Almost English (30 page)

‘Yep.’

‘Practically criminal,’ she says and, an inch from her ear, he gives a snort. ‘What? I mean it.’

He is laughing: at her; at them.

‘Don’t,’ she says. ‘Seriously. Don’t. I’m going to ask you one more time. When are you going to tell them?’

32

Tuesday, 14 March
Founder’s Day Week

10 a.m.–12 p.m. ceramics exhibition (also 10 a.m.– 12 p.m., Wednesday), Radcliffe Library (free)

12 p.m. Uppers’ debate (‘Europe: Friend or Foe’), Old Library, £3

4.30 p.m. ‘Hooked on Bossa’: percussion medley featuring the Combe Players, Founder’s Court marquee, cash bar, £4

6 p.m.
The Merchant of Venice
, Combe Abbey Cloisters, £4

At five o’clock, overdressed and skittish, the Farkas party assembles. It is almost time for headmaster’s drinks, to which the parents of the many participants in
The Merchant of Venice
have been invited. The assistant registrar, distressed by Marina’s family circumstances, still sends everything to ‘Mr and Mrs Farkas’ but, with pleading, Laura has managed to persuade her to extend Dr Tree’s invitation to Marina’s grandmother and great-aunts too.

Most mothers, she suspects, drive over from Salisbury or Yeovil daily, or treat the whole week as an amusing conjugal mini-break, booking into the Oak or the Regency and consorting with friends in the evenings, while their young go to Melcombe for pizzas in rowdy groups. No one else stays at the disappointingly tartan Braegarrold; they will have the breakfast room to themselves.

But in Rozsi and Zsuzsi’s marginally larger room, sitting on the Black Watch bedspreads to giggle and drink instant coffee from home, they are having a fabulous time. The atmosphere is heady, as if they are about to go into battle. ‘We attend,’ announces Zsuzsi, still in her huge sunglasses, ‘even though I am invited to the ballet with Klein Pali tonight, he beg me. It is
Nutcracker
, such a pity. But
von
-darefool, the whole family here. For Marinaka’s sake.’

Rozsi writes to Mrs Dobos on a postcard of Combe Abbey by floodlight, updating her on events so far. Zsuzsi and Ildi are pink-cheeked with hilarity; the beds are shaking. Laura smiles as if she is made of wood. Peter was meeting his consultant today for yet more results; she hasn’t quite understood from his vague description which ones, but they are important. She has, with difficulty, obtained for him the number at Braegarrold; he has agreed that ‘maybe me, maybe Suze’ will leave a message if there is news, but will they? What would silence mean? And meanwhile, at work, where Alistair only decided last night that he could spare her for this little trip, they will be discovering misfiled lab reports; counting Dalmane bottles with puzzled expressions.

When Zsuzsi decides that it is time to open the sponge fingers, Laura dares to act.

‘I’m just going to find my, er,’ she says, and hurries downstairs to explain to the landlady that if she is contacted by a woman called Suze, who is leaving a message on behalf of a mutual friend, it should be passed straight to Laura herself.

Mrs Cousins is not impressed. Having already scented impropriety in the Farkas set-up, she has visited them twice to warn against over-flushing and excessive soap use. ‘This is a respectable house,’ she says. ‘Other guests consider our facilities more than sufficient.’

‘Yes, it’s wonderful, absolutely. But I’m— sorry, it’s the only way my friend can reach me. It’s about, well, some medical results,’ she says, and her eyes begin to burn. ‘Due today.’

There is a long pause. ‘Well, it’s highly irregular. I don’t like it. I’ll have to speak to Mr Cousins. And naturally if for these medical reasons you decide to take off early, there’ll be no refund.’

‘Thank you,’ Laura says.

‘Hmm.’

‘Oh,’ she makes herself add, ‘just one more thing. If my friend does ring, please please don’t tell my, you know. Just tell me. Really. It’s a sort of surprise.’

She walks back upstairs with the sense that she is watched. Her legs are slow and heavy. She passes the dark doorway marked Private, the hidden telephone. What if Peter needs her?

What if he doesn’t?

