Almost English (33 page)

‘Would it not be easier just to go back and ask at that place, West Street?’ she says, trying to think even more quickly than Rozsi.

‘
Hihetetlen
,’ she hears behind her, which is never a good sign.

She turns. Zsuzsi and Rozsi are arguing in Hungarian. Ildi, helpfully in English, says, ‘
Dar
-link. Rozsi think we go back toward the what-you-call-it,
cot-
edrol, maybe we see her then.’

‘There isn’t a cath— oh, you mean the ruins?’ says Laura.

‘We are looking halfway towards London for this concert,’ says Zsuzsi, ‘but no.
Tair-
ible, what she do to us.’

‘Oh. Well, can’t we just— you could go back to the bed and breakfast,’ Laura says, ‘and I’ll keep looking for her. She can’t be far.’

‘Don’t be
rid
-iculos,’ says Zsuzsi. ‘You do not have my sharp eyes.’

‘Well, true. Aren’t you hungry? We could go into town for a baked potato.’ Rozsi loves baked potatoes. ‘There’s a vegetarian café, it looked quite cheap,’ Laura says and, as she glances over Zsuzsi’s shoulder, trying to remember where they passed it, she sees a pub over the road, a big glass window, a sign swinging in the cold Combe wind: the Crown and Mitre. She had forgotten.

Marina’s evening in the Crown is not quite as she had imagined. Mrs Viney is not at the pub after all. No one talks to her. She finishes her first half of cider very quickly. Two beer-mats are lying in peeled layers in front of her, and several crushed crisps; she accidentally knocked most of them on the floor, which made everyone groan in disgust. Simon Vass, a Dene House Upper with enormous rugby shoulders, has bought another round of beers and, for Marina, a vodka and lime. Guy, talking football, ignores her.

The evening she had in mind had featured red wine and intellectual conversation, a certain relaxing of sexual mores. Cornucopiae. And if she is, well, bored, shouldn’t she be doing something better with her time, such as applying her historian’s mind to the mysterious Farkas–Viney connection? Like the young Queen Elizabeth on the eve of accession, she is willing to take up a hallowed burden. She wants to start.

God, what if it
is
to do with the war?

She can see herself quite clearly, on the watered-silk sofa in the drawing room at Stoker, leafing through a photo album and spotting Guy’s parents at a Mosley garden party, or marching on Belgium. Could she ask Mr Viney about it? Perhaps, if she can dare herself. She reaches for her now empty glass and, as she does so, Mr Viney changes seats.

‘So, young Hun,’ he says. ‘We meet again, again. How nice.’

‘Yes,’ says Marina, her resolve evaporating. His eyes are so pale that you can’t help staring at them and then you’re trapped there, gazing into his soul. I need alcohol, she thinks. There should be a way of buying a drink just for yourself and a specified other: a half-round. A crescent.

‘What are you smiling about?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You are.’

‘I’m not. I— you shouldn’t be on that stool,’ she says. ‘Don’t you want the bench?’ and she shuffles up.

‘You’re very kind,’ he says.

‘I’m just being polite,’ she explains. ‘I believe in it for old, I mean—’

‘I see,’ and, as he stands, something over her shoulder seems to catch his eye. He goes still. Marina, hoping for bank robbers, twists round to look at the street outside. A little group of people is standing on the opposite kerb. She turns away, only ninety degrees, then turns back.

It is her grandmother, her great-aunts. And, looking straight at her, her mother, her beloved, who will ruin everything.

Their eyes meet.

At that moment, Ildi touches her mother’s arm.

Marina thinks: this is her Judas moment. She will tell Ildi now about Guy; she will betray me. Slowly, not breathing, she looks again at Mr Viney, who is still standing above her, staring into the road. He seems puzzled, as if he is thinking hard. Then he lowers his gaze to hers. They stare at each other, seriously, adultly, almost, you might think, nakedly. She sees the questions he could ask her, suspended in those cool pale irises. She holds his gaze until he snaps his eyes away and his expression clears.

‘Well, well,’ he says thoughtfully. ‘I hadn’t—’

Guy leans over. ‘What are you doing, you weirdo? With your neck all twisted, you look like the Loch Ness Monster.’

‘Enough, Guy,’ says his father.

She has begun to sweat. ‘I’m just, you know, a bit stiff,’ she says.

