Almost English

by Charlotte Mendelson

  Marina looks blank. She knows nothing about this. Laura explains what she can: something financial, not once but twice, to do with the Viney grandparents’ business—

  ‘Oh, that’s Aston,’ Marina says airily. ‘They’re Aston. They told me. Have you heard of them, they’re very—’

  ‘That’s the one,’ Laura says. ‘So you knew all along. I can’t get over the idea that good old English Aston, all that Argyle check and leather at Harrods—’

  ‘Oh my God. So did we own it?’

  ‘No. No. We’d hardly . . . anyway, no. Actually, I’m not sure.’

  Laboriously she explains what she can about the stolen estate, the friends, a tangle of disloyalty half a century ago, among cornfields and silver birches none of them will ever see. ‘I think,’ she says, ‘because they carried on being friends, even once they’d taken over Zoltan’s father’s estate and turned it into Aston, you know, made it this famous English name, they needed money again, at some point. In the Seventies.’

  ‘When I was alive?’

  In her distress Marina is polishing and polishing her glasses. Laura thinks: I could tell her right now how much her contact-lens losing has cost us. No, of course I can’t. Poor child. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Very small, but yes.’

  ‘Guy’s grandparents, this is?’

  ‘Well, yes. His father too; that’s the problem. I think Zoltan, well, he lent them quite a chunk of money. Not that we want you to worry about money, my love, we’re fine, really. Fine. But Femina was doing well, in those days, and they were old friends, and . . .’

  ‘But,’ says Marina, ‘why would they carry on being friends, after—’

  ‘I know. I thought that. But, well, it was because of Rozsi. The Viney grandmother, Mag— Mog-dolna, Peggy, the founder of Aston, was—’

  ‘English?’

  ‘No. She was Rozsi’s best friend. So there were best friends, Zoltan and Tibor, hanging out at ski lodges together or something, and they each married woman friends, Rozsi and Mrs . . . this Magdolna. I asked Zsuzsi about this, you see, and she said, “Rozsi loved her,” and I said, “Why?” and she said, “Because she was beautiful.”’

  Marina is frowning. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I know. But yes. Oh, and hang on, the Vineys were something else then, Sol, Szos . . . Doesn’t matter. And something went wrong.’

  ‘What went wrong?’

  ‘Szoll . . . something. I think. She didn’t say. Maybe one of Zoltan’s brothers—’

  ‘He didn’t have any brothers.’

  ‘Yes he did.’

  ‘No he . . . they’ve never even mentioned them. Oh,’ says Marina. ‘Oh, God, I see. So when did they— how many?’

  ‘Three, I think. Never mind. Don’t think about it now. Anyway, the point is that they, the Vineys, I think, they didn’t pay the money back. And so, well, it went wrong for Femina. And . . . and so Mrs Dobos took it over. She was connected too. To all of it, I think. She knew everyone.’ She should say about Zoltan’s death, the timing, the odd silence; no, not now. Marina looks washed out.

  ‘Hang on,’ she says feebly. ‘Were they all cousins too?’

  ‘Probably not. No. I think Zsuzsi would have said.’

  ‘Try to remember.’ She sits up. ‘Oh no. It would mean that we, or I, am related to the Vineys. Wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Does it matter, darling?’

  Marina looks at her lap. ‘Well. Yes.’

  ‘Oh. Oh. I see.’

  Together they consider this. When they recover, Marina says, ‘I just can’t believe it. They insulted my family—’

  ‘Sweetheart,’ says her mother, ‘it’s not . . . it’s not about honour. Is it?’

  Marina just waves her hand. Only now Laura notices that her eyelids are heavy; she is sitting up but half asleep, like a little child. What did happen last night? When did she go to bed?

  Adult life requires the capacity either to endure, or to leap, ask the difficult question, face certain pain. Laura can do neither. So she hesitates.

  ‘I just,’ says Marina, curling her legs up on the mattress, ‘want to have a little rest.’

  ‘Hang on,’ Laura says. ‘Wait a minute.’ She hurries into the corridor; most of the bedroom doors are open, their contents removed, but she finds a bathroom, a few mean little hand towels over an icy radiator, and she brings them in. ‘Sit up,’ she says, arranging the towels on the mattress. ‘Lie down,’ and Marina lies. ‘Are you really all right?’ Laura asks, covering her daughter’s legs with her own coat. This is very strange. She might be concussed. ‘We could find a doctor—’

  But Marina’s eyes are closed.

