Almost English (29 page)

Her timing is unfortunate. Whichever God she is currently most frightened of is not looking kindly upon her; perhaps she has backed the wrong one. For, when she trails out of the Chapel porch, feeling as if she is leaving her heart behind her on the Lowers’ pew, she feels a tap on her shoulder.

Vivian
’s door is open, as Suze had claimed. How much easier, and less terrifying, it would have been to have conducted the whole visit in theory, on the telephone. Life, equally: one could just spend a weekend planning it in childhood, all the highlights – the husband, the house and dog and garden, the children returning lovingly from the grammar school down the road – and skip the reality. Do all women, wonders Laura, spend their lives reconciling themselves, or is it that her life has been more unsuccessful than most?

A woman is sitting on the sofa. She is Nordic, tanned, sexually confident: the sort of woman all men like. It can only be Suze.

‘Oh,’ says Laura. ‘Ah.’

A cigarette burns idly between Suze’s fingers. Laura looks down at her own sausagey hands. She is shaking.

‘Sit, please,’ says the woman. Laura sits.

Time passes. The reek of drains and decaying wood is worse than she had remembered, joss sticks and curry, with a rich ammonia undertow. The duck sanctuary has gone; in its place sits a brindled cat on a dishcloth, eating something. Suze leafs through a magazine, not, as far as Laura can tell, something comfortable like
Good Housekeeping
but German fashion. As if the pack ice is melting, the boat creaks and gushes, pops, drips. Laura waits with a smile of idiocy, pretending she is at ease.

‘You’re Marina Farkas, aren’t you?’

Close up, Simon Flowers is beautiful. Think of chess grandmasters or concert pianists: imagine how they ought to look, not how they are. That is Simon Flowers, here, now, before her in the cool stone porch, smiling.

It is her moment to dazzle. Her mouth is dry; she exhales and then again, a little more raggededy-sounding, like a sheep. There is a faint smell of incense, or resin; is his skin alabaster? Or simply porcelain? He is going to ask her to marry him. She wants to be out on the far side of this moment already, analysing. Being here, inside it, is too much.

Face to face, her determination to forget him falters. Come on, she thinks. Be strong.

She has to say something. People are waiting. ‘Why?’ she says. Someone behind her sniggers. ‘I mean,’ she begins. ‘What did you—’

He is thin, with a tiny chip on one glasses-lens. Her heart is racing like a rabbit’s. If she could faint, or tragically die, she could avoid the disappointment which must lie ahead. A different area of her brain is reminding her that she is nobody and a fool to live in hope. And another part says: you and he are the only people alike in the school. Do something now; show him. This is your chance for joy.

But instinct has not been a friend to Marina. She followed it and left her mother; went to Combe; resisted Guy’s physical urges; tried to be herself. And look how she has ended up: worse than before. Clearly some people, such as the Vineys, understand life better. She is lucky to have their example; she will follow it, like a religion. And she knows what Guy’s parents think about boys like Simon Flowers.

He takes a step back. He bites his lower lip; she has devoted hours to considering its cushioniness, its pressing need for lip balm but now she looks away. He starts explaining something complicated involving Tuesday nights and a club; she can’t really listen. She is concentrating on breathing through her nostrils, as though lifting a great weight. No, she tells herself, though her body is screaming yes, please, yes, like iron filings leaping upon a magnet. She inhales his manly aroma and, gritting her teeth, shakes her head.

‘I—’ She clears her throat. Her tongue tastes like wool; she licks her lip before she remembers that this is a powerful sexual signal. ‘I don’t really have, you know, much time left, for, for extracurricular . . . stuff.’

‘Sure?’ he says. ‘Monty thought you’d like it.’

‘Sorry, but—’

‘And he thought you’d be good at general knowledge. But don’t worry,’ he says. ‘It’s fine.’

‘Hang on. You mean, oh, my God. You, the, you mean the team? You, you’re in it?’

He smiles at her kindly. ‘Actually,’ he admits, ‘I’m the captain.’

‘Wow.’ In the deepest part of Combe, down a hidden corridor reached by a secret stair, there has been a place for people like her all this time. Somewhere she could know the meaning of synecdoche or Cole Porter’s middle name without being mocked. She could make friends there. She could go mad with happiness.

‘You, you mean next term?’ she says. ‘Not now, obviously—’

‘Seriously, you should come. Just for a trial.’

