Almost English Page 3

  The downpour increases, as if a dial had been turned. He surveys the dry cleaner’s, who have picked this moment to load clothes rails into their van. ‘I know, weird, isn’t it,’ he says. ‘Went to buy a compact disc on Queensway.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘And then I’m meeting my mother in Holland Park, but I lost my cab money. They said the bus went from the corner. You don’t live here, do you?’

  Marina is not good at being insulted. She goes stiff; if anyone teases her she is frozen for days.

  ‘Anyway,’ he says, not even noticing.

  She wants to turn away but he could say foul things now about her at Combe. Also, he does not seem to be mocking her. ‘Good, good luck then.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  She is about to go inside. But she hesitates, as she always does, and in those few seconds the door to Westminster Court is slowly pulled open. The Combe boy looks round. Marina turns. There, silhouetted by the strip lighting like an avenger, stands an old woman in a floor-length emerald cocktail kaftan, with a cigarette, an ornamental hair clip and big round gilt clip-on earrings: her great-aunt, Zsuzsi.

  ‘I come to find you,’ says Zsuzsi. ‘Everyone asks, you miss the— who is this?’

  The Combe boy’s eyes open very wide. Is it her eyeshadow or her golden hair or the accent? Marina barely hears it but she knows it is there. People often ask Rozsi how long she’s been in London, as if she’s a tourist, and are visibly shocked when she says, ‘Forty years.’

  Rozsi would be bad enough; Zsuzsi is a disaster. Now that Marina has started at Combe, she needs her elderly relatives to be less conspicuous. There are already rumours that she is a Kraut.

  ‘Actually,’ she says, ‘I was just com—’

  But Combe boys are polite to adults. He leaves the bus queue and holds out his hand. ‘Guy Viney,’ he says. ‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t realize you lived here. I’m one of your, ah, daughter’s—’

  ‘Daughter?’ says Zsuzsi, beaming delightedly. ‘Von-dare-fool. Such a nice boy. One of Marina’s school friends? So—’ They have been asking and asking her to bring people home. They are obsessed with Combe. They do not realize.

  ‘Well,’ says Marina, ‘we don’t really know each other. He’s only a—’

  ‘He wait for bus?’ says Zsuzsi, looking as if she is about to offer him a cigarette. ‘No!’

  ‘It’s fine,’ says Marina, as Guy Viney wipes his face with his sleeve.

  ‘Not-at-all,’ Zsuzsi says. ‘Don’t be a silly. We do not let him go like that, a boy from the boarding school. Tair-ible. He is wet. He is hungry. He is—’

  ‘Zsuzsi,’ says Marina, ‘really. I don’t . . . we don’t . . .’

  Her great-aunt takes Guy Viney’s arm. ‘A friend of Marinaka,’ she breathes, as if naming a rare and precious element.

  ‘He’s not my—’

  ‘Shh. Young man, I take you inside.’

  Marina follows them, with difficulty, into the tiny lift. He takes a lungful of stairwell bleach and overheating and she visualizes the exchange of gases in his alveoli: Farkas air going in, contamination out. He will endanger them and she, Marina, is the point on which it all hinges, like the twist in a loop of DNA. He isn’t even very tall and his hair is nothing like a Merchant Ivory hero’s. Above the clanking gears he answers questions while Marina stares at his red right ear, thinking of what he will see when he enters Flat Two: the plate clock from Trieste; embroidered folk items; glazed pot holders; Zsuzsi’s Royalty magazines, the numerous dictionaries and the cupboard fridge on legs.

  ‘I . . .’ she begins. Zsuzsi expects politeness, but this is an emergency. The lift is stopping. Could she just drop to the floor? ‘Actually—’

  He pulls open the grille. Marina hesitates, her hand on the walnut veneer. Zsuzsi gives her a little push. ‘Hurry now young boy,’ she says. ‘We eat cake.’

  And it is too late. Everyone turns as they enter the Farkas flat, smiling at him, then at her, as if—

  Oh, my God. They can’t think that.

  They put him on the sofa. They bring him an extra-large slice of what Zsuzsi unnecessarily informs him is boyfriend cake, and coffee, which he nervously declines, and so thrilled are they by everything he says, and so eager to spot signs of love in Marina, that she cannot stand it. She sees him being made to talk to hundreds of relatives. She squirms, she blushes. She starts to sweat. He catches her eye, this infant, this Fiver, this destroyer, and he smiles.

