by Ann Swinfen
Beccy was going to see a play at the Charlborough theatre that evening with Chris.
‘It starts at seven, so we’re going straight in after I finish at the bookshop. I won’t bother to come home. We’ll have a bite of tea in the theatre café. Then Chris is taking me out to dinner after the play at this fabulous new Turkish restaurant that’s just opened in Charlborough. They say the food is fantastic.’
‘Ah,’ said Kate, who had never been to a Turkish restaurant. ‘Very nice.’ She remembered how she and Tom had loved visiting new and unusual restaurants in their early days together. Money was tight, and a meal out always seemed a terrible extravagance, so they would live frugally for days before, in order to justify it to themselves. A lingering guilt stayed with her still, especially after some grand business occasion which she had not even particularly enjoyed. Beccy’s generation did not seem to suffer from the same guilts. She tried to remember when Tom had last taken her out for a meal, just the two of them. Not since they had left London. And not for a long time before that, if the truth were told. Money was no longer a problem, but now there was never time to do things together. And it was almost as if they avoided each other when he was at home – they seemed to have run out of things to say. This evening she would eat alone again, as Tom planned to work late at the office. The big Manchester project, he claimed, needed his personal attention again.
Viewing the blank desert of a day stretching ahead of her, Kate decided to visit Sofia, whom she hadn’t seen for nearly a week while she had been organising Roz and Stephen to go away. After lunch she packed up some of the flapjack in a plastic box and called to Toby.
As always, Kate was soothed by Sofia’s garden. They sat in the shifting, dappled shade of one of the apple trees on a couple of ancient wicker chairs that sighed and whispered with every movement. Sofia had made fresh lemonade, and they sipped tall cool glasses of it and nibbled at Kate’s flapjack.
‘The bees are going mad,’ said Kate dreamily. Opposite her a tall clump of fennel was alive with Sofia’s own bees, and wild bees, and hover flies. They swarmed in from every direction to crowd and jostle each other on the flat yellow umbels.
‘They look like dozens of little helicopters all trying to land on one pad.’
She could smell the spicy scent from where she sat, mixed with the aniseed of the sweet cicely beside her chair. Its white flowers were finished now, replaced by clusters of shiny, crisp, black seed pods. Kate plucked one and bit into it absentmindedly. The flavour of liquorice spread over her tongue. It was warm and sheltered in the garden, but its nearness to the sea meant that there was always a faint stirring in the air. The breeze must find its way over the sheltering wall and drop down to play around the trees like a boy climbing into a forbidden orchard to steal apples. She closed her eyes and felt this hint of a breeze brush her eyelids like the faint touch of a warm finger.
‘It is so peaceful here,’ she murmured sleepily. ‘So safe.’
‘Yes,’ said Sofia. ‘Perhaps too safe?’
Her voice held a slight note of interrogation and suddenly Kate was reminded of the newspaper stories Chris had found in the archives of the Dunmouth and Welbank Herald. Impossible to think that this place could ever have been the scene of such a violent and fatal attack. Yet what other cottage near Dunmouth could have been occupied by two foreign women back during the war years? It was conceivable that, in those days of suspicion and paranoia about Nazi spies, Sofia and her mother might have been taken for Germans. She had discovered that Sofia spoke German as fluently as Hungarian, coming as she did from the region that bordered on Austria, where almost everyone was bilingual. Kate tried to push away the thoughts of that terrible scene which had taken shape in her mind ever since reading the account, and another more detailed article Chris had found later. The dark, bitterly cold night, the sick woman, the crowd of young people from the village bent on playing their part in the war, led by a fisherman called Edward Stannard who had been declared unfit for war service, the rank hatred welling up, the fear of the trapped women. And somewhere in the crowd – her mother.
She opened her eyes abruptly.
‘When did you have the wall built, Sofia? You said it wasn’t always here.’
‘No, it wasn’t always here. And I built it myself, very slowly. It took about three years. When?’ She paused thoughtfully. ‘It was thirty years ago. At the beginning of the sixties.’
‘You built it to protect the garden? To keep the wind out?’
Sofia looked at her steadily.
