Letters From Prague

by Sue Gee

  ‘I’m hot.’

  ‘Keep walking.’

  Ahead, a lake was shimmering. Beyond, a white-painted café beckoned from the shade. It suited their requirements exactly.

  The heart of Brussels, the capital of Europe, was shaped like a heart. Broad boulevards enclosed it; fine avenues led out from it: towards Laken, in the north; the Bois de Cambre and the Forest of Brussels to the south-east; Anderlecht in the south-west. These, and other outlying districts, were inviting, but could not, within the space of a few days, all be visited, any more than Harriet could expect to visit everything on her list in the centre, especially with Marsha to consider, and especially in this heat.

  But the heat passed, that day an exception to those which followed: manageably cooler, with a breeze; and the heart of the city – served through it was by buses, blue and yellow trams and a metro whose art nouveau entrances, and platforms filled with murals and sculpture, meant that travelling on it was full of delights and surprises – was, like Amsterdam, small enough to make walking pleasurable. It was a place full of charm, full of parks and gardens and graceful, well-kept buildings; for the next two or three days it was – for Harriet, at least, and she tried to make it so for Marsha – full of interest.

  Sustained now and then by paper cones of frites, sold at kiosks everywhere, they wandered through crowded street markets, and gazed in the windows of antique shops near the Place du Grand Sablon. They spent a whole morning in the Royal Art Museums, buying postcards of Brueghel, Van Eyck, Ensor and Magritte, writing a select few home at the table of a café in the Parc du Bruxelles, where that evening they sat in deckchairs listening to a concert. The next morning, exhausted, they spent at home, but went out to stand, at noon, amongst the pigeons in the precincts of the Cathedral of St Michel and St Gudule, listening to a joyous and intricate carillon of bells.

  The streets were full of tourists, from whom they pretended they were distant and different, even though such differences were, truth to tell, largely indistinguishable. Harriet felt that she probably bought less and thought more, and ventured as much to Susanna, in light-hearted vein, as they walked slowly home that afternoon.

  ‘You’re a snob,’ said Susanna. ‘A terrible snob.’

  ‘Just clear-sighted.’

  ‘And so modest, too.’

  They walked on companionably, passing the plate glass and pillars of a tiered arcade of shops. Lace and crystal, leather and cashmere, beribboned boxes of chocolates – perhaps it was the effect of too much sightseeing, but Harriet felt, for the first time since their arrival, a mixture of satiety and distaste. The city was charming, well ordered and full of variety, but it also felt somehow unreal – not as it had done the morning after their arrival, when she had stood in the Grand Place and tried to get her bearings, but simply too pretty, too expensive, too pleased with itself. The capital of Europe, with mountains of butter and mountains of paper, issuing directives, bossing everyone about. Like me, she thought, feeling a sudden puritanical desire for the strict routine of work, a day’s accomplishments ticked off, a supper earned. This was no good: clearly she had become stuck in her ways, unable to relax and take pleasure in freedom. Or perhaps it really was, when you were so used to running your own show, difficult always to be the guest.

  These newly critical feelings were partly confirmed and partly alleviated next morning, when they visited Hugh in his office. Situated in the solidly substantial streets of the upper city, not far from the parliament building and amidst the offices of ministries and insurance companies, Hugh’s bank was all gold lettering, white-painted stone, wrought-iron railings alongside shallow steps.

  ‘Gosh,’ said Marsha.

  They had taken a tram up here, as Hugh did every morning, and walked the last few hundred yards. It had rained in the night, but the morning was fine, the streets almost edibly clean, windowboxes stuffed with ivy and petunia. Men in suits came in and out of doorways, purposeful women in narrow shoes swung slender briefcases and hailed taxis with a finger. The brisk part of Harriet responded to all this, as they stood looking at the smooth exterior of Elbridge & Rowinski; she glanced at Susanna, who had been here often, whose background, indeed, was in this world, but who did not work.

  ‘Shall we go in?’

  They went through double doors fastened open, crossing a threshold of matting and brass on to a sage green carpet, and were greeted by a commissionaire.

