The Lives and Times of Bernardo Brown

by Geoffrey Household

  Bernardo walked home with his identity and its purpose in a chaotic muddle. At last he had Magda in perspective; there was no longer any doubt about that. But having been Bernardo Brown for an hour David Mitrani was out of focus. Mitrani might not become a merchant banker—or was it now a cabaret impresario?—after all. He might vanish, as if by a trick of time, into a personality which had never yet existed, leaving not a soul to miss him but Nadya. He pulled himself together. The day-dream of resuming his true self by stages was extremely dangerous. When Pozharski had impressed on him that he must not get caught, he was warning him not to let their cordial meeting arouse any false hopes. No, he had to stick very firmly and with absolute conviction to David Mitrani. Garotting in Spain was a most unpleasant end, though said to be just as quick as hanging, if the public executioner was sober and his wrists in form.

  Pozharski had insisted on giving him all the money he had, amounting to twenty thousand lei. He must have had a packet on him when he started on the Alhambra’s champagne. If young Nadya had not left for her restaurant, it would have been fun to take her out on the town. She was always a quaintly original companion. He did not see enough of her except on afternoons when she had a few hours off and he had finished sleeping.

  As it was, he changed his clothes, gave himself an excellent lunch and then, well fortified against the cold, strolled over to the Alhambra to see what could be done—cheaply—about the girls’ complaints of the dressing-room lights. He found Despina Vladimirescu on the floor, practising dance steps to a gramophone, and stopped to watch her. She was, he thought, more attractive without make-up—a graceful creature with fresh, ivory skin and gently classical features who ought to be decorating some fashionable drawing-room rather than earning a poor living in cabaret. It occurred to him for the first time that there were the devil of a lot of tall Romanian girls of distinguished appearance. His eyes must have been in the sulks too long. He asked Despina if she was working out a new number.

  ‘I am trying to wake it up,’ she said. ‘I ought to have a partner.’

  ‘If he’s good enough, Stelian will give him an audition. Have you anyone in mind?’

  ‘No. I need a man who can really dance. But if he can, he’ll either be a pansy or want to sleep with me.’

  ‘Well, who wouldn’t?’

  ‘That’s as may be. I want a purely professional relationship.’

  ‘Shall I find you a cabman?’

  ‘Please be serious, Mr. Mitrani!’

  ‘Well, I can’t see what’s wrong. You look like the star of a Hollywood musical when you swing those marvellous skirts of yours.’

  ‘Up the straight, but not on the corners. Now, dance with me and I’ll show you what I mean.’

  Omitting some intimate movements with Magda which at once became more intimate still, Bernardo had not danced since Bilbao where his flamboyant tangos had been known to clear a magic circle on the floor while equally cheerful friends applauded his cavortings from the safety of the perimeter. He mentally spat on his hands and embraced Despina. She was superbly light and flexible. It was like dancing with a willow wand from one of those Wallachian streams. He decided that, by God, he had missed his profession and sent a chair crashing into its table.

  ‘Not so much contact,’ Despina said. ‘Your trousers are far too rough.’

  ‘It would be all right if you had a skirt on.’

  ‘And this is not a Danse d’Apaches. Now, start again! Imagine that I am a débutante and this is the coming-out ball in Vienna.’

  ‘I don’t think they had tangos.’

  ‘I’ll put on a valse.... You needn’t be as far away as all that.... And that’s too close.... God, what did you have for lunch?’

  ‘Ginger ale. You’re not used to it, that’s all. And you look delicious with your head turned away like that—straight from the convent into the arms of the archduke!’

  ‘That’s just the effect I want. Swing me gently round the corner and into the middle! Now take me right off the ground and don’t hit anything! I’ll do it all for you if you simply keep moving.’

  She did. He saw her point about the partner. One couldn’t do that ecstatic swirl without something to hang on to.

  ‘Now slow! At half the time! And lean forward while I look up at you!’

  That was too much. The head thrown back, the half-closed eyes, the full-lipped, mobile mouth, small only when in repose, were irresistible. Bernardo got disappointingly little response, but at least the willow wand curved in all the right directions.

