The Balkan Trilogy (24 page)

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

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
tr
ǎ
sur
ǎ
, 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 phrases 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.

When the snow stopped falling at last, the city was revealed white as a ghost city agleam beneath a pewter sky. The citizens crowded out again and the beggars emerged from their holes.

Beggars now were more plentiful than ever. Hundreds of
destitute peasant families, their breadwinners conscripted, had been driven by winter into the capital, where, it was believed, a magical justice was dispensed. They would stand for hours in front of the palace, the law courts, the prefecture or any other large, likely-looking building. They dared not enter. When cold and hunger defeated them at last, they would wander off in groups to beg – women, children and ancient, creeping men. Lacking the persistence of professionals, they were easily discouraged. Many of them did no more than crouch crying in doorways. Some sought out the famous Ci
ş
migiu, that stretched from its gates like a vast sheeted ballroom. Some slept there at night beneath the trees; others took themselves up to the Chaussée. Few of them survived long. Each morning a cart went round to collect the bodies dug from the snow. Many of these were found in bunches, frozen inseparable, so they were thrown as they were found, together, into the communal grave.

On the first morning that the air cleared, Guy and Clarence were called by Sheppy to the Athénée Palace. At mid-day, when they were expected to leave the meeting, Harriet, anxious and curious, crossed the square to join them in the English Bar.

Wakening that morning she had seen the white light reflected on to the ceiling from the snowbound roofs. Emerging with a sense of adventure, she had been met by the
crivat
, blowing on a wire-fine note. In the centre of the square the snow was heaped like swansdown, its powdery surface lifting in the wind, but at the edge, where the traffic went, it was already as hard as cement. She walked round the statue of the old King, a giant snowman, shapeless and wild. The snow squeaked under her boots.

The cold hurt the flesh, yet even the most cosseted Rumanians had ventured out for the first sight of the city under snow. They trudged painfully, making for some café or restaurant, the men in fur-lined coats and galoshes, the women wrapped in Persian lamb, with fur snow-bonnets, gloves and muffs, and high-heeled snow boots of fur and rubber.

Outside the hotel the commissionaire stood, obese with wrappings, but the beggars were, as ever, half-naked, their bodies shaking fiercely in the bitter air.

As she passed the large window of the hair-dressing salon, Harriet saw inside, lolling on long chairs among the chromium and glass, Guy and Clarence having their hair cut. She went in to them and said: ‘Your meeting could not have lasted long.’

‘Not very long,’ Guy agreed.

‘Well, what was it all about?’

He gave a warning glance towards the assistants and to deflect her interest said: ‘We are going to give you a treat.’

‘What sort of treat? When? Where?’

‘Wait and see.’

When they left the salon, Guy put on a grey knitted Balaclava helmet lent him, he said, by Clarence. It was part of an issue of Polish refugee clothing.

Clarence said: ‘Of course it must be returned.’

‘Really?’ Harriet mocked him. ‘You imagine the Poles will miss it?’

‘I am responsible for stores.’

‘It’s a ridiculous garment,’ she said, dismissing it, and returned to the subject of Sheppy: ‘Who was he? What did he want? What was the meeting about?’

‘We’re not at liberty to say,’ said Guy.

Clarence said: ‘It’s secret and confidential. I’ve refused to be in on it.’

‘But in on what?’ Harriet persisted. She turned crossly on Guy. ‘What
did
Sheppy want with you?’

‘It’s just some mad scheme.’

‘Is it dangerous?’ She looked at Clarence, who, self-consciously evasive, said: ‘No more than anything else these days. Nothing will come of it, anyway. I think the chap’s crazy.’

As they would tell her nothing, she decided she would somehow find out for herself. With this decision she changed the subject.

‘Where are we going?’

‘For a sleigh-ride,’ said Guy.

