Flora Mackintosh and The Hungarian Affair

by Anna Reader

  “I say!” he declared, bounding into the room, his cheeks flushed and his blonde hair in disarray. “What a thing to have in your house – it leads all the way to the road, Flor!”

  “So I hear,” she replied cordially. “Did you enjoy it?”

  “I should think I did,” he agreed enthusiastically, sitting down opposite Flora and lighting a cigarette. “It’s absolutely foul down there – particularly when you go under the moat. Very slimy.”

  “What was the trap-door like at the other end?” she asked, abandoning Trollope and accepting a cigarette from Bertie. “Was it terribly over-grown?”

  “Not a bit of it,” Bertie said. “There were plenty of loose leaves, but it looked as though someone had trimmed it all back very recently.”

  “Then I think we have discovered the German’s way-in,” she said through narrowed eyes. “In which case, I’m inclined to put something very heavy on that door as soon as possible.”

  “I thought you might say that. I spotted a likely looking stone statue of one of your rellies in the hallway – I’ll just drag it across.”

  “Thank you, Bertie,” Flora replied, bestowing a dazzling smile of gratitude upon her friend. “And then let’s go and have a poke around in the study; I’ve patiently waited for your return before heading in there, which I hope you will agree was extremely generous of me.”

  Half an hour later (and once Bertie had discovered that life-sized stone statues were, in fact, a touch heavier than he’d anticipated) the pair ventured into the study, intending to find out why Flora had been instructed to return to Hungary, and what their uninvited visitor had been looking for. In light of the German’s nocturnal preoccupation with the desk that seemed like the sensible place to start, and Bertie and Flora spent a very industrious two hours reading through every scrap of paper stuffed in its drawers or strewn across its red leather top. Apart from an abandoned novel written in the Proustian style (the opening line – “He awoke, not remembering if he’d wept some tears for his lost youth, or no tears at all” filled Flora with embarrassed horror, and she’d swiftly tucked it back into its drawer); a sheaf of bills from Victor’s bakery; a collection of very amorous letters from a woman called Anaïs; and an invoice from a picture framing shop in Budapest, the desk yielded little of interest.

  “What could he have been looking for?” an exasperated Flora asked, letting another graphic declaration of love from Anaïs flutter to the floor and wishing, not for the first time, that she had had the foresight to bring tea-bags. “Other than the fact that my uncle appeared to subsist solely on loaves of bread and was, by all accounts, a neglectful lover, I’ve discovered absolutely nothing. Perhaps he simply asked me to come to help establish some kind of filing system.”

  “It would indeed appear as though this is a dead end,” Bertie conceded, sitting back on his haunches and lighting a cigarette. “At least we know that the German was looking for something which would typically live in a desk, Flor. What could it be?” he wondered. “A letter? A key?”

  “Perhaps the Germans weren’t political spies at all,” Flora mused. “Perhaps, Bertie, they were extremely efficient bureaucrats who had heard of the anarchy existing in this study and decided to take matters into their own hands.”

  Bertie smiled at that, and eased himself into a chair with a sigh. “Did your uncle say anything else in the telegram which could be of help to us? He can’t have expected you to get to the bottom of this mystery without some kind of clue, Flora.”

  “All he said was that I needed to come to Hungary as soon as possible, and that it was obviously curtains for him if I received his message.” She paused to light a cigarette, and collapsed into a chair. “Oh, and he asked me to thank Beatrice for the portrait of my father, and said it needed reframing.”

  “What?” Bertie cried, leaping to his feet, “Well that’s it, Flor! It must have something to do with that picture!”

  “You think so?” Flora asked, suddenly excited. “It doesn’t look particularly mysterious, Bertie. Father does look very handsome, though – I’ll say this for Beatrice, she may be a touch unreliable as a mother, but she’s a very fine artist.”

  Bertie followed the direction of Beatrice’s eyes, and looked up at the portrait on the wall.

