holds her breath when she comes upstairs. If someone in Marina’s family dies, Simonetta will be the reason.
She cannot cry now, about to go into chemistry. All day she aches for her mother, who has not written again, but she saves her sodium chloride tears for the night.
6
Saturday, 21 January
Rozsi is in lingerie. Once they all were; she and her handsome husband Zoltan owned FEMINA OF KENSINGTON , as it still says on the shop front, and Ildi, when she came to London from Budapest in ’56 with a chemistry degree, wrote their letters, and beautiful Zsuzsi, whom it is difficult to imagine doing anything, apparently travelled for them to Greece and Vienna and even ‘Petersburg’, where they understand the power of elastic. What Laura has never quite followed is – well, all of it, really. The heroic origins of Femina have often been repeated: Rozsi’s discovery of some missing money when sweeping a different shop, Ginswald’s on the Finchley Road, when Peter/ Pay -tare was a babe in arms and Zoltan was fighting in the war; her honourable elevation to assistant and the small suggestions which led to her being permitted to design one perfect brassiere, then another, and then to be given a shelf, a section and, in the end, when they had saved and borrowed enough, for the Farkases to buy their own tiny shop and break free. But there is something murky at the back of it, some fell moment when Zoltan weakened, and everything was lost.
Zoltan was a lovely man: not as funny as Peter but gentler, more chivalrous, with the same terrible steely pride. The formality, or sense of honour, which in Rozsi is so terrifying was, in Zoltan, a comfort. With a man who wears a vest to conceal his chest hair on holiday and a tie to see the dentist, who expects toddlers to stand when their mother enters a room and who eats bananas with a knife and fork, you know where you are. Laura, his mere daughter-in-law, misses him more as the years pass; he loved her, although obviously not as much as he did Marina. He cannot be mentioned at home: there will be crying. So on the bus she imagines conversations in which he offers understanding, and forgiveness.
But what did he die of? Somehow she has forgotten, and now she wants to know. It happened suddenly, and at that moment Marina was a tiny child, Peter an increasingly unreliable mess, and their fourth-floor one-bedroom flat in north Acton like something from a Pinter play. All she does know is that Femina, still revered by its loyal customers for its old-fashioned service and the firmness of its silhouette, had to be sold to Mrs Dobos, their compatriot. Rozsi, now merely the manageress, is old. Her salary is her sisters’ only income, apart from a decreasing amount of what Ildi calls home-working: occasional bits of proof-reading for Czech and Hungarian business acquaintances of Rozsi’s, which Ildi does on a fold-out table.
Combe Abbey is the natural home of children with well-fed hair and indulgent businessman fathers. Perhaps there is financial leeway for some families, but it is hard to imagine the bursar offering help to Marina. If Laura loses her own job, due to ineptitude or sex or its absence, what will keep the wolf from their door?
She is carrying her bedtime glass of water into the sitting room when the phone rings. She jumps like a guilty woman.
‘Hello?’ she says. ‘Hello?’
No Marina. No anyone. The fizzing thickens into the sound of breathing, of thinking, pale granules clumping together to form a shape: almost a face. Pale, with red hair. Who else could it be but Mitzi Sudgeon? Hatred has an echo.
War has been declared.
Sunday, 22 January
Sung eucharist (Crypt Choir) or pastoral address, Divinity Hall: Canon Paul Sheath, ‘Overcoming Temptation’; hockey: Pineways Tournament, 1st XI, Sholtsborough (minibus leaves 11 a.m.) (A); OC Society talk by James Pollinger: ‘Constable: His Art, His Life’, Combe Lodge Chamber, 5 p.m.; Wine Appreciation Society: Rioja,
She cannot cry now, about to go into chemistry. All day she aches for her mother, who has not written again, but she saves her sodium chloride tears for the night.
6
Saturday, 21 January
Rozsi is in lingerie. Once they all were; she and her handsome husband Zoltan owned FEMINA OF KENSINGTON , as it still says on the shop front, and Ildi, when she came to London from Budapest in ’56 with a chemistry degree, wrote their letters, and beautiful Zsuzsi, whom it is difficult to imagine doing anything, apparently travelled for them to Greece and Vienna and even ‘Petersburg’, where they understand the power of elastic. What Laura has never quite followed is – well, all of it, really. The heroic origins of Femina have often been repeated: Rozsi’s discovery of some missing money when sweeping a different shop, Ginswald’s on the Finchley Road, when Peter/ Pay -tare was a babe in arms and Zoltan was fighting in the war; her honourable elevation to assistant and the small suggestions which led to her being permitted to design one perfect brassiere, then another, and then to be given a shelf, a section and, in the end, when they had saved and borrowed enough, for the Farkases to buy their own tiny shop and break free. But there is something murky at the back of it, some fell moment when Zoltan weakened, and everything was lost.
Zoltan was a lovely man: not as funny as Peter but gentler, more chivalrous, with the same terrible steely pride. The formality, or sense of honour, which in Rozsi is so terrifying was, in Zoltan, a comfort. With a man who wears a vest to conceal his chest hair on holiday and a tie to see the dentist, who expects toddlers to stand when their mother enters a room and who eats bananas with a knife and fork, you know where you are. Laura, his mere daughter-in-law, misses him more as the years pass; he loved her, although obviously not as much as he did Marina. He cannot be mentioned at home: there will be crying. So on the bus she imagines conversations in which he offers understanding, and forgiveness.
But what did he die of? Somehow she has forgotten, and now she wants to know. It happened suddenly, and at that moment Marina was a tiny child, Peter an increasingly unreliable mess, and their fourth-floor one-bedroom flat in north Acton like something from a Pinter play. All she does know is that Femina, still revered by its loyal customers for its old-fashioned service and the firmness of its silhouette, had to be sold to Mrs Dobos, their compatriot. Rozsi, now merely the manageress, is old. Her salary is her sisters’ only income, apart from a decreasing amount of what Ildi calls home-working: occasional bits of proof-reading for Czech and Hungarian business acquaintances of Rozsi’s, which Ildi does on a fold-out table.
Combe Abbey is the natural home of children with well-fed hair and indulgent businessman fathers. Perhaps there is financial leeway for some families, but it is hard to imagine the bursar offering help to Marina. If Laura loses her own job, due to ineptitude or sex or its absence, what will keep the wolf from their door?
She is carrying her bedtime glass of water into the sitting room when the phone rings. She jumps like a guilty woman.
‘Hello?’ she says. ‘Hello?’
No Marina. No anyone. The fizzing thickens into the sound of breathing, of thinking, pale granules clumping together to form a shape: almost a face. Pale, with red hair. Who else could it be but Mitzi Sudgeon? Hatred has an echo.
War has been declared.
Sunday, 22 January
Sung eucharist (Crypt Choir) or pastoral address, Divinity Hall: Canon Paul Sheath, ‘Overcoming Temptation’; hockey: Pineways Tournament, 1st XI, Sholtsborough (minibus leaves 11 a.m.) (A); OC Society talk by James Pollinger: ‘Constable: His Art, His Life’, Combe Lodge Chamber, 5 p.m.; Wine Appreciation Society: Rioja,
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