Almost English

by Charlotte Mendelson

  But, she imagines saying to Marina, to Rozsi, to Miss Tyce at Ealing, is it possible that we have made a mistake?

  ‘Come home with me tomorrow,’ says Guy.

  They have been getting off against the backdrop for last year’s As You Like It. As always, combining kissing with breathing is a challenge, especially when her legs are shaking. Sexual activity is punishable by immediate expulsion, and this is fairly sexual, isn’t it? Yesterday she heard a story about a girl who had very drunk sex with a boy from another school at a party, and then the boy told his head, who told Dr Tree, and the Upper girl was expelled, though not the boy. And she is scared of the damp dark down here. And what if she suddenly begins to menstruate? Her cheeks are still hot; on the way here she had passed Thomas ‘Tom’ Thomson performing one of his many head-boy duties, commanding two Upper girls to kneel on the ground before him to have their skirt lengths checked. Marina had slowed; she still isn’t used to it. ‘I’m not,’ Tom Thomson had said, gesturing to the older girls to stand, ‘going to check you,’ and they all laughed, Marina too. What choice did she have?

  ‘Hey, mon, chill,’ says Guy, who has been listening to a lot of Bob Marley. He thinks she is nervous about kissing in general, that she is innocent in all things. This is because of an awkward misunderstanding last time they were down here: her fault.

  ‘Have you had any, you know?’ he had asked her.

  ‘What?’ she said, her mind moving like lightning but pretending it wasn’t, to buy herself time.

  ‘Thoughts. About sex. Sexual. Fantasies. I mean, before me.’

  ‘Um.’

  ‘Obviously not wanking,’ he said chivalrously. ‘Not that. But general, like, thoughts?’

  What could she say? He would be disgusted, and disappointed. So she said ‘No!’ and now he clearly thinks his job is to instruct her.

  It is also important that he does not know of an incident in her past: last year, at the cinema at Notting Hill Gate. A middle-aged man in a Barbour with dark hair, a respectable man, was sitting beside her; she did not notice him at first. She was with Urs and Kate Frere; they were watching a French film about sorrow. Then she felt something, once, twice: the lightest possible tickling at her breast.

  She glanced down. The man’s arms were crossed. His fingers had accidentally brushed against her.

  ‘Sorry,’ she whispered, edging away. It happened again. She moved again. The third time, it hit her like a blow to the head: he’s doing it on purpose.

  She was too ashamed to move. The fourth time she felt him, she said to Urs, ‘I need the loo.’ When she came back she kept her head down, found another seat, never said a word, or forgot the sight of his fingers, his thick gold wedding ring. Her right breast has always been darker and guiltier because of it. She is still afraid of meeting the man on the street.

  Guy stops kissing her. ‘Marina?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Come to my house.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why? To visit, you spack. Oh, no, don’t go all weird. I’ve got to go anyway, and you could too. Keep me company on the way, meet my family. I don’t mind.’

  She rubs her finger along the edge of the Forest of Arden, too insulted to look at him, too stupid to come up with a Dorothy Parker response. ‘I don’t think—’

  ‘Don’t sulk. Honestly. They’re cool, my parents,’ he says.

  ‘I’m not sulking. I just can’t,’ she says. The truth is that this weekend she has no plans at all. This is a good thing, she has been telling herself; she can make friends. Have fun. But she knows that she will be spending her Saturday evening in West Street, drinking lo-cal minty chocolate or milky tea which she does not dare refuse, and pretending to be in love with Mickey Rourke.

  ‘Why can’t you?’ he says, jiggling his finger hard in his ear as if releasing pressure. ‘Because of your grandparents?’

  ‘Grandmother. Well—’

  ‘Why’s it up to her?’

  Her face feels frozen. She is trapped; she wants to bite her way out. She thinks: he’s going to start telling everyone about them, but she only says, ‘I’ve got to go.’

  ‘Anyway, your lot are all going to a party or something, aren’t they? You said. So they don’t even need to know. Everyone goes to each other’s houses all the time. You know, discretionary exeats.’

  ‘I, I’ve never even heard—’

  ‘Just ask Pa Daventry.’

