The Tightening String

by Ann Bridge

  These imprudent but forcible missives produced a certain reaction. Indignant and highly-placed mothers and even grandmothers called on equally highly-placed officials in the Foreign Office and the War Office. ‘She can talk to Berlin and Geneva on the telephone – can the Red Cross do that? Or you? And her parcels get there in a few days. Why doesn’t the Red Cross send her our money?’ The highly-placed officials were embarrassed.

  ‘Rosina really has torn it this time’ a friend in the Foreign Office wrote to David. ‘Lady C. called on the Secretary of State yesterday, and fairly beat him up. Can’t you get her to soft-pedal? This sort of thing won’t do you any good, you know.’

  David Eynsham was normally a man wholly devoted to his Service, and highly suspicious of all feminine activities, more especially those conducted by his wife; but this letter roused him to quite unwonted fury.

  ‘I don’t know what you are all thinking about in the Foreign Office’ he wrote to his friend the Private Secretary. ‘Is it white-washing the Red Cross? Here, where we know what is going on in the camps, we happen to be thinking about the British prisoners-of-war; some of them have lost two or three stone in weight since they were captured in June, from under-feeding. My wife, and the staff, are trying to feed them – something which so far the British Red Cross has signally failed to do in, now, nearly five months. If you think I care a tinker’s … about my career in comparison with helping these men, you are quite mistaken.’ He added – ‘I may say that we are now sending 2,500 five-kilogram parcels a month to Germany. If instead of trying to get me to quell Rosina you would turn your attention to compelling the Red Gross to send us funds to do what we can do, and they, it seems, can’t, you would be occupying your time better.’

  Eynsham showed both these letters to his chief – ‘I think you ought to see these, Sir.’ The Minister was surprised at this formality; he discouraged the use of ‘Sir’ from his senior staff. When he had finished reading he looked up at his Counsellor with an unusually warm smile.

  ‘Do you think any action is required from me, David?’

  ‘Not unless you wish to take any, Sir. But I thought you ought to see my reply to X. before I sent it.”

  ‘Since I can’t get at Master X. to give him a good clip over the ear, which is what 1 should like to do, I think your letter is the next best thing, David. Good for you – send it off. How are you feeling?’

  ‘Oh, not too bad, thank you, H.E. This sort of thing doesn’t help – Mendze says I’m not to get angry, but who can avoid being angry over all this?’

  ‘Do avoid it – I need you here. And remember that I am behind you and your wife – and the Committee’ he added carefully, ‘to the end – whenever that comes.’

  At the beginning of December 1940 the War Office in London suddenly forbade any further despatches of private parcels to officers or men in the prisoners’ camps; everything had to be sent to the Vertrauensmann, the British ‘Man-of-Confidence’ for general distribution. In theory this may have been a good idea – ‘fair shares for all’; but it was a severe blow to the little Relief Organisation. Hitherto, since parcels for a high proportion of the officer prisoners had been financed by cheques from England, they had been able to devote all the money raised from local sources to meeting the needs of the men in the Stalags, and to such extras as the musical instruments, the ice-hockey sticks and mouth-organs. Now they could no longer do this, for the British Government took the quite extraordinary step of ‘freezing’ all the Relief Accounts which most members of the staff had opened in their banks in London to receive the cheques from the distracted relations. Right or not, the thing was done in an ugly way, and caused the maximum of embarrassment – since people who had paid for parcels for their menfolk for months ahead had to be told that not only could Tom, or Dick, or Harry be sent nothing more, but that they themselves could not be reimbursed. Careless Rosina, too unmethodical ever to have thought of opening a separate account for the prisoners, scored here; all her cheques, including a most useful £300 from the Scottish Red Cross, had been paid into her private account, which could not be touched. David laughed delightedly when this came to his knowledge.

  ‘Oh Rosie, who would ever have thought that imcompetence could pay such a high dividend?’

  She pulled his ears and gave him a kiss.

