Almost English

by Charlotte Mendelson

  ‘Aduki beans,’ he says to Suze. ‘Amino acids.’

  ‘You said,’ Laura tells him, ‘to be here before twelve.’

  ‘Oh God, sorry, so.’

  ‘No,’ says Suze. ‘It was after twelve. I heard him.’

  ‘Why,’ Laura asks her, ‘didn’t you say? I’ve just been waiting—’

  Only a wicked woman would complain about time in the presence of the sick. They all look at her with surprise, as if a stuffed animal had spoken.

  ‘Never mind,’ says Laura. ‘Sorry.’

  Peter smiles at her and, inadvertently, she smiles back. As the others roam about, making themselves individual hippy teas and rinsing the sprouter, she describes her farcical efforts to slip out of Westminster Court this morning and then, without meaning to, she begins to tell him about Founder’s Day.

  ‘What?’ he says. ‘Three days? Fuck. How are you going to stand it?’

  ‘I know. Oh God, I know. It, it’s a weird place, Combe. Combe Abbey. Horrible, to be honest. ’

  ‘And it’s in Dorset?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Christ, I hate the countryside. The way the hills follow you. Cowshit everywhere. Is it awful?’

  ‘Yes. It is.’ She does not stint. She rubs his face hard in the detail, watching the words solidify as she speaks: how much she hates it, her reservations.

  ‘So this was whose idea?’ he asks, waving offhandedly as Suze and Jensen go off with face paints to a children’s party; this is, apparently, Jensen’s job. It is almost impossible for Laura to be polite to them, but she makes herself say goodbye. After all, she reminds herself maturely, they have looked after him, while I have not. They have bathed him; seen his scar—

  ‘Babe?’ says Peter.

  ‘Her idea, Marina’s,’ says Laura. ‘Completely hers. Though the others joined in. You know. It’s just—’

  ‘What?’

  She gives a wet ugly sniff. ‘I, I, I didn’t dare—’

  ‘Tell them no? I don’t blame you. What a bloody scary idea.’

  ‘You’re still such an interrupter. No.’ She needs a tissue. Gingerly she reaches out for a dishcloth on the counter behind her, snatches her hand away and wipes her face uselessly with her palm. ‘I didn’t dare, oh, I don’t know. Tell her that I wanted her to stay.’

  ‘Hey. Hey.’

  ‘Go away.’

  ‘I’m not. I’m going to perch here.’

  ‘Stop it. Stop stroking—’

  ‘Laura. I’ve been such a shit.’

  ‘You have.’

  ‘A fucker.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘A fucking fucker.’

  ‘God, I miss hearing someone swear. Apart from me.’

  ‘A cunt.’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘You have.’

  ‘I wish—’

  ‘What I just want to know,’ she says, unwisely, ‘is have you— Oh, never mind. Of course you have.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know bloody what.’

  ‘I don’t. Ow.’

  ‘Just look at me. No, you don’t even need to say it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That you had lots of girlfriends. Bet you have, millions of, of floaty sodding girls called Daisy and Saffron.’

  ‘You don’t want to know.’

  ‘I do. I bloody do. I want to hate you.’

  So he tells her, and the answer is not what she had expected; not at all.

  Somehow she is naked.

  Well, near enough. What is wrong with her? The door could open right now; anyone could walk in. Even apart from the repercussions, the thought of being seen in all her squashiness, the pale expanses of hideous skin, is unbearable. She would have to leave, at once and for ever.

  And what is he thinking? He looks better than her, which isn’t difficult; was he horrified and politely not commenting, or too busy to notice? She had not expected this. Had he?

  Or had she? Her legs are shaved. She is wearing her only faintly attractive bra, a Principessa Duchesse Splendide with nylon broderie anglaise edging. He is considerably less washed than her, but this is perversely exciting; reassuring, too, because it means he had not planned this either. She is not in a trap but has chosen this, and that makes all the difference.

  How extraordinary to see him, his soft hidden skin and secret hair, unclothed.

  They are lying on top of his bed, his arm across her throat. She swallows hard; she is starting to feel crushed. Need male limbs be quite so heavy? He is not asleep, yet; just very, very relaxed. Laura, on the other hand, is rigid, eyes open wide as she gazes over his shoulder at the extraordinary fact of what they have just done.

