The Travellers

by Ann Swinfen

  ‘But I don’t understand. There’s no opening. How could you light a fire in it?’

  The guide tapped the wall beside the stove. It echoed hollowly.

  ‘Most stoves in ordinary homes, of course, they have a door for the fire. Behind the wall here there is a door, but it is concealed from the sight of the rooms. The stoves were stoked and cleaned from behind.’

  Kate looked along the wall. ‘But there is no door.’

  ‘Not here, no. Not into the family part of the house. Behind all the walls there is a network of little corridors and stairs, so the servants could carry in the fuel and attend to the stoves without disturbing the family. Come, now we go upstairs to the bedrooms, then down again to view the library and ballroom.’

  As the others, including Sofia, moved away, Kate lingered with her hand still on the stove, thinking of the servants scurrying about behind the walls like a secret army of mice. If a servant lad was careless and dropped a bucket of ashes, would he have been heard in here? And could the servants overhear what was going on in these rooms as they made their way all over the house, just on the other side of the wall? The thought of those interdependent yet separate lives going on was curiously unsettling.

  They were taken through four of the bedrooms upstairs. In the last one Sofia walked over to the window and stood gazing out as the guide explained that this room had once been lined with French tapestries which had depicted events from Greek mythology. Kate joined Sofia at the window.

  ‘Was this your room?’ she asked softly.

  Sofia nodded.

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘You can just catch a glimpse of the village and the river there, where the ground dips and there is a gap in the trees. You can see more in winter, after the leaves have fallen. I used to stand here and wonder what it would be like to play with the children in the village. My parents were quite liberal for their time, I suppose, but they would never have dreamt of allowing me to associate with the children down there. Sometimes I would watch them playing ball or running about together. You can see a corner of the village square in winter. About the only time I mixed with them was when the Danube froze, and my parents and I would go skating, along with half the village, when work was finished.’

  ‘Were you a very lonely child?’

  ‘Yes, I must have been, I realise now. At the time I never questioned it. I knew all the village people by name, of course. Many of them worked for my father, and I would go with my nurse or my mother to buy things in the village. There used to be a wonderful pastry shop kept by a Turkish family. Visits there were always a treat. I’m sad to see that has vanished.’ She gave a little rueful smile. ‘I was a great reader as a child, and I always had a dog. I would go exploring in the woods sometimes.’

  ‘Was that your dog in the picture?’

  Sofia turned away.

  ‘Yes. That was Bárat. I had to leave him behind when we left in 1938. He knew something was wrong. He followed us down to the river and when we climbed into the rowing boat he tried to follow. My father ordered him home, but he sat on the shore and howled as we rowed away, out to the ship in the main channel. My father was afraid he would give us away. I never knew what became of him.’

  Kate touched her hand lightly, but the guide was urging them back downstairs to admire the library (empty, although the bookshelves were still intact) and the ballroom, the one room in the house to have been restored to its former glory. There was a magnificent painted ceiling of voluptuous nymphs riding on dolphins. The walls had been repainted in their original colours of cream and duck-egg blue, with all the riotous mouldings, the cornices and the plasterwork around the windows re-gilded.

  ‘I never liked this room,’ said Sofia with distaste. ‘I hated those fat women, as I called them. I suppose they embarrassed me, baring their breasts like that. I was a modest child.’

  After they had shed their felt slippers and come out again into the sunshine, Sofia said she would not walk around the grounds. She preferred to go back to the hotel and sit quietly until lunchtime, but she urged Kate to stay and explore the garden, which was gradually being restored, and the woods, which always used to be full of pretty walks. Kate agreed. Sofia might want some time to herself to come to terms with seeing the forlorn shell of her home.

  ‘The summerhouse you admired in the photograph is down in that direction,’ said Sofia. She indicated the dip in the ground which Kate recognised from the view out of the bedroom.

  Kate set off in the opposite direction from the Austrian family and the schoolteacher, who were talking animatedly as they went towards a formal garden where small box hedges had been replanted but not yet trimmed to shape. Following an overgrown path heading the way Sofia had pointed, Kate found herself under the welcome shade of the mixed woods which at one time would have been carefully managed, the undergrowth kept down and dead trees cleared away. Now it was wilder, but not totally neglected, and after ten minutes’ walking she found herself at the edge of the clearing she recognised from the photograph. Ahead of her was the summerhouse, a little shabby, some of its railings broken, but still lovely. The metal dragon sat slightly askew on the peak of the roof, and his tail spiralled in an elegant curve towards the sky.

  She had a strange feeling, as though she was stepping into the photograph which had so attracted her. The printed image seemed to melt into the scene before her, and she crossed the grassy clearing dreamily, scarcely hearing the birds around her in the trees, or the sound of her skirt brushing the long grass. Finding herself in this place, she felt the barrier between image and reality dissolve. The illusion, the sense of déjà vu, swept over her as she saw the man from the photograph come out of the summerhouse and hesitate on the steps with one hand on the ornate railing. Then she shook her head, amused at her fanciful thoughts. The man was familiar, but he was not Zsigmond Niklai. He was the man she had met in the gallery in Budapest.

