Almost English (15 page)

This, however, is the least of her problems. Zsuzsi and the others are so keen on manners but, she wants to tell them, they have left her ill-prepared. What use was their training if all she can do is hold open doors and give up seats and defer respectfully to old foreign ladies? Here it is quite different: she is an adult, with no idea how to behave among her kind. She has already made a mess of hand-shaking. Timing is difficult. Who was meant to sit first at the table, all women, or just older women, or men older than her and who serves whom, and when do you start eating? She brought her champagne to the table and had to pour it into a wine glass to avoid rebuke, which then ruined her chances of working out the right ones for anything else. Also, she has too much cutlery; she considers trying to use a knife and fork to eat her bread, just to use some of it, mercifully sees sense and then is shocked to see Mrs Viney using her fingers to wipe up the sauce on her plate. She keeps getting her compliments wrong; her spindly little chair creaked when she sat on it and, to cover her embarrassment, she said how pretty it was, and Lucy Viney said, oh God, that one, urgh, hideous, and Mrs Viney said, ‘It’s mostly plarstic, anyway.’

Whenever Alexander Viney glances her way, Marina tries to look intellectual, yet remote. Mrs Viney, on the other hand, keeps giving her reassuring smiles. Once she even winks. By the time they are on their rhubarb fool and brandy snaps, Marina has stopped trying to join in her neighbours’ conversation. She has forgotten Guy. She looks at Mrs Viney and thinks again: Please.

Olly the student has been growing ever sleepier and stranger. Gradually, something shocking occurs to her: could he be
drunk
? She blushes with shame for him, and disgust. Thank God Rozsi isn’t here, she thinks, then she realizes that this is exactly the kind of error the Fates are waiting for. If she rings home tomorrow and finds that her entire family has been slaughtered, we all know whose fault it would be.

At last, after brandy and port and sloe gin, and Bath Oliver biscuits, which are an enormous disappointment, the dinner ends. Is it possible that she is a tiny bit drunk too? She knows what should happen now, but no one is doing it. ‘Do we adjourn?’ she whispers to the politician, who reels back in theatrical amazement. Her toes are wet with Beckett’s slobber. Bed, she thinks: my cottony room, my dressing table, my rural views.

But Guy has other plans.

‘Don’t put on the light,’ Marina says. ‘I need to sleep.’ The smell of so much fresh air is like being inside his childhood; it almost cancels out her worry that he will suddenly decide to look in her washbag and find her crime. Hungry for her bed, she wanders round in the moonlight, touching a fossil on the windowsill, thinking about castles and dark fir forests, which merge in her mind with the soft brown deciduous haze outside, the terrace and infinite little rooms. Now, able for once to overcome her terror of
The Turn of the Screw
, Peter Quint’s pug face behind the curtain, she stands close to the window, her nose leaving a greasy mark on the glass, and looks out for hedgehogs on the dewy lawn.

It is so easy to imagine where she should have come from: the turrets, the merry woodcutters among the palace birches, all in silhouette against an oily rainbow sky. She wants to be proud of the family peasant-cot, but the dirty crouching truth is that she is ashamed. She would not have been a beautiful simple maiden. She would have been the witch.

‘Come here,’ Guy says, but she hesitates.

He walks up to her, takes her hand and puts it on the front of his chinos, where he is hard.

That, she thinks, is an erection.

Night. It is almost twelve, an hour at which, in London, nothing good can happen: only violence, suffering, furtive struggles in alleyways. There is too much fear and danger in the world for a parent to bear.

Laura walks on tiny stepping stones across a rushing torrent, picking her way between the terrors of daily life. Midnight is one of the worst times: a shameful childhood blight which, disappointingly, she has not grown out of. At home, worrying in her semi-bed, she survives it by avoidance, closing her eyes to the china clock on the opposite wall, her ears to the swishing past of cars in the rain. She awaits the telephone, the knock at the door until, at last, it is twelve-thirty, and Marina can be judged to have survived another day.

How funny, she thinks now, that Alistair Sudgeon, object of so much longing and hope, does not know this about her, yet Peter, with whom the later years were mostly endurance, used to tease her about it, which she hated, until the fear had almost gone.

