Guy asked Dugdale what he imagined would be Germany’s next move.
Dugdale answered in an authoritative tone: ‘In my opinion Germany has made her last move. Russia is the one we have to fear.’
Yakimov, his mouth full, mumbled agreement.
‘The next victim will be Sweden,’ said Dugdale, ‘then, of course, Norway and Denmark. After that the Balkans, the Mediterranean, North Africa – what’s to stop them? The Allies and the Axis will watch helplessly, each unable to make a move for fear of bringing the other in on the side of Russia.’
Guy began to say: ‘This is absurd. Russia has enough to do inside her own frontiers. What would she want …’
He was interrupted by Nikko, his brows raised in alarm. ‘But Rumania would fight,’ he said. ‘And the Turks, too. They would fight. At least I think so.’
‘The Turks!’ Dugdale put a small potato into his mouth and swallowed it contemptuously. ‘We give them money to buy armaments, and what do they spend it on? Education.’
‘Hopeless people!’ Inchcape grinned at Clarence, who grinned back. Harriet was thankful they had, at last, decided to come down on the side of flippancy.
Despina had cut more turkey and was carrying the large serving dish round again. When she came to Yakimov, she held it so that the white meat was out of his reach.
‘Just a soupçon, dear girl,’ he said with an air of wheedling intimacy and, stretching out his arms, he again took most of the breast. Only a few vegetables remained. He took them all. Despina, hissing through her teeth, attracted Harriet’s attention and pointed to his plate. Harriet waved her on. Only Yakimov, intent on his food, remained unaware of Despina’s indignation. He ate at speed, wiped his mouth with his napkin and looked around to see what was coming next.
Guy, having anticipated an evening of Yakimov’s wit, now tried to encourage him to talk by telling stories himself. When his stories were exhausted, he started on limericks, occasionally pausing to ask Yakimov if he could not think of some himself. Yakimov shook his head. Despina having brought in a large mince pie, he could attend to nothing else.
Guy searched his mind for limericks and remembered one that he thought would seem particularly funny to the company. It concerned the morals of a British diplomat in the Balkans.
‘That,’ said Dugdale coldly, ‘seems to me in rather bad taste.’
‘I couldn’t agree more,’ said Yakimov heartily.
For some minutes there was no sound but that of Yakimov bolting down pie. He finished his helping before Despina had completed serving the others. ‘Hah!’ he said with satisfaction and, unimpaired, looked to her for more.
As soon as was possible, Harriet motioned Bella to retire with her to the bedroom. There, not caring whether she was overheard or not, she raged: ‘How dare he snub Guy! The gross snob, wolfing down our food, and bringing that dyspeptic skeleton with him. When he gave his tremendous parties – if he ever gave them, which I doubt – he would not have dreamt of inviting us. Now he entertains his friends at our expense.’
Bella was quick to echo this indignation: ‘If I were you, my dear, I wouldn’t ask him here again.’
‘Certainly not,’ said Harriet, dramatic in anger; ‘this is the first and last time he sets foot in my house.’
When the women returned to the room, the men were gathered round the electric fire. Guy was helping Yakimov to brandy. Dugdale, unperturbed, was sprawling in the arm-chair again. At the entry of the women, he lifted himself slightly and was about to drop back, when Harriet pushed the chair from him and offered it to Bella. He took himself to another chair with the expression of one overlooking a breach of good manners.
Inchcape smiled maliciously at Harriet, then turned to Yakimov and asked him: ‘Are you going on later to Princess Teodorescu’s party?’
Yakimov lifted his nose from his glass. ‘I might,’ he said, ‘but those parties come a bit rough on your poor old Yaki.’
To Harriet’s annoyance, Guy was still trying to persuade Yakimov to talk. Yakimov seemed to be rousing himself, to be searching for jests through the fog of repletion, when there was a ring at the front door. Dubedat was admitted.
He made no concessions to the occasion. He had kept on his sheepskin jacket and to his personal smell was added the smell of badly cured skin. Looking, so Harriet thought, dirtier than ever, he surveyed the table grimly, aware the others had dined here and he had not.
At the sight of this new arrival, Dugdale rose and said he must go.