  ‘No,’ Marina says. ‘I can’t do that.’ Her housemaster, Ronald Daventry, husband of Jonquil, father of twins, deputy senior master, is very popular. ‘Oh, Davs,’ the boys say at any mention of him, ‘what a guy.’ But he doesn’t like Marina. She feels grubbily, disgustingly female in his presence. He does speak to girls, as the boys like to point out, but only the pretty, chirpy ones; never Marina. He presides over assemblies as if they are a private joke and when he has parties for the rowing squads, girls are not invited. ‘He’ll definitely say no.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. Everyone does it. Anyway, honestly, you’d like it there. Hang out with my sister. You can meet my father too.’

  She isn’t really listening. How could he have said she was sulking?

  ‘Hello? He . . . people usually want to meet him. He might actually quite like you.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ She is imagining his mother and father as younger too: short, playful, silly, unlike hers.

  ‘Yes. You don’t know, do you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I knew it. Fantastic. So you’re not—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’s Alexander Viney.’

  8

  Saturday, 28 January

  ‘So,’ says Laura’s mother-in-law at breakfast, spooning compote from its Maxwell House jar. ‘You go with Ildi, or don’t you vant to come with me?’

  ‘She does not listen,’ Zsuzsi says. Does she usually wear this much eyeshadow? ‘Ildi, dar-link, you make this with, what-is, birsalma, kvince – or apple only?’

  ‘Igen, kvince,’ says Ildi. ‘You vont von-illó too, I buy it next veek. The taste is ursh-sehóshernleehótótlón, nem?’

  Laura blinks. She pretends to be thinking. She is no genius; her mind, if anything, seems to move more slowly than other people’s. Some time after they have spotted a problem and skirted around it, slowly into disaster she falls. But the truth is that this morning she feels particularly unalert, thanks to a dream in which she gave birth to triplets unaided. She had been hoping to get through the morning without anyone talking to her at all.

  ‘Laura.’

  ‘I . . .’

  Rozsi’s eyebrows lift. Something flashes below the surface, a volcano under the sea.

  ‘ Tair-ible,’ Zsuzsi observes, but Rozsi says nothing. She has always been polite, except for times when Laura deserved it, like when she referred disrespectfully to Mrs Dobos’s late husband Elmer, or compared Zsuzsi to the newsagent’s beautiful Afghan hound. That was years ago; Peter had to apologize for her, and even so Rozsi would not speak to her for five days. ‘We are talking with Ildi for many minutes,’ she says stiffly. ‘Don’t be funny.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Laura says. ‘But what?’

  ‘The Hungarian Bazaar.’

  Laura mouth falls open. ‘Oh God,’ she says. ‘It’s not today?’

  ‘Igen, igen, of course it is. The – what is it, huszonnyolc, tventy-eight. What for you think Ildi bakes beigli?’

  ‘I . . . I hadn’t . . .’

  ‘We leave twenty minutes to help with set-up,’ Rozsi says, rolling up her napkin. ‘You change this jersey.’

  There will be Mitzi Sudgeon and no Marina. After last year’s Bazaar, a three-hour frenzy of personal comments and awkward questions, she promised herself that she would never go again. Who would not, in such circumstances, dream of sudden death? What a relief it would be; she cannot remember the arguments against it. Nevertheless, because she lacks the courage, she tries another way out. ‘It’s silly, but the funny thing is that today—’


  ‘Of course you come. Mrs Dobos waits for us.’

  ‘I, I thought it was next week. In fact. It’s just—’ Even I, thinks Laura, must have become a bit tougher over the years. I must have absorbed something. I will just refuse.

  They cannot make me do it, she thinks, reaching for her post.

  They make her do it.

  What choice does she have? She gets ready. Or rather, while the others listen to the news she chooses her least awful skirt from the sideboard and creeps through Marina’s room to look in her wardrobe mirror, breathing her smell but being careful not to pry. She tries to imagine herself presentable from the point of view of Alistair, who is in his own neat way an attractive man. She squints into the mirror; she closes one eye. From the neck down this is impossible. From the neck up, through a shivering blur of eyelash, she can almost believe that her hair is less mouse and her cheeks are less pink; that the loveliness of her dark browy daughter did not pour directly through Marina’s father’s side, but gained something hazier, gentler, from her. This is plainly untrue but, to support it, she begins to brush her teeth, wash her face, apply her almost invisible lipstick, bought for adultery, with a shaking hand. She does not meet her eye again.

