The Tightening String

by Ann Bridge

  ‘No, whisky’ Eynsham said in a faint voice – they were his first words. ‘Better for – for —’ his voice failed again.

  Neither whisky nor brandy were available – Count Ernest hadn’t thought of that; distractedly, he sent the waggonette galloping off again. But by Gina’s orders Eynsham was lifted into the second Dolinsky car and driven back to the house, accompanied by his wife, Gina herself, and Count Endre, leaving the Dolinsky party and the others marooned by the pool; gloomily, they dressed in the bathing-hut, and waited for transport – there was only one light waggonette for twelve people.

  ‘How is it that your wife knows so much about this “First-Aid”?’ Count Dolinsky asked Colonel Morven.

  ‘Oh, she used to be an Olympic swimmer – knows everything’ the Colonel replied. ‘But your wife did a good job, pulling him out. But for her, he was a goner.’ The Military Attaché was well aware of the Dolinskys’ political views, but at the moment he felt quite warmly towards Countess Anna.

  That lady, with the doctor, arrived at the same moment that the car bringing David Eynsham pulled up at the front door; Count Endre and the chauffeur carried him upstairs and laid him on the bed, where Rosina pulled off his wet bathing-trunks, and wrapped him afresh in dry blankets from Lucilla’s room; Count Endre meanwhile went and fetched whisky.

  ‘He asked for this’ he said to the doctor, pouring out a glass with very little soda. ‘Eynsham, here is whisky!’

  ‘Good’ David said feebly; as Endre raised him up his wife held the glass to his lips, and he took a good gulp – and then another, and another. ‘That’s better – that’s enough’ he said. They laid him down again, and the doctor began asking questions – Count Endre answered them at first, describing the seizure in the pool; Gina meanwhile had somehow mustered some hot-water-bottles, and was carefully putting them round the sick man, outside the blankets.

  While the doctor was making his examination – pulse, blood-pressure, and so on – both he and Rosina noticed that David Eynsham kept putting his right hand over to his left arm, and stroking it. ‘This hurts?’ the doctor asked in Hungarian, his only language.

  ‘Yes, hellishly,’ Eynsham replied in the same tongue, surprising the earnest little man in pince-nez.

  ‘Ah, so we can speak together! Excellent! And the pain goes down into the hand?’

  ‘Yes of course; the two outside fingers. It’s just a good old coronary. Endre, give me some more whisky, there’s a good fellow. Doctor, I hope you’ve brought your morphine?’

  The doctor had; and while he prepared his syringe, and Eynsham took some more whisky from the glass – ‘The gentleman is medical man?’ the doctor asked Count Endre.

  Eynsham answered him.

  ‘No, but I’ve had this thing before. Ah, that’s fine!’ he said, exhaling deeply with relief as the needle was plunged into his arm. He lay relaxed and quiet, waiting for the morphia to do its blessed work.

  Rosina could not follow any of this except the word ‘morphine’. ‘Endre, what have they been saying?’ she asked anxiously, in a low voice. ‘What’s wrong with David?’

  Her husband heard, and again it was he who answered, in the slow tones engendered by the morphia as it began to take effect.

  ‘Coronary thrombosis, Rosie. I had one in Ankara, while you were bringing Lucilla out at home. I didn’t tell you, because your worrying wouldn’t have done me any good, or you either. And don’t worry now – Unkraut vergeht nicht!’

  At this point Lucilla ran in; the party left at the pool had at last been brought back.

  ‘Daddy darling, what goes on?’ She bent over her Father and kissed him. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes, poppet. In fact I feel lovely – but now I want to go to sleep.’ His eyes closed, gently.

  ‘Are the Dolinskys still there?’ Rosina asked Lucilla.

  ‘Yes – having drinks. Not much of a party!’

  ‘Then stay with your father. Endre, keep the doctor till I come back – I shall want you to interpret.’

  ‘Mummy, do get out of that wet suit! – you’ll catch your death.’ Rosina was still in her discreet little bathing-dress; it was damp.

  ‘In a minute.’ She put on a dressing-gown and a pair of slippers and went downstairs. A distinctly subdued company was having cocktails in the drawing-room; the Professor was wondering audibly to someone how he could get his bath-robe washed. When Mrs Eynsham came in she met a barrage of questions: ‘How is he? What does the doctor say? Is it grave?’

