Letters From Prague (5 page)

The fire had burned low, the lights on the tree in the corner shone like white stars. I don't know, thought Harriet: perhaps one day we might, after all, make a journey to Prague.

She got up and went to the bureau; one or two Christmas cards slipped as she opened the second drawer. She took out the little box of letters and sat by the fire again, reading them through for the first time in over twenty years, those long-distant phrases which seemed to her now not formal and stiff but uncertain, apprehensive.

I am afraid it is not possible … I am afraid … I am afraid
…

What had happened to him? Was he, with everyone else in Prague, out in the Square beneath the balcony, ringing a handbell in the snow? She looked at the address, the Biroed capitals. Ulice Klimentská 6, Byt 8, Žižkow, Praha. Was it possible, after all these years, that he lived there still?

I shall go and find out, she thought, with sudden resolve. I shall make the journey he made, next summer, with Marsha. We shall travel by train, through a different Europe, and one day –

Well. In maturity, she thought, finishing the brandy, one must, I suppose, qualify one's dreams. Still. You never know. Perhaps, one day, I shall see you again, Karel.

Fine rain swept the rooftops. The doors to the bedroom balcony were open a little, and now and then opaque net curtains, affording privacy from the apartments opposite, were disturbed by a current of cool air. Harriet, in a room of many mirrors, in a spacious apartment in a foreign city, had almost finished unpacking.

She opened the doors of a walnut wardrobe and put in their luggage – worn canvas, mother; tough nylon, daughter. Both articles looked unequal to the place in which they now found themselves: within a fine piece of furniture in a spare room larger than Harriet's sitting room; in a fourth-floor apartment in one of the sleekest residential quarters of Brussels. Her clothes, nearly folded and put away, looked, here, similarly unequal to the task of being Hugh's sister, let alone Susanna's sister-in-law. Harriet knew very well how to be Marsha's mother, but that was in London, where her life, so busy and organised, seemed overnight to have become incommunicable.

She closed the wardrobe doors with a click. She put her striped sponge bag next to the washbasin, shaped like a shell, washed her face and brushed her teeth, and then, with no other task to occupy her, stood in the middle of the pale grey carpet, looking uncertainly about her.

It was a long time since Harriet had felt uncertain. In the years since her husband's departure she had learned more self-reliance than perhaps she might have chosen to, but it had become a part of her. She was a competent head of department at school, a competent if exasperated mother, a sensible landlady to her lodgers: students who came and went, given clean sheets on Saturdays and instructions to keep the noise down. Harriet had a life in London which felt, on the whole, rather full.

It was full. There were, naturally, wet weekends when she and Marsha quarrelled, when Marsha retired to her room in sulks and Harriet stood in the hall in despair, staring at loose flaps of wallpaper and scuffed skirting boards, wondering what she had done to deserve all this. But at such moments she had recourse to the telephone, to her friend Fanny, two streets away, whom she had met on the Labour Party street stall just before the 1987 election, and who could generally be counted on for a cheering glass or two while the children played. She had recourse to Robin, her deputy head of department, who had a pretty wit and a season ticket to the National Film Theatre. There were her parents, who enjoyed being Marsha's grandparents – making, indeed, a rather better job of caring for her than they had of their own children. There were any number of people in London, and, furthermore, there was work itself, which despite mounting heaps of paper and frustration at the National Curriculum, still gave satisfaction. It certainly gave little time to think, to dwell.

Harriet, now, found herself dwelling: on the prospect of a good few days in the company of a brother whose life could not be more different from her own and a sister-in-law of whom that was also true, and who felt, still, something of an unknown quantity.

Their reunion at the Gare du Nord had been warm but hesitant. A kiss, enquiries after parents and the journey, luggage put into the waiting car; and then a muted drive through the afternoon rain: along the Rue Royale and past the great Pare du Bruxelles and the Palace.

The windscreen wipers went back and forth. Amongst the drooping, rain-soaked flags of EC member states, and the EC flag with its circle of stars, the Belgian tricolour hung sombrely, looped up with broad black ribbons. Leaning against the Palace railings the cellophane wrapping of thousands of flowers glistened and dripped.

‘Of course,' said Harriet, after a moment. ‘Baudouin has died.'

‘Who?' asked Marsha from the back.

‘The king.' Susanna looked at her in the mirror. ‘Last week the city came to a standstill. People were weeping in the street.'

Harriet shook her head. ‘No one in England knows much about him. It was on the news, of course, but –'

‘He was loved,' said Susanna. ‘He was a shy man, but he was hardworking and represented something solid, and lasting – the Belgians have had so many changes of government since the war, I couldn't tell you how many. And he did a lot to unite the country –' She indicated a street sign in Flemish and French. ‘Hugh will tell you more about it all, if you're interested. Anyway, it was sad. You'll see black ribbons everywhere, not just on the flag – people hung them over their balconies .… Look, there's one above that pharmacy.'

They looked at a heavy fall of black over elaborate wrought iron. A city in mourning, thought Harriet, who had watched the news like everyone else, but who had not quite been able to anticipate how disorienting and excluding it might feel to arrive in such a place, greeted by a member of the family who in truth she barely knew.

‘Did you have a ribbon?' Marsha asked Susanna.

‘Yes, but more for respect, and form, if you know what I mean. We've taken it down now.'

They drew up at traffic lights, and Marsha went quiet, Harriet sensing her sudden exhaustion. It was left to her to comment on expensive shops and restaurants, on the well-dressed women walking on generous pavements, pausing at plate-glass windows, discreet arcades. She asked Susanna one or two questions about her life here; Susanna gave one or two answers, revealing little. Harriet, feeling her way, gave up.

At the Place du Grand Sablon, they turned off into a quiet side street, drawing up outside an apartment block. They paid the taxi driver; a porter came out to help with the luggage. Thick carpets, a lift ascending in silky silence, the doors together apartments solid, and firmly closed. There was this generously proportioned room, to which Susanna had shown them, inviting them to unwind and unpack before tea; there was a sudden quiet, a sense of displacement amongst strangers which Harriet, standing now in the middle of the pale grey carpet, found completely unnerving.

Marsha was having a shower. From the kitchen at the far end of the apartment Harriet could hear the chink of china. She went to the low buttoned chair where she had put down her capacious shoulder bag, and from it withdrew a small wooden box and a notebook.

The box she put on her bedside table. All those letters, all those years ago. In these new and unfamiliar surroundings, the box looked as out of place as she felt herself to be, but it also felt comforting, a link with London and with her past.

However.

Karel had not answered the letter she had written to him last autumn, to his old address, in which she had announced her intention of travelling to Prague.

It is so many years since we met
–

I am not sure if you will remember me
–

I have a daughter, now
–

I am thinking of bringing her for a holiday next
summer
–

And you? What of your own life? I should so like to
hear
–

Without a reply, should she be making this journey? Doubt assailed her. She sat on the low buttoned chair, turning the pages of her notebook.

The notebook was thick and black, its corners tipped in Chinese red. She had bought it at the newsagent's at the end of their road one Saturday afternoon last winter, taking it home with a pile of books from the library: histories and guides and biographies. She had piled them up on her desk in the sitting room, and spent, thereafter, many winter evenings of discovery. The notebook was filled with a summary of all her reading: with dates, with the names of monuments, churches, bridges; with quotations. To the teacher of history which Harriet had become to her very bones this marshalling of facts was deeply satisfying. And now, turning the pages, she rediscovered a little of herself, and her purpose.

This journey was worth making for its own sake. She had realised that on those long winter evenings, curled up with her books on the sofa, or making notes at her desk, absorbed in the lives of the dead.

In Brussels, impoverished lacemakers worked cold fingers to the bone, coughing in damp, ill-lit cellars, where the thread was less likely to break.

In Brussels, on the run from the civil police in Paris, Marx took rooms on the Grand Place, and then a poor little house in the suburbs. Here, his dear wife Jenny had more babies, and he and Engels, visiting from England, became the nucleus of a small community of German political exiles. The
Communist Manifesto
was written here, rolling off the printing press in 1848, when capital cities all over Europe were in revolutionary uproar.

And in Brussels, a few years earlier, Charlotte Brontë had suffered the anguish of unrequited love.

Harriet stopped reading through her notes and leaned back in the chair, yawning. The cool current of air through the balcony doors disturbed the fine net curtains; she closed her eyes. All those books, and notebooks, all those months ago. Much of what she had written she had already forgotten, but knowledge, in any case, paled beside imagination: as a historian, seeking to interpret and reinterpret the past, she had always known that.

And now, tired from her journey and on the threshold of sleep, imagination took hold, and Charlotte, small and downcast, filled with loneliness and longing, returned to the Pensionnat Heger from her afternoon walk. She drew her cloak around her against the wind, dreaming of her Professor, of a look, a word, a smile.

She slipped inside the front door, her heart pounding, and moved, oh so quietly – was he here? Was he coming? Was that his footstep, crossing the hall? – towards the stairs. Younger pupils descended, giggling; they stopped at the sight of their mouselike English acquaintance, hands to their mouths, nodding politely, stepping aside as she crept past. Up in her room Charlotte removed her bonnet, her cloak, laying them on the narrow iron bed, pressing her hands to her face. After a while, she crossed to the gabled window. She stood looking out at the rooftops, slate-grey beneath gathering cloud. Was this how she had imagined it all, planning it out with Emily in the Parsonage dining room? She had not imagined such pain, such longing.

In 1843 Charlotte returned to Haworth and the moors. She wrote long, impassioned letters to Professor Heger, receiving no reply.

I suppose animals kept in cages, and so scantily fed as to be always on the verge of famine, await their food as I awaited a letter
…

Years later, renaming the city Villette, she poured her remembered suffering into the fine and disturbing novel in which Lucy Snowe, impoverished and friendless, took a teaching post in a girls'school in Brussels, falling in love with its handsome English doctor. Her feelings were not returned; in the long summer vacation when the school was empty, she was driven by loneliness to the borders of breakdown and despair. One wet evening she crept into the cold and sombre refuge of a Catholic church. Bells rang; she was almost fainting –

‘Mon père, je suis Protestante
…'

The current of air at the open windows was cool and fresh. There was no sound, where a sound had been. Harriet, waking, realised that the rain had stopped. She rose from her chair, and went out on to the balcony. Ivy, shining and wet, trailed along the wrought-iron railing. Wet geraniums stood in clay pots in a corner; a fuchsia dripped. Harriet stood surveying the street below, the elegant houses opposite, waiting for Marsha's return from the shower, and Susanna's summons for tea.

The houses opposite were like this house: neoclassical, graceful; stone façades supporting slender pilasters. Susanna was a slender pilaster: decorative, but incapable of bearing weight. Was that true? What was it, over a crowded birthday lunch in her parents'dining room, which had felt, somehow, not quite right? Had Harriet imagined it, or had Susanna, today, been deliberate in deflecting questions about herself as they drove, from the station, along the Boulevard St Lazare? The Jardin Botanique should be pointed out, of course, but even so.

Balconies hung on the houses opposite; at the same level as Harriet, net curtains obscured another life. No, not quite: a shadowy figure moved past them. So. Who was at home in the afternoon, alone in a silent apartment? Who was somebody waiting for, nerves on edge at the discreet buzz of the intercom? Charlotte Brontë had suffered and wept, but Brussels in 1993 did not, so far, feel like a city for romantic assignation. Still. You never knew. For a moment, Harriet wondered: how does Susanna spend her days? Her afternoons? And then, surprising herself at her own intensity: if she hurts Hugh, I shall never forgive her.

She leaned on the balcony, looking down at the to and fro of traffic. She had not quite got her bearings here, but she knew that not far away in the south-west stood the Palais de Justice and, sprawling in its magnificent shadow, the impoverished, densely populated district of the Marolles. Tomorrow was for exploration, and settling in – and perhaps, in a day or two, she might also find her bearings in relation to her brother's marriage. She brushed shining water from the curve of the balcony railing. Please, she thought, again surprising herself: don't let this one go wrong.