‘No!’ She was delighted. Forgetting Sheppy, she began hurrying the pace of the two men. They were approaching the Chaussée, that stretched broad and white into the remote distance. At the Chaussée kerb stood a row of the smartest
tr
ǎ
sur
ǎ
s
in town. The owners had removed the wheels and fitted them with sleighs. The horses were hung with bells and tassels. Nets, decorated with pom-poms and bows, were stretched over the horses’ hindquarters to protect the passengers from up-flung snow.

People were bargaining for sleigh-rides and about them were sightseers, and beggars battening on everyone.

‘The important thing,’ said Harriet, ‘is to choose a well-kept horse.’ When they had found one rather less lean than the rest, she said: ‘Tell the driver we have chosen him because he is kind to his horse.’

The driver replied that he was indeed a kind man and fed his horse nearly every day. Waving his rosetted whip in self-congratulation, he turned out of the uproar of the rank and sped away up the Chaussée to where the air was still and the sleigh made no sound. In this crystalline world all was silent but the sleigh-bells.

On either side of the road the spangled skeletons of the trees flashed against a sky dark with unfallen snow. Across the snow-fields, that in summer were the
gradinas
, the wind leapt hard and bitter upon the sleigh. Its occupants shrank down among old blankets into a smell of straw and horse-dung, and peered out at the great plain of snow stretching to the lake and the Snagov woods.

They passed the Arc de Triomphe and came, at the furthest end of the Chaussée, upon an immense fountain that stood transfixed, like a glass chandelier, among mosaics of red, blue and gold.

As they reached the Golf Club, the driver shouted back at them.

‘He says,’ said Clarence, ‘he’ll drive us across the lake. I doubt whether it’s safe.’

Excitedly, Harriet said: ‘We must cross the lake.’

They slid down the bank to the lake, that was a plate of ice sunk into the billowing fields, and the wind howled over their heads.

‘Lovely, lovely,’ Harriet tried to shout, but she was scarcely able to breathe. Her ears sang, her eyes streamed, her hands and feet ached. Her cheeks were turned to ice.

The ice creaked beneath the sleigh and they were relieved to mount the farther bank and find themselves safely on solid ground. They had reached one of the peasant suburbs. The houses were one-roomed wooden shacks, painted with pitch, patched with flattened petrol cans, the doorways curtained with rags. Despite the antiseptic cold the air here was heavy with the stench of refuse. Women stood cooking in the open air. They waved to the sleigh, but the driver, unwilling that foreigners should observe this squalor, pointed his passengers to the cloudy whiteness of the woods and said: ‘Snagov.
Frumosa
.’

They came out to the highway at the royal railway station, which stood by the roadside, painted white and gold, like a booth at an exhibition. The road turned back to the town, so now the wind was behind the sleigh. The singing died in their ears. The horse was allowed to relax and they returned at a slow trot to their starting point.

When they reached the rank, Harriet noticed a young man, too large for a Rumanian, standing head and shoulders above the crowd and observing with an amused air the excitement about him.

Guy cried: ‘It’s David!’ and, jumping down from the sleigh, made for the young man with outstretched arms. The young man did not move, but his small mouth stretched slightly more to one side as he smiled and said: ‘Oh, hello.’

‘When did you arrive?’ Guy called to him.

‘Last night.’

Harriet asked Clarence who this new arrival was.

‘It’s David Boyd,’ said Clarence, rather grudgingly.

‘But you know him, don’t you?’

‘Well, yes. But I expect he has forgotten me.’

Guy swung round and commanded Clarence forward: ‘Clarence. You remember David?’

Clarence admitted that he did.

‘He’s been sent out by the Foreign Office,’ said Guy, ‘the best thing they’ve ever done. At least there’s someone to counteract the imbecilities of the Legation.’

Harriet had heard that Guy and David Boyd looked remarkably alike, but their difference was apparent to her at once. They were large young men, identical in build, short-nosed, bespectacled and curly-haired – but David’s mouth was smaller than Guy’s, his chin larger. He wore a pointed sheepskin hat that had settled down on to the rim of his glasses so that the upper half of his face was snuffed out while the lower looked larger than it probably was.