Almost English (25 page)

‘But . . . no. No.’ The word sits between them on the telephone line, a grey unit of power. ‘I mean, I need to speak to him now. I’ve only got ten minutes; it’s my lunch break and, well, I can’t usually talk. Please. He said I could leave him messages with you and he’d ring. He said.’

‘What can I do? I am performing my yoga now. I cannot go into the garden and ask—’

‘Hang on. He’s in the garden?’

‘No. Of course not. He is at the end of the garden. In the boat.’

‘I don’t understand. His boat is at the end of your garden? You mean, parked?’

‘It is moored on the water, yes. My yoga—’

‘So. Sorry. You live right next to the river?’

‘Yes,’ she says simply. ‘A very big house. My ex-husband is a record producer.’

Laura is well aware that other people, through sheer force of will, persuade strangers to obey them. Rozsi can do it. One day Marina will. ‘Look,’ Laura says. ‘I know about Peter’s, you know. His cancer. And I need to find out what his consultant said. Please. I do. So is there any way you could – ’ her voice catches, but she trudges on – ‘you could go and ask him now, very quickly, if he would come to the phone? Please?’

And Suze says, ‘OK.’

People, thinks Marina dreamily, are like napkin rings. You either have a hallmark or you don’t.

There must be moments in a person’s life when they can be assessed and their value discovered. It is probably measurable scientifically: if you have reached a specified age, say seventeen, and not reached a certain height, or been able to run a mile in under eight minutes, or received any Valentine’s cards at all, doesn’t that make it officially, probably medically, unlikely that things will improve?

First post: nothing. Second post, on which she has always counted to bring her a life-changing letter: nothing either. The others are all out; she is threading a needle through the skin of her palm, thinking: I am epically bored. Heroically bored. Cataclysmically . . .

This is not helping. She has been for a nice walk in Kensington Gardens with Ildi, and made Zsuzsi a beautiful cup of coffee, and been forced to take stuffed cabbage to the ‘poor girls’ in Flat Seven, the bristly chinned Mrs and Miss Fisch, for which she was rewarded with a hard New Berry Fruit and nearly an hour of questions. Now Marina lies sadly on the sofa like Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Whenever she thinks of Combe she feels sick. But she cannot distract herself with rereading
The Snoopy Compendium
or ringing Ursula; these youthful pleasures are lost to her. Now that she is beginning to understand the scale of her social inadequacy, not a moment can be wasted. Last night she tried to read
Brideshead Revisited
, which made her weepy with disappointment at herself, and it. Maybe she should try something Mrs Viney would like; a cloth-bound
Winnie the Pooh
was on the bedside table at Stoker, softened by several generations of little Hons’ hands. There is an old paperback of
The Wind in the Willows
somewhere, probably in the sideboard behind her, where Marina’s mother keeps old letters and baby shoes. In a minute, Marina thinks, unless someone comes to the door to propose to me, I’ll look.

But the smell of Zsuzsi’s roses distracts her. The flat is full of noises usually too familiar to hear – the ticking of the plate clock, the rattling of the clothes racks in the dry cleaners’ on the corner, the terminal decline of the Farkas fridge – which do not comfort her as once they might. Her family is immune to her suffering.

Meanwhile, in Stourpaine, Blandford St Mary, Simon Flowers is in the bosom of his family, having scones made for him and little posies of country flowers, practising on a grand piano in black tie. Imagining herself beside him, turning the pages, even miraculously accompanying him on another grand piano, perhaps shiny white, her throat aches with thwarted love. But why is it that, since knowing the Vineys, she feels even more confused? She is starting to realize quite how misguided, how style-less, how vulgar, she was before. If people like Mrs Viney do not see the point of people like Simon Flowers, his inner beauty, is it possible that they are right? Maybe, she thinks dozily, musicians are less glamorous than she had realized.

Maybe she should give him up.

On Thursday, at the end of a long foul day, Ildi approaches Laura with a book in her hand. Rozsi is at a charity meeting; Zsuzsi and Marina are in their rooms. Laura thinks: Christ, she wants me to read to her. This afternoon at the surgery, Marg answered the phone: ‘Sodding ring-offs,’ she said, loudly enough for the waiting room to hear, but Laura has a feeling that it was Peter, trying to speak to her. The situation is impossible. He says it’s his job to tell the others that he is in London but, until he does, the lie is growing; isn’t she going to have to tell them soon?

