by Ann Bridge
Richard looked embarrassed too, and rather annoyed. Naturally he had not reached the age of thirty-five or thereabouts without having been ‘subjected to other influences’ as the French so elegantly call it, and one of the foremost among these influences was a certain Countess de Vermeil; she had been very much in the ascendant during his time in Washington, and Colonel Campbell, there on some war-time mission or other, had met them both; when Atherley was at the Embassy in Paris before coming to Lisbon, he had in fact seemed quite dominated by her, and Colonel Campbell, then assistant Military Attaché there, had again registered the fact. She was a widow, older than Atherley; ultra-mondaine, skilful, witty, and well-dressed to a French degree of perfection which was like a sort of lacquer over her whole person—she was also tall, blonde, and sufficiently beautiful just to be visible herself through her wonderful clothes. (There are women who dress so well as to render their actual selves practically invisible, but Fanny Vermeil contrived to avoid that.) Lately Richard, absorbed by Hetta, had given very little thought to this enchantress, and the young man in his present mood felt his colleague’s well-meant question peculiarly ill-timed.
‘As far as I know, Madame de Vermeil is not expected here,’ he said coldly.
At that moment Tomlinson ushered in Colonel Marques. Both men, their minds fully occupied in giving the latest facts to the head of the Portuguese Security Service, forgot about any Countesses, young or less young. Colonel Marques was, as always, practical, brief, and shrewd: he noted down the address of the firm from which Julia had hired both her machines, and on learning that she had driven up to Gralheira in Richard’s CD. car nodded approval, and asked where the young lady’s car was at that moment?
‘Under this window,’ Richard said for the second time.
Colonel Marques asked who had the key. Campbell showed it to him.
‘It would be convenient if I might borrow the key, and the car, for a day or two,’ Colonel Marques said—’ If it is not required?’
‘You can do anything you like with it, provided you take it away from under my window,’ Colonel Campbell replied. ‘We don’t in the least want it standing about in this street!’
‘Very well. Thank you. Leave it in my hands, Monsieur le Colonel.’
‘I’ll leave you now,’ Richard said, rising, and went back to his room to ring up Hetta Páloczy.
After some thought as to what would please her most, he took her to Obidos, the little walled city lying between the main Lisbon-Alcobaça road and the sea, one of the most beautiful walled towns in Europe. In its smallness and completeness it compares with Gruyère, and like Gruyère a mediaeval castle dominates it from one end, but in some ways it is even more beautiful; the golden tone of its castle and walls is warmer and richer than the slate-grey of the Swiss town.
Hetta was delighted by it. They left Colonel Campbell’s car outside the big fortified entrance, incongruously lined with blue-and-white azulejos, and inside climbed a flight of stone steps up onto the top of the western wall; a narrow path, originally a firing-parapet for bowmen, runs along the whole length of this to the massive block of the Castelo at the farther end. Neither the steps nor the firing-walk have any form of hand-rail, and people with a bad head for heights find them alarming, but to Richard’s relief Hetta tripped up the steps and along the walk with complete unconcern—he had once had the disconcerting experience of taking a V.I.P. to Obidos, and finding that he could only negotiate the path along the wall on his hands and knees. The girl looked out through the loop-holes at the bright multi-coloured countryside, pink and green with plough-land and springing wheat; the dim blue of the Atlantic bounded the horizon, and nearer at hand was the brilliant blue of the great sand-enclosed lagoon, the Lagoa de Obidos, in which enterprising bathers can catch grey mullet in their hands. On the other side they looked down, very intimately, into the back gardens of the inhabitants, where shapely grey-green medlar-trees stand up among hen-houses, rabbit-hutches, and beds of vegetables. Hetta, inveterately practical, commented on the fact that these back-yards contained almost no lines of washing.
‘No, they spread it out on those slabs of rock with the agaves on them, below the Castelo. Look.’ He took her elbow, and pointed to the open slope, gay with white and parti-coloured linen drying in the sun.
‘Oh I see—how nice.’