  It is the day after, New Year’s Eve eve, and they have been clearing up since breakfast. There is only just room in the kitchen for two people; it is five feet wide, maybe nine feet long, so careful choreography is needed. Poor Marina, who cannot pass a door frame without crashing into it, continually hurts herself. What, wonders her mother, has she done to herself now? Is this why she is being so difficult?

  The problem is that Marina could be bleeding dramatically and would not admit it. Although her face shows every emotion, pride closes her up. She has been this way since babyhood, refusing to admit to pain, or distress, or even ignorance, as if she thinks it is dishonourable. It’s like having a little Hapsburg, thinks Laura vaguely, somewhat out of her depth.

  ‘Sweetheart,’ she says, when Marina bangs her hip on the oven for the second time, ‘are you really all right? What is it?’

  ‘Nothing,’ says Marina, looking offended.

  It cannot be normal for a teenager to be so reserved. What if living with the world’s most formal pensioners has somehow over-matured her? Was it something to do with that rather lumpen boy at the party, with whom Marina was so set-faced, so gloweringly wooden that any (dear God) thought of romance on his part must have stuttered and died? Or could it be that bloody school, with its petty rules, its cheese-paring insistence on charging for every tiny ‘extra’, its complacency? She keeps catching herself cursing it, then remembers that Combe was Marina’s choice, her ardent wish, and Marina will never admit that she was wrong.

  ‘But—’

  They eye each other over the knife drawer. Mothers are supposed to know their child instinctively: not Laura. One of her many greatest fears is that Marina might want her, need her even, and she, Laura, will fail to realize: ‘If only she’d told me,’ she will say afterwards. ‘If only I had known.’

  3

  Marina never thinks of Guy Viney; she notices this quite often. Spring term, Hilary, is about to begin; only four months have passed since she started at Combe and she feels exhausted already, achy and defeated. She goes to see Dr Zhivago at the Czech Centre and attends a children’s New Year party at the house of Mrs Dobos, with lemonade and coffee and a real gypsy violinist, embarrassing to watch, and she can’t even pretend to enjoy either. A frown is settling into the skin of her almost-seventeen-year-old forehead. Packing takes days; she seems unable to make decisions about which home clothes will stand up to the astonishing cold, how many photographs she can bear to have scrutinized. It’s like going off to war. What were once merely things now have special significance; her family’s safety depends on identifying a hitherto unnoticed lucky scarf, her future on the crucial pen which will get her into Cambridge. Cambridge. She holds her breath when she thinks of it; it is too sacred to be spoken of. She wants it. She needs it. She is in love with it, and valueless without it. She must not be distracted now.

  So passing Fivers are nothing to her. Guy will ignore her when they are back. She is another’s anyway.

  But Combe is interested in its pupils’ social lives. They print a crested booklet, the Register, containing contact details. She cannot find him in it but occasionally, when rereading Simon Flowers’s address, she sees herself there as others must see her: Farkas, Marina; Flat Two, Westminster Court, Pembridge Road, London W2, with her telephone number: 01 229 8753 – an open invitation.

  What does madness feel like? Can you develop it quite discreetly on the bus home from Oxford Street, carrying mothballs? Can it be normal to cry in department store toilets, at advertising hoardings o
r thoughts of distant famine? Somebody must know.

  Laura needs a trusted friend in whom to confide. But half of them have crossed to the dark side: Basingstoke, Bedford, Doncaster. St Albans. The London survivors are too sane, too married; they have bedrooms, and whole houses; they have produced charismatic scruffy children who adore them, or live sterile but sexually satisfying lives of style and beauty. She cannot ask them whether, when they stand on an Underground platform, they think of jumping. It isn’t depression, obviously. She isn’t catatonic in an armchair, she doesn’t have time. Besides, she is not entitled to misery. Her life, compared not only with that of starving Ethiopians but also her very own in-laws, is easy; it is simply that, without Marina, a layer of resistance has started to peel away.

  Did it happen in the run-up to Marina’s going, or on the day she left? In either case, it is Laura’s own fault; she should have stopped her. It was a test of motherhood, which she failed.

