Secret Kingdom

by Francis Bennett

  ‘In England, that would be considered very ungallant,’ he argued, dreading the moment when she would leave him.

  ‘In the communist system, women are encouraged to be independent. I will meet you at the restaurant.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘I have said I will come. Why should I change my mind?’

  Would she come? She might. She might not. He knew her name, Eva Balassi, but not where she lived. If she didn’t come, how would he get in touch with her again? If she didn’t come, should he get in touch with her again? In this awful country, she might be frightened of having dinner with him because of what she assumed he was: an Englishman infected with all the contagious bourgeois ailments of the West. He spent a tortured hour working out strategies to track her down if she failed to turn up at the restaurant.

  She was already seated at their table when he arrived. ‘I’m sorry if I kept you waiting,’ he said. She had not worn make-up at the conference and she had been dressed in a plain white shirt and black skirt. Now she had done her face, washed her hair and had chosen a blue-patterned sleeveless dress that brought out the darker tones of her skin.

  ‘You look wonderful,’ he said, wanting desperately to touch her. ‘Quite marvellous.’

  ‘This morning I was in uniform, now I am in my own clothes. That is the difference. Now,’ she said, leaning forward and looking solemn, ‘I insist that we go Dutch tonight.’

  ‘Go Dutch?’ he laughed. ‘Where did you learn that?’

  ‘Is the expression wrong?’

  ‘No, not the expression, the thought,’ he said. ‘Impossible. An Englishman simply can’t allow it. Anyway,’ he lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, ‘the English taxpayer can foot the bill. I shall put you down to expenses.’

  ‘How will you justify that without lying?’

  ‘If we talk business,’ he said, hastily changing his position, ‘that is the justification. If we don’t, then of course, to charge you to expenses would be completely wrong.’

  ‘I think so,’ she agreed.

  Did Martineau sleep with her that night? He wanted to all right. She let him walk back with her; at one point she even took his arm and his hopes rose. He pressed her hand with his. But at the entrance to Vaci Street, she stopped, turned towards him, kissed him lightly on the mouth and said: ‘No further tonight. This is where I leave you.’

  He was about to argue but she put her hand gently on his lips. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘I thank you for a wonderful day. I will go home now and dream about this unexpected pleasure.’

  ‘Can we repeat it?’ He hoped she wouldn’t detect the desperation in his voice.

  ‘I think that might be difficult,’ she said.

  ‘You mean, it ends here, on a street corner, before it’s begun?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ she laughed. ‘I mean days like today do not happen twice, unless you are very lucky.’

  ‘Will I see you again?’

  ‘Yes, I believe so.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘If you will come to my flat tomorrow night, I will return your kindness and you can meet my daughter, Dora.’

  ‘Tomorrow night,’ he said, kissing her on the cheek. Was it his imagination or did he feel her pressing her body against his for a brief moment?

  *

  She sits alone on her balcony in the sunlight. The Englishman invades her consciousness now just as he ruled her dreams during the night. Can it be true that she has known him for less than one day? In the few hours since he came into her life, he has transformed it. For the first time in over a year the trials of her past are briefly obliterated. For a moment or two she is liberated from the guilt, shame, fears and obligations that have controlled her life for as long as she can remember. Losing herself willingly in the unexpected intensity of her few hours with Martineau has allowed her to escape into a present of her own making. She feels as if two separate images of herself have been reconciled into one. Yesterday her happiness absorbed her pain, and she was free, an experience she had thought she would never have again.

  There is danger in this relationship, she recognizes that. Is he more than he says when he tells her he works at the British embassy as an economics specialist? Would he lie to her? A voice inside her says yes, all men have lied to you throughout your life. Why should this one be any different? She denies her own instincts. She accepts he is telling the truth about himself. To ensure that she is not proved wrong, she will never again ask him anything about what he does. If there is a deeper truth to be denied, let it be denied for as long as possible. Nothing must spoil her happiness, even if the feeling lasts only a day or two. It is self-deception, she knows, which she justifies by telling herself she has earned a little respite from the harsh realities of her life.