They were both very happy. In fact many people do experience an unexpected happiness in Obidos; it is a quality of the place. Moreover, this was Hetta’s first expedition into the Portuguese countryside, and she was loving every moment. The Castelo has been turned into a pousada, a government-run hostelry, but when they descended from the battlements by another of those dizzy flights of steps just below it he did not take her there, but led her instead a few yards along one of the two streets, which are all that Obidos boasts, and into a tiny room barely ten feet square, with narrow benches along the walls and a broad wooden counter with wine-barrels below it. Richard knocked on this, and a bright-faced young woman with a flowered kerchief on her head came running in from the next room, and greeted him with cries of pleasure—these brought in a much older man, wearing the regular Portuguese country-townsman’s rig of an open waistcoat, shirt-sleeves with floral stripes, and a black felt hat crammed down on his round head. He, too, showed the utmost satisfaction at the sight of Richard, and wrung him by the hand; he spoke to the young woman, who went out and reappeared after a moment with a big earthenware jug brimming with wine, which she poured into two thick tumblers and handed to the guests.
‘This is their better wine,’ Richard said to Hetta—she sniffed, sipped, and then nodded her head.
‘It is good,’ she pronounced. ‘This is such a nice place, Richard; it is like a Kis-Kocsma in Hungary.’
‘And what does Kis-Kocsma mean, pray?’
‘A small wine-room. They are a little bigger, as a rule, but like this.’ She drank again. ‘Do you know, this is excellent.’
‘The Menina approves of your wine,’ Richard told the man—‘And she knows of what she speaks; her father had his own vineyards.’
‘In what part of Portugal?’
‘Not in Portugal at all—the Menina is Hungara.’
This statement produced some rather surprisingly on-the-spot remarks.
‘From Hungary, eh? Where they have put a Cardinal in prison? I thought the Hungaros were all Communists. Is the Menina a Communist?’
‘No, she is a Condessa,’ Richard said, laughing.’ She has come to Portugal to escape from the Communists.’ But as he spoke he was seized with a sudden pang of the anxiety that had tormented him before on Hetta’s behalf. ‘You don’t go swimming alone in the mornings any more, do you?’ he asked.
‘Not since you told me I should not. Why?’
‘I just wanted to be sure. Have some more wine.’
‘Yes please. But would he mind if we took it outside and sat in that square? It is so beautiful, this town—I cannot see it enough.’
‘There’s nowhere to sit in the largo’
‘Richard, do not be English, and diplomatic! We can sit on the steps.’
On the steps they sat, their refilled glasses in their hands, looking up at the great bulk of the Castelo high above them.
‘I’m glad you like Obidos; it’s a place I love,’ Richard said. He felt warmed towards her, towards the whole world, as he sat drinking his wine, watching her face tilted up to gaze at the castle’s golden crenellations profiled against the blue sky overhead. ‘Tell me why you like it?’
‘Because it is happy, and simple. Much nicer than Estoril!’ she said, with one of her sudden flashes of contempt. ‘I should like to live here—perhaps in one of those houses.’
Below the largo stood a short row of houses considerably more elaborate than most of the town, with green shutters folded back from their windows, creepers on the walls, and in front of them neat little gardens with paved paths leading up to the doors; they had a sort of homely elegance.
‘That one with the not
ice on it is to let,’ he said. ‘Would you like to live there with me, Hetti?’
He spoke on an impulse, born of his immediate happiness, his romantic love for Obidos, and his half-recognised love for the girl beside him. She turned her face towards him at his words, and studied him for some time before she spoke.
‘Richard, I should like to live with you anywhere where you would be happy,’ she said at length. ‘But I am not sure that you would really be happy living in Obidos. Or indeed living with me,’ she added.
‘Hetti, I really believe I should be happy with you anywhere,’ he said, taking her hand. This was really all he could do in the way of demonstration, since the square immediately in front of them had suddenly become filled with small boys, kicking a rather dessicated football about. The Portuguese have of late years developed an obsession for Association Football, which they call futebol; as professionals they play it extremely well, but the entire male population of the country, from the age of seven upwards, spends most of its spare time kicking some sort of ball about any available open space.
