Almost English (2 page)

‘I really,’ she says. ‘I mean I can’t—’

‘
Vot
are you doing?’

‘Sorry?’

‘
Pro
-fession-allyspeaking. You know I am once
mu
s-e-um director?
Vair-
y big museum in Czecho,’ the cousin’s wife says complacently, bracelets clanking on her loose-skinned arm. ‘But you? You are not still reception girl for
von-
darefool doctor?’

‘Oh – the surgery? Yes, yes I am.’

The cousin’s wife shakes her aged head. She is wearing Capri pants, or what Rozsi would call ‘a little
troo
-sair’, and a blouse and waistcoat; perfect, if alarming, lipstick; huge glamorous glasses and a bronze puff of hair. Compared to the others, she is dressed casually; it is almost a slight.

‘And,’ the cousin’s wife continues, offering Laura a pink Balkan Sobranie, ‘you are lonely, yes?’

‘No!’ says Laura, stepping back.

‘Fortunate, to live with the others, but lonely. So. I know.’ They both look down at Laura’s pointless wedding ring.

‘Not at—’

‘Of course now little
Mor
-inaka is at
vot
-you-say board school—‘

‘Boarding school, yes, bu—’

‘The evenings, the weekend.
Vot
are you doing with so much time? You are learning a language? Instrument?’

‘Er . . .’

‘Do not tell me,’ stage-whispers the cousin’s wife, ‘you are having
boy
-friend?’

‘Me? No, not . . . not at all!’

‘Because of course without
Pay
-tare . . . vell.’

Laura has been expecting this all evening. Given the number of Hungarians present, their rampaging curiosity and lack of embarrassment, she knew it would come. Poor Rozsi; they can hardly ask her. The disappearance of Peter, Rozsi’s younger son, and his abandonment of Laura his wife and Marina his child, is not for general discussion. Laura, however, is fair game.

‘You hear from him again?’

‘Peter? No, gosh, never. Not since, you know, that first time, there was a, a card he sent to—’

‘Yes, yes, of course I see this. You do not know where he is, all these years –
tair
-ible. You cry and cry, don’t tell me,
dar
-link,’ she says, thumping her fragile-looking breastbone; she has, Laura is certain, been happily married to the cousin for many decades.

The questions keep coming. At least her inquisitor is, as she reminds herself ceaselessly, so affectionate; they all are. When Laura visits her quiet father in Kestonbridge, the Cumbrian village to which, after her quiet mother’s death, he quietly retired to a bungalow, people who have known them for twenty years are still hard pressed to greet her. Here, they embrace her like a daughter, albeit a disappointing one. Warmth, she tells herself once again, is not to be sniffed at. Since taking them into Westminster Court after Peter walked out, Rozsi has refused to let them consider leaving, even after Ildi was mugged on an Acton bus and moved in, and then widowed Zsuzsi followed. They share their food with her. It is like being raised by wolves.

The problem is that they think they know her. They do not realize that, however sweetly Laura smiles, however demurely she answers, there is somewhere she would prefer to be, something she would rather be doing. And someone, of course, which nobody else must know.

They never will. The idea that, after over a decade of chaste abandonment, Rozsi’s shy daughter-in-law might have, well, needs, has not crossed their minds. However, there are no secrets here, particularly from one so observant as Marina.

Could Marina conceivably have guessed?

Please, God, not yet. Still, Laura worries. With so many inquisitors stuffed into this little flat, no corner where secrets hide, or are hidden, is safe.

‘
Nev
-airmind,’ the cousin’s wife is saying cheerfully, putting her bony hand through Laura’s arm and frog-marching her back into the throng. ‘One day when you are old
vom-
an like me you understand. Men leave. Children leave. All that is left is death.’

With a roar from the crowd, Rozsi stands.

To the casual Englishman, were one present, she might appear as other grandmothers: reading glasses on a chain, worn wedding ring. Do not be deceived. Rozsi is unusually clever and fearless even by her compatriots’ standards. Her younger son Peter, Laura’s former husband, used to call her Attila, with reason. Laura, whose references are more prosaic, thinks of her as Boudicca dressed as Miss Marple. She has a white bun and black eyebrows, her cheeks are soft and age-spotted, but consider the cheekbones underneath; you think she forgives easily? Think again.

