Almost English

by Charlotte Mendelson

  She hurries across the cobbles and through an archway into Founder’s Court. A few stray schoolboys, inexplicably dressed as squaddies, are setting out chairs on the grass. ‘Cockcheese,’ she hears one of them shout, to which another answers, ‘You wish!’ She keeps walking, blushing, apologetic and, although they grow quiet at her footfall, there is a definite recalibration of respectfulness as she passes: laughter again, and louder voices. She clearly hears one of them say, ‘Knob.’

  There is no way for a lay person to distinguish between the surrounding buildings. It feels wrong to be wandering unsupervised. What, she thinks, would be the worst thing I could find?

  At last she locates a telephone, in the entrance to what appears to be a rudimentary pub: jars of penny sweets, file paper, taps for beer. Ringing to hear the verdict on Peter, death or life, is not easy; she has to replace the receiver twice before she dials correctly. Eventually, she reaches Suze.

  ‘I am very busy,’ Suze says. ‘He is due in five.’

  ‘You mean at your house? He’s coming there?’ Laura burns with a pure white hatred. ‘Could you tell him to ring me then, the moment that he arrives? I’m at, I can’t really hang around, I’m at a pay phone. Do you honestly not know what the doctor said?’

  Two older boys stare openly as she waits to be rung back. She slips into a dark flinty place between noticeboards, and closes her eyes.

  He is about to find out if he has a future. Who are you, she asks herself, to think he would even want you? He didn’t before. You weren’t enough, even then. And if you—

  She snatches up the telephone as if it could bolt away from her. ‘Hello?’ It is Peter, and her heartbeat pounds in her ear. ‘Tell me. What did they say?’

  It is complicated, and made more so by his failure to ask the consultant any of the right questions. If he ‘gets to’ six months, as he puts it, then he has double the chance of living to a year than if he’d only got to three months, which he already has.

  ‘Are you sure?’ she asks. ‘What about now? What do they know?’

  Very little. He still claims that it’s a good kind of cancer, the ‘right’ kind. ‘Because a kidney’s removable,’ he says, as if people have perforated lines. ‘Not like a liver, or brain, or, I don’t know, a pen—’

  ‘OK. Enough. And what if the other one . . .’

  They listen together to what she doesn’t say; it rushes in their ears like the air in a baked-bean can, like the sea. No one on the face of the earth cares as much about you as I do, she tells him silently, except—

  ‘Pete,’ she says. ‘What are we going to do?’

  33

  It is the dead of night. At Combe Abbey, in Dorset, probably in the whole of England Marina is the only person awake.

  She has written a poem:

  No more the sun

  No more the moon

  Now more the owlet’s cry.

  I know not what I am to you

  Nor why I long to die.

  It is moving and impressive: a genuine reflection of her suffering. Since turning down Simon Flowers’s overture, for it can have been nothing else, she has been desolate. Everything is going wrong. How could her mother have missed her stage appearance? The lights were too bright to see much once she was out there, selling her oranges, but she could hear loud whispering coming from the Farkases’ general area; they were probably offering their neighbours dumplings, or saying terrible things about their footwear. Everyone will know that they belong to Marina; she should not think like this, but it is true.

  Also, what if someone mentions chemistry? It’s probably best if she doesn’t spend too much time with her family, in case of blurting it out. But then the Vineys and the Farkases may meet unsupervised. How had she even thought this was a situation she could control?

  During the long night which follows, sweating against the radiator on burgundy brushed-nylon sheets, Laura tries to imagine gathering the relatives together over their All-Bran to tell them . . . what, exactly? The thing is, Peter might die; oh yes, and he’s alive after all?

  Then what? Would they go together to find Marina in West Street and explain the whole mess to her, in the godawful beige television room in front of dozens of gaping girls? Must they inform Dr Tree?

  Control yourself, she whispers. You cannot cry in bed beside another woman. A man might not notice but, if Ildi wakes, she will. And she would try to understand why I’ve kept it from them, which would make it worse. Oh, Laura imagines saying airily, I’ve only known he was in London since the twenty-eighth of bloody January. Yes, nearly two months. Yes, once I knew he was ill I was afraid it might be worse for you but, mainly, I was scared.

