An exaggeration to keep him quiet, though there might be some truth in it. The steward was their private banker. He kept the cash and issued it against receipt as and when needed.
‘But, Mr. Nepamuk, suppose one of them suddenly brought a girl home and hadn’t any money, what would he do?’ Bernardo asked frankly.
‘Not ’ere, Mr. Brown. Never! One of them summer ’ouses.’
‘Well, wherever it was, he’d want to give her a present. Or would the valet do it?’
‘If ’e was in attendance, Mr. Brown.’
The picture delighted Bernardo. The respectful retainer presumably tucked you up in bed and you left the rest to some form of irrevocable Kalmody credit card.
‘You may ’ave complete confidence in the Count,’ Nepamuk added. ‘’E knows what ’e’s abaht.’
That was vaguely hopeful. Bernardo would have given a lot to see the telegrams and correspondence passing between the Count and Nepamuk. Possibly they were waiting to see how discreet he was before providing further domestic comforts.
One evening after thunder had rolled across from Romania washing the sky a paler blue and the dusted trees a darker green he rode back to the house with the Master of the Horse. Like a couple of friendly animals they were on the best of terms with no need for any talking beyond exclamations in each other’s language. Kovacs had somewhere picked up most of the words of an infuriated British horseman—tone accurate, vowels all wrong. Bernardo corrected and explained, a forefinger to the sky for ‘God’, a thumb to Kovacs’ ample seat for ‘bugger’. On arrival at the open front door he saw an unusually formal tray of drinks laid out at the far end of the hall. He gestured to Kovacs to hand over the horses and come in. The Master of the Horse was, he understood, grateful and honoured.
Kovacs was an inspired peasant who had risen to groom and from groom to his present dignity. It was always dangerous to drink with him if one had anything to do afterwards, for his cheerful neighings, though remaining formal, invited more and more cordiality. Bernardo, as a result of training in Vizcaya, was able—just—to keep glass for glass with him provided the process was slowed down a little. While hard at it, he vaguely watched through the open double doors the table being laid in the dining room—two places and a lot more silver than usual. For Nepamuk? But Nepamuk took his meals in his apartments. Then was the butler assuming that Kovacs would stay for dinner? That did not seem to conform to the traditions of the house, but no doubt the butler’s experience could be trusted. He slipped out to ask him. If Kovacs was going to be about for the next three hours, consumption of brandy had better be cut down at once.
‘For the master of the Horse, Lajos?’
‘For Madame la Baronne.’
‘Who’s she?’
‘The daughter of the Count.’
‘When is she coming?’
‘She is here.’
And nobody had told him a thing! Arrangements must have gone wrong because his return was much later than usual. Kovacs had also seen the second place and had no doubt that it was not for him. He patted Bernardo’s shoulder to show that they were equals, bowed to show they were not and cleared off. Bernardo shot upstairs crudely yelling for his valet and found him of course already in his room with a velvet dinner jacket laid out on the bed. A quick bath left him fairly sober—which, strictly speaking, he was not—and he beat the baroness to the hall by three minutes.
She came sailing down the stairs in a long dress of crimson brocade with a high collar; it fitted her as closely as a swim suit and ten times more romantically. Bernardo had been expecting some large, pink-faced noblewoman, either sporting or religious. This astonishing creature with dark brown hair and eyes as near violet as made no difference was in her middle twenties and the most devastatingly poised and finished young woman he had ever set eyes on. At that age he had not, he remembered, had the experience to distinguish between female beauty and female ensemble. He was not sure that he could do it yet.
Alcohol inhibited any inferiority complex. He bowed gallantly over her hand, not kissing it because he was uncertain of Hungarian customs.
‘I must apologise for not being here,’ he said. ‘Nobody told me you were coming.’
‘I didn’t know myself when I would arrive. Just some time. How are you getting on in the Arabian Nights?’ she asked in near perfect English.
Her father must have repeated Bernardo’s impulsive phrase. Perhaps it had amused both of them.
