Somehow she managed to find the strength to try and calm him, hushing him as one would a frightened child, vainly trying to lift his head, caressing his tousled hair as if he were her son, and all the while her hands, gentle and motherly, softly stroked his head as she tried to utter some words of comfort:
‘My darling … my own darling. You mustn’t … no, you mustn’t … My very own … my darling … no, you mustn’t …’
As Balint reeled out of Adrienne’s room the hotel was coming to life. He staggered out, not looking back, banging into the doorpost as he went, like a man mortally wounded and unconscious of his surroundings.
Adrienne rose from the bed and walked slowly to the window. From far, far away she thought she could hear music, but it sounded like a funeral march or the sad songs that accompany the dead to their last resting place. Perhaps it was only the echo of some distant siren. Her heart throbbed, beating unevenly as if it were about to stop for ever.
Adrienne just stood there by the window, looking fixedly into a distance that for her did not exist. She never touched the curtains but just stood there, alone, staring into nothing, her nightdress in shreds and in front, where Balint had buried his head, it clung to her thighs wet with his tears, and cold to the touch, for from outside the open window the early morning breeze had just begun.
The voluminous folds of the fine white netting floated around her, veiling her face, her dishevelled, unruly hair, her naked shoulders, until she was entirely covered.
She might have been wrapped in a shroud …
Eddy: The Life of Edward Sackville-West
Michael De-la-Noy
Heir to Knole and a peerage, novelist, discerning critic and brilliant pianist, the intimate of Bloomsbury writers and painters, Edward Sackville-West was born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth. Through diaries and previously unpublished letters, we see a life dogged a chronic ill-health and a masochistic psychological make-up.
‘Nobody can fail to respect the skill and industry which De-la-Noy has devoted to bringing Eddy Sackville-West back to life in this elegant and sympathetic biography’ – Sunday Times
The Tangier Diaries 1962–1979
John Hopkins
American novelist Hopkins arrived in Tangier at the age of twenty-four and ended up spending almost two decades in Morocco, mixing with a wide cast of characters, Paul and Jane Bowles, William Burroughs, David Herbert and Malcolm Forbes among them.
‘Hopkins writes as powerfully of place as of people, capturing the steamy bustle of the Kasbah market and the awesome mystery of the Sahara’ – Michael Arditti, Daily Mail
Doubtful Partners
John Haylock
The latest novel from the author of Eastern Exchange is a light-hearted look at the barriers and frustrations in close attachments – especially those doubtful partnerships in which communication is entirely physical.
‘If there is one thing to bring out the candid in Haylock, it is the ins and outs of intimate intercourse’ – The Times
Eastern Exchange
John Haylock
‘For those with a fascination for eccentric lives, Haylock’s book is a little gem, the record of an extraordinarily interesting life’
– Ian Buruma, Sunday Telegraph
When Memory Dies
A. Sivanandan
A three-generational saga of a Sri Lankan family’s search for coherence and continuity in a country broken by colonial occupation and riven by ethnic wars. Winner of the Sagittarius Prize 1998 and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize 1998
‘Haunting … with an immense tenderness. The extraordinary poetic tact of this book makes it unforgettable’ – John Berger, Guardian
The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon
Richard Zimler
A literary mystery set among secret Jews living in Lisbon in 1506 when, during Passover celebrations, some two thousand Jewish inhabitants were murdered in a pogrom. THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER.
‘Remarkable erudition and compelling imagination, an American Umberto Eco’ – Francis King, Spectator
Night Letters
Robert Dessaix
Every night for twenty nights in a hotel room in Venice, a man recently diagnosed with HIV writes a letter home to a friend. He describes not only the kaleidoscopic journey he has just made from Switzerland across northern Italy to Venice, but reflects on questions of mortality, seduction and the search for paradise.
