Letters From Prague

by Sue Gee

  There were doors to a balcony here, too, opened to let in the last of the afternoon light. Light fell on a round table, placed in a corner, with a chair. On the table a book, a glass vase, a few white roses. One or two petals had fallen on to the dark mahogany. Table, light and fading flowers: it belonged on the cover of an Anita Brookner novel, but Harriet, though she registered this, was also taken, instantly, to another table, brown and cheap, a coffee jar of roses, morning sun coming through a basement window. Karel, sitting on a junk-shop chair, lit a Marlboro cigarette and sipped tea from a thick glass mug, with a slice of lemon.

  Never I think I will meet someone like you, Harriet …

  And there had never been anyone else like Karel. In adulthood, with a daughter, it felt almost shaming to be thinking this still, but it was the truth.

  So. This is love. So simple, so complete.

  Nothing had been simple since then. There had been interest, and liking, and even, with Marsha’s father, love, but look what had happened to love. There had been desire; but there had never, actually, been quite that sense of innocent belonging. And probably, if the truth were told, there never would be now. Harriet was no longer innocent, and who knew, if she found him at all, what kind of man she might meet in Prague?

  Susanna passed wafery sandwiches, papery pâtisserie dusted with icing. Marsha abandoned the bookshelves and began to tuck, in, much as though she were tucking in at McDonald’s.

  ‘You must be starving,’ said Susanna.

  ‘I am. This is yummy.’ Marsha inhaled some of the icing, and began to cough, and could not stop. Flakes of fine pastry flew across the room.

  Susanna rose; Harriet banged Marsha on the back; her eyes streamed.

  ‘I’ll get you some water –’ Susanna hurried from the room and returned with a glass. ‘Here.’

  Marsha sipped gratefully, and wiped her eyes. ‘Thanks.’ Pastry flakes lay all over the sofa; she brushed them on the carpet and then, getting up to brush more off her sweatshirt, trod them all in.

  ‘Marsha,’ said Harriet, wondering that pastry could be, in such immaculate surroundings, so visible, so loud. At home, the house was well run, and Marsha was taught to be tidy, but even so – there was always clutter, and something that needed clearing up, or mending. Here –

  ‘Sorry,’ said Marsha, moving to sit down again, and knocked a cup and saucer flying. A pool of fine scented tea sank into the carpet and settled down.

  ‘Marsha!’

  ‘Sorry, sorry,’ Marsha, visibly distressed, sank back on to the sofa. ‘It’s like Granny’s,’ she blurted out. ‘Everything’s so special!’

  ‘Susanna,’ said Harriet, rising, ‘I’m sorry, she’s tired, we’ve been travelling since –’

  ‘I know, I know, please, it’s quite all right.’ Susanna was leaving the room again, hurrying in search of a cloth. ‘Please,’ she said again over her shoulder, ‘just leave it – it really doesn’t –’

  Marsha and Harriet looked at each other.

  ‘Don’t be cross.’

  ‘I’m not, I know how you feel.’ Harriet picked up tea leaves, one by one, and dropped them into a saucer. ‘But you shouldn’t have said that, even so.’ Rising, she took in what before she had somehow not quite taken in: Susanna’s portrait, hung above the fireplace, gazing out of the frame – not at her, but beyond her, refusing to meet the observer’s eye.

  ‘Marsha,’ she said quietly, as footsteps returned along the corridor, ‘don’t worry about it, just be careful, that’s all.’

  Susanna was back in the room, with a cloth and a bottle of something. She smiled at Marsha, who blushed.

  ‘I didn’t mean it,’ she mumbled. ‘Sorry.’

  Harriet was moved to put an arm round her; Marsha, scarlet, shrugged it off.

  Susanna knelt down upon the carpet, and did not speak, rubbing gently until the stain had gone, leaving only damp wool, which she brushed with long, well-cared-for fingers. How long was it since she had had to go down on her knees and clean up anything?

  ‘There.’ She rose, smiling again at them both. ‘I’ve fixed it, and now we forget about it. And please don’t say sorry, Marsha: you’re right. A grown-up place can be terribly prim.’

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ said Marsha uncertainly.

  ‘Well. Who’d like more tea? Or have we done tea for today?’

