Almost English Page 6

  They walk back to school in formation: popular girls at the front like Amanda ‘Saddle’ Collindale, who hunts, and Michaela Buonasenda the nymphomaniac; Guy in the middle, Marina at the back. The streets of Combe are deserted.

  ‘Where are the peasants?’ bellows Bill, and Saddle snorts. Marina is almost too frightened to breathe. Her lips are dry. Townspeople really might attack them; I would, she thinks. Victoria Porritt, ‘Muffster’, a big-haired fat girl in Fitzgerald House, Fitz, with a Tory MP father, totters on the cobblestones and takes Marina’s arm.

  ‘You don’t want to be a doctor, though, surely?’ she says. ‘I mean, really.’

  ‘Well . . .’ If she explains that it’s not about wanting, Victoria Porritt might not understand. ‘I, I quite like the sciences,’ she says.

  ‘Ugh. Biology. Chemistry! How can you stand it?’

  Marina swallows. ‘What do you want to be?’

  ‘Nothing. Married.’ She puts her wet mouth against Marina’s ear. ‘Did you know I was finger-fucked by Pete Galbraith at half-term?’

  Through silent Garthgate, which usually she avoids despite the new lamp posts and illuminated night guard’s hut. Victoria Porritt does not care. She eulogizes her pony and Marina joins in, the little fraud. Above the spire and ancient towers, the Plough lies upended in the cold. Her heart is clanging. Only babies are afraid of the dark. They face the blackness at the end of the passage. Then, enormous in a strip of lamplight, out of the shadows looms Guy.

  ‘Piss off, virge,’ shout the boys at the back, head-locking him and ruffling his hair.

  ‘Oh, help!’ screams Victoria Porritt and hurries off to join the others.

  Guy grins at Marina. ‘Bet you haven’t seen this,’ he says, and leads her back through the night to a little fence, easily climbed. Into the navy sky above them stretches another tower, a spray of stars, a single lit-up window. They are in a little walled garden hard up against the side of the ruins; there are flowerbeds, but no house close by.

  ‘Like it?’ he says, lowering his voice until it is just breath in the cold.

  A branch of something is close to her ear; it smells sweet although it is winter. Rozsi would rip it off and take it home; she knows no shame. The bat roosts and jagged pressing leaves, the distant footsteps, are horrible. Their curfew is eleven; breaking it is punished with rustication, like sex. She smiles nervously, consolingly. He is just a Fiver, showing off. ‘Shall we—’

  He moves closer: not exactly a friend. Although he has never shown the slightest sign of interest, indeed has discussed further his inexplicable desire for Knobule Stapleton, an atmosphere is developing which even she cannot miss. It fills her with sadness; she had such high hopes. In all these long years when nobody has wanted to kiss her, she has been ready, memorizing Stevie Smith’s ‘I like to get off with people’ and e.e. cummings’s ‘may i feel?’ until she and Ursula knew them, literally, backwards. She understood passion and desire, and how they would feel when they found her.

  But boys like him, she realizes, about to hatch, must need girlfriends too. And if they can’t have Knobule Stapleton they will aim lower, and lower, until they end up with her.

  7

  Many miles away, in west London, Marina’s mother sits at the dining table, making notes on the index cards she keeps in a folder labelled

  LAURA’S WORK

  Laura is a receptionist. Not even a good one, as Alistair, in his capacity as her employer, makes perfectly clear. She spends her working day in a morass of shame and minor disasters, not putting telephone calls through, hiding substandard photocopies, worrying that she has forgotten to tell someone that they are pregnant, dying, both. Her job has, however, three advantages: a constant supply of memo pads and ball point pens labelled CYNOSTEX FOR CYSTITIS AND AGROLAST: THE LARGER HERNIA PATCH; proximity to Alistair, which is, she reminds herself often, the enabler and not the sole cause of their passion; and, most importantly, patient confidentiality. Even Zsuzsi respects this; most of Laura’s paperwork is about verrucas, or mump vaccinations, or any of the many areas of human suffering in which she has no interest. Consequently, every day Laura lugs home a pile of non-exciting correspondence, and in the margins, in light pencil, she expresses herself:

  Oh God rescue me. A: won’t you ring? Marina Marina Marina God I can’t stand this.

