My sight and hearing grew blurred. I heard talk going on around me without taking it in, and I kept staring into our office, which was tidy and empty, bathed in the artificial daylight, and the only unusual sight in it was a bottle of Rose’s lime juice, with its glossy label and gleaming cap, standing on one of the desks. I think it was Queenie’s. Then I recalled that for the past two weeks there had been a large display of Rose’s lime juice in one of the windows of the food department of Selfridges. I still did not understand.
Sergeant Kelly came and said that we civilians would have two days off and please to report to work on the third morning at nine sharp, as usual. I left with Claudia and June, and we went to the Danish coffee shop in Wigmore Street, round the corner. Betty was not with us; it was her free day. They told me the Sergeant had been killed the night before by a V-2, together with about two hundred other people, and that there had been such a crowd in the street because the bomb fell at eleven o’clock, which was the closing time of the many pubs in the neighborhood.
"But he never touched drink," I said. "You know he didn’t."
"He didn’t," said Claudia, weeping. Like many hard drinkers, she was easily given to tears. "He stayed behind in the office, straightening up after us. He often worked late hours. And he got out in the street just at that moment."
"Why couldn’t it have killed someone else instead?" said June.
"What’s going to become of us now?" I asked.
The Sergeant had not been crushed by falling masonry or struck down by flying debris. The same invisible force that had lifted a bottle of Rose’s lime juice from the display shelf in the window and placed it unbroken and upright on Queenie’s desk had caved in his chest. Later on, we knew that this had been the last V-2 to fall on London.
FOR SOME DAYS, we could not eat or sleep, and we shivered with cold. We could not accept the Sergeant’s death, as we accepted, later on, the death of Sergeant Danielevski, who was killed in battle, and the death of Sergeant Kelly, who, during a drunken celebration of V-E Day in London, walked out of a fourth-floor window.
Claudia, June, and Betty all went to America and got married to their lovers. Betty was unhappy and would not admit it, and she was spared from admitting it forever after when she became a widow suddenly, during her first year of marriage. June and her husband opened a private clinic near Chicago, and they ran it successfully.
I met Claudia three years after the end of the war, one day as I came out of the reading room of the British Museum at lunchtime. I saw her walking across the street. "I’m back for good, Prescott-Clark," she said. "I am going back to Bathdale. I’m here because of my lawyer—I’m getting a divorce."
We went to a pub on the corner. She had on a coat and skirt of soft thick camel’s hair and carried a long coat of the same stuff over her arm. I was impressed to see that her shoes and handbag were of brown crocodile.
"You look rich in a nice way, Carter," I said. "Are you rich?"
"He is, Prescott-Clark," she said. "He turned out to be even richer than I thought he was. When I got to New York, he met the boat with a mink coat and an emerald ring. Then we went to Mexico. I’ll tell you what’s wrong with Mexico, Prescott-Clark."
"You tell me, Carter."
"It’s got low air pressure," she said, "because it’s so high up in the mountains. Too utterly awkward, because you take a drink and you fall flat on your face. You can’t devote yourself to the booze there, Prescott-Clark."
I had on my old gray glen-plaid suit and a red-and-white cotton blouse, and I wore scarlet kid pumps and carried a scarlet handbag. "Rich or poor," I said, "we are still nice girls. A nice girl presses her skirt every night, and when she is a very nice girl she has matching shoes and purse. I thought you’d like to know, ma’am. You women are so stupid. Is that what’s been bothering you? I used to know a little girl named Claudia—strange, isn’t it? Claudia, just like you."
"Stop it, Prescott-Clark," she said, "or I’ll weep and ruin my makeup."
"So be it, Carter," I said, "but tell me why you’re back."
"He bored me, Prescott-Clark," she said. "I admit he was good in bed, but you can’t be in bed all the time."
"It’s a pity one can’t be, though," I said. "But anyway, you had your fill. So what the hell are you talking about?"
