Almost English (28 page)

Rozsi would find a way. She has nerve. While this is not an option for her base and cowardly grandchild, in the dark reaches of the night Marina has started to wonder if she too, like so many heroines, will be called upon to prove herself: to show what she is made of. She will screw her courage to the sticking place, although it feels more like trying to nail jelly to a rock. When it happens, whether she is saving a small child from injury or performing an act of political martyrdom, she will think of her forebears, who walked across borders and forged visas and stood up to famous men. She will be strong.

There might be a chance during Founder’s Day week. Yes, she thinks, trying to whip herself into confidence, that’s the answer. Less than a fortnight to go; I’ll make it happen and, before I know it, I’ll be staying at Stoker in the Easter holidays. I can find out then what Rozsi’s objection is. Were the Tudors particularly xenophobic?

But what if it really is something to do with the war?

She has now remembered several occasions when, cello practice done, vocabulary memorized, Rozsi allowed, even encouraged, her to watch history programmes. This leads her to one rather exciting conclusion: it must be personal. The only problem is timing. Mr Viney is older than his wife but, say he is as old as fifty, he can’t ever have fallen in love with Rozsi. Can he? Or – he is an attractive man – was it she who fell for him?

At night, when she is too nervy to sleep, worn out by hours of dictionary flicking and a physically demanding, albeit imaginary, sex life, she tries to imagine alternative scenarios. Are there any love-free circumstances in which Rozsi and Mr Viney could conceivably have met? Her mind aches with trying to force it. Might he have pushed ahead of her in the queue at Selfridges’ Food Hall? Or slighted Mrs Dobos?

Then on Monday evening, very late, as she is writing an essay on the majesty of Peter the Great, Charlie Mingus turned so low that all she can hear is occasional plucking, her mind, as it wanders along snowy mountain passes, suddenly stumbles upon the truth.

Rozsi, according to cousin Fülöp, used to be a Communist. He also claimed she was a student, somewhere like Vienna or Budapest; this seems less likely, but Rozsi was always clever, a fact of which they are all very proud. At least with the Communism there is evidence. Marina has heard a story about her great-grandfather, who owned a factory – no, that can’t be right. He might have been the foreman. In any case, the workers, or possibly serfs, went on strike, much like the miners. Rozsi was a daring young woman, probably about Marina’s age, so although she was only the second or third oldest she was sent by their father to talk to the rebels. She was meant to explain to them why they should behave. But when she came back, she told her father, ‘They are right.’

This proves it. Doesn’t it? So let’s say that in, roughly, 1938, Rozsi was the cleverest and most charismatic of the Károlyi girls. War had not yet come to their Transylvanian village of cow bells and merry milkmaids, and neither had any English people. Which is fine, because she was in Budapest, being the kind of student Marina intends to be. And a fine-boned English officer (Mr Viney, hence his mastery of the area) on a Grand Tour stopped there to feed his horses and . . . here she is hazy, but Love must have been involved. She has the setting but not the story: a station platform. Lipstick. Snow. The romance of war but not the sorrow, because that is something she is too scared to think about.

Yes, Rozsi fell in love with him but was jilted because of her unusual intelligence and then . . . then . . . consoled herself with Zoltan. Poor Zoltan. All Marina knows about her grandfather’s side of the family is that his father was a manufacturer of saddlery. Presumably, therefore, Zoltan in those days was quite rich, and glamorous, and he chivalrously rescued her.

This is all perfectly possible, provided that the ages, of which she is uncertain, match up.
Threads of Gold is
secreted under her mattress. When Heidi goes for her nightly hair-wash, she pulls it out. ‘Alexander Viney,’ it informs her, ‘born in 1944, is a scholar of Westminster and Oxford.’

Hang on.

So if it wasn’t him, who was it? Did he have brothers? Was it his father, or something to do with the First World War? That is the problem: finding out. She needs a convenient attic filled with caches of letters, or an elderly nursemaid with a tale to tell. Ildi might explain, but she doesn’t want to make her cry. Rozsi? Too scary. Zsuzsi?

I wish
you
could tell me, she thinks at her dear grandfather, but his face is indistinct. I am, she tells herself, caught between warring families. But I will be true to the Montagues. Or is it the Capulets? Anyway, one of the two.