  Peter wants them to know.

  Maybe, she thinks, turning her head cautiously to look at her bed-mate, open-mouthed and lightly snoring on her poor aching back. Maybe I could start this off myself, tell Ildi right now, to help him. Something I could do for him.

  ‘Ildi,’ she whispers cautiously. But what if she has a stroke from the shock?

  Tomorrow, thinks Laura. I’ll find a time to tell her then; well, actually today. It is after four. She cannot sleep, or think; her brain clangs like a fire alarm. She has brought nothing to read; how can she, when the others have a Life of Picasso, and a parallel text of Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo? And, when she isn’t fretting, her mind drifts dangerously close to sex, its warm lapping shallows, its sharp rocks.

  Then she has an idea. Slowly, gritting her teeth at every sound, now that she must not wake Ildi, Laura pulls back the blankets and goose-steps amusingly over her aunt-in-law’s fragile limbs to reach the floor. Her nightdress, clinging to her back and stomach with sweat, cools her skin as she moves. She feels herself clench with lust.

  Her foot touches the carpet. Ildi is still snoring. She pulls her case out from under the bed, wincing at the sound of sky-blue leatherette on nylon carpet, and feels around for the box.

  Why did Marina want her to bring letters? Even if the family wasn’t so protective, so convinced that most things must be kept from a child, it was a silly idea. Nineteen-fifties blocks of flats do not contain secret archives behind bookcases. Had she expected a forgotten will?

  The truth is that Laura’s search for letters was fleeting, at best. It felt like exhumation, breathing in the sad smell of crumbled cheap paper, trying not to notice the blurred postmarks which would reveal information she is too cowardly to face. Families like Rozsi’s always have horrible stories in the background, betrayals on snowy mountain passes, little children led trustingly into forests. On this, Laura finds herself agreeing with her in-laws. If she could, she would keep Marina from knowing any of it. Other people’s sadness doesn’t inoculate; it isn’t good for you. It just makes life more difficult to bear.

  So instead she has brought photographs. She found them by accident, looking in the sideboard drawer for the corn-cob forks. No, that is a lie. She was looking for pictures of Peter. And she found this instead: a red tin advertising Rademaker’s Haagsche Hopjes, Zsuzsi’s svee-tie of choice, posted to London at enormous cost by a devoted admirer in Rotterdam. There was a label with Francia on the lid, and a rattle of foreign coins; she almost didn’t look. But then she did and inside the tin, smelling of treacle and orphaned keys, she found these.

  There are thirty or so, mostly pictures of her daughter in gingham sun bonnets and rick-rack braid and startling knitwear; the fat-cheeked infancy of which Marina, knowing her, will always be ashamed. Laura opens the door a little to let corridor light in, looks out cautiously for passing in-laws: nothing. She kneels before the case again.

  Here is Zoltan: grey-haired but ridiculously handsome in a raincoat on holiday; executing one of his perfect dives, side-parting intact, into black water. They make her throat close up, but it is silly to be surprised by family photographs. Other people have them; why shouldn’t the Farkases? Nevertheless, it feels as if she should not be here. Poor Zoltan, she thinks, I love you. I do. I think you even loved me.

  What d
id happen to you?

  The other photographs are tiny, monochrome, frilly edged: a bowler-hatted moustachioed man walking with a woman in furs and a beautiful girl between them, like the last days of the Romanovs; another perfect dive; eleven men and women in all-in-one swimwear from crotch to collar-bone, grinning on a beach like Olympians. Someone has written ‘935 on the back in fountain-pen; Rozsi would have been, what, twenty-six, Zoltan roughly twenty-seven? Neither of them is in the picture. There are groups of laughing skiers in shirts and ties, even the women – Skotarska 937 II.28 – and much merriment: a plain happy woman smoking, knee-deep in a river banked with silver birches; four tiny figures doing the cancan in front of a castle. Everyone is smiling. The sun always shines.

  Laura looks more closely. She gropes behind her and pushes open the door a little more. This is Zsuzsi, definitely, standing on a rock in a sailor top, and again with two beaming younger women: they look like more Károlyi sisters, but wasn’t she the youngest? Unless . . . oh God.

