‘And nothing. Listen, let’s not dwell on such sorry matters now,’ he said, adopting a more cheerful tone. ‘You know, Duško, I often remember our time together in Belgrade. If this damn war ever ends, I’ll go back there...’
‘You’ll always be welcome,’ Popov promised.
‘I remember it fondly. Truly,’ the king said wistfully.
‘And they remember you fondly too. You remember my two lady friends, with whom you had such nice conversations?’ Popov asked.
The king nodded. ‘How could I forget them?’
‘Well, they, for instance, mention you often. They’ve got fond memories of you.’
The two men had to end their conversation when a plump lady with fiery red hair and a red lace dress walked over to them. Her oval, snow white face was like a porcelain plate, graced with bright green eyes, a small nose and full lips, highlighted by dark red lipstick. Clasped on the décolleté over her enormous breasts was the best piece of the evening’s display of jewellery: a brooch with a huge Burmese ruby the colour of pigeon blood, encircled by a wreath of half-carat diamonds. And yet she was not exactly how we imagine a princess. Even with the brooch she looked like a piano teacher or the wife of a provincial doctor dressed up for a wedding. She stepped up to the table and, pleased with herself, showed Carol a purse full of chips.
‘That’s it for this evening,’ Elena said; she had what she wanted and was now ready to take the money home.
The gentlemen, whom one could not fault for manners, rose to their feet.
‘Madame,’ Popov bowed, kissing her hand.
‘My friend, Duško Popov,’ Carol introduced him. ‘We spent time together when I was in Belgrade visiting my sister, the queen.’
‘Such a small world!’ Elena pretended to be pleased.
But Carol’s laugh was genuine as he patted his friend on the back. Although curious, Elena was unable to discover more because two stunningly beautiful girls walked up to them. They had probably come with Popov. One was a green-eyed platinum blonde and the other a grey-eyed brunette. They held out their empty hands.
‘We lost everything...’ they giggled, the blonde saying, ‘Unlucky with dice, lucky in love.’
‘This is...’ Popov proudly introduced the two young women to his exalted company, pronouncing two unusual two-syllable nicknames that nobody either heard properly or remembered afterwards.
The young women curtsied, uttering some polite, heavily accented phrases in French. They tittered, every so often bursting into ringing laughter, as if they were in an operetta. Popov laughed too, putting his arms around them as if to console them for their losses at the roulette table.
The two sisters’ beauty captivated everybody at the casino. They impressed even the royal couple, though each differently. Elena whispered to Carol in Romanian, so that they wouldn’t understand:
‘Who on earth is this pimp?’
‘He is a very dear friend of mine. Relax, you’ll like him. Everybody likes him.’
One thing was for sure: Carol liked women. When he was younger, the talk in Bucharest was that he liked them a little too much. The rumours came from all sides: at court the servant girls would say ‘it’s useless to try to fend off the crown prince’; in high society boudoirs, he was described as a ‘sexual giant’; in brothels and theatre dressing rooms the word was that ‘the Crown Prince prefers devouring women to eating bread’. The court doctor had told his late father King Ferdinand that he thought the son was suffering from satyriasis, male hyper-sexuality. He prescribed bromide, which is given to soldiers to stop them from chasing women. Carol drank the bromide for months, but it was no use. If the stories are to be believed, he only changed his lifestyle when he found a mistress equal to his lust: Elena.
Carol may have liked women, but he did not really understand them. Elena would not have been so upset otherwise.
‘Forgive me, Carol, but this is unseemly,’ she whispered, again in Romanian.
‘What is, darling?’
‘Do you think we should be in the company of an adventurer and these two girls?’
If anybody knew Carol well it was Elena. He was a good man, he did truly love her, otherwise he would not twice have given up the crown for her, but he could easily get carried away, become insatiable, forget himself and misbehave in company. It never lasted for long. This would not be the first time that he had found some sort of rogue with whom to carouse. Elena had had more than enough opportunity these last ten years to develop a special tactic for sabotaging such situations.
