The Balkan Trilogy

by Olivia Manning

  David waited until the end of Clarence’s performance before saying: ‘The Iron Gates? What does he imagine they are? Real gates? Perhaps they hope to blow up the rapids and block the navigable passage close to the right bank. The Germans would soon clear that up.’ He gave a snuffling and derisory laugh. ‘This is “cloak and dagger” stuff, of course. They take on these romantic old war-horses and say: “If you succeed, you’ll get no recognition. If you fail, you’ll take the consequences.” That makes them grit their teeth. They love it.’

  At this, Harriet could keep quiet no longer. She said: ‘But Guy would be hopeless at this sort of thing. If he tried to blow up the Iron Gates, he’d be more likely to blow up himself. As for Clarence – trust him to get out of it.’

  Reminded of her presence and startled by her outburst, Guy said: ‘Darling, you must not repeat a word of this to anyone. Promise.’

  ‘Who would I repeat it to?’

  Clarence said slowly: ‘Harriet is a bitch.’ After some moments, added reflectively: ‘I like bitches. You know where you are with them.’

  Harriet made no comment but she told herself she now knew what Clarence thought of her. The fantasy that had started on the day of Călinescu’s funeral was running its course. The situation had its attraction. It was like being offered a second personality. At the same time, seeing him as he lolled there, smugly smiling, she could have crossed the room and pushed him off the chair.

  David, too, must have been feeling something of this, for he said: ‘Let’s do something noteworthy.’

  He leant forward and smiled with reflective malice towards Clarence: ‘Let’s de-bag him!’ With a sudden, decided movement, he rose and began to advance on Clarence, stealthily, not wholly playfully. He gave a sideways glance at Harriet, knowing her an ally in this, and she jumped up at once, caught into the same impulse to ill-treat Clarence in some way.

  ‘Come on,’ she said to Guy and he was drawn into the assault.

  Clarence, his chair tilted back, sitting inert, with eyes closed, his head propped against the wall, seemed unaware that anything was happening until they were upon him, then, startled, he opened his eyes; his chair legs slipped and he went down, backwards, thumping his head against the floor. He gazed up at them, as though awakened from sleep, then, closing his eyes again, said dully: ‘What do I care?’

  Although meeting with no resistance, David pinned his victim determinedly down like one dealing with a marauder. There was something vindictive in his movements. Clarence might have been an old enemy cornered at last. Harriet flung herself on him and held him down by his shoulders.

  ‘Really!’ Clarence gasped, making a feeble, almost idiotic, effort to escape. As he wrenched one hand free and tried to push Harriet away, she bit his fingers making him howl. Only Guy was treating the whole thing as a joke.

  David began pulling off Clarence’s trousers. Weighty and very strong, he worked with the concentrated gravity of an executioner. On his instructions, Guy pulled the trousers over Clarence’s shoes. When they were off at last, David snatched at them and held them up in triumph. ‘What shall we do with them?’

  ‘Put them on the balcony,’ said Harriet. ‘Make him go out and get them.’

  Clarence lay still, feigning unconsciousness.

  As David went out on the balcony, the icy air came a moment into the room, then he returned and slammed-to the door. Sniggering, he said untruthfully: ‘I’ve thrown them into the street.’

  ‘What do I care?’ Clarence mumbled again.

  The force that had activated the others died as quickly as it had come. They sat around, watching Clarence as he lay in his underpants on the floor. When he did and said nothing, they started to talk among themselves and forgot about him.

  After a while he began getting himself upright in stages. When in a sitting position, he shook his head and sighed, then rose slowly and went out on to the balcony. He remained out there in the snow, in the mid-winter cold, while he put on his trousers, then he returned to the room, closed the glass doors carefully, bolted them and, without a word went out to the hall. The others had stopped talking. They listened to Clarence’s movements in the hall as he put on his coat. The front door shut quietly after him.

  There was a silence, then Harriet said: ‘What is the matter with us? Why did we do that?’

  ‘It was a joke,’ said Guy, though he did not sound sure of what he said.

  ‘Really, we behaved like children,’ Harriet said and it occurred to her that they were not, in fact, grown-up enough for the life they were living. She asked: ‘What is wrong with Clarence? He told me once that he fails everyone.’

  With ponderous irony, David said: ‘Someone should dissect him and remake him nearer to the heart’s desire.’

  Guy said: ‘I might be able to do it, if I had the time.’

  ‘Harriet could do it, I think.’ David smiled slyly at her.

  Harriet grew pink, realising she had felt a pitying sympathy for Clarence as she had watched him picking himself up and taking himself so quietly, so unoffendingly, out of the flat. Both David and Guy were much younger than he and between them there was the understanding of an old friendship. Clarence could not have remained untouched by the fact the two had combined against him. She felt sorry for him, yet she disowned him, saying casually: ‘I don’t want to remake him. Why should I?’ and they went on to talk of other things.