Laura’s secret pills are calling her name. When she is at the flat the sideboard seems to throb; every time one of the aunts-in-law needs a napkin, she has to leap up and fetch it herself. Their presence makes her queasy. Might it help if she just took one?

Peter would know. Well, yes, Peter; back she goes, like an itch, a tic, to Thursday. One minute she was all ready to pledge herself to a life of nursing; the next she was cast out. What did she do? It has just ended, snap, leaving her standing like an idiot on half of a bridge, while the bit she was meant to travel across lies foaming below in the water.

Fool, she thinks. You should have known.

She is updating addresses at the surgery: who has died a lonely bedsitter death, who has wisely left for another practice. Every word is a second wasted, when Peter may now have so few. She thinks: Wilfred Bunting, I resent you. Were you the one with the wart? What’s happened to my memory? Hello, Margret O’Reilly, the baldest woman I ever knew. Oh, Irene Saxle (Dcd) of Queensford Gardens W8, poor Mrs Saxle, I love Peter Farkas, again.

My God.

She stares down at the point of her pencil: the soft wood, the metallic gleam. Is that what this is? She knew already. Love was always there.

Why, Marina wants to know, is the Lower School so excited about Founder’s Day? Every time Dr Tree announces a lighting run-through, or tells them to warn their parents that
Mikado
tickets are selling quickly, excitement ripples through Chapel like a wave, starting with the babies at the altar, cresting among the Fivers and subsiding towards the back. Is it because half of them don’t see their parents from one month to the next?

This cannot be said for the Farkases. They have been planning their trip to Combe since the Michaelmas term, if not before. Last night Marina had to have a discussion about whether Zsuzsi should bring her manicure set. In under a fortnight they will be booking into their rooms in Braegarrold, a bed and breakfast near the station recommended by Mrs Long, the matron, when everywhere else proved beyond their means. A full programme of fun awaits them: in addition to the ceramics exhibitions and percussion medleys and strolling mummers and an Uppers’ debate (‘This House Believes that Success Is Its Own Reward’) and display by the Combined Cadet Force, they have bought tickets (£4 each, non-refundable) for
The Merchant of Venice
, the Founder’s Society’s chamber performance of
Cyrano de Bergerac
, and the orchestral spectacular, ‘All About Jazz’, featuring Simon Flowers on the classical guitar. There is some confusion over whether parents must buy pupils’ tickets; to avoid difficulty, Rozsi has bought extra. Founder’s Day, Marina is afraid, will bring the Farkases finally to their knees.

In fact, the more she thinks about it, the more desperate she begins to feel. There are so many potential disasters: her relatives are too free-range and stubborn to be controllable in the Notting Hill Gate supermarket, let alone in the grounds of Combe. They’ll walk on the Founder’s Lawn to rip off a branch of
mog-
nolia for the bed and breakfast, or insist on sitting with her in the Buttery and cutting up her chicken leg. Anyway, Combe is dangerous for them. What if they breathe air emitted by Simonetta? Or meet the Vineys? Marina is leading them to their death. Every night, full of caffeinated yearning, she lies in bed, her essays written, another day of Combe survived, and brambles of panic seem to creep into her mind. Could she forge a letter announcing that Founder’s Day week is cancelled? She has to do something. She has to act.

Laura is going to have to start making decisions. Founder’s Day is coming nearer, like a train, and she is tied unprettily to the tracks. Alistair awaits. Peter is dying; or, perhaps, recovering, and falling for somebody else. And Laura, meanwhile, a woman in love, will be spending three days escorting pensioners around an extremely minor Dorset market town.

Today in her lunch break she found herself in Boots, where she walked past unfamiliar beautifying inventions, podiatry aids, baby bottles and, at last, still trying to look like a respectable woman lost on her way to shampoo, the family planning aisle. It was appalling. She was a slut. She returned to the surgery, unsandwiched, as her punishment.

At least in eight nights she will see Marina. Marina is all right. Isn’t she?

Eight nights. Seven. Then she snaps.

‘It’s normal,’ says Guy.

It is Tuesday evening, in his bedroom. He has assured her that, if his bin is outside in the corridor, no one, not even Pa Stenning, will come in.

‘But it’s not allowed,’ she says. ‘Everyone says so. Not shutting the door when, when there’s, you know, a girl in here. That’s the rule.’