  “So that’s your father,” he said, looking up admiringly. Beatrice’s picture showed a square-jawed hero looking down at the daughter he had never known: clear blue eyes smiled lovingly at the artist; the olive skin was burnished by the sun and touched by the beginnings of laughter-lines; and fine brown hair was swept across a strong brow. He was wearing his naval uniform, hat perched at a jaunty angle on his head in the manner which, unbeknownst to Flora, had landed her maverick father into trouble with his superiors on numerous occasions. Four hundred years earlier it would have been the face of a dashing pirate; as it was, Beatrice had captured the vibrant spirit of the husband she had known for such a short period of time, and loved beyond measure.

  “It is indeed,” Flora said simply, knocking the ash from her cigarette and looking up at the painting. “I can’t see what the Germans would want with him, though.”

  “My guess is that your uncle has hidden something tucked behind the canvas,” Bertie said, walking across the room and gazing up at the portrait. “Would you mind if I take a look?”

  “Of course not,” Flora replied, quickly joining him next to the fire-place.

  Bertie clambered up onto a chair and reached for the painting.

  “I say, this is all rather reminiscent of Richard Hannay, Bertie,” Flora observed with a laugh, as Bertie stretched up onto his toes and reached for the picture which they hoped would solve the Szentendre mystery. “I wonder if there’s some kind of a code painted into father’s eyebrows.”

  Bertie lifted the portrait from the wall and stepped carefully off the chair back onto the carpet. “Right,” he declared, pulling a pen-knife from his pocket and turning the picture face down, “let’s take a look at it, shall we?”

  “Do be careful, Bertie,” Flora cautioned, feeling suddenly rather protective over this testament to her parents’ affection for one another.

  “Never fear, Flor,” Bertie replied. “I worked in my mother’s gallery for a summer after I left school, so I’m quite used to handling canvases.”

  “Of course you did,” Flora said placidly, accepting this addition to Bertie’s growing armoury of skills with equanimity. “Can I do anything to help?”

  “Shine my torch on the knife,” he instructed her. “That’s it.”

  Very delicately and displaying great patience, Bertie removed the picture from its wooden frame. He managed to execute the task without causing any harm either to the frame or the painting, and Flora breathed a sigh of relief as Bertie propped the canvas against the arm-chair.

  “Lord, Uncle Antal was quite right,” she said, looking down at the heavy frame in disgust. “It really is the most appalling frame – poor Pa.”

  “I don’t understand it,” Bertie said in consternation, pressing his fingers against the back of the canvas and fixedly inspecting the frame. “There’s nothing here.”

  He sounded so wretched that Flora was moved to place a comforting hand on his shoulder. “Perhaps Uncle Antal tucked something inside the frame itself?” she suggested, peering down at the teak monstrosity. “Is it hollow?”

  Bertie picked the frame up and tapped his knife against the wood, generating a dull thudding sound. “It’s absolutely solid,” he said dejectedly. “What a bore.”

  They sat there next to the fire-place, looking down at the disembowelled portrait and wondering whether they had let their imaginations run away with them. The most likely explanation was that whatever the German had been looking for was tucked away in another drawer somewhere in the castle; hidden behind moth-eaten socks and abandoned linens. Why, Flora thought to herself, would her uncle go to all the trouble of constructing some kind of elaborate parlour game if he had needed her help as urgently as his telegram ha
d suggested? She was on the cusp of getting to her feet to make her way back into the library and find Anthony Trollope, when her eye was caught by the strange blood-burgundy stain in the corner of the carpet.

  “Alright,” Flora continued, persuaded by the evidence of a recent death to suspend reality a little longer, “Let’s think about this clue another way. Perhaps Uncle Antal wasn’t talking about the image itself – perhaps the painting of my father is just a sign-post.” She looked across at the opposite side of the room, and at the picture which had faced her father. “Let’s take a look at this one.”

  Abandoning Laszlo, the pair rushed across the room and seized the nondescript sketch of a frozen lake hanging opposite the space where Beatrice’s painting had been. Bertie plucked it out of its metal frame and eagerly ran his fingers across the canvas. Finding nothing he turned to the frame.

