The Drowning People

by Richard Mason

  CHAPTER 12

  IN DUE COURSE THE APPROPRIATE AUTHORITIES were appealed to, the appropriate favors were called in, and a term’s sabbatical was granted. A tape of my playing at St. Peter’s was dispatched to Prague by courier with a long letter from Eric attached; and two days of tense waiting later, a telegram arrived from Mendl saying that he would be delighted to take me on for a term.

  Camilla Boardman telephoned as soon as she knew. “Daaarling! You’re so fabulous!”

  “I think it’s your mother’s work rather than mine, Camilla.”

  “Didn’t I say you two would enjoy each other? Didn’t I say so?”

  “You did.”

  “And wasn’t I right?”

  “You were. Thank you.”

  Camilla required her own portion of recognition.

  My only reservation in all the excitement was the thought of leaving Ella.

  I had told her immediately, of course, of Eric’s offer; together we had endured the tense few days of Regina Boardman’s machinations. Neither of us had believed that they would come to anything, though Ella understood my hopes and hoped with me; and when they did it was Ella whom I wanted to be the first to know. But when I called the house in Chester Square I was told that the Harcourts were away; and the deep voice at the other end was not at liberty to tell me when they might be back.

  For two days I waited, puzzled, while my mother told her friends of my good fortune and undoubted genius. The atmosphere at home had changed now beyond all recognition; for with the instinct of artful losers—or so I understood it at the time—my parents had come to believe that there had been no struggle between us at all. Of course a little uncertainty on their part was only to have been expected, they told me, but that said they had never sought to stand in my way. Quite the contrary in fact, though they still felt it was important not to forget the value of a safe job, whatever I did. With the indifference of youth I listened to their explanations and thought myself very fine for not judging their hypocrisy.

  It was only years later that I was able to see beyond the confines of that struggle with my parents; to understand that, though snobbish, they were not hypocritical to see the love behind our long drawn-out conflict. Only years later could I appreciate the graciousness of their happiness for me; and then, as so often in life, it was too late to tell them so.

  At the time I gave little thought to anything my parents said but concentrated instead on contacting Ella. For three days I was frustrated: again and again I was rebuffed by the deep voice that answered the telephone at Chester Square; again and again I was told that it was not at liberty to say when the Harcourts might be back. On the third day of fruitless calls a letter arrived from her. Its envelope was heavy; its paper thick; and it was engraved with a blue coronet and an address which I did not expect: SETON CASTLE, CORNWALL.

  My dearest, Ella had written.

  You would be embarrassed to know how much I miss you; or at least to be told so in a letter. I think my Californian endearments would make you self-conscious. (And being at Seton in weather like this, with sparkling views of a sunlit sea, makes me achingly sentimental sometimes. So I shall be stern with myself and spare you.)

  The reason for my presence here is a sad one, I’m afraid. Uncle Cyril has had some sort of seizure; he collapsed four days ago and has been in hospital in Penzance ever since. Things are apparently touch and go and the family has been summoned to squabble by his bedside and awe the villagers. Aunt Elizabeth insists on flaunting unity at times like this “as an example to the tenants” which of course is a remark guaranteed to make my blood boil. Such is the damage which an American education can do, even to members of the best families; and I have been the cause of much collective disquiet, I’m sure. Aunt Elizabeth and Sarah hum and ha in corners for hours, talking (I bet) of how reprehensible I am and how there is nothing to be done about it. Poor Pamela comes in for most of the reproving looks, however; she doesn’t have the protection of blood ties, you see—she’s just an interloper whose day will one day come and Elizabeth knows it. My aunt dreads being sent to the Dower House.

  The family disapproval of me and Pamela makes Daddy very angry, naturally; and meals are frosty occasions. I hope Cyril is not sent home to recuperate in an atmosphere like this—it would kill him. But we must stay until he is out of danger, and that will mean at least a week, perhaps two. This, I think, is a good separation for us. Much as I love our times together (and I do love them) they distract me from the matter in hand. I am still engaged; nothing has changed; and I cannot go on behaving as though it has. Charlie is beginning to wonder why I’m always ill when he wants to see me, and my stock of excuses is not endless. I feel Sarah watching me, too, and I wonder how much those cool eyes of hers see. She makes me uncomfortable, as well she might. (You see I do have a conscience, after all.)

