Almost English (34 page)

Where is she? A little impulse murmurs:
find her
.

But Laura is tired, and familiar with unreliable impulses: pinches of fear on which she usually acts, making everything worse. Resist it, she tells herself. Be strong. Everything is bad enough already.

Besides, if she hurries back now to awful Braegarrold, she might find a pay phone on the way.

She is losing heart. Combe itself is vast and, as Founder’s Day has ended for the most part and Marina will have been packed for days, she is not likely to hurry back to West Street, particularly if she is having fun, with friends. She could be. Wandering along Upper Garth Street, Laura assesses the Combe pupils, immediately identifiable among the local teenagers by their pink cheeks and raised voices. They look at her strangely; true Combe mothers are inconspicuous. Could her daughter ever be one of those laughing girls, tossing their curtains of hair?

There is simply no point in hanging round hoping to meet her by chance, she tells herself. Marina’s perfectly fine; stop worrying. You might as well just go back to Braegarrold, and wait for morning.

Marina does not want to be rude. Mr Viney, call me Alexander, is just being kind and interested. Hasn’t she longed for this? And it is, although it shouldn’t be, exciting. It’s just that she’s not quite sure they ought to be having this conversation, far from school on a bridge, in a wood, at night.

For the first time it occurs to her that there are fields all around: no one in sight, or even earshot. She isn’t frightened exactly; he is an adult, and she is actually quite an experienced young woman. Besides, hasn’t she loved it so far: being seen in the pub by people who recognized him, talking to someone who is, at last, mature enough to understand her? She has imagined this, and more, when she is alone: so much more, some of it in this very car. Something in his voice tells her he understands.

With a click and a zipping sound he undoes his seatbelt and flings it back across his chest. He stretches his arms out. ‘Free at last. You know,’ he says, looking out over the lights. ‘The odd thing is that I feel terribly youthful.’

‘Yes?’

‘Entirely. As young as you. If we were . . . If I were closer to your age, and all things were equal, which of course they’re not—’

‘So true,’ says Marina wisely.

‘I can imagine great things for us. Great things.’

‘How, how do you mean?’

He turns to her: head, then shoulders. ‘You in that little school shirt of yours, like a village maiden,’ he says. The strangest thought pops into her head: somehow all this talking means that he is going to kiss me. Shouldn’t I stop him? Those lips have kissed Mrs Viney. She thinks: I don’t know what I want.

But it seems that Alexander Viney does.

37

Ildi’s voice in the quiet night: ‘Something bothers you?’

Laura gives a little jump. She has lain in her nylon bed, she thought silently, for hours, has rolled around and sighed and probably muttered to herself like a loon, thinking that Ildi was asleep.

‘Oh God,’ she says. ‘Sorry. Did I— I woke you, didn’t I?’

‘No. I am awake.’ Then Ildi says, ‘So, it is worse than we think.’

‘Sorry, what is?’ says Laura tentatively, although of course she knows.

‘You take from Marina the book?’

‘You you mean— ’

‘By the man. You take the book?’

‘Well,’ says Laura. ‘I did try. I’m sorry. We, we argued. But anyway it seems . . . ’

‘Yes,’ Ildi says. ‘Well, now I tell you, and it will stop.’

Laura opens her mouth, then closes it. The silence booms. ‘About the author? Alexander Viney?’ she asks. ‘But, you see . . . well, I think I understand.’

‘I do not think,’ says Ildi, firmly, ‘that you do. Only we with Rozsi and Zsuzsi know some things about that family. Now I tell you, too.’

‘Why not?’

Something has gone wrong. As Marina had feared, talking to Mr Viney has turned into being kissed. She did not mean this, at all. Or did she? Her body seems to feel differently. ‘Sorry, I—’

‘Why?’

‘I’m shy,’ she says, to salve his feelings.

‘You’re not shy! After what you told me, about you girls at school, who gets up to what. It’s not exactly chaste, is it.’

‘But I didn’t . . . I hadn’t . . . someone might see.’

‘A passing farmer? Who cares? Haven’t you heard of animal husbandry? Goes on all the time.’

So, imagining horses, she lets his hand stay on her tights leg, and the other up her blouse. His hand is cold, or her skin is burning, which is worse because then he will know that she is excited. Oddly, she preferred the talking before the kissing, when her two lives, real and imaginary, seemed to be merging like spots of coloured light. But now the tingling excitement in her brain and skin and so forth have been transformed into nervousness, which is ridiculous; he is a man, a father. A husband. Famous. Nothing bad could happen, whatever that means.

