Almost English (20 page)

He is smiling at them all, but Mrs Viney stops explaining. ‘Bread, darling?’ she says and he takes a big piece and turns away. Embarrassment grows, like a forest fire; my God, thinks Marina, are they getting divorced? For some reason, possibly loyalty, she can’t quite look at him; she gazes instead at the dark panelling of the Oak, its engraved glass, its—

Mrs Dobos.

Mrs Dobos is sitting by the big palm tree in the middle of the room. Although she is at an angle to Marina, her granddaughter, Natalya, is not. Marina’s mouth goes dry. Mrs Dobos is eating; could she possibly have spotted Marina without turning right round? Maybe not. However, although they are far away, across three tables and a portable wine stand, there is something about the set of Natalya’s evil face which suggests that she has seen her.

It is impossible to move. She thinks: I might faint. Another girl, less sturdy, certainly would, but instead she sits here, solid, graceless, blushing like a pig.

‘I . . . excuse me,’ she says.

She sits in the toilet stall, not daring to urinate in case Mrs Viney comes by to ask her softly, urgently, if she is all right. But Mrs Viney does not appear. When eventually Marina emerges, it is Mr Viney who stands in the corridor, waiting.

‘Hello,’ he says.

Only an idiot would start crying at this, but it is as if a wave has roared up her body and into her head; she can’t help it. He steers her past the telephone booth to the far end of the corridor, where it is darker and more quiet. ‘What is it, silly girl?’ he asks, but kindly, paternally, and her tears come faster and freer like rain, until her earlobes, even her cuffs, are soaked. He passes her a handkerchief.

‘Keep it,’ he says. ‘Now, are you going to tell me what’s wrong?’

His hands are on her shoulders. ‘Look at me,’ he says but, red and wet like this, how could she explain? She can just see the flat wide fingernail, the muscle at the base of his thumb, the hair on the lower section of each finger and the back of his hand. The hand moves up to lift her chin. ‘I know,’ he says.

She looks into his eyes: such a surprising blue, such dark lower lashes. The pores and bristles of his skin are like a secret between them.

‘Enough crying,’ he says. His fingers are cool, near her lips. ‘I know, it’s difficult. It is.’

‘What is?’

‘Teenage life. Life, generally. Isn’t it? Not at all as it’s cracked up to be.’

‘Exactly! And I don’t know . . . oh, all of it. Were you like that when you were a boy?’

‘No.’

‘No one understands . . . don’t laugh.’

‘I’m not. Truly. I think you’re very . . . affecting.’

‘I know that everyone says calm down, don’t care about things like, oh, Cambridge, and love, and stuff, but I can’t not. I want everything too much.’

‘I do know,’ he says. ‘Not many would, but I do.’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I can see that.’ Why does she say this? It is Mrs Viney who understands, but she wants to be nice.

‘I’ve been giving you some thought,’ he says.

‘Honestly?’

‘And you’re obviously bright, for a Combe girl.’

‘Do you think? Oh thank you, that’s so—’

‘Don’t interrupt. Which made me wonder why on earth you’re doing those drab subjects. Eh? Why?’

‘Sorry? Oh, you mean not history.’

‘Not-history, precisely. A little life of lab technicians and glands and researching follicles: is that what you want?’

‘I, I suppose not.’

‘Of course not. Whereas history—’

‘I honestly did want to do history,’ she says. ‘Don’t you remember, I said?’

‘No.’

‘Well, I did, but my family wanted something, you know. Useful. I mean, oh God—’

‘I see.’

‘Well, and my best friend, Ursula, her whole family, too, think the Arts are a waste of, I mean, not practical. I only just got them to agree to English. And, well, I suppose—’

‘What?’

‘I, I didn’t think I was clever enough.’

‘Well, enough is relat—’

‘No, I mean it. To do it at university, I thought you had to be brilliant. Definitely at Cambridge, anyway.’

‘Now you’re being absurd.’

‘No, it’s true. To get on in science you just have to work hard enough to learn everything, stuff it all into your head, although that’s obviously . . . I’m terrified, actually. But history and English are completely different. Only boys try for history from here, and you should see them: they’re so confident. That they’re clever enough.’

‘I thought everyone here’s a thicko.’