  ‘I think we’ve done it,’ said Harriet, realising, with relief, that she liked Susanna. ‘Thank you for being so nice.’

  ‘Not at all. And in that case –’ Susanna stood there, damp cloth and bottle of something incongruous against pale shirt and linen trousers. ‘I’ll get rid of this and then we can talk about your visit. I’ve got lots of books and maps – is there anything you particularly want to see?’

  ‘I want to see Hugh,’ said Marsha.

  ‘Of course you do.’

  Tea was cleared; books and maps were spread upon the table by the bookshelves. They looked at pictures of the cathedral, of markets, museums, parks with lakes, and waited for the sound of a key in the lock.

  ‘Hugh.’ She held out her arms.

  ‘Harriet.’ He kissed her, once on each cheek. No hug: a greeting as to a dinner-party guest, as Susanna had greeted them. But with warmth, undeniably, and when he drew away to look at her he still looked like Hugh. Medium height, compact – well, perhaps just a bit of thickening round chin and middle; close-cut curly hair receding from a clear, intelligent forehead; kind brown eyes. In his well-cut suit, and blue silk tie, he looked, it had to be said, what he was: a Eurocrat, a bit – oh, dear – of a fat cat. But Hugh, still, in that smile.

  ‘God, it’s nice to see you.’

  ‘You, too. Where’s my favourite niece?’

  Marsha, suddenly shy, had retreated from hall to drawing room.

  ‘Marsha?’ He strode towards the open door. ‘Come out, come out, wherever you are.’

  She came, giggling. He held out his hand, very formal; she took it, and shook it, and he picked her up and hugged her.

  ‘What a weight. What a weight!’ He staggered into the drawing room, and dropped her on to a sofa. Marsha jumped up again, knocking the coffee table.

  ‘Careful!’ said Harriet, following. ‘Careful, please!’

  ‘Especially now,’ said Susanna, behind her. There was a shivering chink: Harriet, turning, saw a tray with champagne, fresh orange juice, tulip glasses. ‘Oh, how lovely.’

  ‘But of course.’ Susanna set the tray down on the table, and Marsha, setting herself to rights, told Hugh, ‘I knocked tea everywhere before you got here.’

  ‘Did you, now?’ He was straightening his tie. ‘Please – let me.’ He picked up the bottle and peeled away the foil; he unscrewed the wire –

  ‘Susanna? Have you a glass?’

  She held it ready. They waited, watching the cork’s slow rise –

  ‘There!’ It flew across the room towards the bookshelves. He filled the glass, more glasses; they raised them. All, it felt clear, were suddenly filled with warmth and goodwill.

  ‘To you. Welcome.’

  ‘To you. It’s lovely to be here.’

  ‘Shouldn’t this child be drinking milk, or something?’

  ‘Milk?’ Marsha sipped again. ‘Ugh. Ow. There’s bubbles all up my nose.’

  Susanna poured fresh orange juice into a fresh glass. ‘Here.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  They made themselves comfortable, they began to talk. Susanna had closed the balcony doors against the approach of evening; even though it was August, the air, before she did so, had begun to feel perceptibly cooler, and the room, because the apartment faced so directly on to other buildings, had begun to darken. After a while, she rose, and turned on the lamps: light shone through green shades, falling in pools on tables and the arms of armchairs and bookshelves, and on Susanna’s face, as she sat down again, sinking gracefully against cushions in the corner of the sofa by the petit point screen, beneath her portrait.

  There was a lull. Hugh st
opped asking Harriet about her work and Marsha, with initial coaxing, began to tell him about her school. Soon, with enthusiasm, she was relating a fearsome history of personality clashes.

  Harriet looked up at the portrait and back at Susanna. She was watching Hugh and Marsha; she seemed relaxed, happy to listen.

  And yet – every now and then there passed across her face an expression which Harriet could not quite understand but which gave her, once again, that sense of things being not quite as they should be.

  Susanna, in the portrait, wore sleeveless silk and was set against an indeterminate background of short, painterly brush strokes, in ochre and green. The whole of the painting was done in this manner – soft, informal, intimate, even, as if whoever painted her had known her well. And yet – all this was belied by the gaze beyond the painter, beyond whoever would stand and look, and seek to know her. Perhaps the painter, too, had seen what Harriet, looking back at the original, saw now: a fleeting preoccupation, quickly covered as she felt her sister-in-law’s eyes upon her, and smiled, coming back to the room again.