  ‘That is not professional, Mr. Mitrani.’

  ‘Well, you shouldn’t have done it. I’m not made of iron.’

  ‘We thought you were.’

  ‘Who the hell is “we”?’

  ‘The artistes.’

  ‘They all look as if the sun had never touched them.’

  ‘Do you expect to find Pavlova on the near eastern circuit?’

  ‘No, and I don’t expect to find the flower of all Romania either.’

  ‘We will start again, Mr. Mitrani, and remember my face is all part of the act. Don’t think about it!’

  ‘I assure you I am not, fetitsa mea.’

  The pretty Romanian diminutives were hard to speak—not that they had been left out of his vocabulary like the terms of theology, but all had been fouled in the course of passage through the ceiling above Susana’s bedroom. He tried French, of which Despina understood enough for the purpose. She listened with a half smile and her head on one side—an adorable mixture of the derisive and the provocative—and had to accept what was coming to her.

  She disentangled herself and spun off to the dressing-room to change for the street, firmly locking the door in spite of Bernardo’s pretext that he only wanted to look at the lights. When she came out, elegant and self-possessed, kisses were as if they had never been. No, she could not come out for dinner. Her aunt was expecting her. Bernardo knew the aunt since she always called for Despina at four in the morning when the Alhambra shut. She was a respectable, straight-backed, old grenadier of uninhibited speech. She might or might not be open to offers for her treasure. Despina, he knew, had run away from her husband and taken refuge with Aunt Floarea.

  At night she was the same as ever, well-mannered and distant. Bernardo was puzzled. He had no doubt that the interlude of the afternoon had been entirely her doing and probably due to curiosity. In the past he had been inclined to put down his occasional successes to his own irresistible approach. He observed that he was cured of that illusion, too, though still able to be intoxicated by outstanding physical loveliness as any alcoholic by the taste of liquor. Remembered Spanish beauty seemed to him hard and a little coarse compared to the Byzantine serenity of this distant Latin cousin.

  It was difficult to get a moment alone with her in all the comings and goings of the Alhambra. Two nights later she at least had the decency to arrive a little early for the show, and he had time to tell her she was cruel.

  ‘I do not know what sort of man you are, Mr. Mitrani.’

  ‘We have met every night for weeks.’

  ‘But all you gave us was indifference. One night—the night before you came bursting in and made me dance with you—you were so pale and angry that we all thought you had got the sack. Nobody could guess what was the matter with you. That’s it! Yet nobody dislikes you. All I know of you is that you shout foreign languages at me and try to break me in half.’

  ‘I’ve never made love to anyone in Romanian.’

  ‘But you were born in Romania, they say?’

  ‘When you were born, the stars sang for joy. Let me see you home to-night.’

  ‘You know my aunt calls for me. But I will ask her if you may come to lunch with us to-morrow, and afterwards you can take me to the Alhambra for rehearsal.’

  Miss Floarea Luca turned out to be a great-aunt, as Bernardo might have guessed since Despina herself was only twenty. It did not take him more than five minutes and a second shot of her admirable pelin
to see that she had never dreamed of using the girl as a source of income. Perhaps a scion of one of the princely families might be considered as an unofficial protector, but money would be an insult.

  Obviously Aunt Floarea herself had very little, though no one would have guessed it from the variety of delicate patties set out with the pelin and the lunch of aubergine salad, a boiled fish straight from the river, creamed chicken and the honey-tasting Tâmâioasa wine—a lady’s drink but the old girl saw that his glass as well as her own was continually full.

  The flat was on the second floor of an ancient commercial building, showing bald brick where the plaster had fallen off, with a saddler’s workshop underneath. It was furnished with a tremendous weight of oak made by some long dead provincial joiner who depended on glue and dove-tailing and never used a screw. The windows looked on to a corner of the Central Market where peasants in their embroidered smocks eddied among oxen and undersized horses. Beyond were the lines of the rug sellers along the Dâmbovitsa embroidering the river banks themselves in red, black and green.

