Lace

by Shirley Conran

  “Yes, well, she can’t afford to have such a hasty temper, no matter what the reason. Life is not going to be easy for that child. . . .”

  As Elizabeth ran home through the hushed snow, the cold calmed her turbulent feelings. Holding tight to the iron railing, she clambered, one foot at a time, up the high stone steps to the front door, which was above the winter snowline. She stood on tiptoe to bang the iron door knocker, then bent down to push open the letter box and sniff; diced potatoes with bacon and onion chopped into it. She always felt safe as soon as she was home.

  Careful not to let the snow in, Angelina opened the door a crack. As usual, she was wearing a blue denim dress, blue apron, long shapeless black cardigan and black boots; she never wore makeup or jewelry apart from her wedding ring.

  “Maman, what’s a bastard? That’s what they called me at school.”

  Angelina looked harassed as Elizabeth stamped the snow off her boots. “It’s a silly name for people who haven’t got a father.”

  “But Roger hasn’t got a father, is he a bastard as well?”

  “You can both have a father if you want one.” Elizabeth glanced up, perplexed, as Angelina pulled her gently into the sewing room and shut the door.

  “Shhh. It’s still a big, big secret. But who would you choose for a father?”

  “A fairy prince.”

  “No, someone you know.”

  “Not Roger, he’s not old enough. . . . I know—Felix!”

  “Right!”

  Long dark hair and fingertips touching the cobbles, Elizabeth hung upside down in a yellow, striped bathing suit, her skinny legs wound around the ropes of the trapeze. “Now swing around and up to sit on the bar,” Felix said. “Now, over again, Lili, as high up the ropes as you can get . . . Good.”

  Since he had married Angelina, eighteen months ago, Felix had taught the two children some of the tricks that he had practiced with his brother long ago in Hungary.

  “Now a little trampoline work, Lili,” he ordered, pulling the little green trampoline onto the grass. As he put Elizabeth through her paces, the setting sun slowly touched the peaks of the far mountains with a flushed red glow. Angelina leaned over the balcony to call them to supper. In front of her, a cloud of cream butterflies fluttered around the mirabelle tree and a light sweet scent rose from the pink-and-blue sweet peas that grew against the wooden lattice under the balcony. She watched Elizabeth grasp the man’s hands; her thin legs swiftly ran up his thigh, then his hip, then sprang onto his strong shoulders. There she wobbled until she gained her balance, let go of his hands and slowly stood upright with knees slightly bent and arms outstretched.

  “Can I walk?” called Felix.

  “Not yet, I’m not ready. . . . Ow, Felix, you brute.”

  “Stop talking and concentrate, Lili. I want to see a beautiful leap off my shoulders and onto the trampoline with feet together and no sloppy finish.”

  Obediently, the small girl flew through the air, bounced on the green canvas twice and then bounced off onto the grass. She landed with her feet slightly apart. Drat! She saw Angelina above her and waved, then the child wandered off to the wooden swing under the balcony where she lazily pushed herself backward and forward as she sniffed the summer. The warm odour of earth, garden roses and pine trees in the forest rose to meet the pungent richness of the hay and liquid manure. Summer was a honey-warm smell, autumn smells were sharper and smokier; autumn was the sour smell of fallen apples stored in the cellar to make pink jelly and applesauce, hazelnuts collected from the forest, and piles of rotting pungent leaves at the bottom of the garden begging to be stomped on, kicked and scattered.

  Felix carried the trampoline into the cellar. Then he and Elizabeth clattered up the flight of open wooden steps that led up to the kitchen and supper. Roger was already sitting at the table. He had been swimming in a forest stream and on his way home he had filled his cap with small, wild strawberries.

  “Almost as good as in Hungary,” Felix said approvingly, after a delicious meal of river trout. This remark was always greeted with jeers, but tonight he added, “Before the 1939 war, every Hungarian restaurant—no matter how grand—had to feature on its menu a meal for one pengö; that’s one Swiss franc. So long as he had one pengö, theoretically any old tramp could go in and eat, no matter how dirty he was; by law the restaurateur was supposed to serve him.”

  Elizabeth climbed onto his lap, as she always did after supper, curling up like a kitten.