  ‘Good morning, Mrs Pickering.’ He smiled at Susanna, and at Marsha, beside her. ‘Your husband’s expecting you? I’ll tell him you’re here.’

  Susanna’s hand rested on Marsha’s shoulder; she looked a little on edge, as though she were not simply accompanied by her visiting niece, but needed to be anchored by her, and their relationship. Following, as the commissionaire buzzed an intercom. Harriet glanced to the right, where closed glass doors showed young men in shirt sleeves at dark designer desks, leaning back to talk into trim white telephones, chucking screwed-up faxes into a bin.

  ‘Hugh’s on the fifth floor,’ said Susanna, and led them both to a lift even more silkily silent than the one in their apartment building.

  They came out on to a hushed sunny landing, carpeted in grey and lit by tall sash windows at either end. Passages and discreetly labelled doors led off it; the lift gave a ting and descended, empty.

  ‘Well,’ said Harriet, taking in the view of rooftops beyond the gleaming windows, the rinsed morning sky.

  ‘Here you are,’ said Hugh, coming out through double swing doors. He kissed them all. ‘I meant to be here to greet you.’

  ‘You were, almost.’

  ‘But not quite. A phone call from Paris. Anyway, come through.’

  He ushered them along a corridor, hung with framed posters – not the over-familiar Impressionists you might see in any London office, Harriet noted, but decent contemporary prints – to more swing doors, and an open-plan office. Harriet’s immediate impression here was that Hugh, in the midst of much activity, carried immense authority. There were more young men like those downstairs, and quite a few women; none looked older than twenty-five and they had about them an air of sharp brightness against which Hugh, some twenty years older, felt solid and wise and much more interesting. She was somewhat taken aback by the force of this realisation, and then he was introducing them all, in a sweeping gesture, and people were turning from their computer screens and smiling. Clocks on the wall gave London, New York and Tokyo time, which intrigued Marsha; boards were chalked with prices and commodities; telephones rang, a fax machine whirred, there was the smell of good coffee.

  ‘Come and see where I am.’ Hugh led them away from all this into one of a number of much smaller offices on the perimeter. ‘So.’ He moved to sit in a swing chair behind an enormous desk where his computer stood. ‘What can I do for you? You have come to see the bank because –’

  ‘Because we want to see where you work, silly.’ Marsha was picking up a paperweight from the corner of the desk.

  ‘Oh, is that what it is? I thought you had come for a loan.’ He pressed his fingers together and looked at them gravely.

  ‘Can I sit there?’ she asked.

  ‘Certainly not.’

  She picked up the paperweight and made as if to throw it at him. He ducked behind the desk.

  ‘Spare me, spare me, I have a wife, six children –’

  ‘No, you haven’t.’ Marsha walked round the desk and tugged at his buried head. ‘Move,’ she ordered. ‘Move, or you die.’

  He moved, cowering, to crouch behind the chair where Harriet sat observing this exchange with a mixture of delight and sadness. How had Marsha survived for so long without a father, or father figure, to order about in this way? Close as she and Marsha were, their life together had not, for a long time, allowed for play.

  Marsha sat herself down in the swing chair and swung. She swung back again, picked up the phone. ‘Paris, please. Thank you. Yes. Hello? I should like to –’ she hesitated. ‘I want to –’ She stopped,
and put the phone down, demanding: ‘What do you do?’

  They all laughed, but Harriet, turning to share her amusement with Susanna, saw in her face as she stood with her back to the window, a fleeting but unmistakable shadow.

  ‘Good question,’ Hugh was saying to Marsha. ‘Lend terrifying amounts of money is the answer.’

  ‘Can I have some?’

  ‘Do you wish to make polymers in Bulgaria? To convert feedstock in the Ukraine? Would you like to stop acid rain in Bohemia?’

  ‘I’d like to stop acid rain,’ said Marsha, whose class project on pollution had lasted the whole of the previous autumn term, and who had irritated Harriet, against her better nature, by ferreting about in the kitchen separating the rubbish into three different piles and demanding trips to dumps and bottle banks.

  ‘Well, then. You are now the President of the Bank of Bohemia. We shall lend you the necessary, and you will guarantee to repay us within the next ten years, putting up half of Bohemia as a guarantee. Is that clear?’