She feels she should remind him about Mrs Viney. But Mrs Viney is crushed between them, like the scar in
Thérèse Raquin
: under his fingertips, on his mouth.

‘Come on,’ he says, and bends over her again. It is interesting (they could discuss this, were he not preoccupied) how being desired, pressingly, urgently, had always been the greatest excitement she could invent, yet in real life it feels quite different: more frightening. Distantly she spies another gap in her knowledge. Is it possible that, for Mr Viney, kissing might not be an end to itself but, via some as yet unrevealed route, lead to sex?

‘You silly little girl,’ he says. ‘Come here.’

But can he be stopped? It seems that she has accidentally given him permission, and she can’t offend him by taking it back. When his hand slides up and then down into her tights, she gasps; she can’t help it.

‘Hello,’ he says. ‘Someone is pleased.’

‘Please, I . . . hang on,’ she says uncomfortably. She is expected to lift her bottom a little, to let him pull her knickers down to the top of her thighs; she averts her eyes from the sight. Her breathing is jerky. ‘I’m not sure . . .’

‘Don’t be coy,’ he says. ‘I know what I know.’

‘No,’ she says. ‘But—’

‘You’ve just been telling me,’ he says, ‘about your constant visits to the New Street—’

‘West Street.’

‘Wherever, the girls’ bathroom. Unmitigated filth. You can’t deny your intentions, surely.’

‘What intentions?’

Together they look down at his corduroy lap: trousers in unexpectedly new navy needlecord, in which there is a definite bulge. He’s right. It is completely her fault. And isn’t it the greatest compliment: a bodily reaction to, presumably, her beauty, her intelligence, her sensitivity? It confirms her; she is viable.

Gingerly she puts her hand there, in homage to the honour it has done her, but she cannot help starting away almost immediately when his big hand approaches her skirt once more.

This time he ignores her reaction completely. Her face is being squashed into her seatbelt, which is still done up; it crosses her chest between her breasts, pushing one towards him. It is like being murdered; he is looming over her, pressed against her leg, and the susurrations of the moving corduroy and the thickness of his breathing as his fingers push in and up . . . she bites the inside of her lip. It hurts, and she is frightened, and suddenly very very sorry that she made him feel this way.

‘Come
on
,’ he says in a clotted voice. He is fumbling at his lap, but she pretends to them both not to notice; she moves her bare legs infinitesimally closer together and looks out of the window, into the darkness. ‘Christ,’ he says. ‘Move over, can’t you?’

‘I’m a bit . . . wedged,’ she says.

Then she feels it against her leg, like a dog’s nose; hot and faintly sticky. There is that hot smell again, like, like . . . She catches her breath; she closes her eyes and a tear rolls beneath her eyelashes and splashes off her nose.

‘Sorry,’ she says.

‘For God’s sake!’ he says. ‘What is it now?’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘What?’

‘I can’t.’

‘What do you mean? What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

‘Nothing.’ She thinks: if he’s expecting it, I probably have to let him. But he looks disgusted. ‘I just—’

‘Christ,’ he says. ‘Don’t cry
now
.’

There is a pause. She keeps her eyes closed. Then she hears him exhale sharply, angrily, and a rustling sound as he tucks it into his trousers. He throws himself back in the seat. She keeps herself rigid, closed up like a seashell, until his breathing has slowed. ‘Sorry,’ she says again. ‘I . . . I didn’t realize—’

‘Now you do,’ he snaps, and starts the car.

38

Thursday, 16 March
Founder’s Day Week

10 a.m. Combined Cadet Force display, Memorial Quad, free

11 a.m. Champagne reception, to the foot-tapping sounds of Mr Daventry’s Barber Shop Quartet – Founder’s Court marquee, free

12 a.m. Prize-Giving featuring Tim Pirrey, Commonwealth champion rower and OC, Divinity Hall, free

On Thursday morning, the climax of Founder’s Day, Rozsi and Ildi and Zsuzsi and Laura sit at breakfast in Braegarrold, ingesting mixed-fruit jam and battery eggs. Their bags are packed; Mrs Cousins had already stripped the beds, revealing mattresses which might have been better hidden. In the gap between the historical pageant and the pre-Prize-Giving champagne reception, Laura will be alone with Marina. It is all going to have to come out.