‘Dessaix writes with great elegance, with passion, compassion, and sly wit. Literally a wonderful book’ – John Banville
Double Act
Fiona Pitt-Kethley
‘This poetry collection reads like it’s been written by a sexually charged Philip Larkin. Both witty and scathing, it avoids the tender eroticism often employed when discussing sex and instead goes straight for the jugular’ – D>tour Magazine
Tomorrow
Elisabeth Russell Taylor
In August 1960, a number of ill-assorted guests gather at a small hotel on the Danish island of Møn. Among them is Elisabeth Danziger, whose happy memories of growing up in a brilliant and gifted family are overshadowed by darker ones, over which she struggles to achieve control.
‘A memorable and poignant novel made all the more heartbreaking by the quiet dignity of its central character and the restraint of its telling’ – Shena Mackay
Present Fears
Elisabeth Russell Taylor
‘It is hard to pinpoint what makes these stories so unsettling. Their worlds – some border territory between genteel suburbia and dreamland – are imagined with an eerie thoroughness. The inhabitants are all out of kilter, and terrifyingly fragile; spinsterish middle-agers paralysed by sexual fear; anxious children in the centre of parental power games. Russell Taylor’s abrupt, elegantly engineered anticlimaxes leave the reader with the disquieting feeling of waiting for the other shoe to fall’ – Sam Leith, Observer
Isabelle
John Berger and Nella Bielski
A compelling recreation of the life of Isabelle Eberhardt.
‘A tantalizing enigma, Berger and Bielski’s filmic approach is appropriate to her literally dramatic life, and the symmetry of the imagery is an indication of the artistry of this work’ – Observer
Fear of Mirrors
Tariq Ali
Lovers want to know the truth, but they do not always want to tell it. For some East Germans, the fall of Communism was like the end of a long and painful love affair; free to tell the truth at last, they found they no longer wanted to hear it.
‘When Ali’s imagination goes wild he is superb’ – New Statesman
Time Exposure
Brodrick Haldane
in conversation with Roddy Martine
For almost six decades Brodrick Haldane moved among the rich and the famous, photographing everybody who was anybody, including the Queen Mother, Bernard Shaw, the Aga Khan and Margaret, Duchess of Argyll. Time Exposure is a witty and charming portrait of an age peopled by extraordinary characters.
‘The original society paparazzo, snapping the Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson in exile, Charlie Chaplin and a youthful JFK’ – Sunday Times
False Light
Peter Sheldon Foreword by Francis King
Karl is a handsome adolescent in Vienna between the wars. He has every advantage, but all is not as it seems in a situation full of political tensions and erotic undercurrents.
‘An absorbing read’ – Sebastian Beaumont, Gay Times
Eurydice in the Underworld
Kathy Acker
The last work of new fiction Acker published before her death from breast cancer in late 1997, Eurydice is Acker’s response to her diagnosis. Its ‘raw truth is shot through with surprising lyricism and tenderness’ – Observer. The collection also includes Acker classics such as ‘Lust’, ‘Algeria’ and ‘Immoral’, on the banning in Germany of Blood and Guts in High School.
‘Kathy Acker’s writing is virtuoso, maddening, cra
zy, so sexy, so painful, and beaten out of a wild heart that nothing can tame. Acker is a landmark writer’ – Jeanette Winterson
ARCADIA BOOKS
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About the Author
Count Miklós Bánffy (1873–1950) was variously a diplomat, MP and foreign minister in 1921–22 when he signed the peace treaty with the United States and obtained Hungary’s admission to the League of Nations. He was responsible for organising the last Habsburg coronation, that of King Karl in 1916. His famous Transylvanian Trilogy, They Were Counted, They Were Found Wanting, They Were Divided was first published in Budapest in the 1930s.
Copyright
First published in English in 2000
by Arcadia Books Books, 15-16 Nassau Street, London, W1W 7AB
This ebook edition first published in 2011
All rights reserved
© Miklós Bánffy, 1937
© Translation from the Hungarian, Patrick Thursfield and Katalin Bánffy-Jelen, 2000
The right of Miklós Bánffy to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–1–908129–02–4
They Were Counted (The Writing on the Wall: the Transylvanian Trilogy) Page 80
