Almost English Read online

  Days pass. Life, if one can call it that, continues: a constant counting down of the hours until the end of term. Perhaps, she thinks, tidying the waiting-room magazines, I just need sex.

  Sex is, however, not easily obtained. She has not touched the private flesh of Dr Alistair Sudgeon since a month last Tuesday, when they arranged for her to do an evening spring-clean while he ‘worked through files’. It was not even particularly satisfactory. The effect on her of cold vinyl, antiseptic odours and, curiously, his white coat on the back of the door, to which she had so looked forward, had not been positive. But more, or elsewhere, or better, is out of the question. How can she be old enough to feel this tired, yet have no privacy whatsoever? Alistair is so busy at home, is so widely known – at least, in W2 – and also, perhaps, like Laura, has certain ambivalences (how can she ask him when they are together so rarely? How could she raise, by letter, something that would require discussion, even a row? What is a bubble burst? she sometimes says to him in her head. He does not answer).

  Does this mean, she asks her reflection in the bus window, that things will never improve? In which case, might I be having not a nervous breakdown, but simply a disappointing life?

  At this thought she jerks her face away and finds herself being smiled at sympathetically by the woman opposite. She smiles back before she notices the woman’s multiple badges, her rat’s-tail plaits and tattooed thumbs. Now even mad people pity her. If, she thinks, trying to be matter of fact, the bus skidded now on Westbourne Grove, would that be so bad?

  Every morning after First Quarter Marina and the other West Street girls rush back to the house to check for letters. West Street is just outside the school grounds, reached via a narrow passage beside Bute House. It is not a house in its own right, but a place in which female quasi-members of the boys’ houses live. It was once part of a terrace, now partitioned like an experiment for mice, and Marina has failed to make the slightest sense of the labyrinth. Whenever she ventures to the upper floors, the double staircases foil her. She has endless dreams of being lost.

  There are no mullioned dormitories or coats of arms here, no crested oars draped with football socks, no miasma of Paco Rabanne. West Street is clean, and vigorously air-freshened. There is a kitchenette, floral curtains, doilies. The fire doors are decorated with posters of kittens in hammocks, thoughtful bears. The carpet is dusky pink. And there is a matron, Mrs Long, whose twin passions for Benson & Hedges and her flatulent Dandie Dinmont terrier, Anthony, sit uneasily with her stringent domestic expectations. Other girls receive constant correspondence: brotherly post from agricultural colleges; cheery catch-ups from their mothers about puppies and their fathers’ business trips; invitations to charity fashion shows. They all have thousands of people at other schools in common and read out bits of letters: ‘Jamie – no, silly, Stowe Jamie – says we have to go to the Gatecrasher Ball.’ The only girls who keep their correspondence private are the recipients of love letters, like the eye-linered and patchoulied Simonetta Bruce, to whom Marina has taken a fierce dislike.

  And Marina herself. How could she show her post? This is her total so far: one forwarded membership reminder for the Puffin Club; one grumpy eight-page letter from Ursula Persky, her best friend at Ealing Girls’, tucked inside a Hamlet programme from yet another school trip to Stratford; a single postcard from her mother saying not much; and one of Rozsi’s brown paper packages.

  How she loves these parcels. How she hates them. This one contains sponge fingers, a leaflet about childhood illnesses, unsolicited lo-calorie sweetener, a bank-bag of fresh ten pences for the pay phone, a Tatler from Mrs Dobos and a short letter: ‘Hallo darling don’t you want a lovly hair cut? Tell me I ask Krystof any time he helps you. Sorry you are not siting next to me. I try to send beter letter soon.’ Unlike Ildi, who fills exercise books with vocabulary and old diaries with informative facts (‘Raphael died on his 37 birthday. Crucifiction [sic] early picture (about 20 years). A bit provincial (see fluttering ribbons). Best in the figure of Christ. Painted for a convent’), Rozsi is not comfortable with writing, at least in English. Her handwriting suits Hungarian better. Last term she sent Marina a sewing kit which must have been hers; when Marina ran to the bathroom with it and opened the lid, an old browned piece of lined paper fell out. The smell of the flat has faded from it, but she still has the paper: a few meaningless accented words, written in pencil, too full of possible momentous secrets to throw away.

