Harriet could not refrain from laughing at him. ‘Are you afraid,’ she asked, ‘that people will think you do not belong anywhere?’
Clarence paused, challenged, then looked gratified as though it had occurred to him this might be not so much criticism as coquetry. Opening the front door, he said: ‘I have a weak chest. I have to take care of myself.’
There was a gleam in his eye. Harriet was aware she had been, as she too often was, misunderstood.
The rain had started. To cross the road, they pushed their way through several rows of spectators waiting under umbrellas. The British Information Bureau, a small building, had its windows whitewashed. The painters were at work inside. Above, in Inchcape’s office, the walls had been stripped and given a first coat of white distemper. In one corner there was a stack of new wood cut for shelves. Clarence took the Pringles into the small back room that had been allotted to him. Nothing had been done there. The walls were still covered with a dirty beige paper of cubist design. A table had been put in to serve as a desk. There was nothing on it but a blotting-pad and a photograph in a frame.
Guy picked up the photograph: ‘Is this your fiancée?’
‘Yep. Brenda.’
‘A nice, good face.’
‘Um.’ Clarence seemed to imply he could offer no excuse for it.
They said no more about Brenda. Harriet went to the window and looked out at a large site being cleared in the parallel road, the new Boulevard Breteanu, that was being developed to draw the crowds off the Calea Victoriei. On either side of the site had been built wafer-thin blocks of flats, against which stood wooden lean-to sheds for the sale of vegetables and cigarettes. These had been put up by the peasants from the bug-ridden wood thrown out of the demolished houses. Other hovels stood about on the site, braced with flattened petrol cans, their vents protected with rags.
Clarence pointed out the skeleton of a new Ministry building that stood on the other side of the boulevard. Work on it had now come to a stop. The Minister had decamped to Switzerland with the Ministry funds. Meanwhile the workmen, left stranded, were camping in sheltered corners. Harriet could see them now, standing on the girders, gazing down into the street.
‘Now it’s growing cold,’ said Clarence, ‘they light bonfires and sit around them at night. Dear knows what they’ll do when the winter comes.’
Among the confusion below was a single rococo house, its stucco cracked and grey, its front door of engraved glass opening on to a pretty curve of broken steps, its garden a wasteland. Someone was still living in it. At the windows hung thick lace curtains, as grimy as the stucco.
‘Do you think we could find a house like that?’ Harriet said.
As she spoke, some check in Clarence – a defensive prejudice against her, or perhaps mere shyness – broke suddenly, and he leant forward, smiling. ‘I’m fond of those old houses, too,’ he said, ‘but you can’t live in them. They’re alive with bugs. We’re seeing the last of them, I’m afraid.’ He kept glancing sideways at her, awkwardly, half-smiling. ‘If Rumania had been as long under the Austrians as she was under the Turks, she might be civilised by now.’
She noticed among his features, which before had had no special appeal to her, his sensitive and beautiful mouth. An occasional intentness in his glance made it clear to her that somehow there had been inaugurated an understanding, a basis for a relationship. It was an understanding in which she had no faith, a relationship she had no wish to pursue.
Their talk was interrupted by the distant thud-thud of a funeral march. The three hurried into the front room and, opening the windows leant out. The procession was appearing on the left and heading for the square. From there it would take a roundabout route to the station. Călinescu was to be buried on his own estate.
People were crowding out on to balconies, calling and waving to friends on other balconies. Despite the weather, there was an atmosphere of holiday. As the band drew near, the umbrellas, quilted below, moved towards the kerb: the police, wearing mourning bands on their arms, rushed wildly along in the gutter pushing them back again. A news-man on a lorry started turning his camera handle. The monstrous catafalque appeared, black and blackly ornamented with fringed draperies, ostrich feathers and angels holding black candles. It was drawn by eight black horses, weighted with trappings, the whites of their eyes flashing behind black masks. They slipped about on the wet road so that the whole vast structure seemed to topple.
The Prince walked behind it.
