Almost English

by Charlotte Mendelson

  Thanks to her Divvers adventures with Guy, she knows that at the end of this platform there is a way into the backstage area, near a little toilet. ‘I’ll be quick,’ she says.

  Her mind is moving sluggishly; even her blinks feel slow. She sits down on the toilet seat and has the brilliant idea of removing her tights to allow cool air on her skin, then her ceinture. She is still too hot; she can hear her pulse in the quiet, and another sound, like roaring water. Swiftly, with the expertise of a reluctant room-sharer, she unhooks her bra beneath her blouse, unbuttons the blouse itself and pulls both elastic and cotton out through the head-hole of her voluminous black V-neck. The clothes sit in her hands like entrails; she is panting slightly. She thinks: if I get rid of them now, they can’t infect. Her bare feet are resting on her slip-ons. She pulls off her knickers, holds her breath, removes the cover for the sanitary-towel disposal unit to stuff her underwear and blouse inside, and shoves the lid back on.

  Then, gingerly, she stands. It is so much cooler in only her jumper and skirt; why do people not, she wonders distantly, as if contemplating the ways of mortals from above, dress like this all the time? She can barely hear her feet on the dusty steps back through the wings, so great is the roar of Combe bonhomie. She gives her mother a smile and sits back down beside her.

  ‘Were you sick?’

  ‘No,’ says Marina, scandalized. ‘Of course not. Actually I’d quite like another drink! Are you shocked?’

  ‘Well, no,’ says her mother, although clearly she is. ‘I don’t think we should be staggering round drunk just yet, though,’ she says. ‘We don’t want to burn all our bridges.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Dr Tree is standing. ‘Shh,’ says her mother. ‘It’s about to start.’

  During the headmaster’s speech, Laura quite suddenly makes her decision. She will bring Marina home and, when they are all sitting nicely in the living room at Westminster Court, she will tell them everything she knows, the good and the bad. Love is pain; there is no point pretending otherwise, or trying to protect anyone any longer. I have been mad, she thinks, trapped in a teenage bubble of misery and now I am going to be a grown-up. Definitely.

  When Alexander Viney takes the stage, she bravely resists clapping. Until now she has only seen glimpses of him, the sleeve of his suit, his clever aggressive profile, and there is a thrill, undeniably, in being so close to a famous man. Do you know, Laura asks him silently, that because of whatever you did, not a dramatic wartime betrayal but a grubby act of dishonesty, a business was lost? A good man gave up on life. Would you care?

  If she tells Peter, he will go after him, probably drunk, certainly reckless, and be sued, or end up in prison. What would be the good in that?

  Marina is trying not to listen to Mr Viney. Her skin feels cold under the lambswool; her body is ashamed. It is not only what he did but the fact that she is still sitting here which proves her rubbishness. If she were as brave as Rozsi, wouldn’t she do something for poor Zoltan’s sake?

  After the speech, she thinks, I could go up and hit him. She clenches her fist and inspects the muscles: indelicate, yet puny. No use to anyone. Still: I ought to kill him, if I have the chance.

  The audience is tilting at an interesting angle. Observing this, she notices in passing that Giles Yeo, quite close by at the end of a row, is smiling at her. She glances away, then back; he hasn’t looked away. Giles Yeo, who ignores her. He is only one away from Bill Wallis; he taps him on the arm and whispers in his ear, and then they both stare at Marina, grinning. Smirking. What has she done? Tentatively, she smiles back. She pats her lap. Reflexively, she feels to make sure that the buttons of her school blouse have not come open.

  Then she looks down.

  At the V of her jumper, where her collar and one or two buttons are usually visible, is skin: an expanse of skin. Thanks to her brilliant blouse-removal decision, the lambswool has slipped, unobstructed by cotton. The V is enormous. Most of both of her breasts are on display.

  Her heart forgets to beat.

  Then it starts again. She is still alive, unfortunately. Half-naked. Laughed at. She pulls up the V and plucks at her back and collar as if she is being bitten. An inch of cleavage still remains. She crosses her arms, holds her shoulders; she can’t catch her breath. Her mother hasn’t even noticed. Think, you stupid fuck, think. But her brain won’t move. All that works is her eyes: faces of people she doesn’t know turning to look at her and, worse, Bill Wallis, Giles Yeo, all their friends and cronies. So she takes off her glasses; they are useless anyway when you cry. Now she can’t see but she can still feel them, their delight. Alexander Viney talks on and on.

