by Ann Swinfen
‘I don’t think we can stop him,’ said Tom. ‘Time he found his feet anyway. It will probably do him good – to take some responsibility for himself. You know you’ve been molly-coddling him and Roz both since we’ve been here. He’ll be off to university in the autumn. We have to get used to the idea that he’s growing up, like Beccy.’
‘She’s always had more sense of responsibility.’
‘Well, she’s the eldest. And you are always telling me girls are more grown-up for their age.’
He put down his empty cup, and reached for his briefcase.
‘Just a minute, Tom, before you start. Are we planning to have a holiday ourselves? Beccy wants to work all summer, and perhaps go somewhere in September, so she could mind the house and look after Toby, if we wanted to go off before that. We haven’t had a holiday in four years.’
Tom looked at her doubtfully.
‘I’m not sure, Kate. It’s early days still in this new job.’
‘Tom,’ she said, somewhat desperately, ‘I am really worried about your health. You’re working far too hard and one of these days it’s going to catch up with you.’ She smiled, to take the sting out of the words, and adopted a mock pedagogic tone. ‘Surely good management is all about being able to delegate?’
Tom sighed.
‘Oh, all right. Find out some details about a holiday, then. I’m not promising anything, mind. France would be good. Not too far to get back if there’s an emergency.’
With that she had to be satisfied.
* * *
It was a mechanical problem, however, rather than Kate’s urging, which forced a holiday on Tom, albeit a brief one. In the middle of one of the hottest spells of summer weather yet, the air conditioning plant in Crossbow Computers’ Banford office failed. A building of almost the latest design, Crossbow House was dependent on its computer-controlled heating and cooling system. All the windows, triple glazed to exclude the sounds and traffic fumes from the streets outside, were sealed into their frames. The air was recirculated on a regular cycle, though the system did not draw in fresh air from outside. The employees’ Health and Safety Group had had a meeting with Tom just the week before to put forward their complaints about the high incidence of respiratory illness amongst the staff, and to float the idea that Crossbow House might be subject to sick building syndrome.
With the air conditioning off and the recirculating pump stopped, the building on that Friday morning grew hotter and hotter, and the air more and more difficult to breathe. Several people in the finance office began to complain of severe headaches. A young typist who was an asthma sufferer collapsed and had to be given first aid, then sent up to the accident and emergency department at Banford General.
Tom decided he could take no further risks with the health of his staff, and sent everyone home at eleven o’clock. When the last person had left, apart from the security guards who were making their rounds before locking the building, Tom sat slumped in his office, sticky with sweat and exhausted. He seriously wondered whether he could summon the energy to walk as far as the car park and drive home. He held his head in his hands. It was throbbing. Suddenly the whole endless round of his life seemed futile beyond belief. He shut his eyes and imagined sailing in a stiff breeze over a cool green sea, with Kate in a sun-dress, laughing and trailing her hand in the water.
He sat up. It was impossible for him to work here in the office. Just this one time he would take the rest of the day off and go home. With a sudden surge of cheerfulness he threw into his briefcase the papers he would need to read before Monday and reached for the phone.
Kate was astonished, and then concerned.
‘Are you sure you’re all right?’
‘I’m fine. It’s just the building that’s intolerable. As I said, I’ve had to send everyone home. I’m starting back now myself. Pack us a picnic, will you? I’ll be home by half-past twelve.’
‘Right.’ Kate’s voice rose a little, joyfully. ‘Oh, Tom, that will be lovely.’
As he drove back towards Dunmouth and the sea, Tom caught himself whistling and grinned. Today was the day to hire a dinghy and take Kate out sailing. There was hardly any wind here inland, but there should be a bit more movement in the air over the estuary. Enough to make some headway without scaring her.
At the head office of Crossbow Computers in London, an old friend of Tom’s who had heard a whisper of disturbing news searched in his office directory for the number of Tom’s direct line in Banford. He held the receiver to his ear for five minutes while the telephone rang and rang in the empty office. No one answered.
