Almost English (3 page)

Then Marina went away to school and none of the treats Laura had promised herself, cinema matinées, visits to friends in Bath and Bristol, had happened. She did not want them after all; she just wanted Marina back.

Her entanglement with Alistair Sudgeon is not helping. Any minute now he will appear on the doorstep with Mitzi, his wife, with whom Laura seems to be becoming obsessed.

Mitzi Sudgeon is a legend: her energy, her terrible fecund power. Unlike Laura, who has reached her forty-second year with no more to her name than a teenager, houseless, carless, husbandless, Mitzi excels. In addition to four children she has produced hundreds, probably thousands, of pastel drawings: dancing gypsies, merry vagabonds, babes in arms. Her jam is perfect, or as close to perfection as can be achieved without the legendary Nemtudom plums of Tarpa, near the River Tisza, of which Laura has frequently heard. She makes curtains and marital bedspreads. She bakes relentlessly. She organizes pensioners’ aerobics sessions at Alistair’s surgery.

She is, moreover, an actual Hungarian. In 1956, while the eight-year-old Laura, daughter of two irredeemably English postal workers who called each other ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’ and aimed only not to be noticed, was failing to learn to skip in a Birmingham playground, plucky Mitzi, only three years older, was stowing herself away on a tannery barge and preparing to meet her future.

The guests show no sign of leaving. There is still more cake to be eaten: a symphony in chocolate and cream; there are Sobranies still to smoke, black
kavitchka
to drink, marzipan fruits to nibble, families to be discussed. They are all dreadful gigglers; Ildi, whispering to Zsuzsi in the corner, has tears of laughter running down her pink cheeks. And the food keeps coming. Rozsi’s oldest friend, Pelzer Fanni, has brought a toddler-sized box of her favourite chocolates from Austria,
Mozartkugeln
, decorated with his silly girlish face.

‘
Von-
darefool,’ say the shoals of interchangeable cousins. Laura smiles and nods until her cheeks ache with insincerity. She fears them all: protective, touchy, there is so much they insist on knowing, and Laura is no match for them, least of all tonight.

What if, when Alistair arrives, whose desire, or at least the thought of whose desire, so excites her, she starts glowing through her clothes? One of the in-laws will surely notice; not Ildi, too sweet and innocent for suspicion, but what about Zsuzsi, with her instinct for sex? Rozsi, whose thoughts are unreadable, like a polar bear’s? My jig, she thinks, is up.

She needs somewhere to think. It will have to be the bathroom, although it will be considered a dereliction of hostessly duty. Shyly she begins to kiss her way towards the kitchen, slashing through the alien corn and, whatever her lips say, her mind is thinking: please. Please. Please.

But what is she asking for? Love, peace, privacy? Or the opposite of peace: something that will change everything, for better or for worse?

Marina is going back to school in under a week, and another evening has been wasted. Laura has barely seen, let alone talked to her, or grabbed her and sniffed her hair, howled like a lunatic, held on. She wants to lie face down on the cold tiles and weep. But she cannot, so she tells herself to buck up, blows her nose, and washes her face like the mildly disappointed marmalade-making Women’s Institute member she could so easily have been.

Water is dripping off her nose. She looks like a different species from her daughter, as if a Labrador had produced a salmon. If Alistair talks to Marina, will she talk back?

It happens all the time: people think she is just another nervous teenager, easily melted, and Laura winces to see how their teasing always turns her child to stiffness like a small strict scientist, how quickly she is offended and embarrassed, her flammable pride. Is it normal to be simultaneously so self-conscious and so prickly? Since starting at Combe it has been worse, for reasons Marina will not discuss. Show them what you really are, Laura wills her, watching her daughter’s monosyllabic answers. With her big worried eyebrows and dark thick plait, she has the air of a small Russian poet about to kill herself for love.

Oh, darling, thinks her mother. One day someone will see you. Just, please, not yet.

When the intercom buzzes, Marina knows. This, you see, is how love feels: a heightened awareness, almost psychic, that the beloved is here. Like a magnet seeking metal, a stranded alien found by the mother ship, she is propelled towards him, dodging aged Hungarians with their walking sticks and their determination to pinch her youthful flesh. It is not surprising that she has sensed his approach. In a sandstorm or an avalanche she could probably detect him. Her body would thrum like an antenna, if that is what they do.

How she thrums. Given the strength of her devotion to Simon Flowers, how could it not be him? He must have relented. He has come for her.