Headmaster’s drinks are precisely that. ‘Not a biscuit,’ Laura thinks in Rozsi’s voice, ‘not a nut,’ but the real Rozsi doesn’t say a word. Laura fishes fizzy apple out of her Pimms; Zsuzsi distributes Droste chocolate pastilles. Although the light is fading and it is far from warm, the party is in the gardens of Dr Tree’s house, a Victorian Gothic keep behind a very disciplined twenty-foot hedge. The windows which overlook the lawn are extensively leaded, affording only glimpses of floor-length curtains, a grand piano glinting with silver frames. Mrs Tree, apparently also a teacher, glides amongst them like a sprigged and piecrust-collared priestess, dodging the merrier fathers, greeting favoured mothers with a kiss. Faintly, in a distant rehearsal, a hundred voices are raised in song.

‘
Von-
darefool,’ agree the old ladies, huddling together by the drinks table. Laura searches for signs of life; yes, Zsuzsi is shaking her head, eyes following a particularly wide-hipped woman in Madras check and another in a denim shirtwaister. She looks disappointed. Her gaze moves to the men’s gilt-buttoned blazers, their racy mustard-yellow trousers and brown suede brogues. Laura watches, and thinks: she is right. I should not criticize, dressing as I do, but Combe parents are hideous.

The patriarchs, waving impressive cameras, have staked out tables with hip flasks and fully rollable Panama hats. Old Combeian fathers beget Combe sons, like child abusers; they cuff each other violently on the shoulder, bellowing about ‘Stanters’ and something called ‘jams’.

Where are the children? The play is starting in half an hour. The other parents seem perfectly happy without them, but Laura’s hands twitch with Marina-hunger: the back of her neck, the smell of her cheek. There is nowhere left to sit. Ildi picks shyly at a cement griffin. Rozsi has forgotten her Kodak Disc camera. In London, Peter is finding out if he has a future.

‘Beautiful,’ the Farkases say and Laura runtishly agrees. At long last, after a painful speech about fundraising golf tournaments and Lincoln’s Inn old boy dinners, they are instructed to raise their glasses and toast the school ‘and all who sail in her’, and then, when the hilarity has died down, a side door opens and their children start to drift in.

At least, other people’s children, in gold brocade and alarming make-up. Marina’s family waits.

‘Hello,’ says a voice. ‘Aren’t you Mrs Farkas?’

Standing at Laura’s elbow is a pale powdery girl, turned into an old woman with wobbly eye-liner wrinkles and a hair comb.

‘Heidi,’ the girl informs Laura, like someone at a conference. ‘Marina’s friend from West Street. We have met.’

The girl updates her on her slight netball injury, her inter-house debating near triumph, her progress in inorganic chemistry.

‘Oh, so you’re in the same class as Marina?’ Laura says. ‘How is . . . is she doing OK, do you know?’

‘Marina?’

‘Yes!’

‘Um.’

‘What? What’s wrong?’

‘
Dar
-link!’ Laura hears behind her and, with relief, turns to see her in-laws swoop upon a short dark girl in an unfortunate toga. It takes a moment to recognize her daughter. Laura waits until the great-aunts have stopped their cheek-pinching before asking, ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes,’ says Marina, and her mother knows she lies.

She waits, trembling, in the wings for her only cue. In two minutes, just before the embarrassingly unnecessary sword fight, Marina will enter stage left, right, no left to sell oranges to the populace, before exiting, screaming, stage left. No, stage right. She keeps imagining herself running in the wrong direction; lately her brain has been full of unsquashable thoughts, like a miniature horror film. And she is so tired. There is hardly time to sleep these days. When she tries, her worries multiply in an endlessly branching hell: tree trunks into twigs, leaves, leaf veins; bronchiole, alveoli, capillaries, cells.

There on the dark lawn is her family. It does not calm her; if anything it makes her want to do something rash, run out across the stage, jump down and pull them to their feet, swatting at the Combe grass and Combe insects which are infecting them while they sit there, in blithe ignorance. Only two more nights, she keeps telling herself; that’s nothing. Stop this weakness. Harden your heart.

However, she can’t help noticing, even as she pines and yearns, that they seem to be taking up more room than other people. Rozsi’s stretched-out legs and Zsuzsi’s ancient metal-framed Harrods handbag: they just don’t think. Everyone is looking at them, the oldest, strangest-looking group, in furry coats like bears who have strayed into a picnic.

Sweating like a fat pig in her costume, a grass stain already on her simple espadrilles, she glances once again at the far side of the lawn, where Mrs Viney is still sitting on the bench beside Pa Stenning and, despite Mr Viney’s absence, an image comes to her: the meeting of the tribes.

Dear God. I would, she thinks, do anything to stop it happening.

What, though? How far would I go?