‘Yes. To keep the wind out.’
They lapsed into silence again. But after pouring out more lemonade, Sofia said, ‘I have been thinking about the past a great deal lately. I have been thinking that I ought to go back.’
‘Back? Back to Hungary?’
‘Yes. We left in such haste, you understand.’ She laced her fingers together, and Kate could see how taut her hands were.
‘I have always felt that there was unfinished business there. In my heart I carry a kind of guilt, to have run away like that. I would not go back to live, but somehow, before I grow too old, too feeble to travel, I need to see...’
Kate thought, suddenly: Yet to me she seems to grow younger and younger. When I first saw her, she looked like an old woman. Now – she is so vigorous, so alive, she doesn’t seem much older than I am.
‘I suppose you couldn’t have gone back before. Under the communists, I mean.’
‘No. In 1956 – which you will barely remember, you must have been a child – in 1956 it seemed that the Russians would be driven out and democracy established. Later, when the tanks rolled into Budapest and the slaughter began, I knew I could not go back unless, some day, Hungary gained her freedom from the terror and dictatorship that spread out from the Soviet state.’
She broke off and reached down to fondle Ákos’s ears.
‘I never knew what happened to my father, you see. He managed to smuggle my mother and me out on a boat going down the Danube to Romania, but he felt he had to stay behind and fight the Nazi collaborators who were springing up in Hungary.’ She sighed. ‘I do not even know if he survived the war.’
‘Don’t you think you should go? Just to try to find peace of mind?’ Kate looked around the garden, at the chickens scratching in their wired-in enclosure, at the goat waiting to be milked within the next hour. ‘Of course, the garden and the animals – you’re worried about them. But... perhaps we could help? Beccy and Chris are going to be around all summer, and Chris grew up on a farm.’
‘The young man who works on the newspaper?’
‘Yes. Of course, I realise nowadays the farmers all use milking machines, but he could probably learn to milk the goat, couldn’t he? And chickens are easy enough. The bees would look after themselves, wouldn’t they, at this time of year?’
‘Oh yes. But it would be sad for Ákos and the cats to be alone in an empty house.’
‘You know, Chris might be glad to move into the house for a couple of weeks. He’s always moaning about how cramped and dingy his digs are.’ Kate laughed. ‘I think he’s been hinting for me to take him in while Roz and Stephen are away!’
‘I do not think I could do this, Kate. I do not even know this young man.’
‘Would you like me to bring him to meet you? Then you could see how you feel about it.’
Suddenly Kate was smitten by the recollection that Chris was searching for Sofia, if she was indeed his mysterious poet. He hadn’t spoken of it for weeks and she had forgotten about it. Perhaps she shouldn’t have made the suggestion.
‘Besides...’ said Sofia.
‘Yes?’
‘Well, you will think me very foolish, an old woman like me, but I am... afraid. Yes, that is truly the word, I am afraid to travel so far. I have scarcely left Dunmouth since I came here as a very young woman. I did go once to Paris, three years ago. Just for a weekend, for a conference. Mr Shiraz and his family looked after the animals then, but it was nothing, only t
hree days. And everything was arranged for me. I took the bus to Charlborough, and the train from there to London. After that, I was looked after like a fragile parcel.’
She gave one of her rare laughs, deep and musical.
Kate, who almost never asked her a direct question, felt emboldened. ‘This conference – was it in connection with your poetry?’
Sofia shot her a penetrating look.
‘Now where did you discover this? I have never spoken about it.’
‘No,’ Kate agreed, ‘you never have. But this same Chris, with whom Beccy has become so very friendly – he took a degree in east European studies. He mentioned on the day I first met him that he was trying to discover the whereabouts of a famous Hungarian woman poet who lived as a recluse near Dunmouth. He didn’t mention her name, but I can’t believe there can be another cultured Hungarian woman living like a recluse off the fruits of the sea and of a paradise garden, hidden away behind a high wall – not both of you in the neighbourhood of Dunmouth.’
‘No,’ said Sofia. Her eyes were dancing. ‘Perhaps not. Like you, I believe that this is unlikely.’
