Eva’s head fell forward onto her chest, and Laure, who had kept an eye on her, leapt to her feet. Petr got there first and slid his arm around his wife. Eva’s breath rattled in her chest and she slurred her words. Petr shook her gently. ‘Eva, I’m here. We’ll sort you out.’ He beckoned to one of the party men and issued a command in Czech. The man picked his way through the sozzled guests and left the hall.
‘He’s getting the car,’ said Petr. ‘Listen, can you take her home for me? I have to stay on here for a while.’ He must have sensed Laure’s alarm. ‘She will be fine. She just needs to sleep.’
Laure was conscious of being the centre of attention. ‘And the children?’
‘Leave them with me.’
It flashed across Laure’s mind that this wasn’t her job. Nor did she know how to deal with the collapsed Eva. What did one do? Then, she caught sight of Petr’s expression which was one of extreme distress. Pity won – plus, she knew she could cope. Taking a deep breath, she said, ‘OK. Shall I put her to bed?’
‘Thank you.’ Petr dabbed at Eva’s sweaty top lip with his handkerchief. ‘If you knew how grateful…’ At her table, Maria waved a pennant in their direction. Petr looked over to his daughter. ‘She’s so much happier since you came.’ He then murmured, ‘I think you are the good fairy to this family.’
Laure helped to restrain Eva against the chair. ‘Has Mrs Kobes been drinking?’
‘She’s had a little. It never agrees with her.’
‘Oh.’ Things were more complicated than Laure imagined.
In a low tone, Petr said, ‘She’ll be upset by this, so we won’t mention it again?’
Laure stared at his expensive French tie. She longed to ask, adult to adult: Are you cruel to your wife? You can be honest, I come from Yorkshire and we take these things on the chin.
Their gazes collided. She detected in Petr’s dark gaze the gratitude of which he spoke and also something warmer and experienced a tiny thrill. Of what, she wasn’t sure.
Petr cleared his throat. His customary composure had deserted him. ‘I… we… really need your help, Laure. You are clever and discreet, and I know you understand.’
‘Of course,’ she replied. ‘That’s what I am here for.’
In her next letter to her mother, Laure wrote: ‘Although things seem to be straightforward in this country, and the Party is in control, it is also complicated and there are some people who are favoured more than others…’
She stared at the garish pennant beside her on the table which Maria had brought home from the lunch and presented to her. ‘Because you are like a princess,’ she said.
Halfway through writing it, it occurred to Laure that the letter might be read by censors and tore it up.
*
Laure’s contract stipulated that she had two nights off each week.
In Paris, that had been no problem and she had spent her evenings with a bunch of friends ensconced in cafes and boîtes. In Prague, she was unsure what to do with her free time. Yet use it she would, and asked to be relieved on the specified night.
As promised, Petr returned in good time from his office to help Eva. Laure heard him call out to her and the thump of his briefcase hitting the floor.
The children had staggered bath times with Jan coming after Maria had finished hers. Laure had already run water into the old-fashioned enamel tub and stuck Maria into it and was sponging her clean when Petr appeared in the doorway. He stayed there until Laure had wrapped Maria in a towel.
‘A nice scene,’ he said. ‘The best.’ He spoke in French and Marie shrieked with pleasure. Petr gestured to the chair. ‘May I?’ He sat down with a towel and Laure deposited the damp package that was Maria into his lap.
Petr blew into her neck before gently patting her dry with the ends of the towel. Laure looked up from the bath. Careful, full of pride for his daughter, he was absorbed in his task. ‘Nice Daddy,’ said Maria.
Laure was thoroughly confused, as she so often was in the Kobes household. Petr’s behaviour as a tender father did not fit in with that of the wife beater.
‘Do you know where you are going this evening?’ he asked. ‘Perhaps you’re meeting someone?’
She felt a tiny pulse start up somewhere deep inside. ‘I thought I would go to the marionette theatre.’
