In Westminster Court time moves slowly. Ildi discovers decaffeinated coffee. Rozsi is invited by Mrs Dobos to see La Fille mal gardée at Sadler’s Wells and ends up paying for a taxi all the way home. However, beneath the surface a current of excitement is gaining strength. Founder’s Day is only twenty-one days away and the Farkases are making plans.
Laura tries to look interested. She longs to see Marina, of course she does, but Alistair is waiting for his answer. Mitzi keeps bringing him Thermoses of coffee and collecting him in the car after work. And, down in Chiswick, a little boat sways gently with the river, while Peter grows iller or stronger without her.
She tries to forget him, or drag her mind away, or focus on her own life, to which, arguably, she ought to be hanging on. It does not work. She resorts to torture.
Other people starve themselves or self-flagellate. Laura has London. At some point during most of her conversations with patients, they will refer to one of the many landmarks where, during her brief marriage to Peter Farkas, she was let down by him. She takes it out, this shame, inspects it, rolls it around in her mouth. She lets herself luxuriate in her own stupidity: a salutary lesson. You once fell in love with a prick; she tells herself this until it sounds like poetry. It sticks as a pop song might in other brains less at risk. Some people, the most depraved, come to love their punishment. She wallows in her humiliation and anger until she has remembered every detail of each shoddy betrayal, for which only a fool could forgive him.
Suze telephones her at work. Laura and Peter have agreed that he must stop ringing her himself, since the last time he tried the phone was answered by a suspicious-sounding Dr Sudgeon, looking for paper clips. ‘He says you must come on Thursday,’ Suze says.
‘Where?’ Laura asks wildly, imagining a wonderful party, or running away with him to Wales: reverse elopement.
‘The boat,’ says Suze witheringly. ‘My boat. Where else can he go?’
Yet, despite extensive planning and anticipation, on Thursday Laura manages to reach Stamford Brook Tube rather late. Last time she was here it was dark; there were no trees in tentative leaf, no church bells. Now the air is, for February, warmish on her face, and on the lipstick she wears inexpertly, like a scarlet letter.
In the dusky light she can see more of Eyot’s Boatyard: still creaking with danger and slimy life but marginally less frightening. Every boat she passes, whether painted like a fool’s fantasy of a gypsy caravan or army grey or assembled from bits of junk, suggests other worlds: unhappy ones, obviously, but interesting.
Only Vivian is better suited to the dark. It, he, she, seems to be on the verge of sinking, or dissolving, kept above water level by a skirt of tangled plastic bags and willow leaves. Festooned as it is with cables and bits of rope, it looks temporary, as if built by a giant toddler with the minimum of glue. Why does this upset her? Cancer doesn’t make him saintly, or more deserving. She gnaws off the last trace of lipstick and steps on the deck.
Left foot. Right. Tonight, she reminds herself, gripping the handrail, they must decide what to tell his mother; he wants her to advise him. That is why she is here. There is no reason to be excited; only a pervert would have, well, designs on a man as gravely ill as Peter.
Knock. You ridiculous woman, knock. Count, then: three, tw—
But what will she find? It is almost a fortnight since Bloomsbury Square; he might be thinner, paler. Get on with it: five, four, three . . .
When people are dying, do they clutch onto the past, or race into the future? What will Peter want?
She closes her eyes. She breathes jerkily through her nostrils: mud, weeds, rot, sewage, slime. Ten nine eight five four—
She knocks on the door.
28
‘And every-day we have a little lunch with you. You tell us where.’
‘Actually,’ says Marina, once again at the West Street pay phone, ‘I think, well, we do have lessons during Founder’s Day when we’re not actually performing. Rozsi, it is still term time. We can’t be with our family all day.’
Although the elders will never admit it, Founder’s Day week is badly timed. There are always rumours that, in line with other members of the Headmasters’ Conference, it will be moved to the end of the summer term, so that Combe mothers can be decorative in sun hats and heels, not shivering in their navy quilted gilets. However, the sixteenth of March is officially, albeit fictionally, the Founder’s birthday and, in the words of Captain Porteous, ‘Without Tradition, What is Man?’