Her cake, as is correct and traditional, is not a birthday cake at all, but simply her favourite, a rum and walnut
dios torta
, made by her devoted elder sister Ildi last night. Rozsi, remember to blow the candles out, for luck.

Haaapy Birsday to you . . .

Rozsi looks, all agree, very well. Tonight, in her good dark red dress with gilt buttons, she could not be beautiful; she is too severe for that. But striking, handsome even, like a relatively glamorous Russian spy. Why should Rozsi care about beauty: the smartest of the sisters, a career woman for all these years? And isn’t her life at eighty something to marvel at? Despite everything – that terrible business with her poor late husband and then
Pay-
tare disappearing – to be working still is remarkable. Wonderful. Look at them now, see how Marinaka loves her grandmother; Rozsi will never be lonely. Isn’t that something else to be grateful for?

Haaapy Birsday to you . . .

The cameras flash at Rozsi and, to be truthful, a little more often at her younger sister Zsuzsi, the beautiful one, with her lovely skin and her good teeth and her cigaretty laugh. Those who knew the famous Károlyi girls, Kitti-Ildi-Rozsi-Franci-Zsuzsi, back in Pálaszlany over fifty years ago, claim that people would stop on the street to gaze as Zsuzsi passed by. Men were known to have killed themselves for her, and marriage, then early widowhood, have not reduced her powers. Several of her suitors are here tonight, tall white-haired handsome ‘boys’ in beautiful suits: rich Bíró Eddie, globe-trotting André, Tibor with his duelling scar, still patiently waiting for her to choose after all these years.

Haaapy Birsday
dar-
link Ro-ji,

Haaapy Birsday to you.

Rozsi, of course, widowed almost as young as her sister and more unjustly, has no such suitors. She lifts the knife. She smiles.

2

‘
Ven
you think the doctor arrives?’

Laura turns slowly. Ildi, the elder of her aunts-in-law, unmarried at eighty-two, still going to evening classes, cooking for fifty without apparent panic, is looking concerned. Of course Dr and Mrs Sudgeon are invited; all the elderly Hungarians and Czechs go to his surgery. It is worryingly easy to imagine distinguished Dr Alistair Sudgeon sitting on their hard-wearing green leather sofa, making conversation. Rozsi will be so proud.

‘Hmm,’ says Laura, a little too loudly. ‘Well.’

Careful, says the voice of sense in her ear. Laura, however, has never mastered being careful. She was not careful when, as a hopeful would-be teacher, twenty-six and astonishingly clueless, she was impregnated by the handsome and utterly spoiled Peter Farkas behind a sweet-chestnut tree in Kensington Gardens. She was not careful for the next three years, tending baby Marina and fighting the cold in their rented flats while he pretended to paint, and borrowed from his overstretched parents and then left them entirely in the lurch.

And, well over a decade later, sharing her mother-in-law’s two-and-a-half-bedroom flat with three pensioners and a sixteen-year-old, sleeping at night on their uncomfortable sofa with her clothes in the sideboard, she may be beyond carefulness entirely. Which perhaps explains why she has pledged her loins to the last person she should have chosen: Alistair Sudgeon, her very married employer.

Marina is in the kitchen, washing up cakey cutlery. It is hot in here, and she is wearing a black wool polo-neck, with a huge locket of Zsuzsi’s, a kilt, black fifty-denier velvet-look tights and Edwardian ankle boots. She knows – she thinks she knows – how bad she looks, so why does she keep expecting someone’s handsome grandson to turn up and fall in love?

Because, she tells herself, punishing her ugly cuticles with the washing-up brush, you always think that the next moment is when your life is going to change, and maybe it never will.

This is a recent realization, which she is struggling to accept. Before the sixth form, clothes were tricky but it hardly mattered: her Ealing Girls’ friends were as scruffy as her, as styleless. It was their collective ignorance, she is coming to understand, which doomed her. While elsewhere girls were developing taste and fashion sense, crimping their hair and experimenting with coloured eyeliner, learning what would suit them, she and Katie and Katy and Ursula barely noticed what each other was wearing. Other things were more important, such as memorizing the titles of all Shakespeare’s plays.

Then she came to Combe and discovered she had fallen irretrievably behind.

