‘Come and see it now. You may not get another chance.’
The Club, that stood behind a zareba of evergreens, had been built in the twenties by prospering English businessmen. With remarkable artistry they had, in this climate of extremes, reproduced the dark brick, moss-patched lawns and dank paths of a late nineteenth-century English mansion. The front door stood open. The house appeared to be deserted. Guy, Harriet and David passed through to the sitting-room which, with two vast French windows opening on to the golf course, extended across the back of the house. It was filled with chairs covered in faded chintz. Small tables were stacked with tattered copies of English journals.
Outside the light was changing. The sun had sunk behind trees so the whole of the green was in shadow. A smell of cold, damp earth entered with the air through the open glass doors. From somewhere upstairs came the brr-brr of an unanswered telephone.
The Pringles did not ask whom David had come to meet, but he said: ‘I see no cause for secrecy. This fellow who’s coming is the chairman of a new advisory committee set up in Cairo. He’s been flown here full of zeal, no doubt imagining even at this late hour something can be done. So remote is diplomacy from reality, H.E. still doesn’t know quite what went wrong, so he’s detailed me to try and explain things.’ Two men had walked around the side of the house. ‘There they are, now,’ David said and went out to join them.
One man was Wheeler, a senior member of the Legation, whom the Pringles had met at parties; the other was a stranger, handsome, of middle height, in early middle age, wearing a dark greatcoat and bowler-hat and carrying a rolled umbrella.
Seeing David, who approached them confidently but with a certain deference, being so much their junior, the two men paused. When he joined them, they began pacing together, moving slowly fifty yards or so in one direction, then turning and moving back again. The grass, green after the first rain, luminous in the uncertain light, exuded a mist that obscured the distant bushes and drifted about the legs of the men as they strolled about.
Harriet remembered the period of the fall of France when she had sat day after day with other English people in the garden of the Athénée Palace which she had not entered since. Now, in another time of stress, she was in the Golf Club, which she had never visited before and would probably never visit again. She turned away from the window, saying: ‘What shall we do?’ She felt that she and Guy were like people left in an empty world. Everything was theirs. They could do what they liked, but there was nothing to do. She began wandering about, picking up the magazines and putting them down again. At one end of the room there was a bar, shut-up and padlocked. On the walls were antlers, horns and many other second-hand trophies of the chase. There were also crossed spears and shields taken from some African tribe.
She said: ‘Is this what they imagined home was like?’
Guy picked up a putter which had been left in a corner and said: ‘Let’s go outside.’
They walked to the first green. Standing at an unobtrusive distance from the three in conference, Guy began to address an imaginary ball. Harriet had nothing to do but watch.
The air was full of the sissing of grasshoppers. The sun had set and twilight was beginning to sift down when the Pringles noticed the chairman, with David and Wheeler at his heels, making towards them, his expression amused. Not waiting to be introduced, he spoke to Guy with the easy affability of a man conditioned to importance: ‘I thought you were killing snakes.’
Guy blushed slightly, laughing. ‘No, just killing time.’
The chairman seemed delighted by this simple wit and glanced at Wheeler who, attempting to reflect the chairman’s good humour, looked at Guy as though he had acquired new interest and said: ‘This is Guy Pringle. He was a lecturer at the University here,’ letting the past tense make its own comment.
‘Ah!’ the chairman said with a sympathetic nod.
Harriet was introduced. The chairman, whose name was Sir Brian Love, put his umbrella behind him and, leaning on it, raised his face, which was smooth, beautifully shaven and pink with good eating, and sniffed the damp and woody air of evening. ‘Very pleasant here,’ he said, imparting an atmosphere of well-being. Wheeler, a thin man, his thin mouth drooping between folded cheeks, waited, fidgeting with a car-key on a ring.
The three young people also waited, expecting dismissal, but Sir Brian seemed in no hurry to leave the Club. ‘Smells like England,’ he said. ‘Hot as hell in Cairo. No sign of autumn there. I doubt whether they have an autumn.’ He laughed and said to Wheeler: ‘Couldn’t we all go somewhere and have a drink?’