Anything. Hurt myself. Run amok. Even—

There is a gap on the blanket between the fuzzy outlines of her relatives. Where the hell is her mother?

One minute Laura is sitting on the grass surrounded by Combe families, lolling in self-satisfaction like basking seals. The next she is getting to her feet.

‘What are you doing?’ hisses Zsuzsi.

‘Sorry,’ Laura whispers. She blunders across the grass, dodging between picnic rugs until she finds the dangerously unsignposted fire exit at the other side of the cloisters, is waved away by a man in shorts, rushes back until she finds another opening and bursts out into the unforgiving chill of Martyrs’ Lodge.

She is alone. Close by a bell is tolling. Peter will have his results by now; she must speak to him. Tears have begun to pour from her like a nosebleed. She must find out. She wipes her face on her sleeve. Marina will forgive me, she thinks, if she even notices that I’ve gone. One day I’ll explain it, I definitely will.

She hurries across the cobbles and through an archway into Founder’s Court. A few stray schoolboys, inexplicably dressed as squaddies, are setting out chairs on the grass. ‘Cockcheese,’ she hears one of them shout, to which another answers, ‘You wish!’ She keeps walking, blushing, apologetic and, although they grow quiet at her footfall, there is a definite recalibration of respectfulness as she passes: laughter again, and louder voices. She clearly hears one of them say, ‘Knob.’

There is no way for a lay person to distinguish between the surrounding buildings. It feels wrong to be wandering unsupervised. What, she thinks, would be the worst thing I could find?

At last she locates a telephone, in the entrance to what appears to be a rudimentary pub: jars of penny sweets, file paper, taps for beer. Ringing to hear the verdict on Peter, death or life, is not easy; she has to replace the receiver twice before she dials correctly. Eventually, she reaches Suze.

‘I am very busy,’ Suze says. ‘He is due in five.’

‘You mean at your house? He’s coming there?’ Laura burns with a pure white hatred. ‘Could you tell him to ring me then, the moment that he arrives? I’m at, I can’t really hang around, I’m at a pay phone. Do you honestly not know what the doctor said?’

Two older boys stare openly as she waits to be rung back. She slips into a dark flinty place between noticeboards, and closes her eyes.

He is about to find out if he has a future. Who are you, she asks herself, to think he would even want you? He didn’t before. You weren’t enough, even then. And if you—

She snatches up the telephone as if it could bolt away from her. ‘Hello?’ It is Peter, and her heartbeat pounds in her ear. ‘Tell me. What did they say?’

It is complicated, and made more so by his failure to ask the consultant any of the right questions. If he ‘gets to’ six months, as he puts it, then he has double the chance of living to a year than if he’d only got to three months, which he already has.

‘Are you sure?’ she asks. ‘What about now? What do they know?’

Very little. He still claims that it’s a good kind of cancer, the ‘right’ kind. ‘Because a kidney’s removable,’ he says, as if people have perforated lines. ‘Not like a liver, or brain, or, I don’t know, a pen—’

‘OK. Enough. And what if the other one . . .’

They listen together to what she doesn’t say; it rushes in their ears like the air in a baked-bean can, like the sea. No one on the face of the earth cares as much about you as I do, she tells him silently, except—

‘Pete,’ she says. ‘What are we going to do?’

33

It is the dead of night. At Combe Abbey, in Dorset, probably in the whole of England Marina is the only person awake.

She has written a poem:

No more the sun

No more the moon

Now more the owlet’s cry.

I know not what I am to you

Nor why I long to die.

It is moving and impressive: a genuine reflection of her suffering. Since turning down Simon Flowers’s overture, for it can have been nothing else, she has been desolate. Everything is going wrong. How could her mother have missed her stage appearance? The lights were too bright to see much once she was out there, selling her oranges, but she could hear loud whispering coming from the Farkases’ general area; they were probably offering their neighbours dumplings, or saying terrible things about their footwear. Everyone will know that they belong to Marina; she should not think like this, but it is true.

Also, what if someone mentions chemistry? It’s probably best if she doesn’t spend too much time with her family, in case of blurting it out. But then the Vineys and the Farkases may meet unsupervised. How had she even thought this was a situation she could control?

During the long night which follows, sweating against the radiator on burgundy brushed-nylon sheets, Laura tries to imagine gathering the relatives together over their All-Bran to tell them . . . what, exactly? The thing is, Peter might die; oh yes, and he’s alive after all?