‘Hello?’ someone says into the intercom box. No one answers, which is a sort of sign. Her heart is banging, and organs do not lie. She has willed him here: a hot metallic beam of longing, pulling him all the way from the house he shares with his parents and two little sisters at 29 Mill Road, Stourpaine, Blandford St Mary, Dorset, DT11 2JP, into her arms.

‘I’ll go,’ she says, although everyone is looking. Electric blood booms beneath her skin. Could she have wished him into existence? Until now, fetching the
Evening Standard
for her great-aunt Zsuzsi, or going to the National Portrait Gallery to catch up on the Tudors, or watching the people on the up escalator as she goes down, with her better profile carefully turned their way, she has been certain that in the next minute, or the next, or next, her fortune will change. All it would take was one large aristocratic family or kindly professor. They would recognize her unusual sensitivity, her hitherto unsuspected beauty, and they would welcome her.

This holiday, in the era of Simon Flowers, it has been different. He must come to London, after all, to visit elderly relatives, or buy madrigals. Every time she leaves the flat she is merely a surface, ready to be seen by him.

Now, at last, he will see. Her life will change tonight. She bangs her elbow on the door handle but hardly notices. The air in the basement corridor is pure oxygen. She flies over the sparkling night-blue linoleum, bypassing the lift, in whose coffin of walnut veneer and leatherette she has dreamed of kissing his chapped lips and now, after her time in the wilderness, can dream again. She will look upon his dear scholarly face and he will rescue her, transform Combe, relieve her of her virginity, set her off towards the glorious adulthood which awaits her. So what if boarding school is not what she had hoped? If the boys are scary and the girls are aliens and they call the townspeople of Combe and Melcombe peasants? She runs up the stairs and bursts into the entrance hall, the strip lighting blazing benedictions upon young love.

The pitch of the party has definitely changed; it is quieter, tenser, as if an adulterer is in their midst. They may be sensing imminent excitement: a storming out, tears, insults. When Laura was growing up, public displays of emotion would lead to lifelong polite ostracism. Her in-laws, however, can take drama in their stride.

Or maybe they are waiting for the Sudgeons, she thinks, as the telephone begins to ring.

Because of the noise, Laura hurries into the great-aunts’ room to grab the phone between their beds.

‘Hello?’

There is only silence.

Her mouth is dry. ‘Hello?’ she says again and then, softly, probably inaudibly, she whispers into the yellowing plastic: ‘Is that you?’

Silence.

‘Who is it?’ calls her mother-in-law through the doorway. ‘
Viszontlátásra
,
dar
-link – hurry, Mrs Volf goes now.’

‘I . . . I think a wrong number,’ she shouts back, and the line goes dead.

Simon Flowers is not here. Nobody is. Marina leans back against the front door, trying not to be seen by the people waiting at the bus stop, and is rinsed by a cold wave of self-disgust.

Heartache spreads across her chest, telling her that she will never love again. Simon Flowers is the only boy at Combe she can imagine even liking. He has qualities the others lack: intelligence. Fineness. Beauty, even, if one is sensitive enough to see it. She would give him everything. She would even, it seems, risk letting him into the flat.

Unbeknownst to him, this was to have been a significant, almost ceremonial, moment. For Marina, most things are. She has powers, although she is not sure how they work. Perhaps a suspicion had always been there, an awareness that all that stands between her relatives and their gradual decline into poverty, starvation, diseases missed by neglectful doctors who laugh at their accents, is six years at medical school and lifelong vigilance. However, she had only been away at school a few weeks when she realized that everything she fears stems, via an osmotic process in which she is the conduit, from Combe. Combe is not her family’s salvation but their nemesis, she can see that now. Everyone there is so healthy. Everyone at home is weak and flimsy, and growing more so, while she is away from them.

Perhaps, without the homesickness, she would have felt less oppressed by responsibility. Instead, as term, slowly, passed, her sadness did not retreat. She missed her elderly relatives’ wrinkly elbows, the soft cords of their necks; whenever she saw a pensioner at a bus stop she would try to carry their bags. What if, as she increasingly feared, she was actually killing them long distance?

One freezing November evening, passing the ruins of Combe Abbey on her tremulous way into dinner, she saw a stone which seemed to be glinting significantly, and made a vow. Under the gas-style light of the new old-fashioned street lamps, she accepted the task of protecting her relatives from pain, sorrow and death. I alone, she swore, will do it, whatever it involves. Decontamination. Quarantine. And, obviously, ensuring that no one from Combe ever crossed the threshold.

