The Balkan Trilogy

by Olivia Manning

  ‘He has no money. No one will take him in unless he pays in advance. Let him stay. It doesn’t cost us anything to let him sleep in the chair.’

  ‘It does. It costs me more than you could ever guess. Go and get rid of him.’

  ‘Darling, I can’t. The fact is, I’ve already told him he can stay.’

  She turned her back on him and went over to the dressing-table, reflecting, in a sort of dazed wonder, on how it was that Guy, seemingly reasonable and the most gentle of men, always got his own way.

  Guy, accepting her silence as agreement, said with confiding cheerfulness: ‘You know, darling, it would really pay us to keep Yaki here, where we have a hold on him.’

  ‘You mean you may get back some of the money he owes you?’

  ‘No, the money’s not important. It’s the play. He’s ideal for Pandarus. His voice is the very voice of Pandarus. He could make my production.’

  ‘Oh, that damned production!’

  ‘If we turn him out,’ Guy went on happily, ‘he’ll be found wandering and ordered out of the country. If we keep him, he’ll have to behave. And I’ll make him work. You wait and see.’

  She replied with decision: ‘I don’t want him here,’ and, sweeping past Guy, she returned to the sitting-room, where she found Yakimov settled into the arm-chair with the ţuică bottle.

  21

  A few days later, Guy invited his friends in to a first reading of Troilus and Cressida. Before they arrived, Harriet opened the French-windows on to the balcony. Outside, an azure light glinted over the cobbles and silvered the roofs. The days were growing long and warm, and the evening crowds were coming out again. The murmur of the traffic, muted for months by snow, came distinct and new through the open windows. For the first time that year, she left the doors open.

  Guy was cutting an old Penguin edition of the play. It was evident, from the businesslike manner in which he answered her, that he was excited.

  Harriet had been told she could read Cressida. Yakimov, for whom a camp-bed had been bought and placed in the spare room, was beginning to realise that Guy seriously intended him to take the part of Pandarus. He was expected to learn it by heart. When the order had first been given him, he had dismissed it with a smile: ‘Can’t possibly, dear boy. Always was a poor scholar. Never could remember anything.’

  ‘I’ll see you learn it,’ Guy replied, and when Yakimov put the matter from his mind, Guy, suddenly and with an astonishing firmness, made it clear that if Yakimov wished to remain in the flat he must play Pandarus. This persuaded him to read the part. Before the night of the first rehearsal, Guy took him through it half-a-dozen times.

  Guy, he realised, had complete faith in his ability as a producer. He seemed to have an equal faith in Yakimov. Yakimov himself, with no faith at all, could have wept to find Guy, usually so easy-going, turned to task-master – and no lenient task-master, either. By the evening of the reading he was beginning to remember the lines in spite of himself. He did not know whether to be relieved or sorry. Rising a little out of a nadir of depression, he did his best to greet the visitors. Finding himself treated as one who had an important part in the proceedings, his spirits rose and he began to feel rather pleased with himself.

  Inchcape, when he entered, pressed a hand down on Yakimov’s shoulder and said: ‘Good Pandarus – how now, Pandarus?’

  ‘I have had my labour for my travail,’ Yakimov automatically replied, and at Inchcape’s crow of amusement his old easy smile returned.

  Guy had had the play typed and duplicated and was now handing out copies to each person who arrived. Soon all the men were present. Bella had been invited and was coming in after a cocktail party. The room became noisy with talk. One of the men was telling a funny story about Hitler’s conduct of the war, when Guy called everyone to attention. His manner suggested that the war might be a joke, but this production was not. Rather to Harriet’s surprise, the talk stopped at once. The company seated itself and looked to Guy for instructions. He said: ‘Cressida will read her first dialogue with Pandarus.’

  Calmly, Harriet moved out on to the floor, mentioning that, unlike most of the girls she had known at school, she had never been ambitious to go on the stage.

  Guy frowned at the levity of this approach. Aloof and patient, he said: ‘Will you please begin.’

  Yakimov read: ‘Do you know a man if you see him?’ to which Harriet replied with the gaiety of repartee: ‘Ay, if I ever saw him before, and knew him.’