  ‘Oh – thank you’ Rosina said to her host, who came up to her with a filled glass in his hand. ‘He is better – he is resting’ she told the others. She took a good long pull at the drink – never had a cocktail seemed more welcome; she realised suddenly that she was beginning to shiver. ‘I must go up again in a moment’ she said to Ernest Erdöszy – ‘I do not want to delay the doctor. Where is the Countess Dolinsky?’

  ‘She went to change.’ But at that moment Anna, dressed, freshly made up, perfect, came into the room; Rosina Eynsham, in her dressing-gown and slippers, her hair still wet and untidy from when she had pulled off her bathing-cap to hear David’s weak voice, her face damp and haggard with anxiety, went straight up to her.

  ‘I came down to say Thank you’ she said. Her teeth were beginning to chatter as she spoke.

  Countess Dolinsky put her hands on the Englishwoman’s shoulders.

  ‘He will be all right?’

  ‘Yes, thanks to you – and for your bringing the doctor.’

  The Hungarian put her arms round Mrs Eynsham, and kissed her on both cheeks. ‘So now you forgive my “practical joke”?’

  ‘From today I’ll forgive you pretty well anything.’

  Count Ernest, who like everyone else had watched this small scene, came up with a Martini for Countess Dolinsky – she waved him aside. ‘Later. I take her up; she should change.’ With an arm round Mrs Eynsham’s shoulders she led her out of the room. Upstairs, helped by Lucilla, Anna Dolftisky got Rosina out of her wet bathing-gown in the bathroom; she dressed her in dry underclothes and a frock before she would allow her to go in to see the doctor. ‘He can wait – in any case he cannot go till I take him!’ she said coolly. ‘Where is your cocktail? Oh, I fetch you another.’ She glided off.

  Lucilla had changed at the bathing-pool, and was left sitting by her Father during the conference on the landing, after the doctor had taken the patient’s pulse once more. ‘You sit’ Anna said, pushing Rosina down onto a walnut settee, and giving her the cocktail she had brought up. The doctor proceeded to give his verdict in Hungarian to Count Endre, who translated it for Mrs Eynsham. It was a coronary thrombosis; one could not tell how severe till an electro-cardiograph could be taken in Budapest, but it would be unwise to move the patient for ten days at least. He would call again in the evening, and give more morphine if necessary. Then he asked Countess Dolinsky if he could be taken home? ‘I have other patients.’

  ‘In a moment. Take him down to have a drink’ she told Count Endre. To Rosina she said, in English, in a lowered voice – ‘I should get your husband up to Budapest as quickly as possible, and let Mendze look after him. He is a really good heart specialist; this man is not much more than a vet – isn’t that how you call it?’

  Mrs Eynsham was all for getting back to Budapest, and the best doctors. She didn’t want to put the Erdoszys to the inconvenience of illness in their house – and there were those lists of parcels that she had undertaken to do, and the first knitting-party was to be on Thurday. In fact there and then, at Terenczer, began for Rosina the business of being torn in two between her husband’s illness and the needs of the prisoners-of-war – which was to be her staple diet, a most unpalatable one, for a long time to come. In this first instance there was no conflict – after luncheon she got Colonel Morven to telephone to the Legation to arrange for an ambulance, with a nurse, to come down and collect David the following morning, and herself rang up Dr Mendze and booked a bed in his nursing-home (in Hungary, so
oddly, known as a Szanatorium.) David slept, happily drugged, all the afternoon; they roused him to take toast and bouillon with an egg beaten up in it about eight, and soon after the little doctor came and gave another injection of morphia; he pronounced the patient’s condition fairly satisfactory – ‘But he must be kept still – he should not move.’

  Count Endre again acted as interpreter during this interview. How odd it was, Mrs Eynsham thought, as she hastily changed into an evening-dress for the usual late Hungarian dinner, that the two people in this new country whom she had least liked or respected hitherto should be the very ones who had most helped her today – Anna Dolinsky and Endre Erdoszy. Margit Erdoszy had sent her maid to sit with Eynsham during the meal. ‘She has had her supper, and he can tell her anything he wants, so luckily,’ she said as they went to have coffee – ‘Do sit quiet a little, Rosina. I will try to get the English news —’ And she switched on her enormous radiogram.

