There was hardly time to eat. The food was richer than The Towers’ afternoon tea. Only the tarte aux pommes reminded him of Teddy’s in Paris. Everyone ate enormously, all sorts of little sandwiches, buns with thick sweetened cream, chocolate layer cake.
His head ached—the wheels of the Orient Express still revolving. Then the drive through Bucharest on his way here, being polite about their Arc de Triomphe—the first had fallen down, and this one didn’t look much better (and had he not just come from the real thing?). There’d been beggars— gypsies, he supposed. The women trailed long, brightly colored skirts. When they had stopped the motor car to buy a newspaper one of them thrust a hand in through the open window. There were cabs with weirdly dressed drivers, and peasants walking about, the women in embroidered blouses. He saw at least two very desirable cars—a Mercedes and an Alfa Romeo, both driven by young men who raced past, hooting.
“Young Michael—please call me Sophie—your grandmother writes you are passionate about motors. I think while you are here, my Ion has a small surprise for you. No, not so small, something you will like a lot”
Bucharest, 17th May, 1937
Dear Stingo,
Wish you were here! (So will you! See over the page!) Hope you’ve been getting my letters, and I wouldn’t mind an answer some time— haven’t had a word since the card at Easter. I hope you’re impressed with me getting out the old pen and paper. The only ink here is this frightful color, but anyway here goes.
News from home is I didn’t get that Alvis Speed for my birthday. They didn’t say 18 was too young or anything but just to wait and see till I was back in England. Have changed my mind anyway and if the Trust will cough up I rather fancy a Lagonda LG45—long stroke, four and a half liter. All right?!
They’re a bit funny here but awfully kind really. I’m writing this in the garden by the fountain and may get interrupted any moment —lots of people about and they often get restless suddenly without warning. People are—Ion and his wife Elena (it’s them I’m staying with), their daughters (there’s a bachelor son too—I’m coming to that! who’s on business in Brazil for three months). Then literally dozens of friends and relations. Sophie is the old aunt—her house is nearby but she treats this as a second home.
Now—this is the great news! I’ve got a motor, use of, and you’ll be pea green when you hear, old Stingo. It’s a Bugatti T57C!! She’s a couple of years old but in magnificent tune, and she’s mine all the time I’m here. The bachelor son—remember what I hinted? it’s his but I’m to be trusted with it, though they did test my driving first. I didn’t catch on of course what they were up to. Am I going to have a good time with her?! Feel a bit mean telling you but—well, it beats anything, doesn’t it?
There’s an old lady here often, a family friend, but missing on a few cylinders, I’m afraid. Old age. Her name’s Ana Xenescu and she lives with her daughter, Corina, who’s a widow. The daughter’s always round here, part of the great big family. She’s actually just talking to Sophie now. She’s blond (although it could come out of a bottle!) which is a bit unusual. I expect at any moment she’ll come out here and say—
“Let’s all go to Cina’s. Mikki, what do you write letters for, you look terrible serious. Isn’t that a good bit of English? I like to show my bits of English. Now we speak French again. Maman’s been so trying today—she got some idea in her head that she’d been cheated by her milliner. I do all her accounts so it can’t be, but she wouldn’t be shaken. Then I realized she was thinking about a summer before the war, when I was still a child.”
“Oh Corina,” someone said, “I am sure you were not even born before the war.”
“What lovely flattery,” she said. “The truth is … it was 1902, my birth—and it was of great note because Maman was well over forty.”
Everything was different now he had the Bugatti. The first day that it came from the garage, where it had been lovingly cleaned and serviced, he went out in it with Ion. Once up the Chaussée and into the countryside, he took the wheel. I love her, he thought at once. He allowed his foot to press harder, harder on the accelerator—then out, full out, and off she roared.
“Good. Good,” Ion said.
He was at the wheel again today, going down to the Black Sea, across the wheat plains of the Dobrudja, a monotonous drive. He was taking Sophie and Ana Xenescu and, in the front beside him, Corina. This was because Nicu, the Bugatti owner, had he been there, would have taken them. Michael was not sure about Corina’s company. Certainly the “she” he preferred was the Bugatti.
