THE WINTER CITY

by MARY HOCKING

  ‘Yes. It sounds . . . fairly harmless.’ But she was beginning to tremble violently.

  ‘I hope you will remember; because the whole thing could be greatly exaggerated, particularly by the special police if it suited their purpose . . .’

  ‘But Doyle, that could put you in the most terrible trouble!’

  ‘It could put other people in even greater trouble.’

  ‘I don’t care about other people.’

  She does not care about other people, he thought, and already she knows too much. He remembered the way that Varya had looked at him; he remembered the antagonism of Maria Anas.

  ‘But I have to care about other people,’ He spoke with brutal emphasis, driving the words at her, ‘I should not want any carelessness of mine to lead to betrayal. The rôle of traitor is so small and ignominous, it wouldn’t suit me at all. And then, to have to live the rest of one’s life in the shadows of dead men; that would be quite insupportable.’

  She passed her hand across her forehead. ‘I don’t understand what you are saying.’

  ‘I am asking you, Kate, to forget the whole thing. But if you can’t forget it, and it is hardly human that you should, at least get the truth quite straight—that is, I am nothing more than a messenger, I am involved in no plans, most important of all, I know no names.’

  She cleared her throat and said: ‘I see.’

  He winced as he watched her stricken face, ‘Don’t look like that, Kate,’ He got up and went over to the cupboard. ‘I have an idea. Let’s dismiss the melodrama and enjoy the rest of the evening. I’ll make more coffee and we can have those liqueurs I bought you for your birthday. In the meantime, you can change into your cherry silk; black is altogether too . . .’

  ‘Doyle, my darling, please!’

  ‘Now, Kate . . .’

  ‘I don’t want coffee.’

  ‘Nonsense, no true Canadian . . .’

  ‘Doyle!’

  He turned reluctantly.

  ‘You may stay the night, if you like.’

  She was intensely serious; it was not her fault that, standing there, white-faced and rigid, she made it seem as though she was making the great sacrifice. He turned away to hide his smile.

  ‘You mustn’t get carried away by the cloak-and-dagger stuff, Kate.’ He began to sing ‘The Rose of Tralee’ in a voice choked with emotion.

  Kate crossed the lounge slowly and opened her bedroom door. She had made her last despairing effort to bridge the chasm which separated them; her offer had been rejected and she was ashamed to realize that, mixed with the feeling of anti-climax, there was a very faint relief.

  The window of the room had been left open and the sound of the rain came to her, soft on the leaves of the trees. The air smelled fresh. She stood for a moment, listening to the muffled sounds of the city at night, marvelling how strangely innocent they seemed; the clanking of a tram, the sound of children playing in the street, the murmur of voices not raised in anger or fear.

  VI

  Helen stood in the foyer of the Hotel Kapitol. The clock above the reception desk said ten-fifteen, but it might have been after midnight, the place was so deserted. Through the glass panels in the main doors she could see the avenue with a few bare trees outlined by the glow of a lamp. The avenue seemed deserted, too. Helen shivered and drew her coat around her.

  At the reception desk Maria Anas sat with her dark head bent over a column of figures. Her husband was standing beside her; he was supposed to be helping her with the figures, but in fact he was looking at a ’phone booth across the foyer. After a moment he said to his wife:

  ‘That is Paul Daniels, isn’t it?’

  The words touched a nerve and pain jolted Helen’s body. She did not hear the rest of their conversation, but she saw them talking, their heads close together; she saw that the man was interested, and that he was trying to conceal the fact from his wife. The ’phone booth was several yards away from Helen. She walked across and stood in front of the glass door, as though, by this childish act, she hoped to shield Paul. Maria Anas smiled at her gently and then bent her head over the figures again.

  Paul slammed down the receiver and opened the door of the ’phone booth. He looked tired and there were tight lines about his mouth.

  ‘One simple piece of research!’ he said. ‘All they have to do is to look back a couple of years on their files. And do you think they can do it? They can’t even find the bloody file!’

  ‘We live in exciting times,’ Martin Anas remarked.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Paul said grimly. ‘Very exciting.’

  He buttoned up his overcoat and grimaced as he looked at the rain-washed avenue.

  ‘Do you want to go out in this?’ he asked Helen.

  ‘No,’ she answered, with such unusual vehemence that he glanced at her in surprise. She laughed, and said quickly: ‘I hate the rain.’

  But it was the city that she hated. Recently it had become more beautiful, and whenever she walked in it, it drew from her an emotional response that was too intense.

  ‘We could sit in the lounge,’ Paul said. ‘Or there is my room, it’s not very tidy, but it’s less like a morgue.’

  ‘I don’t think I could bear to sit in that lounge,’ she answered.

  At the turn of the stairs, Helen looked back and saw that Martin Anas was watching them.

  Paul opened the door of his room.

  ‘Oh dear. Worse than I thought.’

  The table on which his typewriter stood was strewn with papers, and reference books of various sorts, festooned with paper markers, were scattered everywhere. Paul cleared two chairs and thoughtfully arranged their contents on the floor.

  ‘I have been trying to check on a point about Matthias,’ he explained, as he tripped over a pile of old newspapers.