  During the War the B.B.C. often deliberately arranged a certain time-lag between actual events and their reporting of them. The Battle of Britain had been going on for some time; but it was in that quiet comfortable room on the edge of the Forest of Bakony that the three English people present – Colonel Morven, Mrs Eynsham and Lucilla – first heard the announcer say, in his unemphatic tones: ‘In the heavy raid on the London docks some days ago, in which 400 German planes took part, the enemy lost 103 to our 26.’

  ‘But they are fantastic, these Spitfires!’ Count Ernest exclaimed.

  ‘Quiet – let’s hear’ Colonel Morven said abruptly; they heard of the first bombing of Buckingham Palace. When the news was over – ‘No, but really the King and Queen should go away’ Margit said.

  ‘Why?’ Lucilla asked. ‘I think they’re where they belong.’

  ‘Quite right’ Colonel Morven grunted, with a baleful glance at the German professor.

  David Eynsham stood the journey to Budapest fairly well, and it was an infinite relief to his wife to have him safely installed in the Augusta-Szanatorium, in a pretty room overlooking a garden, with highly-trained nurses running in and out, and the excellent Dr Mendze in attendance. The electro-cardiograph showed that the coronary had been tolerably severe, and bed was decreed for at least four weeks. However David being David, besides flirting off-handly with the nurses, who all adored him, he was soon insisting on having boxes of papers sent down to the nursing-home.

  ‘For two hours a day, this I permit’ Dr Mendze said. ‘To fret is also a bad thing for the heart. But not more, of work. Visitors – all he wishes. A distraction.’ It suddenly occurred to Rosina to mention the pink corners on the palms of David’s hands which she had seen in the mirror at Terenczer.

  ‘So – you noticed this? When?’

  ‘Just the evening before.’ She described what had happened.

  ‘Yes, in some cases this can be a symptom – not always.’

  What startled and rather horrified Rosina was the diet on which David was put. To lessen the load on the heart his intake was reduced to 800 calories a day, instead of the average 3000. In terms of food this meant a raw tomato and one wafer-thin slice of toast for breakfast, with a cup of milkless tea; a minute piece of steamed fish, some green vegetable, and a little stewed fruit at mid-day; a rusk and a finger of cheese with more milkless tea at tea-time, and two raw tomatoes and a wafer of toast for supper.

  ‘Aren’t you starving?’ she asked him anxiously.

  ‘No, I feel fine – especially as he lets me have a whisky at night – that’s supposed to be a vaso-dilatory. Quite like your prisoners, aren’t I?’ he said grinning. ‘I bet they’re getting more calories than I am!’

  Relatively at ease about her husband for the moment, Rosina again applied herself to the prisoners – when she wasn’t running down to see him, taking packets of tea, flasks of whisky, books borrowed from the staff, and such papers as drifted in from time to time. In Central Europe in 1940 the odd copy of Time and Tide or the New Statesman, brought casually from Istanbul by a King’s Messenger, was a boon beyond all price.

  The first knitting-party, three days after their return from Terenczer, went off all right. Numbers of ladies came, said whether they would knit socks or gloves – some said they could only manage scarves – in idiot-stitch (they didn’t call it that; Mrs Starnberg did) and were supplied with wool and needles. After which they drank the Ministers excellent coffee, and went off highly contented.

  At the second party, a week later, the atmosphere was a good deal less rosy. It is astounding how knitting can befool women not bred up to it; some of the end-products brought back by their creators left Rosina aghast. Scarves seven feet long and four inches wide, or barely two feet long and eighteen inches across. ‘But Mrs Watlington, they don’t want shawls’ Mrs Eynsham said to a woman who brought one of the latter type to the table where she sat listing the objects received.

  ‘It somehow seemed to spread’ Mrs Watlington said abjectly.

  ‘Well it won’t do – it won’t go round one’s neck. Look.’ She demonstrated. Then with a pair of scissors she snipped the wool at the casting-off end, and began to pull the useless thing undone. ‘Would you take it down, and roll up the wool, and try again?’

  ‘But I spent hours over it’ Mrs Watlington wailed.

  Rosina was not in the best of tempers that morning. When she had hurried down to see David before the knitting-party she heard that he had had a bad night, and Dr Mendze said that he was doing too much work – ‘He will not restrict himself to two hours.’

  ‘Well you fight it out with him – I can’t’ Rosina had said, distressed. ‘Can’t your nurses take his papers away when he’s done enough?’ Hence she was unduly harsh with Mrs Watlington.