  Marsha nodded uncertainly.

  ‘This is in fact what you were talking about the other night, isn’t it?’ said Harriet. ‘Financing the desulphurisation unit – is that right?’

  ‘Exactly. We were talking about it the evening Christopher Pritchard came to supper, I think. He seems to have gone to earth, by the way. So. Enough of all this. Susanna has heard me droning on about work too often, haven’t you, darling?’

  She smiled, looking preoccupied. ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘No, it isn’t, it’s as boring as old boots.’ He looked at Marsha, who was turning the paperweight over. ‘All I can say to you, dear niece, is that if you continue in this high-handed manner, you will most assuredly be running a bank by the time you’re eighteen.’

  ‘Good,’ said Marsha, and then, as the telephone rang, ‘I bet you that’s Christopher Pritchard.’

  ‘Why on earth should it be?’ Hugh reached for the receiver. ‘Hugh Pickering. Good heavens, how extraordinary, we were just talking about you.’

  ‘Told you,’ said Marsha, getting out of the chair as he moved towards it.

  ‘Why?’ asked Harriet, holding a hand out towards her.

  She shrugged, and came to stand beside her. ‘Just had a feeling.’

  They waited, listening: Harriet and Marsha engaged with each other, Hugh talking to Christopher, and Susanna, her back to the window and the summer-morning sky, fingering her wristwatch, watching them all, set apart.

  ‘Actually, I’ve got the family here,’ Hugh was saying. ‘Just showing them round, we’ll have a bit of lunch … oh, at the Cockatrice, I should think, round the corner then –’ he glanced down at an open diary ‘then I’m in a meeting. So I’m afraid today’s not really on, unless –’ He raised his eyebrows at them all.

  ‘No,’ mouthed Marsha elaborately. ‘No, please no.’

  Hugh covered the telephone. Harriet covered her mouth. Her back against the window, Susanna was absolutely still.

  ‘Another time,’ said Hugh. ‘Give me a ring? Or I’ll phone you? Very good. Nice to hear from you. Yes, I will. Bye.’

  He put down the phone and Marsha gave a sigh of relief.

  ‘He’s not that bad,’ Hugh said mildly.

  ‘He is. I don’t want to have lunch with him, anyway.’

  ‘Well, you’re not going to. Now, then. Is there anything else you want to organise while you’re here?’

  She looked round the room, so curiously bare after all the activity in the outer office, its walls hung with a couple of watercolours, the gleaming window giving them the city. There was the computer, a bookcase in a comer, a table with copies of The Economist and Financial Times. Other than that –

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘What do children do in offices?’

  Hugh got up from his desk. ‘Dear Marsha, don’t sound so sad. Sometimes I wonder what grown-ups do. How about sending a fax?’

  ‘Yes! Who to?’

  ‘Grandpa? In London? I send faxes to his office sometimes.’

  ‘What do you say?’ They were walking towards the door.

  ‘Oh – what is the price of oil this morning, and what have you got in your sandwiches?’ He opened the glass-panelled door to the outer office and held it for her, courteous and grave.

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘I’m perfectly serious. What are you going to say?’

  ‘I’ll ask him about Victor.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘My mouse.’

  ‘I didn’t know you had a mouse.’

  ‘I don’t know if I still have.’

  He followed her through to the buzz, laughing.

  ‘Give Grandpa my love,’ called Harriet.

  ‘Will do.’

  The door swung to behind them. She turned back to Susanna, saying, ‘That was a nice idea.’

  Susanna was looking beyond her, into the office. ‘Yes.’ She turned to the window, where clouds sailed slowly by, and said carefully, ‘I think it’ll be fine for the rest of the day now, don’t you?’

  ‘Probably.’ Harriet picked up the paperweight, a heavy glass sphere with a small flat base to rest on. Within its transparent solidity the parts of a clock were suspended, as if in air: cogs, small brass wheels, a coiled spring. She turned it over, feeling its cool heaviness, watching Susanna watching the sky.

  She said: ‘Only two more days. You’ve done such a lot for us – it’ll feel very strange travelling on without you.’