Idiot, she thinks. He’ll have forgotten it now. Things were better as they were, without false hope, which is why, as the church on Pembridge Villas strikes the fatal hour, Laura is crouching by the communal bins of Westminster Court in the frost, wearing a nightdress, coat, mittens and substantial knickers, teeth chattering like a child’s as she fails to burn her former husband’s letter in an empty tin of plum tomatoes.

One after another, the matches blow out. She is shivering dramatically. London roars at her back. All evening the letter has lain concealed in her spurious work folder, in an envelope from the milkman until, with the others at last in bed, she reread it by the glow of the street lamp where the curtain gapes, looking for clues.

There were no clues. He sounded surprisingly sane. He knew she must hate him; he referred to his many friends who abandoned wives, children, babies and, as she pursed her lips, he wrote, ‘I always thought they were pricks, and they were, and now I’m one too.’

Which is, of course, exactly the sort of Peterish comment she has edited from her thoughts of him. Keeping her face averted from five floors of nets and proud window boxes, she scans the street. Was it even love, given the quantity of her crying? Hadn’t his selfishness always shown beneath the skin? She thinks of never seeing his handwriting again, his allegedly good intentions, the predictable fact that he is living on someone’s houseboat, and waits to feel purged, renewed. If she doesn’t write back he will leave them alone, which is what she wants, and she can decide what to tell the others in due course: his mother and daughter, whom he has so horribly hurt.

But the tomato can, which had seemed, at the time, an uncharacteristically practical solution to the gratelessness of Westminster Court, contains not enough oxygen, or too much liquid vegetable, to be quite the furnace she had hoped. Burning the letter had seemed the right thing to do when it was ticking away inside the flat: a stupid idea, she can see that now. Six matches left. Five. Four. She could, she realizes now, have flushed it down the toilet, thrown it out with the potato peelings, but burning seemed better.

It is the only way; severing the last tie with this man whom she loved, or thought she loved, to the point of idiocy. This is definitely the right thing to do: a final act of revenge.

But what if she has to contact him?

She needs time alone to think what to do, how to contain him and preserve what little peace she has. The worst thing, she is absolutely certain, would be for the old ladies and Marina to come across the letter before she has prepared them, and she is not ready to tell them quite yet. Anyway, if he is desperate to see them again, which his letter did not mention, he will phone them. He—

Now, too late, she realizes that she has just watched the last match go out. There is nothing to do but haul open the fire door; she is about to creep back inside to her lair when she sees a man crossing the road in front of the building. Her stomach slips. It is Peter. And although in the next moment she knows that it is someone else entirely – the real Peter has bigger eyes, bigger nose, bigger gut and voice and ego – after she has hurried down the cold concrete steps to the basement flat, she is telling herself that this racing heart is fear, of course it is. What else could it be?

15

Sunday, 29 January

‘What the hell time is it?’ says Guy.

‘Half eight. Sorry, sorry. Shouldn’t you be getting up?’

It has not been a restful night. She had brought her most country-house nightdress, green tartan brushed cotton from Marks & Spencer, but was so cold that she had to sleep in the brown tights and a cardigan too. Now she stinks of sweat.

Also, there has been an incident: only a couple of hours ago, when the sun was coming up. The unnaturally loud birds of Wiltshire had woken her at 06.44 and as she lay on her back in her cool linen coffin, alert for footsteps outside her door, she slowly came to realize that nature was calling to her in other ways. She needed the loo.

By the time she had risen, performed her five morning press-ups and tried every possible clothing combination, her need was urgent. She crept out into the corridor. She opened the lavatory door, tried to pull it shut, found that it stuck. There was no lock.

In her distress she made what was meant to be a little groan but came out as something louder, more bodily, which could be misinterpreted. Self-consciousness bloomed in the quiet: she knew she should turn round and go back to bed, but she was more desperate than she had ever been before. She had been dismissing her faint stomach ache as nervousness, and hunger: now she realized that she needed to . . . to . . . empty her bowels. The loo itself was in the bathroom, which Rozsi would consider uncivilized, and the room looked as if Mrs Viney had forgotten to have it decorated. Its walls were made of planks like a boat; it had a green-stained bath in the middle of the room connected to the wall with wobbly pipes; a broken wicker chair with a cushion; a spooky old picture made of dried flowers behind spotty glass; and, for the greater magnification of noise, floorboards instead of carpet. Everything would be audible, to everyone. She sat down on the cold toilet, no, lavatory seat and saw herself reflected in the mottled mirror by the door, frowning like a gargoyle, her knickers by her ankles, her face the colour of shame.

