Almost English (16 page)

‘But . . . hello, Rozsi,’ says Marina, pressing her dramatically bruised elbow against the wall. ‘Yes. Yes. No. Not at all. How pleased? I think . . . Yes, always, very hard. Yes, the top, or near. OK, the top.
Yes
, honestly, you don’t need to . . . every night. Yes, plenty. And I’m in the Current Affairs Society now, did I tell you? The only girl, and mostly younger boys but . . . No, Thursday. Yes, lots of friends. In fact,’ she says, clenching her jaw to control her shivering, ‘actually I’m ringing because . . . well, you know the pay phone at West Street? It’s sadly broken.’

‘
Tair-
ible. You must tell your master that he will help you. It is
ri
-dicoolos.’ Rozsi switches into Hungarian: ongy-bongy, ongy-bongy, explaining to the others Marina’s little lie.

There is a stack of cards and paper by the telephone: The Old Rectory, Stoker, West Knoyle, nr Shaftesbury. They are engraved, she is certain, not thermographed, which is reassuring. New red pencils too; unlike the little green crocodile stumps at home, the wood dark with frugality, this is unbitten, rubber-less, a smooth cylinder with a perfect point: the Platonic ideal of pencils. The gulf, she thinks, between us is unbridgeable.

Then Rozsi is back. ‘How can the little children telephone?’

‘We’re not little, exactly,’ she says. ‘Someone in my English class is eighteen.’

‘Well, he must be a very stupid boy.’

‘Yes, he is.’

‘There we are. So what do they do with this bloomy phone?’

‘Oh,’ says Marina vaguely. ‘Improve it probably. Something digital.’

‘Digital? Very good.’

‘So . . . the thing is, you see, I had to go to one of the other phones and ring for our Sunday chat, but I d—’

‘Where?’

‘The New Lodge. Actually near the Buttery. That’s why it’s so quiet. Don’t worry.’ She doesn’t quite know how to stop. ‘There’s nothing to worry about.’

‘And you are being good?’

‘Sorry? Oh, right, sorry, yes, right. Sorry.’

‘
Dar-
link, please, I must talk to your houseman, master, put him on.’

‘But that’s not . . . I, you can’t. He’s teaching. Rozsi, I’ve really got to go.’

‘I worry,
dar-
link,’ Rozsi says.

‘Oh. Do you?’

‘Yes. Of course. Soon Fenyvesi Ernö and Bözsi are here, we go for little walk, so we talk about it later. I send money.’

‘No, no. No need. I’ve got lots. Honestly.’

‘I send food then. Easy-peasy. We see you soon. Now I fetch your mother. Be good,
dar-
link.’

‘I just, it was easier to ring early,’ Laura hears her daughter say. ‘Today. Or did you not want me to?’

‘Of course I did. It’s— Sweetheart, where are you?’ Her heart is still thumping; an early-morning phone call is never good news. ‘You’re all echoey. Was that a dog’s bark?’

‘Oh. Yes. I’m, I’m at school, obviously – obviously! – but not actually . . . not in West Street. I’m in, in, you know that corridor between the Undercroft and the Praecentor’s—’

‘So early,’ comments Rozsi at Laura’s elbow, as if the phone is permeable. ‘Why, tell us?’

‘Is the West Street one not working?’ asks Laura, closing her eyes. She can’t even visualize where her daughter is standing. Why has she allowed her to live two hours away? How, she would like to know, can anyone stand motherhood? Do other women not live as she does, trying to ready themselves for the phone call which will bring their life to an end?

I can’t go on like this, she thinks, with the sudden clarity of the half-awake. Even apart from bloody Peter, this is unendurable. All this worrying has to stop.

‘Yes,’ Marina is saying. ‘I mean, no, no, it’s completely broken. That’s why—’

‘Are you sure,’ says Laura, sounding strict to keep the wobble out of her voice, ‘that everything’s OK?’

‘Yes. I said.’

‘There’s that dog again. It does sound very close. You hate dogs, sweetheart, ever since Mrs Kroo’s—’

‘I don’t. I mean, I don’t now. You can’t just assume—’

And that is how their conversation ends, with Marina an inch or two further away, and Laura not having dared to say, ‘Come home. I want you. I miss you. I can’t wait another hour.’

Anyway, how could she have said it? There was no way, with Rozsi right here, to raise the subject of leaving Combe. It has to be private, and Westminster Court is never private.

She thinks to herself: you could write to her and ask.

