dr Tree announces a lighting run-through, or tells them to warn their parents that Mikado tickets are selling quickly, excitement ripples through Chapel like a wave, starting with the babies at the altar, cresting among the Fivers and subsiding towards the back. Is it because half of them don’t see their parents from one month to the next?

  This cannot be said for the Farkases. They have been planning their trip to Combe since the Michaelmas term, if not before. Last night Marina had to have a discussion about whether Zsuzsi should bring her manicure set. In under a fortnight they will be booking into their rooms in Braegarrold, a bed and breakfast near the station recommended by Mrs Long, the matron, when everywhere else proved beyond their means. A full programme of fun awaits them: in addition to the ceramics exhibitions and percussion medleys and strolling mummers and an Uppers’ debate (‘This House Believes that Success Is Its Own Reward’) and display by the Combined Cadet Force, they have bought tickets (£4 each, non-refundable) for The Merchant of Venice, the Founder’s Society’s chamber performance of Cyrano de Bergerac, and the orchestral spectacular, ‘All About Jazz’, featuring Simon Flowers on the classical guitar. There is some confusion over whether parents must buy pupils’ tickets; to avoid difficulty, Rozsi has bought extra. Founder’s Day, Marina is afraid, will bring the Farkases finally to their knees.

  In fact, the more she thinks about it, the more desperate she begins to feel. There are so many potential disasters: her relatives are too free-range and stubborn to be controllable in the Notting Hill Gate supermarket, let alone in the grounds of Combe. They’ll walk on the Founder’s Lawn to rip off a branch of mog-nolia for the bed and breakfast, or insist on sitting with her in the Buttery and cutting up her chicken leg. Anyway, Combe is dangerous for them. What if they breathe air emitted by Simonetta? Or meet the Vineys? Marina is leading them to their death. Every night, full of caffeinated yearning, she lies in bed, her essays written, another day of Combe survived, and brambles of panic seem to creep into her mind. Could she forge a letter announcing that Founder’s Day week is cancelled? She has to do something. She has to act.

  Laura is going to have to start making decisions. Founder’s Day is coming nearer, like a train, and she is tied unprettily to the tracks. Alistair awaits. Peter is dying; or, perhaps, recovering, and falling for somebody else. And Laura, meanwhile, a woman in love, will be spending three days escorting pensioners around an extremely minor Dorset market town.

  Today in her lunch break she found herself in Boots, where she walked past unfamiliar beautifying inventions, podiatry aids, baby bottles and, at last, still trying to look like a respectable woman lost on her way to shampoo, the family planning aisle. It was appalling. She was a slut. She returned to the surgery, unsandwiched, as her punishment.

  At least in eight nights she will see Marina. Marina is all right. Isn’t she?

  Eight nights. Seven. Then she snaps.

  ‘It’s normal,’ says Guy.

  It is Tuesday evening, in his bedroom. He has assured her that, if his bin is outside in the corridor, no one, not even Pa Stenning, will come in.

  ‘But it’s not allowed,’ she says. ‘Everyone says so. Not shutting the door when, when there’s, you know, a girl in here. That’s the rule.’

  ‘Not for me,’ he says, ‘babe. So, what about it? Monday night? Tues? I can guarantee at least an hour. Maybe two. We might need longer. We might go for it all night.’

  ‘Please. That’s mad.’

  ‘Other people do.’

  ‘But I thought—’

  ‘It’s not the same in Founder’s Day week, dopey. Teachers are drunk, mostly, and parents.’

  ‘Not mine.’

  ‘It’s not an insult, you wally. Everyone’s a bit drunk.’

  ‘I,’ says Marina with dignity, ‘have never seen any of my family drunk in my life.’

  ‘Fine,’ Guy says. ‘But everyone else will be. So we can just, like, sneak off and I’ll burst your cherry.’

  She is now subsisting on four or five hours of sleep, shored up with Pro-Plus, which at Ealing Girls’ was considered almost heroin, and pounds of apples and handfuls of raisins and
dry muesli every night. She hates herself. Like the crocodile in Peter Pan, something is ticking inside her.

  ‘Guy,’ she says, only slightly wincing as he slides his hand into her knickers, ‘are your parents coming to Founder’s Day?’

  ‘Sorry,’ says Laura. She is hunched over the phone in Zsuzsi’s bedroom. ‘I, I don’t know if he, if I—’

  ‘This is Laura?’ asks Suze.

  ‘I— yes. How is he? I mean, Peter?’

  ‘I know Peter,’ Suze says, needlessly. ‘He is very well.’

