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  It is her grandmother, her great-aunts. And, looking straight at her, her mother, her beloved, who will ruin everything.

  Their eyes meet.

  At that moment, Ildi touches her mother’s arm.

  Marina thinks: this is her Judas moment. She will tell Ildi now about Guy; she will betray me. Slowly, not breathing, she looks again at Mr Viney, who is still standing above her, staring into the road. He seems puzzled, as if he is thinking hard. Then he lowers his gaze to hers. They stare at each other, seriously, adultly, almost, you might think, nakedly. She sees the questions he could ask her, suspended in those cool pale irises. She holds his gaze until he snaps his eyes away and his expression clears.

  ‘Well, well,’ he says thoughtfully. ‘I hadn’t—’

  Guy leans over. ‘What are you doing, you weirdo? With your neck all twisted, you look like the Loch Ness Monster.’

  ‘Enough, Guy,’ says his father.

  She has begun to sweat. ‘I’m just, you know, a bit stiff,’ she says.

  Any moment now Guy will say, ‘Hey, Reen, isn’t that your mother again?’ but it hardly matters any more when a pack of furious geriatrics is about to burst into the pub. Rozsi will hit him, as she once hit that policeman. Where are they? Outside, a yard or two beyond the glass, her fate is being silently decided. Don’t look. Don’t look.

  She looks.

  The street outside is empty.

  They have left her here. She is still staring, mystified, out of the window when a big hand falls lightly on the nape of her neck. ‘I know what the matter is,’ she hears Guy’s father say. ‘It’s bloody freezing by this window. Your muscles must be seizing up,’ and he begins to massage her: her neck, the top of her back. ‘Were those women outside looking for you?’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘Well—’

  ‘No matter. You’re here now,’ he says, squeezing her shoulders. ‘Don’t be prudish. I do it all the time to my children. Come on, submit.’

  What makes Laura pretend not to have seen her daughter? Not sensitivity, not quick thinking but a sort of dumb defiance, creeping up her spine. Everyone needs privacy occasionally, a bit of leeway. She licks her lips, clears her throat, asks herself what harm it can do for her daughter to be in a mixed group like that, fathers and schoolboys in a public place: not with a stranger, alone. Then, when she has summoned her nerve, she says to the in-laws, ‘You know, I’m sure I did see a sign about a Liszt concert, in the, the Underhall, Underthing. That does explain it: even the lipstick, Zsuzsi. It’s good if she’s trying, isn’t it?’ Then, ‘Oh look, isn’t that the wife of the cabinet minister who went to prison?’

  Miraculously, it seems to work. Besides, her in-laws need an early night. They are leaving for Femina early tomorrow morning, just after the historical pageant but before the Founder’s birthday champagne reception and Prize-Giving (‘They do not give Marina presents. Why do we care?’). So it makes perfect sense to send them back in the miraculous taxi at the rank right by the school, while she waits for her daughter’s return.

  But what to do? Every shop and restaurant in Dorset will be shut by now; it is too late to drug herself with tea and cake, or the mild provincial shopping she secretly longs for: mead-based cordials, tea cosies, imitation gargoyles. She finds her slow way back to West Street, her legs aching brutishly as if she has been poisoned. It is a bright cold night: a night for endings. When Marina comes back from whatever she was doing in that pub, Laura will take her somewhere, to an appropriate place for this sort of conversation. She will face their troubles, speak frankly, and sort everything out.

  But at West Street stringent Founder’s Day safety measures are in force. Without a Blue, whatever that is, she can’t even enter the building, let alone retrieve her own child. She has no choice but to leave a short inarticulate note and wander off, deeper into Combe, where she does what anyone in her position would do. She sits on a cold wall under a dripping tree outside the Combe Conservative Association, with Peter and Marina and Alistair Sudgeon and now poor Zoltan, and weeps quietly for an hour.

  Having only sat in the front of a car once or twice before, Marina is not an accomplished strapper-inner. Now she burns with a fierce hot humiliation. Maybe she shouldn’t have tried to hide the open buckle under her arm, but he shouldn’t have told her off like a child. And she is not drunk, hardly at all, just a little bit spinny. In fact, should he even be driving? It is very kind of him to offer her a lift to West Street but, she wants to reassure him, she’s often walked back drunker than this on Saturday nights, everyone does. It isn’t far.