Any moment now Guy will say, ‘Hey, Reen, isn’t that your mother again?’ but it hardly matters any more when a pack of furious geriatrics is about to burst into the pub. Rozsi will hit him, as she once hit that policeman. Where are they? Outside, a yard or two beyond the glass, her fate is being silently decided. Don’t look. Don’t look.

She looks.

The street outside is empty.

They have left her here. She is still staring, mystified, out of the window when a big hand falls lightly on the nape of her neck. ‘I know what the matter is,’ she hears Guy’s father say. ‘It’s bloody freezing by this window. Your muscles must be seizing up,’ and he begins to massage her: her neck, the top of her back. ‘Were those women outside looking for you?’

‘No,’ she says. ‘Well—’

‘No matter. You’re here now,’ he says, squeezing her shoulders. ‘Don’t be prudish. I do it all the time to my children. Come on, submit.’

What makes Laura pretend not to have seen her daughter? Not sensitivity, not quick thinking but a sort of dumb defiance, creeping up her spine. Everyone needs privacy occasionally, a bit of leeway. She licks her lips, clears her throat, asks herself what harm it can do for her daughter to be in a mixed group like that, fathers and schoolboys in a public place: not with a stranger, alone. Then, when she has summoned her nerve, she says to the in-laws, ‘You know, I’m sure I did see a sign about a Liszt concert, in the, the Underhall, Underthing. That does explain it: even the lipstick, Zsuzsi. It’s good if she’s trying, isn’t it?’ Then, ‘Oh look, isn’t that the wife of the cabinet minister who went to prison?’

Miraculously, it seems to work. Besides, her in-laws need an early night. They are leaving for Femina early tomorrow morning, just after the historical pageant but before the Founder’s birthday champagne reception and Prize-Giving (‘They do not give Marina presents. Why do we care?’). So it makes perfect sense to send them back in the miraculous taxi at the rank right by the school, while she waits for her daughter’s return.

But what to do? Every shop and restaurant in Dorset will be shut by now; it is too late to drug herself with tea and cake, or the mild provincial shopping she secretly longs for: mead-based cordials, tea cosies, imitation gargoyles. She finds her slow way back to West Street, her legs aching brutishly as if she has been poisoned. It is a bright cold night: a night for endings. When Marina comes back from whatever she was doing in that pub, Laura will take her somewhere, to an appropriate place for this sort of conversation. She will face their troubles, speak frankly, and sort everything out.

But at West Street stringent Founder’s Day safety measures are in force. Without a Blue, whatever that is, she can’t even enter the building, let alone retrieve her own child. She has no choice but to leave a short inarticulate note and wander off, deeper into Combe, where she does what anyone in her position would do. She sits on a cold wall under a dripping tree outside the Combe Conservative Association, with Peter and Marina and Alistair Sudgeon and now poor Zoltan, and weeps quietly for an hour.

Having only sat in the front of a car once or twice before, Marina is not an accomplished strapper-inner. Now she burns with a fierce hot humiliation. Maybe she shouldn’t have tried to hide the open buckle under her arm, but he shouldn’t have told her off like a child. And she is not drunk, hardly at all, just a little bit spinny. In fact, should he even be driving? It is very kind of him to offer her a lift to West Street but, she wants to reassure him, she’s often walked back drunker than this on Saturday nights, everyone does. It isn’t far.

She can’t think of anything to say. She watches his hands on the steering wheel; she can see, despite the darkness, the flat wide fingernail, the muscle at the base of his thumb, the hair on the lower section of each finger and the backs of his hands. She wants to be in bed but, when he suggests the scenic route, where they could look down on Combe from a Roman bridge or something, she says, ‘Yes.’ Maybe it’s being away from school but he seems funnier and cleverer with every passing minute. They feel like equals, or something close.

‘Tell me about yourself,’ he says, with a smile in his voice. ‘What
interests
you, Marina?’ and she starts to talk, not so much about her vestigial hobbies, the neglected fossils and star charts, the practically first edition of William Golding she found in a charity bookshop in Fulham Broadway, but about, for some reason, school. And he helps her, guiding her into deeper revelations as if he is strewing breadcrumbs, leading her through – presumably, out of – the woods. He is particularly understanding about how girls like Marina are coping with Combe life. She finds herself going into more detail than she had intended, as, she imagines, a woman confiding in a man friend might feel, if the friend was powerful and clever and had a silver car and hair on his forearms. It is enjoyable. It should not be, but there it is.

