Almost English Page 9

  ‘My mother,’ says Guy, and pats her shoulder.

  ‘So, Marina.’ Mrs Viney’s greeny-grey eyes meet hers in the rear-view mirror as she reverses masterfully towards the station barrier, parking voucher between her teeth. ‘What a treat,’ she says in her Radio Four voice, ‘to meet you at last.’

  ‘Oh!’ says Marina, blushing. Shyness seems to light her from within; her movements are clownishly magnified. ‘You’re welcome.’

  Guy ruffles her hair. ‘Isn’t she sweet?’

  As polite as she tries to be, Mrs Viney is even politer. ‘Awfully selfish of us,’ she says, ‘to drag you all this way to see us,’ and she praises Marina for bringing such good weather. ‘We’re terribly dull, I’m afraid,’ she says. ‘I hope we’ll be worth your while.’

  But when Marina tries to be gracious back, it sounds ridiculous. Mrs Viney is not wearing earrings; thank God that Marina has left Zsuzsi’s old clip-on garnet pendants in her toilet bag, but what else has she got wrong? If only she could see if Mrs Viney is wearing a watch; she has a feeling that she won’t be, and silently undoes her own. Guy does a rich belch, which makes her blush, but Mrs Viney only says, ‘Guyie, must you?’ and Marina turns her face to the window to conceal her shock. All her best items, her new green toothbrush, the Liberty shower cap from Mrs Dobos, are squashed into a carrier bag between her legs. She squeezes it between unrace-horsey ankles and wonders if it looks overstuffed. Guy hasn’t mentioned whether or not she is expected to stay the night.

  Guy is no use. He has hot chocolate on his chin. He won’t stop teasing her about the red-and-yellow station tulips she brought his mother, currently banging their heads against her knee as he gestures and winks and she furiously shakes her head at him to shut up. Now he is describing the latest escapades of Henry and Benno and Nick and Giles Yeo, whom his mother seems to know, while Marina tries to flatten her hair back down and regain the art of conversation.

  The car smells of disintegrating leather and apple stalks and dead leaves. ‘Are you,’ she asks Mrs Viney politely, ‘a plantswoman?’ and Guy laughs so much he does another burp. Boys do this at school but she is appalled for them; if anyone heard her do that she could never look at them again. Why is she even here? In a stranger’s car, being driven deeper and deeper into the countryside, with no coat on. She grips the handles of her carrier bag with sweating hands and—

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing,’ says Marina, sensing for the first time the scale of the test which awaits her.

  ‘Silly girl, tell me.’

  ‘Just . . . that . . . there’s a dead bird on the floor.’

  There is a little silence like a sucked sweet. ‘Is there?’ says Mrs Viney. ‘What kind?’

  ‘Chump,’ says Guy. ‘It’s just a hawk moth. You made it sound like a, a chaffinch had flown in, or something. A blue tit! Ha.’

  She turns her burning face to the glass. They drive past violently trimmed twiggy hedgerow, a trout farm and something called an Honesty Box from which Mrs Viney buys a pot of brown jam. She is telling Guy about the nephew of a Mrs Kershaw, ‘You know, the Cluney char,’ dead in a corn silo.

  ‘Oh, God, how awful,’ says Marina.

  ‘Well, he was twenty-six.’

  She keeps having a powerful urge to apologize. Sitting behind the thin shoulders and glossy hair of Mrs Viney, she feels sick and starving simultaneously. What if at dinner they expect forfeits or charades, or a recitation of Noël Coward? Mrs Viney is lovely, for a mother: fragile, but you can imagine her riding to hounds. Her mothy green jumper, which must be cashmere, is torn at the shoulder. Poor woman, thinks Marina kindly, as Guy, mid-anecdote, squeezes her knee a little too hard and his mother laughs. Marina directs a short but, she hopes, powerful prayer to the back of Mrs Viney’s neck: oh God, she thinks. Let me be you. Let—

  The car shudders dramatically.

  ‘God!’ she says. ‘Is it a, a puncture?’

  ‘Cattle-grid, thickster,’ Guy says.

  ‘I know,’ she whispers crossly. ‘Shh.’