  Lucilla was rather remote now from her Mother’s life. She spend most of her day and much of many nights in the Bulletin office; when she had a free evening she went out to dine and dance with her friends. She continued to see a lot of Hugo – his gentleness and affection were an extraordinary solace to her, and after that tranquil evening together in the hide she felt perfectly safe with him. And she needed solace more than ever after the War Office decision. Sending a weekly parcel to Hamish, containing most of her own ration of Virginia cigarettes, had somehow put her right with herself, reassured her divided heart; every time she smoked a distasteful Balkan one she thought of her fiancé, and felt that she was doing properly by him. Now this fragile safeguard had come to an end.

  ‘Mummie, is there nothing we can do? It seems so outrageous, when the Red Cross isn’t sending anything whatever.’

  ‘No, darling, I’m afraid we can’t do anything.’

  ‘Don’t you think it outrageous?’ Lucilla demanded.

  ‘Yes. Worse; very silly. They’ve cut off funds that were available to feed some people, and aren’t replacing them. How do they expect us to raise extra money now? Human feeling is human feeling – or psychology, or whatever they call it’ Rosina said with her usual vagueness. ‘But it’s no good expecting politicians to pay any attention to things like that – they think about votes, not about realities.’ Lucilla laughed and kissed her Mother, and went back to her work.

  That night – it was one of her rare free evenings – Hugo and Emmi took her to dine and dance at the Parisian Grill with a party of young people. This restaurant, very fashionable, had a peculiar feature: a revolving dance-floor, which in its circuit passed behind the bandstand through a narrow shadowed space bounded by a curved wall, on which (feeling being what it was then in Budapest) young gentlemen were apt to scrawl political slogans with their partners’ lipsticks, completing these on successive rounds. Sonia Marston was there that evening with a German journalist; when they got up to dance Hugo said to Lucilla – ‘Let us follow, and see if they write anything.’ They did – ‘Heil H ….’ was scrawled on the first round.

  ‘What do we write?’ the young man asked, as they emerged into the light again.

  ‘God Save The King?’

  ‘Too long. “ Hoch England!” I think. Where is your lipstick?’ Lucilla got it out, and ‘Hoch England’ followed ‘Heil Hitler’ on the curved wall. By this time they were both rather excited, but Lucilla was taken by surprise when on a last round Hugo suddenly kissed her mouth deliberately, back-stepping to keep their place in the dark passage – she made a little startled movement. But the small episode told her some very unwelcome facts about her own feelings. She was not in the least angry with Hugo, being kissed by him was heaven; and his apologies when he was taking her home in the taxi made her realise that she loved him as she never had and never could love Hamish. When would Hamish ever have worried about whether one did or didn’t want to be kissed?

  She put up a front, of course, poor child.

  ‘Yes, well you oughtn’t to have done it, and you mustn’t again’ she said. ‘But don’t worry – these things happen, I know.’ He kissed her hand.

  ‘Then I may still see you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Shortly before Christmas rumours began to fly through Vienna and Budapest concerning the escape of several British officers from the Oflag where Hamish was confined – first by word of mouth, then in the Press; they were said variously to be making for Persia, for Palestine, for Spain. This last seemed highly improbable, since that particular Oflag was right up near the Polish frontier, and they would have to cross the whole of Germany and occupied France to approac
h the Pyrenees; the obvious place for them to try to reach was Hungary, whence there was a certain amount of coming and going across ‘the Green Frontier,’ the long stretch of forest and mountain which was not watched sufficiently closely to seal it altogether. Geoffrey Milton ingeniously contrived to put out a counter rumour – he was good at that sort of thing: ‘Reliable sources believe that the escaped Britons have reached Scandinavia by sea’ – and this much more probable version was generally accepted.