Irresistibly
It must have been bewildering for the guests entering the main hall that evening to be faced by an innkeeper leaning against the lintel of the wide-open glazed double doors leading into the brilliantly lighted reception rooms. Tall, portly, florid, heavyjowled, in shirtsleeves, and wearing a green baize waistcoat with tarnished metal buttons, and black trousers glistening with grease stains, he might have been the owner of a tavern in the main square of a small market town. The sight of him seemed to conjure up homely smells of stale beer, stale gravy, sweat, and drains. With one hand resting on the bronze rosette of the doorknob while he waved a red checked napkin with the other as if intent on chasing off flies, he greeted the arriving couples one by one and offered remarks like "Lucky you turned up today. This is our day for apple strudel. And there’s dumplings, too, with white cabbage stewed in wine—red wine, not vinegar, never fear." Ignoring the shrieks and howls of laughter from the latest guests, he pointed his thumb in a coarse gesture behind him and turned to the next group, now growling, "There’s some sausages left over from yesterday. You’d better look sharp, they won’t last forever. Speak to the missus, in the kitchen— that’s where she belongs."
He was Mr. Haussman, the governor of the Union Bank of Prague, having a lark while hosting the last of the Haussman receptions in that winter of 1932. The Haussmans were Viennese. They had arrived in Prague about ten years before, and the magnitude of his banking post could be guessed, even by a little girl (as I had been then), by the fact that the substantial "villa" on the spacious, sloping grounds of the Weinberge, in our city’s prime residential quarter, had been built for them by the bank before their arrival.
The Viennese like to say that we in Prague are always offended, and it is true. Always inclined to feel inferior and provincial when confronted with anyone from the capital city of what once was our empire, we tend to bristle and to say things like "Don’t forget that we had the first paved streets in central Europe while you Viennese were still slushing ankle-deep in the mud." Or, in a more jovial mood, "Count Bobby meets Count Rudy, on the Graben, in Prague. He says, ‘Where’ve you been all this time? Been ill, or what?’ Rudy says, ‘No, I’ve been to Vienna. Funeral. Buried my mother-in-law.’ Count Bobby, ‘Ah, Vienna, the city of our dreams!’"
My mother soon became Mrs. Haussman’s best friend, to everyone else’s bewilderment. She explained this by stating that Mrs. Haussman, unlike the other Viennese, was not uppity and never gave herself airs. And while this was quite true enough, the Haussmans began living on an unexpectedly grand scale, and it soon became the general opinion that it was just this quality of Mrs. Haussman’s that was such a shortcoming. Because Mrs. Haussman was wrong. Not outrageously, deliberately wrong—like, say, Countess Sternborn, who had enjoyed, even in old age, behaving like a brat, never letting one forget that she had once been a chorus girl, and thus felt free, in the drawing room, to take out some of her artificial teeth and, passing them round, to ask the guests to admire how well they were made—but wrong in lesser and more deadly ways. My grandmother knew that Mrs. Haussman was wrong, even before she met her.
It was Karasek, the chef, who brought the tidings. Karasek worked for Lippert’s, the largest and finest delicatessen on our most elegant avenue, the Graben, and he could always be prevailed upon to supply choice dishes for important at-homes and dinner parties. "She comes and says, ‘Mind, you let me have the boiled beef, too, when you’ve done with it,’ " he told my grandmother. "I say, ‘How so, madam? The beef will be thrown away.’ ‘Not for me, it won’t,’ she says. I say, ‘But, madam, for a double-strength consommé such as you want, the beef is boiled for twelve hours—the meanest cuts, sh
ins and shanks—and it ends up like gray rags. None of my ladies ever—’ She says, ‘There’s always a first time. We cut it up and dress it with onion and oil and vinegar, and it makes a supper dish for the children and the governess.’ "
Conversation is made up of talk, but not all talk is conversation. Finding out that Mrs. Haussman had no conversation took us in Prague less than ten minutes. Even this might have been shrugged off, considering her husband’s standing, but not after the first Haussman tea party my grandmother was invited to—which she soon declared would be her last. The two dining rooms in the Haussman villa— the "everyday" one and the "good" one—were on the second floor. As soon as the table was cleared that afternoon, Mrs. Haussman went out to the landing and yelled to a manservant—thus betraying that she was not accustomed to a large house, where one rings for the staff. The manservant, in any case, shortly appeared, bearing a long jute sack, which he opened, throwing the contents—remnants of silk, tweed, and cotton—onto the parquet floor. The scandalized ladies were invited to help sort these out, kneeling and squatting, and choose the most suitable for making up into a quilt. While the ladies, still speechless, went on exchanging glances, she explained that eiderdowns were expensive, while a quilt, by contrast, could be filled with rubbishy fluff and would do splendidly for the governess’s bedroom.