  “This one’s hollow,” he said, glancing up at Flora. She nodded at him, and he prised the four sides of the frame apart, shaking each one in turn and shining his torch into the dark cavities.

  “Well?” she asked, leaning over his shoulder and trying to get a glimpse into the metal tube.

  “Nothing, I’m afraid,” Bertie said, dropping the piece of frame and switching off his torch. “We’re missing something, Flor – something elemental. I’m convinced that the answer is staring us in the face.”

  Flora took Bertie by the hand and dragged him to his feet. “I vote that we sleep on it, and resume the hunt tomorrow,” she said. “I often find that answers to knotty problems present themselves to me after a good night’s sleep, and I don’t think that we will achieve anything by carving up Uncle Antal’s art collection.”

  “Of course you’re right,” Bertie replied with a rueful smile, slipping the knife back into his pocket and pulling a rogue piece of ivy from his sweater. “It’s intensely irritating not to have solved the thing, though.”

  “Yes it is, Bertie,” Flora agreed, patting his arm, “however just think of all the progress we’ve made today. You, for instance, have disposed of a body; found a passage under a moat; and hit upon the crucial clue in my uncle’s telegram. And I,” she continued, looking up at her friend, “have made it through the first three chapters of The Warden, which I have been trying valiantly to do for the past year.”

  “Are you enjoying it?” Bertie asked conversationally, as he reassembled the portrait of her father.

  “Very much,” she replied. “I always think that Victorian novels are going to be such a trial – it must be something to do with those heavily bearded, rather grim author photographs – but I am almost always wrong and this is proving to be no exception. The legal profession and the press are both being absolutely skewered.”

  “My father wanted me to be a lawyer,” Bertie remarked, as he reinstated Laszlo in his position on the wall. “I told him that I couldn’t imagine anything more soul-destroying than being bound to a desk all day reviewing the dense verbiage of over-paid administrators. And then I ran away to Kenya.”

  “I feel sure Trollope would have approved,” Flora assured him. “Shall we go through to the library and have a cocktail before supper?” She was extremely glad to see her mother’s picture restored to its place once more, and felt that that alone deserved a toast. “I wonder if Magda has got any ginger ale - I’d kill for a horse’s neck.”

  It transpired that Magda did indeed have a stock of ginger fizz in the pantry, since Antal was also partial to that particular drink. “I think that we’d have been great friends,” Flora said with a small sigh. “Everything I learn about my uncle makes me like him more. Although I must say that he treated poor Anaïs cruelly.”

  Magda deposited the bottles on the drinks trolley in the library and was preparing to return to the goulash she had been working on all afternoon, when Flora asked her to stay a moment longer.

  “I wonder, Magda, could you describe Uncle Antal to me?” she asked, as Bertie handed her a drink and lit her cigarette.

  The housekeeper paused for a moment. “He was very tall,” she announced. Apparently she thought that this would sate Flora’s curiosity, and she made to leave the room once more.

  “Hold on, Magda,” Flora called out with a laugh, “couldn’t you tell us a little more than that?”

  As Magda edged back into the room and racked her brains for the kinds of details Flora might want, Flora translated this exchange for Bertie.

  “Now,” Flora said, “what was…is he like? You know, his personality?”

  The question rather perplexed Magda. She had worked for the Medveczkys for more than forty years, yet she had never had cause to assess the characters of the members of the family before; they were just….who they were, she thought to herself impatiently. She wrinkled her nose and twisted her mouth, desperately trying to call to mind anything which may distinguish her employer from any other forty year old Hungarian aristocrat.

  “Well,” she began, “he is very like Laszlo to look at – perhaps half an inch taller, and with slightly darker hair. He has a scar on his chin,” she said, smiling fondly, “from fighting with your father when they were both very small. Very bookish, like Laszlo – they always had their noses in books, those two.”

  Magda paused for a moment, to allow Flora to put this into English for Bertie.