  Harriet thought she did rather well. They both did well. Yakimov, who scarcely needed to be anything other than himself, spoke in his delicate, insinuating voice, only accentuating a little, now and then, its natural melancholy or note of comic complaint.

  At the end Guy said no more than ‘All right,’ then, pointing to Dubedat, said: ‘Thersites.’

  As Dubedat ambled out, the bugle sounded from the palace yard, and Harriet began the old chant of ‘Come, water your horses …’

  ‘Please!’ Guy commanded her and, silenced, she raised an eyebrow at David, who started to snuffle. Ignoring this, Guy repeated: ‘Thersites,’ and Dubedat, his legs still scaled from the ravages of winter, came on to the floor in his new spring outfit of T-shirt and running shorts.

  ‘Begin reading Act Two, Scene One. I’ll do Ajax for the moment.’

  Dubedat read Thersites with a Cockney snivel that was only a slight exaggeration of his normal speech. At the end of the scene, he was applauded, but Guy, not so easily satisfied, said: ‘The voice will do. But the part calls for venom, not complaint.’

  Swallowing convulsively, Dubedat set out again, reading at a great rate, but Guy stopped him: ‘Enough for now. I’d like to hear Ulysses.’

  Inchcape, whom Harriet was certain would refuse to take a part, now got to his feet with a look of deep satisfaction. Hemming and huffing in his throat, he took a step or two into the middle of the room, and, with feet elegantly planted, shoulders back, looking even now more audience than actor, he said with a smile: ‘I’m an old hand with theatricals. I always produced the school play. Of course we never attempted anything as frisky as this.’

  ‘Act One, Scene Three,’ said Guy. ‘The long speech: “What glory” etcetera.’

  Still smiling, matching his tone to his smile, Inchcape read with a dry and even humour that Guy accepted, anyway for the moment. ‘All right,’ he nodded and Inchcape, taking a step back, twitched up his trousers at the knees and lowered himself carefully back into his seat.

  Clarence and David were not yet cast. Guy now suggested that David might attempt Agamemnon.

  David’s lips parted in alarm. As he came out slowly into the middle of the room, snuffling down at his feet, Harriet saw he was not only amused at the position in which he found himself: he was pleased. After some hesitation, he began to read, pitching his elderly don’s voice on too high a note so that he sounded querulous.

  Guy broke in on him: ‘Give it more voice, David. Don’t forget you’re the General of the Grecian forces.’

  ‘Oh, am I? So I am!’ Moving his feet nervously, he pushed his glasses up his nose and started again on a deeper note.

  Harriet and Yakimov, their star positions fixed in a firmament otherwise chaotic, sat together on the arm-chair, Harriet on the seat, Yakimov on the arm. They had nothing to say to each other, but she felt him relaxed as the impossible had become for him possible, and even, maybe, enjoyable.

  Harriet had been feeling a painful anxiety on Guy’s behalf. She would have been glad for the production to collapse first rather than last, so sure was she it must collapse sometime.

  Now she was beginning to realise she might be wrong. Contrary to her belief, people were not only willing to join in, they were grateful at being included. Each seemed simply to have been awaiting the opportunity to make a stage appearance. She wondered why. Perhaps they thought themselves under-employed here, in a foreign capital, in time of war. Perhaps Guy offered them distraction, a semblance of creative effort, an object
to be achieved.

  Guy’s attitude impressed her, though she had no intention of showing it. He had the advantage of an almost supernatural confidence in dealing with people. It seemed never to occur to him they might not do what he wanted. He had, she noted with surprise, authority.

  In the past she had been irritated by the amount of mental and physical vitality he expended on others. As he flung out his charm, like radium dissipating its own brilliance, it had seemed to her indiscriminate giving for giving’s sake. Now she saw his vitality functioning to some purpose. Only someone capable of giving much could demand and receive so much. She felt proud of him.

  David, coming to the end of a long speech, looked uncertainly at Guy.

  ‘Go on,’ said Guy. ‘You’re doing splendidly,’ and David, shouldering importance like a cloak, went ahead with renewed enjoyment.