  She can’t think of anything to say. She watches his hands on the steering wheel; she can see, despite the darkness, the flat wide fingernail, the muscle at the base of his thumb, the hair on the lower section of each finger and the backs of his hands. She wants to be in bed but, when he suggests the scenic route, where they could look down on Combe from a Roman bridge or something, she says, ‘Yes.’ Maybe it’s being away from school but he seems funnier and cleverer with every passing minute. They feel like equals, or something close.

  ‘Tell me about yourself,’ he says, with a smile in his voice. ‘What interests you, Marina?’ and she starts to talk, not so much about her vestigial hobbies, the neglected fossils and star charts, the practically first edition of William Golding she found in a charity bookshop in Fulham Broadway, but about, for some reason, school. And he helps her, guiding her into deeper revelations as if he is strewing breadcrumbs, leading her through – presumably, out of – the woods. He is particularly understanding about how girls like Marina are coping with Combe life. She finds herself going into more detail than she had intended, as, she imagines, a woman confiding in a man friend might feel, if the friend was powerful and clever and had a silver car and hair on his forearms. It is enjoyable. It should not be, but there it is.

  ‘And so there’s a certain amount of . . . association?’

  She glances sideways. Although he is driving fast he turns to grin at her, and it is quite a sexy feeling, knowing that this man, her friend, will tomorrow be standing in front of the entire school handing out prizes. He genuinely wants to know what she thinks. ‘Er, yes. I think so. Yes.’

  ‘And is that what you expected?’

  ‘I—’

  ‘I mean, before you arrived at Combe. Sex, of course. I’m sure I didn’t need to tell you that.’

  Once she would have been too tense, too virginal, to talk like this but that has passed. ‘Well, it’s funny,’ she says. ‘But, well, I was quite . . . hopeful. I just didn’t think that, that I—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, I was at a girls’ school. And I didn’t know any, you know, boys. So the thought of—’

  ‘Of coming here.’

  ‘Yes. And, well, meeting some . . . I was ready to. If you know what I mean. I wanted to get, get going.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘No, that’s it.’

  ‘So,’ he says, smiling, ‘would you say most of the girls have boyfriends?’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘And, even apart from parks, and cinemas and what have you, the boys have study bedrooms?’

  ‘Some of them. But—’

  ‘Because one might think, if they do, the masters are being a little naïve.’

  ‘How, how—’

  ‘I expect they’re at it like rabbits.’

  When he says that she feels it all over her body; her skin seems to ruffle with excitement. Everything about this conversation is exciting; it is what she has dreamed of, over and over again.

  ‘Forgive me, but it’s true,’ he says.

  ‘It’s not—’

  ‘Oh, believe me, it is. I’ve been a seventeen-year-old boy,’ he says. She bites her lip, looks at him quickly, puts her hand to her neck to cool down the spreading flush. ‘And let me assure you, it would have taken a great deal more than a closed door and an incompetent headmaster—’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Don’t interrupt. To
have kept me from fulfilling my, well, baser urges. Of which I had many. Still have, in fact.’

  There is too much here to comprehend. Marina sits in silence, staring out of the window. Then he stops the car. They are on a paved platform beside a big stone bridge, looking down on the twinkling lights and inky countryside of Blackmoor Vale. An urge to confess, to seek help, overwhelms her. ‘I just didn’t think that I, I’d get a chance.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well.’ These are deeper waters than she had anticipated. She swallows hard but tears still spring to her eyes. ‘I, I’m not, not the type that they want. The boys.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘It’s true. I’m not, not blonde, or thin, or pretty.’ She gulps audibly.

  ‘Come now.’

  ‘No, it’s true.’ And then, because she fears she has insulted his son, she says, ‘I mean, Guy is lovely. But we don’t have that much . . . I mean, he’s younger than me, and I like books—’

  ‘Oh, Marina, Marina. It was ever thus. Brainy girl meets hunky boy and, within about ten seconds, is disappointed.’