This reveals what he really thinks of her. Her sinuses tighten, ready for more tears. ‘You . . . you don’t think Guy is, though,’ she says. ‘You didn’t mean it last night, when you said—’

‘Oh,’ says his father vaguely. ‘He isn’t the sharpest knife in the block. That’s why they have you lot, bright girls to up the A-level results, the league tables. Don’t look so staggered. It’s true.’ But before she can probe this dazzling concept further, discover exactly which end of the thicko/bright continuum she inhabits, he says disappointingly, ‘You’re quite simply wrong. Nothing to do with brilliance – of course you can do history if you want.’

‘How?’

‘What are you, a what d’you call it, Lower? Isn’t that what Guy—?’

‘No, he’s a Fiver,’ she says, ashamed for them both. ‘The, the year below.’

‘Well, still plenty of time to change. Easy. Just tell them, and then work like a demon to catch up.’

‘Really?’

‘Really.’

It is strangely difficult to stop looking into his eyes. Her chest feels tender, between warmth and pain. She lifts up her face to tell him so and he kisses her, gently, almost as a father might, then leads her back into the restaurant.

19

At twelve minutes to seven, Laura arrives at the Hercules off the New Kent Road. It is, as she expected, a grotty old-man’s pub, which is good; he’s not even bothering to make an effort, other than to ensure they are miles from anyone who could possibly recognize him. And, knowing Peter, he has probably already left. She is feeling sick: anger, obviously. I won’t even talk, she decides. I’ll just listen to him writhing and squirming and justifying himself, and then I’ll go.

At a table near the bar sits a man. He is tall, like Peter, broad, like Peter, but sadder, thinner faced, the paunch disappeared, and with all that dark thick hair replaced by half an inch of faded bristle. They do not touch. He does not smile. The past flows grey and fetid between them. ‘Hey,’ he says. ‘It’s you.’

‘It is inconceivable,’ says Rozsi, at home in Westminster Court, ‘that Marina will not have seen sense. That silly school lunch; she’ll have abandoned the very idea the moment she put the phone down. All this trying to be independent. Besides, she loves Mrs Dobos and little Natalya. Shall we telephone and ask how it went?’

‘Wholly unnecessary,’ says Ildi, listening to Jacqueline du Pré with her eyes shut.

‘Of course we should ring her,’ says Zsuzsi. ‘All sorts of excitements must be happening at that wonderful school, and we should be the first to know. She is absurdly old for such things, but there we go. Oh, how I envy her: that first flush of romance, the kisses under the cherry trees . . . do you remember, Rozsi, when I crept out of the ski lodge to meet Kís Istvan by the bridge and his—’

‘Enough,’ says Rozsi, switching from Hungarian into English.

Kisses can grow. They spread over your skin like lichen while, inside, you change too. You can’t stop thinking: what did it mean?

‘And another thing—’

Laura is getting into her stride. Peter has bought her red wine, then water, then a bigger glass of wine, and whenever self-pity threatens to make her cry, which would give him satisfaction, the big baby, the pretend artist, she lifts up her chin and takes a fierce gulp, and the tears recede.

She is doing so well. It is not difficult, given the brief scope of their marriage, from the banqueting suite of the Bayswater Royal Excelsior Hotel to its bitter end west of the Westway, to furnish him with details of his husbandly failings. The aftermath is an even richer source: financial indignity, gossip, guilt, uncertainty, primal infant pain. She has rehearsed and polished her hoard of resentments; she has taken them out to show him so many times in her head and, in these scenarios, his response is always either abject grovelling, or continued uselessness, both of which make her feel much better.

But the real Peter does neither. It is maddening. He just keeps saying, ‘I’m sorry,’ which isn’t nearly enough. Unlike the one she used to know, he neither drinks so much that he starts shouting and crashing into bar stools, nor sidles off, hands in his pockets, with one of his unsanitary friends. He still dresses like an idiot in huge boots, pretentiously scruffy work clothes: an artisan hero of the Spanish Civil War. But these days they are older, shabbier. His nails are clean.

What’s more, he is calm. He nods, he grimaces, as if they are friends – ha! – and he is just sympathizing about another man’s crimes. He wants more details of Marina’s character, his mother’s health, than he deserves; it shouldn’t be so easy to find out but he almost seems to want to feel as bad as possible. Fine: let him. She piles on evidence of his failings: the day when Marina stopped inventing excursions with him for her primary school weekend diary; his mother’s silent maintenance of her photographic shrine. The fact that he used to laugh at his family’s idiosyncrasies, and then just abandoned her to them.