  Chapter 9

  István shaded his eyes against the sun. He could see the outline of a woman’s figure at the edge of the clearing, but whether she was old or young, known or strange, he could not tell. She was a black silhouette, rimmed about with the dazzling midday summer sun. She stepped forward and addressed him hesitantly in German.

  ‘How strange, but I think we have met before.’

  She came to the bottom of the steps, tilting her head a little to look up at him. He could make her out more clearly now that he was no longer looking directly into the sun, but his vision still swam with stars and explosions of light.

  ‘You are the gallery owner, aren’t you? From Váci Utca?’

  She looked suddenly embarrassed, put out by his continued silence. She was a few years younger than he, slim, brown-haired. Pleasant-looking, with intelligent eyes and lines of worry about her eyebrows. He stared at her nonplussed. What was she talking about? A gallery owner? Then he remembered. He had spoken to a woman in the gallery in Budapest a couple of days ago. He had taken no particular notice of what she looked like. What had struck him was her total absorption in Magdolna’s work. He recognised her now. He had addressed her in English because her clothes had that indefinable English air – well cut but understated, not as elegant as French clothes nor as outrageous as the multicoloured outfits the Americans were wearing this year. Her German was good, very good, but there was a lightness in the guttural sounds that told him she was indeed English.

  ‘Forgive me!’ He jumped down the last few steps to the ground. ‘You took me by surprise. We did indeed meet in the gallery, but I am not the owner. I was just a visitor like yourself.’

  He did not choose to tell her he was the brother of the artist whose work she had been admiring. When he was in Budapest he always visited the gallery, to check that Magdolna’s work was being displayed properly, and to grind his teeth a little at the high prices the gallery was charging, compared with the little they paid her.

  What was this woman doing here? The gallery was strictly forbidden to give out Magdolna’s address. She sh
rank from publicity and the whole family closed ranks protectively around her. How had this woman found her out? But the next moment he thought that perhaps he had done her an injustice.

  ‘I’m still hoping to go back and buy one of those figures before we leave. Aren’t they wonderful? I’ve never seen anything like them before, even when we lived in London and we had all the galleries there to visit.’

  She smiled without guile.

  ‘What a coincidence, meeting you again! I’ve fallen in love with your beautiful village. My friend and I are planning to spend some time here. You do live here, don’t you?’

  ‘I grew up here,’ he said, switching to English. ‘But now I have a practice in Sopron. I am a family doctor there. István Rudnay.’ He held out his hand.

  ‘Kate Milburn.’ She took his hand in a firm grasp. ‘Are you here on holiday too?’

  ‘Yes, I always stay with my sister and her family for a month in the summer.’

  Kate glanced at her watch.

  ‘I must be getting back. My friend will be waiting at the inn for lunch. It was nice meeting you again.’ She turned to head towards the main gate of the manor house.

  ‘The pleasure is mine. But if you are going back to the village you don’t need to follow the road. It’s in very bad condition, uncomfortable for walking. If you will allow me, I can show you a path down through the woods behind the summerhouse. It is much quicker and very pleasant under the trees.’

  Kate hesitated only for a moment. Then she smiled and turned with him into the wood. He held back some low-growing branches at the far end of the clearing and beyond them a fairly well-defined path led between great, widely spaced oaks and some younger trees, silver birches and rowans, which had insinuated themselves between the older ones.

  ‘I thought the house and grounds had been deserted for years and were only just starting to be renovated,’ said Kate, ‘but this path seems well used.’

  ‘People from the village sometimes use it as a short-cut between the fields near the village and the other land beyond the manor gardens, over there.’ He pointed back in the direction from which they had come.

  ‘Does all the land belong to the people in the village now?’

  ‘Yes, except for the gardens immediately around the house. The last count gave much of his land to the villagers between the wars. Then the communist regime forced them to hand it over to the local collective farm. Now we’ve got it back again.’ He laughed. ‘I think even the politicians have come to understand that a man farms best the soil he owns himself. My brother-in-law is a farmer. These fields just ahead of us belong to him and his brother.’

  They came out of the edge of the woods beside a field of maize. Over to the left was another of sunflowers, and further away, wheat.

  ‘Goodness, they have an irrigation system,’ said Kate. ‘I kept thinking, all the way from Budapest, how dry and parched the fields looked. But these are in much better heart.’

  ‘It has been a terrible summer. Good for the tourists, perhaps, but hardly a drop of rain for the farmers. The irrigation system is really a sort of giant lawn-sprinkler that József’s brother has rigged up, but it does seem to be making a difference.’

  They dodged, laughing, through the drops from the sprinkler and rejoined the road just in front of the church.

  ‘I know where I am now,’ said Kate. ‘Thank you for showing me the way.’

  ‘It was a pleasure. Perhaps we will meet again while you are staying in Szentmargit.’ He bowed briefly, smiled, and walked briskly away through the village.

  * * *

  Sofia had recovered her composure.