So this is it, here, now: one of those life-changing moments for which she has lived in constant readiness, knowing that the interim was just an unpleasant practice session, a series of trials and warm-ups designed to hone and strengthen. The future is unrolling like a carpet. Then into her mind comes an image: she and Simon Flowers, holding hands in the Vineys’ entrance hall among the boots as she introduces him to Mrs Viney.

Her ceinture burns at her left side. It serves to remind her that adulthood is not about self-indulgence; that the life worth living – tempered, civilized, ascetic, like Montaigne in his tower of books – requires sacrifice.

She straightens her back. Isn’t her longing to say, ‘Take me,’ to be accepted into the briefcase-carrying Sellotaped-glasses day-boy world, proof that she must resist? This baseness lies within her. The Vineys will show her the way out.

‘When,’ Laura asks Suze, ‘do, do you think Peter might be back?’

She has been feeling more and more peculiar. At first she assumed it was sea-sickness but gradually, as the minutes have passed, she tried harder to identify this simmering in her stomach, the heat which is building on her neck and back. Is it anger, righteous and refreshing? Fury that he has just turned up in the middle of London, expecting her to take charge?

Just as she is summoning the nerve to tell Suze that she is leaving, Peter appears. He looks smelly. His donkey jacket has been rained on, although no weather has been visible through the smeary portholes; his interesting head-stubble has become faintly threatening, like that of an unstable soldier from the former Soviet Union. He is with a tall fair man, presumably Jensen, who nods at her, as if she is here to swab the decks. Peter is holding a carrier bag from which he proudly unpacks two bananas, a loaf of white sliced and a bag of what looks like gravel.

‘Aduki beans,’ he says to Suze. ‘Amino acids.’

‘You said,’ Laura tells him, ‘to be here before twelve.’

‘Oh God, sorry, so.’

‘No,’ says Suze. ‘It was
after
twelve. I heard him.’

‘Why,’ Laura asks her, ‘didn’t you say? I’ve just been waiting—’

Only a wicked woman would complain about time in the presence of the sick. They all look at her with surprise, as if a stuffed animal had spoken.

‘Never mind,’ says Laura. ‘Sorry.’

Peter smiles at her and, inadvertently, she smiles back. As the others roam about, making themselves individual hippy teas and rinsing the sprouter, she describes her farcical efforts to slip out of Westminster Court this morning and then, without meaning to, she begins to tell him about Founder’s Day.

‘What?’ he says. ‘Three days? Fuck. How are you going to stand it?’

‘I know. Oh God, I know. It, it’s a weird place, Combe. Combe Abbey. Horrible, to be honest. ’

‘And it’s in Dorset?’

‘Yes.’

‘Christ, I hate the countryside. The way the hills follow you. Cowshit everywhere. Is it awful?’

‘Yes. It is.’ She does not stint. She rubs his face hard in the detail, watching the words solidify as she speaks: how much she hates it, her reservations.

‘So this was whose idea?’ he asks, waving offhandedly as Suze and Jensen go off with face paints to a children’s party; this is, apparently, Jensen’s job. It is almost impossible for Laura to be polite to them, but she makes herself say goodbye. After all, she reminds herself maturely, they have looked after him, while I have not. They have bathed him; seen his scar—

‘Babe?’ says Peter.

‘Her idea, Marina’s,’ says Laura. ‘Completely hers. Though the others joined in. You know. It’s just—’

‘What?’

She gives a wet ugly sniff. ‘I, I, I didn’t dare—’

‘Tell them no? I don’t blame you. What a bloody scary idea.’

‘You’re still such an interrupter. No.’ She needs a tissue. Gingerly she reaches out for a dishcloth on the counter behind her, snatches her hand away and wipes her face uselessly with her palm. ‘I didn’t dare, oh, I don’t know. Tell her that I wanted her to stay.’

‘Hey. Hey.’

‘Go away.’

‘I’m not. I’m going to perch here.’

‘Stop it. Stop
stroking—
’

‘Laura. I’ve been such a shit.’

‘You have.’

‘A fucker.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘A fucking fucker.’

‘God, I miss hearing someone swear. Apart from me.’

‘A cunt.’

‘Well—’

‘I have.’

‘You have.’

‘I wish—’

‘What I just want to know,’ she says, unwisely, ‘is have you— Oh, never mind. Of course you have.’