‘Ah.’ Petr helped Maria wriggle into the pyjamas which Laure had painstakingly ironed. ‘You must tell me everything about it when you return.’ His expression was benign but, for some reason, it bothered Laure. ‘Be careful, won’t you. People will look and listen to someone like you.’
Laure frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
He cupped his daughter’s damp head in his head. ‘In Czechoslovakia there’s a contract between the authorities and the people which trusts the latter to behave well and peacefully.’
‘That’s the same at home,’ she interjected impatiently.
‘Is it? Here, if you, or anyone in your family, is considered “unreliable”, you might find your telephone line goes dead, or your driving licence is revoked. It can become difficult. The State is prepared to take measures.’
She was aghast. ‘Do you approve?’
He smiled at her puzzled expression. ‘It doesn’t matter what I think.’ He set a dried Maria down on the floor
Walking over the Charles Bridge towards the Staré Mĕsto, she told herself, yes, it didn’t matter what Petr Kobes thought. All the same, she was intrigued to know if he approved of the ‘State taking measures’.
Dusk was gathering. Once over the bridge, she followed the street eastwards and was plunged into the warm air trapped between the close-knit buildings.
She forced her way closer to the square, only to find herself subsumed into a crowd also heading in that direction. In danger of losing her bearings, she went with the flow, which came to a choking halt at the entrance to the square. This gave her time to take in the faces of the Astronomical Clock and the peeling oxblood façade of the house opposite, which would provide her with a useful navigation point.
In a moment of magic and drama, and dramatically outlined against a pink and opal sky, the church’s fantasy towers came into full view. Laure caught her breath. It was as if she had been pushed across a boundary between what she knew and a new world, as yet insubstantial and unknown but there.
Such was the press, she came to a complete halt as she tried to make her way across to the Jan Hus monument. A stage had been constructed directly in front of it and electrical equipment stashed on the steps. Technicians swarmed over it and a sound system was being tested. A banner strung across the monument read ‘Anatomie’.
Had she remembered the geography correctly? The marionette theatre was in the end of the terrace behind the Hus monument – in the house with a tiny turret. Having finally struggled there, it was to find the entrance blocked by a stack of musical instruments. A girl with fair hair, pulled savagely back by an elastic band, was checking each piece off a list.
Laure made to enter but the girl pointed to the notice taped to the door which Laure took to mean it was closed. ‘When open?’ she asked in English.
The girl looked up. ‘Tomorrow,’ she replied in English. ‘Please go.’
Back by the stage, the heat from the paving stones seeped through the soles of her flimsy shoes and her hair soon clumped into a sweaty mass at the nape of her neck. One of the technicians jumped down from the stage and landed beside her. Two of the spotlights flared on as three figures with long hair and black jeans hauled themselves up onto the stage and loped towards the instruments propped up against the microphones. Laure was close enough, and the spotlight so merciless, that she could see the open pores, the sweat and a tidemark on the drummer’s neck.
There was a moment’s hush on the part of the crowd before a raw, raucous sound punched into the air.
The wind was knocked out of Laure. Her eardrums screamed blue murder. Shockwaves shuddered through her from head to foot and, in an uprush of exhilaration and release,
she swept up into a wild delight.
A third spotlight shorted with a bang and a shower of sparks. Nobody paid it any attention and it remained a sullen and blackened contrast to its companions. One of the electricians crept towards it but gave up.
It was hopeless to think she would understand the lyrics but it didn’t matter. She knew, she just knew, they would be great. To her surprise, however, she did catch one or two English words.
What a performance. What a sound.
This was life, she thought. At last.
Narrowing her eyes, she craned her head back to get a better view. The trio absolutely owned the stage. They knew every inch of it: strutting, wheeling panthers out to conquer their territory. The bass player had a mane of thinning black hair, the drummer was thickset with big hands but the lithest and sexiest of the group, the one who sang and played with heart-breaking intensity despite being the slightest of the trio, was familiar. He wore the group’s uniform of black jeans but had added a striped linen waistcoat with bone buttons.