  ‘We can’t afford to waste wool, you know’ she said. ‘It costs a lot, and it all has to be brought in from outside. Try again – eight inches wide, four feet long. Yes, Mrs Starnberg?’

  Mrs Starnberg, followed by several discouraged ladies, brought up to the table five or six pairs of socks of which one foot was a full three inches longer than the other.

  ‘I wondered if you could pass these, Mrs Eynsham?’

  ‘No I can’t’ Rosina said flatly, after examining them. She plied her scissors again, and pulled out wool from the over-long feet. ‘They must be done to the correct length, ten-and-a-half inches.’ Two or three of the ladies murmured protests.

  ‘But don’t you care what our men get?’ Rosina asked. ‘Personally I think the best is good enough for them – but only just.’ The ladies retreated, abashed; and after two or three weeks quite tolerable articles were produced.

  The knitting business spread. The Dutch Legation asked for supplies of wool, and organised a small but highly efficient knitting section which produced excellent garments very fast indeed. Old Countess Táray, Pista’s mother, called on Mrs Eynsham to say that many Hungarian ladies wished to knit for the British prisoners, if they too could be supplied with the unobtainable wool; she undertook to distribute this if it could be brought to her house ‘discreetly’ – not in a car with the CD. (Corps Diplomatique) number-plate. So wool was taken after dark, by taxi, from Rosina’s small yellow house in the Verböczy-ucta to the huge Táray palace in another of Buda’s beautiful golden streets. By the end of September the British Prisoners-of War Relief Organisation was despatching to Germany, weekly, 250 pairs of socks, some fifty pairs of gloves, ten to fifteen pull-overs and numbers of scarves and Balaclava helmets – Mrs Eynsham got the Minister to cable to Istanbul for a further half-ton of knitting-wool. (One little English lady regularly produced four faultless pairs of socks every week – when she ultimately reached her hundredth pair the Minister, prompted by the omniscient Mrs Starnberg, formally presented her with a huge box of chocolates.)

  For the care of the knitting devolved more and more on Mrs Starnberg. Rosina Eynsham had other tasks. There were those lists. Horace Wheatley devised a system by which all parcels despatched to any camp had to be listed and given a number, with
their contents, under the date of despatch; he also told Mrs Eynsham that she must insist on an acknowledgment from the British Vertrauens-mann,’ the man of confidence’, in each camp, to whom all parcels other than individual ones had to be consigned. Rosina spent hours writing to Vertrauensmannner, mostly rather illiterate Sergeants in Stalags, telling them that parcels Nos. 86 to 101, containing so-and-so, had been despatched to them on such a date, and would they please say if all had been received? Owing to the British blockade Germany itself was desperately short of the things being sent to the prisoners; but from the Hungarian parcels, at any rate, there was surprisingly little pilfering, thanks to the overwhelming respect attached to labels bearing the symbol of the Red Cross.

  The little English group in Hungary was of course intensely concerned about the state of affairs at home. The Battle of Britain had begun early in August – German airraids on London, on the ports, on Coventry and other industrial towns; sad little notices in the ‘Deaths’ column in The Times announced that Sir Malcolm and Lady Buggins and Miss Jane Buggins had died ‘suddenly, in London’ – discreetly, no address was ever given, but their friends realised that the Bugginses and their pretty house and daughter had been blown to glory. Nevertheless by late September it was clear that the Germans had failed in their attempt to subdue England from the air, and the Bulletin published the official figures which gave the reason why – since the 8th of August Germany had lost 1,867 planes against England’s 621. The Hungarian papers also gave an account of the bombing of the Queen’s apartments in Buckingham Palace – ‘fortunately Her Majesty escaped without injury’.

  This last item produced a tremendous impression in Central Europe. At a jour packed out with even quite halfhearted Hungarians, who with their habitual courtesy came to offer congratulations on the Queen’s escape, Pista Táray, freshly returned from Vienna, related to delighted groups a scene which he had himself witnessed at the Opera there on the evening after the news broke. Frau Emmi Goering, the Field-Marshal’s wife, had transferred herself and her children to Austria to be safe from the increasingly severe R.A.F. raids on Berlin; and on that night, ‘blazing with diamonds and dripping with silver foxes’ as Pista said cattishly, she took her seat prominently in the front of a box. As soon as she was observed the reckless Viennese audience began to swing to and fro in their seats, chanting loudly—