Almost English Page 4

  ‘Hanyszor fogsz felkelni ma éjjel?’ she hears Ildi say.

  ‘Ahányszor kell,’ says Zsuzsi. Is there, she wonders, any way to engender a nickname? No one discusses them, and girls cannot invent them. But, without one, she might as well leave.

  Secretly she has dreamed of this. People do; someone called Imelda left after Marina’s first week, and apparently two girls the year before. She can’t stop thinking about the shame of returning to the school you left; the teachers’ faces, the friends who wrote pledges of eternal friendship on your faded Green Flashes, whom you had thought you wanted to escape. She has promised herself only to consider it if her mother raises the subject; Marina has been waiting and waiting, and now it is too late.

  The new term is now only two nights away. All her Ealing Girls’ friends, whom she left for Combe, are back at school and, if she hadn’t tried to change everything, she’d be with them.

  This is the problem. It is her fault. Even a cowardly person can be brave once in their life, and then it ends in disaster. Károlyi women are always brave; that is almost the only fact she knows about the five beautiful sisters who lived in the mountains, or the forest – her knowledge is hazy – and whose father’s bees made the best honey in the country.

  ‘In Hungary, you mean?’ Marina asked once.

  ‘Yes,’ said Zsuzsi.

  ‘No,’ said Rozsi.

  ‘He was your father. You must know,’ said Marina, trying to joke them into revealing something, and then the great-aunts started crying and she never found out.

  Anyway, Rozsi and Ildi and Zsuzsi are Károlyi, first and last. The existence of lovely Zoltan, Marina’s grandfather, of Zsuzsi’s short-lived dentist husband Imré, even of Marina’s own father Peter, has done nothing to weaken the matriarchal line. And so she, Marina Farkas, has striven from birth to be a true and worthy Károlyi. She has been raised on tales of their acts of daring: Cousin Panni smuggling her father’s stamp collection through Customs; the time that Zsuzsi had to climb through a government minister’s window; or when Great-aunt Franci met her husband, Ernö, on a broken-down tram and commanded him to marry her. Rozsi is the bravest of them all; she once hit a policeman. She could easily rule the world.

  Marina is falling asleep. I am not brave, she thinks and, as she sinks through drifts of unconsciousness, she starts to imagine situations in which her courage might be called upon, and would fail her. And then, the innocent, she sleeps.

  In the next room, on her sofa-cum-bed, her mother lies awake. This morning, the first day back at work, she and Alistair were almost discovered. She had been in his office, ostensibly bringing him letters to sign but actually enduring an explanation of how difficult Christmas and the New Year had been, when the door opened and in came his wife.

  Alistair looked terrified. Laura accidentally said, ‘Sorry.’ Mitzi coolly ignored them while producing cheesecake from her bag, trimming loose ends on his blood pressure cuff with her ‘nee-dlevorksisor’; straightening his certificates. ‘I leave you now,’ she said. He hardly spoke to Laura for the rest of the day.

  The truth is that she doesn’t care. Only two nights left of Marina; she cannot bear it. The shock does not seem to have worn off at all. She wants to creep into her room to watch her sleeping. She has done it before: the back of Marina’s head, barely distinguishable from the blankets, a pale smudge which is probably a hand. Sleep, my love, my darling, she thinks, as a mother should, but what she really wants is for Marina to wake up and talk, and that is irresponsible. The girl needs rest, for when she goes back to that awful place.

  My darling, she pleads silently into her forearm. Stay with me.

  4

  Combe began, as disasters often do, with a few small sparks. Marina had begun to fear that her chance to have fun and sexual experience was slipping away. At Ealing Girls’, and home, they thought they knew her. What, she would think, walking in the drizzle from Ealing Broadway, if I want to be someone different?

  ‘Do I have to stay at Ealing for the sixth form?’ she’d asked one evening, after Urs had been reported by a stranger for eating on the Tube.

  ‘I suppose . . . well, not necessarily,’ her mother said.