‘Not for me,’ he says, ‘babe. So, what about it? Monday night? Tues? I can guarantee at least an hour. Maybe two. We might need longer. We might go for it all night.’

‘Please. That’s mad.’

‘Other people do.’

‘But I thought—’

‘It’s not the same in Founder’s Day week, dopey. Teachers are drunk, mostly, and parents.’

‘Not mine.’

‘It’s not an insult, you wally. Everyone’s a bit drunk.’

‘I,’ says Marina with dignity, ‘have never seen any of my family drunk in my
life
.’

‘Fine,’ Guy says. ‘But everyone else will be. So we can just, like, sneak off and I’ll burst your cherry.’

She is now subsisting on four or five hours of sleep, shored up with Pro-Plus, which at Ealing Girls’ was considered almost heroin, and pounds of apples and handfuls of raisins and dry muesli every night. She hates herself. Like the crocodile in Peter Pan, something is ticking inside her.

‘Guy,’ she says, only slightly wincing as he slides his hand into her knickers, ‘are your parents coming to Founder’s Day?’

‘Sorry,’ says Laura. She is hunched over the phone in Zsuzsi’s bedroom. ‘I, I don’t know if he, if I—’

‘This is Laura?’ asks Suze.

‘I— yes. How is he? I mean, Peter?’

‘I know Peter,’ Suze says, needlessly. ‘He is very well.’

‘Oh good! I, you see, we haven’t, I’ve been wondering. But, sorry, you mean, well or well-well?’

‘Well.’

‘But . . . OK. OK. So—’

‘You can speak to him now. He is here, beside me.’

‘What? Right there? But—’

‘Laura?’

‘Yes! It’s me. Where, how—’

‘I thought you’d given up on me,’ he says.

‘Me?’

‘Tell you what,’ he says. ‘Come over.’

‘But—’

‘To the boat. Tomorrow. Please. Just come.’

30

Wednesday, 8 March

During Chapel, despite the discomfort of her contact lenses, Marina makes two important decisions. First, if during Founder’s Day she manages to resist Guy’s accelerating sexual hopes, in the holidays she will let him do what he wants. She should be grateful to have found somebody willing to remove her maidenhood. The previous generation, she once read in a very sexy article in
Harpers & Queen,
lost their virginity much earlier, at hunt balls.

Second, she will do some investigating. Old ladies, at least her old ladies, are always wound up about something and, if some misunderstanding is keeping Marina from seeing the Vineys, it must be stopped. All she needs is evidence and she will solve everything; she’ll even be able to tell her mother that she is going out with Guy. The likeliest, if least romantic, explanation is that Rozsi has mixed up Mr Viney with someone else. It has happened before. Or she might be being overprotective. Or, if there
was
a wartime romance, shouldn’t they be over it now? Maybe Guy’s grandfather is widowed; he might meet Ildi, and find love.

The only possible problem is technical. No one tells her anything about her family; it’s ridiculous how little she knows. She can’t even remember the name of Rozsi’s town, so she can’t look it up and, if you ask the littlest thing about where they came from, their father’s factory or whatever it was, bee farm, let alone mention their parents or the other sisters, they start crying instantly, like turning on a tap. Nevertheless, she has had a brilliant idea. If her mother brings whatever she can find to Founder’s Day, diaries, say, or family documents, she could show them to Mr Viney. It will be worth the embarrassment; he’ll know what to look for, and then the two warring households will be united. Why didn’t she think of it before?

From now on she will be happy. She’ll stop all these fantasies about running away, being welcomed back to Ealing Girls’. Rozsi would never let her leave here, not in a million years and, if she did, everyone would know she was going, and the embarrassment, the mockery, would be unbearable. She must tell no one she has even thought of coming home; it would worry her mother. It might be the death of her. Marina sits a little straighter, partly to make her ceinture more bearable. Suffering is good, but she is still weak.

Obviously she has to tell her family that she is now an historian. That Cambridge is overrated: she has chosen a different future. They love famous people; when they meet Mr Viney, her mentor, how could they not be thrilled? And also – she resolves this suddenly, in the middle of ‘O, Jesus I have promised’ – she will cure herself completely of Simon Flowers. Everything Mr Viney said was right; day boys are different. She grips her seat to stop herself looking for him in the row behind. Now that she has given up medicine, maybe even Cambridge, what does she have in common with him? Nothing at all.