‘I’m a little tired, mon amour. Let’s go to bed and get some sleep. We’ll be travelling in a few days,’ she whispered lovingly in his ear.
‘You go ahead, mon amour,’ said the king, full of understanding.
Most often it was enough for Elena to plead a headache or heartburn for both of them to retire from a party. Actually, Carol liked it when she pretended to be frail; it made him feel protective. But this evening seemed to be one of those times when he was fixated and it was best to leave him be. Her best bet was to stop focusing on him and work on neutralizing the competition.
And so she struck up a casual conversation with the girls, asking them about themselves, where they came from and where they were going. They said they were from Budapest and had arrived in Estoril a few months earlier with their father, an officer, and their mother, a highly gifted, prematurely retired opera singer who had sacrificed her career for her family. There were three sisters. The brunette was a year older than the blonde, and the youngest was already married and waiting for them in America. You could see that they had been well brought up, taught to move in high circles, but this evening, probably because she had drunk too much champagne, the younger sister suddenly started babbling away. She boasted about how wealthy her parents had been; what they had once enjoyed and what they had lost in the political upheavals of the last few years. She talked about their aristocratic roots, her mother’s voice and perfect pitch, something all three daughters had inherited, and about how she had won the Miss Hungary contest in 1936. She talked on and on, as liars often do, even though nobody was asking her any questions.
Elena saw through it right away. The parents had realized that their greatest capital was their good-looking daughters and they knew that no time was to be lost, not because of the war (Hungary was not at war, at least not yet) but because suitable husbands had to be found for the girls while they were still young and beautiful.
While Elena was chatting with the girls and buying time, the king suddenly remembered that he and Popov had drifted apart and that in the future they should spend more time together.
‘You know what, Duško, the next time I go to Belgrade I won’t stay at court with my sister. She won’t mind; anyway she thinks I’m a bad influence on my nephews. I’ll come incognito and stay in a hotel.’
‘If you want to travel incognito, then you would do better to stay with a friend. I still have that apartment behind the theatre. You can always stay with me.’
‘Thank you. If you don’t have a room for me I can always sleep on the sofa,’ the king laughed.
‘I don’t think you’ll have to sleep on the sofa, but who knows?’ Popov smiled.
It amused Popov that when men of a certain age realized they were no longer young they wanted to prove to themselves, whatever the cost, that if not exactly in the flush of youth neither were they senile. At least not yet.
The king laughed and laughed, not even knowing what he found so amusing; then suddenly, well into his cups, he said out of the blue:
‘Let’s all go to our place!’
Had anybody else made a proposal like that, it would have been something to consider, and nothing more. However, when it was a king making the suggestion, one word was enough for everybody to jump up and get going.
Urdăreanu was quick to act. He ordered a car. Everybody was happy with the idea, except for the hostess. She gave Carol a sad, pleading look that said: ‘Why are you doing this to me?�
��, hoping that he would take pity on her. He did not notice when she sighed:
‘But I’m exhausted.’
It was useless. Nobody was paying any attention to her. She knew that the more she carped and nagged, the more she would be ignored and treated like a servant instead of a wife. She had to appear level-headed and calm.
* * *
Above them was the starry sky, around them a wooded glade that on one side opened out to the sea, before them a villa with a huge tiled roof. The chauffeur opened the car door. The king stepped out first, followed by Elena who took his arm; then Popov, a jacket over his shoulders, with the two pretty girls, one on each arm. All that was missing was a bottle of brandy. Behind was Urdăreanu, tanned, in a white suit, like an elegant gypsy musician. All that was missing was a fiddle. The moon, which was full only two days ago, had started to wane. Whether because of the cold moonlight or the silence broken only by the distant echo of the sea, everybody suddenly went quiet, as if they were hiding from some unseen presence. No lights were on in the house; it looked deserted.