  What did happen yesterday? She smiled at him, laughed at his jokes (he certainly made her laugh), she touched his arm, she leaned against him once or twice – can he have noticed? She doesn’t think so. She put her arm through his. All right, she flirted with him at dinner. But he didn’t hold her in his arms. She didn’t kiss him. She didn’t sleep with him. Why does she feel so excited and so guilty? She has spent a few hours of her life with an Englishman and done less with him than she did with boys when she was fifteen. What can be wrong with that? But the rational processes of her mind disintegrate before the power of her emotions. Something did happen yesterday and she knows it. Dare she admit it to herself? No, she is afraid to utter the words. She refuses to acknowledge the truth of what she feels. It is too exhilarating. She smiles with pleasure.

  *

  Next day Martineau behaves like a schoolboy in love, excitable, volatile, voluble.

  ‘God knows,’ Hart said later, ‘he never drew breath, he had opinions on everything. I thought he’d got sunstroke.’

  The day drags. He is distracted, unable to concentrate. He looks at his watch continually. His mind floats above his desk in a land where each sensation he feels has its origin in Eva. He can smell her wherever he goes, sense the touch of her skin on his hands, the soft warmth of her lips on his. He can see her eyes lighting up, the sudden shifts of mood from solemnity to laughter and back again. His sense of her overwhelms his being.

  Does he stop, even for a moment during this fevered day, to consider what he’s letting himself in for? If he does, it’s quickly forgotten. He can offer no resistance to the emotional excitement that seems to lift him so that he can see over the wall that has surrounded his life up to now into a world of new delights. Now is not the time to call a halt to an adventure that has not yet begun. Who knows where he may be led, what secrets he may learn? He is driven on by the delirium of his own euphoria.

  He is outside her apartment twenty minutes early, furious with himself that he has brought nothing with him, no wine, no flowers, and now the market is closed. How could he be so thoughtless? He walks down Vaci Street, turns right into Fovam Square and then up on to the Szabadsag Bridge, with its four eagles in flight above each of the green towers, the strength of their wings perpetually straining, he imagines, to keep the iron bridge from falling into the Danube. Halfway across, he leans up against the rail and watches the great river flow slowly by.

  She has a daughter. Therefore, she is married. Or has been married. She wore no ring, he noticed, but that isn’t unusual these days. Many younger women no longer wear rings. Some stupid communist convention. Just as barmy as their economic theories. Perhaps she’d taken off the ring because she was divorced. Surely she wouldn’t ask him back to her apartment if she had a husband? It was her idea, he remembers, not his, that he should come to her flat for dinner. There are any number of mysteries, he says to himself, which perhaps the night will reveal. He looks at his watch. Time to go. If he walks slowly he will arrive on the dot.

  *

  She is tidying the small apartment, laying the table, preparing the dinner. Her mind is full of the Englishman. What will he think of her when he comes tonight? What will he make of who she is, how she lives?
She tries to imagine her sitting room through his English eyes. She sees its plain, functional furniture, its worn covers, her old, dull curtains, a framed Olympic Games poster on the wall (London, 29 July to 14 August), the books on the shelf. Lenin’s The State and Revolution, Marx’s The Communist Manifesto, Stalin’s essay On Dialectical and Historical Materialism. If only she had time to hide them. Will he use these titles as evidence against her? When he does, will he recognize that the barriers to their friendship are insurmountable?

  Or will his eyes drift on to the photographs, Dora as a baby, Dora aged three, Dora with her grandparents, Dora with Julia before she left for the Games, their arms around each other? How young and excited they look.

  Julia. Julia.

  The past breaks through her dreaming and reasserts its cruel hold on her. Today is the first morning in more than a year that she has woken up without thinking of Julia. She is immediately consumed by guilt. How could that happen? How could she betray her promises? Her mood changes.

