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auspicious, Pembridge Villas a source of contagion, Talbot Road a better route home than Colville Terrace. And it isn’t just safety; nowhere round here feels safe. It is the combination of these which makes everything either light or dark; it promises a safe future for the relatives and Cambridge for her, or wilderness. When she thinks of last term, before she had realized the harm she could do, it makes her feel sick: all that poison, stored. Now, with less than a week to go before term starts, she is resolved to be vigilant. If anything bad happens, it will be her fault.
    Only five nights later, as Rozsi is shouting answers at Mastermind – ‘Fool. Belgrade!’ – and Ildi is in the bath listening to Rimsky-Korsakov live from the Festival Hall, and Zsuzsi is speculating about the bottle of Opium, ‘first-class’, she was given by Eszelbad Béla while his wife was not looking, and Laura is trying to remember her mother’s recipe for Victoria sponge, the phone begins to ring.
    It is exactly half past eight. Who can it be but the anonymous caller from the party, about whom Laura has had such extraordinary dreams? Fantasies, strictly speaking, even while she has known in her heart that it was almost certainly Mitzi Sudgeon. Laura’s affair, love or otherwise, with Alistair will have been discovered. Men have wives.
    ‘Oh, let’s not ans—’ she calls. She should be with them, doing her daughter-in-lawly duty, but there is peace in the kitchen, with the familiar soothing English labels: Tiptree, Twining’s, Tate & Lyle. She recites them to herself, quietly, secretly, as a drowning explorer might murmur the National Anthem as his dug-out slowly fills.
    They all ignore her. Zsuzsi, with the confidence of the much-telephoned, hurries to answer it. She is wearing towelling bath slippers embroidered with Hotel Bristol, Baden-Baden , a present from Mrs Dobos, which Laura suspects were not paid for.
    She puts down her whisk and prepares to be exposed.
    ‘ Ha- llo,’ says Zsuzsi. ‘You vait one moment, please. Laura!’
    ‘Actually I . . .’
    ‘Come, dar -link.’
    Wiping her forehead with her apron, Laura approaches. ‘I don’t—’ she begins.
    Rozsi silences her with a look. ‘A fellow student,’ Zsuzsi whispers, smiling as she tightens the belt of her satinette pongyola . It smells of cloves which she, or Hungarians in general, use by the handful as a moth repellent. ‘For Marinaka. A boy!’
    Laura’s stomach swoops back uphill. She edges past the sideboard and armchairs and bookshelf and dining table until she is standing in front of Marina’s bedroom door. Icing sugar dusts her hands like an interesting skin disease.
    ‘Sweetheart?’
    Laura’s mother-in-law suspends her viewing. Zsuzsi, watching through her gills, unwraps another marron glacé. She has been waiting all day for Laura to paint her toenails Havana Moon. A bus rumbles down Moscow Road, a blackbird whistles from the cherry on the front path. Inside Flat Two all is still.
    ‘Marina. Darling?’
    Still silence, except, perhaps, for the faintest possible sound; a drawer being shut, a pencil rolled. She’s listening to jazz in there, of all things: it sounds like one of Peter’s Charlie Mingus tapes, although those are boxed up in the storage room next to the caretaker’s flat. Poor pet, what must they think of her at Combe?
    When I have a minute, Laura decides, I’ll take her to a record shop. Buy something modern.
    The old women wait, in Hungarian, for Laura to knock. The problem is this: whoever designed this flat understood storage but not the emotional needs of human beings. Although, to be fair, it was probably built for a nice ordinary English couple and their child, not all these Károlyis and the endless tide of visiting cousins. Marina’s bedroom is essentially a corridor, off which the bathroom and the toilet lead, like a boa constrictor digesting a sheep. This affords her no privacy, not that the great-aunts think this