The Brides of Solomon

by Geoffrey Household

  Margit obeyed. The police photographs were clear, glossy prints, upon which every detail could be seen. The subject looked like an unwashed criminal, hollow-cheeked, sneering and obstinate. She did not recognise the face. Then, in the left profile, she noticed the man’s glasses. They were round, old-fashioned, and of heavy tortoise-shell, and there was a home-made repair just in front of the left ear, where the rivet or binding had been wrapped in some soft substance to prevent rubbing.

  A possible identity for Sarvary at once occurred to her. Yet it was so unlikely that there was no sudden start of recognition in her eyes or mouth for the trained interrogator across the table to leap upon.

  ‘You are interested?’ he suggested.

  ‘You told me to take a long look.’

  ‘And what do you see?’

  What she saw in the eye of the mind was a drawer in the consulting engineer’s dressing-table, and a pair of old glasses with the left bar wrapped round by a neatly sewn strip of wash-leather. Could they be the same glasses? Was it possible for a haggard, clean-shaven man with dark, wavy hair to turn into her employer with his well-rounded cheeks, his straight white hair greased firmly back, and his white luxuriant moustache which looked as if it had been over his mouth for the last thirty years?

  Then there was his nose. The man in the photograph had a strong, fleshy nose, quite ordinary. Her employer had a Roman nose with a marked and distinguished bump on its bridge. The shape of it, she remembered—almost with a giggle—seemed to change in hot weather. No, of course it was unthinkable. Her kind master could not be a man wanted by the police, a barbarian trying to bring about another war.

  ‘I’ve seen someone like him,’ she said at last.

  She couldn’t tell how much her face had given away. Something, yes. The keen peasant game of buying and selling was in her blood. She knew, from the parallel of the marketplace, that her hesitation had been too long and that she must explain it.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The new notary of our village.’

  ‘They have a queer breed in your village,’ he remarked contemptuously. ‘Stop fooling, girl! When did this man come to see your employer?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Then what was he doing—the person whom you thought the photograph resembled?’

  ‘Our notary? He makes too much money at home to come to Budapest.’

  The visitor rose from the table and brutally dominated her eyes.

  ‘If you hurt me, I’ll scream,’ she threatened. ‘They know I’m respectable here.’

  ‘Hurt you? My dear, we don’t do that sort of thing. I’m just going to give you time to remember.’

  The gentleman from the corner café strolled impassively across the kitchen and turned on the tap of the barrel. The thin, fast stream of wine hit the tiles with a neat splash.

  Margit shrieked, and leaped for the tap rather than for him. At once she made brutal contact with her chair again, arms bruised, bewildered by the dexterity with which she had been flung back.

  ‘We like wine in our district, don’t we?’ he said. ‘Barrel full?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, sir,’ she begged. ‘Nearly full.’

  ‘Then it will take about ten minutes to empty it. Plenty of time to talk.’

  The purple and pink foam that had jumped from the kitchen tiles subsided, and the lake of wine deepened and spread.

  ‘Please, sir! Please!’

  ‘But, I shall be delighted to turn it off when you’ve told the truth. A pity for such good wine to be wasted! I should say your brother’s is a rather stony soil facing south,’ he replied, talking with an exasperating slowness.

  ‘It didn’t remind me of the notary. I swear it,’ she sobbed, the big tears ricocheting off her apron into wine.

  ‘Ah? Of whom, then?’

  ‘Nobody. I was impertinent. I’ve never seen the face before.’

  ‘And the name Istvan Sarvary? Have you never heard it? Or overheard it, perhaps? Think now! That’s a generous tap you have there.’

  ‘No, never! Never, sir! I’ve never heard it.’

  The words were loud and incoherent with grief. The lake of wine found out an imperceptible slope and began to run towards the passage. At the door it deepened to a quarter of an inch, and the colour changed, from a pink transparency to black with red reflections.

  ‘He might have come here without you knowing it?’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course he might,’ she answered eagerly.

  ‘You’re not sure that you haven’t seen him, then?’