‘I know you believe it,’ Hetta said, returning the pressure of his hand with the small firm clasp of her own. ‘But I am not sure, dear Richard, that—that your belief is true. I mean, I think that perhaps you do not know yourself. You would soon begin to think me too young for you, and in social ways of course I am—though in more real ways I think I am much older, because of how I have lived. Your reality has been easy, mine has been hard; and so a lot of the things you think important are to me quite unimportant. Looks, dress, savoir-faire!’ the girl exclaimed, with a ring of contempt in her voice—‘for you these are all-important; they fill your sky! But to me they are little, little, little I My mother has them all!’ she ended, and sprang to her feet and walked away.
Richard, too, rose, and followed her slowly. He was rather disturbed—and startled by her perspicacity. She had sized him up with an accuracy which plenty of older women had not shown in regard to him, he thought ruefully. How clever she was! No, it was more than cleverness; she was wise. For a young man of his antecedents, living the life he did, Richard Atherley was rather unusually honest; he accepted Hetta’s evaluation of himself as true, and did not resent it. But could one live beside such acuity? The remark about her mother—she would never have said that if she had not realised his own contempt for poor Dorothée, careful as he thought he had been to conceal it.
Hetta meanwhile was sauntering slowly along the lower of the two streets, her dark head sleek in the sun, that orange-patterned cotton frock of hers, that he liked so much, turning a deeper shade as she passed from sun to shadow—she walked beautifully, even in her silly white sandals and on that rough paving: she had that particular quality. He came up with her just as she had reached the spot where a church stood below the road; he laid a hand on her bare arm and said ‘Hetti!’—he could not find words for anything he wanted to say; he did not know, he was all at sea. She turned at once, with her wide gentle smile, and said with the blandest unconcern—’ Should we not go into this church? I believe there are remarkable paintings in it, by a woman.’
It again struck Richard, rather forcibly, that many women of the world could hardly have bettered her self-possession, immediately after receiving what practically amounted to a proposal; it was so completely incongruous with her clear-sighted statement that he would feel her ‘too young’ for him that he burst out laughing, with his great laughter that resounded up and down the little street. But her knowledge took him by surprise too.
‘What do you know about Josefa of Obidos?’ he asked.
‘Oh, she had a school of painting here—such an extraordinary thing for a woman, in the 17th century! And she was an etcher as well, and a silversmith, and modelled in terra-cotta. Do let us go in—I should like to see her paintings.’
‘How on earth do you know all this?’
‘The Monsignor lent me that book about Portugal. I have read it twice, but, of course, I cannot easily go about to see all these buildings and pictures because the car is needed for other things.’
Richard’s heart smote him. He doted on Hetta, for his own pleasure he saw her whenever he could; but until today it had never occurred to him to do that quite elementary thing, show her Portugal—nor indeed that she would want, and want rather intelligently, to see its artistic riches.
‘Look,’ he said, as they stood outside the door of the church, ‘if you can keep your week-ends fairly free I’ll drive you out on Saturdays and Sundays, and show you anything that’s within reach.’
‘That would be lovely,’ the girl said.
The parish church of Sta Maria in Obidos is in fact too dark for the visitor to see much of the versatile Josefa’s pictures, particularly since these are skyed right up under the painted ceiling, above the decorative azulejos which adorn the walls. Hetta was disappointed. ‘Since we cannot see them, her pictures tell us nothing of her,’ she said. ‘How sad.’ Out in the sun again, she swung round on Richard.
‘Our glasses! Did we not leave them in the square? We must take them back, those nice people will want them— poor people cannot afford to lose two glasses.’
‘Hetti, do you know that you are very kind and very good?’ he exclaimed.
‘Niet! It is only that you know nothing about poverty, and I know a great deal,’ the girl replied. ‘You are simply ignorant, not bad; I know, but I am not therefore good. Really, Richard, you are very ingenuous for a diplomat!’