  The Englishman is a dream, and consciously and rightly she murdered her own dreams months ago. There can be no place for dreams or Englishmen in her life. She has other, more pressing commitments. Promises made that must be honoured. It is too late to cancel the invitation for dinner. But after tonight, that will be it. She will never see him again. She hugs herself in despair.

  ‘Mama,’ Dora calls, ‘there’s someone at the door.’

  *

  ‘This is my daughter, Dora,’ she said. A tall, thin girl was standing behind her. Dora looked at Martineau shyly, smiled briefly, said something to her mother, smiled again at Martineau and left. ‘Dora goes to her night studies. She has important exams soon that she must pass if she wants to go to medical school. She will return later.’

  She had prepared an arrangement of local sausage and salami, full of pepper and garlic, which made him thirsty. He drank two glasses of wine before she served him with stuffed pork in a paprika sauce and pickled cabbage followed by chocolate-filled pancakes. She watched him eat with pleasure. When they had finished, she refused to let him clear away, smiling at his protests. She poured him some brandy and, because the evening was so warm, apologizing that she had no fan, suggested they sit out on the balcony, high up on the fourth floor, looking out over the dark street below.

  ‘Maybe it will be cooler outside.’

  He calculated the hours they had spent together and realized that in all that time he had learned next to nothing about her. Except, of course, that she was a swimmer, had competed in the Olympic Games and had had a daughter when she must have been very young.

  ‘Did you win a medal?’ he asked suddenly, voicing the thoughts in his mind.

  ‘A medal?’

  ‘In London.’

  She laughed. ‘Yes, a gold. I won the freestyle final.’

  He knew who she was now, a Heroine of the State, a woman who had privileges and a charmed life. Someone who would be used by the state as an example to others. A part of the structure that kept the communists in power. His heart sank.

  ‘And London? Did you like London?’ Why couldn’t he bring himself to say what he wanted to say?

  ‘I did not manage to see that much. We were not allowed to go about by ourselves. We were always accompanied by the officials of our team.’

  Always those bloody goons wherever you went, smiling, shameless men in ill-fitting suits who assumed an identity to fit the occasion. Physicists one day, swimming coaches the next, hardly bothering to disguise themselves. In the communist bloc, swimmers and physicists were state employees, living and working under the ever-watchful eye of the secret police, to ensure they neither did nor said anything out of line. He’d met them in Moscow and here in Budapest. Bastards always.

  ‘There was so much destruction in London. So many buildings without walls or roofs. I was surprised.’

  We fought too long on our own to keep our world alive, he wanted to say, and now we’re too worn out to repair the damage the enemy inflicted. He said nothing. The night was too warm for morose speculation.

  ‘But I practise my English. That is good at least.’

  ‘Where did you learn to speak English so well?’

  ‘Moscow.’

  Moscow?

  ‘I studied at the Institute of Languages there.’

  ‘Why not in Budapest? Couldn’t you study here?’

  ‘I was chosen to go to Moscow. My parents were upset. They had never left their village all their lives, but I did not want to follow their example, I wanted to see the world. Soon after I got there, the war came and I could not return until 1946. I went for one year and stayed for six.’

  She was a Moscow communist, not someone paying lip-service to the regime in power. During the years in Moscow, she would have built useful connections with the Party hierarchy through her work. She would have returned home full of enthusiasm to turn the world upside down in order to build a modern Marxist state. She had to be a convinced communist. A glimpse at the books on her shelves confirmed his fears. He saw his future with her, whatever that future was, slipping away from his grasp.

  ‘After the war?’ He wanted to know what she believed in but she took him literally.

  ‘I returned to Budapest. I was lucky. I could swim and I could speak English, and I had connections from Moscow. That helped me. Now,’ she said, touching his hands, ‘no more questions. Soon Dora will be back. It is time you returned to your home.’

  His heart raced. He leaned towards her and kissed her. She accepted his kiss but did not respond.