And what does he have to say for himself? That he wanted to write, or send messages, but was afraid to. It was complicated. He didn’t know what to do, and the longer he left it the harder it became. So bravely he did . . . nothing.

Yes, she admits when she has recovered from this outrage, they are all reasonably well, in the circumstances. Yes, they manage. No, hardly anything has happened in the last thirteen years, only the premature end of Laura’s teaching career; the temporary-permanent move to his mother’s flat; the deaths of his fond aunts, poor Kitti in Detroit and Franci in Edmonton; the reign of Mrs Dobos; the transformation of their daughter – ‘sorry,’ Laura corrects herself, ‘
my
daughter’ – into a public schoolgirl.

How unsettling, now that his hair is so short, to be able to see his big handsome skull, his vulnerable temples. She wants to wound them. ‘There’s administration when someone buggers off, you know,’ she points out. ‘Letters from your bank. Not bills, obviously, because you never did those. But having to tell them over and over again that I had no . . . idea where . . . What? Where are you going?’

He is gathering his matches, his pouch of ‘baccy’, his cigarette papers with, as usual, half a cover. ‘Relax,’ he says.

‘How can you . . . Right, that’s it.’

‘Drinking-up time,’ he says. ‘Didn’t you notice?’

‘But . . .’ So many nights preparing speeches; she has only just begun. Can she ask him to meet again for further shouting? ‘I haven’t . . . I need . . .’

‘I wasn’t dumping the whole thing on you,’ he says. ‘I mean, it’s not your job to tell the others. I’m going to do it.’

‘Well. Ha. You shouldn’t have landed me in it then, should you? I’ve
lied
to them because of you.’

‘OK. But.’

‘But what?’

‘Writing seemed better than doing nothing. A first step. You can’t imagine what it’s like to hate yourself for so long, you know?’

Idiot. She won’t lie for him again. Anyway, shouldn’t he first answer the question of what he has been doing, and where, and how often? I have, she thinks, a right to know. Besides, there has not yet been a moment to mention Alistair Sudgeon, which is important. Peter should know that his deserted wife is in demand.

‘Let’s go,’ he says.

An old man with perilously fastened trousers chooses this moment to begin shuffling into the Hercules. Laura and Peter have just entered the vestibule and so they have to stand aside to let him, slowly, pass. The area between front door and inner door is tiny, a box of glossy maroon anaglypta; she is trapped just behind Peter, close enough to feel his heat. Why does he never wear a jacket? His creased grey shirt, the back three inches from Laura’s eye line, is unbearably irritating: his untied bootlace, his grubby trousers, yet he doesn’t look as bad as he deserves. How dare his cells have renewed themselves while she suffered? And Rozsi, and Marina: whatever you say about missing them, she thinks, you chose to leave.

Her heart is beating too quickly, right through her body, as if at any moment it will reach the point when it shatters. His hormones or endorphins, that familiar Peter smell, are reactivating poisonous spores, undisturbed for all these years.

Oh God, she thinks. Don’t let it all start again.

Then the cold air hits her face. No. Absolutely sodding not. It’s just sweat and dirt; he probably exudes it on purpose. And it is possible that, for the first time in years, she is faintly drunk. They walk side by side past shuttered greasy spoons and flower stalls. He is properly tall, unlike her shrunken in-laws, or neat Alistair Sudgeon. He is still the only man who makes her feel normal, not a giraffe. Something floats between them: the ghost of congress past.

Do not turn. He does not deserve to be looked at. She starts to walk more quickly, furiously, to make him hurry, but he hardly lengthens his army-surplus stride, and she remembers being with him in a crowd – was it New Year’s Eve? God, 1971 – surrounded by everyone they knew, and he had whispered in her ear something she has never forgotten: that the only thing they all had in common was sex. ‘We’ve all done it,’ he said. ‘We all know.’ And he was right; this embarrassing hilarious knowledge still amazes her: the sticky secrets of the night.

Stop it. How many New Years did he spend with you?

‘So,’ he says. ‘They really are all all right?’

‘I told you. Why are you off alcohol?’ she asks.

‘Packed it in.’

‘No. Honestly? Just like that?’

‘It was screwing me up,’ he says mildly.

‘I
know.
Christ, Pete, anyone would think . . . I was there. Not just you, either. I—’

‘Well, I have now’

‘God. I mean good. You do . . . you look different.’