But after a term of scouring the emotions out of her postcards, could Laura send a letter like that?

The only way to live apart from one’s child is to shut up one’s heart in a metal box with chains and rust and padlocks, and not open it. She cannot bear to. She has no picture of Marina on her desk. She cannot breathe when she thinks of her.

If Marina is homesick, Laura’s heart will break open. So she cannot entertain the idea. If Marina wants to leave Combe, surely she will say so.

Marina goes into breakfast. Her throat aches as an orphan’s might. She rubs her frozen hands together and smiles shyly at the other guests, at Guy’s sister.

‘Um . . .’

‘What?’

‘Sorry. I . . . is there any coffee?’

There is a short silence, solid, like a pineapple cube. ‘We have
tea
,’ says Lucy Viney. ‘We don’t bother Evelyn for other things.’

‘Oh. Sorry,’ says Marina.

‘Anyway, this is the perfect breakfast. Though, actually, do you mind, the
fresh
orange juice is Daddy’s.’

‘Sorry.’ Biting her lip, she inspects the alien foodstuffs: porridge on a little burner; thick Salisbury honey and Dorset butter; marmalade in a bowl. If, she thinks, anyone mentions the loo last night, anything, sounds, or . . . odours, I will have to bolt. Or die.

‘Shut the door, can’t you,’ says the politician. ‘Were you born in a barn?’

Marina sits with salty porridge and milky tea, resisting the tears which are forcing themselves down her nostrils. She looks out of the window and imagines being shown around the garden in summer, the bee-loud glades thick with honeysuckle and what her grandmother calls
fuk-
sio, tall spinach waving in the breeze, all planted by someone with whom she has a bond. Does Mrs Viney’s beauty conceal a secret sadness? Is she out there now, wandering alone?

I’ll ask Guy about her on the train, she thinks. Though, please, God, don’t let him come downstairs yet. Something else happened last night, after dinner, before the other . . . the toilet incident and the wounding, which she has been trying even harder to forget. But Guy will not have forgotten. It concerned, in part, his manhood.

It was quite interesting: an uncomfortable-feeling gristly knobble. Having never seen a real one, except once on a drunk man peeing behind a phone box near Regent’s Park, Marina has only imagined penises dimly, almost dutifully. Simon Flowers seemed unlikely to have one, the masters too old, boys her age too young. Besides, no one has properly explained the hydraulics: how something soft enough to need the protection of a cricket box can become hard and presumably beautiful, an object of desire. And surely something that sticks out at right angles can’t enter something, well, vertical? She could not imagine what to expect.

Yet here one was, separated from her by the thinnest layer of chino. Guy was moving his lips silently. She listened to his breathing, her hand exactly where he put it, on his loins.

‘Sit down?’ he said in a frightened voice.

‘All right.’ Was it growing? Isn’t that what they do? She must be excited, she told herself, only less than she had expected; more as a scientist might be, in the field. If anything she felt almost motherly towards him, puzzled, as if he was a problem to be solved.

She pressed down a millimetre further. In the nick of time she remembered something she heard in the West Street kitchen; apparently if a stiffened member is bent for any reason at all, it will be terribly damaged. Blood vessels burst. Poor boys, to be so vulnerable. Minutely, she lifted her hand.

‘Nnnm,’ said Guy. They stared at each other, owl eyes in the darkness. Her ignorance crouched behind her on the bed. ‘Please,’ he said. She put her hand back down.

Now, like a coordination exercise, they were kissing too, while she kept her fingertips lightly on his manhood. This was not how she had imagined the beginning of sex, the swoon of joyous reciprocal love in, ideally, an Italian meadow. Guy Viney’s tongue was in her mouth, but her mind kept drifting from his trousers and back to the adults downstairs. Why wasn’t she enjoying this more? Although there definitely was something delicious about this womanly feeling of control; she was thinking she might even slightly increase the pressure, experimentally, when his hand bumped against hers. Then it bumped again.

There was a crackling, sliding sound. He was unzipped.

Could she pretend not to have noticed? It is dangerous, apparently, as well as morally wrong, to deny them release. And she was curious, and in danger of being officially frigid, despite spending every single night of her adolescence hot and restless and full of desire. She looked down carefully, past his neck, shirt buttons, belt, to where, in his lap, floated something pale.

She had tried to do the correct thing. She really had. He felt silky, like a toy as she began, cautiously, to investigate and, although her fingers were shaking, it was at least experience. Then there was a noise.