  ‘Eva.’ She was standing up, evading his grasp. ‘Eva.’

  She took his hands, held them for a moment as if wondering what to do with them, and then slowly pulled them around her waist. He drew her towards him. She leaned her body against his, and he felt her softness. At this moment he wanted her more than he had wanted any woman in his life.

  ‘Bobby.’ She laughed. ‘I have not called you that before. Why are you doing this?’

  ‘Because I love you.’ He had spoken the words before he knew what he was saying. She released his hands and stepped back.

  ‘That is impossible,’ she said. ‘Quite impossible. We do not know each other.’

  Bloody idiot. He had gone too fast. Blown it. Damn.

  ‘I know,’ he said, suddenly apologetic. ‘It’s impossible. Of course I see that. I’m sorry. I should never have said anything. I had no right to. I don’t know what came over me.’ He made to go.

  ‘No.’ She was smiling at him again. His confidence returned. ‘Say it to me again. It sounded so beautiful in English.’

  ‘I love you, Eva.’

  She stared at him, then threw herself into his arms, kissing him passionately. ‘I cannot believe an Englishman has said that to me.’

  Holding her tight, he kissed her again and again. After a time she wriggled free. ‘Now we must stop,’ she said.

  ‘Why?’ he asked.

  ‘We cannot sleep together, Bobby. You know that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  She laughed. ‘I have one bedroom I share with my daughter. One sitting room, where the spare bed is also the sofa. A kitchen so small you can hardly see it, a tiny bathroom. Now do you see?’

  He laughed with her then at the absurdity of it all. To be defeated by circumstances.

  ‘Will it always be like this?’

  ‘I hope not,’ she said, and kissed him once more as the key turned in the lock and Dora returned.

  5

  1

  ‘Mr Lander apologizes,’ a morning-coated servant told him in a conspiratorial voice as he came up the steps into the lobby. ‘He telephoned to say he’ll be a few minutes late. Perhaps you’d like to wait in the library, sir.’

  Pountney would have preferred the bar but that, it seemed, was out of bounds unless accompanied by a club member. He was shown into a deserted, cheerless room with high-backed leather chairs, bookshelves that reached to the ceiling filled with leather-bound books, which, judg
ing by the dust, it appeared no one ever read, a few sombre portraits of men he’d never heard of, a table in the window covered with carefully folded newspapers and magazines, a smell of dust, decay and stale cigar smoke. Soulless and empty. What was the attraction of places like this? Why was membership so highly prized by Lander and others like him?

  Mystified, he sat down and read the Telegraph, wishing he had done the sensible thing and declined Lander’s invitation. He could guess what the conversation would be about and it was a subject he wanted to avoid.

  It was nearly half past one before Lander appeared. ‘You must have given me up for dead, Gerry, I do apologize. God, what a morning it’s been. Let’s go and eat.’

  Gossip accompanied the soup, Suez arrived with the roast beef. Lander revisited all the familiar arguments, offering nothing new. Pountney listened, saying little until challenged to reply.

  ‘What kind of threat is Nasser beside the Soviets?’ he asked. ‘While we’re looking the other way, the Soviets could be getting up to all kinds of mischief behind our back. We’re in danger of forgetting who the real enemy is.’

  Lander disagreed. ‘You don’t treat with pocket Hitlers, Gerry. You put them in their place. Surely that’s a lesson we’ve all learned.’

  ‘Nasser’s not in that league.’

  ‘Try telling that to Downing Street.’

  Whitehall was awash with rumours, though he was sceptical about their origin, preferring to see them as the creations of wish-fulfilment than leaks of policy. If Nasser were to move against British interests in Egypt – a euphemism for nationalizing the Canal – then the SIS would be instructed to assassinate him. Troops were being assembled in Cyprus, ready to teach the upstart a lesson from which he’d emerge with more than a bloody nose. Whatever Watson-Jones might say, the idea of going to war with Egypt was stretching credulity too far. He trusted the Government enough to know that could never happen.