  A few days later something happened which emphasised Lucilla’s feelings about Hugo more clearly than ever. She had been asked to a party at the Dendrassys, but had left it open – ‘I’ll come if I can’ – because Hugo had asked her to go with him to the Looping Bar; and to prove to herself that she was not afraid of being alone with him, after his kiss at the Parisian Grill, she said Yes. He was to pick her up at home about ten; she dined with her Mother, dressed afterwards, and then sat waiting for the ring at the frontdoor bell – Mrs Eynsham had gone back to her office in the Legation. Ten o’clock came, ten-fifteen, half-past ten – no sign of Hugo. At a quarter-past eleven, furious with him for letting her down, she rang up Elsa Dendrassy and said that she would love to come, now, if it wasn’t too late. Of course it wasn’t, nothing used ever to be too late in Hungary; a taxi was sent for and she drove off, still fuming at Hugo. But as the cab spun down the winding road and across the Danube, strung with lights, over the Chain Bridge – the Dendrassys lived down in Pest – the young girl was disturbed by her own anger. Would she be so enraged if she were stood up by someone she didn’t care tuppence about?

  It was a question she didn’t care to examine just then – where had she read that to be angry with a man was a warning signal? Oh yes, Helen in Howards End, of course. But was it invariably true? As her taxi pulled up before the Dendrassy’s house another pulled in in front of it, and Endre Erdoszy got out – he was late too, it seemed; they went up in the lift together. Presently he asked her to dance, and out of pique she began to flirt with him a little, lightly. Now when he had kissed her in the czarda garden on the Hortobagy not so long before she had set him down very sharply indeed; at this new demarche on her part Endre tilted his long, permanently amused face back a little, and studied hers with a quizzical gaze.

  ‘How we do blow hot and cold, don’t we?’ he said, looking more amused than ever as she blushed a little. ‘Can it be that we are rather a flirt, after all? – in spite of seeming so strait-laced?’

  Lucilla, already upset, was so disconcerted by this direct attack that she forgot all discretion, and blurted out the fact of Hugo’s defection – ‘He never even rang up!’

  For the first time since she had known him the young man’s face lost all hint of amusement; he turned deadly serious, and waltzed her out of the room into an open hall-way, brightly lit – it was empty.

  ‘Where was he taking you?’ he asked.

  ‘To the Looping Bar. But why?’

  ‘At what time?’

  ‘Well, he was to call for me at ten, or a little before.’ She was startled by these imperious questions, and his unwonted manner.

  ‘Listen to me, Lucilla. If anyone, however well you know them, should ask you where you were tonight between ten and, say, nearly half-past eleven, you must say that you were at the Looping Bar with Hugo.’

  Now something made her feel rather frightened.

  ‘But – but why on earth should I?’ she asked, uncertainly.

  ‘Because it might mean the difference between life and death, for him.’ The band struck up again, and he started jigging her about in a slow fox-trot.

  ‘Could you explain why?’ she asked, in a very small voice indeed, as they shuffled round the empty landing.

  ‘Not fully – no. But you are not too stupid to take a hint, I fancy,’ he said with a fleeting grin.’ He does undercover work; so do I – and we are often called upon to do it at short notice, and cannot telephone. I was late here tonight, as you saw – and for a similar reason. But it is all for the Allies.’

  At this point Countess Dendrassy appeared in a doorway. ‘Don’t forget that you have been in the Looping Bar’ Endre muttered in her ear as he danced her over towards their hostess.

  ‘Children, what are you playing at out here?’ Elsa Dendrassy asked.

  ‘A little privacy, Elsa’ Count Endre said cheerfully. ‘But now we return.’

  Lucilla was puzzled by all this, and rather disturbed; but she had lived all her life in what her Father cheerfully referred to as ‘an atmosphere of hideous secrets’, and she asked no further questions. When one or two of her subsequent partners inquired why she had come late she said carelessly – ‘Oh, I was at the Looping Bar with Hugo; but it was rather dull, so I came on here.’

  A couple of days after the Dendrassys’ dance Dr Mendze rang up David Eynsham and asked if he could come down to the clinic that morning for his weekly check.

  ‘I’d sooner come at tea-time’ Eynsham said – he was busy, as usual.

  ‘I am afraid this does not suit me; please to come when I say’ the doctor replied, very firmly.

  ‘Oh very well’ the Counsellor said coldly, after a glance at his engagement block – ‘I’ll come at eleven-fifteen.’ Tiresome old man, he thought, breaking into the morning’s work; however he went.