Ah! people shouted from balcony to balcony, this was just what they had expected. The King had been afraid to attend even in his bullet-proof car: yet there was the young Prince, walking alone and unprotected. It was felt that the crowd would give a cheer, were it an occasion for cheering.
Behind the Prince came the canopy of the Metropolitan. On either side the priests swept the watery streets with their skirts. The old Metropolitan with his great white beard, seeing the camera, plucked at his vestments, straightened his jewelled cross and lifted his face with mournful dignity.
The massed military bands, having changed from Chopin to Beethoven, went past uproariously. Then came the cars. Clarence and the Pringles looked out for Inchcape, but he could not be recognised among the anonymous, dark-clad figures within.
The tail of the procession crept past and hard upon it came the press of traffic released from the side streets. All in a moment, it seemed, even while the funeral was still thumping and wailing its way to the square, the Calea Victoriei was aswarm with cars hooting, dodging, cutting in upon each other, eager for life to return to normal.
The ranks of spectators broke up and people began crowding into bars and cafés. They swept past the neon-lit window of the German Information Bureau, which displayed a map of Poland partitioned between Germany and Russia. A swastika obliterated Warsaw. No one paused to give it a glance.
Confidence was growing again. The black market rate had dropped, so even Guy was inclined to agree they could not entertain Sophie every night. One Bucharest paper had expressed in a leader regret that Greater Rumania had not been given the chance to pit her strength against a mighty enemy. She would show the world how a war could be fought. Readers were reminded that in 1914 Rumania’s gold had been sent for safety to Moscow. It had never come back again. Rumanian manhood was eager to redress this wrong – but would the opportunity ever come?
Clarence, drawing in his head and closing his window, said: ‘Now we’ve heard the last of Călinescu, let’s go and get a meal.’
But Călinescu was not to be so easily put out of mind. Three days of official mourning were proclaimed, during which the cinemas were to remain shut. When they opened, they showed a news-film of the funeral. For a week the giant coffin was carried by peasants through rain, to the family tomb, then, at last, the late Premier was replaced and forgotten. Forgotten also was the Iron Guard. Its members, declared Ionescu, had been wiped out to a man.
PART TWO
The Centre of Things
8
Harriet Pringle, no longer fearing that she and her husband would have to flee at any moment, began to look for a flat, buy clothes and take an interest in the invitations that were arriving now that the university term had started. Among those invitations was one from Emanuel Drucker, the banker, whose son was Guy’s pupil.
The rain came and went. At night the wind blew cold and the Chaussée restaurants moved their chairs and tables back to their winter premises. After a week of grey weather the sun shone again, but it was possible to sit out of doors only at mid-day.
To the north of the city, where before there had only been the sheen of sun and mist, mountains appeared, crevassed and veined with glaciers that looked like threads of cotton. One morning the highest peak was veiled with snow. Each day the snow grew a little whiter and spread further down the mountain-side. Although Guy laughed at Inchcape’s theory of invasion, saying the Russians could come by the coastal plain any time they liked, Harriet was comforted by the thought of the hi
gh passes silting up with snow.
The day they were invited to luncheon with the Druckers was one of the last warm days of October. Harriet had arranged to meet Guy in the English Bar, but when she looked for him in the bar, he had not arrived. This did not surprise her, for she was beginning to realise that however late she might be for an appointment Guy could always be later.
The bar was not quite empty. Galpin sat at a table with a girl of dark domestic beauty, while Yakimov stood alone, disconsolately looking at them. Tufton and most of the visiting journalists had returned to their bases.
‘Dear girl,’ Yakimov called when he noticed Harriet, ‘come and join poor Yaki in a whisky,’ his plaintive voice suggesting not the intimidating social background described by Inchcape, but a need for comfort.
She entered. The air was smoky and stifling, and she said: ‘Do you really like this bar? Hasn’t the hotel a garden where we could sit?’
‘A garden, dear girl?’ He glanced around as though there might be a garden at his elbow. ‘I’ve seen one somewhere.’
‘Then let’s look for it.’ Harriet left a message for Guy with Albu, and led Yakimov away.