So, while the others discuss their charming hosts in Hungarian and silently rock with laughter, Laura tries to prepare her material.

One: the best friend, Tibor Szőllőssy, essentially robbed Zoltan of everything: the estate, his former girlfriend, his father’s love, all of it. This is the story Peter told her, now, with Ildi’s accent and place names, given flesh.

Two: but Zoltan forgave him. At least, he carried on seeing Tibor Szőllőssy, and the divorced-woman-now-wife, once they reached England. But why? The Farkases and Károlyis are not like that; they will strike someone from their lives for a funny look outside a newsagent. It makes no sense.

Wait. Didn’t someone, Peter maybe, say that the divorced woman, who was poor Zoltan’s girlfriend, and then Tibor’s, also knew Rozsi? That she was a college friend, a fellow girl-undergraduate pioneer? Might this be the reason?

Three: in any case, Tibor’s son then robbed Zoltan in the mid-Seventies in London; at least, as she understood it from Ildi, he asked to borrow a huge sum of money which, as a fellow countryman of Tibor, honourable Zoltan naturally let him have. And then he failed to repay it, which somehow led to the downfall of Femina, and its sale to Mrs Dobos.

Four: and to Zoltan’s death? Can that be right?

Five: Tibor Szőllőssy’s son is . . . hang on.

Can Tibor Szőllőssy’s son really be that historian? Marina’s boyfriend’s father: is that who they mean? It seems so unlikely; they must have made a mistake.

Or could the Vineys have planned this all along?

Marina has already told her that Guy’s parents live quite close to Combe, near Salisbury just over the Wiltshire border. It’s not so odd if they sent their bloody son to a school like Combe. Combe is the sort of school that kind of person likes. If anything, it is odder that the Farkases sent Marina.

Laura pokes at her watery bacon. Why did we?

Into her mind comes the voice of Mrs Dobos, recommender of Combe. Mrs Dobos will know all the answers; Mrs Dobos who bought Femina . . . hang on. Laura looks up cautiously, to find that Rozsi is looking at her, shaking her head.

‘You are not listening one little bit,’ says Rozsi. ‘But today we leave you with Marinaka, so you wake up now. We, with Ildi and Zsuzsi, leave you in charge.’

Ten past eight, and Marina has not gone to breakfast. She has never broken a school rule like this before; there will be such trouble if she is discovered up here, in the West Street second-floor bathroom, scrubbing at her thighs with a flannel and groaning with self-disgust.

Last night she lay awake until the dawn chorus, listening to seagulls or vultures squawking their mating songs, reminding herself that Mr Viney had done her a great honour and trying not to think of the seatbelt or the car on the bridge, the press of his corduroy. Curiously, although her body feels terrible, her mind, hanging high above thought and feeling, is alert. Her thoughts move in slow motion but with clarity: I made him feel bad. It wasn’t
rape
. Maybe I should have done what he expected: an older, a distinguished man. He’d have been gentle. No one will ever volunteer to do that for me again.

Now he never will. Thanks to her frigidity, she was not deflowered. Instead she had stared out of her window while he reversed quickly back along the bridge and then, frowning, drove out to the hill road down to Combe and Melcombe.

‘I, I love the country,’ she’d said. ‘The way the trees, you know, arch over the . . . it’s one of my favourite things.’

‘How original.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Never mind. I’ll take you straight back. Kindly keep this to yourself, though. More for your sake than mine.’

‘Yes. I mean no. Thanks, thank you.’

He had given a little snort. She wanted to lighten the mood, like a good hostess; make him forget his humiliation and disappointment. To think that she could move a grown man’s trousers so. ‘Sorry about, er, you know.’ There was a pain in her throat. ‘Will you be OK? I mean, without . . . relief?’

He ignored her.

She thought of penises, engorged past the point of recovery; alarming stories told in West Street, after dark. She bit her dry lips. ‘Your . . . interest. I’m very, well, it’s lovely of you. But won’t you—’

He turned his head and looked at her. ‘I expect I’ll get over it,’ he’d said.

One day, Laura has always hoped, she will have to punch someone for her daughter. It would be more satisfying to have to lift a bus to save her, or sacrifice a limb, but physical violence would be better than nothing: a way to express the white heat of motherhood, the helpless rage.