  ‘No. How could I be sure?’

  ‘Then we have only to take a little step further. Look! I’m just going to shut off the tap. Tell me when it was he might have come here—that’s all I want to know.’

  Margit was utterly muddled. What he invited her to say sounded so reasonable. Why on earth was she letting her wine run away when she had only to tell him a date, a movement, her crazy suspicion, anything? Yet—she didn’t tell lies.

  She opened her mouth and nothing would come. All the inhibition of the Christian Europe that had made her stood in the way. Had she been asked outright whether her employer could be Istvan Sarvary she might have answered that at least she had wondered. Might have. But there again, standing at the gate, was all the loyalty of a feudal system that had vanished and left nothing but its good behind.

  ‘I can’t tell you. I don’t know.’

  The interrogator kept the barrel running.

  ‘Won’t, little one, not can’t! Won’t, you mean.’

  She heard the front door open and shut as her employer came home.

  ‘Good heavens, what’s all this?’ he exclaimed.

  He bounded up the passage on the track of the wine, and caught the visitor with his hand still on the tap.

  ‘Margit, your wine! What’s all this?’

  Margit’s face was bedabbled with tears. The gentleman looked confused and guilty.

  ‘Tap leaking?’ the consulting engineer asked.

  ‘He turned it on,’ she sobbed.

  ‘Friend of yours?’

  ‘No, no, no!’

  ‘Well, then—ah, I think I understand! But, my dear sir, if you had anything to ask, why didn’t you come to see me? I know everyone in the building and my reputation is sound, I hope. No good telling you I’m a party member—too old, for one thing. But what I always say is, they’re doing fine work for Hungary. Example to all Europe, eh? We’re both patriots, aren’t we? Well, there’s the bond. Now you put me through the hoops in any way you like.’

  Her master was so friendly and natural that Margit at once put out of mind that imagined identity. After all, there was more than one pair of mended spectacles in the world. And then his nose! You couldn’t alter a nose that God had made.

  ‘What do you know of Istvan Sarvary?’ the visitor shot straight at him.

  ‘Sarvary? Why I thought he was abroad. Don’t tell me the swine has managed to get back to Budapest!’

  ‘He was a friend of yours, was he?’

  ‘No, he wasn’t. Far from it! But you’ve come to the right shop, my dear sir. I’ll answer all your questions. We can’t have men like Istvan Savary about. Margit, there’s nothing to drink in the house. May we borrow what’s left in the barrel? ‘I’ll make it up to you. We’ll try to get something as good as yours.’

  ‘You’re generous,’ the gentleman sneered suspiciously.

  ‘You think so? I’ll tell you how it is. I don’t want the State to show pity. Try the dogs, shoot them, exile them, put them to work! They’re expendable, aren’t they? But a little woman like this—well when she gets in the way, the State can’t help it and mustn’t show pity. Never! But chaps like you and me are free to do what we can. That’s what I say.’

  Margit didn’t agree at all with this view of the State, but she assumed it was politics and over her head. If a man with a good heart accepted cruelty, it meant nothing and was just words.

  The man from the corner café took Margit’s employer
a little aside, and warned him of something in a low voice.

  ‘She? Oh, I don’t think she could have seen him. But you never know. Well, if there’s anything at all, you’ll get it out of her. Better methods than wine taps, eh?

  ‘Now let’s sit down. It must be seldom that you get a real hot tip straight from the horse’s mouth and a jug of first-class stuff to go with it. If you don’t mind my saying so, I’ve watched the scent of that wine making you more human every minute.’

  The visitor grinned, then pulled himself together with military solemnity and declared that he had no time for gossip.

  ‘This gossip is going to be worth your while, captain. I’ll tell you for a start one man whom Sarvary is likely to be seeing—his wife’s cousin. You didn’t know that, did you? And you’re in charge of the investigation.’

  ‘Not yet,’ the visitor admitted, ‘but I shall be. It’s every man for himself in the police, and I like to wait for the best minute to put in my report. Now you help me, and I won’t forget you. What would you say if I told you I’m on to a connection between Sarvary and this very house?’