‘Where are the staff?’ a nervous Elena asked Carol.
‘They were told we did not want to be disturbed,’ came the answer not from Carol but from Urdăreanu.
They entered the house in a different formation. Carol was still in front, but now he was locked arm in arm with Duško, his special guest; behind them was Elena, walking between the two girls. Only now could you see that she was old enough to be their mother. As soon as she stepped on her own turf, her walk became more assured, as if she wanted the heels of her shoes to ring on the marble floor.
The king politely invited them to sit down. He placed Popov in an armchair next to his own, and the three women across the way. Urdăreanu was running in all directions; on rare occasions like this, when the servants were not around, there was nobody else to serve the drinks.
‘Tell me, how’s London? I haven’t been since ’38,’ Carol asked, placing the needle on the gramophone record.
‘How’s London? How it’s got to be. You can always find entertainment if you look for it.’ Their conversation picked up where they had left off at the casino − with women.
With a prohibition-age jazz standard playing in the background, the two men seemed to find everything funny. The women could not hear them because of the music, and the court minister pouring their drinks did not inhibit them. He was serving champagne. The very best.
One of the girls seemed to have already succumbed to the alcohol; as soon as she sat down she dozed off. The blonde, younger sister was not sleepy. Used to being the centre of attention, she was now bored. Unable to sit still, she started walking around the room. She strolled in the half-light, studying the wall panels of blue ceramic tiles. On the one in front of her, a horseman wearing a tricorn hat, his sword drawn, was riding through an unusual tropical landscape, the work of an artist who knew about exotic places only from stories. The girl did not mind the dilettantism of the picture. What she minded was that the horseman was looking straight at her.
Two pairs of eyes on the other panel were trained on her as well − two Jesuits staring fixedly at her rather than at the river in front of them where a white man, also a priest, was standing waist-deep in the water, baptizing two natives. That was when she had an idea:
‘Does this place have a swimming pool?’
No reply. So the blonde girl crept out into the courtyard. She would have gone unnoticed had there not been the sound of a big splash a few minutes later.
The people in the sitting room looked at each other and saw who was missing. Everybody leapt to their feet, even the sister who had been startled awake. Everybody except Carol. He remained seated. He had no intention of moving; instead he grabbed Popov by the arm and pulled him back into his chair.
‘Let them go. They’ll solve it on their own.’
Nobody tried to stop the three who ran outside. First you could hear them calling out in several languages, then another splash.
‘That’s Ernest,’ the king said, turning up the volume on the gramophone.
He was right. Urdăreanu had jumped into the cold water. He couldn’t let the young girl drown; it would be all over the press the next day.
The girl and her rescuer were in the pool. She was splashing around, grabbing hold of him one minute, pushing him away the next. Standing at the edge of the pool was the brunette in her evening gown, holding out her hands and calling to her sister: ‘Zsa, Zsa! Zsa, Zsa! Sári!’ Ernest somehow managed to get the girl to the side of the pool and her sister tried to pull her out, but it was no use, even with Ernest’s help. Elena, who had been giving advice from the sidelines, realized that the matter would never be resolved unless she took over. The important thing was to prioritize and then put out each fire one by one. She went to the pool, leaned over the edge, her bottom up and head down, and with both hands grabbed the drowning girl by her arms and pulled her out of the pool, like an Eskimo pulling a seal onto the ice with a hook. Elena was small but she was strong.
Urdăreanu came out of the water but before he even managed to take off his waterlogged shoes Elena was marching back into the sitting room to give Carol and that Yugoslav crook an earful.
This was the last straw! It was high time to break up this band of debauched bingers. Somebody could get killed. Anyway, this wasn’t the sort of thing a decent house should have to put up with. Why aren’t we in bed? It’s almost daybreak.
But she said none of this. She stood next to the king, her hands on her hips, but he looked at her, smiled and before she could embark on her tirade he turned back to Popov and said:
‘Go on, Duško.’