  31

  Saturday, 11 March

  Two days pass: a sexual desert. They are both so afraid of being discovered before finding a way to tell the others, that they have agreed not to be in contact. In any case, Peter rarely leaves the boat. Then it is the middle of March, the time she dreads all year, when she is obliged to help with Femina’s spring stock take.

  What is so dreadful about it? Everything. The smell of the back room: old perfume, Ildi’s Polish svee-ties, Zsuzsi’s cigarettes, and the dusty scent lingering in every cardboard box and polythene wrapping. The brown luggage tags and tiny paper labels on which elaborate price codes are written by hand; the typewriter for letters to customers; the card index for every single order since time began. The pictures of Marina in childhood, before whatever it was that went wrong between them happened, and the school photograph of Mrs Dobos’s granddaughter, like a plaited pig. The trade brochures and kettle; the sewing tin, because customers expect Mrs Farkas to alter their purchases and, irrespective of arthritis, Mrs Farkas does it. Her ladies are not fond of change. And, worst of all, the yellowing packets of unsellable items, knee-length demi-knickers and Spirella Femme corselettes and Berlei Elastomerics, kept because of Rozsi’s firm belief that ‘Von day, someone vants’.

  There is no choice: Laura has to do it. Rozsi writes dates as ‘976 and ‘989; she speaks Russian and Czech and German and God knows what else but cannot spell ‘tights’. So here stands Laura, ticking off an unsold Gossard Long-line Thermal Camisole in Illusion, not thinking about Peter.

  ‘I suppose . . .’ says Laura a little later.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. This is your fault,’ she says. ‘If you’d just, I don’t know, gone to see them, independently, like you should have, I wouldn’t have had to ring you to tell you to do it. And then I wouldn’t have ended up round here.’

  It isn’t true. She could not stop thinking about his shaved head, whether the bristle felt velvety or rough. And his skin so pale, his cheeks thinner: who could help wanting to discover what else has changed? She has spent so many years energetically resisting all memory of his body, its muscles and enormous bones, its touching flaws, and what has that achieved? Nothing. Here it all was, as she unwrapped it, exactly as she had known it would be.

  They are lying on what remains of a sofa. A candle, inevitably, flickers on the seat of a chair nearby, and a blow heater blasts from a suspended home-made socket, warming her right instep and two or three toes.

  ‘I am very uncomfortable,’ she says.

  ‘Me too.’

  Still they lie there. She is cold and needs the toilet and can see her numberless physical flaws as he must, violently magnified. She thinks: I must hide myself. I want to go. But, if she stands, the delicious loinal heat, the ache, the melting in her wrists and knees, will pour out of her and leave her with nothing. She had not forgotten this feeling; she had only thought it would not happen again.

  ‘This is all wrong.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘We’re bad.’

  ‘So bad.’

  ‘Wrong.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Practically criminal,’ she says and, an inch from her ear, he gives a snort. ‘What? I mean it.’

  He is laughing: at her; at them
.

  ‘Don’t,’ she says. ‘Seriously. Don’t. I’m going to ask you one more time. When are you going to tell them?’

  32

  Tuesday, 14 March

  Founder’s Day Week

  10 a.m.–12 p.m. ceramics exhibition (also 10 a.m.– 12 p.m., Wednesday), Radcliffe Library (free)

  12 p.m. Uppers’ debate (‘Europe: Friend or Foe’), Old Library, £3

  4.30 p.m. ‘Hooked on Bossa’: percussion medley featuring the Combe Players, Founder’s Court marquee, cash bar, £4

  6 p.m. The Merchant of Venice, Combe Abbey Cloisters, £4

  At five o’clock, overdressed and skittish, the Farkas party assembles. It is almost time for headmaster’s drinks, to which the parents of the many participants in The Merchant of Venice have been invited. The assistant registrar, distressed by Marina’s family circumstances, still sends everything to ‘Mr and Mrs Farkas’ but, with pleading, Laura has managed to persuade her to extend Dr Tree’s invitation to Marina’s grandmother and great-aunts too.