‘Oh, no.’ Guy tried to detain him. ‘You have plenty of time to catch your train. You must have another brandy.’
Guy began rapidly splashing brandy from glass to glass, but Dugdale stood firm. He had, he said, to collect his baggage from the cloak-room.
‘Well, before you go,’ said Guy, ‘we must have “Auld Lang Syne”.’
Several people informed him that that was sung at New Year, but Guy said: ‘Never mind.’ His enthusiasm was such, the others rose and Dugdale let himself be drawn into the circle. When he had retrieved his hands, he said in a businesslike way: ‘Now, my overcoat.’
While he was wrapping himself up, Yakimov sat down again and refilled his glass. Harriet, noticing this, said: ‘I imagine you will see your friend to the station.’
‘Oh, no, dear girl. Yaki isn’t too well …’
‘I think you should.’
Even Yakimov recognised this as an invitation to go. Despondently, he gulped down the brandy and let himself be put into his coat.
When he and Dugdale had gone, Harriet and Bella freely expressed their indignation – an indignation that completely bewildered Guy.
‘What are you two talking about?’ he asked.
When they told him how he had been insulted, he burst out laughing. ‘I doubt whether Yaki even knew what he had said.’
Harriet and Bella would have none of this, and Nikko backed them. While the other men sat complacently uninvolved in the situation, the two women insisted that he should never speak to Yakimov again.
Guy sat in silence, smiling slightly and letting the storm pass over his head. When at last it died down, Clarence said from the back of the room: ‘Yakimov came to the Relief Centre the other day presenting himself as a refugee from Poland. I lent him ten thousand.’
‘Oh,’ said Guy easily, ‘he’ll pay it back.’
Down in the street, Yakimov said: ‘Seems to me I was given the boot. Can’t for the life of me think why.’
Dugdale showed no interest. Calling a taxi, he said discouragingly: ‘I suppose you want to be dropped somewhere?’
‘Athénée Palace, dear boy. Feel I ought to drop in on Princess T.’ As they drove across the square, he added: ‘I wonder, dear boy – end of the month and all that; bit short of the Ready – could you lend poor Yaki a leu or two?’
‘No,’ said Dugdale, ‘my last five hundred went on tea.’
‘If you have any odd pennies or francs …’
Dugdale did not reply. When the taxi stopped, he opened the door and waited for Yakimov to descend.
Yakimov on the pavement said: ‘Delightful day. Thank you for everything. See you when you’re back this way. Yaki’s turn next.’
Dugdale slammed the door on his speech and directed the taxi on. Yakimov pushed against the hotel door: the door revolved and he came out again. He stood for a moment looking after the taxi. Could he have brought himself to admit his address, he might have been driven all the way home.
He set out to walk. The Siberian wind, plunging and shrilling, stung his ears and tugged at the skirts of his coat. As he put up his collar and buried in it his long icicle of a nose, he murmured: ‘Poor Yaki’s getting too old for his job.’
Soon after the last of the Christmas guests had gone, the telephone rang in the Pringles’ flat. Guy answered it. The caller was Sophie.
Sophie had not arrived, as expected, after dinner. Harriet went into the bedroom and left Guy to talk to her.
Sitting at her dressing-table, Har
riet heard Guy’s voice, concerned, solicitous, apparently pleading, and it renewed in her the anger Yakimov had aroused. Bella had said if she were Harriet, she would put a stop to that relationship. This, Harriet felt, was the moment to do it. She went into the sitting room and asked: ‘What is the matter?’
Guy was looking grave. He put his hand over the mouthpiece and said: ‘Sophie’s in a state of depression. She wants me to go over and see her. Alone.’
‘At this time of night? Tell her it’s out of the question.’
‘She’s threatening to do something desperate.’
‘Such as?’
‘Jump out of a window, or take an overdose of sleeping-tablets.’
‘Let me speak to her.’ Harriet took the receiver and said into it: ‘What is the matter, Sophie? You are being very silly. You know if you really intended to do anything like that, you would do it and not talk about it.’
There was a long pause before Sophie’s voice came, tear-fully: ‘I will jump if Guy doesn’t come. My mind is made up.’
‘Then go ahead and do it.’
‘Do what?’
‘Why, jump, of course.’