If that’s how it was, if he wasn’t prepared to listen, then she had better bite her tongue and keep quiet. If she started shouting, she risked Carol sending her away, as he once did at the beginning of their relationship, before she knew how far she could push him. That time, Carol had kissed her with a smile and ordered the staff to take her off to bed and, when she protested, he offered to get her a hotel room until she calmed down and got some sleep. Now, with much more experience, she knew how to contain her anger. Suppressing her emotions and making her voice as sweet as possible, she spoke with feigned concern.
‘Carol, I think it might not be a bad idea to call the servants to help the poor girl... She’ll freeze like this.’
‘Leave her be...’ said the king.
For a few seconds Elena still held out hope that he would have a change of heart and that she would wake up from this nightmare but when she saw that it was useless, reluctantly she went back outside, looking dishevelled and disgruntled.
She encountered Ernest as he was carrying the soaking wet girl back into the house. Nobody would have held it against her had Elena retired to her bedroom at that moment but, being the kind of woman she was, she could not desert the battlefield. Who knew what turn this could still take unless there was somebody sensible there to keep an eye on things?
‘Well, Elena, my girl, you’ve come far!’ she muttered as she walked over to help them.
Meanwhile, the king and Popov were still listening to music in the sitting room.
‘Just listen to this, Duško,’ said the king, putting on another record. A woman’s nasal voice started singing a Romanian folk song.
He raised his head only to find himself looking not at Popov but at a girl. A naked girl. We will never know how she managed to slip away from the other two, but there was the blonde, standing between the two men, facing Carol with her back to Popov.
‘I took a dip in the pool,’ she announced as if revealing a big secret.
Who knows what kind of reaction her inebriated brain expected, but she was clearly disappointed by the king’s. His eyes at half-mast, he continued to listen to the crackling music on the record player as if she were not there.
‘I’m wet,’ the naked girl said. And indeed she was wet, her skin goosepimply, her nipples pert, a hand awkwardly placed over her Venus mound.
The
king deigned to cast her a brief look, raising his finger to his lips for her not to talk, while to Popov he said:
‘This is a song from Banat, not far from where you were born.’
Unlike Carol, Popov was more interested in the sight in front of him, but was unable to enjoy it for long.
The search party came rushing onto the scene. They had obviously been looking for the fugitive in the other rooms but they arrived too late to lay their hands on her. As soon as she spotted them she let out a scream and ran. They tried to catch her but her wet body slipped out of their hands and she escaped on drunken, teetering legs to the next room, hurled herself onto the bed, buried her head in the pillows and started sobbing in Hungarian.
A furious Elena and a worried Urdăreanu tried everything they could think of. They covered her with a sheet, she kicked it off; they tried to dress her, she pushed them away; they tried to comfort her, she screamed. She knew to what depths she had sunk and was angry at herself.
‘You’re too old to behave like this, kid,’ Elena muttered through her teeth in a futile attempt to wrap her peignoir around the girl.
Meanwhile, back in the sitting room, Carol and Popov were listening to an American orchestra playing more lively music. The commotion in the background gradually died down. Now and then there was the odd whimper until silence finally prevailed.
*
Nobody knows how the blonde girl managed to creep out of her bed. It did not take long to find her. She was discovered in the bathroom hugging the toilet. She had not made it in time. In the middle of the room was a repulsive, spreading puddle of alcohol and gastric acids, floating with chunks of meat, masticated cucumbers and crêpes. The rescue team had limited manoeuvring space. Ernest slid along the wall, left of the vomit. Elena trod a little more carefully on the opposite side, looking disgusted. They had not got far when the brunette burst into the bathroom and, as if spellbound, went to her sister’s aid. But after taking just two steps, she slipped, fell, kept trying to get up several times but failed, as if the revolting puke had her glued to the floor. Every time she tried to stand up she slipped and fell flat on her back again, until she was covered with spew.
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