  So I shall spend my time here thinking seriously of what is to be done. And I shall think also of you and your tremendous opportunities in Prague. How I shall miss you if you go (damn Regina Boardman—she’ll kill herself to arrange things, I know). But with a feeling as strong as ours there is plenty of time.

  I love you and love you,

  Ella

  I did see Ella once before my departure, for studying permits took longer to arrange than Eric and I had anticipated and we remained in London while the bureaucracies of two governments took their time over us. Uncle Cyril came home, recovered, and sent his family away in irritation at the fuss which it made over him. So Ella returned to London and once again the house in Chester Square became a hive of wedding activities. We met on the day before my departure. Clothes and books had been carefully packed; visas collected; friends telephoned and seen. All was ready. Camilla Boardman had demanded a private interview and, over lunch, had told me that London would be horribly dull without me. Michael Fullerton had telephoned to wish me luck. And Regina Boardman, true to form, had organized a last charity concert, and so seen at least an initial return on her investment in my future.

  Ella and I met in the triumphant Victorian splendor of the National Portrait Gallery. It was mid-September, one of the last days of that long, warm summer. Outside in Trafalgar Square and Charing Cross Road the crowds were sweaty and loud; inside, in the sepulchral cool of the gallery and its long deserted rooms, there was silence. I can see her as she walked up the stairs towards me; can see the expectant haste of her quick, light step; the smile on her lips; the glow of her cheeks. She was wearing a short, flimsy dress of pale blue cotton; her knees were bare; her hair looked wet and was brushed back from her face.

  I don’t remember all we talked of, though she must have told me about her visit to Seton; about her uncle’s recovery; about the suppression of family bitterness in the invalid’s presence at least, if not elsewhere. I remember telling her of Regina Boardman’s supremely focused efforts on my behalf; of the fraught days before Mendl’s acceptance of me as a pupil; of the fact that Eric’s great-aunt had been Isabelle Mocsáry. I remember going next door with her to the National Gallery to see its small collection of Mocsárys and our disappointment on being told that they were on loan to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Above all I remember the intimacy of those few hours, the ease with which we talked and laughed and, over tea in a Covent Garden café, kissed. It was only as evening drew on that our talk grew serious, with the seriousness of lovers about to be parted.

  “I can’t say how glad I am for you,” Ella told me quietly. “And how sad I am for me. But I think this separation will be good for us.” She paused to light a cigarette and I watched the elegant arch of her fingers as she clasped it and put it to her lips. She lit it and took two meditative puffs, slowly. “And I think that it should be a complete separation, at least for the moment.”

  “In what way?”

  “I don’t think we should communicate at all, Jamie.”

  “What?”

  She smiled at me. “We know what we have. It won’t go away. But I want us only to write or speak whe
n I’ve done what I have to do and not before. This … hide-and-seek isn’t good for either of us, and I’m sick of running around like a guilty child.”

  I nodded, though I did not wholeheartedly share her distaste.

  “It’s time to get things sorted out, once and for all,” Ella continued. “I haven’t thought of Charlie as I ought to have done; I haven’t thought of Sarah, either. And I know she’s watching, watching everything I do. She knows something’s up. That’s why we mustn’t write to each other.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Don’t you see? When I’m with you I’m too happy to be tragic. And it would be the same if we wrote to each other every day while you were in Prague. You need to be my reward, Jamie, not my distraction. I must extricate myself from this tangle so that I can enjoy you … unfettered, as it were.”

  “But Ella…”

  “Please Jamie.”