‘How censorious you are!’ But he laughed and took her elbow as they went back to the largo below the castle. Their tumblers had gone; some of the youthful futebol-players, seeing them abandoned on the steps, had taken them back to the ‘small wine-room’, as they at once explained to Richard when he began to peer about.
‘What are you doing for dinner tonight?’ the young man asked, as they drove back towards Lisbon.
It appeared that Hetta was doing nothing for dinner; her mother was dining out.
‘Then come and dine with me,’ Richard said. He was in a divided mood. On the one hand he acknowledged the truth of her diagnosis of his own attitude towards her; on the other, the mere fact that she was shrewd enough to make it, and her subsequent lively uppishness about diplomats drew him to her more strongly than ever—and he had a sudden desire to push the thing farther, if only to find out more about his own feelings, and hers.
She made no answer to his invitation.
‘Well? Yes—no?’ he asked.
‘No,’ the girl said, turning to him—‘It is No, please, Richard.’
‘Why on earth not?’
‘Because we are not ready—I am not, you are not. You want me to come tonight so that you may make a little love to me, and see if that is nice. Oh, of course it would be nice!’ she exclaimed—’ lovely, delicious, fun! But you and I are not people to live just by fun; you have perhaps been a little spoilt, but you need truth in your love, and you do not know yet where the truth is, I think. I told you that on those steps. We have done enough for today about what is between you and me. Let us leave it—take me home.’
Again her honesty and clear-sightedness took him by surprise; he felt something like reverence for her just then, mixed with admiration for the cool fearlessness with which she had spoken of love between them. Oh yes, she was right about him: he had wanted to try it out on the physical plane, leaving everything else in a warm happy fuzz; and Hetta, uncompromising as ever, wouldn’t have that.
‘Whatever has been done about us today, it’s you that have done it,’ he said, putting his hand over hers.
‘Because I am so old!’ she said lightly.
As they approached Estoril—‘Richard, will you let me know when I am to see Father Antal quite soon?’ she asked. ‘I would excuse myself from almost any engagement, except just this one with the Bretagnes, for that. Where is this place in the country to which he has gone? Is it far away?’
‘Yes—the better part of a day’s drive. He’s at Gralheira, the Duke of Er
iceira’s house near São Pedro do Sul, right up in the North.’ Richard had no scruples about telling Hetta this; she was in the whole affair up to her neck. ‘It would mean staying a night,’ he went on, ‘but I don’t suppose your mother would object to your going to the Ericeiras. What about next week-end? I have something on, but I would cut it for that—for you, Hetti.’
Hetta ignored his final words.
‘So long?’ she said dismally. ‘Could we not go sooner? You see, he may be going on to America. Do you know when?’
‘No, I don’t. But I’ll find out. Don’t worry, Hetti—I’ve promised, and I will keep my promise. Goodbye, my dear one. You will come and dine with me some time, won’t you?’
‘Yes—at the right time!’ she said, as they drew up at the hotel. ‘Thank you, dear Richard, for the lovely expedition. I have been so happy.’
Hetta enjoyed her luncheon at the Bretagnes the following day. It was a homely, family affair. Innumerable Bretagne children, of all ages down to a seven-year-old, sat round the long table gazing at her, and occasionally firing off questions in her direction; the only guests besides herself were the young Archduke, a lively fair-haired youth whose questions about Hungary poured out like machine-gun fire, and a big, tall, lusciously beautiful woman who had, it seemed, only arrived by plane that morning, and having telephoned was bidden to this very unsocial meal—her name Hetta, too often absentminded, failed to catch, though she realised clearly enough that this was a last-minute addition to the party. In this pleasant atmosphere the girl expanded, answered the Archduke briskly, and laughed heartily at the innocent question of one very youthful princeling—’ Did you give the priest you cooked for soup? I hate soup!’
‘You would not hate my soups; they are delicious,’ she told the child.
‘Then I wish you would come and speak with our cook. He gives us bouillon de légumes, which is altogether horrible,’ the little boy pronounced.
‘Countess, it looks as though I shall have to employ you to nourish my family!’ the Pretender said, laughing—’ or are you tired of cooking?’