Wheeler looked startled, then, worried by this suggestion, said: ‘There’s really no time, Sir Brian. H.E. dines at seven, and as you’re going back tonight …’
Sir Brian nodded, but still showed no inclination to move. He looked up at the dark Club windows. ‘Not much going on here,’ he said.
‘Practically no members left,’ said Wheeler.
‘Still, it’s delightful after the Middle East.’
‘Were you in England recently, sir?’ Guy asked.
‘Less than a month ago. You’d find it much changed, I think. Changed for the better, I mean.’
While Wheeler, with knotted brows, concentrated on the task of getting the car-key off the ring, Sir Brian talked in a leisurely way of a new sense of comradeship which he said was breaking down class-consciousness in England and drawing people together. ‘Your secretary calls you “Brian” and the liftman says: “We’re all in it together.” I like it. I like it very much.’ Once or twice, while talking, he gave a slightly mischievous side-glance at Wheeler, so the others warmed to him, feeling he was one of them and on their side against the established prejudices of the Legation.
Wheeler, not listening, gave a sigh. The key had come off the ring. He gazed at it, perplexed, then set himself the more difficult task of getting it on again.
‘After the war we shall see a new world,’ Sir Brian said and smiled at the three young people, each of whom watched him with rapt, nostalgic gaze. ‘A classless world, I should like to think.’
Harriet thought how odd it was to be standing in this melancholy light, listening to this important person who had flown in that afternoon and would fly out again that night – an unreal visitant to a situation that must seem unreal to him. Yet, real or not, the other men would be left to the risk of imprisonment, torture and death.
Sir Brian suddenly interrupted his talk about England to say: ‘So it’s all over here, eh? Geography defeated us. The dice were loaded against us. No one to blame. These things can’t be helped.’
His tone was conclusive: he stood upright, preparing to depart.
David moved forward. ‘In my opinion,’ he said, ‘this could have been helped.’
‘Indeed!’ The chairman paused in surprise.
‘We lost this country months ago through a damn-fool policy of supporting Carol at no matter what cost to the rest of the community. The better elements here refused to serve under such a rule. Maniu and the other liberals would have been with us, but we had no use for them. We kept a pack of scoundrels in power. No wonder the country was divided against itself.’
‘Ah!’ Sir Brian was non-committal: a just man, he was prepared to hear all sides. ‘And what are the facts, as you see them?’
Wheeler rubbed his brow in a despairing way.
Speaking authoritatively, all diffidence gone now, David said: ‘A united Rumania – a Rumania, that is, who’d won the loyalty of her minorities by treating them fairly – could have stood up to Hungarian demands. She might even have stood up to Russia. If she’d remained firm, Yugoslavia and Greece would have joined with her; perhaps Bulgaria, too. A Balkan entente! Not much perhaps, but not to be sneezed at. With the country solid, enjoying a reasonable internal policy, the Iron Guard could never have regained itself. It could never have risen to power in this way.’
Sir Brian, hands together on his umbrella-handle as on a gun-butt, stood upright, head bowe
d at the neck in an attitude of mourning.
Wheeler cleared his throat, preparing to arrest this indictment, but David was not easily arrested. ‘And,’ he persisted, ‘there were the peasants – a formidable force, if we’d chosen to organise them. They could have been trained to revolt at any suggestion of German infiltration. And, I can tell you, the Germans don’t want trouble on this front. They would not attempt to hold down an unwilling Rumania. As it is, the country has fallen to pieces, the Iron Guard is in power and the Germans have been invited to walk in at their convenience. In short, our policy has played straight into enemy hands.’
Sir Brian jerked up his head. He briskly asked: ‘So it’s now too late?’
‘Too late,’ David agreed.
The chairman gave Wheeler a glance, no longer mischievous. He had asked for facts but clearly felt the facts were getting out of hand. Wheeler, too, was losing patience. ‘I really think …’ he began.