  By the time Laura has emerged the others are all waiting by the flat door. Zsuzsi looks at her outfit, bobbly, fraying, and shakes her head.

  ‘Vot-apity you do not want I lend you blooze,’ she says, complacently stroking her own cuff, the chocolate-brown silk with a gold stirrup motif bought in Paris when she was married, before Laura was born. Her gilt earrings are the size of plums.

  ‘Thank you,’ says Laura. ‘Oh, Rozsi, no, let me take that box.’

  Usually, when Laura, like a minor husband, tries to save her mother-in-law from hobbling with shopping bags, she says, ‘Silly girl. Look at these legs, I live for ever,’ and Laura gives a smile like cracking mud.

  This morning, Rozsi lets Laura take the box.

  Ildi locks the door. Zsuzsi checks her lipstick in the glossy lift wall. Laura remembers that Rozsi told her to give her brown coat to Oxfam. She should probably go shopping for a new one, except that she can’t afford it and, if she could, she ought to buy something for Marina instead. Zsuzsi, naturally, is in fur, at least on her collar: black, silken, inches thick – ocelot, or man. From time to time she turns her head and her huge eyes, her pretty little nose, her profile are beautiful, like an aged doll. Rozsi is wearing her favourite suit, black bouclé, with a green and gold silk square. She looks like a Soviet minister engaging in leisure, but it agrees with her; she has an air almost of amusement, as if she expects good sport today. Even Ildi has a brooch pinned to her lapel: a nest of robins in enamel, one of the innumerable love tokens Zsuzsi receives from Gyorgy, a ‘nice boy’ whose costume jewellery was once reputedly worn by Princess Grace of Monaco. Ildi’s bright white hair is fluffy with excitement.

  ‘I wonder,’ she confides in Laura, ‘the walnut beigli, I should have make more? The seed is good but—’

  ‘They’re both delicious,’ says Laura, as they approach Porchester Baths. They are walking slowly to keep company with Rozsi and her hip. This is a sad development. Only two years ago she could walk into Soho more quickly than it took by bus.

  ‘You mean, er, the diós?’

  ‘Vell done! Vair-ygood! You are nearly right, poppy-seed is mákos. Now tell me, what do you think?’

  I think, thinks Laura, that I am losing my grip. My only child wants to be at boarding school and not with me, and Alistair will be at the Bazaar with that bloody wife, and if I have to suck up to Mrs Dobos again, or Perlmutter Sári, or Pelzer Fanni with her terrible wart, I will go mad.

  ‘I’m sure everything will be fine,’ she says, putting the box down so that Rozsi can catch up and feeling, as she does so, the crackle of paper in her pocket: an envelope, the one which arrived yesterday. Like an innocent passer-by touching a case containing a bomb, she tears it open.

  The letter is from her husband, whom she had hoped was dead.

  9

  ‘Who’s Alexander Viney?’ asks Marina.

  She has rung Ursula from the pay phone. Behind her the girls of West Street prepare for Saturday morning school, crashing up and down the stairs overhead in search of Feminax, hair-dryers, prep books covered in Laura Ashley wallpaper and synchronized-swimming nose clips.

  What she needs is a dose of home, or rather Urs’s home: the intellectual certainty, the unembarrassed family self-belief, which Marina loved and envied and hated her for. But Ursula is prickly on the phone. She thinks Marina abandoned their life together for Combe, but has conveniently forgotten the little put-downs, the teasing about Marina’s clumsiness and forgetfulness and persistent losing of every important item. She keeps reminding her of the highlights of their youth: the notes in Latin; the minor secrets revealed. ‘Your made-up friends’ is what she calls everyone Marina has mentioned from Combe. ‘They don’t know you like we do.’

  Ursula doesn’t know her either. Marina, she thinks, is just like her: loyal, dutiful, devoted, sure. You can talk and talk for seven years: lessons, journeys in the third carriage of the District Line train, hours of telephoning, twenty-page letters. You can pledge eternal best friendship. Yet that doesn’t mean they understand your other world, when you’re not together, at dinner with your mother and three old women, in bed at night.