* * *
The dinghies supplied by Dunmouth Water Sports were very light and skittish, quite unlike the clinker-built wooden dinghy Tom had sailed in his youth, and he was glad the breeze was so gentle. Kate had stowed a plastic box of sandwiches, a bag of fruit and a thermos of tea under the foredeck, and then had submissively obeyed his orders, even when he grew a little rattled about the unfamiliar rigging and was somewhat curt with her.
At last, however, they stood offshore in a light north-westerly breeze, and Tom set a course northwards past the sandy beach and the headland, explaining the principle of tacking and reaching, and enumerating the various lines and the parts of the sail.
‘Of course this is a very small jib,’ he said. ‘Hardly makes any difference. I believe they do sometimes use a larger jib on this class of boat, but I expect those people at the sports centre don’t want to run any risks when they’re hiring boats out.’
The young man, Harry, who had supplied the boat and who was one of the two partners in the business, had taken the trouble to ask Tom a few searching questions about his knowledge and experience of sailing.
‘Stan – that’s my mate – is more into speedboats and jet bikes,’ he said, ‘but me, I’d surfboard any day. Nearest thing to flying, I reckon.’
‘Not so good when there are two of you, though.’ Tom grinned. ‘I haven’t tried one of those things, and I don’t intend to, not on these waters. I might just venture out on a nice quiet reservoir.’
‘You ought to have a go, seriously,’ Harry urged. ‘A lotta middle-aged businessmen taking it up. Keeps them fit. Impresses the birds.’
Kate was snorting with suppressed laughter as they ran the dinghy down the slipway.
‘That put us both firmly in our place, didn’t it? Better get your middle-aged muscles toned up if you want to pull in the birds.’
Tom had tipped her amiably over in the shallows and she had retaliated. By the time they pulled away from the shore, their clothes had nearly dried, so hot was the sun. As they drew level with the headland, Kate caught sight of Sofia probing amongst the bladder-wrack for mussels, and waved. Sofia raised one hand solemnly and let it fall.
‘Who was that? Friend of yours?’
‘Sofia. The old lady who lives in the cottage by the headland. I told you about her.’
Kate, however, had not told him everything. The secret of the wonderful garden she hugged to herself. Whenever she came away from it, out into the drab world of every day, she felt as though she must have dreamed it, and expected, on returning, to find it had vanished, like a palace conjured up by a genie in The Arabian Nights. She had also said nothing about her suspicion that Sofia might be the reclusive poet whose whereabouts the young reporter Chris was so assiduously seeking. If Sofia wanted to remain private, Kate was going to respect her wishes.
Yesterday when she had been visiting the cottage, Sofia had handed her an old photograph album.
‘You have told me of your family. Here is mine. This is all I have left.’
Kate examined the old photographs with interest. Sofia had lived in a beautiful house, built in the eighteenth-century baroque style, and her parents had been a handsome couple. Her father was dashing in a hussar’s uniform in the early pictures, with a thick moustache and dark, sad eyes. Her mother seemed hardly more than a young girl herself, holding the young Sofia. She wore rather old-fashioned cl
othes, with tight waists and long full skirts, when the other young women who appeared from time to time – house guests, tennis players – had begun to wear the straight, revealing dresses of the flapper era.
One photograph in particular caught Kate’s attention. It showed a summer-house in a clearing in a wood. The structure was painted white, with absurd latticework, and a pagoda-like roof crowned with a metal dragon. Sofia’s father – older now, and shorn of his moustache – stood with one foot on the bottom step and his hand resting on one of the delicate ribbed wooden pillars which supported the roof. There was something compelling about this picture that drew her back to it again and again. Beyond the dainty white building the forest diminished into darkness.
Sofia had offered very little information about herself, but Kate took the photograph album as an invitation to venture a few questions.
‘Is this where you lived with your parents?’
‘Yes. In the north-west of Hungary. Not far from the Austrian border. In a region called Szigetköz, lying between the Danube and the Mosoni-Duna. It was a very beautiful and secret place. My father was forced to fight in the Austrian army in the first world war. You know about this? Probably not. No one here understands about the position of Hungary. We were yoked to Austria under the Hapsburgs, but all true Magyars wanted to be free and independent. In the last century we tried to break away from the Austrian Empire. During the revolutionary time of 1848 our people were spurred on by the poetry of Sándor Petöfi, but we were defeated. Hungary tried to stay out of the first world war, but again Austria was too strong for us.’