  She keeps having premonitions that harm is coming to them. Since Combe, or was it before, she cannot stop expecting it, attempting to prevent it, knowing that nothing she does will be enough. The fear that she will contaminate them is much stronger this term. Simonetta ‘Slutter’ Bruce has the room next to Marina’s, and her music and loud laughter infest everything Marina owns. Although she is an Upper, and is best friends with a girl in School House so is often elsewhere, the smell of her Players and Rive Gauche means that she always seems present: a force for bad. Apparently, she has had sex in Divvers; her mother is dead, or at least divorced. Two days into the new term Marina is using her jumper sleeves to open doors which Simonetta might have touched. She holds her breath when she comes upstairs. If someone in Marina’s family dies, Simonetta will be the reason.

  She cannot cry now, about to go into chemistry. All day she aches for her mother, who has not written again, but she saves her sodium chloride tears for the night.

  6

  Saturday, 21 January

  Rozsi is in lingerie. Once they all were; she and her handsome husband Zoltan owned FEMINA OF KENSINGTON, as it still says on the shop front, and Ildi, when she came to London from Budapest in ’56 with a chemistry degree, wrote their letters, and beautiful Zsuzsi, whom it is difficult to imagine doing anything, apparently travelled for them to Greece and Vienna and even ‘Petersburg’, where they understand the power of elastic. What Laura has never quite followed is – well, all of it, really. The heroic origins of Femina have often been repeated: Rozsi’s discovery of some missing money when sweeping a different shop, Ginswald’s on the Finchley Road, when Peter/Pay-tare was a babe in arms and Zoltan was fighting in the war; her honourable elevation to assistant and the small suggestions which led to her being permitted to design one perfect brassiere, then another, and then to be given a shelf, a section and, in the end, when they had saved and borrowed enough, for the Farkases to buy their own tiny shop and break free. But there is something murky at the back of it, some fell moment when Zoltan weakened, and everything was lost.

  Zoltan was a lovely man: not as funny as Peter but gentler, more chivalrous, with the same terrible steely pride. The formality, or sense of honour, which in Rozsi is so terrifying was, in Zoltan, a comfort. With a man who wears a vest to conceal his chest hair on holiday and a tie to see the dentist, who expects toddlers to stand when their mother enters a room and who eats bananas with a knife and fork, you know where you are. Laura, his mere daughter-in-law, misses him more as the years pass; he loved her, although obviously not as much as he did Marina. He cannot be mentioned at home: there will be crying. So on the bus she imagines conversations in which he offers understanding, and forgiveness.

  But what did he die of? Somehow she has forgotten, and now she wants to know. It happened suddenly, and at that moment Marina was a tiny child, Peter an increasingly unreliable mess, and their fourth-floor one-bedroom flat in north Acton like something from a Pinter play. All she does know is that Femina, still revered by its loyal customers for its old-fashioned service and the firmness of its silhouette, had to be sold to Mrs Dobos, their compatriot. Rozsi, now merely the manageress, is old. Her salary is her sisters’ only income, apart from a decreasing amount of what Ildi calls home-working: occasional bits of proof-reading for Czech and Hungarian business acquaintances of Rozsi’s, which Ildi does on a fold-out table.

  Combe Abbey is the natural home of children with well-fed hair and indulgent businessman fathers. Perhaps there is financial leeway for some families, but it is
hard to imagine the bursar offering help to Marina. If Laura loses her own job, due to ineptitude or sex or its absence, what will keep the wolf from their door?

  She is carrying her bedtime glass of water into the sitting room when the phone rings. She jumps like a guilty woman.

  ‘Hello?’ she says. ‘Hello?’

  No Marina. No anyone. The fizzing thickens into the sound of breathing, of thinking, pale granules clumping together to form a shape: almost a face. Pale, with red hair. Who else could it be but Mitzi Sudgeon? Hatred has an echo.

  War has been declared.

  Sunday, 22 January

  Sung eucharist (Crypt Choir) or pastoral address, Divinity Hall: Canon Paul Sheath, ‘Overcoming Temptation’; hockey: Pineways Tournament, 1st XI, Sholtsborough (minibus leaves 11 a.m.) (A); OC Society talk by James Pollinger: ‘Constable: His Art, His Life’, Combe Lodge Chamber, 5 p.m.; Wine Appreciation Society: Rioja, deputy headmaster’s rooms, Cordfield; Choral Society rehearsal (open), Divinity Hall, 7.30 p.m.