  ‘I thought we’d eat early tonight – after your journey, and with Marsha here. About seven-thirty – would that suit you?’

  ‘Of course. Then we can be fresh for tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hugh. ‘But tomorrow night I’m afraid we shan’t be just us – well, I don’t know if “afraid” is right, but it does feel nice to be en famille, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Very,’ said Harriet, aware of Marsha’s adoring look at him as he rose to refill their glasses. ‘What’s happening tomorrow?’

  ‘Believe it or not –’ he was holding the bottle above her glass, ‘someone I knew at school is coming to dinner.’

  ‘How extraordinary. Thank you.’ Harriet lifted a newly foaming glass to her lips. ‘Who’s that? Did we ever meet him?’

  ‘Did you ever meet anyone from school?’ Hugh was refilling Susanna’s glass: their hands touched briefly, and he turned back to Harriet. ‘Chap called Christopher Pritchard, who interestingly enough has some kind of East European connection, as we do.’ He smiled at her. ‘Everyone seems to, these days.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Harriet, recalling a letter whose contents she had skimmed. ‘Remind me what yours is.’

  He sat down again. ‘You’re making your journey, we’re in a joint venture with the European Bank – financing a clean-up job on a power station in northern Bohemia. I haven’t been there, yet, but it’s near the Krus˘ne Hory mountains – along the German-Czech border.’

  ‘And what are you doing exactly?’

  ‘Lending the money for a desulphurisation unit. Trying to help do something about the fact that Bohemia has some of the worst acid rain pollution in Eastern Europe.’

  ‘We’ve done pollution at school,’ said Marsha.

  ‘Have you, now? Do you know anything about lignite?’

  She frowned. ‘No. But I know about acid rain.’

  ‘Well, then, you might be interested in this. Bohemia’s power stations run on stuff called lignite – that’s brown coal to you and me; it gives out grisly amounts of sulphur. You have to burn more of it than ordinary coal, so that makes it worse. And the countryside in that part of Czechoslovakia – the Czech Republic, as it is now – is choking to death. Fish dying in rivers, trees all bare, the air too thick to be safe for children so they have to stay indoors in winter, sometimes. So we’re lending money for this unit to take the sulphur out, and help reduce pollution. Does that meet with your approval?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Marsha. ‘It sounds good. I could do a project.’

  ‘And this schoolfriend of yours?’ asked Harriet. ‘What’s his connection?’

  ‘He wasn’t exactly a friend – it seems extraordinary that he’s resurfaced. I think he must have come across my name through common contacts – or perhaps he looked me up somewhere, I’m not sure.’ Hugh raised his glass again. ‘Cheers once more.’

  ‘Cheers,’ said Harriet, realising that the ‘somewhere’Christopher Pritchard might have used to look up his old contemporary could well have been Who’s Who. Hugh was modest, but he was making his mark and how was it possible to connect, now, this charming and quietly successful man, with his lovely wife and elegant apartment, with the lonely child who had kept everything stiffly laced in behind perfect manners; whom Harriet used to come upon, muttering to himself in an empty dining room?

  ‘Anyway,’ Hugh was saying. ‘Pritchard seems to be acting as some sort of east-west middleman – I’m not quite sure about his field. He has a background in the City, but he didn’t say much about that. Funnily enough, his name rang a bell in that connection, too, when he called, but I can’t place it. Too many names to remember in my old age. But he’s a bit of a one-man band these days, I gather – office somewhere out in the suburbs, been here only a few months. Couldn’t quite get the picture, but no doubt I’ll hear more. He seemed keen to renew our acquaintance, and it seemed a reasonable idea to invite him over while you’re here. He might even be useful to you. Is that all right?’

  ‘Of course. An interesting diversion. And did you like the sound of him, after all these years?’

  Hugh thought. ‘Not sure. The last time we saw each other was in ’66. I can’t say I cared for him much.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Susanna from across the room.

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. He was a bit of a bully in those days.’