Obviously an experienced performer – they all were – he coped easily with the sightlines for the craning audience. Whipping around, he raised his guitar and the ripped section of shirt under the arm revealed a spear of flesh. Along with most of the other women in the audience, Laure caught her breath.
He was riveting. He knew what he was doing. The audience was his and he played them. He had rhythm. He was sex incarnate. He was telling them that he understood their unvoiced desires, whatever their age or gender. Shrieks and gasps greeted his stage moves, his gyrations, the play of thin fingers over the strings. During a pause between numbers, he pushed back heavy brown hair from his forehead to highlight a bony profile.
Halfway through a song, and at the end of a prolonged guitar riff, he looked down at the faces clustered below him, intercepted Laure’s wide-eyed stare and sang the next line directly at her.
Blood pulsing through her veins, she grinned at him and raised her fist in a salute. A man standing beside her jerked her arm back down. He frowned, shook his head and edged away from Laure.
The grin was wiped from her lips. Her elation vanished. Perplexed as to what she had done, she rubbed her wrist. Even more bewildering, a space opened up around her. Mortified, she tried to concentrate on the stage. It was being conveyed to her that she had transgressed. But how?
Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a glint of glass and squinted at it. A man stood at the window in a house behind the Jan Hus monument, training a pair of binoculars onto the stage. Below him, a second man in a leather jacket was positioned in a doorway, a sight she quickly realized was repeated around the square.
Her instinct was… well, what was it? To ridicule? To ignore?
Ignore was best. All the same, a finger seemed to run its way down the vertebrae in her spine.
As decisively as it had begun, the concert ended. Taking their cue from each other, the trio hurled a mega chord at the fans. The drummer leapt to his feet and the guitarists held their instruments aloft. The spotlights cut out.
The audience went wild.
Uneasy and unsure, Laure shrank back against the stage. The technicians had returned and were dismantling the equipment in double-quick time. The musicians jumped down to be enveloped by the crowd. A couple of women screamed.
She was left empty but longing for more. Limp almost.
It was certainly time to return to the Kobes’ apartment and, still unsure of the geography, she sketched out in her head the route back. Find the ox-blood house, leave the square by the same street, head for the Charles Bridge, walk straight ahead the other side, keeping St Nicholas in sight.
At that moment, Tomas Josip looked over his shoulder, spotted Laure and smiled. Raising his hand, he beckoned. ‘Come,’ he said in English.
Intriguingly, Tomas did not choose the main streets but piloted Laure along small, sometimes claustrophobic, alleys which ran parallel to, and occasionally crossed, the thoroughfares.
He knew the way, ushering her through them as if he was sovereign of this clandestine cityscape of dim passageways and cut-throughs. ‘This way, Laure.’ He shuffled her this way and that, plunging her into a couple of alleys so narrow that they barely justified the term.
There had been a micro-second of doubt about taking up his offer.
‘You’re quite safe.’
‘I have to get back to my employers.’
‘And you will.’
‘Is it safe?’
‘No need to worry. Someone will take you back.’ His smile was lopsided and slightly mocking. ‘If I’m lucky it might be me.’
The smile touched the sore place in Laure’s heart. She had been so busy acclimatizing to the job and celebrating her liberation from Brympton and her grief-stricken home, that she had not realized that she had missed friendship, talk, joshing.
He came to a dead stop, turned around and she went smack into his ribcage. He grunted and she cried out, ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘Only one rib is broken. It’ll be fine in a month or two.’
‘What? You don’t mean it?’
He grinned at Laure’s distress – and took pity. Placing his hands on her shoulders, he said, ‘At most, a faint bruise.’
‘Thank God,’ she breathed.
The heat seemed to wrap them in tight, private world.
Slight as he was, his physical presence was almost overwhelming. Skin gleaming with heat, his grip on her shoulder, the suggestion of sweat and tobacco and drink all combined to make her feel lightheaded.
He looked down at Laure and they found themselves smiling broadly at each other. He had, she noted, absurdly long, dark lashes. She looked down at his bare forearm, fretted with light gold hair. To her astonishment, she longed to run her hands over his chest and the curve of his shoulders.
