Almost English Read online

  ‘You can.’

  ‘Don’t, Urs. I’d look . . . stupid.’

  For a moment Ursula is silent, then: ‘You promised us. Your old friends. Maybe you think we’re just babyish now, but—’

  ‘You know I don’t.’

  ‘Well. We promised each other. That’s all I’m saying.’

  Laura stands at the Porchester Baths entrance. The others are up the stairs ahead of her, scanning the horizon for interest; they love taking umbrage when people stay away. The letter from her husband, Rozsi’s son, Marina’s father, is trembling in her hand.

  He is coming back to them.

  This is the miracle they have longed for. To the Károlyi sisters all men are sacred; they have only to change a light bulb to be deified. Even more than dull Robert, Rozsi’s elder son, the charming cavalier Peter has always been particularly revered. When Laura first visited Peter’s parents, having assumed until then that calling himself ‘foreign’ was a pose, it felt like entering a flat in Prague or Vienna: the wall of classical LPs and art books; the extraordinary food; the photographs. Pay-tare the Holy Infant was everywhere: his indulged boyhood, solemn in a tiny mackintosh; his handsome adolescence, smirking next to his proud beehived mother at a wedding.

  The signs were there and she missed them. When he started drifting away for hours, then days at a time and eventually failed to return at all, it was horrible of course, but, after years of his indolence and drinking, whispered fights, promises to reform, at last Laura could breathe. I only have one infant to look after now, she told herself, and tried to feel consoled. Then she ran out of money, and accepted Rozsi’s verdict that Marina needed her grandparents, and they moved, temporarily of course, into Westminster Court. And Marina has coped, if refusing to discuss it is coping. They have all managed, even poor Rozsi, who pretends that Pay-tare is simply obliged by work to be elsewhere, like Robert in Australia.

  So where has he been? Unconscious? At sea? His letter, unexpectedly sane and contrite for someone in his position, refers vaguely to friends. Could that mean bigamy? She had not foreseen the humiliation of knowing that he was alive all along. Hating him, trying not to think about him, was easier. Now, much worse, there is hope.

  Because, if he does come back, everything might change. She gazes blindly at the embroidered banner above the swing doors:

  WELCOME

  to the Magyar League for Women

  Annual Bazaar

  If he comes home, she is thinking, Marina might soften. Rozsi might forgive her for having driven her sacred son away. Laura could even act on a long-cherished fantasy, in which she rings the headmaster’s secretary at Combe, dispenser of poison from her panelled castle, and instructs her to send Marina home.

  Idiot. Your ex-husband, she reminds herself, is a drunk, and feckless, lazy, self-indulged. He brought us all endless grief, Marina most of all, and he must not be allowed to do that again.

  ‘Laura.’

  She looks up. Rozsi, Zsuzsi, Ildi, all more vulnerable than they know, are staring at her from the top of the stairs.

  ‘What is it, dar-link?’ Ildi asks.

  Aren’t they stable now, and coping? The last thing Marina needs is drama and that is what he’ll bring. Before telling them anything, and destroying what they do have, she must read the letter properly, alone.

  ‘I . . .’

  Imagine if she announced that he was returning and he let them down: that unwashed hair, those big dangerous eyes. They have spent the last thirteen years building barricades. She cannot just open the door to let the whirlwind in.

  ‘Laura? What is it?’

  ‘I . . .’

  She means to tell them. Of course she does. Even when her hand moves towards her pocket, entirely of its own volition, she intends to do the right thing. She just needs a little time.

  10

  Of course Marina is not going to Guy’s parents’ house. But at break, hunger and the thought of a weekend without her mother send her to the tuck shop, where everyone else spends pounds and pounds on blue fizzy drinks and a disgusting margarine-flavoured biscuit known as Slice. She is paying for her sherbet pips when he comes in.

  ‘OK?’ he says.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So what are you doing later?’

  ‘Auditions for the Choir.’

  ‘But you said you can’t sing.’

  ‘I know,’ Marina answers stiffly, looking away because she is an adulterer, who can’t stop thinking about Simon Flowers’s solos. ‘But I should try.’

  ‘See?’ he says. ‘You might as well come back with me – have some fun, not with those spazzes. Don’t look all hurt, you know what I mean. If we meet in Mem at one fifteen we’d catch the twenty to.’

  No, she thinks. Not your scary father, and your mother who will look down on me. I can’t do it.

