Almost English (10 page)

‘Don’t you remember the Marrying Game?’

‘When we had to choose which historical figure we’d most like to kiss? And I chose Peter the Great and you said the only sane choice was Gustavus Adolph—’

‘No, no no. Wrong game. It was that time at Soph’s – we put the names in her Laura Ashley hat, the one with the silk scarf, not the felt. We ate strawberry ice-cream, I seem to recall.’

‘Oh . . .’ This was during their fortune-telling phase, when despite the boys they ‘knew’, the example of their parents, reason and rumour and evidence, they foresaw, unequivocally, long joyous marriages ahead, and trouble-free children with artistic tendencies, and pre-eminence, or at least modest glory, in whichever job they chose: conducting at the Proms, say, or running MI5. The secret sorrows of adolescence would be rewarded. ‘It’s the only way to save ourselves from . . . you know,’ one of them had said, and they all thought of their mothers, and were silent.

‘I got Harrison Ford,’ says Marina now.

‘No you didn’t. That was Cristina Koralik – we let her play. She kept asking about having sexual intercourse, you must remember. And I got that comedian, though sadly not Stephen Fry, to whom I am affianced. No, silly, you definitely had Alexander Viney.’

Not ‘definitely’. You should say ‘absolutely’. ‘I’m not silly,’ says Marina.

‘Well, you did. Don’t go all quiet on me. You know. From the telly. The
Making of Kings
fellow. Sophie chose him, she fancied him secretly. We were having that phase of mental promiscuity, you know.’ Sixty-six map centimetres away as the crow flies, Marina blushes at the thought of how many boys, even now, feature nightly in her private bath-time orgies, as she breathes through her mouth to escape the reek of air freshener, and tears slide itchily down her temples and into her hair.

‘You do know,’ Ursula is insisting. ‘We thought he was brilliant in Lower Five. Miss Covs showed
Our England
in double hist. You must remem—’

‘Him? Oh my God. Seriously? I’d forgotten – of course, Viney, of course it’s him. Then why wasn’t he in the Combe
Register
?’

‘Never mind that,’ says Urs. ‘You’ve prob even got his books. I have,
Tudors in Love
, it’s fantastic. Sophie’s definitely read one of them, although it is about eight hundred and ninety-two pages long. She could lend it. Or have you gone all cool, now you’re in love with the Embryo?’

‘Stop it. Wow. I hadn’t realized. We loved him.’

‘Yes, wow! By the way, remember that time Roz said—’

‘I should go,’ says Marina. ‘Sorry, but they kill you if you’re late for morning school.’

‘God, you and your Saturdays. Are you still in uniform? Is it ebbing your life-blood?’

‘You know I am, I have to.’

‘OK, OK. So quickly, tell me, why do you want to know about Alexander Viney? Are you a swinger?’

So Marina explains.

Ursula is squeaking like a guinea pig. ‘You are joking?’

‘No. Honestly. I thought Guy was, well, I just didn’t make the connection. He doesn’t look . . . he’s just ordinary. Not romantic at all.’

‘You know what this means? You could actually do it. Marry him.’

‘Guy? He’s in the year
below
.’

‘No, Guy Senior. The famous one. You could! That was the idea. Or at least you have to try. We plighted.’

‘I’m sure it’s pledged.’

‘We’ll ask Zoë. But you have to.’

‘Don’t be mad.’

‘You’re being mad. Look, you said the Embryo invited you. You could meet them. Just say yes.’

‘I can’t,’ she says, but a strange heat is growing in her chest: an emptiness, like love or hunger. She remembers Alexander Viney’s face perfectly now: oldish, but not much more than her friends’ fathers.

‘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? Marijuana? 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.