  How Marina misses her. So she has phoned, and been fondly interrogated by Mr and Mrs P, and updated Ursula on her thoughts, if not feelings, regarding the Embryo, as Urs insists on calling Guy, and enquired about Ursula’s plans for Mr Burnett from Ealing Boys’, once glimpsed at a science quiz. Then Marina makes herself ask about Guy’s father.

  ‘You are joking, n’est-ce pas?’ says Ursula. ‘You must know who he is.’

  ‘I don’t. Is he that actor with no lips?’

  ‘You know nothing. Your memory has been razed, hasn’t it? Er, hello, Ursula, your best friend?’

  ‘Stop it. You know that’s not—’

  ‘Don’t you remember the Marrying Game?’

  ‘When we had to choose which historical figure we’d most like to kiss? And I chose Peter the Great and you said the only sane choice was Gustavus Adolph—’

  ‘No, no no. Wrong game. It was that time at Soph’s – we put the names in her Laura Ashley hat, the one with the silk scarf, not the felt. We ate strawberry ice-cream, I seem to recall.’

  ‘Oh . . .’ This was during their fortune-telling phase, when despite the boys they ‘knew’, the example of their parents, reason and rumour and evidence, they foresaw, unequivocally, long joyous marriages ahead, and trouble-free children with artistic tendencies, and pre-eminence, or at least modest glory, in whichever job they chose: conducting at the Proms, say, or running MI5. The secret sorrows of adolescence would be rewarded. ‘It’s the only way to save ourselves from . . . you know,’ one of them had said, and they all thought of their mothers, and were silent.

  ‘I got Harrison Ford,’ says Marina now.

  ‘No you didn’t. That was Cristina Koralik – we let her play. She kept asking about having sexual intercourse, you must remember. And I got that comedian, though sadly not Stephen Fry, to whom I am affianced. No, silly, you definitely had Alexander Viney.’

  Not ‘definitely’. You should say ‘absolutely’. ‘I’m not silly,’ says Marina.

  ‘Well, you did. Don’t go all quiet on me. You know. From the telly. The Making of Kings fellow. Sophie chose him, she fancied him secretly. We were having that phase of mental promiscuity, you know.’ Sixty-six map centimetres away as the crow flies, Marina blushes at the thought of how many boys, even now, feature nightly in her private bath-time orgies, as she breathes through her mouth to escape the reek of air freshener, and tears slide itchily down her temples and into her hair.

  ‘You do know,’ Ursula is insisting. ‘We thought he was brilliant in Lower Five. Miss Covs showed Our England in double hist. You must remem—’

  ‘Him? Oh my God. Seriously? I�
�d forgotten – of course, Viney, of course it’s him. Then why wasn’t he in the Combe Register ?’

  ‘Never mind that,’ says Urs. ‘You’ve prob even got his books. I have, Tudors in Love, it’s fantastic. Sophie’s definitely read one of them, although it is about eight hundred and ninety-two pages long. She could lend it. Or have you gone all cool, now you’re in love with the Embryo?’

  ‘Stop it. Wow. I hadn’t realized. We loved him.’

  ‘Yes, wow! By the way, remember that time Roz said—’

  ‘I should go,’ says Marina. ‘Sorry, but they kill you if you’re late for morning school.’

  ‘God, you and your Saturdays. Are you still in uniform? Is it ebbing your life-blood?’

  ‘You know I am, I have to.’

  ‘OK, OK. So quickly, tell me, why do you want to know about Alexander Viney? Are you a swinger?’

  So Marina explains.

  Ursula is squeaking like a guinea pig. ‘You are joking?’

  ‘No. Honestly. I thought Guy was, well, I just didn’t make the connection. He doesn’t look . . . he’s just ordinary. Not romantic at all.’

  ‘You know what this means? You could actually do it. Marry him.’

  ‘Guy? He’s in the year below.’

  ‘No, Guy Senior. The famous one. You could! That was the idea. Or at least you have to try. We plighted.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s pledged.’

  ‘We’ll ask Zoë. But you have to.’

  ‘Don’t be mad.’

  ‘You’re being mad. Look, you said the Embryo invited you. You could meet them. Just say yes.’

  ‘I can’t,’ she says, but a strange heat is growing in her chest: an emptiness, like love or hunger. She remembers Alexander Viney’s face perfectly now: oldish, but not much more than her friends’ fathers.