Almost English (6 page)

Then, on Friday night, she has to queue right behind him in the Buttery. He is extremely sure of himself for a Fiver. He is talking to horrible Giles Yeo from Marina’s year and, although Giles always ignores Marina, when Guy says, ‘Wotcha,’ Giles gives her a curious look.

Why is Guy so confident? Fivers usually keep to themselves but he finds a table with Giles and some of the Bens and says, ‘Come on,’ so she sits down with them. As she sprinkles cheese on her baked potato, grate by grate, she watches him consume mulligatawny, beans, double chips, peas, broccoli, grilled tomatoes, buttered rolls and two vast sides of breaded haddock, and listens to his silly jokes. Once or twice she laughs, accidentally, and he grins at her. She concentrates on resisting the temptation to take off her glasses; it makes the Buttery less frightening, but she is so shortsighted she will walk into a table. If only, she thinks, I were normal, like everybody else.

‘Can I have your custard?’ Guy says.

She won’t let down her guard just because he’s younger. He’s still secretly laughing at her; he’d probably be one of the boys holding up score cards for the new girls, if it hadn’t been banned last year. Apparently they had to; that’s why Imelda someone ran away into the night and was never seen again. Even so, they still put up lists giving marks out of ten in some of the houses: maybe Macdonald, where the boys won’t speak to girls at mealtimes, or Fielding, where they ambush girls with buckets of water for wet T-shirt contests, not just in the summer term as in other houses, but all year long.

She must have a score. She wants to know what it is.

What kind of girl, she thinks, wishing she hadn’t eaten her crumble, would—

Then she looks up and sees Simon Flowers.

Behind him, in slow motion, the Buttery doors flap shut, open, shut. She can feel the slowing of her atrial diastole; she is barely breathing by the time he reaches the trays. He speaks kindly to the one-armed dinner lady. Why is he, a day boy, having supper at school? Probably he’s been practising his jazz guitar riffs, or playing the organ alone in the Chapel, and a scene from her numerous imaginary sexual adventures catches her unawares.

Her heart booms towards him, yet he does not see her. She must practise saintly patience. How long must she wait? A week? A term? If you haven’t got off with someone by the time you’re seventeen, you will definitely die alone. It’s a measurement, like lung capacity. Everyone here has been doing it for years; she has pretended the same.

‘What’s up?’ says Rory Kingsly. ‘You look like a flid.’

Two blonde girls from the year above giggle.

‘Shut up, Kingsly,’ says Clare Laker. ‘You sound like a knob,’ and she mouths at Marina, ‘Pitiful.’

But Marina who, four and a half months in, still feels her true Combe friend is yet undiscovered, hardly notices. She is thinking: I can’t go on. Simon Flowers: Simon. Come and get me. I am ripe for you.

Meanwhile, in London, Laura exists. She polishes the grill pan until it shines like pearls; she helps Ildi find her lost Italian dictionary; she feeds Rozsi’s jade plant the correct quantity of vegetable water and battles the relentless London dust; she makes up her bed each night on the sofa cushions and falls asleep, eventually, to the perpetual murmur of the World Service, to the snoring and sighing of elderly immigrants and buses hissing past outside. Around and around in her tired head one thought spins, ‘What should I do?’ as if, with five minutes of hard thinking, she will realize that she has all the solutions already: a good man, close by and single, with whom to fall in love; somewhere affordable to live, where she can eat baked beans and listen to music befitting her age group and walk around in the nude; a professional qualification about which she had forgotten; a nearby day school which her child will consent to attend.

She goes to work and feigns interest in plans to replace the receptionists’ plywood shelves with plastic-coated steel. Black or grey? Who cares? She sits on the bus and feels guilty about the Farkas-Károlyis’ unlimited kindness; about her father, her daughter’s father, and her daughter. Then she comes home again and tries to think about Alistair, or composes letters to Marina, which she rewrites until nothing she wants to say is left.

