Almost English (7 page)

Sung eucharist (Crypt Choir) or pastoral address, Divinity Hall: Canon Paul Sheath, ‘Overcoming Temptation’; hockey: Pineways Tournament, 1st XI, Sholtsborough (minibus leaves 11 a.m.) (A); OC Society talk by James Pollinger: ‘Constable: His Art, His Life’, Combe Lodge Chamber, 5 p.m.; Wine Appreciation Society: Rioja, deputy headmaster’s rooms, Cordfield; Choral Society rehearsal (open), Divinity Hall, 7.30 p.m.

It is strange, Marina observes, that once you start noticing someone you see them everywhere; in the queue for tuna crumble, or hiding under the Praecentor’s Gate from a downpour of acid rain. Now as well as Simon Flowers, and various enemies, and Wilco the feral groundsman, she begins to spot Guy Viney all the time.

‘All right?’ he says when he sees her, even in public. The shame of talking to someone who has read all Jane Austen’s novels, even
Lady Susan
, doesn’t seem to occur to him; he clearly does not know that in lessons she is the only girl who puts up her hand. Or is it because he is younger? He is lucky that she acknowledges him at all.

‘
Minden jól
,’ which means ‘very good’, says Zsuzsi on Sunday morning, when Marina rings home. ‘How is that nice boy?’

At that moment Marina realizes that no one at school has referred to Guy’s visit to Westminster Court. Is it possible that he hasn’t told everyone, that they are not laughing and mocking behind her back?

Maybe he won’t ruin her. Maybe he is nice.

But that is all. They have nothing in common, whereas Simon Flowers, scientist with a soul, is a perfect match. If he boarded like Guy, they could talk all night; instead, he goes home to his family, about whom she knows not enough, except that his mother is a librarian, which warms her heart. She would pay all her money to visit his house for a single minute. Guy Viney must have a family too, but who cares?

That evening Alexia ‘Sexier’ Prior says, ‘Come with me, no one else is around,’ when she is getting ready to go to Percy to see her crush, Jim Finn, and so Marina goes. The staircase is rich with the smell of plimsolls and what she suspects is boys’ deodorant, sprayed in flammable quantities. Guy’s room, Percy IV, is next door, up in the roof. His door is open. ‘Hey,’ he says. ‘Want a chocolate biscuit?’

Percy IV has a romantically steep ceiling, a collapsing armchair, carved stone vines around the door and a glow-in-the-dark ‘Stairway to Heaven’ poster. For a Combe boy he is friendly, although the Fiver sitting on a beanbag, his roommate Tosser something, ignores her. At first Marina just smiles and nods as they talk about football; if she fails to look interested they will call her a ‘woman’, which is a grievous insult. But Guy keeps giving her biscuits, and doesn’t refer to having seen Westminster Court, or laugh when she says, ‘But who is Jim Morrison?’, and when his friend says, ‘WSK,’ which means West Street Knockers, he tells him to shut up. Guy doesn’t ask her questions either, but when, almost for something to say, she starts talking about Cambridge – mocks, predictions, UCCA forms, the masters’ frustrating lack of interest in helping her choose a college – he doesn’t look disgusted.

‘Oh, right,’ he says. ‘A brainy bird.’

‘Honestly not,’ she says. ‘It’s . . . actually, I’m really scared. I’m never going to make it.’

‘Bollocks,’ he says. ‘Just give it a whirl.’

When she gives up on Alexia Prior and starts to go, he says, ‘Come by any time,’ and, because he is not remotely a romantic option, she does. She has never been good at Social in the West Street television room, where combinations of Allegra and Isla and Ellie and Nicky and Alex and Fleur and Vix and Belinda and Antoinette ‘Toni, rhymes with Joni’ Collister and Daisy Chang and Annabelle ‘Pubic’ Tuft eat white toast and discuss either the First Eleven, or frequency-wash shampoo, or which boys they all know at Marlborough and Wellington, every single night.

Upstairs is worse because her bedroom contains Heidi Smith-Russell, her Hilary term room-mate, daughter of a millionaire poultry-feed manufacturer near Chichester. Heidi has a Filofax and buffs her nails twice a week; she claims that this is as important as washing your hair. Marina wants to ask Mrs Long if they were put together this term because they are equally unpopular, but fears the answer. Anyway, unlike Marina, even Heidi has friends.