This, too, was resented by the guests. Whereas it had been considered only amusingly scandalous when the Countess Sternborn had once lifted her skirt at the bridge table, undone her garter, and used the tongue-shaped rubber part for erasing an error on the scoring pad, thus showing off her famous legs, it was unforgivable that Mrs. H. should expect her guests to work for their tea by making such demands upon them, in her obsessive thriftiness.
THE PAINTER Miroslav Dalibor was, as my mother said, "not madly entertaining," but, on the other hand, "one knew what stable he came from." Being unmarried, he was also an asset for parties. I had last seen him two years earlier, when I was fifteen, but finding him now at the Haussman villa was a happy surprise. The villa’s reception rooms were on the ground floor, and the moment I entered the first drawing room I could see him in the last, the third one, as the rooms were enfiladed. He was standing in a niche formed where a wall met a bay window, half hidden by the folds of the crimson velvet curtains. This was not astonishing. In whatever drawing room Dalibor happened to be, he would always place himself in a corner and as far away from the main entrance as possible. There he would remain, never milling around, never joining a group.
Various opinions were given about this behavior. There were those who said that Dalibor always felt at a disadvantage because he earned his living by doing the portraits of the wealthy and sometimes even of the famous. Yet at the same time, because it was vital for him to strike up acquaintances, it was considered that he might be taking up the stance perversely, as though to deny all that.
Others said that this was nonsense and plunged into further long, delicious conversations about his history and his money. There was no question of his living from hand to mouth: there was still a regular income he could draw on, from the Dalibor estates in the Burgenland. No, he was just plain snooty. True, one uncle of his had been the minister of foreign affairs in the old days. But Dalibor père had been nothing but a privy councillor (two a penny in old Austria) and had labored in some obscure ministry, too—railways or possibly pensions, I ask you. No, he was just standoffish. Was he doing us a favor coming to Prague once in a blue moon this way? He was Viennese—need one say more?
"Dalibor," I said, coming to a halt in front of him. "I am irresistibly drawn to you."
"So I see," he said. "I can’t very well return the compliment, though, can I? Seeing that I’m standing here, nailed to the spot. Sufficient to say that I watched you wending your way through the throng. Will that satisfy you?"
"It will," I said, although I was aware of being less than pleased with my dress—pink net, strewn with embroidered forget-me-nots—which was a last year’s bridesmaid gown. But since I was not yet eighteen, I had no claim to anything like a regular evening gown, and also I knew that my presence at this reception had been permitted as a special favor to me. I was grateful to Dalibor for speaking to me in the manner he had, for he was aware of a diffidence I felt not only because of my age and my dress but also because I felt tainted as compared to my schoolmates, who all had fathers at home, whereas I was the only child of a mother who had been twice divorced before the age of thirty—the first time from my father—yet who was socially acceptable everywhere, living sumptuously as she did in her mother’s (my grandmother’s) house in Florence Street.
Dalibor was in his late thirties—"a lovely age for a man," as my mother would have said. But he had none of the seductive glow that was hinted at by this remark. He was of medium height, and looked shorter than he actually was, owing to his build, which was sturdy, broad-shouldered, wide-chested. His pale blond hair was wavy, but rolled into curls around the temples and at the nape of the neck, where it had been left to grow longer than was usual. The low, very wide, and bumpy forehead and the small, deep-set eyes gave him an air of brooding obstinacy.
