by Ann Swinfen
Then there was her companion – a tall, gaunt woman, reserved and dignified. He was sure he had never met her before, yet something in her face and gestures was familiar. He must be going crazy – he was imagining connections everywhere he turned. Ever since Magdolna had found that box of papers he hadn’t been himself.
He had looked in at the Blue Heron after lunch, ostensibly for a glass of beer, but really to pump Mihály for information about the women.
‘They’re English, I think,’ said the innkeeper, ‘though they both speak fluent German and the older one speaks Hungarian.’
‘That’s unusual, surely?’
‘True enough. The younger one is called Mrs Milburn. She paid the deposit and seems to make all the arrangements.
‘What’s the older one called?’ István asked casually.
‘Couldn’t say. I think I heard the other one call her Sophy or Sofia.’
‘But don’t you have to check their passports when they book in?’
‘Oh well,’ Mihály shrugged and laughed. ‘They don’t look like drug smugglers, nor is this the Budapest Hilton. Mrs Milburn got out two British passports to show me, but I didn’t bother to examine them. This is a free country now, István, in case you’ve forgotten!’
So István was no further forward. He thought he might try speaking to them at the inn, perhaps even invite them to have a drink at the house, if Magdolna and József agreed.
‘Wow!’ said András. ‘I think I’ve got a bite!’
* * *
Kate and Sofia spent the next morning taking a walk round the village, investigating the three shops, and then wandering along some of the paths through the manor woodland. They came back, rather late and hot, to lunch under the tree in the square again. As they sat down, Kate noticed Dr Rudnay sitting at another table with three of the local farmers. He raised his hand in greeting and she smiled back.
‘That’s the man I met by the summer-house,’ she said in a low voice to Sofia. ‘The doctor from Sopron.’
Sofia looked at him discreetly over the menu.
‘I see what you mean. He is much the same build and colouring as my father. No wonder you were startled, coming upon him like that.’
‘Yes,’ said Kate thoughtfully, and opened her mouth to say more, but thought better of it.
Because of the oppressive mid-day heat, they fell into a pattern of retiring to their rooms after lunch and resting a little where it was cool, to emerge later in the afternoon refreshed and ready for the rest of the day. At first Kate had urged this because she was afraid of tiring Sofia, but now she looked forward to the hour or two each afternoon which gave her an opportunity to be alone. She had begun to keep a journal, recording her impressions of Hungary in a hard-backed notebook with a cover patterned with vines and grapes, which she had purchased on that last day in Budapest, in Váci Utca. As she lay on her bed each afternoon she brought it up to date.
Today, their third in the village, after dutifully recording a description of their morning’s walk, she paused with her pen in her hand and gazed out of the north-facing window of her room, towards the rose-coloured cottage and the Danube. Ever since she had made the decision to come to Hungary with Sofia she felt as though something within her had begun to change. It had accelerated as they arrived in Budapest, and now that they were settled in Szentmargit she found she was looking forward to each new moment with eagerness.
It is a curious thing, she wrote, but I cannot remember the shape and layout of the rooms in Craigfast House. I close my eyes and try with my reasoned, conscious mind to imagine myself getting out of bed and walking to the window, but instead two other pictures insistently present themselves. Either I find myself in my childhood bedroom in Castle Terrace, looking out at the place where the Dun flows into the sea, or else I find myself visualising this room, which I have only known for a few short days.
Even stranger, the bedroom in London, where I rose and retired for twenty years, where my three children were conceived, is now a total blank. The most anxious and careful attempt to call up its image fails totally. My memory has become a baffling cup-shaped curve: the earlier and most recent times clear, the part in the middle dipping down into darkness. The memory plays curious tricks. Until the last few months, it was my childhood which was the book with blank pages.
