Almost English (11 page)

‘Is it a long journey to, you know, um—’ she asks hopefully, fiddling with the paperback of Gogol’s
Dead Souls
which, after long deliberation, she has decided is not too pretentious to bring: it is a comedy, after all. She has been dreaming of a lengthy Tolstoyan train ride with serfs scything the cornfields; somehow she had even envisaged a sleeper compartment, in which Guy would attempt to kiss her.

‘God, I don’t know,’ he says, biting into a colossal cherry scone. ‘Blandford then Limehurst, Winsham St Peter, Goring Water, Goring thingy, Staithe. Shaftesbury, East Knoyle, lift to Stoker . . . less than an hour. Fifty minutes? Weekend trains aren’t up to much.’

The mere mention of weekends makes her stomach squelch with anxiety. He said his mother would clear this exeat with Pa Daventry, but surely it’s not as easy as that. It has all happened so suddenly; when she thinks of Rozsi she feels faint, even though, she tells herself, her mother won’t care, or even notice, so in a way it’s her fault.

Guy keeps grinning at her. When she accidentally rests her knee against his, he does not pull away. She looks at the spots on his temples and remembers the questing way that his lips met hers in the ticket queue, as a guinea pig’s might. Simon Flowers, she thinks, despite having decided to forsake all thoughts of him this weekend, Simon, I will ever be thine. She tries to remember how much money she has in her purse, in case she needs to flee.

‘You won’t mind if my father’s not there, will you? My sisters might be, but—’

‘Don’t you know?’

‘Why would I? One of them’s married, children, everything. Only Lucy lives with us. I just meant that maybe you were expecting my dad to be there. Because you, people, seem . . .’

‘I don’t mind.’

‘Good girl,’ he says and, with a soulful expression, tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. They have stopped at a tiny station. She keeps her eyes on two big black birds, crows or ravens or rooks, near the train track, which are fighting over a stone. One wins the battle; it flies towards them with the stone in its beak, over ridges of what Dr Tree calls ‘good Dorset clay’ and is almost above the train when a sound outside startles it. The stone falls to the ground, so close to her window that she can see it if she cranes her neck, which she does because one day she might regret not having looked. It is not in fact a pebble but something small, furry, bloody: a baby rabbit or mouse, or something worse. She looks away quickly, appalled to find she wants to cry.

Guy is telling a story about some boys pushing a master’s Vauxhall Astra into Divinity Hall. She is horribly nervous. As the rackety little train passes through Blandford Forum towards Shaftesbury, she witnesses one of those special effects for which the English countryside is famed. The raindrops racing down the glass suddenly slow. Sheets of gold pour on a distant field; the clouds tear open and the entire carriage is bright with winter sunlight. It must be significant. The train whispers ‘Alexander Viney’ with every rattle of the wheels. Are they wheels? She thinks of all the things she has forgotten to bring: perfume; sanitary equipment; a spare book; a rape alarm; a copy of her most impressive English essay, in case Mr Viney is interested. ‘Be a good girl,’ she imagines her grandmother saying. The carriage door squeaks: Viney. Viney. Alexander Viney. I, thinks Marina, am not a good girl. I am ready for love. Ready for sex. Dear God, let it start.

The Hungarian Bazaar is like being consumed by loving cannibals. Wherever she turns, old women ask her, ‘So, no more children?’ and shake their heads pityingly, or squeeze her upper arm or pat her bottom; ‘Hodge vodge?’ they ask,
hogy vagy
, ‘How are you?’ and she smiles and nods as if these are merely rhetorical questions. People keep giving her paper plates of veal, and she has to remember to thank them in Hungarian, ‘Kusenem saipen,’
köszönöm szépen
. Her pocket feels transparent, she may be sick. She has to tell Rozsi about Peter’s letter but here, in public, is not the right time. I’ll do it tonight – that would be kinder, thinks Laura, looking up to see Alistair and Mitzi Sudgeon pushing through the swinging doors.

She reaches behind herself for support and finds her hand closing on a bag of paprika, squashy as a tiny corpse. Her brain is still struggling with the idea of Peter Farkas but her eyes follow the man she sort of loves. Or, rather, they follow his wife. Like a rabbit fascinated by a circling hawk, Laura gazes upon her nemesis.

Mitzi Sudgeon is pale, like something found in a cleft in a Carpathian mountainside. Her hair is dyed red; she wears lipstick but otherwise she looks fragile, naturally thin: a woman too busy doing good deeds to eat. She smokes stylishly. She has virtuous breasts. Not pretty, exactly, but beautiful, powerfully attractive both to elderly maternal Hungarians and to men, of every age. She looks like a tiny diplomat at an enemy’s wedding.

