The Portuguese Escape

by Ann Bridge

  ‘So this is the young lady who is such a good cook!’ Lady Loseley said, smiling, as she shook hands with the girl; Hetta liked her immediately for this sensible frankness but the Countess’s eyelids began to flutter—what a reputation for her daughter. ‘Henry, I don’t think you know Countess Páloczy—and this is her girl who has been in Hungary for so long,’ Lady Loseley went on; the Ambassador turned away from a conversation with the Papal Nuncio to greet the two ladies. He was not tall, with gay blue eyes in a deceptively cheerful and open face; he had also a trick of picking at one thumb with the nail of the other, and did so as he said to Hetta—’ I wish you would do me a real favour.’

  ‘What is that?’ Hetta asked bluntly, entirely forgetting to say Your Excellency, as she had been told to do.

  ‘Teach my idiot of a chef how to make Hasen-pastete. We used to have it for breakfast at the Budays—I never ate anything so good. Can you?’

  ‘Yes—but hares will not be in season till September,’ said Hetta seriously.

  ‘No more they will—though I doubt if that cretin in the kitchen would know a thing like that! All right—you’ll come and make one in September.’ He turned back to the Nuncio.

  ‘Countess, the buffet is round the corner, on your right,’ Atherley said.’ This house is such a jig-saw! Ah, M. le Duc, quel plaisir!’

  Hetta and her mother perforce moved on as the Duke of Ericeira and his old sister approached their hostess.

  Hetta was rather upset by seeing Richard in this formal role—she felt that he was cold, distant; not at all the person she knew. And she had wanted to talk to him, and ask him if he had any more news of Father Antal, and when she was to see him. She followed her mother out of the morgue in a slightly gloomy frame of mind.

  It was a fine warm afternoon, and all the glass doors had been thrown open onto the courtyard, making it almost an extension of the house; most of the many guests were congregated there, and the Countess and Hetta drifted out with the rest—a footman in livery brought up a tray of cocktails.

  ‘Je préfère le Xérès,’ Hetta told the man, as her mother took a glass.

  ‘Immédiatement, Mademoiselle.’

  ‘Really, Hetti—’ the Countess was beginning, when Mgr Subercaseaux came up and kissed her hand.

  ‘Good afternoon, Countess. What a lovely day! So you still prefer sherry, Hetta?’

  ‘Yes—I do not like cocktails.’

  ‘Wise child. Countess, isn’t this a charming house? Have you seen the azulejos with the coats of arms of the former Ministers and Ambassadors? Oh, but you must— the whole diplomatic history of the English in Lisbon is here; it is unique! Permit me to act as cicerone.’

  This particular feature of the Embassy in Lisbon is indeed unique, and rather decorative. Since the Moors, seven or eight centuries ago, taught them the art, the making of coloured pictorial tiles has become a Portuguese speciality; and some diplomatic genius initiated the idea of having the arms, crest, and name of each Minister— later of each Ambassador—emblazoned and set in the walls round the courtyard and up the steps leading to the garden. These the Monsignor now proceeded to point out to Countess Páloczy and her daughter. But the Countess was only slightly interested; living notabilities meant more to her than dead ones, and her attention strayed to the people about her. Not so Hetta.

  ‘Oh, look—this Legate was here under three Kings!’ she exclaimed, as she read the Latin inscription on one plaque.

  M. de la Tour, the French Ambassador, who was talking to the Monsignor and the Countess, overheard her.

  ‘Tiens!’ he said, going up and poking his pince-nez over her shoulder towards the decorative panel—‘So he was. Do all young ladies in Communist countries learn so much Latin?’

  Poor Hetta had quite forgotten who this busy friendly little man was.

  ‘Communists, Monsieur,’ she said coldly, ‘know nothing and learn nothing.’ She looked round, seeking an escape, and was delighted to be greeted by the old Ericeiras—she remembered them from Mme de Fonte Negra’s party, and elderly as they were she liked them. She thus escaped for the time being her mother’s vexation that she should have addressed an ambassador as ‘Monsieur’; the Countess, however, apologised on her behalf to His Excellency— ‘She has had no advantages, poor child.’