  What choice does she have? Here in her candlewick sarcophagus, space is limited. Her bedding lives in a suitcase beside the bookshelves; forty years’ worth of childhood books and over-exposed Polaroids tangle in her mother-in-law’s spare drawer. If Laura kept a diary under the sofa cushions, someone would find it, yet there is much in her mind which needs an outlet. Such as, for example, her feelings about the fourth great advantage of her job: a little drawer, a little key, a cupboard in Dr Sudgeon’s office containing Tramadol, Valium, Temazepam, of whose comforting existence she has been thinking more and more. Would, she wonders now, purely theoretically, twenty be enough?

  This is how it begins: an ordinary teenage love story. He never, obviously, contravenes the Six Inch Rule by touching her in public, or is affectionate in private, or acknowledges their intimacy where others could hear. It is better this way, given that he is in the year below. However, everyone, from children in the Freshers to the head boy and captain of rugby, Thomas ‘Tom’ Thomson, seems to find her less freakish now. It’s like being married. They have a routine. Girls are not allowed in boys’ rooms after Hall, but luckily Guy is helping the Freshers build a feathered gondola for The Merchant of Venice, in which Marina has a humiliatingly small part. Drama at Combe Abbey is spectacularly lavish, like its sport. Participation, the pupils are frequently told, ‘is what makes a well-rounded Combe Man’, although most of them stick to rugby. Guy, however, has been roped in by his housemaster, Pa Stenning, to help with the props. And so, three or four times a week, Marina accompanies him beneath the stage of Divinity Hall.

  Although the handsome bachelor Pa Stenning is the head of drama, he never checks on Guy and his little shivering team of Removes and Freshers, tapping away in the cold. Guy says Pa Stenning trusts him. He smokes cigarettes, cupped in his hand like a workman, and issues instructions. Marina pokes among the smelly costumes, practising her formulae and the laws of chemical combination, waiting for him like his French lieutenant’s woman, trying to think of conversational topics which might interest him without boring her to despair. Then they go round the corner to ‘check the rig’ and clinch under the cables: Guy’s shirt sleeves around Marina’s soft body, the smell of hot dust and sweat. She likes the way his veins stand out in his forearms, the size of his wrist bones despite his youth, and this encourages her; she is not dead to his attractions. Yet when his Doc Martens nudge her penny loafers she edges away, as she would never have done from Simon Flowers.

  Perhaps because he still fancies Amanda Stapleton – he talks about her and then gets off with Marina, as if she is a spittoon – he is less pressing than she had expected. She is still splashing her bust with cool water, experimenting in private with scrunchies, regularly applying lip balm. Nothing helps. Should she be stoking his ardour? Shouldn’t he be trying to ravish her? So she does nothing but let herself be kissed, and sometimes she can almost feel herself tipping over into excitement when they kiss particularly hotly, their bodies cores of fire wrapped around with cold.

  When does petting start?

  She is not, whatever his friends think, a prude. She has been waiting for someone to touch her breasts since she was eleven. Sex, she has always known, will be wonderful. Maybe, she thinks now, exhausted yet wide awake at three in the morning, looking across to where Heidi sleeps in a haze of vaginal deodorant and body spray, she was wrong.

  ‘You’re Mrs Farkas, aren’t you?’ says a voice.

  Laura is shopping in Fritz Continental on the Edgware Road for the particular brand of blueberry jam the aunts-in-law prefer. It is a guilt present; this week she had hoped to buy herself a magazine, but she feels she should be making up to them
.

  She turns. The woman beside her, frowning at crisp-bread, is tallish too, worried-looking too, distantly familiar. ‘Oh,’ says Laura. ‘School – I mean, Ealing. Aren’t you—’

  ‘I taught Marina history. Bridget Tyce.’

  ‘Sorry. I’m an idiot. Miles away.’

  ‘Mm, I’m the same.’ They look at each other. ‘I have a Russian mother-in-law,’ she tells Laura, ‘with specific crisp-bread needs. Do you happen to know—’

  ‘That one. They like the seeds. I thought . . . Aren’t you Miss Tyce?’

  ‘Well, not a legal mother-in-law. Teachers have sex too, though, you know,’ she says and smiles.

  Laura smiles back; there is a pause as they both consider the sex Miss Tyce has been having.

  ‘How is Marina?’ Miss Tyce asks.

  ‘Well—’

  ‘We miss her, you know. Bright girl. I do hope she’s happy.’

  Laura’s face says it. She means to come out with the usual reassurances, opportunity and facilities and privilege, but the words will not form. She feels her bottom lip beginning to betray her, and coughs. ‘Well.’