  Most mothers, she suspects, drive over from Salisbury or Yeovil daily, or treat the whole week as an amusing conjugal mini-break, booking into the Oak or the Regency and consorting with friends in the evenings, while their young go to Melcombe for pizzas in rowdy groups. No one else stays at the disappointingly tartan Braegarrold; they will have the breakfast room to themselves.

  But in Rozsi and Zsuzsi’s marginally larger room, sitting on the Black Watch bedspreads to giggle and drink instant coffee from home, they are having a fabulous time. The atmosphere is heady, as if they are about to go into battle. ‘We attend,’ announces Zsuzsi, still in her huge sunglasses, ‘even though I am invited to the ballet with Klein Pali tonight, he beg me. It is Nutcracker, such a pity. But von-darefool, the whole family here. For Marinaka’s sake.’

  Rozsi writes to Mrs Dobos on a postcard of Combe Abbey by floodlight, updating her on events so far. Zsuzsi and Ildi are pink-cheeked with hilarity; the beds are shaking. Laura smiles as if she is made of wood. Peter was meeting his consultant today for yet more results; she hasn’t quite understood from his vague description which ones, but they are important. She has, with difficulty, obtained for him the number at Braegarrold; he has agreed that ‘maybe me, maybe Suze’ will leave a message if there is news, but will they? What would silence mean? And meanwhile, at work, where Alistair only decided last night that he could spare her for this little trip, they will be discovering misfiled lab reports; counting Dalmane bottles with puzzled expressions.

  When Zsuzsi decides that it is time to open the sponge fingers, Laura dares to act.

  ‘I’m just going to find my, er,’ she says, and hurries downstairs to explain to the landlady that if she is contacted by a woman called Suze, who is leaving a message on behalf of a mutual friend, it should be passed straight to Laura herself.

  Mrs Cousins is not impressed. Having already scented impropriety in the Farkas set-up, she has visited them twice to warn against over-flushing and excessive soap use. ‘This is a respectable house,’ she says. ‘Other guests consider our facilities more than sufficient.’

  ‘Yes, it’s wonderful, absolutely. But I’m— sorry, it’s the only way my friend can reach me. It’s about, well, some medical results,’ she says, and her eyes begin to burn. ‘Due today.’

  There is a long pause. ‘Well, it’s highly irregular. I don’t like it. I’ll have to speak to Mr Cousins. And naturally if for these medical reasons you decide to take off early, there’ll be no refund.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Laura says.

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Oh,’ she makes herself add, ‘just one more thing. If my friend does ring, please please don’t tell my, you know. Just tell me. Really. It’s a sort of surprise.’

  She walks back upstairs with the sense that she is watched. Her legs are slow and heavy. She passes the dark doorway marked Private, the hidden telephone. What if Peter needs her?

  What if he doesn’t?

  Headmaster’s drinks are precisely that. ‘Not a biscuit,’ Laura thinks in Rozsi’s voice, ‘not a nut,’ but the real Rozsi doesn’t say a word. Laura fishes fizzy apple out of her Pimms; Zsuzsi distributes Droste chocolate pastilles. Although the light is fading and it is far from warm, the party is in the gardens of Dr Tree’s house, a Victorian Gothic keep behind a very disciplined twenty-foot hedge. The windows which overlook the lawn are extensively leaded, affording only glimpses of floor-length curtains, a grand piano glinting with silver frames. Mrs Tree, apparently also a teacher, glides amongst them like a sprigged and piecrust-collared priestess, dodging the merrier fathers, greeting favoured mothers with a kiss. Faintly, in a distant rehearsal, a hundred voices are raised in song.

  ‘Von-darefool,’ agree the old ladies, huddling together by the drinks table. Laura searches for signs of life; yes, Zsuzsi is shaking her head, eyes following a particularly wide-hipped woman in Madras check and another in a denim shirtwaister. She looks disappointed. Her gaze moves to the men’s gilt-buttoned blazers, their racy mustard-yellow trousers and brown suede brogues. Laura watches, and thinks: she is right. I should not criticize, dressing as I do, but Combe parents are hideous.

  The patriarchs, waving impressive cameras, have staked out tables with hip flasks and fully rollable Panama hats. Old Combeian fathers beget Combe sons, like child abusers; they cuff each other violently on the shoulder, bellowing about ‘Stanters’ and something called ‘jams’.