‘Should you mind Chris finding you? Maybe it was a silly suggestion.’
‘What is he like, this young man?’
‘A very good sort of boy, I think. He wants to be a success as a journalist, one has to be aware of that. But he is sensitive and tactful. I think, if he wrote about you, he wouldn’t publish anything you didn’t approve of. I believe he would respect your privacy.’
‘Well, perhaps I will agree to see him, Kate. Let me think about it for a little. But although that might solve the problem of the animals and the garden, it does not solve the problem of my fear. I tell myself it is stupid. I want to go, and yet I am afraid. Our escape, you see, was very frightening. The ship was overloaded, full of Austrian Jews escaping after the Anschluss. Near the end of our journey, in Romania, the ship foundered. Twenty or thirty people were drowned – no one was sure how many. We survived, but lost many of our belongings.’
She shivered, and wrapped her arms around herself.
‘It is difficult to shut that out of my mind – the terror during the journey, the stories the Jews told, the dark water closing over my head. For years now I have been able to pull down a shutter over it, but ever since I began to think about returning – just to discover what happened, nothing else – the memory has been growing in me, more and more of it coming back. I did not even open the trunk containing my father’s papers until a few weeks ago. Those photographs I showed you? I did not even know we had brought those out with us. Studying the papers – mostly my father’s diaries and a few letters – and looking at the photographs, that part of my past has suddenly come alive again. Can I explain this properly? It is not as though I am simply remembering it. It is as though I am living it again.’
‘If Tom and I weren’t going to France, I’d come with you,’ said Kate, thinking of this strange, remote country which had never truly entered her consciousness before she had met Sofia. ‘But Stephen and Roz will be home soon after we’re due back and I’ll be swamped with domestic duties. And if we left it till the autumn, Beccy and Chris are talking about going off somewhere together, after he has earned some holiday entitlement.’
‘No, you must not think of it,’ said Sofia briskly. ‘How free the young are now, are they not? In my youth, a girl who went on holiday with a young man would have had her reputation ruined for ever. Nowadays it is quite normal. Even a recluse learns about such things!’
* * *
‘I thought we might have a small dinner party the day after tomorrow,’ Kate said to Tom that evening.
‘What? Who?’ He sounded surprised. ‘People from Crossbow?’
‘No. I haven’t met any of your colleagues from Bamford. I want to invite two people from the village. Linda, who runs the bookshop, and Sofia, the old lady I told you about.’
‘What, some sort of hen party? Or do you want me to bring some unattached men to even out the numbers?’
‘No, I don’t think so. I don’t see it as that sort of party.’ Kate paused. ‘You’ve met Linda already. You know she’s lost her husband just recently. I think a pairing off of the sexes would be very insensitive. I thought we would just make it family, and the two of them, and perhaps Beccy’s friend Chris, unless he’s working late at the paper.’
Tom grunted. He was reading the weekly project report from Manchester.
‘You will be here, won’t you?’ she insisted. ‘The day after tomorrow. Could you manage to be home by eight, just this once?’
‘Oh, all right.’
‘Put it in your diary, then.’
He jotted down a note and settled back to his report. The deadlines were only just being met and the whole project made him uneasy. Also, he was finding it difficult to concentrate – for weeks he had been plagued by headaches. Reading glasses prescribed by the optician were not providing any help.
Linda and Sofia both accepted the invitation to dinner. Chris would be tied up at work.
‘Five of us,’ Kate said to Beccy. ‘I think we’ll eat in the dining room for the first time in this house. We could eat in the kitchen, but this way I can shut the chaos away out of sight!’
As Sofia had so much seafood in her normal diet, Kate decided against it for the dinner. A chilled watercress soup, because of the hot weather, duck in a wine sauce and home-made sorbet, she thought. All fairly easy to prepare in the short time available.