So this year the pageantry climaxes on the Thursday, the day that the Hilary term ends. Rozsi has decreed that the Farkas/Károlyi party will go for two nights, the most they can afford given the mid-week closure of Femina; they will return to London on Thursday morning and then Laura will bring Marina home later that day, after Prize-Giving. This schedule means missing Monday night’s Freshers’ performance of The Mikado; on the bright side, they will be in time for The Merchant of Venice.
‘Don’t be funny,’ says Rozsi in Marina’s ear. ‘Of course you eat with us.’
‘The thing is—’
‘I do not hear you.’
‘The thing is, are, are you sure about coming? I don’t know how, well, interesting it will be.’
‘Why?’
Marina sighs. It’s not just the Vineys, although she hasn’t yet worked out whether to bring them all together and prove to her family how marvellous they are, or to keep them apart, for slightly baser reasons. She also has a duty to protect her loved ones. Combe is a plague pit. With every dark sad bitter-coffee night she understands more about unseen connections, the ways in which every single object, person, even thought, is either a contaminant or a protector, with her family in the middle, perpetually at risk. ‘You like London things,’ she says desperately. Recently in history she heard about ceintures, and the idea has stuck. If monks have their penances, their hair shirts and prickling belts to stave off vice, why shouldn’t she? Having a constant reminder of her own badness seemed at first intriguing, then advisable, and it’s hardly as if she’s using thorns, just a Sixties belt of Zsuzsi’s which any normal seventeen-year-old ought to be able to fit into. She pokes a finger inside for a moment’s relief. ‘Galleries,’ she says, ‘and plays and, honestly, I don’t think you’ll enjoy it. I really, I mean, I won’t be offended, you see, if you stay at ho—’
‘What a nonsense,’ Rozsi says. ‘It is lovely, What-not of Venice. We see you.’
‘Only I’m an orange seller. I don’t actually speak.’
‘Never-mind. You sit with us and run on for your little talking. Anyway, we pay the hotel already, so it is done.’
‘Oh. Were they . . . nice?’
‘Don’t be funny. Not at all. Stupid people. It does not matter. We are there. We cheer for you. Now, I bring Zsuzsi. I love you, dar-link.’
‘I, I love you too.’
You little traitor. What happens when they find out you have given up chemistry, that you will never be a doctor, that you have lied to them? The most recent parcel from home contained not only toilet soap and a Boots guide to Symptoms but also a proper doctors’ white coat, with Marina Farkas embroidered on the pocket. She can’t possibly wear it; she bundled it under her bed, with an ossified beigli and other items of shame and now when she tries to sleep she can feel it through the sheets.
The panicky feeling builds. It’s not as if she’s even good at history. In the term and a half she has missed, a great deal has happened, as Pa Jenner, who does Europe, likes to point out: the Age of Reason, for example. Victorian England is with Mrs Tree, the headmaster’s wife, who is not officially qualified so mainly reads aloud from textbooks. It is not at all like being taught by Alexander Viney. Why had she not anticipated this?
‘Von-darefool you act,’ says Zsuzsi loudly in her ear. ‘Is like me at conservatoire, I am Boris Godunov. I tell Mrs Dobos already, she wants photograph. But vot-apity we don’t stay nearer.’ Zsuzsi resents the fact that they, or at least she, has not been invi
ted to stay within the very walls of Combe itself, in a gracious guest suite, if not in the private apartments of Dr Tree. ‘Maybe, who knows, we will be lucky.’ She gives a sniff. ‘Tell me, dar-link. You do well? How are the boys?’
‘You mean—’
‘Not that tair-ible boy, Gab, Gib, Gob—’
‘Guy?’
‘Of course, but other ones. You meet them?’
‘Wel—’
‘Very good. Ildi thinks you should not see so many, but she is old-fashioned. I say, yes. Von-darefool.’ Zsuzsi sounds as if she means it. ‘So, we see them then? We will learn all about them. And now we meet the families too.’