  “Tell us about Gundels,” begged Elizabeth, who loved hearing his stories about the gaiety and romance of prewar Hungary.

  “Well, Lili, I was just a young waiter, but oh, we saw such food. Pressed boar’s head in aspic, cold pike with beetroot sauce and cucumber salad, shredded marrow in dill sauce, thimble egg dumplings, smoked sausage, rich red goulash, Transylvanian goose and pancakes stuffed to bursting with fluffy orange curd, sultanas and chocolate sauce. . . .”

  “Don’t tell us about the food, tell us about the children and the parties in the park,” demanded Elizabeth, banging an imperious little fist on his chest.

  “Well, Lili, you know that the Gundel family with their ten naughty children lived over the restaurant, and the restaurant was surrounded by trees, with two huge black iron gates at the front.”

  “Get on to the party in the park,” Elizabeth shrieked with excitement.

  “Well, the first fifty tables formed the outdoor beer garden—although we mostly drank white wine—and then the next fifty tables were for more expensive meals, and then, at the back, you walked up eight shallow stone steps onto the terrace where vines trailed down from the roof, and that was where the aristocracy ate. The whole of Hungary ate together in that garden to the music of the brass band in the beer garden and a romantic gypsy band near the terrace.”

  “Show us how the gypsies played, Felix,” she called excitedly.

  “They wore wonderful, bright Hungarian costumes.” The big man stood up, carefully put Elizabeth on his chair, draped his scarlet napkin around his neck, picked two twin-sprigged cherries from the bowl on the table and hung one over each of his ears; then he tied his red spotted handkerchief around his head and started to hop slowly around the kitchen table, like a great black bear playing an imaginary fiddle.

  Elizabeth shrieked again with delight.

  “Can we play the best night ever, Felix, oh, please?”

  Felix looked at Angelina and asked permission with raised eyebrows. She laughed and nodded, whereupon the little girl tore out of the kitchen and dashed back in her petticoat, carrying two strips of white sheet and a traditional wide, red laceup belt. “Start, Felix, start,” she cried with excitement, as Angelina indulgently knotted the two lengths of cotton over her skinny shoulders.

  “The best night ever,” Felix said, stroking his long, dark mustache, “was one velvet evening in 1938 when King Zog of Albania became engaged to be married to a Hungarian aristocrat. Geraldine Apponyi was her name.” Angelina untied the little girl’s plaits and softly fluffed up the long, dark hair. “She was dark and beautiful,” Felix sang, “and she was going to become Queen of Albania. They had a huge dinner party on the terrace and I served there from seven at night until seven in the morning.” Taking white roses from the bowl in the centre of the table, Angelina started to pin them in the child’s hair, like a coronet, as Felix continued. “There was music but no dancing, and there were gay, happy speeches all night.” As Angelina laced the belt around the child’s slight middle, Elizabeth stood up, straight and grave, awed, and aware of all those eyes upon her.

  “Was the little queen a bit frightened, Felix?”

  “A bit bewildered, perhaps. But she looked stunning in a white dress with lace and diamonds sparkling in that thick, dark hair.”

  Beneath her wreath of white roses the child’s big, dark eyes dreamed in a sun-golden face. Serene, confident and very lovely, she raised her little forehead, then gave a regal nod.

  “What did I eat, Felix?”

&
nbsp; “I served you with a dish of creamed eggs, calf’s brains and mushrooms, just an ordinary in-between-courses dish,” said Felix, suddenly an obsequious waiter, bending to offer an imaginary platter. “I could hardly breathe. I couldn’t take my eyes off that beautiful woman. She only helped herself to a teaspoonful of the food, by the way, not like the Archduchess Augusta—that was the Emperor Franz Joseph’s daughter—she had a face like a bear and an appetite like a bear, and a laugh like a bear. And she smoked huge cigars, puff, puff, puff.”

  Suddenly the little girl tugged the roses out of her hair, draped her scarlet napkin around her shoulders, twisted her hair up into a bun with her left hand, slumped back into her chair, grinned with her lips pulled over her teeth, nodded in a knowing fashion and with her right hand puffed an imaginary cigar. “Puff, puff, puff like this, Felix?”

  “To the life, Your Highness.”