  Or perhaps, she thinks, after yet another stern self-talking-to, perhaps this is how women her age are supposed to feel. There is no way of knowing for certain. The lives of women like her, without men, away from their children, do not feature in magazines. When, on the Tube, or tidying the waiting room at work, she happens upon an advertisement for microwave ovens, sun-dried tomatoes, granite worktops, stippling, hyacinths, her soul lifts. Whisper it: this does not happen at exhibitions of German Expressionism. And it is possible, she wants to explain to the world, to be a reasonably intelligent woman – shamefully ignorant and under-educated, yes, but once attached to a modestly adequate brain – yet to long for the four-seasons duvets she will never have.

  So if she is not stupid, how is it that Mitzi Sudgeon has everything, the labour-saving devices and career and Alistair Sudgeon, and she, Laura, has not? Is it for want of personal grooming? If she had concentrated properly during drawing lessons, might she now have him? Most women your age, she tells herself many times a day, do not live in a basement with two virgins and two widows and innumerable house plants. They are not told off at mealtimes for being too quiet; they have friends. Lovers, even. Is it any surprise that, after thirteen years, you are a little low?

  Many times a day Marina checks that the phones are on the hook, in case Simon Flowers decides to ring her; although, when he does, it would be better if she were out. Being in would mean she is either a saddo or desperate for him, practically a slut. This is the boys’ favourite subject, who is a dirty slut and who is frigid and, since discovering that this is how girls are divided, she has devoted many hours to deciding which she is. What with that, and her chemistry struggles, and trying to learn about jazz for when she and Simon Flowers do finally meet, the holidays are racing past. She feels like an old person, watching the days run out, and all her plans for the holidays – ear-piercing, daily sit-ups, reading Ulysses, possibly learning a bit of medicine in case of future emergencies – have failed.

  This is partly a question of time. She has less of it now; her old habits of preferring certain streets to others, touching doors and her lucky ribbed tights and shampoo and pens, have expanded until they take up hours. Everything has some bearing on the future. It isn’t just the street name, or the houses, or past associations which makes Bridstow Place auspicious, Pembridge Villas a source of contagion, Talbot Road a better route home than Colville Terrace. And it isn’t just safety; nowhere round here feels safe. It is the combination of these which makes everything either light or dark; it promises a safe future for the relatives and Cambridge for her, or wilderness. When she thinks of last term, before she had realized the harm she could do, it makes her feel sick: all that poison, stored. Now, with less than a week to go before term starts, she is resolved to be vigilant. If anything bad happens, it will be her fault.

  Only five nights later, as Rozsi is shouting answers at Mastermind – ‘Fool. Belgrade!’ – and Ildi is in the bath listening to Rimsky-Korsakov live from the Festival Hall, and Zsuzsi is speculating about the bottle of Opium, ‘first-class’, she was given by Eszelbad Béla while his wife was not looking, and Laura is trying to remember her mother’s recipe for Victoria sponge, the phone begins to ring.

  It is exactly half past eight. Who can it be but the anonymous caller from the party, about whom Laura has had such extraordinary dreams? Fantasies, strictly speaking, even while she has known in her heart that it was almost certainly Mitzi Sudgeon. Laura’s affair, love or otherwise, with Alistair will have been discovered. Men have wives.

  ‘Oh, let’s not ans—’ she calls. She should be with them, doing her daughter-in-lawly duty, but there is peace in the kitchen, with the familiar soothing English labels: Tiptree, Twining’s, Tate & Lyle. She recites them to herself, quietly, secretly, as a drowning explorer might murmur the National Anthem as his dug-out slowly fills.

  They all ignore her. Zsuzsi, with the confidence of the much-telephoned, hurries to answer it. She is wearing towelling bath slippers embroidered with Hotel Bristol, Baden-Baden, a present from Mrs Dobos, which Laura suspects were not paid for.

  She puts down her whisk and prepares to be exposed.

  ‘Ha-llo,’ says Zsuzsi. ‘You vait one moment, please. Laura!’

  ‘Actually I . . .’

  ‘Come, dar-link.’

  Wiping her forehead with her apron, Laura approaches. ‘I don’t—’ she begins.

  Rozsi silences her with a look. ‘A fellow student,’ Zsuzsi whispers, smiling as she tightens the belt of her satinette pongyola. It smells of cloves which she, or Hungarians in general, use by the handful as a moth repellent. ‘For Marinaka. A boy!’