  Bella, arriving in a suit of black corded silk, hung with silver foxes, was asked if she would play Helen.

  ‘Is it a long part?’ she asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Thank goodness for that!’ she exclaimed over-fervently.

  Inchcape, bending towards her, said: ‘You are Helen of Troy. We ask only that you should be beautiful. Yours is the face that launched a thousand ships.’

  ‘Dear me!’ said Bella. She threw off her furs and her cheeks grew pink.

  She took the floor, read her exchange with Pandarus and came, flushed and serious, to sit near Harriet. She was, Harriet was beginning to realise, a woman of considerable competence. She knew nothing of acting; she never had been on a stage; her movements were stiff, yet she had done well.

  ‘What about Troilus?’ Inchcape asked. ‘Who can we get for him?’

  Guy replied that he was hoping to cast one of the Legation staff for the part. He was waiting for the Minister’s approval.

  ‘And Achilles?’ asked Inchcape. ‘Rather a tricky part!’

  ‘I’ve one of the new students in mind, young Dimancescu, a good-looking boy and a junior fencing champion. He went to an English public-school before the war.’

  ‘Indeed! Which?’

  ‘Marlborough.’

  ‘Excellent!’ said Inchcape. ‘Excellent!’

  Harriet burst out laughing. She said: ‘Most of your actors have only to play themselves.’

  Guy turned on her frowning. ‘Just try and keep quiet,’ he said.

  His annoyance startled her into silence. Guy called the men to read in a group, himself taking the parts still uncast, and avoiding those scenes in which Cressida appeared.

  Next day in the students’ common-room, Guy held a meeting of those students he proposed using in his production. While he was out, Dobson telephoned to say the Minister would permit any of his staff who wished to take part in the play.

  ‘He approves, then?’ Harriet said, surprised.

  ‘He thinks it a splendid idea,’ said Dobson. ‘Showing the flag and all that. Cocking a snook at the Boche.’

  So Harriet had been wrong again. She said to Guy when he returned: ‘This is wonderful, darling,’ but he was not responsive. He was, she supposed, absorbed in his production, and the fact made her feel misgiving like a child whose mother is too occupied with the outside world. Still, she was caught in a sort of wonder at the growing reality of the play.

  ‘You are rather remarkable,’ she admitted. ‘You make it all seem so easy. You just ignore difficulties that would have brought me completely to a stop.’

  His only reply was: ‘I’ll take Yaki with me tomorrow. We’ll have to start rehearsing seriously.’

  ‘And me?’

  ‘No.’ He was sitting on the edge of the bed tugging at his shoes, trying to get them off without undoing the laces. As he did so, he gazed out of the window with a frown of decision: ‘I think you’d be more useful doing the costumes.’

  ‘Do you mean instead of playing Cressida?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She was, at first, merely bewildered: ‘But there isn’t anyone else to play Cressida.’

  ‘I’ve already got someone.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Sophie.’

  ‘You invited Sophie to play my part before you’d even told me?’ She was dumbfounded. This treatment seemed to her monstrous, but she told herself she was not hurt. She did not care whether she was in the production or not. After a pause she asked: ‘Did you tell Sophie that I was to have played the part?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘But someone else might have told her.’

  ‘They might, of course. What does it matter?’

  ‘You don’t think it matters if Sophie learns she has pushed me out of the play?’

  ‘She hasn’t pushed you out of the play. It had nothing to do with her. It was simply obvious to me that we couldn’t work together. You would never take the production seriously.’ He started looking about for his slippers. ‘Anyway, no producer can do a proper job with his wife around.’

  After she had absorbed the situation she tried to explain it away. Guy, she supposed, found her presence frustrating. She had not actually ridiculed his position – but he feared she might. She made him apprehensive. Her presence spoilt the illusion of power.

  After a long interval, she said: ‘I suppose I deserve it.’

  ‘Deserve it? What do you mean?’

  ‘I made no attempt to understand Sophie, or to behave, so I brought out the best in her. I suppose I could have played up to her; shown sympathy or something. I didn’t. I was to blame. Now you are giving her an opportunity to get her own back.’