She paused and looked up. The village seemed sunk in an afternoon siesta. Even the farmers were waiting before returning to the fields. There was no rumbling of tractors up the village street, or whirring of the ancient, Russian-built combine from the field away over to the right, where they had begun to harvest the wheat. She could see a goat tethered behind someone’s house, nosing amongst parched grass to snatch a few mouthfuls. At the end of the garden of the Blue Heron, a lean black cat leapt on to the low wall. It walked delicately along the narrow top, picking its way over the crumbling brick, and then sprang to the roof of the pigsty in the adjacent garden. Here it stretched out in the sun, flat and motionless as child’s toy. Above her head she could hear the rustling of the young birds in the heron’s nest, which was immediately over her room. Every time a parent bird returned with food the rustling became more frantic, mingled with the cries of the nestlings demanding food. As the great bird landed, Kate could feel a distinct thump, and the supports of the nest-platform creaked.
Apart from the animals and birds, the village was asleep.
I love this place, she wrote. I love the light. I love the houses with their steep roofs and their wonderful colours – lime and ochre, cinnamon and sage, wine and lemon. I love the semicircular windows in the roofs which peep out under their heavy lids of rush-thatch or wooden shingles. I love the old, counter-weighted well in the village square.
Every house in the village has water on tap, but yesterday I saw a young man come in from the fields and strip off his shirt in the square. He was covered with little bits of chaff and straw – in his black hair, on his golden back, on his blue jeans. He dipped up a bucket of water from the well and poured it over his head. The water streamed down over him, till his hair hung down like a waterfall and his jeans were patched with wet. Two girls, going home with bread in baskets over their arms, paused and shouted something teasing at him, but he just laughed and flung back his head so that his hair spun an arc of water out across the dust of the square and spattered them where they stood.
I love the pace of life. Everyone here works hard, from early in the morning until well into the evening, yet no one seems rushed. Friends stop when they meet in the street, to talk and laugh. Women lean over the fence and chat with their neighbours. The children play for hours with simple things – a ball, a new kitten, their bicycles, or a wonderful contraption some of the boys have been making out of four ill-assorted wheels, some old beer crates begged from Mihály, and what appears to be a sort of sail, cut from someone’s old sheet.
I love the chickens. They are very big and grand – copper-coloured, fat, and full of conceit. They live in special houses, little thatched cottages of their own which stand on legs in back gardens. This, I suppose, is to keep the rats away, like staddle stones on old barns. Each morning the chickens descend from these houses with mincing gravity, down sloping gangplanks. After a day spent scratching about the village, getting in the way of tractors and motorbikes, and sometimes pecking the legs of unwary children, they are summoned home in the evening by name, and ascend once again to their houses for the night.
I love the people. They are friendly, yet dignified, with a kind of old-fashioned courtesy we seem to have forgotten in England. And when you remember what the older ones have lived through, you wonder how they have managed to emerge unscathed by bitterness. Yet they do not seem bitter.
I love it here. I can’t imagine ever going back to the greyness that was Dunmouth and my life before I came.
I love it here.
Kate put down her notebook and pen on the bedside table and lay back against the pillows. She closed her eyes and smiled. I love it here. She stretche
d hugely, every limb taut and then loosening, sinking down. Falling asleep.
* * *
Kate came down in the mid-afternoon sunshine, bursting with energy. She felt light and free, as though weights had been removed from her limbs. She found Sofia talking to Dr Rudnay.
‘Ah, Kate, my dear, Dr Rudnay has just very kindly invited us to join him and his sister for a cool drink and a cake at her house by the river. I said that I was sure we had nothing planned.’
‘That would be lovely,’ said Kate. ‘We haven’t been right down to the river yet, and we’d love to meet your sister. And your brother-in-law – I think you said he was a farmer?’
‘Yes. József will probably join us later. He and Imre have been moving the sprinkler system to a new position, and that always takes quite a lot of time. The joints in the hose are not very secure, so when it is moved they leak, and everything must be carefully adjusted again.’
‘When would you like us to come, Dr Rudnay?’
‘Why don’t you walk down with me now? And I would be honoured if you would call me István, Mrs...er?’