‘And so there’s a certain amount of . . . association?’

She glances sideways. Although he is driving fast he turns to grin at her, and it is quite a sexy feeling, knowing that this man, her friend, will tomorrow be standing in front of the entire school handing out prizes. He genuinely wants to know what she thinks. ‘Er, yes. I think so. Yes.’

‘And is that what you expected?’

‘I—’

‘I mean, before you arrived at Combe. Sex, of course. I’m sure I didn’t need to tell you that.’

Once she would have been too tense, too virginal, to talk like this but that has passed. ‘Well, it’s funny,’ she says. ‘But, well, I was quite . . . hopeful. I just didn’t think that, that I—’

‘What?’

‘Well, I was at a girls’ school. And I didn’t know any, you know, boys. So the thought of—’

‘Of coming here.’

‘Yes. And, well, meeting some . . . I was ready to. If you know what I mean. I wanted to get, get going.’

‘Go on.’

‘No, that’s it.’

‘So,’ he says, smiling, ‘would you say most of the girls have boyfriends?’

‘Well—’

‘And, even apart from parks, and cinemas and what have you, the boys have study bedrooms?’

‘Some of them. But—’

‘Because one might think, if they do, the masters are being a little naïve.’

‘How, how—’

‘I expect they’re at it like rabbits.’

When he says that she feels it all over her body; her skin seems to ruffle with excitement. Everything about this conversation is exciting; it is what she has dreamed of, over and over again.

‘Forgive me, but it’s true,’ he says.

‘It’s not—’

‘Oh, believe me, it is. I’ve been a seventeen-year-old boy,’ he says. She bites her lip, looks at him quickly, puts her hand to her neck to cool down the spreading flush. ‘And let me assure you, it would have taken a great deal more than a closed door and an incompetent headmaster—’

‘But—’

‘Don’t interrupt. To have kept me from fulfilling my, well, baser urges. Of which I had many. Still have, in fact.’

There is too much here to comprehend. Marina sits in silence, staring out of the window. Then he stops the car. They are on a paved platform beside a big stone bridge, looking down on the twinkling lights and inky countryside of Blackmoor Vale. An urge to confess, to seek help, overwhelms her. ‘I just didn’t think that I, I’d get a chance.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well.’ These are deeper waters than she had anticipated. She swallows hard but tears still spring to her eyes. ‘I, I’m not, not the type that they want. The boys.’

‘Oh?’

‘It’s true. I’m not, not blonde, or thin, or pretty.’ She gulps audibly.

‘Come now.’

‘No, it’s true.’ And then, because she fears she has insulted his son, she says, ‘I mean, Guy is lovely. But we don’t have that much . . . I mean, he’s younger than me, and I like books—’

‘Oh, Marina, Marina. It was ever thus. Brainy girl meets hunky boy and, within about ten seconds, is disappointed.’

‘Not dis—’

‘May I be frank with you?’

‘Oh,’ she says excitedly. ‘Yes. Please.’

‘You will be so much happier when adult. You need experience, young Marina, and one day you will have it. I see you with someone older. Don’t you?’

Where
is
Marina? This is getting ridiculous. Laura can hardly hang around the school until pub closing time, hoping to bump into her own child. It would look strange. Besides, what if those Vineys turn up again, that cocky son or his thin ethereal somehow old-seeming mother, like a dowager duchess in the body of a twenty-year-old? She has courageous impulses but not the courage to act upon them; at least, not yet.

Then something else occurs to her. For all these weeks Laura has pictured Marina painfully attentive in lessons, or standing on a staircase chatting to friends, as they do in the school prospectus. Until now, sex, hormones, the limitless urges of male adolescents, have rarely crossed her mind. But it is a boys’ school, run by men – there does not seem to be a single prominent female teacher – with girls just parachuted in. For all its trumpeting about safety and maturity, does Combe know, or care, what goes on behind the study doors?

Surely anything could happen.

As if a slide has been snapped in place, she sees another image: Marina roaming free. She has given up her A levels without telling them, she has changed everything, lied, pick-pocketed probably, all under the uncertain influence of these awful Vineys. For, even if their unknown crime was decades ago, in Hungarian years it is recent. Forgiveness is out of the question. Laura has to warn Marina about the Viney family; not just for the sake of Ildi and the others but for Marina too, who may be going wrong just as her mother did before.