  Poets, male ones, have written about watching children sleep. They have no idea; it is not love you feel, but pain. As she watches her daughter, Laura’s heart tightens with the thought of future grief. She could gaze at the curve of her cheek and the length of her lashes for ever but she cannot keep her mind from horror: childhood illness; fevers; death. Bloody Auden.

  So she creeps downstairs, a ten pence stolen from her daughter’s desk hot in her hand and, although Peter doesn’t answer Suze’s phone, in fact nobody does, she has the conversation she wants to have with him in her head.

  Is the Zoltan mess, the Viney mess, the great dragging weight of ancient rivalries and expectation and grudges, the reason that you left?

  And: I love you.

  And: Pete, my period is late.

  40

  When Laura and Marina walk out of West Street a little later, past the Memorial Quad and Garthgate and into Founder’s Court, the sun is shining. The old walls of the ruins and the abbey glitter wetly; all the crumbling cement, every patch of lichen, is illuminated, as if for a filmset. There must be birdsong but you cannot hear it over the sound of Combe parents’ revelry. All creeping things, the squirrels and mice and the rats in the kitchen bins, have hidden themselves away.

  An immense marquee, with vestibule and medieval-style scalloping, dominates the lawn. The masters are all in gowns, their hoods proudly displayed: from the snowy rabbit fur of Pa Willey, Latin (‘an exceptionally brilliant junior fellow,’ Dr Tree murmurs to the parents, ‘of King’s College, Oxford, who has changed direction, fortunately for us! Ha ha ha!’) to the turquoise satin of Pa ‘Fletch’ Fletcher, PE (Loughborough, no Honours taken).

  Pa Daventry’s Barber Shop Quartet has already moved on from ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’ to a medley of songs of yesteryear. As Laura and Marina enter the hot grassy shade of the marquee, huge pink-cheeked boys in striped blazers and boaters begin to sing ‘Daisy, Daisy’ suggestively to the headmaster’s wife, who is perching on a wobbling Raleigh Caprice amid the hay bales.

  ‘Champagne?’ asks a tall fat young man with a pierced ear, holding a bottle; its label has been covered with a large sticker bearing the Combe coat of arms. Marina holds out her glass.

  ‘I’m seventeen. We’re allowed,’ she tells her mother and Laura nods gamely. ‘That was one of the groundsmen,’ Marina whispers when he has gone. ‘He’s weird.’

  Shouldn’t the feeling of not knowing anyone, and thinking that everybody else does, have faded by the time one is a parent? Laura finds she recognizes no one whatsoever. At first Marina sticks to Laura’s side; she seems to be guiding her towards the back of the marquee, where a group of older earnest-looking boys are talking to Pa Bayham, head of music. Then she stops dead.

  ‘They’re there,’ she says.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You know. No! Don’t look.’

  It is too late. Laura has turned. In the middle of a cluster of parents stand the Vineys: no sign of the mother but there is Guy and a haughty-looking girl and, with his arms around them, Alexander Viney himself.

  Only last weekend, on leafing through The Times, she had wondered how it would feel to be the person who spots a former war criminal, living it up in a café in Belgrade or Buenos Aires. Alexander Viney is talking, laughing, as if he has nothing to do with suffering except the historical kind: that of
miscellaneous peasants, or men at sea. Laura thinks: what on earth should I do?

  ‘You know what Rozsi would do,’ she hears Marina say beside her. ‘Walk up to them and whack them. Him, anyway. You know she once hit a policeman.’

  Marina’s glass has mysteriously already been refilled, but Laura is too distracted to say anything about it. ‘Yes,’ she says tiredly. ‘I know that story.’

  ‘But we can’t.’

  ‘No, we can’t.’

  Then, in a small sad voice, Marina says, ‘I want to.’

  Laura looks down at her. She has asked nothing about poor Zoltan’s death, but might she have guessed?

  ‘What?’ she says. ‘Tell me. What?’

  ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘What do you mean? I can see it’s not. You look— what is it, my love?’

  ‘Too many revelations. I can’t cope with more.’