And, covering everything like ash, in four days Marina is going back to school.

Ildi holds out the book. ‘What is this,
dar
-link?’

‘Sorry, no idea. Was there any post for me?’ Other people who have done wrong either repent and stop, or are blind to their sin and carry on sinning. How do they do this, leading themselves by the hand to the next crime and the next, as if through a meadow, trampling daisies underfoot? She, Laura, knows that seeing Peter secretly is terrible, yet she has not stopped.

Ildi seems not to hear her. ‘It is important,’ she says, looking nervously towards Marina’s bedroom door. ‘I find it earlier on Marinaka’s shelf, I am looking for dictionary. And I do not know what to do, so I wait for you.’

Laura flops down into a chair. Radiotherapy radiotherapy: it rings in her brain like the name of a beloved. Despite her patchy receptionist’s knowledge, it is strangely difficult to remember the scanty facts he told her: what exactly they did to him before the surgery or might do now, if the news is bad. She can imagine Peter bald and sickly, can visualize his grave, but it has become muddled with the time when her mother was dying; when, if either the Aston Park hospital or Laura had been vigilant, she might have recovered. Why, Laura wonders now, am I so sleepy? I could put my head down on the table—

‘
Dar
-link,’ says Ildi. ‘Please.’

To humour her, Laura takes the book. She reads the jacket. ‘Oh, Alexander Viney. Well, that’s educational, isn’t it? Isn’t he the one who— God, Ildi, what’s wrong?’

Sweet soft-cheeked Ildi is sobbing, quietly, politely, like a Jane Austen character given tragic news. Nothing Laura can say will soothe her.

‘But I don’t understand. What has Marina done?’ She can’t remember what she is supposed to know; should she tell Ildi that Zsuzsi has already spoken to her? ‘It’s not . . . unsuitable, is it?’ He is quite attractive, at least in his photograph, but how could a history book offend them? ‘It’s not, well, unsuitable, is it? Actually, I’ve been—’

‘
Nem, nem
,’ says Ildi, searching her cardigan pockets for a handkerchief. ‘
Nem tu dom
. It is just . . . it is just . . .’

‘It’s not that the wars will upset her, is it?’ she asks. ‘And you don’t know him, do you?’

‘No!’ Ildi says, as if grievously insulted. ‘I? No, not at all.’

‘But honestly,’ says Laura, turning the pages. ‘I don’t see the— oh, there’s something written. Look, it’s signed for her. See? How nice: “To Marina, my fiercest fan.” He’s spelled it right too. “Until,” I can’t read that bit. “Very best, Alexander Viney”.’

‘
Dis
-gusting,’ says sweet Ildi.

‘Look, unless someone tells me what the problem is— Is it a, a personal thing?’ That must be it, she is thinking: the past. Her brain is flinching from the very idea. This is another of her weaknesses. Over the years she has heard fragments, censored for the ears of children and Englishwomen but still too awful to bear. She knows what she should have done: approached the subject rationally, researched, asked diplomatic questions, then carefully informed her child, with a mixture of fact and reassurance, of the essential facts about her family’s past. She has not done this. So great is her cowardice, her selfishness, that instead she has buried the little she knows in her mind, like an inexpert grave-robber shoving the unspeakable, pale and wet and soft, back into the pit.

In Rozsi’s room, the radio flicks off. ‘Quickly, take it,’ Ildi whispers. ‘You throw in dustbin, outside. And you tell Marina—’

‘I can’t! I don’t understand—’

‘Never, ever, in this house. Nothing about him. You must tell her. But Rozsi, it will kill her. We never let her know.’

Marina is writing Guy an extremely tricky letter. Everything has to be right, guaranteed not to betray the slightest trace of what the Vineys call naffness, from the colour of her ink to the licking of the stamp. Unfortunately, the available materials disappoint. Nothing is watermarked. She considers using the Femina notepaper; she forgets to maintain her Greek ε in three separate places. Guy might not notice, but Mrs Viney will.

The content has been long in the planning but the tone is hard to gauge. Mrs Viney will be interested to hear that Marina recently visited the horticulture exhibition at the V&A; Guy will call her a ponce. Similarly, he will not be impressed with her thoughts on
Leave it to Psmith
or the lesser works of E.F. Benson. Guy won’t even discuss whether his father should accept the professorship at Exeter, which Marina heard him talking about with lucky Horatia that evening at Stoker.