  ‘Countess, if I were as well pleased with everyone’s daughter as I am with yours I should be a happier man and a far happier priest,’ Subercaseaux said emphatically; he bent a peculiarly benign glance on Hetta, who was working her way round the plaques with the Duke of Ericeira, pouring out Latin and lively comments. The Countess was startled by the priest’s tone, and rather upset —she was not wholly pleased, either, to see her gauche daughter on such easy terms with someone whom she herself had never managed to meet. The priest gave her a fine, ironical smile as he moved away; he passed through the crowd, smiling and Dear-lady-ing right and left—Hetta, her tour of the diplomatic azulejos with the old Duke completed, observed him with distaste. Then she was fastened on by Townsend Waller.

  ‘Oh hullo! How nice to find you here. Isn’t this a fascinating house?’

  ‘I like this outside part,’ Hetta said, temperately.

  ‘I saw you reading Latin aloud to the old Duque. What a lot you know—thanks to Mother Scholastica! Have you been round the garden?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh, come on. Wait—I’ll get you another sherry.’

  Glasses in hand, they went up the steps under the pepper-tree, and out onto the broad lawns between their gay borders. Hetta was delighted. ‘Such a huge garden, in the heart of a city!’

  ‘Have you any idea what was really going on the other night?’ Townsend presently asked her, as they strolled about.

  ‘No. I only heard what you heard,’ the girl lied blandly. ‘Do you not think these Spaniards were drunk, and came back to see if they had killed you and Yulia?’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ the American said bluntly. ‘I think it was something else, though I still don’t know what. Who is Major Torrens, anyhow, and why is he here? Have you any idea?’ They were approaching the top of the steps again, and could look down on the throng in the little courtyard. ‘Oh, there’s Atherley,’ the Bostonian said. ‘Do you mind if I leave you, Hetta? I want to catch him.’

  ‘But of course. In any case I must find Mama—I expect we should go soon.’ She did not, however, at once leave her coign of vantage, but stood by the low parapet which overlooked the courtyard and watched what was going on below. She saw that Lady Loseley, the receiving over, had come out to talk to her friends and get a breath of fresh air; the Ambassador had done likewise, and so had Richard, released from his official duties; her mother was in a little group which included Mme de Fonte Negra. Hetta watched Townsend Waller forging his way through the crowd in Atherley’s direction, but before he reached him Monsignor Subercaseaux was suddenly at Richard’s side, and speaking in his ear; the young man made laughing excuses to the people he was with and began to move towards the steps, the priest beside him. They encountered Townsend—the summary friendly decision with which Richard dismissed him was diagrammatically clear; Hetta laughed softly to herself at the American’s disconcerted face. But how tiresome this was—she, too, would have liked to speak to Richard. Vexed, she watched them climb the stone steps, pass her, and move away across the garden. What could Richard and the ultra-social Monsignor want to talk about in private?

  In fact they talked at first about her. As they strolled across the lawn Subercaseaux surprised Richard by saying, ‘What a delightful child Hetta Páloczy is.’

  The young man could only agree.

  ‘I am glad that you see something of her—you do, do you not?—for I think she feels herself rather at a loss here; all her surroundings are strange to her, and I fancy there is a good deal that she finds uncongenial.’

  ‘That isn’t altogether surprising, is it?’ Richard said—he never beat about the bush with Subercaseaux, and certainly didn’t intend to in this connection,
if he was twenty times Dorothée’s confessor.

  The priest laughed gently.

  ‘No—indeed it is almost inevitable. Her “formation”’ —he used that untranslatable French expression for the exterior forces which mould a person—‘has been so unusual, and so different.’

  Richard was really quite glad to discuss Hetta’s formation with the Monsignor, since it was one of his main preoccupations at the moment.