  ‘The house was not so very different from what I had pictured to myself,’ she said to Kate as they sat over the last of their lunch under the walnut tree in the village square. ‘Seeing the photographs upset me for a moment. Until then, you know, I could quite put myself at a distance from it, as if the house had nothing to do with me. Then the photograph of us all... And to see Bárat again. Foolish, isn’t it? How you give your heart to animals, when you know it must be broken? That picture would have been taken in 1934 – when he was a puppy. I suppose my parents already knew that dangerous things were happening in Germany, but for me life was going on just as it always had. I was away at boarding-school in Switzerland by then, of course. Quite happy, on the whole, but I only really felt alive when I came home to Hungary.’

  She broke off, sipping her coffee. ‘How fortunate it is that we can’t see into the future.’

  She poured them each a second cup and sat stirring it thoughtfully.

  ‘I had a curious experience after I left you,’ said Kate. ‘Do you remember the picture you had, of your father on the steps of the summer-house?’

  ‘Yes. You were very interested in it.’

  ‘I don’t know why. Something about the delicate structure with the dark trees behind, and your father...’ She could not say what had so moved her about that picture of Zsigmond Niklai.

  ‘I went looking for the summer-house where you said, and I found it.’

  ‘It is still standing?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Kate was puzzled by this. ‘I think someone must have been looking after it. You would expect a building that is mainly wood to have fallen down by now, wouldn’t you? Anyway, as I came out from under the trees into the sunlight of the clearing, there was a man coming down the steps of the summer-house, and for a moment I felt I had stepped into that photograph. He looked so like your father. The next minute I realised that I had met him before, in the gallery with the ceramics I told you about.’

  ‘Strange you should meet him here.’

  ‘Isn’t it? It appears he’s a doctor from Sopron, and he’s spending his summer holiday with his sister, who lives in the village. He said he grew up here himself. He showed me a way back to the village through the woods from the summer-house.’

  Sofia smiled. ‘Ah yes, I remember that path.’

  Suddenly Kate recalled the little scene she had witnessed from her bedroom window yesterday – the boy, the man in the city suit, and the woman throwing her arms around him. She had thought they were husband and wife, but now she realised that it must have been Dr Rudnay and his sister, who was married to a farmer in the village. When they had met this morning he was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, and she had not connected him with the man in the suit, who looked so out of place in Szentmargit.

  * * *

  When the worst of the midday heat was over, István agreed to go fishing with András. Their favourite stream ran down from the gardens of the Niklai manor house – where it formed the central feature of the water garden – and wandered between the fields until it joined the Danube a little way upriver from the Buvaris’ house. Willows grew along its banks, ancient pollarded trees which had provided the villagers with withies for centuries. There were several deep pools under the trailing branches where, with a bit of luck, trout might be taken.

  The canopy of leaves provided welcome shade from the heat of the sun, which was still uncomfortable, even though it was now declining in the afternoon sky. They had brought three-legged stools with them from the house, and made themselves comfortable under a large willow, with sandwiches and drinks to hand – fizzy lemonade for András and beer for István. They debated wedging the bottles in the water to keep cool, but the stream was warm on their dipping fingers, running sluggishly under the sun. They laid out their lines.

  András was a good companion for a fishing trip, thought István. He had a great capacity for stillness, and would sit by the hour dreamily watching the float bobbing and the movement of the stream through the rushes along the shore. A moorhen had its nest opposite them, and was busy taking its chicks on their first swimming expeditions, never more than a metre or two from the nest up stream or down and then back again. How mysterious children are, he thought. One minute so adult, the next reverting to babyhood. Playing football with his friends András was as noisy and boisterous as any of them, but now, sitting qu
ietly beside his uncle, he was as silent and absorbed as a grown man.

  His own son László had been a mystery to him. István, struggling when László was young to be both father and mother to him, had thought they were as close as a father and son could well be. Despite the fact that he was also trying to build up his practice in Sopron, he spent every available minute with László. Always, at the back of his mind, was his own sense of loss, his feeling that without a father he himself had been somehow incomplete, diminished. Yet he could never remember having with László the easy companionship he knew with András. Perhaps with László he had tried too hard, while with András he had never felt the need to try, so that their friendship, more important even than kinship, had grown and strengthened naturally.

  As he had reached adolescence, László withdrew more and more into himself, actively cutting himself off from his father. Did I smother him? István wondered. Did I somehow drive him away through loving and needing him too much? Because I did need him, do need him. More, it seems, than he ever needed me.

  A sharp sighed escaped him involuntarily, András looked across at him.

  ‘Are you tired, Uncle István? Do you want to go home?’

  ‘No, no, not at all. I was just thinking.’

  ‘About work?’ András knew that this often made his mother distracted, and his uncle was like his mother in many ways.

  ‘Something like that. Do you want to stay by this pool, or do you want to try that smaller one, further up above the alders?’

  ‘Let’s stay here. I’ve seen one whopper down there by that rock.’ András pointed. ‘He just doesn’t seem hungry.’

  ‘We’ll have to be patient, then.’

  They lapsed back into silence.

  István was still puzzled by the two women staying at the Blue Heron. Visitors to the village were rare. What had brought them here? On their walk down through the woods to the village, Kate Milburn had made no further reference to Magdolna or her work. If she was here in search of the artist, surely she would have tried to find out more from him?