  Then she imagines being able to tell Ursula all about it. Her family too: they believe in courage and, more than that, in famous people. Zsuzsi once bought an ice-cream next to Lady Antonia Fraser; in the retelling they have become close friends. They all expected Combe to be full of the children of eminent people, not only the kind they have met – someone from the Czech embassy; Lady Renate’s friends; George Arthur, the unconvincingly British conductor – but also the greatest excitement of all: aristocrats. Although as a child it has always embarrassed her, now that she is a woman it makes sense. They don’t want her to grow up like their neighbours’ grandchildren, baking Hungarian biscuits and going to folk-dancing lessons on Saturday mornings, then joining their family’s business. They want her to be more than this.

  Dear Lord, she thinks, please let me be adequate. Let my baseness be concealed.

  ‘OK,’ she says. ‘Yes, OK.’

  It is like an English church fete, deformed. One may, indeed must, buy painted napkin rings and embroidered place mats; costume jewellery donated by Zsuzsi’s friend Gyorgy and discreetly folded flesh-coloured support tights from Femina; celluloid tourist dolls in Hungarian national costume; tapes of gypsy flute music; dried mushrooms, salami, garlic plaits. Someone’s well-meaning English husband is manning a second-hand book stall featuring a 1973 Austin Rover users’ manual, Dick Francis paperbacks, Baedeker guides to Swiss spas. The air is blue with cigarette smoke. There is a coffee stall, with porcelain cups and the brown sugar crystals they are all obsessed with and, naturally, food: stuffed paprikás and pancakes and chicken cooling under foil duvets, some of it in the white harvest-themed Pyrex of home. And, on an altar in the middle of the room, stands a cake stall presided over by Zsófia Dobos, Mrs Dobos to her friends: patron of the arts, owner of Femina and, in her day, proprietress of a famous delicatessen in Soho, although that day is past.

  The old women flutter round her, praising Mrs Dobos’s flower arrangement, her lace tablecloth and the creations of her elderly protégé Rudi, reputedly a former employee of the great Gerbeaud but now living in poverty in Holloway.

  ‘Nez. Beautiful, nem?’ says Rozsi. Obediently Laura nods. This is not enough; she must turn round to admire Rudi’s pistachio mignons, arranged like the overlapping scales of a mighty fish. She looks in the general direction of krinolinkies, Wasp’s Nests and Bear Paws; Cobbler’s Delight; Gâteau Princess Anne; a ‘my-ladeesvims’ (‘Sorry? Oh, My Lady’s Whims. I see’); rum and hazelnut kisses; marzipan crescents; cakelets of plum, or chestnut, or sour cherry; ‘student food’; cheese medals; sweet cabbage dumplings and a monstrous praline and wafer Pischinger; not to mention beigli galore, which have been shipped from a beiglimeister in Budapest.

  ‘I buy one of the necklets for Marina,’ says Ildi, looking crestfallen, hurrying towards a row of padded satin jewellery cards.

  How can Peter be back? Peter, who behaves as if it is reasonable to disappear and then be resurrected? Who has, since she last saw him, gone mad. His letter, crunching in Laura’s pocket, really says so: ‘The balance of my mind – dodgy at the best of times, as you know – was disturbed.’

  What does this mean? Mari
juana? Women? It has an ominously legal sound: has he been in prison? Unlikely; he was too soft for crime. Could he have moved on from wine and strange dusty liqueurs and even the terrible Unicum, Hungary’s national drink, to something worse? Worse, even, than a thirteen-year hiatus, and a character change? Could the little maddening chips in his nature, the fanatical protectiveness about his mother and acceptance of his role as family god-head, have coagulated into that?

  Or could it not be him? The handwriting had been like his, she thinks, but not exactly. What would an impostor want from her in-laws? Attention? Money? To worm his way into their complicated but arguably warm embrace?

  Please, God, she thinks, going nicely with her in-laws to kiss a horrible powdery old woman called Borbála, let it be blackmail, extortion, anything but the return of the prodigal, entirely irresponsible yet still, apparently, perfect in the eyes of the Károlyis. And, if he is coming back, he will be alone. Because wherever he chooses to live, in his mother’s flat or some revolting alternative, Laura cannot go through that pain again.