  ‘Darling, you are absurd!’ Though he laughed at her ideas, he was clearly disconcerted by them. ‘You can’t possibly believe that!’ He frowned down at her, his frown affectionate yet perplexed. He put a hand on her shoulder and gave her a slight shake as though seeking to shake her into a semblance of something more comprehensible. He said: ‘It was only that I had to have someone else. Sophie is suitable. You must agree. You would have done quite well, but I knew I couldn’t produce you. The relationship would have got in the way.’

  She let the matter drop. It was only later when everyone she knew was in it that she began to feel hurt at being out of the production. More than that, she was jealous that Guy should be producing Sophie in one of the chief parts of the play. Unreasonably, she told herself. She could no longer doubt that Guy had been perfectly honest about his relationship with Sophie. Innocent and foolish as he was, the idea of marriage to Sophie had been, nevertheless, attractive as an idea rather than a reality. He was not, in fact, one to make a marriage of self-sacrifice. He was a great deal more self-protected – perhaps from necessity – than most people realised. Realising it herself, she could only wonder at the complexity of the apparently simple creature she had married.

  22

  The spring showers washed away the last vestiges of the snow. With each reappearance the sun grew warmer. More and more people came out at evening to stroll in the streets. Up the Chaussée, where the chestnut branches were breaking with green, the chatter of the crowd could be heard above the traffic. Despite the delights of the season, it was a disgruntled chatter.

  The Cabinet had inaugurated internal retrenchment in order that exports to Germany might be increased. To save petrol, taxis were forbidden to cruise in search of fares: they could be picked up only at given points – an unheard-of inconvenience. Food prices were rising. The new French silks were appearing in the shops at an absurd price. Imported goods were growing scarce and would, it was rumoured, soon disappear altogether. In panic, people were buying many things they did not want.

  Guy was not much interested when Harriet described the sense of grievance in the city. His worries were elsewhere. There was, she thought, a sumptuous aloofness about his manner these days. His preoccupation was the deeply contented preoccupation of the creator: he was not to be shaken by trivialities. Even Inchcape, coming in one breakfast time – his usual time for unexpected visits – could rouse little curiosity in Guy, although h
e made it evident that his news was likely to please Guy less than it pleased him.

  He would not sit down, but strolled about the room laughing in high delight at what he had to tell. ‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘Well, well!’

  The Pringles, knowing that, given encouragement, he would only procrastinate further, waited in silence to hear it.

  At last he relented. ‘You’ve heard what’s happened to your friend Sheppy?’ he asked.

  They shook their heads.

  ‘Ha!’ squawked Inchcape; then, coming to it at last: ‘He’s been arrested.’

  ‘No!’ said Harriet.

  ‘Yes. Down by the Danube. The ass was caught with the gelignite on him.’

  ‘Trying to blow up the Iron Gates?’

  ‘Something like that. They were caught in a river-side bar, shouting drunk, talking quite openly about bringing Danube shipping to a standstill. They imagined, because Rumania is supposed to be a British ally, the Danube bargemen would be happy to help sabotage their own livelihood. What a pack of fools! Anyway, they’re all under lock and key now. “A fair cop,” I believe the expression is.’

  ‘Who got caught with him? Anyone we know?’

  ‘No, none of the local conscripts were there; only the top brass. This was Sheppy’s first expedition – and his last.’ Inchcape slapped his thigh, crowing at the thought of it. ‘The first and last sally of Sheppy’s Fighting Force.’

  Harriet smiled at Guy, but Guy might have been a thousand miles removed from the whole matter. She asked Inchcape: ‘What will become of them?’

  ‘Oh!’ Inchcape twisted his mouth down in his ironical smile. ‘No doubt the F.O. will get them out. They’re much too valuable to lose.’

  Rumania did not want a diplomatic incident just then. Sheppy and his ‘henchmen’ were flown back to England. After that came official denial that he had ever existed. No saboteur, it was stated, could slip past the net spread wide by Rumania’s magnificent body of security police. But the story had got around and it added to the general sense of insecurity and victimisation. The press began to write openly of the injustices being suffered by a peaceful nation in someone else’s war.