‘But your father was all right? I mean, he wasn’t injured?’
Sofia looked at her broodingly.
‘I do not think that anyone who fought in that war was “all right”, as you say. Certainly it made him determined to keep Hungary independent and neutral in the future. He met my mother shortly after the war. She was a professional violinist, and he heard her play in a concert in Budapest. After that he followed her everywhere, while her father tried to keep him away.’
She smiled.
‘My mother, Eva, was the child of a gypsy mother and a Magyar father. When his wife died, my grandfather undertook the education of his little seven-year-old daughter himself, and he found she had a wonderful gift for music, inherited from her mother, who came of the musician class of gypsies. These are a special group, you understand. They scorn the artisan gypsies who live like vagabonds. The musician caste are the aristocrats – or they were in the past.’
She spread her hands apologetically. ‘Of course, I do not know how it is today. My grandfather had his daughter trained by the best masters, and forced her to practise and practise for hours every day, until her fingers bled and she cried from the pain in her shoulders and arms. Nowadays this would not be permitted, no? But that is how you make a musician. Like Mozart’s father, my grandfather wanted to live through her glory, and of course her earnings. But Eva had also inherited some of the gypsies’ wildness. One night, after a concert in Pécs, when she was just seventeen, she gave her father the slip and ran away with her lover, taking nothing but her violin. In spite of her father’s cruel regime, she loved her music. They married in Budapest, and I was born a year later. She never saw her father again. He disowned her, but I do not think she minded.’
She paused, looking inwards.
‘The year they married was 1919, in the middle of a time when there was another attempt to make Hungary free and democratic, under the leadership of Count Mihály Károlyi. It was not all noble and good, you understand, this Chrysanthemum Revolution – too many foolish things were done, like disbanding the army through an idealistic belief in peace, when the French, the Serbians and the Romanians were all marching on Hungary from different directions. And at the end, when Béla Kun tried to throw in Hungary’s lot with the new Bolshevik state in Russia, everything turned sour. But for my parents’ generation, who remembered the early hopeful days, it seemed a door had opened briefly, only to be slammed shut in their faces. And then the White Terror came, under Horthy, with its mass killings of peasants and workers and Jews and anyone who spoke up for democracy.’
Sofia sank into silence again, and Kate did not feel she could probe any further.
Now, seeing the figure amongst the rocks on the waterline, Kate was struck as never before by the extraordinary contrast between what Sofia’s life must once have been and what it was now. What had become of her parents? How had she fetched up, of all places, in Dunmouth? The album of photographs had stopped abruptly when Sofia was probably in her late teens, a pretty girl, but not as remarkable looking as Eva had been.
‘Kate, pay attention,’ said Tom, irritably, ‘I don’t think you’re listening. I asked whether you would like to take the tiller for a while.’
She pulled her mind with difficulty back to the boat.
‘I’d love to.’ She was pleased, really pleased, that he had come home early and suggested this outing. She must not spoil it for him. ‘Let’s just have our lunch first. You’ll manage to steer and eat at the same time, but I’ll have to concentrate and hold on with both hands. I hope I won’t turn the boat over!’
‘Capsize it,’ said Tom. ‘OK, pass me a sandwich then. I wish you’d brought beer instead of tea.’
* * *
On shore Sofia watched them gliding smoothly northwards, and could detect at once when Kate had taken over the tiller, as the boat dipped and hesitated, then moved forward awkwardly, like a bird with a damaged wing. That must be the husband with her in the boat. It was curious that he should be here now, in the middle of the day, sailing with his wife out on to the North Sea. According to Kate he was obsessed with work, hardly aware of his family, his mind always turned towards that inland city where he worked. This boat trip seemed a good sign. She had taken, inexplicably, to Kate.