  Marina has never sat next to a boy on a train before; until Combe she had hardly been on a train. A great ball of breath keeps being trapped in her throat. The scale of her unfitness to meet his parents is only just occurring to her. She is wearing all her best clothes: stone-washed jeans, maroon Marks & Spencer V-neck bought for her by Zsuzsi, in a smaller size than she likes (‘Vair-y good. We see your bust’), the brown ankle boots which she rarely wears in case of scuffing, and her birthday green velvet jacket, of which she is so proud. ‘This is great,’ says Guy, nuzzling her neck like a horse.

  ‘Is it a long journey to, you know, um—’ she asks hopefully, fiddling with the paperback of Gogol’s Dead Souls which, after long deliberation, she has decided is not too pretentious to bring: it is a comedy, after all. She has been dreaming of a lengthy Tolstoyan train ride with serfs scything the cornfields; somehow she had even envisaged a sleeper compartment, in which Guy would attempt to kiss her.

  ‘God, I don’t know,’ he says, biting into a colossal cherry scone. ‘Blandford then Limehurst, Winsham St Peter, Goring Water, Goring thingy, Staithe. Shaftesbury, East Knoyle, lift to Stoker . . . less than an hour. Fifty minutes? Weekend trains aren’t up to much.’

  The mere mention of weekends makes her stomach squelch with anxiety. He said his mother would clear this exeat with Pa Daventry, but surely it’s not as easy as that. It has all happened so suddenly; when she thinks of Rozsi she feels faint, even though, she tells herself, her mother won’t care, or even notice, so in a way it’s her fault.

  Guy keeps grinning at her. When she accidentally rests her knee against his, he does not pull away. She looks at the spots on his temples and remembers the questing way that his lips met hers in the ticket queue, as a guinea pig’s might. Simon Flowers, she thinks, despite having decided to forsake all thoughts of him this weekend, Simon, I will ever be thine. She tries to remember how much money she has in her purse, in case she needs to flee.

  ‘You won’t mind if my father’s not there, will you? My sisters might be, but—’

  ‘Don’t you know?’

  ‘Why would I? One of them’s married, children, everything. Only Lucy lives with us. I just meant that maybe you were expecting my dad to be there. Because you, people, seem . . .’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘Good girl,’ he says and, with a soulful expression, tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. They have stopped at a tiny station. She keeps her eyes on two big black birds, crows or ravens or rooks, near the train track, which are fighting over a stone. One wins the battle; it flies towards them with the stone in its beak, over ridges of what Dr Tree calls ‘good Dorset clay’ and is almost above the train when a sound outside startles it. The stone falls to the ground, so close to her window that she can see it if she cranes her neck, which she does because one day she might regret not having looked. It is not in fact a pebble but something small, furry, bloody: a baby rabbit or mouse, or something worse. She looks away quickly, appalled to find she wants to cry.

  Guy is telling a story about some boys pushing a master’s Vauxhall Astra into Divinity Hall. She is horribly nervous. As the rackety little train passes through Blandford Forum towards Shaftesbury, she witnesses one of those special effects for which the English countryside is famed. The raindrops racing down the glass suddenly slow. Sheets of gold pour on a distant field; the clouds tear open and the entire carriage is bright with winter sunlight. It must be significant. The train whispers ‘Alexander Viney’ with every rattle of the wheels. Are they wheels? She thinks of all the things she has forgotten to bring: perfume; sanitary equipment; a spare book; a rape alarm; a copy of her most impressive English essay, in case Mr Viney is interested. ‘Be a good girl,’ she imagines her grandmother saying. The carriage door squeaks: Viney. Viney. Alexander Viney. I, thinks Marina, am not a good girl. I am ready for love. Ready for sex. Dear God, let it start.

  The Hungarian Bazaar is like being consumed by loving cannibals. Wherever she turns, old women ask her, ‘So, no more children?’ and shake their heads pityingly, or squeeze her upper arm or pat her bottom; ‘Hodge vodge?’ they ask, hogy vagy, ‘How are you?’ and she smiles and nods as if these are merely rhetorical questions. People keep giving her paper plates of veal, and she has to remember to thank them in Hungarian, ‘Kusenem saipen,’ köszönöm szépen. Her pocket feels transparent, she may be sick. She has to tell Rozsi about Peter’s letter but here, in public, is not the right time. I’ll do it tonight – that would be kinder, thinks Laura, looking up to see Alistair and Mitzi Sudgeon pushing through the swinging doors.

