‘Calm enough. Foreigners were leaving, of course. The official who examined our passports at Dover said: “The first today”.’
Inchcape took a seat. ‘Well’ – he frowned at Clarence – ‘sit down, sit down,’ but there was nowhere for Clarence to sit.
A chair was brought from a neighbouring table but Clarence remained standing. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘I only came to say “Hallo”.’
‘Sit down.’ Inchcape impatiently slapped the chair seat and Clarence sat. When all the party was settled, Inchcape surveyed it, drawing down the corners of his lips in ridicule of the announcement he had to make. ‘I’ve just been put in charge of British propaganda in the Balkans,’ he said. ‘An official appointment.’
‘Why, splendid!’ exclaimed Guy.
‘Umph! It’ll lead to a rearrangement of duties, of course. You,’ he nodded to Guy, ‘will take over the English Department – a much reduced department, needless to say. You can get some of the local teachers of English to give you a hand. I’ll remain in charge; all you’ll have to do my dear fellow is work.’ He pushed Guy’s shoulder in humorous dismissal, then turned to Clarence: ‘We’re opening a propaganda bureau in the Calea Victoriei opposite the rival establishment. You will be required to bring out a news sheet.’ He smiled at Clarence but did not attempt to touch him. Clarence, tilted back from the table, his hands in his pockets, his chin on his chest, was not responsive. He seemed to be rejecting patronage with an uneasy air of ease. ‘You’ll have plenty of other jobs to do, of course.’
Clarence said slowly: ‘I’m not at all sure I can take on this sort of work. I’m seconded from the British Council. The Council is purely cultural and Lord Lloyd …’
‘I’ll deal with Lloyd.’ Inchcape jerked upright and looked about him. ‘Where’s the waiter? What about a drink?’ He turned his neat Napoleonic face towards a waiter, who, conscious of having neglected the table, now sprang on to the platform with exaggerated alacrity.
When their order had been given, Harriet said to Inchcape: ‘So you think we shall stay here?’
‘Why should we not?’
Guy said: ‘Woolley stopped us earlier this evening and tried to order Harriet home.’
Inchcape, eyes and nostrils distended, looked from Guy to Harriet and back again: ‘Woolley took it upon himself to give you orders?’
Enjoying Inchcape’s indignation, Harriet said: ‘He said that he is the leader of the English colony.’
‘He did, did he? The old fool’s in his second childhood. He spends his days in the bar at the Golf Club getting sustenance out of a bottle, like a baby. In his dotage; his anecdotage, I’d say. Ha!’ Inchcape gave a laugh, cheered by his own wit, then he fell to brooding and, after a pause, said: ‘Leader of the English colony forsooth! I’ll show him who’s leader if he tries to order my men about.’
Guy and Clarence exchanged smiles.
Harriet asked Inchcape: ‘If there were an invasion, if we had to leave here in a hurry, where would we go?’
Inchcape, still annoyed, answered shortly: ‘Turkey, I suppose.’
‘And from there?’
‘Oh!’ His tone became milder. ‘Make our way through Syria to the Middle East.’ He assumed his old joking manner. ‘Or we might try a little trek across Persia and Afghanistan to India.’ But he still spoke grudgingly. He interrupted himself to say: ‘But there’ll be no invasion. The Germans have better things to do with their troops than spread them out over Eastern Europe. They’ll need all they’ve got to hold the Western front.’
Clarence stuck out his lower lip. He ‘hmmd’ a bit before remarking in a casual tone: ‘Nevertheless, the situation is serious. I bumped into Foxy Leverett today and he advised me to keep my bags packed.’
‘Then you’ll keep them packed a long time.’ Inchcape now shrugged the matter off. He might have been dealing with a junior-school fracas of which he had had enough.
The piccolo arrived, a scrap of a boy, laden with bottles, glasses and plates. Breathing loudly, he set the table.
Glancing up, Harriet found Clarence’s gaze fixed on her. He looked away at once but he had caught her attention. She noted his long, lean face with its long nose, and felt it unsatisfactory. Unsatisfactory and unsatisfied. As she assessed him, his eyes came, rather furtively, back to her and now he found her gazing at him. He flushed slightly and jerked his face away again.