  ‘Quite so. But though she is right about many things, she has some rather unreasonable prejudices,’ he said slowly.

  ‘She has. I personally feel her prejudice against me not wholly reasonable,’ Subercaseaux said, with the ecclesiastical equivalent of a grin. Goodness, how sharp the old boy was, Richard thought, even while he laughed. ‘But it is quite understandable, in view of her background. And about certain things she is, as you say, entirely right. Did she tell you that the Bretagnes wished her to go to luncheon with them, and that she refused?’

  ‘No. Why wouldn’t she go? They’re such very nice people, and I should have thought poor Dorothée would have loved it.’

  ‘She made it a condition—the invitation was transmitted through me—that her mother should be invited to the wedding, which is of course the poor lady’s heart’s desire.’

  The young man stood still for a moment—then he burst out laughing.

  ‘Oh, well done, Hetti! How splendid! And what happened?’

  It has been arranged,’ Mgr Subercaseaux said, smiling a satisfied smile. ‘The Pretender is so anxious to secure little Hetta’s acquaintance for his children that he has agreed. The poor Countess will get that so coveted card this evening.’

  ‘Well I hope, Monsignor, that you will make sure that Dorothée knows to whom she owes it!’ Richard said. ‘Hetti never says a word, but I don’t think she has too easy a time with her mother—or with herself, poor child,’ he added, with something like a sigh.

  ‘You are right. But she suffers more from the difficulty “herself” gives her than from any external cause,’ the priest said, bending his iron-grey eyebrows thoughtfully on the young man. ‘The defects of her qualities—that is her trouble. In fact she has few defects; but even her qualities at the moment are like a coat put on the wrong way out, and the lining is not becoming! We must help her to put this garment on the right way out.’

  Richard regarded him steadily.

  ‘Who are “we”, Monsignor?’ he asked.

  ‘You and I, at present. I endeavour to do what a priest can; you, I hope and believe, are doing what a young man can do for a young woman—which is something rather different! But equally important.’

  Richard was not really ready for anything so direct as this. He hesitated for a moment.

  ‘Monsignor, what are you driving at?’ he asked at length.

  ‘At a whole host of things!’ Nothing could disconcert Mgr Subercaseaux, and he spoke easily. ‘But she has special qualities which it is good for her to use, and which, here, have so far lain fallow. I think you did well to employ her at Portela yesterday morning.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Richard said, looking at the priest with a face completely devoid of expression.

  ‘I said that I thought you did well to employ her at Portela yesterday morning—if I am to dot the i’s and cross the t’s to identify Father Antal Horvath.’

  Atherley’s face remained stony.

  ‘May I ask how you know this?’

  ‘Major Torrens told me when he brought me in yesterday afternoon to have my first meeting with his—protégé, shall we say?’

  Richard stared at the ecclesiastic for a moment longer— then his huge laughter resounded all over the Embassy garden.

  ‘Good Lord, Monsignor! You don’t mean to say that you are the famous contact?’

  ‘In fact I am,’ Subercaseaux replied, with a modest smirk. ‘My dear Richard, can it be that you underestimate me as much as the little Countess does? My vanity is wounded!—so useful for me really, of course.’

  ‘But why you?—and here? Do forgive me, but I’m all at sea.’

  ‘The Vatican. Naturally it is essential that they should hear, as directly as possible, all that this eminent, saintly, and heroic man has to tell of conditions in Hungary, and about the Cardinal—but there were too many practical difficulties about getting Dr. Horvath to Rome himself, so it was arranged that he should come here and see me, and that I should act as intermediary. When he is safely out of the country I can go and report—I was in Rome, you may remember, a few weeks ago.’

  ‘Getting briefed?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I’m surprised,’ Richard said reflectively, ‘that Torrens should have taken you to see him the very day the Father arrived—I should have expected him to wait till he saw if everything was quiet.’

  ‘That was his intention, but he had to summon me to resolve a little difficulty.’

  ‘What? May I know?’