‘Christ.’

She jerked her hand away. He gave a little grunt. There was a strange doughy smell, wetness warm as blood. What had she done? ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’ He would not look at her. ‘Are you OK?’

‘God,’ he said and cleared his throat. Semen, she thought. Squirmy tadpoles all over her hand; she could get pregnant.

‘Tissue?’

‘It’s fine, I’ll go the bathroom. Don’t worry,’ she said kindly, holding her hand out stiffly like a piece of rotten meat.

The big upstairs hallway was dark, the carpet soft, and she did not see his father until they were face to face.

‘Oh!’ she said, jumping. She hid the hand behind her back. ‘Sorry.’

‘Bit late to be exploring, isn’t it?’ His voice was so quiet that she had to lean closer to hear him. Closed doors on either side; she listened hard, but all was still. Which one had he come out of ? Perhaps the Vineys sleep separately. Was he going for a marital visit?

‘I didn’t mean—’

‘Don’t apologize. Was something keeping you up?’ He smiled at her in the half-light. Could he smell it? ‘It’s terrific to have you here.’

‘Really?’

‘Oh yes. In the bosom. My family is everything to me, you know, but I cannot be
limited
. The enthusiasms of young people make life more liveable. You understand.’

‘Yes,’ she said. When he touched her forearm, she gave a little jump. She looked up at him. A thread seemed to shoot between them. ‘You must come again,’ he murmured. ‘I insist that you do,’ and he turned and left her standing there, the thread pulled tight.

16

‘The thing is,’ Laura says. ‘I know it’s late. But I have to go out.’

Rozsi is visiting invalids; Zsuzsi is in bed with the Combe
Almanac
, reading out difficult words – ‘Vot is this “Dibbers”?’ – in a carrying voice through the open door. Only Ildi is in the living room, packing up knitted dolls for the poor children of Romania. ‘
Vair-
y sweet,’ she says, waving the hand of a soldier doll. ‘
Ha-
llo.’

The Tube will be fastest, to Earls Court on the District Line. If only there was a quicker way. ‘Hello,’ says Laura politely to the soldier. ‘Ildi, is that all right? I’m a bit late . . .’

Ildi, pulling down the skirt on a reversible princess homunculus, takes a breath. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘They—’

‘I know,’ says Laura. ‘But I won’t be long.’

London at night. Why is her stomach fluttering? She stands in the roaring glare of the Underground, as if queuing to enter hell, and the pulse in her throat seems audible. Is it the heady fumes of strangers’ alcohol, the fact that nobody knows where she is? Or the thought of an accident: fear, pain, blood loss in public, but a solution of sorts? Which would be worse for Marina, in the long term: losing or keeping a mother like Laura?

However, when she emerges at Stamford Brook and crosses King Street towards the Great West Road, her daughter is forgotten. Laura is wishing she had put on different clothes. Not that she will see anyone she knows, let alone have a conversation. She is only going to look.

I am burying your ghost, she thinks, you . . . you bastard, and that will be the end of you.

The boat on which Peter is staying is parked in something called Eyot’s Boatyard, on the north bank of one of the confusing loops of the river. You simply open the wooden gate and walk through, along a rickety platform, above a glistening surface of soft grey mud. No one questions or molests her. To her left are huge slimy stakes, a fence for giants. To her right is creaking, splashing, the muddy tide of the Thames. She had imagined gin palaces, technology, not this almost rural calm.

Beau Geste
, she reads on the side of the first boat, which is much bigger than she had expected, solidly built of grey riveted metal.
Mirabelle
,
Basinger
,
Fidelity
,
Scheherazade
. She does not expect to find
Vivian
. It would be better for all of them if she did not. She should turn around. She could still do it. This is where her future divides: happiness or sorrow. Life or death. Heart pounding like a dying thing, she walks on.

The problem with co-education is that you are trapped. Marina has been unsuccessfully avoiding Guy since Sunday, which makes her either frigid or a prick tease. She keeps worrying that Simon Flowers will detect the odour of sin upon her, or even actual spermatozoa – she keeps seeming to smell something similar, on the Buttery stairs or crossing Founder’s Court under the trees. Oh, sperm, she can now think to herself airily. This is some comfort.

She has drawn a plan of her place setting at dinner and written down every single book she saw at Stoker; it makes her feel like a criminal whenever she bumps into Guy. He keeps trying to entice her to his room.