No wonder Paddy fell in love. She was sixteen years older than he (in later years, he would gallantly reduce this figure to twelve) and far more sophisticated, with a flowing physical grace. Like his, her imagination was drawn to a romanticized past. Her talk was playful and lively, enriched by much reading. She had studied painting, and had developed a serious interest in culture in reaction to the superficial tastes of her mondaine mother. To each the other came as a revelation. She was touched by Paddy’s youth, and saw that his erratic brilliance was in need of some polish – though she refused to call him Michael, the name he had used since leaving London. She preferred Paddy, so Paddy he became once again.
The eldest daughter of Prince Léon Cantacuzene and his wife, Princess Anna Vacaresco, Balasha and her younger sister Hélène (always known as Pomme) were brought up speaking French, English and Rumanian. They had a house in Bucharest and an estate in Moldavia, the northernmost of the two principalities that originally made up Rumania.
In 1924 she had married a Spanish diplomat, Francisco Amat y Torres, known as Paco, who served for three years as third secretary in Bucharest. They were en poste together in Warsaw, Spain, Belgrade and, latterly, Athens. Balasha had turned a blind eye to Paco’s infidelities but in Athens he fell seriously in love with Clothilde, the American wife of the British diplomat Bill Bentinck (Victor Frederick William Cavendish-Bentinck, later 9th Duke of Portland). They started an affair, and – about a year before she met Paddy – Paco had left Balasha for Clothilde. His next posting was to Buenos Aires, and Balasha never saw him again.
Balasha stayed on in Athens. She found a small pink cake of a house on Tripod Street near the Plaka, described by Paddy as ‘half a minute from the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates, where Byron had first taken lodgings in the now-vanished Capuchin Monastery’. From there, he says, ‘a sleeper-out on the balustraded roof could gaze straight up the cliff of the Acropolis at the stars’.11 It is typical of Paddy that although he writes of his unnamed painter-hostess as ‘more than a friend’, he banishes himself to the roof alone.
Neither he nor Balasha had much money, and leading a glamorous life in Athens was expensive. After two or three weeks on Tripod Street they began to look for somewhere more secluded to spend the summer, and to get away from the heat and dust of the capital. Hans Dyckhoff, Paddy’s friend from the Meteora, told them of a watermill at Lemonodassos, ‘the lemon grove’, south-east of the little town of Galatas which looked across a narrow channel to the island of Poros. The mill, a working water-mill built to irrigate the groves of orange and lemon trees that grew around the house and over the hillside, was maintained by Spiro and Marina Lazaros, who lived downstairs with their eight children. The airy upstairs room was let out to lodgers.
The room contained three old brass beds, while just beyond it the torrent that drove the mill came thundering down into the pool: ‘so you had only to step out’, said Paddy, ‘and you were in a glorious cold shower.’12 It had no telephone and no electric light, and Marina fed her guests on a diet consisting mainly of eggs: four each, for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Her eldest children, Kosta and Katrina, were about twelve or thirteen, while the youngest was still in its cradle, slung in a walnut tree and soothed by the sound of the water. The water driven by the mill was directed into a network of little channels, tended by a group of men who would gather in the evening to drink and sing on the terrace, which served as a café.
Paddy and Balasha spent the mornings painting and writing. Balasha worked on a portrait of Paddy, whilst he wrote about people and places he had seen in Greece, borrowing books on Greek history, ethnography and folklore from Aleko Matsas and the British School in Athens with a view to writing a book about Greece himself. After a swim and a long siesta they would walk down to the little town of Galatas, along a rocky path that wound its way through pine and myrtle, fig and olive trees. Here they would sit at little iron tables under the plane trees, drinking and talking as they gazed out over the water to the monastery on the island.
On one of their occasional visits to Athens, Paddy and Balasha stayed with Constantine (‘Tanti’) Rodocanachi and his Rumanian wife Margèle, who were particularly attached to Balasha since she had introduced them. Born in Egypt and educated in England, Rodocanachi was a veteran of the Graeco-Turkish and Balkan wars, as well as the Great War. He had made and lost fortunes, served in the diplomatic corps, and when he retired he devoted himself to writing. His first novel Ulysse fils d’Ulysse, was loosely based on the life of the arms dealer and financier Basil Zaharoff.