"And why do you find me irresistible?" he asked. "This is so sudden."
"Because— There must be about one hundred people here? Roughly?"
"Oh yes, easily. Certainly no less. But do go on."
"And you are the only one among them who is dressed," I said. "Not just dressed for dinner, but in the grand manner."
"Oh yes," he said. "I put on white tie so as not to be taken for a waiter. In self-defense. Because waiters in tails put on black tie, you know. Just so as not to be taken for gents."
"True. But don’t be beastly. Do come on. Tell me, where are you off to after this? You only came here to make acte de présence, to kill time, didn’t you?"
He lowered his eyelids and bent his head, feigning humility, pretending to be found out. Then, straightening up, he declaimed with sarcastic solemnity, "I’m going high up. To the very heights. To the highest hill. To what you might truly call the Acropolis of Prague."
"To the castle?" I said. "The President? But you’ve done him already, once."
"No. But you are getting warm."
"To the Czernin Palace? That’s Foreign Affairs, isn’t it?"
"You are getting colder."
"The Sternberg Palace, the art gallery?"
"You are getting pretty hot."
I said, "The Archbishop’s Palace!"
Once more he went through his mime of humility.
"Golly. Devastating! The Cardinal Archbishop? Golly."
He said, "You are repeating yourself."
"That’s because I’m so devastatingly impressed. ‘Thrilled’ isn’t the word."
"Oh, do stop your society gushing. You’re trying to sound like your mother. Enough time once you get to her age. Behave, or I’ll never again give you a sip of whiskey from my glass behind your mother’s back. As I did two years ago. That was a do with one hundred, too, wasn’t it?"
"Yes," I said. "Though we’ve never done such a crowd since. But do tell me, what’s he like, the Cardinal? I’ve only seen him once or twice. That smile, sheer heaven. When he looks at you, you feel all has been forgiven."
He said, "That smile. Carefully studied in front of the mirror. To me, he means just work. But in private he can be quite . . . Do you know what happened to me the very first time I was presented to him? To start with, there were some people milling around, secretaries and creatures. Then, as they leave—once we are left alone, with the doors closed—I fall on one knee and want to kiss the ring. He says, ‘Cut it out, brother.’ "
He watched me laughing, remaining grave himself.
"But the priceless thing happened at another time, at a party at the Austrian embassy. Along comes—I shan’t tell you who, because gentlemen don’t tell. Sufficient to say a cabinet minister. Staggering and weaving, in his usual state of—sufficient to say. He comes up to another guest and utters, ‘You gorgeous creat
ure in red, come and dance with me, I inshist.’ Yes, he did say ‘inshist.’ And the gorgeous creature in red says, ‘I don’t think it’d be a good idea. Because for one thing I’m a man, and, for another, I’m the Cardinal Archbishop of Prague.’ "
Then, after pretending to be astonished by my laughter, he said, glancing over my shoulder, "There goes our gracious hostess. Always true to her motto—dressed simply but with bad taste."
And when I just nodded, he went on, "And yet, if she were a grande dame it wouldn’t matter. She could drape herself in her kitchen curtains and get away with it. And she hasn’t even got a walk, have you noticed? She doesn’t walk, she flits like a weasel."
"You say that because you haven’t been asked to do her."
He said, "No, it isn’t sour grapes. I haven’t been asked to do her, that’s true. But even if I’d been asked, I would have refused. How could I draw her? She hasn’t got a face."
I said, "What on earth?"
"Haven’t you noticed? Each time she gets herself a new lover she takes on a new personality. The image her lover wants her to have."
I said, "And you can tell all this when you only come here once a year, or not even once in two years, and stay only a few weeks? And you can’t hear all our gossip, either, because you are not really in our crowd."
The Darts of Cupid: Stories Page 6