  Then the car slows. The Viney house (never ‘home’) has a short drive, a tall hedge, and a messy half-tarpaulined pile of logs, broken flowerpots, petrol containers, farm machinery. Mrs Viney swoops into the space beside it. As Marina climbs out of the car, she accidentally gives a little grunt of disappointment. The house is – well, modern: yellow Lego bricks with ruched blinds and pointy shrubs and a wishing well. ‘Oh, lovely,’ she says, projecting well in case Mr Viney is waiting to greet them. Besides, she tells herself, it must be stylish, just not in a way she yet understands. ‘What a sweet bird bath!’

  ‘Darling,’ says Mrs Viney, crunching across the gravel, ‘that’s Barker’s, the neighbour. We’re over here.’

  She is heading for a gap in an old wall Marina had not even noticed, green where the guttering has leaked. Beyond her lies another house entirely.

  ‘God,’ says Guy. ‘You’re not serious? You thought . . . ha! That’s brilliant.’

  It feels as if her skin is cracking. ‘I didn’t mean that one,’ she says with dignity. ‘I was joking.’

  ‘Hilarious,’ he says.

  They approach the real house around its side. Marina’s eyes are stinging so she registers only height, grassy leagues or hectares stretching into the distance, mist and terraces and trees. The house seems infinite, like part of a school, except that Combe is a mess, Gothically old and new and faux-old, and this is sand-coloured, beautifully regular, at least three storeys high with balconies and a castellated roof, like something from a postcard. As they approach, there is a thunderous barking, as though the hounds of hell are loose. Like a duckling, Marina follows Mrs Viney through a thicket of mackintoshes (never say ‘raincoat’), outdoor garments and sporting goods. It is no warmer than outside. The air is faintly scented with rubber.

  Mrs Viney says, ‘I’m afraid it’s a dreadful mess.’

  ‘Oh, not really,’ says Marina. ‘Don’t worry. I mean, God. This house is enormous. Does it have a, a name?’

  ‘Nah,’ says Guy behind her. ‘Just the Old Rectum. Rectory. Or Stoker, if you’re desperate to call it something.’

  ‘Not desp—’ Marina begins, but Guy is already saying, ‘Dad in?’

  Mrs Viney pushes open a door. There before them stands another kind of man entirely, from whom fame radiates.

  ‘What the h—’ Then his voice changes. ‘Hello,’ he says. ‘And who are we?’

  12

  ‘Dad,’ says Guy. ‘Marina. Marina, my father. We, um, I—’

  ‘Marina. Aha. Good name.’ Alexander Viney looks at her thoughtfully over the top of his glasses. He is shockingly three-dimensional; escaped from the crackly school television to stand before her, live.

  ‘Hello, darling,’ says his wife.

  It is impossible not to smile at him when he shakes your hand: those interested blue eyes, that short silvery hair and big imperial nose, that appearance of strength, like an intellectual stevedore. Until this moment she has thought that the perfect man, the only kind she could imagine marrying, would be tall and thin and elegantly aquiline, like Lord Peter Wimsey in daguerreotype. Mr Viney looks as though he chops logs off camera. She doesn’t care. She steps aside to let Mrs Viney pass, treads on a vast navy galosh, then stumbles against something softer.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ he says.

  ‘Oh my God. I – I’m so stupid. Are you—’

  ‘That,’ he says, ‘was my bad foot.’

  ‘Oh no. Oh, God. Sorry. Sorry.’

  Mrs Viney and Guy are beyond them, in the hallway but, when she ducks her head to slip by Mr Viney, thinking comforting thoughts of death, he stops her. ‘Wait.’

  ‘Sorry. Oh, yes.’ With a mighty effort she lifts her head. He is holding out his hand. ‘So, you’re a friend of my son’s, are you, from school?’

  ‘I . . .’

  ‘Of course you are. I can see, from his little red cheeks, that you are. Well, good for him.’

/>   First, Guy says, they will go for a walk. This seems a pity. His mother is reading the Saturday papers in a room apparently reserved for the purpose, and his father has disappeared.

  ‘We could wait and . . . he might like to chat to us,’ she says.

  ‘God no,’ says Guy. ‘Need to stretch my legs.’ They go first to talk to a man in a nearby field about drainage, and then to feed a colossal horse, Billy, who has cracked teeth as big as her finger and strings of drool pouring from his gums, and thence to a freezing bluebell wood, which she had always assumed was a fictional construct, like Hades. It is a horrible place, dark and probably dangerous. Trees are fine individually, essentially just big plants, but these black weeping woods make her think of Baba Yaga, crows and huntsmen and maidens walled up in towers. There is too much nature here, moving in the darkness, flying things, distant rumbling. Marina is sitting on a soggy tree stump watching Guy kick at some rotten wood, when he suddenly puts his cold hand up her jumper. At that moment, something tears through the undergrowth behind them and a tall girl, with irritatingly gamine hair and Quink-coloured jeans, appears from the shadows, escorted by a huge brindled hound.