‘Dear me, yes.’ Sir Brian shot out his hand to David, to Guy to Harriet, concluding the discussion. ‘It’s all been very interesting. Very interesting, indeed!’ The charm was well sustained, but something had gone wrong with it. He led the way round the side of the house, the others followed. He was talking, affable again, but his affability was for Wheeler.
It was almost dark. There was no sign of light or life about the house, but the front door still stood open and through it Harriet glimpsed the white jacket of a servant whose keys clinked in his hand. He was waiting to lock up when they, the last of the British, had taken their departure.
While Wheeler opened his car-door, Sir Brian looked back at the three young people and lifted his umbrella-handle to his hatbrim before getting into the car. He did not smile. Wheeler said nothing at all but slammed the door furiously and made off. Watching the red tail-light draw away, Guy said: ‘We’re all in it together, are we? The bastard!’
David remained indulgent. ‘The duplicity of office! And Wheeler is a prize ass. He once said to me: “If diplomacy were as simple as it appears to the outsider, my dear Boyd, we’d never have wars at all.”’
In reaction from a sense of reprimand that touched on their youth, the three, on their way back to the town, laughed uproariously together while the wind blew coldly at them across the dark deserted grădinăs. They were glad to reach the lighted streets.
As they turned into the square, Harriet looked across at the large, brilliant window on the corner of the Boulevard Breteanu and saw that it was empty. The Hispano, that for two months had stood there like a monument, stood there no longer. Guy ordered the trăsură to stop outside the show-room and went in to inquire. He learnt that the car had been bought by a German officer who had paid the full sixty thousand lei without question, the rate of the Reichsmark being such that the cost of the Hispano was less than the cost in Germany of a toy. The money was being sent to Mr Dobson at the British Legation.
Where were they going to eat? David asked. Harriet wanted to take her farewell dinner at Cina’s or Capşa’s. They decided to drive to Capşa’s.
The main restaurants were always refurbished when they returned indoors for the winter months. There was about them all a sense of a new season that held its own excitements. After the vacancy of the streets, Capşa’s interior, with its red plush and gilt and vast crystal chandeliers, seemed dazzling to the three entering, chilly, from the open trăsură.
Food now was not only meagre, it was often bad, as though shortage had led to hoarding and hoarding to decay. But Capşa’s, much patronised by the German community, had kept a certain standard. The better cuts of meat were, of course, put aside for high-ranking Germans and their guests, but the open menu usually offered chicken or rabbit, hare in season, and even caviare of a sort. Later in the evening the place would be crowded, but now there were a good many vacant tables.
Seated by the door, accompanied by two of the young officers of the mission, were Princess Mimi and Princess Lulie. Their faces went blank at the sight of the English. As the three advanced, there was a small stir in the room. The head waiter intercepted them with a look of surprised inquiry as though it were possible they wanted something other than food.
Speaking Rumanian, David asked for a table. The head waiter replied: ‘Es tut mir leid. Wir haben keinen Platz.’
David protested in English: ‘But half the tables are unoccupied.’
The other, from past habit, replied in the same language: ‘All are booked. In these times it is necessary to book.’
David opened his mouth to argue, but Harriet said: ‘The food here is deplorable, anyway. Let’s go to Cina’s.’ She turned with the hauteur of the beset and, as she passed the princesses, she caught the eye of one of the young Germans who were watching her with sympathetic amusement.
‘Well, to Cina’s then,’ said David when they were on the pavement again.
‘No,’ said Harriet, near tears. ‘We’ll only be turned out again. Let us go somewhere where we’re not known.’
They decided on the Polişinel, a restaurant dating back to boyar days, once very fashionable, where Guy and David had often eaten when Guy was a bachelor. They found another trăsură and drove down to the Dâmboviţa.
The Polişinel, built when land was cheap and plentiful, surrounded a large garden site. They went to the main room which, lit by a few brownish bulbs, stretched away into acres of shadow. Only the proprietor was there, dining with his family. At the sight of the foreign visitors, he rose, delighted, and bawled importantly for the waiter. He probably thought they were Germans, but the English, thus welcomed and made to feel at home, forgot their earlier experience.