  Suddenly it made sense. A better school, a famous school, would change her life. They were all so determined that she should do medicine at Cambridge, and how would she manage that from scruffy Ealing, with its dark poky labs and its half-blind chemistry teacher? They ordered a range of prospectuses for London day schools, but the classrooms looked disappointingly like those at Ealing, and the girls in the photographs were much more glamorous. That ruled them out. Was she cool enough for a mixed State school? She quite liked the idea of saving her grandmother money, but Rozsi would not consider relying on the government to pay for her grandchild’s education. Besides, Marina was beginning to wonder whether true sophistication was realistic in London, where every bookshop and café seemed to contain old ladies saying ‘You must be Farkas Rozsi’s grand-daughtair! Dar-link, you re-membair me?’

  Then, one night, as she watched St Trinian’s on television with her mother and Ildi, she had a brilliant idea: boarding school. Cricket pavilions, and midnight feasts, and Gothic stone. Oh yes.

  The moment she started imagining it, her heart beat more quickly with dreams of reinvention. She could try anywhere, become a traditional boarding-school girl, or an arty progressive bohemian, and some time passed before she realized how stuffy an old-fashioned all girls’ school would feel after Ealing; how out of her depth she would be among people who had grown up in co-education. And so it was that Marina Farkas, girl, from a girls’ school, a female family, was left with only one alternative. She would investigate the venerable boys’ public schools which now took girls in the sixth form.

  The snowball grew larger; she was running to catch up. There was a question buried in the middle, like an aniseed ball: did her mother know her, love her, enough to refuse to be parted from her child? Apparently not. She just let it happen, flicking through prospectuses, trailing around with Marina and the great-aunts at open days, and did not once protest.

  Right, thought Marina. If you don’t care, if you want to be rid of me, I’ll apply for them myself. Besides, the others were excited. These ancient schools were beautiful, and famous, and fantastically well equipped; practically little colleges, which surely would give her a better chance. Mrs Dobos, her grandmother’s friend, summoned them to her white-carpeted Maida Vale flat, with the prospectuses. They told her what they had seen at the open days: boathouses, cloisters, ‘dormies’, ‘com-putair’ rooms, observatories.

  ‘Svimming pools?’ asked Mrs Dobos.

  ‘Inside pools!’ said Rozsi, who will swim in anything: black water, weedy woodland lakes.

  ‘Very good,’ said Mrs Dobos. ‘But Combe Abbey, where my great-niece went, of course you look there too.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Rozsi, shooting a fierce look at Marina. ‘Of course!’

  So she applied to sit the exams. She had done all this research, and no one seemed worried about the money. The snowball rolled over a bump and picked up speed. She probably wouldn’t get in anywhere. But it would be silly to lose courage now.

  She won a place at all four schools she tried. But even though the two most genuinely famous ones offered her scholarships and Combe Abbey only a modest bursary, she found herself thinking that Combe might be the place for her. Some of the others, with their icy radiators and silent gardeners raking the drives, their school farms and yachts and clay pigeons and compulsory outdoor skills expeditions, were clearly not. Combe, however, seemed to be the perfect combination of impressive age, good results and moderate status. And it was in Dorset, near Blackmoor Vale; very healthy, agreed the great-aunts, and not too difficult by train.

  And if her relatives were worrying for her about daily Chapel, or drugs, or a ratio of four boys to one girl, they didn’t say. She was anxious herself, who would not be, but more about whether her constant backache meant osteoporosis, or
if she could bathe her breasts in cold water often enough to firm them adequately before September. Soon fat crested envelopes began to arrive from Combe Abbey, to be read as a reward between her GCSEs until the pages softened. There were calendars of Chapel services: Matins and sung eucharists in the Choir which Marina would joyfully attend, raising her voice on high to ‘Ave Verum’ by Byrd (William, 1543–1623). They examined the little plan of the abbey ruins, to which the school was attached, its old walls skilfully incorporated into newer buildings by an Old Combeian architect with, suggested Marina’s mother, friends in the Planning Department. They went to Rozsi’s optician, where, after a lengthy examination, she was permitted to have semi-permeable contact lenses to be worn for two hours a day. She practised with them every night; it was like putting grit in her eye, but it would be worth it.