  ‘She isn’t?’

  ‘It’s, well, to be honest, it’s a shock. I mean, not just for me! But, but she’ll settle, I’m sure. We’re all very proud.’

  ‘Boarding school and Marina: it’s hard to imagine. Not one to suffer fools, is she? No. Well, we’d have her back in a second.’

  Laura nods. A cloud of unknowing sinks upon her, blotting out decisions, feelings, the future. She wants to lie down and sleep.

  ‘If you did, if she did change her mind,’ she hears, ‘we could discuss it. Definitely possible. But don’t leave it, or it’ll be too late.’

  When Marina rings home on Sunday morning, the ten pences hot and damp in her palm, she has decided to mention, just by the by, the fact that she is a tiny bit homesick.

  It doesn’t work that way.

  ‘Antibiotics,’ her mother tells her, sounding distracted. ‘It’s her age . . . they want to be sure.’

  ‘Poor Ildi.’

  ‘She is eighty-two, sweetheart. They’ll keep an eye on her.’

  ‘What if it’s more serious?’ asks Marina. Ali Strewer canters past her in full lacrosse kit. Marina steps aside to let her pass, bangs her elbow on the pay phone and gasps, but she will not cry. Last night, with chemistry homework to finish, she had not enough sleep and too much coffee and now, despite never having been to a funeral, she can see clear as day Ildi’s coffin, half open like a pope’s; a sad dark chapel. A sob catches in her throat. The relatives are too vulnerable without her, yet nothing makes them happier than knowing that she is here.

  ‘Are you positive everything’s all right?’ she asks her mother.

  ‘Definitely. Why not?’

  ‘I just thought— Never mind. I’d better go,’ she says. ‘I’m very busy. By the way, I’ve lost another lens. The left. No, the right. Hang on—’

  ‘Oh, my love. Can’t you be more careful? The insurance won’t keep paying. I mean, it’s fine. But just try, please?’

  Now Marina feels even worse. Her problems are manifold. For a start, she isn’t in love with Guy, although he is quite nice to her, so perhaps she is incapable of passion like a psychopath. It’s not even because he’s younger, though obviously that adds to her self-disgust. She is pining so badly for home that she can hardly sleep, but she can’t worry her relatives, and Urs would gloat and say again she was wrong to leave, and there is no one else she can imagine telling. Among the many other incidents she will not think about, buried in a pit of fear and shame, is the time she rang the Samaritans last term from the pay phone out by the petrol station, and then, on their advice, went to see the school counsellor: Ma Gilbray, the chaplain’s perpetually smiling wife, with her pearly lipstick and Lady Diana hair. Sitting on a patchwork cushion in the Gilbray family study, Marina remembered a story about the last Combe chaplain, who tape-recorded confessions and played them for laughs in the staffroom, and found it hard to confide.

  The idea of admitting how she feels is unbearable. It is too big, too easily ripped open. Every time she thinks of Cambridge she feels as if she will burst with desire and desperation, and the fear that something will happen to upset the celestial balance, that she will fail to do the one safeguarding thing, makes her sick with fright. She has also become a tiny bit obsessed with washing her hands. So now as well as asthma, or whatever is causing this feeling that she can’t take enough oxygen in, she has given herself eczema. She is the only girl in the Lowers with no idea how to make small talk or flirt; she remains unnicknamed. Doc Ventner won’t let her answer a single question in biology, only the boys in his house and, whenever she asks Doc Steven how long her English essay should be, he says ‘as long as a miniskirt’, which is not helpful. She has never fainted or ridden a bicycle; she doubts that she could climb a tree. She is afraid to swim in case boys see her in her costume. There is no Poetry Society. She is irrelevant.

  Then Guy makes a suggestion.

  It is eight o’clock. Laura and her in-laws have had an early dinner (mushroom palacsinta, cabbage with caraway, which is kukorica, or is that something else? Ladybirds?). And now Rozsi, Zsuzsi and Ildi, over Danish butter biscuits and kavitchka, which definitely means coffee, and a performance of Mozart’s Requiem on Radio Three, are discussing their acquaintances, laughing until they weep. It is happiness, of a sort. ‘Buto,’ they say, ‘chunyo,’ and Laura smiles weakly; these are words she should know by now. The in-laws take her failure to learn Hungarian very well, like a small physiological malformation. Marina has learned to count to ten, and knows certain key words such as slippers and tomato; today in the kitchen, thinking, how hard can it be, Laura looked at a cookery book over Ildi’s shoulder:

  Borjúláb kirántva

  A borjúlábakat legelőbb megkoppasztjuk a következő módon: Veszünk sárga szurkot vagy 15–20 dekát és megtörjük egész porrá két vastag papír között. Aztán a lábakat egyenként mindenütt nagyon jól dörzsöljük be vele, fővő vízzel forrázzuk le és vegyük ki az asztalra vagy táblára és sietve gyorsan dörzsölve húzzuk . . .