‘Bored, Baroness. But now I think I must have rubbed the lamp without knowing it.’
One up for drinks with Kovacs! She spotted the compliment with merry eyes and immediately drooped long lashes over them, as if Bernardo’s gaze were too fervent. It probably was.
‘What have they told you about me?’ she asked.
‘Nothing at all. Lajos just said you were here, and Nepamuk never warned me.’
‘Oh, Nepamuk! The only bearable thing about him is that he can keep his mouth shut. What did you think of his English?’
‘I wish I spoke Hungarian as well.’
‘Such a polite little prisoner! Do you know that everyone likes you?’
‘No. How can anyone like a ghost which can’t speak to them? I don’t even know your name.’
‘Well, I used to be Magda Kalmody,’ she said. ‘But now I am the Baronin von und zu Pforzheim.’
She pronounced her title in stilted German, underlining her Magyar disrespect for mere Austrian aristocracy.
‘And you know my story?’
‘Only that you were the witness to one of my father’s wilder pot shots in defence of Queen and Country and that he felt you’d be better out of Spain till it all blew over.’
That was one aspect of the truth and simple enough by itself to be convincing. Bernardo did not elaborate it.
‘Something of the sort,’ he admitted.
She took the head of the table with Bernardo on her right. When he had been alone Lajos and a footman were in attendance on him. He now realised that this lavish service was merely the ordinary routine for bachelors. Magda rated full uniform for Lajos—which made him look as if he had just dismounted from a horse on a chilly evening—and an extra footman, plus formal poppings-in and poppings-out of the housekeeper whom Bernardo had seldom seen. She was presumably acting as a jack-in-the-box chaperon.
The first flash of sympathy could not be developed under many eyes so that he was compelled to be on his best behaviour. Excitement helped rather than hindered. It was essential to convince Baroness Magda von What’s-his-name that he was a possible companion before opening up other possibilities.
She questioned him about what he had been doing in Spain. Bernardo promoted himself to shipping manager and launched into his love of the country. No, he didn’t know any of the grandees she mentioned. She replied that they were a stuffy lot and not up-to-date.
‘Everybody knows that the English manufacture their gentlemen, and very well,’ she said.
Bernardo let that pass, allowing it to be thought that some imperial public school was responsible for him. For a few seconds the dreamy detachment of good wine took over and he observed his performance with satisfaction. What the hell was responsible? Spain and his mother for manners; the Jesuits for quick reaction and the ability to hold his own in any society; his father for dignity; a year at a Polytechnic for the unimportant skills of earning a business living which any fool could pick up in the course of it.
Over the coffee she exclaimed:
‘All this is such a bore. Give me the twentieth century!’
That was comforting. One was always entitled to be optimistic when young women started to purr about the twentieth century. Certainly she was determined to show her disapproval of the Kalmody style of living. There had been a puzzling impatience in her attitude to the family retainers, which sometimes gave an impression of dislike for the person rather than the system. Bernardo was surprised to discover that the Spanish half of him was on their side.
‘I am a s
ocialist,’ she announced.
Those lovely, flashing eyes, dark blue now rather than violet! He adored her fire and sincerity, though she was the most improbable socialist he had ever come across. Socialists were his dear iron-workers in Baracaldo. Still, they might not be the only kind. Somebody had to deal little by little with all this colossal, wasteful wealth.
Meanwhile this exquisite example of conspicuous consumption—probably dressed by one of those Paris names seen in print and forgotten—had demanded from Lajos her father’s best cognac. It was the first time Bernardo had seen a woman drink brandy; after sipping his own he could not take his eyes off the brown and gold of hair and glass, and the red brocade provocatively outlining those imperious young breasts.
After dinner the long vistas of the garden beckoned, where the pyramid moon shadows of cypress and Irish yew fell across the gravel walks. Bernardo was now in the delightful state when he would have accepted Eden as plain fact and advised the Almighty—with genial respect—how to run the place. He was aware that Magda liked him but had no idea, being still young enough to suppose that seduction was the prerogative of the male, how to initiate slap-and-tickle with a Kalmody. One couldn’t just grab the flower of Europe and any soft meetings of hands seemed provincial.