For the last eight months, since Marina started preparing to go away, Laura’s life has been controlled by the Royal Mail. Her spirits, too, now that she thinks of it. She had been proud of how well she coped after Peter went, and through the long years of sofa-dwelling in Westminster Court. But now, whenever she is out, she looks for postcards – paintings from the endless exhibitions she attends with the in-laws and, when away from them, ‘Great British Fry-Ups’ or ‘Piccadilly Circus by Night’. When at home she is thinking of amusing observations, timing her day around the arrival of post. She sent a card every day last term, but now she has decided she must restrict herself. Marina hardly ever commented; she just became tenser and crosser. Clearly, all Laura’s careful non-expressions of love were too much.

Days pass. Life, if one can call it that, continues: a constant counting down of the hours until the end of term. Perhaps, she thinks, tidying the waiting-room magazines, I just need sex.

Sex is, however, not easily obtained. She has not touched the private flesh of Dr Alistair Sudgeon since a month last Tuesday, when they arranged for her to do an evening spring-clean while he ‘worked through files’. It was not even particularly satisfactory. The effect on her of cold vinyl, antiseptic odours and, curiously, his white coat on the back of the door, to which she had so looked forward, had not been positive. But more, or elsewhere, or better, is out of the question. How can she be old enough to feel this tired, yet have no privacy whatsoever? Alistair is so busy at home, is so widely known – at least, in W2 – and also, perhaps, like Laura, has certain ambivalences (how can she ask him when they are together so rarely? How could she raise, by letter, something that would require discussion, even a row? What is a bubble burst? she sometimes says to him in her head. He does not answer).

Does this mean, she asks her reflection in the bus window, that things will never improve? In which case, might I be having not a nervous breakdown, but simply a disappointing life?

At this thought she jerks her face away and finds herself being smiled at sympathetically by the woman opposite. She smiles back before she notices the woman’s multiple badges, her rat’s-tail plaits and tattooed thumbs. Now even mad people pity her. If, she thinks, trying to be matter of fact, the bus skidded now on Westbourne Grove, would that be so bad?

Every morning after First Quarter Marina and the other West Street girls rush back to the house to check for letters. West Street is just outside the school grounds, reached via a narrow passage beside Bute House. It is not a house in its own right, but a place in which female quasi-members of the boys’ houses live. It was once part of a terrace, now partitioned like an experiment for mice, and Marina has failed to make the slightest sense of the labyrinth. Whenever she ventures to the upper floors, the double staircases foil her. She has endless dreams of being lost.

There are no mullioned dormitories or coats of arms here, no crested oars draped with football socks, no miasma of Paco Rabanne. West Street is clean, and vigorously air-freshened. There is a kitchenette, floral curtains, doilies. The fire doors are decorated with posters of kittens in hammocks, thoughtful bears. The carpet is dusky pink. And there is a matron, Mrs Long, whose twin passions for Benson & Hedges and her flatulent Dandie Dinmont terrier, Anthony, sit uneasily with her stringent domestic expectations. Other girls receive constant correspondence: brotherly post from agricultural colleges; cheery catch-ups from their mothers about puppies and their fathers’ business trips; invitations to charity fashion shows. They all have thousands of people at other schools in common and read out bits of letters: ‘Jamie – no, silly, Stowe Jamie – says we
have
to go to the Gatecrasher Ball.’ The only girls who keep their correspondence private are the recipients of love letters, like the eye-linered and patchoulied Simonetta Bruce, to whom Marina has taken a fierce dislike.

And Marina herself. How could she show her post? This is her total so far: one forwarded membership reminder for the Puffin Club; one grumpy eight-page letter from Ursula Persky, her best friend at Ealing Girls’, tucked inside a
Hamlet
programme from yet another school trip to Stratford; a single postcard from her mother saying not much; and one of Rozsi’s brown paper packages.

How she loves these parcels. How she hates them. This one contains sponge fingers, a leaflet about childhood illnesses, unsolicited lo-calorie sweetener, a bank-bag of fresh ten pences for the pay phone, a
Tatler
from Mrs Dobos and a short letter: ‘Hallo darling don’t you want a lovly hair cut? Tell me I ask Krystof any time he helps you. Sorry you are not siting next to me. I try to send beter letter soon.’ Unlike Ildi, who fills exercise books with vocabulary and old diaries with informative facts (‘
Raphael died on his 37 birthday. Crucifiction
[sic]
early picture (about 20 years). A bit provincial (see fluttering ribbons)
.
Best in the figure of Christ. Painted for a convent
’), Rozsi is not comfortable with writing, at least in English. Her handwriting suits Hungarian better. Last term she sent Marina a sewing kit which must have been hers; when Marina ran to the bathroom with it and opened the lid, an old browned piece of lined paper fell out. The smell of the flat has faded from it, but she still has the paper: a few meaningless accented words, written in pencil, too full of possible momentous secrets to throw away.