  After making the examination with his usual care the doctor said – ‘Would you mind coming across to the Szanatorium for a minute? I will explain as we go.’

  ‘I really ought to get back’ Eynsham objected.

  ‘No, it is essential that you come.’ Out in the street – the nursing-home was barely two hundred yards away – the old doctor, safe among the hurrying and indifferent passers-by, said – ‘I have two English prisoners-of-war here; so they say. I want you to speak with them, to establish their bona-fides; something I myself cannot do. This is why I sent for you. I think they are two of those whose escape was reported. But I cannot keep them long – I would like them to leave this evening.’

  ‘How on earth did you get hold of them?’ Eynsham asked.

  ‘One of our agents went up and brought them down from the frontier – he has done much of this work for the Poles, also. I think you know him, young Weissberger?’

  ‘Hugo? Oh yes – a good boy.’

  A nursing-home is a place where people can come and go unquestioned, if escorted by the doctor. In a chintzy room very like the one where he had recently spent so many weeks David Eynsham encountered two very tall men, most oddly dressed for British officers. Muddy trousers of shoddy cloth and windproof zip-jackets with fleece collars; on the bed lay two high sheepskin hats – the whole constituting a very fair reproduction of country winter dress in Central Europe. A few minutes conversation satisfied him that they were British officers: a Major Dougal Malcolm and a Captain Donald Campbell of Escairt, both of the Argylls. ‘What was your Mother’s Christian name?’ he asked the younger man.

  ‘Lorna, Sir.’

  ‘I thought so. Where from?’

  ‘Kinlochruel.’

  ‘That’s all right’ Eynsham said to Mendze. ‘They’re genuine. I’ll send someone down to collect them tonight, at seven, with a taxi.’ He had already decided what must be done with the prisoners. But the Major wanted reassurance about David’s bona-fides, after being bundled about from one foreign guide to another, across strange frontiers, and finally fetching up in what seemed to be a hospital.

  ‘I beg your pardon, Sir, but might I ask who you are?’

  ‘Yes, of course – sorry. I’m Counsellor at the British Legation here; my name is Eynsham.’

  The younger man got up off the edge of one of the beds. ‘You’re really English? How wonderful. Can’t you stay a minute or two?’ It was clear that he couldn’t take his eyes off an Englishman.

  ‘Not just now; I’ll be seeing you later’ Eynsham said smiling

  ‘Shall you come to fetch us?’ the Major asked.

  ‘Certainly not’ Mendze put in, decisively. ‘This is a sick man, a
patient of mine. He must not run about.’

  David, grinning, pulled an envelope from his wallet, tore off the flap, and wrote on it – ‘Go with bearer.’ He handed it to the Major.

  ‘Whoever comes to fetch you will have a duplicate of that, so that you can compare the writing.’ He turned to the doctor. ‘Very good of you, Mendze – can’t thank you enough. Now I must go. Good-bye – see you later’ he said to the two prisoners, and went away.

  Back at the Legation he had a brief conference with Sir Hugh.

  ‘Yes, they’d better come here. The P.C.O. or one of his people can fetch them; the M.A.’s away today. What did Mendze say about you, David?’

  ‘Oh going on fine, thank you.’

  ‘Good.’

  The Minister then summoned Martha.

  ‘Can you fix up a couple of beds in those spare rooms opposite the Bulletin? Without the servants helping?’

  ‘I’m not sure – they’re pretty crammed with what came out of the office. When for?’

  ‘This evening.’

  ‘I’ll go and look.’

  She was back in a couple of minutes.

  ‘We could do it with Tom’ (Tom was the English boxer night-porter.) ‘There’s a lot of heavy stuff to shift.’

  ‘No, don’t use Tom; get hold of Horace.’

  ‘Right. Will they want sheets? That will mean asking Minnie – she keeps the linen-room locked.’

  ‘Then we’ll do without sheets.*

  ‘I can snitch some towels and pillow-cases out of the upstairs spare room’ Martha said, ‘and put bottles in the beds.’