  ‘Was he?’ Marsha was all ears. ‘We talk about bullies at school, in social education. What did he do?’

  But Hugh did not elaborate, and Harriet sensed that he did not want to be pushed. What in childhood had been deep reserve had developed, as he grew older, into deep discretion – a quality which had no doubt done much to earn him trust and respect among the bankers of Brussels, but was possibly not always easy to live with. Still. Was not a sister allowed to know a little?

  ‘I hope,’ she said thoughtfully, drinking, ‘that this chap did not bully you.’

  Hugh shrugged again, and who knew just what he meant by that. ‘I kept out of his way. But people used to have an eye on him, I think. Especially where younger boys were concerned.’

  ‘You mean …’ she hesitated, and broke off. Who knew what Hugh himself might have got involved in, amongst that community of boys?

  Marsha was fully focused now. ‘Are you talking about child abuse?’

  Hugh’s and Susanna’s mouths both fell visibly open. Harriet laughed.

  ‘Sorry. This is precocious only child in 1993.’

  ‘This is my niece!’

  ‘Come off it.’ And she suddenly switched from long-ago concerns about her little brother to her life as it was lived now, in multi-cultural London, with a daughter she was bringing up to be confident and direct. Her earlier sense of uncertainty and displacement fell away: she was no longer intimidated by these surroundings but was making her own mark.

  ‘I suppose,’ she said clearly, ‘it must seem bizarre when you don’t yet have children of your own, but London kids are streetwise now, you know – they have to be. I mean, I try to protect Marsha from growing up too fast, but it’s rather a losing battle. And if that’s the case, I’d rather we talked about things – wouldn’t I, Marsha? – so that she knows how to cope –’

  She heard her voice, no doubt all the stronger for a couple of glasses of champagne on an empty stomach, ring out into a deafening silence.

  ‘Well, of course,’ Hugh said smoothly, ‘you’re talking to the uninitiated. You’re right – what would we know? It just seems rather a far cry from our own protected childhood, doesn’t it?’

  ‘It does,’ said Harriet, trying to cover her own confusion, thinking, as she looked at the rise of bubbles within her glass, breaking on the surface: but how protected were you, Hugh? Any kind of abuse might have been done to you in that distant and expensive place.

  ‘Supper,’ said Susanna, rising rather quickly. ‘I’ll just go and see how it’s getting on …’

  ‘Can I help?’ asked
Harriet. ‘You’ve been doing everything.’

  ‘It’s fine, I enjoy it. I’ll call you in a few minutes.’

  And she went gracefully from the room. The linen trousers had been replaced by a skirt in the finest cotton, a dusty jade, with a loose cream shirt tucked into the narrow waist. She’s perfect, thought Harriet, watching her. She’s perfect. What has gone wrong?

  ‘On formal occasions,’ said Hugh, leading them along the corridor, ‘we eat in there. When it’s just us, we use the kitchen.’

  ‘Good,’ said Harriet, looking in at ‘there’: a dining room hung with striped wallpaper and containing a table intended for twelve. It looked like nothing so much as the dining room in her parents’ house, as if Hugh and Susanna had skipped a generation and landed, effortlessly, with the accoutrements of late middle age. Again, for an instant, following her brother, she saw him murmuring at the long mahogany table of their childhood, and then they were all in the kitchen, assembling round something much less formal and quite charming: print cloth, china candlesticks; basket in the centre heaped with fresh rolls, butter imprinted with oak leaves.

  Marsha sank happily into her chair and took a roll from a solicitious uncle. Susanna served soup from a pottery tureen. They began to talk of parents, in Kensington and Wiltshire; of life in retirement – useful committees, private views and dedication to the garden. Such talk felt cementing and, in still strange surroundings, comforting, so that when they turned to plans for the week it did feel as if they would be setting out on excursions as a family, known and secure.

  ‘And tomorrow the bully’s coming,’ said Marsha, tucking into a warming casserole.

  ‘Marsha,’ said Harriet.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Hugh didn’t say he was a bully now …’

  ‘Hugh wishes he hadn’t said a word,’ said Hugh, with a forkful of beef. ‘Niece please forget. He’s probably charming.’

  ‘He might still be horrible.’