  One of the youthful swimming-costume photographs is shot in deep grass, with long waving wheat or corn behind and a mountain; a blonde woman, a dark man sitting chastely, seriously, with hands around their knees. The man is Zoltan; the woman is not Rozsi, although Rozsi swims at every opportunity. She might be just off-camera, or behind it, except for the fact that these two look so . . . alone. Here is Rozsi in a short woollen jacket and mittens, skiing; who is the girl next to her, faintly similar, prettier? These women look so alike: wide gleaming cheekbones, radiant smiles, flat lightly waved hair like floppy berets. The man with his arms around them, not Zoltan, looks richer, older, with very white teeth and combed-back hair thinning at the temples; he wears a buttoned-up thick shirt and pleated-front trousers and, as in one of the snowy hillside photographs, no skis. Familiar writing on the back says 34 and an illegible word; somebody else has written English for Foreigners, L.C.C. Evening Institute.

  She sits back to think. Wasn’t there someone they used to visit: Zoltan’s best friend? There was, she is almost sure of it. When Laura first knew them, Rozsi and Zoltan used to see the other man, and his wife, all the time. And then they stopped.

  34

  Wednesday, 15 March

  Founder’s Day Week

  10.30 a.m. water polo demonstration match, Greer’s (free)

  12 p.m. lunchtime music: Military Band, Founder’s Court marquee, £3

  1.30 p.m. ‘Music for a Nightingale’: music and song in celebration of the English countryside by Elgar and Vaughan Williams, and a sprinkling of Baroque classics, with Mrs Susan James and the Crypt Choir, Combe Abbey Crypt, £5

  3–5 p.m. visual arts private view: a cocktail of painting, drawing and sculpture, Moore Studios, £3

  7 p.m. ‘All About Jazz’: a spectacular featuring the hits of Fats Waller, Cole Porter, Herbie Hancock and others, with the Combe Rock Combo and the Combe Players, soloists Gemma Alcock (Lower, Fitzgerald), Ben Blake-Charles (Upper, Daneford), Tony Lemon and Mrs Deborah Tree, Divinity Hall, £10

  Last night Marina could not sleep. She is jumpy and wide-eyed; at breakfast the porridge does not anchor her. Her family are attending the Lowers’ debate in the Buttery; even the thought of them makes her eyes fill. When she said goodbye after the play last night, before she trudged back to West Street alone, she dared, for once, to ignore the risk of divine retribution and tell them that she loved them. Her mother, distracted, did not say it back.

  Although Laura tries to claim a headache, they are up and cerealed and standing shyly outside Garthgate by nine o’clock (‘Vot a vether’) discussing how to spend their day. There are limited opportunities for cultural enrichment in Combe. Marina will be working all day, she has told them; she won’t see them until just before tonight’s jazz spectacular begins. So, with the aid of a tourist brochure from the rack at Combe station, Laura plots today’s activities: a tour of the alleged birthplace of a poet she has never heard of; a trip to the wood-turning demonstration being held at the local library; and a visit to the Combe Art Block, where they view an exhibition of awful sculpture and several studies of reflections on sunglasses.

  And, pretending to need the loo yet again when they’re eating ham sandwiches (salad 10p extra) at the Olde Copper Kettle (‘Very nice,’ says Rozsi bravely), she goes downstairs to the public phone. Suze won’t like her ringing again but she has an excuse; she wants to ask Peter about this mysterious former friend – Rudi? Sándor? Possibly a Tibor – whom she is increasingly sure is the ski-less man in the photograph.

  Yet the human libido is an extraordinary— what? Weakness? Delusion? Even in the least erotic circumstances, such as standing in a phone booth surrounded by amateur dramatics posters and a mop, one can be having thoughts. Urgencies. She cannot stop thinking about his hands.

  He may not want to talk to her. I could always try later, she thinks, listening to the dialling tone, it’s not urgent; at least this bit, the Zoltan part of it, isn’t. She knows where that story will end.

  Then Suze picks up the telephone.

