Kitty & Virgil

by Paul Bailey

  ‘Talk to me, sweetheart.’

  He laid his head on her breast and talked to her.

  When she awoke each morning he was there beside her, sleeping lightly.

  This guest-house, which was called Braeview, had a gong outside the dining-room. Mrs McFarland, the owner, had warned Mr and Mrs Florescu that she was in the habit of banging it vigorously on the dot of eight, to summon her laggards down to breakfast. She banged it now, with the promised vigour. ‘It’s the only serious exercise I get.’

  Mr and Mrs Florescu’s short honeymoon in Scotland was almost at an end.

  ‘The gong has sounded, Virgil. Tea and marmalade await the newly-weds.’

  ‘The mature newly-weds. The doddering newly-weds.’

  The table Mrs McFarland chose for them offered a panoramic view of the usually visible brae, but a September mist was shrouding it at present, which she hoped would clear before too long.

  ‘I see no marmalade.’

  ‘I can fetch you marmalade, Mr Florescu, if that’s your desire. May I invite you to be a wee bit adventurous and try something different? I make my own jams and there’s one I’m especially proud of, I have to confess.’

  ‘I shall try it. Thank you.’

  They ordered porridge and scrambled eggs, and when they had finished eating Mrs McFarland brought them a pot of her special jam.

  ‘Taste it.’ She spooned a glistening, dark-red dollop on to his plate. ‘Let me have your verdict.’

  ‘It is exquisite, I should say. It is truly delicious.’

  ‘Can you identify the fruit?’

  ‘I am not sure. It is a berry of some kind.’

  ‘It is, indeed. Wild raspberry, to be precise. We have wild raspberries in Scotland. This was made with last year’s crop.’

  ‘Oh, it is exquisite. You are kind, Mrs McFarland. It is simply exquisite.’

  ‘Are those tears in your eyes, Mr Florescu? I’ve received my fair share of compliments for the wild raspberry jam, but no one has ever wept over it before.’

  ‘It is bringing to me a memory.’

  ‘Not a happy one, by the looks of it.’

  ‘A happy one. Yes, yes. A happy one.’

  ‘That’s good. Will you still be requiring marmalade?’

  ‘No. No, thank you.’

  ‘Then I’ll leave you in peace.’

  They ate in silence.

  ‘Is it such a happy memory? Is it, Virgil?’

  ‘When I was a boy –’ he began and smiled. ‘I always seem to be saying that these days. I apologise for the predictable beginning.’

  When he was a boy, he said, his mother often tantalised him with visions of fragile pastries and richly scented sweets and chocolates in a vanished cofetãrie she had visited during far-off summer holidays. It had seemed to her a fairy-tale place, but it was real enough and famous throughout the Balkans. The shop belonged to a Greek family named Kalin-zachis in the town of Sinaia, a popular resort where the king had a residence. Matilda Popescu’s favourite delicacy was a preserve of wild raspberries from the Carpathians. The fruit was sometimes difficult to find, because the zmeure salbatice were loved by the mountain bears, who risked being shot by hunters in order to feast on them.

  ‘It was a happy memory for Mãmicã. From the time when her life was carefree.’

  (On their pretend honeymoon, she discovered a new aspect of Virgil’s character. For an avowed lover of cities he was surprisingly knowledgeable about birds that live mostly in the countryside. The sore-throated laugh that sounded as if it were mocking them as they picnicked in a field on the edge of a pine forest belonged to a disappearing jay, he informed her with obvious pleasure. ‘It looks pinkish when it is still and rather plump, but when it is in the air it shows the blue and black stripes on its wings. It has a white bottom also. Do you see the beautiful stripes?’ The jay let out a final scream before vanishing into the trees.

  ‘You must accept my word that those are migrant red-breasted flycatchers passing over us, eating as they go,’ he said to her three days later. ‘Yes, I am sure that is what they are. The black-and-white tails are distinctive. We are very lucky, very fortunate, they are flying so close to earth. They are enjoying their last Scottish meal, I should imagine.’

  How, she wondered, tickling him, had Mr Florescu acquired his ornithological expertise? He giggled and begged her to stop. There was a simple explanation, if she would kindly remove her roving hands.