  Marina stands.

  ‘What are you doing?’ whispers her mother. ‘Don’t—’

  Marina closes her ears. Not at all cautiously, welcoming the pain that chair legs and railings will cause her, she starts to hurry along the platform, down the long length of Divinity Hall. She is gripping the wool of her jumper collar to conceal her flesh, like an effigy with its wrists crossed on its chest, yet people will still be looking at her, and laughing. She can hear whispering, although Mr Viney’s voice keeps on.

  Someone grabs her arm. She pulls away, stretching the sleeve, and it seems easier to slip her own arm away into the jumper, hot against her flesh and then, with one quick and graceful movement, to pull the whole thing off. She starts running. By a miracle, she doesn’t fall.

  There are gasps, noise, outraged shouts; possibly cheering. Nothing to hold back now, she thinks as she stumbles, then runs, on towards the end of the platform. Have a look, then, Giles bloody Yeo, Bill bloody Wallis, Mr fucking fucking Viney. If you’re so sodding interested, have a big fat look.

  She unbuttons her skirt, undoes the zip and lets it fall. Oh, the feeling of air on her poor hidden skin. Out of the vestibule, down the steps, outside, and she is free.

  42

  ‘I shouldn’t laugh,’ says Laura to her daughter.

  For a woman prone to embarrassment, she has very rapidly learned to endure. First there was the hurried gathering up of Marina’s jumper and box-pleated skirt and her own coat and bag, then following, blushing, in her wake as she bounded off the platform and made for the doors. Behind them, Alexander Viney said, ‘My work has had some extreme reactions, but that—’ and his audience laughed sycophantically, then with relief as he just carried on. Towards the back people were standing up, meaning to catch her naked daughter. Laura did not look back, even when she heard an official voice saying, ‘Mrs Farkas!’ as if she was the one who had erred.

  Of course, she has. Clutching her child’s garments, she burst out of the doors and found her just outside, shivering on the bottom step.

  ‘Marina!’

  ‘Thank you,’ said her daughter.

  Then it was a matter of hasty dressing, watched by a handful of spectators at the top of the steps. Marina was quiet: could this be shock? And, after that, who could blame her?

  ‘Mrs Farkas,’ said the voice again, now at her shoulder: a fat little man with many chins. ‘I must insist—’

  ‘God,’ said Marina quietly.

  ‘You’re Marina’s housemaster, aren’t you?’ says Laura.

  ‘We have met,’ he says. ‘I—’

  ‘The person responsible for her pastoral care? I’m sure we were told that when she first arrived.’

  ‘Well, yes. And as Dr Tree’s deputy vice-master I must ask you—’

  It came from nowhere; Laura, the weakling, was suddenly strong. She held up her hand to stop him, palm outward and he, just as surprised as she was, fell silent. She swallowed hard.

  ‘I think,’ she found herself saying, ‘that anyone with the least understanding of pastoral care would see that now is not the time.’

  Marina gave a tiny whimper.

  ‘I,’ Laura announced, ‘am taking my daughter home. We will make arrangements for her things.’ And, with one arm around Marina’s shoulders, without the faintest idea what these arrange
ments will be, she led her past Divinity Hall and across the Memorial Quad to Garthgate, to the taxi rank, then the station and, eventually, the London train.

  To fill the cold anxious wait at Combe Station, Laura bought them coffee, salt and vinegar crisps and a tangerine. They have finished them already. Marina, buttoned up in Laura’s coat, says nothing. They sit next to each other in backwards facing seats, in a smoking carriage filled with what seem to be Germans. Laura, thoughtfully licking salt off her fingers, is beginning to realize that, unless she broaches the subject, they will reach London and still Marina will not have spoken. She is also terribly afraid that she may laugh.

  ‘My love,’ she says. Her voice sounds crushed. She puts her arm back around Marina’s shoulders, leans her cheek against the top of her head and the warmth of her skull, the unwashed familiar smell of her hair, catches her throat.

  ‘Oh God,’ says Marina softly. ‘I can’t believe—’

  It would be lovely if the small movements of her head and chest, the snuffling noises, were laughter; of course they are not.