Rodocanachi gave Paddy a copy of the book in French. He hoped to publish it in America and England, but needed a translator. Paddy leapt at the chance to translate it, and Rodocanachi’s terms were generous. If the book were published in English, Rodocanachi was prepared to give him a third of his royalties.
He and Balasha were living the life of Daphnis and Chloe, but a spectacular summer storm heralded a chill wind that whipped up the clouds and blew through their thin clothes. Not even Lemonodassos would be idyllic in winter. Rather than return to Athens, Balasha suggested that they go to Rumania and spend the winter at Băleni, her family home, close to the Bessarabian border.
They went by sea to Constanța, by train to Galatz, and then (by which time the train had dwindled to a very rustic conveyance) to a tiny station where they were met by an old Polish coachman called Pan Stanislas. It took them another hour to reach Băleni.
The long, low manor house was one storey high with thick whitewashed walls and green shutters; one visitor described it as looking ‘like a sunken ship’.13 Outbuildings and stables, barns and cow byres were built around a courtyard full of deliriously barking dogs. On one side, the house looked on to a village of white cottages with thatched roofs, their windows and doors outlined in a thick band of brightly coloured paint. The peasants wore black and white homespun clothes and felt hats, and almost all the women spun from a distaff when not engaged in other work; the men drove high carts pulled by pale oxen. To the other side, the house looked over a vast undulating plain, which was brown and windswept when Paddy and Balasha arrived. Soon the winter winds would drive the snow into impenetrable drifts that came up to the windowsills.
They were ushered into the house by Balasha’s sister Pomme, who had run the estate with her husband, Constantin Donici, since the death of her parents. It had been in a sorry state when they took it over, since the old Prince was more of a gambler than a landowner. Pomme and Constantin had thrown all their energy into Băleni, and Constantin also acted as agent for his neighbour, Prince Zuzev.
Constantin’s grandfather had been a celebrated Moldavian writer and translator of Pushkin, but he himself was a practical, easy-going man who didn’t have much thirst for literature. He was attractive to women and had taken part in two or three duels in his youth – always as the challenged party. But he had now settled down to life as a country gentleman, and his greatest pleasure was hunting. Pomme too was a countrywoman, and a bee-keeper. She and Constantin had a daughter just into her teens called Ina, whom Paddy thought resembled Millais’ Ophelia.
Plaster flaked from the columns and pediments, and indoors, room opened into room in vistas of Louis Philippe and Second Empire furniture. Benevolent or wicked voivodes gazed from the walls in half-Byzantine, half-Slavonic panoplies of fur hats, aigrettes, furred robes and pearls. There would be a Western relation or two with powdered hair, Boyar descendants with epaulettes and sabres, some touching girls in crinolines holding flowers and pigeons …
He also remembered ‘glass cases with the lumpy seals of parchments, the family’s two-headed eagle, tall china stoves, the prisms of chandeliers, stags’ antlers, the glass eye of a huge bear’s pelt from the Carpathians, and thousands of books in several languages’.14
Everything was rather run-down and shabby. The Cantacuzene estates had been much diminished by land reforms after the Great War, and at the time Paddy arrived in Rumania, the country was still in the grip of economic sta
gnation caused by the great depression. Though there was never much cash, Constantin managed the land well. There was still something to be made from the sale of grain and cattle, but the day-to-day economy depended largely on barter and payment in kind, and feudal customs still persisted: one visitor to Băleni recalled that when Balasha went out on the estate, peasants would go down on one knee and kiss her hand. In such a society there was no shortage of servants and retainers; their wages amounted to little more than board and lodging, but working in the big house held a certain prestige.
Niculina, with her white coif, came in with a spill every evening to light the shaded kerosene lamps with hummingbird swiftness. She was in love with one of the woodsmen, Mihai Pintili. There was Ionitza the cook, Ifrim Podubniak the slightly sozzled butler, Ivan the Russian plumber, and Mustafa from the Dobrudja. Paddy particularly enjoyed talking to the old Polish coachman, Pan Stanislas. ‘He had done his military service in the 2nd Schwartzenberg Dragoons when Galicia was still Austrian, and he seemed to know all the novels of Sienkiewicz by heart.’15 It is hardly surprising that Paddy remembered them all so well, for Băleni was where he spent much of the next four years. The Cantacuzenes, who welcomed him so warmly, almost began to take the place of his family.