  A scarlet fever questionnaire arrived; then the Almanac; the school rules, the supplementary rules for scholars, and the rules for what at Ealing Girls’ were just called monitors and at Combe were apparently ‘Sirs’, even the girls. They purchased a recent copy of the school magazine, the Combeian (£5 from the school bursar, Colonel Perry). They were sent packing lists, details of permissible extras (scientific calculators, tuck boxes, riding boots ‘if wished’; desk light [UK plug]; laundry bag; ‘one [1] mug’); the addresses of approved purveyors of the boys’ exciting tailcoats and girls’ disappointing blazers and the school scarf in navy and pink; a brochure of Old Combeian Association cricket jerseys, cummerbunds and decanters; a book list; and, most deliciously of all, the exact dimensions of her trunk.

  She had never desired any object more. Her love for her twin-deck JVC tape recorder, even for her desk, paled in comparison. The night before her grandmother went into town to buy it, she could not sleep for excitement. But at Harrods, the only official stockist in central London, Rozsi chose black leatherette with shiny brass studs: an enormous disappointment, which Marina concealed.

  Besides, there was always the Register for comfort: the masters, degree and alma mater noted, down to the head groundsman (Henley Agricultural Institute, Dip. Hort.); and, better still, the boys: three years’ worth of Freshers and Removes and Fivers called Quentin and Hugh and then the entire Sixth, girls included: two hundred and forty-three possible friends for midnight feasts, moorland house parties and, almost certainly, marriage. It didn’t seem to matter, at the time, that girls had only been admitted to the sixth form for three years. How much difference, she asked herself, could that make?

  But she would have to change her old self; no doubt about that. She needed class. She spent the summer preparing. She read Tom Brown’s Schooldays and Billy Bunter as if they were textbooks. She tore pages out of Mrs Dobos’s old Tatlers and Harpers & Queens (‘For the Smart Insider’) to decorate the inside of her wardrobe: square-jawed men lounging about in libraries and beautifully dishevelled women on grouse moors; Scottish Christmases in velvet and taffeta. She was in love with tartan. There was a world out there in which people celebrated Burns Night with wild country dancing, drank sloe gin at point-to-points, bundled up for the night in cold stately homes under opossum car rugs ‘like Granny wore in her Daimler’.

  Oh. Please. Yes.

  This was it: the future. She was at the peak of nervous happiness and thought that another, higher, peak was beyond. It would feature cheery refectory meals beside tall friendly English girls with welcoming families; stimulating lessons in well-equipped Victorian laboratories; handsome boys writing her sonnets beneath historic oak trees. Handsome boys, like, at a push, Guy Viney. Soon it would not matter that she could neither hurdle nor paint nor sing, her shyness in the showers would be irrelevant, for at Combe she would blossom and become herself. And even when she had waved her family goodbye on the terrible first day, watching their hats receding down the drive and feeling she would die of pain and fear, she had not realized how much worse it would become.

  5

  Friday, 6 January

  Rugby: Dorset and Wiltshire sevens, U18 (all day), Salisbury; Freshers’ swimming time trials, Recreation Centre, 4.30 p.m.; squash tour to Kuala Lumpur begins (minibus leaves Garthgate 5.10 p.m.); Countryman Society talk by Mr Kendall: ‘Forestry: An Ancient Craft’, Old Library, 7.30 p.m.

  The first days back are horrible. Marina keeps expecting her mother to come and take her away. But what if she can’t?

  All the fears of childhood have come back with new vigour now that Marina is too far away to protect them from intruders, race riots, Spanish flu, nuclear winter, IRA bombs. Guy Viney is irrelevant, a plaster on a spurting wound, and so the first time she sees him, muddy and laughing at lunch with Ben L and Ben P and Rich from her year, she ignores him. She is busy trying to think of a reason to be near the crypt when the Combe Singers, in which Simon Flowers is a tenor, finish practice. Guy won’t speak to her now they are back at school. She certainly won’t speak to him.

  Then, on Friday night, she has to queue right behind him in the Buttery. He is extremely sure of himself for a Fiver. He is talking to horrible Giles Yeo from Marina’s year and, although Giles always ignores Marina, when Guy says, ‘Wotcha,’ Giles gives her a curious look.