She smiled to herself.
Guy said: ‘I asked Sophie to join us here.’
‘Why, I wonder?’ Inchcape murmured.
‘She’s very depressed about the war.’
‘Imagining, no doubt, that it was declared with the sole object of depressing her.’
Suddenly all the perturbation of the garden was gathered into an eruption of applause. The name of the singer Florica was passed from table to table.
Florica, in her long black and white skirts, was posed like a bird, a magpie, in the orchestra cage. When the applause died out, she jerked forward in a bow, then, opening her mouth, gave a high, violent gypsy howl. The audience stirred. Harriet felt the sound pass like a shock down her spine.
The first howl was followed by a second, sustained at a pitch that must within a few years (so Inchcape later assured the table) destroy her vocal chords. People sitting near Ionescu glanced at him and at his women. Sprawled sideways in his seat, he stared at the singer and went on picking his teeth. The women remained impassive as the dead.
Florica, working herself into a fury in the cage, seemed to be made of copper wire. She had the usual gypsy thinness and was as dark as an Indian. When she threw back her head, the sinews moved in her throat: the muscles moved as her lean arms swept the air. The light flashed over her hair, that was strained back, glossy, from her round, glossy brow. Singing there among the plump women of the audience, she was like a starved wild kitten spitting at cream-fed cats. The music sank and her voice dropped to a snarl. It rose and, twisting her body as in rage, clenching her fists and striking back her skirts, she finished on an elemental screech that was sustained above the tremendous outburst of applause.
When it was over, people blinked as though they had survived a tornado. Only Ionescu and his women continued, to all appearance, unmoved.
Inchcape, not himself applauding, pointed in amusement at Guy, who, crying ‘Bravo, bravo!’ was leaning forward to bang his hands together. ‘What energy,’ smiled Inchcape. ‘How wonderful to be young!’ When there was silence again, he turned to Harriet and said: ‘She was a failure when she toured abroad, but here she’s just what they like. She expresses all the exasperation that’s eating these people up.’ As he turned in his seat, he suddenly saw Ionescu’s party. ‘Oh ho!’ he said, ‘Ionescu complete with harem. I wonder how his wife enjoyed the performance.’
‘You think,’ Harriet asked him, ‘she knows about Florica and her husband?’
‘Dear me, yes. She probably has on record everything they have ever said or done during every moment they have spent together.’
To encourage him, Harriet made a murmur of artless interest. Inchcape settled down to instruct her. He said: ‘Rumanian convention requires her apparent unawareness. Morality here is based not on not doing, but on recognising what is being done.’
They had been served with a rich goose-liver paté, dark with truffles and dressed with clarified butter. Inchcape swallowed this down in chunks, talking through it as though it were a flavourless impediment to self-expression.
‘Take, for instance, the behaviour of these women in company. If anyone makes an improper joke, they simply pretend not to understand. While the men roar with laughter, the women sit poker faced. It’s ridiculous to watch. This behaviour, that fools no one, saves the men having to restrict their conversation when women are present.’
‘But the young women, the students, don’t they rebel against this sort of hypocrisy?’
‘Dear me, no. They are the most conventional jeunes filles in the world, and the most knowing. “Sly”, Miss
Austen would have called them. If, during a reading in class, we come on some slight indecency, the men roar their enjoyment, the girls sit blank. If they were shocked, they would not look shocked: if they were innocent, they would look bewildered. As it is, their very blankness betrays their understanding.’ Inchcape gave a snort of disgust, not, apparently, at the convention but at the absurdity of the sex on which it was imposed.
‘How do they become so knowledgeable so young?’ asked Harriet, half listening to the talk between Clarence and Guy, in which she caught more than once the name of Sophie. Clarence, half in the party and half out of it, was taking a bite or two of paté.
‘Oh,’ Inchcape answered Harriet, ‘these Rumanian homes are hot-beds of scandal and gossip. It’s all very Oriental. The pretence of innocence is to keep their price up. They develop early and they’re married off early, usually to some rich old lecher whose only interest is in the girl’s virginity. When that’s over and done with, they divorce. The girl sets up her own establishment, and, having the status of divorcée, she is free to do what she chooses.’
Harriet laughed. ‘How then is the race carried on?’