Alistair, with the methodical humourlessness she tries to find touching, has confided about their marriage: the union brokered by his first employers, kindly Dr and Dr Országh-Nagy, Mitzi’s guardians (or were they kindly?), the dietary control and screaming rages, the many faults she finds with him. However, Laura’s rival has not only beautiful eyes and a waist but also the blessing of the holy Catholic church, which Alistair, despite not being himself a Catholic, finds unbreakable. Not that Laura wants to marry him. She just wants to be married.

Never mind, she thinks, eyeing them from behind the leather goods like a chicken with a fox. She will buy something for Marina, even though she can’t afford to. She swallows hard but there is dust in her throat, or ash, or sorrow, and she cannot be rid of it.

Almost an hour passes. Laura takes a sip of hot coffee and somehow misses her mouth, dabs her breast with a napkin and spreads the stain, spills icing sugar from a little walnut pastry on to the brown patch and, hideously soiled and besprinkled, is turning to go to the toilets when she crashes full length into Mitzi Sudgeon, who is bearing teacups on a silver tray. Everything falls to the floor including, after a hesitation, Mitzi.

‘
Jesus Maria!
’

‘Oh God, I’m so sorry,’ says Laura. ‘Let me—’

The hall stills. Down on the parquet, Mitzi feels her ankle gingerly. Alistair, her medically trained lawful husband, kneels in slow motion. His eyes are on Laura’s; they seem to press against her with anger, or ardour, or a plea for understanding. Despite their stolen time together, she does not know him well enough to be sure.

‘It is . . . it is,’ says Mitzi, as if she is trying to be reassuring but has no words. Her accent is improbable even by Hungarian standards. ‘I move, I hope.’

‘God, I’m so sorry,’ says Laura again. ‘I’m so stupid. I—’

‘No, not stupid,’ says Mitzi. ‘But you are so much bigger than me. And . . . oh!’

Alistair, kneeling, his neat hands on her skin, has found a sore place on her ballet dancer’s blue-veined instep. Laura looks down at his balding head. Breathing is strangely difficult. She watches his fingers creeping up the thin white calf of his wife.

‘Can you walk?’ he says to her.

‘I . . . I
sink
so,’ she says. Gently, professionally, he puts one of her arms over his shoulders and helps her to rise. There is murmuring all around them, mercifully not in English.

‘I’m . . . this is awful,’ Laura says.

‘Please,’ says Mitzi Sudgeon. Laura steps aside to let them by. As Alistair passes, her spirits seem to fall slowly through her chest and onto the parquet. She kneels to gather up the broken teacups and, in a broken voice, Mitzi says, ‘My bag.’

‘Let me,’ says Laura, but Mitzi bends down, still supported by Alistair. She leans towards Laura.

‘Do not touch,’ she hisses. And then they are gone.

11

In the country Guy makes more sense. She sees the fields through which he will have gambolled, the cows whose milk, presumably, nourished all those big white teeth.

West Knoyle is a disappointingly ordinary station, ringed with ratty garden sheds: blue sky, the sadness of naked trees. He strides across the tarmac towards an estate car, oppressively cheery in his football jumper. Anyone could be here to meet them. Marina’s family do not know where she is.

She grasps her bags as if they contain important medical supplies and follows.

The car is old and filthy and apparently partly wooden, its back windows edged with moss. The passenger seat, comprehensively ripped, contains a box of jam-jars; beside it, one finger on the steering wheel, sits a woman with longish blondish hair, smiling, thin, good-looking. She is wearing muddy grey cords and a moth-holed jumper. Wow, thinks Marina: staff.

‘My mother,’ says Guy, and pats her shoulder.

‘So, Marina.’ Mrs Viney’s greeny-grey eyes meet hers in the rear-view mirror as she reverses masterfully towards the station barrier, parking voucher between her teeth. ‘What a treat,’ she says in her Radio Four voice, ‘to meet you at last.’

‘Oh!’ says Marina, blushing. Shyness seems to light her from within; her movements are clownishly magnified. ‘You’re welcome.’

Guy ruffles her hair. ‘Isn’t she sweet?’

As polite as she tries to be, Mrs Viney is even politer. ‘Awfully selfish of us,’ she says, ‘to drag you all this way to see us,’ and she praises Marina for bringing such good weather. ‘We’re terribly dull, I’m afraid,’ she says. ‘I hope we’ll be worth your while.’