Guy saves her. Because she has a boy to visit, the West Street girls don’t mind if she misses Social, but their indulgent smile and references to ‘happy hour’ confuse her. ‘It’s not
that
,’ she says, burning with shame and pride. Nevertheless, the next time she goes she wears her contact lenses and then just sits blinking on Guy’s beanbag, feeling like a fool.

He is quite funny for a Fiver but not at all attractive: too pasty and puffy-haired for that. He likes explaining in detail why he fancies Amanda Stapleton, known as Knobule: her tennis shoulders, her long flicky hair. His maleness is irrelevant, like a dog’s. Later, in her room, she thinks about Simon Flowers just as much as before. Besides, she has work to do: an assessment of Hardy’s nature poetry, the respective properties of chlorophyll-
a
C
₅₅
H
₇₂
O
₅
N
₄
Mg and chlorophyll-
b
C
₅₅
H
₇₀
O
₆
N
₄
Mg. She writes on and on in brown-black ink, past midnight, past two, and although her backache is worse, and sometimes she doesn’t seem to be breathing properly, and her heart aches, she tries to keep her mind on the golden prize: Cambridge. Isn’t that the point of it all? Simon Flowers will be there too. They will punt, or bowl, or play croquet, in an intellectual yet passionate union, miles away from Combe.

As she falls asleep she thinks of him chastely in bed in Stourpaine, and barely misses her mother. Or, rather, discovers that if she refuses to let herself, closes herself to even the possibility of pain, she can bear not to be with her. Besides, it is safer for the Farkases not to be thought about and, although forcing her mind away is like bending metal, she is Rozsi’s grandchild. She manages.

Then everything changes.

On Saturday nights they are allowed, Within Reason, their freedom. This means alcohol. The Combe Abbey rules about alcohol are perfectly clear: never before the sixth form and, if every term a Fiver stomach or two has to be pumped, there is no need to discuss it. On returning from dinner out (never just drinking) on a Saturday night, Combe pupils must report to their housemaster. Why the housemasters never notice that everyone is completely drunk is a mystery. It has happened to Marina twice already; she remembers nothing at all of the first time, and the second she insisted on walking in a straight line and broke a chair leg. There are always awful stories: paralytic staggerings into the arms of the headmaster’s wife, vomit in the Chapel, turds. Today is the birthday of Selina Knocker, the sweet but stupid child of the head of the navy who is, physically at least, in all Marina’s classes. This must be why Marina is invited, but Guy is a Fiver, too young to be in town after dark. So why is he allowed, even if their parents do know each other? She tries to ask, but he just grins and says, ‘Ve haff vays.’

She is wearing contact lenses. Dust and drizzle and her own fringe keep blowing into her eyes as she walks along the dark East Combe Road, next to Selina’s cousin Gypsy. No one brings coats, let alone their great-aunt’s umbrella from Fenwick’s, so Marina’s teeth are chattering, which she is trying to disguise with conversation. Because this part of Dorset is so very flat and ringed by hillsides, she often has a feeling of being cut off from the rest of England, as if they are walking at the bottom of a meteor hole. If only, she thinks, I could see London from here, even just a bit of Esher, I would know they were safe.

Gypsy, Jippo, is unfriendly but very beautiful, with long brown legs and big blinky blue eyes. Apparently she has just been skiing and seduced an instructor. Marina is struggling to find common ground.

‘Where are we going?’ she asks, after an awkward silence through which Jippo sails, serene. ‘I mean, I know the name, but I haven’t . . . is it a, a
smart
restaurant? I mean—’

‘Just Capote’s.’

‘Oh. Thanks.’ She has already spent too much this term on inspiring postcards and impressive Penguin European Classics:
Orlando Furioso
,
Oblomov
,
The Trial
. She cannot ask her mother for more money. They pay probably hundreds every year for her fees, and then there are the train fares and the Old Combeian Society (motto:
Floreat Combeiensis)
, for which Rozsi signed her up for lifetime membership, together with OCS crested lapel badge and fountain pen, before Marina’s first day. Even the uniform, all those ties and tennis shoes, must cost quite a bit. I will order modestly, she thinks, and sits down, moved.

But they are cold and damp, and order hugely: onion rings,
frutti di mare
, lamb chops, steak. She eats her Margarita pizza and drinks enough house white to make the night seem glittery, the future not exactly golden, but not leaden either. She catches Guy’s eye and smiles. She can even stand sitting between Giles Yeo, who has slicked-back hair and Ray-Bans, and Bill Wallis, whose shirt has bow ties and champagne bottles on the sleeves.

‘Wop,’ they call each other, ‘flid’ and ‘spaz’ and ‘faggot’.