How, she worries, absent-mindedly tearing off half of her toenail, will she find out what Mr Viney has decided? It has clear implications for Marina’s educational future; Cambridge, she has been thinking, might not be right for history. Too far; besides, Mr Viney does not approve of it: ‘Too full of striving grammar-school boys.’ And they hate him there, he says; someone else was given his rightful Chair. And Oxford is antiquated. This was his very word.

Marina feels tearful, almost bruised, as if someone has been shouting at her. She pretends to be very tired and spends a lot of time in bed with her eyes closed, so that she can worry in private. Every time she thinks of Combe, the contamination she is spreading, the thought of her return, the tears well up. She runs a bath and decides that, if her mother comes to check on her well-being, she’ll tell her everything.

But she does not come. She does not notice that her only child is weeping quietly underwater for nearly an hour and a half.

So Marina goes for a walk in the park, as Rozsi tells her to. This is good, she thinks, tearing up a curl of plane-tree bark. I like fresh air. I like the country. Then, right by the Peter Pan statue, she sees Mrs Zagussy out with her grandchildren and, to avoid questions, has to dodge behind a tree until they pass. That evening, halfway through dinner, she starts crying.

‘Vot is, you miss
Top-
ofzePops?’ says Zsuzsi.

‘N-no.’

‘Oh,
dar
-link,’ says Ildi, ‘I make you something different? A little soupie?’ but Marina, giving her a watery smile, squeezes past her, around the dining table to where her mother sits.

‘Yes, darling?’

‘I—’

She stands beside her. Then she leans her body against her mother’s arm and, although her mother puts up a hand to stroke Marina’s cheek, she does not understand. She cannot possibly.
Sunt lacrimae rerum
, thinks Marina, as the tears roll down.

When everyone else is in bed, Laura, the Lady Macbeth of Bayswater in sprigged polycotton, knocks softly on her daughter’s door.

There is a flurrying sound, a cupboard door shutting. ‘Come,’ Marina says, like a headmaster and Laura creeps in. She sits on the edge of the bed, smiling fearfully at what must be, given the intensity of darkness, her daughter’s hair. Whenever she kisses her sleeping child she imagines her murdered, the pillow black with blood. Marina is silent. Tentatively, like one reaching out to touch a corpse, Laura lowers her hand.

‘What?’ says Marina. Her skin is disconcertingly warm; her open eyes catch a glint of street light, like oil. ‘You forgot you’ve got to buy me a different tennis racquet; no one has the old-fashioned kind any more.’

‘We’ll go to Lillywhites,’ whispers Laura. ‘I didn’t mean to wake you. I just wanted to check.’

Why is she awake? Is she sad? Does she doubt her mother’s devotion? Laura imagines telling her the truth about love, what it means. She could say: I can hardly bear to think about you. It hurts everywhere, my knuckles, my shoulders: a permanent ache. When you’re away I sometimes have to wear sunglasses on the bus to hide my eyes. And letting you go away to Combe was the worst thing I have ever done. Almost. And, when you hear about your father, I’m going to lose you all over again.

‘Mum— Mummy, I really need to go to sleep,’ Marina says.

‘Of course, sorry. Sorry. Have you got lots of work to do?’ Are you happy? Happy enough to stay there?

‘You know I have. I said.’

‘Yes.’ Shyly she strokes the arm beneath the blanket. Most of Laura’s actions are dictated by the thought of how she’d feel if she didn’t do them and Marina were to die: extra kisses, extra warnings. Peter once called it a provisional life, this constant gingerish prodding at the unthinkable. Helpfully, he left before revealing how she might change. The worst
can
happen; Marina could be hit by a bus tomorrow. Or – because Laura has always had a dread of teenage runaways, because she fears her daughter’s ferocious little soul – what if Marina creeps out at night and disappears? Laura has been watching her closely for signs of unbearable homesickness but Marina confides nothing. The only clue seems to be that she wants Laura near her but this must not be pushed or relied upon. If anything, thinks Laura, I should keep my distance. That must be what she wants.

Stay, thinks Marina. Please, please stay. Her mother is wearing the torn nightdress which Rozsi wants for dusters. Marina thinks: I will save it. She moves her finger closer to the stroking hand. Closer, closer. Stay with me.

‘By the way,’ says Laura, clumsily, like an inept social worker. ‘There’s, there’s a new history book on your shelf, and I wondered where it’s from.’ She feels Marina stiffen. ‘I mean,’ she says, ‘don’t tell me if you—’