After so many years of living on her own and talking only to her animals, she had found it difficult at first to cope with Kate’s shy friendliness. But there was something about the younger woman that seemed to call out to her – an aura of loneliness and unhappiness that bore little relation to the surface appearance of her life as a fulfilled wife and mother, with a large house and a successful husband. Kate herself seemed only half aware of her need. She talked about being bored without a job, and of the partial relief from boredom afforded by helping to set up the bookshop. Yet underneath the polite English façade, Sofia sensed strong emotions and a deep loneliness. Her initial invitation to the cottage had been made on the spur of the moment, and immediately regretted. Before Kate’s first visit she had dreaded it as an intrusion into her perfect self-contained solitude. Now, to her surprise, she found that she welcomed the visits.
The cottage felt blessedly cool after the heat on the foreshore. Sofia made herself a tisane of peppermint sweetened with honey, and sank into one of the sagging, threadbare armchairs which had been here when they had bought the neglected house from an old man during the war. Sofia had retained these old chairs because they were comfortable and they were too large for her to move out. Covered with bright shawls they now looked like a pair of magpies’ nests on either side of the fireplace.
The photograph album was still lying on the table beside the chair, where Kate had laid it down yesterday. Sofia picked it up and turned the pages over. Until she had dragged out the old wooden trunk, she had not realised that Eva had brought any photographs with her. All these years they had been lying there. Little by little she had been examining them, but the process was disturbing, stirring up the muddy sediment of discarded memories. Interspersed amongst the photographs were programmes for Eva’s concerts, fewer after her marriage, but always at famous halls in Budapest, Vienna or Prague – even as far as Paris and London. There were a few postcards, including some of the Lido at Venice. Sofia could remember that holiday, spent in northern Italy when she was about seven. But it was to the photographs of the house and her parents that she kept returning.
She had gone ba
ck to her father’s diaries, but instead of reading them chronologically she found herself dipping into them for reminders of times she could remember herself, curious to see what different light might be shed on events by her father’s perspective. She turned over the pages now until she found an entry which corresponded to the postcards of Venice.
Diary, Venice, July 1927
Today was spent amongst the glories of Venice, admiring the architecture of palazzo and chiesa, and introducing Sofia to masterpieces by Giorgione, Bellini and Titian. I am afraid the child was hardly impressed. However, eating magnificent Italian ices amongst the pigeons in the Piazza di San Marco was the true high point of the day for her. As for Eva, she loves the painters of the Rinascimento, but not, she says, in such hot weather. I was forced to concede victory to the fairer sex without too much regret, and enjoyed the gliding trip by gondola amongst the hidden waterways, behind the great buildings which are the public face of the city, and under the lines of washing strung across the back canals. Here the women tie their small children on long reins to the iron railings, to protect them from a sudden tumble into the water, while the older boys (some no older than Sofia) swim like eels amongst the striped mooring posts and steps slimy with weed. The smell of these canals is not agreeable in the heat of summer, but a strong Turkish cigarette soon takes care of that, while the rest of the senses are ravished. Even the shrill cries of the women from window to window, calling to their neighbours across the canal, have a native music in this most musical of languages.
On returning to our hotel at the Lido in the early evening I found a letter from cousin Gábor. He says that the effects of the Prime Minister’s decree of last autumn, restoring the upper house of feudal magnates, are working further mischief. Our liberal colleagues have been rendered almost powerless. The composition of the upper house, with its great hereditary landholders, its ecclesiastical barons, and a few Horthy placemen from amongst our own country gentry, ensures the reactionary authoritarianism of the regime. There have been one or two unpleasant anti-Semitic incidents in Budapest, he says, and the appeals of industrial workers and farm labourers for a return to pre-war conditions are treated with contempt. At least I can do whatever I am able on my own estate. The háztáji I have made over to each of the peasants according to family size do provide sufficient land for growing vegetables and keeping some stock, enough for the household’s needs. The other fields above the village furnish some arable land. If I had none but myself to consider, I would follow the lead of Tolstoy and share out the whole of my land amongst them, but I cannot see that to copy his example and pauperise my family would be the act of a decent man. As it is, Jenö complains that the estate is now too small to be viable, and he can no longer manage it profitably. He grieves for the days when his grandfather managed it for mine, and regards me as a dangerous lunatic!