On the evening of the dinner Linda and Sofia walked up the hill together. With Beccy’s help, Kate had everything ready in good time, and the four women sat down in the drawing room with pre-dinner drinks. The antique mahogany table in the dining room glowed a deep red, reflecting the flames of the candles in the heavy silver candelabra. Kate had arranged yellow roses from the garden in small cut-glass vases in front of each place and folded yellow cotton napkins into fans tucked into the wine goblets. The white wine was chilling, the red wine breathing on the sideboard, and pyramids of fruit stood at each end of the Louis XV serving table. She had flung open the french windows in the drawing room and the evening breeze rising up the hill from the sea billowed the long curtains of white voile so that they lifted and spun like girls in white dresses.
At half-past eight, she took the duck out of the oven to relax, and moved the sorbet from the freezer to the fridge. At ten to nine, she put the softened sorbet back in the freezer, wrapped the duck in foil and returned it to a low oven. At nine she phoned Crossbow, but no one answered Tom’s direct line. At half-past nine, at Beccy’s suggestion, they started their meal. The duck had dried up. The sorbet was studded with fragments of ice crystals. Politely and awkwardly the four women made their way through the ruined meal.
At a quarter to eleven, Beccy drove Linda and Sofia home in Kate’s car. When she returned they washed up in silence. At midnight, Tom arrived home.
Kate was reading in bed.
‘It was our dinner party tonight,’ she said quietly. ‘What happened to you?’
‘Oh, was it?’ Tom tugged at his tie. ‘Well, you didn’t need me, did you? I sent for the Manchester project team and we spent the evening going through the plan and assessing the work still to be done.’
Kate laid aside her book and switched out her light. Her anger had dried up. Nothing was left but emptiness.
* * *
The drought at Szentmargit continued, and the unyielding heat of midsummer. In her barn workshop Magdolna straightened her throbbing back and looked about her, bemused. She was always like this after a day totally absorbed in her work. She came back to the everyday world slowly, unsure of the time, unsure even of the season. Her intense concentration while she was working on one of her figures deafened her and dulled her sense of heat and cold. The earthy scent of wet clay and the faintly metallic hint of ceramic glazes filled her nose and lingered on her tongue, but above all her sight was focused – partly inwards on the vision, partly outwards as the power of the vision flo
wed down her arms and into her fingertips.
The barn was poorly heated by a portable paraffin stove, except when additional warmth was given off by one of the kilns. In winter time József would come in to find the stove burnt out and ice forming in the buckets of water. Magdolna’s hands would be blue with cold, but she was aware of nothing but her fingers working, making tangible the ideas which crowded her mind. Then he would refill and relight the stove. Moving with soft sounds to bring her gradually back to him, until she looked up at him wide-eyed like a child suddenly woken. He would take her hands and gently rub the warmth back into them, and together they would stare down at the fingers, suddenly stiff and chapped with cold, now that the driving force had been withdrawn.
Not that it was cold today. The heat wave which had begun several weeks ago had continued unabated and the farmers, amongst them József, were worried. Unless it rained soon the maize would remain shrivelled on the cob and the sunflowers – already stunted and poor-looking – would be useless for making oil. At first the excessive heat had drained Magdolna of energy. She had completed very little work over the last month. The finding of the box hidden by her mother had also unsettled her, awakening memories she had tried to bury. But a few days ago she had suddenly woken from sleep with clear ideas for three studies in her head, and now she was working as if possessed, trying to make up for lost time. She had been leaning over her worktable at the same angle far too long, hours probably, and now that she had become aware of her surroundings the pain at the base of her back was acute. She flexed her spine with a groan, pressing her hands into the small of her back and leaving grey smears of clay on her dress.
It was András who came to fetch her this evening, not József.
‘Papa said to tell you that he will be late tonight,’ he said, perching on the rim of a barrel in which clay was packed, wrapped in damp cloth. ‘He and Gyula and Uncle Imre are trying to fix up some kind of irrigation system for the cornfields. Uncle Imre has brought back a pump and a kind of spray from Györ. It’s supposed to throw water in a big arc and spin round. Uncle Imre says it will cover half a field at a time, then you shift it to the other half. They’re joining all their hoses together with some fixings he bought, so they can run one long hose down to the river for the water. It’ll be super if it works.’ He said ‘super’ in English, not Hungarian. British and American television had reached a few houses in Szentmargit, though not his own, and the children were learning fast.