  Where are the children? The play is starting in half an hour. The other parents seem perfectly happy without them, but Laura’s hands twitch with Marina-hunger: the back of her neck, the smell of her cheek. There is nowhere left to sit. Ildi picks shyly at a cement griffin. Rozsi has forgotten her Kodak Disc camera. In London, Peter is finding out if he has a future.

  ‘Beautiful,’ the Farkases say and Laura runtishly agrees. At long last, after a painful speech about fundraising golf tournaments and Lincoln’s Inn old boy dinners, they are instructed to raise their glasses and toast the school ‘and all who sail in her’, and then, when the hilarity has died down, a side door opens and their children start to drift in.

  At least, other people’s children, in gold brocade and alarming make-up. Marina’s family waits.

  ‘Hello,’ says a voice. ‘Aren’t you Mrs Farkas?’

  Standing at Laura’s elbow is a pale powdery girl, turned into an old woman with wobbly eye-liner wrinkles and a hair comb.

  ‘Heidi,’ the girl informs Laura, like someone at a conference. ‘Marina’s friend from West Street. We have met.’

  The girl updates her on her slight netball injury, her inter-house debating near triumph, her progress in inorganic chemistry.

  ‘Oh, so you’re in the same class as Marina?’ Laura says. ‘How is . . . is she doing OK, do you know?’

  ‘Marina?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Um.’

  ‘What? What’s wrong?’

  ‘Dar-link!’ Laura hears behind her and, with relief, turns to see her in-laws swoop upon a short dark girl in an unfortunate toga. It takes a moment to recognize her daughter. Laura waits until the great-aunts have stopped their cheek-pinching before asking, ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Marina, and her mother knows she lies.

  She waits, trembling, in the wings for her only cue. In two minutes, just before the embarrassingly unnecessary sword fight, Marina will enter stage left, right, no left to sell oranges to the populace, before exiting, screaming, stage left. No, stage right. She keeps imagining herself running in the wrong direction; lately her brain has been full of unsquashable thoughts, like a miniature horror film. And she is so tired. There is hardly time to sleep these days. When she tries, her worries multiply in an endlessly branching hell: tree trunks into twigs, leaves, leaf veins; bronchiole, alveoli, capillaries, cells.

  There on the dark lawn is her family. It does not calm her; if anything it makes her want to do something rash, run out across the stage, jump down and pull them
to their feet, swatting at the Combe grass and Combe insects which are infecting them while they sit there, in blithe ignorance. Only two more nights, she keeps telling herself; that’s nothing. Stop this weakness. Harden your heart.

  However, she can’t help noticing, even as she pines and yearns, that they seem to be taking up more room than other people. Rozsi’s stretched-out legs and Zsuzsi’s ancient metal-framed Harrods handbag: they just don’t think. Everyone is looking at them, the oldest, strangest-looking group, in furry coats like bears who have strayed into a picnic.

  Sweating like a fat pig in her costume, a grass stain already on her simple espadrilles, she glances once again at the far side of the lawn, where Mrs Viney is still sitting on the bench beside Pa Stenning and, despite Mr Viney’s absence, an image comes to her: the meeting of the tribes.

  Dear God. I would, she thinks, do anything to stop it happening.

  What, though? How far would I go?

  Anything. Hurt myself. Run amok. Even—

  There is a gap on the blanket between the fuzzy outlines of her relatives. Where the hell is her mother?

  One minute Laura is sitting on the grass surrounded by Combe families, lolling in self-satisfaction like basking seals. The next she is getting to her feet.

  ‘What are you doing?’ hisses Zsuzsi.

  ‘Sorry,’ Laura whispers. She blunders across the grass, dodging between picnic rugs until she finds the dangerously unsignposted fire exit at the other side of the cloisters, is waved away by a man in shorts, rushes back until she finds another opening and bursts out into the unforgiving chill of Martyrs’ Lodge.

  She is alone. Close by a bell is tolling. Peter will have his results by now; she must speak to him. Tears have begun to pour from her like a nosebleed. She must find out. She wipes her face on her sleeve. Marina will forgive me, she thinks, if she even notices that I’ve gone. One day I’ll explain it, I definitely will.