  Laura’s stomach swoops back uphill. She edges past the sideboard and armchairs and bookshelf and dining table until she is standing in front of Marina’s bedroom door. Icing sugar dusts her hands like an interesting skin disease.

  ‘Sweetheart?’

  Laura’s mother-in-law suspends her viewing. Zsuzsi, watching through her gills, unwraps another marron glacé. She has been waiting all day for Laura to paint her toenails Havana Moon. A bus rumbles down Moscow Road, a blackbird whistles from the cherry on the front path. Inside Flat Two all is still.

  ‘Marina. Darling?’

  Still silence, except, perhaps, for the faintest possible sound; a drawer being shut, a pencil rolled. She’s listening to jazz in there, of all things: it sounds like one of Peter’s Charlie Mingus tapes, although those are boxed up in the storage room next to the caretaker’s flat. Poor pet, what must they think of her at Combe?

  When I have a minute, Laura decides, I’ll take her to a record shop. Buy something modern.

  The old women wait, in Hungarian, for Laura to knock. The problem is this: whoever designed this flat understood storage but not the emotional needs of human beings. Although, to be fair, it was probably built for a nice ordinary English couple and their child, not all these Károlyis and the endless tide of visiting cousins. Marina’s bedroom is essentially a corridor, off which the bathroom and the toilet lead, like a boa constrictor digesting a sheep. This affords her no privacy, not that the great-aunts think this matters. Despite their absolute silence on matters sexual and the lengths to which they will go to avoid being seen entering a toilet, Rozsi and Ildi and Zsuzsi are startlingly relaxed about the female body, keeping each other company when they have baths, stumping around the flat in nothing but supportive Swiss underwear and rubber orthopaedic shoes. Marina may be young but they show her no quarter, continually whipping back shower curtains, patting her popsi, assessing the progress of her breasts. This must add to her terrible bodily shyness. How on earth does she cope at school?

  Laura, too, believes in privacy. She is just thinking: I will count to ten, no, twenty, when Rozsi appears behind her, heaves the door open over the carpet ripples and reveals Marina, slightly pink, on the threshold.

  ‘Why are you slow? That very nice young boy Guy, he wait on the telephone,’ announces Zsuzsi from the sofa, and Marina runs past her mother and slides the hall door closed.

  Laura hov
ers in the sitting room, trying not to look at the wavy shape of her child behind the glass, the telephone cable trapped like a sea creature’s tender frond. Her daughter, about whom, until Combe intervened, she knew almost everything: the only living person who had exactly the same sense of humour. Those days have passed. Marina is in a lengthy solemn phase, which is probably perfectly normal.

  I miss you, she thinks, even as her daughter is standing there.

  What was Guy Viney’s motive? He was, he said, just ringing to say thank you but, even if his mother made him, boys like him do not ring girls like Marina. It doesn’t make sense. He may only be a Fiver, single sex since he was thirteen, but he must know this. Was it a dare? Was someone standing beside him while he dialled the number, egging him on: Olly Sands, who did the knickers questionnaire? The short ugly boy who won’t sit next to girls because he says they have hag fleas? And, if so, why would they do it? As far as the boys are concerned, Marina does not exist.

  Combe has a caste system and nicknames are the key. They started in the first week, parthenogenetic, like mushrooms, and stuck: the whole school uses them. You have one if you are famous in school, either officially Hot, with Disney eyes and long legs like Marie-Claire van Dere (‘Vanderwear’) and Alex ‘Nips’ Nash, or impressive, like Fernanda ‘Queeny’ Dodd. And you have one if you are ugly, like ‘Fatima’ Bryan, or poor Sarah Molle, who is known as Anal Mole.

  Marina tries to tell herself that it is better without a nickname. She doesn’t want six hundred boys making mechanical wrenching noises every morning when she walks up the Chapel aisle, like sexy Joanna ‘Spanner’ Aitchison, particularly now she has discovered that spanner means tool, which means penis. But the truth is that being unworthy of a nickname is a disaster. You are invisible.

  She can hear the oldies getting ready for bed, talking loudly in Hungarian as if a language she doesn’t understand won’t wake her. Since Combe started they have stopped offering her bedtime food, grated apple or a segmented orange. It seems extraordinary that only last year she used to lie in bed idly eating and writing letters to her friends, like a White Russian before being shot.