  “But …”

  “Don’t you see how a clean break, even for such a short time, will help me? How it will help me to arrange things?” She took my hand. “I want this to be permanent; I want us to be permanent. Open; above board; acknowledgeable. I don’t want us to sneak around like this anymore. And I need an absence of distractions if ever I’m going to sort out this mess. I owe that much at least to Charlie, don’t you think?”

  I nodded sullenly, beginning to understand.

  “Now don’t get like that. We have time. You’ll only be away for two months. And when you get back we won’t have to skulk around like criminals. You can meet Daddy and Pamela properly; I can meet your parents. We can go down to Seton and not have to stay in the village pub and avoid the guards. Don’t you see how different it will be then? How lovely?”

  I nodded again, less sullenly this time, slightly mollified.

  “So go to Prague and don’t write. Your letters—anything from you—make me too happy, as I’ve said, to be tragic. And tragedy is the least I can do for Charlie; I owe him that much at least, don’t you think? I’m going to have to take my time over this. You can’t break off an engagement overnight, you know; particularly when the circumstances are as they are.”

  I nodded again.

  “Do you understand what I’m saying?” She looked at me anxiously from across the table.

  “I think I do,” I said. “I don’t like it, but I understand.”

  “Good.” She squeezed my hand.

  “But you’ve only got until Christmas,” I said. “Once Christmas comes you won’t be able to get rid of me.”

  “I won’t want to, stupid.” She squeezed my hand. “I don’t want to now. But for both our sakes I must.”

  “I know.”

  And we kissed each other lingeringly.

  CHAPTER 13

  PRAGUE SPREAD BELOW ME: a city of arched bridges; sharp steeples; gracious domes. Bathed in a morning light sharper and colder than the light of London, the mist rising from the Vltava was a brilliant, dreamy ribbon in the gray blanket of the city. “Close your eyes,” said Eric beside me, as the wing dipped. “We are about to pass over the suburbs.” So I closed my eyes and was allowed to open them only as we landed at an airport with a name full of consonants, a concrete carbuncle designed—so far as I could make out—to deter visitors and thus secure and protect undisturbed the splendors of the city it served. My memories of Eric are clearer now. I see him sitting in that airplane, his large frame cramped by an encroaching pair of armrests, his eyes bright with the excitement of travel, his voice softly pointing out the landmarks of a city neither of us had ever seen but which he at least had read about.

  Prague and I were yet to be introduced. But even as I saw her for the first time I knew, as sometimes one knows instinctively, that I would not find her as I found London; that she was not reserved, not distant, not cold. Proud, yes. But Prague’s pride was alluring, enticing, and shrouded in romantic mystery. Not for her, as I was to discover, were the triumphant boulevards of Paris or the sneering skyscrapers of New York. She was a city of cobbled streets and hidden staircases; of courtyards hung with flowers and filled with whispers; a city where palace and tenement lived side by side, together, and crumbled uncomplainingly with picturesque dignity. Brutal investment and unthinking, unquestioned improvement were foreign to her as yet. Developers and housing ministers might corrupt her suburbs; paneláky and office blocks might rise steadily on her perimeter; she might be under siege from all sides. But the center of the city, the few square miles that held her essence, had kept themselves pure. Prague is at heart a town of romantic guile; it knows how to charm and to seduce all who would conquer, change and improve. Governments might come and go, regimes might rise and fall; but the Hrad would remain impassive, standing guard over the city it has protected for centuries.

  All this I sensed dimly, as a taxi took Eric and me onto the highway and then through leafy suburbs with strange art nouveau houses set in overgrown gardens Decay was almost tangible here; but the once magnify cent buildings faced the change in their fortunes with dignity and a certain impressive acceptance. Not so the newer, uglier achievements of the Communist housing initiatives. These towers, the paneláky which ringed the city’s approaches, turned sullen faces to the world and stared malevolently out over ill-lit streets.

  “Where did your aunt live?” I asked Eric. “Somewhere out here?”

  “Oh no. She was a woman who had to be in the thick of the things. Without the smell of the traffic fumes she was unhappy. Her house—her apartment, I should say—is in the centre and just as she left it apparemment. We will live in the real Prague. These prisons are not for us.”