  ‘Not dis—’

  ‘May I be frank with you?’

  ‘Oh,’ she says excitedly. ‘Yes. Please.’

  ‘You will be so much happier when adult. You need experience, young Marina, and one day you will have it. I see you with someone older. Don’t you?’

  Where is Marina? This is getting ridiculous. Laura can hardly hang around the school until pub closing time, hoping to bump into her own child. It would look strange. Besides, what if those Vineys turn up again, that cocky son or his thin ethereal somehow old-seeming mother, like a dowager duchess in the body of a twenty-year-old? She has courageous impulses but not the courage to act upon them; at least, not yet.

  Then something else occurs to her. For all these weeks Laura has pictured Marina painfully attentive in lessons, or standing on a staircase chatting to friends, as they do in the school prospectus. Until now, sex, hormones, the limitless urges of male adolescents, have rarely crossed her mind. But it is a boys’ school, run by men – there does not seem to be a single prominent female teacher – with girls just parachuted in. For all its trumpeting about safety and maturity, does Combe know, or care, what goes on behind the study doors?

  Surely anything could happen.

  As if a slide has been snapped in place, she sees another image: Marina roaming free. She has given up her A levels without telling them, she has changed everything, lied, pick-pocketed probably, all under the uncertain influence of these awful Vineys. For, even if their unknown crime was decades ago, in Hungarian years it is recent. Forgiveness is out of the question. Laura has to warn Marina about the Viney family; not just for the sake of Ildi and the others but for Marina too, who may be going wrong just as her mother did before.

  Where is she? A little impulse murmurs: find her.

  But Laura is tired, and familiar with unreliable impulses: pinches of fear on which she usually acts, making everything worse. Resist it, she tells herself. Be strong. Everything is bad enough already.

  Besides, if she hurries back now to awful Braegarrold, she might find a pay phone on the way.

  She is losing heart. Combe itself is vast and, as Founder’s Day has ended for the most part and Marina will have been packed for days, she is not likely to hurry back to West Street, particularly if she is having fun, with friends. She could be. Wandering along Upper Garth Street, Laura assesses the Combe pupils, immediately identifiable among the local teenagers by their pink cheeks and raised voices. They look at her strangely; true Combe mothers are inconspicuous. Could her daughter ever be one of those laughing girls, tossing their curtains of hair?

  There is simply no point in hanging round hoping to meet her by chance, she tells herself. Marina’s perfectly fine; stop worrying. You might as well just go back to Braegarrold, and wait for morning.

  Marina does not want to be rude. Mr Viney, call me Alexander, is just being kind and interested. Hasn’t she longed for this? And it is, although it shouldn’t be, exciting. It’s just that she’s not quite sure they ought to be having this conversation, far from school on a bridge, in a wood, at night.

  For the first time it occurs to her that there are fields all around: no one in sight, or even earshot. She isn’t frightened exactly; he is an adult, and she is actually quite an experienced young woman. Besides, hasn’t she loved it so far: being seen in the pub by people who recognized him, talking to someone who is, at last, mature enough to understand her? She has imagined this, and more, when she is alone: so much more, some of it in this very car. Something in his voice tells her he understands.

  With a click and a zipping sound he undoes his seatbelt and flings it back across his chest. He stretches his arms out. ‘Free at last. You know,’ he says, looking out over the lights. ‘The odd thing is that I feel terribly youthful.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Entirely. As young as you. If we were . . . If I were closer to your age, and all things were equal, which of course they’re not—’

  ‘So true,’ says Marina wisely.

  ‘I can imagine great things for us. Great things.’

  ‘How, how do you mean?’

  He turns to her: head, then shoulders. ‘You in that little school shirt of yours, like a village maiden,’ he says. The strangest thought pops into her head: somehow all this talking means that he is going to kiss me. Shouldn’t I stop him? Those lips have kissed Mrs Viney. She thinks: I don’t know what I want.

  But it seems that Alexander Viney does.

  37

  Ildi’s voice in the quiet night: ‘Something bothers you?’

  Laura gives a little jump. She has lain in her nylon bed, she thought silently, for hours, has rolled around and sighed and probably muttered to herself like a loon, thinking that Ildi was asleep.