The garden proved to be small, high-walled and accessible only through the French-windows of the breakfast room. Weather-worn tables and chairs stood under heavy trees. A few couples were sitting in secluded corners. The men glanced up at the newcomers in disconcerted surprise: the women, each of whom wore dark glasses, turned away. They all looked like people tracked down to a hide-out.
There were no flowers in the garden and no ornaments except, in the centre of the pebbled floor, a stone boy pouring an ewer of water into a stone basin. Sitting down beside the fountain, Harriet said: ‘This is better, isn’t it?’
Yakimov murmured doubtful agreement and sat beside her.
There was a sense of pause in the air. The couples remained silent until Harriet and Yakimov began to speak. Harriet asked: ‘Who was that girl with Galpin?’
‘Polish girl,’ said Yakimov, ‘Wanda Something. Came down here with McCann. Thought she was McCann’s girl; now, apparently, she’s Galpin’s. I don’t know!’ Yakimov sighed. ‘Wanted to have a talk with Galpin about this mobilisation order. Y’know, I’m a journalist. Have to send stuff home. Important to discuss it, get it straight. Went up to them in the bar just now, said “Have a drink”, and got the nose bitten right off m’face.’
He turned to stare at Harriet and she was surprised to see his eyes, set within the bewildered sadness of his face, become hard with grievance. He looked for the moment like an embittered child. Before she could speak, the waiter came to the table and she ordered lemonade. She said:
‘Do you think it significant, the mobilisation order? Are they expecting trouble?’
‘Oh no.’ Yakimov swept the thought aside with a movement of the hand. Galpin was forgotten now. Yakimov smiled with the delight of the entertainer. ‘You’ve heard about this frontier line the King plans to build round Rumania? Twice as strong as the Maginot and the Siegfried rolled into one? To cost a million million lei? The Imaginot Line, I call it, dear girl. The Imaginot Line!’
When Harriet laughed, he leant a little nearer to her and became gravely confiding. In the manner of an informed man, he said: ‘What I did think important was Hitler’s peace plan. Said he had no more territorial ambitions. Amazed me when I heard they’d turned it down. Don’t want to be critical, but I think Chamberlain slipped up there. No one wants this silly war, now do they?’
‘But Hitler so often said he had no territorial ambitions. We couldn’t possibly trust him.’
‘But we must trust him, dear girl.’ Yakimov’s great eyes seemed to swim with trust. ‘In this life we have to trust people. It’s the right thing to do.’
Unable to think of a reply, Harriet drank her lemonade. Yakimov, his face relaxing after his effort at earnestness, said easily: ‘I wonder, dear girl, could you lend me a couple of thou?’
‘What are “thou”?’
‘Why, mun, dear girl. Cash. Ready. Your poor old Yaki is broke until his remittance turns up.’
She was so startled, her cheeks grew pale. She opened her bag and searching through it with flustered movements, found a thousand-lei note. ‘It is all I have,’ she said.
‘Dear girl!’ – he pocketed the note in an instant – ‘how can poor Yaki express his gratitude?’ But Harriet did not wait to hear. As she rose and hurried from the garden, he called after her in hurt dismay: ‘Dear girl!’
She met Guy as he entered through the revolving door. He said: ‘What’s the matter?’
She was too abashed to tell him, but after they had crossed the square, she had regained herself enough to laugh and say: ‘Prince Yakimov invited me to have a drink. I thought he was being kind, but all he wanted was to borrow some money.’
Unperturbed, Guy asked: ‘Did you lend him any?’
‘A thousand lei.’
Now that Guy was treating the matter as unimportant, Harriet regretted her thousand lei. She said: ‘I hate lending money.’
‘Darling, don’t worry about it. You take money too seriously.’
She would have said that that was because she had never had any, but she remembered Guy had never had any, either. She said instead: ‘Yakimov is a fool. He was telling me we must trust Hitler.’
Guy laughed. ‘He’s a political innocent, but no fool.’
They were approaching the back entrance to the park where the disgraced politician stood with his head in a bag. The Drucker family lived nearby in a large block of mansion flats owned by the Drucker bank.