  ‘Hello!’ says Marina, like an eager shepherdess interrupted with the young lord. Should she stand? She starts scrambling to her feet, sees faint amusement in the girl’s expression and subsides into a wobbly kneel in the thick damp leaves, holding up her hand to be shaken.

  ‘What are you doing, you mad girl?’

  There is a creaking, rustling hesitation, punctuated by the sound of hungry canine sniffing centimetres from Marina’s groinal area.

  ‘Get up, you loon,’ says Guy. ‘This is my sister, Lucy. Lucy, Marina.’

  ‘Hello,’ says Lucy Viney with a cooler, calmer smile, while Marina struggles back on the tree stump with mud all over her knees. Like Marina, Lucy Viney is wearing a V-necked jumper, but the effect is so different. If only I’d worn navy, thinks Marina, and a shirt underneath with thick stripes, and old walking boots, and—

  ‘You poor child,’ says Lucy Viney, who is barely older than she is. ‘Aren’t you cold?’

  Marina’s heart gives a little slip of hope. She thinks: this is someone I could be friends with, if Guy stays out of the way. She could teach me. ‘No,’ she says, trying to stop her chattering teeth.

  ‘You are sweet to come all this way,’ Lucy says. ‘For Guy.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ begins Marina.

  ‘But,’ Lucy says, with a significant glance at her brother, ‘it’s terribly sad that Papa’s working this weekend.’

  ‘She’s not bothered about silly old Dad,’ says Guy.

  ‘I – Guy invited me, actually,’ Marina says hotly. ‘I’m not a, a tourist.’

  ‘A tourist!’ Lucy Viney is greatly amused. ‘Er, this isn’t a stately home, lovey. Not many follies and urns here.’

  ‘I know that,’ says Marina.

  ‘Don’t be touchy, sweetie,’ says Lucy Viney in a bored voice, hiding her hands elegantly in the sleeves of her huge waxed jacket. ‘One becomes so protective. I’m sure he’ll think you’re marvellous.’

  Then she ignores her. If it were possible to lie down under the leaf mould and die of shame, Marina would do it. She examines a sinister-looking fungus, feeling at first so sad that her throat hurts, then more picturesquely tragic.

  ‘Ah,’ she says with a loud sigh. ‘The woods make me so melancholy.’

  Guy frowns.

  ‘Rummy?’ Lucy Viney says suddenly.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Luce is mad on cards,’ says Guy.

  ‘Oh. I, I don’t think th—’

  ‘You must. What then? Racing Demon? Vingt-et-un?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Marina says, trying not to look shocked. ‘I, I mean, not well.’ She looks nervously at Guy, but he is wiping something on a tree trunk. ‘Maybe,’ she says brightly, thinking of the West Street girls, ‘we know someone in common. You’re at Hill House, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well then. I think Antoinette at Combe went there. No? How about Liza Church?’ Why isn’t this working? In West Street they talk like this all the time. ‘Sara-Jane Brownleigh? Sorry, “Turtle”?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh. Well, so, so you’re going to Edinburgh next year.’

  ‘This year, actually. History of Art. Yes. I hope, Guy lovey, that you’re not thinking of a tedious year out when it’s your turn, like some of the idiots at school. Or,’ she says, smiling at Marina, ‘you?’

  ‘Definitely not,’ says Marina, who had been on the verge of deciding to spend her year out in Florence. ‘Your house is lovely.’

  ‘No,’ says Lucy Viney. ‘Our house is amazing.’

  Marina feels her smile set. ‘Um, you might know a friend of mine, actually, who’s an Upper at, at Combe, Simon Flowers. He’s very musical. He’s going to Cambridge, actually, to read, um, natural sciences. Tall and thin.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ says Lucy Viney, ‘I don’t know him. He doesn’t sound at all like the kind of person I would know.’

  Marina tries to smile while biting her lip. ‘I just thought, well, you know some of the Uppers at Combe, don’t you? Guy said.’