And, oh dear God, what to do about flushing?

Since childhood she has known never to alert others to one’s night-time wee, let alone wake them, by using the chain. Never: not at home and certainly not anywhere else. One simply disguises it with extra paper, washes one’s hands silently, and scarpers.

Here, now, this was not an option. The house lay in perfect silence. A passing Viney would hear her; thanks to the carpeted hallway she might not even hear them. She closed her eyes. A pipe gurgled; someone might think it was her.

Then she realized that it was.

Her stomach gave another gurgle, then a loud growl. She sat back sharply, whacking her elbow extraordinarily hard against a metal pipe which protruded from the wall. It was too dark to see but there must be blood; now she felt sick too. And meanwhile the noise in her stomach began again, more loudly than ever and nothing, not even prayer, or leaning forward to hold her ankles, could squash it into silence. The sweat smell grew stronger. Could she could find somewhere else to go, a downstairs bathroom, the woods?

It was too late. Her need was pressing. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she gave in to her fate.

Who could have slept after that? She thinks now, standing just inside the doorway of Guy’s fuggy bedroom, that she probably never will. If he refers to hearing sounds in the night, or, dear God, having gone in after her, she will pass out. But he is still only half awake, indistinct in the furry darkness. To the level of his strange boy-nipples, if not lower, he is bare.

‘Oi you, come here.’ he says.

‘I can’t. I, I have to ring my home.’

‘Get a grip.’

‘No, seriously. I do. They, I, honestly. Please. I can pay—’

‘They’ll be fine,’ he says irritably and, when she still resists him, sends her off with the vaguest of directions.

Her jumper smells of wood smoke and armpits. The ground floor is cold; no one is about. She keeps looking over her shoulder as she searches for the telephone. There is a reassuring pile of logs outside the back door, innumerable spare wellingtons and woolly jumpers. Last night, it occurred to her that if a war began this weekend and the Vineys offered to give her family sanctuary, she’d have to explain all about them. She has spent so many hours thinking of how she’d save them during an unspecified apocalypse – which foods in the looted shops of Queensway might be more sustaining, for example, or whether they know anyone in Scotland. What if the coast is invaded by, well, invaders? It is bad enough in London, where they are at constant risk of kidnap, murder, accident, of junkies, muggers, stalkers, flashers, gropers, rape or worse, if there is worse. Of course Mrs Viney would welcome Rozsi and her mother and the others, but it would be awkward.

A good, moral person would not think in this way. She deserves what she will get.

By the time they answer, her teeth are chattering.

‘
Ha
-llo.’

‘It’s me,’ she says. ‘But I can’t really tal—’

‘
Dar-
link,
von-
darefool,’ says Zsuzsi, sounding faintly disappointed. ‘But how so early? No matter. Tell me all about those lovely boys.’

Her breath stops. Then she understands: ‘Oh!’ she says. ‘You mean—’

‘The aristocrat Lord Charles, how is he?’

Zsuzsi is obsessed with the Hon. Charlie: a sweet dullard in Bute who was polite to her on Marina’s first day. Bute is, nominally, Marina’s house; she sees him several times a week there at House Prayers and House Meeting and Ronald and Jonquil (‘Ron and Jon’) Daventry’s weekly teas. He has a special bond with Pa Daventry. Thanks to his floppy fringe and noble profile, for a week or two Marina had imagined they might be friends, or possibly marry.

‘Charlie’s fine,’ she says. ‘I think. Actually, could I—’

‘Or that young boy, for example. Gay.’

‘Guy.’

‘Yes, yes. So good-looking. He is not a lord?’

‘No.’

‘
Nev
-airmind. To me, he is so romantic. A girl has to live a little.
Igen
. Wait one second,
dar-
link. Rozsi speaks.’