“You drive well,” Corina said. Her hair, worn simply, was kept back with a jeweled clasp. Her lipsticked mouth was a vivid slash of red.
Ana, at the back, either chattered or, head lolling, snored. They stopped halfway and drank champagne, iced, that they had brought with them. He was a little light-headed when they started off again, and surprised at how easily the Bugatti handled. I really know what I’m doing, he thought.
“You drive well,” Corina said again. She had been talking a lot on the journey. Her scent was heavy and obtruded. He thought that he preferred the smell of petrol.
On the whole, girls bored him, although he was surprised sometimes to find himself suddenly for a whole ten minutes absolutely crazy about, for instance, Stingo’s sister, Lizbeth. In Paris there hadn’t been many girls, just women friends of Teddy’s. They made a fuss of him, which he didn’t mind, except that they seemed to him rather old, as was Corina, really. She had even owned to it.
“We’ll go swimming,” she said now. “I’m sure you look magnificent in swimming costume. Such a big boy.”
He didn’t like that at all. He said in a cross voice, the champagne wearing off, making his head ache, “If you want to see someone really magnificent, look straight ahead.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“The Bugatti of course. The most beautiful woman between here and Bucharest. Least, I think so.”
She was silent for a while after that. When she spoke again, she was like a small child who’d been scolded. She said in English:
“Don’t you like that I am calling you ‘big boy’? Is that the matter?”
“Leave me alone, and don’t tease.”
“Corina naughty, naughty!” called her mother in a sharp voice. A moment before he’d seen her in the mirror, asleep. “Naughty girl, shan’t have a cake!”
“Pay no attention,” Corina said to him. “Ignore her. She forgets quickly, thank God.”
The sun didn’t shine much for them during their stay at Constanza. Six of them were in a large villa outside the town in the direction of Mamaia. Nearby was a large hotel, the International, newly built. They went there to eat and to dance.
Corina needled him. “You don’t dance very well. You must let me give you lessons.”
He felt angry and said, “It doesn’t come easily to Englishmen. And anyway my aunt thinks I’m not bad—and a friend of mine, his sister, she tries all the time to get me as a partner.” He thought nostalgically of waltzing with Lizbeth. Uncomplicated, nothing expected of him. (What was expected of him here?)
Sophie asked him one day, “You like all the family? Such nice girls, and these boys”—she called Ion a boy still—“all so nice too. Corina, I ask you to be patient. She is sometimes nervous. Her husband—it wasn’t a love match, of course, but all the same …”
A gull perched on a rock. It was like any gull anywhere—it didn’t know that it was a Romanian gull. A sharp wind blew off the sea. Blue-black Black Sea, gray Black Sea. There was a monument to the poet Ovid, who had died in exile there.
Sophie told him of how their “old Queen,” Carmen Sylva, had recited her terrible poetry through a speaking trumpet to the ships moored at Constanza. “I think it was when the Russians planned perhaps to marry their sad imperial Olga or Tatiana Romanov to our Prince Carol. He didn’t like how either of them were looking, but of course he would have made safe the life of one of them.”
The Bugatti. Oh, you beauty. Bugatti beauty. She was all he could think of. Her long body, with its great Scintilla headlamps. Dark blue pigskin upholstery trimmed with softest glove leather. Beautiful wood of the steering wheel, a stopwatch mounted in its center; under the spokes near the rim, the four horn buttons. Strombos air horns.
The Sunday after their return from Constanza there was a luncheon party at Corina’s flat. Ion and Elena went, along with Michael, Mariana and her husband, Stefan, and their children. It was Michael’s first visit there. They ate baby lamb roasted with wine and herbs, which he found delicious. As a gathering, though, it wasn’t entirely a success. The twins were overexcited on arrival. During the meal one then the other rushed out to be violently sick. Their sister Dina preened herself because she hadn’t been, and got a telling-off, which set her in a rage. Ana Xenescu, sensing a storm, joined in with querulous shouting: “That’s right, naughty boys and girls, that’s right, we shall all be punished.”