They lean across to talk about rugby, pretending to be very careful of her WSK but otherwise ignoring her. Bill’s three brothers all came here; next year he will be captain of the rowing team, so it would be unwise to annoy him. Nevertheless, Marina refuses to make conversation, on principle. She looks towards the salad bar with an enigmatic smile, thinking of being with Simon Flowers at Cambridge, crossing the quadrangles in lab coats on their way to making discoveries.

They walk back to school in formation: popular girls at the front like Amanda ‘Saddle’ Collindale, who hunts, and Michaela Buonasenda the nymphomaniac; Guy in the middle, Marina at the back. The streets of Combe are deserted.

‘Where are the peasants?’ bellows Bill, and Saddle snorts. Marina is almost too frightened to breathe. Her lips are dry. Townspeople really might attack them; I would, she thinks. Victoria Porritt, ‘Muffster’, a big-haired fat girl in Fitzgerald House, Fitz, with a Tory MP father, totters on the cobblestones and takes Marina’s arm.

‘You don’t want to be a
doctor
, though, surely?’ she says. ‘I mean, really.’

‘Well . . .’ If she explains that it’s not about wanting, Victoria Porritt might not understand. ‘I, I quite
like
the sciences,’ she says.

‘Ugh. Biology. Chemistry! How can you stand it?’

Marina swallows. ‘What do you want to be?’

‘Nothing. Married.’ She puts her wet mouth against Marina’s ear. ‘Did you know I was finger-fucked by Pete Galbraith at half-term?’

Through silent Garthgate, which usually she avoids despite the new lamp posts and illuminated night guard’s hut. Victoria Porritt does not care. She eulogizes her pony and Marina joins in, the little fraud. Above the spire and ancient towers, the Plough lies upended in the cold. Her heart is clanging. Only babies are afraid of the dark. They face the blackness at the end of the passage. Then, enormous in a strip of lamplight, out of the shadows looms Guy.

‘Piss off, virge,’ shout the boys at the back, head-locking him and ruffling his hair.

‘Oh, help!’ screams Victoria Porritt and hurries off to join the others.

Guy grins at Marina. ‘Bet you haven’t seen this,’ he says, and leads her back through the night to a little fence, easily climbed. Into the navy sky above them stretches another tower, a spray of stars, a single lit-up window. They are in a little walled garden hard up against the side of the ruins; there are flowerbeds, but no house close by.

‘Like it?’ he says, lowering his voice until it is just breath in the cold.

A branch of something is close to her ear; it smells sweet although it is winter. Rozsi would rip it off and take it home; she knows no shame. The bat roosts and jagged pressing leaves, the distant footsteps, are horrible. Their curfew is eleven; breaking it is punished with rustication, like sex. She smiles nervously, consolingly. He is just a Fiver, showing off. ‘Shall we—’

He moves closer: not exactly a friend. Although he has never shown the slightest sign of interest, indeed has discussed further his inexplicable desire for Knobule Stapleton, an atmosphere is developing which even she cannot miss. It fills her with sadness; she had such high hopes. In all these long years when nobody has wanted to kiss her, she has been ready, memorizing Stevie Smith’s ‘I like to get off with people’ and e.e. cummings’s ‘may i feel?’ until she and Ursula knew them, literally, backwards. She understood passion and desire, and how they would feel when they found her.

But boys like him, she realizes, about to hatch, must need girlfriends too. And if they can’t have Knobule Stapleton they will aim lower, and lower, until they end up with her.

7

Many miles away, in west London, Marina’s mother sits at the dining table, making notes on the index cards she keeps in a folder labelled

LAURA’S WORK

Laura is a receptionist. Not even a good one, as Alistair, in his capacity as her employer, makes perfectly clear. She spends her working day in a morass of shame and minor disasters, not putting telephone calls through, hiding substandard photocopies, worrying that she has forgotten to tell someone that they are pregnant, dying, both. Her job has, however, three advantages: a constant supply of memo pads and ball point pens labelled
CYNOSTEX FOR CYSTITIS AND AGROLAST: THE LARGER HERNIA PATCH
; proximity to Alistair, which is, she reminds herself often, the enabler and not the sole cause of their passion; and, most importantly, patient confidentiality. Even Zsuzsi respects this; most of Laura’s paperwork is about verrucas, or mump vaccinations, or any of the many areas of human suffering in which she has no interest. Consequently, every day Laura lugs home a pile of non-exciting correspondence, and in the margins, in light pencil, she expresses herself: