Letters From Prague (14 page)

She rose. ‘I have to move. What shall we do?'

‘There's a particular kind of convent in Belgium,' said Susanna, getting to her feet. ‘I expect you've read it all up.'

‘The Béguines.'

‘I knew you would have done. Yes.'

‘The what?' Marsha was following her out of the pew.

‘An order of women who live as a sisterhood but without vows. They have power to return to the world.' She looked at Harriet. ‘Yes?'

‘You would know better than I, but yes, that's how I understand it. Dating from the fourteenth century.'

‘Possibly. It's the convents which remain here. They're extraordinarily lovely – airy and quiet. Would you like to visit one?'

‘Yes. It was on my list, anyway.'

‘I'm sure.' They were out in the aisle; they wandered between the pillars, looking around them. The young man with the Modigliani face had gone; the organist, with only a handful of listeners left, began to play again, softly, something gentle and high. They stopped to listen. Every now and then the door swung open, as somebody left, or somebody else arrived; they walked on, looking at tombs and plaques and wall hangings.

‘More tapestries,' said Harriet, adding quickly, not wishing to take Susanna into whatever painful territory had made her weep before the last one: ‘The other thing about the Béguinages, of course, was that the women were exploited by the cloth merchants. Isn't that right? They wove to the glory of God, all through the fifteenth century, and the merchants made a fortune.'

‘Yes. Like the lacemakers, except that they were worse off – no protective convent, just their own homes, or some miserable cellar.'

‘The convents sound perfect,' said Harriet, as they completed their tour, and came, once again, to the heavy oak door. ‘I mean in principle. Sanctuary, sisterhood, power to leave when you choose.'

Susanna was opening the door, and did not answer.

Outside, the pavement was hot and the sun was dazzling. Streets and buildings were bleached and deserted, outlined here and there by tall black railings. Convent colours, broken now and then by a brimming windowbox. They put on their sunglasses, and wondered what to do.

‘I'm hungry,' said Marsha. ‘I'm thirsty.'

‘We all are.' Harriet looked about her, wishing for a hat.

‘Lunch,' said Susanna, ‘and I know just where to have it.'

She led them through the sleepy afternoon heat to a pleasing, surprising flight of steps down into a little park. Mothers watched prams beneath the trees, lovers strolled hand in hand along the paths.

‘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.