  ‘When I began to learn English in earnest I needed books, any books, as many books as I could find. I had an English Grammar, and an out-of-date phrase book and some newspaper articles. I had a comic book with silly words like “Bam” and “Wham” and “Zap” and “Zonk”. It was too soon for Shakespeare and Keats, far too soon, but I managed to read a novel by P. G. Wodehouse without realising, alas, that it was supposed to be humorous. I was desperate for English sentences to unravel and put back together. Then, one wonderful morning a school-friend gave me a book his father had picked up on a train – abandoned, he assumed, by that rarest of creatures, a tourist. It was called A Guide to the Birds of Europe. I read it, reread it and studied the photographs, and lo and behold, I was an expert. If the book had been A Guide to the Fish of Europe instead, or A Guide to the Trees of Europe, or any other such guide, I would be dazzling you with a different kind of expertise. I am, perhaps, not quite so clever, Kitty. My knowledge is accidental.’

  In Edinburgh, at the start of the holiday, after Kitty had shown him the imposing stone house in the New Town in which Nelly had been born and raised, a sudden strong wind nearly blew them along the crescent. They turned into a side street and entered a wine bar. While they waited for a table Virgil spoke a poem by Montale to her – ‘His only Edinburgh poem, as far as I can tell’ – and translated ‘Vento sulla Mezzaluna’ into ‘approximate English’. She would remember the image of the preacher on the crescent who asked the poet ‘Do you know where God is?’, received an unexpected answer and was lifted up by the whirling wind into a darkness above the city. ‘I should like to meet a fire-and-brimstone preacher, Kitty. And see him carried off like that. Is Scotland still the place for him?’)

  That evening, strolling back to Braeview, they were brought to a halt by the eerie sound of a woman singing to the accompaniment of a harmonium. They saw, through the open window of a room lit by an oil lamp, that the woman was old and toothless, and playing the instrument herself. They strained to catch the words she was wailing, but could only make out the repeated phrase ‘And love will waste my body’. Sensing that she was being watched, she turned her head and took her hands from the keys, and screeched what they assumed, from her expression, was an obscenity. They resumed their stroll and the woman her wailing.

  ‘“And love will waste my body”,’ Virgil whispered.

  ‘Not yet, sweetheart.’

  The next day, as they were leaving, Mrs McFarland presented them with two jars of her wild raspberry jam. ‘I shall always think of you as the gentleman who wept with joy when he tasted it. It was joy, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. Thank you. It was.’

  ‘Godspeed, Mr and Mrs Florescu.’

  That Christmas they followed the progress of the revolution in Romania on a television set Nelly had hired for Virgil’s benefit.

  ‘These must be troubling days for you.’

  ‘Very troubling, from such a distance, yes. I am finding it somewhat unbelievable. Too good to be true, perhaps. At the moment, Nelly, it is far too good to be true. But I may be wrong. I hope most fervently that I am wrong.’

  (The Conducator, protected against the fierce December cold in a heavy greatcoat and lambskin hat, stands on the balcony of the Central Committee building and waves to the working people who have just been assembled in the square below. He has come to convince them that all is well, despite the rumblings from distant Timioara. He has plans to better their lives, with promises of food, of higher wages, of the inevitable ‘improved conditions’. The droning old man antic
ipates applause, but suddenly there is booing and yelling from the back of the crowd. Someone shouts ‘Timioara!’ The sounds of disrespect and discontent are taken up by others and soon there is scarcely anyone who is silent. The Conducãtor, who has always been assured by his advisers that the ordinary citizens of Romania love him as a father, is startled by this unaffectionate display. He mumbles the word ‘aceasta’ before speech deserts him. His expression changes from incomprehension to amazement to something like terror. His burly bodyguard warns him that the crowd is moving nearer and the voice of his unseen consort is heard, ordering the man to be quiet … and the picture of the terrified leader is blacked out; the direct transmission terminated.)

  ‘It is pleasing to me to see fear in his eyes. So the cunning fox is finally trapped. It is a pleasing spectacle.’ He smiled and added: ‘There are other foxes, though. Masses of them. Some have gone to earth already, I should not wonder.’