Sophie gulped with horror. She said: ‘I hate you. I hated you from the first. You are a cruel girl. A girl without heart.’ There came the thud of her receiver being thrown down.
‘Now,’ said Guy severely, ‘I shall have to go. There’s no knowing what she may do if I don’t.’
‘If you go,’ said Harriet, ‘you won’t find me here when you come back.’
‘You are being absurd,’ said Guy. ‘I expected more sense from you.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I married you. You are part of myself. I expect from you what I expect from myself.’
‘You mean you are taking me for granted? Then you are a fool. I won’t tolerate any more of this Sophie nonsense. If you go, I leave.’
‘Don’t be a baby.’ He went into the hall and started to put on his coat, but his movements were uncertain. When he was ready, he stood irresolute, looking at her in worried enquiry. She felt a flicker of triumph that he realised he did not know her after all, then she choked in her throat. She turned away.
‘Darling.’ He came back to the room and put his arms around her. ‘If it upsets you, of course I won’t go.’
At that, she said, ‘But you must go. I can’t have you worrying about Sophie all night.’
‘Well!’ He looked into the hall and then looked at Harriet. ‘I feel I ought to go.’
‘I know,’ she said, solving the problem as she had intended to solve it all along. ‘We’ll go together.’
The front door of Sophie’s house was unlatched. The door into her flat was propped open with a book. When she heard Guy’s step, she called in a sad little voice: ‘Come in, chéri.’ As he pushed wide the door, Harriet, behind him, could see Sophie sitting up in bed, a pink silk shawl round her shoulders. On the table beside her the picture that had been face downwards on Harriet’s first visit now stood upright. It was a photograph of Guy.
Despite the smallness of her down-drooping smile, Sophie was much restored. She put her head on one side, sniffed and began to speak – then she noticed Harriet. Her expression changed. She turned on Guy.
‘Your wife is a monster,’ she said.
Guy laughed at this statement, but it brought Harriet to a stop in the doorway. She said: ‘I’ll wait for you downstairs.’
She waited for about five minutes in the hallway of the house, then went out into the street. There she started to walk quickly, scarcely aware of the direction in which she went. For the first few hundred yards, feeling neither cold nor fear of the empty streets, she was carried on by a sense of injury that Guy should choose, after such a remark, to stay with Sophie: that he was, in fact, still with her.
Harriet was resolved not to go home. She found herself in the Calea Victoriei moving rapidly towards the Dâmboviţa, then she asked herself where she could go. In this country, where women went almost nowhere unescorted, her appearance, at this hour, luggageless, in an hotel would rouse the deepest suspicion. She might even be refused a room. She thought of the people she knew here – Bella, Inchcape, Clarence – and was disinclined to go to any of them with complaints about Guy. Inchcape might be sympathetic but would have no wish to be involved. Clarence would misunderstand the situation. Wherever she went, she would take with her an accusation of failure against Guy’s way of life. She reflected that for her, and for Clarence, life was an involute process: they reserved themselves – and for what? With Guy it was a matter to be lived.
Contemplating in Clarence her own willingness to escape from living, she felt a revulsion from it. She had, she knew, done her worst with Sophie. She had made no attempt to flatter, she had not admitted herself to be vulnerable, she had not wanted Sophie’s assistance. She had made none of those emotional appeals to which Sophie, once put into a position of power, might have responded with emotion.
Had she, she wondered, lacked charity? Had Sophie had some justification in seeing her as a monster?
She had withheld herself. Now she could not defend herself. She turned and walked slowly back to Sophie’s house. She arrived at the doorstep as Guy came out. He took her hand and tucked it under his arm.
‘That was nice of you,’ he said.
‘What happened?’
‘I told her not to be ridiculous. She really is as big an ass as Bella, and she’s a great deal more of a nuisance.’
PART THREE
The Snow
14
The New Year brought the heavy snow. Day after day it clotted the air, gentle, silent, persistent as time. Those who walked abroad – and these now were only servants and peasants – were enclosed in flakes. The traffic crept about, feeling its way as in a fog. When the fall thinned, the distances, visible once more, were the colour of a bruise.