  ‘I can’t believe I did that,’ she mutters.

  ‘It’s OK,’ says Laura, wiping her own face with her other arm. She glances down.

  Marina is pressing her lips together bravely, but her body shakes with little spasms. Tears drip on her hands. ‘I . . . oh, God.’

  ‘Oh God.’

  ‘What will Rozsi say?’

  Laura opens her mouth; no platitude comes, only the thought of Rozsi, say, tomorrow morning, when Laura gives them all bigger news than this. She shrugs. ‘It will be all right,’ she says. ‘I’ll, well, I’ll handle it.’

  ‘Mum, you can’t.’

  ‘It’s all right. The thing is, love, I’m . . . how . . . it’s going to be difficult next term, if you wanted to go back there.’

  ‘I’m not going back,’ says Marina simply.

  ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘OK. I see. After that I don’t really see, anyway, how . . . OK. Fine,’ she says.

  The train races past a ploughed field and another. If spring is coming out here, there is no sign. Marina is shaking again. ‘Shh,’ says Laura, stroking her daughter’s hair, wiping the tears away, running her fingertips over Marina’s cheekbones, her lashes, her mouth, her eyelids. At last she feels her grow calmer.

  ‘You were very brave,’ she tells her.

  Under her fingers, Marina gives a little smile. ‘Do you think so?’

  Laura looks down, into her hazelnutty eyes. She knows them like a lover’s. ‘I do, my love,’ she says. ‘I do.’

  Epilogue

  There must be, thinks Laura, sitting in uncomfortable state on the green sofa, an easier way. Running barefoot down a mountainside, for example, bearing stone tablets. Dragging a banner up to the roof of St Paul’s: anything to avoid telling her in-laws everything, now, face to face.

  She has already informed them that Marina will not be going back to Combe. Their response, by Farkas standards, was curiously muted; partly because Marina herself was there, at Laura’s insistence. Perhaps they also sensed further storms ahead.

  ‘Tair-ible’ they say, and, ‘But vy?’ and, ‘Megmondhatjuk Dobos neninek?’ Laura imagines saying, ‘Because I’ve decided and I’m her mother,’ but would that make any difference?

  ‘Hang on,’ she half-shouts eventually. ‘I, I need—’ Ildi, thank God, is nearest; Laura glances frantically in her direction and receives what she can only hope is an encouraging smile. ‘There are, well, a, a couple of other things we, I—’

  ‘Couple?’ asks Rozsi.

  ‘Leljesen hülye,’ says Zsuzsi. ‘Mad.’

  ‘Mum—’

  ‘No, let me,’ says Laura, and Marina blinks. ‘I . . . well, luckily she can go back to Ealing Girls’.’

  Consternation.

  ‘I made a phone call,’ she says.

  ‘Mum!’ says Marina. ‘How could—’

  But by now there is so much uproar that Laura can safely ignore her. Surely, she thinks, I could just leave the A-level change for another time? But even she, coward that she is, knows the answer: all or nothing. Slash and burn. ‘It’s very good news,’ she says. ‘We’re very lucky. They want to have her—’

  ‘Vell, of course,’ says Zsuzsi indignantly. ‘They are lucky. But all those sad old vom-ans—’

  ‘There is,’ Laura says, ‘just one m—’ Marina is crying and trying to interrupt. ‘Darling, let me. Well, it’s good, in a way. They want her to do history again.’

  And she sits back, felled by the force of her lie.

  In the outrage which follows, she realizes that Marina, whom she had not forewarned, may weaken. While Laura is busy explaining that apparently history is a better choice for Cambridge where, she has been told – by whom? By herself – that medicine isn’t even very good, she hears Marina say to Rozsi, ‘But if you really want me to I don’t m—’

  ‘Sweetheart,’ says Laura, ‘it’s decided.’

  She puts out her hand to grab Marina’s; she squeezes it hard, to comfort one of them.

  ‘Tair-ible,’ Zsuzsi says, lighting another cigarette.

  ‘Von-darefool,’ says Ildi, and smiles. But Laura by now is almost past the point of fear, as though she is leaping boulders, ready to snatch Marina from a lion’s jaws, or a woman willing to resist oblivion, the strongest temptation of all, for the sake of her daughter.