  On the morning of Christmas Eve, when it seemed that Romania had been liberated from tyranny, Virgil – who had stayed awake the entire night – rose from the kitchen table and announced that he needed to take a solitary, thought-collecting walk. ‘I have too many ideas and not enough intelligence.’

  He kissed Kitty’s hair and closed the kitchen door quietly behind him. His feet scrunched the gravel on the driveway.

  ‘Now we can deal with trivial matters,’ Nelly said. ‘Until Virgil returns. I mean comparatively trivial matters, like your rejected sister’s state of mind. I am concerned for her, Kitty, as I haven’t been for years. She is behaving rather as she behaved after Felix – there’s a trivial subject – abandoned us for his heart-throb with the headaches. I was shocked when I saw her last week. I was so shocked, in fact, that I suggested she come here with the children. Thank God she declined. Tantrums à la Daisy and the Romanian revolution – no, no, I couldn’t have coped.’

  ‘I had a rambling letter from Cecil. He loves this young woman. I can’t believe he ever loved Daisy as deeply.’

  ‘As deeply as she loved him? Let’s be more serious than trivial for a moment. What distresses me about Daisy is that I find it impossible to sustain a conversation with her. I dread saying even perfectly simple things in her presence. She asked me yet again why I visit Egypt so often and I was unable to tell her the truth. It’s my undying fascination with the Valley of the Kings, I said. I’m still keeping Omar a secret from her, because I don’t want to give her another reason for reproving me.’

  ‘I give her plenty of scope for disapproval, Nelly. Virgil does, too. It’s a pity she and Daddy can’t compare notes. The one thing that unites them is their contempt for my “daft Romanian park attendant”. That’s a fairly recent Daisy-ism, if you didn’t recognise the tone.’

  ‘I despair of her. I hate to play Cassandra, but I predict she might go to pieces once Cecil’s girlfriend has had their baby. When is it due?’

  ‘February. Late February.’

  ‘We shall batten down the hatches in February then. Be on Daisy alert, Kitty. Be prepared for disaster.’

  Virgil came back in the early afternoon. ‘I have walked miles, but my thoughts are no clearer. I should like to accompany you to church tonight.’

  ‘Of course you may. No need to ask.’

  ‘I should like to hear Christian hymns in the appropriate setting.’

  ‘The vicar will be pleased to see you again. You must be hungry and thirsty. Would you care for a beer while I rustle up some onion tart and salad?’

  ‘You are kind, Nelly. Yes, I should like a beer.’

  ‘Kitty is glued – as we say – to the television. It really does seem that your country will soon be free.’

  ‘It does seem so, yes. I will join her. I too will be glued.’ He smiled. ‘“Glued to the television” is good. It is a new turn of phrase for me.’

  (‘He is the Emperor’s personal poet, Kitty,’ said Virgil, identifying the fat man in a black cloak who was being jostled by the crowd. ‘No, not a poet. He is a versifier. He was a poet when he wrote for his own pleasure. Then he began to evacuate – yes, “evacuate” is the mot juste – hundreds and hundreds of wretched verses in praise of the nation’s saviour, and hundreds and hundreds more of an even worse wretchedness, and his talent – his small, but genuine talent – bade him a last goodbye. That’s him, the unstoppable Adrian. You remember my telling you the Securitate visited upon me a silent thug called Adrian, along with the vacuous expert on Emily Dickinson? That was a literary joke for my amusement. The name Adrian is not associated with wordlessness. Ha, ha, ha. Ho, ho, ho. They have brains as well as muscle, our resourceful secret policemen. And women.’

  A second poet – ‘He is honourable. He has courage’ – appeared on the screen. ‘He is not lost for words. He has been unable to speak for several months.’ An actor – ‘Our Romeo, our Hamlet’ – stood beside him. Virgil could identify most of the people crammed inside the television studio the revolutionaries had seized. ‘Radu is not there. Radu should be there. I wonder where is Radu.’)

  She held his hand throughout the midnight service. Prayers were said for the sick, the bereaved, the lonely, and for the martyrs and victors of the Romanian revolution.