First, there is the smell. Laura had expected a certain level of manly chaos, socks on the floor and a shortage of clean mugs, but not this insinuating mildewed reek, as if every constituent part of Vivian’s godforsaken interior, rotting wood and peeling cork tiles, leaking Calor gas, lame ugly cats, has been repeatedly soaked in river water and never allowed to dry. Silverfish are in the corners. If you look through the floorboards, which is easy to do, you see them moving.
‘Oh,’ says Peter, ‘no, that’s probably earrings, and keys and such.’ There are still traces of Rozsi under his London accent; this feels more comforting than it should. ‘Nowhere to keep anything, you know, storage. You lose things in the bilges all the sodding time.’
There is a wounded duck in a washing-up bowl by the sink, presumably drying, and laundry strung before dim portholes, to catch the sun. There is no sun. It starts to rain and the smell intensifies: yes, definitely sewage. It is very cold. And still they talk.
She tries to edge around the subject of the surviving Farkas-Károlyis, whom he has left behind. He starts crying: not undignified sobbing, or self-regarding wails. He simply closes his eyes, leans his head against the back of his chair and allows small tears to roll down his cheeks and fall discreetly on his ANC sweatshirt. He says, ‘I just don’t know how I can. I feel like a bloody murderer.’
‘Well, so bloody do I. But you have to.’
‘How? Tell me how. And Marina, God, I’m terrified of seeing her. Wouldn’t it be worse for them to find out I was alive? All that time?’
‘What, worse than you dead? Worse than that?’
He passes the test. She can see him increasingly pained at the thought of Marina; she thinks: I’ll give him that. She says, ‘I suppose with you being ill . . .’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes.’
She needs to know more about cancer. Is this boat even suitable for someone in his condition: the discomfort, the ancient mould? The cold intensifies. The lights keep flickering; it seems that he, or the fabled Jensen, has connected it up to Suze’s electricity supply, illegally, lethally. ‘What, running through the flowerbeds?’ she says, peering out of a porthole full of spiders and flies. ‘Not seriously. What about rain?’
‘It’s fine,’ he says. ‘Gaffer tape.’
She is watching something in a carrier bag floating downriver.
‘But—’
‘Bit soon to be sorting me out, don’t you think?’ he says, smiling, which could mean anything.
‘Who is bloody Jensen anyway?’ she says. ‘Do you actually know how to sail this thing?’ He looks as if he’s about to cry again. All the questions she needs to ask him, such as ‘Is this a good or a bad kind of cancer?’, or ‘How long might you have?’, or ‘Is it genetic?’, or ‘Will you let me see where they cut you?’, are unbroachable, and he keeps trying to change the subject, as if he fears her reaction, or she is not important enough to be told. It all happened last summer, even the surgery, in a place and among friends she will never know. He is here not to escape Pontypridd General but because he ‘wanted’ to ‘come back’.
‘But why? I mean, why now? Not before?’ And, when he is silent, she tells him, ‘You could have, you know,’ and he looks at her. She tells him about her job and, almost, about Alistair, and the answer she must give him. She wants to ask Peter what to do. If, thanks to her enormous reserves of patience and forgiveness, or victimhood, she is now going to be friends with her abandoning husband, as appears likely, she should be able to discuss it. She has technically only twenty-four hours in which to make up her mind.
Yet she can’t say the words. ‘What . . . will there be radiotherapy?’ she asks instead. Apparently not, which seems odd, probably wrong. Could he be dying and no one have noticed?
‘Don’t be mad,’ he says, rolling another cigarette on the sticky coffee table. ‘I’m really fine.’
‘I’m not mad,’ she says. ‘Just so worried.’
‘Laur—’
‘I know. I shouldn’t be. You don’t deserve it.’
‘Too right.’
Yet every time their conversation ought to stop, when he could take offence or she should storm out in disgust, they keep on talking. I just, she tells herself, need to find out certain things. At last, when it is completely dark and, in Westminster Court along the river, the worrying will have started because she has no life of her own and never goes out, she dares to touch on his future.