  ‘Not really, no. Guess,’ she says, turning to Guy, ‘who got into dire trouble with Papa last week? You know that new chap round the corner?’

  ‘I know where you mean,’ says Marina, and is about to say Mr Barker, the bird-bath owner, when Lucy Viney asks, ‘Oh, so you know them up at the Hall?’

  ‘I, not exactly,’ and Marina sees the encouraging look fall away.

  The Vineys, brother and sister, begin to walk back towards the house; Marina, rehearsing a defence of Simon Flowers, hurries beside them like a page. She scans the fields for interesting local wildlife, searches for something intelligent to ask about rural pursuits, but can remember nothing beyond the maple-syrup snow in Little House on the Prairie and something in Lark Rise about sheaves. Wood pigeons, or perhaps cuckoos, sing their peculiar song as they leave the shrubbery. What can only be outbuildings cluster to the side of the house; one has what looks suspiciously like a stable door. There is even a mighty oak with a bench around it, almost as if they have stepped into a film set in an English country-house garden, not a real garden at all.

  It is twilight, the hour in children’s literature when the adult world comes to life. Guy’s house, Stoker, has long many-paned windows, in which dimples and puddles of the dying sun reflect like fire. If I lived here, thinks Marina, I would probably become a poet.

  But the truth is that she is starving, muddy and frozen and wondering how she will converse with the Viney parents at dinner. Guy’s other sister, Emmy, Emster, might come by for a drink; she is married to someone called Toby. Maybe, thinks Marina, pointlessly biting a big chunk from her thumbnail, I should just go back to school now. Would anyone care? Her throat tightens. I am, she thinks, of humbler stock.

  Just as she is wondering about buses to the station, they reach a stone terrace, blotted with lichen, with grey cannon-balls on every other step. ‘God, I love your house,’ she says, and the Viney children look at her as if surprised. Perhaps I am, she thinks, unusually responsive to Beauty. Rather moved by her sensitivity, she looks out across the woods to a river valley just visible where the trees part, as if the scenery had arranged itself for her delight. ‘Wow,’ she says. ‘Is that a tennis court?’

  ‘Yup,’ says Guy.

  ‘Afraid not much of one,’ says his sister. ‘Bit too pitty for a really serious match. Do you play?’

  Marina gives a snuffly simper. The worn edges of the stone in the gloaming, like the rosy brick wall beside it, make her chest hurt with love and envy. From inside the house comes the clinking of china. Mrs Viney will be making dinner: probably steak and kidney pudding, or partridge, or a fricassée. Into the silence Guy lets out an enormous fart.

  ‘Oh!’ says Marina.

  ‘Stinker uno,’ says Lucy Viney and, without further comment, they walk up into the house. Marina h
as no words. There is something about bodily emissions in her Sloane Ranger Handbook; you are meant to find them hilarious but she is too stunned to speak. She has barely ever done an audible one herself; at home, such things are never, ever, mentioned. What are the rules for this?

  And so the moment for leaving passes. Much, much later, now a different adult from the one she might have been, she wonders if this was the moment when she chose the interesting path through the forest, where trouble lay in wait.

  Guy’s mother has set out food of fantasy: an entire cold roast chicken, warm wholemeal bread, floppy lettuce leaves, a huge piece of ham on a glistening bone. Together they sit, like adults, at a big square table with a blue and white checked cloth and a jug of branches and bits of leaf. Surely this can’t be just a lunch room; and what meal does this count as? High tea? It is lined with what is probably blue damask and on it hang paintings of dogs, tiny-headed horses and bloodied stags. There are decanters everywhere and nutcrackers and ashtrays and pewter birds and silver candlesticks and what she hopes is a porringer. The furniture is dark and very polished; you can smell beeswax, on top of fresh air, and wood smoke, and cold iron, and what must be port or wine. Every inhalation stokes her excitement and her terror. In the fireplace, porcelain elephants bearing little Chinese figures stand guard over the bellows and toasting forks. If she hadn’t come here she would never have realized that all these things are tasteful.

  ‘Your mum’s an amazing cook,’ she says wistfully, hoping that he won’t ask if hers is, but he only grunts. A lawn the size of a park stretches into the distance, beyond a window framed with some sort of dead vine. Where is everybody?

  She takes a modest half-slice of the delicious-looking ham. He takes three. She says, ‘Why are you putting jam on that?’

  ‘It’s chutney, idiot. What? You must have had chutney before.’