Those who stayed indoors were disturbed by the outer quiet. It was as though the city had ceased to breathe. After a few days of this, Harriet, hemmed in by her surroundings, ventured down the street, but her claustrophobia persisted outside in the twilit blanket of snow, and she lost her way. She returned to the flat and telephoned Bella, who suggested they go together to Mavrodaphne’s. Bella called for her in a taxi.
The two women had met several times since Christmas and a relationship that neither would have contemplated in England was beginning to establish itself. Harriet was becoming used to the limitations of Bella’s conversation and did not give it much attention. Bella was easy, if unstimulating, company, and Harriet was glad, in the prevailing strangeness, of a companion from a familiar world.
In the café, while Bella described the latest misdoings of her servants, Harriet gazed at the café window, through which there was nothing to be seen but the mazing, down-soft drift of snow. Occasionally a shadow passed through it, scarcely distinguishable as a cab, or a closed trăsură, or a peasant with a sack over his head. More often than not the cabs stopped at Mavrodaphne’s. The occupants, having sped the pavements, escaped the clamour of the beggars in the porch and entered the heady warmth with the modish air of hauteur. Turning their backs on the barbarities of their city, they saw themselves in Rome or Paris or, best of all, New York.
Bella raised her voice against Harriet’s inattention. ‘And,’ she said, ‘I have to keep all the food locked up.’
Recalled by Bella’s aggravated tone, Harriet said: ‘Why bother? Food is so cheap here. It’s less trouble to trust them.’ She regretted this remark as she made it. Tolerance, after all, should come of generosity, not expediency. Bella disapproved it for a different reason. She said:
‘That attitude is unfair to other employers. Besides, one gets sick of their pilfering. If you’d had as much as I’ve had …’
When advising and informing the newcomer, Bella was as smug as an elder schoolgirl patronising a younger. Now she was in the presence of wealthy Rumanians, she reverted to refinement. Harriet could hear in her voice – especially in phra
ses like ‘you daren’t give them an inch’, and ‘the better you treat them the more they take advantage’ – the exact inflections that had once made her aunt’s dicta so irritating. For some moments it recalled an odd sense of helplessness, then she suddenly interrupted it.
‘But what’s the cause of all this?’ she asked. ‘The poor aren’t born dishonest any more than we are.’
Bella looked startled. This was the first time Harriet had attempted to combat her. She tilted back her head and drew her fingers down her full, round throat. ‘I don’t know.’ She spoke rather sulkily. ‘All I know is, that’s what they’re like.’ She bridled slightly and a flush spread down her neck.
In the uncomfortable pause that followed, Harriet saw Sophie enter. Hoping for diversion, she sat up, prepared to greet the girl, feeling she had come to terms with her; but when she raised a hand, she realised that only she had come to terms. Sophie had not. Sweeping past, with the sad averted smile of one who has been mortally wounded, Sophie joined some women friends on the other side of the room.
Rather out of countenance, Harriet turned back to Bella, who, given time to reflect, was saying defensively: ‘I know things aren’t too good here. I noticed it myself when I first came, but you get used to it. You’ve got to, if you want to live here. You can’t let things upset you all the time. There’s nothing you can do about them. I mean, is there?’
Harriet shook her head. Bella was no reformer, but even if she had been prepared to beat out her brains against oppression, here she would not have changed anything. Having revealed her uncertainty in her situation, she looked rather shamefaced and for this reason Harriet warmed to her.
‘No one can do much,’ said Harriet. ‘Nothing short of a revolution could force these people to change things. But why should you accept their absurd conventions? You are an Englishwoman. You can do what you like.’
‘You know,’ confided Bella, ‘when we talked that afternoon you came to tea, I remembered how free I was before I came here. And next day I wanted some things and I thought, “Why shouldn’t I go out and get them myself?” and I just took a shopping-basket from the kitchen and went out with it in my hand. I met Doamna Popp and didn’t she stare!’ Bella gave one of her vigorous laughs and Harriet liked her the more. Bella had felt satisfaction in instructing Harriet, and Harriet might find satisfaction in releasing Bella. To Harriet it seemed that to have found a sound basis for friendship with anyone as different from herself as Bella was a triumph over her own natural limitations.
The Balkan Trilogy Page 19