  Helen stood on the threshold, her head turned towards the corridor.

  ‘Do you know Martin Anas well?’ she asked. ‘He seemed interested in you.’

  ‘You mean the character downstairs? I didn’t recognize him, though I suppose I must have met him before.’

  ‘I think he’s a bad lot,’ she said, and was immediately ashamed of herself.

  ‘Really?’

  Paul drew her into the room and took her coat. She glanced around her, a little dismayed; she had not realized before the extent to which he lived with his work.

  ‘Doyle produced this,’ Paul said, holding up an un-labelled bottle. ‘He swore it was a special local wine, very seldom procurable now. It turned out to be whisky.’

  ‘A nice surprise.’ She took the glass which he handed to her.

  ‘You don’t look well,’ he said gently. ‘Has anything upset you?’

  ‘I’ve had a hectic day at the Embassy. The whisky will settle my nerves.’ She threaded her way between books and papers to the window’ ‘How peaceful it is here. We have the buses on top of us, rumbling down the Avenue of the Republic’

  Paul watched her as she stood with the glass held halfway to her lips, the light-brown hair forming a soft frame to her shadowed face; the grey eyes were gentle, but a little remote, the tip-tilted nose was at once provocative and aloof, and although the mouth was generous there was a hint of obstinacy in the line of the jaw. Too often in the past he had found that he soon came to the end of a person, but with Helen it was as though something was always held in reserve, and each discovery brought a realization of how much remained unknown to him. It was inconceivable that he should ever tire of her. The thought gave him a sense of security which he had never had before in a relationship with a woman. She offered him more than happiness: in a union with her he would find fulfilment. And he had only to speak.

  He closed his eyes and tried to lull himself into a state where nothing else existed but himself and Helen and their love; but just as he began to relax, the irritating detail about Matthias which had eluded him all day flickered across his mind and was gone before he could grasp it. For the next few minutes it continued to nag at his tired brain to
the exclusion of all else.

  Helen had been aware that Paul was close to surrender. She had stood quite still, feeling his eyes on her yet not daring to turn to him lest her eagerness should check his resolution. Now the tension slackened. She looked at him and saw that he was slumped back in his chair; his eyes were closed and his face, denied their vivacity, looked drained. He had withdrawn from her. Time was against her and each small defeat could be fatal. This new sense of urgency made her desperate; it took a considerable effort of will to stop herself from compelling his attention by a violent outburst.

  She looked around his room as though trying to come to terms with an enemy; her eyes registered the half-written report in his typewriter, the clutter of reference books and old newspapers, the bookcase, the pile of gramophone records stacked in an untidy heap in a corner; the things which made up his life of which she was ignorant. She moved over to the bookcase, hoping to find something which would serve to bring her close to him. On the top shelf there were several rather forbidding volumes on Central European politics; ‘Persuasion’; a couple of donnish detective stories; ‘The Great Gatsby’; and, finally, three books on trees. She was just about to ask him whether he had inherited the latter or whether he was interested in trees, when he shot out of his chair and snatched up one of the reference books.

  ‘I’ve just thought where I might find something I have been searching for.’

  She watched him as he turned pages impatiently, his face intent. She was conscious of being completely excluded. After a moment he tossed the book down and returned to his chair.

  ‘Am I in the way?’ The words flashed out before she could check them.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry!’ His dismay would have been comic at any other time. ‘I’m so tired, my mind keeps going . . .’

  While he fumbled with words she realized how completely the crisis was beginning to dominate him. She realized, too, that each, time he was with her he tried to escape, and each time he failed. Perhaps she was to blame for his failure because she tried to ignore events here; perhaps together they could find a way out of this dark tangle before it was too late. It was the last hope. She moved a chair near to him and sat down.

  ‘Paul,’ she said. ‘What is it that makes you feel so deeply about events here? Try to explain to me.’

  He began to grope for cigarettes, as he often did when he was a little at a loss. She waited anxiously. As he drew on the cigarette he tilted back his head, looking through smoke-narrowed eyes at the light above.

  ‘These lights have been flickering all the evening. I suppose it is that which I fear. That a light will go out, and that when the current is restored it will never burn so brightly again. When that happens, I think that we, as well as these people here, will have to learn to live in the twilight.’

  ‘I see.’

  He looked at her strained face and smiled.

  ‘I’m sorry. Do I sound as though I am dictating a leader?’

  ‘A little.’

  He was silent for a moment and Helen was uncomfortably ware that he was summoning strength; it was almost as though they had become antagonists.

  ‘On a more personal level, then,’ Paul began quietly, ‘this country made a deep impression on me at a particularly impressionable time in life; since then I have studied it and written a lot about it. Now that it is likely to become an arena where the things in which I believe must fight for survival, I find myself very disturbed—naturally enough, surely?’

  ‘But what can you do?’ Already her control was beginning to slip. ‘What can any of us do? We are helpless surely?’

  ‘But doesn’t the man who stands by, equally helpless, at a lynching make the same plea? Yet he still cannot escape the consequence, which is that his own freedom has been impaired.’