  ‘Oh good! I, you see, we haven’t, I’ve been wondering. But, sorry, you mean, well or well-well?’

  ‘Well.’

  ‘But . . . OK. OK. So—’

  ‘You can speak to him now. He is here, beside me.’

  ‘What? Right there? But—’

  ‘Laura?’

  ‘Yes! It’s me. Where, how—’

  ‘I thought you’d given up on me,’ he says.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Tell you what,’ he says. ‘Come over.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘To the boat. Tomorrow. Please. Just come.’

  30

  Wednesday, 8 March

  During Chapel, despite the discomfort of her contact lenses, Marina makes two important decisions. First, if during Founder’s Day she manages to resist Guy’s accelerating sexual hopes, in the holidays she will let him do what he wants. She should be grateful to have found somebody willing to remove her maidenhood. The previous generation, she once read in a very sexy article in Harpers & Queen, lost their virginity much earlier, at hunt balls.

  Second, she will do some investigating. Old ladies, at least her old ladies, are always wound up about something and, if some misunderstanding is keeping Marina from seeing the Vineys, it must be stopped. All she needs is evidence and she will solve everything; she’ll even be able to tell her mother that she is going out with Guy. The likeliest, if least romantic, explanation is that Rozsi has mixed up Mr Viney with someone else. It has happened before. Or she might be being overprotective. Or, if there was a wartime romance, shouldn’t they be over it now? Maybe Guy’s grandfather is widowed; he might meet Ildi, and find love.

  The only possible problem is technical. No one tells her anything about her family; it’s ridiculous how little she knows. She can’t even remember the name of Rozsi’s town, so she can’t look it up and, if you ask the littlest thing about where they came from, their father’s factory or whatever it was, bee farm, let alone mention their parents or the other sisters, they start crying instantly, like turning on a tap. Nevertheless, she has had a brilliant idea. If her mother brings whatever she can find to Founder’s Day, diaries, say, or family documents, she could show them to Mr Viney. It will be worth the embarrassment; he’ll know what to look for, and then the two warring households will be united. Why didn’t she think of it before?

  From now on she will be happy. She’ll stop all these fantasies about running away, being welcomed back to Ealing Girls’. Rozsi would never let her leave here, not in a million years and, if she did, everyone would know she was going, and the embarrassment, the mockery, would be unbearable. She must tell no one she has even thought of coming home; it would worry her mother. It might be the death of her. Marina sits a little straighter, partly to make her ceinture more bearable. Suffering is good, but she is still weak.

  Obviously she has to tell her family that she is now an historian. That Cambridge is overrated: she has chosen a different future. They love famous people; when they meet Mr Viney, her mentor, how could they not be thrilled? And also – she resolves this suddenly, in the middle of ‘O, Jesus I have promised’ – she will cure herself completely of Simon Flowers. Everything Mr Viney said was right; day boys are different. She grips her seat to stop herself looking for him in the row behind. Now that she has given up medicine, maybe even Cambridge, what does she have in common with him? Nothing at all.

  Her timing is unfortunate. Whichever God she is currently most frightened of is not looking kindly upon her; perhaps she has backed the wrong one. For, when she trails out of the Chapel porch, feeling as if she is leaving her heart behind her on the Lowers’ pew, she feels a tap on her shoulder.

  Vivian’s door is open, as Suze had claimed. How much easier, and less terrifying, it would have been to have conducted the whole visit in theory, on the telephone. Life, equally: one could just spend a weekend planning it in childhood, all the highlights – the husband, the house and dog and garden, the children returning lovingly from the grammar school down the road – and skip the reality. Do all women, wonders Laura, spend their lives reconciling themselves, or is it that her life has been more unsuccessful than most?

  A woman is sitting on the sofa. She is Nordic, tanned, sexually confident: the sort of woman all men like. It can only be Suze.

  ‘Oh,’ says Laura. ‘Ah.’

  A cigarette burns idly between Suze’s fingers. Laura looks down at her own sausagey hands. She is shaking.

  ‘Sit, please,’ says the woman. Laura sits.

  Time passes. The reek of drains and decaying wood is worse than she had remembered, joss sticks and curry, with a rich ammonia undertow. The duck sanctuary has gone; in its place sits a brindled cat on a dishcloth, eating something. Suze leafs through a magazine, not, as far as Laura can tell, something comfortable like Good Housekeeping but German fashion. As if the pack ice is melting, the boat creaks and gushes, pops, drips. Laura waits with a smile of idiocy, pretending she is at ease.