  Papír: paper, she guessed, and felt quite satisfied.

  She has been polishing shoes: one of her manly jobs. Something about the ancient shoe-cleaning case, dusters made from Peter and Zoltan’s shirts, duplicate brushes bequeathed by the dead Károlyi sisters, poor Kitti and poor Franci, is weighing upon her. Marina has a new posh accent; Penelope Leach says this is perfectly normal. Maybe she is happy there, and Combe is good for her. Maybe.

  ‘I’m having a bath,’ she says eventually. ‘Unless . . . ?’

  ‘Vot-apity that you don’t vant to sit with us,’ says Zsuzsi, addressing an envelope in loopy foreign-lady handwriting to one of her many dearest friends, Lady Renate Kennedy née Rivka Kroo, wife of Britain’s foremost importer of Czech crystal hedgehogs. She and her sisters do not like Sir James, formerly Jenő; they refer to him contemptuously as being ‘more English than the English’, although everyone knows that he was born in Hódmezövásárhely. Lady Renate, however, is an authority on most things, including the inadequacies of Laura Farkas. The very envelope itself seems to be looking down on her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Laura says. ‘I’m tired.’

  A look passes between Rozsi and Zsuzsi. Slowly, sadly, Laura runs four inches of scalding water into the chalky turquoise bathtub. She takes off her clothes. She stands, naked, in front of the mirror and looks at her forty-one-year-old body: vigorously used by one or two unmemorable boys in the small Birmingham suburbs, then at teacher training college; desired by Peter Farkas but evidently not enough; utilized occasionally by Dr Alistair Sudgeon. Is that it? If one discounts all that is wrong with her, her height, her face, elephantine knees and big red hands, is it possible that anyone could ever find some of the rest of her attractive again? Look harder. Squint through the steam. Her skin is soft. Her breasts are . . . well, breasts. Gingerly, she rubs her shoulder with h
er thumb, her collarbone. Her nipple. Darling, she whispers to herself, and looks away.

  She lowers herself into the water, back against the cold enamel, calves and thighs bright pink, the Requiem reaching an exciting climax two rooms away. Sadness seems to close around her. She thinks: I want more than this. I . . .

  ‘Qui tollis,’ she hears over the clanking of the hot-water pipes, ‘peccata mundi, miserere nobis.’

  I cannot go on like this.

  ‘Dona nobis pacem.’

  I cannot go on.

  Guy’s hand is on Marina’s school blouse, but he doesn’t seem to know what to do with it. It floats above her sturdy bra, a Courtauld Damask Touch in oyster, which she begged Rozsi not to make her bring to Combe, while he kisses her. Her skin awaits him. Daringly she sticks out her chest a little further: still nothing. What is she doing wrong?

  When Laura emerges from her bath, hot and sore-eyed and modestly belted into her towelling dressing gown, pongyola, with a cardigan on top, everything has changed. She does not know this. She is thinking, Oh God, not Last Year in Marienbad now, I want to go to bed, do I actually have to sit on the sofa and pretend to be interested or could I— when Ildi hands her her post. It is nothing, only a bank statement for £53.32, and a manila envelope with blocky biro capitals: the council about dustbins, or the library with Ildi’s new card. She will deal with it later. First, she has a task.

  She has made a resolution in the bath, and now she must act upon it. She sits at the dining table, pretending to watch the film and covertly nibbling at the belt of her dressing gown. She is working herself up to ask a difficult question: should they do something about Marina? They have all made sacrifices: Rozsi’s income; Ildi’s Post Office savings; the brooch that Zsuzsi claims she sold and, obviously, Laura’s entire poxy salary, hence her having to live with people to whom she is unrelated, and inexplicable, and presumably rather a pain. That can’t be enough. Rozsi and the others must be borrowing money from somewhere, one of the distant Ottos or Fülöps. They have put themselves in debt for this.