‘What?’

‘You know bloody what.’

‘I don’t. Ow.’

‘Just look at me. No, you don’t even need to say it.’

‘
What?
’

‘That you had lots of girlfriends. Bet you have, millions of, of floaty sodding girls called Daisy and Saffron.’

‘You don’t want to know.’

‘I do. I bloody do. I want to hate you.’

So he tells her, and the answer is not what she had expected; not at all.

Somehow she is naked.

Well, near enough. What is wrong with her? The door could open right now; anyone could walk in. Even apart from the repercussions, the thought of being seen in all her squashiness, the pale expanses of hideous skin, is unbearable. She would have to leave, at once and for ever.

And what is he thinking? He looks better than her, which isn’t difficult; was he horrified and politely not commenting, or too busy to notice? She had not expected this. Had he?

Or had she? Her legs are shaved. She is wearing her only faintly attractive bra, a Principessa Duchesse Splendide with nylon broderie anglaise edging. He is considerably less washed than her, but this is perversely exciting; reassuring, too, because it means he had not planned this either. She is not in a trap but has chosen this, and that makes all the difference.

How extraordinary to see him, his soft hidden skin and secret hair, unclothed.

They are lying on top of his bed, his arm across her throat. She swallows hard; she is starting to feel crushed. Need male limbs be quite so heavy? He is not asleep, yet; just very, very relaxed. Laura, on the other hand, is rigid, eyes open wide as she gazes over his shoulder at the extraordinary fact of what they have just done.

31

Saturday, 11 March

Two days pass: a sexual desert. They are both so afraid of being discovered before finding a way to tell the others, that they have agreed not to be in contact. In any case, Peter rarely leaves the boat. Then it is the middle of March, the time she dreads all year, when she is obliged to help with Femina’s spring stock take.

What is so dreadful about it? Everything. The smell of the back room: old perfume, Ildi’s Polish
svee-ties,
Zsuzsi’s cigarettes, and the dusty scent lingering in every cardboard box and polythene wrapping. The brown luggage tags and tiny paper labels on which elaborate price codes are written by hand; the typewriter for letters to customers; the card index for every single order since time began. The pictures of Marina in childhood, before whatever it was that went wrong between them happened, and the school photograph of Mrs Dobos’s granddaughter, like a plaited pig. The trade brochures and kettle; the sewing tin, because customers expect Mrs Farkas to alter their purchases and, irrespective of arthritis, Mrs Farkas does it. Her ladies are not fond of change. And, worst of all, the yellowing packets of unsellable items, knee-length demi-knickers and Spirella Femme corselettes and Berlei Elastomerics, kept because of Rozsi’s firm belief that ‘Von day, someone vants’.

There is no choice: Laura has to do it. Rozsi writes dates as ‘976 and ‘989; she speaks Russian and Czech and German and God knows what else but cannot spell ‘tights’. So here stands Laura, ticking off an unsold Gossard Long-line Thermal Camisole in Illusion, not thinking about Peter.

‘I suppose . . .’ says Laura a little later.

‘What?’

‘Nothing. This is your fault,’ she says. ‘If you’d just, I don’t know, gone to see them, independently, like you should have, I wouldn’t have had to ring you to tell you to do it. And then I wouldn’t have ended up round here.’

It isn’t true. She could not stop thinking about his shaved head, whether the bristle felt velvety or rough. And his skin so pale, his cheeks thinner: who could help wanting to discover what else has changed? She has spent so many years energetically resisting all memory of his body, its muscles and enormous bones, its touching flaws, and what has that achieved? Nothing. Here it all was, as she unwrapped it, exactly as she had known it would be.

They are lying on what remains of a sofa. A candle, inevitably, flickers on the seat of a chair nearby, and a blow heater blasts from a suspended home-made socket, warming her right instep and two or three toes.

‘I am very uncomfortable,’ she says.

‘Me too.’

Still they lie there. She is cold and needs the toilet and can see her numberless physical flaws as he must, violently magnified. She thinks: I must hide myself. I want to go. But, if she stands, the delicious loinal heat, the ache, the melting in her wrists and knees, will pour out of her and leave her with nothing. She had not forgotten this feeling; she had only thought it would not happen again.

‘This is all wrong.’

‘I know.’

‘We’re bad.’

‘So bad.’

‘Wrong.’