By the time the meal was over and they sat drinking coffee, discussing whether to go for a drive, how to pass the rest of Sunday, the atmosphere was tense.
“Not long now,” Mariana remarked, “until we go to the mountains. To Sinaia.”
All that week it had been hot, oppressive.
“Let’s dance,” Corina said impulsively, jumping up, full of energy, eager to carry out the suggestion at once. “Let’s dance—it’s almost thé dansant time.”
He knew she loved to dance, but he didn’t want to, remembering her taunts at the International. When she took his hand, leading him over to the gramophone, he said, “I hope you’re not going to give me a lesson.”
“Lessons are private,” she said. “And very expensive.” She lifted a pile of six records above the turntable. “Mikki, please don’t be difficult.”
He said sulkily, as the voice of Elyane Celis burst into “Piroulirouli,” “It isn’t for you to tell me off. I’m not one of Mariana and Stefan’s offspring.”
“Oh absurd, you’re absurd.” She put out her arms so that he was forced to clasp her, in time to the music: “That’s better, much better. Arguing, it’s so silly.”
He shrugged his shoulders in time to the music, smiled—and felt tired. She said as they danced, “Did Sophie ever ask you to be kind to me?” “I don’t remember—I don’t know.”
“Well, if she does, pay no attention. I can look after myself.” Her voice had lost suddenly its flirtatious, bantering tone.
Soon after, Stefan came and took her away. “We are old dancing partners,” he said. “Watch us together.” Michael sat on the sofa at the side and talked to Sophie. The twins, recovered, ran in and out of the room playing Catch.
That night he dreamed he was in a large room with white walls, simply furnished. He sat drinking something sweet but tart also. He was at peace. There seemed nothing odd when Corina appeared suddenly, standing beside him dressed as if for a garden party. Long white silk crepe, a jacket trimmed with brown feathers, flowery picture hat worn on the side of her head. She sat on the arm of his chair. She didn’t talk, or appear to want to. He noticed then that she had for a while been stroking the back of his neck. He didn’t try to stop it. He felt her other hand stroke his leg beneath the trouser. “Do go on,” he said. “It’s quite all right.” She was leaning forward, and he saw down the jacket that there was no real top to her dress. He asked her then if it was all right to touch her breasts. When she didn’t answer, he knew that it was—for her hand now moved slowly, oh so wonderfully high, higher, from knee to thigh, inside thigh. Ah, but, he leaned over her breasts … I am going to cry, he thought in the dream. Sharp delight woke him, and the sound of birds in the little walled garden.
“Nicu sends you best wishes from Rio, where he is doing good business, and hopes you are a friend of his Bugatti, and that you are loving her a lot.”
Few letters seemed to come for Michael—he’d been waiting all that week for one. Nothing from Stingo, not even envious congratulations about the motor. From Grandma Lily only a short letter. Teddy, a scrawled card. He remembered he had promised to write to Willow, and resolved that tomorrow he would buy some postcards. He felt a great wave of homesickness.
The next morning they left to spend ten days among the painted churches of Moldavia. He met there friends of Ion and Elena’s, grandchildren for the twins and Dina to play with. Their nurse, a red-faced peasant girl with black button eyes, chased them good-humoredly. When she called them, they ran in the other direction.
His dream: it had stayed with him for two or three days, then grown fainter. It embarrassed him to remember it. Often as he drove the Bugatti he would find himself suddenly thinking of Corina, wanting to tell her this or that, wanting her approval—even, he wasn’t sure why, her disapproval. He told himself, Really she’s awfully nice and fun to be with, so of course I want to see her again.
And soon he would, for when he traveled to the Carpathians next week, they would all meet up. Sophie and Ana Xenescu—and Corina, who would stay in the villa that had belonged to her husband, Matei Draganesti. “This very high cross up on the mountaintop,” Corina said, “that’s a memorial for the Great War. It’s made from the remains of bridges destroyed in the fighting.”