Within the doorway of the block were two life-sized bronze figures holding up bunches of electric-light bulbs. There was an impressive stairway, heavily carpeted. The hall had an atmosphere of France, but smelt of Rumania. The porter, who, in hope of a tip, pushed his way into the lift with them, reeked powerfully of garlic, so that the air seemed filled with acetylene gas.
They were taken to the top floor. When the Pringles stood outside the great mahogany doors of the Druckers’ flat, Harriet said: ‘I cannot believe that anything human exists behind these doors,’ but they opened even as Guy touched the bell and behind them stood Drucker and his sister and daughters. The actual opening of the door had been accomplished by a manservant, but Drucker’s impulsive movement forward suggested that, had convention permitted a gentleman to open his own front door, he would have done it for Guy’s sake.
At the sight of Drucker, Guy gave a cry of pleasure. Drucker shot out his arms and at once Guy threw wide his own arms. A tremendous babble of greetings, questions and laughter broke out while Guy, breathlessly trying to answer all that was asked of him, bent about him, kissing the women and girls.
Harriet stood back, watching, as she had watched the similar excitement in the wagon-lit.
It was Drucker himself – a tall, slow-moving man, stooping, heavy, elegant in silvery English tweeds – who came with outstretched hands to include her: ‘Ah, so charming a wife for Guy! Si jolie et si petite!’ He gazed down on her with a long look of ardent admiration. He took her hands with confidence, a man who knew all about women. Added to the sensual awareness of his touch was a rarer quality of tenderness. It was impossible not to respond to him, and as Harriet smiled he nodded slightly in acknowledgement of response. He then called to his eldest sister, Doamna Hassolel.
Doamna Hassolel detached herself from Guy, giving a slight ‘Ah!’ of regret. The animation of her face became restrained and critical as she was called to give attention to Harriet.
She was a small, stout, worn-faced woman with a decided manner. She took charge of the guests, apologising for the absence of the hostess, Drucker’s wife, who was still at her toilette. Harriet was introduced to the younger sisters, Doamna Teitelbaum and Doamna Flöhr. The first had a worried thinness. Doamna Flöhr, the beauty of the family, was plump and would, in time, be as stout as the eldest sister. She examined Harriet with bright, empty eyes.
They moved into the l
iving room. As soon as they had sat down, a servant wheeled in a trolley laden with hors-d’œuvres and the little grilled garlic sausages made only in Rumania. Harriet, having learnt by now that luncheon might be served any time between two o’clock and three, settled down to drink ţuică and eat what was offered her.
The room was very large. Despite its size, it appeared overfull of massive mahogany furniture and hemmed in by walls of so dark a red they were almost black. Hung on the walls, darker than the paper, were portraits heavily framed in gold. A vast red and blue Turkey carpet covered the floor. In the bow of the window, that overlooked the park, stood a grand pianoforte. Drucker’s eldest daughter, a school-girl, sat on the stool, occasionally revolving on it and touching a note whenever she stopped before the keyboard. The younger girl, a child of nine, dressed in the uniform of the Prince’s youth movement, stood very close to her father. When he had filled the glasses, he whispered to her. Shyly, she drew herself from his side to hand the glasses round.
The women talking in French and English, questioned Guy about his holiday in England – a journey that now seemed to Harriet to have happened long before – and all he and his wife had done since their arrival. Across the boisterous talk, Drucker smiled at Harriet but he was too far from her to draw her into the conversation. When she answered the questions that Guy referred to her, her voice sounded to her discouraging and remote. She had the sense of being isolated in this tumult of vivacious enquiry. Guy, flushed and excited, seemed as far from her as they were. The first time he had visited here, he had been a stranger like herself but he had been taken immediately into the family’s heart. She, she felt, was not what they expected; not what they felt she ought to be. She would be a stranger here for ever.
They began to talk of the war. ‘Ah, the war!’ The word flashed from one to the other side of the little, quick-speaking women with intonations of regret. Now they had touched upon this serious subject, they turned to Drucker for comment.
The Balkan Trilogy Page 11