  16

  The next morning, when alone in the flat, Harriet took out the envelope Guy had given her and opened it by rolling a pencil underneath the flap. Inside there was a print of a section through – what? An artesian well? Or, more likely, an oil well. Something else to be blown up. A blockage in the pipe was tagged with the one word: ‘Detonator’. There was no written explanation of the diagram. She resealed the envelope and put it back into the drawer.

  She heard no more about the Force until a few weeks later, when Guy telephoned from the University to say he would not be home for supper. He had been called to a meeting.

  ‘Not one of Sheppy’s meetings, I hope?’ said Harriet.

  Guy admitted it was, and added quickly that Clarence, who had refused to attend, had offered to take Harriet out to dinner. That, said Guy, would be nice for her. Clarence would take her to the new restaurant, Le Jardin, and Guy would meet them both later, in the English Bar.

  Clarence called for Harriet while she was listening to the news. The Mannerheim Line had been breached but, except for the fighting on the Karelian peninsula, the war was at a standstill.

  Clarence listened to such news as there was with a rather stern expression. He seemed to feel strain at being alone with Harriet, and Harriet, enjoying his embarrassment, talked vivaciously. She said that although there were people who still believed that ‘something must happen soon’, a good many now regarded the war as practically over. Anyway, no one gave it much thought these days. It had become like a background noise that could attract attention only by its cessation. The Jews were so confident, the black-market rate for sterling was lower than it had been before war started.

  Clarence listened to all this with an occasional murmur, then picked up the book she had been reading. It was one of the D. H. Lawrence novels on which Guy was lecturing that term.

  ‘Kangaroo,’ he read out scornfully. ‘These modern novelists! Why is it that not one of them is really good enough? This stuff, for instance …’

  ‘I wouldn’t call Lawrence a modern novelist.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’ Clarence flipped impatiently through the pages. ‘All these dark gods, this phallic stuff, this – this fascism! I can’t stand it.’ He threw down the book and stared accusingly at her.

  She took the book up. ‘Supposing you skip the guff, as you call it! Supposing you read what is left, simply as writing.’ She read aloud one of the passages Guy had marked. It was the description of the sunset over Manly Beach: ‘The long green rollers of the Pacific’, ‘the star-white foam’, ‘the dusk-green sea glimmered over with
smoky rose’.

  Clarence groaned through it, appalled at what was being imposed on him. ‘I know!’ he said, in agony, when she stopped. ‘All that colour stuff – it’s just so many words strung together. Anyone could do it.’

  Harriet re-read the passage through to herself. For some reason, it did not seem so vivid and exciting as it had done before Clarence condemned it. She was inclined to blame him for that. She turned on him: ‘Have you ever tried to write? Do you know how difficult it is?’

  Well, yes. Clarence admitted he had once wanted to be a writer. He did know it was difficult. He had given up trying because, after all, what was the point in being a second-rate writer? If one could not be a great writer – a Tolstoy, a Flaubert, a Stendhal – what was the point in being a writer at all?

  Disconcerted, Harriet said lamely: ‘If everyone felt like that, there wouldn’t be much to read.’

  ‘What is there to read, anyway? Rubbish, most of it. Myself, I read nothing but detective novels.’

  ‘I suppose you do read Tolstoy and Flaubert?’

  ‘I did once. Years ago.’

  ‘You could read them again.’

  Clarence gave another moan. ‘Why should one bother?’

  ‘What about Virginia Woolf?’

  ‘I think Orlando almost the worst book of the century.’

  ‘Really! And To the Lighthouse?’

  Clarence wriggled in weary exasperation. ‘It’s all right – but all her writing is so diffused, so feminine, so sticky. It has such an odd smell about it. It’s just like menstruation.’

  Startled by the originality of Clarence’s criticism, Harriet looked at him with more respect. ‘And Somerset Maugham?’ she ventured.

  ‘Goodness me, Harry! He’s simply the higher journalism.’

  No one else had ever called Harriet ‘Harry’ and she did not like the abbreviation. She reacted sharply, saying: ‘Maybe Somerset Maugham isn’t very good, but the others are. So much creative effort has gone into their work – and all you can say is “Really!” and condemn them out of hand.’ She rose and put on her coat and fur cap. ‘I think we should go,’ she said.

  Le Jardin, recently opened in a Biedermeier mansion, was the most fashionable of Bucharest restaurants and would remain so until the first gloss passed from its decorations. Situated in a little snow-packed square at the end of the Boulevard Brăteanu, its blue neon sign shone out cold upon the cold and glittering world. The sky was a delicate grey-blue, clear except for a few tufts of cirrus cloud. The moon was rising behind the restaurant roof, on which the snow, a foot thick, gleamed like powdered glass.

  The interior of Le Jardin was the same silver-blue as the out-of-doors. The house had been gutted to make one vast room, and the proprietor, breaking away from the tradition of crimson and gilt, had trimmed it in silver with hangings of powder-blue. These cool colours, more fitted for summer than winter, were made appropriate by the sultry warmth of the room. The restaurant’s décor had been described in the press as ‘lux nebun’ – a challenge to the war world in which it had opened. But there, Harriet noted on arrival, was the usual Rumanian sight of a fat official, with his hat on, packing cream cakes into his mouth.