  ‘But that is something which happens in his own country, among his own people,’ she cried. ‘This is not your country, you have no responsibility here.’

  ‘No, no, no!’ They were shouting at one another now. ‘It is not as simple as that. I am, after all, of the human race and I can’t stand by and watch a major convulsion without being touched, simply shrugging my shoulders and saying “It’s all very sad, but I am not responsible.” You ask me why I am moved by events here; but what astonishes me is that anyone should be unmoved.’

  ‘But what good will all this do? If there is a rising, when it is all over and done with, what good will it have done? Do you think that everything is going to be put right, that they will establish God’s kingdom on earth?’

  ‘No,’ he said wearily, ‘I don’t think that; I think that if there is a rising it will fail.’

  ‘Then isn’t it a rather pointless, and costly, gesture?’ She felt that she had an advantage and she thrust the words at him.

  ‘Costly, certainly,’ he parried, ‘but I’m not sure that it is pointless. There may come a time in a man’s life when to live is no longer the most important thing; there are circumstances in which the human personality faces annihilation of a kind which seems worse than death.’ He was on the offensive now. ‘Might it not seem that the body must be destroyed in the belief that the spirit will live? Or does that seem nonsense to you?’

  She turned her head away. ‘No. I don’t think that is nonsense; if it is true. But I can’t really grasp the idea that the human personality can be annihilated.’

  ‘Isn’t that because we find it difficult to comprehend horror?’

  She held up her hand as though to ward him off, ‘Perhaps. I don’t know . . .’

  I should never have argued with him about ideas, she thought wretchedly, it was inviting defeat; a man’s mind is so precise. She tried to revert to the personal.

  ‘But you did think it was wrong for Doyle to become actively engaged?’ Paul did not reply at once. ‘You did think it was wrong?’ she persisted, frightened by his hesitation.

  ‘We don’t know that Doyle is actively engaged,’ he answered defensively.

  ‘But supposing that he is?’

  ‘What is wrong for me may not be wrong for Doyle. Personally, I should feel that I was being rather irresponsible if I tried to stir up trouble in another country. But I realize that that is inconsistent with . . .’

  ‘And once the trouble had started, you would still think it wrong, wouldn’t you, Paul?’

  ‘That situation hasn’t arisen yet.’

  Helen got up and went to the window. Her head ached and her body felt bruised; she seemed unable to breathe without pain. She rested her cheek against the cold glass. She was looking towards the other wing of the building; it was dark, but as she watched a light came on in one of the near windows. Marshall Pickard stood by the door taking off his overcoat, he let it fall to the floor and walked across to the bed, his steps unsteady. Helen watched as he slumped down, his head turned to the wall. It occurred to her that he might be ill, but she had no feeling to spare for Pickard and she looked away.

  Paul came and stood beside her. In the distance a clock began to chime midnight. The window was slightly open and they could hear the rain falling on the roofs and the pavements. Paul was very conscious of Helen’s nearness and he longed to take her in his arms; but it was a dark longing, a desire for oblivion. She sensed his awakened interest and turned to him.

  ‘Come away with me, Paul. Away from this city.’

  The anguish in her voice caught him unawares and for a moment he could not answer. Tears disfigured her face, and this moved him more than her loveliness had ever done.

  ‘Come away with me,’ she said again.

  ‘I can’t Helen. You know that I can’t.’

  He was white about the mouth; even in her desolation, she pitied him.

  He walked to her flat with her; they did not talk much, but as they stood in the dishevelled garden outside the block of flats she surprised him by asking whether he was interested in trees.

  When he returned he was barely conscious of his surroundings, with the result that he did not notice the car app
roaching him as he crossed the Avenue of the Republic. There were no outriders, no escorts, nothing to attract attention. It drew near, travelling fast; the horn blared and Paul had to jump to one side to avoid being run down. He stood in the road staring after the car. In the dull light from the street lamp, one face had looked out at him, a sad, monkey face.

  Chapter Nine

  SATURDAY

  I

  ‘Too late, of course,’ Jean Dulac said. ‘Earlier, Matthias might just have managed to inspire some confidence in the present leadership. Now, there is only one rôle for him to play. Resistance leader. I don’t envy him.’

  He poured himself out another cup of coffee. ‘What do you imagine they make this stuff with? It’s worse than coffee in England.’

  Paul, who was making notes on the back of the Party’s official paper merely grunted and said, without looking up:

  ‘At least you get it hot in England. I’ve drunk more cold coffee in France than anywhere else.’

  Dulac picked up another paper from a pile at his elbow.

  ‘ “Complete freedom from”, etc., etc. “No half-measures will do now”. By the way, I went for a walk this morning.’

  Paul glanced at the clock across the breakfast room. The hour hand pointed at eight.

  ‘So early?’

  ‘Yes. I saw the dawn rise in the hills—very overrated. Very wet, too; all the mountain streams have thawed and the water is beginning to flow again. Soon it will be a torrent. There are people coming into the city across the hills—mostly young people, shining-eyed, as though they were on a pilgrimage. It made me want to cry.’ He pushed the paper wearily to one side. ‘After this, when we talk of freedom, you and I, we shall have to talk softly.’