  Marina, in history, struggling with the War of Jenkins’ Ear, makes a new decision. She will confront her mother. If she can’t even be bothered to watch her only child (Marina) sell oranges, that’s the end, isn’t it? Something has died.

  It occurs to her now, staring out of the window to make her tears retract, that all this could have been avoided if she’d never left home in the first place. Which means that it is her fault. Which means that no one will save her.

  It sounds as if there is a party: Peter, it turns out, is already in Suze’s house. ‘What’s going on?’ asks Laura.

  ‘It’s just Jens and a couple of mates,’ he is saying. ‘So, hang about, what are you asking?’

  ‘I know it seems stupid. And you, you’ve got other things to think about. But I need to know about Zoltan’s friend.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘I can’t — wasn’t there someone they used to see all the time? Maybe a Tibor, or a Sándor?’

  ‘Oh, Szőllőssy Tibor, that the one?’

  ‘Maybe. I think so.’

  ‘Yep. They were best friends. You definitely would have met him. Why?’

  She is not going to tell him about the photographs; she decided last night. ‘I saw these photos,’ she hears herself saying. ‘At home, you know, West—’

  ‘Vest-minstaircourt,’ he says, and something scrapes in her chest.

  ‘Yes, and he was there.’

  ‘So, right, yep. So they were best mates and then, I don’t know, something happened. End of story. Let’s talk about something else.’

  This is what she fears. Either he won’t know a thing, or he’ll tell her a war story so horrible that: what? The world will crumble and melt around them because nothing will be able to bear the truth?

  ‘What?’ she says in a small voice. ‘Tell me. If you can.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I just don’t. You know what they’re like, they’d die before they said, well, that they were dying. For example. It was something, God, hang on, let me think. Business, I think.’

  ‘What? You mean as in Swiss banks with stolen paintings?’

  ‘Course not. They, it was before I was born. In Pálaszlany. You’d have to ask Rozsi.’

  ‘How can I, Pete? Think.’

  ‘OK. OK. I do know, I just don’t like talk— Never mind. So Zoltan, my Zoltan, was meant to inherit his dad’s estate.’

  ‘Did he have one? I didn’t know.’

  ‘Course. In the country somewhere. Pink house, horses everywhere. He told me,’ he says, and she hears him swallow, ‘they used to take off their shoes at the beginning of the summer and not put them on until they went back to town. So, yeah, he was meant to get the business, all of it. Whatever you need to make saddles for the Austro-Hungarian army. Lasts? Saddle moulds? I don’t know. Anyway, Tibor got it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He, I don’t know, lied about something. He was
, I think he was working for my grandfather, Zoltan’s dad, managing it. The steward or something, and he—’

  ‘Hang on. He lied? About his friend? Where was Zoltan, anyway?’

  ‘At college, wasn’t he? Doing doctor training. They trusted Tibor, you know, he was local. Poor. His brothers and sisters took it in turns to wear one pair of boots to school apparently. And my grandfather loved him: his son’s best friend. So he believed Tibor when he said Zoltan was morally . . . what’s that word? Well, dodgy, anyway.’

  ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘But why?’

  Peter gives a mighty sigh. ‘Because, because before Rozsi, so I suppose just before the war, when all this happened, Zoltan had a girlfriend. And she was, wait for it. Divorced.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘So that was obviously a big deal. She had a child, I think; there was some story about crossing borders in a diplomatic car. Anyway. So, after the, whatever, cheating, disinheritance, Zoltan came to England to make a new life with various people including Rozsi, who was the divorced woman’s best friend from university. You must know about this . . .’

  ‘No I don’t,’ Laura says. ‘They never told me.’

  ‘Well, they did, just when the war was starting, and there was a whole palaver about Rozsi getting forged passports and visas and things. You do know that bit?’

  ‘No. Honestly. How do you—’

  ‘Just things I’ve picked up. In any case, while they were risking their lives on a train to wherever, Belgium maybe, or Amsterdam, although there’d be all those canals . . . anyway, wherever, bloody Tibor, Zoltan’s great friend, was copping off with, get this, the divorced woman!’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Oh yes. I suppose they’d split, in the chaos, but still: after all that fuss. Tibor just took over. He even married her. Bastard.’