  This was Bucarest as it had been in the last century and a proper setting for Miss Luca. Over the coffee she talked severely at both of them, praising the stern morality of her girlhood when there had been no Romania, only the two principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia governed by native princes under the suzerainty of the Turks. She recalled a land of waving corn and gross boiars who owned it and Greek traders, pestered by invading Russian armies and popular bandits. She prided herself on descent from Tudor Vladimirescu, a peasant hero who had impartially led revolts against Turks, Hungarians and landlords in general.

  ‘I should have liked to show you his portrait, Mr. Mitrani, but during the German occupation of my house they used my grandfather as a lavatory seat.’

  Bernardo, startled by this demure, eighteenth-century frankness, made enquiring noises.

  ‘He was in an oval frame, you see. One would not have expected such a thing even from Turks.’

  ‘They don’t use seats,’ Despina giggled.

  ‘I am well aware of that, my dear,’ Aunt Floarea replied stiffly, as if such discussions were perfectly proper at her age, but not at Despina’s. ‘My father, I may say, had a most lucrative offer for me to join the Sultan’s seraglio.’

  Yes, there had been the occasional, spectacular Turk trying to buy their lovely Christian virgins for the court. She considered her niece’s profession was altogether too close a parallel, especially since her last engagement had been in Istanbul. Brothers, Bernardo gathered, were what Despina needed, who after protecting her honour from all those nasty foreigners with whom she had to sit at table would have fled, blood-stained and respected, into the mountains.

  Miss Luca evidently approved of him. Although he was engaged in the same vile trade as Despina he was presentable and of good Moldavian descent. She went so far as to remark that her treasure had been married to a brute and that the Church would give her a divorce whenever she wanted it. He was permitted to pay a formal visit and to return hospitality at a restaurant of her choosing where the food was somewhat oriental and the gipsy music superb.

  She still took Despina home from the Alhambra herself, But Bernardo was now allowed to call for her at the respectable hour of nine p.m. A fortnight passed which was enough to disinfect for him all the Romanian words of affection and to arrive at the exasperating limit of what could be effected on a public street in an open cab. Nadya remarked that he looked less worried and that, whatever he might say about the winter, it was doing him good.

  He was getting fond of great-aunt and—for just a moment—was more sympathetic than excited when one early morning she did not turn up to take Despina home. He asked if she were ill. No, Despina said, but they had quarrelled. Someone had proved to her that the name of Mitrani was Jewish. Aunt Floarea stormed that she had been grossly deceived by both of them; they had allowed her to think that he was of good family. His accent and the little mistakes he made in the language had reminded her of the boiars of her youth who were educated abroad and spoke more French than Romanian. Neither she nor Despina would have anything more to do with him. Turning Christian just to get a job!

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘That you’d have got a much better one by remaining a Jew.’

  ‘But then I should never have met you.’

  ‘I believe you never had any religion at all, David. But it takes courage to leave one’s past. It was not easy to leave my husband, but he could think of nothing but money.’

  ‘Well, aunt will be over it very soon.’

  ‘Maybe. But I shall not. I am not going home.’

  Old Mr. Brown looked back through the fog of the years. Probably there was little to be seen through it but the ivory pillar of Despina and the mixed appeal and decision of autumn-coloured eyes of which the expression rather than the shape remained.

  ‘Neultata Despina! Unforgettable! I can see the comedy of Magda—that febrile, overwhelming actress. But Despina: no comedy, no bitterness, just a divine simplicity fit to be worshipped. I did, by God! And always the exquisite, drowsy response. You don’t expect acrobatics of Aphrodite.’

  The only thing which interrupted the undiluted worshipping was a slight inquietude about Nadya. He vaguely felt himself in the position of, say, a widower living with his daughter and reluctant to parade an affair too obviously. Her room was far enough away on the next floor, and she had no chance of observing his return from work unless she deliberately looked out for him. There was, however, the common bathroom which she used when he was still fast asleep. He got up once and inspected it with the care of a detective until sure that there was no trace of Despina.