‘Kate, please.’
‘And I am afraid I did not catch your name...’ he turned to Sofia.
‘Sofia,’ she said, extending her hand, ‘will do very well.’
Kate, who knew that Sofia was not keen to reveal her surname too soon here in Szentmargit, smiled to herself.
They walked together, the three of them, down the slope from the higher part of the village, where the church, the inn and the square stood, along a dusty roadway of beaten earth between a double row of cottages, towards the half-dozen which stood beside the river itself. Kate was not surprised to see that they were heading for the rosy red cottage. To the left of it was a large barn, backing on a field of sunflowers, to the right another cottage, much smaller, painted a faded lemon colour. István’s sister’s house had a neat white picket fence separating it from the street, behind and through which grew enormous red poppies, spilling their petals into the dust and lifting new buds jauntily above the low fence posts. There were rows and rows of well-tended vegetables, some fruit trees, and a few flowers. It was clear that the gardener made use of almost every corner to grow practical crops, but could not resist the beauty of flowers in pots and window-boxes.
There was a balcony running around the upper floor of the house, on to which the bedroom windows opened. This was painted white and was festooned with what Kate thought, at a distance, were red streamers. As they drew nearer, however, she saw that these were strings of dozens and dozens of paprika peppers, hung up to dry in the sun, like red ribbons on a white dress. Later they would be stored for the winter’s cooking.
They walked round the corner of the house and found a small area of lawn, thin and parched with the heat. A dozen bronze chickens were scratching under an apple tree, near a thatched hen coop, and the end of the garden sloped down to the river, where a small blue rowing boat was tied up to a wooden landing stage. The house door stood open and was protected from insects by a curtain of paper lace streamers, like the one they had seen in the Sterns’ shop in Budapest. To the right of the door, a wooden trellis supporting a grape vine made an arbour around a window, with a bench against the wall of the house, and a table and chairs arranged in front of it.
‘What a lovely house!’ Kate exclaimed. ‘It’s so pretty – and with the view over the river – it’s just perfect.’
István smiled at her a little sardonically.
‘Not so good in winter, when the river freezes and the snow comes up to the windowsills. At least now we have electricity and water, not like in our childhood.’
‘This was your parents’ home?’
‘Our grandparents’ home. Our parents died when we were very young, and we were brought up here by our mother’s parents.’
A woman came out of the house carrying a tray with plates and glasses, and one of the light, rich Hungarian cakes. She set it down on the table and turned to them, wiping her hands on her apron and smiling shyly.
‘My sister Magdolna,’ said István, switching from English to German for her benefit. ‘This is Kate,’ he said. ‘And... Sofia.’
Magdolna shook hands with them and invited them with a gesture to sit down. She was about Kate’s age, perhaps a little older, and she was unmistakably the woman Kate had seen from her bedroom window at the inn.
‘It is very kind of you to invite us to your home,’ said Sofia, smiling warmly and looking about her. ‘Such a beautiful house, and a wonderful garden. How do you manage to grow such vegetables in the heat we have had this summer?’
‘It has not been easy,’ said Magdolna, unloading the tray on to the table. ‘At least the river is near, so I have plenty of water. The water supply we have on tap is not always reliable. I water twice a day from the river.’
‘Sofia is also a keen gardener,’ said Kate. ‘She is almost self-supporting. And she catches fish and shellfish from the sea where we live.’
‘Really?’ Magdolna smiled. ‘You must meet András, my son. He too is a keen fisherman. Excuse me a moment. I will get the lemonade.’
She went back into the house, and István contemplated the two women. The thought of Sofia harvesting shellfish and growing her own vegetables did not quite fit his perception of her, and he adjusted his impressions to accommodate the idea. She was sitting very upright on the old wooden chair in a dress of pale blue linen, with a white scarf at the neck. It was impossible to imagine her netting shellfish.