  “You spoil her,” Angelina laughed, but then he spoiled all of them. They had led such a quiet, sedate and orderly life until Felix crashed into it with this masculine strength, exuberance and noise.

  “Bedtime,” Angelina said, reaching forward to unknot Elizabeth’s robe.

  “Maman, can I have a proper white dress, not an old sheet?”

  “No, you’d only get it dirty, my little acrobat. When you’re older you shall have a white dress, if you’re good.”

  “Am I as good as you were when you were a little boy, Felix?”

  “On the trapeze, Lili, yes, but not quite so good on the trampoline. But when you go to Hungary in September you can practice with Uncle Sandor on the trampoline we used together as children, and by then I expect you to do a double somersault and land with both feet together.”

  15

  ELIZABETH HUNG OUT of the window and waved to the people she passed. Farmworkers in blue dungarees waved back from fields of high Indian corn, luxuriant tobacco leaves or nodding yellow sunflowers. Herdsmen on horseback flourished their whips above flocks of great white oxen, lazily chewing. Like a time machine, the olive train ran through a Hungarian countryside that had changed very little over the past two hundred years.

  It all looked so pretty that Elizabeth couldn’t understand why Felix wasn’t his usual cheerful self. He sat with his head turned away from the railway corridor, biting his lip, silent and trembling. Though he looked out of the window, he didn’t seem to see the flat golden fields of wheat or the lake where placid fishermen sat in flat-bottomed punts and willow trees trailed their branches in the water.

  Angelina tugged at Elizabeth’s cotton dress as they passed pale gray towers and battlements rising above the trees. “We’re nearly there, let me comb your hair. . . .”

  At Sopron, Uncle Sandor was waiting for them on the platform, waving his whip in recognition. He was dark and fiercely handsome, like a gypsy, with even longer mustachios than his brother Felix. After bear-hugs of welcome, they climbed onto the flat-bottomed, dusty red farm cart. An hour’s ride lay ahead of them, through poplar-lined, shady roads that cut through field after field of ripening grapevines.

  They reached the farmhouse as dusk fell over the low building. Vanilla-scented pink and white oleander bushes grew along the whitewashed walls, long strings of dark red peppers were hung to dry outside the kitchen window, dogs barked as the wagon wheels creaked to a halt. Grandma Kovago rushed into the yard, wiping her hands on her white apron, then drew the children into the lamplit kitchen where thin, bent Grandpa Kovago, wearing a collarless open shirt and frayed black suit, waited to greet them.

  On the wall opposite the kitchen door hung a tambourine, three old shotguns and several gilt-framed pictures in which crudely coloured saints rolled their eyes toward the ceiling. Two nineteenth-century sepia portraits of the Empress Elizabeth gazed seriously into the lamplight. The kitchen table was set with wooden platters and huge earthenware crocks of food. A sour smell of cheese, spices and rough wine hung over the low room. Black hams hung from the smoke-stained rafters, along with strings of sausages and ropes of dried mushrooms.

  When the women were putting the children to bed and for the first time Felix found himself alone with his father, the old man’s amiability was abrupty discarded.

  “Why have you come back, Felix? How dare you take such a fearful risk—not only for yourself but for your wife and the children!”

  Felix was silent. It had been a hard decision. Three months before, after receiving the smuggled message from his mother, he had sweated at the thought of the danger he was running into. As a war refugee, Felix hadn’t been granted Swiss citizenship and was in no position to apply for a Hungarian passport. It would have been an insane risk for him even to go to the Hungarian consulate in Berne and make inquiries about the possibility of visiting his homeland. Not only had Felix fought against the Russians in the Hungarian army, but also in the German army. When Felix consulted the Hungarian anti-Communist exile group in Geneva they told him he could expect to be arrested at the frontier and sent to a labour camp for twenty years—if he was lucky!

  But after some argument, the group eventually agreed to provide Felix with the necessary forged documentation, and it was agreed that he would cross the border with his Swiss wife and two Swiss children to strengthen his story of a family visit.

  So far, in spite of his fright, the scheme had worked successfully. In the lamplit kitchen, he lifted his head and for the first time he addressed his father man-to-man, and not as an amiable son.