  Why is Guy so confident? Fivers usually keep to themselves but he finds a table with Giles and some of the Bens and says, ‘Come on,’ so she sits down with them. As she sprinkles cheese on her baked potato, grate by grate, she watches him consume mulligatawny, beans, double chips, peas, broccoli, grilled tomatoes, buttered rolls and two vast sides of breaded haddock, and listens to his silly jokes. Once or twice she laughs, accidentally, and he grins at her. She concentrates on resisting the temptation to take off her glasses; it makes the Buttery less frightening, but she is so shortsighted she will walk into a table. If only, she thinks, I were normal, like everybody else.

  ‘Can I have your custard?’ Guy says.

  She won’t let down her guard just because he’s younger. He’s still secretly laughing at her; he’d probably be one of the boys holding up score cards for the new girls, if it hadn’t been banned last year. Apparently they had to; that’s why Imelda someone ran away into the night and was never seen again. Even so, they still put up lists giving marks out of ten in some of the houses: maybe Macdonald, where the boys won’t speak to girls at mealtimes, or Fielding, where they ambush girls with buckets of water for wet T-shirt contests, not just in the summer term as in other houses, but all year long.

  She must have a score. She wants to know what it is.

  What kind of girl, she thinks, wishing she hadn’t eaten her crumble, would—

  Then she looks up and sees Simon Flowers.

  Behind him, in slow motion, the Buttery doors flap shut, open, shut. She can feel the slowing of her atrial diastole; she is barely breathing by the time he reaches the trays. He speaks kindly to the one-armed dinner lady. Why is he, a day boy, having supper at school? Probably he’s been practising his jazz guitar riffs, or playing the organ alone in the Chapel, and a scene from her numerous imaginary sexual adventures catches her unawares.

  Her heart booms towards him, yet he does not see her. She must practise saintly patience. How long must she wait? A week? A term? If you haven’t got off with someone by the time you’re seventeen, you will definitely die alone. It’s a measurement, like lung capacity. Everyone here has been doing it for years; she has pretended the same.

  ‘What’s up?’ says Rory Kingsly. ‘You look like a flid.’

  Two blonde girls from the year above giggle.

  ‘Shut up, Kingsly,’ says Clare Laker. ‘You sound like a knob,’ and she mouths at Marina, ‘Pitiful.’

  But Marina who, four and a half months in, still feels her true Combe friend is yet undiscovered, hardly notices. She is thinking: I can’t go on. Simon Flowers: Simon. Come and get me. I am ripe for you.

  Meanwhile, in London, Laura exists. She polishes the grill pan until it shines like pearls; she helps Ildi find her lost Italian dictionary; she feeds Rozsi’s jade plant the correct quantity of vegetable wa
ter and battles the relentless London dust; she makes up her bed each night on the sofa cushions and falls asleep, eventually, to the perpetual murmur of the World Service, to the snoring and sighing of elderly immigrants and buses hissing past outside. Around and around in her tired head one thought spins, ‘What should I do?’ as if, with five minutes of hard thinking, she will realize that she has all the solutions already: a good man, close by and single, with whom to fall in love; somewhere affordable to live, where she can eat baked beans and listen to music befitting her age group and walk around in the nude; a professional qualification about which she had forgotten; a nearby day school which her child will consent to attend.

  She goes to work and feigns interest in plans to replace the receptionists’ plywood shelves with plastic-coated steel. Black or grey? Who cares? She sits on the bus and feels guilty about the Farkas-Károlyis’ unlimited kindness; about her father, her daughter’s father, and her daughter. Then she comes home again and tries to think about Alistair, or composes letters to Marina, which she rewrites until nothing she wants to say is left.

  For the last eight months, since Marina started preparing to go away, Laura’s life has been controlled by the Royal Mail. Her spirits, too, now that she thinks of it. She had been proud of how well she coped after Peter went, and through the long years of sofa-dwelling in Westminster Court. But now, whenever she is out, she looks for postcards – paintings from the endless exhibitions she attends with the in-laws and, when away from them, ‘Great British Fry-Ups’ or ‘Piccadilly Circus by Night’. When at home she is thinking of amusing observations, timing her day around the arrival of post. She sent a card every day last term, but now she has decided she must restrict herself. Marina hardly ever commented; she just became tenser and crosser. Clearly, all Laura’s careful non-expressions of love were too much.