  ‘You’re Marina Farkas, aren’t you?’

  Close up, Simon Flowers is beautiful. Think of chess grandmasters or concert pianists: imagine how they ought to look, not how they are. That is Simon Flowers, here, now, before her in the cool stone porch, smiling.

  It is her moment to dazzle. Her mouth is dry; she exhales and then again, a little more raggededy-sounding, like a sheep. There is a faint smell of incense, or resin; is his skin alabaster? Or simply porcelain? He is going to ask her to marry him. She wants to be out on the far side of this moment already, analysing. Being here, inside it, is too much.

  Face to face, her determination to forget him falters. Come on, she thinks. Be strong.

  She has to say something. People are waiting. ‘Why?’ she says. Someone behind her sniggers. ‘I mean,’ she begins. ‘What did you—’

  He is thin, with a tiny chip on one glasses-lens. Her heart is racing like a rabbit’s. If she could faint, or tragically die, she could avoid the disappointment which must lie ahead. A different area of her brain is reminding her that she is nobody and a fool to live in hope. And another part says: you and he are the only people alike in the school. Do something now; show him. This is your chance for joy.

  But instinct has not been a friend to Marina. She followed it and left her mother; went to Combe; resisted Guy’s physical urges; tried to be herself. And look how she has ended up: worse than before. Clearly some people, such as the Vineys, understand life better. She is lucky to have their example; she will follow it, like a religion. And she knows what Guy’s parents think about boys like Simon Flowers.

  He takes a step back. He bites his lower lip; she has devoted hours to considering its cushioniness, its pressing need for lip balm but now she looks away. He starts explaining something complicated involving Tuesday nights and a club; she can’t really listen. She is concentrating on breathing through her nostrils, as though lifting a great weight. No, she tells herself, though her body is screaming yes, please, yes, like iron filings leaping upon a magnet. She inhales his manly aroma and, gritting her teeth, shakes her head.

  ‘I—’ She clears her throat. Her tongue tastes like wool; she licks her lip before she remembers that this is a powerful sexual signal. ‘I don’t really have, you know, much time left, for, for extracurricular . . . stuff.’

  ‘Sure?’ he says. ‘Monty thought you’d like it.’

  ‘Sorry, but—’

  ‘And he thought you’d be good at general knowledge. But don
’t worry,’ he says. ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘Hang on. You mean, oh, my God. You, the, you mean the team? You, you’re in it?’

  He smiles at her kindly. ‘Actually,’ he admits, ‘I’m the captain.’

  ‘Wow.’ In the deepest part of Combe, down a hidden corridor reached by a secret stair, there has been a place for people like her all this time. Somewhere she could know the meaning of synecdoche or Cole Porter’s middle name without being mocked. She could make friends there. She could go mad with happiness.

  ‘You, you mean next term?’ she says. ‘Not now, obviously—’

  ‘Seriously, you should come. Just for a trial.’

  So this is it, here, now: one of those life-changing moments for which she has lived in constant readiness, knowing that the interim was just an unpleasant practice session, a series of trials and warm-ups designed to hone and strengthen. The future is unrolling like a carpet. Then into her mind comes an image: she and Simon Flowers, holding hands in the Vineys’ entrance hall among the boots as she introduces him to Mrs Viney.

  Her ceinture burns at her left side. It serves to remind her that adulthood is not about self-indulgence; that the life worth living – tempered, civilized, ascetic, like Montaigne in his tower of books – requires sacrifice.

  She straightens her back. Isn’t her longing to say, ‘Take me,’ to be accepted into the briefcase-carrying Sellotaped-glasses day-boy world, proof that she must resist? This baseness lies within her. The Vineys will show her the way out.

  ‘When,’ Laura asks Suze, ‘do, do you think Peter might be back?’

  She has been feeling more and more peculiar. At first she assumed it was sea-sickness but gradually, as the minutes have passed, she tried harder to identify this simmering in her stomach, the heat which is building on her neck and back. Is it anger, righteous and refreshing? Fury that he has just turned up in the middle of London, expecting her to take charge?

  Just as she is summoning the nerve to tell Suze that she is leaving, Peter appears. He looks smelly. His donkey jacket has been rained on, although no weather has been visible through the smeary portholes; his interesting head-stubble has become faintly threatening, like that of an unstable soldier from the former Soviet Union. He is with a tall fair man, presumably Jensen, who nods at her, as if she is here to swab the decks. Peter is holding a carrier bag from which he proudly unpacks two bananas, a loaf of white sliced and a bag of what looks like gravel.