  As Harriet passed between the tables with Clarence, there was a little murmur of comment: first, that she should make this public appearance with someone other than her husband, then the common complaint that English teachers – they were all regarded as ‘teachers’ – could afford to come to a restaurant of this class. In Rumania a teacher was one of the lowest-paid members of the lower-middle class, earning perhaps four thousand lei a month. Here was proof that the English teachers were not teachers at all but, as everyone suspected, spies.

  When Harriet and Clarence were settled on one of the blue velvet banquettes, Harriet returned to the subject of Clarence’s writing. For how long had he tried to write? What had he achieved? To which publisher had he sent the results? Clarence squirmed under these questions, shrugged and was evasive, then admitted he had produced very little. He had planned a novel and written six pages of synopsis, very carefully worked out, but it had got no further than that. He could not visualise scenes. He did not know how to bring his characters to life.

  ‘So you gave up? Then what did you do?’ Harriet asked, for Clarence was nearly thirty and must have some sort of career behind him.

  ‘I joined the British Council.’

  ‘You had a good degree?’

  ‘Quite good.’

  He had been sent to Warsaw. Harriet questioned him about his two years there. Where Guy’s memories would have been all of the conditions of the country and its people, Clarence’s memories were personal, tender and sad. His face became wistful as he talked. Harriet, realising there was about him something poignant and unfulfilled, felt in sympathy with him.

  In Poland he had fallen in love for the first time. He said: ‘It’s extraordinary to look back on the things that used to be important to one. I can remember a night in Warsaw … I can remember standing under a street lamp and turning a girl’s face to catch the light and shadow. As I did so, it all seemed significant. I don’t know why. It would mean nothing now. And I remember walking with her to the Vistula and seeing the broken ice on the water. And we went through streets where they were building new houses, with everything half finished and the pavements muddy, with planks across them. But she wouldn’t have me. She turned up at the office one day and said she was engaged to someone else. I believe she’d had this other man all along. I’ll never forget it.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Harriet.

  ‘Why be sorry? At least I was alive then. I could feel.’ He reflected on this, then said: ‘I’ve never had the woman I wanted. I always seem to want bitches and they always ill-treat me.’

  ‘What about your fiancée?’

  He shrugged. ‘She’s a good girl, but, really, she stirs nothing in me. With her, there’s nothing to fight against. She’s just a punching bag. So am I, for that matter. Anyway, who knows what will happen? The last time I wrote to her, I said: “It may be ten years before I get home again.”’

  ‘You think that? And Brenda is willing to wait?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Clarence sighed deeply. ‘But I did advise her to marry someone else.’

  ‘After Poland, where did you go?’

  ‘Madrid. I was there when the civil war broke out. The British were being evacuated and I jumped a lorry going to Barcelona. I offered myself to the International Brigade, but I was pretty sick. I’d caught a chill on the way. I’ve always had this trouble with my chest. When I got better, I was put in charge of a refugee camp, where I was more use than I would have been in the lines. But I wanted to fight. Not fighting was a sort of sacrifice.’

  ‘Anyway, it let you preserve your integrity intact.’

  Clarence kept his head hanging for some moments, then, hurt, he said quietly: ‘I might have expected you to say something like that.’ He suddenly gave a half-laugh of satisfaction that she had fulfilled his worst expectations, then he said: ‘Someone had to look after the camp.’

  ‘A woman could have done the job.’

  He raised his brows, considered this, then drawled: ‘No, not really,’ but he did not enlarge on his denial.

  ‘So there were no bitches there!’

  ‘Oh yes, there was one – a magnificent bitch. An English girl looking after a crowd of evacuee children. She did exactly what she liked. She slept with anyone she wanted. Even with me. Yes, one night she pointed at me and said: “I’ll have you,” and I followed her out.’ Clarence sat for a while silent, smiling at the memory of it.

  ‘Nothing came of that, I suppose?’

  ‘What could come of it? She had a Spaniard she was mad about. One of the English fellows went on leave to Paris and she ordered him to bring her back an evening dress. When he brought the dress, he gave a party, thinking she would dance with him: but she just ignored him and danced all night with the Spaniard. I like tough women. Women of character.�
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  ‘You like being pushed around.’

  ‘Not necessarily.’ He sat withdrawn for a while, before he said: ‘In Spain there was colour and heat and danger. Things were significant there. Life should be like that.’

  ‘There is danger here.’

  ‘Oh!’ He shrugged his contempt of the present.

  Throughout the meal Clarence pursued his memories, that were all much alike. Contemplating those worlds of delight from which he felt himself excluded, he said several times: ‘Life should be like that.’ When he had talked himself out and was waiting for the bill, Harriet asked him: ‘You like feeling dissatisfied with yourself. Why is that?’

  Clarence stuck out his lower lip but did not reply.

  ‘For you do like it,’ she insisted. ‘You enjoy revealing your worst aspects.’