How did this happen? First of all, she never knows what you ought to like. Red, for example, the colour of her duvet cover at Combe and her favourite jumper, is common, and she hadn’t known.

Second, what if she dares to try something new but looks stupid, without realizing? She has a terror of this. That, and having food on her teeth.

Third, she is naturally unappetizing.

The truth, which her family do not acknowledge, is that some people can look all right, while others can’t. If you’re pretty, it’s fine to check your reflection in a mirror, or wear mascara. But what if you’re not? It’ll look like you think you are all right, that you can improve your appearance by smoothing your fringe, but you still have glasses, and spotty upper arms, and hideous knees, and eyebrows like a boy’s. Some people are beyond improvement and, when they try, they look like fools. This Marina will not be.

She is uniquely cursed in other ways. She is shy; clumsy; short; fatherless; scared of cats, and the dark, and the future. She is going to be a doctor but knows she isn’t up to it, and if she doesn’t get into Cambridge her life will be over. And, unbeknownst to anyone at Combe, she lives with old people in a little bit of darkest Hungary, like a maiden in a fairy story. Or a troll.

These things are too shameful to be spoken of. She keeps them in her rotten heart. On reflection, it occurs to her now, maybe her heart is the problem. For, although technically quite innocent, Marina has a very adult love. A world away, in Dorset, the boy she longs for – Simon Flowers, senior music scholar, day boy, bound for Cambridge this very October – is attending polite little family gatherings, packing his physics notes for the new term, writing essays with the clarity of the pure of heart. Nobody knows of her passion. There are so many reasons to keep her love secret: not least that it is against the school rules. And she will be teased about it, which is insupportable. And her family do not approve of boyfriends until she is at Cambridge, ‘
meen
-eemoom’. And he is an active member of the Christian Union.

Yet although Simon Flowers is in the year above, she knows him well, by observation. He may even have feelings for her. He has smiled at her in Chapel, for example, which is quite unheard of for an Upper, particularly one so glamorous, so talented. Admittedly, they have not technically spoken but she has stared unwaveringly at him to convey her devotion; he can’t not know how she feels. It is deafening. She thinks about him every few minutes, planning for their passionately intellectual future. She feels physical pain at the thought of their being asunder. And so she has become increasingly sure that the life-changing moment of union will happen; it has to. Thought beams should make a difference. If you want to see someone enough, they should come.

But what if he doesn’t? Nothing, not even the many tragedies of her youth, has pained her as much as the mere sight of his sensitive hands, his leather briefcase, his wire-rimmed glasses. Without him her life will be ashes; besides, she will be unable to care for another. First love can never be repeated. She has read Turgenev. She knows.

‘Quickly,’ whispers Great-aunt Ildi. ‘Where is nice ashtray for Mrs Dobos?’

Mrs Dobos, her grandmother’s employer, raises her prima ballerina’s head and stares at Marina, as if assessing stock. She is on the most comfortable chair; they dusted behind the radiators in case she looks.

‘Here it is,’ says Marina, with a lovely smile. ‘All washed up specially.’

‘Marinaka
dar
-link,’ says Mrs Dobos. ‘You still do not tell me about Combe-Abbey. You are liking it, as I say you will. You are happy there. I can tell: you eat well. Your bust grows.’

‘I—’

‘Of course you are happy. It is
von
-darefool school.
Von-
darefoolopportoonity.’

‘Yes,’ says Marina. ‘I am very very lucky. Thank you, Mrs Dobos, for recommending it.’

Once Laura was reasonably intelligent. She had thoughts like: what should we do about Europe? She cared about starving children, about the decline of native woodland. As it turns out, all that concern was varnish. She is merely a collection of needs which are unfortunately not going to be met: to free herself from Dr Alistair Sudgeon, her ageing paramour; to carry her daughter’s pure childhood scent around with her in a sniffable capsule, if not Marina in person, like a papoose; to slice through the knot of guilt and duty and financial embarrassment which tightens daily and find somewhere else to live: an independent adult woman with her daughter.

Until September, only four months ago, she could cope with all of this. It was so good for Marina to be brought up with the in-laws, with their culture and their love and all that food; it hardly seemed to matter that she, Laura, wasn’t even related to them. When she compared Westminster Court with the bungalow in Kestonbridge, or an unaffordable studio flat beyond the M25, she knew that they were lucky.