  ‘Your very good health!’ exclaimed the consulting engineer, raising his glass. ‘Is that so? Well, well, now let me see! First of all I’ll fix up my Margit, and then I’m with you. I can’t have such a cook upset,’ he explained. ‘You can’t expect a little artist to work without a drink in her heart. Look here, sweetheart, here’s an address! You go there and tell them to deliver another barrel of red this evening. And you must need a rest after all this. Take the afternoon off if you want to.’

  He scribbled a note and gave it to Margit. She had never seen her employer so cordial. She was hurt that he had never smiled at her as genuinely as he was smiling at this filthy crook from the corner café, and hurt, too, even if she were to be compensated, that the pair of them should calmly sit down and drink up the rest of her wine. She said to herself that it was unfeeling. Just unfeeling, that was all. Not even enough to excuse a toss of the head.

  ‘But I can’t stop long,’ the visitor protested. ‘I don’t want to take my eyes off this street.’

  ‘Splendid! Splendid! It’s good to know that our safety is in your hands. But why not telephone one of your sergeants and tell him to check all movements in and out of this house in your absence? A good chance to see whether he knows his job! He won’t know you are here and you can watch him through the curtains.’

  Margit put her kerchief over her head and went out, leaving the two to their sly grins and good-fellowship. It was just like men, she thought, to sit down and souse on somebody else’s wine and pretend they were catching enemies of the State. It didn’t make any difference—townee or peasant, consulting engineer or communist, they were all the same. Wine and pinching people where people were roundest and sacrificing the helpless.

  She delivered her employer’s note at the address he had given her. It was a cheerless, obscure, commercial office without the heartening smell of liquor or the noisy group of customers welcome to try out many more vintages than they ever meant to buy. Well, nothing was sold any longer as, traditionally, it ought to be sold.

  She called on a friend who might have comforted her, but wasn’t in. Boozing, too probably. Then she idled away the afternoon in public gardens and at a public meeting. After two hours she went home. It was all very well to tell her to take the afternoon off, but who would get the supper, she would like to know.

  Her employer was asleep. The gentleman from the corner café had gone. Neither of them had made any attempt to mop up the lake of wine and its meandering streams, so she set to work on the kitchen. She forced herself (for she was economical) to dip a fine white cloth in the deepest pool and to squeeze it into a glass in case the wine should be still drinkable. It certainly wasn’t. She was ashamed and determined to clean her floor much more thoroughly than usual, especially after chopping meat.

  Then three hefty men brought up her new barrel. They did not talk much, and they would not accept a drink. They weren’t at all like delivery-men she used to know. The three rolled away the old barrel down the passage. She wondered what wood her brother was using for staves. But perhaps the barrel seemed so heavy because the delivery-men didn’t get enough to eat. That must be it. In these days they made criminals into policemen and boys of good family into porters.

  After that, all the tides of complication receded from her little personal island.

  There was a flurry of nervousness when some police came to inquire about the gentleman from the corner café, who, it seemed, had disappeared. Her kind employer told her not to be frightened of them but to describe her interrogation just as it had happened.

  ‘The only thing I shouldn’t say if I were you, Margit,’ he warned her, ‘is that the man stayed on a little here after he telephoned his sergeant that he had gone. We don’t want him to make trouble for us when he turns up again, do we?’

  So Margit said nothing at all of that, and the police found the incident of the wine tap so comic that they paid very little attention to her. She disapproved of their behaviour. It was typically masculine and insensitive. But—taking the rough with the smooth, as she put it—she couldn’t complain. The new barrel of wine did not carry in it the love of a brother, but at least she would be able to taste, whenever she sat down to her meals, the remarkable generosity of her master.