‘There’s a quota of normal marriages, of course. But surely you’ve heard the story of the Rumanian walking with his German friend down Calea Victoriei – the Rumanian naming the price of every woman they meet? “Good heavens,” says the German, “are there no honest women here?” “Certainly,” replies the Rumanian, “but – very expensive!”’
Harriet laughed, and Inchcape, with a satisfied smile, gazed over the restaurant and complained: ‘I’ve never before seen this place in such a hubbub.’
‘It’s the war,’ said Clarence. ‘Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we may be starving to death.’
‘Fiddlesticks!’
The second course arrived, a duck dressed with orange. As this was being carved, Inchcape said quietly to Harriet: ‘I see your friend Sophie Oresanu in the distance.’
Not avoiding the underlying question, Harriet replied: ‘She is not my friend. I have never met her. What is she?’
‘Rather an advanced young lady for these parts. Her circumstances are peculiar. Her parents divorced and Sophie lived with her mother. When the mother died, Sophie was left to live alone. That is unusual here. It gives her considerable freedom. She worked for a while on a student’s magazine – one of those mildly anti-fascist, half-baked publications that appear from time to time. It lasted about six months. Now she thinks the Germans have marked her down. She’s taking a law degree.’
‘Really!’ Harriet was impressed by the law degree.
‘It doesn’t mean anything here,’ said Inchcape. ‘They all take law degrees. That qualifies them to become second assistant stamp-lickers in the civil service.’
‘Guy says the Rumanian girls are intelligent.’
‘They’re quick. But all Rumanians are much of a much-ness. They can absorb facts but can’t do anything with them. A lot of stuffed geese, I call them. An uncreative people.’ While speaking, he kept his eye on a young woman who now mounted the platform and, stopping at the table and ignoring the others present, stared mournfully at Guy. He, talking, failed to notice her.
In a plaintive, little voice she said: ‘’Allo!’
‘Why, hello!’ Guy leapt to his feet and kissed her on either cheek. Sophie suffered the embrace with a slight smile, taking in the company as she did so.
Guy turned cheerfully to Harriet: ‘Darling, you must meet Sophie. Sophie, my wife.’
As Sophie looked at Harriet, her expression suggested she was at a loss to understand not only how he had acquired a wife, but how he had acquired such a wife. She eventually gave a nod and looked away. She was a pretty enough girl, dark like most Rumanians, too full in the cheeks. Her chief beauty was her figure. Looking at Sophie’s well developed bosom, Harriet felt at a disadvantage. Perhaps Sophie’s shape would not last, but it was enviable while it lasted.
Guy looked for another chair.
‘Here,’ said Clarence, ‘take mine. I must go.’
‘No, no.’ Guy tried to hold him, but, after pausing uncertainly for a while, Clarence suddenly darted off.
‘Now where’s he gone?’ Inchcape stared after Clarence, then gave Sophie a frown of annoyance, making it clear he thought her a poor exchange. Ignoring him, Sophie watched Guy reproachfully. It was some time before he noticed this, then he said:
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Nothing to be discussed in public.’ After a pause, she added: ‘Ah, this war! Such a terrible thing! It has made me so sad. When I go to bed at night, I am thinking of it: when I wake, I am thinking of it. Always I am thinking of it.’
Inchcape filled a glass and put it in front of her. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘have a drink and cheer up.’ When Sophie ignored the wine, Inchcape turned his back on her and indicated the diners below. ‘Down there,’ he said, ‘unless I’m much mistaken, there’s a fellow who was at the Crillon when I stayed there some years ago. A Prince Yakimov. He used to be a very well known figure in Paris society.’
While Inchcape spoke, Harriet heard Sophie’s voice, uneven with tears: ‘How can he say to me “Cheer up”? Is this a time to cheer up? It is very well, the “stiff upper lip”, if you are not sensitive. But me – I am very sensitive.’ Guy was trying to distract her with the menu. What would she eat? It was difficult to decide. She had just come from a party where she had eaten this and that; and was not hungry but perhaps she would have a little smoked salmon.
‘Yakimov?’ Harriet tried to sort that name out of her memory. ‘Which do you mean?’