She keeps having premonitions that harm is coming to them. Since Combe, or was it before, she cannot stop expecting it, attempting to prevent it, knowing that nothing she does will be enough. The fear that she will contaminate them is much stronger this term. Simonetta ‘Slutter’ Bruce has the room next to Marina’s, and her music and loud laughter infest everything Marina owns. Although she is an Upper, and is best friends with a girl in School House so is often elsewhere, the smell of her Players and Rive Gauche means that she always seems present: a force for bad. Apparently, she has had sex in Divvers; her mother is dead, or at least divorced. Two days into the new term Marina is using her jumper sleeves to open doors which Simonetta might have touched. She holds her breath when she comes upstairs. If someone in Marina’s family dies, Simonetta will be the reason.

She cannot cry now, about to go into chemistry. All day she aches for her mother, who has not written again, but she saves her sodium chloride tears for the night.

6

Saturday, 21 January

Rozsi is in lingerie. Once they all were; she and her handsome husband Zoltan owned
FEMINA OF KENSINGTON
, as it still says on the shop front, and Ildi, when she came to London from Budapest in ’56 with a chemistry degree, wrote their letters, and beautiful Zsuzsi, whom it is difficult to imagine doing anything, apparently travelled for them to Greece and Vienna and even ‘Petersburg’, where they understand the power of elastic. What Laura has never quite followed is – well, all of it, really. The heroic origins of Femina have often been repeated: Rozsi’s discovery of some missing money when sweeping a different shop, Ginswald’s on the Finchley Road, when Peter/
Pay
-tare was a babe in arms and Zoltan was fighting in the war; her honourable elevation to assistant and the small suggestions which led to her being permitted to design one perfect brassiere, then another, and then to be given a shelf, a section and, in the end, when they had saved and borrowed enough, for the Farkases to buy their own tiny shop and break free. But there is something murky at the back of it, some fell moment when Zoltan weakened, and everything was lost.

Zoltan was a lovely man: not as funny as Peter but gentler, more chivalrous, with the same terrible steely pride. The formality, or sense of honour, which in Rozsi is so terrifying was, in Zoltan, a comfort. With a man who wears a vest to conceal his chest hair on holiday and a tie to see the dentist, who expects toddlers to stand when their mother enters a room and who eats bananas with a knife and fork, you know where you are. Laura, his mere daughter-in-law, misses him more as the years pass; he loved her, although obviously not as much as he did Marina. He cannot be mentioned at home: there will be crying. So on the bus she imagines conversations in which he offers understanding, and forgiveness.

But what did he die of? Somehow she has forgotten, and now she wants to know. It happened suddenly, and at that moment Marina was a tiny child, Peter an increasingly unreliable mess, and their fourth-floor one-bedroom flat in north Acton like something from a Pinter play. All she does know is that Femina, still revered by its loyal customers for its old-fashioned service and the firmness of its silhouette, had to be sold to Mrs Dobos, their compatriot. Rozsi, now merely the manageress, is old. Her salary is her sisters’ only income, apart from a decreasing amount of what Ildi calls home-working: occasional bits of proof-reading for Czech and Hungarian business acquaintances of Rozsi’s, which Ildi does on a fold-out table.

Combe Abbey is the natural home of children with well-fed hair and indulgent businessman fathers. Perhaps there is financial leeway for some families, but it is hard to imagine the bursar offering help to Marina. If Laura loses her own job, due to ineptitude or sex or its absence, what will keep the wolf from their door?

She is carrying her bedtime glass of water into the sitting room when the phone rings. She jumps like a guilty woman.

‘Hello?’ she says. ‘Hello?’

No Marina. No anyone. The fizzing thickens into the sound of breathing, of thinking, pale granules clumping together to form a shape: almost a face. Pale, with red hair. Who else could it be but Mitzi Sudgeon? Hatred has an echo.

War has been declared.

Sunday, 22 January