  It is strange, Marina observes, that once you start noticing someone you see them everywhere; in the queue for tuna crumble, or hiding under the Praecentor’s Gate from a downpour of acid rain. Now as well as Simon Flowers, and various enemies, and Wilco the feral groundsman, she begins to spot Guy Viney all the time.

  ‘All right?’ he says when he sees her, even in public. The shame of talking to someone who has read all Jane Austen’s novels, even Lady Susan, doesn’t seem to occur to him; he clearly does not know that in lessons she is the only girl who puts up her hand. Or is it because he is younger? He is lucky that she acknowledges him at all.

  ‘Minden jól,’ which means ‘very good’, says Zsuzsi on Sunday morning, when Marina rings home. ‘How is that nice boy?’

  At that moment Marina realizes that no one at school has referred to Guy’s visit to Westminster Court. Is it possible that he hasn’t told everyone, that they are not laughing and mocking behind her back?

  Maybe he won’t ruin her. Maybe he is nice.

  But that is all. They have nothing in common, whereas Simon Flowers, scientist with a soul, is a perfect match. If he boarded like Guy, they could talk all night; instead, he goes home to his family, about whom she knows not enough, except that his mother is a librarian, which warms her heart. She would pay all her money to visit his house for a single minute. Guy Viney must have a family too, but who cares?

  That evening Alexia ‘Sexier’ Prior says, ‘Come with me, no one else is around,’ when she is getting ready to go to Percy to see her crush, Jim Finn, and so Marina goes. The staircase is rich with the smell of plimsolls and what she suspects is boys’ deodorant, sprayed in flammable quantities. Guy’s room, Percy IV, is next door, up in the roof. His door is open. ‘Hey,’ he says. ‘Want a chocolate biscuit?’

  Percy IV has a romantically steep ceiling, a collapsing armchair, carved stone vines around the door and a glow-in-the-dark ‘Stairway to Heaven’ poster. For a Combe boy he is friendly, although the Fiver sitting on a beanbag, his roommate Tosser something, ignores her. At first Marina just smiles and nods as they talk about football; if she fails to look interested they will call her a ‘woman’, which is a grievous insult. But Guy keeps giving her biscuits, and doesn’t refer to having seen Westminster Court, or laugh when she says, ‘But who is Jim Morrison?’, and when his friend says, ‘WSK,’ which means West Street Knockers, he tells him to shut up. Guy doesn’t ask her questions either, but when, almost for something to say, she starts talking about Cambridge – mocks, predictions, UCCA forms, the masters’ frustrating lack of interest in helping her choose a college – he doesn’t look disgusted.

  ‘Oh, right,’ he says. ‘A brainy bird.’

  ‘Honestly not,’ she says. ‘It’s . . . actually, I’m really scared. I’m never going to make it.’

  ‘Bollocks,’ he says. ‘Just give it a whirl.’

  When she gives up on Alexia Prior and starts to go, he says, ‘Come by any time,’ and, because he is not remotely a romantic option, she does. She has never been good at Social in the West Street television room, where combinations of Allegra and Isla and Ellie and Nicky and Alex and Fleur and Vix and Belinda and Antoinette ‘Toni, rhymes with Joni’ Collister and Daisy Chang and Annabelle ‘Pubic’ Tuft eat white toast and discuss either the First Eleven, or frequency-wash shampoo, or which boys they all know at Marlborough and Wellington, every single night.

  Upstairs is worse because her bedroom contains Heidi Smith-Russell, her Hilary term room-mate, daughter of a millionaire poultry-feed manufacturer near Chichester. Heidi has a Filofax and buffs her nails twice a week; she claims that this is as important as washing your hair. Marina wants to ask Mrs Long if they were put together this term because they are equally unpopular, but fears the answer. Anyway, unlike Marina, even Heidi has friends.

  Guy saves her. Because she has a boy to visit, the West Street girls don’t mind if she misses Social, but their indulgent smile and references to ‘happy hour’ confuse her. ‘It’s not that,’ she says, burning with shame and pride. Nevertheless, the next time she goes she wears her contact lenses and then just sits blinking on Guy’s beanbag, feeling like a fool.