‘There, dining with Dobson. Haven’t you met Dobson? Yakimov’s the long, lean fellow, face like a camel. Not, I may say, that he’s one for going long without a drink.’
‘I’ve seen him before. He came on our train.’
This concentration of interest elsewhere was too much for Guy. Breaking through a new plaint from Sophie, he asked: ‘What are you talking about?’
‘A man called Yakimov,’ said Inchcape. ‘Something of a raconteur and joker. There’s a story about his painting the windows black.’
Harriet asked: ‘Which windows? Why?’
‘I’ve no idea. Being half Irish and half White Russian, he’s said to have a peculiarly English sense of humour.’
The three of them watched Yakimov, who, intent upon his food, was not recounting at that moment.
Petulantly Sophie broke in on them to ask: ‘What is a peculiarly English sense of humour?’
‘A pleasant humour, I suppose,’ said Guy, ‘a good-humoured humour. Here a painful boot in the arse is called a Rumanian kick, and a dunt with the knee is called the English kick. That’s the idea.’
At the word ‘arse’ Sophie’s face went blank, but only Harriet noticed it.
Guy said: ‘I’d like to meet Yakimov. Let’s ask them over.’
‘Oh,’ Inchcape protested, ‘do we want Dobson here?’
Guy said: ‘I don’t mind Dobson. He entered the diplomatic service so late in life, he is still reasonably human.’
‘An amateur diplomat, you might say. Drifted into the service after a rich and idle youth. I don’t dislike him myself. If it costs him nothing, he’d as soon be pleasant as unpleasant.’
Guy tore a sheet from a notebook and scribbled on it while Inchcape, having no part in the invitation, looked the other way. The note was taken by the waiter. Dobson wrote a line on it and sent it back.
‘They’re coming for coffee,’ said Guy.
‘Ah!’ Inchcape let his breath out and helped himself to wine.
Before retiring to bed that afternoon, Yakimov had sent to the station for his cases and handed most of his clothing over to the hotel valet.
Now, sauntering behind Dobson across the restaurant, his yellow waistcoat newly cleaned, the fine line of his check suit accentuated by skilful pressing, he had an air of elegance, even if rather eccentric elegance. When he reached the table to which he w
as being led, he smiled benignly upon it. After he had been introduced to the table, he picked up Harriet’s hand, kissed it and said: ‘How delightful, when one has lived too long abroad, to meet an English beauty.’
‘I’m told you have a peculiarly English sense of humour,’ said Harriet.
‘Dear me! Has poor Yaki’s reputation preceded him?’ Yakimov showed his gratification so simply, it dissipated Harriet’s first suspicion of him – a suspicion based on nothing she could define. He repeated: ‘A peculiarly English sense of humour! I am flattered,’ and he looked to see if Dobson had overheard the tribute, but Dobson was talking to Guy. He said: ‘I was delighted to hear you chaps were back, but surprised they let you come.’ His nervous explosion of laughter softened his remark, but Inchcape’s mouth turned down.
Dobson, who had walked trippingly, carrying himself so that his back line curved in at the waist and his front line curved out, was in young middle age, plump, dimpled, pink and white as a cupid. He was very bald but over his pate were pools of baby-soft fluff left by the receding hair.
Guy said: ‘I was ordered back here. The London office says we’re in a reserved occupation.’
‘So you are,’ Dobson agreed, ‘but they don’t think what a worry it is for us chaps now having a lot of British nationals here without diplomatic protection.’ His laughter exploded again, joking and tolerant, but Inchcape was not amused.
He said: ‘I imagine that worry is part of your job.’
Dobson jerked his head up, discomforted at being taken so seriously. He laughed again and Harriet understood why he seemed to Guy ‘reasonably human’. This constant nervous laughter rippling over his occupational self-possession gave the impression he was more approachable than his kind. At the same time, she realised he was more than a little drunk. She decided he might be an easy acquaintance, but would not be easy to know.
Chairs were becoming scarce now. Guy had to tip the waiter before he would set out in search of more. When two arrived, Dobson lay on his as though about to slide off it, and stared at a slip of paper he held in his hand. It seemed so to bewilder him that Harriet looked over his shoulder. He was studying his dinner bill.
The Balkan Trilogy Page 5