  And with a secret relief I watched as we left them behind and descended the steep cobbled avenue that cuts down from the Strahov Monastery to the Malá Strana, the baroque “little quarter” of winding streets crushed together beneath the castle which was to be my first contact with the city proper. Before us was the Vltava; in the distance the twin towers of the Charles Bridge and its line of statues, sinister and black with age and soot. It startles me how vividly I see this all, how completely the view forms in my mind. I have never gone back to Prague since Eric and I left it, for its associations are painful; but I have never forgotten it. It strikes me that the city I know and the city it is today are probably different, must almost certainly be different. Perhaps all Prague’s streets are tarred now; perhaps its corners boast the fast-food outlets of other cities; perhaps its monasteries and palaces are hotels. I do not wish to return. I am content with a mental revisiting of the city that awed a young, impressionable man, quick with life. I wish to dwell again on her mysteries, to laugh at her mannerisms, to sample her tastes and smile at her eccentricities. I wish to experience again the tingling of those first few moments, the rush of that first spectacular view.

  As I stared out of the window, Eric was asking our taxi driver, in German, how he felt about the fall of Communism. I listened idly, my attention fixed on the great sweep of the city fanned out below us.

  “He says his countrymen have become like Americans,” Eric translated for me. “Money, money, money. It has become the new obsession.”

  Our driver nodded. “I speak English. A little. Too,” he said shyly.

  Eric nodded encouragingly. “This is Georg,” he said to me.

  Georg and I nodded at each other in the rearview mirror and I said my name.

  “Before the Fall,” Georg went on, “people used to talk, to discuss. There was much … going to the theater. But now,” he looked at us sadly in his mirror, “there is only work. Work to make money. That is all there is. Since the Fall it is the foreigners who fill our theaters.”

  Georg was a dignified old man; and the tranquillity with which he described the infiltration of his culture belied the strength of his resistance to it. He faced the new army of invading imperialists defiantly. “They,” he said—meaning me and capitalists like me—”try to conquer our minds. They want to make us slaves. All we think of now is money and sex, sex and money. That is all
that matters.” As he tackled the increasing traffic he warmed to his theme. “Not even Havel has written a play since the revolution,” he told us. “He sits in his palace up there on the hill”—a wave of a wrinkled hand indicated the Hrad behind us, its mullion panes glinting serenely in the morning light—”and is cut off from us. He leaves us to be exploited by the West and by each other. It must not go on.”

  There was nothing for us to say; and the drive continued in silence until, with another shake of his head, Georg deposited Eric and me on the corner of a street of grand old houses. Motioning us towards number 21, the address Eric had given him, he accepted his money as though it were he, not us, who was giving something up.

  Left on the pavement in the chilly air I waited while Eric fumbled for keys.

  “This,” he told me, “was once the Sherkansky Palace. Now it is flats.”

  “Quite grand flats,” I said, looking at the marble steps and heavy doors.

  “My great-aunt was a flower of the regime,” he replied, smiling. “She was an artist admired by the world. She was at the top of the housing lists.”

  He had found the keys and opened the door, leading the way forward under the arch. In the interior gloom the moldings on the walls and ceiling loomed ghostly: cherubs smiling when the wind changed, trapped forever in delirious wantonness. Light streamed, muted by dirt, through large windows on both walls; and before us there was a staircase, relic of an age more elegant than our own, which led upwards graciously into darkness. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dim light cast by a weak and solitary bulb I saw the true state of the building: the chipped paint; the broken tiles; the cracked plaster. Then all was dark. With a muttered curse Eric groped for a light switch, found one, and another ineffective light, far away, flickered to life. Thus began our ascent. For intervals of ten seconds at a time it was possible to move up the staircase with something approaching adequate illumination; but the weight and number of our bags meant that we inevitably trod the last few steps of each flight in darkness. On the third and final floor Eric produced another key before another set of heavy doors.