‘I have brought lemonade, not wine,’ said Magdolna, returning, ‘because it is so hot. I think one needs to drink for thirst, and wine is not refreshing enough. But we will have wine later, when József returns from the fields.’
She set down a beautiful earthenware jug on the table, and took the chair between István and Sofia. But before she could pour the lemonade into the glasses, Sofia started to her feet and picked up the jug. Her face was white.
* * *
It is the height of summer and blazing hot. Sofia has taken her favourite walk through the woods, past the old summer-house and down to the edge of the village near the church. Yesterday was her tenth birthday, and she expected to feel different now that she has reached double figures, but she seems the same – taller, certainly, than she was a year ago, but still wiry and tough as a boy. Mama gave a party for her birthday, with a few guests from the other big houses in the country round about. They were not Sofia’s friends, but the children of her parents’ friends. They played politely with each other, the boys in long trousers and white shirts and ties, the girls in party frocks with puffed sleeves and sashes tied in big bows at the back. Sofia is glad to be back in her skimpy cotton frock and sandals, scuffing through last year’s leaves in the wood, with the wolfhound Iro nosing about, looking for rabbits.
Mama has gone away to Budapest, where she will be giving a concert in two days’ time, and Papa has gone with her, partly for company, partly on business. Sofia is left alone at the manor with the servants and her governess, who will be leaving soon when Sofia goes away to boarding-school in the autumn. From the edge of the wood she looks enviously at the village children playing in the square. She knows most of them by sight, but she is not supposed to play with them. Something unusual is going on.
Several of the village women are plaiting together grasses and red poppies into a kind of mat, as they sit chatting on the benches outside the village csárda. Children are coming in from the meadow with arms full of long grasses and more poppies. The men are standing around drinking beer and arguing about something. Sofia slips into the square so she can see better what is happening. There is another mat of plaited grass lying across one of the tables.
‘It is no good,’ says a thickset man, whom she recognises as the village potter. ‘You cannot have the Paparuda without a gypsy girl.’
‘This is the first year the gypsies have not come by in August,’ says old Ágoston, taking his pipe out of his mouth and shaking his head mournfully. ‘It’s a
bad omen. We cannot have the Paparuda, and the crops will wither for lack of rain.’
‘Don’t be an old misery,’ cries his wife, fat kindly Ágnes, who keeps the village grocery shop, and sometimes slips a sweet into Sofia’s pocket. ‘We will use another child. It will be all right.’
‘It is no good without a gypsy,’ her husband persists stubbornly. ‘It is the gypsies who have the power to bring the rain or take it away. You’re all wasting your time.’
Ágnes’s eye falls on Sofia. ‘Hello, little countess. Have you come to join the Paparuda?’
Sofia knows now what they are preparing. Whenever there is a year when the rains are short and the crops in danger, the village holds a Paparuda to bring water back to the dry earth and make it fertile again. They capture a young gypsy girl to be the Paparuda. Sofia heard Papa say once that it must be a virgin, but when she asked him what that meant he said she would understand when she was grown-up. The villagers strip the girl naked in front of the church and dress her up in a sort of tunic made from grasses and poppies, then they walk her in procession around the village pouring jugs of Danube water over her and begging her, in song, to bring the rain. Sofia has seen the Paparuda only twice, but it was exciting and she hopes they will do it again.
The women are fastening the two mats together with shoulder straps of braided straw. The completed garment can be put over the head, hanging down at the front and back, but open at the sides. Suddenly old Ágoston taps out his pipe, and as he does so he catches sight of Sofia fingering the left-over poppies lying on the table.
‘That one would do. She has gypsy blood.’
Ágnes makes a disapproving, clicking noise with her tongue and shakes her head, and several other women look shocked.
‘True enough,’ says the potter, looking her up and down. Sofia has always liked him, but she feels uncomfortable now and a little afraid under that speculative gaze. ‘Why not?’ he says.
‘She is the count’s daughter,’ someone whispers in horror.