He looked up at the high peaks, the remnants of snow, the dark patches of green forest. He had been longing for the heights, mountain air, fresh in the June heat. Mariana had told him that in full summer Bucharest could be as hot as India:
“The pavements boil and melt, it’s unbearable. Then we don’t eat in the evening until twelve o’clock—often we sit and watch the sun come up. We can sleep away our afternoons.”
Here he was now, in Sinaia, with his beloved Bugatti. He couldn’t imagine sleeping away afternoons. He was full of energy and excitement. Also Corina was being very sweet and easy. She had not teased him once.
Today they were visiting the monastery on a hill outside Sinaia. Bearded monks wearing tall hats. Because she was a woman, Corina was not allowed into parts of the building. They found a memorial to one Take Ionescu, who in 1881 had married an Englishwoman, Bessie Richards, and later had been a hero of the Great War. Corina translated some words of his in 1917: “I believe in our victory as I believe in the light of the sun.”
She said, “The war was a terrible time.” Her scent, with its exotic undertones, became confused with the remnants of incense, there in the small golden chapel.
“Can you remember the war?”
“But of course. I was a young girl. You forget I’ve been here a long time.” She shrugged her shoulders. “But it’s all politics. I don’t concern myself with that.”
On the hill coming down from the monastery, she stopped the Bugatti and said, “My brother is buried here.”
They went in together. It was a small cemetery. Most of the graves were in good repair, with fresh flowers in small silver vases. He saw everywhere the word Eroul Hero. She led him over to a grave where there was the photograph of a young man, mustachioed, with a center parting and a high white collar. “Lieutenant Xenescu, Mihail … 18.9.16.” And the place of death. “In luptule de pe Vale Cerbului.”
“I remember when we had the news he’d been killed. My mother … My husband, you know, was in the same regiment. He was a major. He survived that battle, although I’m not sure it was good he did so. A man can have too many wounds.”
It was the most she had ever said about her husband. Coming out of the graveyard now, she shivered as if the air had grown cold. A cart was making its way up the hill. Two young children, feet dangling at the back, waved and called to Michael. She said, “Your grandmother—she’ll have known Mihail. They were all at Sinaia the summer she was there. They stayed at Teodor and Sophi
e’s.”
“Yes,” he said, “my grandmother told me about the house. Only now there aren’t any borzois.”
“A lot of people coming and going,” she said. “There was another Take, not the one there in the monastery. An anarchist. They used to drink at the Café Napoleon. My brother admired him a great deal. Too much. And Ion’s brother, Valentin—Tino … oh, but he was very good-looking.” She laughed suddenly, lightly, “Better-looking than you—yes, better even than you, Mikki.”
It was the first time since his arrival in Sinaia that she had needled him, and it was over in a moment. As they got back into the Bugatti, she said:
“It’s a nice thought in a way, where they’ve built the graveyard. There used to be dancing there. It was a special meeting place.”
He said, “You don’t talk much about your husband.”
“Why should I? He wasn’t very interesting.”
From the monastery, a single bell. The sound carried in the high air.
“We go to the Casino this evening,” she said, in her more brittle voice, “I hope you’re going to be daring.”
The next day when he drove Sophie over to Corina’s villa so that she might sit with Ana for the afternoon, he meant to go straight back.
He saw at once that Corina was in an odd mood. I am really getting to know her, he thought suddenly, and then was terrified. He remarked casually:
“You know, I’m really getting to know the Bugatti. She’s more than a beautiful body. She’s beautiful all through. And when I get inside her … the six-bearing crankshaft, you see, it’s turned from a solid billet …”He didn’t know the words in French and had to paraphrase.
“Oh dear God,” she said, “you really are boring.” The hall where they stood was for sitting also; there was a fireplace for damp or chilly days. In a low voice, she said:
“Sophie’s going to read to Maman. Maman can follow a story if it’s a book she knows. When they’re settled, Mikki, stay for a while. A drink …”
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