  In the long run he reckoned that it would be easy for Nadya to accept the position. Her work at the restaurant and his at the Alhambra only left a couple of hours in the afternoon for him to keep an eye on her. Despina’s private rehearsals would still allow time for that. Nadya in any case could hardly be shocked. In the aftermath of the revolution the back-street search for any kind of sexual satisfaction must have been as familiar to her as the back-street search for bread. Bernardo had never discussed the matter with her. Considering Stepanov’s dismal exhibition and her disillusionment after eloping from the convent, delicacy precluded the subject. He was inclined to think that Nadya would never have any sex life or, if she did, that it would be some detestable affair in which the man’s part would be limited to a short-lived curiosity.

  For three days he congratulated himself on getting away with it. Nadya left for her restaurant while he and Despina were still in bed, and by the time she came back for her free hours of the afternoon, the pair of them had gone out for their breakfast-cum-lunch, after which Despina went off to the Alhambra. Twice he cleared his throat with the intention of having a fatherly chat with young Nadya and both times she seemed too abstracted for him to get anywhere. It was absurd and distracting that he should have difficulty in reconciling two plain and easy relationships.

  It was Despina who broke the spell of inaction by asking if the girl upstairs was a servant. Bernardo said she was a Russian refugee who worked as a waitress.

  ‘What a curious figure!’

  ‘She didn’t have much to eat for a long time. Perhaps she can’t help making up for it.’

  ‘And such an exquisite face! We ought to do something for her.’

  Bernardo, wriggling on this unforeseen hook, asked what.

  ‘We could tell her she would be lovely if she took more care and exercise. Or is she pregnant?’

  ‘Not by me.’

  ‘As if I think you’d take a roly-poly pudding to bed unless you were drunk! And then a girl as sweet as that wouldn’t look at you. How like a man to live under the same roof and not ask questions!’

  ‘I can’t go asking strange girls if they are pregnant.’

  ‘But I can.’

  This was the devil. He went up to Nadya’s room that afternoon and warned her that a—um—friend of his was likely
to ask awkward questions.

  ‘She has, David.’

  ‘Already, you mean?’

  ‘Yes. You were still asleep and she was going out when I came in. So we talked and she came to my room.’

  Bernardo suspected that Despina had not been quite so sure as she sounded about the roly-poly pudding, but she could not be accused of duplicity. She never said that she had not talked to Nadya, only that she intended to.

  ‘What did you tell her?’

  ‘What I tell everyone—that my bones are a little deformed. I don’t think she believed me because she asked if I was pregnant and if she could help.’

  ‘The darling!’ Bernardo exclaimed enthusiastically.

  ‘Yes, she is. I thought that when she came home with you she was just here for the night.’

  ‘You knew?’

  ‘Of course I knew.’

  ‘She might be here for some time, Nadya.’

  ‘She must love you very much.’

  ‘I don’t think so. Just a little.’

  ‘Then God does not like it.’

  ‘But I do.’

  ‘Do you want me to find somewhere else to live?’

  ‘Of course not! What for? This place is just made for you until you get your passport.’

  He knew at once that he should not have mentioned ‘until’. Always in talking with her he tried to avoid any forecast of a future from which David Mitrani and his moral support, such as it was, might have to vanish without warning.

  ‘Are you going to marry her?’ Nadya asked. ‘If you marry her, I shall not lose you.’

  That took a bit of working out until he saw what she meant. She knew very well that he was English and compelled for some reason to hide it. That lovely Romanian girl who could afford to be generous represented possible permanency. If there were anything which could settle him firmly in time and space it might be Despina.

  Thereafter Bernardo’s home life continued in peace, though he heard Nadya’s laughter less often. When Despina, apparently seeing more of her than he did, repeated the sad story of her life, he observed that Nadya had given nothing away of her essential secrets, managing to slide without any perceptible break from the convent to the restaurant and keeping up a pretence of meeting Mr. Mitrani for the first time when he took the downstairs room. Bernardo had never suspected that she could use her angelic simplicity as an impenetrable cover, never complicating anything unnecessarily. She would have made a much better secret agent than he.