Paddy’s relations with his mother had been reduced to a frozen silence as a result of Æileen’s jealousy of Balasha, which erupted with the unexpected force of a genie from a bottle. Little realizing what he was doing, Paddy had written his mother a letter to tell her about Balasha and how wonderful she was. He looked forward eagerly to her reply, and an envelope duly arrived addressed in his mother’s hand. Inside he found nothing but his original letter, torn to shreds. ‘It created a chasm between us for many years,’ he said. ‘In fact, I don’t think it was ever quite right between us after that.’16
In February 1936, still at Băleni, Paddy turned twenty-one and received an unexpected windfall – a godfather he had never met, Sir Henry Hubert Hayden who had been Director of the Geological Survey of India between 1910 and 1921, had made him a gift of £300. This was a considerable sum of money, and he hoped to make it last as long as possible.
Paddy spent all of 1936 at Băleni, translating Tanti’s book in the octagonal library, and reading, mostly in French: Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Gide and, for the first time in its entirety, A la recherche du temps perdu. He also read Tolstoy and Turgenev in French translation, while Les Enfants terribles, Le Grand Meaulnes and L’Aiglon were read aloud in the evenings. His Rumanian improved, and with Balasha’s help, he translated the hauntingly beautiful Rumanian folk poem, ‘Mioritza’.
He rode almost every day, though Balasha had lost her nerve after a bad fall. He begged her to try again. She did, riding side-saddle which made her feel more secure, ‘but she didn’t really enjoy it,’ said Paddy sadly. ‘She only rode to please me.’17 Dressed in long sheepskin coats and hats, they went for long rides under white skies, coming back at dusk. Then tea was served from a samovar, accompanied by a raisin bread called cozonac.
As the weather grew warmer the snows retreated, the brown plain turned green.
A shepherd called Petru played a long wooden flute. Ifrim the butler’s father carved me a three-stringed rebeck out of a walnut tree, blown down in a storm; Anton, an accomplished violinist with a kicked-in face, played and sang when called upon, backed by half a dozen fellow-gipsies settled in the village. There was a crone there who knew how to cast spells and break them by incantations; another, by magic, could deliver whole villages from rats. After sheep-shearing, these would all gather in a barn to spin the wool – hilarious days with a lot of food, drink, singing, story-telling … I got to know everyone for miles: hardy men in sheepskin jerkins and conical fleece hats and women in coifs. I felt half-Moldavian by adoption and tried to pick up their dialect and turns of phrase.18
With a cousin of Balasha’s, Alexander Mourouzi, who lived a few hours away in a neo-Palladian house called Golásei, Paddy explored the Danube delta. They set off to Galatz by train, then took a steamer up the northernmost arm of the river to the town of Vâlcov: ‘a maze of willow-shaded canals and the huts of White Russian fishermen who, every few hours, landed an enormous sturgeon from which huge slimy troves of caviare were untimely ripped.’19 They found a boatman called Nicolai who, like most of the Russians of the delta, belonged to a sect known as the Lipoveni.
When the reformed or Nikonian Orthodox Church was established in Russia in the seventeenth century, the ‘old believers’ were branded as heretics, to be persecuted and hounded out of the country. The Old Religion splintered into many sects, one of which was the self-mutilating Skopzi, who traditionally drove the horse-drawn cabs in Rumanian towns and whom Paddy had seen in Bucharest. The Lipoveni were another: the men had long hair and beards, and spoke a curious dialect of their own.
Nicolai’s boat was a lotka, a long, black, steeply prowed and masted craft, manoeuvred with a long pole. For two weeks Paddy and Alexander Mourouzi wove their way among the meandering channels and lagoons of the delta, thick with feathery reeds twenty foot high, alive with fish and water fowl, and heavily infested with mosquitoes. The birds seemed quite fearless, ‘scarcely moving as the prow of our lotka forged through their floating tribes. They swarmed and settled on the masts and on the bulwarks, and looked at us with curious or brazen scrutiny … Cranes and herons fished among the weeds, and swans drifted by in flotillas and every now and then a pink cirrus of flamingos would loom over overhead through the manifold wheeling phalanxes of geese and ducks.’20
Later in the summer, Paddy and Balasha travelled in Bukovina and Bessarabia. Bessarabia (now the Republic of Moldova) is a long triangle of land between the rivers Prut and Dniester going all the way down to the Black Sea. It had been ceded to Russia in 1812; but in 1918 it had declared its independence and united with Rumania. The Bukovina, northern Moldavia, had been ceded to Austria in the eighteenth century. Ukrainians, Poles, Hungarians, Jews and Germans had settled there, but Rumanian speakers were still in the majority.