‘I’ve still got one,’ he says. ‘It’s just sort of stopped. I mean, I’m not getting iller. The doc says I’m likely to—’
‘Recover?’
He looks away. ‘Not . . . well. You know that’s not how they talk. Live.’
‘Oh. Well. Good.’ Although her throat tightens, she is not going to cry for him. Get a grip, she snaps at herself and, oddly, it works. ‘So—’
‘For, probably, a year.’
‘Oh! Oh God.’
‘No, not, you know. It’s then, like, two. Then five. You know, probability.’
But it’s like being hooded, put into a diving helmet: nothing to see or hear or even smell, only the roar of her breathing. He might still die. He might still live.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ she says. Her voice is too plaintive; it would irritate me, she thinks, if I were him. ‘What do you want me to do?’
She knows what she would say in this position: ‘Be with me.’ But he does not. ‘I don’t bloody know,’ he says.
‘Oh.’
He doesn’t respond. Dust and flies and death are settling over everything; the tide has turned. ‘Well, so what do— maybe I should . . . let you get on with it.’
‘You mean, leave?’
‘Yes.’
He is frowning, isn’t he? In the darkness it is difficult to be sure, but he doesn’t say, ‘Please, don’t,’ or ‘I need you.’ He says nothing at all.
‘Pete?’ she says.
‘I don’t want to be . . .’ he begins and she thinks she hears him swallow.
‘Do you want me to go?’
‘If you think you should,’ he says, ‘then yes. In fact, definitely, yes. Please. Go.’
29
Wednesday, 1 March
Fresher trip to Rome; Fivers community workshop: Combe Pensioners’ Friendship Circle; cross country: Dorset and Somerset Schools’ League at Dorchester College, Senior and Junior Boys, Open Girls, 2.30 p.m.; Fencing: Public Schools’ Championships, Crystal Palace (all day)
The second half of Hilary term is even worse than the first and more confusing. Perhaps it has been blighted by bad omens but, already, Marina is cast down by homesickness and worry: no time to sleep, and the gnawing of her conscience. And now she seems to be homesick for Guy’s house too. Her mind keeps sneaking back there as to a love object, towards the sunlight in the upstairs hall, the peace, and Mrs Viney, the repository of all worthwhile knowledge, if only Marina had another chance to ask her.
Rozsi would find a way. She has nerve. While this is not an option for her base and cowardly grandchild, in the dark reaches of the night Marina has started to wonder if she too, like so many heroines, will be called upon to prove herself: to show what she is made of. She will screw her courage to the sticking place, although it feels more like trying to nail jelly to a rock. When it happens, whether she is saving a small child from injury or performing an
act of political martyrdom, she will think of her forebears, who walked across borders and forged visas and stood up to famous men. She will be strong.
There might be a chance during Founder’s Day week. Yes, she thinks, trying to whip herself into confidence, that’s the answer. Less than a fortnight to go; I’ll make it happen and, before I know it, I’ll be staying at Stoker in the Easter holidays. I can find out then what Rozsi’s objection is. Were the Tudors particularly xenophobic?
But what if it really is something to do with the war?
She has now remembered several occasions when, cello practice done, vocabulary memorized, Rozsi allowed, even encouraged, her to watch history programmes. This leads her to one rather exciting conclusion: it must be personal. The only problem is timing. Mr Viney is older than his wife but, say he is as old as fifty, he can’t ever have fallen in love with Rozsi. Can he? Or – he is an attractive man – was it she who fell for him?
At night, when she is too nervy to sleep, worn out by hours of dictionary flicking and a physically demanding, albeit imaginary, sex life, she tries to imagine alternative scenarios. Are there any love-free circumstances in which Rozsi and Mr Viney could conceivably have met? Her mind aches with trying to force it. Might he have pushed ahead of her in the queue at Selfridges’ Food Hall? Or slighted Mrs Dobos?
Then on Monday evening, very late, as she is writing an essay on the majesty of Peter the Great, Charlie Mingus turned so low that all she can hear is occasional plucking, her mind, as it wanders along snowy mountain passes, suddenly stumbles upon the truth.
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