  “You know why I’ve come back, Papa. Because Mama sent for me. Because you’re . . . not going to live forever . . . And we all know it. I came back to see you both for the . . . once more . . . And I came back because Mama wants me to get Sandor out. That’s why I’ve come back, and that’s what I’m going to do.”

  “Does Angelina know?”

  “No. Because she’s safer not knowing.”

  “Does Sandor know?”

  “Not yet, for the same reason.”

  There was a silence, then the old man sighed and said, “You’re a brave boy and I’m proud of you, but you’re foolish, and your foolishness makes me angry because of the danger.”

  For the next two weeks the children lived the pleasant, pastoral Hungarian life that had changed little since medieval days. They rode bareback, swam in the lake and gathered berries from the hedges to make jelly. In the brackish wet soil of the woods they picked thick, fat mushrooms beaded with dew and as big as a baby’s fist.

  They practiced acrobatics on the trampoline that Uncle Sandor dragged out of the stable, and he tossed, caught and instructed the two children as they leaped and turned on the canvas. Elizabeth’s small, thin frame obeyed Sandor’s every shouted command, and she continued to sail through the air long after Roger had become bored and wandered off to the stables. The two children went for short walks with Grandpa Kovago or long walks through the forest with Uncle Sandor, who carried their lunch in a basket strapped to his back. One day they even went as far as the Austrian border, which lay northwest of their farm. As they sprawled on a hilltop, eating smoked sausage, Elizabeth was a little disappointed. She had expected to see a thick red line wandering as far as the eye could see—as it did on the maps at school—but no red line led through the forests of pine that covered the hillside.

  Wherever they looked outside the farm, rows of vines stretched to the horizon. They weren’t waist height like Swiss vines, but were trained around twenty-foot-high poles, and they looked like rows of green-leafed wigwams. When harvesting started, Angelina worked in the fields with the other women pickers, propping a fifteen-foot-high ladder against the vines in order to reach the topmost branches. The burly male supervisor moved slowly along the lines, stooping with the weight of the big wooden container that was strapped to his back. As he passed each woman, he stopped while she tipped her bucket into the container on his back. When it was full, he climbed up the ladder that was propped against the open truck and leaned over so that the grapes fell from his container and over his head onto the golden, growin
g pile of fruit in the truck.

  One evening Elizabeth triumphantly dashed up to Felix and threw her arms around him. “I’ve been practicing all day! I can do a backward somersault off the farmyard gate and onto the trampoline!”

  “You can?”

  “Well, I almost can.”

  “Either you can or you can’t, Lili. Stick to yes and no; can or can’t; did or didn’t; will or won’t; good or bad. Everyone knows what black and white is, but gray can be anywhere in between, so stick to black and white, miss. Now, let’s see that somersault.”

  That evening the two brothers walked down to the local csarda, two miles distant, to meet the men they had known since boyhood. Walking back in the moonlight after a lot of gossip and far too much white wine, Sandor suddenly said, “Felix, I must admit I thought you were a fool to have left Hungary, a fool to risk coming back—most of all, a fool to have left the farm to me. But now I’m not so sure.”

  “Why not?” asked Felix, guardedly. “Everything looks as good as it ever did, the grapes grow, the sun shines, the children play.”

  “Felix, you’ve never been able to see more than what’s under your nose.” Sandor stumbled. “Nothing’s wrong with God’s weather, the trouble is man’s tyranny. Under the surface, Felix, things in Hungary are getting worse. You haven’t felt the fear in the cities. You don’t notice that everyone is shabby and everything is in short supply. You don’t notice that men have been taken off the farms to work in the new factories, so farms are producing less because now farming takes second place.”

  Sandor stopped on the moonlit road and with an exaggerated, tipsy gesture, he started checking off on his fingers. “Farming takes second place to the coal industry, the chemical industry, the bauxite and the dye industry. The Russians send raw materials here to be processed and manufactured in Hungary, then it’s nearly all sent back to Russia and our workers have nothing to show for their work. All the farm produce is collected by the state and a lot of the food is sent out of the country, so there isn’t much incentive for farmers to produce it in the first place—but if there isn’t enough food to collect, then a farmer might suddenly be thrown into prison.”