  ‘Neither can I,’ her mother says, ‘but, my darling, if something has happened . . .’

  ‘No,’ says Marina. ‘It hasn’t. Really, nothing. Never mind.’

  And that might have been it. Marina could have stopped drinking, and she and Laura could have sat through Prize-Giving, and then they could have gone home.

  ‘Hi,’ says Hannah North from West Street as if, although she is an Upper, they are old friends. She’s my height too, thinks Marina, unlike all those other giants, and not even very thin.

  ‘I’ve lost my rellies,’ Hannah says. ‘Where are yours?’

  Marina’s mother, making elaborate ‘I won’t disturb you’ gestures, starts wandering off towards the parents’ toilets.

  ‘Around,’ says Marina, looking over Hannah’s shoulder for Simon Flowers’s family.

  ‘Not the old ladies?’

  ‘What?’ says Marina, frowning at her. ‘So you know about them?’

  ‘It’s not . . . don’t look like that. Mine are Irish, my father anyway, so Daventry calls me the Publican’s Child. Hilarious.’

  ‘That’s terrible. That’s . . . racist. God. Don’t you mind?’

  ‘Used to it. Look, there’s a bottle going round. Grab it.’

  Giles Yeo has his hand on Victoria Porritt’s lower back; they are chatting to his red-faced father like adults at a cocktail party. ‘How long does this last?’ asks Marina.

  Hannah North moves her face closer as she pours.

  ‘Are you OK?’ she says.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You’re not, are you?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s obvious. Always is with you. You look all . . . frozen.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’ Marina’s sinuses are stinging. Shut up, she tells herself. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘You’re homesick, aren’t you? I could tell you are. I was, I used to vomit. I thought you were, since you arrived. It’s obvious. You could have come to me.’

  ‘How? How could I know?’

  ‘Well . . .’ says Hannah North vaguely.

  ‘You can’t say that now. It’s too late.’

  ‘Don’t be melodramatic. Anyway, are you going to tell me what’s happened? You look even more miserable than normal. Something’s got to be up.’

  Why not? thinks Marina suddenly. She leaves out some of the details but she tells her the rest: sitting in the front seat of a nameless friend’s father’s big silver car, being . . . being . . .

  ‘Oh God,’ says Hannah North, but resignedly, almost casually, as if it happens all the time. Marina rests her head against the marquee post behind her. ‘Not everything?’

  ‘No!’ says Marina. ‘No. Definitely not. But a lot. And the thing is—’

  ‘It was unfamiliar,’ says Hannah North, after a pause.

  ‘Yes. No. Yes.’ She closes her eyes again and tries to explain how what happened in the car is her fault. ‘I mean, it’s not the olden days. I, I shouldn’t mind, I know I shouldn’t. Really it was my fault. In fact, I’ve thought that maybe I should apologize— I can’t believe I’m telling you all this. Don’t you have, you know, people to see?’

  ‘Yes. But, look—’

  ‘Well you should.’

  ‘But, poor you.’

  ‘Don’t be mad.’ She tips her head back: don’t sodding cry.

  ‘I mean it. Of course poor you, you dope.’

  ‘The thing is,’ says Marina in a rush, ‘I know it’s stupid, but I just don’t know what I should be thinking. How, how to feel.’

  ‘Angry.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous.’ And just like that, Marina’s embryonic liking for Hannah North evaporates.

  Because Hannah North is wrong. Marina listens to Pa Daventry’s boys singing ‘Goodbye, My Coney Island Baby’, tapping her foot awkwardly just out of time to the music; she shakes her head when her mother, back from the loo, asks if she wants orange juice. Instead she marches up to Bill Wallis in his novelty shirt sleeves, who has commandeered two bottles just for his family; she holds out her glass. Angry? What rubbish. Hannah North, although older, just doesn’t understand.

  Ten minutes later, during ‘Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine’, it hits her. Hannah North is right.

  After that, it is as if she is being powered by fury, at all of them. Vengeance, she thinks, with expansive mental hand gestures, will be mine. Ours. Should be. How dare you? she imagines saying to Alexander Viney, pushing him off her. How dare you?

  She is possibly a bit drunk now, but everyone is: except, obviously, her mother, which would be disgusting.

  ‘There aren’t any sandwiches here or anything, are there?’ her mother says, though anyone could hear her.