  “He has always been a very good master,” she continued, warming to her theme, “he never raises his voice and always makes sure I have my afternoon off. On Wednesdays.” Magda was sure to stress this last point for Flora’s benefit. “Mind you, he’s been away a lot lately,” she added, looking slightly troubled. “There have been lots of hushed telephone conversations in that study of his, and last minute trips to I don’t know where. He says it’s to do with that book he’s been writing,” - Magda’s voice was thick with scepticism; evidently she did not think a great deal of Antal’s literary aspirations – “but that always sounds like balderdash to me. Besides, I’m sure Mór Jókai’s housekeeper didn’t have to provide clean socks for foreign jaunts at a moment’s notice.”

  “Has he told you anything about an important piece of paper?” Flora asked hopefully, wondering whether her uncle would have entrusted Magda with whatever it was he was hiding. “Perhaps a letter…a map…something like that?”

  “Paper?” Magda repeated with evident surprise. “No, nothing’s been said about any paper – other than that I’m not to throw away any of the pages of that blasted book of his whenever I’m allowed in to clean the study – which is not very often, let me tell you.”

  For a fleeting moment Flora wondered whether the Proustian novel held the key – perhaps her uncle had filled it with coded references for her, rather like Wilfred Owen’s postcards from the front? Had she been on to something with her gag about The 39 Steps? This all struck her as being remarkably far-fetched, not to mention a great deal of work for her uncle (who must already have been fighting a daily battle to keep on top of Anaïs’s endless correspondence), however she decided that it must be worth another look.

  “Thank you, Magda,” Flora said. “That’s very helpful.”

  “I don’t suppose he’s told you when he’s coming back?” Magda asked as she made her way to the door. “It would be nice to have some warning, and he’ll only complain if he has to sleep between unaired sheets.”

  Flora felt a quick pang of guilt. “No, I’m afraid he hasn’t told me,” she replied, despising herself for the deception. “What time’s supper?”

  “It’ll be ready when it’s ready,” came the gnomic reply from the departing housekeeper.

  As soon as Magda had left, Flora retrieved her uncle’s manuscript from the study. “She said that this is the one thing my uncle asked her not to touch,” she explained, flicking through the type-written pages once more, “so I wondered whether he might have employed some kind of…code, you know.”

  The idea, once articulated, sounded ridiculous to Flora, but Bertie didn’t laugh.

  “It must be worth a read,” he replied, forev
er the optimist. “I’m afraid that I won’t be much help though, Flor – not with the thing being in Hungarian.”

  “He does use the odd English word, though,” Flora observed. “And actually, there’s absolutely no reason for him to have known that I speak Hungarian – I was barely a year old when we left.”

  “In which case, why is your Hungarian so good? I’ve been meaning to ask.”

  “Beatrice, god bless her,” Flora replied with a smile. “Her Hungarian is hopeless, but apparently she thought that if I could speak the same language as my father, we’d have a connection of sorts. So she found a Hungarian émigré in Cambridge, and has paid for me to have lessons with him every week for the past ten years. It’s the one thing I’ve really worked at,” she explained, her eyes fixed on the manuscript. “It’s such a beautiful language, you see, and she was quite right – it is nice to have something tangible in common with Laszlo.”

  Flora seized a pad and pencil from the coffee table, and told Bertie to read out every English word he came across. “Let’s see if there’s anything in it,” she said, finished her horse’s neck and settling back into the arm-chair.

  After taking a short break to enjoy Magda’s wholesome goulash (which Bertie described as being one of the finest meals he had ever eaten, to Magda’s intense delight) the pair eventually assembled a list of some thirty words.

  “I warn you, Bertie, this does not look terribly promising,” Flora said, her lips quivering slightly.

  “Read them out, then!” Bertie cried, refilling their glasses with burgundy.

  “Alright, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Flora held the list up to the light of the nearest lamp and trying to keep her voice steady. “Rhododendrons; marzipan; shuttle-cock; tremulous; wicket; madrigal; rancid; bamboozle; Shylock and fudge. Should I continue?”

  “Oh lord,” Bertie gasped, his shoulders shaking with laughter. “How wonderfully obtuse!”