  ‘And tonight,’ says Laura, ‘all of you . . . there’s one more thing. Something good, or bad. Well, both, I suppose. You’re having a visitor.’

  Author’s Note

  As the grandchild of TransCarpathian-Ruthenian former subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who were born in what is now the Ukraine, learned their sums in Russian, spoke Hungarian together yet considered themselves Czech, I grew up knowing only the smallest and most confused details about where my maternal grandparents came from, or the language they spoke to each other. I inherited most of their dictionaries, including László Országh’s A Concise Hungarian–English Dictionary (Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, 1967) and English–Hungarian Dictionary (Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, 1955), both carefully wrapped in plastic and smelling of their flat, from which I discovered that the very few words I thought I knew (dressing gown, central heating) were spelled rather differently from how I had assumed.

  It was only when I began to write this novel that I realized how very little I knew about the history of Hungary and the Carpathian mountains. Slowly, painfully, I saw that knowledge was not the point; it was the lives of central Europeans in England, and their silence about the past, which interested me. Consequently – what a wonderful excuse – my research was dominated by one of my and my grandparents’ main interests: food. I particularly recommend:

  Maria Floris, Cooking for Love (Putnam, London, 1959), for its old-fashioned intimacy, Anglophilia and wit; it could have been written by Mrs Dobos.

  Károly Gundel, Hungarian Cookery Book (Corvina Press, Budapest, 1974).

  Erzsébet Hunyady, Ajó Házi Konyha (Singer & Wolfner, Budapest, early 20th century).

  George Lang, The Cuisine of Hungary (Penguin, London, 1985), which has all the recipes for Witches’ Froth, Eggs Metternich, Transdanubian Corn Cake, Wild Duck with Quinces and Hortobágyi reszelt tészta tüdovel (grated noodles with calf’s lung filling as in Hortobágy) that one could wish for.

  József Venesz, Hungarian Cuisine (Corvina Press, Budapest, 1963), chiefly for its startling photographs.

  However, certain other books were also helpful for atmosphere, and a little detail, particularly:

  Péter Baki/Colin Ford/George Szirtes, Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the Twentieth Century (Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2011).

  Adam Biro, One Must Also Be Hungarian (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2006).

  Edita Katona, Code-Name Marianne (Fontana, London, 1977).

  Sándor Márai, Embers (Viking, London, 2002).

  George Mikes, How to Be an Alien (Peng
uin, London, 1966) which, more than anything else, captures the character of the Hungarians I knew; it could have been entitled How to Handle a Hungarian.

  G. Pálóczy-Horváth, In Darkest Hungary (Gollancz, London, 1944).

  Jan Pierikowski, The Fairy Tales (Puffin, London, 2005).

  Daniel Snowman, The Hitler Emigrés (Pimlico, London, 2003).

  Bram Stoker, Dracula (Penguin, London, 1994).

  And lastly:

  Ann Barr and Peter York, The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook (Ebury, London, 1982) and The Official Sloane Ranger Diary (Ebury, London, 1983).

  Glossary and Pronunciation

  In Hungarian, the emphasis is always on the first syllable. This makes the pronunciation of many English words and phrases rather distinctive:

  Don’t be funny – Donnt-be-fanee

  Never mind – Nair-vairmind

  Wonderful – Von-darefool

  Terrible – Tair-ible

  Attila – Ott-illó

  Waterloo – Vort-aloo

  Westminster Court – Vest-minstaircourt

  Rozsi – Roe-ji

  Zsuzsi – Ju-ji

  Marinaka – Mor-inókó

  Hungarians will tell you proudly that their language is phonetic. However, learning how to pronounce each letter takes a little time:

  Á or a like the English ‘ó’ as in ‘Pot’

  C like the English ‘ts’ as in ‘Volts’

  Gy like the English ‘dy’ as in ‘D’ye know where the bus is?’

  I like the English ‘ee’ as in ‘Flee’

  Lj like the English ‘ly’ as in ‘Lure’

  Ö like the English ‘er’ as in ‘Her’

  S like the English ‘sh’ as in ‘Shame’

  Sz like the English ‘s’ as in ‘Sausage’

  Ü like the English ‘oo’ as in ‘Look’

  Zs like the French ‘j’ as in ‘Je’