But when Marina tries to be gracious back, it sounds ridiculous. Mrs Viney is not wearing earrings; thank God that Marina has left Zsuzsi’s old clip-on garnet pendants in her toilet bag, but what else has she got wrong? If only she could see if Mrs Viney is wearing a watch; she has a feeling that she won’t be, and silently undoes her own. Guy does a rich belch, which makes her blush, but Mrs Viney only says, ‘Guyie, must you?’ and Marina turns her face to the window to conceal her shock. All her best items, her new green toothbrush, the Liberty shower cap from Mrs Dobos, are squashed into a carrier bag between her legs. She squeezes it between unrace-horsey ankles and wonders if it looks overstuffed. Guy hasn’t mentioned whether or not she is expected to stay the night.

Guy is no use. He has hot chocolate on his chin. He won’t stop teasing her about the red-and-yellow station tulips she brought his mother, currently banging their heads against her knee as he gestures and winks and she furiously shakes her head at him to shut up. Now he is describing the latest escapades of Henry and Benno and Nick and Giles Yeo, whom his mother seems to know, while Marina tries to flatten her hair back down and regain the art of conversation.

The car smells of disintegrating leather and apple stalks and dead leaves. ‘Are you,’ she asks Mrs Viney politely, ‘a plantswoman?’ and Guy laughs so much he does another burp. Boys do this at school but she is appalled for them; if anyone heard her do that she could never look at them again. Why is she even here? In a stranger’s car, being driven deeper and deeper into the countryside, with no coat on. She grips the handles of her carrier bag with sweating hands and—

‘Oh.’

‘What?’

‘Nothing,’ says Marina, sensing for the first time the scale of the test which awaits her.

‘Silly girl, tell me.’

‘Just . . . that . . . there’s a dead bird on the floor.’

There is a little silence like a sucked sweet. ‘Is there?’ says Mrs Viney. ‘What kind?’

‘Chump,’ says Guy. ‘It’s just a hawk moth. You made it sound like a, a chaffinch had flown in, or something. A blue tit! Ha.’

She turns her burning face to the glass. They drive past violently trimmed twiggy hedgerow, a trout farm and something called an Honesty Box from which Mrs Viney buys a pot of brown jam. She is telling Guy about the nephew of a Mrs Kershaw, ‘You know, the Cluney char,’ dead in a corn silo.

‘Oh, God, how awful,’ says Marina.

‘Well, he was twenty-six.’

She keeps having a powerful urge to apologize. Sitting behind the thin shoulders and glossy hair of Mrs Viney, she feels sick and starving simultaneously. What if at dinner they expect forfeits or charades, or a recitation of Noël Coward? Mrs Viney is lovely, for a mother: fragile, but you can imagine her riding to hounds. Her mothy green jumper, which must be cashmere, is torn at the shoulder. Poor woman, thinks Marina kindly, as Guy, mid-anecdote, squeezes her knee a little too hard and his mother laughs. Marina directs a short but, she hopes, powerful prayer to the back of Mrs Viney’s neck: oh God, she thinks. Let me be you. Let—

The car shudders dramatically.

‘God!’ she says. ‘Is it a, a puncture?’

‘Cattle-grid, thickster,’ Guy says.

‘I
know
,’ she whispers crossly. ‘Shh.’

Then the car slows. The Viney house (never ‘home’) has a short drive, a tall hedge, and a messy half-tarpaulined pile of logs, broken flowerpots, petrol containers, farm machinery. Mrs Viney swoops into the space beside it. As Marina climbs out of the car, she accidentally gives a little grunt of disappointment. The house is – well, modern: yellow Lego bricks with ruched blinds and pointy shrubs and a wishing well. ‘Oh, lovely,’ she says, projecting well in case Mr Viney is waiting to greet them. Besides, she tells herself, it must be stylish, just not in a way she yet understands. ‘What a sweet bird bath!’

‘Darling,’ says Mrs Viney, crunching across the gravel, ‘that’s Barker’s, the neighbour. We’re over here.’

She is heading for a gap in an old wall Marina had not even noticed, green where the guttering has leaked. Beyond her lies another house entirely.

‘God,’ says Guy. ‘You’re not serious? You thought . . . ha! That’s brilliant.’

It feels as if her skin is cracking. ‘I didn’t mean that one,’ she says with dignity. ‘I was joking.’

‘Hilarious,’ he says.

They approach the real house around its side. Marina’s eyes are stinging so she registers only height, grassy leagues or hectares stretching into the distance, mist and terraces and trees. The house seems infinite, like part of a school, except that Combe is a mess, Gothically old and new and faux-old, and this is sand-coloured, beautifully regular, at least three storeys high with balconies and a castellated roof, like something from a postcard. As they approach, there is a thunderous barking, as though the hounds of hell are loose. Like a duckling, Marina follows Mrs Viney through a thicket of mackintoshes (never say ‘raincoat’), outdoor garments and sporting goods. It is no warmer than outside. The air is faintly scented with rubber.