  She reaches behind herself for support and finds her hand closing on a bag of paprika, squashy as a tiny corpse. Her brain is still struggling with the idea of Peter Farkas but her eyes follow the man she sort of loves. Or, rather, they follow his wife. Like a rabbit fascinated by a circling hawk, Laura gazes upon her nemesis.

  Mitzi Sudgeon is pale, like something found in a cleft in a Carpathian mountainside. Her hair is dyed red; she wears lipstick but otherwise she looks fragile, naturally thin: a woman too busy doing good deeds to eat. She smokes stylishly. She has virtuous breasts. Not pretty, exactly, but beautiful, powerfully attractive both to elderly maternal Hungarians and to men, of every age. She looks like a tiny diplomat at an enemy’s wedding.

  Alistair, with the methodical humourlessness she tries to find touching, has confided about their marriage: the union brokered by his first employers, kindly Dr and Dr Országh-Nagy, Mitzi’s guardians (or were they kindly?), the dietary control and screaming rages, the many faults she finds with him. However, Laura’s rival has not only beautiful eyes and a waist but also the blessing of the holy Catholic church, which Alistair, despite not being himself a Catholic, finds unbreakable. Not that Laura wants to marry him. She just wants to be married.

  Never mind, she thinks, eyeing them from behind the leather goods like a chicken with a fox. She will buy something for Marina, even though she can’t afford to. She swallows hard but there is dust in her throat, or ash, or sorrow, and she cannot be rid of it.

  Almost an hour passes. Laura takes a sip of hot coffee and somehow misses her mouth, dabs her breast with a napkin and spreads the stain, spills icing sugar from a little walnut pastry on to the brown patch and, hideously soiled and besprinkled, is turning to go to the toilets when she crashes full length into Mitzi Sudgeon, who is bearing teacups on a silver tray. Everything falls to the floor including, after a hesitation, Mitzi.

  ‘Jesus Maria!’

  ‘Oh God, I’m so sorry,’ says Laura. ‘Let me—’

  The hall stills. Down on the parquet, Mitzi feels her ankle gingerly. Alistair, her medically trained lawful husband, kneels in slow motion. His eyes are on Laura’s; they seem to press against her with anger, or ardour, or a plea for understanding. Despite their stolen time together, she does not know him well enough to be sure.

  ‘It is . . . it is,’ says Mitzi, as if she is trying
to be reassuring but has no words. Her accent is improbable even by Hungarian standards. ‘I move, I hope.’

  ‘God, I’m so sorry,’ says Laura again. ‘I’m so stupid. I—’

  ‘No, not stupid,’ says Mitzi. ‘But you are so much bigger than me. And . . . oh!’

  Alistair, kneeling, his neat hands on her skin, has found a sore place on her ballet dancer’s blue-veined instep. Laura looks down at his balding head. Breathing is strangely difficult. She watches his fingers creeping up the thin white calf of his wife.

  ‘Can you walk?’ he says to her.

  ‘I . . . I sink so,’ she says. Gently, professionally, he puts one of her arms over his shoulders and helps her to rise. There is murmuring all around them, mercifully not in English.

  ‘I’m . . . this is awful,’ Laura says.

  ‘Please,’ says Mitzi Sudgeon. Laura steps aside to let them by. As Alistair passes, her spirits seem to fall slowly through her chest and onto the parquet. She kneels to gather up the broken teacups and, in a broken voice, Mitzi says, ‘My bag.’

  ‘Let me,’ says Laura, but Mitzi bends down, still supported by Alistair. She leans towards Laura.

  ‘Do not touch,’ she hisses. And then they are gone.

  11

  In the country Guy makes more sense. She sees the fields through which he will have gambolled, the cows whose milk, presumably, nourished all those big white teeth.

  West Knoyle is a disappointingly ordinary station, ringed with ratty garden sheds: blue sky, the sadness of naked trees. He strides across the tarmac towards an estate car, oppressively cheery in his football jumper. Anyone could be here to meet them. Marina’s family do not know where she is.

  She grasps her bags as if they contain important medical supplies and follows.

  The car is old and filthy and apparently partly wooden, its back windows edged with moss. The passenger seat, comprehensively ripped, contains a box of jam-jars; beside it, one finger on the steering wheel, sits a woman with longish blondish hair, smiling, thin, good-looking. She is wearing muddy grey cords and a moth-holed jumper. Wow, thinks Marina: staff.