  ‘Something the Major found it very hard to understand,’ Subercaseaux said with a small smile. ‘The Father wanted to say his Mass this morning; Torrens had forbidden him to leave his room, so I had to intervene.’

  ‘Goodness! Oh well, I suppose it’s all right for him,’ Richard said, trying to be charitable. ‘But with all that’s at stake, and the risks other people are taking! What did you arrange?’

  ‘I took him very early to a little church in the Alfama where I often say Mass on week-days; I take an interest in one of those parishes, and by Countess Páloczy’s bounty am able to relieve much want, much suffering.’

  Richard knew the Alfama, that very ancient and very poor quarter of Lisbon huddled below the Citadel; built on rock, the houses there were not destroyed in the great earthquake of 1755, and thus it escaped Pombal’s town planning; its streets remain crooked, very steep, and almost too narrow for wheeled traffic—no car can pass another in most of them. It surprised him to learn that the Monsignor should have any connection with such a part.

  ‘Does Dorothée go in for charity? You don’t say so!’ he said.

  ‘My dear Richard, you should avoid hasty judgements. She does.’

  ‘How extraordinary! Well never mind—was it all right?’

  ‘No,’ Monsignor Subercaseaux said, frowning. ‘It was not all right. I served his Mass, he served mine, in that dark shabby little building, so touching and so aged; we went just before six o’clock, and the street outside was empty then. But when we came out—it was not yet seven —a lorry was drawn up across the bottom of the ruelle, and a group of men stood round it; they were strangers, not people from the parish, in hats and smart raincoats. This seemed to me rather peculiar, and I decided to go the other way; but even as we turned uphill a taxi stopped at the top of the street, blocking the way there also, and more of these men, who certainly did not belong in the Alfama, got out of it and stood about.’

  ‘How very nasty. What did you do?’

  ‘We went back into the church, which has an exit through the sacristy into the priest’s house; we got out that way into a different street, and I took Father Horvath back to his lodgings.’

  ‘Safely, I presume?’

  ‘Yes. But not unobserved, I am afraid—-in fact they must be known, and an agent has been on the watch as early as 6 a.m., who traced us to São Braz and sent those men to entrap him as he came out.’

  ‘How did you get away?’

  ‘Oh, your Major Torrens is very clever! He has hidden the Father in rooms above a small curio-shop, built right against the slope of one of the hills, and like São Braz it has a back entrance, not far from one of those extraordinary lifts. When I wished to leave I went down into the shop and examined some old prints under the window for half an hour, and was able to observe two men constantly appearing and reappearing on the pavement opposite. So I went out by the back way, got into the lift, shot up a couple of hundred feet, and took a taxi back to Estoril.’

  Richard, though he seldom used them himself, was familiar with that highly peculiar feature
of Lisbon, the huge lifts which so conveniently take pedestrians from one level of the tip-tilted city to another. The ingenuity of the priest, and his self-satisfied expression as he recounted it made him laugh a little, but in fact he recognised well enough that this was no laughing matter. He didn’t, being a diplomatist, at once say so; what he said was—

  ‘I don’t know why you call him “my” Major Torrens.’

  ‘No—you are quite right; it was a slip of the tongue. In fact you are his Mr. Atherley.’

  ‘I’m nothing of the sort!’ the young man protested.

  ‘Oh yes you are—if only because the little Countess is involved in this. But, my friend, something else must be arranged; the present situation is impossible. It is hopelessly compromised.’

  ‘I’m thinking about that, of course,’ Atherley said, ignoring the remark about Hetta. ‘He must be moved at once. It isn’t really safe for you to try to see him in those rooms any more.’

  ‘Have you any ideas?’

  ‘How you do go on dragging me into it, Monsignor!’ Richard said, very good-naturedly. ‘Yes, I have had one, a quite wild one.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘To park him with the old Ericeiras. Private chapel in the house for saying Mass, and all.’

  ‘Do you know this idea came to me also just now, as I watched the little Countess airing her Latin to the old Duke while they studied those plaques together.’