The only exception was to be Simon Flowers: a boy of whom even her family would approve. So great was her love that she had decided he was worth the risk. But he is not here. The damage has been done by thought alone and—

‘Hey,’ says someone in the bus-stop queue.

‘Hello?’ She squints into the darkness, hoping that Simon Flowers’s slender frame will materialize but, in his place, stands someone vaguely familiar: a paleish, slabby, mouse-haired boy. Her face starts to heat like a kettle element, tainting the air around her.

‘Come on,’ he says. ‘You know. School.’

‘No, I don’t,’ she says, although she does recognize him now, a younger boy from Combe, a Fiver, not even in her house: Guy somebody. Rain is beading on his hair, she notes, still observant despite the shipwreck of her hopes and dreams. ‘What are you doing here?’

The downpour increases, as if a dial had been turned. He surveys the dry cleaner’s, who have picked this moment to load clothes rails into their van. ‘I know, weird, isn’t it,’ he says. ‘Went to buy a compact disc on Queensway.’

‘Really?’

‘And then I’m meeting my mother in Holland Park, but I lost my cab money. They said the bus went from the corner. You don’t live
here
, do you?’

Marina is not good at being insulted. She goes stiff; if anyone teases her she is frozen for days.

‘Anyway,’ he says, not even noticing.

She wants to turn away but he could say foul things now about her at Combe. Also, he does not seem to be mocking her. ‘Good, good luck then.’

‘Thanks.’

She is about to go inside. But she hesitates, as she always does, and in those few seconds the door to Westminster Court is slowly pulled open. The Combe boy looks round. Marina turns. There, silhouetted by the strip lighting like an avenger, stands an old woman in a floor-length emerald cocktail kaftan, with a cigarette, an ornamental hair clip and big round gilt clip-on earrings: her great-aunt, Zsuzsi.

‘I come to find you,’ says Zsuzsi. ‘Everyone asks, you miss the— who is this?’

The Combe boy’s eyes open very wide. Is it her eyeshadow or her golden hair or the accent? Marina barely hears it but she knows it is there. People often ask Rozsi how long she’s been in London, as if she’s a tourist, and are visibly shocked when she says, ‘Forty years.’

Rozsi would be bad enough; Zsuzsi is a disaster. Now that Marina has started at Combe, she needs her elderly relatives to be less conspicuous. There are already rumours that she is a Kraut.

‘Actually,’ she says, ‘I was just com—’

But Combe boys are polite to adults. He leaves the bus queue and holds out his hand. ‘Guy Viney,’ he says. ‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t realize you lived here. I’m one of your, ah, daughter’s—’

‘Daughter?’ says Zsuzsi, beaming delightedly. ‘
Von-
dare-fool. Such a nice boy. One of Marina’s school friends? So—’ They have been asking and asking her to bring people home. They are obsessed with Combe. They do not realize.

‘Well,’ says Marina, ‘we don’t really know each other. He’s only a—’

‘He wait for bus?’ says Zsuzsi, looking as if she is about to offer him a cigarette. ‘No!’

‘It’s fine,’ says Marina, as Guy Viney wipes his face with his sleeve.

‘Not-at-all,’ Zsuzsi says. ‘Don’t be a silly. We do not let him go like that, a boy from the boarding school.
Tair-
ible. He is wet. He is hungry. He is—’

‘Zsuzsi,’ says Marina, ‘really. I don’t . . . we don’t . . .’

Her great-aunt takes Guy Viney’s arm. ‘A friend of Marinaka,’ she breathes, as if naming a rare and precious element.

‘He’s not my—’

‘Shh. Young man, I take you inside.’

Marina follows them, with difficulty, into the tiny lift. He takes a lungful of stairwell bleach and overheating and she visualizes the exchange of gases in his alveoli: Farkas air going in, contamination out. He will endanger them and she, Marina, is the point on which it all hinges, like the twist in a loop of DNA. He isn’t even very tall and his hair is nothing like a Merchant Ivory hero’s. Above the clanking gears he answers questions while Marina stares at his red right ear, thinking of what he will see when he enters Flat Two: the plate clock from Trieste; embroidered folk items; glazed pot holders; Zsuzsi’s
Royalty
magazines, the numerous dictionaries and the cupboard fridge on legs.