  He is quite funny for a Fiver but not at all attractive: too pasty and puffy-haired for that. He likes explaining in detail why he fancies Amanda Stapleton, known as Knobule: her tennis shoulders, her long flicky hair. His maleness is irrelevant, like a dog’s. Later, in her room, she thinks about Simon Flowers just as much as before. Besides, she has work to do: an assessment of Hardy’s nature poetry, the respective properties of chlorophyll-a C55H72O5N4Mg and chlorophyll-b C55H70O6N4Mg. She writes on and on in brown-black ink, past midnight, past two, and although her backache is worse, and sometimes she doesn’t seem to be breathing properly, and her heart aches, she tries to keep her mind on the golden prize: Cambridge. Isn’t that the point of it all? Simon Flowers will be there too. They will punt, or bowl, or play croquet, in an intellectual yet passionate union, miles away from Combe.

  As she falls asleep she thinks of him chastely in bed in Stourpaine, and barely misses her mother. Or, rather, discovers that if she refuses to let herself, closes herself to even the possibility of pain, she can bear not to be with her. Besides, it is safer for the Farkases not to be thought about and, although forcing her mind away is like bending metal, she is Rozsi’s grandchild. She manages.

  Then everything changes.

  On Saturday nights they are allowed, Within Reason, their freedom. This means alcohol. The Combe Abbey rules about alcohol are perfectly clear: never before the sixth form and, if every term a Fiver stomach or two has to be pumped, there is no need to discuss it. On returning from dinner out (never just drinking) on a Saturday night, Combe pupils must report to their housemaster. Why the housemasters never notice that everyone is completely drunk is a mystery. It has happened to Marina twice already; she remembers nothing at all of the first time, and the second she insisted on walking in a straight line and broke a chair leg. There are always awful stories: paralytic staggerings into the arms of the headmaster’s wife, vomit in the Chapel, turds. Today is the birthday of Selina Knocker, the sweet but stupid child of the head of the navy who is, physically at least, in all Marina’s classes. This must be why Marina is invited, but Guy is a Fiver, too young to be in town after dark. So why is he allowed, even if their parents do know each other? She tries to ask, but he just grins and says, ‘Ve haff vays.’

  She is wearing contact lenses. Dust and drizzle and her own fringe keep blowing into her eyes as she walks along the dark East Combe Road, next to Selina’s cousin Gypsy. No one brings coats, let alone their great-aunt’s umbrella from Fenwick’s, so Marina’s teeth are chattering, which she is trying to disguise with conversation. Because this part of Dorset is so very flat and ringed by hillsides, she often has a feeling of being cut off from the rest of England, as if they are walking at the bottom of a meteor hole. If only, she thinks, I could see London from here, even just a bit of Esher, I would
know they were safe.

  Gypsy, Jippo, is unfriendly but very beautiful, with long brown legs and big blinky blue eyes. Apparently she has just been skiing and seduced an instructor. Marina is struggling to find common ground.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she asks, after an awkward silence through which Jippo sails, serene. ‘I mean, I know the name, but I haven’t . . . is it a, a smart restaurant? I mean—’

  ‘Just Capote’s.’

  ‘Oh. Thanks.’ She has already spent too much this term on inspiring postcards and impressive Penguin European Classics: Orlando Furioso, Oblomov, The Trial. She cannot ask her mother for more money. They pay probably hundreds every year for her fees, and then there are the train fares and the Old Combeian Society (motto: Floreat Combeiensis), for which Rozsi signed her up for lifetime membership, together with OCS crested lapel badge and fountain pen, before Marina’s first day. Even the uniform, all those ties and tennis shoes, must cost quite a bit. I will order modestly, she thinks, and sits down, moved.

  But they are cold and damp, and order hugely: onion rings, frutti di mare, lamb chops, steak. She eats her Margarita pizza and drinks enough house white to make the night seem glittery, the future not exactly golden, but not leaden either. She catches Guy’s eye and smiles. She can even stand sitting between Giles Yeo, who has slicked-back hair and Ray-Bans, and Bill Wallis, whose shirt has bow ties and champagne bottles on the sleeves.

  ‘Wop,’ they call each other, ‘flid’ and ‘spaz’ and ‘faggot’.

  They lean across to talk about rugby, pretending to be very careful of her WSK but otherwise ignoring her. Bill’s three brothers all came here; next year he will be captain of the rowing team, so it would be unwise to annoy him. Nevertheless, Marina refuses to make conversation, on principle. She looks towards the salad bar with an enigmatic smile, thinking of being with Simon Flowers at Cambridge, crossing the quadrangles in lab coats on their way to making discoveries.