‘I’m a stranger,’ she said. ‘Why are you being so nice? People aren’t nice to strangers.’
Something else crept into his expression. It was if he recognized a Laure that no one knew or suspected.
‘I don’t know why,’ he replied, his face still bent over hers. ‘Do you?’
His mouth was good humoured, with some stubbornness in its definition. She loved that. ‘No.’ As soon as she uttered it, she checked herself. She wasn’t going to lie. Not with him. ‘Yes, I do.’
He nodded as if he expected that answer. As if he was pleased with it. ‘Could it be that you’re not a stranger? Not really.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think that might be it.’
‘Good.’
CHAPTER 10
SHE WAS EXPECTING TO BE TAKEN TO A CAFE. INSTEAD, she found herself mounting an unlit sweeping stone staircase in what had once been – clearly – a grand house.
Tomas took her by the hand to help her up. On the first floor, he pushed Laure into a room that ran the width of the building and which would have been beautiful but for its shocking state of disrepair. The paint on the walls was all but obliterated and an elaborate plaster frieze was just hanging on. Cow-dung-coloured lino covered the floor into which had been ground cigarette butts and food. At one end, a trestle table had been set up with bottles and glasses. Despite the heat, the windows had been blacked out with sheets and rugs.
At Tomas’s entrance, there was a muted cheer. A man thrust a filled glass into his hands and a woman kissed him on both cheeks.
Laure hovered uncertainly but Tomas put an arm around her shoulders and drew her forwards. ‘Meet my friend,’ he said in English.
A girl whom Laure recognized from the marionette theatre elbowed her way through the crush. The over-blonde hair had been released and allowed to hang down over her shoulders and she had changed into a red, wrap-around dress that looked homemade but revealed a ripe and desirable figure.
A torrent of Czech issued from her. Tomas listened patiently and put his hand on her arm. ‘Will you be kind to my new friend?’ Again, he spoke in English.
The appeal did not find favour.
Lucia brushed off Tomas’s hand and let loose a second tirade. Tomas turned to Laure. ‘Lucia is suspicious. She thinks you may have been planted here by the police. It’s not unknown. They like to know what people think and say in private.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘They’re particularly keen on getting to know the jokes people make.’
‘Jokes?’
‘Apparently, they reveal what you’re really thinking.’
‘I understand. Please could you tell Lucia that I’m an unlikely stooge as I don’t speak Czech.’
To her surprise, Lucia appeared to understand. ‘She speaks English,’ Tomas explained. He lowered his voice. ‘But we keep quiet about it. English speakers are not popular with the authorities. It’s considered subversive.’
Lucia nodded, and Laure realized her hostility stemmed in part from apprehension. Should she turn tail and get the hell out? Laure watched the black-maned bass player from Anatomie mount the table from where he made obscene gestures to the back of the room.
Tomas’s gaze rested on a gyrating figure close to them and the drinker hugging a bottle in the corner. ‘Welcome to the world of never knowing,’ he said into Laure’s ear. He pointed to the figure on the table. ‘That’s Manicki. The fans love his long hair, which means he can never cut it and he longs to do so because he’s a bourgeois at heart. And…’ he pointed to the drummer from Anatomie leaping up to join Manicki, ‘that’s Leo. He likes to be inscrutable.’
There were no speakers in this place. Manicki was now singing a countrified song far removed from the rock concert. Several of the listeners had closed their eyes and swayed to the melody. Tomas thrust a glass into her hand. ‘Well, Laure who dislikes yellow curtains, if you go and stand by the window, I have some living dangerously to do but I’ll join you later.’
That suited her fine. She squeezed over to the window and leant back against it. Masked by the blackout, the clasp on the shutter dug into her back but it helped her keep a grip on who and where she was. She took a mouthful from the glass and nearly spat it out. It was neat vodka but, after a few more mouthfuls, she had no objection to it at all.
The Museum of Broken Promises Page 11