  They drank whisky on their return. The previous year, Kitty and Virgil had danced to Nelly’s records of Fred Astaire, the dapper idol of her girlhood, and Virgil had surprised them both by singing, or growling, ‘Black Mountain Blues’: ‘I am not a jazz fiend, as are many of my friends, Radu in particular, yet I do love Bessie Smith. I found this easy to learn.’

  ‘Black Mountain people are bad as they can be

  Black Mountain people are bad as they can be

  They uses gunpowder just to sweeten their tea,’

  he sang, in an impossible American accent, which only made him sound more Romanian than he did when speaking.

  ‘I’m bound for Black Mountain

  Me and my razor and guns

  I’m gonna shoot him as he stands still

  And cut him as he runs,’

  he growled, with his eyes shut tight for concentration.

  They had applauded him and demanded an encore, but he had laughed, saying ‘That is the beginning and end of my repertoire. There is nothing else I can sing.’

  Now they sat round the kitchen table, talking quietly.

  ‘I fear very much those students, those martyrs, have died fruitless deaths. I fear they have died in vain. It may be that they were simply murdered.’

  ‘Perhaps your fear is unfounded, Virgil.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  (Radu and Alina Sava would take her to the bleak cemetery in the northern part of Bucharest where the murdered students and schoolchildren were buried. She would read the messages on the obelisks that marked their graves – ‘My dear parents and brothers, please forgive me for leaving you when I was only thirteen. Octavian Burcioaila – “Tavi”’ – and gaze at the bright and confident faces that stared out of the photographs. Beyond the burial ground were apartment blocks resembling beehives. ‘Buzzing with misery,’ Alina would comment. ‘The families in those beehives must often wish they were over here.’)

  ‘That is convenient. That is very convenient,’ Virgil muttered when they heard, late on Christmas Day, that Nicolae and Elena Ceauescu had been shot dead by a firing squad after a brief trial in a makeshift court at the army barracks in Tirgoviste. ‘Oh, that is perfectly convenient. Neat and tidy and – what is your expression? – shipshape. The square pegs have been adjusted to fit inside the round holes and everything is hunky-dory. Except that it isn’t. Comrade Iniquity and his iniquitous wife have been released. They have been set free. They should have lived. They deserved to live. They did nothing to deserve this quick kindness.’

  ‘They look peevish,’ Nelly remarked, when the Ceauescus were shown sitting on a bench, haughtily refusing to answer their inquisitors. ‘They look like a peevish elderly couple. They look like Punch and Judy.’

  ‘They do. A pair of terrible puppets. Punch
and Judy is indeed apropos.’

  The bulletin ended with a picture of the corpses.

  ‘Is that real blood on his face, do you imagine? Two rag dolls, thrown to the ground. Two crumpled marionettes. That’s all they look like now.’

  ‘Will you be going home, Virgil?’

  ‘I am not sure. I shall wait until I receive word from my few close friends. I am in no hurry.

  ‘I must unglue myself from this,’ he said, as the camera revealed a smiling woman holding up the Romanian flag with a hole where the Communist insignia had been. ‘My eyes and ears and brain are tired. I am all of a sudden exhausted.’

  ‘Goodbye, Nelly.’

  ‘Au revoir, if you don’t mind, Virgil. Au revoir, please.’

  ‘We say la revedere.’

  ‘In that case, I shall say it too. La revedere. Come back in the spring, come back in the summer, but come back. You still haven’t seen my datura in flower.’

  ‘The angels’ trumpets?’

  ‘The very same.’

  ‘I shall bring him, Nelly.’

  Nelly spread out her arms and held Kitty and Virgil in a single, long embrace.

  ‘Happy New Year, beautiful Kitty Crozier.’

  ‘Happy New year, sweetheart. Happy New Decade.’

  ‘I shall be staying for breakfast. I shall be staying for tea and the dregs of the wild raspberry jam.’

  ‘That’s hours and hours in the future. We must think up ways of occupying ourselves till then.’

  ‘Kitty, this is Virgil. Thank God you are there. I am calling you from the airport. I will be again in England soon. Oh, my English is failing me today. There is something in the post for you. You will get it, I hope, tomorrow. I must fly, in every sense. I love you.’

  The ‘something in the post’ was a poem: ‘A venit vremea de apoi.’