  Susanna nodded. ‘We’ll miss you.’

  There was a silence. The glass-panelled door sealed the office away: there was only, through the open window, the muted sound of traffic from the street below, and the sight of the drifting clouds.

  Harriet ran her fingers over the smooth curve of the paperweight, looking at Susanna’s profile, so clear; at her expression, so remote.

  ‘Susanna?’

  ‘Yes?’

  She turned; their eyes met.

  ‘I should so like to get to know you better. Before we leave.’

  ‘We have got to know each other better.’

  ‘Yes, but –’ Harriet rested the paperweight on the desk again, observing the separate parts – a slender pair of black pointed hands, a scattering of minute brass screws – frozen, still. She said: ‘I’m fearful of prying. I just want you to feel you can talk to me if you need to. I shan’t say it again.’

  ‘Now is not the moment.’

  ‘It never is.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you mind if I ask: is it painful for you, being with Marsha? Seeing her with Hugh?’

  ‘Yes. But I’ve always –’ She lifted her hands to her head, and clasped it – briefly, but as if she couldn’t help herself, as if she were trying to hold everything in place. ‘Never mind,’ she said quietly, shaking her head, her eyes closed. ‘Never mind, never mind, never mind, never mind –’

  ‘Susanna –’ Harriet rose from her chair. ‘Forgive me.’

  Susanna’s hands went over her face. ‘Stop it. Please. They’ll be back in a minute.’ She drew a deep breath, lowered her hands and looked at her, smiling decidedly. ‘There. Let’s leave it, okay?’

  Behind them the door swung open.

  ‘We did it!’ said Marsha. ‘And he replied. He says Victor’s missing us, but he’s eating well. Look.’

  She waved a sheet of fax paper under Harriet’s nose.

  ‘I wish I were eating well,’ said Hugh, following. ‘Who’s for lunch?’

  The clouds were thickening as they came out of the building: it no longer looked as though the day were set fair, and as they set off down the street, Hugh in the lead, it felt cooler, too. He turned to reach out a hand for Susanna, saying to the others, ‘It’s not far, this place, just round the block.’

  ‘Is it posh?’ Marsha asked hopefully, leaving Harriet’s side.

  ‘Very.’ He held out a hand for her, too, but she moved to disengage Susanna’s, so that she was between them, a hand each.

 
‘Now I’ve got both of you.’ She swung their arms.

  And Harriet, walking a pace or two behind, so as not to take up the whole pavement, observed the three of them, close and relaxed, looking, to passers-by, like a neat little family: two plus one, quite content.

  An expensive-looking man in a hurry brushed past her, bumping her arm without apology.

  ‘Excuse you,’ she said sharply, but he had gone, unheeding. As yesterday, passing the shopping arcade, with its calfskin bags and cashmere cardigans, she felt a shiver of distaste. There were too many people here earning too much money, and perhaps that included her brother. This was not just the self-styled capital of Europe but of European capitalism itself, and for all that Hugh’s projects sounded useful and right-thinking there was a part of her which felt firmly: and so they jolly well should be.

  The street was beginning to fill with people looking for lunch – more expensive food, more consumption. She had had enough. I shall be glad to be on the train to Berlin with a packet of sandwiches, she thought, as they rounded the corner, and then, seeing Marsha looking happily from Hugh to Susanna, and Susanna’s affectionate glance in return, felt chastened. There was no less sorrow here than anywhere else: that could not, in the quietness of Hugh’s office, have been made more plain.

  Our way lay through some of the best streets of Villette, streets brightly lit, and far more lively now than at high noon. How brilliant seemed the shops! How glad, gay, and abundant flowed the tide of life along the broad pavement! While I looked, the thought of the Rue Fossette came across me – of the walled-in garden and schoolhouse, and of the dark, vast ‘classes’where, as at this very hour, it was my wont to wander all solitary, gazing at the stars through the high, blindless windows …

  Is it Susanna, or is it myself? thought Harriet, surprising herself. Which of us, all solitary, is wandering in that walled-in place?

  A few drops of rain began to fall. Ahead, the others quickened their pace, Hugh turning to call to her: ‘It’s on the next corner, okay?’