An old waiter fussed over them, placing them at a window table which overlooked the garden, then hurried to switch on more lights. He brought a large, dirty menu, handwritten in purple ink, and whispered: ‘Friptură, eh?’ It was not a meatless day, but he spoke as though suggesting a forbidden pleasure and the three gratefully agreed to it.
The proprietor bawled again and in trailed a dilapidated gipsy orchestra which, seeing the quality of the company, struck up with spirit.
‘Oh, Lord!’ said David. ‘They think we’re rich.’
‘We are by their standards,’ said Guy.
David pulled his chair round so his back was to the smiling players and did his best to talk above the din: ‘There’s a story going round. Horia Sima and his boys went to the Holy Synod and demanded that Codreanu should be made a saint. The head of the Synod said: “My son, it takes two hundred years to make a saint. When that time has elapsed, return and we will discuss it again.”’
Now that attention had been deflected from the foreigners and their wealth, David settled down happily forgetful of the music. The two men talked about Russia. Neither had visited this country to which they looked for the regeneration of the world, but the previous spring, when Soviet troops were rumoured to be massing for an invasion of Bessarabia, David had reached the Russian frontier. He had stood beside the Dniester and looked across to where there were a few cottages. The only sign of life was an old peasant woman working in her garden.
That he should tell them even as much as this of his travels in Rumania was a sign that their life here was over and his travels at an end.
‘Was it possible to cross into Russia?’ Harriet asked.
‘No, there was no boat or bridge, no means of crossing.’ There was nothing but the water, grey with cold, and ruffled by the bitter wind: and beyond the water league upon league of snow-patched, yellow earth stretching into infinite distance.
Harriet told them about the Jewish frontier village which Sasha had described to her. She said: ‘Were all the Bessarabians as wretched as that?’
‘Perhaps not,’ said David, ‘but they were wretched enough. The majority of them welcomed the Russians. The Rumanians have never learnt to rule by persuasion rather than force. They deserved to lose their minorities: not that their own people get much better treatment. The peasants have always been robbed. Why should they want to w
ork when everything they make is taken from them? They’ve always been fleeced by the tax-collector or the money-lender, their own army or some other army. Now they feed the Germans. They’ve been kept in the position of serfs, yet, given the opportunity, I believe they would prove intelligent, creative and hard-working. In my opinion, the best thing that could happen to this country is the thing they dread most – to be overrun by Russia and forced to adopt the Soviet social structure and economy.’
Guy smiled at a prospect that seemed to him too good to be true. ‘Will that day ever come?’
‘Perhaps sooner than you think. The Rumanians imagine that with German support they can get back Bessarabia. If they try, the result could be a Russian occupation of Rumania, and perhaps of the whole of Eastern Europe.’
A flower-girl came round taking from her basket small bunches of marigolds and pom-pom dahlias which she placed on the tables, then stood at a respectful distance while the diners decided to buy or not. Guy gave her what she had asked – a small sum – but she looked surprised. She had done no more than mention a point from which the bargaining might begin.
Sniffing the bitter, pungent smell of the marigolds, Harriet looked out at the garden, which was pebbled and much cluttered with stone statues. There were several old trees that had reached up beyond the surrounding buildings and now, too tall for their strength, bent and soughed in the wind. On the opposite side of the garden were the once famous salons particuliers, all the windows lit. In some the curtains were drawn as though the rooms were in use. In others the curtains were looped back with heavy cords so it was possible to see gilt and white walls and chandeliers with broken bulbs and lustres missing. Through the nearest window Harriet could see a table ready laid for two and a sofa covered in green satin – a pale, water-lily green, probably very grimy. The rooms had not changed in fifty years and some people said they had not been cleaned either. Harriet was touched to see, as everything broke up about them, this seedy grandeur still limping along.
The Balkan Trilogy Page 66