The problem was solved by his own genuine emotion as she stood, half turned away from him, with one hand flicking moss from the under lip of a stone urn. The Bilbao cabaret provided a precedent; there too you could not touch but you could certainly express enthusiasm and a lot of good it would do you. What he thought of her poured out of him, sounding no doubt exotically emotional since his passion had slipped into Spanish ringing with the native melancholy of unattainable desire.
It was far from unattainable. The response of arms and lips was gloriously unexpected. He hurled an unknown someone’s dinner jacket over a scattering of dry leaves and lowered on to it the red dress and its contents. Or was it a mutual collapse followed by the most artistic show of reluctance he had ever imagined? And that was saying something. Kisses interminable, evasions, returns. No and no, and finally a cry of:
‘You should help me to be faithful.’
Bernardo felt a tinge of conscience—not much, but enough to let the moment go since the future was reasonably assured. It was plain that fidelity to the Baron was a matter of six square inches; you could do what you pleased anywhere else. Considering the storm of physical and romantic excitement which she was capable of arousing, it was improbable that all lovers had been as manageable as himself.
It was time to return to the house and be seen in public. Lajos asked if they had any further commands for him, shut the French windows and said good-night. Magda went upstairs, leaving him in the vast emptiness of the hall. He could not follow. For one thing, her maid was already curtseying to her on the landing; for another, he had no idea where her room was. This was hell. Far too many people, and unfamiliar conventions. It occurred to him for the first time that he did not even know who turned the lights out and when. One might have to explore those convenient summer houses of which Nepamuk had spoken.
As soon as his unnecessary valet had been dismissed he tip-toed out of his room and listened to the silence of the empty passages. Somewhere at the end of the long gallery on the south side of the house he heard footsteps. The rustle of petticoats suggested that it was not Magda but her maid. The maid did not reutm, and unmistakable sounds revealed that Magda was having a bath not very far away. He chose a window seat in the gallery and waited, more to catch a last glimpse of this astonishing creature than in any hope. There was a soft light for every ten yards of the gallery which had never been lit before. A Kalmody could not be allowed to search for a switch.
She came out of the bathroom and looked up the gallery. Bernardo felt slightly embarrassed at his own affinity to a tom-cat sitting patiently on a wall. She seemed to feel none at all, giving the impression that she was completely in command of a quite natural situation. She came to meet him and leaned forward, holding his hands, to give him a little-girl good-night kiss. This time he did grab. It was the bow of wide, red ribbon on top of her head which did it, making it impossible to consider her as wife, baroness or anything but an adorable poppet in a filmy dressing gown. She clung to him as he carried her into his room, soft and tremulous in orgasm and deliciously pretending to be ashamed of it. No, he could never forget a moment of that first night, for his experience till then had been limited to purely physical enjoyment or the unsatisfactory sentimentalities of youth. She left him exhausted and unavoidably in love, running the arrival of that damned valet pretty close.
She insisted on absolute discretion in public—not too difficult since they spent more time in private—but the affair must have been obvious to the whole establishment. All behaved, however, as if Bernardo and his baroness existed on some ethereal plane, continuing like priests monotonous service without questioning what they were serving.
Old Kovacs was the most unconcerned of the lot, seeming to consider the affair as natural as the successful covering of a favourite mare. He did not of course comment, but always looked as if he were about to put an arm round each neck and walk between them to some bucket bubbling with his own strength-giving mixture of black beer and hot corn mash. Bernardo was beginning to feel he could do with it. Day and night, the park, the summer houses, bed, variations of armchairs and the drawing room floor—he had long since lost count of all but the most ingenious few which aroused ecstatic protests and therefore had to be repeated. Magda’s own original contribution was gramophone accompaniment. He had known her disconcertingly to stretch out a white arm and wind it up so that the record should not run down before Bernardo did.