  ‘Oh God,’ she says. ‘Sorry. Did I— I woke you, didn’t I?’

  ‘No. I am awake.’ Then Ildi says, ‘So, it is worse than we think.’

  ‘Sorry, what is?’ says Laura tentatively, although of course she knows.

  ‘You take from Marina the book?’

  ‘You you mean— ’

  ‘By the man. You take the book?’

  ‘Well,’ says Laura. ‘I did try. I’m sorry. We, we argued. But anyway it seems . . . ’

  ‘Yes,’ Ildi says. ‘Well, now I tell you, and it will stop.’

  Laura opens her mouth, then closes it. The silence booms. ‘About the author? Alexander Viney?’ she asks. ‘But, you see . . . well, I think I understand.’

  ‘I do not think,’ says Ildi, firmly, ‘that you do. Only we with Rozsi and Zsuzsi know some things about that family. Now I tell you, too.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Something has gone wrong. As Marina had feared, talking to Mr Viney has turned into being kissed. She did not mean this, at all. Or did she? Her body seems to feel differently. ‘Sorry, I—’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m shy,’ she says, to salve his feelings.

  ‘You’re not shy! After what you told me, about you girls at school, who gets up to what. It’s not exactly chaste, is it.’

  ‘But I didn’t . . . I hadn’t . . . someone might see.’

  ‘A passing farmer? Who cares? Haven’t you heard of animal husbandry? Goes on all the time.’

  So, imagining horses, she lets his hand stay on her tights leg, and the other up her blouse. His hand is cold, or her skin is burning, which is worse because then he will know that she is excited. Oddly, she preferred the talking before the kissing, when her two lives, real and imaginary, seemed to be merging like spots of coloured light. But now the tingling excitement in her brain and skin and so forth have been transformed into nervousness, which is ridiculous; he is a man, a father. A husband. Famous. Nothing bad could happen, whatever that means.

  She feels she should remind him about Mrs Viney. But Mrs Viney is crushed between them, like the scar in Thérèse Raquin: under his fingertips, on his mouth.
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br />   ‘Come on,’ he says, and bends over her again. It is interesting (they could discuss this, were he not preoccupied) how being desired, pressingly, urgently, had always been the greatest excitement she could invent, yet in real life it feels quite different: more frightening. Distantly she spies another gap in her knowledge. Is it possible that, for Mr Viney, kissing might not be an end to itself but, via some as yet unrevealed route, lead to sex?

  ‘You silly little girl,’ he says. ‘Come here.’

  But can he be stopped? It seems that she has accidentally given him permission, and she can’t offend him by taking it back. When his hand slides up and then down into her tights, she gasps; she can’t help it.

  ‘Hello,’ he says. ‘Someone is pleased.’

  ‘Please, I . . . hang on,’ she says uncomfortably. She is expected to lift her bottom a little, to let him pull her knickers down to the top of her thighs; she averts her eyes from the sight. Her breathing is jerky. ‘I’m not sure . . .’

  ‘Don’t be coy,’ he says. ‘I know what I know.’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘But—’

  ‘You’ve just been telling me,’ he says, ‘about your constant visits to the New Street—’

  ‘West Street.’

  ‘Wherever, the girls’ bathroom. Unmitigated filth. You can’t deny your intentions, surely.’

  ‘What intentions?’

  Together they look down at his corduroy lap: trousers in unexpectedly new navy needlecord, in which there is a definite bulge. He’s right. It is completely her fault. And isn’t it the greatest compliment: a bodily reaction to, presumably, her beauty, her intelligence, her sensitivity? It confirms her; she is viable.

  Gingerly she puts her hand there, in homage to the honour it has done her, but she cannot help starting away almost immediately when his big hand approaches her skirt once more.

  This time he ignores her reaction completely. Her face is being squashed into her seatbelt, which is still done up; it crosses her chest between her breasts, pushing one towards him. It is like being murdered; he is looming over her, pressed against her leg, and the susurrations of the moving corduroy and the thickness of his breathing as his fingers push in and up . . . she bites the inside of her lip. It hurts, and she is frightened, and suddenly very very sorry that she made him feel this way.