Almost English (12 page)

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 has 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.’

She looks at her plate, the crumbly mess of home-made bread on the tablecloth because she didn’t know what to do about side plates, and makes herself say, ‘I . . . I should ring home. Just so they—’

‘Nah, don’t bother,’ he says. ‘They’ll be fine.’

‘No, you don’t— I really have to. And I should get something better for your mum. Chocolates?’ She hears herself say ‘chocklits’ but he doesn’t seem to notice. ‘If I could run to the shops.’ The tulips are still upstairs on her bag; two have lost their heads. What can she give the others? Rozsi rarely leaves the flat without a selection of gift items – boxes of handkerchiefs; stockings in plastic eggs; wooden dolls hand-carved in Prague and horrible floral notelets; beaded glasses chains; liqueur chocolates – which she distributes to every tradesperson and cashier and even the teachers at Ealing Girls’, until Marina wept for her to stop.

‘God, no, not presents,’ he says, grasping her hand awkwardly across the table. ‘Dad hates them. People usually just leave a tip for Evelyn.’

‘Do you often have guests?’ she asks to distract him; she needs her hand back to fold her napkin, but there are no napkin rings. He scrumples up his and chucks it at his plate. ‘Does your mothe—’

‘Shh,’ he says, reaching out a finger to stroke the back of her hand, tracing the tendons with a sheen of ham fat. ‘Come on, eat up,’ and he gives her a significant look.

Laura comes home, a little earlier than the others. I have been entombed here, she thinks as she unlocks the flat door, like a prawn trapped in aspic, and now it will all fall apart. She puts on the kettle to keep herself company and listens to the straining water. By now, she thinks, sitting on the edge of the sofa like a woman in a waiting room, Mitzi Sudgeon will be lying bravely on a chaise longue in the middle of the Bazaar, having attendance danced upon her. Yet however much Laura pricks herself with this thought, she cannot feel it. The kitchen smells of smallness, secrets which would be better kept; the stoicism of old women doing their best far from home. Think, she tells herself. Think.

She has to tell them about Peter.

The light slowly fades. She must show them the letter. There is no reason to keep it secret. Only a monster would do that.

13

In Guy’s room, on Guy’s bed. They are kissing in a bubble of beauty, distant birdsong, the soft pluck and suck of their mouths. Marina can see past the red rim of his ear, illuminated by the setting January sun, which pours, much warmer than it feels outside, through his window. The room smells fresh: bonfire and laundry; this counteracts the whiffs of scalp from Guy’s unwashed hair.