  The Greeks had no word for it

  ‘MAY I say ten pounds?’ the auctioneer asked. ‘Five? Thank you, madam … Six … Six, ten … Seven … Seven, ten … At seven pounds, ten. Going at seven pounds, ten. An ancient Greek drinking bowl of the best period. Going at …’

  Sergeant Torbin had at last wandered into the auction because there was nothing else to do. It was early closing day in Falkstead, and the shops were shut. There was nowhere to sit but the edge of the quay, and nothing to watch but the brown tide beginning to race down to the North Sea between grey mud-banks. The only sign of animation in the little town was around the open front door of a small box-like eighteenth-century house, the contents of which were being sold.

  ‘Eight!’ said the sergeant nervously, and immediately realised that nothing could give a man such a sense of inferiority as a foreign auction.

  But the atmosphere was quiet and decorous. The auctioneer acknowledged Bill Torbin’s bid with a smile which managed to express both surprise and appreciation at seeing the United States Air Force uniform in so rural a setting. He might have been welcoming him to the local Church Hall.

  ‘May I say eight, ten?’

  A military-looking man, overwhelming in size and manner, nodded sharply.

  Bill could hardly hope that the bowl was genuine. He liked it for itself. Angular black figures chased one another round the red terracotta curve. He recognised Perseus, holding up that final and appalling weapon, the Gorgon’s head. Very appropriate. A benevolent goddess, who reminded Bill of his tall, straight mother, looked on approvingly.

  He ran the bowl up to ten pounds. When the auctioneer’s hammer was already in the air, he heard someone say:

  ‘Guinness!’

  There was a snap of triumph in the word, a suggestion that the whole sale had now come to a full stop. It was the military man again. To Sergeant Torbin he was the most terrifying type of native—a bulky chunk of brown tweed suit, with a pattern of orange and grey as pronounced as the Union Jack, and a red face and ginger moustache on top of it.

  It’s against you, sir,’ the auctioneer told him hopefully.

  Bill knew that much already. But the mysterious word Guinness sounded as if it had raised the ante to the moon. He panicked. He decided that he had no business in auctions. After all, he had only been in England a week and had come to Falkstead on his first free afternoon because it looked such a quiet little heaven from the train.

  ‘Going at ten guineas … At ten guineas … Sold at ten guineas!’

  Hell, he ought to have guessed that! But who would think that guineas would pop up at auctions when they belonged in t
he time of George III? Bill Torbin walked out and sat on the low wall which separated the garden from the road, conducting a furious auction with himself while he waited for the six-thirty train back to his bleak East Anglian airfield.

  He had just reached the magnificent and imaginary bid of One Hundred Goddam Guineas when the tweed suit rolled down the garden path with the drinking bowl under its arm.

  ‘Nice work, colonel!’ Bill said, for at last he had an excuse to talk to somebody.

  ‘Oh, it’s you, is it? I say, you didn’t want it, did you?’

  The sergeant thought that was the damn silliest question he had ever heard. He realised, however, that it was meant as a kind of apology.

  ‘British Museum stiff with ’em!’

  Again he got the sense. The Englishman was disclaiming any special value for his purchase. Bill asked if the bowl were genuine.

  ‘Good Lord, yes! A fifth-century Athenian cylix! The old vicar had it vetted. His father picked it up in Istanbul during the Crimean War. That was the late vicar’s late niece’s stuff they were selling. Have a look for yourself!’

  Sergeant Torbin took the bowl in his hands with reverent precautions. Round the bottom, which he had not seen before, two winged horses pulled a chariot. He wondered what on earth he would ever have dared to do with so exquisite a piece if he had bought it. He might have presented it to the squadron but, like himself, the squadron had no safe place to keep it.

  ‘How the devil did you know I was a colonel?’

  Bill did not like to say that he couldn’t possibly be anything else unless it were a general, but he was saved by the bell. The church clock struck six.

  ‘Ah, they’ll be opening now,’ said the colonel with satisfaction. ‘How about a drink?’

  Bill Torbin murmured doubtfully that his train left at six-thirty. The colonel announced that Falkstead station was only two minutes from the pub, and that he himself had often done it in eighty seconds flat. Considering the noble expanse of checked waistcoat, Bill thought it unlikely. But you never knew with these tough old Englishmen. Half of the weight might be muscle.