Nepamuk had handed over his beaming prisoner as if there were perfect understanding between himself and Kalmody’s daughter. He never questioned any decision of hers except on one occasion when she insisted on sending out for a gipsy band to show Bernardo their Hungarian music. Her response to Nepamuk’s hesitation was startling. Bernardo’s redribboned girl was transformed into a statue which spoke fast and tonelessly with set face. When Nepamuk raised his obsequious head, Bernardo ventured a quick glance of sympathy. It was returned by an insolent stare putting him in his place as an outsider.
He did not entirely desert the Kalmody stables. Sometimes when Magda had flickered down the gallery to her own room and the fresh morning was an invitation he would slip out of the house, take a salami sandwich—plus the inevitable tot of brandy—with the Master of the Horse and join Perico.
Their former intimacy was strained. Bernardo put this down not only to the loss of a companion but to Perico’s frank disapproval of Magda’s horsemanship. She rode flamboyantly without any consideration for her mount which she would bring back to the yard in a lather of foam and with staring eyes.
‘You should not hold it against her,’ Bernardo told him. ‘It’s that she lives in towns and has no patience.’
‘I have nothing against her, friend, except that to her we are dirt, the horses and all. I have never been in Spain. How are the grandees there?’
‘Far worse than here. They let their people starve.’
‘But speak to them as gentlemen?’
‘Of course.’
‘Listen friend! You are wasting your time and are too decent a fellow to see it.’
‘Not a word against her, Perico!’
‘Good, man, good! Take it that I have said nothing!’
Bernardo returned to the house in a Castilian mood of fury; he would have laid his hand upon the hilt of his sword if he had got one. The reasonable Englishman then took over. What offended Perico was after all very natural in a girl brought up to such splendour. But how magnificently she had declared herself a socialist! He was sure that she herself, so warm and eager, could have no idea of the effect she produced. If only they could live long together, he would help her. That ‘if only’ was, he knew, a wild bit of day dreaming on a par with the cheerful fantasies which had occupied him on Lequeiti
o beach and just as full of risks. All the same he maintained stoutly to himself that this was the only woman for him if ever he could return to prosperous life.
There were still a few more days of paradise before the occasion for his help arrived. They came back from an evening ride to find Kovacs waiting in the palace courtyard to take over the horses. He was slightly flushed with liquor, and Bernardo instinctively understood why he was there in person. In an access of affection he had come to do the menial service of a groom: a parade, as it were, of his homage and loyalty. He allowed himself some too genial remark. He might have commented on the fact that the horse had hardly been ridden at all, as indeed they had not. Magda savagely reprimanded him, and he turned his back. Later on he sent down Perico instead of one of the usual boys to lead back the horses.
After dinner when Bernardo was alone with Magda in the vast, chintzed drawing-room, where he seemed to himself no bigger than the Dresden china shepherd preposterously tootling a flute on the mantelpiece, he asked what Kovacs had done.
‘He must be retired, and I told him so. He’ll be well looked after.’
‘A tragedy for him to do nothing!’
‘He does nothing anyway for half the year.’
‘But that goes for all of them.’
‘Then they are better back in their villages. Once a peasant, always a peasant, Bernardo.’
‘What about your socialism?’
‘That is politics and has nothing to do with it. If this country wants the lower classes to be contented, it must care for them properly. But that does not mean that I can’t tell Nepamuk to dismiss an impudent servant.’
‘You leave that kind of thing to Nepamuk?’
‘It’s what he is there for and he likes it, so why not?’
‘I wouldn’t turn Nepamuk loose on anyone.’
‘Peasants only respond to kicks, Bernardo. You cannot treat them as equals as you do that groom.’
‘Perico is not a peasant. He is a friend.’
‘Please forget that you are the son of a dock labourer! If I can, you can.’
The Lives and Times of Bernardo Brown Page 5