In Bukovina they visited the churches and painted monasteries around Suceava; while in Bessarabia they stayed with General Volodya Cantacuzin, who lived on a huge estate among rolling hills. He lent them horses and they rode about the countryside, visiting friends and relatives of Balasha’s. Somewhere else, Paddy could not remember where, there was a great banquet under the trees. Yet for all their warmth, laughter and hospitality, the people here were living under a shadow. Soviet Russia had never accepted that Bessarabia was part of Rumania, and was bent on claiming it for the Ukraine.
It was a terrifying prospect, for everyone knew what had happened in 1932 and the years that followed. The farmers and peasants of the Ukraine had been subjected to the forced collectivization of their fields and farms, which had led to man-made famines accompanied by cruelty on an unimaginable scale. People died in their millions, while their orphaned children were either abandoned, shot, or locked into camps where they starved to death. Communism had never exerted any pull on Paddy, any more than Fascism. Both were ready to destroy everything he loved about European civilization in order to build their aggressively utilitarian, industrial superstates. Yet it was the experience of living with the Cantacuzenes on the eastern edge of Rumania and the visit to Bessarabia that, in his own words, ‘inoculated me against Communism’.21
Paddy had kept in regular touch with Tanti Rodocanachi during the translation of Ulysse fils d’Ulysse, and once completed it found an English publisher. William Heinemann would be bringing out the book, now called No Innocent Abroad, in 1937. He and Balasha therefore decided to go to England. Neither of them had much money, but Paddy hoped to pick up some work on the back of the novel’s publication. Balasha would try and sell her paintings of Rumania and, perhaps, secure some portrait commissions.
When Paddy had left England that rainy night in December 1933, he was escaping: from his parents’ disappointed expectations and his own hopeless, idle, easily distracted, unemployable self. He returne
d three years later, having travelled more than most people then did in a lifetime, with the knowledge that all he really wanted to do was write. He also knew that he possessed an exceptional gift for companionship and entertaining people. The magic did not always work; there were plenty of people who found him an insufferable show-off. But when it did work, he found he could lift people’s hearts and spirits, and enchant both men and women. This was all very well, but surely his scholar-gypsy life must come to an end sooner or later. The time had come to take a grip.
Paddy, Balasha and Pomme arrived in London in January 1937, a month after the abdication of King Edward VIII. They stayed with Guy Branch, a friend of Balasha’s who was living with his widowed mother and his younger sister Biddy in Pembroke Square. Guy lent them his studio at the bottom of the garden, but in time Paddy and Balasha found a flat of their own at 9 Earl’s Walk, off the Earl’s Court Road.
Without much enthusiasm Paddy set about finding a job that would earn some money, while still giving him time to write and translate. He enrolled as a tutor with the educational consultants Gabbitas & Thring, but after a few sessions with a sullen child whose mother sat in on all the lessons, he decided that tutoring was not for him. His next job was reading German film scripts for Twentieth Century-Fox. Here too he proved unsatisfactory, since Paddy’s German was not quite good enough to judge whether a script was good or bad.
The most congenial work he found was on the World Review, a right-wing political monthly featuring articles from the international press, created by the journalist and later MP Vernon Bartlett. Paddy acted as sub-editor and general dogsbody to Kathleen Outhwaite, who ran the magazine from an office in Chandos Street. He may have been responsible for one or two of the short, unsigned reviews in the book section, but only one was printed under his name. It discussed a book called Count Your Dead – They are Alive!, a polemic which was also an urgent warning against the perils of totalitarianism by the author and painter Wyndham Lewis. It was while he was working for the World Review that Paddy met Kim Philby, who was an occasional contributor (Paddy noticed the leather patches on the elbows of his tweed jacket, a sartorial feature he had never seen before).
Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure Page 13