  ‘No,’ says Marina. ‘Of course not. We’re not meant—’

  ‘Come on, love.’ Her mother gives her a look. ‘We could go over the road quickly and get you something to eat.’

  ‘We can’t leave,’ says Marina impatiently. ‘It’s not allowed.’ I am so angry, she thinks experimentally but already the guilt is bubbling through to the surface. She needs Hannah North to tell her again what to feel.

  ‘Anyway, soon it’s the, the . . . you know.’

  ‘Prize-Giving.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Marina quietly. ‘I hate him.’

  ‘I know,’ says her mother. ‘So do I.’

  Where is Alexander Viney now? Mrs Viney has gone back to Stoker and her herb garden. Guy catches Marina’s eye and mouths something unreadable but she doesn’t care, not if she never sees him again, because now when she looks at his father, the giver of prizes, the jewel in Dr Tree’s crown, she feels sick. What was he doing, driving her half-drunk to a bridge? He is a married man. Mrs Viney should have stopped him. She thinks confusedly of feet of clay, of statues on columns, of, primarily, the bulge in his too-new needlecord trousers: the lap not of a gentleman but a pretender. ‘I don’t want to go to the stupid Prize-Giving,’ she says.

  ‘Don’t be silly, sweetheart. We just have to sit there, and then it’s home. Lovely home. You need a rest.’

  Marina bites her lip: so sore that it makes her wince. She is wearing ten separate items of Combe uniform, including shoes, ceinture and hairband but leaving out her watch. She sees now that what happened with Mr Viney, in this very uniform, has intensified the contamination: the danger to her family, the betrayal. Even apart from her stupid hugging of them all this morning, isn’t her mother being infected right now, inhabiting the same cuboid of air? And then it will be concentrated by the treacherous act of sitting in Divvers, listening, clapping when he gives his spontaneous amazing Prize-Giving speech.

  The very thought makes her feel sicker. After all that her brave family has done for her, this is how Marina will repay them: by bringing everything Mr Viney stands for straight back to Westminster Court.

  There is no time to plan. Pa Daventry is at the marquee flap, summoning them all and, although it seems fantastically important that they should be early, to choose the best seats, somehow Marina and her mother hesitate until they are trapped at the back, and reach Divvers last.

  41

>   Marina, her mother has realized, is possibly slightly drunk. So is Laura; her capacity is pitiful. As a Non-Prizewinning Pupil + Parent (1), they are supposed to sit in the body of the hall but, by the time they fight their way in, there are apparently no seats left anywhere.

  ‘What about those?’ she says to Marina, nodding at a row of chairs on a long thin platform, running along the right-hand wall. They seem less popular; despite being up a couple of steps, their view is partially blocked by the maroon barley-sugar columns which feature repeatedly in the prospectus. Because of this, presumably, several seats are left.

  ‘We can’t,’ says Marina. ‘They’re for Sirs.’

  ‘What? Well, we can today, other people are sitting there. I think the teachers, er, Sirs, prefects anyway, they’re all on the stage. And look, there’s a couple left near the front.’

  If you sit forward you can see quite well around your column: not, as Laura had assumed, ugly marble but merely plaster, painted an unpleasant chicken-liver colour with darker menstrual clots. Or, rather, you can see the audience; not most of the staff nor, thankfully, Alexander Viney himself, who must be beside the headmaster on the stage. Laura rests her forearms on the low rail which divides them from the rest of the school; she resists the urge to lean her forehead on it too, just in time. Marina is protesting about sitting up here; frankly, enough is enough. Laura has a headache and several enormous problems, and it would be good just to rest here quietly, thinking, before they have to catch the train. Alexander Viney may be a bad person but he’s still an intellectual, prize-winning, televised, and poor Zoltan is dead. They will just listen to him, clap politely, and leave.

  Marina looks out across the audience. Sitting up here, raised only slightly but at right angles to the other rows, against the grain, is like watching television. She has nothing to do with these people. Her ceinture is hurting and her heart feels tight; she can’t see Guy, or Simon Flowers, or anyone she cares about at all. Even Mr Viney is out of sight, although soon he will begin his speech. The Prize-Giving is scheduled to start in six minutes, and Dr Tree is very keen on promptness. She feels suddenly rather sick.